04-Mothers of the Disappeared

by Russel D. McLean

  ‘Or maybe he was worried you’d get too close to something.’

  ‘Tell me something, McNee. I know I’m a cynical bawbag, but you take the bastard biscuit. You really do. Taylor’s probably off the end of the autism scale, but that doesn’t make him a criminal genius. Sometimes just because something looks suspicious, doesn’t mean it is.’

  I nodded.

  But I didn’t agree with him.

  Something about Jason Taylor was rotten, and had been from the moment he offered his services to help bang up his friend.

  And I was going to prove it.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sometimes, even when all the evidence tells you it’s a bad idea, you need to follow your instinct.

  Wemyss was right that the most likely suspect was the missing father. But there wasn’t much more I could do about that than the police were already doing. Besides, what harm could there be in just talking to Taylor? Assuring myself that I was wrong? That he really didn’t know anything?

  The internet is a wonderful thing. But it’s easy to hide behind the anonymity of an email or the relative safety of a phone connection.

  Face to face communication gives away a lot. If you want to lie, the worst thing you can do is talk directly to someone. That’s one of the reasons police interrogations work best up close and personal. A good copper isn’t always a trained psychologist – although people are coming to the force through a variety of paths these days – but they quickly develop a good eye for the things that people aren’t saying with words. They learn to instinctively read between gestures. They get at the truth and chip away at a person until finally they can no longer hide those things they’ve been saying all along.

  It’s about facial tics. Small gestures. Imperceptible eye movements.

  The things you see, but don’t see.

  Intuition is another word for the unconscious. Your mind will pick up on things you can’t always consciously articulate.

  Crimes committed in the last twenty years will often have an electronic trail. Incriminating emails, phone calls, text messages or a thousand other ways of implicating yourself that you’d never think of in the day-to-day running of things. There is always something visible to the breed of detectives that followed in the lead of willing geeks like Jason Taylor. Information is the new DNA, and if most minor criminal acts are caught by hair fibres or fingerprints, then many other crimes can now be caught by discarded strands of information that even your smarter-than-average crook won’t believe to be important.

  But confession still comes down to confrontation.

  You can follow the evidence all you like, but it’s meaningless if you don’t understand people. It’s the old difference between the letter and spirit of the law. You can arrest someone for breaking the law, but doing so doesn’t mean a damn if you don’t understand why they did what they did.

  It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the offices of Redboot, on the upper floor of an unassuming building on the outskirts of Ayr. Not the most salubrious of addresses, but then London, Glasgow and Edinburgh were no longer the centre of the world, and a start-up had as much a chance succeeding out here as anywhere else.

  Although if I could have afforded to set up anywhere other than Ayr, I would have given it a go. It’s an odd little town. Despite the closeness of the sea, there’s an air of better days having been seen and that all-too-familiar feel of the little Scottish town that no longer knows what it is in the grand scheme of things. Birthplace of Burns? Aye, but is that enough to provide a sense of purpose in an age of austerity and recession?

  I parked across the street and settled in to wait.

  I tilted the seat back, kept the radio on. Flicked through local stations. What I got were DJs trying too hard, and pop songs that came from artists I could no longer readily identify mixed in with embarrassing guff from the eighties and nineties.

  Finally I gave up, plugged in the MP3 player, let Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and ol’ Bob Dylan wash over me.

  Bob was Tangled Up In Blue when Taylor left the Redboot offices. He was taller than I expected, walked with a strange, loping gait. It didn’t fit with the voice I’d heard on the telephone or the image projected by his picture on the website, but I was beginning to remember him better now. He was a geek trying to hide himself. Someone for whom his natural social awkwardness was a constant embarrassment. Something to be hidden behind carefully considered affectations. This was a man who didn’t let you see what he really was.

  I got out of the car, rushed to catch him up. He was about to climb into a silver Merc when I called his name.

  He turned round, leaned against the car as I walked over to him. ‘I could put out an injunction against you,’ he said. ‘This is harassment.’

  I shrugged. ‘Persistence.’

  ‘Poh-taye-toh,’ he said, ‘poh-tah-toh.’

  I said, ‘Let’s call the whole thing off?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s.’ He still felt he was in control of the situation. His voice retained that strangled attempt at education that covered up his natural accent. I remembered thinking when we first met that he was somehow ashamed of his roots, that everything about him was an affectation. Not that it struck me as a definite problem. He wasn’t the first guy to try and leave working-class roots behind.

  ‘You never talked to Alex Moorehead after he was arrested,’ I said. ‘But before the incident, you were close friends. At least that’s the way you spun it.’

  He had the car door open. He stood up straight and let go of the handle. ‘Would you talk to him? After that?’

  ‘Right.’ I waited a moment. ‘Because you felt he had betrayed you? Or because you felt you betrayed him?’

  ‘I was hoping I’d find something to exonerate the poor bastard.’

  ‘Looking back on it, I just thought maybe you were a bit quick to lend a hand.’

  ‘Buyer’s remorse?’

  ‘Copper’s remorse, maybe.’

  ‘Is this why you’re no longer on the force? Are you going around, now, trying to screw up all the cases your boss ever made?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Tell me how you define friendship, Mr McNee. I thought we were friends, me and Alex. Then I realized I never knew him. Kind of hard to imagine he was keeping that kind of secret.’

  ‘I’ve seen people who were betrayed before,’ I said. ‘Most of them want answers. They feel it so personally, so deep inside them, like a blade stuck between the ribs, that the only way to rid themselves of the echo of that pain is to confront the person who betrayed them and ask one very simple question.’

  ‘Yes.’ He regarded me for a moment. Moved his head from one side to the other. Quick and jerky. He held his hands down his sides, arms absolutely still, back ramrod straight, but his fingers twitched incessantly as though they wanted to wrap themselves around something and squeeze.

  Maybe my neck. Or the neck of the man he claimed to have betrayed him.

  He was tough to read that way.

  He said, ‘Why? That’s the question. You want to ask him, why?’

  ‘But you never did. At least you never asked us. Or him. You came, did what you needed to do, and then you just walked away.’

  ‘I needed to process what I found. I’m sure you dealt with that kind of thing all the time when you were a copper. Me, I’d never seen anything like it before.’

  I remembered his reaction. He’d asked to be excused, to take some air, said he’d found something but couldn’t put into words what we would see on the screen.

  It had seemed genuine enough at the time. Enough that no one had questioned it. Not Ernie. Not Wood.

  Was I now rewriting history to fit my current theories?

  ‘Do you mind if I ask …?’

  He took a deep breath, loud enough to stop me mid-question. His tongue darted from between his thin lips and dabbed around for a second. Making me think of a lizard who sensed a nearby fly.

  ‘Will it make you leave me alone?’r />
  ‘If I’m happy with the answer.’

  ‘You’re not the police any more,’ he said. ‘But I could call them, the real police, have them sling your arse inside for harassing a private citizen.’

  ‘Aye, you could,’ I said. ‘And I’d understand. But all I want is a moment of your time. I need to understand Alex. I need to reassure my clients that the right man paid for his crime. That I didn’t overlook anything. To do that I need all the facts at my disposal.’

  ‘And you think talking to me will help?’ Was that a slight twitch in his left eye? An involuntary flinch?

  ‘It can’t hurt,’ I said. ‘You knew him, I think, better than anyone.’ What I did then was play the deception card. ‘The last person he talked to was his father. It was only after that he killed himself. Now his father’s disappeared. Coincidence?’

  Taylor shrugged.

  ‘I just need a better picture of who Alex was. His relationship to his family, especially. It might help explain some things.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can—’

  ‘Like I say, you knew him best of all the people we interviewed. Even more than his father, I suspect. There might be something you can tell me that I overlooked at the time. I’m just looking to tie up all the loose ends, Mr Taylor. Not as a cop. But as someone looking to bring peace of mind to the people that Alex hurt.’

  He hesitated. ‘I have somewhere to be,’ he said. ‘My mother … it’s her birthday. We have … she’ll be … She gets upset if I’m late.’

  ‘I know how it is.’

  He smiled. No humour there. Perhaps a kind of sadness. ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

  ‘Then we’ll talk later.’

  ‘You won’t let this go?’

  ‘I’m tenacious,’ I said, ‘because my clients pay me to be that way.’

  He nodded. Again, his head ticked from side to side. A metronome in a lanky wig. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We can talk. But the minute I don’t like your questions, I’m walking.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said.

  I watched as he got into his car.

  Trying to search for any sign that I’d shaken him.

  The closest cafe was a Costa Coffee at the local Tesco. Around us, shoppers bustled and echoed from the aisles and the coffee machine provided a discordant, hissing, steaming soundtrack.

  We both drank black coffees – Americanos, the barista had insisted when we ordered – and for a few moments we had nothing to say to each other. An awkward and unexpected blind first date. We both struggled to find a way to break the ice.

  Finally: ‘What were you afraid he would say?’

  Taylor sipped at his coffee. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. It was prominent in his neck, more than you’d have noticed in the photograph he had on the company website, and when he got nervous about what he was saying, it bobbed so hard you worried it might dislodge itself and spit halfway across the room.

  ‘I was afraid that he wouldn’t be the man I used to think he was,’ said Taylor. ‘It’s one thing to know what he did, to find the evidence, to work in his office without him there. But to face him again, knowing what I knew …’ He bowed his head, looking away from me. ‘I couldn’t … How could you know everything you’d been through with this person and then have to come to terms with them doing something like that? I couldn’t … I didn’t want. I didn’t want to remember him as a monster. To me, I wanted to think of it like, like maybe he’d died, you know?’ He finally looked up again. It couldn’t have been any more convincing if there were tears in his eyes. But there weren’t. He wasn’t playing it up like that.

  Maybe that was meant to make it more convincing.

  But like I say, there are things you’re looking for that are outside the normal reactions, the things that maybe you can’t put a name to, but that you know are there. Small gestures or changes that you only notice with experience.

  ‘You were his friend. You shared a flat with him during your student days. You probably knew him better than most. There was no sign of unusual behaviour?’

  ‘Define unusual. We were geeks, Mr McNee. Unusual goes with the territory. Especially at that age. I just … when you think about those other children … If I’d known at the time, seen the way he looked at them …’

  Playing it up just a little too much.

  ‘The other children? The ones that Amityville connected to Moorehead?’

  Taylor nodded. Suddenly reticent. His words and his act drying up like spit on a hotplate. He licked his lips. Playing for time.

  Had he meant to bring up those other children?

  Had he taken this act too far?

  He had never commented publicly on the other children that Moorehead had been linked to. The media had tried to get him to speak, but he never said anything. Everyone took this as his way of cutting his time with Moorehead out of his life completely.

  But was it something else?

  ‘If you’d seen something at the time? You weren’t living at the same address during those years.’

  ‘We were still friends. I would visit him, sometimes.’ Speaking a little too fast. Eyes looking to the side, not meeting mine. Slight sheen of sweat on his lips and forehead.

  He was a liar. Covering something up. And I needed to know what it was.

  It could have been a tiny thing. An omission he now regretted or perhaps a suspicion he’d never acted on. Or it could be bigger. A secret that would finally help me understand the inconsistencies in Alex Moorehead, the man who admitted killing one child and denied all the others that followed his established MO.

  If Taylor’s cover-up was as big as I suspected, then it had helped put away an innocent man before finally killing him. By inches. If he was innocent, then Alex Moorehead’s suicide was maybe less of a tragedy than if he’d continued living with the consequences of one man’s deception.

  Was Moorehead’s death a release?

  Not the final escape of a murderer but of an innocent man?

  The problem with Taylor was that if he was lying, he probably believed his own deception. The consequences of telling a lie for so long: you start to behave as though it’s the truth.

  So how could I draw him out, make him admit to a truth I could only guess at?

  I needed to find the cracks in his deception, the places where his lie was at its weakest, where even he could see the seams and understand the fraud.

  I hated to do it.

  I didn’t want to do it.

  But I needed to.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I took a walk down to the water, breathed in the air. Gulls circled, occasionally looping down, grabbing any fish that came too close to the surface. At the beach, the waves broke gently against the sand.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that Taylor was lying. I needed to find that chink in his armour, work in my knife.

  My interrogative strengths had always been psychological, getting people to reveal the truth of who they were. It had been an instinctual thing at first, but I had worked on it over the years. Physical intimidation had never been my preferred tactic.

  When I moved over to the private side, I discovered the need to understand my clients more than I ever had a suspect in interview. Police work always had a straightforward goal, an end in sight. You were working to put away the criminals and protect the innocent. But working for private clients meant digging through grey motivations and the silent ethical realities that they brought into the office. People often glossed over the real reasons for hiring a private detective. I had frequently had as much trouble with my own clients as I ever had with a suspect.

  I had come to believe that – to some degree at least – Alex Moorehead was innocent. So, I was looking for someone who could give me the answers as to why he would take the rap for something he never did. I was looking for the one-armed man, like Dr Henry Kimble. Except I couldn’t be certain that there ever really had been one.

  Taylor had answers. I was sure of it. But were
they the answers I wanted?

  In the back of my mind there were suspicions and conspiracy theories too wild to say out loud. The Wood connection had me worried. Taylor was hiding something. I knew the kind of pressure the ex-assistant chief constable had exerted on people. I’d had to fight to bring to the surface the terrible things he’d done.

  Taylor had fitted up his friend. I was sure of it.

  But why?

  On whose authority?

  I watched the gulls for a while, let the breeze caress my face. I caught the scent of salt whipped off the water. The sound of the waves and the call of the birds made me feel a million miles away from civilization.

  I wondered if I was just being paranoid. Becoming a conspiracy theorist; seeing connections where none existed, making up stories to fit facts I had already decided upon.

  Nearby, kids shouted to each other. Their voices were rough, less innocent than I remembered being at that age. But then this was a harsh world we had created. Our own fears created a generation who frightened us because we’d given them more knowledge than they’d ever be ready for, without the critical tools to deal with it. These kids had been brought up in the spectre of dead children whose cases were highly publicized, pushed to the forefront of the public’s mind. They were a generation in constant fear. Which made them harder than any generation before. They’d developed tough skins to deal with the fear their parents subjected them to every day. My last couple of months on the force, I remember thinking that the juvenile crimes were getting worse than the adult ones. That there was a generation who’d been brought up with both the fear of the bogey-man and the certainty that they themselves were invincible, that they could do whatever they liked and still get away with it.

  Thinking like that made me feel old, out of touch. An old man in his mid-thirties. Worried for the youth of today, his own childhood lost in the dim and distant past.

  As I turned to walk back into town, where I’d left the car, one of the kids – couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven – shouted at me as his gang came into earshot: ‘Oy, mister! Got any fags on you?’