04-Mothers of the Disappeared

by Russel D. McLean

  When I’d talked to Taylor earlier, and we’d both pretended I was still talking about Moorehead, he’d been desperate to rationalize and excuse the monstrous actions of a child-killer, to explain the motivation. Making like it was some kind of sickness of the mind. Something that might even be deserving of sympathy from those who couldn’t share his urges.

  I’d known, then. I’d have been an idiot not to see it.

  But all the same I hadn’t wanted to understand what he was trying to tell me. There was part of me wanted to be mistaken. Because that kind of truth is something most people can’t comprehend, don’t want to face.

  Because when you do, you finally realize the depths of horror that humanity is capable of. And you have to wonder why we even deserve to go on living.

  Taylor had known that I suspected the truth. We had spoken around the subject because I couldn’t confront him. But he wanted me to know that he wasn’t the evil monster I would think him to be.

  That was why he’d run. Because even he knew the truth.

  That he was a monster. That even though he’d tried, he could never succeed in passing on the guilt of his crimes to another man.

  That guilt consumed him, as it did so many of these monsters. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to stop, or even admit what it was that he did.

  Wemyss said, ‘Care to take a guess why Moorehead lied for this bawbag?’

  I shook my head.

  How could I figure it out?

  Maybe it was because they were friends. Maybe because he couldn’t stand the idea of his friend being responsible for such acts and convinced himself that somehow he was doing the right thing in coming forward because, in the end, someone always has to pay. Or maybe there was something deeper, darker, more sinister than either Wemyss or I could imagine.

  Maybe there was no simple explanation. Just a tangled mess of the worst that humanity has to offer.

  Only two men had any of the answers. One of them took his own life. And the other was last seen driving his car to God knows where. He could still be driving. He could have gone to ground. Hell, he could even be trying to kill himself, realizing there was no other way out.

  Part of me hoped he was dead. That he took the same way out as Moorehead. That he finally understood the depths of what he had done.

  But then the cool, rational part of my brain wanted to get him alone in a room. Not to beat the ever-living shite out of him or to punish him in any way, but to find the truth behind the disappeared, the dead and the destroyed. To make sense of all the horror that he had brought into the world. And then, once I’d done that, I’d let the other part of me strangle the fucker with my bare hands.

  The tech at the computer said, ‘We’re in.’

  Wemyss turned away from the album. ‘What have we got?’

  ‘I’ll need to take the machine and have a proper look. Lots of encrypted files. Mostly media. Video, audio, images …’

  I was lightheaded.

  ‘I need some fucking air.’

  I made my way out of the basement, towards the world above, craving the cleansing breath of the wind and the sting of the salt carried from the nearby sea that might help me to feel part of the human race once again.

  THIRTY-THREE

  We met at her dad’s old place. Over a year and a half after his death, it was still on the market. They’d done it up inside and out, but with the recession and the economy, it was proving difficult to shift. In a strange way, I didn’t want it to sell. The house was all that was left of Ernie. While it was still unoccupied, it felt as though you could walk past one day and find he had returned.

  Susan met me on the drive. Looking up at the house as though trying to figure out whether there was still some part of her dad left inside somewhere.

  I said, ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me, if that’s what you mean,’ she said. ‘He might have admitted it, eventually. But you know how he was. Liked to keep everything close. Didn’t ask for help unless he needed it. When I was a girl, Mum used to steal his keys and lock him in if she thought he was too unwell to go to work. She’d call ahead and let them know, but she knew that unless he lost both his legs, he’d still try and walk into FHQ, as if he could carry the world on his shoulders.’

  ‘He was police through and through,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘Mum and me got lucky, though. It was never at the expense of family.’

  She was wearing rose-tints, of course. Her parents had divorced a few years before Ernie’s death. In part, due to the secrecy that Ernie had shrouded himself in for the past few years. Yes, he’d always been a family man as much as a policeman, but the nature of his covert work for Griggs and his predecessors had finally taken its toll. Ernie never told his wife the truth. How could he?

  ‘Does your mum know? That you’re back?’

  Susan shook her head. Walked to the front door, unlocked it. Ushered me inside.

  The hall was dark. Dust motes floated in the air, caught in the light that came from outside.

  Everything was still.

  We were intruders.

  I followed Susan to the kitchen. They hadn’t yet cleared out Ernie’s utensils. Pots, pans, even a kettle. The house didn’t appear as empty as I expected and it took me a few moments to realize why. ‘You’ve been living here?’

  Susan nodded as she switched the kettle on. ‘Just temporary,’ she said. ‘While we’re in the city.’

  The casualness of the ‘we’ caught me, but then, maybe I was paranoid. After everything that had happened over the last few weeks, I had every right to be suspicious of anything anyone told me.

  Maybe I needed to book time in with a masseuse. Try and work out the tension. Relax a little. The next few months were going to be about deception.

  Months?

  Ernie had been working Burns for years as far as I could tell. What had it got him?

  Dead.

  What was it going to do to me?

  ‘Here,’ Susan said, and handed me a black coffee. She had a mug of her own, but the whole time we talked, she didn’t take even a sip.

  ‘You wanted to talk.’

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘You were gone for …’

  ‘I was abroad five months,’ she said. ‘Went through Europe, saw all the sights you want to see. Decided that Prague might have been beautiful once. Before it became the number-one destination for stag parties. Realized that you can lose yourself in Rome or Paris in the same way you can become lost in a dream and never want to wake up. I even got a little baked in Amsterdam.’ She smiled. But only with her lips. ‘Then I went east. Did all the backpacking tours. Seemed like a good idea. I’d never done the whole gap-year thing. Seemed like a plan, a good way to rediscover myself.’

  ‘Did you meet any mystics?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It still seemed like bullshit to me. Guess Daddy really did raise a practical girl.’ She put her mug down on the worktop. ‘I missed you, Steed. I really did. Every day. Some mornings I’d wake up, wonder why I’d left you behind.’

  ‘So why did you?’

  She chewed at her lower lip. Her brow furrowed, gently, and her eyes looked down as though she could find the answers in her coffee. ‘You know why. I meant what I said when I left. Everything between us was complicated. Too many secrets.’

  I understood, I really did.

  ‘When did you find out the truth?’

  ‘It was Griggs who got in touch with me. He’s persistent. Guess you know that. Emails. Phone messages. The whole treatment. He didn’t come out and say it, not until I got back, but he told me that what he had to talk about was to do with Dad. That I couldn’t share it with anyone.’

  ‘I used to work with Griggs.’

  ‘He remembers you. Not like you are now. You were uniform then. Says you always had a spark, but that you seemed too in awe of authority to really come out of your shell.’

  ‘I was learning. Besides, he’s one to talk about people changing.
’

  We moved through to the living room. Nothing had changed. Even though she must have been here for at least a month, there was no sign of occupation. The furniture was the same. The bookshelves, even the DVD collection were still Ernie’s.

  As I sat down in an armchair, I became aware of the stillness around us. Like the house was holding its breath.

  Maybe Ernie really was still here, somewhere, watching us. I wondered what he’d think, whether he’d approve of what happened between me and Susan.

  If things had been different, I like to think he would have. If things hadn’t turned sour between all three of us, I like to think that he would have given us his blessing.

  And that he might have tried to intervene when things went wrong.

  ‘What was he like, then? The man you remember?’

  ‘Griggs? Passionate. Idealistic. Angry, too. Had a thing for wife-beaters.’

  ‘Still does. One of the reasons he came to SCDEA, he could do the work without getting personally involved.’

  ‘You don’t think he’s personally involved? He wants to lay out Burns as much as anyone I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Even my dad?’

  ‘Your dad must have known that no matter what he did trying to take down Burns the way he did, it would be the end of his life on both sides. He couldn’t turn because he’d be a traitor to Burns, and he couldn’t stay a cop because there would be people who would never understand what he’d done, who would think of him as a bent copper looking for any way to save his skin.’

  ‘Which is why I suggested you.’

  For just a moment, I didn’t know how to respond. I just looked at her, and got a blank in my brain, as though some switch had been tripped and I was lost between sensations.

  ‘You can walk the line,’ Susan said. ‘You’re not a cop. You’re not a criminal.’

  ‘But I need my clients to trust me,’ I said.

  ‘The ABI,’ she said. ‘We can make that go away. We can …’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘On paper. I think I know why your dad did it. He was close to retiring. It didn’t matter to him. He could go out in a blaze of glory. And I’m sure there was a handsome payout involved, too. One that could set you up if anything were to happen to him.’

  ‘I never received any money. Neither did Mum.’

  ‘Maybe you should ask Griggs,’ I said. Then I stopped myself. The old anger was coming through. The stubborn, obstinate anger that had stopped me from being a fully functioning member of the human race for so long. I let it die. Said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that what I’m about to do … Just tell me, Susan, do you think things might have worked out different for us? I mean, if Ernie was still alive? If he was the one telling us the truth about what he was doing with Burns?’

  She leaned in and kissed me gently on the cheek.

  When she pulled back, there was a moment’s silence. Strained. Uncomfortable. The way it had been before she left; an unanswered question still between us.

  I said, ‘You never told me.’

  ‘Should I have to?’

  When we discovered that Kevin Wood was in part responsible for her father’s death, Susan had snapped, kidnapped the deputy chief constable and locked him in a storage unit. Her actions were never made public. She had avoided the glare of the officers investigating Wood’s actions.

  Which would have been fine for me if not for one loose end.

  Kevin Wood never went to trial. The investigation into his actions was conducted posthumously. He had been found in the storage locker, burned alive following what arson investigators ruled a freak accident.

  When I left Wood in the locker, he was alive.

  I always had my doubts as to how the fire had started.

  Susan knew it. Refused to answer my questions.

  There were too many secrets between us, me and Susan. Too many doubts and uncertainties. No wonder we’d been a bad match.

  No wonder she’d left.

  I said, ‘No. You shouldn’t.’

  ‘You’re always looking for secrets, Steed,’ she said. ‘All the time. Even when there aren’t any.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  She shook her head. But she smiled.

  I decided that was enough of an answer for me.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ‘You have a … David Burns is here to see you.’

  Dot was pretty good at keeping a neutral air around most clients, but David Burns had this way of getting to people. Maybe it was the sanctimonious air of hypocrisy that hung around him. Didn’t need a caged canary to catch a whiff of that.

  He came through, smiling, offering his free hand. ‘Always said you were like a dog with a bone, son.’ I couldn’t help but notice the envelope he had with him. What was he carrying? A reward?

  I nodded. This wasn’t how I’d intended to approach Burns. The idea had been to wait for Taylor to be arrested, for the whole damn thing to be over. But with Taylor on the run, and currently nowhere to be found, it was only a matter of time before word reached the old man.

  No doubt he had someone on the inside. His kind always do.

  He sat down without being asked. I swallowed my pride, let it pass without comment. ‘I don’t like to see the guilty go unpunished.’

  ‘Something we have in common,’ he said. ‘A crime like that is … unforgiveable.’

  ‘There are victims that are off limits,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘We talk around things all the time, you and me,’ he said. ‘Never quite saying what we really mean. I think that’s what gives rise to … misunderstandings between us. I’m no angel, I accept that. I’ve had to. People in my life, they have to make choices that privileged people can’t always understand.’

  ‘And here was me thinking you wanted to be friends.’

  ‘You always had some learning to do about life. I think leaving the police was the best thing you ever did, son.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You know I’ve always had an interest in you. Because I think you’ve been learning more and more about how to make hard choices. My overtures have been a bit … enthusiastic, I admit. But I see potential in you.’

  I felt the familiar clench. The knot in my stomach and the tremors in my hands that told me the only way to relieve the tension was to bodily chuck the old fucker out of the office. Preferably through the window.

  While it was still closed.

  But I held the urge in check. Wondering if he noticed.

  ‘It’s getting hard to tell who the bad guys are any more.’

  ‘You sound like him, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ernie.’

  ‘Bright?’

  He nodded. ‘I told you before,’ he said. ‘We were old friends.’

  ‘He tried to take you down more than once.’

  ‘He was a copper. That was his job. But I think he always understood the need for men like me.’

  I nodded. ‘You went to school together, didn’t you?’

  He nodded. Around a year and a half earlier, he’d given me a potted history of their friendship in an attempt to explain why Ernie had appeared – to me at least – to be a crooked copper, not the hero I’d always thought he was.

  Three years ago, before Ernie’s murder, I’d discovered this apparent friendship, while working a case that had deep ties to Burns. The old man had been throwing a party at his house when I went round to talk to him about a case that had been troubling me. I wound up threatening Burns, shoving him against the wall. Then one of his guests intervened. The shock of that guest being Ernie Bright, the man who had embodied everything that being a detective ever meant to me, quelled my anger, turned it into a betrayed confusion.

  Ernie died before we could ever really talk about what had happened that night.

  But something in my brain was beginning to click. Connections that had been disparate before now started to come together. Back in the nineties, Ernie had been Burns’s contact on the force during a brief period when
the police had taken it into their heads to work unofficially with the devils they knew to take down the devils they didn’t. According to Burns, that partnership had outlasted the operation because of the two men’s shared background. But there was something else going on, something that I hadn’t been aware of.

  That even Burns wasn’t aware of.

  Something that tied together all the apparent contradictions surrounding Ernie Bright.

  I said, ‘In the grand scheme of things, you keep a tidy house. Your operations are run like a business.’

  He smiled. ‘This isn’t really the place to talk about such things.’

  I relented. Too eager. He wanted to trust me because of whatever bond he felt was between us. But he hadn’t got where he was today by being an idiot. Like Taylor, he understood the need to hide in public the things he did in private. But oddly, I was beginning to understand his long-standing argument about the relativism of criminal activity, and how he was less of a monster than someone like Taylor.

  But that didn’t make him less of a criminal. Not to me, and certainly it wouldn’t have to Ernie. No, even if they had been friends, I knew that Ernie was not the kind of man to confuse his principles in the way Burns had described.

  Why was Susan working with SCDEA on this project?

  Why was she so desperate for me to get in close with Burns?

  It made sense. Absolute sense. When you stopped to think about it.

  I said, ‘Maybe we can talk about things later. I can tell you what I know about Taylor.’

  He stood up. ‘If you hear anything about this pervert, where he is, whatever, give me a call. I’d like to see him face justice.’

  ‘You mean you want to be the one to call in the cops?’

  He found that funny enough to give me a chuckle. ‘Something like that. I guess we’ll see,’ he said. ‘In the meantime I have a proposition for you. Things have changed between us. I’m sure of that. We have an understanding.’

  I shrugged.

  He put the envelope on the table. Patted it. ‘Maybe I’m wrong. But I think we might do when you see this. When you hear my little proposition.’