‘You understand?’
‘Aye.’
‘I know you feel like I manoeuvred you into this … but believe me, you were the only logical choice. And I needed someone who already had connections to the old man. Someone I could drop in fast. Someone David Burns would be pre-disposed to trust. He always treated you like a wayward son. You’ve admitted that yourself.’
‘Care to tell me why you needed someone so fast?’
Sandy Griggs steepled his long fingers, looked at me over them. His red hair was tousled. Not out of any sense of style, but because he had other things on his mind than how he looked. There was shabby-chic and then there was simply shabby. Accounted for the wrinkled shirt and jacket he was wearing, too.
We were in my offices at 1 Courthouse Square. Eight months before Findo Gaske beat the shit out of a fat Hungarian man, using a lead pipe.
I had a knot in my stomach. In hindsight, bad as it felt, it probably wasn’t tight enough. But I wasn’t stupid enough to not be afraid of what was coming. Says a lot that agreeing to go undercover with the old man seemed the least dangerous of my options.
Or maybe I just told myself that.
Griggs had the look of a man trying not to tell the truth. Word around Tayside Constabulary had always been that he was the kind of man you didn’t want on the other side of the table during a round of poker. Could have fooled me. He wore his anxiety like a suit. Better pressed than the one he actually had on.
‘This time next year,’ he said, ‘there will be no SCDEA. You’ve heard, haven’t you?’ Of course I’d heard. Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, was disbanding old policing structures, introducing a new, unified Scottish police force. The old divisions would be gone. No more Fife. No more Tayside. No more Lothian. The force would be as one. Police Scotland. The shiny new face of twenty-first-century Scottish law enforcement. As well as the old divisions collapsing into obsolescence, so were newer and more modern institutions like the SCDEA. The Agency would be enveloped into Police Scotland, but no one seemed sure of the details.
‘You’re running out of time.’
‘Maybe we’ll still be operational in a year’s time. Same game, different initials. You know what bureaucracies can be like. But I’d rather not take any chances. Besides, this operation against the old man has been running for close to ten years, now. I’m not the first man to head it. The SCDEA didn’t start it. There were others before this even began. But we’re running on empty, now. Despite everything we know about David Burns, we’ve never been able to bring him in. Never had enough to satisfy the Procurator Fiscal’s office.’
‘Which is why you need me. Why you needed Ernie Bright’
He nodded.
I understood why Griggs had been so heavy-handed in his pursuit. David Burns was fascinated by me, in his own way. Time and again the aging hard man had made overtures about how I should join his outfit. Painting himself not as a crook, but as a man of the people. The police, in his mind, were little more than automatons following a party line. Men like Burns, on the other hand, understood the complex needs of the population and were therefore entitled to do whatever was right for the people.
Regular fucking Robin Hood. Or at least that’s how he always wanted me to see him.
Burns’s view of me as a sympathetic soul meant that, if I pressed the matter, I was perfectly placed to get close to the old man, to uncover his secrets.
Which was why Griggs figured I’d make the perfect honey trap. Thankfully, without the sex.
By the time of this particular meeting, I had already made an overture to Burns. Not in the way that Griggs had expected, and not in a way I’d ever go into detail about. That was fine by Griggs, just as long as I delivered what he needed. We both understood that sometimes undercover work could involve undertaking actions that were morally uncertain.
What I’d done for the old man was deliver him a killer. A man who had murdered children, including the son of Burns’s neighbour. Burns killed the twisted fuck, weighted the corpse and tossed it deep into the Tay, where he could rot at the bottom of the river for all anyone cared.
I had watched the execution. It had been an initiation, I suppose.
The first step in our new acquaintance.
A first step from which there was no turning back.
‘Are you willing to do what the old man tells you? He will test you.’
He had already tested me. When the old man killed a child murderer in front of me, it was as much a test of my reaction as it was the legitimate passing of a sentence against a man who had transgressed Burns’s personal moral code.
But David Burns was not the type to trust easily. I would be expected to do more than just passively observe acts of violence. I would be expected to get my hands dirty. Whether Burns accepted my personal moral code or not, he would expect me to follow his orders. Obey his rules.
As part of our arrangement, Griggs assured me that as long as I stayed within certain parameters of behaviour, he would be able to give me a clean slate when the old man was brought in.
I wanted to ask: is this what he offered Ernie Bright?
Did anyone ensure that he had understood the risks? That he knew there was a possibility he could wind up dead in an abandoned warehouse, his chest torn apart by a shotgun blast, his life and career in ruins?
But I didn’t say anything like that. Because by then, there was nothing left to say. The chance to back out was long gone.
I was in deep.
All I could do was try and keep my head above water.