Back at my flat, I tried to make a start on finding Nairn. But I was exhausted, ready to give up before I even started. Even firing up the PC, all I did was stare at the homepage and think about what I could type into Google, none of the possibilities exciting any action in my fingers.
So I threw myself on the couch, channel surfed until I dozed off. Woke around nine and moved to the bedroom, where I collapsed on top of the covers and passed out completely.
I don’t remember dreaming, but when I woke again about half-three, I was drenched in sweat and tangled in the covers. Like I’d been fighting them in my sleep.
I had told the old man I’d find Craig Nairn.
And what then?
The two of them have a nice wee chat, sort things amicably?
Aye. Right.
Griggs had told me he would clear me of any criminal charges, ensure that I was allowed to do what was needed without fear of reprisal. But there were limits. Not just for what he could clear me of, but for what I could stomach doing.
What worried me most was the idea that I could stomach it. That I felt something of the old man’s righteous anger. I wanted to find Craig Nairn. Punch his face into hamburger meat. Use my bare hands. Make it hurt.
We’d both said it, the old man and I: This was for the girls.
I used to think there was a line separated me from men like Burns, but the more I pretended to work with him, the more uncertain I became that I was pretending.
Were our intentions so far apart? Were we so different, as I had always claimed?
I had slept only a few hours, but I couldn’t force myself to relax enough to pass out once again. I hit the bedside light, walked through to the living and turned the TV on for company.
Twenty-Four-Hour News Cycle. Even the presenter looking bored, aware that at this hour most people were drunk and tuned to Babestation or wired on coffee and economic anxiety, trying to solve the pay-per-play quizzes on some of the higher up channels for a quick cash-hit.
I just needed the sound of a human voice. Something about the BBC news was comforting. There was a house style that was almost reassuring.
I pulled out the hidden laptop from where it was taped behind the sofa. Let it whirr into life. Took me two tries to get the password, the mix of capitals, numbers and symbols dancing about in my groggy, sleep-deprived brain.
I opened files. Read details. Reaffirmed my moral superiority. Reminded myself why I was doing this. Whose side I was really on.
David Burns. Born in one of the failed social experiments popularly referred to as ‘schemes’. Brought up hard, despite being the middle son of a hard-grafting family. Saw his friends fall to drugs. Learned from their failures. Not that drugs were bad, but that the right man could make a good profit shifting them. He saw other’s weaknesses and realized there was a living to be made exploiting them. But he wasn’t dumb enough to simply dive in feet first. Burns had a natural understanding for the order of power, knew he couldn’t just make it to the top in a single bound. The only people who did that were jammie bastards or psychotic bawbags. More usually both. And while some people would have called the old man psychotic, the truth was far more complex than that. So Burns played the long game. Ingratiated himself with local gangs. Worked his way up from thug to trusted confidant to man tipped for the top. Became privy to the city’s other political system. Learned that the real world and the underworld weren’t so separate as people believed.
He played a long game. And played it well. Just the right mix of business savvy and inescapable violence. When power came his way, he consolidated his grip on criminal activities while simultaneously cultivating a more respectable public persona. He was a businessman. That was his line. A businessman. And who could blame him for a rough past given his upbringing?
It was a necessary fiction. A reimagining of his early years. Not just for the good of his legal status, but for himself. Burns began to believe his own lies.
He was a family man. That much was true. But it was only his own family that he was concerned for. No thought was ever given to the families of those whose assaults and deaths he ordered, and occasionally participated in. But that didn’t matter. He became an expert at separating his actions and his beliefs, somehow able to balance what he did with what he claimed to believe.
I had to wonder if he would look at the reports of his own crimes and recognize the truth in them, or if the moral outrage that would explode from his aging but still deadly frame would be genuine and absolute. Had his own lies now become more real to him than the truth?
When I was young, my gran was the one who told me about heaven and hell. She was a believer, of course. In the fine traditions of the kirk and the Church. She told me once that even if you behaved like a decent person on the outside, presented a fine public figure to all those you encountered, then God would still know the truth. Would still judge you and find you wanting. Because, inside, you can’t disguise your own guilt. She said that God knows the truth about us because we know the truth. We can’t escape it. We can tell all the lies we want and become so good at telling them that we can fake belief in our own delusions. But when it comes to Judgement Day, none of that will matter, because we cannot hide the truth inside ourselves. Sooner or later, as the song says, God’s gonna cut us down.
I wonder whether God would be able see the truth inside Burns. It often felt as though the old man had performed a miracle of ethical alchemy. For him, now, the truth was his own righteousness. His sheer strength of belief trumped any independent evidence. He would genuinely believe that his accusers were the ones deluding themselves.
I read his biographical notes over and over. My eyes watered from the glare of the laptop screen. A needle started digging just above the bridge of my nose.
Maybe it was stress. Brought on not by focussing on backlit screens or tiny text, but by David Burns.
Were we really so close? Could we finally bring him down?
Did I want to bring him down? This killer and self-proclaimed ‘family man’?
Family, as I had found over the last few years, was not just flesh and blood, but those you surrounded yourself with. If you were close to Burns, he treated you well. I had been aware of that for a long time. During Ernie’s attempts to gain favour with the old man, Burns had treated his contemporary with grace and good will. Made him part of the family. Bonhomie and generosity had been the orders of the day. Enough that I came to believe Ernie really had fallen for the old thug’s schtick.
I had misunderstood. Seen only what Ernie needed me – and the old man – to see in that moment. For over two years I would believe that the man who had been my mentor was in reality a corrupt and rotten cop who had fallen for the charms of a psychopath. Ernie would die before I learned the truth. Before I followed down the same path.
Had Ernie been this conflicted? This uncertain about what he was doing?
Burns’s solution to the people traffickers was swift and brutal. Outside the law. Immediate. Designed to satiate the natural feelings of revenge and injustice that accompanied the crimes we had witnessed.
To take down a man like Craig Nairn by the letter of the law, the authorities would follow a slow set of precisely choreographed procedures. Unable to strike until the situation was perfect. The same procedural behemoth that allowed men like Burns to feel they were one step ahead of the law. They could move nimbly, where the law lumbered.
What Burns offered felt like real justice. Quick. Decisive. Driven by emotion. It was what we all wanted deep down beneath our thin layers of civilized behaviour.
Because it was easy.
I had gained the old man’s trust by bringing him a sacrificial lamb. A child killer who had fixed up an innocent man for his own crimes. One of the sickest men I had ever encountered. His attempts to explain his crimes as a kind of illness had made me feel the old rage rise in me again. I had wanted him dead. It was what monsters like him deserved. When I watched Burns slit the child killer’s throat, I did so with the kind of cruel satisfaction I imagine crowds used to experience when viewing public executions.
The guilt came later. The shame.
How could I say I was so different from Burns when I had that kind of anger inside me?
How could I know that I shouldn’t be turning myself in as well, when this operation was finished?