‘Let him sit down, David.’ When I’d met her a few years earlier, Burns’s wife had treated me as though I was the devil himself. Over the past few months, she had come to think of me more softly. Seeing what she believed to be another side to me. The same way she had perhaps softened to Ernie, too, the man who had harassed her husband so many times on official police business, and yet became a family friend, a dinner guest, a confidant. When I gave the old man a lift to meetings, Mary Burns would greet me with black coffee and insist I sit at the breakfast bar while Burns finished whatever it was that had distracted him that morning. Now she was fussing over me, the concern etched into her features. I’d seen her look this way before when she thought her husband had been harmed during an attempt on his life.
Funny how things can change.
Funny how I only felt guilt over my deception when I had the distance to think about it.
‘You OK to stand, son?’
‘Aye.’
‘Then let him alone,’ the old man said to Mary. ‘We need to have a wee word in private.’
We walked out to the back garden. Stood down the far end, near the fence that backed on to scrubland, and, beyond that, the railway that led to Aberdeen and all points north. Burns said, ‘Tell me.’
I told him what I knew. Leaving out that I had offered Gemma Fairstead the chance to escape. Fudging my motivations for seeking her out. I had simply been trying to confirm the facts before approaching him. His time, after all, was precious. Didn’t want to waste it.
His response was simple: ‘Dangerous move.’
I nodded. He was right in more ways than he suspected.
Burns reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. ‘I quit. So she thinks. But at my age, what’s the worst that can happen?’ He offered me one. I almost took it, but withdrew my hand at the last second, shaking my head.
We stood in silence for a while. Burns said, ‘He was a chancer. Always was. But something like this …’
‘Not his style.’
‘He’s too fucking dumb. You can say it. I’m being kicked around by a fucking mental midget.’
There was that. And nothing I had seen proved otherwise. Burns hadn’t underestimated Craig Nairn. But there was something that we had been missing this whole time. And perhaps the only person who could answer our questions was Nairn himself.
‘So what do we do?’
‘You get some bedrest. Jesus, look at you. Bloody sight, you are, son.’
‘And you?’
He didn’t answer me. Looked across at the tracks. Had he ever considered just walking away from it all? He made a big deal about being a self-made man. Working his way up from nothing. I always wondered if he really believed that the sacrifices he made had been worthwhile. He had let go of normality and security to gain wealth and power. But with that came the constant threat of someone like Nairn who thought that he could take it all away from Burns, who thought that he could inherit that wealth and power.
There was always one.
Burns had taken it from his predecessors, of course. The Kennedys had been the city’s dominant crime family for decades. Burns had been an enforcer for the old man, passing down his empire to his two sons. When the elder Kennedy died, Burns struck out on his own, knowing that the two lads were too much in love with the product that they supplied to last long in the business. Their empire and influence slowly shrunk. Eight years ago, the brothers had been murdered – executed – in a case that the police never solved. But there were rumours. There are always rumours.
That new swimming pool down by Riverside had very strong foundations.
‘I can help you.’
‘You’re not able to do what needs to be done. I’ve always known that about you, son. You’re flexible. But every man has a point where they break. I don’t think you’ve found yours yet. But I know where it is.’
He knew about the man I had killed six years earlier. He knew that I’d willingly delivered another to his death. But perhaps he thought those were the exceptions that proved the rule. Or that killing another man would irredeemably change me. Or that the context had to be right for me to act. I couldn’t justify the deaths of faceless others in a war over drugs and territory the same way that I could justify the death of those who had inflicted pain and suffering on innocents.
I’d always believed that Burns hid himself from the moral quandaries of his life. But the more time I spent with him, the more I realized that he truly understood who and what he was. He just chose to ignore the moral problems such duality posed.
What’s worse?
To become a monster and never accept that fact?
Or live every day with the monster that you created?
Burns looked at me for a moment, side-on. Maybe reassessing, trying to decide whether he had misjudged me. ‘You’re in no state, either way. So here’s the thing. This wee bollock’s coming after me and my family. He’s made that much clear. My wife … she knows who I am, even if she doesn’t know everything. She’s been with me through it all. The court cases, the raids, the wars, the good times, the bad times, all of it. When they’ve banged me up on suspicion, she’s the one comes every time bail me out and never says a fucking word. She means everything to me, McNee.’
I’d already let him down once. And here he was again asking me to protect his family. Was his confidence in me that strong? Or was this another attempt to keep me on the sidelines? Another babysitting job? One that he felt I couldn’t possibly fuck up.
It was hard to tell. The old man was an accomplished liar. The only way you could see the truth of him was in his actions. And by then it was often too late. As too many corpses could attest.
I hesitated.
‘You’re the one who came to me,’ he said. ‘Offered your support. Your allegiance.’
‘Because I had no other choice.’
He nodded. ‘Keep telling yourself that. You were cast out from your old friends. Oh, it’s a tragedy, all right, son. The good man who did all the wrong things for the right reasons.’ Was he mocking me? It was hard to tell. There was a bitterness dancing just underneath the words.
‘Isn’t that how you see yourself?’
‘Like I said, we’re more alike than you might care to admit.’
What could I say to that?
‘She’s an innocent, McNee.’
Really? Perhaps, in our world, innocence was simply a matter of degrees. But I had to wonder if his wife – who knew and quietly accepted the truth about her husband – was still complicit in his guilt.
‘You told me once that all you wanted was to do the right thing. This is the right thing, McNee. Protecting someone who has done nothing wrong.’
‘And what about you?’
‘I’ll pay for my sins. Sooner or later. All of them. The reckoning comes to us all in the end. So they tell us every fucking Sunday. I accepted that a long time ago.’
Did that make it easier or harder for him, I wondered? To know that the end, when it came, would be a tally of all his willingly accepted evils?