I would only discover later what happened.
How Burns came when he got the message. Whether or not he knew he was walking into a trap, I’ll never be sure. But he showed up. Alone. As though he really believed I was the one who’d contacted him.
Griggs watched him leave the house. He’d been parked across the street, watching the old man’s house. Waiting for his moment. He let the other car pull away and waited for a few minutes before breaking into the house. Patient. He knew that if he rushed any of this, he risked blowing his last chance. He set the fire in the living room, and walked out of the house as though he had merely been visiting. None of the neighbours realized anything was wrong until the windows at the front blew open with the sheer force of the interior heat. Shards of hot glass rained down on what had once been the safest street in the city.
The old man’s empire was crumbling. He was vulnerable. Two attacks in as many weeks. People were getting the message.
This was why Griggs had set the fire. A final humiliation.
Griggs sent a second text message to Burns:
Change of plans. Meet at new location. Security compromised.
Burns didn’t recognize the new address. Why would he? What would he have cared about an empty building where they once found the dead body of a drug-addicted girl whose life had ended before it even had a chance to begin?
He didn’t know CeeCee’s name. He wouldn’t have cared anyway. Her choices had nothing to do with him.
Burns arrived at the new destination maybe ten minutes later. He climbed out of the car and looked around, maybe wondering why I had chosen this place to meet.
But he wasn’t here to meet me.
And when he saw Griggs, he smiled.
It was nine years since CeeCee’s corpse had been found at the rear of the property. The building had been empty for half that time. The doors were shuttered, the windows covered by metal grates to stop intruders and squatters from breaking in. Not that it made a difference. The pebble-dash walls were washed out by years of neglect. The front garden was overgrown. People dropped their rubbish among the tall grass as they passed by. Bottle shards and needles sparkled in the moonlight. The house had a grim kind of beauty.
I walked up to the main door. The padlock had been broken, the metal cover pushed aside. I pushed it further, let the long-dead house swallow me up. The hallway was dark. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the dark. I began to distinguish silhouettes; enough to place the stairs leading up to the second level and the length of the corridor leading to the kitchen at the rear of the property.
Bile rose up the back of my throat. The world lurched, like a passenger liner caught in a sudden swell. I reached out to steady myself, my hand touching the cold, rough plaster of the walls.
‘Hello? Griggs?’ My voice seemed to crack. But I couldn’t afford weakness. Once this was done, once this was finally over, I would seek medical attention. If it wasn’t too late.
I had spent the last few years drawn inevitably to the broken places in the city; the remaining hangovers of decades of poverty that had afflicted the self-described City of Discovery. My life had not moved with a city that was trying to forget its broken past. Instead, I remained in the shadow of places like this. Meanwhile, to the outside world, Dundee displayed its culture and shining future, its achievements and its potential.
I had to wonder: Which was the real city?
Was it possible for both to exist side by side?
Did we only see the city we wanted to see?
What did it say about me that this was the Dundee I knew? That the shiny future so often seemed distant and unattainable to my mind. As though it belonged to other people. As though I did not deserve it.
There was movement from the kitchen. I walked through. Got to the doorway and then stepped back, my hand over my face, as a torch beam exploded in my eyes. ‘Jesus!’
‘You’ve got a hard head,’ Griggs said.
‘Aye, that’s the truth,’ a second voice said. The old man. Sounding defiant. What else would I expect? ‘He’s too stupid to realize when he should just give up and lie down.’
‘Do you recognize the gun?’ Griggs asked.
I blinked. The scene came into focus. Illuminated not just by the torch, but by streetlights leeching over the rear garden and through the slats in the metal covers across the windows.
I could see the dust dancing.
The old man was on his knees, facing away from Griggs, head bowed, fingers locked at the back of his skull. The SCDEA agent was holding a handgun.
Sure, I knew the gun. Why he had chosen that one in particular. Although God only knew how he got his hands on it. Maybe there was no longer anything left of the old Sandy Griggs: the man of honour and integrity. The man who had once believed completely in justice. He was so consumed by his need for revenge that nothing else mattered any more. He had given himself up to that hatred that I knew so well. He had become what I had tried so long to escape.
I said, ‘Why that gun?’
‘You’re not daft, McNee. You can figure it out. For all the speeches you give, I know you want him dead the same as me. You’ve got as much reason. Jesus, he’s the reason that Ernie Bright’s fucking dead. Susan’s too scared to face up to her anger, but you understand. You killed a man with this gun, McNee.’
I remembered the way that the bald thug had been knocked back. The way he crumpled to the muddy ground like a discarded doll.
And the way that one act of violence failed to fill the gaping, aching hole in my heart like I hoped it would.
‘No,’ I said. ‘This isn’t how it ends. We don’t kill him. We can’t. It makes us just as bad—’
That got him. ‘Fuck you! Fuck your moral platitudes!’
‘I mean it, Griggs. You’ve got so twisted up on all this you can’t see right. You have to step back. He’s finished. You’ve done your job. What you needed to do. We have more than enough to fuck him up for good. So let’s end this the right way. No bloodshed. No more death.’
‘I knew you were a spy,’ Burns said. ‘I knew you were working for him. But I know you’re not like him, son … I know …’
‘Shut up! You don’t speak, old man. You don’t say a fucking word.’ Griggs’s finger tightened round the trigger. I took in a sharp breath that stayed caught in my lungs.
‘Or you’ll kill me? Jesus, you don’t really have it in you. You’ll get someone else to do it, maybe. But when it comes down to it, Griggs, you won’t kill me. The only man you ever killed was your father. And you’ve never been able to live with that, have you?’
‘Shut up and I’ll make it fast.’
‘I was never afraid of violence, son,’ Burns said. ‘But it wasn’t all that I lived for. You have a tool, you have to know how to use it properly. That’s all I ever did. It was never personal. Never like this.’
‘Crucifying a priest?’
‘The message, not the medium.’
‘You killed my sister.’
‘She killed herself. I never even met her. Frankly, son, I couldn’t give two shites about some sad wee junkie whore who doesn’t have the strength of character to pull her bloody socks up.’
‘You gave her the means to destroy her own life.’
‘I never met her. Never encouraged her. Never said she should shoot that shite in her veins. I didn’t even know her name—’
‘Her name was Catherine.’
‘CeeCee,’ I said, quietly. ‘When she died, her name was CeeCee.’
Griggs was losing it. He trembled. That finger made to squeeze the trigger.
Burns couldn’t see any of this. But he had to know what was happening.
I said, ‘Her name was CeeCee, not Catherine. And she killed herself.’
Griggs let his gun arm drop. His features dropped with the shock of betrayal. He started to say something. But the words stuttered before he could form them.
The old man moved faster than I expected. He whirled round and got to his feet. He was holding a knife. I hadn’t seen where it came from. He feinted, and grabbed at Griggs’s gun with his left hand. Griggs let go of the gun as he fought for balance. Blood arced from the back of his hand where the knife caught him.
The old man dropped his knife. It clattered on the ground. The only sound for a moment. The gun leapt from Burns’ left hand to his right. He adjusted his position with a practised air, and shot Griggs square in the forehead.
The silence that followed was crushing. Made me want to drop to my knees.