04-Mothers of the Disappeared (16 page)

He was silent.

‘What if it was your boy?’

More silence. Stubborn. How could he ever admit I was right?

‘I’d want the cocksucker castrated,’ said Lindsay. ‘But Alex Moorehead went down for this crime …’ Outside of his home, away from his family, he had reverted to the Lindsay I knew and loathed. Foul mouth, snap judgements, little patience. Put me on an even keel, at least.

‘You’d have been happy with the lie?’

‘If I believed it was the truth. Which I still do. You know I assisted Ernie after your little accident? Took up the slack, so to speak.’

‘He never mentioned it,’

‘Why would he? Given everything else, how would you feel if you knew I’d come along and nicked the case that was supposed to set you up for a long life at CID?’

I slugged back a mouthful of beer.

Wished I had something stronger.

‘You know that Elizabeth Farnham had a little thing for geek boy?’

I shook my head.

‘They slept together, her and Alex Moorehead. Three weeks before Justin vanished. She was always calling up Ernie, protesting the prick’s innocence. Once we got it out of her, I mean. I always thought, who’d want to admit they slept with a monster? In her mind there had to be a mistake.’

‘There was. Even Wemyss admits that.’

‘No,’ said Lindsay. ‘He admits the possibility. There’s a big fucking difference. That fat fuck may look like the only two things on his mind are when to eat and when to shite, but he’s sharp as a pointy stick up the arse. And he admits you might have a point, despite the fact that you’re a shitey wee arsebucket. But that doesn’t mean you’re right. Just means you might not be wrong. Besides, you’re pointing fingers at the wrong people.’

‘Really?’

‘I used Taylor myself. After that bang-up job he did on Moorehead’s system. And, aye, Wood’s reference helped. So don’t go thinking what I know you’re thinking. This was back when IT was small, underfunded, maybe even misunderstood. Although I hesitate to tell the geeks that, you know? I gave the arrogant twat a few calls when we were stuck. He was good, McNee. I mean bona-fide digital dick genius. Wood even offered him a full-time position when Tayside finally started properly building its IT operations and digital forensics.’

‘But he turned it down?’

‘Better money to be made in the private leisure sector. So he said.’

‘Or maybe he was worried you’d get too close to something.’

‘Tell me something, McNee. I know I’m a cynical bawbag, but you take the bastard biscuit. You really do. Taylor’s probably off the end of the autism scale, but that doesn’t make him a criminal genius. Sometimes just because something looks suspicious, doesn’t mean it is.’

I nodded.

But I didn’t agree with him.

Something about Jason Taylor was rotten, and had been from the moment he offered his services to help bang up his friend.

And I was going to prove it.

S
ometimes, even when all the evidence tells you it’s a bad idea, you need to follow your instinct.

Wemyss was right that the most likely suspect was the missing father. But there wasn’t much more I could do about that than the police were already doing. Besides, what harm could there be in just talking to Taylor? Assuring myself that I was wrong? That he really didn’t know anything?

The internet is a wonderful thing. But it’s easy to hide behind the anonymity of an email or the relative safety of a phone connection.

Face to face communication gives away a lot. If you want to lie, the worst thing you can do is talk directly to someone. That’s one of the reasons police interrogations work best up close and personal. A good copper isn’t always a trained psychologist – although people are coming to the force through a variety of paths these days – but they quickly develop a good eye for the things that people aren’t saying with words. They learn to instinctively read between gestures. They get at the truth and chip away at a person until finally they can no longer hide those things they’ve been saying all along.

It’s about facial tics. Small gestures. Imperceptible eye movements.

The things you see, but don’t see.

Intuition is another word for the unconscious. Your mind will pick up on things you can’t always consciously articulate.

Crimes committed in the last twenty years will often have an electronic trail. Incriminating emails, phone calls, text messages or a thousand other ways of implicating yourself that you’d never think of in the day-to-day running of things. There is always something visible to the breed of detectives that followed in the lead of willing geeks like Jason Taylor. Information is the new DNA, and if most minor criminal acts are caught by hair fibres or fingerprints, then many other crimes can now be caught by discarded strands of information that even your smarter-than-average crook won’t believe to be important.

But confession still comes down to confrontation.

You can follow the evidence all you like, but it’s meaningless if you don’t understand people. It’s the old difference between the letter and spirit of the law. You can arrest someone for breaking the law, but doing so doesn’t mean a damn if you don’t understand why they did what they did.

It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the offices of Redboot
,
on the upper floor of an unassuming building on the outskirts of Ayr. Not the most salubrious of addresses, but then London, Glasgow and Edinburgh were no longer the centre of the world, and a start-up had as much a chance succeeding out here as anywhere else.

Although if I could have afforded to set up anywhere other than Ayr, I would have given it a go. It’s an odd little town. Despite the closeness of the sea, there’s an air of better days having been seen and that all-too-familiar feel of the little Scottish town that no longer knows what it is in the grand scheme of things. Birthplace of Burns? Aye, but is that enough to provide a sense of purpose in an age of austerity and recession?

I parked across the street and settled in to wait.

I tilted the seat back, kept the radio on. Flicked through local stations. What I got were DJs trying too hard, and pop songs that came from artists I could no longer readily identify mixed in with embarrassing guff from the eighties and nineties.

Finally I gave up, plugged in the MP3 player, let Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and ol’ Bob Dylan wash over me.

Bob was Tangled Up In Blue when Taylor left the Redboot offices. He was taller than I expected, walked with a strange, loping gait. It didn’t fit with the voice I’d heard on the telephone or the image projected by his picture on the website, but I was beginning to remember him better now. He was a geek trying to hide himself. Someone for whom his natural social awkwardness was a constant embarrassment. Something to be hidden behind carefully considered affectations. This was a man who didn’t let you see what he really was.

I got out of the car, rushed to catch him up. He was about to climb into a silver Merc when I called his name.

He turned round, leaned against the car as I walked over to him. ‘I could put out an injunction against you,’ he said. ‘This is harassment.’

I shrugged. ‘Persistence.’

‘Poh-taye-toh,’ he said, ‘poh-tah-toh.’

I said, ‘Let’s call the whole thing off?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s.’ He still felt he was in control of the situation. His voice retained that strangled attempt at education that covered up his natural accent. I remembered thinking when we first met that he was somehow ashamed of his roots, that everything about him was an affectation. Not that it struck me as a definite problem. He wasn’t the first guy to try and leave working-class roots behind.

‘You never talked to Alex Moorehead after he was arrested,’ I said. ‘But before the incident, you were close friends. At least that’s the way you spun it.’

He had the car door open. He stood up straight and let go of the handle. ‘Would you talk to him? After that?’

‘Right.’ I waited a moment. ‘Because you felt he had betrayed you? Or because you felt you betrayed him?’

‘I was hoping I’d find something to exonerate the poor bastard.’

‘Looking back on it, I just thought maybe you were a bit quick to lend a hand.’

‘Buyer’s remorse?’

‘Copper’s remorse, maybe.’

‘Is this why you’re no longer on the force? Are you going around, now, trying to screw up all the cases your boss ever made?’

I shrugged.

‘Tell me how you define friendship, Mr McNee. I thought we were friends, me and Alex. Then I realized I never knew him. Kind of hard to imagine he was keeping that kind of secret.’

‘I’ve seen people who were betrayed before,’ I said. ‘Most of them want answers. They feel it so personally, so deep inside them, like a blade stuck between the ribs, that the only way to rid themselves of the echo of that pain is to confront the person who betrayed them and ask one very simple question.’

‘Yes.’ He regarded me for a moment. Moved his head from one side to the other. Quick and jerky. He held his hands down his sides, arms absolutely still, back ramrod straight, but his fingers twitched incessantly as though they wanted to wrap themselves around something and squeeze.

Maybe my neck. Or the neck of the man he claimed to have betrayed him.

He was tough to read that way.

He said, ‘Why? That’s the question. You want to ask him, why?’

‘But you never did. At least you never asked us. Or him. You came, did what you needed to do, and then you just walked away.’

‘I needed to process what I found. I’m sure you dealt with that kind of thing all the time when you were a copper. Me, I’d never seen anything like it before.’

I remembered his reaction. He’d asked to be excused, to take some air, said he’d found something but couldn’t put into words what we would see on the screen.

It had seemed genuine enough at the time. Enough that no one had questioned it. Not Ernie. Not Wood.

Was I now rewriting history to fit my current theories?

‘Do you mind if I ask …?’

He took a deep breath, loud enough to stop me mid-question. His tongue darted from between his thin lips and dabbed around for a second. Making me think of a lizard who sensed a nearby fly.

‘Will it make you leave me alone?’

‘If I’m happy with the answer.’

‘You’re not the police any more,’ he said. ‘But I could call them, the real police, have them sling your arse inside for harassing a private citizen.’

‘Aye, you could,’ I said. ‘And I’d understand. But all I want is a moment of your time. I need to understand Alex. I need to reassure my clients that the right man paid for his crime. That I didn’t overlook anything. To do that I need all the facts at my disposal.’

‘And you think talking to me will help?’ Was that a slight twitch in his left eye? An involuntary flinch?

‘It can’t hurt,’ I said. ‘You knew him, I think, better than anyone.’ What I did then was play the deception card. ‘The last person he talked to was his father. It was only after that he killed himself. Now his father’s disappeared. Coincidence?’

Taylor shrugged.

‘I just need a better picture of who Alex was. His relationship to his family, especially. It might help explain some things.’

‘I’m not sure I can—’

‘Like I say, you knew him best of all the people we interviewed. Even more than his father, I suspect. There might be something you can tell me that I overlooked at the time. I’m just looking to tie up all the loose ends, Mr Taylor. Not as a cop. But as someone looking to bring peace of mind to the people that Alex hurt.’

He hesitated. ‘I have somewhere to be,’ he said. ‘My mother … it’s her birthday. We have … she’ll be … She gets upset if I’m late.’

‘I know how it is.’

He smiled. No humour there. Perhaps a kind of sadness. ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

‘Then we’ll talk later.’

‘You won’t let this go?’

‘I’m tenacious,’ I said, ‘because my clients pay me to be that way.’

He nodded. Again, his head ticked from side to side. A metronome in a lanky wig. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We can talk. But the minute I don’t like your questions, I’m walking.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said.

I watched as he got into his car.

Trying to search for any sign that I’d shaken him.

The closest cafe was a Costa Coffee at the local Tesco. Around us, shoppers bustled and echoed from the aisles and the coffee machine provided a discordant, hissing, steaming soundtrack.

We both drank black coffees – Americanos, the barista had insisted when we ordered – and for a few moments we had nothing to say to each other. An awkward and unexpected blind first date. We both struggled to find a way to break the ice.

Finally: ‘What were you afraid he would say?’

Taylor sipped at his coffee. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. It was prominent in his neck, more than you’d have noticed in the photograph he had on the company website, and when he got nervous about what he was saying, it bobbed so hard you worried it might dislodge itself and spit halfway across the room.

‘I was afraid that he wouldn’t be the man I used to think he was,’ said Taylor. ‘It’s one thing to know what he did, to find the evidence, to work in his office without him there. But to face him again, knowing what I knew …’ He bowed his head, looking away from me. ‘I couldn’t … How could you know everything you’d been through with this person and then have to come to terms with them doing something like that? I couldn’t … I didn’t want. I didn’t want to remember him as a monster. To me, I wanted to think of it like, like maybe he’d died, you know?’ He finally looked up again. It couldn’t have been any more convincing if there were tears in his eyes. But there weren’t. He wasn’t playing it up like that.

Maybe that was meant to make it more convincing.

But like I say, there are things you’re looking for that are outside the normal reactions, the things that maybe you can’t put a name to, but that you know are there. Small gestures or changes that you only notice with experience.

‘You were his friend. You shared a flat with him during your student days. You probably knew him better than most. There was no sign of unusual behaviour?’