04-Mothers of the Disappeared (17 page)

‘Define unusual. We were geeks, Mr McNee. Unusual goes with the territory. Especially at that age. I just … when you think about those other children … If I’d known at the time, seen the way he looked at them …’

Playing it up just a little too much.

‘The other children? The ones that Amityville connected to Moorehead?’

Taylor nodded. Suddenly reticent. His words and his act drying up like spit on a hotplate. He licked his lips. Playing for time.

Had he meant to bring up those other children?

Had he taken this act too far?

He had never commented publicly on the other children that Moorehead had been linked to. The media had tried to get him to speak, but he never said anything. Everyone took this as his way of cutting his time with Moorehead out of his life completely.

But was it something else?

‘If you’d seen something at the time? You weren’t living at the same address during those years.’

‘We were still friends. I would visit him, sometimes.’ Speaking a little too fast. Eyes looking to the side, not meeting mine. Slight sheen of sweat on his lips and forehead.

He was a liar. Covering something up. And I needed to know what it was.

It could have been a tiny thing. An omission he now regretted or perhaps a suspicion he’d never acted on. Or it could be bigger. A secret that would finally help me understand the inconsistencies in Alex Moorehead, the man who admitted killing one child and denied all the others that followed his established MO.

If Taylor’s cover-up was as big as I suspected, then it had helped put away an innocent man before finally killing him. By inches. If he was innocent, then Alex Moorehead’s suicide was maybe less of a tragedy than if he’d continued living with the consequences of one man’s deception.

Was Moorehead’s death a release?

Not the final escape of a murderer but of an innocent man?

The problem with Taylor was that if he was lying, he probably believed his own deception. The consequences of telling a lie for so long: you start to behave as though it’s the truth.

So how could I draw him out, make him admit to a truth I could only guess at?

I needed to find the cracks in his deception, the places where his lie was at its weakest, where even he could see the seams and understand the fraud.

I hated to do it.

I didn’t want to do it.

But I needed to.

I
took a walk down to the water, breathed in the air. Gulls circled, occasionally looping down, grabbing any fish that came too close to the surface. At the beach, the waves broke gently against the sand.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Taylor was lying. I needed to find that chink in his armour, work in my knife.

My interrogative strengths had always been psychological, getting people to reveal the truth of who they were. It had been an instinctual thing at first, but I had worked on it over the years. Physical intimidation had never been my preferred tactic.

When I moved over to the private side, I discovered the need to understand my clients more than I ever had a suspect in interview. Police work always had a straightforward goal, an end in sight. You were working to put away the criminals and protect the innocent. But working for private clients meant digging through grey motivations and the silent ethical realities that they brought into the office. People often glossed over the real reasons for hiring a private detective. I had frequently had as much trouble with my own clients as I ever had with a suspect.

I had come to believe that – to some degree at least – Alex Moorehead was innocent. So, I was looking for someone who could give me the answers as to why he would take the rap for something he never did. I was looking for the one-armed man, like Dr Henry Kimble. Except I couldn’t be certain that there ever really had been one.

Taylor had answers. I was sure of it. But were they the answers I wanted?

In the back of my mind there were suspicions and conspiracy theories too wild to say out loud. The Wood connection had me worried. Taylor was hiding something. I knew the kind of pressure the ex-assistant chief constable had exerted on people. I’d had to fight to bring to the surface the terrible things he’d done.

Taylor had fitted up his friend. I was sure of it.

But why?

On whose authority?

I watched the gulls for a while, let the breeze caress my face. I caught the scent of salt whipped off the water. The sound of the waves and the call of the birds made me feel a million miles away from civilization.

I wondered if I was just being paranoid. Becoming a conspiracy theorist; seeing connections where none existed, making up stories to fit facts I had already decided upon.

Nearby, kids shouted to each other. Their voices were rough, less innocent than I remembered being at that age. But then this was a harsh world we had created. Our own fears created a generation who frightened us because we’d given them more knowledge than they’d ever be ready for, without the critical tools to deal with it. These kids had been brought up in the spectre of dead children whose cases were highly publicized, pushed to the forefront of the public’s mind. They were a generation in constant fear. Which made them harder than any generation before. They’d developed tough skins to deal with the fear their parents subjected them to every day. My last couple of months on the force, I remember thinking that the juvenile crimes were getting worse than the adult ones. That there was a generation who’d been brought up with both the fear of the bogey-man and the certainty that they themselves were invincible, that they could do whatever they liked and still get away with it.

Thinking like that made me feel old, out of touch. An old man in his mid-thirties. Worried for the youth of today, his own childhood lost in the dim and distant past.

As I turned to walk back into town, where I’d left the car, one of the kids – couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven – shouted at me as his gang came into earshot: ‘Oy, mister! Got any fags on you?’

I shook my head, walked on.

‘Fuck you, then!’ he shouted.

‘Paedo!’ another yelled, no sense of what the word really meant. Or the terrors and nightmares that it would give his mother.

No evidence of sexual assault.

Back at the office, I read and re-read the reports concerning Justin Farnham’s death. He’d been murdered. Tortured, even. But not sexually interfered with.

That still jarred with what we found on Moorehead’s PC. The pictures had been brutal, all with a twisted sexual element. And yet Moorehead himself showed no other signs of sexual interest in children.

At the time it had been easy to explain his inability to carry through the act with Justin, resorting instead to the violence that existed in the second half of the equation. He wasn’t ready to cross the line between fantasy and reality, but in starting his crime he had to ensure that there were no witnesses. But in jail, he’d seen numerous counsellors and never once – aside from some vague mumbling around the issue – had he expressed or displayed that kind of pathology.

And besides, Project Amityville later linked other, earlier, cases to Alex. The other murder providing a definite sense of a killer escalating towards sexual gratification. Given Justin’s position in the timelines of these murders, there should have been a more sexual component to the murder; a hint of escalation.

So why the apparent disconnect between crime and killer?

I called Bobby Soren. On his unlisted number, of course.

Soren was also known as ‘the Grinch’, a paranoid computer hacker who saw himself as the online Banksy. He’d been arrested and fined a few times, suspected and glowered at several more but mostly no one knew who he was, because he was too damn good at covering his tracks.

‘Awright, McNee,’ he said when he realized it was me on the other end of the line. ‘How’s it hanging, my man? Little to the left?’

I didn’t even bother answering. ‘Need your help, Bobby.’

‘Aye, aye,’ he said. ‘Hugg E-bear, that’s me.’

It was a good gag by his standards, even putting the emphasis in the right places.

‘How are you on history?’

‘I remember something from school ’bout a Schlieffen Plan, but only ’cos it sounded cool.’

‘I mean old computers.’

‘How old?’

‘2004, 2005,’ I said. ‘Around then, anyway.’

‘Aye, aye,’ he said. ‘Real old, then.’

‘Real old.’

‘Know how old I was then?’

‘How old?’

‘Still shiteing my breeks is how old,’ he said. And laughed. ‘But, sure, I could probably still have taken apart those old bad boys and put ’em back together. Strong, faster, better.’ Bobby had a thing about TV shows from decades before he was born. Ripped them from online streams, watched them over and over.
Starsky and Hutch
was his favourite, but clearly he’d been watching Lee Majors in the
Six Million Dollar Man
lately.

‘You want to meet?’ I asked.

‘I got time,’ he said. ‘If you’ve got the good stuff.’

‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the good stuff.’

Soren was an odd mix of clichés. Dressed like a protonerd with ill-fitting white tracksuit and baseball cap with over-sized peak, but living the life of your typical alpha-geek, existing on an odd diet of sugared drinks and junk food.

The good stuff, for Soren, was a multi-pack of Red Bull and several oversized bags of M&Ms.

We met at a coffee house in the town centre. The Empire, trying to pretend like it was a slice of New York in the centre of Dundee. Maybe you could fool yourself if you didn’t look outside. Or listen to the accents.

I ordered a black coffee. No one insisted on calling it an Americano. Soren had a Coke. Occasionally, he stroked the goodie bag I’d brought. When he noticed me looking at him, he laughed and said, ‘My preccioussss,’ in his best Gollum voice.

‘I looked into it,’ he said. ‘What you said. It’d be piss easy to hack into someone’s old PC and plant a trail. More so back then because people weren’t quite so sophisticated when it came to looking out for hackers’ footprints, know what I mean? Now you need to be better than the best because the cops, they all hire the best to watch out for guys like me.’

‘You never fancied working as a police geek?’

‘Fuck the man,’ he said, a little too loudly and punched his fist in the air. Several people looked round. I tried not to look back in case I found myself having to apologize for my companion’s behaviour. He leaned forward, as though sharing a deep, dark secret, voice suddenly sotto: ‘They’d never have me, anyway. Not now.’

I couldn’t argue. A few years back, the Grinch had hacked Tayside Police’s website and replaced the homepage with an animation of a copper humping a pig. Political subtlety wasn’t really his strong point. Staying off the grid, however, was.

‘So it would be possible to add images to a hard drive, make it look like they’d been there a long time, maybe even redirect where they came from?’

‘Back then? Oh, aye. It was possible. Security being what it was, then, the hackers were always one step ahead of everyone else.’

I thought about it for a minute. Figured the Grinch was probably now the equivalent of what Alex Moorehead had been then. So why didn’t Moorehead even float the possibility that someone had added those pictures to his drive? At the very least it would have been a good delay tactic while we investigated the possibility. Allowed him to sort his thoughts and his alibi.

Was I clutching out in desperation, eyes closed, fingers hoping that whatever they touched would help pull me out of the dark?

Soren said, ‘Deep in thought, man?’

‘Just … considering things.’

‘You have something you want me to take a look at?’

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Wish I bloody did, though.’ If Soren could take a look, maybe he could apply over six years’ worth of experience with computers since the original hack and uncover something that whoever planted those images didn’t realize they had left behind.

A grand plan. Except the computer was stored away in an old evidence locker somewhere. If anyone even knew where that was, it was still going to be impossible for me to get to.

After all, I had no real friends left on the force. At least, none who would be willing to stick their neck out.

T
he warehouse was even more desolate than it had been eighteen months earlier. If it was dying before, there was no trace of a heartbeat now.

An air of tragedy continued to hang over the building. Even the birds gave it a wide berth. A couple of lone gulls sat on the low wall that marked the boundaries of the long-empty industrial estate and stared at me, as though they couldn’t work out what anyone would be doing here.

Except making a point. A childish point.

But it was too late to change my mind. When I spoke to Griggs, this was the address I gave him. He hadn’t questioned my decision, and I wonder if he understood the significance. If he didn’t, then Susan certainly would.

The car, when it pulled up, was a late-model BMW. An old joke about managers driving BMWs because it’s the only car they can spell skittered through my brain.

Griggs got out of the driver’s side, regulation suit and dark military-style jacket, maybe thinking he looked like something out of
The X-Files
. I noticed the passenger door open as well. My breath caught in my throat. Susan got out, dressed in a dark jacket that went down to just below her knees, and dark boots that hugged her calves.

They walked towards me. I stayed where I was. The birds scattered, steering clear of the warehouse. Like I said, they must have sensed what happened here. And maybe had an idea of what might happen now.

When he got close enough, Griggs said, ‘You want to talk? Seeing sense, at last?’

I looked past him to Susan. Her eyes told me everything I needed to know. Susan had always been her father’s daughter, and she had inherited his ability to play her cards close to her chest. But some things you can’t hide. Some things are too personal to disguise. Especially from someone who knows you too well.