Father Confessor (J McNee series) Read Online Free

reason for her father’s close relationship with Burns. And once that might have been true, in the days when the Force tried to work with organised crime gangs rather than against them. When they still retained the feeble and naïve hope that they might be doing something proactive and preventative instead of making costly deals with the devil that would never pay out.
    Ernie had been part of those deals, once.
    Now his friendship with Burns – and I had been there, witnessed for what it was – was crossing a line unacceptable on any level for a professional copper, especially with a reputation like DCI Ernie Bright.
    “There has to be something,” she said. “Something we don’t know. An angle. A play. Anything.”
    But back then I believed that she was fishing in empty waters.
    And I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

FOUR
    It was late afternoon when Susan called, asked me to meet her at a coffee shop on the Perth Road. One of those places that did fair-trade coffee and home-baking.
    When I arrived she was sat at the window, looking out.
    She tried for a smile when she saw me walk in. Failed. I guess you could say, miserably.
    I sat beside her. She inched a black coffee over to me. I took it, letting my hand brush against hers as I did so. A small gesture. Nowhere near enough. Like anything I could do would have been.
    I said, “Tell me.”
    And she did.
    ###
    The story that Lindsay told her was much the same as the one he’d given me.
    However, Susan was sure that the DI left out certain details, And it wasn’t to spare her feelings; that wasn’t Lindsay’s style. No, when it came to other folk’s feelings he was subtle as a shotgun blast to the groin. And, I sometimes thought, proud of it, too.
    “He asked a lot of questions,” Susan said. “Like how much I saw my father outside of work, how close we were, whether he’d been acting different lately, all that shite.”
    I wondered what her reaction had been. She’d talked about his secrets catching up with him, and I knew that Ernie’s colleagues – Lindsay in particular – weren’t dumb. They had to have known something was up with their boss.
    Or maybe they’d put any recent behaviour down to the fact of his wife leaving; an event that had been a blow for Susan as much as her father. Even when you’re an adult, there’s still a small part of the child inside you that wonders if, in some tacit way, you are to blame for the erosion. If only you had behaved differently they would still be together.
    I wondered how Susan really felt about Lindsay’s questions. Whether she’d seen them as purely professional, or if she had sensed some personal jab behind them. As though her superior officer was trying to find some way to blame her for what had happened to Ernie.
    But Susan was smart enough to know when she was being played. She’d worked alongside Lindsay for a year, had known him longer than that, knew his style when it came to an investigation. He was always one for looking at relatives first, of methodically following procedure and protocol.
    Even when his gut might be telling him something else.
    I looked at Susan’s face. Her eyes were puffed, bloodshot. Her forehead was creased. Feeling the strain. I wanted to hold her. Just hold her and tell her that everything would be alright.
    But instead, I pulled back and said, “What did you tell Lindsay?”
    She reacted to that by straightening her back. Looking at me with a strange expression. One I couldn’t read.
    “I told him what I could. Which wasn’t much. That we haven’t been talking as much since the Furst incident. That he didn’t know what to make of what happened between you and me.”
    Aye, there was another subject I’d been avoiding of late. We’d fallen into the rhythm of a relationship without thinking about it, without knowing the boundaries or the strengths of what was between us.
    But together, I sometimes felt that we were further apart than we had ever been