Father Confessor (J McNee series) Read Online Free Page A

before.
    The strain of a secret.
    The tension of a lie.
    Susan said, “He asked about you, as well. About you and Dad. How you felt about being the Golden Boy and then just another piece of shite investigator getting up everybody’s arsehole , to quote the man himself.” She smiled, the way everyone did when talking about Lindsay’s own peculiar turns of phrase, but it was weary and more out of habit than anything else.
    The words started to bounce around my head. I should have known Lindsay would try and make this personal. Ever since I broke his nose – right before I quit the force – he’d gone out of his way to prove that I was a fuck-up, a gobshite, whatever.
    Some days, I believed he was right.
    Susan sipped at her tea. She said, “I need to go home, Steed. Need to sleep.”
    I said, “I’ll see you later.”
    She kissed me on the lips. Fleeting, so fast I almost couldn’t feel it. Then she got up. Paused, as though thinking about something. “Do I have to say it?”
    “What?”
    “Leave this to the people who know what they’re doing?”
    I shot her my best smile, reached and touched her hand.
    It seemed to be answer enough for her.
    ###
    The work of an investigator is rarely black and white. Unlike the coppers, you don’t have the same moral and legal high ground to dig into people’s lives. The various Freedom of Information Acts that arrived with the dawn of the digital age have served to make our jobs more difficult, despite the clear advantages the digital age has brought to the profession.
    Which means that sometimes you have to make friends off the grid.
    Like Bobby Soren. The Grinch, as he liked to be known.
    He was the one who hacked Tayside Police’s website and replaced the homepage with an animation of a pig humping a rat. As he said later, it was computer code and not artistic subtlety that was his strong point.
    The Grinch considered himself a political radical. “I don’t harm anyone,” he told me once. “I’m like the Banksy of the online world, ken?”
    His grandparents had been German, but The Grinch was Dundee through and through. Born in the city, grew up here. He’d run with the last of the Dundee gangs during his youth, and had some scars to show for it. He’d only received, though. The Grinch, as he would tell anyone who’d listen, was “a lover not a fighter”. Aye, and he said that in his best Michael Jackson impression, too.
    So, The Grinch acted like a dumb prick, but he was always on the ball. The fact that he knew he was smarter than anyone he knew was probably what led to his little stunts. Boredom and frustration can do more to form habitual criminals than any other factor you care to mention.
    He met me at a café in the east end of the city. The kind of place where people didn’t pay attention to you and where no-one wanted to be noticed.
    I grabbed a weak coffee and managed to resist the bacon rolls sitting under the warmer. The fat oozed off the meat, white and thick.
    It was hard not to stare.
    The Grinch himself was wearing a DUFC baseball cap and a dark tracksuit that hung loosely from his skeletal frame. He grinned as I came over. Half his teeth looked black and rotten. He spent so much time behind a computer screen these days, he’d forgotten how to spell personal hygiene.
    “Awright, buddy?”
    “You said you owed me a favour.”
    “More than one.”
    I sipped at the coffee. Tried not to make a face. “How do you feel about data protection?”
    “Depends whose data needs protecting.”
    I told him what I wanted. He snorted. “Piece of piss. Could do that in my sleep.”
    I didn’t care if he was wired or snoring, just as long as he got me results.
    “Aren’t there, ken, official channels for that kind of shite?”
    I said, “You know I never ask you questions?”
    He tapped his nose. Winked. “Gotcha,” he said. Like we were partners. Old friends. Comrades in arms.
    ###
    The drug squad have a motto: Follow the money .
    As in, you don’t