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

go for the street level dealers, you follow the money as far up the chain as you can and then that’s the guy you take down.
    I figured if Ernie was fiddling his morals, he would be fiddling his cash, too.
    Follow the money .
    The Grinch had asked if there weren’t official channels I could go through to get my hands on Ernie’s statements. And maybe there were, but I didn’t have time to waste and more importantly I didn’t want to leave a public trail. Not just because I knew Lindsay would be doing exactly the same thing I was. And I knew he wouldn’t be too happy to have me pissing on his shoes. Again.
    The statements the Grinch pulled – he sent an intermediary to the office with hard copies – went back years.
    I spent the afternoon locked in the office, looking at numbers, figures, account details, names. Trying to find patterns, repetitions.
    After a while, my vision was beginning to blur. My brain was pushing out against my skull, begging for release from this task. I thought maybe a walk would do me good, but I couldn’t leave the room.
    I had to keep trying.
    Because something in those numbers was going to make sense.
    At five, Dot chapped on the office door, told me she was heading home. Asked if there was anything else I needed. I mumbled thanks, told her I’d lock up, let her go.
    Too wrapped up in my own head for civility. Even if I knew I’d end up paying for that later on.
    It was past six, and I had sheets full of names and patterns. I’d tried drawing connections, spider-diagrams, notes of all kinds, anything to make sense of what I had.
    One name had leaped out.
    Mulvaney Wholesale had been paying a regular sum into Ernie’s accounts for the last year. They were a front, of course. Mulvaney Wholesale had gone under years ago. Old competitors of David Burns, they’d been subject to what many would euphemistically term a “hostile takeover”.
    Before Mulvaney, a whole raft of payments came on a regular basis from names I recognised and others I didn’t. All companies with dodgy pedigree, but I’d bet you couldn’t trace that pedigree in a straight line back to the one man I knew was behind them all.
    He was too careful for that. There would be buffers in place. Enough to protect him. The words, not proven were a mantra to Burns and his kind.
    I didn’t bother tracing the payments all the way, although I was sure The Grinch would have given me enough that if I wanted to, I could. Most of those payments could have been refunds or payouts for moonlighting gigs, and none of them tied back explicitly to Burns. Nothing screamed complicity on the part of a dead DI. Unless that’s what you were looking for. And even then, they only whispered surreptitiously.
    With malicious intent.
    I had to wonder, when did it start?
    When did Ernie Bright turn from a man whose moral and ethical compasses were sharply set to a crooked cop who took money from known criminals and drank at their houses as though they were old friends?
    ###
    “We learned the hard way, son, that you can’t deal with men like these.”
    We were in the Phoenix, a pub on Dundee’s Nethergate that’s become a Dundee institution. The landlord himself was on the bar, had made his usual cracks, asking whether we expected protection money as we walked in the door.
    Drinks ordered, we’d grabbed a booth near back of the bar; a small amount of privacy in a public place. The bar was dark, decorated with an appealing eccentricity. The early evening drinks crowd were buzzing pleasantly, even though the pub wasn’t quite at full capacity.
    The night, of course, was young.
    Ernie had been the one dying for a pint at the end of the shift. I wasn’t going to complain if a DCI wanted to reach into his pocket, and besides, the Phoenix had been, for many years, my spiritual home.
    The day had been a bad one. A probable witness to organised criminal activities had been found face down in the river. An apparent suicide; statements taken at the scene