04-Mothers of the Disappeared Read Free Page B

on. This left my options limited. Giving me no choice but to go ask the questions I’d been too scared to ask earlier that day. Call in favours I’d never really earned.
    ‘Don’t start thinking we’re going to become bosom buddies,’ Lindsay said. ‘Just because I have a modicum of gratitude for what you did …’
    I still couldn’t get used to it. When he was in the house, he didn’t swear. His wife had tried to tell me as much when I met her in the hospital while the grumpy old bastard was in a coma, but I hadn’t believed her.
    ‘I need a favour.’
    ‘Not much I can do moping around on the couch all day. Not much I’d want to do for you, anyway.’ The barb was sluggish, more force of habit than genuine enthusiasm. You could see by the way he was sitting – back curved, head slumped just a little, arms hanging there – that he had lost something of the
joie de vivre
he once had. And who could blame him? Spend time in a coma, see how you feel when you come out of it. Especially when the people who put you there were people you were supposed to trust. Fellow police officers turned rent-a-thugs desperate to protect a powerful man’s secrets.
    I remember talking to Lindsay’s wife after he came out of the coma. She told me that a little something inside him had died. That he wasn’t quite the same man. Not just his quieter demeanour. There was the sense of shell-shock to him, as though his whole world had been turned upside down.
    He hadn’t been able to defend himself.
    I think that was the worst thing for a man like Lindsay. He’s always been proud. Used to take great pride in the fact that he was an outsider; granted grudging respect because of his by-the-book mentality, but never really one of the gang because of his refusal to form relationships within the job.
    Then again, I’d taken the opposite tack, and look at which of us became the pariah.
    ‘You’re bored,’ I said. ‘I get that. When I took time off after the accident, all I wanted was get out there and do something. It drove me crazy.’
    ‘Aye, turned you into a bigger arsehole than you already were.’ Just a growl, a hint of the old bastard I used to know. Brought a smile to my face. Christ, times were bad when I got nostalgic for a man like George Lindsay.
    ‘I’m not asking for much,’ I said. ‘Just a name. That’s all.’
    ‘And what happens when they ask me why I want to know?’
    ‘You can work that out.’
    ‘I just want to congratulate whoever stuck the knife in.’
    ‘Always knew you had a sneaky side.’
    He didn’t say anything.
    ‘Look, I just need to know,’ I said. ‘Something about the timing of all this seems very convenient.’
    ‘Convenient, how?’
    He couldn’t work it out? I had to wonder if the coma had slowed him a touch more than anyone realized. ‘I’ll tell you if you get me the name.’
    Another hesitation. I hoped he was thinking it over.
    Persuasion is a delicate art. Like the police interview. You have to know when to push and when to step back. Go too much in either direction, you lose the control of the situation that you crave.
    ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘But that’s it. Anyone wants to talk, I’ll listen but there’s no fu— no way, I’m putting my own reputation on the line for you. You go down, it’s on your own. Right?’
    ‘That’s all I’m asking,’ I said. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’
    That evening, I stayed up late in the front room, sitting in the padded armchair, watching reruns on the TV. Most of them made little sense. TV scheduling goes out the window when you work my kind of gig, and with more and more TV built around story arcs and viewer loyalty, it meant that I just let the images wash over me.
    In the end, I found that it wasn’t enough of a distraction and turned off the set. I needed engagement. Something I could follow, could lose my brain in. I grabbed a book from the shelf –
American Skin
, by an Irish writer Cameron Connelly