Duty Man (Best Defence series Book 2)

by William H. S. McIntyre

  I suggested the Champany Inn, arguably Scotland’s top eating place, a mile out of town on the road to Blackness. I’d had a minor disagreement with the management previously, but not sufficient to prevent my mouth watering at the prospect of a medium rare porterhouse steak washed down with something from St. Emillion old enough for a bus pass. Instead, we adjourned to a pub by Linlithgow Cross for a passable, if under-heated, steak pie and a pint of ale with bits in it. Was there a real ale anywhere that hadn’t been awarded a gold medal by some organisation or other? Not one to grumble, my plan was to scoff lunch and get rid of the journalist right after pudding.

  ‘So, what story are you after,’ I asked. ‘Doing an article on Scotland’s top lawyers?’ I laughed. He didn’t.

  ‘Mr Munro…’ He dipped a hand into his pocket and produced a wildly vibrating mobile phone. ‘Do pardon.’ He looked at the display, grunted and put the phone on the table. ‘You were saying?’ he asked, once the phone had ceased buzzing.

  ‘I was saying—’

  The mobile phone lit up again and started to jump about the table. Reynard glanced down at the number flashed up on the screen and then ignored it.

  ‘I was asking why you’d come all this way to see me.’

  ‘Why? Chic Kelly, of course,’ he said, in a ripe, plummy tone of surprise. ‘He called me - from prison – a few weeks back. You’ll understand that I receive a lot of calls from prisoners. I suppose they’ve little else to do. Mercifully their phonecards tend to run out so I don’t have to be rude and hang up. One can never be too careful about how one speaks to the criminal classes, what with early release and such like.’

  ‘You’ve been trying for weeks to speak to me about Chic Kelly - why?’

  Over apple pie and ice cream, I learned that the journalist had chucked Chic a rubber ear until, on a slow news day, he’d had a researcher check out his credentials. It was then he’d realised he was dealing with something of a celebrity criminal and set off hot-foot for Glenochil Prison to meet the prisoner whose health was so rapidly deteriorating.

  ‘I came all the way up to the frozen north only to find the chap was practically ga-ga and prattling on about the blackmail of a judge and a rather predictable tale of his own wrongful conviction.’ He yawned, revealing a portion of half-chewed apple pie before covering his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘You’ll know better than I, Robbie, that our jails are simply crammed with innocent people.’ His stiff upper lip twitched. ‘Anyhoo, Mr Kelly said he had photos. Not Lord Lucan stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s, I’ll grant you, but I have to say I was quite interested. Sex and the judiciary - it always sells newspapers. I think it’s something to do with the wigs and silk stockings and if there’s a hint of blackmail to boot, so much the better.’

  ‘Chic Kelly was trying to sell you photographs?’

  ‘Wanted fortunes for them. How I laughed. Told him I’d need to see the stuff before he saw a penny.’

  ‘And he told you to contact me?’

  ‘Precisely. Said I should get in touch with you and, as I’ve now discovered, you are a very busy man.’

  ‘The photos - I can’t give you them.’ No point beating about the bush.

  ‘Has someone else approached you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Then if it’s about your commission, I’m sure we can work something out.’

  I would have loved to have worked out something, but I feared my commission and Reynard’s feature-spread were both lost.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t have them. I mean I did - but I don’t now - and I don’t think I can get them back.’

  At this news, Reynard put down the spoon with which he’d been prodding a concrete piece of pie crust and sat back in his chair. He looked like a vulture digesting a glass eye. He pulled out a cigarette packet. ‘You Jocks and your smoking ban. It started up here and now it’s everywhere. Bloody nuisance. My old boy didn’t fight Hitler just for me to end up choking for a smoke.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘You’ll excuse me, won’t you?’

  In the chrome rims of the cruet set I saw the waitress hove into view carrying a saucer with a folded piece of paper weighed down by a couple of sweeties.

  ‘What it is to be a nicotine addict,’ Reynard said, getting up from his seat.

  ‘Sam,’ I called out once he was near the exit. He turned and I held up his mobile phone.

  He came back to the table and took the offered phone. He studied the dead screen and gave the phone a little shake. ‘No-one there.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the reception can be a bit iffy up here in the frozen north.’

  He made to leave again but not before he’d bumped into the saucer carrying waitress.

  ‘Thanks for lunch,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk you to the train.’

  CHAPTER 54

  I left Reynard at the station and headed up the brae to the Union Canal. As a boy I’d gone there often with Max. Armed with jelly jars and fishing nets made from his mum’s tights, we’d spent many a happy hour catching tadpoles and minnows. Back then it had always been blue skies and sun. Today it was cold, the sky heavy with rain clouds.

  At the canal basin there was a bench. It was a peaceful spot and that was precisely what I needed: peace, time to think, take stock. I sat back and watched the coots dart in and out of the reeds. Soon it would be spring. Until then there wasn’t much food for the birds apart from the occasional school kid prepared to share a packed lunch.

  I tried to concentrate. Chic Kelly. What a man. He’d obviously expected that when he died the trust fund money from Frankie would die with him. Not only had he been after the reward money, he’d also tried to punt the story, complete with photos of Lord Hewitt and his lover to the Sunday papers as a legacy for his son and soon to be widow.

  Surely that couldn’t be the link between Max’s death and the photos? Surely he hadn’t been murdered to stop the News of the World or some rag getting its inky hands on some pictures of a dead judge and a rent boy: front page one day, fish supper wrapping-paper the next. There had to be something more. I recalled the look on Frankie’s face when I’d showed him the blood-stained clothes.

  Frankie McPhee is a dangerous man. The opinion of former Police Sergeant Alex Munro and Detective Chief Inspector Petra Lockhart. If Frankie had killed Max he would kill me too if he didn’t get what he wanted. He had the photos and blackmail note that linked him to Devine. Now he’d want the rest of the stuff. I had left myself two obvious options.

  Option one: give the clothes and pistol to Frankie. Max’s killer would go free and Sean Kelly would probably do life.

  Option two: go to the police, tell them everything and hope that the Crown would grant immunity to me for my possession of the pistol in exchange for testimony at Frankie’s trial. Chic’s statement to Lockhart and the clothes that were now locked in my office safe should be enough to see him convicted of murdering Lord Hewitt.

  Option one was a non-starter and there were serious problems with option two. Grass on Frankie and I’d have to watch my back for the rest of my life whether he went to jail or not, and it still wouldn’t guarantee the release of Sean Kelly for there was not one shred of evidence pointing to Frankie having murdered Max.

  I was considering whether there might be a third option when behind me, across the other side of the huge 16th century sandstone doocot in Learmonth Gardens, the Glasgow to Edinburgh ScotRail express sped by shattering the tranquillity of my surroundings. The sounding of its horn as the train rattled through the station must have drowned out the noise of a dilapidated motor coming over the canal bridge and parking at the side of the road.

  A crunch of gravel. The gloomy sky seemed to darken even more and I gazed up to see Big Jo-Jo Johnstone standing on the towpath looming over me.

  ‘Frankie wants to see you,’ he said. He took me by the upper arm and hauled me from the bench. ‘Don’t struggle.’

  But struggling was exactly what I intended to do. I twisted and then dropped suddenly
, trying to use the weight of my body to break free and scramble to safety. Big Jo-Jo’s iron grip on my bicep did not lessen one degree. He wrenched me to my feet and pulled me close. ‘Don’t struggle,’ he repeated and into my face pointed one of the fingers that protruded from his light-blue splint. It was the size of one of TESCO’s posh sausages and he placed it on my right eye, the pressure of it causing the eyelid to shut. One prod and... squish.

  Spinning me around as though I were a doll, he dragged me from the canal bank down a short flight of stone steps to the roadway and his parked car where Frankie was sitting in the front passenger seat. Jo-Jo opened the back door, placed me inside and slammed it shut. Once behind the wheel, using his uninjured hand, he adjusted the rear-view mirror until it was just so. Without rushing, he started the engine and flicked the indicator on.

  It was now or never. I reached for the door handle. Jo-Jo glanced at both side-mirrors then looked over his shoulder to check the deserted road for traffic prior to moving off. He saw what I was doing and pawed at me over the back of his seat, the seat belt and his bulky frame making it difficult for him to get at me.

  The door was stuck. I flung myself at it and it flew open. Jo-Jo accelerated. Slowly the car began to move off. I rolled out onto the road and was at the top of the steps and onto the towpath before the car had come to a halt again.

  Jo-Jo and Frankie jumped out of the car.

  ‘Robbie,’ Frankie called to me, ‘I only want to talk. There’s things I need to explain.’

  I knew all about the ways Frankie McPhee and his pals explained things to people. I’d seen the photos of their victims when I’d defended them in court.

  ‘You want to explain?’ I shouted to him. ‘Call me.’

  Frankie glanced at Jo-Jo and the big man started to walk up the steps. I looked around for help. The problem with peaceful beauty spots is that they are peaceful and beautiful because there are so few people around.

  I had gone there to mull things over, consider my options. Now I had another choice to make: I could run left or right along the towpath. Left it was seven miles to the Falkirk Wheel, right it was seventeen miles to Edinburgh. Jo-Jo reached the top step. I feinted left, he moved left. I feinted right, he moved right. He came straight for me. I turned around and jumped into the canal.

  Ice-cold water stripped the air from my lungs. Reeds wrapped around my legs. Mud sucked at my feet. I managed to push myself off from the side and into the middle, scattering the family of coots, the birds squawking, fluttering in all directions. The basin was the area where the barges turned and so was much wider than the canal itself and a lot deeper. Although I could feel the creepy caress of under-water weeds on my ankles, I was able to swim and as I splashed my way to the far side I heard a car engine rev.

  I hauled myself out of the water and looked back. Frankie and Jo-Jo were gone. There was nobody there. Nobody except an old man in a tweed bunnet walking quickly along the side of the canal, dragging a small white dog along on a leash behind him and keeping a wary eye on the crazy man who sat soaking wet and bedraggled on the far away bank.

  CHAPTER 55

  My mobile phone was water-proof, I discovered, and so one short taxi ride and one surprised and slightly miffed taxi driver later, I was slopping my way up my dad’s front path.

  ‘You fell in the canal?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I confirmed for the umpteenth time. I sat down on a kitchen chair and pulled off my wet socks. ‘I went for a walk, tripped over something and the next thing I knew I was doing duck impersonations.’

  The old man came over and stuck his nose in my face. ‘You always seem to be slipping or tripping. Are you drinking?’

  ‘I’m naturally clumsy – you know that.’

  Former police-sergeant Alex Munro was clearly not satisfied at the suspect’s replies to questioning but terminated the interview. He put on his coat.

  ‘Well, I’m away round to Vince’s.’ He took a bottle of whisky from a cupboard and stuffed it in his coat pocket. ‘We’re going to watch some football: the sixty-seven game. The one you got me off the internet. You seen it?’

  I hadn’t. Only the clips they occasionally played on the telly to raise Scots’ spirits in times of impending sporting adversity.

  ‘Me and Vince were at the game, did you know?’ I did. He’d reminded me frequently over the years. ‘I went down with some of the boys from the station. You didn’t need a ticket back then. Not if you were polis. A flash of the warrant card and you were right in there no questions asked. Vince was home on leave from Belize or somewhere. We arranged to meet at Piccadilly Circus.’ My dad laughed at the memory. ‘Took us an hour and a half to find each other. We went for a dook in the fountains at Trafalgar Square and then off to the pub – or it might have been the other way around. Anyway, by the time we got to the game we were too bladdered to know what was going on.’ He made a selection from the row of football DVD’s lined up on a glass shelf below the TV and inserted it into the coat pocket not otherwise occupied by a bottle of Islay single malt. He walked past me to the door, pinching my cheek as he went. ‘Jim Baxter, digitally re-mastered – pure magic.’

  Once he was gone I bolted the front and back doors, chucked my wet clothes in the spin-dryer and ran a bath.

  Before I lowered myself into the foaming waters, I put on the latest Ojos de Brujo album; quite possibly it was their only album. Apparently, Andy liked to play the CD in the office when I was out at court and Grace-Mary, not a big fan of the flamenco/hip-hop scene, had confiscated it. When I found it in my desk drawer I wrapped it up and gave it to my dad as part of his birthday. I’d never heard him play it, but I liked the sound.

  Sometime between ‘Color’ and ‘Tanguillos Marineros’ the phone rang and I let it. I closed my eyes and put all thoughts of Frankie McPhee and Max Abercrombie out of my head.

  The phone rang again later when, armed with a bottle of cheap wine, I was sprawled on the sofa watching TV. Once more I ignored it. There was a horror movie on. Three teenagers stumble upon an ancient tomb in the basement of a ruined castle and instead of informing the National Trust, prise open the lid. It doesn’t come as a complete surprise when one of the hapless three cuts his finger in the process and carelessly lets a drop of blood fall on the desiccated corpse of Count Dracula. Mayhem follows and everyone ends up at Dracula’s place to find him entertaining some highly promiscuous and scantily-clad young vampire ladies. It made me wonder whether that sort of thing, orgies and the like, would still be as much fun if one were immortal. All that blood-letting and sex every night. Surely sometimes you’d just want to have a night in and crack open a thousand piece jig-saw.

  The movie flew by in a lorry load of dry ice, buckets of ketchup and lots of dodgy Eastern European accents, before one well-placed tent peg rendered the man in the tuxedo no longer a threat to nubiles in diaphanous nighties. It was a tired plot, poorly acted and just what I needed: two hours of brain inactivity.

  The titles rolled. I went through to the kitchen to make a coffee, catching sight of my reflection in the hall mirror. Robbie Munro after half a bottle of Sicilian red and no sleep for a week - never mind the curse of the undead - that really was scary.

  A noise in the street made me jump. Headlight beams shone in through the curtains, shredding the blinds and casting strips of light across the room for a second or two. I went to the window, pulled back the curtain a fraction and peeked out. One of my dad’s neighbours was struggling from a taxi. He steadied himself, one hand on the roof of the cab the other digging deep in a pocket. At least someone had been away enjoying themselves. He chucked some cash at the driver and laid an uncertain path to his front door. I left him fumbling for his keys, went through to the kitchen and decided against making coffee. Caffeine was one drug I didn’t need. I was edgy enough already.

  I was drinking a glass of water, when from the pocket of my coat, slung over a radiator and dripping into a basin, I heard my phone play a drunken ring-tone. The number wa
s withheld; that usually meant the police.

  ‘Mr Munro?’ Sure enough, it was the custody sergeant. ‘I have one Richard Milligan, date of birth twenty-two, four, ninety-three, here on a fines warrant for two hundred pounds. He wanted you to know.’

  I didn’t recognise the name. He must have been a new boy otherwise he wouldn’t be letting himself be arrested on a Friday night for an unpaid fine and he wouldn’t have wasted his phone call having me informed – it wasn’t like I was going to rush down to the station with the dosh. He’d be taken to court on Monday and given more time to pay or ordered to perform unpaid work in the community. The jails were too full to be clogged-up by fine-defaulters.

  When the phone rang again a short time later, I answered expecting the custody sergeant to say that the fine-defaulter’s mum had been in and paid the fine, but it wasn’t the police; it was Frankie.

  ‘Robbie, we need to talk.’

  I hung up and peered through the window again. Though the street was lined both sides with parked cars there was no sign of life. Suddenly - brake lights. At the end of the road, a familiar beat-up motor carried out a laborious three-point turn and came rolling down the road towards me. It stopped, straddling the white lines. In the amber glow of a streetlight I thought I could just make out Jo-Jo Johnstone’s bulky silhouette in the driver’s seat.

  There was a loud bang on the front door. I knew it was Frankie before I heard his voice.

  ‘Robbie! Let me in!’

  Through the spy hole I could see him standing there, a bulge in the chest of his jacket and a determined look on his face.

  ‘Robbie!’

  Another thump at the door. Frankie was taking a chance. He might have guessed I’d hole up here, but he couldn’t afford to be arrested; even a breach of the peace allegation would see his licence recalled and he must have known that my dad wouldn’t hesitate to call the police. He was clearly desperate.