Good News, Bad News

by WHS McIntyre

  ‘She wants to leave you money in her will too,’ I said.

  ‘Whatever she’s got, tell her to keep it.’ Freddy picked up his weaponry and shoved omelette into his mouth.

  I followed suit. The meatloaf was delicious and no meal was ever the worse for gravy and a doughball or two.

  Joanna ignored her own food, keen to have everything tied up before we moved onto the coffee and little biscuits. ‘So she cheated on you. What was it? A one-night stand? Every woman can make a mistake.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘No they can’t. Not every woman.’ My further protests were stifled by a swift kick from under the table.

  ‘What I mean,’ Joanna continued, ‘is that maybe Ellen did make a mistake. A big mistake—’

  ‘That some men . . .’ I paused, to give Joanna what I hoped was a meaningful stare, ‘could never forgive.’ I turned back to Freddy who was stoking his face with omelette, while the gravy on my meatloaf grew cold and began to congeal at the edges.

  Joanna took up the reins of the conversation once more. ‘Freddy, Ellen’s dying. She just wants to spend some time with you and say goodbye.’

  ‘I said goodbye to her the night she cheated on me.’

  ‘But surely you can’t deprive your wife of her dying wish?’

  ‘You don’t think so? Then just watch me.’ He halved his final piece of omelette with a decisive swish of his knife, like an old-school surgeon who thought keyhole surgery was for wimps. He poked egg into his face, allowing us to spectate as he spoke. ‘She screwed Jake Turpie . . .’ Freddy paused to take a drink of water and then inserted the final morsel of his meal. ‘And so I screwed him and left her.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s sorry,’ Joanna said.

  ‘If she’s sorry, then she has no-one to blame but herself.’

  ‘And she wants to leave you her estate.’

  ‘If she expects me to forgive her just because she’s going to leave me a few quid—’

  ‘Half a million,’ I said. ‘She won the lottery.’

  Freddy stopped chewing, mouth wide open. He closed it eventually, which came as a relief to those of us forced to witness the early stages of his digestive process. A sudden difficulty swallowing was only overcome by a pull on my glass of dark ale.

  I put a hand inside my jacket, took out an envelope and shoved it across the table at him. ‘That’s two thousand euros. Get yourself on a flight back to Edinburgh, book into a hotel and give me a call when you’re settled.’

  ‘But not too soon,’ Joanna said. ‘First of all, we have some sightseeing to do.’

  17

  And we did. We saw a great deal of Prague over the next three days, and a fair amount of our hotel bedroom as well. The following Monday it was business as usual. Joanna started her new job at the PF’s office in Falkirk, and I was face to face with Sheriff Albert Brechin for the first time since the arrest of his granddaughter.

  ‘The court will rise and sit again at eleven thirty,’ the Clerk announced, after I’d finished my final plea in mitigation that morning. Surprisingly no-one had gone to jail yet. ‘Sheriff Brechin would like a word with you before you go,’ the clerk whispered to me, a look of apology on her face. Eleanor Hammond had been a Clerk of Court as long as I’d been in business, possibly since I’d left school, possibly since I’d started school. She’d been the mainstay of the court forever, initially when it was based in Linlithgow and then after it had been relocated ten miles south to Livingston.

  Eleanor had summoned me to Sheriff Brechin’s chambers on many occasions over the years. Usually, it was to discuss procedural problems that had arisen during the course of a trial; today it was for something else.

  ‘I see you’ve appealed me,’ Brechin said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Again.’

  I sat down on the other side of the extremely neat and tidy desk from him. There was a small pile of papers in a wire tray to his left, a larger pile in the tray to his right, a pen-holder, and two silver-framed photographs. One of the photos was a black and white shot of a young man in a Scots Guards’ uniform, whom I took to be Brechin back in the day, the other, a more recent coloured photo, was taken shortly after he’d departed Crown Office to take up the post of sheriff, when he’d switched from prosecutor to persecutor in one swift donning of a horsehair wig. Eleanor having shown me through to chambers, was dismissed by a wave of the shrieval hand.

  ‘I’ll be waiting outside,’ she said, with the reassuring smile of a zoo keeper who’s just put a visitor in charge of the tiger enclosure while she nips around the corner for a smoke. Brechin leaned forward. With an effort he lifted a few sheets of paper from a leather-bound, green blotter that was situated front and centre on his desk. He held them up to me. ‘No reasonable Sheriff, you say, would have reached the verdict I did in Miss Somerville’s case.’

  For obvious reasons, the no reasonable Sheriff ground of appeal was particularly disliked by sheriffs and one usually given short-shrift by their brothers and sisters sitting in the Appeal Court; however, as, technically, Brechin had not erred in law, I could see no other avenue.

  ‘I can go over my de minimis argument again if you like,’ I said.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t, Mr Munro. I heard quite enough at the trial.’

  ‘If you’re not prepared to concede the point, then why am I here?’

  Brechin tossed the papers to one side. He’d had enough of smiling. ‘Why didn’t my granddaughter plead guilty?’

  ‘We defence lawyers call it the presumption of innocence. You may have heard of it.’

  That didn’t provoke quite the explosive result that I thought it might.

  ‘I’m not asking you as a sheriff. I’m asking you as her grandfather. If Antonia had pled guilty at the earliest stage it would have gone much better, both sentence-wise and when she came before the disciplinary tribunal.’

  ‘Can I refer you back to my early comment about the presumption of innocence?’

  ‘But there is no presumption of innocence here.’ He leaned forward and thumped a fist on the blotter, driving his point home like he was driving a nail into my head. ‘The girl is guilty. She’s told me as much. I know she will have told you too, and yet you have pled her not guilty, no doubt expecting a larger fee the longer you can spin—’

  ‘I’m a defence lawyer. Presenting defences is my job and in my opinion a plea of not guilty is best.’

  ‘Best for your business, perhaps, while Antonia’s career sails off down the river.’

  I’d had enough. It wasn’t his insults. I was used to those. And I could understand his role as the concerned grandfather. Antonia was his flesh and blood and he’d want what was best for her. What I wasn’t prepared to accept was advice from someone who’d shown scant interest in the well-being of any other client I’d had up until then.

  ‘I think I should go,’ I said.

  He wasn’t listening, but at least the fist-banging had stopped. ‘By dragging this whole sorry process out you are only maximising the embarrassment to everyone.’

  I stopped halfway out of my seat and sat down again. ‘Is that what this is really all about, minimising embarrassment? To Antonia or to you?’

  The anticipated detonation might very well have taken place there and then, but for a light knock on the door. Eleanor poked her head into the room. ‘Are you going to be long, Sheriff? We’ve still the court to finish and there’s a police officer here looking to have a search warrant executed.’

  Brechin beckoned her in, dipped a hand into the wire tray to his left and removed a single pre-signed sheet of paper. ‘Give him this.’ The clerk came over and took the piece of paper from him. ‘Tell the Procurator Fiscal that I’ll sit again in five minutes.’ When she was gone he turned his attention once more to me. His temper seemed somewhat defused, no longer a UXB with corroded wiring. He took off his wig, set it down on the desk and stared at it. Suddenly, I felt sorry for him. Almost.

  ‘I’m going to do my best for Antonia,’ I sai
d.

  ‘You’d better.’ Not looking up, he stroked the roughness of the wig, lovingly, like it was a pet cat, albeit one in need of a hot-oil conditioning treatment. ‘I strongly believe she should have pled guilty when she had the chance.’

  ‘With the greatest of respect, Sheriff,’ I said, which is legalese for, “listen up dunder-heid,” ‘when have you ever not thought it best that someone should plead guilty, and the sooner the better?’

  He stopped stroking the wig, placed it on his head and stood up.

  I wasn’t finished. ‘Another thing—’

  ‘Thank you, that will be all.’

  But it wasn’t all. Not for me. I remained seated and stared up at him as he came around the desk, walked to the door and held it open for me. Eleanor had sent a bar officer who was waiting patiently in the corridor, ready to lead the Sheriff back onto the bench. ‘Why should Antonia opt for the worst-case scenario? Plead guilty and the only result is a conviction. With a plea of not guilty there’s always hope.’

  ‘Put off the evil day, you mean. Let you rack up the fees.’

  ‘The longer we hold out, the more chance there is of the PF dropping the charge. After all it’s only a single wrap of cocaine.’

  ‘Really? How likely is it that the proceedings will be discontinued? The case against my granddaughter is more open and shut than this door.’ He pushed the door to his chambers, slamming it against the frame. ‘She should have pled guilty and you should have put forward mitigation and begged the court for leniency.’

  Mitigation? Leniency? Brechin was finding a whole new vocabulary.

  ‘This is a prosecution under summary procedure,’ I felt it necessary to remind him. ‘There are lots of things that can go wrong with the Crown case.’

  ‘And you’re the very man to capitalise on any mistakes. Is that it?’

  ‘You’re a judge. I’m a defence lawyer. Each to his own.’

  ‘Well, if there is a chink in the Crown’s armour you’d better find it.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. ‘At least there is one major problem I won’t come up against.’

  ‘And that is?’

  I opened the door for him. ‘You.’

  18

  Freddy Fletcher was taking no chances. He called me while I was still at court on Monday morning to say that he’d booked into a hotel, the name of which he was not prepared to divulge. We arranged to meet in Edinburgh at one thirty at a café on the corner of West Richmond Street and The Pleasance, looking onto the Deaconess Gardens, where, on a reasonably warm May afternoon, the cherry trees still hung on bravely to a few clumps of blossom, and students sprawled on the grass amidst scattered text books, pretending to study.

  Directly across the road was the murder locus of Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots’ second husband. The main suspect, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, having been tried and acquitted, promptly married Mary three months later. On the site now stood the Kirk O’Fields, the point of its red spire stabbing the cloudless blue sky like a bloody dagger.

  But it wasn’t for reasons of horticulture or history that Freddy Fletcher had chosen our meeting place. That had more to do with the public setting and the fact that St Leonard’s Police Station was but a truncheon-throw away.

  Not renowned for my punctuality, I was nonetheless first to arrive. I pulled up a bamboo chair at one of several small round tables on the wide pavement and ordered myself an Americano and a sausage sandwich. I was becoming better acquainted with the latter when Freddy appeared from behind the red telephone box to my right only twenty or so metres away. He was looking more like how I remembered him, dressed in a heavy-weave, tobacco-brown suit and yellow shirt, his bearded chin resting gently on a bright, multi-coloured cravat. Perhaps in August, during the Festival, he’d have blended in more, but for a man trying not to draw attention to himself he was about as inconspicuous as the seagull perched on the adjacent table that was eyeing up my sausage sandwich with evil intent.

  ‘I sincerely hope this is not a set-up, Robbie,’ were his opening remarks as he shook my hand using his fingertips as though trying to avoid contaminating himself in the process.

  I pushed a chair at him with the sole of my shoe and looked around for the waitress, while Freddy studied the occupants of nearby tables for potential assailants. The only possible suspect I could see was the seagull. ‘Stop worrying and sit down.’ I took out my mobile phone and laid it on the table between us. ‘Ellen isn’t far away. She can be here in five or ten minutes. She’s just waiting for my call.’

  ‘Why is she not here herself? What has any of this got to do with you?’ Freddy took out a paper pack of foreign cigarettes, and offered it to me. I declined. He shook one out, tapped the end of it on the table and put it in his mouth. ‘Why . . .’ He lit the cigarette with a cheap disposable lighter and puffed. ‘Why does Ellen need you here if she just wants to meet me?’

  ‘Two reasons,’ I said. ‘Firstly, she wants me to ensure your safety. After all there is Jake Turpie to think about. We wouldn’t want you ending up inside a crushed vehicle on the back of one of his low-loaders would we?’ Freddy started looking around again, as though Jake might jump out of one of the cars parked nearby or from behind the red and yellow plastic dumpster at the side of the building. ‘I really wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Robbie.’ He took a restorative puff and blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. ‘It’s upsetting.’

  When the waitress arrived, Freddy sent her off in search of a double espresso as I munched the final bite of my sandwich. ‘Ever think that maybe caffeine and nicotine are the cause of your irritable bowel and not Jake Turpie?’

  ‘I see you’ve added a medical degree to your LLB since I’ve been away,’ Freddy replied. ‘How about I deal with my eating disorder the way I see fit and you don’t speak with your mouth full?’ This from the man whose mushroom-omelette-coated tongue and tonsils formed a mental image it had not been easy to dispel. ‘What’s the other reason Ellen wants you involved?’

  I chewed, swallowed and wiped my mouth with a paper napkin that was already slightly damp from some spilt coffee. ‘She wants me to break the news of your return to Jake and square him up for the money you stole — without any loss of blood. Your blood.’

  The waitress hove into view with Freddy’s coffee. ‘And you and Ellen think that’s possible?’ he asked, squashing his cigarette into a small tin ashtray.

  I picked up my phone. ‘Let’s find out, shall we?’

  Freddy was stirring a heaped teaspoonful of sugar into his second double espresso and I was peeling the foil from a can of San Pellegrino when a taxi pulled into the kerb. The red-headed nurse with the legs and light green trouser-suit got out, opened the rear nearside door and helped her charge onto the pavement. Ellen came across to where we were seated.

  ‘Hello, Freddy,’ she said.

  ‘Ellen,’ Freddy grunted, stirring his coffee and not looking up. Ellen sent her companion off inside the café and stood gazing down awkwardly at her husband. I pulled over a chair for her.

  ‘What can I get you?’ I asked.

  ‘A glass of water is fine,’ she replied, and I conveyed this to the waitress who was collecting empty cups and saucers from a nearby table.

  ‘I’ve just been telling Freddy that we’ll have to tread cautiously with Jake Turpie,’ I said, when it became apparent that neither of the two was going to break the silence.

  Freddy pulled another cigarette from the packet, lit it, inhaled deeply and let the smoke out in a long extended stream straight at his wife.

  Ellen sat there for a moment, tendrils of smoke winding themselves around her recently coiffured hair, and then she snatched the cigarette from Freddy’s lips and threw it into the street. ‘I get it. I get that you’re angry with me for what happened. Sorry. Unfortunately, I can’t turn the clock back. In fact, there aren’t that many hours left on my clock.’

  Freddy raised his tiny coffee cup to his nose and gave it a sniff. Ap
parently satisfied at its aroma, he drank the contents with one deft flick of the wrist. ‘I suppose,’ he said, with a sniff, drawing a crooked forefinger across his moustache, ‘it is good to see you, Ellen, and I’m sorry to hear about your . . . your predicament.’

  ‘Can it,’ Ellen said. ‘I don’t need any fake sympathy from you. You decided you could do without me and even though you made that decision, without giving me the chance to explain—’

  ‘Explain what?’ Freddy set down the tiny coffee cup. ‘That you didn’t have sex with Jake Turpie?’

  Freddy’s voice was raised, and one or two tables were now beginning to take an interest in the real-life soap opera unfolding in front of them.

  ‘Maybe we should continue this discussion somewhere more private,’ I said. ‘How about we go back to your hotel, Ellen?’

  Freddy shook his head. ‘No, I like it here fine. I’m not going to any hotel room with people I don’t trust.’

  I didn’t know if Freddy Fletcher’s new life in the Czech Republic centred entirely around selling tat to tourists, but until he’d disappeared off the radar, his main goal in life had been to make as much money as possible, by conning as many people as possible. Now he was being handed a fortune on a plate and seemed intent on throwing it away.

  ‘Let’s all calm down,’ I said. ‘I’m sure there was fault on either side and that both of you are sorry for what happened. I glanced from one to the other. Neither seemed particularly repentant. ‘Now, we all know why you’re here, Freddy.’

  ‘Do we? Tell me, Ellen. Why am I here?’

  Ellen reached out to take his hand. Freddy tried to pull it away, but wasn’t fast enough. She took a firm grip. ‘I may have no future, but I do have a past and that’s you. We’ve no children and, like you, I’ve no family. All I have is money, and I can’t take it with me. However, if you don’t want—’

  ‘No, no,’ Freddy protested. At long last a degree of sanity was being restored to the proceedings. ‘It’s not that I’m not . . .’