Good News, Bad News

by WHS McIntyre

‘It’s getting pretty crowded around here,’ Jim said.

  ‘Not too crowded that I can’t open a home for stray dogs, apparently,’ my dad said.

  ‘Come off it.’ Malky picked up the dog, jerking his head this way and that as it tried to lick his face. ‘Bouncer’s brand new. He’ll be great company for you when everyone goes and you’re left on your own.’

  ‘I don’t mind being left on my own. You mix with a better class of person.’

  Malky put the dog down and it ran off around the rear of the house with Tina in hot pursuit.

  ‘What’s with the dog, anyway?’ Jim asked. ‘I thought you hated dogs, Jo.’

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  ‘Is that right?’ Malky asked. ‘You’re a vegetarian who hates dogs?’

  ‘Just because I don’t want to eat something doesn’t mean I have to like all its panting and slobbering.’

  ‘That’s what all Robbie’s girlfriends say,’ Malky said.

  Jim laughed. ‘No, really, were you not thinking about getting Tina a rabbit?’

  ‘We had a rabbit,’ Malky said, bumping shoulders with me and Joanna in turn. ‘Until this pair allowed it to be torn to pieces by the local fox. We’re still finding body parts. It’s like a butcher’s shop out back.’

  That wasn’t quite true, but it wasn’t easy explaining to a five-year-old that her bunny had gone off to live with some bunny friends when you kept tripping over bits of fur and bone scattered about the garden.

  The two dads and Joanna went inside and Malky and I walked around to the back garden to watch Tina throw a tennis ball for Bouncer. Rather than allow the dog to sleep indoors, my dad had turned the mega-hutch into a kennel by removing the door and putting an old piece of carpet and a blanket inside. Someone had thrown in one of Tina’s soft toys.

  A magpie swooped down. It landed not far from us and strutted its stuff on the grass until Bouncer chased after it, sending it soaring skywards again, white wing tips spread out like a fan, the bright sunlight of a June late-afternoon bringing out a blue sheen to black plumage and a bright green tint to long tail feathers. I hoped Malky didn’t notice and start banging on again about one-for-sorrow.

  My phone buzzed. Malky flicked the dog’s tennis ball up with his foot and played keepy-uppy while I took the call. It was Sammy Veitch.

  ‘If we’re going to do this thing, is there any chance we can do it soon, Robbie? It’s just that the wife’s trying to drag me off on a fortnight’s holiday before the end of the month when the schools get out and the prices rocket. I’m free tomorrow, if that suits you. How about eight o’clock?’

  ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘I think I might be trying to have a life.’

  ‘Not tomorrow night. Tomorrow morning. Early start and we can put this thing to bed by noon, no problem.’

  I phoned Jake Turpie. He was fine with eight the following morning and we agreed to meet at the cottage that Ellen was to make her home for the time she had remaining. Then I phoned Sammy back to confirm arrangements. It would only take me minutes tomorrow morning to introduce him to his new clients and then I’d be well out of it and back home to a Saturday morning fried breakfast. With one less problem to worry about, I could concentrate on Antonia Brechin’s upcoming trial.

  Joanna came out of the back door and hooked an arm through mine.

  ‘Tough day?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, and it just got a lot tougher. Somehow it’s my turn to make dinner again, and my dad and Malky are staying too, so that’s just the six of us. Robbie, we all know I’m not the world’s greatest cook.’

  ‘Your soup is getting better,’ was the best mitigation I could come up with.

  ‘We can’t live on soup and I can’t cope with this any longer. We need to get out of here.’

  ‘Go down to Sandy’s you mean. The six of us? I suppose—’

  ‘No, me and you and Tina, we need our own place. I’m fed up always cooking and tidying and doing your dad’s laundry, then there’s the queue for the bathroom . . .’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And does your dad have to debrief after every toilet trip? Also I never get to watch my TV programmes. It’s always football or golf or one of his old detective shows. And, if I so much as tentatively suggest a veggie meal, he starts coming over all faint or gives me a lecture on the subject of protein and Tina’s growing bones. We need our own space if we’re going to start a proper married life together. Somewhere we can breathe. It’s too claustrophobic here. Sometimes I wish I’d never moved in.’

  If you listened to Joanna long enough you’d think she’d been forced to vacate the Palace of Versailles and flit to the Black Hole of Calcutta, as opposed to leaving her pokey wee flat in Glasgow to move into my dad’s cottage with me.

  ‘I want to go house hunting tomorrow.’ She sounded pretty adamant about that. ‘We’ll get up first thing and see what’s available.’

  ‘Just how first thing are we talking?’ I asked, not wanting to share my early morning meeting plans. ‘How about if I help make tea tonight and, instead of first thing, we go house hunting in the afternoon?’

  Malky was approaching the magic one hundred when the tennis ball came off his foot at an angle and struck Joanna on the side of the head. She picked up the tennis ball and threw it back to him with more force than was strictly necessary to cover the short distance between them. ‘No long lies. We’re getting up early and going to see what properties are on the market in our price range.’ Joanna put her arms around me and pressed her body most agreeably against mine. ‘Think how happy that would make me.’

  I did think about it, and, when Joanna was this happy I was usually very happy. All I had to do was make a couple of phone calls and shift tomorrow’s meeting to Sunday.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it. Me and you, first thing tomorrow, off in search of our new home.’

  Joanna took a pace back, holding my hands in hers. ‘Promise?’

  I preferred it when she was closer. I pulled her against me again. ‘Promise.’

  44

  ‘Perjurer.’

  I didn’t recall having actually sworn an oath. Joanna and I were both lawyers, it was important to be legally accurate about those sorts of things.

  ‘Contract-breaker, then. You promised to go house hunting and now you’re saying you can’t, so that’s a breach of contract.’

  ‘Not if the contract is frustrated, by factors that were unknown at the time of its making,’ I said, almost sounding like I knew what I was talking about.

  ‘Well, you certainly weren’t frustrated last night. You lied to me and then took advantage of the situation.’

  I had. Twice.

  ‘Hey, hey, that’s enough of that,’ my dad said. He was sitting in an armchair, wrapped in his big Paisley-patterned dressing gown, slurping from a cup of tea. I hadn’t noticed it until recently, when Joanna had pointed it out to me, but my dad didn’t sip, he slurped. It was another thing that annoyed her. She had a list. The old man was trying to read yesterday’s newspaper while listening in on our conversation at the same time. ‘Will you two try and remember there’s a wean in the house?’

  Tina was outside in the garden and, unlike him, not eavesdropping. She was trying to teach the dog how to sit and beg. I’d have preferred if she’d taught it how to poop in a plastic bag and cut out the middle man.

  ‘Then try and remember that I’m in the house,’ he said, when I pointed out his granddaughter’s absence.

  ‘How could we forget?’ Joanna muttered.

  My dad peered over the top of the newspaper. ‘What was that?’

  I put a hand on Joanna’s arm and led her away. ‘I’m sorry, but how was I supposed to know this was going to happen? I can’t very well not go. We’ll house hunt tomorrow.’

  ‘With you it’s always never-do-today-what-you-can-do-tomorrow, isn’t it Robbie?’

  Joanna and I had been arguing around in circles since I’d taken the phone call
from Bert Brechin that morning. It was almost a relief when my brother arrived carrying a blue carrier bag.

  ‘What’s wrong with your face?’ he asked me. ‘Apart from the obvious. And Joanna, what’s with all the mascara? You look like a cat. Or an Egyptian. Or an Egyptian cat.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s up,’ Joanna said. ‘What’s up is that there are no mirrors in this place.’

  ‘There’s one on the wall in my room,’ my dad called to her.

  ‘Which apparently you think is for hanging dirty shirts over,’ she shouted back.

  ‘They’re not dirty, they’ve only been worn the once and don’t need to be washed. I can’t very well put them in beside the clean ones. I’m actually thinking about you. Saving you extra laundry.’

  ‘And, as for the mirror in the bathroom,’ Joanna continued, ‘it would be easier for me just to memorise my face than put make-up on using that daft wee shaving thing, all splatted with bits of foam and stubble.’

  ‘Egyptian cat . . .’ Malky laughed, and then tried and failed a serious face. ‘Sorry, I’m just in a great mood this morning. No, really, I’m fine. So, Joanna needs a mirror, what’s your excuse, Robbie?’

  ‘There’s nothing the matter with me,’ I said.

  ‘There must be something or you wouldn’t be looking like dad does when someone puts ice in his whisky.’

  ‘What Robbie means is that there’s nothing the matter that you’d be interested in,’ Joanna said. ‘It has nothing to do with grown men kicking a ball about a field.’

  ‘I’m interested in other things,’ Malky said, not specifying further. ‘Come on, try me. Maybe I can help.’

  Joanna must have thought it less effort just to tell him. ‘Okay. You know this court case Robbie’s got?’

  ‘Robbie’s always got a court case. That’s his job, isn’t it?’

  ‘The one with Sheriff Brechin’s granddaughter.’

  ‘Never heard of it. Was it in the papers?’

  ‘Not yet, but it’ll be all over the front page soon enough. That’s the page on the other side of the back page.’

  A rustle of newspaper. ‘Strictly speaking, the page on the other side of the back page is the second back page.’ My dad wasn’t helping.

  Malky took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. ‘Will you just tell me what the big problem is?’

  ‘The big problem,’ Joanna said, ‘is that Robbie and I are supposed to be going looking for houses, but Sheriff Brechin has phoned to say he wants to meet him urgently.’

  ‘Antonia will be there and I have to discuss the case with her sometime anyway,’ I told Joanna, not for the first time. ‘The continued First Diet is on Tuesday.’

  Joanna’s eyes flared as she ignored me and continued to address Malky. ‘And Robbie’s too stupid to realise it’s a trap.’

  ‘How can it be a trap if Brechin’s insisting I continue to act in his granddaughter’s defence?’

  Joanna had that covered. ‘Pride is blinding you to the obvious, Robbie. Brechin’s a sly old fox. Of course he wants to keep you in the case. If you win, great. If you don’t, he has Antonia lodge an appeal blaming her conviction on your defective representation. Once the appeal court hears that you ignored your client’s instructions to plead guilty to a lesser charge at an early stage, wham, conviction quashed and, bam, you’re on the carpet before the Disciplinary Committee being showered with the confetti that used to be your practising certificate. Tell him, Malky. Going to meet Sheriff Brechin is a terrible idea.’

  Malky mulled over my predicament for a moment or two, stretching his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger, finally letting it snap back against his teeth. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I’m not interested. However, Robbie, you will be interested in this.’ He grabbed my arm and dragged me through to the kitchen where he laid the carrier bag back down on the table.

  ‘Malky, I’ve no time. I’ve got to go.’

  ‘No, you don’t. All you need to do for the next two minutes is sit down and shut up.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Do you trust me, Robbie?’

  ‘Not an inch.’

  ‘Then you will after this.’ With a flourish, he whisked a thin plastic packet from the carrier bag. ‘Behold, I give you—’

  ‘It’s prosc—’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I can’t pronounce it either.’

  ‘Thanks, but I can pronounce it. It’s prosciutto.’

  ‘It’s easier just to say Parma ham.’

  ‘Malky, what’s this about?’

  ‘What did you have for breakfast?’

  ‘Toast and Marmite.’

  With a scornful grunt and a shake of the head, Malky walked over to the hob, lit the gas under the perpetually in situ frying pan and poured in a drop of oil. ‘I hope your taste buds are limbering up for this.’

  There are great moments in history when you’ll always remember where you were. I was in the kitchen of my dad’s house, one Saturday morning in early June when I had my first bite of a fried prosciutto sandwich.

  I took another. How could I have lived this long without realising? It seemed so obvious. It was a universal rule of gastronomy that everything tasted better fried, so why not prosciutto? I gazed into Malky’s expectant face, the face of my brother, the brother who had shared this wonderful culinary discovery with me. ‘It’s . . . it’s . . .’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s bacon but it’s better. There’s no flubbery fat. It crisps up in thirty seconds and there’s none of that white goo squirting out of it, because it’s not pumped full of water. It’s brilliant on a fried egg roll. I’ve brought half a dozen with me if you want to give it a try.’

  Joanna marched in as I was munching another morsel of deliciousness. She was dressed for going out, though with less make-up than previously. ‘Put the dead pig down and let’s go.’

  ‘I told you,’ I said, crunching the finest, crispiest cured ham the city of Parma had to offer. ‘We’ll go looking for houses tomorrow, promise, but for now, right after this sandwich, I’m going to see Sheriff Brechin. Don’t you want to know for sure what he’s up to?’

  ‘Very much,’ Joanna said. ‘That’s why I’m coming with you.’

  45

  I’d never given a great deal of thought to where Sheriff Albert Brechin resided, which was surprising given the number of times over the years I’d had an urge to follow him home and pan in his windows.

  I suppose I’d imagined him to be proprietor of a sizeable chunk of real estate, perhaps in Murrayfield, Blackford, Barnton or some other prestigious area of Edinburgh, secure behind high gates, with a driveway sweeping up to the grand entrance door of a large sandstone villa. But, no, home to Sheriff Brechin was Torphichen, a village not far from Linlithgow, and a bungalow set in a garden of well-tended trees and shrubs with a lush front lawn that had never suffered the ignominy of a practice shot from a badly swung sand-wedge. I’d already made it clear to the Sheriff when he’d called that I would only discuss the case with him if Antonia consented. For that reason I’d expected her also to be present. What I hadn’t counted on was a gathering of Clan Brechin.

  Antonia’s mother met us at the front door and showed us down a long, dimly lit hallway and into the brightness of a large conservatory. There, sitting on a collection of wicker chairs, Antonia, her father and grandfather awaited us. They remained seated when I entered, only Sheriff Brechin rising to his feet, either out of politeness or surprise, when he realised I had not come alone.

  ‘Miss Jordan, this is most improper,’ he said, taking his seat again. For the first time in my life I found myself agreeing with the Sheriff. Maybe he could talk sense into her. ‘This is a private and highly confidential discussion concerning the defence in a criminal trial. We can’t possibly have a member of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service present.’

  Mrs Brechin hovered at her chair, unsure whether she should offer Joanna a seat. I was permitted to stand.

  ‘I’m not here to liste
n in to any private discussions about the case,’ Joanna said. She smiled at my client. ‘Though, I do hope it all goes well for you, Antonia. No, I’m here because if there is to be any threat of a formal complaint against Robbie for failing to follow instructions—’

  Brechin was straight in there. ‘So you admit that there has been fault on his part?’

  ‘I can’t admit anything,’ Joanna said. ‘I wasn’t there, and neither were you, Sheriff. The point I’m making is that if anyone here considers Robbie to have done something wrong, now is the time to say so. Don’t wait until after the case is over and start blaming him if things don’t go the way you’d have liked. Sack him now, otherwise let him do his job.’

  I had to hand it to myself, I knew how to pick a wife. It was true what they said, practice made perfect.

  ‘Let him do his job?’ Brechin glowered at Joanna, with a face like a boiled ham. ‘Miss Jordan, I’ve watched that man do his job for the last twelve years, and a very unedifying experience it has been, let me tell you.’

  ‘Perhaps . . .’ What did she mean, “perhaps”? ‘But you can’t deny that he always tries his best for his clients.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll give him that,’ Brechin scoffed. ‘Mr Munro can be extremely trying at times.’

  Well intentioned though it was, as pleas in mitigation went, I felt Joanna’s was in danger of making things worse. That was the problem with PFs. They were so used to sticking the boot in, they forgot how to accentuate the positive. I walked over to the big glass door and slid it open. ‘Joanna, why don’t you step outside for a while? I won’t be long.’

  With a little further encouragement Joanna moved towards the door. Antonia got up from her chair and looked as though she was going to join her.

  ‘Stay where you are, Antonia,’ Mrs Brechin said, and the young woman froze.

  I slid the door shut behind Joanna, before turning to face the assembled Brechins. ‘Right,’ I clapped my hands together. ‘What’s it to be? Am I in or out?’

  ‘That very much depends,’ Mrs Brechin said. ‘Antonia is back in court on Tuesday, what are you proposing to do?’