Good News, Bad News

by WHS McIntyre

  ‘Is the date on that warrant the twenty-seventh of April?’ I asked, when at last Brechin had located and donned his spectacles.

  He screwed up his eyes and peered closely through his half-moons at the piece of paper he held in his hand. ‘Hard to say, really, but no, it’s definitely not twenty-seventh April.’ Having decided the matter, he whipped off his spectacles and laid the warrant down on the edge of the witness box. ‘Though I can see why Inspector Fleming might have been mistaken.’

  ‘How so?’ asked the Sheriff, who had her own copy of the production. ‘It looks like twenty-seventh April to me.’

  ‘Yes, my handwriting can be quite poor at times.’ Brechin manufactured a little laugh. ‘It certainly says the twenty-seventh, but it must be March not April.’

  I could do no other than agree with the witness’s deciphering of his own handwriting, and so I sat down.

  By now the lady Sheriff’s mouth was a thin, grim line of red. ‘Procurator Fiscal, do you have any questions for this witness?’

  Not rising, Hugh Ogilvie shook his head.

  Her ladyship turned to me again. ‘Then, if Sheriff Brechin’s evidence is to be believed, the search was not carried out timeously, rendering the findings inadmissible,’ she said, summing up my position precisely. ‘Do you agree, Mr Munro?’

  How could I not? There was no way Sheriff Brechin could have signed a search warrant on the twenty-seventh of April. Not when on that day he’d been birdwatching in Madeira. ‘I do, M’Lady. The only other explanation is that Sheriff Brechin pre-signed a pro forma search warrant and left it behind like some kind of blank cheque for the police to cash in on any search they fancied.’ I fabricated my own little laugh. ‘But that would mean that both his Lordship and D.I. Fleming have stood before the court this very afternoon and lied under oath.’

  The Sheriff stared down to her right at Hugh Ogilvie. He looked like a man who just wanted to go home, lie down in a darkened room and dab his temples with cologne. ‘Do you agree, Procurator Fiscal?’

  Ogilvie’s responses were now restricted to head movements. He nodded.

  The Sheriff picked up her copy of the warrant again and made a show of studying it very carefully. ‘I suppose it must all have been a terrible mistake,’ she said. ‘Unless, of course, anyone thinks I should consider the other possibility . . .’ Now she was staring directly at the man in the witness box. ‘That what we have here is evidence of a blatant abuse of power, compounded by perjury. What are your views on that, Mr Munro?’

  What a darling. She was leaving it to me. I could almost taste the pleasure. It was win-win. The warrant was either out of date in which case invalid, or it had been pre-signed by Brechin in which case equally invalid, but with a criminal investigation to follow and heads to roll — one quite possibly with a horsehair wig on it. I looked at him standing there in his black suit and white shirt, like a great, big, sullen magpie. What was it to be? Sorrow or joy? Good news or bad? It was all down to me.

  ‘Stick it to him, Robbie,’ Gail whispered, hand covering her mouth.

  ‘Don’t, Robbie, please,’ Eleanor the clerk mouthed at me. She knew that all I had to do was call her to take the stand and the career of Albert Brechin would be shredded like a bird flying into a jet engine.

  From behind me I heard the sound of someone crying. It was Antonia. Silence fell in court like a feather falling on water. Eventually, having savoured every last beautiful moment, I heard a voice that sounded very much like my own, say, ‘I’m sure, M’Lady, it has all been a most unfortunate misunderstanding.’

  54

  No valid search warrant, no lawful search. No lawful search, no drugs. No drugs, no case to answer - just two very happy young women.

  I tidied up my papers and left the courtroom to see Gail Paton outside in the corridor being hugged by her frizzy-haired client.

  Further along the corridor, there was more embracing, Antonia Brechin and her mother standing, arms wrapped around each other, crying, while Quentin smiled and stroked his daughter’s head.

  ‘You can’t beat getting a guilty person off, can you?’ Gail said, cheerily, once she’d disentangled herself and followed me into the agent’s room.

  I knew what she meant. Where was the fun in having an innocent person acquitted? It was like a doctor curing someone who had nothing wrong with them in the first place.

  ‘My client’s delighted she took my advice to plead not guilty,’ Gail said. ‘I knew it was the right thing to do when I saw you meant business with that search warrant challenge.’

  I hadn’t noticed Crinkly-hair actually accepting Gail’s advice. In fact, by the way she’d yelled from the dock, I’d formed the completely opposite opinion. It was funny how clients never complained when you didn’t follow their instructions, so long as everything worked out well. It was only when things didn’t go to plan that fingers were pointed.

  Andy came in to collect his coat. He didn’t acknowledge us. His client had pled guilty. She’d be sentenced in course. There was no going back for her, dodgy search warrant or not.

  ‘Cheer up,’ I called to him. ‘You did the right thing. Played the odds.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Robbie,’ he said, taking his raincoat off a hook without looking round.

  ‘I’m not. You did what you thought was in your client’s best interests. I only got a result because I was forced to gamble. Some you win, some you lose. You can’t be blamed because I had a lucky win.’

  He grunted. ‘Somehow I don’t think Freya Linkwood’s father will see it that way.’

  ‘You know that Joanna’s gone back to the Fiscal Service,’ I said as, putting on his coat, Andy walked past us. ‘If you get kicked out of the Halls of Valhalla, there’s a place for you in Munro and Co. Just name your starting salary, we’ll all have a good laugh and then I’ll tell you what it really is.’

  But even that attempt at humour, such as it was, failed to lift my ex-assistant’s spirits.

  As he stomped off into the sunset, I sat down at one of the tables, swung back and put my feet up for ten minutes, content to give the Brechins time to leave the building before I returned to the office.

  ‘Not going out to face the adoration of your client and her family?’ Gail asked.

  Of course, I was pleased for Antonia and would have liked to have passed on my best wishes, but I wanted to hear no words of gratitude from her drug-dealing father, nor any lame excuses for the threats made by her mother.

  Gail packed up her papers and stowed them alongside her court gown in her holdall. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Robbie, it was a very neat piece of work. I’d let you buy me a coffee if I wasn’t in such a hurry. You’ll just have to make do with helping me carry my stuff to the car.’

  Usually you can tell when it’s summer in Scotland: the rain gets warmer. Unusually, the last few days had been wall to wall sunshine. It had to end sometime, and it did. Gail and I were standing in the foyer of the Civic Centre, waiting for a heavy burst of rain to exhaust itself, when the automatic doors opened and Sammy Veitch came scampering through them, holding a plastic carrier bag over his head, kilt flapping in the breeze.

  For a man who’d had a sudden soaking, he seemed pretty upbeat about the weather. ‘Great, isn’t it?’ he said, once the glass doors had swished shut behind him. ‘After that wee spell of dry weather a spot of rain’ll make the roads nice and greasy.’

  But Sammy hadn’t popped in just to spread the good news about the treacherous driving conditions. He was there to hand something in to the planning department. I took him aside on his return. ‘How’s that thing going with you-know-who?’

  ‘It’s going fine,’ he said. ‘I’ve just lodged a bogus planning application, the life policy proposal has been submitted and the first premium is paid. It’s just a matter of time.’

  ‘And no comebacks? Ellen’s not got that long. You don’t think someone will be suspicious?’

  ‘Not a chance. It’s all as neat as you like.’ Sam
my shook water from the carrier bag across the stone floor. ‘Nice piece of business. I’m telling you, you should have wet your beak a little on this one, Robbie.’

  He seemed happy enough and yet I couldn’t help feeling guilty for getting Sammy into it.

  ‘No reason to be concerned about me, son,’ Sammy said. ‘No-one knows about Ellen’s big C. It’s a straightforward term insurance policy. If she dies, they have to pay out.’

  ‘And if the insurers make some enquiries . . . ?’

  ‘Robbie, is there something you’ve not told me?’

  There was. It had been preying on me for a day or two. I confessed it to Sammy.

  ‘She had a private nurse! Now you tell me. What was her name? Who did she work for?’

  All I could remember was long auburn hair, even longer legs and a lime green uniform with some kind of red-cross logo on the collar.

  ‘A long-legged redhead?’ Sammy said. ‘Well, I suppose if you’ve got to have a nurse you might as well . . . No, Mrs Veitch would never stand for it. Not even if I was dying. But, Robbie, d’you realise that if word gets out that Ellen knew the score before signing that policy, it’s going to blow the whole thing wide open.’ He stared down at his ox-blood ghillie brogues, and shook his head sadly. ‘Why did I let you get me into this?’

  Get him into it? Sammy had got into it like a La Quebrada cliff-diver gets into the Pacific Ocean.

  ‘What’d do you think we should do?’ I asked.

  ‘We?’ Sammy said. ‘We should do nothing. But you, you’re going to have to go see Ellen and get things sorted.’

  55

  I tried to contact Ellen over the next couple of days but she was never available, always off somewhere with Jake who seemed determined to show her a few last good times. Eventually, I phoned Sammy to say he’d just have to keep his fingers crossed that Ellen’s nurse had either been unaware of the nature of her employer’s illness or sworn to secrecy.

  Come Friday afternoon I was in an excellent mood. The very fact it was Friday was a pretty good start in itself, and then Joanna had phoned me at lunchtime to say that the threatened weekend of house hunting might be curtailed because she’d seen a property she liked.

  I told her to note interest and we’d make an offer when a closing date was fixed. I didn’t think there was a need for me to view it. If Joanna liked it, then, so long as she was going to live there with me, and my dad wasn’t, I felt sure I’d like it too.

  As I walked down the stairs from the court and into the atrium of the Civic Centre at three thirty that mid-June afternoon, with an unsullied weekend spread out before me, I heard someone call my name and turned around to see Eleanor Hammond, the Sheriff Clerk, at the top of the stairs waving a brown envelope. I could tell it wasn’t my favourite type of brown envelope because it was thin and A4-sized and also by the way that, when I’d climbed the stairs to meet Eleanor on the top landing, she tried to hit me over the head with it.

  ‘What were you trying to do the other day?’ I knew there had to be a reason she was personally delivering something that could easily have been stuck in the post. ‘I don’t see what the big fuss was about,’ she said huffily. ‘It’s not like the Sheriff wouldn’t have granted the warrant if he’d been here. I’ve been clerking for Sheriff Brechin for twenty-five years and he’s never refused to sign a warrant yet.’ She thrust the envelope at me.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘The final stated case in your appeal.’ The final nail in the coffin of Heather Somerville’s teaching career more like. ‘You’ll need to lodge it with the summary appeal court. Also . . .’ she jabbed a thumb at the ceiling. ‘Sheriff Brechin wants a word before you go.’

  Sheriff Brechin had his back to me when I was shown into chambers. He had changed from his formal black suit into a more informal, slightly less black suit, and was busy knotting a tie about the collar of a fresh white shirt. Without turning around, he asked me to take a seat and Eleanor to close the door on her way out.

  ‘About Antonia’s court case, I haven’t had a note of your fee yet,’ he said, once he’d taken up position in the chair opposite.

  ‘There are a lot of numbers to add up,’ I said.

  His smile was as thin as an honest alibi. ‘I see you have Miss Somerville’s stated case.’

  ‘For what it’s worth.’

  He kept smiling, apparently waiting for me to say something more. Was he wanting an assurance that I wouldn’t seek an investigation into the pre-signed warrant and his obvious perjury?

  ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ I said, when the silence grew uncomfortable.

  ‘Oh come now, Mr Munro. I’m sure there are very many things you don’t understand.’

  ‘Remember the first meeting we had about Antonia’s case? It was in here after the pleading diet, when I’d made her . . . advised her . . . to plead not guilty. You didn’t want me to act. What made you change your mind? Was it purely in the hope that she might win a defective representation appeal? That would have been a bit of a long shot, wouldn’t it?’

  Hands clasped on the desk in front of him, Brechin leaned forward. The sunlight from the window behind him bounced off the shiny bald patch where his comb-over had gone AWOL. ‘After the initial shock of realising that Antonia had pled not guilty,’ he said, ‘I also realised that you, being you, would be intent on taking the matter to trial. I suppose . . .’ he cleared his throat, ‘I had faith in you, Mr Munro. Faith in you to be as irritatingly persistent as you usually are in seeking out a defence where it seemed none existed.’

  ‘Then if you had so much faith in me, why did you let your daughter-in-law sack me from Antonia’s case last Saturday?’

  ‘You were asked to set out your plans for Antonia’s defence, and it was clear you didn’t have any. I thought that my faith had been misplaced. I have to say I was surprised. Over the years there has not been a legal barrel you have not scraped. You probably have wood-shavings under your fingernails.’

  ‘I didn’t have to scrape too deep this time,’ I said. ‘It was at that same meeting I saw you give the Sheriff Clerk a pre-signed warrant.’ I looked to my left. The wire basket was gone.

  ‘And it took you long enough to appreciate the significance of that,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How many times have you been in chambers with me over the years, Mr Munro? Dozens of times. Certainly far too many, and, usually arguing some point of law — or at least your version of the law. Had you ever noticed that basket of pre-signed warrants before?’ He answered his question for me. ‘Of course you hadn’t. Never mind the dishonesty of such an arrangement, do you actually think I would be so stupid as to pre-sign a warrant and then hand it over in front of a defence solicitor?’

  I found questions along the lines of, ‘How stupid do you think I am?’ were usually best left unanswered.

  ‘There was no policeman wanting a search warrant that day,’ Brechin said. ‘It was a put-up job. You were supposed to notice. You were supposed to start scraping around in those barrels of yours. You certainly took your time about it.’

  I stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Sheriff, but it’s Friday afternoon and I’ve better things to do than listen to you try and cover up the truth that you pre-signed a warrant and that you committed perjury, not to save your granddaughter’s career, but to save your own. That warrant didn’t sign itself. And it wasn’t signed on the twenty-seventh of April.’

  ‘You’re correct about one thing, Mr Munro.’ Brechin rose to his feet. ‘There were indeed two careers at stake, but mine was never one of them.’ He turned again and looked out of the window. ‘I’ve been here since this place was built. Before that I was seventeen years at Linlithgow Sheriff Court. For every single one of those years, my clerk has been Eleanor Hammond. Over that time, including my wife’s illness and subsequent death, she has been a great comfort and support. Yes, Eleanor knows me very well and is a true friend. As for the warrant, I have to disagree. It was
signed on the twenty-seventh of April; however, it wasn’t signed by me.’

  It took me a moment or two to absorb what he was trying to tell me. I sat down again and stared at the green leather surface of the massive solid teak desk. ‘Eleanor signed your name on the warrant when you were in Madeira?’

  He didn’t admit it, but neither did he object.

  ‘Why didn’t you just say so? If you had, Antonia’s case would never have got off the ground.’

  ‘If I had said something, Eleanor’s career would have been over. Forging a sheriff’s signature on a legal document? Without doubt she would have been summarily dismissed and goodness knows what might have happened to her pension. She could very well have gone to prison.’

  ‘But your granddaughter’s future was at stake.’

  ‘I was left with a terrible choice. Whatever I did could not help them both.’

  I could see that. What was good news for one was bad news for the other.

  ‘I had to make a decision. I did so on the basis of what I thought was the most just course of action.’

  ‘You risked your own granddaughter’s career for the sake of your clerk?’

  ‘Antonia was guilty of possessing drugs. Drugs that she intended to share with others – that is the very definition of possession with the intent to supply, whether those others are friends or not. All Eleanor was guilty of was oiling the wheels of justice by granting a warrant that she knew would have been granted anyway, had I been there. Where was the justice in ruining her life over that?’

  ‘But you do not preside over a court of justice,’ I said. ‘Yours is a court of law. Remember?’

  ‘I do, and I allowed you to use that law to achieve justice.’

  ‘By making it look to the Sheriff that you had pre-signed the warrant, without you actually admitting it?’

  ‘It would have been a lie for me to say that I had signed the warrant on the twenty-seventh of April, and yet neither could I say, truthfully or otherwise, that it had been pre-signed. You, on the other hand, Mr Munro, could raise such a doubt, and the raising of reasonable doubts is your job, is it not? I knew I couldn’t save both careers, but I believed, together, we could.’