‘Mr Munro, I don’t think you appreciate how important it is that you assist with our enquiries.’
‘Maybe if you told me what it is that’s so important that you expect me to breach client confidentiality, I might be able to help.’
There was a pause, then, ‘As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m not at liberty to divulge any information at this stage.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’ll be at your office tomorrow, first thing. Be there.’
6
Had the man with the nicely-trimmed beard asked me equally as nicely to meet him first thing in the morning, as opposed to ordering me to be there, I might have acceded to his request. But he hadn’t and so I didn’t and anyway I had a more important matter to attend to.
Joanna, my legal assistant, was in Glasgow sitting in on a rape trial. High Court work always sounded terribly glamorous and interesting compared to the average day at the Sheriff Court. In actual fact, on legal aid, it was a lot of high-pressure work for the same low-pressure pay. And there were other practical differences between the High Court of Justiciary and the local Sheriff Court. Sentencing powers was one: life imprisonment as opposed to a maximum of five years. Another was the pace of proceedings. Speed-wise we were talking the difference between my two favourite authors: Sir Walter Scott and Raymond Chandler. With the former, nothing happened fast. Scott could take several pages to set the scene of a Highland glen at sunset, allowing the reader to soak in the atmosphere, his fine prose seeping into the mind like a vintage brandy, poured over a ripe Christmas pudding. On the same word count, Philip Marlowe had already smoked a pack of cigarettes, slugged a couple of bad guys, and driven off into a Santa Rosa sunset, necking a pint of bourbon as he went.
Proceedings were underway and grinding slowly when I arrived and slipped in through the side door, past the witness box and into a seat in the well of the court next to Joanna. ‘I need a word,’ I whispered.
‘Shush. Not now,’ she said.
Defence counsel was cross-examining in slow motion. I didn’t recognise him. He looked very young, with lots of hair poking out from beneath a snowy-white horsehair wig that marked him as a junior-junior. It was day two and we were still on the first witness. I could have rattled through several Sheriff Court trials by now. If a one hundred pound fixed-fee did nothing else, it encouraged defence lawyers to get to the point, get onto the next case and one day, hopefully, get paid.
The practice in the High Court was to stop mid-morning at a convenient time in the evidence, usually around the back of eleven. When the half-hour had come and gone, I started to yawn, the combination of an early rise and the heat of the courtroom.
‘I hope we’re not keeping your instructing solicitor awake, Mr Hazelwood,’ Lady Bothkennar said to the white-wig. I turned my yawn into an awkward clearing of my throat, sat up straight and tried not to catch the eye of the jurors. ‘Perhaps some caffeine would help. I’m sure the ladies and gentleman are about ready for a cup of coffee.’ The judge turned to the witness. ‘That’s enough for the moment, thank you. You can return to the witness room, but please do not discuss your evidence with anyone.’ Lady Bothkennar stood. ‘The court will sit again at eleven forty-five.’
‘Court!’ The macer called out, and climbed the steps to the bench, opening the door just in time to allow her Ladyship to exit in a swish of red silk.
‘Thanks for that, Robbie,’ Joanna said. ‘Brian has the complainer on the ropes and you start yawning like a narcoleptic hippo.’
From what little I’d seen, far from having anyone on the ropes, it looked to me like Brian was only learning the ropes.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Tina’s an early riser. I just came to see how things were going.’
The accused had been arrested several months previously. I’d attended his police interview and then passed the papers onto Joanna. It was around the time I’d been battling for the custody of my daughter and I couldn’t remember much about the case other than it was another rape. It wasn’t that rape trials were ten-a-penny, but there had been a lot more of them since they’d amended the law on what constituted the crime.
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘That age-old tale of boy meets girl, boy and girl get drunk, boy and girl have sex, boy phones girl a taxi, girl phones boy the police?’
‘I wish it was a too-drunk-to-consent case,’ Joanna said. ‘At least they usually deteriorate into a beauty contest.’
I knew what she meant. A lot of people on juries were of a certain age. The word rape conjured up to them Vikings and burning villages or women walking home alone being dragged into the bushes. What they didn’t expect to hear was a teenage girl saying that she would never have had sex with the accused if it hadn’t been for happy hour at the Student Union and those eight tequila slammers, so she’d like him sent to jail for six years please.
In those sort of cases where the accused scrubbed up well, there was no violence involved and it came down to two drunk people having sex, you could almost guarantee a not proven verdict. ‘Not that a beauty contest would have suited us either...’ Joanna winced. ‘You’ve seen the accused.’
I had, but it had been months since my one brief encounter with him and I couldn’t have picked him out from a police line-up. Joanna pointed him out to me. He was standing further across the lobby, a worried-looking man beside an even more worried-looking woman who I took to be his wife. Keith Howie was forty-eight and hadn’t worn all that well. According to Joanna, Ruby Maguire, the alleged victim, was sixteen coming on seventeen and pretty.
‘And to think we’ve got ourselves ten women on the jury,’ Joanna complained. ‘What a waste.’
Most men accused of rape complained if the jury of their peers turned out to be predominantly female. Joanna, like a lot of defence lawyers, was of the view that the more women, the better. She believed that women judged other women much harder than men did, that male jurors looked at the woman in the witness box and saw their daughters, while the females looked at the man in the dock and imagined their sons. Either way, I didn’t think it would matter how the jury was made up. This was no beauty contest. It was Beauty and the Beast.
Niceties over, it was time to move on to the reason I’d come. ‘Did I mention how exceptionally lovely you’re looking today?’ I said.
Joanna gave me a lemon-twist of a smile. ‘Do you need to? Don’t I always look lovely?’ She gave me a friendly shove. ‘Really, why are you here? Are you checking up on me or something?’
I felt the need to clear my throat. ‘Brian, I need a quick word with Joanna. Business.’
The advocate raised an eyebrow, but eventually he took the hint.
‘Something’s cropped up,’ I said after counsel had left.
‘Robbie, this is you. Something’s always cropping up. Just tell me what’s so important that it’s brought you out here to interrupt my mid-morning latte.’
I attempted a laugh. ‘Well… It’s sort of like this—’
‘You’re going to sack me.’ Joanna folded her arms. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? I mean I know business is bad, no one’s getting prosecuted these days, but—’
‘It’s not that,’ I said.
Joanna looked up at the high ceiling while tapping a toe on the marble floor. I suggested we go for some fresh air, and we walked together out of the main entrance to stand beneath the sandstone portico where wigged and gowned figures leaned against stone pillars, smoking, chatting and drinking from cardboard cups.
‘I was wondering if you’d consider coming in with me,’ I said, when we’d found our own few square yards of privacy.
‘In with you? In where with you?’
‘In with me at Munro and Co.’
‘You mean like as a partner?’
‘You’ve worked with me long enough and we get along fine. The punters like you and—’
‘Hold on. Let me get this straight. You want me to go into partnership with you?’
That more or less summed it up.
�
�On what? An equal profit-sharing basis?’
‘Yes. Eventually. Possibly. We’d have to work out the details.’
‘What’s brought this on?’
I hadn’t expected Joanna to fall on my neck and dampen my suit collar with tears of gratitude; nonetheless, she could have sounded a fraction more excited at the prospect. ‘Why does something have to have brought it on? Is it not enough that I as your employer have recognized your talents and want to reward you with the chance to join Linlithgow’s premier criminal defence firm?’
‘I’ll overlook the fact that it’s Linlithgow’s only criminal defence firm, Robbie, and repeat my question. What’s brought this on so suddenly that you need to come charging through here to ask me something that could easily have waited until I was back in the office?’
I hoped the hurt expression I’d adopted, as I studied my shoes and realised they hadn’t been polished in a while, would be answer enough. It wasn’t. I wondered about telling her the truth, but in matters of business as well as love and the law I found it rarely helped. ‘Grace-Mary said something and I wondered if you were thinking of a return to the Fiscal Service.’
‘I did give it some thought…’
‘And... Well... I don’t want to lose you.’ I was beginning to sound like the script from a cheesy chick-flick, and yet Joanna was seriously lapping it up. If only there had been a string quartet to burst into tune at that moment.
Joanna placed a hand on my arm, lowered it to my hand. ‘You were really so worried I might leave that you dropped everything to come out here and ask me to be your partner?’ I thought for a moment there might be tears. I felt her hand tighten on mine. Uncomfortably so. ‘And here was me thinking it was so you could tell me you’d been struck off the Legal Aid register.’
She knew. I rescued my hand and flapped it at her. ‘Who cares? There’s plenty of other work out there without all the hassle of grovelling to SLAB for every penny we earn. Who needs legal aid?’
‘You do,’ Joanna said. ‘It’s the mainstay of the firm. She jerked a thumb at the building in whose shadow we were standing. ‘This case I’m in just now is legally-aided. It pays the bills. Without it we can’t survive.’
‘Okay… but back to the whole partnership thing…?’
‘Let me ask you a question, Robbie. If you hadn’t been struck off the register, would you still be asking?’ She flicked a glance over my shoulder. I turned to see junior counsel coming through the revolving doors with one less than three cardboard cups of coffee.
‘Definitely... well, probably. ‘
‘Then get yourself back on it,’ Joanna said, setting off to meet junior counsel and her mid-morning cuppa, ‘and I’ll definitely, probably consider your offer.’
7
It had been six long years since my resignation from Caldwell & Craig. That I’d resigned was the version of history I adhered to, though booted-out might have more accurately described the termination of my career at the old Glasgow law firm. I hadn’t been back since. Not a lot had changed. The offices of C&C were incorporated within the same great sandstone building, the same portraits of former partners hung in the same gilt frames, and still stared down disapprovingly at me as I walked along the corridor to the office at the end.
Interiorly it had always been reminiscent of a Victorian library: oak flooring, high ceilings, and a prevailing smell of wood polish, leather and dusty law books. That hadn’t changed either, but something was different. Back in my day, it had been a happy place. People milling around chatting, laughing, sharing stories. Now the few folk I saw dodging in and out of offices had serious expressions and no time to stop and talk with a former employee.
When I reached the enormous panelled door at the end of the corridor I knocked and walked in. Maggie Sinclair was standing behind her desk at the far side of the room, arm resting on a high-backed chair, staring out of a window at the world.
Maggie was mid-fifties, and going prematurely blonde. Following a series of retirements, she was now senior partner, though, unlike her predecessors, Maggie saw herself less as a lawyer and more of an organiser of things, most of which were pretty well organised already, and, like all professional delegators, she was a firm believer in hard work — so long as it was being done by other people.
She turned to look at me as I entered the room, a mixture of mild surprise and annoyance on her face as though I had interrupted her contemplations on some important matter of law.
‘Robbie. So good to see you,’ she said, with that almost smile of hers. ‘How are things in Linlithgow? I hear you have a child.’
‘Yes I have. Tina, and she’s doing fine,’ I said. ‘She’s all set to jet off to Disneyland with her grandmother in a few days.’
Maggie gestured to the seat opposite and we both sat, acres of mahogany and tooled green leather between us. ‘Yes, children are great, but it’s good to have some time to oneself, isn’t it?’
As I recalled Oneself had packed her own child off to boarding school the moment they’d severed the umbilical cord.
‘What age is she?’
‘Four and a half.’
‘Have you thought about schools?’
I had and decided on the nearest one. It was where all the other children went.
Maggie frowned. ‘A comprehensive education is the cheap option. But is it the best?’
‘Worked for me,’ I said. ‘The cream rises.’
‘True, and there are all sorts of other unpleasant things that float. When I ask if it’s best, I’m not talking about academic achievement. I’m talking about contacts for future life.’
Again, I couldn’t disagree. A good number of my old school chums had become regular clients of mine and not all of them were in jail.
‘Take Sir Philip Thorn for instance. I was at school with his sister.’
‘Who?’
‘You must know Philip.’
I did a mental run through of all those knights of the realm with whom I was on first name terms. It didn’t take long.
Maggie sighed. ‘He’s why I’ve asked you to come and speak to me.’
‘Not to offer me a job, then?’
‘I’m so glad you’ve kept your sense of humour, Robbie. Can we get to the point?’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘After all, my meter is running.’
‘Meter?’
‘When you called me you said you were after a spot of advice. Legal advice is what I sell.’
‘And the day I need to buy any legal advice from you is the day…’
I waited.
‘The day…’
‘Then why am I here?’ I asked, when it became painfully apparent that Maggie wasn’t going to come up with a witty rejoinder any time soon. No doubt she’d think of a right good one the minute I’d left.
‘To discuss something that might be to our mutual benefit,’ she said.
‘And what would that be?’ I knew perfectly well that Maggie Sinclair did things for her own benefit and nobody else’s.
‘Philip Thorn is looking for a man.’
‘A lot of ex-private-schoolboys are.’
‘A former employee who’s gone AWOL,’ she continued. ‘Philip’s extremely anxious to track him down.’
‘And you do remember that I’m a lawyer?’
‘I try.’
‘As opposed to a private investigator.’
‘Yes, we’ve already hired one of those.’
‘And he didn’t come up with any leads?’
‘Just the one. You.’
I leaned back in my chair and let her carry on.
‘One of the first things the P.I. did was to check on the missing person’s criminal record. He phoned the clerk of court, asked who had last represented him, and guess what?’
‘Just because I’ve appeared for someone in court doesn’t mean that we exchange Christmas cards.’
‘Well, I’m afraid you’re all we have at the moment, and, as I’ve already mentioned, Philip is extremely a
nxious to receive any information available about this person’s whereabouts.’
‘How keen?’ I asked.
‘That depends on the reliability of your information.’
‘Try me.’
‘William Paris. You represented him in the Sheriff Court, June of last year, on assault and breach of the peace charges. Have you seen him recently?’
I took a moment to smooth a rough edge on a fingernail. ‘I might have.’
Maggie sat up straight. ‘Coffee?’ She pushed a button on the intercom.
Refreshments duly ordered, I wondered aloud whether the whereabouts of one of my clients wasn’t something we could have discussed over the phone. It didn’t need me to come all the way through to Glasgow just to tell Maggie that I couldn’t disclose personal information on a client.
The coffee arrived super-quick. ‘No one is asking you to breach client confidentiality,’ she said, pouring us each a cup. ‘Honestly, I never knew you were such a stickler for legal ethics.’
How much of a stickler depended on the answer to one very important question. ‘What’s in it for me?’
‘Naturally, there would be a finder’s fee.’ She tipped cream from a white porcelain jug over the back of a silver teaspoon and into the murky depths of her coffee cup. She waited until it had bloomed across the surface before looking me straight in the eye. ‘So, do you know where this Paris person is?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘but—’
‘But you know how to find him?’
I took a drink of coffee. One thing hadn’t changed about C&C, the coffee was still as good as ever. ‘It won’t be easy.’
‘Nothing worth doing ever is.’
Words to live by. That is, for other people to live by. Not Maggie.
‘How worth doing is this?’ I asked.
‘Find this man and I can assure you it will be very worthwhile.’
I felt a warm feeling inside me, and it wasn’t just the coffee. ‘When I do find him, what then?’
She raised the white china cup and held it poised at her lips. ‘Simply tell me where he is…’ she took a sip from the cup and set it down once more on its saucer, ‘and I’ll tell Sir Philip to write us both a nice fat cheque.’
Present Tense Page 4
