Unnatural Justice ob-7

by Quintin Jardine

  Maltbie had heard about Joe's death the night before; although there was nothing in the press, word had spread through the Mother well grapevine like a flash fire through a pine forest. (I saw one of them once in Spain, from a safe distance; the flames swept through the fallen needles on the dry ground at about the same speed as a man could run.) He knew as much as I did; maybe Fallon had told him on the quiet, or maybe it had come from Dr. Halliday.

  "What exactly is your relationship to my client, Mr. Blackstone?" he asked me finally.

  "Don't you know?" I countered.

  The wee eyes grew even sharper. "Maybe I can't answer that."

  "Why couldn't you?"

  "Maybe my client told me something once, but it was in confidence.

  Let's say he did, but that there was no proof of what he was saying, none at all. And he certainly didn't say that he'd told anyone else.

  For all I know, sir, you're on a fishing trip; if you are I'm not going to be caught." His chest puffed out as he finished, as if he was telling me that he was a big man in this town. I was reminded of a character in a script that Roscoe had sent to me a few months earlier: we'd turned it down.

  I gave him what was meant to be my "Isn't this tedious' expression. "I grew up in a fishing village," I told him. "If I was trying to catch you, I would. Now let's stop the sparring. I'll answer your question, then you can answer a couple of mine. Joe Donn was a main board director of my wife's company, the Gantry Group. I'm a director too, so he and I were colleagues at that level. We also had a more personal connection. Joe was my father-in-law." Still Maltbie didn't blink.

  "Your lack of reaction tells me," I continued, 'that was the thing he may or may not have mentioned to you in confidence."

  "Let's say it was," the lawyer murmured. "But there remains the question of proof. I concede that Mr. Donn did tell me some time ago that he believed that he, and not Lord Provost Gantry, was the father of his former wife's child. However he told me also that her birth certificate says the opposite."

  "It still does," I conceded. "But you're not quite up to speed on the issue. After Joe told Susie what he believed to be the truth, they agreed between them that they would confirm it by having DNA comparisons made." I took an envelope from my document case and handed it to him, across the mountain of documents. "That's the report; my solicitor assures me that it's all the proof a court would need. You can take a copy if you wish, to be retained on Joe's file, although not to be passed to anyone else without my wife's written permission."

  Maltbie slid out the A4 sheets and read through them, carefully. When he was finished, he nodded. "I concur with your solicitor's opinion," he said. "I'm sorry Joe didn't choose to confide in me that he had done this."

  "What would it have changed?"

  "My reaction to your visit, for one thing. It obviates my concern that Joe's body has been released to you."

  "Which reminds me," I interrupted. "Did Joe leave any specific instructions with you regarding his funeral?"

  Maltbie shook his head. "No, none at all."

  "That's fine, then." I told him about our provisional arrangements.

  He grunted agreement. "Tell the undertaker to send me the bill. I'll meet it from the estate."

  "That won't be necessary," I replied. "My wife wants to bury her father herself."

  "I understand," said Maltbie… whether he did or not. "About Joe's death," he went on, sounding hesitant for the first time. "Do you have any view?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Ah, I don't know, really. The police are calling it an accident. You were there, I gather. You don't think it might have been…"

  "Suicide?" I retorted. "Listen, I'm the main reason they're calling it an accident. No way was Joe suicidal. The verdict is that he had a bit too much to drink, went into the garage to play with his car, and fell asleep with the engine running. It's cast iron."

  "No, I didn't mean suicide."

  I looked at Maltbie in a new light; the man had an imagination after all. I couldn't help laughing. "You're kidding me, aren't you? Did Joe have an enemy in the world, that you know of?"

  "No," he conceded.

  "You're not suggesting that his opponent in the Lanark championship final might have got a bit extreme, are you?"

  The lawyer glared at me. "Hardly. Joe was due to play my nephew."

  "In that case, forget it."

  "I suppose so. It's just that Joe wasn't much of a drinking man."

  "He wasn't dry either. They found a bottle of Amarone empty in the kitchen, and its contents in his stomach, at the autopsy. That's powerful stuff, if you're not used to it. A bottle would send me to sleep, I reckon, and I can shift a bit more than Joe."

  Maltbie shrugged his shoulders; the gesture caused a small flurry of dandruff. "I suppose so," he conceded, with a heavy hint of disappointment in his voice.

  "I suppose also," he went on, abruptly, 'that you'll want to know about the will."

  Actually, I didn't; indeed the thought had never occurred to me. I had only gone along to see the man to discuss the funeral. "Joe left a will?"

  "Of course. And there you certainly do have a locus, Mr.

  Blackstone."

  "Eh? Joe hasn't left anything to Susie and me, has he?"

  "As a matter of fact he has. He's left you his golf clubs… two sets, one Taylormade, about two years old, and the other a mix of Callaway ERC woods and Big Bertha irons. He acquired them at the start of the season; he asserted to me that they helped him play the best golf of his life. They don't come guaranteed, I'm afraid."

  I smiled. I'd given Joe the Callaways as a Christmas present, but I didn't tell that to Maltbie. He thought I was responding to his attempted joke and grinned back. "On the other hand, Mrs. Blackstone's legacy certainly does," he said. "You may be aware that Mr. Donn was a keen collector of crystal." I was indeed aware. On the few occasions I'd been to Joe's place I'd seen it and admired it. "All of it goes to your wife."

  I felt a twinge of something in my stomach; I felt oddly grateful to Joe, and I think I realised at that point just how much Susie and I would miss him. He may have been a bloody awful accountant, but he was a nice bloke, a friend to Susie as well as, in truth more than, a dad, and most important of all he'd been invariably on her side. Without his presence, and without his vote when needed, I had a feeling that our board meetings wouldn't be as smooth as they had been in the past.

  "The rest of the movable estate, that is to say the furniture, paintings etc." goes to charity," the solicitor continued, 'or the proceeds of its sale will. There are two small bequests of five thousand pounds each, to South Dalziel Parish Church, and to Lanark Golf Club." He took a deep breath: I could tell that the meaty part was coming up. "With one exception, the balance of the estate, that is the proceeds from the sale of the house in Crawford Street and of his car, plus the cash of which he died possessed, will, after payment of inheritance tax and professional fees, be placed in trust for your daughter, and for any further children you and Mrs. Blackstone may have. You and your wife will be the trustees; winding up of the trust will be at your discretion, once the last beneficiary has reached the age of eighteen."

  I whistled, then found myself smiling again. Trust Joe to provide for the grandchildren; he had always thought that I lived in Fairyland… he wasn't a million miles wrong… and I guessed that in his heart of hearts he had worried that Susie might not be able to run the business without him. If I was right it was pretty rich, since Joe had been partly responsible for the Group winding up at the door of the knacker's yard, from which she had saved it, but in the circumstances, I was prepared to forgive him.

  All of a sudden an alarm bell rang in my head. "What about Joe's shares in the Gantry Group?" I asked. This was not a daft question.

  Joe owned just under seven per cent of the business, a chunk which, at current value, was worth around two million quid.

  The structure of the group was complicated. Effectively, Susie owned a controlling i
nterest in the business, but it wasn't straightforward.

  Her shares were locked up, like the kids' money from Joe would be, in a trust, of which she was the sole beneficiary. Before he went off his trolley, or at least before anyone noticed that he was off his trolley, Jack Gantry had signed over control to her, irrevocably. The legals had been done by a very high-powered firm of corporate specialists in Edinburgh, and her position was completely secure. I knew this because I'd asked Greg McPhillips to give me a second opinion on the way it was set up. He'd referred it to a top QC, who'd pronounced it iron-clad.

  It may have been, but it tied her in too; she couldn't sell, even if she wanted to, other than in the event of an outright takeover of the group that was unanimously agreed by the shareholders. In essence, that meant that Joe had to vote for it.

  When Jack Gantry had owned and run the group, he had held ninety per cent of the shares himself. The other ten per cent had been gifted to Joe Donn, years earlier, on the basis that they could only be sold with Jack's permission. That veto over the sale had passed to Susie through the trust.

  Many things had changed since Jack had gone to the funny farm. For one there was the question of successor. The trust specified that in the event of Susie's death, its benefits and control would pass to her next of kin… other than Jack. At the time it was drawn up and signed, this had meant her hated aunt, the Lord Provost's sister, to whom she never spoke. But with Janet's birth, things had changed. The trust gave me no rights of succession; what it did was to specify that on Susie's death, her holding would pass to her children. In other words, my daughter and unborn son were heirs to a very considerable fortune.. two, if you count mine.

  The other significant change was in the structure of the company itself. Quite naturally, an enormous scandal had followed the unmasking of the Lord Provost as a murderer, drug baron and overall major league criminal. It had reached a crescendo when he was packed off to the State Hospital at Carstairs, without limit of time, into the care of the Secretary of State for Scotland, and later the First Minister.

  In the aftermath, the bankers and assorted creditors who had collectively invested millions in the sprawling enterprise that was the Gantry Group had, not unnaturally, collectively shit themselves. When Jack had installed Susie as chief executive, they had all gone along with it, because none of them had believed that she was actually running the show. In truth, she hadn't been, not entirely. The Lord Provost had always kept an eye on things, and offered 'advice' whenever she did something he didn't agree with. When she fired Joe as finance director, he bided his time, but when an opportunity to reinstate him came up, he had taken it.

  With the great Jack gone, it was touch and go for a while; there was talk that the bankers might make Susie take a figurehead role, and force the appointment of their nominee as chief executive, but her extraordinary powers of persuasion won her a trial period. They found she could be tough too. They tried to insist on appointing new directors to the board to give them a voting majority, but she refused point blank. In the end they settled for Gillian Harvey as their sole representative.

  From gathering round her like feeding dogs, it took very little time before they were eating out of Susie's hand. She took a series of strategic decisions, and put them into practice swiftly and, where necessary, ruthlessly. She identified potential weaknesses in the group Jack had built, and eliminated them. The Healthcare Division, a series of labour-intensive nursing homes through which the Lord Provost and his nasty nephew had obtained prescription drugs for sale on the streets, was the first to go. It was sold to another group, once she had cleaned up the operation by firing all the managers for failing to detect Jack's racket, or as she suspected in some cases, for turning a blind eye to it.

  That, and a few shrewd sales of industrial properties, changed the cash position of the group; within a year of Jack Gantry's downfall, Susie had gone from being at the mercy of the bankers to being their mistress. She renegotiated the terms of their relationship, won herself a rolling borrowing facility that meant she didn't have to trot along to her bank manager's office to have every decision okayed, and put in place a five-year development strategy, based on sound research into future market trends, rather than on sheer guesswork, as most of her predecessor's projects had been. This is not to say that the Lord Provost was an idiot, but for sure his success was based as much on luck… and political power… as on judgement.

  Her salvation of the Gantry Group won her the first of her Scottish Businesswoman of the Year awards. Her second came after she had floated the company on the Stock Exchange. After her early treatment by the bank's corporate department, Susie hadn't been entirely happy to have them funding all her future projects. So, after discussing things with Joe and Gerry Meek, she had decided to raise extra capital by going for a stock market listing. The lawyers conferred, and confirmed that this was something she could do under the terms of the trust. Her holding would simply be converted into shares in the new public company that would be created, and she would continue to control the business.

  Only one third of the company would be offered to the market.

  It went through without a hitch. The group was valued at sixty million pounds, and the twenty million shares on offer were snapped up. As soon as trading opened their value rose by a third; with very limited trading they had stayed at that level until the downturn in the market took them back down to par. We didn't panic when that happened, though; it still left Susie worth a right few quid.

  "Well?" I repeated to Mr. Maltbie. "What about Joe's shareholding?"

  The solicitor pursed his lips. "That's an interesting one," he said.

  "I'm sure it will revert to your offspring in due course, but it can't yet, I'm afraid. You see, technically it isn't part of the estate."

  I frowned and then I got it. "Let me guess. They're held by a trust too."

  "Got it in one," the solicitor murmured. "Inheritance tax shelter. I'm surprised you didn't know that already."

  It's not easy to kick yourself effectively while you're sitting down, but I managed it nonetheless. A director of a company might be expected to be reasonably familiar with its shareholder register, and that would have told me right away. Worse, I was on the damn thing myself. Since Susie and I had been together, I had been building up a small shareholding in the company; a show of solidarity as much as anything else.

  "Who set it up?" If ever there was a rhetorical question, that was it.

  Joe wasn't the sort of accountant who'd have thought that sort of arrangement up for himself. He was a common sense guy, but once the beans got above the five-figure mark he had always struggled to count them. Plus, he'd never lived like a millionaire, or referred to himself as one, nor I reckoned even thought of himself in that way. No, considering the origin of the holding, there was only one answer.

  "Lord Provost Gantry did," Maltbie confirmed. "Joe benefited from the dividend income from the shares, but he had no effective right of disposal. In addition to the chairman's right to veto any proposed sale, there is a pre-emption clause which gives Mr. Gantry first refusal."

  "And with Joe's death…?"

  "With his death, the shares revert back to Mr. Gantry."

  "What, you mean they go into Susie's trust holding?"

  "No, I do not. They revert directly to him."

  "But he's in the slammer," I protested. "He's in a maximum security mental hospital."

  "That doesn't stop him owning property' "It doesn't stop him owning a significant shareholding in a public company?"

  "No, it doesn't." Maltbie raised his right index finger, pointing at the dull, discoloured ceiling of his office. "But it does stop him exercising some of the rights and privileges of a shareholder. He's entitled to participate in dividends, but he can't vote himself."

  I had never thought of Jack Gantry as a legal entity; in truth I had stopped thinking of him as a human being a long time ago. As far as Susie and I were concerned he was dead; that was how we coped best
with our memories. His name was never mentioned in our house; there were no photographs of him, not even in Susie's childhood albums. She had destroyed them all, as she had thrown out every memento of the time when she had held the courtesy title of Lady Provost, and had accompanied him to official functions.

  "So what happens to those rights and privileges? Are they just in limbo?"

  "No, that's not the case. The Criminal Procedure and the Mental Health Acts make provision for someone to be appointed to take such decisions on behalf of a detained patient. As in England, he'll be regarded as a ward of court, more or less."

  "And in the case of a barker like Jack, who would this person be? The First Minister?"

  "No, that wouldn't be usual. It would normally be a lawyer or accountant. On the other hand it is possible for a person's local authority to be appointed as his guardian, if there's nobody else."

  I gasped, then bellowed with laughter. "What? You mean that the mighty Jack Gantry's gone from exercising complete power over Glasgow City Council to being completely in its power?"

  The solicitor allowed himself a thin smile. "You find irony in that?"

  "I think it's fucking hilarious actually. Jack used to scare the shit out of all the officials in the City Chambers, and most of the councillors. I'll bet some of them would enjoy getting even."

  "They wouldn't quite have that sort of licence. The Mental Welfare Commission would be down on them like a ton of bricks. But…" He paused, and the extended finger was replaced by the palm of his hand held up like a traffic cop. '… as I understand the circumstances of Mr. Gantry's case, he would be a State patient, and as such his hospital consultants would be responsible for him. I'm no expert in these areas, but where a patient has substantial resources it would be almost certain that the court would appoint a professional person to act on his behalf.

  "Whatever the circumstances, the shares will not become inactive in voting terms."

  I wasn't laughing any more. Whoever was feeding Jack his gruel, I still didn't fancy having to tell Susie that one dad had replaced another as a major shareholder of the Gantry Group.