Duty Man (Best Defence series Book 2) Read online

  DUTY MAN

  Second in the Best Defence Series

  William H.S. McIntyre

  More in the Best Defence Series:

  #1 Relatively Guilty

  #3 Sharp Practice

  #4 Killer Contract

  #5 Crime Fiction

  #6 Last Will

  #7 Present Tense

  This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013

  William H.S. McIntyre

  All Rights Reserved

  www.bestdefence.biz

  In memory of my Dad

  A man less like Alex Munro it is difficult to imagine.He thought this book the best in the series. Perhaps because it’s the shortest. Who knows? For he only encouraged, never criticised.

  Do your duty and leave the rest to heaven.

  ~ Pierre Corneille ~

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘That was quick.’ The custody sergeant stabbed my details, one-fingered, into the computer. ‘Didn’t expect to see you this early on a Sunday morning.’

  It was true. A two-cop bop and a police assault didn’t normally have me leaping nimbly out of bed in the middle of the night, but I couldn’t sleep: too much on my mind and too little in my bank account.

  Clipboard in hand, the sergeant climbed down from his seat and led me along a narrow corridor where shoes and belts were neatly stacked outside a row of heavy iron doors.

  ‘Oskaras Vidmantis Salavejus,’ he read slowly from the charge sheet. ‘Lithuanian, apparently.’ We came to a halt outside one of the doors. ‘Seems he took a sudden dislike to our Inspector Fleming.’ The sergeant produced a bunch of keys. ‘Out for a quiet curry, Friday night, next thing he knows your client’s getting torn into him.’ He handed me the charge sheet. ‘Speaks English, or maybe that’s only when he’s pished.’ He unlocked the door and held it open. It started to close as I walked in. I put out a hand.

  ‘Leave it, will you?’

  ‘He’s a jaikie, he’ll not kill you.’

  I was more worried about the smell killing me than the prisoner.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I’ll not let him escape.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the turnkey, ‘I know how much you Legal Aid fat cats hate to see a fee run out the door.’

  I stepped inside and the stench hit me. Just who was the person with the bright idea to design cells with cludgies that flushed from outside? Did some over-cautious architect foresee problems with prisoners trying to launch themselves to freedom via the plumbing system? ‘Well at least pull the plug. This place is honking.’

  There came the sound of running water and the custody sergeant put his head in the doorway. ‘You will let me know if there’s anything else.’

  The door slammed shut. I kicked the plastic mattress on which the prisoner was stretched and elicited no response. I could have given him a shake, but that would have involved using a hand so I kicked again, harder.

  The dishevelled figure peeled his face from the mattress. He was tall and slim with a good head of black hair and high cheekbones. He reminded me of an upper-class bounder in a second-rate period drama. He sat up, yawned, rubbed the palm of his hand from greasy forehead to square, stubbly-chin and stared at me through bleary, blood-shot eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, with no hint of an accent.

  I backed away from his zombie-breath. ‘Robbie Munro - duty agent.’ He took the charge sheet in shaky hands, squinted at the page, screwed it up and tossed it aside. It hit the wall, bounced twice on the shiny linoleum floor and skidded into a corner.

  ‘I’ll take that as a not guilty,’ I said.

  The prisoner flopped back onto the mattress. Consultation over, I picked up the ball of crumpled paper and dropped it into my jacket pocket. ‘Well then... see you in court.’

  I banged on the cell door. There’d been a shift-change and a new custody sergeant, young and bristling with customer service qualifications, took me back to the front desk.

  ‘That you finished?’ he asked.

  ‘You tell me. Anyone else want the duty man?’

  He went around the counter, jumped up on the high stool and consulted the screen.

  ‘Nope. Looks like it’s been dead quiet tonight.’ He dismounted and snatched a set of keys from the desk. The phone bleeped and he answered. ‘On second thoughts you might want to stay,’ he said, replacing the receiver. ‘That was a call about Mr Abercrombie.’

  Was he talking about Max?

  ‘The lawyer at the end of the High Street. Did you know him?’

  He was talking about Max - and in the past tense. Cold fear distilled in the pit of my stomach. Max Abercrombie was an old friend.

  The young cop must have noticed the blood drain from my face. He looked embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve just started my shift and it’s on the screen here. I thought you’d have heard. Mr Abercrombie was murdered- Friday night. They’ve got someone already and they’re bringing him in right now. He’ll need a brief and seeing how you’re the duty...’

  ‘No.’ I placed a hand on the counter to steady myself. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’

  CHAPTER 2

  I took my feet off the desk, ripped January from the calendar and filed it in the bin. The first Monday in February: the worst day in the week of the worst month in the year.

  Rain pattered against the window. I went over and looked out at The Royal Burgh of Linlithgow. Why had I even bothered to come back?

  When I’d first qualified I couldn’t wait to leave the town of my birth. Clutching law degree and tatty black gown, I’d set out into the big bad world of criminal defence, and over the years had not done too badly, subsisting on Legal Aid fees and tucking away the brown envelopes. Then, hurtling into my thirties, I’d left my employment with Glasgow lawyers Caldwell & Clark, Tyrannosaurus Rex in the world of legal dinosaurs, following a difference of opinions: I wanted me to stay, they didn’t.

  Cast out but with a reasonable bundle in the shoe box under my bed, I’d decided it was time to take stock, prepare for the future. It was late 2007, property prices were soaring and I wanted a piece of the action.

  ‘Bank stocks,’ Stephen, my new bestest friend and IFA, had said. ‘RBS. It’s the bluest of chips, been around for three centuries and safe as the houses they lend on.’ Apparently there was a revolution happening. China, India, Africa, the whole world was building houses, offices, hotels, and they had to borrow the money somewhere. ‘In a gold rush,’ opined Stephen, who preferred to be called Steff, ‘you don’t invest in the mines or the miners: you invest in the guys who supply the shovels.’

  A year later and I was chasing after Steff with a shovel and setting fire to RBS share certificates to keep warm. I don’t know why he hadn’t just pointed a gun in my face; the whole financial disaster thing couldn’t have come as any more of a surprise.

  So I’d gone home to West Lothian and after a pretty good start found myself teetering on the brink of bankruptcy; mainly thanks to the introduction of the Procurator Fiscal fines and Police penalty notices that had taken away half of my workload along with the presumption of innocence.

  Now Max had gone and got himself murdered.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about my friend. We’d gone to school together, studied law together and whereas I’d escaped my small town ties, he’d stayed and put a brass name plate on his door. Though we’d once been close, time had taken its toll on our friendship. Latterly, we’d kept in touch sporadically. I tried to remember - when was the last time we’d gone out for a drink? What had we talked a
bout? Work probably and mine most likely. That was the thing about criminal law, always something interesting to talk about: crazy clients, stupid Sheriffs, amusing courtroom incidents; there weren’t too many laughs in Max’s world of residential conveyancing and commercial leases.

  Grace-Mary came through clad in green cardigan and tartan skirt, a pair of spectacles hanging on a gold chain about her neck. She was carrying the court diary.

  ‘You all right?’ she asked, placing two fingers under my chin, raising my face for closer inspection. ‘No you’re not. Look at the state of you. Why don’t you go home?’

  I dismissed my secretary’s concerns with a wave of my hand. She sighed loudly, backed off and opened the diary while I lifted my briefcase onto the desk ready to start filling it with files. A morning in court might help take my mind off Max.

  Grace-Mary lifted the spectacles from her bosom and perched them on the end of a serious nose.

  ‘Look,’ she said, shoving the diary at me. ‘There’s only a few cited cases. Most of them are road traffic or shoplifting. It’s all mince. Send Andy. It’ll keep him from getting under my feet.’

  ‘I’ve picked up a duty client as well,’ I told her ‘Some foreign guy.’

  ‘What is it? A not guilty plea?’ She knew me so well. ‘Andy can take care of that.’

  Andy Imray hadn’t been with me for that long, just long enough for Grace-Mary to have taken him under her wing. He’d served a year of his traineeship up north with a rural practice before moving south for court experience. Now in his second year, officially admitted as a solicitor and with a restricted practising certificate burning a hole in his pocket, my assistant was keen to get into court and strut his stuff. I’d let him have a few run outs in the JP court where he couldn’t do much damage but on his one or two trips to the Sheriff court he’d tended to fare less well and I had my new Firm’s reputation to think about.

  ‘I thought you wanted the desks in here re-arranged? I’ll ask Andy to help you.’

  ‘Away. Have you felt the weight of them?’

  ‘Not lately, ‘I said.

  ‘Well they’re very heavy. You don’t want the boy to strain something do you?’

  I’d never noticed my assistant straining himself in any other aspect of his working life. ‘Andy’s not ready for Sheriff Court work.’

  ‘Oh, go on.’ She looked at me beseechingly over the top of her specs. ‘I caught him trying on the spare gown again yesterday. He’s dying to be let loose on a jury. Do you know he’s even drafted an outline for a closing speech?’

  No doubt all about scales and the golden thread of justice. The only thread of justice I knew was the one the cops used to stitch people up with.

  ‘War is sweet to those who have never tasted it,’ I said.

  ‘And don’t quote me any more Homer...’

  ‘Pindar,’ I corrected my secretary; there was a first time for everything. Leaning back in my chair, I was about to hold forth on the greatest of the nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, when Andy walked in. Caucasian, male, twenty-four, five feet seven, stocky build, with wavy black hair and dark square-framed spectacles; that’s what his police description would have said. Easier to imagine a vertically compressed photo-fit of Buddy Holly. He was carrying a steaming mug.

  The reception phone rang and Grace-Mary went to answer it. Andy set the mug down on the desk in front of me. ‘Another day in the fight for truth and justice eh, Robbie?’

  I gave him a sideways look. If truth and justice won too often I’d be out of business. I sipped and almost choked. ‘Instant?’ With age comes the realisation that life is too short for instant coffee.

  ‘Unscrew your face and don’t be so precious,’ he retorted - a little too cheekily for the hired help I couldn’t but think. In my traineeship days the next thing you’d hear after back-chatting the boss was the sound of your arse skidding to a halt on the pavement. I let it pass.

  ‘I’m going down to Sandy’s for a real coffee,’ I said, tipping the contents of the mug into a pot that was the final resting-place of a desiccated umbrella plant. ‘How about you, Grace-Mary?’ I shouted through to reception. ‘Want anything from Sandy’s?’She didn’t. She was like one of those desert plants, surviving only on fresh air – and, perhaps, the occasional light misting of gin.

  Andy cleared his throat. ‘While you’re there...’

  ‘Bacon roll, extra-crispy, plenty of brown sauce?’

  He smiled. Cheeky, perhaps, but in choice of employer and matters of haute cuisine the lad definitely had taste.

  CHAPTER 3

  Alessandro Cabrini owned the café at the end of the block. His father and his father before him had run the place as a proper chippy, but Alessandro who’d worked behind the counter since he was knee-high to a pizza supper, had bigger and better plans for his inheritance. No sooner had title to the shop been transferred, than he’d acquired the dry cleaner’s next door and knocked through to form the eating establishment that he liked to call Bistro Alessandro and everyone else in the town knew as Sandy’s.

  As I approached the café, a white van screeched to a halt and double-parked, engine running, on the opposite side of the road. Three men got out. I was something of a creature of habit and so I guessed they had been driving up and down the High Street, waiting for me to show.

  The smallest of the trio was Jake Turpie. Pure evil distilled, poured into an oil-stained boiler suit and walking about in steel toe-capped boots. Jake owned the local scrapyard. He also owned my office premises for which he’d seen no rent recently. The fact that he was taking the trouble to seek me out did not bode well.

  ‘Robbie!’ he called, from across the street. ‘A word.’

  I feigned deafness and walked faster, hoping to reach the café before I was forced to acknowledge his presence.

  ‘Hey, baw heid!’ he called again, as I went to open the door.

  Ignoring him and walking straight ahead into the relative safety of Sandy’s café was not an option. Jake would have seen it as a sign of weakness, and the one thing you didn’t show a pit-bull like Jake was fear.

  I turned to face him. The two men either side were much taller but Jake needed minders like Snow White needed another dwarf. One of the bookends, I recognised: Deek Pudney, a brute of a man who’d worked with Jake for years. The other was much younger, Deek’s apprentice, tall and well-built, with a prematurely receding hairline and bad skin.

  ‘Jake. How’s it going?’ I asked, like I was interested in the answer.

  He frowned, which was not necessarily a bad sign. Unpleasant things happened to people when Jake smiled; or at least he smiled when he happened to do unpleasant things to people.

  ‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ he growled, ‘but business can’t be good because you’re late with the rent and you know how I like punctuation when it comes to matters of finance.’ He meant punctuality. But one big word was as good as another to his two cauliflower-eared pals and I wasn’t about to get picky with his vocabulary. ‘I’ve never had a bolt out of you for three month.’

  ‘Sorry about that, Jake. Give me a couple of weeks and I should have most of it.’

  ‘No. I want it now – the lot.’

  I switched smoothly into plea-in-mitigation mode. ‘Come on, Jake. Things have been a bit slow. What I need is a crime wave. There’s hardly been a ripple lately.’ I laughed; he didn’t; I tried again. ‘Look, I’m doing okay. Honest. The future’s bright for Munro & Co., it’s just that the Legal Aid payments aren’t coming through right now.’ I wasn’t lying. The Legal Aid cheque was late as always. End of the financial year and the annual budget had been reached. The idea that the Legal Aid bill might actually go up always took the Scottish Government by surprise like the Council gritters at the first frost of winter. Jake gestured to the van.

  ‘Let’s go, Robbie. We can talk about this back at the yard.’

  Conversations with Jake about anything, but especially money, were best done in broad daylig
ht with plenty of witnesses. Talking, Jake could do over the phone. Giving me a Molegrip manicure required a more private and personal touch.

  ‘Can we do this some other time?’ I said, trying hard to sound casual, as though I believed a friendly chat was all he had in mind. ‘I’ve got court in half an hour. Catch you later, eh?’ I made for the café door. Deek, grinning like a slashed tyre, stepped forward, blocking the way. I turned around and faced Jake again, giving him my best smile. ‘Listen, Jake. Sorry about the rent. Give me two weeks and I’ll square you up and maybe bung you a month in advance – how’s that sound?’

  He mulled that suggestion over for point five of a second. ‘No, let’s do this now.’

  I had to remain calm. Talking was what I was supposed to be good at; defending the indefensible, though persuading a jury to find a reasonable doubt was one thing, trying to talk a very unreasonable man like Jake Turpie out of force-feeding me light bulbs, quite another. I took a deep breath. The future was looking less bright and a lot more painful by the second. Jake strode towards the van. His two henchmen took a grip of me and were ready to follow when a silhouette formed in the café door. I didn’t recognise it straight away, distorted as it was by frosted glass and the passage of time. The door opened, the silhouette materialised and onto the pavement stepped Frankie McPhee: gangster, racketeer and former generous contributor to the Robbie Munro pension fund and bar bill.

  ‘Hello Robbie,’ he said, apparently oblivious to the goons either side of me. ‘They said I might find you here.’ I had no idea who ‘they’ were but I thanked them from the bottom of my heart. Frankie continued: ‘I’ve a piece of business I’d like to run past you. Got a minute?’

  ‘I’m not sure...’ I said, looking at each of Jake’s men in turn, in case Frankie hadn’t noticed I had company.

  ‘Your friends won’t mind me dragging you away,’ he said, with a smile that could have set a jelly.