Relatively Guilty (Best Defence series Book 1) Read online

  Relatively Guilty

  First in the Best Defence Series

  WHS McIntyre

  Copyright William H,.S. McIntyre

  This book is a work of fiction

  More in the Best Defence series:

  #2 Duty Man

  #3 Sharp Practice

  #4 Killer Contract

  #5 Crime Fiction

  #6 Last Will

  #7 Present Tense

  #8 Good News, Bad News (out Spring 2016)

  A truth that’s told with bad intent,

  Beats any lie you can invent.

  ~ William Blake ~

  CHAPTER 1

  He’d been stabbed through the brain.

  ‘Via the eye or the ear would have been the professional’s choice,’ said the man in green scrubs. ‘This is clumsy work.’

  Sometimes I suspected that much of Professor Edward Bradley’s non-clinical research was Hollywood-based. I’d have thought that by now the aging pathologist would have come to realise there were very few professional hitmen around, certainly in Central Scotland. From my experience, most murders were not committed by highly-trained assassins, were not even premeditated, but were spur of the moment acts involving young men with too few functioning brain cells in their heads, the result of too many pints of beer in their stomachs.

  ‘Yes, very clumsy,’ said the Professor. He scratched the wiry grey hair under his scrub cap, ‘But, I suppose, showing a certain degree of enthusiasm.’

  He tilted the dead man’s head towards me. ‘You’ll notice that the wounds are all through the left sphenoid bone. That tends to suggest the deceased was lying on his right side. The close grouping indicates a rapid succession of blows. Takes a fair bit of force to do that.’ He shoved a shiny metal probe through one of the holes. ‘And, of course, a good quality screwdriver.’

  My stomach heaved. It was too soon after lunch for a defence autopsy. I should have sent Andy. It was the sort of thing young legal trainees enjoyed.

  I swallowed the wad of mucus that had gathered in my throat and was threatening to choke me. ‘What makes you so sure it was a screwdriver?’

  The Professor pointed a slimy, blue, latex finger at a patch of flesh, swollen and suffused with dark blood.

  I couldn’t see anything of note.

  He lifted the flap of skin and cartilage that had once been the face of Police Constable Callum Galbraith to reveal the underside, a thin, creamy layer of adipose tissue and some puncture wounds, small but clearly visible. ‘Your woman must have been running out of steam. Some of the blows haven’t penetrated full-thickness.’

  He was talking about my client, Isla Galbraith: a Highland lass, pretty, docile and prime suspect for the vicious, cold-blooded murder of her policeman husband.

  Using the probe, the Professor indicated some more of the round marks under the skin. He was quite correct; a few of the blows hadn’t penetrated far and one or two had left distinct cross patterns at the hair-line.

  ‘A Phillips type,’ he said. ‘Small gauge, long-stemmed. The sort of screwdriver watch repairers use. Like so.’ The Professor mimed a series of fast jabs.

  ‘Painful.’

  ‘No, not really. He wouldn’t have known much about it. For all intents and purposes he was a goner after what I presume was the initial blow, received to the back of his head.’

  ‘Consistent with an axe?’

  ‘Entirely.’

  That more or less summed up the Crown’s position. Callum Galbraith was in bed, sleeping, when he was clunked over the head with an axe. If you assembled all the items under Britain’s beds, kept handy in case of that late-night intruder, you’d have an immense armoury of pokers, hammers, rolling pins and other deadly weapons. Callum Galbraith had kept a tomahawk; a souvenir from a trip to the States. I’d already examined it through the thick plastic of a Crown production bag and recalled a cheap replica with a brass axe-head and an eagle painted on the heavily-lacquered handle. Goodness knows how he’d got it through customs. The force of the blow must have broken it, as it was now in three pieces. A tomahawk; it was a strange choice. You’d have thought a cop would have kept a truncheon.

  The consensus was that, after being knocked senseless, Galbraith’s wife had finished him off with a series of frenzied and rather unnecessary blows with a screwdriver, smashing through what I’d have called the temple, but which Professor Bradley and the Crown post-mortem report referred to as the sphenoid bone of the skull. Both attacks had caused serious and irreparable damage to the brain.

  ‘Anything else you can tell me?’ I asked, hoping that, if there was, he could relay it quickly so I could get back out into the fresh air.

  The Professor replaced the flaps of skin and shaved scalp that he’d peeled back from the top of the head. The brain was missing and in a glass jar or somewhere.

  ‘I’d say we can draw two conclusions from this examination,’ he said, scrunching up a few pages from a Daily Record and packing them into the head cavity before fitting the lid of the skull back into place. ‘Firstly, he’s definitely dead and, secondly, whoever did it to him was seriously pissed off about something.’

  ‘And you’re definitely ruling out suicide?’

  Professor Bradley tore of his gloves, crossed the room and dropped them into a bucket. ‘You’re a funny man, Robbie. About as funny as your client’s life sentence is going to be.’

  ‘Unusual, though, don’t you think?’ I said, following him to the sink. ‘A ferocious attack like that, by a woman?’

  ‘It’s certainly unladylike, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Unladylike? Is that the best you can give me?’

  The Professor turned on a tap with an elbow and shoved his hands under the stream of water. ‘What do you want me to give you? Your client is found covered in her dead husband’s blood, clutching the weapon that killed him and then she confesses everything to the police. I’m not a lawyer, but it sounds like guilty to me.’

  The whole blood, murder-weapon, confession thing was a chain of evidence that hadn’t escaped my finely-tuned legal brain, and yet from the look of my client I couldn’t imagine her having a cross word with a fly far less harming one.

  The Professor squeezed soap from a dispenser and began to lather his hands. ‘So, if you’re expecting me to come up with a crazy theory to provide you with the basis for some kind of a defence—’

  ‘I’d be eternally grateful.’

  ‘Sorry. No can do.’ He rinsed his soapy hands and ripped a bunch of green paper towels from a box on the wall. ‘I don’t know about harming flies...’ The Professor squashed the paper towels into a ball and missed the bucket by a mile. ‘But your girl did a hell of a good job swatting her husband.’

  CHAPTER 2

  A spider; I could see it from the doorway, crawling on my bedroom ceiling. It was all I needed after a Friday afternoon spent cutting up a dead bloke.

  I let my jacket drop to the floor and ripped off my tie. The last day in June. Blue skies and soaring temperatures, sun shining like the West Indies and not West Lothian. It might have been a freak spell of weather or all down to global warming; whatever, it was decidedly un-Scottish.

  Meanwhile, the spider continued its slow, relentless, upside-down march. I hated them. All those legs, eyes and fangs, webbing with the equivalent strength of hi-tensile steel – evolution or God – it seemed a lot of bother to go to, to catch a few flies. I removed a shoe. Exhausted and ready for a cold shower and an even colder beer, before I could relax I’d have to dispatch the beast. Eyes fixed on the ceiling, I jumped onto the bed and steadied myself. Careful; I might only get one shot at splatti
ng it. What I didn’t want to do was send it scurrying off into a dark corner, leaving me not knowing when or where it might reappear.

  Deep breath. Arm coiled. I was about to let fly when the bed beneath my feet shifted. Losing balance, I fell and landed on a big lump snuggled under the duvet. I leapt backwards, granting the spider a stay of execution, my arm still raised, the shoe held aloft. With a snort and a grunt the bump in my downy struggled to the surface.

  ‘Robbie?’ it croaked.

  ‘Malky?’

  ‘Sorry. I must have dozed off. Just got in a few hours ago. Still a bit jet-lagged.’

  Last I’d heard my brother lived in London. It was a one hour flight.

  He yawned enormously and rubbed a tousled head of hair that, unlike my own, showed no trace of grey and was way too long for a man of his age. ‘Dad gave me a key ages ago. In case of emergencies. He said you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Okay, you got me there. But he did give me a key.’

  ‘So why are you here? What’s the big emergency?’

  ‘Why am I here? That all you can say? No, how’s it going Malcolm? What have you been up to these last two—?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Three years? Can’t believe it’s been that long.’

  He swung his legs out of bed. An ugly scar ran down the front of his left knee, a lasting reminder of the injury that ended a short-lived but, according to experts like my dad, brilliant football career. He stood up. My big brother. Three inches taller and two years older. I couldn’t help notice the pair of baggy jockey shorts. ‘Y-fronts? Get them from dad too?’

  ‘Cat’s idea,’ he said, leaning over to pick his trousers off the floor. ‘All to do with air circulation. Supposed to keep my… well they help me stay cool. Good for the wee fellas apparently. Makes for better swimmers or something. I’ve sort of got used to them.’

  I’d first met Cat, or rather Dr Cathleen Doyle, raven-haired beauty of Northern Irish descent, when I’d worked in Glasgow with Caldwell & Clark: T-Rex in the world of legal dinosaurs. She’d had a spot of bother with a red light on her way to an emergency call-out and I’d talked the Fiscal into dropping the charges. It had been no big deal, but on the strength of that minor victory I’d asked her out and we’d dated for a while until it had seemed only natural to move in together. There had been a time when I thought of her as the future Mrs Robbie Munro. That is, until I came home one evening to find her giving my big brother a thorough physical examination on our bed.

  I picked up a paperback from the bedside table, gave it to Malky and pointed at the bug on the ceiling. ‘Squash it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re still scared of spiders – at your age?’

  ‘They give me the creeps.’

  ‘There speaks the boy who used to have a pet rat.’

  ‘Geordie was a gerbil.’

  ‘Horrible scratchy feet. Bit me once. What’s scary about a wee spider?’

  ‘Arachnophobia. If it was a rational fear it wouldn’t be a phobia.’

  He took the book and stood on the bed. ‘Your big brother still comes in handy for some things eh?’

  ‘Just get rid of it.’ I jumped down from the bed and went through to the bathroom to wash my face. When I returned, the spider was nowhere to be seen and Malky was pulling on his trousers, tightening his belt.

  ‘And how is Cathleen?’ Her name tasted like battery acid. ‘Knocked her up yet? Or are the wee fellas insufficiently chilled?’ I was on a roll. ‘Come up to Scotland hoping for a cold snap did you? Sorry, but, as you’ll have gathered, we’re in the middle of a heat-wave.’

  I glanced down at the paperback, now returned to the bedside table, the cover suspiciously devoid of splattered spider. ‘So where is she? Is the delightful Dr Doyle not with you?’

  Malky zipped-up his fly, sat down on the edge of the bed and started to put on his shoes.

  ‘Cat’s dead,’ he said. ‘I killed her.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Monday morning, I took my feet off the desk, tore June from the calendar and filed it in the bin. The first day of July and the sun was still shining. I went to the window and looked out at Linlithgow. Population 13,423. Birthplace of a Queen of Scots who got her head chopped off.

  Grace-Mary walked into the room. Sometimes I wondered if the woman had been born in that green cardigan and tartan skirt, a pair of spectacles dangling on a gold chain about her neck. Congratulations, Mr and Mrs Gribbin, it’s a legal secretary.

  Grace-Mary looked down her nose at my big desk diary. She did not approve. Not after I’d made the mistake of sending her on a night school computing course, since when she’d never stopped harping on about networking and integrated diary systems. Me? When it came to the recording of important information, I still preferred the security blanket that was a piece of paper.

  She lifted the diary with an air of faint disgust and flicked over a few pages. ‘The Faculty Dinner. You going? I think there is a window in your hectic social calendar.’

  I didn’t answer, coming to grips, as I was, with an on-line legal aid form and realising that the problem with e-applications is that you can’t write notes in the margin to explain that your client doesn’t have an address, lives in any handily unlocked outbuilding and has an income derived from whatever he can thieve.

  ‘You should go. All work and no play…’

  I pressed the submit button and hoped for the best.

  My secretary wasn’t for giving up. ‘You could take Zoë…’

  Now that was a thought. Zoë was new. Zoë was gorgeous. Zoë was going to be my girlfriend - I just hadn’t plucked up the courage to break the news to her yet. I wasn’t sure if I ever would. Zoë had temped earlier in the year when Grace-Mary was on holiday and because business was picking up I’d offered her a job. Since Grace-Mary’s return, Zoë had been put on reception duties. She was fun, fit and, if not the highly efficient secretarial machine that was Grace-Mary Gribbin, she was a trier. Even my secretary found it hard to find fault with the new receptionist, apart, that is, from her habit of wearing exceptionally tight satin blouses to work. I was not one to complain.

  Grace-Mary’s suggestion was nicely timed to coincide with the arrival, dead on nine o’clock, of my receptionist. Today’s blouse was ruby red.

  Sensing she might have struck a chord Grace-Mary pressed ahead. ‘The girl’s on the phone all day. It would be nice for her to meet some of the local lawyers. Put faces to voices.’

  Tempting. I wondered. Would she go? Since Cathleen, my luck with the opposite sex mirrored the state of the FTSE one hundred, down and showing little sign of rallying. I had no time to ponder the subject because my diary was packed with appointments. Sometime after eleven, when I was between clients, Andy marched into the office in a hail-the-conquering-hero sort of a way. The eyes beneath the curly black hair and behind the dark frames of his specs were sparkling, his face flushed. I’d forgotten how even a trip to the Justice of the Peace Court could seem exciting to a newly-qualified solicitor.

  ‘Another beautiful day,’ my young assistant announced.

  The clear sky and blazing sun corroborated his remark but he wasn’t looking so pleased with life simply because of the weather.

  ‘I take it all went according to plan down at the Palais de Justice?’

  My young assistant tossed the tatty, spare court-gown into a corner of the room and perched himself on the edge of my desk, partially demolishing a pile of files that Grace-Mary had stacked for my attention. ‘As predicted, the P.F. forgot to serve the speed-camera calibration certificates and had to move to adjourn.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I opposed the motion, the magistrate saw things my way, the case was deserted simpliciter, et voila: no totting-up disqualification for Mr Turpie.’

  I was pleased to hear it. Jake Turpie was owner of the first floor flat which, with every expense spared, he’d converted into office space now home to the recently established law fi
rm of Munro & Co., senior partner, only partner, yours truly: Robbie Munro.

  Access to the premises was gained via a close off the High Street and up a flight of stairs to the front door: the only solid fitting in the building because I’d installed it myself on the recommendation of a dealer client who assured me that breaking in with a police battering ram would be like trying to crack open a coconut with a banana. Once inside the office, there was a central corridor. To the right: reception, the biggest room, where Zoë sat at the phones and Andy took up a desk by the window. Further down on the same side of the corridor was a small room occupied by Grace-Mary, when she wasn’t marching about the place firing orders, and which doubled as the cashroom. The waiting room was situated at the end of the corridor while, coming back up the other side, there was a kitchen, toilet, broom cupboard and then, directly opposite reception, my room where Grace-Mary and I were now congratulating my assistant on his victory.

  Grace-Mary finished giving Andy a small round of applause and turned to me. ‘How much do you want to charge him, Robbie?’

  There was little point in sending Jake Turpie a fee note. My landlord was notoriously tight-fisted and requests for money were seldom well-received. I thought it best simply to deduct my fee from the rent; a cash payment that Jake demanded monthly and in advance and, occasionally, with menace.

  ‘After today’s display I reckon I’m ready for the Sheriff Court,’ Andy said. ‘What do you think, Robbie?’

  I thought the prisons were sufficiently overcrowded as it was.

  Andy removed a fifty pound note from his top pocket and began to fan himself with it. ‘Oh, and I nearly forgot. A small token of Mr Turpie’s esteem.’

  A bung? From Jake Turpie? Unheard of. He must have been well-chuffed. I snatched it from my assistant’s fingers.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Hey, nothing. Whose idea was it to challenge the speed-camera calibration in the first place?’