Killer Contract (Best Defence series Book 4) Read online

  ‘Larry Kirkslap? That man's obviously got more money than sense. I mean, Caldwell & Craig? Do me a favour. What does that lot know about criminal law?’ I tore a chunk out of my bacon roll.

  ‘You weren’t saying that when you were working there. Best law firm ever back then, according to you.’

  And I’d been quite correct. After all I’d been the criminal law partner until C&C had decided that crime soiled the livery, or, at least, legally-aided clients did.

  ‘Same again, is it, Mr Munro?’ Sandy called over, having eventually taken the hint. He placed his dictionary under the counter. ‘What about you, Robbie?’

  I had most of my roll left, but shouted up another. Better safe than sorry. ‘How many criminal lawyers do you know dad?’

  ‘Too many.’

  ‘Okay, let me put it this way. Just say you got yourself in bother.’ He was about to protest, but I put up a hand. ‘Who would you trust to get you off? Me—’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Okay, not me. How about Paul Sharp?’

  ‘The weirdo? The one who dresses like Georgie Fame?’

  ‘Paul is an experienced criminal lawyer. He's been around for years. Be honest, who would you instruct? Paul or Andy?’

  His refusal to answer was answer enough.

  ‘These rich clients,’ I said, munching my way through the rest of my roll. ‘They don’t know what they’re doing. They assume you get what you pay for and so they go to the biggest, most expensive law firm when they get into trouble. The really big legal outfits never darken the door of the criminal courts. Andy's got potential, but he'll not learn his trade doing the occasional, high-profile work that comes his way at C and C. He needs to work his way up through the leagues. Spend some time in the JP and Sheriff courts before charging into a mega-murder trial.’

  I popped the final morsel of roll into my mouth and explained how it was all very well for Andy to be swanning around the High Court, but what about the client? He needed someone who knew the angles, the legal loop-holes and technicalities of criminal defence work. Larry Kirkslap would learn the hard way and have a life sentence to mull over his choice of lawyer.

  I was all set to expand further, with reference to Deek Pudney’s acquittal, when Sandy emerged from the kitchen carrying a plate.

  My dad made way for the next batch of rolls. ‘By the way, Sandy, Robbie’s getting these. And don’t give him any tick, let him show you the colour of his money.’ He picked up a roll. ‘Your boy, Andy, seems to have done all right for himself, though.’

  ‘In what way?’ I asked my dad, once I’d assured Sandy that I’d square him up later. Much later.

  ‘Have you not heard?’ My dad's teeth were already embedded in his second roll. He chewed for a moment or two, savouring the food and the news he was about to impart. ‘Kirkslap was acquitted. It was on the lunchtime news, just now. Andy, your hopeless ex-assistant, got him off on some kind of loop-hole or technicality.’

  Chapter 9

  ‘You do have to admit it puts your smoking jury case into perspective,’ Paul said, as I thrashed about in the long stuff, looking for my drive. My golfing companion’s fascination for Sixties’ fashion extended even to golf-wear: white nylon polo-neck under a lemon pullover and on his bottom half, hound’s-tooth slacks and matching black-white spikes. I felt drab in my ancient chino’s and washed out navy polo shirt.

  Paul selected a weapon from his golf bag and joined me amidst the foliage. ‘Terrific win and Andy couldn’t have picked a bigger client.’ He laughed. ‘ And as for the Crown case - talk about a stone-waller? You could have seen it from the moon; there was masses of top quality circumstantial evidence.’

  ‘He got lucky,’ I said, realising how jealous I sounded. ‘How could the judge forget to swear-in the jury before the trial?’

  ‘It happened to me once,’ Paul said. ‘No-one noticed until after the first witness had given evidence. Nothing important just the police photographer. All they did was restart the trial, swear-in the jury and take his evidence again. It was just routine stuff anyway.’

  ‘Think they’ll just do the same here?’ I gave the shrubbery an extra hard whack with my seven-iron.

  ‘I’m not so sure. No-one noticed until after the jury came back with its guilty verdict. They could re-indict, but if the Crown is out of time and the Appeal Court think Kirkslap’s tholed his assize or think he couldn’t receive a fair trial, Andy could be on the receiving end of a giant win bonus. You know his client’s reputation. The man’s a party animal and not shy when it comes to throwing money about.’

  Paul killed a bunch of thistles with a series of swipes to reveal my golf ball, resting in the roots of a gorse bush. A couple of whacks failed to dislodge it. I declared it unplayable. ‘I’ll take a drop,’ I said, hooking the ball out with my club and punting it onto the centre of the fairway. Rounds of golf with Paul were fairly relaxed affairs. He might dress like Bernard Gallacher, but that was where any similarity ended.

  Paul lined up his second shot from the edge of the fairway. He still had a hundred and fifty yards to go to the flag. He swung, hit mostly grass and watched as his golf ball hopped, skipped and jumped along the fairway and into a greenside bunker.

  ‘Shame,’ I said, lining up my own shot. ‘It looked so good in the air.’ I hit what for me was a sweet shot that landed on the edge of the same sand trap, took a friendly bounce and rolled to the middle of the green.

  Paul snorted in disgust. ‘Remember you’re four to there... at least,’ he said. His familiarity with the rules of golf was as vague as my own.

  I shoved my club back into the bag and we set off down the fairway.

  ‘By the way,’ Paul said, ‘I’ve got a nice wee cut-in for you. It’s a bail undertaking on Monday.’

  Whenever Paul or I had a case involving two accused, we shared them to avoid a conflict of interest. It wasn’t a good idea to act for both in case the clients started pointing the finger at each other during the course of the trial.

  ‘It’s for those two boys who tried to break into the mausoleum, you know, over at Ecclesmachan. It was in the Gazette today.’ Kaye must have gone ahead and published right enough. ‘Violation of a sepulchre.’

  ‘Not a crime you see in court every day,’ I said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Paul said, attempting to dislodge himself from the sand. On his third blow, the ball blasted from the sand, hurtled over the green without touching grass and ended up a pitching-wedge away in the rough.

  The standard of play didn't improve greatly. We shook hands in the gloaming on the ninth green. As the scoring had been somewhat uncertain throughout, we decided to call it a halved game.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ I said to Paul, as we were changing out of our spikes.

  ‘If that’s not the most disconcerting thing to say to another man in the changing rooms, it’s definitely in the top one,’ Paul replied.

  ‘Shut up and look at this.’ I shoved my mobile phone under his nose. The display showed a picture I’d taken of the engagement ring I’d bought for Jill.

  ‘Robbie, this is all so sudden—’

  ‘Very funny. It’s for Jill.’

  ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘Five, nearly six, months.’

  ‘Fast worker. How old is she?’

  ‘A year younger than me.’

  ‘You know, she might just be desperate enough. Her biological clock will be boinging away like crazy. They could probably use it at the start of News at Ten. Have you two talked about having—’

  ‘Just try and concentrate. The ring.’ I pushed the image on the phone closer to his face. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s a stoater.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Not a mistake? Grace-Mary and Joanna seem to think that presenting Jill with it is arrogant.’

  ‘Well...’

  ‘You think it is too?’

  ‘No...’

&nbs
p; ‘Good.’

  ‘Slightly desperate perhaps.’

  ‘Desperate?’

  ‘You know, please, please marry me - see I’ve bought you a lovely ring, desperate. You want to play it more cool. Women can sense desperation a mile off - it’s very unattractive in a man.’

  Who knew proposing was so difficult? ‘When did men stop buying engagement rings?’ I asked.

  ‘They never started. You've watched too many old movies.’

  ‘So what do I do with it?’

  ‘Take it back to the shop. Let her pick one herself - if she says yes.’ I didn’t miss the slight emphasis he’d placed on the if. ‘You know what women are like. It could be the Star of India and she wouldn’t like it. They’re never happy unless they’re complaining about something.’

  ‘I can’t take it back. I got a special deal for cash.’

  ‘Well,’ Paul said, shoes laced and striding off to the clubhouse, ‘you better hope Jill likes the desperate, arrogant type.’

  There was no escaping Larry Kirkslap’s case, not even at the nineteenth where the enormous TV in the corner of the room, that usually showed nothing but sports, was tuned into a news programme.

  It seemed the jury had come back with a majority guilty verdict, but before the Advocate depute could move for sentence, defence counsel had advised the court that there was some doubt as to whether the jury had taken the oath, to well and truly try the accused in accordance with the evidence.

  Andy took up the story from there during his interview with a BBC reporter. ‘There was a lot of head-scratching as everyone tried to think back to the start of the trial. Then the jury was sent out, the recording of the first day’s proceedings was played and sure enough: no oath.’

  ‘So the error had gone unnoticed for twenty-one days? When was it you realised there might have been an oversight?’ asked the man with the microphone.

  Andy smiled. ‘Day one.’

  ‘Nice one, Andy,’ I said, after they'd wrapped up and moved on to a story about salmon fisheries.

  Paul put down his pint tumbler and winced. ‘Ooh, not sure if he should have said that.’

  ‘Why not? So, he kept it up his sleeve in case it came in useful, which, by the way, it did - big time.’

  Paul disagreed. ‘If he realised there was an error in the court procedures he should have mentioned it straight-away.’

  I almost choked on my pint. Was Paul being serious? ‘He’s a defence lawyer. If I taught him one thing at Munro & Co., it’s that you do your best for the client. There’s enough people out to get an accused without his own lawyer joining in.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you think, Robbie. Andy’s an officer of the court. The powers that be won’t like this at all.’

  ‘But his client will like it.’ So far as I was concerned that was the main thing. ‘And there's nothing anyone can do about that.’

  Chapter 10

  ‘They sacked you?’

  Andy was an early Monday morning visitor to Munro & Co. Joanna hadn’t arrived at the office yet and Grace-Mary, who had put the kettle on for an emergency cup of tea, was now hovering in the background, a concerned expression on her face.

  My former assistant, sitting opposite me, nodded. ‘Gross misconduct, bringing the firm into disrepute.’

  ‘By getting your client a great result?’

  ‘Unprofessional, underhand and unbecoming an employee of Caldwell & Craig, is what Mrs Sinclair said.’

  Maggie Sinclair, senior partner of Caldwell & Craig, lived by a strict set of business and moral rules that she applied whenever it suited her, and always to people other than herself. She was the one who’d persuaded the partners that crime didn’t pay and been directly responsible for my departure, and, indirectly, for the setting up of Munro & Co.

  ‘We're quite busy just now, aren't we, Robbie?’ Grace-Mary said. ‘We're bound to be able to give Andy something to do. Tide him over until he finds something else. Something better than here,’ she added, unnecessarily I thought.

  Was that why Andy was here? Looking for his old job back? I had to put a halt to such talk. Joanna was pulling her weight, but she still felt like a luxury I could ill afford. My work load didn't justify bringing on board another assistant. I had a note of Maggie Sinclair's direct-dial number and thus managed to circumvent Caldwell & Craig's tank-trap of a receptionist. ‘What's wrong with you, Maggie? Are you crazy or something?’

  ‘Perfectly sane, Robbie. Thanks for asking. Now what can I do for you?’

  ‘Not for me: for Andy. How could you fire him, especially after he's secured such a famous victory?’

  ‘It's precisely because of his, I'd call it, infamous victory, that his employment here has been terminated. When I took Andy on to deal with clients who'd fallen foul of the law, I was thinking of things like corporate manslaughter, fraud, insider-trading; normal, respectable crimes. Not murder. How he managed to persuade me to take on Larry Kirkslap’s case—’

  ‘Apart from the money?’

  ‘...I'll never know,’ she continued unfazed. ‘But his indiscretion on prime time television was totally unacceptable. You must see that. Setting free a murderer, not letting the judge know he had made a mistake and being pleased about it afterwards? It’s dishonourable.’

  I didn’t buy it. Give me a dishonourable victory over an honourable loss any day of the week.

  ‘Larry Kirkslap’s case is over...’

  Now we were getting closer to the truth. Before the Kirkslap case came along, Andy had seen little or no action at C & C. The problem with rich clients was that they didn’t get into trouble often enough. You needed regular bampots, a good turnover of proper criminals, if you were going to get anywhere in criminal law, but Legal Aid rates couldn’t sustain a blue chip firm like Caldwell & Craig, whose hourly rate was greater than the five hundred pounds the Scottish Legal Aid Board deemed sufficient funding on which to defend an entire prosecution. That was the reason I’d been ousted and later replaced by a less expensive model in the shape of my former assistant. To Maggie’s mind, now that Larry Kirkslap’s case was over, and with no other high-earning criminal cases on the horizon, what was the point of keeping Andy on? Except that Maggie didn't seem to realise that the case was far from over.

  ‘The case is over,’ I agreed. ‘For the time being, at any rate.’

  ‘...and so is Andrew's career at Caldwell & Craig.’ She paused. ‘What do you mean, for the time being?’

  ‘I mean there's bound to be a re-trial.’

  Andy leaned forward, elbows on my desk. ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Maggie demanded.

  Did Maggie really think that the High Court of Justiciary would sit back and do nothing after one of its brethren had cocked-up so supremely? No chance. While it was the Clerk of Court’s responsibility to administer the oath to the jury, the buck stopped at the person wearing the horse-hair wig and red jersey. The Appeal Court wouldn't let a little thing like a judicial oversight get in the way of a conviction. They'd rubber-stamp any Crown appeal and Larry Kirkslap would be back in the dock in no time at all.

  ‘You really think there might be a retrial?’ Maggie's coolish tone had warmed up somewhat, and I knew why. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and suggested that Andy and Grace-Mary go get a cup of tea. They left; Andy with his head held low.

  ‘Are you still there Robbie? What do you mean a retrial? Kirkslap got off on a technicality. The court mucked the whole thing up. How can they have a retrial?’

  For a moment there was silence as, from afar off, we both heard the ching-ching of the same cash register.

  ‘Maybe...’ Maggie's tone of voice lightened. ‘Maybe for once, you're right, Robbie.’ She laughed. ‘Perhaps I have been too hasty—’

  If Maggie was having second thoughts it had to be because she knew Kirkslap would follow Andy. Sure Caldwell & Craig could easily employ somebody else, but did they have time? Had Andy formed a strong relationship wit
h the client? Why would the accused want to go to anyone other than the lawyer who had already had him acquitted?

  ‘Well, if that's your final word on the matter, Maggie…’ I said.

  ‘Didn't you hear me, Robbie, I said—’

  ‘Still, I know how precious the name of the Firm is to you, so I suppose Andy will just have to abide by your decision. He always did say you were a miserable old cow,’ I added, burning any remaining bridges.

  Grace-Mary and Andy returned clutching mugs of tea, my former assistant wearing a hesitant, but hopeful, expression.

  I replaced the receiver. ‘Sorry, Andy.’

  ‘That's okay,’ he said, with a helpless shrug. ‘At least you tried.’

  ‘So, what are your plans now?’ Grace-Mary asked him.

  ‘Dunno. I'll have to start looking around for another job. I can't set up on my own, I've not been qualified long enough.’

  ‘You know, Andy,’ I said. ‘What Grace-Mary was saying earlier... there may be a way we could squeeze you in here, temporarily.’

  Andy looked around the room, no doubt recalling the extravagant surroundings of his recently departed office at Caldwell & Craig. I should have taken up Grace-Mary's offer and had her brother-in-law give the place a freshen-up. Maybe even taken down some of the more stubborn Christmas decorations that remained sticky-taped to a corner of the ceiling. If only I could bring Andy on-board, with the fees from Larry Kirkslap's retrial I could practically gold-leaf the interior.

  ‘It's kind of you, Robbie,’ Andy said, ‘but I think I'd rather stay in Glasgow, or even move through to Edinburgh. I thought you might ask around for me, see if anyone is hiring. I like Linlithgow but it's so— ‘

  ‘What's it today?’ Joanna demanded, striding into the room, slinging her bag from her shoulder and dropping it on my desk. ‘Invisible dogs or erect penises?’ She noticed Andy. ‘Hello. What are you doing here?’