Last Will

by William McIntyre

  15

  ‘Walk me through it again.’ Malky said.

  ‘Right, Tina’s at nursery just now. You know where that is?’ He nodded. I’d already given my brother the address and directions to it by way of references to nearby pubs. ‘Okay, so I took her there earlier this morning. You need to go back and collect her, at what time?’

  ‘Twelve. Should we be synchronising our watches?’

  ‘Shut up. I’ve told the nursery that you’ll be collecting Tina. All you have to do is go in, sign the book and take her away. She likes to feed the ducks, so take a bag of bread with you.’

  ‘Ducks. How am I supposed to find ducks?’

  ‘It’s not a problem. Just go down to the loch with bread and they’ll find you.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Give her a shot on the swings and then bring her back here and give her something to eat.’ I led him through to the kitchen and pulled open some cupboard doors. ‘Providing the ducks have left you any bread, make toast or roasted cheese and there’s beans, spaghetti and sausages, super noodles, stuff like that, or you can make an omelette. No onions. Tina doesn’t like onions. Not unless she can’t see them. And no crisps or sweets, and only milk or water to drink, no sugary drinks. Got that?’

  ‘No crisps, sweets or juice? Come on. Give the kid a break.’

  ‘She’s had too much sweet stuff lately, most of it from you, and sugary juice will rot her teeth.’

  ‘She’s got baby teeth. Who cares if they rot? They fall out by themselves anyway. She can look after the new ones when they come in.’

  ‘Malky, listen to me. No sweets. If she eats her lunch and drinks her milk you can give her a biscuit. One biscuit.’

  ‘When do I send her up the chimney to give it a sweep?’

  ‘Stay focused, Malky. If she gets bored and I’m not back, put a DVD on or play a game or read a book. Do not under any circumstances answer the door. It will only be Dad or, nearly as bad, Vikki the lawyer who’s doing a report on me. You got all that?’

  ‘Nursery, ducks, lunch. No crisps, sweets, juice, female lawyers or elderly relatives. Possibly one biscuit. Yeah, I think I’m good to go. Any beer in the fridge?’ He gave my cheek a friendly slap. ‘Kidding.’

  I went through to my room and took my suit jacket out of the wardrobe. By the time I’d returned, Malky’s earlier cheery expression had changed to one bordering on terror. ‘What happens if she needs to go to the toilet?’

  ‘Just point her in the direction of the nearest loo and she’ll take it from there,’ I said. ‘Just remember to take some toilet paper with you in case you’re out and about and she has to go to the ladies.’

  ‘And if it’s a . . . ?’ He blew a raspberry. ‘There won’t be any . . . you know . . . wiping involved, will there?’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘How unlikely?’

  ‘Extremely unlikely,’ I said, but he didn’t seem satisfied at my answer. ‘Okay, yes, it is just possible that there could be some kind of bottom malfunction, but really it’s not that big a deal. If you’re worried, take a spare pair of undies with you.’

  ‘I’ve only got the ones I’m wearing.’

  ‘Not for you, for Tina.’

  ‘You want me to carry kids’ underwear about in my pocket?’

  ‘Look, I’ve already told you it’s not going to happen and if it does, well, what’s the big problem? We’re talking about a number two, not DEFCON 2.’

  Malky sniffed several times and screwed up his face. ‘Talking about number twos. Have you let one rip?’

  I hadn’t, but I knew what he meant. There was a very strong smell of . . . well . . . shit.

  Sniffing like a bloodhound, Malky came closer. ‘Yeah, it’s definitely you,’ he said, sniffing some more. ‘I hope you’ve got a spare pair of undies with you, because I think you’ve filled the ones you’re wearing.’

  I backed away from him. He was right. The smell was coming from me. I removed my jacket. On the outside it seemed fine, but upon examination of the interior I could see, smeared across the lining, caked on hard, a substance which upon closer inspection was definitely the source of the smell.

  ‘Forget to take extra toilet paper with you the last time you were out and about?’ Malky asked.

  At first I didn’t understand how it could have got there and then it dawned on me. This was the suit I’d been wearing the day I’d rescued the little girl at the farm. I’d wrapped the jacket around her and she’d worn it in the car all the way to the police station. Before she’d been whisked away by the social services it had been exchanged for a fleecy blanket.

  I found a black bin bag, folded the jacket and laid it inside. ‘Any chance of you dropping that off at the dry-cleaners on the way to collect Tina?’

  ‘None whatsoever,’ Malky replied.

  By the time I was changed and ready to go, my brother was sitting in the living room with a cup of coffee and the newspaper.

  ‘Don’t be late for Tina,’ I told him.

  Malky didn’t look up. ‘Tell you what. I promise not to be late if you promise not to do poo-poos on your jacket again.’

  16

  Deek Pudney’s first appearance was scheduled for noon but didn’t call until after three. The wheels of justice grind slow. At Livingston Sheriff Court, even on a quiet day, they barely ground at all.

  The sheriff had left the bench at the end of the summary custody cases to allow the courtroom to be cleared while Deek’s petition was computer-linked between the PF’s and Sheriff Clerk’s offices. When I made my way up from the cells, clutching my client’s recently served papers, Hugh Ogilvie was sitting in the well of the court, a single red file on the table in front of him. Ogilvie only attended court for the most high-profile of cases or to gloat. In this instance it was a bit of both. The charge was murder. Daisy Adams, proprietor of Sunnybrae Farm, had been at last identified as one of the victims. She’d been strangled by means of a ligature. Deek’s other alleged victim’s identity was meantime unknown. The latter had been struck with a knife or similar instrument. It was funny how the Crown always liked to hedge its bets on the weapon used, even when it was found sticking out of the victim’s chest. The date of the crimes was vaguely stated as having taken place sometime during a seven-day period, ending on the 14th October, the date the bodies were found.

  ‘Can we get this show on the road?’ I asked the clerk. ‘I’ve somewhere else to be.’

  The clerk nodded to the bar officer who went off in search of the sheriff. ‘Are you applying for bail?’ she asked me.

  ‘Bail?’ Ogilvie laughed. ‘Have you seen his client’s previous?’

  I waved the petition at Ogilvie. ‘Almost as funny as your half-baked prosecution. You’ve got a nerve remanding my client. What have you got on him? Nothing. You don’t even know the name of one of the victims, far less the date he was killed. This whole procedure is a disgrace. You’ve got nothing on Pudney that you haven’t got against Jake Turpie or, for that matter, me. Why single him out, other than because you know bail is a non-starter and you’d like him off the streets?’

  Ogilvie grunted and shuffled his papers. ‘Perhaps you should read the summary of evidence before you start accusing the Crown of acting in bad faith.’ The rest of his words were drowned out by a bellow of ‘Court!’ from the bar officer and we stood as Sheriff Albert Brechin swept onto the bench.

  To become a sheriff you had to apply to the Judicial Appointments Board, recommending yourself for the job and stating reasons why you thought you’d be good at it. I could only assume that Bert Brechin had thought he’d make a good sheriff because he’d been so useless at everything else he’d tried. If I’d had my way, a burning desire to sit in judgement of others would have been a barrier to the job.

  A few seconds later Deek appeared from the cells below, a G4S security officer either side, one male, one female, one old, one very young. It didn’t look like either would be of much use if Deek decided he’d had enough and wa
nted to leave.

  As it was, the hearing lasted only a couple of minutes, during which Deek was on his best behaviour. The case was formally continued for further enquiries and my client led off to start his seven-day lie-down. He’d be up again the same time next week. If the Crown was satisfied as to a sufficiency of evidence, he’d be fully committed for trial. If not, he’d be released.

  I explained all this to Deek in the cells and he seemed neither up nor down at the prospect of a week’s stay courtesy of Her Majesty. He probably thought it would be a nice break from being shouted at by Jake.

  The case having called in private, as did all such matters in their initial stages, Deek’s boss was sitting on one of the stone benches in the Civic Centre atrium waiting for me. He saw me coming down from the court and sauntered over to meet me at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘What’ve they got on him?’

  ‘They don’t need much at this stage,’ I said. ‘It’s enough for them that he was at the scene of the murder.’

  ‘So was I and so was you. What else they got?’

  Hugh Ogilvie had said something about the summary of evidence, a document stapled to the petition and usually compiled by the reporting police officer. It was supposed to give the accused early notice of the case against him. More often than not it contained what the cops hoped the evidence would be, rather than what it actually was.

  ‘We’ll know more this time next week,’ I said, not mentioning that another thread of evidence the Crown had against Deek, apart from his mere presence at the crime scene, was what I’d told the cops in my witness statement about the debt due by Daisy Adams to Jake. Although I hadn’t said as much, Dougie Fleming would be well aware of Deek’s role in Jake’s credit control system.

  ‘What now?’ Jake asked.

  ‘For now, I’ve told Deek that it’s best if you don’t go and visit him and he’s asked that you send him up some money.’

  ‘No problem. What’s your plan?’

  ‘I don’t have one. Not yet. I’ll need to see what the Crown has got first, but if it wasn’t Deek who murdered those people, somebody else did.’ Jake couldn’t argue with that. ‘And it will be down to us to find out who that person is. The cops will be too busy trying to link Deek to the murders to bother looking for other suspects.’

  ‘What if Deek wasn’t there when the murders were committed?’

  ‘Alibi?’

  ‘Yeah. Like you just said, if Deek didn’t do it, somebody else did, and if Deek wasn’t there when it happened, he must have been somewhere else.’

  Which was all perfectly logical, I just didn’t want Jake putting something together that wouldn’t bear up to scrutiny.

  ‘We’ll need to do it right,’ I told him. ‘Nothing worse than a burst alibi, and I can’t start looking into that side of things until I know when the murders happened. You saw the guy on the table. He’d been there a while. We need more information before we start lobbing alibi defences about.’

  ‘I had one of the boys swing by the farm today,’ Jake said.

  ‘You what? Have you never heard the saying, the murderer always returns to the scene of the crime? That’s the sort of thing the cops will be looking out for. They’ll latch onto anything suspicious that can be traced back to you.’

  ‘He only drove by. I told him not to stop.’

  ‘What did he see?’

  ‘The place is sealed off. There was a cop car and a van there. They’ve taken the jeep away.’

  The scene of crime examinations would still be ongoing. They wouldn’t let me in until they were finished, but I might be able to have an informal word with someone and find out a bit more about the timing of the killings. If Deek was truly innocent then it followed he must have an alibi. He couldn’t have been in two places at the same time.

  The big Civic Centre clock told me I was already way behind schedule. Malky would be going crazy.

  ‘Robbie!’ one of the court clerks called from the top of the stairs. ‘Phone call from your office. It’s urgent.’

  I left Jake with assurances that I’d be in touch as soon as there was any news and went up to the Sheriff Clerk’s office.

  It was Grace-Mary. ‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ she said. ‘Your brother phoned looking for you. He said you were supposed to be back ages ago and he had to go to work.’

  Work? Of course, it was Friday the day of Malky’s weekly football phone-in. Surely he hadn’t gone off and left Tina to fend for herself.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Grace-Mary said. ‘She’s here at the office, helping Joanna paint her fingernails.’

  ‘Great. Keep her there. Tell Joanna if she runs out of fingers to start on her toes. I’ll try and be back about five.’

  ‘Try?’

  ‘I’ll do my best. If I’m not back you can stay on and make up for your half-day yesterday.’

  ‘It was only a couple of hours and I still had to go to the post office,’ Grace-Mary said, and whether she went on to debate the point further I didn’t know because by then I’d hung up.

  17

  It was a typical late autumn afternoon in Scotland, overcast with light drizzle, when I left the Civic Centre. I met Paul Sharp as I came out of the clerk’s office and we walked together back to our cars.

  ‘I hear I narrowly missed out on a murder cut-in,’ Paul said. ‘I met Joanna and she was telling me all about it. Tricky situation for you. What’s going to happen if they come up with some evidence against Jake Turpie? He won’t like it if you can’t act for him and I can’t see how you could jump ship from Deek to Jake’s defence. Not if there was even the remotest chance of a conflict of interest. That’s how you get yourself struck off.’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ I assured him.

  ‘Joanna was also saying that if it does go to trial you’re likely to be a defence witness. Can’t you find someone more credible?’ He laughed. ‘Who’s going to believe a lawyer’s word on anything?’

  ‘Like I say, I don’t see the prosecution going that far. There’s not enough evidence.’

  ‘What have they got?’

  ‘The three of us at the locus, several days after the actual murders.’

  ‘Who saw you there?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Well, how do the cops even know you were there?’

  I thought about it. ‘Because I told them.’

  ‘Careless,’ Paul said.

  What did he think I should have done, arriving at a police station with a distressed child who’d been living alone in a house full of dead people for probably the best part of a week? ‘The cops asked for a witness statement and I gave them one. I never thought for a moment that they’d actually arrest Jake and Deek.’

  ‘And presumably you advised them not to answer any questions?’ Paul continued as we crossed the bridge over the Almond to the car park at Livingston FC’s stadium. The water below us was running in full spate and I could hardly hear Paul above it. ‘Are you sure you’ve thought this through?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if there is only you putting your clients at the scene, that makes you more of a prosecution witness than a defence witness. Doesn’t it?’ I hadn’t thought about it that way. ‘And,’ Paul said, warming to his theory on everything, ‘if they’ve served Deek Pudney with a petition, and not Turpie, then they’ve obviously got something else on him. What does the summary of evidence say?’

  I had absolutely no idea. I’d not bothered to look at it yet, more interested in getting out of court and back to Tina. More interested in being a father than a lawyer.

  ‘That information is confidential at the moment,’ I said. ‘You understand.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Paul said, in a tone that suggested of course he didn’t. ‘But watch out. These guys will sell you down the river if it means them spending one minute less in jail. Anyway, how did the holiday go? I didn’t expect to see you back at work so soon.’

  ‘I’m still on it and i
t’s not a holiday,’ I said. ‘It’s childminding. Just like work, only a lot harder. Ask Mrs Sharp.’

  Paul laughed. ‘I’m joking. Anyway, I do my share of looking after the kids.’ He set his key-phaser to stun and pointed it at a row of parked cars fifty metres away. Through the gathering gloom a set of indicator lights blinked orange. ‘How is Tina? Got you Munro boys whipped into shape yet? I hope you’re managing to keep Barry Munn sober long enough to do the paperwork.’ He made it sound like Barry was helping me take out finance on a second-hand car, not fighting for custody of my daughter.

  ‘Tina’s had my dad and Malky wrapped around her pinky since day one,’ I said. ‘I’m still putting up a fight. I didn’t realise that being a dad also meant being a spoilsport a lot of the time.’

  ‘It’s called responsibility. Get used to it.’

  We reached Paul’s car. ‘This being a parent – it’s tricky, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Hard work’s not easy. You’re not having second thoughts, are you?’

  When I first met Paul he was young, free and single. A man whose unexplained fascination for the music of the Sixties had extended not only to his clothes, but to a lovingly restored Triumph Spitfire. These days, married with a couple of kids, he drove a Ford saloon and the retro suits came out only on special occasions.

  ‘Of course not. It’s just that sometimes I wonder if I’m doing the right thing trying to run a law firm and raise a child at the same time,’ I said.

  Paul opened his car door. ‘It’s going to be difficult for you as a single parent. Just remember that at the end of the day a job is just a job, but family is everything.’ He clamped a hand on my shoulder. ‘And if you do decide to pack in the law, feel free to send me your clients.’ He sat down and looked up at me through the open door. ‘Seriously, Robbie. I know you. You’ve got what it takes to do what it takes. You’ll be fine.’

  I watched him drive away before setting off to find my own car further down the same row of vehicles. Once inside I took the rolled-up petition from my pocket and studied it under the dim glow of the courtesy light. What could they possibly have on Deek that they didn’t have on Jake? It didn’t take me long to find out. Fingerprints. Lots of them, and one in prize position; right there on the handle of the murder weapon. I’d told the big idiot to touch nothing and yet he’d obviously been wandering around that farmhouse kitchen slapping his dabs on every available surface. He deserved to be in jail just for being stupid. Still, the presence of those fingerprints did put my mind slightly at ease. It wasn’t only my statement that had put Deek at the murder scene and I could provide a perfectly innocent explanation for Deek’s fingerprints being there. My own prints would be on the front door, on the banister and in the bedroom where I’d found the child. Jake would be the same. Wouldn’t he? I recalled a set of driving gloves. Who wore driving gloves these days? To drive an Aston Martin, perhaps. But a battered Ford Transit van?