Last Will

by William McIntyre

  ‘Calm myself?’ He clambered to his feet. ‘Calm myself? That woman is the only thing standing between you and custody of my granddaughter and all you can say is calm yourself?’

  ‘I’m just helping her out.’

  ‘How’s you slobbering all over her helping out? At least wait until this thing with Tina is all sorted.’

  Malky was signing off; another hard night’s punditry over.

  ‘What thing with me?’ Tina asked.

  ‘It’s a surprise,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘I like surprises,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll be very surprised if your dad doesn’t mess this up,’ my dad said. ‘No, don’t roll your eyes at me, Robbie. You know fine well what you’re like with women. If they’re not trying to kill you, they’re throwing engagement rings in your face or emigrating to Aus . . . ’ He caught himself just in time. That was a conversation I’d have with Tina another day.

  ‘Look, Dad. Vikki has to go back to Sunnybrae Farm to get the wee girl’s property, and wants someone there for moral support. I’m doing her a favour. What can go wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ My dad dropped his buttocks into an armchair, like a Lancaster dropping bombs over Leipzig. Tina came over and sat on his knee. He ran a hand through her hair. ‘But I’m sure you’ll think of something.’

  27

  Saturday morning, Vikki picked me up and drove us to Sunnybrae. For the first time the farm was trying to live up to its name, and a low October sun threatened to impart some warmth to the surroundings, its weak rays reflecting in the farmhouse windows, though making very little impact on the faded paintwork of a certain vintage Volvo parked in the courtyard.

  The same cop was on guard duty. Somebody somewhere hated him. He took Vikki and me to the side entrance. The old damaged door had been completely removed and replaced by an aluminium and polythene structure. It was there that any hopes I had of entering the building for a look around were dashed. Only Vikki was to be allowed entry, and only after she had donned a paper boiler suit and plastic foot coverings.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ I asked, as she tucked her hair into a blue shower cap. She gave me a thin smile and nodded. ‘I’ll be right here waiting for you,’ I called after her as she walked down the plastic tunnel and out of sight.

  So much for that idea. Other than seeing Vikki again it had all been a waste of time. I’d be permitted a site inspection in due course once the police forensic work had been carried out, but what I’d come along for was a chance to speak to one or two of the SOCOs in case they let anything slip about how they viewed the cause of the two deaths.

  For the next twenty minutes I paced up and down the courtyard, watching the tunnel. At one stage a scene of crime officer came out carrying some gardening tools sealed inside a large production bag. He placed the equipment into the rear of a police van and was away again before I had a chance to grab him. I was kicking one of the bigger pieces of gravel about when down the plastic corridor and into the late autumn sunshine came Professor Bradley.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.

  ‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’

  ‘Well, I asked first.’

  The professor removed his plastic foot coverings and dropped them into a black plastic bin. ‘The police are just about finished and wanted me to take a look at some blood stains.’

  ‘And what did you find?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. Check the average kitchen thoroughly enough and you’ll find all sorts of gore, human and animal. I wouldn’t like to put my kitchen units under a crime-lite after I’ve been cutting things up for soup.’ It wasn’t really an answer. He unzipped his paper suit and struggled to climb out of it. ‘How do they expect anyone to get into one of these things,’ he said, ‘far less get out again?’

  Perhaps the manufacturers hadn’t expected them to be used by overweight pathologists in tweed suits. I took a grip of the collar at the back and yanked it down to waist height. ‘What’s the verdict on Daisy Adams?’

  The professor momentarily ceased his struggling. ‘She’s dead.’ He stripped off the remainder of the suit, one leg at a time, using me as a leaning post.

  ‘That’s why you’re the expert,’ I said. ‘No, really, how was she killed?’

  ‘You’ll see my report all in good time.’

  ‘Then why can’t you tell me now?’

  ‘Because I haven’t written it yet and it’s the Crown who are paying for it.’ He tossed the suit into the bin. ‘And, by the way, they pay a lot better than legal aid does.’

  He took his pipe and a soft leather pouch out of his pocket and began to pack the bowl with shreds of tobacco.

  ‘Don’t let my daughter catch you doing that,’ I said.

  He pretended to glance around anxiously. ‘She’s not here, is she? No, she can’t be. Some of the shrubbery is still intact.’ He put the pipe in his mouth and was about to light up when a paper suit appeared at the entrance to the tunnel and asked him to move further away. He did. I followed.

  ‘I heard she was strangled,’ I said. ‘That strike you as odd? One victim strangled, the other stabbed?’

  The Professor puffed smoke in reply.

  ‘All I want is the answers to a few questions and I’ll leave you alone. Call it a precognition. You’ll have to provide me with one sometime. What’s wrong with now?’

  He thought about that, shifting the pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. Finally, he rattled the stem against his teeth. ‘What about my fee?’

  ‘You know I need to get sanction from the Legal Aid Board first, they never pay anything retrospectively.’

  ‘Then do that and give me a call.’

  He was all set to commence the short march to his car until I stepped in front of him.

  ‘All right. I’ll get sanction. I’ll just have to be imaginative when I put the actual date of this meeting on my attendance note.’

  ‘Good. Then you were told right, she was strangled. Now, was there anything else? I’ve not had breakfast yet, just toast, not a proper Saturday breakfast.’

  ‘Let me put a scenario to you,’ I said.

  He puffed, lowered his head and directed blue smoke at his brogues. ‘Okay, but do it quickly.’

  ‘Someone sneaks in the side door.’

  ‘Smashes through it, you mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t. It’s a Thursday evening in the boondocks. Why would the door be locked?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He locks the door behind him, goes through to the front room where Daisy is watching TV or something, kills her and is about to leave when someone else—’

  ‘Let me guess. Your client?’

  ‘ . . . crashes through the kitchen door, confronts the killer and kills him.’

  ‘In self-defence, no doubt?’ He was catching on fast.

  ‘But not before he himself is slashed, and bleeds everywhere,’ I said.

  The professor pointed the stem of his pipe at me. ‘You’re starting to lose it.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with that as a possible version of events?’

  ‘Why would your client—’

  ‘Someone.’

  ‘Okay, someone. Why would someone having done that not call the police?’

  Someone with a long and well-documented history of violence, well known to the police? Was it all that unreasonable to assume that Deek Pudney would only have been interested in covering his tracks? I doubted if the concept of calling the police was one that he’d have even considered. He might have a big head, but there was a lot of room inside. His chief concern would have been to get out of there and report back to Jake.

  ‘I’m precognoscing you because you’re a pathologist,’ I said. ‘Just because you smoke a pipe doesn’t make you Sherlock Holmes.’

  The professor pulled up the sleeve of his jacket to reveal a leather-strapped watch. ‘Robbie—’

  ‘Forensically, is there anything wrong
with the scenario I’ve suggested?’

  ‘Probably not, no, but . . . ’

  ‘The woman was strangled. How?’

  ‘A ligature. Could have been anything, an electric cord, something like that.’

  ‘Any blood?’

  ‘No. There was a struggle. She had skin under her fingernails, but no open wounds as such.’

  ‘And the skin under the fingernails?’

  ‘Tests are still being done . . . ’

  ‘But?’

  ‘There are matching scratches on the backs of the hands of the other deceased.’

  ‘You’re in the witness box, right hand up. Who do you say killed Daisy? It’s got to have been the dead guy. Am I right?’

  ‘You know who killed Daisy?’ Vikki had appeared carrying two white bin bags stuffed full.

  ‘Not you too,’ the Professor said. ‘Are you buying Robbie’s defence or do you have one of your own?’ He stuck out a hand. ‘Sorry, we haven’t been introduced. Edward Bradley. Joanna isn’t it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Vikki said.

  Time for me to step in. ‘Professor Bradley, meet Vikki Stark. ‘She’s Molly’s . . . that is Daisy Adams’ adopted daughter’s, curator ad litem. She’s here to pick up some of Molly’s clothes and things.’

  Professor Bradley withdrew the hand that remained unshaken. ‘Yes, terrible, really terrible. Still, kids, they can be very resilient.’

  Vikki whipped off her shower cap letting her hair tumble out. ‘You were saying something about a defence. Whose defence? Not the person who killed Daisy?’

  The professor pressed down the extinguished tobacco in the bowl of his pipe with a thumb and lit it again. ‘That’s what we’re debating,’ he said, after a few rapid puffs to get his lum reeking.

  ‘But the police have got him, haven’t they?’ Vikki turned her puzzled expression from the professor to me.

  ‘Robbie seems to think his client is innocent. There’s a shock for you.’ The professor laughed. ‘Anyway, must go. Nice to meet you . . . ’

  ‘Vikki.’

  ‘Of course.’ He shook her hand and then slapped me on the back. ‘Robbie, I’ll send you my fee note in a few days. Give you time to work something out with the Legal Aid Board.’

  ‘Get everything you came for?’ I asked Vikki, as Prof Bradley marched off in the direction of his Volvo and a full Scottish breakfast.

  She dropped the bin bags at her feet. ‘What did he mean client? Are you acting for the person who killed Daisy?’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘I don’t think I am.’

  ‘But other people do?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Then why not just come out and say it?’

  ‘Because I don’t think the person charged with the murder did kill Daisy.’

  Hands on her hips, eyebrows lowered, Vikki reminded me of someone else. Someone younger. ‘Of course you don’t. Not if you’re his lawyer.’

  ‘I don’t think Professor Bradley does either,’ I said.

  Vikki unzipped the front of her paper suit in one flowing, if violent, motion and slipped her slim frame out of it in a fraction of the time it had taken the professor. ‘And that’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? To see him. Not to support me. To support your client.’ She threw the white suit hard at the black bin and missed.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ I said.

  Vikki picked up the bin bags. ‘Well, it looks bloody well like it to me.’ And, by the time I’d picked up the paper suit and dropped it into the receptacle, she had birled on a Cuban heel and set off for her car.

  28

  After spending a fortune on a taxi back to civilisation, the rest of Saturday went by without much further event. When I collected Tina from my dad, I kept short the report on my meeting with Vikki and he didn’t suspect anything.

  Sunday afternoon, he invited us round for lunch. Steak pie, mashed potatoes and carrots. Malky was there, much to Tina’s delight.

  ‘So what’s this I hear about you finding yourself a woman?’ Malky stuffed the last piece of pie-crust into his mouth. ‘What’s her name? Vikki?’

  ‘Dad was trying to kiss Vikki, Uncle Malky,’ Tina piped up. ‘Me and Molly were painting and he was trying to kiss her.’

  ‘It was an accident. I may have misread the signals,’ I said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ my dad asked. ‘What signals? I thought you said you and her were—’

  ‘I never said anything.’

  ‘So everything’s fine between you?’

  ‘I like Vikki. She smells like flowers,’ Tina said.

  ‘What kind of flowers? Cauliflowers?’ Malky tickled her tummy and she giggled, spluttering mashed potatoes.

  My dad grabbed Malky’s arm. ‘Are you trying to make the lassie choke to death?’

  ‘Finished!’ Tina said, pushing her plate away.

  ‘No, you’ve not,’ I said. ‘You haven’t touched your carrots.’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Malky said, his own mound of carrots still intact.

  ‘They’re horrible and orange,’ Tina said, her face screwed up.

  ‘That’s what they used to say about your Uncle Malky when he played for The Rangers,’ I said. ‘Come on now, Tina. Gramps makes the best carrots in the world and if you eat them up you’ll be able to see in the dark.’

  ‘I don’t want to see in the dark. There might be a monster or something.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as monsters. Come on. Try one. How do you know you don’t like them if you won’t even taste them?’

  ‘I don’t like carrots and I don’t like onions and I don’t like tomatoes.’

  I’m sure Tina intended her list of hated foodstuffs to end the conversation there and then, but this was one argument I was determined not to lose. ‘You do like onions because that’s what Gramps puts in the mince to make it taste nice and you like mince, don’t you?’

  Tina sat back, arms folded, a fork still in one hand, sticking prongs up.

  ‘Well done,’ my dad said. ‘That’ll be her off mince now.’

  ‘And you like tomatoes too, because that’s what they put in spaghetti hoops and on pizza to make them taste nice too.’

  ‘I don’t like lumpy tomatoes.’

  ‘She’s got a point,’ Malky said. ‘I don’t like fresh tomatoes either. The insides give me the creeps. It’s like some kind of alien embryo or something.’

  Tina, with her uncanny ability to latch onto comments better left unlatched, would normally have been all over Malky’s embryo remark and there would have followed a lot of awkward questioning. Fortunately, she was too much in the huff.

  ‘Just one piece of carrot,’ I said. Tina didn’t flinch. ‘Come on. You’ve only got six. One wee carrot and you can leave the table. If you’re good maybe Gramps will give you some ice cream.’

  If anything my daughter grew more resolute. She was still sitting there ten minutes later. My dad having cleared away, the only thing left on the table was her plate, home to a small colony of defiant orange batons.

  ‘She’s going to have to leave the table sometime,’ my dad said from behind a Sunday paper, when I went through to the living room, after having washed up.

  ‘Yeah, she’s starting school in the summer, isn’t she?’ Malky added.

  ‘Just wait. She’ll come around.’ I said, chucking Malky a dish towel.

  He cast it aside. ‘It’s more hygienic to drip dry.’

  My dad folded his newspaper and laid it on the arm of his chair. ‘I’ll do them.’

  ‘This Vikki. Tell me about her,’ Malky said, after the old man had left, dish towel in hand. ‘Dad’s practically got the two of you married off and Tina with a brand-new mum.’

  Typical. No happy medium with my dad. He was either trying to talk me out of seeing Vikki in case I messed things up or he was hearing wedding bells.

  ‘Things aren’t so far advanced as Dad might have allowed you to
think.’

  I walked over and lifted the newspaper. Malky punched my arm. ‘Don’t give me that. I heard what Tina was saying about you trying to kiss Vikki.’

  ‘Trying being the operative word. Me trying and failing to kiss Vikki has been the extent of our lovemaking thus far,’ I said. ‘And believe me when I say it’s not likely to extend any farther. Not after what happened yesterday.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve mucked this one up as well. Not already,’ Malky said, after I’d given him a brief summary of the previous morning’s events. ‘That’s got to be a new personal best.’

  ‘What do you mean, mucked this one up as well?’ I turned to Malky’s column on the inside back page to see what his ghost-written opinion was this week.

  Malky snorted. ‘Let’s face it, Robbie, when it comes to women you’ve been chucked more times than a big log at the Highland games.’

  I tucked the newspaper under my arm. I didn’t have to sit there and be insulted. I could do that anywhere. I walked through to the kitchen to see how Tina was doing.

  ‘Are you going to be good and try one carrot?’ I asked.

  Tina’s eyes began to fill with tears. ‘I don’t want to be good yet.’

  I closed the door and retreated. What was I trying to do? Discover who, father or daughter, was the most stubborn?

  ‘All you need to do is say you’re sorry and buy this Vikki some flowers,’ Malky said, on my return to the living room. He’d obviously been giving my predicament some thought. ‘Trust me. Don’t fight it. Put your hands up to whatever it is you’ve done, and she’ll be fine.’

  ‘But I’ve got nothing to say sorry about. She wanted me to chum her back to the farm.

  ‘Would you stop making things difficult for yourself? She’s a woman. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually in the wrong. If she thinks you’re in the wrong then you’re in the wrong. End of. It’s like the ref blowing for a free kick.’ Most of Malky’s analogies ended up on the football pitch. ‘You have to play-the-whistle, they never change their mind. And even if she doesn’t think you’ve done anything wrong and you still apologise, she’ll know you’re only doing that to get back on her good side and women love it when you do that. I’m telling you, chuck in a bunch of flowers and you’ll be right in there.’