Last Will

by William McIntyre

  ‘Dame Ursula. I don’t want to seem rude, but I have a daughter. She gets out of nursery in an hour and—’

  ‘You want to know why you’re here?’

  ‘It would be nice.’

  ‘Then sit.’

  I sat.

  ‘This house was formerly the seat of the Lords Blantyre,’ she said. ‘This was the Duke’s Room.’ She tilted the pheasant feather at the window. ‘Do you see that building across the river?’

  It was hard to miss the white house, nestled at the foot of the hills.

  ‘The Duke, I can’t remember which number in the line he was, but whichever one, sometime in the eighteenth century he built that splendid house for his mistress. The story goes that when his wife retired to her room of an evening the Duke would place a lamp in the window and, if answered by a light across the water, would send a man in a boat to collect his mistress. She’d stay the night and be rowed back across come dawn.’

  An interesting enough story; not one that took me much further in knowing why I’d been summoned.

  Dame Ursula smiled at me. ‘The Duke’s wife turned a blind eye to the whole affair. No doubt she felt it more dignified than facing up to reality. Me? I’m the complete opposite. I don’t care if it is a lamp in the window or a phone call or a secret rendezvous in a deserted warehouse. Deceit is deceit and I won’t stand for it. I know Zander far too well not to keep him on a short leash.’

  She had to be referring to the man in the camel-hair coat. Two Zeds in one day was too much of a coincidence.

  She wheeled herself over to the Italian marble fireplace and pressed a bell-button set into the wall by the side of it. ‘I’m having tea.’

  I had no time to start mucking about with cups of tea. I had a wee girl to pick up from nursery. According to the porcelain face of the gilt mantel clock it was a quarter to three, and I was thirty miles away from the Little Ships Nursery. Even with a following wind I was never going to make it on time. I took Molly’s phone from my pocket and got through to Grace-Mary.

  ‘I’m going to be late for the nursery,’ I told her.

  ‘Robbie, you’re hours late. It’s nearly three o’clock!’

  ‘Not the morning session. Tina’s in for the afternoon. It finishes at four. Do me a favour, pick her up and take her back to the office. I’ll be back before five.’

  ‘Robbie—’

  ‘Can’t talk right now. I’m doing something important.’

  ‘It always is,’ Grace-Mary said, before I hung up on her and turned again to the woman in the wheelchair.

  ‘Tea?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thanks. Now do you mind if we stop the cat and mouse? I’m in a hurry.’

  ‘That call just now. Your wife?’ Dame Ursula asked.

  ‘My secretary.’

  ‘You’re a single parent?’

  ‘I’m single, but not yet a parent. Not officially. My ex-partner died and I’m hoping to be awarded custody of my daughter.’

  ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘Not too well. My work and my gender seem to keep getting in the way.’

  ‘Were you working when you met with Zander today?’

  ‘I thought I was.’

  ‘Who’s your employer?’

  ‘You’re looking at him.’

  She wrinkled her eyes. ‘Your little meeting with Zander, it was about our latest designs, I take it. How much did you offer him?’

  ‘Fashion is not my line of business,’ I said. Something she seemed to accept quite readily.

  ‘Then it’s about La-La. Now that Stephen’s dead the vultures of the press have stopped circling and are coming in to peck over the dead body.’

  I didn’t know what I’d been expecting to hear, but mention of La-La certainly wasn’t it. I hesitated. ‘Are you talking about La-La Delgado?’ I asked, as though the world was full of La-Las.

  ‘You don’t deny it then? You don’t deny that you’ve been snooping around trying to find out more on Stephen’s affair with La-La? More sordid information so that you can smear his name without fear of reprisal now that he’s dead. No doubt you’ll be hoping for information that he raped her or was a paedophile or—’

  I hated to interrupt while she was mid-accusation, but felt there was something I had to tell her. ‘Dame Ursula, not only have I never heard of Stephen, but before today I’d never heard of Zander or . . . you.’

  If I’d ripped off her pheasant-feathered hat and slapped her about the face with it, it would not have resulted in a greater expression of shock.

  For a moment or two Dame Ursula was silent, then she smiled primly. ‘Have it your way. You’ve never heard of Sir Stephen Pentecost, myself, the House of Pentecost, La-La Delgado or—’

  ‘No, I have heard of La-La Delgado.’

  ‘Really? And what have you heard? That she had a fling with Stephen? Oh no, wait. How could you? You’ve never heard of Stephen.’ She gave the bell another long press. ‘Come off it. Every rag in the country covered the story, but I’m not the Duke’s wife. I didn’t turn a blind eye. It doesn’t matter how deep you dig or what that little snake tells you about Stephen. La-La was a one-off. I forgave Stephen. He was a man. He made a mistake. A mistake I made sure La-La regretted for the rest of her life. After I’d put out the word on her she couldn’t get a job lying across bonnets in a used car showroom.’

  ‘That’s not what I know about La-La,’ I said. ‘The only information I have on her is that she was a girl from Leith who left home to be a model, returned to Scotland and died of a heroin overdose.’

  A purple sleeve reached out and rapped me on the knee. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘She has a sister.’

  Dame Ursula nodded, thinking. ‘Ah, yes. Stella, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Estelle. She runs a tacky amusement arcade and, I’d guess, is also a junkie.’

  ‘I remember her. She came to London hoping to follow in her sister’s footsteps. La-La insisted that Stephen and I meet her. Sadly, she didn’t quite have what her sister had.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Who can say? One only knows it when one sees it.’ She wafted a hand at an antique oak sideboard up against the far wall. I crossed the room to it. The centrepiece was a glass drinks cabinet, home to a fine selection of single malts. Between a crystal fruit bowl and a vase full of fresh cut flowers was a cellphone. I picked it up.

  ‘Do you know what that is?’ she asked.

  I brought it back to my seat and inspected it. A phone seemed too obvious an answer.

  ‘It’s a clone. Whenever Zander makes a call, whenever he sends or receives a text message, I know about it. Everything he does, I see. Everything he says, I hear. Everywhere he goes, I have him followed. I know his family, his friends, his lovers.’

  I could take a hint. She didn’t trust this Zander guy. If he was the young man I’d met in the warehouse this afternoon, I didn’t trust him either and he sure as hell had good cause not to trust me. I placed the phone into her outstretched hand. ‘I don’t know what Zander has told you.’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to Zander yet. But I will. For the moment I know he received a call from an unknown phone yesterday. He replied with a cryptic text and I had him followed. The two of you met this afternoon at the industrial estate where we are about to shoot the promo for our new Urban Zealot range. That meeting was either for the purpose of industrial espionage, which I wouldn’t put past Zander, or in order to try and smear Stephen’s name. If it’s the latter then I think you should know that whatever Zander may be, he would never utter a single word against Stephen, no matter how much money you offer him.’

  ‘I’m not offering to pay him anything,’ I said, almost extracting the envelope from my back pocket to prove my point.

  ‘Then why did you arrange to meet with him?’ Dame Ursula reversed the wheelchair a foot or two and studied me carefully, finger on her chin, as though I was the pattern for a new dress design she wasn’t sure whether to risk on the Milan catwalk. ‘
Who are you?’

  ‘I’ve already told you. My name is Robbie Munro.’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘I’m a lawyer.’

  ‘And what were you doing communicating secretly with the House of Pentecost’s operations manager?’

  ‘Most communications with lawyers are by their nature secret, but your man Zander is no client of mine. My client is a man charged with the murder of a woman called Daisy Adams. He says he didn’t do it. I’m trying to find out who did. There was a phone found by me at the locus. I called a number on it and got Zander. The only reason I know about Lafayette Delgado is because she was a friend of the murdered woman.’

  Dame Ursula’s tea arrived on a rosewood tray while she was absorbing that news.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t have any?’ she asked, composing herself.

  Being whisked off to a luxurious destination by a supermodel had long been on the Robbie Munro to-do list, but the whole experience wasn’t living up to my expectations.

  ‘All I want,’ I said, ‘is a little information and then a lift back to my car.’

  37

  ‘Of course there’s way too many laws nowadays. The government’s trying to give everyone a criminal record. Put us all in jail. Save a fortune on building new houses.’

  The trip back to my car turned out to be a lot more conversation-filled than the outward journey: more chat, but equally one-sided. This time the person doing all the talking wasn’t me, but the driver of a local limousine company. He’d started off on football, a safe enough topic of conversation, I thought. He remembered Malky, had seen him play a few times and, like every taxi-driver I’d ever met, had the answers to all the problems in Scottish football. When he’d finished sharing them he changed to politics and then the law after I made the mistake of telling him I was a solicitor.

  ‘Take me, for example. When I started off in this game nobody wore a seat belt. Now they throw you in jail if you don’t. Us cabbies can’t even keep a wee chib under the seat. No, it’s true,’ he said, as though I’d tried to contradict him. ‘The neds can rob you, but suddenly it’s against their human rights if you hit them. You must know that. You lawyers will be raking in all that legal aid money. I mean, you’ve got Scottish nationalists running the country, banging on about Bannockburn and singing Flower of Scotland and sending the English home to think again, but slag off an Englishman in a pub and they lock you up for being a racist. You couldn’t make it up. And what about the Romanian gypsies? Coming over here, nicking everything that’s not nailed down. And don’t get me started on the Muslims.’ I didn’t intend to, except it didn’t seem that my input was all that necessary. ‘Not that I’ve got anything against them.’ I was sure Islam would be pleased to hear it. ‘And then see those Blacks, or should I say, African Americans? Can’t be doing with them. They’re always harping on about roots and their ancestors being slaves. It was hundreds of years ago. Get over it. You don’t hear me complaining that my great granddad had to leave school at nine and work down a mine, do you?’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘No, but that’s not the point. If it wasn’t for slavery all them black Americans would be sitting in mud huts instead of cutting about Hollywood in gold necklaces and making that hip-hop racket that’s never off the radio.’

  I was going to suggest that he could always tune in to a different station, but by this time I knew that anything I said was only going to make things worse, so instead I tuned him out and thought back to my visit with Dame Ursula.

  We’d parted on friendly enough terms, once, that is, I’d convinced her I wasn’t a journalist looking for an exposé to damage the good name of her fashion house. It was too much to expect that she might disclose to me the very information that she’d originally thought I’d been prepared to buy from her allegedly traitorous operations manager, but she did provide some background details.

  Stephen Pentecost and Miss Ursula Hattersfield had been children of the revolution: the fashion revolution, a revolution that never ends and which each generation claims as its own. Born in the late fifties they’d met in the seventies at St. Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, and from there on had been the ones to watch. Immediately after graduating with distinction, Ursula was snapped up as buyer for a chain of female fashion stores, while Stephen, initially headhunted by a Japanese menswear monthly, went on to have a spell at GQ magazine before moving to Los Angeles where he made his name styling New Romantics and Post-Punk artists in the eighties. By the age of thirty, Stephen was poised to set up his own unisex brand and, needing a female perspective, sought out his old college chum, Ursula, by that time a clothing consultant to aristocrats across Europe. Together they became the House of Pentecost and since the mid-eighties there hadn’t been an Oscar Night or royal wedding where a ‘Pentecostal’ design didn’t grace the red carpet or curtsey to the Queen. Their marriage had sparked a bidding war between the celebrity photo-magazines and for the past twenty years they’d seldom been out of the fashion news. Which was probably why I’d never heard of either of them.

  Ursula and Stephen Pentecost: a partnership made in fashion heaven and brought to a violent end on a windy stretch of road in the Highlands.

  ‘It was Stephen’s birthday and he was driving us to a fashion show at Balmoral,’ Dame Ursula had told me earlier. ‘Stephen could have hired a team of chauffeurs, and yet always insisted on driving us everywhere. “Why own a fleet of fast cars and let somebody else drive them for you?” he’d always say.’

  I might have agreed more readily if I didn’t keep thinking of my earlier driver. I’d happily have let her drive me anywhere.

  There had been no other vehicle involved in the accident. Stephen had died many months later from head injuries sustained in the crash. Dame Ursula considered herself lucky to have crawled from the wreckage on knees so severely damaged that she was having to learn to walk again.

  Out of action for the best part of a year, she’d had to rely on others to keep the business ticking over in her absence. Which had brought us back onto the subject of the mysterious Zander, a man Stephen had taken on as a gofer at the age of sixteen and who over the years had embroidered himself into the very fabric of the House of Pentecost. Stephen had treated him like the son he’d never had and Zander had treated Stephen like a god. Not a chocolate eclair was scoffed by one of the models, not a pin dropped in a Bangladeshi sweatshop, but Zander heard about it and reported back to his boss. Even when Stephen had lain in a coma for months, Zander was there to visit him every day. Devastated by Stephen’s death, according to Dame Ursula, he’d been acting strangely ever since. She wanted to know why and hoped I could tell her. I couldn’t. Other than that Zander had been prepared to hand over a wad of cash to me without any explanation and that the phone I’d used to contact him had probably belonged to a dead woman from a farm in Outer-West Lothian, I was as much in the dark as to his motives as she was. It had to be a case of mistaken identity. Zander and I had never met before our meeting in the warehouse. But then who did he think I was?

  ‘Seen any of them?’ the cabbie asked me, as we neared the industrial estate and my car.

  I’d been so out of it I wasn’t sure if we were still talking Romanians.

  He cleared his throat, rolled down the window and spat. ‘The models?’ he said, as the window whirred back into place. ‘They’re up for a fashion show or something. Come here every year. Every day it’s in and out to Glasgow to the shops. Money no object. Half of them are foreign. Can’t understand a word they’re saying. You’d think there were no British girls looking for jobs.’

  I wondered. ‘Have you come across a man called Zander?’

  ‘Zander Skene? Oh, aye. He’s the boss man now. Great tipper. I think he’s probably a poof, but an all right one. Most of the guys in fashion are into all that gay stuff. I suppose you have to be if you need to know about underwear and dresses and that.’

  ‘Better watch what you’re saying,’ I said.

/>   ‘How’s that then?’

  ‘Calling people poofs. For all you know, I could be gay. If I was, you’d be waving goodbye to a tip, maybe your job.’

  ‘But you’re not.’

  ‘But I could be.’

  He glanced again at me in his mirror. ‘Naw, son. I know one when I see one.’

  He sounded like Dame Ursula. She was able to spot modelling talent; my driver was some kind of gay-finder general.

  ‘You ever meet Stephen Pentecost?’ I asked.

  ‘Sir Stephen?’ He chuckled. ‘Nothing poofy about him. And what a job he had. Surrounded by fashion models all day and paid millions for it.’ He winked at me in his rear-view mirror. ‘They could have me do it for half the price. I mean, what’s so difficult? When you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. Tall, lanky, no boobs. You’d need to take one out for a fish supper before you could get a squeeze.’

  ‘I heard he’d had an affair once with a model called Lafayette Delgado. Some people called her La-La?’

  The cabbie shook his head. ‘Scandal, was it? You’re asking the wrong person. My missus will probably know all about it. Still, no big surprise. I mean, surrounded by top-class totty all day? It would be like working on the Pick ‘n’ Mix and never stealing a handful of cola cubes. Shame what happened to him. Although he did get every chance. If he’d been on the NHS they’d have unplugged him long before they did. I’m telling you, son, if you’ve got the money, go private. Mad not to. Think about it. Sick people cost the NHS money. Those GPs are all on budgets. The more they spend, the less money they get. Now, the private hospitals get their money from insurance companies. The more they treat you, the more money they get, which means the longer you live, the richer they get. Who’s going to try and keep you breathing the longest? It’s obvious.’

  With those final words of wisdom ringing in my ears I was dropped off at my car and, as good as my word, I was climbing to my office with five minutes to spare before close of business.