‘Had a bit of an accident. Need a car. Don’t worry about it. Off you go to bed.’
He shrugged and disappeared into his room. The door closed, but only for a moment before it was thrown wide and Andy marched out again. I’d never seen him angry before.
‘What’s this all about?’ he demanded. ‘You come here in the middle of the night, torn clothes, face like a pound of mince, asking for a loan of my car and then pack me off to bed. When are you going to stop treating me like a child?’
‘When you stop throwing tantrums.’
‘Everything I know about throwing a wobbly I learned from you,’ he said. ‘Now, if you want my help, I need to know a few things first - like what the hell is going on?’
I drank, wincing less from the pain in my injured lip than at the taste of Andy’s coffee.
‘It’s complicated. I don’t want you involved.’
‘I can handle myself.’
I forced myself to drink some more of his coffee.
‘I’ve been about a bit,’ he said.
‘Andy, you think you know all about the mean streets because you saw a fight outside a chip shop once. This is a serious business, involving an extremely serious person. I didn’t get this black-eye by looking through a trick telescope.’
‘Tell me or you’re on foot.’
He was either very brave or very drunk.
‘You know Jake Turpie?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Well I owe him some money and he seems fairly determined that I settle up.’
‘Are you talking about the rent?’ I nodded. Andy thought for a moment. ‘And you say he did that to your face?’ He looked sceptical. ‘When? Tonight?’
‘Yes, well not him personally. One of his boys.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
I was taken aback. ‘Want me to take the oath?’
‘Robbie, I think we’ve already established that you don’t even have a nodding acquaintance with the truth.’ For his sake I hoped it was the beer talking. Andy gazed at the ceiling. ‘I mean, why would Jake Turpie do that to you?’
‘Hmm, let me think... because I owe him six grand and because he’s a vindictive little shite? That would be my guess.’
Andy walked to the door and held it open. ‘I think you should leave.’
The boy was a P45 waiting to happen.
‘You heard me.’ There was a sideboard by the door. He lifted a chunky beer mug from it and emptied a set of car keys into his hand. He threw them at me. ‘Now, go.’
Chapter 38
I checked into a roadside hotel on the outskirts of Edinburgh, near to the airport. The room had a splendid view of a motorway flyover and a thermostat on a blast-furnace setting. I didn’t care. I slept like a baby and woke at eight. By nine I’d showered and had breakfast, by ten a chunk of my rainy day stash had been spent on some new clothes and by eleven I was pulling into the yard of Turpie (International) Salvage Ltd, a forty-acre piece of wilderness to the south of Linlithgow.
When I arrived that Saturday morning, I was met by vehicle transporters coming and going, a crusher squeezing former showroom specials into one-ton blocks and a grab hand crane swinging backwards and forward, loading a fleet of flatbed lorries.
I parked near the gates. Some of the water-filled potholes dotted around the red blaize surface looked big enough to swallow Andy’s Fiat and I was slightly worried in case I came back to find my assistant’s car gone and a small cube of squashed metal in its place. That’s if I came back.
It was by no means my first visit to Jake’s place and as always it confirmed my opinion that the man was as bent and twisted as one of his scrapped cars. There he was, the proprietor of a large slice of real estate, with a thriving business, and yet he didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, never went on holiday, his favoured mode of transport was the Ford Transit van and I’d never seen him wear anything smarter than oil-stained overalls. He had to be seriously minted and yet he was prepared to have me threatened, beaten up and my dad’s house wrecked all for the sake of some back-rent.
In my new shoes, my fear neutralised by anger, I picked my way through the puddles and pot-holes to the headquarters of Turpie (International) Salvage Ltd, a prefabricated hut with sagging roof and walls that looked incapable of standing up to a reasonably loud fart. I still had the pistol and had thought about sticking it in my belt so that I could pull it out and wave it around if things got a bit hairy. I’d had second thoughts about that. Even if I could have worked out how to take off the safety, I wasn’t about to shoot anyone. Jake would know that. He’d have called my bluff, taken the gun and even if I didn’t end up with a bullet in me, he’d have the pistol again and I was damn sure he wasn’t getting it back.
As I climbed up the wooden steps to the door, the bad-tempered mongrel that was tethered to the flimsy handrail growled at me. I growled right back. I was all set for Jake Turpie. Maybe I wasn’t going to shoot him, but verbally he was about to get both barrels. I’d take out a loan, borrow from my dad if need be; he’d get his rent money, somehow, but after that he could find another tenant for his run-down office premises, and find himself another lawyer. It made me furious to think of the number of times I’d acted for Jake and his associates. Jake wasn’t such a great payer himself. I always had to demand money upfront and he’d never not quibbled over a legal fee. Well, he’d have to find a new brief after this. I was moving out. I’d worked from home before and could do it again.
At the top of the steps I threw open the door to reveal the younger of Jake’s two minders, lounging around, picking the spots on his face and watching Saturday morning kids’ TV. The steps behind me creaked.
I turned around to see Jake Turpie standing at the foot of the steps. He had a length of scaffolding pole in his hand. Maybe meeting Jake on his own turf was a bad idea. Why hadn’t I brought the gun?
‘Robbie, what the hell are you doing here?’
‘I want a word.’
Jake grimaced. ‘I’m trying to get the alloys off a write-off and get a set of steelies on it before the insurance engineer gets here.’ He walked up the steps and right past me. ‘Have a seat, I’ll not be long.’ He gestured to an orange velour cushion running the length of the back window from which brown stuffing protruded through a number of split seams. ‘Hey!’ He tapped the top of the television with the length of scaffolding pole, making both the picture and his minder jump. ‘Make Mr Munro a cup of tea.’
The young man made a face and dragged himself to his feet. He lifted a grimy looking kettle and followed Jake out of the door. I went after them.
Spotty went to a nearby standpipe and began to fill the kettle. A cigarette packet peeked out from under one of the sleeves of his short-sleeved T-Shirt. His arms were thick and white and hairy, his wrists both uninjured. Deek, Jake’s other minder, was nowhere to be seen. Was his right arm similarly unscathed?
Jake crouched down beside the jacked-up rear end of a badly smashed Ford Mondeo. He attached the length of scaffolding tube to a wheel wrench to give it extra leverage and started to loosen the studs of the nearside rear wheel one by one.
‘The rent.’ I said, after he’d removed the wheel and rolled it to the side.
‘S’alright,’ Jake grunted. Deek’s out on police bail, but don’t leave it so late next time.’ He fitted an old steel wheel onto the bolts where the alloy had been. ‘I’ve other tenants. It doesn’t look good if I have a favourite.’
Me? Jake Turpie’s favourite tenant?
He quickly tightened the wheel nuts while I was trying absorb that thought. ‘Frankie McPhee?’ he said, wheezing a laugh like a faulty ignition. He trundled the trolley jack around to the offside and pumped the handle of the jack hoisting the car up again. ‘Hope you know what you’re doing. I don’t care where you get the money from to pay your rent but I heard the last man who bumped McPhee is still trying to swim the Forth in Blue Circle Speedos.’
What was he saying? Frankie had settled my deb
t? Standing there in that rutted wasteland of dead motor cars, my new shoes sinking into the mud, all set to haggle with my landlord over rent arrears that no longer existed - I suddenly felt a little bit silly. Jake looked up at me. ‘Apology accepted. Now, if that’s all you came for, d’ye mind? I’m busy’
Chapter 39
Any feelings of relief over the settling of my rent arrears were quickly swamped by a dread realisation that someone other than Jake Turpie had been responsible for the attack on me. On a better the devil you know basis, when I’d believed my landlord to be behind it all at least there had been one obvious solution: keep on my toes, pay up and Jake would leave me alone.
Now that it was clear someone else was to blame I had to work out who and why. Thinking things through logically, whoever it was who had attacked me and ransacked my dad’s home had been after something; that much was clear. Unless they’d been particularly badly advised on the state of my finances, that more or less ruled out money as a motive. My thoughts came around once again to the package Chic Kelly had tried to send me; the bag allegedly containing evidence sufficient to convict Frankie McPhee of murdering Lord Hewitt. Chic’s plan, or so he had told me, was for the package to be used as the means of negotiating a reward that would provide financial security for his next of kin.
On that count, regrettably, I’d had to put him right for he hadn’t appreciated that no matter his offer of a generous commission or the fact that he believed the brand new Frankie posed no threat to my safety, it wasn’t possible for me to act if there was a potential conflict of interest with another client. As I’d explained to Chic, shortly before his next and even more dramatic seizure had aborted my visit, arranging to have one client sent to prison for life so that the other could benefit financially was about as extreme a conflict as I, or the Law Society, could imagine and one that if taken forward would see me struck off and render any evidence inadmissible. He hadn’t been at all pleased. I’d left fully expecting some other lawyer to get the call. Two days later Chic had danced a Tyburn jig. Still, everything now led me to think that the package was the reason I’d been attacked and, more importantly, the reason for Max’s murder. My friend had been shot the very same day that Sean Kelly had taken the package to his office, and I’d been attacked only days after I’d met with Sean Kelly and his father at their respective prisons, by which time it would have been reasonable for anyone interested in such matters to assume that I either had the package or knew where it was. Who could possibly want it so much that they’d be prepared to kill for it? What if Chic had been wrong? What if Frankie knew about the package of evidence? Had word of Chic’s intentions reached Frankie? The one person who knew for certain that the package existed and of Chic’s intention to have it delivered to me was Sean Kelly. Frankie and the boy had seemed quite friendly as I recalled from my first trip to Polmont. Sean trusted him. Who knew what had been said between them?
So deep in thought was I as I sped along the coast road to St Andrews, that the beautiful scenery of the East Neuk of Fife went past unappreciated. Andy’s car was of reasonable spec and nippier than the one I’d rammed up the close. I wondered how he could afford it given what I paid him and the size of his student loan.
It was early afternoon as I neared the ancient burgh and I thought I’d stop off at The Barns: a pub, the only pub, in Kingsbarns. The beach there had been a popular day-trip destination for the Munro’s and I held fond childhood memories of summer days spent paddling, building sand castles and fishing in the rock pools for hermit crabs. My dad had always threatened to retire there. What better place? The beach but a gentle stroll away, world famous links courses right on your doorstep and some great fish and chip shops only a mile or two down the road in Anstruther. Then he’d discovered the price of property in the pretty wee village and decided to stay put.
I ordered a pint and a steak pastry and began to feel more like a holiday-maker and less like Victim Support’s next customer. Pleasant thoughts, though, soon made way for more pressing matters, like the identity of my assailant. The ski-mask hadn’t offered so much as a glimpse of his face; however, I could rule out Jake Turpie’s boys and I knew it hadn’t been Frankie McPhee, at least not him personally.
If I went to the police, what would they do? Not provide me with round the clock police protection that was for sure. As for proof that Frankie was behind the attack, I had nothing to give them other than the ramblings of a dead man. A convicted murderer who at the last had claimed to be innocent, and my own cobbled-together theory. Without something concrete I’d be wasting my time. I carried the drink and pastry to a table by the window. From there I could see Andy’s car. The pistol was locked in the boot, hidden beneath the spare tyre.
Suddenly, I realised I had more to give the police than just Chic’s story. The holiday feeling evaporated. If the person who attacked me was the same person who’d killed Max, was the gun in the boot of my car the one used to shoot my friend? Professor Bradley, my favourite pathologist, had thought a thirty-eight. The gun my attacker had left behind was a nine millimetre. The difference in slug size between the two was minimal.
I left half my pint, most of my pastry and walked back to the car, debating with myself. Should I go to the police with the gun, tell them what had happened? If I did, they’d want to know why I had waited to hand it in; especially, as I’d met with three cops, including a Detective Chief Inspector, on the very night I’d acquired it and said nothing. Possession of a handgun, even for a short space of time, was a mandatory five year sentence. No ifs, no buts, just jail – Dunblane had happened, the tabloids had spoken, Parliament had written.
Of course, I could throw the gun away or leave it somewhere and make an anonymous call to the cops, neither of which would help in the search for Max’s killer. If I was right about the gun, the murderer was still on the loose. Max had been killed by someone who thought he was in possession of the package. That person hadn’t realised the package had been tossed out of the fire exit along with the young man who was trying to deliver it. If I actually did get my hands on what was in it, I’d not have to go looking for Max’s killer. He’d come looking for me. I had to find it. Where would a nineteen year-old hide something so important? Somewhere safe. Somewhere he knew intimately, but where no one else would think of looking. Somewhere close to home.
It took only ten minutes to drive the last few miles to St Andrews: a lovely town though one where a defence agent could easily starve; the only things criminal in the place being the house prices and the lack of parking spaces. After several circuits, I found a bay at the far end of Market Street, paid and displayed and from there walked down onto South Street and into Queens Gardens.
Strolling along the terrace, counting down the numbers on the door mantles of the period properties, I almost bumped into four boys running out of a doorway, pushing and shoving each other as they made their way along the pavement. They were twelve, thirteen years old: private schoolboys, who played rugger, steeped their conkers in balsamic vinegar and thought Buckie was a town further up the east coast and not a tonic wine. On approaching me they organised themselves into a semblance of orderliness and filed by. It was a nice, middle-class neighbourhood. Not where I had expected to find the widow of the man who’d blasted the Lord Justice Clerk.
I chapped the door and it was answered by a tall angular woman in a pale blue twin set. Around her neck she wore a thin gold chain and crucifix. She was too hatchet-faced for a ‘Betty’, I thought, and younger than I’d expected. At first sight, she didn’t look the sort of girl to whom most men would dream of bringing home a broken wage packet, and yet there was something vulnerable about her; it was the eyes. I guessed that no-body knew the trouble she’d seen. I took to her straight off.
‘More tea, Mr Munro?’ Betty asked, teapot poised over the porcelain cup that sat in a saucer on the small side table by my knee. Once I’d introduced myself as her son’s lawyer, I’d been shown through to the best room and she’d insisted on
providing afternoon refreshments.
‘Please.’ I sat back in the soft armchair watching as she calmly poured. I had to hand it to her: for someone whose man had hanged himself a few days before and whose only child was behind bars and odds on for a life sentence, she seemed to have her emotions well under control. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a strip of silver foil poking from behind a pigeon racing trophy on the sideboard. Dr Prozac I presumed.
‘You’ve a fine house,’ I said, stirring my tea and the coals of conversation.
‘Not what you expected?’
A three-bedroom town house in one of the more desirable parts of Scotland’s property hot spot? She could say that again. I smiled diplomatically. Betty didn’t look like a captain of industry and whereas the late Charles Kelly may have been the nearest thing to Raffles that West Lothian had ever known, the man I remembered used to divvy up any ill-gotten gains between the bookies and the nearest boozer.
‘I don’t suppose house prices are cheap in this neck of the woods.’
‘Chic always said he’d look after us.’ Betty pulled a little embroidered handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan and dabbed the corners of her eyes in turn. ‘He never let us down. His cheque comes in every month.’
‘Cheque?’ I asked as casually as I could.
Betty sniffed. ‘Regular as clockwork from his trust fund. When Chic...’ She blew her nose on the little hanky. ‘When he went inside, I bought this place to get away from the wagging tongues. I love it here by the sea and the folk are so friendly.’ She sniffed again and tucked the hanky away.
My mobile went off. It was Frankie McPhee.
‘Would you like to take it in private?’ Betty asked.
‘No need.’ I bumped the call. ‘It’s Frankie McPhee, I can speak to him later. Frankie’s the reason I’m acting for Sean. Tells me you and him used to be quite friendly.’
‘Did he?’ A cold light flashed in Betty’s eyes. She lifted a tray of biscuits from the coffee table and I helped myself to a piece of shortbread.
Duty Man (Best Defence series Book 2) Page 14