Crime Fiction (Best Defence series Book 5)

by William H. S. McIntyre

  WHS McIntyre is a partner in Scotland's oldest law firm Russel + Aitken, specialising in criminal defence. William has been instructed in many interesting and high-profile cases over the years and now turns fact into fiction with his string of legal thrillers, The Best Defence Series, featuring defence lawyer, Robbie

  Munro.

  The books, which are stand alone or can be read in series, have been well received by many fellow professionals, on both sides of the Bar, due to their accuracy in law and procedure and Robbie's frank, if sardonic, view on the idiosyncrasies of the Scots criminal justice system.

  William is married with four sons.

  More in the Best Defence Series:

  #1 Relatively Guilty

  #2 Duty Man

  #3 Sharp Practice

  #5 Crime Fiction

  #6 Last Will

  #7 Present Tense

  #8 Good News Bad News

  Crime FICTION

  Fifth in the Best Defence Series

  WHS McIntyre

  This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  William H.S. McIntyre

  Copyright ©

  www.bestdefence.biz

  If the ink is in your blood…

  ~ Douglas B. Tulloch J.P. ~

  On a bench – Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

  Chapter 1

  ‘Okay, so you’ve got seven million pounds. What do you do with it?’

  University of Edinburgh Student’s Union, November 1999. We’d all chipped in and bought a lottery ticket. Suzie Lake took a sip from a French Martini, set her glass down on a table crowded with pint tumblers and stared around at those others who’d gathered to refresh depleted brain cells after a mind-numbing, two-hour accountancy tutorial.

  ‘It’s tax-free, remember,’ said Lewis, whose last name I couldn’t remember. Tax-free? Unlike me he must have been paying attention at the tutorial. ‘I know what I’d do,’ he said. ‘I’d stick it in the bank and travel the world living off the interest. Either that or I’d donate it to worthy causes, like cocaine dealers and strippers.’ Lewis liked a beer and a laugh. Pity that after graduation he’d taken his law degree to the diplomatic corps and now, I imagined, spent a lot of his time drinking spiced-tea with angry Arabs.

  Max Abercrombie, my best bud, was up next with his wish-list. ‘I’d buy my mum a house, myself a three hundred ZX Turbo, no, wait, an Aston Martin, and pay someone to go to mercantile law lectures for me. What about you Robbie?’

  Nineteen year-old me pondered the question over a mouthful of Tartan Special. ‘Let me see... How much does it cost to buy a distillery?’ The general consensus was that even one on the holy isle of Islay could be acquired for a good chunk less than my imaginary winnings. ‘Then I’d buy my dad a distillery.’

  ‘It’s sweet that the first person you think about is your dad,’ Suzie said.

  Max laughed. ‘Robbie’s only saying that because he knows his dad would drink himself to death.’

  ‘After that,’ I continued, ignoring Max and happy at having said something to please Suzie, ‘I’d buy Linlithgow Rose, build a great team: Malky at centre-half, me at centre-forward, and win promotion to the Premier League.’

  ‘Seriously,’ Suzie said. ‘What would you do, Robbie, Would you stay on at Uni or drop out?’

  ‘Seriously?’ Lewis chirped. ‘Seriously, I think Robbie would give you the whole seven mill if you’d go out on a date with him.’

  I laughed along with everyone else, though I suspected I wasn’t the only male present who would have given anything for one night with Suzie.

  ‘Stay on,’ I decided. ‘With that kind of money I could set up my own business, take on the most difficult cases.’

  ‘Pro bono?’ Suzie asked.

  ‘Of course,’ the teenage Robbie Munro replied. Looking back, I wasn’t sure if I’d meant the part about working for nothing, but it made Suzie smile when I said it and I used to love it when she smiled. ‘Even if I didn’t have seven million, even if I wasn’t getting paid, if I believed my client was innocent I’d do everything and anything to get him off.’

  Lewis rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s face it, Robbie. If you really did win the lottery tonight, you’d probably buy a Ferrari, get rat-arsed and wrap it around the nearest tree.’

  Amidst the ensuing laughter, I could see the expression on Max’s face change. He pointed a finger in Lewis’s face. ‘That’s enough from you.’

  Lewis looked confused.

  ‘It’s okay, Max,’ I said, ‘Lewis didn’t know.’

  My mum had been killed in a car crash. No Italian super-cars involved; just a police vehicle, a wet road and an elm tree. I’d been a baby at the time. You didn’t miss what you’d never had.

  I told Lewis that there was no apology necessary, which was just as well because he didn’t seem inclined to offer one. He turned on Max. ‘So it’s okay for you to talk about Robbie’s dad drinking himself to death, but I can’t mention a car crash in case I inadvertently cast-up the memory of his mother?’

  ‘Yeah, well, Robbie’s mum is actually dead, his dad isn’t,’ Max said. He pulled apart a bag of Scampi Fries and threw one into his mouth. ‘And you’ve never met his dad,’ he added with a crunch.

  Suzie entered the fray again, lightening the mood once more. ‘Well, I still think it’s great that Robbie’s first thoughts were about his father. Life is not all about money. When it comes down to it, your family, your parents, your children, that’s all that’s really important. I hope when I have kids they all turn out to be like Robbie.’

  ‘I’m sure that could be arranged,’ Lewis muttered into his beer.

  ‘I don’t mean it like that,’ Suzie said, amidst the laughter, and rather too quickly than was good for my ego. ‘But you’re probably right, Lewis. Knowing Robbie he’d do something stupid with the money and end up dead or in jail.’

  ‘I would need to be dead, then,’ I said, ‘because with seven million on my hip, there would be no shades of the prison-house closing on this growing boy, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Shades of the prison-house?’ Lewis enquired, simultaneously nicking one of Max’s Scampi Fries.

  ‘Wordsworth,’ Suzie said.

  The puzzled expression remained on Lewis’s face. ‘The daffodil guy?’

  Max pulled the bag out of Lewis’s reach and looked at me as he thoughtfully munched on a fish snack. ‘So what you’re saying is that if you do win the lottery that’ll be like a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card?’

  ‘Totally,’ I replied, overlooking the fact that I hadn’t the means to buy a lottery ticket, having already tapped money from Max to buy Suzie’s cocktail.

  ‘I don’t get it. What good is the money going to do?’ Lewis asked. ‘This is Scotland. You can’t buy your way out of prison here.’

  I begged to differ. ‘Unless whatever crime I may one day commit is witnessed by the Pope, the Queen and the Dalai Lama, seven million in the right hands will get me out of any scrape. That’s all you need to stay out of jail – a lot of money and a little imagination.’

  ‘Then, what you really mean is seven million pounds in the wrong hands,’ Max said.

  ‘Wrong/right, it depends on how you look at things,’ I said.

  Suzie disagreed. ‘No it doesn’t. What’s wrong is wrong and two of them don’t make a right.’

  The discussion quickly became a debate, with Lewis, Suzie and Max on one side and me the other. ‘Is it wrong to break the law to ensure that justice is done?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s n
o logic to that statement,’ Suzie said. ‘Justice and the law - they’re one and the same thing.’

  I was about to explain how wrong she was when Max interrupted. ‘Don’t get Robbie started on one of his jurisprudential rants. He still hasn’t explained why it is that unlimited funds win cases. If that was true, the Crown, with all the resources at its disposal, would win every prosecution.’

  If it had been 2001 and not 1999, the snappy answer would have been to refer Max to the Lockerbie trial; the Crown, that is to say the Government, wins the ones it has to, by whatever means.

  Lewis stood, stared off into the mid-distance and said, in what I took to be a Churchillian tone: ‘in this proud country of ours, we have the finest legal system in the world. A system of justice iron-bound by a code of ethics, practised by an upstanding profession that tries its utmost, whether briefed for defence or prosecution, to ensure that justice is done. One that plays by the rules and will never resort to bribery, corruption, cheating or sharp practice. One that ensures the truth will out.’

  I let Lewis finish, raised a glass to toast his fine words, necked my pint and reminded him it was his round.

  ‘He’s right, though,’ Max said, once we had shoved Lewis in the direction of the bar. ‘The Scots legal system...’ He lifted the bag of fries and emptied the crumbs into his mouth. ‘Best in the world.’

  And nineteen-year-old me could only agree, because it was the best - then - and I dreamt of the day when, clad in a black gown, I’d be part of it: exposing corruption, using my forensic courtroom skills to secure justice and set the wrongly-accused free.

  Fast forward to the present. Livingston Sheriff Court, Friday, June thirteenth. A date regarded by many as unlucky, but for me no worse than any other day when Sheriff Albert Brechin was presiding.

  ‘Mr Munro, would you like to ask the officer any questions?’

  I shook off my reveries and rose to my feet in the well of the court. ‘So, Inspector Fleming,’ I began, ‘it’s your assertion that so observant are you, you can identify the man in the dock after only a fleeting glance from a motor vehicle heading in the opposite direction, three months ago?’ Cross examination of the final Crown witness had commenced after lunch, Friday afternoon. I continued. ‘Presumably, then you can tell me…’ I turned my back on the witness. ‘What colour of tie I am wearing?’

  Ninety per cent of all criminal cases in Scotland were dealt with under summary procedure; no jury, only a Sheriff to be judge of the facts and the law. The legal aid fixed-fee was introduced in 1999 and cut by fifteen per cent ten years later. Now some Legal Aid troll had made it a rule that no matter how much time and preparation had gone into investigating a case, if the accused pled guilty before the start of trial, the already sliced and diced fixed-fee was cut in half.

  It was justice on the cheap. It was why Munro & Co. clients pled guilty to very little and took their chances at trial.

  I could hear D.I. Dougie Fleming sigh almost as loudly as the Sheriff.

  When it worked, the old what-colour-of-tie-am-I-wearing routine went down well with the punters, even if Bert Brechin had never been unduly impressed.

  ‘Your tie was red, Mr Munro,’ Fleming said. ‘But that was before lunch. Now it’s blue with white stripes.’

  Chapter 2

  Late Friday afternoon: other than yours truly, Paul Sharp was the only lawyer left in Livingston Sheriff Court. He was sitting at the table in the centre of the room, wading through a pile of papers. I lobbed my case file onto the table beside him, took off my blue tie, stuffed it into my jacket pocket - next to the red one - and hung up my gown in the Munro & Co. locker.

  Paul looked up from his paperwork. ‘Seriously? The tie trick?’

  ‘Worth a go.’

  ‘Talk about desperate. I thought you’d reached an all-time low on Monday, when you accused that witness of being in denial.’

  ‘And she denied it. What can I say? Classic cross-examination.’

  ‘For you, maybe,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t think there is any record of Cicero coming out with that one in the Forum. So, anyway, the tie-trick - did it work?’

  ‘No, Dougie Fleming practically quoted me the silk to polyester ratio.’

  ‘Guilty?’

  ‘Incredibly. Still, I got the full fixed fee and the client would have been just as guilty if he’d pled.’

  ‘Things really that tough?’ Paul asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘they’re much tougher. Anyway, what are you doing still here on a Friday afternoon?’

  ‘Hiding.’ Paul returned his gaze to the mound of paper. ‘I’ve got a bundle of stuff to read and if I go back to the office people want to speak to me and the phone keeps ringing.’

  I looked at the file. HMA –v- Dominic Quirk; a touchy subject between myself and Paul. Dominic was a former client of Munro & Co., a young man whose father, Aloysius Kenyon Quirk, was well known in West Lothian, having run a string of small bookmaker’s shops that had spawned many a rumour of dodgy dealings, match-rigging and loan-sharking. Then one day, when most men would be thinking of retirement, Al the Bookie had woken up and smelt the internet. Quirk senior sold his High Street outlets and spent the proceeds, not on a bungalow and new set of golf clubs, but on a team of IT experts, licensed software developers and a series of TV adverts featuring himself, ‘Honest Al’, the friendly face of AKQ On-line Betting.

  The move from real to virtual was literally a gamble for the Quirk family, but an immensely successful one. Soon Al Quirk could leave the running of the business to others while he devoted himself to good works. In no time at all, he went from small-time bookie to one of Scotland’s foremost philanthropists; a man whose modesty would have gone unnoticed were it not for his PR machine’s frequent press releases. A man fêted by politicians and local dignitaries seeking endorsement and by charity fund-raisers keen to tap money for worthwhile causes. Few recalled those early, dodgy days. Those who did, dared not mention them; however, it came not as a complete surprise, when, on a like-father-like-son basis, Dominic, aged twenty-one, fell afoul of the law.

  ‘You’re not going to start complaining again?’ Paul asked. ‘You had your chance with Dominic’s last case.’

  ‘I had my chance, all right,’ I said. ‘And I took it. Not proven. What was he expecting? A medal?’

  Clients. How soon they forgot. It was only a matter of a few months ago that the Quirk family was practically carrying me shoulder high out of Livingston Sheriff Court.

  It was a day for reminiscing, and, whether he wanted them or not, I reminded Paul of the facts of what, in the Robbie Munro bumper book of famous victories, had to rank in the top ten.

  One year before, Dominic Quirk was alleged to have jumped a red light, collided with another vehicle and driven off, leaving Wendy Smith, driver of the other car, bleeding and dying. Range Rover Sport -v- clapped-out Renault hatchback was always going to be something of a mis-match.

  He’d been charged with causing death by dangerous driving. The defence maintained that Miss Smith must have pulled out from a side-street before the lights were at green and that Quirk was only to blame for panicking and leaving the scene.

  Concerns over the evidence caused the Crown to reduce the allegation to the lesser, but still serious, charge of causing death by careless driving. The trial proceeded before a Sheriff and jury and, when the sole eye-witness did not stick to the script, all the Prosecution had left were some dubious forensics and a series of heart-breaking before-and-after-pictures of the deceased. In its closing address, the prosecution asked the fifteen jurors to infer guilt from the fact that Quirk had failed to stop at the scene. They didn’t, at least not eight of them, and Quirk escaped with a twelve month driving ban and a fine of five hundred pounds for failing to stop at the scene of an accident.

  Quirk’s father paid the fine within the hour and my not inconsiderable legal fee the following day. The newspapers, deliberately misunderstanding matters, as usual, announced that a few hundred pounds was
the price the Scottish courts placed on the life of a young woman. If the Lord Advocate was decidedly unhappy, the Justice Minister was furious and all set to amend some laws to make sure more people were convicted and to hell with the evidence and those pesky reasonable doubts.

  For Dominic, his acquittal meant that he was free to resume his studies. A former pupil of St Ignatius’ College, Scotland’s top Catholic School, he had left with the best grades money could buy and the Jesuits beat into him. Even then he’d only managed to scrape his way into something arty at St Andrews University. Not that his academic limitations were a major concern; it was odds-on the Quirk family business would absorb hapless Dominic in due course.

  Ten months had passed from the date of the car crash to Dominic’s trial and it had been an ordeal for everyone. Afterwards, I hadn’t expected any repeat business. I didn’t get any. Not even when, only a matter of weeks after the famous acquittal, the young man was again facing criminal charges. This time it was murder, and the Quirk family looked to Paul. When I heard the news, there’d been no confusing me with a ray of sunshine and, without sounding churlish, the fact that I had later been instructed by Quirk’s legally-aided co-accused, Mark Starrs, was but slight consolation. Trust me to be stuck with the only poor student at St Andrews.

  ‘I thought I’d avoid interruptions and stay here,’ Paul said, after I’d recounted my sorry tale, with which Paul was already very familiar. ‘For some peace and quiet.’

  In hindsight, he may have emphasised those last words; whatever, I pulled out a chair and sat down at the table across from him. Dominic Quirk’s case wasn’t only a touchy subject between us because of my ex-client jumping ship. I was in the process of cutting a deal for his co-accused and Paul didn’t like it.

  The two young men had been charged with the murder of a waitress Doreen Anderson. When my client indicated to me that he had some incriminatory things to say about Quirk, I knew the Crown would be interested. So interested, that I believed, if he cooperated, the murder charge against him would be dropped. If the prosecution proceeded against the two and both refused to testify, actual evidence of who had killed Doreen was pretty thin. The last thing the Lord Advocate wanted was a reasonable doubt creeping into proceedings and Dominic Quirk sailing off into a Monet sunset, leaving yet another dead body in his wake.