I bent over and gave her a kiss. ‘Sorry. I had a late appointment. You’ll never guess who—’
She held up her hand. ‘Look, Robbie. I’ve had a really busy week. The flight up from London was terrible, not helped by the security at Gatwick. It’s like check-in at a concentration camp. Some of the things they do to you. It’s practically sexual assault. I mean do I look like a terrorist?’
I was about to remark that the best terrorists didn’t look like terrorists and that, until terrorists started carrying signs saying that they were terrorists, the random security checks would probably continue, when the waitress who hadn’t moved from her spot butted in.
‘Nightmare isn’t it?’ she said, thinking she was part of the conversation. ‘A couple of weeks ago me and my boyfriend went down to see a show and—’
‘I’ll give the wine a miss,’ I said. ‘Just a beer for me. Anything that’s not lager.’
It had been my idea to eat at the Barn Door; peaceful surroundings and great steaks, but only after Jill had insisted that we meet up in Edinburgh for a meal rather than at her place.
‘So how is it?’ she asked, not letting up on the subject of my tardiness, ‘that I can travel all the way from London, on a delayed flight, go home, change and be at the restaurant on time, when you can’t make a twenty minute train journey without arriving half an hour late?’
‘I like your hair,’ I blurted. It was a gamble, but I was sure it looked different, shorter. Hopefully she hadn’t just washed it or something.
She teased the ends of some strands of hair with her fingertips. ‘You don’t think they took too much off?’
‘No, just the right amount,’ I said.
‘I was thinking maybe it makes me look old-fashioned.’
‘Not old-fashioned. Professional,’ I said, and she didn’t object. My beer arrived. I drank half of it in one go before asking, ‘How’s work doing?’
Unlike my own, Jill’s career was going places. During a spell in Switzerland, working for their rivals, Jill had been noticed by global pharmaceutical giants, Zanetti Biotechnics Inc. She’d been headhunted, offered a financial package that made my legally-aided eyes water and, once on-board, had somehow managed to make herself indispensable. I didn’t have much of a clue about what she did, only that Zanetti was on the verge of something big and extremely important and that my fiancée’s opinion was sought at all stages of whatever it was that was so big and extremely important that meant she had to spend most of her time living away from me.
‘Work is busy,’ she said. ‘It always is. Very busy, but very exciting. I wish I could tell you more, but... you know…’
I knew.
The tap of high heels on wooden floor behind me. A tall, harshly-attractive older woman arrived at our table. Late forties? Fifties? It was difficult to tell. Her cheekbones were high, her skin a witness to many years in hotter climes or under sun lamps. My initial impression was Cruella De Ville with a tan and a bleached razor-cut. She placed a mobile phone on the table and sat down. I’d spied her loitering outside the front door when I came in and thought that she’d given me a funny look. It was then that I noticed the third place-setting. ‘Robbie,’ she said, stretching a perfectly manicured hand across the table to me and gripping the tips of my fingers in what was her idea of a handshake. ‘Felicity. We met at Zanetti’s New Year’s Eve party.’
I smiled back at her. There had been a free bar at Zanetti’s Hogmanay bash. That was about all I remembered. That and waking up with a black-eye and a stonker of a hangover.
‘Sorry, Jill,’ Felicity said, lifting the phone and giving it a little shake. ‘That was Hercule from Bern. You know what he’s like. The man never takes a break. By the way, he was asking after you.’ She set the phone down again and looked from wine bottle to empty glass, her head at a quizzical angle as though uncertain how she could transport the contents of one into the other. I took the hint. As I poured, I gave Jill a quick sidelong look which I hoped relayed the message, ‘what’s this woman doing here on our first night together in over a fortnight?’
Felicity’s phone flashed and began to vibrate, rattling against a pudding spoon. ‘Not again,’ she said. Taking a quick sip of wine, she snatched the phone and headed off in the direction of the stairs to the front door.
‘Felicity?’ I asked.
‘Felicity Davenport. Don’t you remember her? Of course you don’t. She’s Zanetti’s UK development manager.’
‘Your boss?’
‘She’s a lot of people’s boss. We’ve a meeting with some politicians at Holyrood tomorrow and travelled up on the same flight. I could hardly just ditch her at the airport, could I?’ Jill smiled sweetly. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’
Jill poked me in the chest. ‘Don’t start getting all shirty. Just sit there, eat your dinner and smile. Two beers, no more. After the New Near bash, and I do mean bash, everyone in Zanetti UK thinks I’m marrying some kind of wild, whisky-swilling highlander. I don’t want you showing me up again. I’ve told Felicity that your brawl with Desmond was out of character.’ She put up a hand to abort my plea in mitigation. ‘And I’ve told her that as far as drink is concerned you can take it or leave it.’
I could take it or leave it. But this was Friday night and Friday night was when I liked to take it.
Jill’s pointy finger prodded my breastbone again. ‘Two beers max - and no tales from the courts about how you got some crazy client off.’
She really knew how to hurt a guy. Compared to her, when it came to getting all shirty, I was just a big girl’s blouse.
‘I thought you liked my tales from the court,’ I said. She didn’t reply. ‘You said they were interesting.’
‘Some of them could be quite interesting,’ Jill said. ‘But not the way you tell them.’
I was mentally analysing my anecdote delivery, while at the same time conserving rations with a modest swig of beer, when Felicity weaved her way back to the table.
‘That’s it,’ she laughed. ‘No more calls. I’m turning this thing off.’ She laid the phone on the table again, not, I noticed, turning it off. ‘So, Robbie, what’s new in the law?’ She asked, not looking at me, but at some point over my left shoulder.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They keep changing it without telling me.’ Felicity looked confused. To indicate that I’d been joking; very nearly, I laughed. Felicity didn’t, just continued to stare right ahead over my shoulder. She was one serious woman.
Jill picked up a menu. ‘What are we all having?’
If Felicity was paying I was definitely having the fillet steak. Anyone who was Jill’s boss had to be minted, and if there wasn’t some unwritten rule about the gooseberry picking up the tab, then there should have been.
‘Robbie?’ Felicity said. She seemed troubled. ‘Who’s that man over there?’
‘What man?’
‘There’s a man at a table in the corner who keeps staring over at you. Don’t look now, but he doesn’t seem terribly friendly.’
I turned and looked over to where I’d been told not to. A middle-aged man, black shirt, fawn chinos, stared back at me. It was true; he didn’t look particularly friendly, but, then again, this was Edinburgh.
‘Probably a client or someone I’ve met at court,’ I said, recommencing my study of the menu and pondering over choice of sauce to go with my steak. ‘I meet a lot of people in my job and I’m not that good with faces. Or names.’
‘Well, he definitely seems to know you,’ Jill said.
I turned again, this time to see the man remove the white linen napkin, a corner of which had been tucked into the open neck of his shirt. He stood and began to walk towards us. And then I did remember. We’d met a week or so back - he’d been in the witness box and I’d been cross-examining him. He hadn’t been very friendly then either.
I rose to my feet just as he arrived at our table.
He pointed a finger straight between my eyes. �
�I thought it was you, ya bastard.’ His face contorted as he spat the words. He wasn’t as tall as me, but much broader. He grabbed a bunch of my shirt in each hand. I didn’t know what was going to happen next, though I sensed his forehead was at an optimum head-butting level with my nose and I was now well in range.
My mother died when I was very young. My dad single-handedly raised my brother Malky and me. He didn’t teach us how to bake cookies or construct handmade greetings cards; he taught us what he knew, and he hadn’t spent thirty years as the only law in Linlithgow without learning how to take care of himself. It was said my dad could clear a pub in less time than the barman could clear away the glasses.
Instinctively, I hooked my index finger in the V between the man’s collarbones; the manubrium, that soft gap where sternum meets the clavicle-bones. It’s not particularly sore; just hugely uncomfortable. The man recoiled, letting go of my shirt. Before he could step forward and grab me again, I held out my hands, palms outwards. ‘Take it easy. I was only doing my job,’ I nearly managed to say before he swung an over-arm right at me. He was drunk. I could have ordered a medium-rare fillet with peppercorn sauce before the blow landed. I side-stepped. His weight caused him to lunge forward, right arm hitting nothing but air. He stumbled and fell across the table, upsetting the wine cooler. It toppled. The bottle slid out. White wine glugged across the table and onto Felicity’s lap. She shrieked and jumped to her feet, taking a section of table cloth with her. Cutlery, glasses and various other table items clattered onto the floor.
Meanwhile, angry man sprawled across the table, struggling to regain his balance. I kicked his legs away and he fell heavily to his knees, chin striking the table on the way down. A tooth pinged out from between his lips and ricocheted off the little white vase in the centre of the table that held a single pink orchid. I helped the man to the floor with the sole of my foot. By this time the doorman and a couple of waitresses were on the scene. I stood back while they raised Mr Angry from the floor and wrestled him to the door. I could see other diners on their phones, either calling the police or preparing footage for YouTube.
I looked at my grim-faced fiancée.
‘Go,’ she said, and I went.
Chapter 5
Saturday morning. Jill was escorting Felicity to a conference at the Scottish Parliament building, followed by an afternoon’s shopping. The phone rang as I was frying an egg.
The caller had one of those accents that was either Scottish posh or English. Mr Posh wouldn’t give his name, just said he was an agent for Victor Devlin, a name I knew vaguely and only by reputation. From what I’d heard, Devlin was scum and, like scum, he’d floated to the top of his profession; if you could call corporate fraud and swindling people out of their life savings a profession.
Why Devlin would want to make contact with me I didn’t know. I could only hope he was in trouble and looking for a lawyer. He might be scum, but he was rich scum and rich scum in trouble was my favourite kind of scum.
I emptied the now frazzled egg into the bucket, grabbed a coffee and bacon roll at Sandy’s café and made my way down Linlithgow High Street to the offices of Munro & Co. No sooner had I put key in lock than I was joined by a man; late sixties I would have guessed. He was tall and broad, his nose and cheeks a crazed road map of broken capillaries. From bespoke tweed suit, to his highly-polished shoes, to a styled head of wavy, if suspiciously dark, hair and thin strip of a moustache, everything about him oozed money.
‘Are you here on behalf of Mr Devlin?’ I asked.
The man nodded. I opened the door and he followed me down the close, up the stairs and into my room. Saying nothing, he looked around at the shabby decor, the desiccated umbrella plant and carpet of multifarious stains.
I sat behind my desk and gestured to the chair opposite. ‘Be it so humble...’
‘Quite.’ The posh one flicked imaginary, possibly not, detritus from the chair and sat down. He crossed his legs and leaned back. ‘I need your help,’ he said, after tugging the sleeves of his shirt in turn, one of them failing to obscure a chunky diamond-studded Rolex.
Music to my defence lawyer’s ears.
‘Have you heard of Tantalite, Mr Munro?’
I hadn’t.
‘Perhaps you know it as coltan.’ I didn’t. ‘It’s a rare mineral used in the microchips of cell phone batteries. No tantalite, no cell phones. You get the idea. Eighty per cent of the world’s reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s the new gold-rush. Mr Devlin formed a mining company, Devlin Polymineral Limited, took on board a few wealthy investors—’
‘Who all of a sudden aren’t quite so wealthy anymore?’
The man stared coldly at me. ‘Indeed.’
Perhaps I shouldn’t have jumped so quickly to what I thought was the obvious conclusion; however, even based on a hazy knowledge of Devlin’s track record, I assumed he hadn’t sent Mr Posh to see me because of my in-depth knowledge of company law.
‘A complete tragedy,’ he said. ‘Regime change, civil unrest, miners striking, machinery stolen, friendly government officials threatened or murdered. Happens all the time out there, I’m told. Devlin Polymineral went belly up. The investors lost everything.’
In business there are never losers without winners. I was guessing Devlin fell into the latter category.
‘And Mr Devlin?’ I asked. ‘How did he do out of it?’
Very well, it transpired. When the tantalite dust had settled, a few businesses had made a profit. Quite a healthy one, in fact. Those were the various companies who had supplied goods and services to the failed mining company, all of which corporations were wholly, exclusively and very conveniently owned by Victor Devlin. His posh chum made it sound like good fortune. We both knew differently.
‘How can I help?’ I asked, hoping he’d come to the point.
He got up, walked to the window and looked out through dusty panes at the bustle on Linlithgow High Street. ‘Always background-check your investors, Mr Munro,’ he said, as though I might be thinking about setting up my own international mining fraud. ‘On this occasion Mr Devlin was lax and as a result has become persona non grata with some very angry men. Men with guns.’
In Devlin’s line of work, I felt certain he’d know some men with guns himself.
Mr Posh returned from the window, stood behind his chair and leaned two hands against the back of it. ‘The men with guns that Mr Devlin knows are scared of these other men with guns. These men don’t start fights, they start wars. He’s lost their money, and now they’d like to kill him.’
They might have to join a fairly lengthy queue, I suspected.
‘All Mr Devlin wants is to take his profits and disappear somewhere warm before he winds up dead.’
I was also fairly certain that even if Devlin did end up dead, he’d be going somewhere warm all right, but I kept the thought to myself as I sensed we were at last coming to the reason for the posh one’s visit.
He took his hands from the back of the chair and began to slowly pace up and down the room. ‘Mr Devlin has a problem. His money is mainly invested off-shore: Belize, the Caymans, Switzerland, numbered accounts, of course. It was my job to keep track of them. All the details were stored on a computer. A computer that has now been stolen and, no doubt, thoroughly and professionally hacked. Fortunately, the data is encrypted so it won’t do anyone any good, but it means that I don’t have the information to hand.’
All highly interesting; however, I was wondering when he’d come to the part requiring my professional assistance.
‘As you can imagine, Mr Devlin is not at all happy, though the good news is he has a back-up hidden in one of his little hideaways. All he needs is someone to fetch it. Someone he can trust. I’d go, but there is a possibility the property is being watched. Someone with no connection is required.’
I wondered why he was telling me this. ‘You want me to go?’ He did. ‘Just one question: why does Mr Devlin need a solicitor for this work?’
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‘Mr Devlin likes to work with professionals. This is a highly confidential matter and he’d like it to remain so. On this occasion he has done his research and he believes you can be trusted to carry out this simple task without any risk of breach of confidence.’ He stopped pacing and fixed me with a stare, his mouth a grim line. ‘A breach of his trust would not, could not, be tolerated.’
‘But—’
‘However,’ he said, all smiles now. ‘It is a task for which you would be well remunerated.’
I no longer felt quite the same urge to protest. ‘How well?’
‘Five thousand pounds.’
Devlin was a master conman. He had to be loaded. ‘Twenty,’ was my counter-offer.
Mr Posh drew a finger across his moustache. With a bit of luck, he’d offer six and we’d shake on seven.
‘Twenty it is.’ He reached across the desk and offered me his hand. ‘Five in advance, the balance on your successful recovery of the data.
I took his hand. ‘If the house is being watched, I can’t just go waltzing in or they’ll know why I’m there.’
‘Not if you have a plan.’
‘And what would that be?’ I asked.
He stood up and walked to the door. ‘For twenty thousand pounds, I’m sure you’ll think of something.’
Chapter 6
‘What are you doing here?’ Saturday afternoon. My dad was in the kitchen, golf bag on the table beside a basin of soapy water and an old towel. ‘I thought you were seeing Jill this weekend?’
I’d brought the bottle of whisky Suzie had given to me. The cardboard tube was wrapped in a plastic carrier bag that I had wound around with tape to deter tampering; at least until I had retired to a safe distance. I placed it on a spare, square-foot of worktop near to the bread bin. ‘I saw her last night. She’s got her boss up from London and they’re away shopping or sightseeing or something.’
‘Her boss?’ He removed a pitching wedge from the bag, took it over to the big Belfast sink and set about the dried-on dirt on the face of the club with a nail brush. ‘What’s he like?’
Crime Fiction (Best Defence series Book 5) Page 3