Crime Fiction (Best Defence series Book 5)

by William H. S. McIntyre

  ‘It was the Juniors,’ Malky corrected her. ‘I was never an amateur. Unless you count the school team. I went straight into Junior football with The Rose and then Senior with Rangers.’

  It was Eleanor’s turn to look concerned. I explained that despite the title, Junior football was played by adults. It was a rung lower than the Senior game, but a step up from Amateur.

  ‘Unless, it’s Queens Park,’ Malky corrected me, only helping to confuse matters further. ‘They’re amateurs, but better than Juniors and play in the Senior league.’

  Eleanor let that wave of information wash over her for a moment or two. ‘You tell the story, the spook will get it all down on paper. I’ll make a few calls and see who’s available; someone who knows a bit about football; seniors and juniors and all that stuff.’

  ‘I was wondering about Suzie Lake,’ I said. ‘I believe your firm represents her.’

  Eleanor let rip a loud laugh. ‘Suzie? Firstly, I doubt if she knows any more about football than I do, and, secondly, she’s an internationally acclaimed author and, even if she is skint, do you know how much she’d charge?’

  Suzie skint? I laughed at my own stupidity. ‘You’re right. We’ll leave the choice of writer to you.’

  Eleanor seemed happy at that. Somehow she raised herself from a cross-legged position on the floor without using her hands and, lifting a wooden box from her desk, opened it to reveal neat rows of cigarettes. She offered the box around. Malky and I declined.

  ‘I’ve cut down to five a day,’ she said, sticking a cigarette between her lips and lighting it up in one smooth, yet frenzied, motion.

  ‘How is Suzie, these days?’ I asked.

  Eyes closed, the literary agent inhaled deeply then let out a steady stream of smoke. After a moment or two’s bliss she opened her eyes again and wafted a hand in front of her face as though trying to get a better look at me through the fog. ‘You know Suzie?’

  ‘We’re old friends.’

  ‘Must be a while since you saw her last, if you don’t know the state she’s got herself in, the poor lamb.’

  ‘Last time I saw her she was complaining of writer’s block,’ I said.

  ‘Well she’d better unblock it fast. If she doesn’t bash out another bestseller soon, the publishers will be looking for their advance back and there’s nothing that idiot next door will be able to do about it. The boy’s not a fraction of the agent his father was. Mike Travers always protected his clients and could have sold white heather to a gypsy. It was Mike who spotted Suzie. He encouraged her, edited that terrible first book of hers, proof-read it, did everything bar paint the cover.’ Eleanor flicked a length of ash into an empty coffee mug. ‘What was it called again...?’

  ‘Portcullis? I gave Suzie the—’

  ‘No, no, way before that. It was some romantic drivel. Bombed like a B forty-two, but Mike stuck with her. When Portcullis came along, he secured a three book deal and the biggest advance in this agency’s history. Then he went and died. Heart attack.’ She took a few rapid draws, stubbed out the remains of the cigarette and pointed to the mug from which a few stray wisps of smoke were rising. ‘By the way, I’m only counting that as half.’ The mug seemed pretty full of half cigarettes. ‘You didn’t mind did you?’

  Malky was bored now and had started to wander around the room, looking at framed photographs similar to the type I’d seen in the waiting room on my previous visit. ‘Is that not her off the telly who used to be married to that guy who was in... What was the name of the band?’

  Eleanor swished over to where Malky loitered. ‘The Pink Pineapples,’ she said. ‘Strange isn’t it, how many bands are named after fruit? Pink Pineapples - got to be something Freudian going on there. Anyway, Natalie Jack, one of my clients, married the lead singer, discovered he was one, a fruit I mean, and divorced him - but not most of his money. After that she wrote a book about what a bastard he was. It’s what publishers call a divorce made in heaven.’

  ‘What are these?’ Malky asked, pointing to what were patently hardback books stacked neatly on a nearby sideboard.

  ‘Signed copies from one of our debut novelists. Go on, take one. Could be right up your street.’

  Malky’s literary street was something of a cul-de-sac of football and car magazines; nonetheless, he picked up one of the hardbound volumes and studied with more than polite interest a bright front cover on which I glimpsed a submarine and some helicopters featuring prominently.

  Before Malky could ask any more inane questions, I joined the pair of them and tried to steer the good ship Eleanor in the direction of why I’d really come. ‘So what’s Suzie’s problem?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to be able to help if I could.’

  Eleanor smiled. ‘I’m sure you would, dear, but it’s all about money. She’s being sued right left and centre. What Suzie needs right now is either a lottery win or a sugar daddy, and, sadly, it’s all this guy’s fault.’ She picked up one of the hardbacks from the pile. I thought she was going to give it to me, instead, she turned it over to show a photograph of the author on the back cover. The mug-shot was in black and white in soft focus, a strong, serious face, beneath a harshly-cropped head of hair.

  ‘Then again,’ Eleanor said, ‘that big pussycat hasn’t had his own troubles to seek. Tragic really. Two such terribly good people with such terribly bad luck. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day they got together, despite everything.’ She flipped the book around again and placed it back with the others.

  By this time Malky had finished reading the blurb on the inside cover and was examining the signature on the fly-leaf. ‘Is that his real name? How come all those famous writers have weird names?’ I really hoped he wasn’t going to suggest he change his own name, not for his autobiography. He closed the book and studied the cover, where the author’s name was writ large in bold crimson lettering. ‘Weird,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen Clive spelt with a Y before.’

  Chapter 39

  I dropped Malky off at Haymarket Station, did a quick about turn and drove east to North Berwick.

  Fiona Faye had recently remarried. I’d only met her latest husband, Tim, once; at their wedding. I liked him. He was a good ten years older than Fiona and an expert in clocks and barometers with a major auction-house. A quiet man, with a dry sense of humour, he’d somehow managed to, first of all, talk Fiona into marrying him and then, even more surprisingly, to sell her beloved New Town property and move to his sandstone villa on the outskirts of North Berwick. A property only six or seven miles from Victor Devlin’s hideaway, but not in nearly so remote a setting.

  Fiona’s clerk had given me the address and rough directions. None of the properties on the street seemed to have numbers, only names, mostly on a nautical theme: Sea Breeze, Windward, The Crow’s Nest, and even though I drove slowly down the quiet country road, houses to my right, fields and the North Sea to my left, I would have driven past had I not spied a tall, lanky frame at the garden gate, wearing a Bill and Ben hat and attacking an innocent rosebush with a pair of secateurs.

  I parked opposite the house, half on the roadway, half on the raised stretch of dirt that served as a pavement, and climbed out of my car.

  ‘Fiona!’ Tim yelled, as he saw me approach. ‘You’ve a visitor.’ He snipped off a stalk that so far I could see was meaning nobody any harm.

  ‘Tell them to go away!’ I could hear Fiona, but couldn’t see her.

  Tim pricked himself on a thorn, sucked at the bead of blood that had formed on the tip of his finger and then wiped his hand on a trouser leg. He stepped aside to let me past. ‘Enter at your own risk. Her ladyship watched a cookery programme on TV last night. Believe me it’s a bloody sight safer out here.’

  As he renewed his assault on the vegetation, I walked down the path, through the open front door and followed the smoke trail to the kitchen where Fiona was standing at an open oven door, looking in. With a degree of hesitation, she reached a set of pink oven gloves inside and they came out with a loaf tin,
the contents of which were gently smouldering.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, when she saw me come into the room.. She carried the loaf tin to the sink, placed it in the basin and ran the tap across it. ‘What is gas mark five, anyway? I don’t have gas mark five, mine starts at a hundred and goes right up to two-twenty.’

  ‘What was it supposed to be before you burned it at the stake?’ I asked.

  ‘Banana chocolate chip loaf.’1

  ‘Ambitious.’

  ‘It’s supposed to be easy-peasy banana chocolate-chip loaf.’ Fiona pulled off the oven gloves and pitched them onto a big oak table that was strewn with mixing bowls, spoons, bags of sugar, cartons of milk, boxes of eggs, all covered in a layer of flour. ‘To what do I owe?’ She pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Make it quick, I’ll have to try again, I promised Tim I’d bake him something. He’s been pruning things all afternoon. Problem is, I know as much about baking as he does about gardening.’

  ‘Okay, don’t think I’m crazy.’

  ‘Too late for that love.’

  ‘Clyve Cree?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The new Crown witness in Mark Starr’s case. Turns out he’s a former Royal Marine, now an author writing lad’s fiction, full of explosions and helicopters. My brother’s a big fan of his.’

  Using the side of her hand, Fiona gathered a small pile of sugar and flour and pulled it off the table into her other hand. She leaned back in her chair and dropped the mixture into the sink. ‘Very interesting but it’s not baking me any buns.’

  ‘I have an old friend, Suzie Lake—’

  ‘The writer? I loved Portcullis. Great book. Keep meaning to buy her next—’

  ‘Do you remember Joe Finnegan?’

  ‘The guy from Shettleston who shot those two—’

  ‘I told Suzie about the case and she wrote a book about it.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Portcullis.’

  Fiona looked as confused as I imagined she did when reading a cake recipe. ‘What’s Portcullis got to do with your gangster client blowing holes in the heads of his drug-dealing rivals?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Then why are you telling me? Listen, Robbie. I so enjoy our little chats, but can this not wait? Why don’t you swing by Parliament House one afternoon when we’re both not so busy?’

  ‘I’m not busy now.’

  ‘Well I am. Tim will be finished maiming the plant life in a moment or two and all I’ll have to show for my afternoon’s efforts is a charcoal log.’

  ‘So what you can’t cook? Are you telling me Tim thought he was marrying a Michelin star chef and not a Q.C.?’

  Touchy subject. It turned out that Chris’s first wife was a domestic goddess who could whisk-up a sponge cake so light that on baking days air traffic control had to be notified.

  ‘Surprised he let her get away,’ I said. ‘What happened? Did they make an Eton Mess of the marriage?’

  Fiona didn’t find that nearly as funny as I did. While I was laughing at my own joke, she leaned to her left and looked down the hallway. Coast clear, she whispered. ‘Let’s just say he no longer employs a gardener and that these days he refers to his ex as ‘the Tartlet’.’ She stood up again and dusted her apron. Clouds of flour rose about her. ‘I know it shouldn’t bother me that I’m so hopeless in the kitchen, it just does.’

  I winked at her. ‘I’m sure you make up for it in another room of the house.’

  ‘The bedroom? Trust me, Robbie. When men of a certain age are given the choice between sex and a really good Eve’s Pudding, there’s only one thing getting covered in whipped cream and it ain’t the wife.’

  I took off my jacket and hung it on a hook on the back door. ‘Leave this to me.’ I strode across the kitchen, placed my hands on Fiona’s shoulders and gently pushed her down onto the chair again. There was already sugar, flour, milk and eggs on the table. ‘Right, I’m going to need a drop of oil and one really big frying pan.’

  Inside twenty minutes I’d knocked out a dozen pancakes that my dad and his dad before him would have been proud of. I let them cool, wrapped in a clean dish towel, while I told Fiona about Clyve Cree and his potentially damaging evidence.

  Fiona couldn’t resist taking a peak below the dish towel. ‘And you think this has got something to do with Suzie Lake in some way?’ she asked, nipping a chunk from the side of a pancake.

  I explained how Al Quirk had past form for trying to influence the outcome of certain events and the chats I’d had with Suzie on the problems with Dominic Quirk’s defence. ‘Then out of the woodwork pops Clyve Cree. Ready-made witness all set to give our client a motive for murder and Quirk an incrimination defence that didn’t exist a fortnight ago.’

  ‘Mmm. These are really good pancakes,’ Fiona said, stealing a second piece. ‘Who taught you to bake?’

  ‘My dad.’

  Fiona couldn’t stop nibbling. ‘Then the man’s a culinary genius.’

  ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘He’s not. But he does have a fool-proof recipe. Do you have maple syrup?’

  She didn’t.

  ‘Don’t worry. Golden syrup is just as good,’ I said.

  ‘I probably should, but I don’t even know what that is.’

  ‘Then we’ll just melt some sugar and butter in a wee pot and...’

  Fiona went off, presumably in search of a sauce pan.

  ‘Not now,’ I said. ‘The deal was I made pancakes, you listened to what I had to say.’

  ‘I thought you’d finished. Very interesting it was too. And imaginative. Have you ever thought of writing a book? I’m sure Miss Lake could help you - once she gets out of jail, that is. After all, if what you’re suggesting is true, and I doubt that very much, she’s guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice.’

  The front door opened. Tim clumped into the porch and began to divest himself of gardening clobber.

  ‘Let me take care of Suzie,’ I said. ‘You’ve just finished a stint in Crown Office. All I’m asking is that you put out a few feelers. Find out if there is a link between Cree and Al Quirk. I’d do it, but there is no way the Legal Aid Board would cover the costs of a private detective. I might as well ask them to sanction funds to send Philip Marlowe off in search of the Maltese Falcon.’

  ‘Sorry. No can do. And the Maltese Falcon was written by Hammett, not Chandler, so it would be Sam Spade, not Philip Marlowe.’ Fiona made a move towards the pancakes. I stepped in front of them. She sighed. ‘It’s like this, Robbie. Al Quirk’s a philanthropist who sits on some of the same charitable committees as the Lord Justice Clerk. Hard to believe, I know, but I wasn’t universally loved at Crown Office; too fond of antiquated notions like sufficiency of evidence and the presumption of innocence. There’s some of them in there who’d be more than happy to go running to the LJC if I started casting aspersions about his chum.’

  Tim stuck his head into the kitchen and inhaled deeply. ‘Smells great.’ He clapped his dirty hands together. ‘I’ll just nip off and have a quick shower. Staying for supper, Robbie?’

  ‘Sadly, not,’ Fiona answered for me. ‘The work of a defence solicitor is never done.’

  I said my farewells to Tim before he went off in search of soap and water. ‘There’s got to be somebody you trust who can make a few discreet enquiries,’ I said to Fiona.

  ‘I’m sorry, Robbie.’

  ‘But I made the pancakes...’

  Fiona smiled. ‘And I listened. That was the deal, wasn’t it?’ She lifted the tea towel and nicked another morsel from the already savaged top pancake. ‘Tim is going to love these.’

  ‘And he’ll love you all the more for having made them. In fact he’ll probably want you to make them again and again. It’s going to be a huge disappointment next time when I’m not here and you dish him up a stack of rubber frisbees.’ There was a notepad on one of the kitchen counters. I picked up a nearby pen and tapped my chin with it thoughtfully. ‘If only you had som
e kind of... I don’t know... fool-proof recipe.’

  Chapter 40

  Tuesday mid-July. Grace-Mary was looking for a pay-rise. It was a regular, though, thankfully, not too frequent, occurrence, which, like my secretary’s request for air-conditioning, delivered annually during Scotland’s one week of sunny weather, I generally played with a straight bat.

  ‘You do know you’ve got twenty thousand pounds sitting on deposit?’ she said, and deploying some arcane rites and a computer keyboard, brought up a screen full of figures in an instant. She pointed to some of them. Devlin Polymineral Incorporated had paid me another three instalments of five thousand pounds over the past three weeks, to go with the first five grand Mr Posh had paid me up front. It didn’t make sense. The deal I’d struck was to recover and make over a memory-stick full of important data, and in that task I had singularly failed. I told Grace-Mary that I’d take her request into consideration and asked her to try and get me Gail Paton on the phone. Gail wasn’t available. Her office said that she’d gone to Barlinnie Prison and wasn’t expected back until the afternoon.

  The drive west took me around half an hour. Most Scottish prisons had been refurbished in recent years. Not so long ago, the greasy, cramped surroundings of the average prison visit room would have appalled a sardine. Now they were clean and spacious. The other difference was that they were empty of lawyers. Legal aid rates for prison visits were outrageously low and often non-existent. For a legal aid lawyer, a client in jail was a drain on resources, so if you were having to drag yourself all the way out to prison, it made sense to see as many clients as possible in order to make it pay. I had only one client in Barlinnie in need of a visit. I liked to think that having so few clients behind bars was down to my success rate, but it was probably more to do with lack of business. At any rate it was a good chance for me to kill two birds with the one stone.