Killer Contract (Best Defence series Book 4)

by William H. S. McIntyre

  ‘The preliminary hearing can't be this week,’ I said. ‘The indictment has only just been served.’

  ‘I know,’ the clerk had lowered her voice, ‘but the Crown shortened the induciae for the new trial so the prelim's been brought forward too.’ She looked down at the diary.

  ‘When did this happen?’ I asked. I thought she said Friday afternoon, but her voice was so soft I could hardly hear what she was saying.

  Crowe had noticed his clerk's strange behaviour too. ‘What's the matter with you?’ he asked.

  She glanced up and looked over his shoulder. A dark shadow loomed over even the tall frame of Cameron Crowe. The high and mighty Nigel Staedtler Q.C. pushed between myself and Crowe.

  ‘What's this all about?’ he demanded of the clerk who didn’t answer.

  ‘We’re discussing the Larry Kirkslap case,’ I said. The way the Q.C. was now glowering down at me I thought I should say something. ‘There’s going to be a change of counsel for the re-trial.’

  ‘Says who?’

  Before I could reply with a, ‘says-me,’ Staedtler turned his disapproving gaze on Crowe. ‘A word. Now.’

  The two advocates took a few steps away for the sake of privacy, although anyone within a twenty metre radius would have had no difficulty over-hearing their conversation. Whatever their respective advocacy skills, they'd learned how to project their voices to the back rows.

  ‘Look here,’ Staedtler said, ‘Lucy is my junior. She knows the case inside out, and it's only fair to give her another crack.’

  Evidently, word of the change in agency had not quite filtered through to Kirkslap’s old defence team. It was about to.

  ‘There’s going to be a new defence team for the re-trial.’ Crowe said. ‘I’m going to take a fresh look at the evidence—’

  ‘I’ll decide who my junior is, who do you—’

  ‘Think I am?’ Crowe said into Staedtler's increasingly purple face. ‘I’m the new lead counsel.’

  There then followed a verbal exchange which, had two of my clients carried on in that way, would undoubtedly have been considered a breach of the peace. But this wasn't a couple of neds fighting over a bottle of Buckfast. It was learned counsel disputing ownership of a valuable brief and, watching Crowe in action, treating his more senior colleague with unconcealed contempt, only vindicated my decision to instruct the Prince of Darkness.

  ‘Ask Miss Locke to deliver a set of papers to my box by the end of the day,’ Crowe said. ‘I see you’ve somehow managed to let the Crown shorten the induciae leaving very little time to prepare before the preliminary diet.’

  ‘That's because I don't need time to prepare!’ Staedtler replied. ‘I am fully prepared!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Crowe, ‘but I’m preparing to win.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Staedtler pulled Crowe back by his shoulder. ‘You think you can step into this case on the say-so of that jumped-up, legal-aid shyster?’ Staedtler jerked a thumb in my direction. At least I assumed it was my direction, my being the only jumped-up, legal-aid shyster in the immediate vicinity.

  I thought Crowe wavered slightly. He looked around at me, a worried expression flitted across his face. Did he think I was on the wind-up? I went over and pulled him away. ‘I'll have a set of papers couriered to you this afternoon.’

  Staedtler lumbered off, muttering something about the Dean and bloody upstarts.

  Crowe watched him go. ‘Man’s an idiot. Four days to prepare?’

  When the dust had settled, a phone call to the Clerk of Justiciary confirmed that, in his zeal to get the show back on the road, the Lord Advocate had argued for a shorter than usual notice period before the statutorily required preliminary hearing. It was a request to which the court had been happy to accede.

  ‘A preliminary hearing on Friday, and I haven’t seen so much as a copy of the indictment yet. I’m beginning to think I should let Staedtler keep the brief. Who’ve we got for the hearing?’

  Crowe’s clerk checked the court list for the week. ‘Lord Haldane.’

  ‘Could be worse.’ Crowe said. ‘We can ask for things to be knocked on a month or two. Haldane’s not so bad if you know the right strings to pull.’

  ‘Do you think Staedtler even bothered to challenge the request for a re-trial?’ I asked Crowe, after we’d put a pen through the next four weeks of his diary and were walking past St Giles Cathedral on the way back to the Lawnmarket.

  ‘Probably not, but would have been a waste of time anyway.’

  ‘What about the adverse publicity? How can Kirkslap expect a fair trial when his name and the guilty verdict have been plastered across the newspapers?’

  ‘That would cut no ice with their Lordships. The Court ballsed-up the case last time, the Lord Advocate is annoyed, that means the Government is furious. The judiciary will be gagging to make amends.’

  ‘And the prejudice caused by the reports in the media, which every potential juror will have seen...?’

  ‘There’s not a perceived unfairness which the Appeal Court thinks cannot be remedied by proper directions from the trial judge. Handy when you’re a prosecutor, not so good on this side of the fence.’

  ‘On the defence side of de-fence?’

  Crowe curled a lip. Maybe it wasn’t just females who didn’t appreciate my humour. ‘The judge will tell the new jury to put out of their minds anything they may have heard or read about the case and to concentrate their deliberations only on the evidence put before them. I’d quite like to know what that evidence is likely to be.’

  We stopped outside the front doors to the Lawnmarket, next to the statue of David Hume. Dressed in toga and sandals, the philosopher's right big toe was shiny from people, accused and counsel alike, rubbing it for luck before they went inside.

  ‘How long are you going to be with your deferred sentence?’ I asked. ‘If you like, I can wait and we can grab a coffee at Florentine’s while I tell you everything I know about the case. We could discuss it over an espresso.’ I laughed. He didn't.

  ‘Let me make one thing abundantly clear,’ he said. ‘I'll accept your instructions, but I still don't like you.’ He walked away. The glass doors of the court parted as he approached. ‘Have the papers with my clerk by lunch.’

  Chapter 24

  The only set of papers I had for Kirkslap's case was the one I'd received by way of mandate from Caldwell & Craig. The papers would have to be copied a couple of times and properly bound. For Grace-Mary that meant getting out the needle and pink string; ring-pull binders just wouldn't do.

  Off the train, and on the way back to the office, I stopped at my place to collect the brief, only to discover a suitcase inside the front door and another in the hallway.

  ‘That you, Robbie?’

  I went through to the livingroom to see my dad, propped on one crutch and studying a hairbrush that Joanna must have left behind. It had long plastic teeth with styling bumps at the end. Ex-cop, Alex Munro, had evidently deduced that the device would have been of little effect on my short back and sides.

  ‘What's this doing here?’ he asked, holding up prosecution label number one - a hairbrush.

  There was a perfectly innocent explanation.

  ‘Jill's,’ I said. ‘What brings you here and what's with all the suitcases?’ My dad pulled some hairs from the brush and studied them closely. Brunette, just like Jill's. Only if he started to measure the length of them would I really be in trouble. ‘I'm sure she wouldn't mind you borrowing it, though,’ I said.

  He grunted and set the brush down again on the coffee table. ‘Got the roofers in. All my stuff is happed-up and the place is covered with tarpaulins.’ He hobbled over to the couch, let the crutch fall and dropped into it. ‘Where's the controls?’

  We hunted around until we found the remote wedged underneath him.

  ‘So, how long are you planning to stay?’ I asked, as though the answer was of little import.

  ‘Long as it takes,’ was the best I could get out of hi
m.

  Twenty minutes later, I left him with tea and toast, taking the Kirkslap papers with me and reeling from the shock of my unexpected house guest. A drop of rain spat down the back of my neck. Did roofers work in the wet?

  Joanna was there when I eventually made it to the office. Kirkslap had called, she'd assured him that preparations were well underway and a consultation had been set up for six-thirty that evening. I told her that I'd formally instructed Cameron Crowe as counsel.

  ‘He doesn't like you,’ she said.

  ‘I know. Don't worry, it's purely personal.’

  We cleared my desk for the first time probably ever and set about making up a new brief. There was no point chucking absolutely everything the Crown had disclosed into a brief, and so Joanna and I separated out what we had decided were the relevant papers, while Grace-Mary stitched them into neat bundles, each with its own index. We had bundles for Police statements, civilian statements and precognitions and for the various forensic reports and the transcript of Kirkslap’s interview with the police.

  There were also some DVD’s with no descriptions, only Crown label numbers on them. I expected they would be the video versions of Kirkslap's police interviews and perhaps a film tour of various loci, including Kirkslap’s lodge where the murder was supposed to have taken place, zooming in on the bloodstained carpet and car boot. There might also be footage of the route taken by Kirkslap on his late-night road-trip, all as tracked via the GPS chip on his mobile phone.

  ‘We should really watch these,’ Joanna said. She was right, but we only had a couple of hours before we were supposed to consult and, as Grace-Mary pointed out, certain technological advances had yet to reach the offices of Munro & Co. It wasn't a huge problem for me. I used to take Crown DVD's home and watch them there. I suggested Joanna do the same.

  ‘I’ll stay here and finish off the rest of the paper work. Be back for six at the latest.’

  She held out her hand. ‘Key?’

  ‘You won’t need it. My dad’s there just now. He's broken his leg and is convalescing. It's no problem, he’s perfectly harmless.’

  Grace-Mary suddenly felt the need to clear her throat.

  ‘He’s fairly harmless,’ I corrected myself. ‘Just tell him who you are and that he’s to stop watching day-time TV or his football DVD's and let you use the telly. If he doesn’t like it, tell him I said he can take up his crutches and hobble off to a hotel.’

  ‘Yeah, like I’m going to say that,’ Joanna said, pushing the brown, padded envelope that held the DVD collection into her giant handbag. ‘Anyway, I’ll bet he’s perfectly charming.’

  ‘Joanna’s never met your dad, then,’ Grace-Mary said, after my assistant had left, tossing me another neatly-stitched bundle headed: ‘Speed Camera and Vehicle Reports’.

  Attached to it by a short treasury tag was an A5 book of photographs, with the Scottish Police Service crest on the blue cardboard cover with the words: Semper Vigilo underneath.

  There were several photographs of the speed camera in situ, and two showing the rear of a vehicle. The first of those was of a black Audi Q7, the second a close-up of the registration plate.

  ‘So what’s the story,’ Grace-Mary asked, as I handed her the final pile of documents to go under her needle. ‘Just how guilty is he?’

  The short answer was, very, but I made do with, ‘too early to say, really. Looks bad at the moment, but I have yet to weave the old Robbie Munro magic.’

  Grace-Mary sucked the end of the pink string, closed an eye and pushed it at the eye of the flat-blade needle. ‘Make stuff up you mean? Like you usually do?’

  ‘What I do is seek out and compile an alternative view of the facts and present them to the jury.’

  ‘An alternative to the truth?’

  ‘Quid est veritas?’ I find that a good way to end an argument, especially one you’re liable to lose, is to lapse into Latin. Unfortunately, not when the person on the other side is my secretary.

  She hit back with a quote from the Bard. ‘The truth will out.’

  Not if I could help it, it wouldn’t. ‘You want me to have a go at that?’ I asked, as Grace-Mary failed yet again to thread the needle.

  ‘No, I’ll manage.’ She took off her glasses and pushed them onto the top of her head. The next attempt also failed. ‘I’ve been pushing this needle through so much paper today that my hands are shaking,’ she said, lining up another charge at the needle-eye. ‘I’m glad this is the last one.’ Her glasses fell off her head and onto her chest. The gold chain around her neck to which they were attached became caught in her hair, and she spent a moment disentangling it before taking up the needle again.

  Watching my secretary, combing her hair flat with her fingers, I suddenly remembered Joanna’s hairbrush.

  ‘When those are finished, call a courier and have them sent to Cameron Crowe’s clerk at the Advocates’ Library,’ I said, grabbing my jacket from the back of a chair.

  ‘Cameron Crowe?’ I heard Grace-Mary say. ‘You’re kidding right?’

  But I was already in the corridor and running down the stairs.

  Chapter 25

  ‘You two having fun?’ I walked into the livingroom to find my dad seated on the sofa, his stookie resting comfortably on a cushion on the coffee table. By the looks of the glass of whisky in his hand, he’d found the bottle of ten year-old Talisker I’d inadequately concealed behind a family-sized cornflakes packet in one of the kitchen cupboards.

  Joanna was sitting in an armchair with the TV remote in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Both she and my dad had their eyes fixed on the screen as they watched the blurry image of shoppers going in and out of somewhere that I eventually recognised as the Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow. The date and time at the bottom of the screen showed 14.23 hours on 31st October 2012.

  ‘We’re just watching the last pictures of that woman your client murdered,’ my dad said. ‘Out shopping one minute and then...’

  ‘And then what?’ I asked.

  ‘We haven’t got to that bit yet.’ He took a drink of my whisky, staring straight ahead at the CCTV footage. ‘Aye, the Talisker ten. Not a bad drop, but it’s nothing on the eighteen.’

  ‘Nothing like the price either.’ I had a quick look around to see if I could spy Joanna’s brush. I couldn’t. I caught my dad glancing at me out of the side of his eye. I’d seen that look before. ‘What have we learned so far?’

  ‘Nothing we didn’t already know,’ Joanna said, ‘although it’s all much more real when you see it on television and don’t just read it in statement. This is the last anyone ever saw Violet Hepburn.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  Joanna had to rewind and play a few times before I could pick out a head in the crowd. The face was only on screen for a second, but her parents and a video identification expert were all satisfied it was Violet Hepburn, buying make-up from a cosmetic counter at John Lewis, around two-fifteen. The CCTV showed her leaving the Galleries just a few minutes later and blending into the crowd on a dull and dreary Monday afternoon in late October.

  ‘If it wasn’t for all the brollies, they might have been able to follow her a bit better,’ my dad said.

  ‘And that’s the last anyone saw of her?’

  ‘Apart from your client when he murdered her,’ my dad said, rather predictably. He drank some more whisky.

  ‘You’d have thought a neighbour might have been able to narrow the times down more accurately,’ Joanna said. ‘No-one seems to have noticed anything strange until the Friday night when there was a disturbance outside her house. Some neds found an on-line grocery delivery outside Violet’s door and started chucking it about. One of the neighbours called the cops.’

  ‘When was the order placed?’ I couldn’t remember seeing that in the papers I’d read.

  ‘First November. It was the last purchase she ever made with her credit card.’

  ‘What did she buy?’ my dad asked.

  ‘Ignore him,’
I told Joanna, ‘he thinks he's still a cop.’

  ‘And why was she having home deliveries?’ my dad asked. ‘Did she work?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘Scrounger, then?’

  ‘No, I don’t think she was signing-on,’ I said in defence of the deceased.

  ‘Miss Hepburn was what you might call a good-time girl, Mr Munro,’ Joanna said, probably thinking that references to 1940’s melodramas might aid my father’s understanding of the late Violet’s occupation.

  ‘A prozzie was she?’

  ‘Did you not read all about the trial in the paper, first time round?’ I asked.

  ‘I wasn’t really paying that much attention.’ My dad read newspapers from the back pages forward and usually stopped when he came to the crossword. ‘But I don’t remember anything being said about her being on the game.’

  Joanna corrected him ‘She wasn’t a prostitute, Mr Munro. She made friends with rich men and they bought her gifts, clothes and jewellery. She didn't necessarily have to perform, you know... sexually.’

  My dad finished his drink. I’d have to find a better hiding place for that bottle. ‘Is that a fact? Don't suppose those rich guys would chip in for a present for me, do you? I’ve got a birthday coming up.’

  It was nearly five and we still had to get back to the office, collect our set of papers, make sure that Crowe’s brief had been couriered and then head west for the consultation.

  ‘Mustn’t forget this again,’ Joanna said, after we had packed away the DVD’s into the brown Jiffy-bag.

  The whole point of my going home had been to avoid any reference to the hairbrush. I'd become so engrossed in Violet Hepburn's last movements, as shown on TV, that I'd completely forgotten. Joanna went over to the mantelpiece and retrieved her hairbrush. Her actions didn’t go unnoticed by a certain ex-cop.

  ‘Can I pour you another wee drink before I go?’ I asked him. He didn’t reply. My dad ignoring the offer of a fine single-malt? Not good.