Relatively Guilty (Best Defence series Book 1)

by William H. S. McIntyre

‘Then you haven’t been listening. If you’re going to use Robbie’s room, because he’s hardly ever here anymore,’ Grace-Mary said, pointedly, in my direction, ‘then you’re going to have to learn to respect the office procedures.’

  ‘It’s the Bic with the red rubber band wrapped round the end,’ I said, trying to help. I knew the junkie pen was one of my secretary’s pet subjects and if she was getting on at Andy, it meant that I was avoiding the flak for once.

  ‘What’s a red rubber band got to do with anything?’ my assistant asked.

  ‘No reason,’ I told him, ‘other than to signify which pen junkies are to use when they sign the legal aid forms.’

  ‘Grace-Mary doesn’t even know if he was a junkie.’

  I looked out of the window. Andy’s client was six feet tall, couldn’t have weighed more than nine stone soaking wet and was tottering down the High Street like a puppet with some strings snipped. If he wasn’t HIV positive, riddled with Hep C or incubating some other communicable disease, I’d walk across the Channel to see Fergus Galbraith.

  Grace-Mary picked up the summons from my desk. The charge libelled a contravention of section 5(2) of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. ‘You know what diamorphine is don’t you?’

  Andy rolled his eyes. ‘He’s not a junkie, he’s a jaikie. He’s on medication…’ He flipped over the summons to read the notes he’d made on the reverse. ‘See? Antabuse. That’s the stuff that makes you sick if you drink alcohol.’

  ‘Which is probably why,’ I said, ‘he’s now using heroin.’

  ‘Look, Andy,’ Grace-Mary said, taking up the cause once again. ‘I don’t care what people do to their bodies in their spare time. If nobody took drugs or drink Robbie would have to divorce folk and draw up wills like a real lawyer, but understand this - if it looks like a junkie, walks like a junkie and is charged with possessing smack then it’s a candidate for the junkie pen. Okay? Now which pen did he use?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Andy sighed loudly and unclipped a rather nice Parker pen from his inside jacket pocket. ‘I let him use mine. Some of us aren’t quite so fussy as you all seem to be.’

  He was about to leave but changed his mind.

  ‘Grace-Mary,’ he said. ‘Do you think I could speak to Robbie?’

  ‘You seem to be doing fine.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Grace-Mary picked up a wire-basket of letters to be filed and backed out of the room.

  ‘Is this about my trial,’ I asked, once my secretary had closed the door behind her.

  ‘It’s on Tuesday,’ Andy said. ‘Who’s acting for you? I mean… I don’t think I’m…’

  ‘I’ve asked Paul Sharp to act.’

  ‘The 60’s guy?’

  ‘Don’t judge by appearances. He knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘Robbie, he thinks he’s Adam Faith.’

  ‘He’s very good. I wouldn’t have instructed him otherwise.’

  ‘And your defence?’

  ‘Do you still think I should tell the truth?’

  ‘Why, are you allergic?’

  ‘Watch it. There’s more than one way to lose a traineeship.’

  He hung his head. ‘Sorry. I’m worried and not just about me. Why don’t you get senior counsel in to take the case?’

  ‘Horses for courses,’ I told him. ‘Get a Q.C. in and suddenly it’s all a big deal. I’d rather play the whole thing down. That way the Sheriff won’t think he’s making some kind of landmark decision when he comes back with a not proven, and, anyway, Paul’s good. He’ll do the business for me. Which brings me back to the defence. I don’t see any point in challenging Fleming’s notebook.’

  Andy was aghast. ‘Why not? He’s lying. You can’t just let him stitch you up.’

  He had much to learn. ‘You have to learn to roll with the blows,’ I told him. ‘Even the low blows. Challenge a cop head on and usually there’s only going to be one winner in the eyes of the court.’

  ‘So what’ll you do?’

  ‘I’ll say that I did indeed make a reply and that I have no idea where the fifty came from. Due to the unusually fine weather, I seldom have my jacket on. I leave it lying all over the place. Someone must have stuffed the money into my top pocket without me noticing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A practical joke. A fit up? Who knows? Who can say it’s not true? Not Inspector Dougie Fleming. It fits in exactly with what I told him. And why would a defence agent, who always advises his clients to say nothing, make a reply himself unless it was the truth?’

  ‘You think that will work?’

  ‘Why not? Brechin’s on holiday so we’ll end up with Dalrymple or a floater.’

  Andy still looked troubled.

  ‘You see a problem with that defence?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes – it’s not the truth.’

  Andy, like a lot of young defence lawyers, had a certain fascination with the truth

  ‘And what about the bigger picture?’

  ‘What about it?’ He didn’t seem any less troubled.

  ‘Well, do you think I’m innocent of the charge against me?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So the truth is I’m not guilty?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Then if I’m found not guilty does it really matter what route I take to the truth?’

  ‘Yes. The money came from Jake Turpie. You know that. You can’t lie about it.’

  ‘So far as I know the money came from you.’

  ‘But I can give evidence and explain how I got it.’

  I appreciated Andy’s willingness to help but I couldn’t lead a defence that involved the impeachment of Jake. ‘He’s my client, Andy. He owns this place. There’s a blatant conflict of interest.’

  ‘So you’re going to lie? That makes you no better than Inspector Fleming.’

  ‘You’d really rather I told the court that you took a bung from Jake Turpie and it turned out to be a fake?

  ‘What would happen if you did?’

  ‘You might end up being charged too. Jake would definitely have his premises raided by the cops and feel obliged to exact some kind of retribution.’

  ‘On me?’

  ‘Not immediately. For starters I assume he’d go straight to the top.’

  ‘Robbie… I want you to do what’s best.’ Dragging his feet, my assistant walked to the door. I opened it for him to find Grace-Mary bent over, picking up some letters that must have fallen from her filing basket. Andy returned to reception where Zoë was slaving over a hot scanner, sending my sanction request and attachments down the line to SLAB. I followed him through carrying the drugs summons.

  ‘By the way,’ I said. ‘Your client - the junkie. Is he pleading?’

  ‘What do you take me for?’

  With the prisons bursting at the seams no-one these days was in danger of getting banged-up over a couple of wraps of smack, and if there was no prospect of jail there was no legal aid for a guilty plea.

  ‘Got a defence?’

  ‘Illegal search - no reasonable suspicion.’

  A defence meant a trial, and a trial usually meant legal aid. His concerns with the truth aside, the boy was definitely learning. He sat down at his desk, took an apple from the drawer and bit into it. Then he opened his jacket to reveal the Parker pen clipped into his inside pocket.

  ‘Junkie pen,’ he said to Zoë and they both laughed.

  ‘All the same,’ Grace-May said, ‘I hope you washed your hands before touching that apple.’

  CHAPTER 47

  The road from Aizenay to Coex ran through the heart of the Vendée, in the Pays de Loire, and was how all roads should be: wide, quiet and completely straight for as far as the eye could see.

  Personally, I didn’t think the scenery compared with the Road to the Isles, but Zoë was happy and if she was happy I was happy. I would have been even happier were we cruising along in something more sporty than the clunky far-eastern motor I’d hired at the
airport, just as I’d have preferred to travel British Airways to Nantes rather than bucket-line to Beauvais or Beauvais-Paris as it was described on the web-site; which was like calling Edinburgh airport: Dundee-Edinburgh, because we’d landed seventy kilometres north of the French capital. Still, needs must when the Scottish Legal Aid Board drives. My sanction request for additional expenditure, backed-up though it was by counsel’s opinion, had received short shrift and instead of funds to cover a round trip with an overnight stay I’d been allowed an extra two hundred pounds on the basis that I could instruct an English-speaking French advocat to do the interviewing of Fergus Galbraith.

  I’d liked to have argued the point with SLAB but there’d been no time to become entrenched in a correspondence war with that bunch of ignorant, penny-pinching tossers, not with Isla due in court in a few days’ time. I was also unsure how to go about explaining to some French brief that I wanted them to trap Fergus Galbraith into saying something inadvisable that I might later be able to twist into the semblance of a reasonable doubt on behalf of his sister-in-law. It would just be my luck to instruct a Frenchman with morals. Not only that but, from what little experience I had of foreign lawyers and their fees, it was unlikely they’d be overly keen to do anything on the promise of a measly two-hundred of my Scottish pounds. So, I’d used the additional funds and booked flights for one hundred pounds return and hired the lowest form of vehicular life for another fifty.

  ‘Grace-Mary told me about you and Malky,’ Zoë said when there was a lull in the conversation and we’d heard all her James Blunt CD’s. ‘About how he stole your girlfriend. The one that died in the crash,’ she added, as though there might have been others. Zoë put her hand on the back of my neck and gently massaged. ‘I don’t know how you can even bear to talk to him.’

  ‘We’re brothers,’ I said, and hoped she’d leave it at that and continue the neck-rubbing.

  ‘How do you feel about it, though? Did you love her? Grace-Mary said that she moved in with you, then she went off with him and now she’s dead.’

  It was an accurate enough summary. I rolled my head from side to side to ease my stiff neck. We’d hammered down the toll roads and were making good time. Having left Prestwick at five in the morning, even with the clocks being an hour ahead, it was only mid-afternoon when I slowed for a roundabout on the outskirts of St Gilles Croix De Vie, a seaside town on the banks of the River Vie. In the middle of the roundabout a banner proclaimed un Fête de Sardine. I was more interested in the signpost that told me the town of Challans was ten kilometres away and which according to the map meant I was nearing my much anticipated rendezvous with Fergus Galbraith.

  ‘Not long now,’ I said.

  ‘But how do you feel?’ Zoë asked, not allowing herself to be side-tracked. ‘I haven’t noticed you being too sad about it. Don’t you miss her?’

  I didn’t answer. When I thought about Cathleen now, the only feelings I had were guilty ones. When she had left me for Malky I’d been devastated. Bad enough being given the heave-ho, but ditched in favour of my brother? Now that she was dead - I felt nothing. She’d been the woman I’d intended to spend my life with. Why didn’t I care more?

  ‘You never talk about her. In the office, I mean, and you don’t seem too sad. You’re not… because of what she did… you’re not glad she’s dead – are you?’

  ‘No, Zoë, I’m not glad she’s dead and I don’t talk about it because I don’t want to talk about it.’

  A huffy look crossed her pretty face. The massaging stopped. She removed her hand from my neck and stared out of the window.

  At the next roundabout I took the first exit onto yet another arrow-straight road for five or six kilometres towards Challans before hanging a left down a country lane sign-posted: Sallertaine.

  According to the on-line encyclopaedia, the town of Sallertaine had once been the centre of the European salt industry. These days its commerce was tourism-based, catering to those who came for the many craft shops that lined its narrow boulevard or to visit the Church of St Leonard, built in 1172, once sanctuary for Thomas Beckett after his fall-out with Henry II Plantagenet, then King of England as well as Normandy and much of Western France.

  From being a highly-populated industrial town in the middle-ages, Sallertaine had shrunk over the centuries to little more than a village, home to scarcely two thousand inhabitants. Certainly, there seemed few enough of them around that afternoon as I drove down a dusty main street, past arts and crafts workshops, expecting at any moment to spy a tall, red-headed Scotsman come striding through the heat haze to meet me.

  Where to start? I didn’t have a house number only a name, ‘Chardon’ on the Rue de Verdun. I parked in the centre of town next to a war memorial not far from the famous old Church. As I alighted and stretched my weary bones I ran an eye down the list of local soldiers of France who had fallen during the World Wars: presumably the ones who hadn’t run away or collaborated with the Nazis. Zoë, who had emerged from her brief huff, noticed that the name Tessier featured three times on the bronze plaque affixed to the memorial stone and that the same name was above the boulangerie on the other side of the street. If the family had been around since 1914, she suggested, it would be a good place to enquire as to the recent arrival in town of a strange Scotsman.

  The 21st Century Monsieur Tessier was a short, squat middle-aged man with a smiley face and an abundance of curly, implausibly-dark hair poking out from beneath a little white paper hat. When we entered the shop, making the little bell above the door tinkle, he was busy stacking freshly-baked baguettes in rows of wicker baskets, ably assisted in his task by two girls who may have been his daughters each wearing similar paper hats and blue and white striped aprons.

  After a faltering attempt to communicate with the baker in French, he pointed to a sign on the counter top announcing: English spoken here, and which, to be fair, was probably correct had I been ordering half a dozen croissants and not trying to track down an evasive witness. Though I repeated the address several times I was getting nowhere and, after a few confusing minutes during which I was offered a selection of pastries including an extremely tasty looking tarte citron, Zoë took over and let fly in schoolgirl French which, I had to admit, was a lot better than my schoolboy variety.

  ‘Je cherche pour un homme.’

  ‘Alors,’ said Monsieur Tessier, as though all had at last been made clear, and removing his hat with both hands he clutched it to his breast, much to the amusement of his young female helpers. ‘A votre service,’ he said, bowing, ‘madame.’

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ Zoë said, to gales of laughter from the girls behind the counter. ‘Un homme particulaire - d’Ecossais,’ she battered on regardless. ‘Ma copain.’

  ‘Ah, Ecosse,’ the baker said, replacing hat on curly head and nodding furiously. ‘Glasgow, non?’

  We both returned his nods rather than attempt any more French. He came out from behind the counter, took us to the door and pointed to a shop further down the street where in the shade of a little red awning, his wooden chair resting on its two back legs and leaning against the front of the building, sat a man arms crossed, straw hat over his eyes, dozing.

  The baker paddled an imaginary canoe. ‘Le Voyage du Sel.’

  ‘The journey of salt,’ Zoë translated for my benefit.

  We thanked the baker for his help and made our way down the street munching a couple of pain au raisin, pretending to be tourists with me thinking how best to play my meeting with Isla’s paramour.

  My pastry was almost scoffed by the time we neared the man sleeping in the chair. Sensing our approach he lifted his hat sleepily from his head, dragged a forearm across his brow and replaced it. That brief glance was enough to confirm that this man was not Fergus Galbraith. He was too old, late forties early fifties I reckoned, and his short, wiry hair was salt and pepper. I understood from my conversations with Isla that Fergus, like his brother, was a redhead and no ginger nut took a tan like the man in the ch
air whose leathery skin was as brown as a mahogany sideboard.

  ‘Bonjour,’ Zoë said. Her language skills another feasible excuse for bringing her along with me.

  The man pushed back his hat. ‘How’s it going?’ he replied in a broad Scots.

  ‘You’re Scottish.’

  ‘So are you,’ he said, deadpan, and then laughed. ‘You here to hire a canoe?’

  ‘No,’ Zoë said, ‘ we’re looking for someone. A man—’

  ‘Then look no further.’ He stood up, took off his straw hat, hung it on the back of his chair, came over and put an arm around my receptionist’s shoulder.

  Maybe it was something they put in the water.

  ‘A particular man,’ I said, feeling the need to regain the initiative.

  He took his arm away, feigning sudden disinterest. ‘Rules me out,’ he said. ‘I’m not very particular at all. However, if you two fancy a tour of the salt marshes, my name’s Eddie and I’d be happy to oblige.’

  Zoë looked enthusiastic. I had to admit there were a lot worse ways to spend a sunny afternoon than a leisurely canoe trip with my pretty receptionist and wise-cracking Eddie as our guide, but there was work to do.

  ‘We’re looking for someone. Fergus Galbraith. I think he has a place in the village making jewellery. Charm bracelets. That sort of thing.’

  Eddie scratched his head. Galbraith? Nope, never heard of him. There was something about the way he didn’t look me in the eye when he spoke and his sudden need to roll himself a smoke that made me think he wasn’t being entirely honest.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he asked, sticking a rollie in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘It’s a free country,’ I said.

  ‘Sure is,’ Eddie said. He winked at Zoë, lit his cigarette and blew twin jets of smoke down his nostrils. ‘A canoe trip on the salt marshes - the offer’s still open.’

  I pretended to think about it while I planned my next move.

  ‘Eddie,’ I said, eventually, ‘why are you covering for him?’

  He picked a piece of loose tobacco from the tip of his tongue unable to look me in the eye. ‘What do you mean?’