Present Tense

by William McIntyre

  ‘When are you getting the doll?’ he asked.

  The old man had done nothing but harp on about that doll for weeks and how I was spoiling Christmas for everyone. Now, on Christmas Eve, despite the fact that his son was a media sensation, he still couldn’t come to terms with the fact that I’d failed as a father.

  ‘The doll’s not happening, Dad.’

  ‘You know the wean will be devastated.’

  ‘She’s getting plenty of other toys.’

  ‘Not the one she wants.’

  ‘Tina’s tough.’

  ‘What Tina is, is a wee girl who lost her mum less than a year ago and now this.’

  There was no point arguing with him, but I did. ‘And if she can come to terms with her mum dying of cancer, she’ll get over not having a doll that will be old-hat come the next TV fad.’

  The phone saved me from any comeback. I went through to the hall to answer it, speaking softly so as not to waken Tina. Surprisingly, it was the Bulldog again. ‘Mr Munro... I just wanted to say that when your girlfriend slapped me—’

  ‘My colleague.’

  ‘Whatever, when she hit me, the DI was right, I did deserve it.’ It seemed the Yuletide spirit had fallen upon everyone. ‘I don’t like double-dealing shysters — no offence — but I shouldn’t have brought up the safety of your daughter. I’ve got a daughter. For what it’s worth, she wanted a Pyxie Girl too and I couldn’t get her one either.’

  ‘Then you’re in for as hard a time as I am tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘You see, I have a plan B.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to admit it to the Bulldog, but Plan B was brilliant. Not that Keith Howie quite shared my enthusiasm for it when I phoned his house around half past ten. He was even less enthusiastic when asked to go down and open his shop. I was waiting for him.

  ‘This really isn’t good enough.’ Howie selected one from a bunch of keys and unlocked the front door. The only reason he’d come out was because his wife had answered the phone and I’d told her how important it was to my daughter. Joanna was right, Mrs Howie was lovely. I could understand why she’d been more concerned for the accused’s wife than the accused himself during the recent High Court trial. ‘My children are in bed, and if I hadn’t been helping Liz prepare the vegetables for tomorrow, I would be too. I can’t abide being taken advantage of.’

  I could have reminded him that, but for yours truly, he’d be having plum-duff courtesy of the Queen the next day, but instead made no comment. Unlike Howie I was good at that. I didn’t want an argument. I just wanted what I’d come for. A Pyxie Girl outfit. Why bother with the action figure when you could dress up and look just like your hero? Zooming about in a mask and cape would appeal to Tina’s imagination; much better than a stupid doll, and it was all thanks to Joanna. That slap across the Bulldog’s chops had brought him to his senses and his belated apology had saved Christmas Day.

  Once inside, Howie disappeared through the back of the shop, returning shortly with some large square plastic packages, each with a picture of a happy child dressed as Pyxie Girl on the front. He threw them down on the counter between us. ‘That’ll be twenty-nine ninety-nine,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘Let’s call it thirty. I’m not opening the till, and after all us numpties have to make a living too.’

  I’d wondered when he’d bring that up.

  ‘I thought you might see this as, if not a Christmas present, as a sort of thank you,’ I said.

  Howie took a step back in fake astonishment. ‘I’ve to be thankful have I? For being found innocent of a crime I didn’t commit? I’m afraid being thankful didn’t stop somebody putting my kitchen window in with a half-brick last night. You know, I’ve been thinking. If you or Miss Jordan had asked me about my vasectomy at the start, I needn’t have been put through the hell of a High Court trial —- twice!’

  ‘And I’ve been thinking too,’ I said, digging into my jeans pocket, bringing out some cash and floating three tenners down on to the counter, ‘that if you don’t know why your tubes were cut, that’s nobody’s fault but your own. Maybe you should have listened more carefully to your biology teacher.’

  ‘Or maybe I should have got myself a better lawyer.’

  Fists clenched, I planted my knuckles and leaned across the counter. ‘Have you a complaint to make about the way Miss Jordan managed your case? Because if you have, I’m sure I could deal with it now.’

  Howie snatched the money and backed away. ‘Just get out.’

  I picked up one of the packages and clamped it to my chest. With my daughter’s present problem sorted, it was hard not to feel good, even if Howie was doing his Scrooge-like best to put a damper on things. I walked to the door. Sometimes I wondered why I bothered. Clients, mad, bad or sad, it was the ungrateful ones that annoyed me most. Still, who cared? I reached for the handle, pulled open the door and looked out at a chilly night, thinking of a warm Christmas morning to come.

  60

  Here it was at last. Christmas morning. Peace on Earth and good will toward men.

  ‘You complete idiot!’

  Perhaps not all men.

  ‘Age ten to twelve?’ My Dad hurled the plastic package at me. ‘Some great idea. You can’t give Tina that, it will drown the lassie.’

  How was I to know Pyxie Girl suits came in small, medium and large sizes? I’d just picked up the nearest. It hadn’t been until I was back home and doing a spot of late-night present wrapping that I’d made the discovery. There’d been no point trying to contact Howie for an exchange. On the burnt-boats scale we were talking Pearl Harbour.

  Tina trotted through to my bedroom while my dad was holding forth on my intellectual shortcomings, something of a specialist topic for him, and I hurriedly threw the Pyxie Girl costume under the bed.

  ‘When’s Uncle Malky coming, Dad?’ she asked. Christmas morning, half-eleven. Tina had been up for hours. She’d opened her presents, played with her toys, tried on her new clothes and eaten her body weight in chocolate. Now she was wondering when her guest would be arriving. Thankfully, in all the excitement, the absence of Pyxie Girl the action figure had seemingly gone unnoticed. Until now. ‘Do you think Santa will have given Uncle Malky my Pyxie Girl doll to bring with him?’

  Glowering, my dad bumped me out of the way as he left the room. I picked Tina up and took her to the window. ‘I don’t think so, pet.’ Life sucked. If anyone should know that it was Tina, with no mum and only a dad who couldn’t even get her what she wanted for Christmas. At least I had someone to blame. ‘I think Santa’s made a mistake. He’s like Gramps. He’s getting on a bit and his memory is not that good. But he’s brought you lots of other nice things, hasn’t he? When he gets back to work in the New Year I’ll have Gramps phone and ask him to bring you a brand new Lady Pyxie doll. How’s that?’

  Not good enough by the look on her wee face. The heat was taken off momentarily when Malky arrived bearing gifts. My daughter ripped through them like a tornado in a Tennessee trailer camp, and only I heard the knock at the door. It was Joanna, bottle of champagne in one hand, carrier bag in the other.

  ‘Well, you did offer,’ she said.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Don’t look so worried. I’ve brought my own lunch.’ She held up the plastic bag. ‘Chestnut, spinach and blue cheese en croute. Just slam it in the oven for twenty minutes and you carnivores can get stuck into the dead bird. Maybe after lunch you and I can talk a few things over.’

  By a few things I took it she meant either business or what had happened on Thursday night. I’d been doing a lot of thinking. More about Thursday night than business.

  ‘I’ve got some good news on the business front,’ I said, ‘but it will keep until the New Year.’

  Joanna smiled. ‘Great. Then there’ll be more time to talk about us.’

  Us. Why was she so keen to talk about us? Was there an us? Did she want there to be an us? Why would she? The woman needed to speak with my bro
ther and learn all about League Divisions and our relative standings.

  I helped Joanna off with her coat. She was wearing the same little black number she’d had on at the Munro & Co. Christmas lunch. Talk about an action figure! She walked past me down the hall. As she reached for the handle on the living room door I had an idea. I caught her arm and ushered her further down to my bedroom. ‘Would you mind waiting in here for a couple minutes?’ I said.

  ‘In your bedroom?’

  ‘It’s… a surprise. I’ll explain in a moment.’ I pushed her in and closed the door.

  ‘You’ve already ruined the wean’s Christmas, don’t make it any worse by falling out with Joanna,’ my dad said, after I’d taken the Munro boys through to the kitchen for a conference.

  I wasn’t to be put off. ‘No, it’s perfect. Tina wants Pyxie Girl—’

  ‘It’s the doll she wants,’ my dad said.

  I clenched my teeth. ‘I know. But we haven’t managed to get her one.’

  ‘You haven’t,’ he growled back at me.

  ‘And why’s that? It’s because nobody can get one, and the only reason Tina is having difficulty understanding that is because someone…’ I hoped my stare left my dad in no doubt who that someone was, ‘said that he had Santa on speed-dial.’

  My dad rejected any criticism with a snort that parted his moustache.

  ‘As I was saying, Tina wants Pixie Girl, Joanna would do anything for Tina and—’

  ‘Even if that was true, do you think that by getting her to squeeze into a child’s play costume—’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s the ideal combination. Tina loves Joanna even more than Pyxie Girl, and she’s got a vivid imagination.’

  ‘You’ll not need an imagination if you have a full-grown woman squeeze into that thing!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing. It’ll be far too tight.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ Malky said, intervening, an oasis of calm in the storm of words between his father and brother. ‘Let the man speak, Dad.’ He turned to me. ‘Robbie, this costume, just how tight are we talking?’

  ‘It will be pretty tight,’ I admitted, ‘but it’s Lycra, it’s stretchy.’

  ‘There you are then,’ Malky said, with an air of finality, surprisingly on board with the whole suggestion.

  So, motion carried by a majority, I left them to keep Tina amused while I had the somewhat daunting task of trying to persuade Joanna into saving Christmas. She was waiting patiently in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking through the presents I’d opened earlier. Socks and toiletries featured prominently. She held up one of a number of deodorant sets.

  ‘Do you ever think people are trying to tell you something?’ she asked.

  ‘That I smell and have holes in my socks? Yes, sometimes.’

  I sat down beside her.

  ‘Okay, so what’s the big surprise?’

  ‘Joanna, there’s something I have to ask you.’

  She smiled and gave me a shove. ‘Robbie, I know I said I wanted to talk about us and the future, but don’t you think we should get Christmas dinner out of the way first?’

  ‘I’m not talking about the future. I’m talking about this time, this place, pro loco et tempore.’ I wasn’t sure if Latin would assist. It often did when speaking with fellow lawyers. ‘Joanna, when I ask you this I don’t want you to answer, not straight away. At least hear me out and think it over carefully before you say no.’

  She seemed interested and why shouldn’t she? Though Sheriff Albert Brechin had once described me as a man whose legal submissions were unrestrained by relevancy, this request was well reasoned, logical and directed at someone who was actually prepared to listen. Joanna was a good sport, but if things did become tricky, and my hand forced, there was an ace up my sleeve. If it came down to it, I’d remind her of her words to me shortly before the retrial of HMA –v- Howie, ‘If you can find a way to have Keith Howie acquitted, I’ll find you a Pyxie Girl for Christmas.’ Well, I had found a way. Now it was time for her to keep her end of the bargain.

  ‘You like Tina, don’t you?’ I said.

  Joanna frowned, puzzled. ‘Yes…’

  I laughed lightly. ‘In fact, you, me and Tina, we’re a bit of a team.’ I gave her a friendly tap on the shoulder with my fist.

  She gave me a less friendly tap on my shoulder with hers.

  ‘Then I want to ask if you’d do something to keep that team bond strong.’

  ‘Would you hurry up and ask?’

  ‘It’s Christmas—’

  ‘I’d noticed.’

  ‘And at Christmas it’s easy to become overly sentimental, too full of Christmas spirit, I know that, we all know that, but it’s also the time to think of others, good will toward men, and all women and especially children, and I was wondering—’

  ‘Robbie, really, what are you going on about?’

  ‘Okay, okay. Here’s the thing.’ I took her hands in mine. ‘This will seem slightly crazy to you, embarrassing even, but—’

  ‘Robbie…’ Joanna warned.

  I thought it was best just to show her. I slid off the bed and dropped onto one knee, reaching a hand under the bed to retrieve the Pyxie Girl costume.

  In hindsight it was the dropping to one knee that probably caused the confusion.

  Head bowed, I fumbled around for a second or two until I found the package. I looked up. Why were there tears in her eyes? ‘Joanna, would you...’ The words put on this costume and pretend to be Pyxie Girl? never made it out of my lips. It was difficult to talk when someone was kissing you. I found it even more difficult when that person was Joanna because I couldn’t help kissing her back.

  We stood up together. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is crazy, but I will marry you.’ Tears streamed down her face. She wiped at them with the back of a hand, smudging mascara. She was searching for a tissue when she noticed the package at my side. ‘What’s that?’

  I looked down at the package and swallowed hard. ‘This? This is... a present for you to give to Tina.’

  ‘Robbie, I put my gift for Tina under your Christmas tree last week.’ She took the package from me. ‘Age ten to twelve? It’s going to be way too big for her.’

  They say that at the time of death a person’s past life flashes before their eyes. I hesitated for a moment, only for a moment, and in that moment I saw, not the past, but a life still to come. ‘Maybe we can have it taken in. Can you sew?’

  ‘Not even slightly.’

  ‘Then she’ll just have to grow into it,’ I said, and, putting an arm around my fiancée, led her out of the door, from the present tense towards a bright, if uncertain, future.

  Authors Note

  As readers of the earlier stories in the Best Defence Series will have heard me mention before, many of the characters, cases and incidents are based, often very loosely, on my time as a criminal defence lawyer.

  While I have been involved in a number of alleged conspiracy theories over the years, generally the workings of certain clients’ feverish imaginations, I have to admit none has involved a helicopter, nor indeed a potential spaceport. On the other hand, the trial of Keith Howie is almost identical to a case in which I was involved back in the late Eighties, when I was a good bit younger than Robbie Munro.

  My client, a middle-aged man, was charged with the rape of his teenage neighbour, whom he had known since birth and who referred to him as ‘uncle’. When the girl’s parents were away one weekend, she asked to stay with my client and his wife rather than alone in her own home. My client’s only child, a son, was grown up and away so there was a spare bedroom. On the Saturday night, the girl went out for the evening and arrived at my client’s house around midnight, slightly the worse for wear. She thereafter went to bed, and about six the next the morning, woke screaming and highly distressed claiming to have been raped in the night. She tried to leave the house only to find the door locked. The key to the door was hidden on a window ledge under a vase and
my client had to let her out.

  In due course, my client was interviewed by the police and, despite my best efforts to have him make no comment, insisted on providing a lengthy statement to the police in which he denied having gone near the girl, thus ruling out any possible defence of consent.

  Although I never called this particular client ‘a numpty’, there have been times when I have been less than diplomatic towards clients who feel they have to tell the police their side of things. It’s not that I don’t understand the urge to do so, but in all my years of sitting in on police interviews I have never heard one end up with a policeman telling a suspect, ‘Well, thank you for clearing that up. You are free to go.’

  Unlike in the ‘Howie’ case, the evidence of distress, which corroborated the girl’s own allegation of having been attacked, was not provided by my client’s wife, but spoken to by someone who met the girl shortly after she had left the house that morning; however, as with the ‘Howie’ case, corroboration of penetration hinged on the forensic report, and it was anxiously awaited, my client being certain it would vindicate him.

  Back in 1988 or 1989, DNA was forensically in its infancy, and, although it had been used in some extremely high profile and serious cases in England, was not widely available, as I recall, in Scotland. Instead, the Crown forensic experts relied on blood grouping, not the standard A, B, O system, but a much more precise version, which in my client’s case disclosed, firstly the presence of sperm (thus corroborating sexual intercourse) and, secondly, that blood-group-wise the sperm matched my client’s, a group that was shared by only 9% of the population. It wasn’t the billion-to-one odds that regularly feature in DNA reports today, but a nice adminicle of evidence nonetheless. Not that DNA is the be all and end all. Even today, there are many cases where the presence of sperm can be identified, but DNA cannot be extracted, often due to the passage of time.

  As defences go, my client’s it wasn’t me, honest, line wasn’t the best, but it was all we had. The Crown was in a much stronger position. There was a clear sufficiency of evidence enhanced by that one major factor upon which many a Crown case hangs: why would the young woman lie about such a thing?