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‘What are you up to today?’ he asked.
I hesitated to answer in case he was going to ask me out.
‘Don’t worry – you’re safe. I’m just going to bide my time and catch you when you’re lonely – again.’
‘Was I that pathetic?’
I didn’t have to turn to know that Deans was nodding his head.
‘Actually, I do have plans. I’m supposed to be seeing my grandad and my moth— and Kailash – they tell me they’re worried about me, so I need to go and calm them down.’
‘They’re not the only ones bothered,’ he commented.
I looked at him sharply. Insulting me, glorying in finally getting me into bed, I could take – but care and concern?
‘Not me.’ He looked as aghast as I felt. ‘It’s the hairy-arsed sheep-shagger you hang around with who’s all het up.’
‘Glasgow Joe?’
‘Aye, the one and only.’
‘Jack – you’re the only one I know who could consider Glasgow the heart of sheep-shagging land. It fits in so well with your impeccable journalistic credentials. Never let facts get in the way of a good insult.’
My heart started racing at the thought of how Joe would react if he knew what we’d done.
‘Whatever you want to call him, he’s the one who’s concerned.’ I sighed. One problem after another. Right now, there was one particular issue that I had to bring up with Jack.
‘Jack? Do me a favour? Don’t mention last night to Joe.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t – under usual circumstances it would be the talk of the steamie, but …’
‘But you’re rather attached to your bollocks?’
‘No, it’s not that – actually, Brodie, you won’t understand this, but I like Joe and I wouldn’t want to hurt him.’
‘Don’t give me that crap – if you really felt like that you wouldn’t have dragged me back here last night,’ I countered.
‘As I recall, Miss McLennan, it was you doing the dragging.’ He paused for effect.
Jack moved towards me at the kitchen table – I expected him to kiss me or try to do the dragging to bed this time. I don’t really know whether I felt relieved or disappointed when he only reached down for his battered briefcase which he threw on the table.
‘Like I said, Kailash and old man MacGregor aren’t the only ones who are concerned,’ he said, handing me some sheets of paper. ‘Take a look at this.’
‘You sad git, Jack. I didn’t know you were into tracing family trees. It’s the new train-spotting for blokes your age, isn’t it?’
‘No – blokes “my age” have got other things to do with their time.’ He managed to say this whilst looking lecherously at me – I was touched: I looked a right state but he was still so desperate he wasn’t kicking me out.
‘It’s your family I’m digging at, Brodie, not mine. Now stop being so vain and put your specs on to look at it properly. Don’t worry about me seeing you less than perfect – I’ve seen it all now, even …’
‘I’m putting them on,’ I said loudly, cutting him off mid-sentence.
I looked at what was in front of me.
My line.
My blood.
The blood that I didn’t even know I had running through my veins until just about this time last year. At the bottom of the page, I saw my own name and that of my parents. If you could really call them that – a paedophile and a whore. A match made in heaven. My blood parents.
Alastair MacGregor ———Kailash Coutts
|
Brodie McLennan (bastard)
The line ended with me.
Even on the sheet of paper I looked lonely.
‘Cheers, Jack, I’m moved. It makes me feel all warm inside. How nice of you to remind me what I came from.’
I threw the papers down on the table.
‘Don’t get bloody touchy with me, Brodie. Those bits of paper simply state facts. You always knew your dad wasn’t around, you always knew you were a bastard – you just have to understand that now you are a high-class bastard.’
He poked his fingers at names above my own.
‘All high-court judges. All above the law. They’re protected, Brodie. To a man.’
‘My father wasn’t safe, though, was he?’
I still felt odd calling the man who had raped Kailash by that title. And poor dead Mary McLennan, cold in the ground with only me to remember that she was the woman I considered my real mother. She’d taken me on with more love than most people receive in a lifetime. Running through it all in my head made me think I was reading the TV listings guide for a particularly tempting episode of The Jerry Springer Show. There wasn’t much to laugh at when it was my own life, though. Jack’s words dragged me away from my reflections.
‘Alastair MacGregor was protected, Brodie. He was protected by the law – not the law that you and I live by, but the law that has protected men like him and their interests for centuries. That’s why Kailash had to kill him. He had gotten away with it for decades. All those girls, all those boys, with no families to worry about them, being taken out of the care homes and sent to be abused by good, upstanding legal men like your father? Fucking protected to the hilt, the lot of them. I’d rather there were a thousand Kailashes than one of him. She may not be the usual type of mother, but she knows right from wrong – and she fights for what’s hers.’
I imagined my mother in her work guise as Scotland’s most notorious dominatrix, running her girls across the country, and doing it all with beauty and style. I wasn’t much closer to understanding her than I had been a year ago when I represented her – not knowing then that our connection was so much more than lawyer and client – but I did realise that she loved me – in her own way.
‘You’re not your father, Brodie. Just like he wasn’t his. All the stuff you learned last year might make your head spin, but it’s true – it’s your truth, the truth of who you are. It’s not every day your mother asks you to defend her for killing your father. But there are decent people in your blood, Brodie – your grandfather is a good man. Like Kailash, he loves you and knows that his only son was an evil bastard. What more evidence do you need? He saved Kailash, he stands by her now – and they both want one thing: they want you to be careful.
‘Yes, you have enemies. You’ve made a lot in the last year – but they’ll back off if you decide to toe the line. You have to listen to the old man, Brodie.’
‘Has Grandad been speaking to you?’ I said accusingly.
‘Maybe …’
‘Family trees, now cosy chats with my grandad? I’ll just nip out and get you some slippers and a pipe. The years are taking their toll.’
‘I’m not daft, Brodie – even if I wasn’t … keen on you,’ he raised his eyebrows at me as he found the right word, ‘I’m a journo, I’d have to be stupid to ignore everything in my line of work. Look at this …’
Jack pulled his laptop across from the table at the side of him and fired it up. My heart sank as I saw that the Journal of the Law Society was in his favourites list. He clicked on the icon and opened up an article I recognised only too well. The words in the piece were engraved on my mind, because – rightly or wrongly – I had felt they all applied to me. Complaints about falling standards were pretty predictable from the old guard who moaned every century or so when they were nudged out of their complacency by the recognition that there were others out there who wanted to drag law into this millennium. But this article was far more strident than usual. The author had chosen to remain anonymous, which was very rare in itself. They must be pretty well in with those at the top of the tree if they were being allowed to hide. Whoever was behind it – and I had my suspicions of who it might be – was on their high horse about the fact that they believed solicitors were looking on what they did as a business, not a profession. They rattled off a few sound bites about whether they were lawyers or ambulance chasers, which had got a few snippets of coverage from the papers. However, the most interesting – or irritating – point for me, was the remark about ‘rumbles’ from last month’s meeting of the Edinburgh Bar Association, where, allegedly, there had been talk about how one firm in particular was going to be reported to the Law Society for blatant touting.
‘Come on, Brodie, you know all about this – you’re one of the lawyers they’re particularly worked up about. You’re too successful – they prefer mediocrity to brilliance.’
I stared at him long enough for him to feel uncomfortable.
‘And gorgeousness too – obviously, gorgeousness too.’
‘Yeah, that’s it, Jack. They’re terrified of my brain and my thighs. In the real world, I think you’ll find it’s all down to what it’s always been about with lawyers – money and power.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘but ask yourself this – just how many clients can one firm represent without there being a conflict of interests?’
‘No idea, Jack, but I guess I’ll find out pretty soon.’
‘Alex Cattanach is keeping an eye on you. You don’t want head-honcho accountants on your tail at the best of times – you certainly don’t when they are telling everyone in town that they have enough to take you down. I’m usually all for smart-arses, Brodie, but you can’t keep annoying the Bar Association or they’ll take you out. They might be wankers … but they’re not stupid wankers. You can’t watch your back the whole time.’
‘You watch it for me then, Jack,’ I threw back at him and wiggled my arse right out his door, vowing never to return.
Not even I believed it.
Chapter Two (#u16ed8790-2977-5cfd-997e-9d1574345488)
‘I don’t know how you’ve managed it, but you’ve achieved in months what no man has done for the past two hundred years – you’ve united the Bar. Unfortunately, it’s against you.’
Lord MacGregor, my newly found grandad, was sputtering his words out. I was still coming to terms with things. Until recently, I had thought of another woman as mother, another man as father – albeit an absent one – and didn’t think I had a grandad to call my own. It was a lot to take in – on top of that came the spectacle of the man who was universally recognised as one of the greatest legal minds to ever come out of Scotland lying half-naked on a table in front of me. Behind him, the masseur gave a deep-tissue massage to help loosen the old man’s blue-veined limbs, which were becoming knotted with arthritis. I didn’t want to imagine the conversations Malcolm, my mother’s gay personal dresser/masseur friend, could be having with the pillar of the legal community when I wasn’t there. What could they possibly have in common? Apart from a genuine admiration of Kailash Coutts, I couldn’t come up with anything.
I shook myself out of my reverie.
‘Have you finished yet?’
‘You’ll know exactly when I’ve finished with you, young lady.’
This was something else I was having to get used to. To him, I wasn’t kicking thirty now, nor did I have a career of my own – I was just the wee lassie who needed to be kept in line.
It irked and delighted me at the same time. His face was turning puce, whether from temper or the pain of the massage, I couldn’t tell.
‘Grandad, I was speaking to Malcolm.’ It still felt weird that, a year ago, I had virtually no family to speak of, and now, here I was calling one of the most important and influential men in Scotland ‘grandad’.
‘Five minutes, Brodie. I told Lord MacGregor that if he cancelled this appointment, I couldn’t fit him in for another ten days. I’m very busy with colonics these days, you know.’
‘If you’d arrived when you were supposed to, Brodie,’ started my grandad again, ‘I’d have met you with my breeks on. But that’s the state of Edinburgh today – I can’t get help with my arthritis for the citizens of Edinburgh wanting the shit washed out of them. More money than sense. In my day we went to the toilet ourselves.’
Malcolm rolled his eyes dramatically. As usual, he was immaculately turned out in purple and green tartan trews. His black patent dress brogues twinkled beneath the massage table as he pushed and pummelled my grandad. The scent of warm lavender oil filled the air. Pig farmers have been known to use that essential oil to stop sows eating their young – but it wasn’t working on my grandad and his savaging continued.
‘Kailash? Kailash? Where are you, girl?’
Lord MacGregor looked like an old tortoise without a shell as he craned his neck upwards to shout for my birth mother.
Malcolm pushed his client’s head down onto the table. Lord or not, Malcolm would allow no one to be harsh with Kailash.
‘She’s making some tea. It’s no good getting yourself all hot and bothered – you only make your blood pressure go sky-high.’
Malcolm was from Inverness via San Francisco. His curious lilt soothed the belligerent old man in front of him; either that or it was the vision of loveliness that kicked open the door carrying a butler’s tray of steaming cups.
Kailash floated in, dressed in soft white linen. Her black hair rippled around her shoulders. It was obviously freshly washed, whereas mine felt itchy and I fought the urge to scratch the crown of my head until her back was turned. To make things worse, the smell of Malcolm’s unguents and potions were bringing on my hangover again. Seriously dehydrated, I almost snatched the mug of steaming tea from Kailash’s beautifully French-manicured hands. Rats were chewing at the base of my skull and I gingerly reached out to find a seat.
‘Are you still on that diet?’ Kailash queried.
‘I didn’t know I was on one,’ I answered.
‘I could have sworn last time we spoke you mentioned something.’
I knew what she was doing. Her underhand tactics weren’t going to work on me, but maybe I could lay off the booze for a couple of days. Or months. In truth, I was quite impressed that she had managed to cotton on so quickly to that mother’s way of hiding insults behind innocent comments. I bit my bottom lip.
‘Show it to her, Kailash,’ interrupted my grandad. ‘I don’t think she’s seen it.’
Kailash reached down to a chair and picked up today’s paper. They had all paused their various activities to look at me. I sensed that it was going to be news best taken standing so I feigned disinterest and moved over to stare out of the window.
Kailash’s voice was slow and warm. I tried to listen with half an ear, sure that that the words she spoke were not going to be good. I stared out of the windows in Ramsay Gardens and watched the people scurrying below in Princes Street. I loved my grandad’s flat. There wasn’t a garden but the place snuggled in deep beside Edinburgh Castle. Built before planning regulation, it was a delightful hodge-podge of styles. There had been dwellings on this site for centuries and, as I looked at my grandad lying there, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that he had been amongst the first residents.
I turned my attention back to the pedestrians below. I wished that I was one of them. Even the road-sweeper’s job looked alluring right now. Kailash’s words brought me back to the moment.
Cash laundering link to missing law chief
Scottish solicitors suspected of money laundering are to be interviewed by detectives investigating the disappearance of the chief accountant of the Law Society of Scotland.
Former Scottish rugby internationalist, Alex Cattanach, has not been seen for ten days. Cattanach is known to have launched what colleagues describe as a ‘fatwa’ against corruption in the legal profession.
Police are probing a theory that Cattanach was the victim of a revenge attack ordered by a lawyer whose criminality was about to be exposed.
Cattanach, characterised as ‘a tough customer’ by more than one top lawyer, is understood to have spearheaded a recent crackdown on all forms of misconduct relating to finance, including money laundering.
At present, sixteen Scottish solicitors face charges. A Lothian and Borders Police source said, ‘We will be questioning people we suspect have been involved in money laundering, given that Cattanach’s team would normally investigate them. There are some guys – especially some guys in criminal practice – who give us a lot of concern because of the people they associate with.’ One police officer who wished to remain anonymous added, ‘These solicitors are not whiter than white themselves. They know some pretty disreputable characters. Characters who are proud to let it be known that they can make problems – or people – disappear.’
Police will also this week begin sifting through all Law Society files that were being dealt with by Cattanach and the team of twelve accountants. They will be looking for anyone who had a grudge against Cattanach or who may have feared being investigated. The police source added: ‘It’ll be a pretty long list.’
Silence.
I didn’t turn round. I continued staring down, ignoring my racing heart as much as I could.
Lord MacGregor, now dressed in a robe, tapped me on my shoulder whilst Malcolm and Kailash scurried in the background pretending not to listen.
‘Now, lass, I’m not suggesting that you’re one of the lawyers that’s going to be investigated.’
By his glinting eyes, I guessed that something must have shown in my face. The wily old fox was used to reading witnesses.
‘Tell me things haven’t got that bad?’
He moved on to shaking my shoulders roughly.
