Blood Lines

‘Sign this.’

I shoved the mandate under his nose. I could take the details later. Right now I had to find the lawyer who was supposed to be representing him and get the document to them.

‘Who was supposed to be representing you?’ I asked.

‘Bridget Nicholson.’

Shit. With the way my day was going I should have guessed it would be her.

As always, when I entered the agents’ room I was struck by how bland it was. Not to mention the fact that there was absolutely no privacy.

Bridget Nicholson brushed her peroxide-blonde hair. She caught me looking distastefully at the hairs that were landing on her black court gown and falling on the floor.

She deliberately swung her skanky mane at me and I jerked backwards. Her lips were bright red, which made her teeth look yellow. I tried to remember those makeover television shows. I’m sure they would advise her to use a lipstick with more blue in it.

I couldn’t deny some men found her attractive, but then again, there’s no accounting for taste. At thirty-nine, Nicholson looked years older than Kailash – I didn’t want to imagine what she’d been doing to make herself look so haggard. I put my scuffed bike helmet down on the carpet, beside her well-polished stilettos.

As I straightened myself up, I became uncomfortably aware of the hush that had settled on the agents’ room. No one was making any pretence of not listening. Reaching into my trouser pocket, I pulled out the crumpled mandate and handed it to her. She looked at it as if it were a steaming pile of shit.

The hordes clustered round, waiting for a scene. They looked like a gang in pristine black gowns – all except Eddie Gibb in his funny-coloured green gown. Still, at least he had a gown on. I was the outsider and felt that they were all willing Bridget to rip me apart.

‘How much did you pay him?’ Nicholson asked.

‘Pardon?’

‘You heard me, Brodie. How much are you paying your clients?’

I ignored her and pointed to the appropriately signed mandate.

‘Come on, Brodie,’ she went on. ‘You must be making some kind of profit out of this – so what incentives are you giving these young men? Maybe it’s not financial? You handing out blow jobs like your mother?’

I wanted to hit her, but Eddie Gibb showed previously hidden speed, and his surprisingly steady hand held mine as he spoke to Nicholson.

‘Brodie has a legitimate mandate – failure to furnish her with the papers will result in a complaint to the Law Society.’

I was surprised by the gravitas in Eddie’s voice.

‘Speaking of the Law Society – have you been interviewed yet about Cattanach’s disappearance, Miss McLennan?’ Nicholson shouted loudly so that her public could hear every word. ‘Don’t look so surprised; everyone here knows you’re being investigated – that’s why we’re not bothered by these.’

She threw the mandate back in my face. Eddie pulled me close and whispered in my ear.

‘Stay calm – you know that she and Cattanach were an item.’

I followed his advice because I knew it was the right thing to do and I couldn’t think of a smart retort. I took the file from Nicholson and ripped out the complaint – the piece of paper that stated what the Alchemist had been charged with – then handed the file back to her. As I walked out of the agents’ room to change for court, I heard her shout.

‘Cat got your tongue, Brodie? Or are you just upset that you can’t shag your way out of this one?’

Chapter Five (#u16ed8790-2977-5cfd-997e-9d1574345488)

‘You look as if someone is squeezing your balls, Brodie!’

Robert Girvan shouted at me as we scurried between courts like black rats trying to find their way round a maze.

The weight of the files was hurting my arm. I was struggling just to be in the right place at the right time, without even considering how good my performance was. This morning’s work was purely administrative, a chimpanzee could have done it, in fact there was one ugly bastard at the Bar doing a grand impression of an orang-utan.

I missed the easy camaraderie of my early years, when all the old letches were falling over themselves to help me. Either I had lost my charms or I was even more unpopular than I wanted to know. I didn’t know which was worse. No one had stood up for me earlier except Eddie, and I wasn’t daft enough to think that was for any other reason than the fact that I paid him.

I had finished my morning’s work except for the Alchemist’s intermediate diet – meaning I would have to tell the court whether or not we were ready to go to trial – and a probation hearing for Tanya Hayder. I’d won the battle of wills with Lavender – stubbornness usually does win the game, and it was always a foregone conclusion given the history between Tanya and myself. Both cases were in different courts at different ends of the building. Eddie, Robert and Laura were in trials that were about to start. I had intended to cover one of the trials, but the Alchemist situation was one which definitely required ‘delectus personae’, not just because he was an important client, but because the courtroom would be filled with spectators hoping to see another fight. Tanya Hayder would have to go on the backburner and I prayed that everything would run smoothly.

The glass and marble halls of the new Edinburgh Sheriff Court are sharp and clean, easily wiped-down surfaces to erase the mistakes of humanity that appear there on a daily basis – the lawyers, not the clients. There is obviously a large police presence at the Sheriff Court, but the court cops are a different breed. Whether by accident or design, the powers-that-be have reassigned the best negotiators to work there; they are so skilled they should be in the diplomatic corps sorting out the Middle East.

The Alchemist lounged against the glass balcony outside Court Seven. Moses wasn’t there. Instead, the Alchemist’s entourage consisted of two sixteen-year-old schoolgirls, who were definitely not Dark Angels. This was very unusual because the gang were a clannish bunch – once you were in the inner circle, which this boy obviously was, you didn’t taint yourself with outsiders.

I don’t know why I called him a boy – probably more due to thinking he must have made some daft choices to end up here rather than his looks. As I studied him more closely I would have placed him in his early thirties: tall, about six foot three, and I guessed he’d weigh about nine and a half stone soaking wet. His Adam’s apple was the largest I’d ever seen and it bobbed about nervously in his scrawny neck. I sensed that he was nervous because he was having difficulty swallowing. One of the first signs of fear is a dry mouth.

He had all the trademarks of a Dark Angel but there was something different about him, more than just his age. The peroxide-white hair was gelled to perfection, but it was sparse and I just wasn’t used to seeing a balding Angel. It didn’t fit. The Dark Angels were beautiful, in their own unorthodox way.

His skin was pale, except for an angry shaving rash around his chin and a cold sore dominating his thin blue lips – I knew that Malcolm would give an alternative reason for this, nothing as boring as a virus but the consequences of ‘angry words not spoken’. Maybe Malcolm was right in this case. The Alchemist looked the type of coward to keep all his rage inside.

‘Georgia, Alice, this is my lawyer Brodie MacGregor.’

‘McLennan. It’s Brodie McLennan.’

Had he done that on purpose? And what was the deal between posh girls and criminals? Judging by their customised uniforms, these girls went to St Charles’, Edinburgh’s most exclusive girls’ school. They were beautiful in the way only the daughters of the very rich can be, as an ageing pop casanova once said. Their skin was creamy and blemish-free, their confidence was overwhelming – so why were they hanging around this loser?

The Alchemist was clearly much more interested in them than me, and I sensed my time for getting information out of him was fading. I needed the details and I needed them fast.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘The Alchemist,’ he replied instantly, turning round and grinning at his harem.

‘Well, unless you want to do six months for perverting the course of justice or contempt of court, you’ll stop being a smart-arse and tell me your given name … now.’

He stared at me to check I was serious. I didn’t blink.

‘Bernard Carpenter.’

I’d call myself ‘The Alchemist’ with a name like that too, but the girls’ adoration wasn’t dented.

‘It says here,’ I wiggled the complaint under his nose, ‘that on the fifteenth of May, you were caught breaking into a house in Morningside Road. I spoke to the Procurator Fiscal earlier because today is an intermediate diet. I have to say that I have all the prosecution statements and any defence witnesses are ready. Now, the Fiscal told me that you’ve been caught with your dick flapping in the wind. The Crown have productions – namely the jewellery that was taken from the house, and they say that it was found in your possession.’

‘No way – that lying bastard DI Bancho is just out to get me. There is no way that was on me when I was taken to the police station. As a matter of fact, I threw that jewellery away.’

I sighed.

‘Thanks, Bernard – you don’t even have the courtesy or common sense to keep your mouth shut. Now that you’ve told me you did it, I can’t argue in court that you didn’t.’

I was really getting angry with this idiot. He must be a pretty spectacular chemist for Moses to put up with his amateurish attitude. I had a duty as an officer of the court that if a client told me they were guilty then I couldn’t argue that they were innocent. Sweet Jesus, most of the prisoners in Scottish jails were still protesting their innocence.