Dark Angels (3 page)

Edinburgh Castle sat, impenetrable on its rock,
shrouded in mist, as I turned down the Royal Mile, past Deacon Brodie’s pub. The sign on the tavern wall told the true tale of his downfall and continued the myth of two-faced Edinburgh denizens: ‘worthy by day, a gentleman burglar by night, hung on the very gallows he invented’. As a child, I had stood with my mother in front of the painting of the hanging Deacon, relentlessly questioning her: was he my namesake? Was I named after Deacon Brodie? To my disappointment, she always blasted my romanticism out of the water, repeatedly telling me that I was named after the old tea factory that our thirteenth-storey flat overlooked. I still clung to the hope that I had more in common with a licentious, gambling, thieving criminal hanged for his sins than a packet of tea.

On the opposite corner to the pub that still drew me in, outside the High Court, sat a statue of Hume, the father of Scottish law. Draped in a sheet, I felt the artist could have used some aesthetic licence–the sagging pectorals of the carved man made me swerve every time I drove past, although it appeared that only the pigeons and I took any notice of him.

I increased my speed and Parliament House sped by. The route to St Leonard’s was a trail of the crime history of Edinburgh, and the narrow closes where body snatchers and serial killers Burke and Hare plied their trade to keep university anatomists busy flew past. Now a city of repute, the Capital could not easily erase its disreputable past. The new Scottish Parliament building at the foot of the Mile did nothing to expunge its notoriety–a series of architectural and financial
disasters had led us to a point where the whole business had made Edinburgh a laughing-stock and bought only a few dodgy constructs with what looked like bingo-winner stone cladding.

On every corner in Edinburgh, I see an imprint of crime overlaid onto the landscape. I looked up at Arthur’s Seat, the Salisbury Crags looming ominously in the early morning skyline, and remembered the German bride thrown over its cruel edges to her death. Not too heartbreaking for her new husband as he collected the insurance money. Everywhere was the same, every place had a story of cruelty or jealousy or lust or evil. St Leonard’s Police Station nestles at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town, and is not averse to putting a few new nasty stories into the history of the city. Ordinarily, the streets around the station are, by and large, deserted. But as I approached it in the early hours, it looked like a three-ringed circus. This spelled trouble.

Reporters with notepads and tape recorders, like flies on a corpse. They were everywhere. A television crew was on the street, a man in a sodden trench coat talking into a microphone, his face serious as a grinding camera recorded him for the morning news.

They were all waiting impatiently, for my arrival. I could have kicked myself for not stopping to put some make-up on, but I genuinely hadn’t realised there would be this much interest in Kailash so early on in the case. Someone at St Leonard’s must have made a tidy backhander alerting the hacks to this one. Reluctantly, I parked and made my way towards them–I didn’t want
to look dazed and tired in a million homes tomorrow, but without the benefit of a full-blown Jo Malone overnight kit and emergency make-up box in my backpack, I’d have to accept it.

Jack Deans was the first one to notice me as I pulled off my helmet. I always feel obliged to say, ‘Jack Deans, prize-winning investigative journalist’ when I introduce him to anyone. I preferred not to recognise that I still got a very worrying flutter every time the fucked-up waster looked at me. Christ knows why. He was a decade past his best–and that would have been if he had spent his best years sober. A former international rugby player, he towered above me. His eyes slowly lowered to meet mine. They were deep, deep blue and he managed to draw me into his stare–or maybe he was sleep-deprived too and couldn’t focus very well.

Deans was definitely handsome, in a worn out sort of way. In his younger years, he covered war zones and corrupt dictators; in his latter years he had lost himself in a morass of laughable conspiracy theories and discovered that he couldn’t quite find enough clarity at the bottom of a bottle of Laphroaig. He claimed he wasn’t drinking these days, but I’d seen him slip enough times to know that he didn’t have a permanent pass for the wagon. I had to shake myself out of my very private but still highly mortifying crush on Deans–he’d never let me live it down if he ever found out. His grey black hair flopped over his right eye as he approached me and I drew myself to my full height (five foot four plus the three inches I got from the rather snazzy Cuban heels on my hand-made biker boots).

‘Brodie!’ shouted Deans, his voice shaped by a past affair with whisky and cigarettes. (‘No! No! No!’ I told myself. ‘It’s shaped by booze and fags and cancer and hardened arteries and all sorts of manky stuff. He is
not not not
sexy.’)

‘I take it you’re here for Kailash?’

The woman had turned into Madonna–she needed no surname. I was tired and I did actually resent his familiarity, even if I did, on a dull night, often want to get into his no-doubt-vile-but-very-well-filled pants.

‘No comment,’ I said tersely.

‘I’ve been standing here, in this pissing rain, for almost two hours–give me something. Please? Please, Brodie? Pretty please?’

The rain had plastered his hair to the side of his grizzled cheek. Although it was raining, the night air was still–after about thirty seconds with the man, as usual, my bizarre crush had worn off and I just wanted to slap him for assuming he had any right to information from me. I was also not so smitten that I didn’t wonder how he could have been there for nearly two hours unless someone had called him pretty bloody sharpish.

I ignored Jack Deans and made my way to the front door of the station and he followed me. His past glories were still sufficiently bright in the eyes of the other journalists present for them to hang back deferentially.

The man was tracking me. I felt his eyes bore into me but continued to ignore him, until he grabbed my arm. Instinctively, I smashed my helmet into his knee: to his acolytes (and the CCTV outside the station door),
it looked like a clumsy accident, but we knew differently. He crashed to the ground, like a newly cut Christmas tree.

Magic moment officially broken.

He grabbed my ankle on his way down. Almost toppling, I angrily held my balance. I stared at him, now just wanting this fine gentleman of the press to bugger off out of my way so that I could get on with my job. Rather than look annoyed, or even pained, the face of Deans was the picture of smugness.

‘You don’t know, do you?’ he whispered.

I wouldn’t give him the upper hand, wouldn’t start our usual tit-for-tat.

‘You don’t know, do you?’ he asked again, slightly louder this time.

I waited all of five seconds before breaking.

‘No, Jack, I don’t know. I don’t know which schemy wee copper has phoned you out of your stench-filled pit at this time of the morning. I don’t know how many Big Macs or cans of cash-and-carry lager you’ve paid him for his trouble. I don’t know why so many half-bit hacks are gathered outside when all they’re going to do is run more pictures of tarts in mini-skirts with a cut-and-paste job pretending to be a story. But I bet, I just bloody bet, you’re going to tell me.’

I stood with my hands on my hips, feeling quite pleased with myself. Losing your cool and shouting outside a cop shop while on professional duty was always a good way to start a case.

Jack Deans stood back from me and mirrored my pose, a smile creeping onto his lips. He let his eyes
wander all over my face, and, for a moment, I thought I almost saw a flicker of sympathy.

‘Brodie?’ he asked, as if I’d know the answer. ‘Brodie? They haven’t told you, have they?’

I kept my silence this time. If he had news of Kailash, he’d be bursting to tell me anyway.

The next words out of his mouth were a statement, not a question.

‘You don’t know who she’s murdered.’

A smile of satisfaction crossed his face. I had to hand it to the grandstanding bastard–this round was going to him.

‘Why didn’t they tell you, Brodie?’

The same question was beginning to float through my mind.

‘If I was you, Brodie, I’d figure out who wanted to throw me to the wolves.’

Jack Deans knew that his special status was coming to an end, the press pack descending, and me running out of patience.

He propelled me through the doors into the police station in one fluid movement.

‘Alistair MacGregor,’ he whispered in my ear.

I had no time to answer him.

I had no time to think.

I could only assume that I hadn’t heard him correctly.

What was wrong with Kailash Coutts? Could she just not keep her hands off the Scottish judiciary? Like most of the men she came into contact with, Alistair MacGregor had another identity–but this one didn’t involve bondage and baby nappy fantasies. No, this one was a shitload more complicated. The dead man wasn’t known as Alistair MacGregor. He was known by his full title, Lord Arbuthnot of Broxden, Lord President of the Court of Session, or, to make things simpler: the highest Law Lord in Scotland. No wonder Sergeant Munro was so keen to get this one processed quickly, and no wonder the entire Scottish media was camped outside St Leonard’s in the wee small hours.

I didn’t have any time to wallow in the misery that was hurtling towards me–times were bad when Jack Deans seemed to be the only one giving me a hand–as the full wonder that was front-house in an Edinburgh cop shop opened out in front of me. The smirks on the faces of the police officers at the desk could have made me regret some of my past harsh cross-examinations,
but I was more concerned with trying to block out the truly awful rendition of ‘Rawhide’ that was going on as I made my way to the desk. No introductions were necessary. I’d spent far too much of my time here in the past. Desk Sergeant Anderson waddled towards me, red faced and huffing from the exertion of moving two feet without a pie in his hand. His cheap white shirt was see-through, and puckered over his vast gut, the only accessory being some worn-in underarm sweat stains. A veteran, coming up to retirement age, he made it known he’d seen–in his words–young ‘punks’ like me come and go. Given that I was also pretty sure he dreamed of himself with a shiny ‘Sheriff’ badge pinned to his chest, I wasn’t exactly bothered. What did worry me was the fact that he was breathing so heavily he was either going to have an orgasm in front of me, or he was working up to some godawful joke that he’d laboured over since the last time we met. At least the first option might be funny.

‘I’d
like
to take you to the cells, Miss McLennan…’ he wheezed, pausing for dramatic effect as the lackeys around him waited for the punch line. ‘But you might call me a liar.’

Had the Marx Brothers suddenly been arrested, dragging in Laurel and Hardy with them? Had Tommy Cooper come out of cryogenic hibernation to announce a new career in law enforcement with Ricky Gervais and John Cleese as his loyal sidekicks? Or had some fat sweaty bastard of a useless copper just tried–in vain–to score a lame point against someone who wouldn’t shite on him if he paid Kailash rates? Whatever
the reason, St Leonard’s erupted with joy at the witticism launched into posterity–Anderson wouldn’t be able to move for bacon butties and Irn Bru for the rest of his shift given the joy he had bestowed on his colleagues with his pathetic introduction. I vaguely recalled our last meeting–a police assault case involving some wealthy young pro-hunt protesters. I won, although the verdict owed more to the judicial loyalties of the bench, than any great legal point on my behalf. Every dog has its day, and this was Sergeant Anderson’s. His young posse were enjoying his bravado, especially the ones who had also received a tongue lashing from me when they had appeared in the witness box.

Just as I was trying to boost myself with the facts of my incredibly superior existence and immaculate professionalism, I caught sight of my reflection in the plate glass windows of the station. Normally, my best feature is my hair; at the moment it looked like the stuffing that escapes from horsehair settees. Dark auburn curls had turned to frizz with the help of the damp night air and my motorbike helmet. The rain and spray from the roads had soaked through my leather jacket, leaving me no alternative but to remove it. I should have known better. I was wearing my favourite t-shirt, soft, grey, and very worn. The kind of garment you wear to bed when your mum says you look a bit peaky. Unfortunately, in this scenario, I don’t have the sort of cleavage which makes a police station full of men look away. They didn’t like me personally and they hated what I stood for–but all that could
be forgotten amidst the amazing revelation that I possessed breasts. Sergeant Anderson’s moment of glory was stolen as an entire cop shop launched into a communal wet-t-shirt fantasy. It could be worse, I told myself, before remembering that the belt buckle holding up my leather trousers bore the Harley legend: ‘Born to Ride’.

As I followed Sergeant Anderson to the staircase door leading to the cells, I tried to block out the hilarious comments being lobbed my way. There was no denying that I enjoyed the attention that came from being a court lawyer when it suited me, and on my terms, but tonight, going into whatever lay in front of me, I could do without anyone’s eyes and remarks. In fact, I’d have paid good money for an uptight Marks and Spencer suit and button-down shirt. I didn’t exactly look the picture of legal respectability, or the embodiment of my infamous claim to fame as youngest solicitor advocate in Scottish legal history. Still, no matter that I could hide behind all sorts of professional titles such as Writer to the Signet (alongside Sir Walter Scott, no less)–in this place, I was the lowest of the low: a lawyer and a woman. Even my client could probably expect better treatment than me. God knows what she would make of my appearance–actually, she’d probably think that she was being visited by one of her peers, and not a very good-looking one at that. Alongside wondering how Kailash Coutts would interpret me, I also briefly thought of what my mother would say–discomfort made me shut that voice off pretty sharpish.