Bad Debt, page 12
Like most Scottish towns there wasn’t all that much for young people to do in Linlithgow. The days of youth clubs and other such voluntary organisations were largely gone. If young people didn’t want to join the Scouts, Guides, Boys’ Brigade or other such pseudo-paramilitary organisations, their other options were to stay in and play video games or hang around street corners and parks, waiting until they looked old enough to sneak into a pub without anyone asking too many questions. So I drove around town, checking everywhere I thought Meeko might be loitering. I had almost given up when I encountered a bevvy of neds, if that’s the correct collective noun. One of them peeled himself away and sauntered over to me. He had lank greasy hair, a face you could have lost in the snow, and by the way the bright red cotton tracksuit hung from his scrawny fame, I reckoned the only actual tracks he saw were the marks on his arms.
‘You looking for that wee bitch Meeko?’ he asked, in a manner that suggested he might once have been given a close-up of the heavy end of a Buckfast bottle by my missing client. He certainly seemed like her target audience. ‘What you want her for? She on the game now?’
‘She stole a mobile phone. I’m looking to get it back,’ I said.
He cracked a laugh. ‘Good luck wi’ that.’
He was about to walk away, until I pulled him back by the shoulder. I tugged a tenner from my pocket. ‘Any ideas where she might be?’
He shrugged out of my grip. ‘Hey, boys,’ he called to the group. ‘Anyone know anything about that wee slag Meeko and a mobile?’
No one did.
‘Too bad,’ I said.
The young man didn’t move, just stood there watching as I carefully folded the ten-pound note and returned it to my pocket.
‘She’ll have it in her house. I know where she lives,’ he said, which was a fat lot of good because so did I.
‘Not much good to me if she’s not in,’ I said.
He sneered up at me. ‘How’s that, then?’
Under normal circumstances I would have drawn the line at housebreaking, but housebreaking was only a crime if the security of the premises was overcome with the intention of theft. I wasn’t stealing. I was recovering stolen property for the purpose of returning the item to its rightful owner, at least that was what I kept telling myself. Under cover of darkness, or as dark as it gets in Scotland around eleven o’clock on a late May evening, which is to say not very, I pulled up outside Meeko’s place. It was a four-in-a-block and she had the top left flat which was entered by a door at the side of the building. There was no knocker or bell, just the pane of frosted glass that I’d been banging on earlier to no avail.
‘What’s the plan?’ I asked. Fortunately, upon looking around, there didn’t seem to be anyone who might be interested in us, and anyway, Meeko’s immediate neighbours would be used to noisy comings and goings. ‘You done this before? What is it, a Yale lock?’
‘Calm yoursel’,’ the young man, whom I now knew only by his nickname, Bop, said. ‘I’ve done this hunners of times. I did four months last year for tanning the bowling club.’ He studied the door, gave it a push to test its strength, shook the door handle a few times and then took off his tracksuit top. I put out a hand to take it from him, but instead he wrapped the clothing around his arm. Before I could fully risk-assess the situation, Bop had stuck his elbow through the glass in the door. In hindsight it would probably have been best to instruct a housebreaker who didn’t get caught quite so often.
‘That’s us in,’ he said, reaching through the jagged edges and taking the snib off the door.
‘No, that’s me in,’ I said, handing him the tenner. ‘You stand over there, Raffles, and keep edge. I’ll be back in a minute.’ I needed that phone. What I didn’t need was the boy called Bop charging about, switching on lights and generally attracting the sort of attention that would get both of us lifted.
Through the door, I ran up the internal stairs and straight into a living room strewn with fast food wrappers, crushed beer cans and empty bottles of cheap sherry and tonic wine. From there I went through to the only bedroom. It was dark and I didn’t want to switch on a light. The police had taken my phone as a Crown production, but I had an old one with me. It had a torch. I used it to scan the room. In the narrow beam I made out an unmade bed, a small dressing table with make-up piled high in a little wicker basket, an empty munchy-box, an overflowing ashtray, a jewellery box and a burst-open pack of tampons, but a distinct lack of any handheld telephonic communication systems. Keeping the light on the move, I could see that, apart from the bed and dressing table, the only other items of furniture were a small bedside table with a pint glass half-full of water on it, and a pine wardrobe with a green hoody hung over one of its doors. On the floor below was a bunch of dirty underwear, leggings and socks. I opened the other wardrobe door to reveal a row of coat hangers, most of them empty. I took a step back. To search the place properly would take time and that was in short supply. I stood, frozen, not knowing where to start, or even if I should start. I just wanted to get out of there, but I needed that phone. I took a deep breath and turned to face the door I’d come in. There, hanging from a hook, was a bright orange hoodie, filthy and torn. That was because it had skidded across Linlithgow High Street and almost underneath a passing car. Just how drunk had Meeko been that night? Too drunk to do anything other than cast aside her damaged hoodie and crash out on the bed? Too hungover in the morning to remember robbing a terrified teenager of a mobile phone? I really hoped so.
Thirty seconds later, mobile in hand, I was back downstairs and onto the street. I reckoned my first housebreaking had lasted all of three minutes. The same length of time it had taken Bop and my tenner to disappear.
I headed for my dad’s, stopping en route for a closer look at my ill-gotten gains: a mobile phone in a pink case with sparkly bits on it. A strange choice for a schoolboy, but it looked like the kind Grace Mary used. The screen was cracked, and it was hard to tell if the phone was broken or if the battery was dead. First thing to do would be to try and charge it up. Grace Mary might have a charger somewhere and, if not, back at my own house there was a tangled box of cables that probably contained jump leads for the Space Shuttle. But that would have to wait. I’d taken enough risks for one night. I wasn’t going to chance returning to my home address in case the cops carried out a routine check and caught me breaking bail.
The old man was in bed when I arrived back at his place. Next morning I’d get a charger from somewhere, check the contacts on the phone, call the boy’s mum and ask her to put me on to Stan. We’d arrange a meeting and I’d talk some sense into him. Stan was anything but stupid. He was a businessman. I’d been his lawyer for years, ever since I’d been at Caldwell & Craig. When I’d left, the old established Glasgow law firm had retained Stan’s commercial business, but the criminal side of things had followed me to Linlithgow. There was no logic in throwing me to the wolves when we both knew who the real culprits were. Stan could hire any old muscle to chauffeur him around. He wouldn’t want to see me, his favourite lawyer, go to jail for a crime I didn’t commit. Would he?
21
I was still trying to reassure myself on the integrity of the man who’d made a fortune out of illegally importing drugs into the UK over many years, as dawn broke on a new working day. I did eventually manage a couple of hours’ fitful sleep, but was up, washed, dressed and pacing around by six-thirty. Tina didn’t wake for another hour. I had her breakfasted and ready for school in record time.
‘It’ll be great,’ I said, dropping her off. ‘You’re first in the playground, so you can meet all your pals and have lots of time to play before school starts.’
Next stop was the office. In the drawer of Grace Mary’s desk I found the charger I was looking for. I took the mobile, plugged it in and it soon booted into life. To operate the phone required fingerprint ID. Either that or a six-digit passcode. I had neither. Mobile phones feature a lot in criminal cases, and I knew that without some pretty sophisticated gear I might as well try and crack a walnut with a damp sponge. Still, anything was worth a try. I was busy punching in random numbers at nine o’clock when I heard my secretary arrive.
‘Grace Mary, bring your finger through here, will you?’ I called through to reception.
‘Which one?’ she yelled back, sounding like she had a particular finger in mind.
I didn’t respond, so she walked into my room and stared down at me. ‘Is that my charger?’
‘Put your finger on here,’ I said.
The charger cable was only two feet in length and the plug was just above the skirting board, so she had to hunker down to do it. Even after I’d made her use all ten fingers, the phone stubbornly refused to comply, no matter how much she wiggled her digits.
‘Who do we know who can crack open phones?’ I asked.
‘There’s Geode Forensics, who we normally use,’ Grace Mary said, as with the help of a hand on my head she hoisted herself back onto her feet. ‘Though they’re not cheap.’
‘This is my case we’re talking about,’ I said. ‘Expense is irrelevant.’
‘And they might have some concerns.’
‘About what?’
‘About a few things, like whose phone is it, do you have permission to bypass the security, data protection, the right to privacy. Oh, and reset of stolen goods.’
‘Who else do we know?’ I said.
‘There’s what’s his name, Jeffrey Freeman. He’s got an intermediate diet coming up soon. Maybe you could speak to him about it?’
Jeff would certainly know how to crack open a phone. And he owed me one for taking on his case. I brought up Skype on my laptop and clicked on the avatar that made him look even more hairy and toothy than in real life, if that were possible.
‘I hate to correct you, Robbie. But I don’t owe you anything,’ was Jeff’s toothy on-screen response. ‘Up until now all you’ve done is scribble something on a piece of paper for me to hand into the court.’ An unclothed female figure scampered across the background and a voice yelled at Jeff telling him to hurry up and something about nuns’ costumes being itchy. The screen went blank for a moment thanks to Jeff’s finger over the camera, then he returned. ‘And as you can see, Robbie, I’m very busy at the moment, so sorry if I don’t drop everything to help you get into your phone because you’ve forgotten your own passcode. Try your date of birth. That’s what everyone else uses.’ A long rectangular box on my laptop screen told me the call had ended.
‘Maybe Joanna will know someone,’ was Grace Mary’s next suggestion.
Until yesterday Joanna was a procurator fiscal depute. The people she knew who could break into phones were police officers. Me breaking into a phone associated with Stan Blandy was a big enough risk. Having the cops do it was suicide.
‘Joanna’s not coming into the office today, is she?’ I said. ‘We agreed not to see each other until we have the bail condition removed.’
‘Relax. Joanna took a load of files home last night and said she’d go straight to court after she’d dropped wee Jamie off with your dad.’
I sat thinking while I left the phone to charge and, no brilliant ideas springing immediately to mind, at the back of eleven I trudged round to Sandy’s café, or Bistro Alessandro as nobody but Sandy called it, for a coffee and crispy bacon roll. What was I going to do? Stan was my only hope.
‘Got yourself in some real trouble this time, haven’t you, Robbie?’ Sandy said. He set down my order on the table in front of me and pulled up a chair opposite. The only other customers were two older women having coffee and sharing a cake in the faraway corner. Sandy’s voice was loud enough for them to hear. ‘Murder. I suppose if you’re going to start off on a life of crime you might as well start at the top.’ He put two fingers to his brow. ‘Tia saluto.’
If Alessandro’s AKA Sandy’s coffee was as good as his third-generation Italian, I’d have been drinking somewhere else. I tucked a paper napkin under my chin. ‘Forgive me for lapsing into two of the handful of Italian words I know, Sandy,’ I said, but it’s not tia saluto, it’s ti saluto.’ I lifted the lid of the roll and squirted on some brown sauce.
Sandy scowled. ‘That’s what I said. Anyway, ti, tia, it’s the same thing.’
Was it? My own Italian was pretty much based on repeated viewings of The Godfather. ‘What about Tia Maria?’ I said.
The women at the corner table ordered another vanilla slice. They’d worked out that by eating only half a cake they could save enough calories to eat another half. ‘And by the way, Tia Maria is Spanish,’ one of the women called over to me, wiping cream from her lips with a napkin. ‘It means Aunt Maria.’
There then ensued a discussion as to why an Italian liqueur had a Spanish name.
‘Why you always showing me up in front of the customers, Robbie?’ Sandy said, sotto voce, not that he’d have known what that meant. ‘Are you in a bad mood today?’
‘Yes, Sandy,’ I said, ‘I am in a bad mood today. I was in a bad mood yesterday, I’ll be in a bad mood tomorrow and, quite possibly, I’ll be in an extremely bad mood for the rest of my life, or until I get parole.’ That was how it was going to be if I couldn’t prove my innocence. Not that an accused person was required to prove their innocence. There were two sides to every trial. The scales held by Lady Justice were equally weighted, but into the defence’s pan was dropped the golden feather that was the presumption of innocence. Or so they said. I’d seen enough verdicts to wonder if the people in the jury box had been watching the same trial as me. I blamed the media. In Scotland, justice wasn’t done unless someone was convicted. Even Police Scotland’s boast that they’d solved every murder allegation since the Force was unified, included those accused who’d been found not guilty. So far as their statistics were concerned, they’d charged the right person, it had just been the wrong verdict.
‘I’m sorry, Robbie. I was just trying to cheer you up,’ Sandy said. ‘If there’s anything I can do to help . . .’ He screwed up his face and shrugged. ‘I don’t know . . .’ he glanced around in case the women at the corner table were undercover cops; they were certainly eating enough pastries. ‘Maybe . . . you know . . . you were at my place watching the football that night.’
If I’d bought a ticket and gone to the game, there wouldn’t have been as many people watching it with me as were now volunteering to give me an alibi.
‘Thanks, Sandy, but I wouldn’t want to get you into any trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble,’ he said, getting up and making his way around the counter. ‘You can count on me. I’ll not let the Carabinieri put you away.’
I was taking the first bite into my crispy bacon roll – was there even such a thing in prison? Bacon rolls inside, if they existed at all, were probably all flubbery fat and tomato ketchup. As I mulled over this hellish scenario, the bell over the café door tinkled and a couple of uniforms marched in.
‘Robbie Munro?’ the first in the door asked.
‘Over there,’ Sandy replied helpfully, pointing me out.
The first cop came over. ‘Robbie Munro?’
I stopped chewing and nodded.
‘Mr Munro, I am arresting you on suspicion of housebreaking. You don’t have to say anything, but anything you do say will be noted and may be used in evidence. Do you understand?’
I did. Only too well. I untucked the paper napkin from the collar of my shirt and stood up. The second cop started to unclip a set of handcuffs from his belt, but his colleague shook his head, and he put them away. ‘No need for that. Mr Munro isn’t going to cause any problems, are you, sir?’ He gestured towards where the second cop was now standing holding the door open. ‘You can bring your roll with you if you like. We’ve had a lot worse than a few crumbs in the back of our unit.’
But the food of the gods might as well have been food for the dogs. I couldn’t have swallowed a bite. I laid my roll down and let myself be escorted outside. By the stares from the faraway table, some people now had more to talk about than the origins of coffee liqueurs.
‘We’ll contact your lawyer when we get to Livingston,’ the first cop said, when I was safely in the back of the patrol car.
Lawyer? Charged with housebreaking while on bail for murder? I didn’t need a lawyer. I needed an escapologist. How could I prepare my defence to a murder charge from behind bars? As the patrol car eased into the High Street traffic, reality bit. Was this it? Was I starting my life sentence now?
22
‘Murder, now housebreaking, you’re becoming an old hand at this, Mr Munro,’ the custody sergeant said cheerily, as I was brought up to the charge desk where, details taken and rights read, I was all set to be processed for the second time in a fortnight. Once again, I chose not to seek legal advice. Sammy Veitch wouldn’t have a clue what to do, and I couldn’t face Joanna. The ten-mile journey from Linlithgow to Livingston had given me time to think. If I was officially charged with housebreaking, I’d most likely be prosecuted under summary procedure. Since I was alleged to have broken bail, that meant a maximum forty-day remand before I had to stand trial. Providing I was acquitted, I’d be out before the murder charge was anywhere near a trial date.
They kept me waiting in a cell for what must have been a couple of hours: lightning fast by Police Scotland standards. After that there was a short trip from the cell area to the corridor containing the interview rooms. I was shown into the first of these by the same cops who’d arrested me and told to sit down. They asked if, before they started the interview, I wanted something to drink. I asked for a glass of water and they left, locking the door behind them.
