Blood Lines

She considered her options. ‘Well, even for your body I wouldn’t have your life – well, I might consider it.’ Lavender self-consciously smoothed her hands over her rounded rump before continuing. Like a hound dog she turned on a sixpence – for all her flaws, I loved her to bits, and knew that it was reciprocated. She presented me with a steaming cup of strong black coffee before delivering the killer punch.

‘You’ve been shagging this weekend – haven’t you?’ Her bright blue eyes were hungry for details.

‘Come on, Brodie, share – don’t spare my blushes.’

‘Your interest in other people’s sex lives is, frankly, obscene.’ I tried to sound superior, but we’d had too many of these conversations in the past to take the moral high ground.

‘Oooh, you’re not denying it then?’

‘I didn’t admit anything – I was merely commenting on your unhealthy obsession with second-hand sex.’

‘Do I know him?’

She pressed her face into mine, and for some bizarre reason sniffed as if she believed she would get his scent.

‘What the hell do you think you are doing, Lavender?’

‘Trying to get inside your aura.’

‘My what?’ Lavender came up with the oddest things sometimes. I’d known her ever since I was a student doing part-time work at the firm and she was a secretary there – over the years we had become friends much more than workmates, and I trusted her more than I trusted myself at times – but she was still strange on occasion.

‘You know that I’ve been going to the College of Parapsychology to increase my psychic ability,’ she said, as if she’d just signed up for woodworking. ‘Well, this weekend I went to an introductory course on psychometry.’

Keeping up with Lavender’s fads was quite beyond me. I adopted my usual tactics – I put my feet up on the desk and switched off.

‘I found I was good at reading people’s auras – probably because it works at an emotional level.’

If Lavender was trying to imply she was good at sensing other people’s feelings she was either lying to herself or ignoring mine. Knowing her, she would simply be disregarding my desire for privacy.

‘This man – the one you won’t tell me about – he’s very drawn to you, you’d be surprised at the depth of his feelings.’ Her head moved from side to side like a snake as she read me.

‘Was it Joe? Did you sleep with Joe?’

I ignored her, but she continued undeterred.

‘Brodie, did you know that feelings get trapped inside material items? So …’

There was a long pause whilst she stood up, before she pounced like a cat.

‘All I have to do is figure out what you were wearing when you were with him. And, unlike most women, you only seem to have one pair of shoes.’

She snatched my shoe off my foot. She held it aloft and ran round the office, avoiding the piles of files and law books that were scattered on the floor. Those shoes could tell a tale or two, she was right there.

‘I’m not in the mood, Lavender.’

‘You were in the bloody mood on Friday night,’ she snapped back. ‘And Jack Deans is a pisshead.’

I was impressed and it must have showed on my face.

‘And you need to stop drinking so much. I saw you go off with him. You were like a bitch in heat, dragging him out the door, too busy to notice anybody watching you.’

‘So much for your aura-reading, Lavender; you’re just a nosy cow, aren’t you?’

The shoe hit me on the arm. There was no time for explanations or apologies as the agency lawyers started to appear and Lavender went to pour the coffee.

This was where recent events started to hit home. The Edinburgh Bar’s latest meeting had concluded I was to be shunned – sent to Coventry. This decision went beyond social niceties; it was an unwritten rule that members of the Bar watched each other’s backs. No one can be in two places at once, but often the court diary decreed that I was in two or three courts at 10 a.m. I might have a deferred sentence in Court Four, a plea in mitigation in Court Two, and a trial in Court One. I would turn up at Courts Four and Two; ask the clerk in Court Two to hold back my plea in mitigation until the end of the roll – in Court Four I would expect another lawyer to cover the call-over for me – gratis. At 10 a.m. on the morning of a trial that is assigned to a court, the sheriff has the case called. This involves the clerk shouting out the name of the accused person to make sure that he has turned up. If they fail to appear, a warrant is taken for their arrest; it’s purely administrative and anyone who wears a gown can do it. The practice was that if a fellow lawyer was in another court, then I would stand up for them. But as the Bar had taken the huff with me, it meant I had to get cover for every single case I had in court – even if I was only there for five minutes. They kept trying to trip me up, hoping that if I didn’t have cover I’d be found in contempt of court – thus losing my practising certificate and my livelihood.

I needed to use agency solicitors because I couldn’t afford to hire full-time assistants. I hired the agents on a daily basis. They got a higher rate of pay than full-time assistants would, but I only paid them to do the things that I couldn’t do myself. I had been working ridiculous hours lately, but even I recognised that I couldn’t be in two courts at once.

As a rule, firms were reluctant to use agency solicitors because they were loose cannons. Most lawyers didn’t choose to be agents, they went down that route because some setback had forced them out of private practice.

I preferred to think of my agents as outsiders. I needed my agents to take shit from the Edinburgh Bar and they were tough enough to do it – trainees were not. Typically, Robert Girvan appeared first. Sober and freshly dressed, he was the odd man out. Handsome, intelligent, personable – he made my flesh creep. He was my dark doppelganger. If everything went tits over arse, then I would be like Robert Girvan. I kept him around as a cautionary tale to myself; whenever I felt like slacking off, his face would flash before mine and I would keep going.

‘Brodie.’ He nodded in my direction as he took his suit jacket off to stop it crushing, laying it carefully on my desk. Censure flicked through his eyes as he surveyed my mess.

‘Are you checking out my backside?’ he asked Lavender as she handed him the coffee.

‘Absolutely, Robert – and you’ve been working out. Good boy.’

‘Buns of steel, that’s me – I’ve got to be careful how I sit.’

Silently I agreed with him, but for different reasons – beneath his joking, my overriding impression of Girvan was that he was anally retentive.

I could already hear the shuffling and coughing in the corridor that meant one thing. Lavender stood at the ready with a double espresso in one hand and a couple of paracetamol in the other.

Eddie Gibb was about to arrive.

His entrance didn’t disappoint. His sandy hair was messier than mine, and his suit jacket hung off his shoulders as if he had shrunk in the night. Eddie, like all of us, carried his court gown over his arm. The main difference being that Eddie’s was a nasty shade of green. I surmised that it was some strange yeast growth from all the beer that had been spilled upon it as it lay discarded in some spit-and-sawdust pub that would still sell him drink.

Of course, that wasn’t the image Lavender saw. Her eyes lit up as she looked upon his craggy wee face. Why did I employ this waster? Not just because of Lavender. Eddie Gibb sober was quite simply the greatest court lawyer I have ever seen. He never looked at a file during a trial, saying that it confused him. Eddie questioned and probed police witnesses until they cried. Right-wing judges were putty in his hand and, at that moment just before any case collapsed, Eddie always believed he was at his best.

There was someone missing.

‘Where’s David? Did you instruct him, Lavender?’ I asked. I was beginning to get anxious. It was past 8 a.m. and we hadn’t started the court meeting yet. We had trials set down for courts outside Edinburgh and they needed to be handed out and discussed so that the agent could arrive on time.

‘I phoned him last night to confirm he would be here, but there was no answer. It seems Edinburgh has turned into Sodom and Gomorrah – everyone’s having sex except me.’

Lavender looked at Eddie wistfully. I ignored her and so did he.

‘Well, to be fair, every weekend’s pretty much like that for David,’ commented Eddie before Lavender could rugby tackle him to the ground with her demands.

‘Maybe this weekend was different,’ added Robert Girvan. ‘He told me he’s met a soul mate at the Fire Island club and he wants to spend some time basking in young love’s delusion. I hope he’s got the sense to lock up his valuables.’

This was a recurring pattern with David. He’d married young in an effort to convince his mother he wasn’t gay, and as soon as she was lukewarm in her grave, he was off with the scoutmaster. Like all his relationships, it didn’t last long. David couldn’t decide whether he was a slut or a hopeless romantic. It didn’t bloody matter – I was one body down.

‘Don’t worry – I’ve taken care of it.’ Lavender bristled with efficiency. ‘I’ve instructed Laura McGuigan.’

Everyone groaned.