Paddy said that was a real shame because she wrote for the Scottish Daily News and she’d been hoping to speak to him about doing a series profiling prominent lawyers.
The secretary hesitated. Paddy assumed she was a little awestruck. She was feeling smug and cozy, tricking a slippery lawyer into an early appointment with the promise of an ego rub, when the secretary said, “But he’s only twenty-three.”
“Ah.” Her feeling of superiority evaporated. “Well, you know, up-and-coming lawyers, the future and all that…”
Thirty seconds later she was talking to the squeaky-voiced boy and he agreed to see her in half an hour. She thought he sounded a little breathless.
IV
By day Blythswood Square was an elegant square of Georgian town houses, now offices, set around a private garden. The curbs were high to the road, the step steep to accommodate descent from a carriage. At night the square became the working route of roving prostitutes, bare-legged girls with poor hair and prominent bosoms, faces dripping rank misery, ready to be peered at and pawed.
McBride’s Solicitors was in one of the older houses but the impression of elegance was lost at the door, where a cheap black punch-hole board was hanging with the names of the resident companies picked out in white plastic lettering. McBride’s Solicitors and Notaries were on the very top floor.
Paddy was panting and damp by the time she reached the sixth flight of stairs, leading to what had once been the servants’ quarters, shallow and sagging wooden steps worn in the middle, the banister sticky from trailing, sweaty fingers. She caught her breath on the top step, embarrassed, as she always was when she lost her breath, to be a fat woman, sweating.
McBride’s office was a fading brown nod to the seventies. A motherly receptionist was dressed accordingly, in a brown skirt and matching jumper with a modest rope of pearls at her throat. The fittings in the reception area looked as old as she was: the phone was two-tone brown, the appointments book a battered black-leather puff of paper.
She was impressed when Paddy introduced herself, clutched her neck and said she was a big fan.
“Thanks,” said Paddy and looked for somewhere to sit.
“No, no, go through. Mr. Fitzpatrick’s waiting for you.” She pointed to a flush dark-wood door.
Inside, a chubby teenager in a suit was standing stiffly by his desk. Mr. Fitzpatrick was not only pleased to see her but seemed to have had a shave just before she got there. As she stepped forward to shake his hand she could smell soap and see that the skin on his cheeks was glossy smooth, a small nick at his ear still oozing white blood cells. He fussed her into a chair.
“I don’t know how you could even have heard of me. Did someone give you my name?”
She bit the bullet and admitted the ruse: she needed to find out about Terry and couldn’t get an appointment for two weeks so she’d fibbed. His disappointment was palpable.
“But I phoned my mum.”
Paddy cringed in sympathy. “I thought you were older,” she said. “I thought I was playing a trick on a smug big lawyer who couldn’t be arsed seeing me. I’m really sorry.”
“What’ll I tell my mum?”
“Can’t you tell her it didn’t come off? That’s what I always tell mine.”
“She’ll call the paper.”
“You could say the article is about left-wing lawyers so we had to leave you out?”
He considered it for a moment. “Yes, that might work.”
“Tell her it was for the Star or some paper she won’t see. Or the Daily Mail.” She didn’t want to be presumptuous, but guessed his mother wouldn’t take the Daily Star.
Having resolved his angst over his mother’s disappointment, Mr. Fitzpatrick turned to the matter of Terry, far more kindly than she would have done in the circumstances.
He took out a file and opened it. Terry had left her everything: there was a car, an old model, worth a couple of hundred pounds, all his papers and books, some clothes and the house.
“Which house?”
“Eriskay House.” He peered at his notes. “A two-bedroomed house with three acres of land in Kilmarnock. It’s an old house of the family’s. I don’t know what sort of condition it’s in but it must be pretty good: we’ve already had an objection lodged by Mr. Hewitt’s cousin, a Miss Wendy Hewitt.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that she’s challenging the validity of the will. In short, we can’t execute.”
Paddy shifted uncomfortably. A house. She didn’t want anything to do with Terry, didn’t think she could stay in a house he’d lived in or owned, but it was, after all, a house. Not one that Burns paid for either. And it had land around it for Pete to play in.
“Could I sell it to her?”
“No. You need to own it before you can sell it. You don’t own it at the moment.”
“Well, who does own it?”
“Mr. Hewitt’s estate owns it.”
“So…?”
“Mm.” Fitzpatrick looked at his notes again. “So we’ll have to wait to see what happens.”
“How long could that take?”
He blew his lips out. “Months? A year? Longer?”
Paddy glanced at her watch. It was five past three and Pete got out of school at half past. She had to get a parking space near the gates or he’d try to cross the road himself. The lollipop lady sometimes hid behind a tree for a cigarette and the road was busy.
“OK.” She stood up. “Fuck it. Let me know what happens.”
“There are these papers…” He waved his hand towards a folder on the table. It was brown, made of soft cardboard, fraying all around the edges. She could see that it was stuffed with well-thumbed sheets of notes, yellowed newspaper clippings folded over on themselves, a bit of a magazine. Her name was written on the outside cover, “Paddy,” in a blue felt pen, the pigment faded into a yellowed green. If Fitzpatrick had been trying to lure her into a cave full of tigers, he could have done worse than leave the folder at the mouth. Paddy could feel herself salivating. “Where did it come from?”
“He left it with me, in the safe.”
“When?”
“A year ago.”
It might be nothing to do with his murder. Her interest blunted, she looked at him, but Fitzpatrick was working a move. He licked his bottom lip, looking back at her with a steady, distracted eye.
“What’s in it?”
“I couldn’t say.” He almost smiled.
She pressed him further. “Can I look at what’s in it?”
“No. I could give it to you now, to take away, but you’d need to sign off the claim to the house.”
He waited. She waited. His eyes slid to the side. With every second thudding past, the realization dawned on Fitzpatrick that she wasn’t that hungry for the folder.
She cleared her throat. “You know Wendy Hewitt then, do you?”
His eyelids contracted momentarily, eyes widening. “Not personally, no.”
“Do you represent her professionally?”
“No,” he said, too quickly.
She suddenly didn’t give a shit anymore. She stood up. “Fuck this, I’m off.”
Fitzpatrick stood up to meet her. “But his effects, you need to clear out his flat.”
“What?”
“His effects. The landlord wants the flat emptied or he’ll have the house cleared…”
