Blood Lines (2 page)

Where the hell was my left shoe? I was at the stage where staying and looking would have probably been more embarrassing than leaving in my bare feet and answering lecherous questions from a taxi driver.

‘Are you looking for this?’ a voice called from the bedroom.

Shit.

No escape.

I’d have to go back and retrieve it now or have him think I was too lovestruck to face him rather than too hung over to think about it. If only I had just gone home after the office. If only I hadn’t bumped into him making his way back from a Saturday shift. If only I hadn’t said hello and noticed how bloody gorgeous he was. I hobbled my way along the hallway like Long John Silver on a bad day – although, for all his worries, I’m sure he didn’t have to deal with not taking his mascara off and being covered in stubble rash the morning after.

With one shoe off and the other dangling from his hand, I lurched towards him. Towards it. Towards my shoe. Towards Mr Jack Deans, Esquire.

I was very upset. Very, very upset. Unlike me, the bastard looked good. Even in the morning light after a very heavy session I could see why I’d finally been unable to resist. Before last night, I’d only ever seen him in his work clothes – crumpled suit, clichéd raincoat. Now, covered only by an impressively white bath towel, he looked damn fine. Just back from the South of France – research, I’m sure, not a piss-up – he was dark, handsome, and absolutely chock-f of himself. A very useful bout of food poisoning had knocked a stone off him and there wasn’t a moob in sight.

‘I bet you’re just thinking what a lucky girl you are,’ he crooned as he launched himself off the bed and walked towards me, twirling the shoe on one finger.

‘No, no … I was “just thinking” that fat looks better when it’s brown.’

‘Liar,’ he whispered into my ear, giving it a surreptitious lick for good luck.

I was back to our familiar double-act of winding each other up much quicker than he was. I took the end of my jacket and wiped the inside of my ear dry. My gesture of dismissal was wasted because Deans was already in the kitchen – with my shoe.

What had once looked a very attractive half of an LK Bennett leopard-print combo was now just pissing me off. It was a shoe, not the bloody Holy Grail, yet he was dragging it from room to room as if I was in thrall to the wonder of a well-turned heel at the cost of my pride.

The offending article was on top of the kitchen table.

‘Don’t you know that’s bad luck?’ I said, forcing my foot into the shoe. It scraped on my skin, hurting my little toe. Actually, come to think of it, they’d always nipped – I should have left the buggers whilst I had the chance.

‘Let me guess, Brodie – that’s one thing you don’t need more of?’ He wriggled his pelvis at me in a way that would have put a geriatric Chippendale to shame. ‘Aw, I don’t know – looks like your luck might have turned. Do you want sugar in your coffee?’

‘You know I don’t take sugar.’

‘With a face like yours this morning, you look as if you could do with a little sweetness.’

‘You weren’t complaining about my face last night.’

Damn. I was the first one to obviously refer to the sex thing.

‘Last night I thought
I
was the sugar you were needing, darling.’

‘You must have been drunker than I thought then. But definitely nowhere near as comatose as me – obviously.’

‘Frankly, Brodie, I was a bit hurt that you were going to sneak out without saying goodbye. I felt used. A piece of meat. Just a plaything for you.’

For the first time that morning I actually looked into his eyes – only to see his smile lighting them.

‘I’m in no mood for jokes, Jack. I’m pissed off, I’m late, and my shoes hurt.’

‘I can see that. Well, I can see the pissed-off bit anyway. Christ knows what you’ll be like when you get a look at your face – it’s dragging along the ground.’

I tried to ignore him, took my coffee and wandered round his tiny kitchen. I did what I could to avoid facing the fact that he was almost naked.

‘What are you up to today?’ he asked.

I hesitated to answer in case he was going to ask me out.

‘Don’t worry – you’re safe. I’m just going to bide my time and catch you when you’re lonely – again.’

‘Was I that pathetic?’

I didn’t have to turn to know that Deans was nodding his head.

‘Actually, I do have plans. I’m supposed to be seeing my grandad and my moth— and Kailash – they tell me they’re worried about me, so I need to go and calm them down.’

‘They’re not the only ones bothered,’ he commented.

I looked at him sharply. Insulting me, glorying in finally getting me into bed, I could take – but care and concern?

‘Not me.’ He looked as aghast as I felt. ‘It’s the hairy-arsed sheep-shagger you hang around with who’s all het up.’

‘Glasgow Joe?’

‘Aye, the one and only.’

‘Jack – you’re the only one I know who could consider Glasgow the heart of sheep-shagging land. It fits in so well with your impeccable journalistic credentials. Never let facts get in the way of a good insult.’

My heart started racing at the thought of how Joe would react if he knew what we’d done.

‘Whatever you want to call him, he’s the one who’s concerned.’ I sighed. One problem after another. Right now, there was one particular issue that I had to bring up with Jack.

‘Jack? Do me a favour? Don’t mention last night to Joe.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t – under usual circumstances it would be the talk of the steamie, but …’

‘But you’re rather attached to your bollocks?’

‘No, it’s not that – actually, Brodie, you won’t understand this, but I like Joe and I wouldn’t want to hurt
him
.’

‘Don’t give me that crap – if you really felt like that you wouldn’t have dragged me back here last night,’ I countered.

‘As I recall, Miss McLennan, it was you doing the dragging.’ He paused for effect.

Jack moved towards me at the kitchen table – I expected him to kiss me or try to do the dragging to bed this time. I don’t really know whether I felt relieved or disappointed when he only reached down for his battered briefcase which he threw on the table.

‘Like I said, Kailash and old man MacGregor aren’t the only ones who are concerned,’ he said, handing me some sheets of paper. ‘Take a look at this.’

‘You sad git, Jack. I didn’t know you were into tracing family trees. It’s the new train-spotting for blokes your age, isn’t it?’

‘No – blokes “my age” have got other things to do with their time.’ He managed to say this whilst looking lecherously at me – I was touched: I looked a right state but he was still so desperate he wasn’t kicking me out.

‘It’s your family I’m digging at, Brodie, not mine. Now stop being so vain and put your specs on to look at it properly. Don’t worry about me seeing you less than perfect – I’ve seen it all now, even …’

‘I’m putting them on,’ I said loudly, cutting him off mid-sentence.

I looked at what was in front of me.

My line.

My blood.

The blood that I didn’t even know I had running through my veins until just about this time last year. At the bottom of the page, I saw my own name and that of my parents. If you could really call them that – a paedophile and a whore. A match made in heaven. My blood parents.

Alastair MacGregor ———Kailash Coutts

|

Brodie McLennan (
bastard
)

The line ended with me.

Even on the sheet of paper I looked lonely.

‘Cheers, Jack, I’m moved. It makes me feel all warm inside. How nice of you to remind me what I came from.’

I threw the papers down on the table.

‘Don’t get bloody touchy with me, Brodie. Those bits of paper simply state facts. You always knew your dad wasn’t around, you always knew you were a bastard – you just have to understand that now you are a high-class bastard.’

He poked his fingers at names above my own.

‘All high-court judges. All above the law. They’re protected, Brodie. To a man.’

‘My father wasn’t safe, though, was he?’

I still felt odd calling the man who had raped Kailash by that title. And poor dead Mary McLennan, cold in the ground with only me to remember that she was the woman I considered my
real
mother. She’d taken me on with more love than most people receive in a lifetime. Running through it all in my head made me think I was reading the TV listings guide for a particularly tempting episode of
The Jerry Springer Show
. There wasn’t much to laugh at when it was my own life, though. Jack’s words dragged me away from my reflections.

‘Alastair MacGregor
was
protected, Brodie. He was protected by the law – not the law that you and I live by, but the law that has protected men like him and their interests for centuries. That’s why Kailash had to kill him. He had gotten away with it for decades. All those girls, all those boys, with no families to worry about them, being taken out of the care homes and sent to be abused by good, upstanding legal men like your father? Fucking protected to the hilt, the lot of them. I’d rather there were a thousand Kailashes than one of him. She may not be the usual type of mother, but she knows right from wrong – and she fights for what’s hers.’

I imagined my mother in her work guise as Scotland’s most notorious dominatrix, running her girls across the country, and doing it all with beauty and style. I wasn’t much closer to understanding her than I had been a year ago when I represented her – not knowing then that our connection was so much more than lawyer and client – but I did realise that she loved me – in her own way.

‘You’re not your father, Brodie. Just like he wasn’t his. All the stuff you learned last year might make your head spin, but it’s true – it’s your truth, the truth of who you are. It’s not every day your mother asks you to defend her for killing your father. But there are decent people in your blood, Brodie – your grandfather is a good man. Like Kailash, he loves you and knows that his only son was an evil bastard. What more evidence do you need? He saved Kailash, he stands by her now – and they both want one thing: they want you to be careful.

‘Yes, you have enemies. You’ve made a lot in the last year – but they’ll back off if you decide to toe the line. You have to listen to the old man, Brodie.’

‘Has Grandad been speaking to you?’ I said accusingly.

‘Maybe …’

‘Family trees, now cosy chats with my grandad? I’ll just nip out and get you some slippers and a pipe. The years are taking their toll.’

‘I’m not daft, Brodie – even if I wasn’t …
keen
on you,’ he raised his eyebrows at me as he found the right word, ‘I’m a journo, I’d have to be stupid to ignore everything in my line of work. Look at this …’

Jack pulled his laptop across from the table at the side of him and fired it up. My heart sank as I saw that the
Journal of the Law Society
was in his favourites list. He clicked on the icon and opened up an article I recognised only too well. The words in the piece were engraved on my mind, because – rightly or wrongly – I had felt they all applied to me. Complaints about falling standards were pretty predictable from the old guard who moaned every century or so when they were nudged out of their complacency by the recognition that there were others out there who wanted to drag law into this millennium. But this article was far more strident than usual. The author had chosen to remain anonymous, which was very rare in itself. They must be pretty well in with those at the top of the tree if they were being allowed to hide. Whoever was behind it – and I had my suspicions of who it might be – was on their high horse about the fact that they believed solicitors were looking on what they did as a business, not a profession. They rattled off a few sound bites about whether they were lawyers or ambulance chasers, which had got a few snippets of coverage from the papers. However, the most interesting – or irritating – point for me, was the remark about ‘rumbles’ from last month’s meeting of the Edinburgh Bar Association, where, allegedly, there had been talk about how one firm in particular was going to be reported to the Law Society for blatant touting.

‘Come on, Brodie, you know all about this – you’re one of the lawyers they’re particularly worked up about. You’re too successful – they prefer mediocrity to brilliance.’

I stared at him long enough for him to feel uncomfortable.

‘And gorgeousness too – obviously, gorgeousness too.’

‘Yeah, that’s it, Jack. They’re terrified of my brain
and
my thighs. In the real world, I think you’ll find it’s all down to what it’s always been about with lawyers – money and power.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘but ask yourself this – just how many clients can one firm represent without there being a conflict of interests?’

‘No idea, Jack, but I guess I’ll find out pretty soon.’

‘Alex Cattanach is keeping an eye on you. You don’t want head-honcho accountants on your tail at the best of times – you certainly don’t when they are telling everyone in town that they have enough to take you down. I’m usually all for smart-arses, Brodie, but you can’t keep annoying the Bar Association or they’ll take you out. They might be wankers … but they’re not stupid wankers. You can’t watch your back the whole time.’

‘You watch it for me then, Jack,’ I threw back at him and wiggled my arse right out his door, vowing never to return.

Not even I believed it.

Chapter Two

‘I don’t know how you’ve managed it, but you’ve achieved in months what no man has done for the past two hundred years – you’ve united the Bar. Unfortunately, it’s against you.’

Lord MacGregor, my newly found grandad, was sputtering his words out. I was still coming to terms with things. Until recently, I had thought of another woman as mother, another man as father – albeit an absent one – and didn’t think I had a grandad to call my own. It was a lot to take in – on top of that came the spectacle of the man who was universally recognised as one of the greatest legal minds to ever come out of Scotland lying half-naked on a table in front of me. Behind him, the masseur gave a deep-tissue massage to help loosen the old man’s blue-veined limbs, which were becoming knotted with arthritis. I didn’t want to imagine the conversations Malcolm, my mother’s gay personal dresser/masseur friend, could be having with the pillar of the legal community when I wasn’t there. What could they possibly have in common? Apart from a genuine admiration of Kailash Coutts, I couldn’t come up with anything.