Bad Debt by William McIntyre

Author:William McIntyre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2020-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

26

The call was made. I met Stan the next day. Stan didn’t like meetings with criminal lawyers at the best of times. He liked being seen meeting criminal lawyers about as much as the average Scottish Nationalist likes being seen in Union Jack underpants. For that reason, anywhere with CCTV coverage was a no-go, thus ruling out most of central Scotland’s public areas. Which was why I had returned to the offices of Caldwell & Craig. I arrived via the side entrance around half-twelve, the arrangement being that Stan would give me a maximum of thirty minutes before he took Maggie to lunch, and I went back to Linlithgow and a bacon roll at Sandy’s.

Maggie met me at reception and guided me through to the boardroom, where two rows of empty chairs stared at each other across a wide expanse of mahogany. I pulled one out and sat under the gaze of her late father, Tom Sinclair, whose oil painting hung on the walls alongside some former senior partners of the grand old law firm.

Maggie herself had for a short time been senior partner of Caldwell & Craig. Moneywise, she no longer needed to work. Which was good because she’d always preferred others to do that for her. She’d been married three times, most recently to Alasdair Brodie, aka Lord Bantaskine, who, like his father and his father before him, was a High Court judge. The ancestral Bantaskines had each at one time held the position of Lord President of the Court of Session, Scotland’s senior judge. It was only a matter of time for Alasdair. In Scotland, when it came to the justice system, we liked to keep things in the family. Thus far for Maggie, all three of her marriages had been financially advantageous, the two divorces even more so. How she managed to lure so many wealthy men into her web, I didn’t know. For me, the thought of romance and Maggie Sinclair was as irreconcilable as peanuts and chewing gum. I was sure her two ex-husbands now felt the same. Some said the excellent divorce settlements had been all down to her legal expertise. Personally, I thought anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves wedlocked to Maggie would be happy to pay the ransom money just to escape. Why the present incumbent was still hanging in there, I couldn’t understand. Just as I couldn’t fathom why Stan Blandy had been chauffeuring Maggie’s stepson across Central Scotland on a Friday night. Surely, it couldn’t be love.

The Stan Blandy I knew was a hard-nosed businessman, in the same way Ben Nevis was a bump in the road to Fort William. Relationships were dangerous and an unnecessary distraction from the business of making money. I’d heard him say many times before that women were not to be trusted. Stan must have an angle, for there’d never been so much as a whisper of an affair or the possibility of a Mrs Blandy. Stan loved himself too much. It was said that he’d have sex with himself, if he could turn around quick enough.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.