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TWO

Kailash Coutts. Edinburgh’s most notorious dominatrix. The word that said it all. Kailash was named after one of the most sacred mountains in the Himalayas. Pilgrims trek around it three times for purification and blessings, for it is thought to be the gateway to heaven. Never has anyone been more inaptly named. That woman was a signpost on the road to hell. As I hung up, my feet were already on the old wooden floorboards and the adrenalin hit my nerves like a bucket of cold water.

The house was quiet–as normal houses should be at that time of night–but I had begun to dread the hours between midnight and 3.00a.m. While the rest of Edinburgh sleeps, the violent and deranged call on my services. Ordinarily in practices they have a rota of on-call solicitors, but we weren’t an ordinary partnership. I was the only solicitor advocate in Lothian & St Clair Writer to the Signet who touched criminal work.

The partnership where I worked was founded when Robert Louis Stevenson was a boy. Our client list read like a Scottish Who’s Who. Lothian & St Clair was officially a corporate firm dealing with acquisitions and mergers, business deals and documents, and such like. However, clients would keep being naughty. I made it clear: crime (and the profits which come from representing it in court) should be kept in house.

It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a popular idea. I’d have been as well to suggest that we ban double-barrelled names and holidays in Aspen. The price I had to pay for pointing out the obvious was that I got lumped with the whole bloody lot.

The tide turned somewhat two years ago. Rather than scumbag clients (whether well-to-do scumbags or not), it was one of our own who needed help. Senior partner Roddie Buchanan’s picture was splashed all over the tabloids. There was some justice in this. The man’s mantra had always been, ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity.’ Somehow he seemed to question the validity of that stance when pictured on the front page of The Sun naked in the dungeon of an S&M whorehouse.

I kept Roddie Buchanan’s file at home–away from the prying eyes and empty wallets of summer work experience students who might think to supplement their grants by rehashing old news, or selling pics to their pals. When I opened the folder, loose clippings fell to the floor, scattering around my feet.

A hidden camera had snapped a masked Roderick Buchanan Esquire, trussed up like a Christmas turkey. And here was where my past met my present–Kailash Coutts, clad in black leather basque and fishnet stockings stood over him, a large syringe in her hand. Apparently, Roddie had paid her to inject his testicles with water until they were the size of footballs. And they say men don’t have any imagination.

On the day The Sun led with the story, Roddie didn’t deign to come into the office. It didn’t matter. He was irrelevant. I was asked–no, told–by my colleagues to represent him. It was up to me to determine what line such a representation would take. I didn’t need anything real. I just needed to throw Roddie and his wife a bone, so to speak.

I sued The Sun for three million pounds thanks to a technical error in the wording of the story. In Scotland, if you want to avoid being sued for defamation, then every word printed has to be correct. The article stated (actually, the one-handed hack job leered under the headline: NO BRIEFS, MISS WHIPLASH!!!) that Roddie Buchanan (‘posh Edinburgh legal bigwig’) paid Kailash Coutts (‘infamous pervy S&M Queen’) to inject both of his testicles. I got Kailash to sign an affidavit, in front of an independent Notary Public, to the effect that he only wanted one bollock dealt with.

The paper settled, for a derisory sum, but they gave us the all-important apology (notwithstanding that it was printed on page nine). Roddie could now say to everyone that he’d been defamed and his wife could broadcast her husband’s absolute innocence in every drawing room in the city. After all, if the nasty tabloid could lie about the number of testicles involved, it stands to reason that the whole thing could be made up–doesn’t it?

In the immediate aftermath of the case, appearing in court was awkward. I was initially greeted with messages for Roddie. The whole business kept every would-be stand-up comedian in a wig and gown going for months, generally along the lines that Roddie had wasted his money given that half of the Edinburgh legal establishment would have been willing to kick his bollocks for free anyway.

Turns out that Buchanan was right in one way–there was no such thing as bad publicity. My career–and my fees–rocketed. A grudging respect from him would have been nice though, given that I was the one who had cleared up his scandal–somehow, he just didn’t seem to be able to show that little bit of gratitude. I didn’t take it personally; it wasn’t just me he didn’t like: he may have paid other women a fortune to whack him off with a whip or inflate his bollocks to within an inch of their life, but he wasn’t that fond of the fairer sex. I wasn’t too surprised–I had met Eilidh Buchanan on a number of occasions.

Now I was going to have to ask Roddie’s permission to take on this case. Kailash Coutts must have been behind The Sun getting the pictures of Roddie’s hobby in the first place. She certainly knew that we had asked her to be complicit in getting an apology from the paper on a technicality that didn’t matter one bit–in fact, we were all sure she must have had a dozen photograph albums made up of much tastier pics than the paper ever published. There was a clear conflict of interest, and I thought that I should withdraw from acting. My opinion was irrelevant until it had been past Roddie Buchanan.

It was a lovely prospect. I had to face calling him at home to inform him that his favourite prostitute was in police custody and that she wanted me to represent her. That was bound to go down well with his wife.

My mouth was dry and I felt embarrassingly nervous as I rang his home number. I could have kicked myself the moment the receiver was picked up and I recognised Eilidh Buchanan’s voice. I remembered Roddie was in Switzerland, putting a deal to bed.

Details were unnecessary. No matter what, I had to tell her that Kailash Coutts was in custody and I did not want to represent her.

She listened as I spluttered out the sparse information.

‘You will contain this,’ she said condescendingly. ‘I will not tolerate the firm splashed all over the gutter press again.’

Edinburgh lawyers’ wives–they’re the ones you don’t mess with. They’re the ones so warm and cuddly that their men pay good money to get whores to dress them up in rubber fetish gear and inject their genitals for fun.

‘I can’t stop it. The trial will be a matter of public record. Open to the tabloids. I don’t doubt that they’ll…erm, re-open old wounds, but there’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘Well, now…’ replied Eilidh Buchanan. ‘You’ve just laid something on the table, Brodie. I think we need to examine your attitude closely. If you can’t stop what needs to be stopped, we’ll need to find someone who will.’

‘Is that a threat?’ I asked.

‘I’m just stating a fact. For the record.’

My pet hate is pointless conversation, and nothing could be gained by continuing this tête-à-tête, so I said goodbye and within seconds had grabbed my scuffed black biker’s helmet, worn from years of use, and left for St Leonard’s Police Station.

The night air was damp and earthy; a soft haze covered the slate rooftops. There were no lights in the windows of my neighbours’ houses. I threw myself onto the kick-start, praying the pistons were on their firing stroke, otherwise I would be thrown off the bike. Not that it was just ‘a’ bike; it was my pride and joy–a 1970 Ironhead Fat Boy Harley, and it thankfully roared into life, the huge 1200v twin engine with straight through pipes woke half the neighbourhood in the process.

I looked up. I wasn’t too bothered about waking neighbours, but there was one person I cared about and I cared about the fact that he never got enough sleep (not that I would necessarily ever tell him). I didn’t want to be the one responsible for waking him if he had finally dropped off. The bedside light was still on in the first floor bedroom in our house. Fishy must still have been awake anyway. This must be another night when he would be plagued by his worries, where sleep would evade him, and he would ponder over his work until morning. This would be one more day, when I wasn’t there to listen to him. Fishy and I went back a long way–we had met on our first day in the Law Faculty at university and he was the only student to win more prizes than I did.

When I first bought my flat, I adored the isolation. I revelled in the space and light, and particularly in the fact that I could have anyone to stay over without withering looks or comments from others. Of course, by ‘anyone’, I mean men–my track record meant that few of them ever stayed more than one night. My romantic dreams of finding someone a bit more permanent were as much coloured by my habit of pushing away most men who tried to get close as by the fact that they were generally losers anyway. It wasn’t that I didn’t get on with men–far from it; some of my closest friends were afflicted with excess testosterone, and I wasn’t averse to non-committal relationships based purely on a nice backside and a lie-in–but as soon as any man started to get, as my mum would have put it, ‘serious’, the shutters came down and the metaphorical locks got changed.

By the time I realised this, I also realised that I was spending a hell of a lot of time alone anyway. I decided that a flatmate was in order and texted lots of old pals from university and around–Richard Sturgeon and I had got on well when we were students together, and I was delighted when he got back to me and said he was working in Edinburgh and needed somewhere to stay.

I had hardly seen him recently. We both shared a house, and, when we had time, shared laughs too, but those times were rare just now. Not only were we both working ridiculous hours, but the bone of contention which was always between us seemed to be even more problematical than usual. I wasn’t fighting Fishy–I was fighting DC Richard Sturgeon. I had always thought Fishy had thrown his talent away by joining the police force. I knew how good a lawyer I was, and the thought that the one person who I thought was better than me had actually chosen a different path was unfathomable. His job appeared to be just as stressful as mine, judging by his insomnia and weight-loss, but I didn’t have much sympathy. I just couldn’t understand why he was taking this career path–I wasn’t just being stubborn; I genuinely thought he would be better out of the police force, especially given that he seemed to be miserable all the time anyway. Still, as every women’s magazine on earth would tell me, I needed to be there for him as a friend rather than a constant critic.

In truth, Fishy was just another one to add to my list. Another one hacked off at me, another one to push out of my mind as I headed off to the station. Sergeant Munro would be there having a fit at my lack of promptness, and Eilidh Buchanan was already gunning for me.

Roll on Kailash Coutts–could it get any worse than a tart who already disliked and had tried to bankrupt me, now demanding that I represent her in a murder case?