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  I showed him the flat of my hand. ‘But I’ll need the cash up front.’

  2

  ‘Well?’

  One of the many drawbacks of living at my dad’s house was that he lived there too.

  I’d sold my one-bedroom flat, been unable to find anything suitable within my restricted means, and had, in a moment of madness, agreed to move into his cottage with Tina. It meant that, with his junk-room redecorated and fitted-out, there was a bedroom for each of us. It also meant that if my dad tried to throw me out he knew I’d be taking his granddaughter with me.

  The old man was sitting at the kitchen table when I walked in the back door. Handkerchief in one hand, cup of tea in the other, he was looking decidedly sorry for himself. My daughter sat next to him, a heap of multi-coloured Lego bricks in front of her, my brother on the other side holding the base of a tall structure that had been designed without regard for earth’s gravitational pull.

  I threw my briefcase into a corner and loosened my tie. ‘Well, what?’

  ‘The wean. You’re just letting her go?’ He sneezed massively into the nearly white handkerchief.

  ‘She’s going to Disneyland. I’m not selling her into slavery. It can’t be less fun than sitting around here trying not to catch your cold.’

  Tina stood on her chair, stretching to place another brick atop the tower. She dropped the piece. Malky tried to catch it, releasing his grip on the base. The whole thing toppled, crashing down on the tabletop, bits scattering in all directions.

  My dad fished a brick out of his cup, shook the tea off and chucked it onto the demolition site.

  ‘Look, Dad. She’ll have the time of her life and be back before Christmas. What’s the problem?’

  Silly question. The problem, as I well knew, was the battle of the grandparents. It had been raging since Tina had come to live with me. If my dad bought Tina a T-shirt, her grandmother would show up with a full designer ensemble. If he bought her a tricycle, next time we visited Tina’s gran there would be a motorised scooter waiting. Only the weekend before, my dad had taken Tina to Princes Street for the Christmas market and a go on some of the fairground rides. Now Mrs Reynolds had scheduled a trip to Disneyland. What was I supposed to do about that? Tina loved her mammy’s mammy and the feeling was obviously mutual. If Mrs Reynolds wanted to take Tina on an all-expenses-paid trip to Disneyland Paris, with her cousins, I could hardly refuse. ‘No, sorry, Tina, you can’t go to see Donald Duck, but don’t be upset, Gramps will take you and a half-loaf down to Linlithgow Loch and you can feed some of Donald’s real-life relatives.’

  Maybe it’s because we were brothers that Malky and I were sometimes tuned to the same wavelength. ‘How come Mickey Mouse wears trousers and Donald Duck doesn’t?’

  Okay, some of his wavelengths were a lot shorter than mine, probably due to the number of footballs he’d headed in his time.

  ‘Creepy, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘A duck wearing a shirt and no breeks.’

  ‘Gramps says I have to go in a hairy-plane.’ At four and a half years of age, Tina had already learned to ignore her uncle’s ramblings. She climbed down from the chair to begin the rebuilding work. ‘I don’t like hairy-planes.’

  ‘Me neither, pet.’ My dad reached over and patted her on the head. ‘You’d be better off staying at home with me.’

  ‘What have you been saying, Dad?’ I asked, as Tina spilled some more bricks and scrambled under the table after them.

  ‘Me? Nothing.’ The old man poured tea into a face replete with the shocked innocence of the wrongly-accused.

  ‘You must have said something or Tina wouldn’t be talking about not liking hairy-planes.’

  ‘How can I help it if you can’t switch on the telly news without seeing a story about some plane or other crashing? It’s the anniversary of Lockerbie next week. It’s been all over the news.’

  ‘So you’ve been scaring Tina? Is that where all this stuff about hairy-planes is coming from? Have you forgotten that earlier this year she flew all the way from Australia and never batted an eyelid?’

  Tina emerged from beneath the table, clutching a handful of Lego bricks. I lifted her up, held her in my arms and ruffled her hair. ‘Well, the good news is, honey, no one is going anywhere in a hairy-plane. You and Granny, Aunt Chloe and your cousins are all going in a nice big aeroplane, and the flight to Paris only takes an hour. By the time you’ve buckled your seat belt and sucked a sweetie, it’ll be time to land again.’

  Tina squirmed in my arms. ‘But Gramps said—’

  Whatever Gramps had said was drowned out by a loud clearing of his throat.

  ‘Never mind Gramps,’ I said. ‘He was only kidding you on. You know how hilarious he can be. Now put all the bricks away and I’ll make your tea.’

  On Friday evenings Tina was allowed to eat her meal on her knee while she listened to her Uncle Malky on the radio. Tonight’s live football phone-in was to be replaced by a pre-recorded Christmas special.

  Tea was mostly eggs. Cheesy omelettes for me and my dad. Boiled egg chopped up in a cup with soldiers for Tina and scrambled eggs for Malky.

  ‘I wanted fried eggs,’ Malky said, as I took his plate through to the living room.

  ‘They broke and I knew you’d moan if they weren’t runny so I scrambled them instead.’

  ‘How can you break two eggs? One, fair enough, but two?’

  I had to accept that while one burst egg could be considered collateral damage, nought for two wasn’t a great egg-cracking average. Then again, it had long been a puzzle why when you fried eggs there were always casualties no matter how carefully you cracked them into the pan. On the other hand, with scrambled eggs you could practically lob them into the pot from a great height and the yolks would remain intact, sunny side smiling up at you, demanding to be whisked.

  ‘Then you should have pretended you were going to make scrambled eggs, cracked them into the pan, changed your mind and fried them,’ was Malky’s solution to a problem that had defied domestic science for centuries.

  ‘Pretend? To what? The eggs?’

  ‘Aye.’ He reached for the salt and sprinkled some across his food. ‘Just walk up to the cooker, all casual like, and say... “I think I fancy some scrambled eggs tonight,” crack the eggs into the pan and then fry them instead.’

  ‘You want me to lie to a couple of unfertilised hen’s ova?’

  ‘You seem to manage okay with a jury,’ my dad said. ‘Now would you two wheesht? Malky’s programme is about to start.’

  ‘What’s a hen’s ova?’ Tina asked.

  My dad froze so quickly I could have snapped the end off his moustache. Suddenly, Malky was finding my scrambled eggs to be food of the gods, digging in, cramming buttered toast into his mouth without taking time to chew. I was on my own with this one.

  ‘It’s just a fancy name for an egg,’ I said. ‘Ovum means one egg. Ova is if it’s more than one.’

  ‘But what does it mean? Unfertil…thingy.’

  My dad had thawed out sufficiently to lower his brow. Slitty-eyes sent invisible death-rays in my direction as he leaned forward in his chair to turn up the volume on the radio.

  Tina was unrelenting. ‘Where do eggs come from, Dad? They come out of a hen’s bottom, don’t they?’ My daughter had clearly been giving the subject way too much thought. ‘Is an egg a hen-poop?’ She made a face and stared in horror at the contents of her cup.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘an egg is not a hen-poop, it’s more like… hen-fruit.’

  Tina looked up at me. ‘Baby hens come out of eggs, don’t they?’

  It wasn’t good to ignore your child’s questions. I’d read that somewhere. Fob your kid off with some banal answer and you’d only stunt an enquiring mind.

  ‘Well…?’ Malky was now also taking an unhealthy interest in hen biology. ‘Where do chicks come from, Robbie?’

  Paying him no heed, I held my daughter’s stare. ‘You see, Tina, it’s only the mummy chickens that are called
hens and it’s the hens that lay the eggs…’

  ‘What do the daddy chickens do?’

  Malky sniggered. My dad emitted a low growl. His knuckles tightened on the arms of his chair.

  I ignored them both. I could do this. ‘They wake you up in the morning. They go cock-a-doodle-doo.’

  Tina was unimpressed. ‘But why do daddy chickens not lay eggs? And why is there not a chick in my boiled egg?’

  ‘Well, you see, if there is a mummy chicken and a daddy chicken then the eggs have chicks in them. If there is just a mummy chicken—’

  ‘You mean a hen,’ Tina said.

  So far so good. ‘That’s right. If there is just a hen—’

  ‘How can a daddy chicken put baby chicks in an egg? And if a mummy chicken is a hen, what’s a daddy chicken called?’

  Malky began to choke on a piece of toast. The combination of this and the theme tune to his phone-in show was enough to distract Tina while I sidled off to make my omelette. I ate at the kitchen table, away from the radio and Malky’s Christmas special, listening to the hoots of laughter coming from the next room. Later, when I went through to collect the plates for washing up, all hen talk had ceased, the radio was off and the TV was on, showing the local news: yet another report on the upcoming anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing.

  The wreckage of Pan Am flight 103 flashed up on the screen. I manoeuvred myself between my daughter and the TV. ‘Come on.’ I reached out, took one of her hands and pulled her off the couch and onto her feet. ‘Let’s brush your teeth and get you ready for bed.’

  ‘It’s too early for bed,’ Tina said, pulling free and looking at me as though I were insane. ‘We’ve not even played dominoes yet and how can I brush my teeth if I’ve just had my tea and haven’t had my supper?’

  Tina’s supper usually consisted of a glass of milk and a biscuit or a slice of toast taken a couple of hours after her tea. It was a snack she could spin out longer than a royal banquet and the fact that she’d not long finished her late tea was no reason for a change in routine.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the TV screen and a huge gouge carved out between demolished houses. ‘Well, if you put your pyjamas and dressing gown on, I’ll let you stay up extra late tonight.’

  It was an offer my daughter couldn’t refuse and one of which she’d take full advantage. She was out of the room in a shot.

  ‘You can’t hide it from her,’ my dad said. ‘This is the sort of world the lassie’s growing up in. Terrorists blowing themselves up, flying planes through windows, running about beaches with sub-machine guns. You know what happened in Paris back in two thousand and fifteen, and you still think it’s okay for her to go to Disneyland?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I’m her dad and I say she’s going.’

  ‘And what do I tell the bairn if she starts asking questions?’ He pointed at the screen. No longer Lockerbie, but the twisted remains of a light aircraft strewn across a bleak hillside. A picture of a young couple, happy and smiling on their wedding day, appeared, the bride white and lacy, the groom in full Highland regalia, both smiling straight into the camera lens. They’d set out to chase the Northern Lights and found the side of a hill.

  ‘That wasn’t terrorists,’ Malky said. ‘Just bad flying.’

  The newly-weds disappeared to be replaced by still images of another couple, video footage of the North Sea and a story about a missing helicopter.

  I switched the TV off just in time for Tina to come bouncing back into the room wrapped in a big fleecy pink dressing gown. She flopped down beside me, smiling broadly, all ready for a long night of hard domino playing.

  I put an arm around her. Maybe my dad was right. Maybe terrorism was a fact of life. But, like the reproductive cycle of the chicken, it was something I was going to put off telling my daughter about for as long as absolutely possible.

  3

  There weren’t many places I’d rather not have been on a Monday afternoon than the offices of the Scottish Legal Aid Board. My usual line of communication with the personnel at SLAB was restricted to abusive online messages and the occasional heated telephone call as I tried to counter their best efforts not to pay me.

  The young woman on the opposite side of the desk drummed bright red fingernails on top of the pile of files that lay between us. So cunning was the Scottish Legal Aid Board that they were now recruiting attractive people.

  ‘This is not the first time we’ve had to warn you about your lack of attendance notes,’ she said. Her smile, like her eyebrows, stencilled onto her face. ‘It was raised at the last two annual inspections. By constantly failing to keep a proper record of work done, it seems to me you’ve been flirting with disaster for some time now.’

  The majority of cases were dealt with on a fixed-fee basis so it was the same rate of pay win or lose. And that was the problem: SLAB didn’t care if you won or lost, just so long as you time-recorded everything you did. Personally, I couldn’t see the point. If the fee was the same whether you spent three hours or thirty-three hours working on it, surely the result was all that mattered?

  ‘There are thirty files here,’ she said. ‘All taken from your office.’ She wasn’t only pretty; she could count as well. ‘Out of those thirty you have failed one hundred per cent of the time to record advice to the client that under section one-nine-six there is a sentencing discount available for an early plea of guilty.’

  ‘That’s because I don’t advise people to plead guilty if they’ve told me they’re not guilty.’

  ‘You should have advised them nonetheless.’

  Who wrote SLAB regulations – Franz Kafka? ‘Are you actually saying that I should advise clients to plead guilty to crimes they say they didn’t commit in order to get a soft sentence?’ That was like going to the doctor, hoping for a cure, and being told that if you just went off and died it would save everyone a whole lot of bother.

  ‘So, some of my files are not perfect. What about it?’

  ‘Not some. Here’s thirty for a start.’

  ‘Thirty? I must have done three, four hundred cases this year.’

  I tried my winning smile. It came in second to her frown. She donned a pair of spectacles that somehow only served to make her look more alluring, and picked a sheet of paper from the desk. ‘You registered two hundred and eight-five cases with us, and these,’ she tapped the top of the pile again in case I was having trouble following, ‘represent a random sample of approximately ten percent of your legal aid workload. None of which is satisfactorily completed.’

  Not satisfactorily completed? I looked at the name on the cover of the top-most file: Hugh Hendry. Charge: indecent exposure. He’d taken a walk from the dock after I’d explained to nice Sheriff Dalrymple, who’d once been the Tory parliamentary candidate for Morningside and somehow managed to come third, that the lack of public lavatories due to the SNP’s council tax freeze was causing havoc for those with weak bladders. Fortunately, he’d formed a reasonable doubt without giving much thought to why the bold Hugh had been jumping out of a bush with his tadger in his hand rather than the other way round. Whatever, it was my turn to tap the stack. ‘Ask Mr Hendry if he thinks his case was satisfactorily completed.’

  She sighed, took the file and opened it. ‘No initial attendance note…’ She intercepted my attempt to put her right on that score with a raised hand. ‘Illegible scribbles on the back of the charge sheet do not constitute an accurate record of legal advice given and instructions received.’

  Advice? Instructions? Hugh didn’t need advice, unless it was to stop getting his tackle out and waving it at passers-by, and, as for instructions, all he instructed me to do was keep him from going to jail again. How precisely that was to be achieved was something he was happy to leave to his lawyer, and, furthermore, those scribbles were perfectly legible to the one person who needed to read them – me.

  She continued through the thin sheaf of papers, coming to rest on the final page, a scrawled note with the date of the trial and a bi
g NG. ‘Not even a final letter to advise the client of the outcome of the case,’ she said, closing the file and staring at me accusingly.

  Personally I’d assumed the absence of bars and stripy pyjamas would have been sufficient clue for Hugh as to the outcome of his court case. ‘You do know what NG stands for?’ I said. ‘Take a look. How many not-guilties are in that pile?’

  ‘That’s irrelevant.’

  I pulled the stack of files towards me and started opening them one at a time. ‘Not guilty, not proven, pled to one out of three charges, case deserted, not guilty, pled to a lesser charge…’ I shoved the files away from me. ‘That’s a random sample of six cases from the thirty seized from my office. Three acquittals, one desertion and two pleas to less serious charges. Those results are not irrelevant. Not to my clients.’

  She sighed and sat back in her chair. ‘You are being paid from the public purse. We need to satisfy ourselves that you are doing what you’re being paid to do. That’s not possible if you don’t keep adequate records.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve been keeping your own records.’

  She smiled thinly. ‘You’ve been warned time and time again.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘These are fixed-fee cases. What difference does it make when I do the work or how long it takes? It’s all about the result.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ She took the half-dozen files, snapped them shut one at a time and dropped them back on top of the pile.

  I could imagine a SLAB compliance officer in hospital. No, it doesn’t matter if you cure me doctor, just so long as you keep an accurate record of your time spent treating me.

  ‘I was thinking,’ I said. ‘How about we discuss things in more detail over lunch? Or maybe a drink after work?’

  Slowly the frosty expression thawed and a warm summer of a smile spread across her face. ‘That would be nice.’ Coyly, she patted the sides of the files to even the stack out and slid them across the desk at me. ‘Can I bring my boyfriend along? Maybe we can all go out together after his mixed martial arts class.’