Blood Lines. Grace Monroe
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.
‘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