nameless male victim was pronounced dead on arrival at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Are you taking all of this down, Miss McLennan?’
I wanted to butt in with: ‘No, I’m thinking about recipes and marrying policemen, Sergeant Munro,’ but managed to keep quiet.
‘Miss McLennan, will you be here shortly? Miss McLennan?’
‘I’ll be in to the station, Sergeant Munro, as soon as you give me my client’s name.’
There was definitely hesitation this time.
In retrospect, I wish it could have gone on for longer.
‘You may be familiar with the name, Miss McLennan,’ he said.
‘Coutts. Your client is Kailash Coutts.’
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
