"What would it have changed?"
"My reaction to your visit, for one thing. It obviates my concern that Joe's body has been released to you."
"Which reminds me," I interrupted. "Did Joe leave any specific instructions with you regarding his funeral?"
Maltbie shook his head. "No, none at all."
"That's fine, then." I told him about our provisional arrangements.
He grunted agreement. "Tell the undertaker to send me the bill. I'll meet it from the estate."
"That won't be necessary," I replied. "My wife wants to bury her father herself."
"I understand," said Maltbie… whether he did or not. "About Joe's death," he went on, sounding hesitant for the first time. "Do you have any view?"
"What do you mean?"
"Ah, I don't know, really. The police are calling it an accident. You were there, I gather. You don't think it might have been…"
"Suicide?" I retorted. "Listen, I'm the main reason they're calling it an accident. No way was Joe suicidal. The verdict is that he had a bit too much to drink, went into the garage to play with his car, and fell asleep with the engine running. It's cast iron."
"No, I didn't mean suicide."
I looked at Maltbie in a new light; the man had an imagination after all. I couldn't help laughing. "You're kidding me, aren't you? Did Joe have an enemy in the world, that you know of?"
"No," he conceded.
"You're not suggesting that his opponent in the Lanark championship final might have got a bit extreme, are you?"
The lawyer glared at me. "Hardly. Joe was due to play my nephew."
"In that case, forget it."
"I suppose so. It's just that Joe wasn't much of a drinking man."
"He wasn't dry either. They found a bottle of Amarone empty in the kitchen, and its contents in his stomach, at the autopsy. That's powerful stuff, if you're not used to it. A bottle would send me to sleep, I reckon, and I can shift a bit more than Joe."
Maltbie shrugged his shoulders; the gesture caused a small flurry of dandruff. "I suppose so," he conceded, with a heavy hint of disappointment in his voice.
"I suppose also," he went on, abruptly, 'that you'll want to know about the will."
Actually, I didn't; indeed the thought had never occurred to me. I had only gone along to see the man to discuss the funeral. "Joe left a will?"
"Of course. And there you certainly do have a locus, Mr.
Blackstone."
"Eh? Joe hasn't left anything to Susie and me, has he?"
"As a matter of fact he has. He's left you his golf clubs… two sets, one Taylormade, about two years old, and the other a mix of Callaway ERC woods and Big Bertha irons. He acquired them at the start of the season; he asserted to me that they helped him play the best golf of his life. They don't come guaranteed, I'm afraid."
I smiled. I'd given Joe the Callaways as a Christmas present, but I didn't tell that to Maltbie. He thought I was responding to his attempted joke and grinned back. "On the other hand, Mrs. Blackstone's legacy certainly does," he said. "You may be aware that Mr. Donn was a keen collector of crystal." I was indeed aware. On the few occasions I'd been to Joe's place I'd seen it and admired it. "All of it goes to your wife."
I felt a twinge of something in my stomach; I felt oddly grateful to Joe, and I think I realised at that point just how much Susie and I would miss him. He may have been a bloody awful accountant, but he was a nice bloke, a friend to Susie as well as, in truth more than, a dad, and most important of all he'd been invariably on her side. Without his presence, and without his vote when needed, I had a feeling that our board meetings wouldn't be as smooth as they had been in the past.
"The rest of the movable estate, that is to say the furniture, paintings etc." goes to charity," the solicitor continued, 'or the proceeds of its sale will. There are two small bequests of five thousand pounds each, to South Dalziel Parish Church, and to Lanark Golf Club." He took a deep breath: I could tell that the meaty part was coming up. "With one exception, the balance of the estate, that is the proceeds from the sale of the house in Crawford Street and of his car, plus the cash of which he died possessed, will, after payment of inheritance tax and professional fees, be placed in trust for your daughter, and for any further children you and Mrs. Blackstone may have. You and your wife will be the trustees; winding up of the trust will be at your discretion, once the last beneficiary has reached the age of eighteen."
I whistled, then found myself smiling again. Trust Joe to provide for the grandchildren; he had always thought that I lived in Fairyland… he wasn't a million miles wrong… and I guessed that in his heart of hearts he had worried that Susie might not be able to run the business without him. If I was right it was pretty rich, since Joe had been partly responsible for the Group winding up at the door of the knacker's yard, from which she had saved it, but in the circumstances, I was prepared to forgive him.
All of a sudden an alarm bell rang in my head. "What about Joe's shares in the Gantry Group?" I asked. This was not a daft question.
Joe owned just under seven per cent of the business, a chunk which, at current value, was worth around two million quid.
The structure of the group was complicated. Effectively, Susie owned a controlling interest in the business, but it wasn't straightforward.
Her shares were locked up, like the kids' money from Joe would be, in a trust, of which she was the sole beneficiary. Before he went off his trolley, or at least before anyone noticed that he was off his trolley, Jack Gantry had signed over control to her, irrevocably. The legals had been done by a very high-powered firm of corporate specialists in Edinburgh, and her position was completely secure. I knew this because I'd asked Greg McPhillips to give me a second opinion on the way it was set up. He'd referred it to a top QC, who'd pronounced it iron-clad.
It may have been, but it tied her in too; she couldn't sell, even if she wanted to, other than in the event of an outright takeover of the group that was unanimously agreed by the shareholders. In essence, that meant that Joe had to vote for it.
When Jack Gantry had owned and run the group, he had held ninety per cent of the shares himself. The other ten per cent had been gifted to Joe Donn, years earlier, on the basis that they could only be sold with Jack's permission. That veto over the sale had passed to Susie through the trust.
Many things had changed since Jack had gone to the funny farm. For one there was the question of successor. The trust specified that in the event of Susie's death, its benefits and control would pass to her next of kin… other than Jack. At the time it was drawn up and signed, this had meant her hated aunt, the Lord Provost's sister, to whom she never spoke. But with Janet's birth, things had changed. The trust gave me no rights of succession; what it did was to specify that on Susie's death, her holding would pass to her children. In other words, my daughter and unborn son were heirs to a very considerable fortune.. two, if you count mine.
The other significant change was in the structure of the company itself. Quite naturally, an enormous scandal had followed the unmasking of the Lord Provost as a murderer, drug baron and overall major league criminal. It had reached a crescendo when he was packed off to the State Hospital at Carstairs, without limit of time, into the care of the Secretary of State for Scotland, and later the First Minister.
In the aftermath, the bankers and assorted creditors who had collectively invested millions in the sprawling enterprise that was the Gantry Group had, not unnaturally, collectively shit themselves. When Jack had installed Susie as chief executive, they had all gone along with it, because none of them had believed that she was actually running the show. In truth, she hadn't been, not entirely. The Lord Provost had always kept an eye on things, and offered 'advice' whenever she did something he didn't agree with. When she fired Joe as finance director, he bided his time, but when an opportunity to reinstate him came up, he had taken it.