‘Are you serious?’ he had demanded. ‘We’ll be the laughing stock of Liverpool.’
‘Laughing all the way to the bank, if the figures I’ve seen stack up,’ his partner had replied. ‘Cyril’s comfortably off and he’s not seeking much money for the goodwill.’
‘Goodwill? Most of his files are marked with the black spot.’
‘You exaggerate, as usual. Say what you like about Cyril — and you usually do — he has plenty of profitable work-in-progress in his cabinets. Besides, his overheads are minimal.’
‘Of course they are. He pays his staff peanuts and never moves a muscle on any of his files unless someone forces his hand. What about the risk of negligence claims?’
‘Warranties and insurance,’ said Jim with a wave of the hand. ‘Believe me, we can afford a bank loan to pay him what he’s looking for and wait for the money to roll in.’
‘If it’s such a good deal, why aren’t our competitors biting his hand off?’
‘Same reason you’re so nervous. Cyril has a wonderful reputation with his clients, quite the opposite with other solicitors. Besides, most firms are trying to move upmarket. They’re aiming for the corporate business, that’s where the money is supposed to be. I tell you, though, Harry, I’ve examined Cyril’s accounts as sceptically as if they had been prepared by Robert Maxwell and as far as I can see, we simply can’t lose.’
So the deal had gone through and although Harry still had the occasional nightmare that one day a knock on their door would herald the arrival of joint envoys from the Fraud Squad and the Law Society, he had to admit that thus far their investment had paid off. But he still thought it a fluke: rather like the entire career of Cyril Tweats.
As soon as he had studied the last football league tables in The Sunday Times and consigned the business and personal finance sections to the wastepaper bin unread, he set off for Aigburth. Cyril had retired to a palatial villa in a quiet road with views over the cricket field. Only a stone’s throw away from Battlecrease House where Florence and James Maybrick lived, thought Harry, but then he bit his lip and told himself to watch out: crime was rapidly becoming not only his bread and butter but also the obsession of his every waking hour. As he turned into the drive, he saw a man bending over a drain underneath one of the downspouts on the side of the building. Harry thought it was a tramp but when the man straightened, he realised his mistake. Cyril himself had been clearing out a handful of soggy brown leaves. In his donkey jacket and elderly trilby, he hardly looked like a distinguished professional man, but Harry reflected that was fair enough, since he had not been one.
Cyril’s whole career might have been planned to prove that it is better to be born lucky than rich. His rise to fame and fortune had become the stuff of Liverpool legend and these days it was hard to separate truth from the layers of accumulated myth. He seemed always to provoke exasperated amusement, and every solicitor in the city had a Cyril story to tell.
He stood up at the sound of the car and waved as Harry walked towards him, a vague gleam in his watery eyes.
‘My dear fellow, how are you? Good to see you.’
‘Hello, Cyril. How’s retirement?’
‘Splendid, absolutely splendid. I seem to be so busy about the garden that I can’t recall now how I managed to fit any legal business into my working day. Come in and have a cup of tea and a jaffa cake.’ He led the way to the house, calling out, ‘Dolly! We have a visitor.’ Turning at the door, he confided, ‘She looks after me damned well, you know. Not that I’m much trouble.’
‘I’m sure.’ Privately, Harry entertained the greatest respect for Cyril’s widowed sister. Amiable as the old man was, prolonged exposure to him would test anyone’s patience. But Dolly Harris would have made Job seem like a chain-smoking neurotic.
As they entered the lounge, Cyril pointed to the huge aquarium that was his pride and joy. Perhaps the open mouths of his exotic fish reminded him of clients past. He tapped the side of the tank and said, ‘Exceptionally thick glass, you know. It would stop a bullet.’
‘Very handy, if someone wants to assassinate your fish.’
Cyril shook his head sadly and settled himself into an armchair. ‘Oh Harry, Harry. You’re so sharp that one day you’ll cut yourself. Well, young man, what brings you here? I suppose you’ve come to pick my brains?’
God forbid, thought Harry, but aloud he said, ‘Sort of, Cyril.’
Cyril gave a comfortable nod. He always liked to say that he had had a marvellous education in the university of life and he saw nothing risible in the idea that a professional colleague might seek to benefit from his accumulated wisdom.
People said he had only scraped through his exams because the Law Society could not face marking any more of his resit papers. The principal who had signed his certificate of fitness to practise once he had completed his articles had been either drunk or simply desperate to get rid of the lad. After gaining a little more experience at the expense of a series of luckless clients, Cyril had put up his own nameplate outside an alcove in the Cunard Building, less from a desire to become a sole practitioner than from a growing awareness that no-one else would have him. He made a vow early on not to narrow his horizons through specialisation and as a result he applied his inverse Midas touch to an infinite variety of legal problems. His conveyancing clients ran the risk of finding a main road running through their back yard within months of completion and people who came to him for advice on a divorce could count themselves fortunate if they were not reduced to penury by the financial settlement. Yet for all that, his unflappable, if insensitive, good nature coupled with a native Liverpudlian’s ability to talk himself out of trouble helped him to make ends meet. And then one day, Cyril Tweats struck gold.
It began in a small way, as causes celebres often do, when he was consulted by a Toxteth resident aggrieved by the noise and smell from a local glue factory. Impressed by Cyril’s talk of taking the attack to the multi-national which owned the offending premises, the client encouraged a dozen of his neighbours to make similar complaints. Cyril duly wrote a ferocious letter to the company and when its failure to disclose any realistic cause of action prompted the managing director to consign it to the waste bin, he issued a writ and promptly forgot about the matter.
As the proceedings lumbered along, head office in Illinois was informed and hotshot in-house lawyers came on to the scene. When their powerful defence failed to persuade the litigants to throw in the towel, they sent a letter making a token offer of settlement with a view to saving time and expense. Cyril, as was his custom, ignored the offer and in due course the Americans increased it in the hope of ridding themselves of the case once and for all. Further correspondence and telephone calls provoked no reply and as time passed a degree of panic set in. The company was engaged in a fierce takeover battle and needed to be squeaky clean. As the day of the hearing drew near, the commercial cost of the dispute mounted and before long the need to resolve it became a cornerstone of boardroom policy. Cyril had scarcely turned his mind to details like the need to brief counsel when nerves finally cracked on the other side of the Atlantic. The lawyers put forward a proposal designed to make every plaintiff rich. When Cyril laughed at it, they took him to be hell-bent on making legal history rather than simply unable to credit the sum being mentioned and so they hurriedly doubled it. The name of Tweats and Company became the toast of Toxteth; Cyril’s reputation was made. Thereafter he was often described as a pioneer of English environmental law.
Yet he was not a man to brag. ‘Ah yes, the case of the glue factory,’ he would say. ‘Damned sticky business.’ And he would smile in his charming manner.