worth making much fuss over. He was in his late thirties/early forties, dressing smartly but perhaps a little too flamboyantly for his age. She saw in him an affable fellow, generous of spirit but perhaps over-keen to be liked. A onetime looker, probably a ladies' man, who had screwed up at least one good relationship somewhere along the line and was trying to recapture youthful glory days because he couldn't recapture whatever he had regretfully thrown away. It was a lot to read into a bad haircut and silly jacket, but she did have a good track record on this sort of thing.
The place had been in a ferment over the fact that one of the Voss accused was a client. And when they opened the envelope - working on the reasonable assumption that Thomas McInnes was unlikely to show up in person to retrieve it - Campbell had ushered her into his office and closed the door.
"I'll make this brief because I've got to be in court in half an hour," he had said. "But the first thing you should know is that I defended Thomas McInnes, Robert Hannah and associates during the Robbin' Hoods trial. That's why McInnes came to Manson & Boyd with this," he added, in response to the involuntary widening of Nicole's eyes. "When I say defended, I suppose I should really say represented, as there wasn't much defending to do. They pleaded guilty. That wasn't on my advice - they had decided on it well before it reached that stage. When the game was up, the game was up, was how they saw it. Kind of the opposite of 'it ain't over till it's over'.
"My job was really to present them as remorseful and penitent men, who posed no danger to society and who had committed their spate of crimes -
first offences, incidentally - in circumstances unlikely to be repeated, etcetera etcetera." A sad look of pity and regret passed over his normally indefatigably smiley face.
"I have no idea whether I was any good or not," he continued, shrugging,
"because I could have stood up and said, 'Your honour, my client would like to state before the court that you suck horses' cocks and your wife shags donkeys,' and it wouldn't have been much worse. These guys had been screwing the homes of the great and the good and they were going to get it up the arse with a chainsaw for their troubles, no matter what mitigation I presented. Normally, poor people just steal from other poor people. And back then, Scottish country mansions simply didn't get burgled. The establishment were affronted at the sheer temerity of it, that some bunch of oiks could even 55
dare to attempt what they had done. But what really sealed the Hoods' fate was that insurance premiums on such properties soared as a result; before this, they were - ironically or not - regarded as comparatively low-risk. Like I said, nobody stole from these places. After the Hoods hit the headlines, the insurance firms saw things a wee bit differently. So these four men's actions hadn't just deprived a few toffs of some trinkets - their repercussions were going to hit the pockets of every member of the landed gentry across the UK. Including the judge, Lord McLean."
"And I suppose an exemplarily harsh sentence would be seen as a deterrent to further such offences, and thus smiled upon by the insurers?"
"You got it. Seven years."
"Jesus," Nicole gasped.
"Unprecedented and unbefuckinglievable. Not only that, but their parole was messed about with and various strings pulled to make sure they served just about all of it. The establishment made sure they got every ounce of their pound of flesh. So I took it as a measure of the man's character that McInnes actually came back here for legal assistance. Blamed no-one but himself for what happened. A man of dignity and humility.
"He got pulled in for questioning a few times about rural break-ins, first year after he got out, and always got in touch with us for a brief. He even handled all that stoically as part of the price he was paying, and fortunately the cops gradually got the
The place had been in a ferment over the fact that one of the Voss accused was a client. And when they opened the envelope - working on the reasonable assumption that Thomas McInnes was unlikely to show up in person to retrieve it - Campbell had ushered her into his office and closed the door.
"I'll make this brief because I've got to be in court in half an hour," he had said. "But the first thing you should know is that I defended Thomas McInnes, Robert Hannah and associates during the Robbin' Hoods trial. That's why McInnes came to Manson & Boyd with this," he added, in response to the involuntary widening of Nicole's eyes. "When I say defended, I suppose I should really say represented, as there wasn't much defending to do. They pleaded guilty. That wasn't on my advice - they had decided on it well before it reached that stage. When the game was up, the game was up, was how they saw it. Kind of the opposite of 'it ain't over till it's over'.
"My job was really to present them as remorseful and penitent men, who posed no danger to society and who had committed their spate of crimes -
first offences, incidentally - in circumstances unlikely to be repeated, etcetera etcetera." A sad look of pity and regret passed over his normally indefatigably smiley face.
"I have no idea whether I was any good or not," he continued, shrugging,
"because I could have stood up and said, 'Your honour, my client would like to state before the court that you suck horses' cocks and your wife shags donkeys,' and it wouldn't have been much worse. These guys had been screwing the homes of the great and the good and they were going to get it up the arse with a chainsaw for their troubles, no matter what mitigation I presented. Normally, poor people just steal from other poor people. And back then, Scottish country mansions simply didn't get burgled. The establishment were affronted at the sheer temerity of it, that some bunch of oiks could even 55
dare to attempt what they had done. But what really sealed the Hoods' fate was that insurance premiums on such properties soared as a result; before this, they were - ironically or not - regarded as comparatively low-risk. Like I said, nobody stole from these places. After the Hoods hit the headlines, the insurance firms saw things a wee bit differently. So these four men's actions hadn't just deprived a few toffs of some trinkets - their repercussions were going to hit the pockets of every member of the landed gentry across the UK. Including the judge, Lord McLean."
"And I suppose an exemplarily harsh sentence would be seen as a deterrent to further such offences, and thus smiled upon by the insurers?"
"You got it. Seven years."
"Jesus," Nicole gasped.
"Unprecedented and unbefuckinglievable. Not only that, but their parole was messed about with and various strings pulled to make sure they served just about all of it. The establishment made sure they got every ounce of their pound of flesh. So I took it as a measure of the man's character that McInnes actually came back here for legal assistance. Blamed no-one but himself for what happened. A man of dignity and humility.
"He got pulled in for questioning a few times about rural break-ins, first year after he got out, and always got in touch with us for a brief. He even handled all that stoically as part of the price he was paying, and fortunately the cops gradually got the
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