Bitter End.

Joyce Holms.

Chapter One.

Fizz had been keeping an eye on Buchanan for two days.

He'd never been the most frolicsome of bosses but you could usually get a smile out of him now and then if you tried hard enough. Not recently, though.

It certainly wasn't like him to sit at his desk for minutes at a time, staring blankly into s.p.a.ce, with an expression on his face like he could feel the entire population of Edinburgh walking over his grave. She was fairly certain it wasn't an affair of the heart, but something was definitely preying on his mind and he was refusing to admit it, either to Fizz who had already tried several pseudo-casual probes -or to his secretary, the Wonderful Beatrice.

'So, you reckon it's not something to do with work, Beatrice? Buchanan hasn't made a bit of a hash of something, maybe, and is worried about getting found out?'

Beatrice's eyes glittered behind her specs: a lioness defending her cub. 'Mr Buchanan doesn't make mistakes,'

she said, barely parting her teeth sufficiently to let the words out. 'Not mistakes of that calibre, at any rate.'

Fizz was happy to agree with that estimate of her boss.

She might prefer the simple things in life but she had no intention of working for one. She said, 'Well, but accidents happen, Beattie.'

'Not since I've worked here,' Beatrice stated, leaving Fizz to draw the obvious conclusion from that. 'I can't imagine Mr Buchanan having any professional worries, and I'm quite sure he wouldn't thank you for poking your nose into what is clearly none of your business, no matter how charitable your intentions.'

'How do you know it's none of my business?' Fizz retaliated. 'If the firm's about to go bust I want to be the first up at the Job Centre, don't you?'

'The firm's not going to go bust, Fizz, I can tell you that. Old established law practices like Buchanan and Stewart don't collapse overnight, and thank G.o.d for that because the Job Centre's not much good to a woman in her fifties.' She rapped the s.p.a.cebar on her keyboard to clear her Screensaver and started to hammer the keys like she was playing 'The Flight of the b.u.mblebee'. 'So clear off and give me peace.'

'I wonder if Dennis would crack under interrogation,'

Fizz mused, looking out the window at a bunch of pa.s.sing tourists on the open-topped City Tours bus. The tourists stared back at her with as much attention as they were allocating to the other sights of Edinburgh. One of them even raised his camera but lowered it again when he saw she was giving him the finger.

'Dennis?' Beatrice stopped typing and slipped her specs up on to her ferro-concrete perm. 'What makes you think Dennis would know any more than I do?'

'I'm not suggesting he knows more than you do, Beattie.'

Fizz headed for the door, pausing to send her a sad smile.

'I'm just saying he might be more likely to talk.'

Beatrice didn't rise to that one, according it only a hollow laugh, which could mean she knew no more than Fizz did after all. That left only Dennis, the junior partner, and Fizz didn't really want to visit him in his office. He was too likely to get between her and the door and start practising his pathetic seduction technique. One had to draw a pretty careful line with Dennis: somewhere between poking him in the eye and actually giving him an inch, and she didn't feel up to it at three-thirty on a Friday afternoon.

Instead she extracted the Mail In book from the front office and took it into the filing room to see if it might contain some hidden clue as to what had put a burr under Buchanan's saddle. Some of the letters that had been logged over the past few days were identifiable as referring to current, and equally dull cases; others were familiar to Fizz because she still did some filing, now and then, when Buchanan had no paralegal work for her to do. The half dozen remaining entries were easy enough to track down and all but one of them proved to be uniformly unproductive, no matter how you looked at them. The sixth, however, had possibilities.

It was an official letter from the Lothian and Borders police informing Buchanan that the inquiry into the death of Mrs Vanessa Gra.s.sick had now been completed and, the coroner's verdict being accidental death, the probate of her will could now go ahead.

The letter in itself was not all that unusual: people were for ever driving off the road or taking a header down tenement stairs and they all needed clearance before their wills could be processed. What was unusual was the name.

It wasn't by any means a common name in this neck of the woods; in fact, Fizz could recall coming across it only once, and in that case it referred to Lawrence Gra.s.sick, probably the most respected and influential advocate in Edinburgh as well as being someone high up in the political scene. But had he been a client of Buchanan and Stewart, Fizz could hardly have avoided knowing about it. It was unlikely, in any case, that Lawrence Gra.s.sick would put any of his, or his wife's, legal affairs into the hands of a solicitor other than one of his own a.s.sociates -not unless it was some sort of deal that he wanted to keep very hush-hush. One could imagine him turning, in such an instance, to Buchanan's father who had also been much respected in the city's legal fraternity and had only recently retired but, if he had, it had been kept very quiet indeed. There was nothing filed under Gra.s.sick in any of the cabinets.

How curious, Fizz thought, rapidly losing all interest in Buchanan's mental state and zeroing in on this new -and much more interesting -enigma.

She returned the Mail In

book to the front office before someone noticed it was

missing and resumed a systematic search of every file that

might reveal the intriguing contents of Mrs Vanessa

Gra.s.sick's will. It didn't take long, however, to establish

that it was either in Buchanan's safe or the devious woman

had used her maiden name; either state of affairs more or

less const.i.tuting a blank wall. Fizz sat frowning at the problem for a while, refusing to be balked. There were still possibilities, of course. One could ask Dennis, but (a) chances were he wouldn't know, and (b) the usual reasons. One could bring up the matter casually with Buchanan next time he was in an expansive mood, but (a) he didn't like it when she snooped around, and (b) he could be quite cutting. Alan Stewart, the other partner, might be easier to schmooze into parting with some sort of clarification, but he was in court today and might not even be in the office on Monday. The Wonderful Beatrice, even if she knew the truth, wouldn't reveal it under torture and Margaret, lately promoted to office manager, had maintained immunity to Fizz's charms for over two years now and would immediately -and with the greatest pleasure -report any unauthorised curiosity to Buchanan.

That left Buchanan's father, known around the office as Big Daddy. It wouldn't be too difficult to fabricate an excuse to phone him at home. Fizz had been helping him, in the intervals between lectures, tutorials, studying and working part-time in his son's office, to research his memoirs.

This was an ongoing project which served him as an excuse for sitting in his study half the day playing Minesweeper on his computer, but he was well used to her phoning him up with the odd query. Keeping an ear open for the sound of Buchanan's door opening, she snuck into Alan Stewart's empty office and dialled the number fast.

'Mr Buchanan? Hi. It's me. Fizz.'

'h.e.l.lo there, Fizz! How are you? How's the studying going?' He said the same thing every time she phoned him,

invariably followed, as now, with, 'Good . . . good. Glad to

hear it. And what can I do for you?' 'Just a tiny query about the Morris case. Do you need the entire transcript or will a summary be enough?'

'Eh . . . Morris . . . let's see. Oh, you'd better send me the whole thing I suppose. My memory isn't exactly infallible these days and that one was quite a few years back.

I'd better have the whole transcript to hand. Don't want any mistakes creeping in.'

'Okay. I'll get it in the post tonight.'

'No rush, m'dear. It'll do when you have a minute.

Anything else?'

'No, that's everything for now.'

'Fine. Tell Tam his mother's wondering if he's left the country, will you? Maybe he'll drop by over the weekend.'

'I'll do that. He's with a client right now but I'll see him before I leave the office -oh, there is one thing you could help me with. I want to get this filing finished before I leave and I have a doc.u.ment for someone called Gra.s.sick which doesn't appear to have a home. Any ideas?'

'Rudyard Gra.s.sick,' said Big Daddy immediately. 'It'll be filed under the firm's name. Rudyard Gra.s.sick, Commercial Artists.'

'Great! That saved me a bit of time. Thanks a lot, Mr Buchanan. Talk to you soon.'

The name Rudyard Gra.s.sick rang no bells. It turned out to be one of the many small firms that didn't bring in a lot of legal business. The few doc.u.ments in the file were mainly to do with the setting up of the partnership, three years ago, and with the purchase of some office s.p.a.ce in Nicholson Street. But Mrs Vanessa Gra.s.sick's will was there, all right, and it made interesting reading. Interesting, not only because it bequeathed virtually all her worldly goods, plus her share in the business to her business partner, Joseph Rudyard, but because it had been drawn up -replacing all previous wills -barely six weeks ago. The earlier will, which was still on file, had left the bulk

of her estate to her husband, none other than the celebrated

Lawrence. It wasn't such a vast amount of money a paltry twelve thousand pounds, which was peanuts

compared to some bequests Fizz had dealt with recently,

but Vanessa had made d.a.m.n sure that her husband wasn't

getting a penny. Which, Fizz couldn't help thinking, was