[Edinburgh early that evening]
“You look great,” said Sarah.
She’d just finished applying makeup to Jak. Both of them were dressed to go out on the town. While Jak’s clothes appeared to be a little dated, the addition of a brightly coloured shawl changed the look entirely.
The clothes were dated… that’s why the former owners had disposed of them in the plethora of charity shops in Morningside. The shawl was a vintage paisley-patterned silk shawl complete with a ‘Liberty’ label.
Sarah had put them all together and made an outfit that Jak was proud to wear.
She held her hand, and together, they looked at themselves in the full-length mirror that Calum had installed in his bedroom.
“Well?” asked Sarah.
“Pretty good.”
“Only pretty good?”
Jak smiled.
“Ok, very, very good indeed.”
“Now!” said Sarah.
“I can’t call you Jak looking like that. What do you call yourself?”
“I call myself Holly.”
Sarah smiled.
“Pleased to meet you, Holly. Shall we go? Our carriage awaits.”
They put on their coats and went to the front door. Sarah opened it and got a huge surprise. A man was about to knock on the door.
A smile spread over his face when he saw Zak/Holly.
“Well… Look at what we have here. The pervert cavorting with the hired help?”
A look of fear combined with surprise spread over Holly’s face.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Looking for that no-good brother of mine, and I find you? Well, you are coming home with me, but not looking like something from the Rocky Horror Show.”
“Sorry, Dad. I’m not coming home with you. This is my home now. As for Calum, he passed away in the summer. He left me half of his business empire. The other half was left to his daughter. This is his daughter Sa’ana, or Sarah for short.”
Holly looked at Sarah.
“Her? Who’d leave anything to a blackie? Besides, she can’t be his daughter. I made sure of that nearly forty years ago.”
“I’m his adopted daughter, and you, sir, are not welcome here. So why not fuck off back to the shit hole, or rather your stupid coal mine and stay there,” said Sarah.
“Why, you little bitch,” said Robert. He made a step towards Sarah at the same time as raising his hand as if he was going to slap Sarah.
Holly reacted by grabbing a walking stick from the container by the side of the door and bringing it down hard on her father’s arm. The blow that was coming failed to reach its target.
“Why, you little bastard. I’ll make you pay for that!”
Holly didn’t wait for him to move. She slammed the front door in his father’s face.
“Call the cops. He tried to assault you,” said Holly.
Sarah shook her head.
“That won’t do any good. They’ll take ages to respond.”
“Then we can ignore him. He hates people ignoring him.”
“Do you think that he’ll go away?” asked Sarah.
“Not a chance, but it will wind him up something rotten. Then… he might make a mistake that could end up with him being arrested, but if his history was anything to go by, he seems to be covered in the same brand of Teflon as Donald Trump.”
The arrival of Jak’s father put an end to Holly’s first trip out. It was a huge letdown for her as she’d psyched herself up for the event.
“We should go and see Mr Mackay tomorrow. I’ll email him about the arrival of your father tonight.”
Holly sighed.
“It’s not the first time that he has turned up like that. He descended on my university graduation and demanded a seat in the front row. He didn’t like it when he was told to sling his hook by the vice dean. I had to grovel just to get my five seconds of fame when he handed me a scroll of paper. He has this effect on people if he does not get his way. That attitude is a large part of why I would never work for him. The rest of it is that I think that mining coal for power generation is a dead-end industry. We had had several stand-up rows over it. I was accused of being a rabid commie and a Marxist for my support of renewable energy. He won’t budge until the mine runs out of customers. The writing is on the wall, but he won’t see it.”
Sarah thought for a moment.
“There was something that your father said about making sure that Calum could not have children.”
“And?”
“Calum told me once… it was on the plane from Nairobi to London that he could not have children, and I was to be his one and only child. He doted on me and gave me the love that I never had until then.”
“Something must have happened between them when they were younger. My father is, by my estimate, around eleven years younger than Calum. I know from my gran that my father was in an accident, if you understand my meaning.”
Sarah nodded her head before saying,
“Jealousy is a strange beast. I had the hots for a boy at school. His brother had other ideas and deliberately broke his brother’s leg in full view of both their father and me, just so that he could go to the High School dance with me. I went with him and gave him the knee right where it hurts and walked out. His father went mad and threatened Calum with all sorts of retribution. Calum just took it on the chin and said, ‘If you hang your younger son out to dry like that, then you don’t deserve to be a parent. My daughter agreed to go to the dance with your younger son and not the jerk that is your older offspring.’”
“Ouch!”
“Yeah. Calum could be a ruthless bastard when it came to protecting me. That’s why I loved him so much. He’d let me make my own mistakes up to a point, but he always had my back.”
“I can tell that by the way your eyes go all watery when you talk about him like that. As for what happened between them, I will have to wait. We should think about the here and now and how to get him off our backs.”
“Agreed.”
“Any ideas?”
Sarah slowly began to smile.
“Yeah. We get married. From the evidence of our last close encounter of a parental kind, he does not like people with skin like mine. Am I right?”
“Yeah. He is an almost out-of-the-closet racist. He flies a ‘Proud Boys’ flag from the back of his truck. He… he’s way out there with the hard-right fascists. As for the wind turbines that I saw from the train, according to him, they need to be blown up.”
“Then having me in the family will really annoy him.”
Jak thought for a moment and then shook his head.
“Don’t you want to marry me?” asked Sarah.
“I do, but he’s a loose cannon. There is no telling what he would do next. If I thought that getting married would get him off our backs, then I’d do it in a flash. We are lucky that we aren’t stateside. He carries it everywhere he goes.”
“Carries?” asked Sarah.
“Sorry. He takes a gun everywhere he goes. The last time I was at home, he was carrying a Glock 17 pistol with a seventeen-round magazine around the house. He sleeps with it under his pillow. This place is a lot saner. His truck usually has a couple of AR-15s with 30-round ammo clips on a rack behind the driver. Those are semi-automatic rifles. I don’t like guns full stop.”
“What do we do then?”
“We go and see Mr Mackay in the morning and ask him what we can do. Then we go shopping.”
“What for?”
“A wardrobe for me, silly. I need to learn what works for me. Then, I’ll go home and start the ball rolling about a visa so that I can stay here. If anything has come out of this evening, then it is that I’m done with the old country.”
Sarah gave Holly a big hug.
“Are you a bit disappointed about not getting married?” asked Holly.
“Not really. It just seemed to be one way of getting him out of our hair.”
Holly smiled.
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we look for a pair of rings? Then, we can show intent. As for the real thing, we both know that it will take some time for us to gel as a couple, but I do want you in my life until death do us part.”
Sarah gave Holly a big kiss.
“And you still have not tried to get me into bed!”
“Sarah, I know that this might sound strange, but why are you so accepting of me? Please don’t say Calum told me to!”
“Calum told me about you when he showed me the photos of you at the Pride March. I could tell right away that his dying wish would be for us to get together. I went along with him, but being CEO of a refugee charity, I have contacts all over the world. One of them from the US gave me a report on you. It said almost everything that you have told me about your fights with your family. It also said that you were a decent human being. Believe me, they are in short supply in many places that I’ve worked in, not to mention Somalia. I decided early on to play it cool when you came over. That went out the window that first day in the Botanic Gardens. I knew then that you were the one for me. Since then, it has, as they say, been all my own work.”
Both of them laughed. They were cool with each other.
Four days later, Sarah took Jak over to Glasgow airport for a flight to New York. She was pretty tearful as she said goodbye. Jak had been everything that she’d hoped and that Calum had promised.
“Don’t stay away for too long. I’ve grown to like having you in my life. I’d like you back here to meet me when I return from Africa.”
She’d discussed her forthcoming trip to Burundi with Jak. With any luck, it was to be her last one to that particular location. Someone as beautiful as her could and sometimes did attract the attention of the wrong sort of people. She was fearful of some of the ‘warlords’ in the DRC. The border between the two nations is very fluid, and that is on a good day. Memories of them from her time in Somalia were something she did not want to repeat in her lifetime.
“Just keep an eye out for my father. According to the ‘FlightTracker’ website, his jet is still at Prestwick after flying over from Shannon at the start of the week.”
“I will, darling, I will.”
Jak’s father had not been idle and had engaged a firm of Solicitors in Edinburgh to look into the affairs of his estranged brother Calum. They soon came back with the bad news.
“Mr McGee, your brother Calum died last summer while he was attempting to climb every peak over 3000 ft in Scotland. The cause of death was heart failure.”
“Why the hell was he trying to do something like that?”
“Mr McGee, this is a popular target for people in this part of the world. I can put you in touch with the Solicitors who are dealing with his estate. He knew that his time was almost up and wanted to go out doing something that he enjoyed.”
He began to understand why his son had come over to this, in his opinion, horrible place when he did.
“And they’ll tell me jack shit?”
“Mr McGee, there might be some sort of provision for you in his will. Unless you ask them, you will never know. We can’t do it for you naturally. It has to be done in person because you will need to prove your identity if there is a provision in his will for you...”
“Oh… very well. Who is handling the estate?”
“A Mr Donald Mackay. That would be the young Mr Mackay.”
“’ Young Mr Mackay?”
“There are two Mr Donald Mackay’s working there. They are father and son.”
He left the offices after reluctantly paying their bill, wondering what century this part of the world was living in. Why couldn’t they just use Junior?”
His opinion of Edinburgh went even further downhill when he found that he had to walk up five flights of stairs to reach the offices of MacKay, MacKay and Browne.
The mutterings he made under his breath as he climbed the steep stairs would make many a man blush.
He was quite out of breath by the time he reached the top. He cursed his brother once more before going into the offices. The cheeriness of the receptionist did nothing to make him feel happier.
“Ah yes, Mr McGee. Mr Mackay will see you now,” she said after a short phone call.
One of the oak-panelled doors opened, and a man in his early 30s stepped out.
“Mr McGee? I’m Donald Mackay. I have been dealing with Calum’s estate. Please come into my office.”
He showed Robert into his equally oak-panelled office. It was all too dark and threatening for him.
“Please, Mr McGee, take a seat.”
Donald sat down and took a file out of a drawer. Robert raised an eyebrow when he saw just how thick it was.
“Mr McGee… can I please see some identification. Your passport would be fine.”
Robert didn’t want to hand it over, but soon understood that Mr Mackay was just making sure that he was the real deal. He handed his passport over to Mr Mackay.
Donald checked the passport details against a sheet of paper in the file.
“Thank you, Mr McGee. We just have to check. Impostors have been known to try to obtain assets from recently deceased clients. I’m sure that you understand and that it is not personal.”
“Yes, I get you. Now, what’s this about my brother Calum climbing mountains?”
Donald resisted smiling.
“Your late brother was indeed trying to replicate a feat he achieved not long after coming to this country. There are almost 300 such peaks. He knew that he was on borrowed time, yet he wanted to die doing something he loved.”
“He was always rather odd like that. So? What about his will? As his next of kin, I think that I’m entitled to know it all?”
“Mr McGee, your brother did mention you in his will. Here is a copy of that document.”
Donald handed Robert a copy of the will that he took from the top of the file.
“In short, Mr McGee, you are not the only next of kin. He has a daughter.”
“No, he doesn’t. He was impotent. If you are talking about that woman, then she is an impostor. No McGee from our part of the world would be seen dead with someone like her.”
“She was his legally adopted daughter, Mr McGee. I am given to understand that you met her the other evening.”
“As I said, there is no way that a McGee could even think about adopting someone like that.”
“Mr McGee… Your brother was heavily involved in charitable work in sub-Saharan Africa. It was there he met a child that he rescued from a Somali warlord and later adopted as his daughter. She inherited half of his estate. Your son Jak, the rest.”
“Him? Charity? Don’t tell me lies. He was always about the money.”
“I’m sorry, Mr McGee, Calum made his money legally in business in the city and around the country and used it for good causes. He did leave a letter for you in the event of his death and you presenting yourself here in person.”
Donald gave Robert a sealed envelope. It had his name on it.
“Do you know what this contains?”
“No, sir. Calum gave it to me for safekeeping before setting out on his last trip.”
“You call him ‘Calum’? Isn’t that a little unusual for a lawyer?”
“No, Mr McGee. Your brother was godfather to my two children and, therefore, a part of my family.”
“That man never had a dose of humanity in him.”
“He changed when he came here. He started with nothing and built a sizeable fortune all down to hard work.”
“Nothing? What happened to the three million dollars that our grandmother left him?”
“Mr McGee, once he was established here, he gave it all away to charity. To date, the total of his donations has run to more than ten million pounds. Most of the charities he donates to are related to the plight of immigrants and those who are illegally trafficked into this country.”
“In other words, the dregs of society and lowlifes who will never contribute to anything other than polluting the blood of the country.”
“Mr McGee, my wife was trafficked into this country from Mozambique. She is now a Professor of Economic Development at the University and the mother of two girls. I resent your last comment. I am going to have to ask you to leave these offices and never return.”
“You are nothing but a jumped-up clerk. I will have your law license for dinner.”
“Please leave, Mr McGee. You are welcome to complain to the Law Society, but I don’t think it will go anywhere. You clearly didn’t see the sign outside that says that all meetings are recorded. Those insults you just made against my family are very close to defamation. I think that I’ll have what you people call a ‘slam dunk case’ when it comes up in a Scottish Court.”
Donald gave Mr McGee a copy of Calum’s will and ushered a very red-faced man out of the office.
Donald returned to his desk and started writing down the details of what had just happened. He’d hardly started when his father came into the office.
“Well done, Son. Calum told us that he was a nasty piece of work. It looks like Jak and Sarah are going to be left alone from now on.”
“I hope so, and Dad, don’t we owe almost everything to Calum?”
“We do, son, we do, and we owe it to him to keep fighting his fight. Son, don’t forget to give Jak and Sarah a heads up about his visit.”
“I will do that as soon as I have finished my records of his visit.”
Sarah received the email just before she headed to Waverly Station and the start of a trip to Burundi. The charity that Calum had started and that she now ran, funded a small camp for refugees who had fled the intermittent fighting in the eastern part of the DRC. She shook her head and put the whole incident with him to the back of her mind. She was in a good mood, thanks to an email that she’d received from Jak about his visa application. Thanks to the documentation that Donald Mackay had provided, the process had gone smoothly so far. All he needed to do now was wait and lie low so that his father could not find him.
Her day was made even better when Jak emailed her during a stopover in Nairobi to say that his father’s plane had left Scotland and was heading west across the Atlantic Ocean.
Jak had left New York and had sent the email when he was on an Amtrak train to Albany. A college friend of his who lived in the neighbouring city of Troy had a cabin up near the Canadian border that was available for a few weeks. The friend had encountered the wrath of Jak’s father before and was prepared to lie to keep him from finding Jak. He had an old pick-up that Jak could use while he was in the area.
Danny Moeller met Jak at the station. At that moment, Jak’s father’s plane was landing at a small airport on Long Island. His P.I. had been tracking Jak’s spending since he returned to the city.
“Sir,” said the P.I.
“Your son bought an Amtrak train ticket to Albany. I found out from his university yearbook that one of his classmates lives across the river in Troy.”
“What are we waiting for, lets’ get back in the G5?”
“Sir?”
“We are flying to Albany… today.”
The PI knew that was what was going to happen, even if it would take some time to file a flight plan for the short flight. New York airspace is one of the most congested in the world.
Almost three frustrating hours later, the G5 took off bound for Albany.
Jak was already a long way from Albany on his way north. Danny Moeller was at home with his family and his lawyer brother. The ‘FlightTracker’ site showed that the private jet was on its way flying up the Hudson Valley. They were waiting for the storm to arrive. A CCTV camera had been set up to record the inevitable encounter with Jak’s father. Jak would be long gone, but that was part of the game of cat and mouse that was now in play.
[to be continued]