Stiffs don’t get regulated

It was one of those days in Wharfside Street when the rain soaks you worse than an SDT costs order. I ran from the 67 bus dripping like a litigant in person. I’d been acting in the matter of a principal caught stapling page seven of a 22-page CFA upside down before mailing it to a client. By the time I came knocking they’d disappeared on a one-way ticket to Yekaterinburg.

Back at my desk, I poured myself three fingers of Highland Spring and contemplated for the thousandth time refreshing my door sign: ‘Phyllis Frizer, Sole Practitioner. Missing Cats and SRA Interventions a Speciality’. I decided to leave it: signwriters were quoting high since cashing in on the QC-to-KC bonanza.

And then I had a client. A blond in a lightweight silk suit which clung to the right places and a suntan that screamed Margate, but not to scare the seagulls. I pointed to the chair but he wisely chose the desk. ‘I hear you know the regulation game and don’t charge by six-minute increments,’ he opened.

‘Who’s asking?’ I said, flicking him a know-your-client form.

‘Let’s just say I represent the... executives branch of the profession. I’m in town to talk to the big boys at the Cube about an... alliance. Figured I needed protection.’

‘I don’t do hit jobs,’ I said. ‘Not even on licensed conveyancers.’

He twisted the corner of his mouth. ‘I just need someone to come along for the ride.’ All my instinct screamed no. But a fistful of twenties made it my business.

He drove a Desiato Hotblack coupe, parked across two sets of yellows. I hailed a cab to run me round to the passenger door.

Which meant that I was safely clear when the grand piano being craned into the penthouse suite came plummeting down, squashing my client flatter than an uplift in the guideline hourly rate.

***

‘Accidental death,’ said the West Midlands cop. ‘So, what’s not to like?’

‘A lot,’ I said. We were seated in her office in Snow Hill. On the wall, a peeling poster reminded me not to leave my Ford Anglia to defrost with the engine running. ‘A lot of people would like to see the regulators’ turf war turn hot again. A thing like this could kick it off.’

‘Listen, Ms Frizer. You know as well as I do this city’s lousy with legal regulators – but, mostly, they stick to their patch. Everything's sweet. We start pressing charges and pretty soon we’ll see a repeat of the 2012 ABS rumble. Lady, we’re still dredging stiffs in concrete overshoes up from Gas Street Basin.’

I figured the war had broken out already. But who was stirring the pot? I needed answers. And not those on the SQE multiple choice paper.

***

JD Wetherspoon runs a classy joint on Chancery and Carey; safe for a quiet talk. I’d come down to London on Avanti West Coast, where if you buy a controlling share in the company they throw in a second-class ticket. Leastways, that’s how the single fare from New Street looks.

It was steak club Tuesday. I recognised one face in the bar: a Gazette editor in a black Fedora dividing his attention between a jug of Malbec and a 2,000 page Law Commission report on the legislative implications of time travel. Looked like the Malbec was winning.

The party I had come to see was seated upstairs in a dark alcove. Black Letter Man: a walking encyclopedia on every comma and colon of the 2007 Legal Services Act. But today he was strangely silent. When I tapped his shoulder he slumped forward. Then I saw the three-letter acronym he’d managed to smear in beer on the tabletop. And the steak knife impaled between his shoulder blades.

***

Finally, I got my suspicions to the top. It was only three months before I was sitting with the deputy assistant head of intergovernance at the Legal Services Board.  She sneered at my credentials – and my suggestion that Black Letter Man and Mr Margate getting chilled was no coincidence. ‘Sure, maybe the SRA is getting too big for its boots, what with the SLAPPs and the Lawtech racket. And that SIF heist was a slick job. Lot of tanks on other people's lawns – but murder?’

‘Forget the SRA,’ I said. ‘Forget the BSB, CILEX, the CLC and the Mafia, while you're at it. The real hard boys playing the long game are the ones above any suspicion.’ I told her the three letters: ‘TFO’.

She stiffened. ‘But they’re clean as a whistle. You never see a word of scandal about them in the papers, not even in the Gazette.’

‘That’s the point,’ I said. ‘They’re too clean. Everyone's friend. So when the music stops and the government rewrites the Legal Services Act, The Faculty Office is going be the only regulator left standing. And that means no room for the LSB, either.’

‘Maybe you’re right, Frizer. But if we’re taking on the Archbishop of Canterbury, I’m gonna need a deputy. How about it?’

I thought about it: an LSB salary, pension, wild staff awaydays in the Premier Inn, Droitwich. Yes I thought about it, for maybe half a second.

‘Forget it. I’ll wear a hole in my own office carpet,’ I said. I left her gazing into the middle distance and rode the elevator down to the ground floor.

A punk stopped me in the lobby: ‘You got a light mac?’ he said. 

‘No,’ I replied, ‘Mine’s the fawn trenchcoat. Thanks for looking after it.’