The Lawyer Who Caught The Crabs

By Alex French

Max Standen is a provincial lawyer in a dusty and disorganised practice. Both he and the business are, frankly, past their prime. But now that his partner Giles Furnell has been suspended, Max must tackle an array of bizarre and often outrageous legal cases on his own. With a client who is supposed to be dead but isn't, a malicious tattoo artist with a hate for women, and the ongoing dodgy antics of a local Premier League Football Club, Max has his hands full. What he really needs is a more-than-capable assistant. And that assistant comes in the form of Tracey, a single mum and a feisty, newly qualified solicitor. Not only does Tracey make an impression on the clients, she makes an impression on Max too. But will Max be able to keep her, when the incompetent and snobbish Giles Furnell is intent on returning? What can be done?

"Alex French's first novel is a great achievement - its skilful play on words and many laugh-out-loud moments will remain with you long after you've finished reading the book." - Pat Sumner, Editor & Writer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex French
• Release date: Apr 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995782112

Alex French

I'm just a guy that enjoys writing. I'm from Denver, Colorado and I have an interest in film, devoting my time to creating videos, photography, writing screenplays, short stories and comic book scripts.

Book preview

Chapter 1

His ship had sailed. As Max Standen looked out of the window across the grey town to the dockland cranes beyond, he had to acknowledge that he had missed the boat. His 22 years as a solicitor in provincial Milverton had not brought the exciting and dramatic life he had envisaged when as a law student he had bestrode the mock courtroom at university with authority. In that arena, the fledgling legal trainee had rehearsed his smooth yet incisive cross-examination of witnesses who withered before him, all diminished by his rapier tongue. Through a process of inertia, as well as being in the wrong firm at the wrong time, Max had never reached those rarefied heights of excitement and drama after those early days of promise. Instead, he had specialised in the less than thrilling world of family break-up and divorce, a bit of property law, and in particular conveyancing.

So now, rather than breaking down arch criminals on the witness stand, he was more concerned with filling out conveyancing forms for the exchanging of contracts, and ensuring that the lists of fixtures and fittings included in house sales were accurately completed. Max was stale and bored. And now he had the prospect of running the firm whilst his partner Giles Furnell was absent for who knows how long. Actually, Max did have a good idea how long. He had gathered that Giles’ suspension by the Law Society would in all probability last for six or seven months. Unfortunately, it could be a permanent absence, depending on the outcome of the inquiry into the allegation of professional misconduct that he was currently contending with. Giles, at the point at which his mistake had come to the attention of the Law Society, had pleaded that the misunderstanding could have happened to anyone, and that it was all an ‘accident’. The Law Society, being made up of, well, principally lawyers, preferred the descriptor ‘gross professional negligence’ when reflecting on Giles’ actions in his administration of the estate of the late Mrs Maureen Burridge.

As Max looked out, a knock on his door was followed by the unmistakable sound of his secretary Mrs Corrigan shuffling into his office. She nodded towards the window as Max turned.

‘I see its sleeting again. Yesterday we had bright sun. This weather goes from one extreme to the next.’

‘The other,’ said Max.

‘Eh?’

‘It’s one extreme to the other. There can only be two extremes so describing the only other extreme as the next can’t be right. It implies the next in a line, or a number at any rate.’

Mrs Corrigan ignored the apparent chiding as she always did. She was used to Max and his pedantry. He was a pedant. He was pedantic. She wasn’t sure what the correct expression should be but she did know who would. Max’s strength was an attention to detail but this led conversely to a weakness when it came to engaging in casual social conversation.

‘Mrs Burridge is coming in this week so you’d better get your story straight by then.’ She left a cup of tea with him and two ginger-nut biscuits, and departed.

Max sat down and enthusiastically tucked into the biscuits and tea. This was becoming a moment he looked forward to more each day, which he realised meant that any real excitement or interest in his life was diminishing. Due to a set of unusual circumstances, which he could not yet foresee, that would change, and soon.

He put his mind to the impending encounter with the redoubtable Maureen Burridge who had been a client of Giles Furnell. He had managed her affairs following the death of Tom Burridge, her late husband and owner of two top-shelf titles selling in newsagents under the ‘adult entertainment’ banner. Three years ago, her husband Tom had suffered a catastrophic cardiac arrest whilst interviewing two prospective models whom he believed showed considerable promise to the extent that they might adorn one of his impressive periodicals. It was commonly believed that he had died whilst ascertaining the authenticity of the CVs of the two young ladies in question, by examining them rigorously in a series of practical exercises. Naturally, the news of Tom’s demise proved a great shock to his friends who at least consoled themselves with the knowledge that he had died doing something he loved. Tom had died on the job. It’s what he would have wanted, they agreed when chatting at the funeral, although it was not as Mrs Burridge would have wished him to go.

Tom’s widow Maureen had little appetite for business or the field of publishing, which Tom had bestrode with some distinction, or extinction now. She was advised to sell the business in view of this, not least because of the steady march of alternative media that made the ‘special-interest’ material more accessible, more plentiful, and free. With a plethora of Internet porn sites available to his former clientele, loyal readers were already drifting away to the twilight world of the flickering screen in the spare bedroom, or ‘study’, to elevate the status of the arena. With a press of a button, customers could now access special-interest material that was only available formerly through an extraordinarily awkward social undertaking carried out with almost military precision. Previously one would have to embark on clandestine visits to newsagents – but not the local one in case the nice lady two doors up witnessed the purchase, and certainly not one in which one faced the prospect of being served by a female. As well as the expense of the magazine in question, there was always the additional purchase of an unwanted journal on gardening or church architecture, or at least a magazine larger than the publication in question, so that it could be buried within the others without attracting attention. Finally, there was the need to get the loft ladder from the garage to store these journals of erotic art, and again in order to retrieve them on the few occasions that one could be sure that both the children and the wife would be out for the afternoon.

Maureen was fortunately able to sell the business for over £2,000,000 and as husband Tom had been a longstanding (or lying now) client of the firm, she had come to Giles to make out her new will. In it she betrothed to her three children what was now a sizeable fortune, taking into account all assets including the house which was worth approximately £800,000 in itself.

Eighteen months after the making of the will, Maureen made a decision that was to have far-reaching consequences. She decided to splash out on the sort of holiday that she had never had the time to take previously, and informed her family that she was going on a long cruise. She wanted to clear her head of the recent personal grief on the one hand and tedium on the other, which had come to represent her recent life. Because of this, she told the rest of the family that she would be in only periodic contact and not to worry about her. Five weeks later, and with no contact from her for over two weeks, her eldest son took a call from the purser on the cruise liner. The purser said Maureen had gone missing and from all accounts had not been seen leaving her cabin or anywhere else on the ship for ‘a day or two’. Furthermore, and even worse, two days later her blood-stained scarf was discovered on the foreshore a few miles upstream, in an area notorious for shark activity. It had been identified as hers from photographs taken when she was invited to the captain’s table for dinner. The not unreasonable view had been reached that she had probably fallen overboard at the last port at which they had docked, namely, Cairns in Queensland, Australia. This led to the conclusion that her failure to return to the ship that fateful evening for her three-course dinner was because she herself had become a one-course lunch for one of the local hungry sharks.

Not long afterwards Maureen’s solicitor Giles Furnell applied for a death certificate for her on the urging of her children. After all, as Giles inelegantly observed to his colleague Max, her body was never likely to be recovered unless the miscreant shark had a bilious attack after eating a dodgy prawn, thus regurgitating her onto the beach. Now, her ‘children’ were anxious to get their hands on the estate. It is a curious fact that when referring to the estate of a deceased person, the children never grow up. They become the Peter Pans of probate. The youngest was 27. As instructed, Giles put Maureen’s house on the market quickly and at a competitive price. Within three weeks, contracts were exchanged on the house with Mr and Mrs Marshall, the purchasers keen to move in by Christmas, which was in just over a month’s time. Giles was satisfied that this had been the most expeditiously completed sale this year, and without a hitch. He had himself reflected that it was almost too good to be true.

Three weeks after the exchange of contracts for the sale of her house, the late Mrs Burridge demonstrated that she wasn’t late at all. She was always punctual and having just arrived back in the United Kingdom a day earlier to prepare for Christmas, she turned up at her now rather sparsely furnished house to be told by Arthur Slaney, her elderly gardener, that at that precise moment all the family were at the village church attending her memorial service, convened due to the absence of a body. It should be said that Arthur was only able to inform her of this important fact after having been revived by Mrs Burridge following his collapse as she had walked in through the front door, as it were, as large as life. After ensuring that Arthur was, as she was, back in the land of the living, she made her way purposefully to the parish church.

She arrived at the point when the rector, on high in the pulpit, was grandly asserting that Maureen would always be with them in spirit. With a flourish, she burst through the doors in a more permanent form than had been implied and strode down the aisle to the front of the congregation. Using words that the rector did not regard as very Christian, she made it clear that what those attending were witnessing was not a ghostly resurrection or miracle, but a rather angry, elderly lady with a dark tan and an even darker temper.

The memorial service was quickly abandoned as it descended into complete disorder, with two of her children and some close friends agreeing that someone would have to pay for this ‘cock-up’. Two people collapsed and one, Miss Whittaker, her friend from the Women’s Institute, even claimed that they were witnessing a miracle. When the rector rather dismissively and with a slight sneer told her that it was not so, another friend Jean Parmenter rounded on him and gave her views. ‘Don’t patronise us; it’s you lot who talk about this nonsense all the time. Two loaves and five fishes feeding the 5,000? If that was a miracle, why isn’t this?’

The reverend adopted that fixed, benevolent smile that vicars always do when they’re angry. It must be taught in a masterclass at Theology College. After a brief pause, he said, ‘Actually, its five loaves and two fishes,’ in a rather authoritative and triumphant way, as if that in any way addressed the central point.

‘Eh? Oh, sorry for getting that wrong. Well, I was being ridiculous, wasn’t I? You’re absolutely right, of course. Here’s me thinking that you could feed 5,000 people with two loaves and five fishes. The other way around and it all makes absolute bloody sense!’ The last few words were said to the back of the retreating clergyman who clearly was not intending to remain to hear the end of Mrs Parmenter’s Bible class.

Although rather unsure of the etiquette in such circumstances, Mrs Burridge attended the post-service reception in the Red Lion Hotel, held in her memory, and, ironically, ate as well if not better than anyone. Shock does not enhance the appetite and a few of those at the reception might well have been regarded as closer to death than her at this stage, had their blood pressure been taken.

In the days following the un-memorial service, the story emerged as to how Maureen had met Hamid in Cairns whilst the ship docked for a couple of days. He was a wealthy Arab oil merchant and she had spontaneously left the cruise liner one evening without telling anyone, taking a few possessions, including her passport. At 70, she had eloped with her 65-year-old toy boy on a whim and spent three glorious weeks travelling around the Great Barrier Reef on his yacht. He had been very generous and Maureen, needless to say, had never needed to spend any of her own money or dip into any of her accounts. It was this absence of banking transactions that reinforced the popular belief that the stout Maureen must have provided ‘Jaws’ with his not-so-light lunch. As regards the blood-stained scarf, it had been discarded by her on the beach after she had used it as a temporary bandage for a child who had gashed his leg on a rock. She had been walking along the shoreline when the incident had occurred and it had been used as a tourniquet. When Hamid and Maureen finished their sojourn, they were many hundreds of miles from the liner; in fact, they had rested up in Sydney. After her stay, she decided to fly back to the UK, again rather impetuously and of course Hamid paid for the flights. Therefore, there was no direct connection to her disappearance.

As often happens with so many fleeting flings of the young at heart, septuagenarian Maureen and Abdul had reached the conclusion that theirs had been a brief and thrilling escapade that had been bound to end after the physical thrill of the vigorous attempted sex had subsided. At the point when conversation took over and each realised that both spoke barely a word of the other’s language, it could only end one way. So, with the experience behind her, she returned home for Christmas. She had looked forward to relaxing once again in her familiar surroundings and reclining on her favourite comfy sofa in her lounge. Instead, when she got home the sofa had been replaced by a reinforced cardboard box. On returning from the memorial service, or ‘A celebration of a life lived’, Maureen looked around her virtually empty house and decided that there would be trouble.

For Giles Furnell, the senior partner at Furnell and Standen Solicitors, this trouble landed at his door, as a result of his failure to delay the distribution of Maureen’s estate before she had been confirmed and certified dead by the Australian authorities. The ‘provisional’ findings of the mortician needed to be formally ratified before becoming legally binding and Giles had failed to wait. It was known that the blood group on the scarf was ‘O’, which coincidentally was the same as the injured boy’s blood group, and being the most common this should not necessarily be too much of a surprise. Giles’ mistake was not waiting until a DNA check had been carried out in full. Therefore, he had jumped the gun.

So calls began to come in from Maureen, as well as lawyers representing her children, whose plans now had to change. If that was not enough (and it would have been, by the way), the new owners of her house had no intention of relinquishing the property that they had exchanged contracts on and therefore legally owned, despite not having yet moved in. Therefore, it came almost as a relief to Giles when the complaint to the Law Society resulted in his suspension, meaning that he could remove himself from the arena of battle. This sense of relief, however, was met by a corresponding rising of tension in Max Standen, his only partner, who would have to deal with the fallout from the estate of Maureen Burridge (not deceased). In due course, he would need to meet with Maureen and explain everything to her. It would be his encounter with the undead.

Max was in the unhappy position of now being the only fully qualified lawyer in the firm and he reflected that clearly, he was going to be busy with his own matters to deal with as well as those of Giles. He had not realised that by the end of that day he would be taking on a new matter that had the potential to match the case of the elderly lady whose lust for life had been mistaken as the loss of it.

Max’s musings were disturbed when his secretary Mrs Corrigan knocked on his office door again, but came in again before he could invite her. She always did this, and Max thought it rather defeated the object of knocking in the first place. That said, Mrs Corrigan (her first name was Deborah but nobody referred to it) had been a stalwart support during the turmoil surrounding the trials (and potentially trial) of Giles. She was a lady in her early 60s with rapidly greying hair who one could say dressed more for comfort than style. She preferred the cardigan look and had been known to wear slippers around the office. However, Max appreciated her quiet efficiency and above all, she possessed the most important quality in a secretary – loyalty. She could be trusted.

Mrs Corrigan said, ‘I’ve just had Paul Baxter’s secretary from Milverton Football Club asking who’s dealing with Giles’ work. I told them it was you as there’s nobody else here who can handle his commercial contract work. She said Paul will call you this afternoon as they have