Chapter 119: Client Account II

It said £1,400.

"Third thing’s the name. It’s called The Corner and I want it over the door."

"Sole trader?"

"Just me."

"Then you can trade under it, and your own name and an address for service go on your invoices and the bottom of your menu, which nobody ever does." She wrote The Corner and looked at it for a second. "I will run it on the register tomorrow. Nobody calls a chain The Corner."

"Fourth."

"Go on."

And Danny leaned forward in the chair.

"I want a year of their wages put somewhere I can’t get at them."

Priya Anand stopped writing.

"Say that again."

"Keisha and Tobi. Twelve months of both, up front, out of my account and into something that pays them on the last working day whatever happens to me." He said it straight through. "If I go under a bus. If it goes wrong in March. If I turn out to be an idiot."

She sat back with the biro in her hand and the room got colder in a way he could not have put a number to.

"Why?"

"Because he’s got a kid in a nursery and the nursery rings you at 5 past 9, and I told him at a bus stop on Saturday that he’d never be paid late." Danny had his hands flat on his knees. "And I’ve had 11 years of other people’s cash flow. It’s always a bloke in an office deciding he’ll be all right another week, and it’s always somebody else stood in a Tesco."

"That is a decent instinct," Priya said, "and I want you to understand what you have just asked me before you say anything else."

"Go on."

"You have asked me to take your money into a client account and sit on it."

"Is that not what you do?"

"It is what I do on a matter." She put the biro down. "I can hold money that is passing through a transaction I am conducting. I cannot hold money as a favour, or as a safe, or as a bank, and a solicitor’s client account is the oldest laundry in this country and it is watched accordingly."

"I’m not asking you to hide anything."

"I have not said you are." Her voice had not gone up once. "I am telling you that if I took 6 figures off a client into that account for safekeeping I would be in front of a tribunal by spring, and the money would be frozen, and your 2 people would get nothing for 18 months."

"So it’s no."

"It is a different shape." She pulled a clean sheet. "You do not want a solicitor holding it. You want an arrangement at a bank with a second signature, a standing instruction that does not die when you do, and a will."

"A will."

"You are 28, you own a leasehold business, you are about to employ 2 people, and you have not got one." She was writing fast now. "And I have been waiting for you to arrive at that on your own since October."

"What happens now if I go under a bus?"

"Intestacy." She said it the way she says numbers. "No spouse, no children. So it goes to your parents. Both of them. Equally."

Danny sat very still in a chair in a room the size of a bathroom.

"Both of them."

"Father and mother, half each." Priya looked up. "Is your father living?"

Say no.

He’s in Noosa with a woman called Sharon and a jetty and a glass of something and you have got his address folded into 4 in a purse in Battersea.

"He’s alive," Danny said. "He went in 2014 and I’ve not seen him since and he’s in Australia."

"Then as it stands he gets half your café." Priya did not soften it at all. "Half the lease, half the machine, half whatever is in that account on the day, and your mother would have to deal with him to sell any of it."

The dry cleaning machine went into its spin.

"He left her £40,000 in the hole," Danny said.

"That has no bearing on it whatsoever."

"None?"

"None. Intestacy does not care what anybody did." She put the pen down. "Which is why people make wills, Mr Flynn, and why I have been nagging every client in that chair for 30 years, and why 2 women cried in it over a dog groomer’s."

Danny looked at the floor for a bit.

"Then do a will."

"I will do a will, and I will set up the wages arrangement at the bank, and between them your 2 people are covered whether you are here or not." She started a new line. "It is about £900 and 2 more afternoons. And it needs some very boring things off you."

"Like what?"

"Full name, date of birth, and a birth certificate."

"You took my passport in October."

"I took a passport on a property matter and it was correct and I still have a copy." She did not look up. "A will is contested by people who want to say the testator was not who he said he was. A passport is a document about travel. A birth certificate is the document about existing."

"Right."

"If you have not got one it is £12.50 from the register office and about 4 days, and you will need your mother’s full name including her maiden name, and where it was registered." She wrote the amount down and pushed the sheet across. "Thursday at 4. That is the last slot I have got before December and I am giving it to you."

"Why?"

"Because you asked me to protect 2 other people’s wages before you asked me to protect a penny of your own," Priya said, "and I have been doing this long enough to notice when somebody does that."

She went back to the ceiling letter.

At the bottom of the narrow stairs he stood in the doorway with the traffic going past on the Clapham Road and a bit of paper in his hand that said £12.50.

Twelve pound fifty and 4 days.

And I can do that this afternoon. I know her maiden name. I know it was Hackney because she’s told me about that registry office about 40 times, the one where the man had a cold.

So order it.

And then there’s a certificate with my name on it that goes back 28 years, which is the only thing in the world that does, and it’ll be on a mat in 4 days.

He stood there long enough for the woman in the dry cleaner’s to look at him twice.

So why haven’t you got the phone out.

Because if that thing arrives and it’s wrong, I’d rather not know on a Thursday.

And because there’s one in a tin on a side in Battersea that I’ve never seen, that she told me to stay out of on Friday morning stood on a walkway in her coat, 11 days after I went in her handbag on my own kitchen island while she was asleep in my spare room.

And she’s right. It’s hers.

So you’re going to have to ask her.

He got the phone out and rang his mother, and she picked up out of breath with a bus stop behind her.

"Danny. What is it?"

"Are you on the 44?"

"I’m waiting for it. Winston’s late." A car went past on her end. "What?"

"I’m coming Tuesday. I’ve got your postcard."

"I know you have."

"And I want to ask you for something while I’m there, and I’m telling you now so you’ve got a day to think about it instead of me springing it on you at your own table."

There was a pause with a whole bus stop in it.

"That’s a funny way of going about it," his mother said.

"Yeah."

"Go on then. What is it?"

Danny stood on the pavement outside a solicitor’s office on the Clapham Road.

"Your tin," he said.