The night before had been cold but not wet. I was running into work thinking about the Christmas break ahead and the skiing holiday that we had planned. Anything to shut out of my mind the fact that this was also the day of Peregrine’s final hearing – the day when the financial squabble between him and his ghastly wife would finally be decided by the court.
The first thing that I noticed when Harry came into sight was that there was no Jenny. The second thing that I noticed was that Harry did not even look up as I pulled my earphones out and said my usual, ‘Hi there, buddy.’
‘Where’s Jenny, Harry?’ He didn’t reply. He was shaking and didn’t look at me.
‘Come on, Harry. What’s happening?’
‘They killed her.’
‘What do you mean, they killed her?’
‘I mean they killed her.’
‘Who did, Harry?’
‘The lads that burnt down the tent.’
‘Burnt down the tent?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘You know.’ He didn’t want to talk. I sat down on the pavement next to him.
‘Harry, I don’t know. Tell me.’
‘They threw petrol over the tent and then set it on fire. They were pissed. Jenny tried to protect me, so they kicked her to death. It’s as simple as that.’
‘Where were you?’
‘I couldn’t stop them.’ He obviously thought I was asking why he hadn’t protected her.
‘No, that’s not what I meant. Are you OK … were you hurt?’
He showed me his hands which were bandaged.
‘I was in the tent. That’s when it happened.’
‘Oh, Harry. I am so sorry.’ I put my arm around his shoulder, hoping that he would lean into me, but he didn’t. It felt like hugging a statue.
‘Who bandaged your hands?’
‘The hospital. The police rang an ambulance and so I spent most of the night waiting in A and E.’
‘What happened to the bastards who did this?’
‘Don’t ask me. They fucked off.’
‘Where is Jenny now? What happened to her?’
‘One of the policemen got a black bin bag and put her in the boot of the car.’ That’s when he started to cry. The second time only I had seen him do that.
‘Happy fucking Christmas,’ he finally said as he wiped the snot from his nose and the tears from his eyes.
I was really late by then. I was supposed to be meeting Peregrine at 8.45 a.m. to walk him around to court and it was already 8.35 a.m.
The two women who ran the shop outside which he was sitting had always been very kind to Harry and had started a Christmas collection for him – I knew this because they had asked me to contribute. I went into the shop. One of the women was in tears.
‘How can they do that?’ she asked… ‘How can people behave like that? Look at his hands! And the dog – why kill the dog?’
The other woman just said: ‘Well, it’s Christmas. The rich get pissed at Christmas, don’t they? Then they kick the shit out of the poor.’ I didn’t have time for that.
‘Look, can you take care of him a bit today and I will see if I can get him into a hotel or B and B place tonight?’
‘My lover, we always do take care of him.’ She came from Bristol, I discovered, and had a strong accent.
‘Harry. I’ve got to go now,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to find somewhere for you to stay the night. Can you be here at 6 o’clock this evening? I’ll meet you here.’ I gave him some money and pelted off down the street as fast as my geriatric legs would take me.
Was he there later? Of course not. He doesn’t do charity and, when hurt, he disappeared into hiding, like a fox that had been knocked down by a car. And, anyway, why wait for the next load of pissed-up bastards to deliver the modern-day Christmas message and kick the shit out of him? It was a month before I saw him again. A month in which a lot else happened.
Chapter Twelve
Arriving late at the office wearing running gear on the day of a big court hearing is not the best way to impress a client, certainly not a client like Peregrine. And, chance being what it is, Peregrine was having a row with the security guys as I arrived.
‘You’re not searching through my fucking bag.’
‘Well, sir, then I am afraid you can’t go in.’ Harvey was only following protocol and was right to do so.
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘No, sir. But if you tell me I’ll make a note of it and pass it on to the police when I ring them.’ Harvey rarely comes second.
‘Don’t be so fucking stupid.’ A wobbling mass like Peregrine can rarely get the ball back over the net, even in a game of verbal tennis like that.
‘I’d like to speak to the senior partner…now.’ It was the outwitted prima donna’s last stance – do what I want or else I’ll have an even bigger tantrum and drag everyone into it.
Arun was about to weigh in and, if the stories of his weekend work as a bouncer were true, that meant smack the man in the face first and ask questions afterwards. It was tempting to let him, very tempting, but no. I intervened.
‘OK, OK. What’s the problem?’ I asked. Peregrine looked at me with utter disdain.
‘I am not having this black guy searching through my personal possessions. Who does he think I am? One of your criminal clients?’
‘Now, now, Peregrine, you know full well I don’t do crime. Looks like things are getting a bit heated here. OK,’ I turned to Harvey. ‘I think that we had better let this gentleman through. He’s with me.’
Harvey just shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’ll make a note of this and report it to my boss.’ Peregrine turned on him: ‘You fucking do that. You just do that. And I’ll have you out of a job before your filthy fingers can fiddle their way down the situations vacant column.’
Arun by that stage had taken out his phone and was filming Peregrine. ‘Smile please...I think that you just threatened my colleague here.’ Then he took a flash picture straight into Peregrine’s face. ‘Not bad ID, that. Look good in the papers.’
‘No, this won’t do. We are moving on from this, please. Come on, Peregrine.’ I ushered him away. ‘And I’m really sorry, Harvey.’
As we got into the lift, Peregrine looked me up and down as if I were the scum of the earth.
‘I hope you’re going to change before we get to court.’
‘Of course I will, Peregrine. Of course I will.’
‘Well, none of the other partners dress like that.’ I let him have the last word. He needed that.
‘Ma’am, before my learned friend calls his evidence, I wonder whether I might outline our case to help you.’
‘Well, I think that I know what the issues are, thank you. But if you want to set out your position orally at this stage, I won’t stop you as long as it’s brief.’
Peregrine’s silk wanted to get in from the start, even though, as the respondent party, it was not his turn to make a speech under the usual rules of procedure. ‘To summarise the key points of our case, we say that the value of the husband’s shares in the business should be totally ignored because they are non-matrimonial assets and that, if contrary to that primary submission you do take them into account, their value should be discounted by 30% because the husband only has a minority interest. The matrimonial assets, amounting to just over £1.2 million, can be distributed so that the wife has £850,000, leaving the husband with a very small proportion of the liquid assets and all of the risks of the commercial assets, the shares. The company is not doing well and there is a huge risk, which the husband will bear, that things will deteriorate further. We accept that the wife should have maintenance of £30,000 a year for a limited period but, bearing in mind her age of 43, the ages of the children and her ability to work in the future, we contend that there should be a clean break in four years’ time, ending the wife’s rights to maintenance. Generously, the husband accepts that the wife should have 60% of his private pension policy by way of pension sha
ring order, so she will have a pension fund of about £120,000.’
The judge, faced with our top-notch London QC, was making notes on her computer and keeping her eyes firmly away from the silk’s smooth gaze. She spent most of her time doing care proceedings and small civil claims – car crash cases and the like – so this case was beyond her usual comfort zone although she handled it, and the imperious silk, very well. The trick is never to engage with people like that and she was an experienced judge.
Peregrine’s former wife, represented by a barrister who did a lot of that type of work, sat sobbing into a handkerchief. Peregrine had insisted that we did not tell our opponents that we were employing a silk, but the barrister did not seem remotely uncomfortable about being pitted against a QC who was such a drama queen. The silk tried to give the impression that he could smell his opponent’s excrement and also kept trying to pull rank – a very unwise thing to do in front of a local District Judge.
What, in normal language, was our silk saying? He was saying that Peregrine had owned the shares in the business before the marriage, and so the shares should be totally ignored and his former wife should not get her dirty mitts on any part of them. But, much more than that, he was trying to say that their value should be totally ignored when looking at what was fair. If the judge disagreed then, he said, the shares should be knocked down in value because the husband only had one-third of the total shareholding in the company – nobody buying a one-third interest in the company would pay full value for it because the control would still lie with the other two shareholders who were also members of Peregrine’s family. £850,000, topped up with maintenance for four years, would give her more than she needed. She could buy a house, invest the rest of her capital and retrain over the next four years. The pension was the cherry on the cake. The business was on the skids.
What Peregrine was saying about the business was, of course, rubbish. The silk knew it was rubbish, I knew it was rubbish, but Peregrine insisted and the client’s instructions were the trump card. Peregrine and the other two shareholders, brother Bertram and mother Gladys, had suppressed his income from the business ever since they got wind of the divorce and were running a totally false argument about how the business was faring. There was no way that Peregrine would ever sell his shares on his own; if any shares were ever sold by anyone it would be on the basis of a company buyout in which all of the family members would sell all of their shares to an outside buyer. In legal language, it was a quasi-partnership and the minority discount argument relating to the value of the shares was a joke. Hidden in the accounts was a massive amount of undrawn income in a directors’ loan account and Peregrine’s suggestion that the other directors would not let him touch the loan because it was needed to weather the storm of a downturn in business was also a badly told fairy story. The man was a liar and came from a family of liars.
So, Mrs Hamley-Smith was the first to give evidence in her East London accent and, after answering some gentle questions from her own barrister, saw the QC’s guns turning on her. He obviously thought that she was easy picking and too unintelligent to deal with the likes of him.
‘Mrs Hamley-Smith, what exactly did you bring into this marriage?’ the silk asked her in very aloof cross-examination.
‘Two children, actually and I supported your client for years in his business and through his many affairs.’
The District Judge intervened. ‘I’ve read the papers. I know the background.’
‘Thank you, Madam,’ the silk persisted. ‘Now, can you answer the question, Mrs Hamley-Smith? What did you bring into this marriage financially?’
‘You didn’t ask me that. Anyway, you know the answer already.’ More tears. ‘I had nothing when we met, I was still in my twenties. But I’ve given everything to that man. My whole life.’
‘It’s called pond life,’ Peregrine whispered to me. God, I hated the man.
‘You were working as a waitress in a bar when Mr Hamley-Smith met you, weren’t you?’
‘Well, I worked in a pub. Yes.’
‘You had no money at all, did you?’
‘He knew that when he asked me to marry him. Where do our children fit in with all this?’
‘So, the answer to my question is “No,” isn’t it?’
‘If you say so.’
‘Look,’ the judge intervened again and looked directly at the silk. ‘I’ve already told you I’ve read the papers. I don’t need cross-examination on this.’ I had once heard her say to a stroppy barrister: ‘in a battle between the bench and the bar, the bench wins.’
The silk moved on after pausing to write down a note, pretending that Mrs Hamley-Smith had just conceded a big point. He was just trying to push her around.
‘Thank you for that, Mrs Hamley-Smith. Now, as you know the family home, Casa Blanca, has been valued at £1.3 million.’ Peregrine had not got his way on the valuation. ‘It has a mortgage on it of £300,000. How do you think you can stay there?’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ She reminded me of a cat flying out of a corner with its claws extended. ‘It’s the children’s home. It’s my home. It’s our only security.’ Then she looked across the small courtroom at Peregrine. ‘Perry, how could you do this? How could you do this to our beautiful girls?’
‘How do you expect the mortgage to be paid?’ The silk ignored the histrionics.
‘How do you think?’
‘Please don’t ask me questions, Mrs Hamley-Smith. We’ll get along a lot faster if you just reply to what I ask you.’
‘Just listen to counsel’s questions, Mrs Hamley-Smith, and do your best to answer them.’ The judge was on firmer ground this time.
‘He can pay it. He always has.’
‘Where would he live then? Almost all of the free capital is tied up in the house.’
‘Wherever his trousers next take him.’ Bad answer. More tears. Loads of huffing and complaining from Peregrine.
‘I think we will take ten minutes, please,’ said the judge.
When the case resumed, the silk messed around with questions about how much Mrs Hamley-Smith needed if she was going to buy a new home – could she be rehoused for £500,000? Easy – yes, but that would not buy anything like what they were used to. It would mean moving area. The usual replies to the usual questions.
Then he turned to what she could earn and all hell broke loose on that one as well. She had six GCSEs, no work qualifications and no work experience other than behind bars and in restaurants. She was not going to work as a receptionist. It was like Bonfire Night.
‘Mrs Hamley-Smith, what are you going to do all day when your children are at school or when the children are with my client?’
‘What, once a week on a Sunday afternoon, when he remembers?’
‘Answer the point, please, Mrs Hamley-Smith. Are you not going to want to do some sort of work at some point in the future?’ The judge was trying to stop the rows.
‘Well, yes. But it will take time…when the girls are a bit older.’ In the end, in answer to the judge’s questions rather than the silk’s, she said that she thought that she should be able to find some sort of work in about three years’ time and could earn something like £12,000 a year.
Peregrine’s evidence saw his glasses coming repeatedly off his nose, his hair swept back constantly and lies pouring from him in a never-ending stream of mendacity. He had filed a narrative statement setting out all the evidence he wanted to give; I had swallowed my pride and written the first draft of the statement for him, although he had amended it heavily. The silk was wise enough to say: ‘You have seen the position statement that I have filed with the court on your behalf and you have filed a narrative statement which is flagged in the bundle. Are the contents of those statements correct to the best of your knowledge and belief?’ It is always a good idea to get a lying witness that you are calling out of the witness box as quickly as possible.
The barrister for Mrs Hamley-Smith made a good job on the company accounts a
nd pulled to pieces the argument that there should be a discount in the share values for minority holding. He successfully derided the suggestion that Mrs Hamley-Smith could get a well-paid job and made a reasonable job of showing that Peregrine could draw much more income from the company if he wanted.
And there was one particular piece of evidence that went like this:
‘For the purposes of the record, please Mr Hamley-Smith, I need to ask you this. Within the past two years, have there been any discussions or negotiations with any third party or amongst the shareholders about the sale of the business as a whole?’
‘None at all.’
‘So, let me understand this. I want to break it down. You and the other shareholders have not discussed the sale of the company ever during the last two years?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you know of no discussions or negotiations with any third parties about the sale of the business either in whole or in part?’
‘That’s right, too.’
‘You’re quite sure of that?’
‘If my learned friend has any positive evidence to put on this point it should have been disclosed and he ought to put it now. Properly. Otherwise this is a totally reprehensible fishing exercise,’ the silk jumped in. Peregrine could obviously not resist smiling at him.
The barrister persisted, however, and the judge didn’t intervene. ‘I’ll take it that the answer then is “No”.’
‘I thought that this line of questioning wasn’t going any further.’ Peregrine tried but failed; I remember thinking, ‘Shit, where is this leading?’
‘Answer the question, please.’ The judge could sense the tension, too.
‘The answer is no.’ Peregrine pointed the arm of his glasses at the barrister, shifted in his seat and swept his hair back. He then smiled at the judge and I had a horrible feeling that he was about to call her sweetheart. She did not smile back. She was now much more on her home territory and had begun to get the case, and Peregrine, into her grasp. The issues were pretty clearly defined and were not very difficult once all the blather was stripped away. It was obvious that she had taken a strong dislike to Peregrine and was not going to let the silk push her around.
Harry Page 5
