Dead Against the Lawyers

by Roderic Jeffries

  By 1850, the jurisdiction of Hertonhurst Bar had been severely restricted and most of the lawyers had left — rats deserting the sinking ship. In 1856, the Act of Parliament abolished the court except in so far as a court of quarter sessions. On the face of it, the Hertonhurst Bar should have vanished, to become absorbed in the SE Circuit, but by some historical fluke it continued into the twentieth century. In 1928, there were two members, both of whom had private incomes: if they had not, the Bar would have finally vanished. But then there was an unexplained upsurge in litigation and two reasonably successful barristers joined the Bar and brought life back to it. Solicitors rediscovered the advantages of briefing local counsel, not the least of which was the diminution in costs: a diminution solicitors were sometimes decent enough to pass on to the lay clients. In 1945, Radwick Holter joined the Hertonhurst Bar and in 1955 he took Silk. His successes brought more life to the Bar than there had been in the previous hundred years.

  Holter was born in that unlikely named Midlands town, Ashby-de-la-Zouch. He was the second of six children and his father had been a blacksmith. Inheriting his mother’s quick intelligence, he gained a scholarship to the local grammar school and another from there to Trinity College. He attained a good degree and a 2 (1) in the Bar finals.

  Before the Second World War, a man without some private income had to be exceptional to succeed at the Bar: it cost a considerable sum of money to join one of the Inns of Court, a considerable sum to become a pupil in chambers and a far larger sum to live during the initial years when briefs from solicitors were as rare as miracles. Unusual ability or unusual luck, together with tremendous guts, were needed to overcome the disability of poverty. Holter had considerable ability and all the guts in the world because of a blinding desire to succeed. When called to the Bar, he was wearing a hired suit, shoes with badly worn heels, and odd socks. For five years, he worked at night as a dishwasher. After ten years, he had become something of a ‘name’ as a junior. At forty-eight, against a lot of apparently good advice, he took Silk and within a year it was clear he was never going to regret the move. Before long he was making twenty thousand pounds a year, appearing in courts all over the circuit and in London. He was given more apparently good advice. ‘Leave the Hertonhurst Bar and join chambers in London,’ but he ignored this just as he had the previous time.

  He was a man who dismissed as unimportant the poverty in which he had been born and had lived, but if ever he had been honest with himself on this point he would have admitted he had been indelibly marked by it. The bitterness of it had spurred him on to success and then for ever persuaded him that such success must be shown to all for what it was.

  *

  Josephus Traynton, wearing black coat, striped trousers, stiff white collar, and silver tie, arrived at chambers — on the first floor of Awcott House — at 9.00 AM, just as he had done for the past fifty-six years. For him, 8.59 was early and 9.01 was late. He was a ponderous man, who looked his seventy-one years. He had a large, round face, creased by age, with very definite jowls. He was about to retire and was quite certain that chambers would find it very difficult to continue once he had done so.

  He took two keys from his pocket and opened first the heavy wooden door, with the names of the members of chambers on its inner face, and then the second and much lighter built one. He stepped into the rectangular hall-cum-passage. Puffing from the effort involved, he bent down and picked up the mail from the carpet, after which he walked into the clerks’ room on the right. He placed the letters on his desk, took off his mackintosh and bowler hat and hung them on the mahogany stand. He returned to his desk, sat down, and sorted out the mail. There was a brief for Resse marked at a mere seven & two, a cheque for Spender in settlement of a long overdue account, a letter from Ashford solicitors reporting the settlement of a case Spender had been advising in, two circulars, and private letters for Holter and Aiden. Traynton’s expression became severe as a close examination of the handwriting on the letter to Aiden convinced him that the writer was a young barrister from London who had referred to him, Traynton, as the only living mastodon in captivity, little knowing he was in earshot.

  He distributed the letters to the various rooms and by the time he returned to the clerks’ room, Marriott had arrived.

  ‘Good morning, good morning, and the top of the world to you,’ said Marriott loudly.

  ‘I observe you did not finish the statement of claim in the Fabian case last night,’ said Traynton coldly.

  ‘Time pressed so I left it for today.’

  ‘In the old days, a conscientious clerk did not allow time to press.’

  ‘Back in those dark ages, they were still sending little boys up chimneys to sweep ’em, but now, thanks to a thriving capitalistic society, nobody works any more than he bloody well has to.’ Marriott at twenty-nine possessed the cockiness of someone who was certain he knew all the answers. He refused to wear black coat and striped trousers, saying such a mournful dress was for undertakers and he appeared instead in patterned suits. He was always careful to make certain the handkerchief in his breast pocket was showing and he knew that only the really uneducated would drink red wine with fish.

  Traynton pursued the subject further. ‘This is not a job in which a man’s work is regulated by a clock. Had I spent all my career looking at my watch ...’

  ‘The Hertonhurst Bar would have crumbled, nothing at all would ever have got done, and so sing glory Alleluia to Jo-Jo Traynton.’

  ‘That is not amusing.’

  ‘It’s all a question of taste, isn’t it? Some people laugh at Punch, some don’t.’

  ‘I dread to think what clients will say when I ...’ Traynton stopped. He was only too aware that in Marriott’s eyes he was an ancient relic who needed putting out to grass.

  The telephone rang and Traynton answered it. A Maidstone solicitor wanted to know how much Holter would ask to lead in a defended divorce suit at the next assizes. Traynton queried who the client was and, because the answer was evasive, became certain the fee should be a generous one. ‘Two hundred and another hundred for the consultation.’

  ‘What? Good God, man, I could get F. E. Smith up from hell for that.’

  ‘We are very busy now.’

  ‘I don’t care how busy you are. I’ve shoved a lot of work Holter’s way before now and he can damn’ well do this for me now at a reasonable price.’

  ‘I might, sir, as a special concession, drop to a hundred and seventy-five.’

  ‘A hundred.’

  ‘A hundred and seventy-five, sir, and we might call the consultation fifty.’

  ‘You’re a blasted thief, Traynton, and it’s nothing less than blackmail. I’ll tell Holter that when I see him.’

  After the call was concluded, Traynton stared down at his desk with a satisfied smile on his heavy face. Marriott would have accepted that brief at a hundred guineas because he had neither the experience nor the intelligence to realize how much it would bear.

  Holter, due in court at 10.30, arrived in chambers at 9.30. He went into the clerks’ room. ‘ ’Morning, Josephus, ’morning, George.’ He sat down on the edge of Marriott’s desk. ‘We had quite a good dinner last night, if one ignores the food. The judge wasn’t too objectionable and he left early, so maybe he won’t have a liver this morning. Though, God knows, he doesn’t need a liver attack to be a bastard in court. Every time I tried to make a point for our chap yesterday, he knocked it aside. Tell me, Josephus, how am I going to get the man off?’

  ‘I confess, sir, that I see little hope for us.’

  Holter stood up, crossed the room, and leaned against the marble mantelpiece. His blustering manner covered a character which hated to lose, even when he knew from the beginning that there was small chance of winning: much of his success at the Bar was due to the fact that he never stopped fighting. ‘I wonder what kind of witness he’ll make in the box?’

  ‘Not very good, sir,’ answered Traynton. ‘It would be an exaggeration to
suppose any part of his story will be believed.’

  ‘Why in the devil did he have to drag the poor woman down and dump her body beneath that photo of himself? No jury goes for that sort of thing, Josephus.’

  ‘No, sir. Especially as he had a good education.’

  ‘It was a frenzy of love,’ said Marriott. ‘She enjoyed herself with another bloke, so he knocks her on the head and drags her body in front of his photograph to show what he thinks of her. If I was on the jury, I’d acquit him for showing some real passion.’

  ‘That is hardly a responsible and proper attitude,’ said Traynton, with a loud sniff.

  Holter jerked himself upright, and walked across to the door.

  ‘Mr Drift is sending a defended divorce, sir,’ said Traynton.

  ‘As long as the fee’s high enough,’ answered Holter without interest as he left. He went into his own room, to the right of the corridor, and crossed to the window. The main road was as clogged with traffic as ever, despite the by-pass, and as he watched a policeman appeared and tried to ease a right-turning car across the far line of cars. He thought about the case and became angry because he knew that so far his advocacy had been useless: then his mind switched to the previous night and he remembered how Charlotte had refused him, and why, and that made him angrier because he hated to think of himself as anything but successful.

  He turned away from the window and sat down in the leather-covered chair behind his massive and expensive desk. On his right was the wall cabinet with glass doors in which were the visible, macabre proofs of his previous successes against all the odds: the murder weapons from cases he had won.

  He stared at the photographic portrait of Charlotte which was on the corner of his desk. The photographer had brilliantly captured her striking, exotic beauty and the smile which had, until she agreed to marry him, tormented him with an aching longing. He remembered her as she had been when he first met her, not exactly poor but not able to buy the kind of clothes and jewellery her beauty so obviously called for. Thank God, he thought, he had had the sense not to think of marriage until he could afford the luxury. Oliver Resse had married the same year he was called to the Bar and ever since then he and his wife had had to make do and mend, which must have been extremely galling for her since she came from a very well known county family.

  He looked away from Charlotte’s photograph and switched his mind back to work. When the trial resumed, he would have to open the case for the defence and put Albert Smith in the witness-box. What could they do to help save the man?

  *

  Albert Smith resembled no Romeo, no Paris, swept by the burning fires of passion: he was small, round-shouldered, mean-faced, and his wispy moustache was the same indeterminate colour as his rapidly thinning hair. His life was a recorded failure, first as a schoolboy, then as an articled clerk, finally as a husband. One day, when he knew all about middle age, he met a woman in a pub near Coninden and was immediately captured by her broad, jolly vulgarity: captured to such an extent that two weeks later he made a half-hearted attempt to seduce her. He was astonished when he met nothing but encouragement. He loved her passionately and talked about gaining a divorce. Then, one afternoon, he visited her house when he had not been expected and he found obvious signs that he was not the only recipient of her favours. He clubbed her to death with a poker, dragged her body from the bedroom to the sitting-room and left it under the photograph of himself which she had always said was her most treasured possession. He went home and told his wife everything, tearfully complaining about the unfaithfulness of his late mistress.

  In the witness-box, Albert Smith looked incapable of killing anything larger than a mosquito.

  Holter fought hard and long for the defence, but the jury were plainly against him and the judge, looking in his robes and wig to be quite incapable of erroneous human emotions, did not hesitate to underline the defects in the defence’s version of what had happened.

  ‘When ... When there was no answer, I went into the house,’ said the prisoner.

  Holter concealed his contempt for Smith. Smith was a failure and he, Holter, hated failures. That was why he had in the past fifteen years only once returned to Ashby-de-la-Zouch to see his brothers and sisters. ‘Will you please describe what you did on entering the house?’

  ‘I called out “Jane” and there wasn’t any answer.’

  ‘Did that worry you at all?’ asked the judge, with a tired sarcasm which could never appear in the transcripts, but which plainly told the jury what he thought of such ridiculous evidence.

  ‘Worry ... worry me?’ said Smith.

  ‘Never mind.’

  Holter spoke. ‘Perhaps, my lord, it would be better if the accused were left to tell us in his own words what happened?’

  ‘Better for whom, Mr Holter?’

  Holter addressed Smith again. ‘What did you do when there wasn’t any answer?’

  ‘I went into the sitting-room.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She wasn’t there.’ He said this with such an air of pained surprise that someone laughed. He hastily went on speaking. ‘I ... I went up the stairs to her bedroom.’ He began to stutter. ‘When I look ... looked in I saw her. She ... she was on the floor, dead. I swear she was ... was dead. You ... you’ve got to believe me.’

  ‘It is not your own counsel you have to convince,’ commented the judge. ‘It is the jury.’

  ‘My lord, I really must object,’ said Holter.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘It is most damaging for the Bench to suggest such an implication.’

  ‘What am I supposed to have implied, Mr Holter?’

  Holter wisely forbade to answer. He turned to face the witness-box. ‘What did you do when you discovered she was dead?’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it was true. I knew I had to get her to a doctor so I carried her downstairs.’

  Holter stared at the prisoner and wondered how any man could be such a fool as to say that? Hadn’t they tried to tell him in the consultations that jurymen might be stupid, but juries usually had a certain amount of collective common-sense? ‘Where did you put her downstairs?’

  ‘In the sitting-room.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘I ... I was going to put her on the sofa, but I couldn’t, so I laid her carefully on the floor.’

  Holter looked down at his brief. His solicitor, sitting in front, turned round and grimaced. Holter put another question. ‘Did you place her near anything?’

  ‘Just on the floor.’

  ‘Not in any one particular part of the floor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We have heard evidence that the dead woman’s body was discovered immediately underneath a photograph of you. Did you know you were leaving her near this photograph?’

  ‘No. No. I swear I didn’t. I didn’t know what I was doing.’

  ‘You are saying, then, that the fact the dead woman was found beneath your photograph was pure coincidence and not, as the prosecution alleges, a symbolic gesture of hate?’

  ‘No,’ mumbled the prisoner. No man had ever made a more patently false denial.

  *

  Fifteen days later, on a June day so warm that he had actually left his umbrella at home, Josephus Traynton arrived in chambers as the church clock was striking nine o’clock. He took the two keys from his pocket and inserted the larger one in the lock of the outer, wooden door. When he tried to turn it, nothing moved. Frowning, he stared down at the lock and thought sadly how everything had changed since he was a boy and then he removed the key, visually inspected it, and re-inserted it. Again he tried to turn the tumblers and again they did not move. Muttering angrily, he went to pull the key free, but because it was not exactly lined up with the keyhole it caught on the lock plates. The door swung open.

  He was shocked. There were certain verities in life and when any one of them ceased to be it was as if the world had denied part of itself. An even more cataclysmic thought occurred to him — su
ppose the inner door was also unlocked so that throughout the night anyone in Hertonhurst could have walked into chambers and poked and pried amongst all the papers? Almost afraid to do so, he turned the handle of the inner door and pushed. It opened.

  He shuffled forward, bent down and picked up the mail and went into the clerks’ room which, somewhat to his astonishment, was exactly as he had left it the previous night. He hung his bowler hat on the nearest hook, checked in the mirror that his tie was neat and tidy, and sat down at his desk to open the mail. There were three new briefs which gave him great pleasure, not because his own income was thereby augmented by a shilling in every pound, but because the success of members was his success.

  He read through four letters that were addressed to him. A firm of solicitors were disputing the statement of fees he had sent them. Since he had not once been wrong in his thirty-five years as chief clerk, he ignored the accusation.

  He picked up the private letters for Holter and Resse and left. He first went into Resse’s room and put the two letters on the larger of the two desks, then walked along to Holter’s room. He entered, crossed to the desk, and was about to put the letters down when he looked to the right at something which until then had been hidden by the desk. On the floor was the body of a man whose head was partially missing.