Clint and Buffalo had arrived at the station a few minutes after me. Ken Jones, a friend of Clint's, happened to be the inspector on duty. He'd recognized me from the rugby club, so when Clint came dashing in to see what was going on, Ken said to him, 'We've got one of your mates. I think you should look at the report book.'
Clint flipped the pages and found the relevant entry. It read: '0200 hours: Red Mill Inn, Ashley Road. A European male attacked a Chinese male with an offensive weapon, namely a knuckleduster.' Clint was incensed when he read this, and insisted on changing the book. He later got a severe reprimand for this, but he was determined to see the truth come out even if it meant putting his job on the line.
Clint and Buffalo decided right at the outset to take the unusual step of appearing for the defence. A policeman is only ever expected to appear for the prosecution – even more particularly in instances such as this, when the case for POOW was cut and dried. Buffalo was sticking his neck out even more than Clint. He had crossed swords with the police establishment in the past and was already considered something of a renegade. What made them dig their heels in even further was when they were called into the office one day and told bluntly, 'You are strongly advised not to appear for the defence.' Without their support my case would have been severely weakened. To ensure the co-operation of the police authorities, my solicitor sent a subpoena requesting the presence in court of Clint and Buffalo simply because they had facts material to the case. The police couldn't legally refuse the request.
Clint came to visit me in Gunclub Barracks. 'They're determined to nail you,' he said. 'They are pressing ahead with the AOABH despite what Buffalo and I have told them. With a half-decent judge you might get off, but there is still the charge for the POOW. Do you realize what you are looking at? You are going down for six months, more if they make the AOABH stick. You're convicted even before the trial.'
'But I didn't start anything. It was self-defence. Surely the judge will see that.'
'Makes no difference. It's mandatory. No matter what the reason, POOW is an automatic six-monther. No appeal.'
I didn't know what was the greater blow: the contemplation of a minimum six-month stretch locked up inside some humid rat-hole in Hong Kong, or the prospect of a certain end to my career in the SAS and the Army following a jail sentence. 'Is there nothing we can do?' I asked.
Clint looked at me. He seemed hesitant, reluctant to continue. 'Well there is something. A mate of mine in the CID has been doing some research for me on the quiet. There's a procedure for requesting corporal punishment as an alternative. What do you think?'
'What does it entail?'
'Bamboo across the backside. A short sharp shock, then you're back in business.' I was too relieved by the thought of escaping prison to notice the shadow of a frown that flitted across Clint's face.
'Sounds OK to me. Anything's got to be better than being cooped up in prison. I'd die of boredom. Yeah! Let's go for it.'
'OK, but don't count on it. It's entirely at the discretion of the judge.'
* * *
The judge was about to return after considering his verdict, and I'd been called back into the dock. While awaiting the reappearance of the judge, the policeman sitting to my left unconcernedly brought a newspaper out of his pocket and began to read it. This informal motion contrasted starkly with the gravity of the surroundings. But then to him it was just another case in a long line of such cases. As far as he was concerned, familiarity bred irreverence. I shifted nervously in my seat and looked round as the court began to reconvene. My gaze finally came to rest for no particular reason on the dull brass bars surrounding the dock, and just for a moment or two I had time for my own thoughts.
I'd spent two weeks at Gunclub Barracks before the trial came up. Then, on the appointed day, the police Land Rover had come to pick me up at dawn to bring me to court. As we drove in, I scanned every detail of the city scene, things I would not normally cast a second glance at, knowing it could be my last visual stimulus for six months: a van parked up unloading boxes, a hotel worker emptying the leftovers from the morning's breakfast into the refuse bins. As we drew closer to the centre, the sheer compactness of so many buildings in such a small space began to press on me. And once inside South Kowloon Court, the institutional solidity, the implacable process of the law gripped me even tighter.
Waiting for the case to be called, I could not feel comfortable for more than a few minutes in any one position: sitting down, standing with hands defiantly in pockets, pacing up and down the corridor, staring blankly out of the window and inwardly contemplating the impending loss of freedom. Even my cast-iron digestion was beginning to weaken. I asked to go to the toilet. When I saw the white pan already besmirched by the day's nerve-churned stomachs, the call of nature struggled with the urge to turn straight round and get back as quickly as I could.
Before I knew it the case was under way. The first two days flashed by in a blur of formalities and feigned politeness. The charges were read out. I pleaded guilty to POOW. The prosecution constructed their case for AOABH. Witnesses came and went. My defence lawyer, the colonel of the Army legal services, countered at best he could each of the points that were raised. Clint and Buffalo, the only defence witnesses, appeared to give their evidence, but they had some difficulty giving a coherent story. They were constantly interrupted by Harry Reynolds, OC CID, who kept telling them to speak more slowly. He was taking down what they said word for word. Their evidence was going to be minutely compared with their previous written statements. The Hong Kong police, still smarting from the two men's insistence on appearing for the defence, were all out to trip them up. One slip-up, one discrepancy between the two accounts and they would be up for perjury. When they had finished they took their places in the spectators' gallery to see if their interventions would make any difference.
The first two days had raised more questions than they had answered. The proceedings had become increasingly bizarre, the story of what had happened increasingly disorientated. I was beginning to feel my freedom slip away.
* * *
'All stand!'
Mid-morning on the third day, and Justice Ferguson was returning to deliver his summing-up and pronounce his judgement. The policeman sitting next to me hurriedly folded his newspaper as the judge came in, bowed stiffly to the court in mock obeisance and took his seat on the dais.
At the beginning of the trial, the first thing I had noticed was that there were no windows in the courtroom. This had emphasized to me the falseness of the proceedings, the separateness from the real life of the city. Now, at the end of the trial, I was aware that somewhere along the line, my view had done a volte-face. Now, the outside world had faded to unreality. The only real and tangible thing was this courtroom, the only thing that mattered to me was this quaintly berobed representative of the legal process sitting before me sipping a glass of water and adjusting the position of several weighty tomes of law on a ledge in front of him.
'This being a criminal case, the defendant is presumed to be innocent until proved guilty…'
The use of the word 'until' had an ominous finality to it. Was this a Freudian slip? Had he given the game away right at the start of his summing-up? If he had said 'unless' instead of 'until', his pronouncement would have a much less fatalistic ring to it.
I was surprised at how much time the judge spent on seemingly irrelevant or minor details, such as the amount of light in the bar at the time, the sound level of the jukebox, the background noise of the city itself, and the exact distances between the bar, the booths and the jukebox – and here witnesses were asked to select two points in the courtroom to illustrate how far apart they estimated these items to be. I glanced at the clock high up on the wall. Already three-quarters of an hour into his summing-up, the judge didn't appear yet to have said anything concrete or to have given any indication as to which way the case would swing. My stomach still felt uneasy. I shifted in my seat again and crossed my right leg horizon
tally over my left knee. The policeman next to me leaned forward with his hand on his forehead and appeared to doze off.
'Being cross-examined is not a very pleasant experience…'
By now, the judge's voice had become strangely monotone, his manner remote and detached, and his delivery had lapsed into a seemingly automatic style. A lull seemed to descend on the court. Attention began to wander. The only person who maintained his level of concentration was the court stenographer, inconspicuously sitting a few feet to the judge's right, furiously tapping away at what looked like a desktop calculator. I found myself staring blankly at the reflected shine of the neon lighting in the varnished wooden rail in front of me. My reverie was interrupted by a noise as someone walked in front of the spectators' gallery. There was so much ancient-looking wood in the room that the slightest movement anywhere in the court was accompanied by an intrusive creaking sound.
'Indeed, excessive anxiety against a charge falsely brought can lead to false evidence being given…'
False evidence! There was certainly plenty of false evidence being given, but not through any sense of anxiety or nervousness! Quite the contrary. It was a cold, deliberate attempt to pervert the course of justice, to set me up and to deflect attention away from the truth about what had really been going on in the bar. And the source of this false evidence? Who should appear as star witnesses for the prosecution? None other than the thugs who had started the fight in the first place: Peres and his bottle boys, all smartly turned out and looking distinctly uncomfortable in their Sunday-best suits designed to impress the court and project an aura of probity and integrity. The young Chinese inspector, completely misreading the situation, had tracked down Peres and his gang and brought them in to make out a case against me.
I had been utterly astonished. I wouldn't have been more surprised if, to make pronouncement on the proceedings, the judge had called in a jury consisting entirely of a vanload of day-tripping psychiatric patients from the local asylum. To add weight to the gang's story, a Chinese doctor was wheeled in to testify that in his professional and considered opinion the wound on Peres' head had indeed been caused by Exhibit A – the infamous knuckleduster, which lay all along in the middle of a large table below the judge, tagged with a small white label. It looked faintly ridiculous – like an unwanted sale item – and totally innocuous. You couldn't fire it, throw it, detonate it, cut with it. If a machine gun or a pistol or a ten-inch bladed knife has been lying there, then the severity of the court proceedings would have been justified. But a knuckleduster, a lump of inert metal! To add insult to injury, the thugs were aided and abetted in their evidence by the meek and mild Soriano sisters, who looked as if they'd been given time out from the nunnery specially to appear in court that day. I daresay they were under some kind of duress to turn up. To me they seemed essentially decent types who somehow had lost their way, who somewhere along the line had naively been caught up in the petty-crime scene.
'Now to the evidence itself…'
Justice Ferguson picked up a large red notebook, adjusted his spectacles, coughed, flicked through the pages to refresh his memory with some of the handwritten notes he'd taken and proceeded to read out his version of the events. The sight and sound of the learned judge describing in reverent tones the details of a fight that was clearly totally alien to someone of his status bordered on the comic.
'Kicked the assailant in the groin… struck him a blow to the temple… head-butted the second man… grappled with the broken bottle… split his scalp with a blow to the head… rolled across the floor… a scuffle ensued…'
A scuffle! More like a life-or-death struggle. I glanced over at the policeman next to me to see what he was making of it all. He was still leaning over with his head on his hands, but contrary to what I had at first supposed he was not dozing. The newspaper had been folded in a strategic manner and he was actually doing the crossword! So much for his concern for the drama that was gripping me.
As I looked around again I realized I'd be glad to be out of this place, no matter what the outcome. The courtroom was much smaller than such rooms appear on TV and in films and, with all its dark wood, it was beginning to press in on me.
'I have weighed all the evidence and completed my deliberation…'
The last three words were like a whip-crack. One and a half hours had passed since the summing-up begun, but now the courtroom was fully alert once more. I leaned forward in my seat, partly in anxiety, partly in an attempt to catch the judge's fading voice.
'In the matter of the case for AOABH, the prosecuting counsel together with Mr Reynolds representing the CID have not covered themselves with glory. Far from it. Their performance borders on the shameful. I have not heard such an ill-prepared case in a long time…'
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Relief was sweeping through me. Vindicated! Not only was their case not good enough, but they were being actively criticized for putting it together so poorly. 'The evidence was atrocious. All the stories were false, nobody told two accounts the same, no two pieces of evidence were consistent…'
At this point the prosecution barrister rose to protest. 'If it please your honour…' The judge glared down at him over his glasses. The barrister quickly lost courage, mumbled something in a tone of voice hushed to the point of obsequiousness, then sat down, disheartened.
'The only independent witness,' Justice Ferguson continued, 'should have been the barman. He wasn't part of Peres' party, he wasn't police, he wasn't with the defendant. But the only time he told the truth…' Here the judge paused regally in mid-sentence, poured himself a glass of water from the carafe, drank half of it and then went on, '…was when he said that when it was all over he went round and collected money from everyone for the drinks. The only two prosecution witnesses who consistently spoke the truth were the two Chinese detectives who happened to be having a quiet drink in the bar. Even though they were appearing for the prosecution, their evidence undermined the very case the prosecution was attempting to establish…'
It was going my way. Maybe the due process of law had some merit after all! The tension in my shoulders had noticeably relaxed, and I eased back slightly in my chair.
'I rule therefore that the charge of AOABH should be struck out…'
Wonderful! I could have been looking at a long stretch for that. Justice Ferguson is not as senile as he looks. One down, one to go. Because of the prosecution's bungling on the first charge, the judge might have some sympathy with me on the second – possession of the duster. He might, after all, accept my argument of self-defence. I was in for a shock.
'As for the charge of possession of an offensive weapon…'
Here Justice Ferguson reached forward for one of the large volumes of case history that lay before him, adjusted his wig slightly, shaded his eyes with his left hand, turned the pages of the book with the other and proceeded to cite the case in 1974 of a Chinese civilian who had got involved in a punch-up in a bar in Kowloon. He'd ripped an ornamental sword from where it was displayed stapled to the wood above the bar and used it to defend himself. He was arrested, charged with POOW and sentenced to six months. My euphoria was quickly dissipating.
'In spite of the considerable extenuating circumstances surrounding this case, I have still been given no valid reason why you should have about your person an offensive weapon, namely a knuckleduster. Even if it formed part of your training – and who am I to question these things? I leave that to the judgement of the military authorities – even if it was part of your official equipment, you should not have been carrying it, let alone using it in a public place. Before we know it we will have off-duty members of the forces walking down the street with rifles and machine guns. That is something that just cannot be tolerated.'
All hope was fading. How would I cope with a prison sentence? Would I be able to bear the strain of the claustrophobic routine? What would I do when I got back to the UK? Would the RE have me back? If they wouldn't, it would be a dishonourable
discharge and into Civvy Street to try to get work with the only trade I knew: driving trucks.
'Taking everything into consideration I have no alternative but to find you guilty as charged…'
Here the judge paused. He was sitting with a large ledger before him, pen poised. The pen was just coming down to write me off for six months when my lawyer, the colonel, stood up. 'My learned judge, before you pass sentence…'
The judge looked at him with a certain benign curiosity.
'There are certain mitigating circumstances in this case.'
There was a moment of silence. The judge looked over his halfglasses, pen still poised, and said in a slow, enquiring voice, 'Yes, Colonel?'
Soldier I Page 19
