Rumpole and the Reign of Terror

by John Mortimer

  7

  PERHAPS THERE AREN'T ANY particularly nice prisons, not one you'd want to spend a relaxing year or two in, but Belmarsh is certainly to be avoided. It occupies a large, flat area by the Thames known as Plumstead Manor and is connected to Woolwich Court, so an invited person can be shut into it after a trial without necessarily coming up for air. The exercise yard is covered over, in case helicopters should swoop down and rescue the particularly important inmates. The result of this is those in custody never see what Oscar Wilde called 'that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky'.

  Getting to Belmarsh by public transport would entail a train and a bus ride or a bus ride and a walk, so Bonny Bernard offered to drive me in his family car. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.

  Now, in his professional life Bernard is a wise and careful fellow, perhaps more unlikely than I am to take risks, but at the wheel of the Mondeo he became a different character, accelerating as though on a racetrack, hooting and muttering insults at other, more reasonably paced drivers.

  Not only was there the element of danger, the drive did not exactly pass through beautiful countryside. We headed east from the Temple, along the Commercial Road, and drove through the Blackwall Tunnel under the river, then along the Woolwich Road to Plumstead, past gaunt and unappealing buildings, to the new prison, built in the 1990s, which resembles, architecturally, the supermarket Hilda and I visit on Saturday mornings.

  Belmarsh is a maximum-security prison which houses murderers, rapists and major drug barons. The visitors' centre, where we had to check in, was crowded with their friends and relatives. After a considerable wait we were asked to show our passports, empty our pockets of everything except one pen each and surrender our fingers to some form of invisible ink. These prolonged formalities gave me the feeling of entering another country, a land in which the principles of justice had been forgotten.

  From the visitors' centre it was a ten-minute walk to the prison, where we were searched again and had our fingers inspected. I was also relieved of a lever-arch file which would eventually contain my notes of the conference with Mahmood Khan. The file was examined with deep suspicion by the authorities, who apparently thought it could be used by my client to tunnel his way out of custody, or at least become a weapon of mass destruction. We were sent back to hand it in at our first port of call. At last Bonny Bernard and I were installed in an interview room to wait, for what seemed an unusually long time, for the delivery of our client.

  There had been some developments since Tiffany called for our help in the corridor of the Old Bailey. The indefatigable Bernard had issued an appeal to SIAC, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission. The powers that be, it seemed, understood that Dr Khan could not be sent back to Pakistan as he'd be at risk of being subject to torture and imprisonment because of his 'political activities' in that far-off country. They therefore offered him the alternative delight of being locked up in Belmarsh for an indefinite period of time.

  Some sort of preliminary statement of a case had been served on Bonny Bernard. It merely told us that information had been received that Dr Khan was regularly in touch with a terrorist organization in London with whom he corresponded. He had, the statement went on, encouraged, helped and suggested acts of terrorism. Names, dates, places and circumstances relied on were notably absent from this document.

  At last our client was brought to us in an interview room, by which time I was exhausted by the unusual exercise and resentful at the exclusion of my lever-arch file. By contrast, Mahmood Khan seemed composed and even, extraordinarily enough, moderately cheerful. He was small, I thought not much taller than his wife. He also had large brown eyes and they were filled, not with tears, but with a look of incredulous amusement at the extraordinary situation in which he found himself. He sat on one of the four hard chairs the room contained, his hands neatly folded on his lap, and he looked at me as though I was just another inexplicable surprise that fate had inflicted on him.

  'My name's Horace Rumpole,' I told him. 'I am a criminal barrister. That is,' I was anxious not to be misunderstood, 'I am a barrister who does criminal cases. I'm pretty well known. You might, perhaps, have heard of me.'

  'No, Mr Rumpole. I'm afraid I have not heard of you. Should I have?'

  'It doesn't matter,' I hastened to reassure him. 'And this is Mr Bernard, the solicitor who is also prepared to act for you.' (I didn't add, 'You certainly won't have heard of him.') 'Your wife came to meet us down at the Old Bailey and asked us to take on your case.'

  'My wife. Yes. This must be very hard for her. And the children, of course. They must be completely mystified.'

  'The government wants to keep you here,' I told him, 'because it would be unsafe for you to return to Pakistan. Apparently you were plotting there, against the regime.'

  'Oh, we wanted to do terrible things, Mr Rumpole. We wanted women's rights and free speech and fair trial and police who didn't do things like strangle a woman's baby to make her confess. In fact, we wanted all the good things you have in England. So naturally if I went back they would apply electronic charges to various parts of my body and lock me up.' Dr Khan's smile widened. 'You see, I freely confess my guilt.'

  Bonny Bernard was regarding our client with obvious admiration, and I was conscious that he had come, so far, better out of the interview than his somewhat hesitant defender. All the same I had to return to the business in hand.

  'You read a copy of the notice served on Mr Bernard?'

  'Yes, indeed.' Dr Khan managed to look as though he was enjoying the joke. 'I'm meant to have been involved in a plot to blow up London.'

  'Is there any truth in that at all?'

  'Of course not. How could there be?'

  'Do you know anyone who talks to you about terrorism in England? Anyone who says they approve of it?'

  'If they did I would immediately end the conversation. I, who love England, have an English wife, my children go to English schools. I, who have spent the best part of my life here. England is my home, my dear, dear country.'

  'You don't have to go that far.' I felt the good doctor was rather over-egging the pudding. 'I mean, it's not compulsory to respect the royal family, eat roast beef and care deeply about cricket.'

  'Oh, but I do, Mr Rumpole. Indeed I do.' My unexpected client still seemed to be on the verge of laughter. 'I have a huge respect for Her Majesty. Tiffany can cook excellent roast beef. And I often take my boy to watch the cricket at Lord's. That is, whenever I get a day off from the hospital.'

  It was all too good to be entirely true: the amused stoicism, the enthusiasm for England which anyone English would find embarrassing. Wouldn't an innocent man have boiled over with anger, raged against the authorities, damned the police and showed nothing but contempt for a country which had arbitrarily imprisoned him? Would any innocent man treat the whole affair as though it was an unfortunate but slightly amusing collapse of a number of wickets?

  Such thoughts occurred to me but I suppressed them. It was my job to argue his case as well as it could be argued. I just hoped that he would stop behaving like David Niven in some ancient film of understated wartime heroism.

  'Have you any enemies?' I went on to ask, as usual suppressing my possible disbelief. 'People who might have informed the police against you?'

  'Enemies?' Trying hard to think, Mahmood was feeling the back of his neck. 'I don't think so. Tiffany's family don't like me very much, but that hasn't landed me in prison, has it?'

  'Probably not. There's only one way to flush a bit of information out of the powers that be then. We're going to appeal against your detention. Then we might get some clue as to what this is all about. Mr Bernard will tell you about the procedure.' I hoped our client wouldn't guess that I was moving into unfamiliar territory.

  'We're going before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission,' Bernard explained. 'It's chaired by a judge and heard in the law courts. You can be represented there by the counsel of your choice. I assume that will be M
r Rumpole, whom you have now met.'

  'Mr Rumpole, of course.' Our client sounded enthusiastic. 'Now I remember the name. I have read it often in the newspapers. I know that you, Mr Rumpole, are a great fighter for the truth in the Courts of Law.'

  'We can only hope,' I told him, 'that SIAC will turn out to be a Court of Law.'

  8

  CLAUDE ERSKINE-BROWN, the opera-loving, inferior advocate, the frequently love-torn member of our chambers, came striding confidently into my room and lowered himself into my client's chair and asked, 'Aren't you going to congratulate me, Rumpole?'

  'You've managed to win a case?'

  'A good many. But it's not that.'

  'You've found the love of your life?'

  I asked the question with a sinking of the heart. Claude was married to a High Court judge, Dame Phillida Erskine-Brown, who had been, in happier days, my pupil Phillida Trant, later to become the Portia of our chambers. She bore Claude two children, Tristan and Isolde, named after his operatic favourites. On her becoming a scarlet judge, she treated me with unusual severity, no doubt in order to prove to the world that having once been my pupil she was not going to do me any favours. The stability of this marriage had survived the many occasions when Claude conceived a desperate passion for some client, court official, lady barrister or, on one famous occasion, the Home Secretary. These affairs of the heart were, in Claude's case, about as successful as one of his cross-examinations.

  'Well, out with it,' I said, hoping to get the confessional over quickly. 'Who are you in love with today?'

  'Love?' He spoke as though it were a matter of which he had little or no experience. 'This is a serious matter, Rumpole, and I take it as a great honour. I have received an appointment.'

  My mind boggled. The idea of Mr Justice Claude was clearly ridiculous. No Lord Chancellor with even the most superficial knowledge of Claude could have made such an appointment.

  'Is it the Weights and Measures Committee?' I asked in good faith.

  'No, Rumpole. It is not Weights and Measures. I have been appointed a counsel to SIAC.'

  I heard once again the brief hiccup of disgust Bonny Bernard had uttered in Belmarsh Prison.

  'How very convenient. I've got the case of a Dr Khan. He's appealing to your commission.'

  'Then I shall see that the court appreciates any points there might be in his favour.'

  'No need for that.'

  'That will be my job, Rumpole.' Claude spoke with obvious pride and satisfaction.

  'I mean, I will be there to argue the case.'

  'Will you?' This was said with a distinct note of disappointment. 'It won't really be necessary. I am the lawyer appointed by the court to see that your client is treated according to his deserts.'

  '"Use every man after his desert and who would 'scape whipping?"' I was sure that Claude did not recognize the quotation from Hamlet, so I made my position entirely clear. 'I'm the lawyer appointed by Dr Khan to see that his case is put as well as it can possibly be.' ('And far better than you would ever be able to do it,' was what I didn't add.)

  'You're entitled to be there.' Claude said this, I thought, a little grudgingly.

  'If your commission's entitled to keep a man locked up in prison, of course I'm entitled to be there. And while I'm about it, would you mind giving me further and better particulars of the charges against Dr Khan?'

  'You've had a general statement.'

  'Worthless! All it says is that someone suspects him of being involved in a terrorist plot.'

  'Not just someone, Rumpole. The Home Secretary.'

  'To my mind that makes the situation rather worse. Places, dates, times? When and where and with whom was he involved?'

  'I can't tell you that, Rumpole.'

  'But you know.'

  'As a friend of the court, I shall be completely informed. But I won't be allowed to broadcast such facts, either in chambers or in court. Government sources have to be protected.'

  'I thought you were there to protect Dr Khan.'

  'From what I've heard of him, I suspect he knows all about the where and the when and a lot more besides.'

  'I'll see you in court, Erskine-Brown,' I said to avoid further argument. 'And I'll apply for further and better particulars of any crime anyone thinks Dr Khan may have committed.'

  •

  In all honesty I can't say that those months marked the happiest or the most successful period of the Rumpole career. For a start the mansion flat had to accommodate a prolonged visit from Hilda's old schoolfriend Dodo Mackintosh. This Dodo, whose indifferent watercolours of Lamorna Cove failed to cheer up our living room, had formed the view, from what Hilda had told her about the Khan case, that I was a fully paid-up member of al-Qaeda.

  'This Dr Khan.' Dodo seemed to have appointed herself a member of the prosecution. 'He's not a British citizen, is he?'

  'He's lived here for twenty-odd years. He didn't think he had to go through the business of becoming a citizen.'

  'He could always have gone back to Afghanistan or wherever it was.'

  'Pakistan.'

  'Then why didn't he go there?' Hilda joined her old schoolfriend in the argument.

  'Because he'd be arrested and probably tortured. He was in a group working against the government.'

  'So he was a terrorist there too, was he?' Dodo asked the question with quizzically raised eyebrows and in a manner which I found particularly irritating.

  'So far as I know, his protests were entirely peaceful.'

  'The trouble with people like your Dr Khan,' Dodo spoke confidently, as though she had studied my instructions from Bonny Bernard clearly, 'is that they don't want to take on the British way of life. They simply don't understand our values.'

  'Understand our values?' I repeated. 'It may surprise you to know that Dr Khan is devoted to the royal family, roast beef and cricket. In that respect he's a great deal more English than I am.'

  'What do you mean, Rumpole?' Dodo asked the question with a sigh.

  'At school I was never devoted to cricket. Every time they shouted, "Over", I moved further and further away from the action until, in the end, I was lying in the long grass, reading detective stories.'

  'Rumpole always tried to be different,' Hilda explained to her friend. 'Even when he was a schoolboy.'

  It was evening in the mansion flat, in the long hours between supper and bedtime, and my fingers were itching to turn on the news. I searched for an accommodating statement which would put an end to the conversation.

  'I may be ridiculously old-fashioned,' I said, 'but I prefer to believe Dr Khan is innocent until he's proved guilty.'

  'I think,' Dodo Mackintosh, the watercolour artist from Cornwall, told me, 'you really are very old-fashioned about most things, Rumpole.'

  She and Hilda went off together shortly after that and I was able to watch the news. Later I heard the sound of jovial laughter issuing from the boxroom.

  •

  Things were little better in chambers. Luci, with an 'i', Gribble cheerfully told me that my terrorist practice wasn't going to do anything for chambers 'image-wise', and couldn't I find myself a nice sensational murder to get me back in the tabloids? Soapy Sam Ballard called on me in person to advise me to dump the Khan case. 'We already have the excellent news of Claude Erskine-Brown being appointed to argue the justice of the case as adviser to the court.'

  'And you don't object to that?'

  'A more personal contact with a terrorist by a member of chambers, however long in call and approaching the end of his career, would really single us out as a legal bolthole for some of the most dangerous clients in the world today.'

  'You mean, word will go round the souks of Saudi Arabia and Iran that as soon as you've blown up the Houses of Parliament, you should make straight for 4 Equity Court?'

  Ballard didn't immediately answer my question. Instead he looked thoughtfully into the middle distance. Then he said, 'Peter Plaistow, QC, MP, prosecutes in most of these cases.
You know Plaistow, of course?'

  'Never heard of the fellow,' I had to confess.

  'Charming chap, Rumpole. Perfectly charming. Peter's right at the heart of New Labour. Of course, he has the ear of the Home Secretary.'

  'I shouldn't think that's a particularly attractive thing to have.'

  'And he's very close to the Lord Chancellor,' Ballard ignored my comment. 'No doubt he exerts a good deal of influence when it comes to the question of appointing judges.'

  'Are you thinking of getting your bottom on the bench?' I'm afraid I was rude enough to ask.

  'I'm not speaking of myself exactly.' Ballard's smile was still irritatingly tolerant. 'I'm thinking of Equity Court in general. We hardly want to get the reputation of being a thorn in the flesh of the government, do we, Rumpole?'

  'Don't you, Ballard? Speaking for myself, I can think of no finer reputation.' At which our Head of Chambers gave me an even sadder look and left quietly, as though leaving a person suffering from a serious, and probably fatal, disease.

  •

  The only person who seemed able to approach the Khan case as simply another brief in another potential miscarriage of justice was my old friend and loyal, trustworthy solicitor, Bonny Bernard.

  He discovered the date when Dr Khan's case was likely to come up before the curiously named SIAC. Barrington Whiteside, the hospital administrator, was prepared to tell us all he knew about Dr Khan, but he preferred to do so at an informal meeting as he had to clear things with Oakwood before he would be allowed to give evidence. I took the phrase 'informal meeting' to mean a chat over a bottle of Château Thames Embankment at the corner table in Pommeroy's Wine Bar and arrangements were made accordingly.

  I have to say that I took immediately to Barry Whiteside. He was a large grey-haired man with a twinkle in his eye which reassuringly indicated that he didn't take many things in life, including himself, too seriously. After we had settled down and Barry Whiteside further endeared himself to me by insisting on stumping up for the bottle of Pommeroy's plonk, he became suddenly serious.