Flashpoint

by Michael Gilbert

  As the Director got out, the young barrister who was the Lord Chancellor’s private secretary hurried out to meet him. Together they entered the lift. (It had been installed by the last Chancellor but four, a man of more weight in his body than his judgements.) Alighting at the first floor they walked along a passageway from both walls of which previous Chancellors looked down their noses at them, and came finally to the large light room overlooking the Thames on one side and Black Rod’s garden on the other, which is the inmost sanctum of the British legal system.

  The Lord Chancellor who got up to greet the Director was a short man with a face like a prizefighter.

  He said, “You know why I’ve sent for you?”

  “Not difficult to guess.”

  “Have you read the article?”

  “Certainly. It was also sent to me separately, by three Members of Parliament, one High Court Judge and the Chairman of the Metropolitan Magistrates Association.”

  “Do you think it’s actionable?”

  “Defamatory, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I don’t. I think a jury would almost certainly hold it to be fair comment on a matter of public interest.”

  “Do you think it’s contempt of court?”

  “That’s much more difficult to answer. If the hearing had been committal proceedings, to be followed by a jury trial, one would assume that the jury would read the article and could be influenced by it. In which case, in my view, it would constitute contempt.”

  “So–?”

  “But this is rather different, isn’t it?”

  “Why?”

  “The next step in this case is a hearing before a Divisional Court. Can one suppose that three experienced judges are going to be influenced in their decision by a newspaper article?”

  “Surely the test is objective, not subjective. It doesn’t matter who is going to read the article. If it comments on a case while it’s proceeding, in a way which could affect the mind of a reader, that is contempt of court.”

  “That may have been so once. I’m afraid it’s not the way the courts apply it now. In recent cases–”

  “You’re thinking of the Distillers.”

  “Among others.”

  “And you’re advising me that a charge of contempt would not stand up.”

  The Director considered his answer very carefully. He tried not to let the fact that he disliked the Chancellor influence him. He said, “I think it’s a borderline case. You might secure a verdict at the end of the day. Part of the article is a serious and personal attack on the magistrate who heard the application. And he is the magistrate to whom the application will have to be referred back if the action in the High Court succeeds. That must be objectionable.”

  When the Director paused, the Chancellor said, “I was sure that sentence was going to end with the word ‘but’. You think a charge would lie, but–”

  “You want my personal opinion?”

  “That is why I interrupted your busy morning, Director.”

  “I think it would be inadvisable.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because it would appear to the public that the Judiciary were lending themselves to a cover-up operation by the Executive.”

  That produced a very long silence indeed. Then the Chancellor said, in a voice which tinkled with ice, “Well, I asked for your personal opinion, and you’ve certainly given it to me. You say, ‘people might think’. You wouldn’t, I take it, subscribe to the view yourself.”

  “If you mean,” said the Director, “do I think that those two policemen were deliberately set on to Mauger to discredit him, the answer is no. I’ve studied their records. There are a number of instances in the past when that same pair have picked up men, late at night, on a drunk and disorderly charge. On more than one occasion the man is said to have assaulted them. In this case they were particularly anxious to round off their patrol with a charge and a conviction.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’d missed out on an office-breaking job earlier in the evening, and had found a reprimand waiting for them when they reported back to the Station at midnight.”

  “I see,” said the Chancellor with distaste. He knew, as well as anyone, that the best police forces have a sprinkling of unreliable characters. It pained him only to have his attention drawn to it.

  “On the other hand,” said the Director, “if you’re suggesting that the Government was embarrassed by Mauger’s article, and the attention it drew to the Killey-Dylan case, I should advise the Government – if they asked me, and if they ever listened to my advice – to steer as clear as they possibly can of the whole business.”

  “It’s a counsel of perfection,” said the Chancellor coldly. “But I’ll see that it’s passed on. I shall be personally involved, in any event.”

  “Oh?”

  “I am attending the hearing as amicus curiae.”

  “I see,” said the Director. He was aware that the Chancellor, by virtue of his office, had to be both politician and lawyer. It had always seemed to him to be an unhappy arrangement.

  Lambard was going out to lunch with his son Jonathan. Jonathan had suggested the date. His father had suggested the venue. He trusted the food and the wine list at his own club more than of any restaurant that his son was likely to be able to afford.

  As Lambard sat in his office he wondered, rather sadly, what Jonathan wanted. Usually it was money. His taxi was at the door and he was on his way out when the telephone rang. He hesitated, realized that his secretary would not have put the call through if it had not been important, and went back.

  When five minutes later he walked out to the taxi and the driver said, “Where to, sir?” he stared at him, his thoughts obviously far away. Recalling himself with an effort he gave the name of his club, and climbed in. The taxi driver thought he looked like a man who had either heard bad news which he didn’t want to believe, or news so good that he hardly dared to believe it.

  Over lunch Jonathan kept the conversation so firmly on polo and regimental shop that his father concluded that he must be angling for a very large loan indeed. They were tucked away in the furthest corner of the guest room and the table next to them was empty. When the coffee had been poured out Jonathan cleared his throat and said, “There was one thing I wanted to talk about, Dad.”

  Lambard reached mentally for his chequebook.

  “I was talking to Bill Sexton on Wednesday. He came to one of our guest nights.”

  Lambard nodded. He knew that his young partner had a number of army friends and was himself a territorial soldier.

  “He was rather worried.”

  “Really?” said Lambard. “He had no cause to be. We’re doing rather well this year.”

  “Not about the firm. About you.”

  “Oh?”

  Jonathan looked embarrassed, but determined, like a young man about to propose marriage for the first time. He said, “You mustn’t be annoyed with him. He told me because he thought I ought to know.”

  “About what?”

  “About you being offered a knighthood.”

  “Oh, that. It’s not certain yet. Though they don’t usually say anything about it unless it’s pretty definite.”

  “That’s just what I mean. They could change their minds, couldn’t they?”

  His father looked at him curiously. A faint suspicion of what was coming crossed his mind. He said, “Certainly. Until the thing’s in the Gazette it’s just pie in the sky. I believe that, in theory, the Queen can change her mind even after that.”

  “Mummy would be terribly disappointed if you don’t get it now.”

  “She might be if she knew anything about it.”

  “She does. I thought I ought to tell her.”

  “In that case, you did something extremely stupid.”

  “I realize that now,” said Jonathan, with unexpected humility. “Only when Bill told me, I assumed it was a snip. It wasn’t until he ra
ng me up last night that I realized that you might – that it might not come off.”

  “I see,” said his father. He waved to the waiter who came across with boxes of cigars on a tray. Lambard offered them to his son, who shook his head impatiently. He selected one himself, cut the end, and lit it. Then he said, “I suppose Bill told you that I was taking on the Killey case.”

  “Yes. He explained it all to me. That you thought Killey was being framed by the Government. It was because people at the Law Society had unearthed some other cases like it. Years and years ago. The whole thing sounded pretty thin to me, actually.”

  “Did it?”

  “Suppose you’re wrong about it. Suppose it was a coincidence. Coincidences do happen. I remember one of the masters at school told me that three different chaps invented logarithms, in three different countries, at the same moment.”

  His father looked at his son through a haze of cigar smoke. He saw the handsome, self-assured petulant face and tried to build it back into the little boy that he had known only a dozen years before. But the child had gone; gone for ever.

  He said, as gently as he could. “This isn’t a mistake, Johnnie. The earlier case was brought by a man called Herman. This one was a man called Stukely. They’re the same man. Herman changed his name by deed poll to Stukely some years ago. I heard just before I came out. The Law Society have found the record.”

  19

  When Mrs Warburton got to the office, as she was the first to do every morning, she was unable to open the door. Her key went into the lock and turned for a certain distance, then it stuck, and no effort of hers would rotate it far enough to free the catch. Young Willoughby, who arrived shortly afterwards, was unable to do much better.

  Willoughby said, “If I use much more force I’ll snap the key. There’s something in the lock. It’s not dirt. It’s something hard.”

  At this point Jonas arrived. He examined the lock and sent Deborah out to fetch the ironmonger from his shop at the other end of Coalporter Street. The ironmonger arrived with a probe and a length of wire and after a few minutes of fiddling extracted the fragment of metal that was jamming the lock and got the door open.

  “Stone the crows,” he said. “Someone’s been having a party, no error.”

  The outer office was a sea of papers. Filing cabinets had been opened, and the contents strewn over the floor. The mess in the other rooms was worse. Every drawer in Jonas’ desk had been emptied by the simple process of pulling it out and upending it. The top drawer, which he kept locked, had been smashed. Books had been swept out of the shelves. Folders of papers had been torn open and the contents added to the pile in the middle of the room.

  The ironmonger said, “I’ll give the police a ring from my shop. Not much good trying to use that.”

  The telephone had been pulled out of the wall.

  The police sergeant who arrived examined the chaos with an experienced eye. He said, “Doesn’t look as if they were after money. They’d have gone straight to the safe.”

  “I don’t think they were after money,” said Jonas. He sounded unperturbed, almost uninterested. “Actually I think they were after some papers.”

  “Something important?”

  “Important to them. But they didn’t find it.”

  “And how would you know that, sir?”

  “Because if I’m right, the things they were looking for are in my own lawyer’s strongroom up in Holborn.”

  The sergeant considered this. He said, “Well, sir, if you know what they were looking for, you must have some idea who it was did the job.”

  “Oh I have,” said Jonas. “It was Her Majesty’s Government.”

  The sergeant looked at Jonas suspiciously. Then he said, “Mr Killey? Mr Jonas Killey? Aren’t you the man they’ve been making all that fuss about in the papers?”

  “I believe there have been a number of reports. I haven’t bothered to read them.”

  “Thought I recognized the name. I’m going to get the inspector in on this.”

  “Will it be all right if we start clearing up?”

  “Can’t do much harm. Not easy to pick up fingerprints on paper. Better leave your desk for the moment. We might pick up something off that.”

  By the time the inspector arrived a measure of order had been restored. The inspector examined the lock and the piece of metal which had been retrieved from it.

  “Professional job,” he said. “They used a thin key blank and forced up the catch with it. Works all right in an old lock, when there’s plenty of play in the gate. Forced it so hard they broke the tip off.”

  The sergeant agreed with him. He said, “Must have taken quite a time to do all this. I’d better start asking round. See if anyone noticed anything. No curtains on the windows. Someone may have noticed the light on.”

  When the sergeant had gone, the Inspector said, “Did I understand, sir, that you told Sergeant Borrie you had some idea who might have done this?”

  “I was pulling the sergeant’s leg,” said Jonas. “I’ve really no idea. I expect the man was after cash. He wasn’t equipped to open the safe, so he turned the place upside down.”

  “But what could he have expected to find?”

  “He probably did it out of spite,” said Jonas impatiently. “As far as I can see, we don’t seem to have lost anything. The desk will have to be repaired and the telephone put back. I’ve spoken to the Post Office about that. They’re sending an engineer right away.”

  “I shall have to make a report,” said the Inspector.

  “You do that,” said Jonas. He sounded unaccountably cheerful.

  A possible reason for this was explained when he sent for Willoughby after midday. “I thought I ought to tell you,” he said, “only that little bit of fuss this morning put it out of my head. I’ve heard from the Law Society. They don’t intend to take any further action about Mr Stukely’s complaint.”

  “They don’t – for God’s sake. What’s made them decide? I mean – I’m very glad.”

  “They came to the conclusion that Mr Stukely was not likely to prove a reliable witness. Did you succeed in reassembling Mrs Lampier’s file? I must do something about her maintenance claim.”

  Willoughby returned to his own room and converted an imaginary try by booting the waste-paper basket over the desk. He was a conscientious young man, and the thought that he might have blotted his copybook at the outset of his professional career had been weighing very heavily on him.

  “I wonder when he knew,” he said. “For God’s sake. He might have told me before. A professional misconduct charge. ‘Thought I ought to tell you.’ The office burgled. ‘A little bit of a fuss.’ I wonder if anything really would upset him.”

  Half an hour later he found an answer to this. Jonas came into his room. His face was white. He said, “I’ve just had a call from the nursing home at Woking. My mother’s had a turn for the worse. I’m going there right away.”

  Willoughby made some suitable comment. He had never met Mrs Killey, and could not feel very deeply about her. His immediate reaction was that with Jonas out of the way he could take a decent lunch break. He felt that he could use it.

  A favourite lunching place, when he had time to get there and back, was the Ring of Bells on Putney Common. A public house which served a decent variety of food, and where he could usually encounter rugby-playing acquaintances. He fell in with two of them at once, and was joined by a third. This involved four rounds of drinks. By the time the last of them had been consumed, Willoughby felt that he was ready to eat.

  He shared his small table with a man he thought he had met before, but could not quite place. It is difficult to sit face to face with someone, one yard from them, without saying something. Willoughby, who was not a reticent young man at any time, and was feeling particularly relaxed and happy at that moment, was soon deep in conversation.

  Two further rounds of drinks followed. The man opposite was a year or two older than him, and had a pleasant,
non-descript face. The tie he was wearing had silver crossed quills on a dark red background. Willoughby meant to ask him about it, but the conversation had somehow turned on to his own job. Willoughby was not drunk. But he had reached a point where it seemed easy and natural to confide in a chance-met stranger things that he might not have said at all if he had been strictly sober.

  Soon he was telling him about the burglary. The young man was most interested, and insisted on ordering another drink.

  “If your boss has gone down to this nursing-home place at Woking,” he said, “it’s ten to one he won’t be coming back at all today. Might as well make the most of it. After all, it isn’t every day you have a burglary to celebrate.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Willoughby, “it wasn’t only the burglary. Something else happened this morning.”

  The young man was a good listener. The story of Mr Stukely’s appearance and disappearance lost nothing in the telling.

  At half past two the shutters went up on the bar, and they drifted out into the street. The young man had a car, and obligingly dropped Willoughby at the end of Coalporter Street. Then he sprinted to the nearest telephone box and dialled a number.

  The news editor of the Banner said, “What’s that?” and “Come again. Say it slowly and I’ll get someone to take it down.” And finally, “I suppose it’s true.”

  “Of course it’s true,” said the young man. “He works in Killey’s office. I took him back there just now, to make sure.”

  “We’ll get people checking up on all the different angles,” said the news editor. “You got the name of that nursing home in Woking? Good boy.”

  Parts of the room were dark; parts were bright, where the afternoon sun struck down through the slats of the Venetian blind and laid patterns on the floor.