Flashpoint

by Michael Gilbert

  After sitting in semi-darkness for most of that Saturday Willoughby got fed up, escaped by the kitchen window and made his way down to the local. Here he was recognized by the press. A number of his rugby-playing acquaintances were on hand as well, and a warm five minutes ended with the reporters being thrown out on to the pavement.

  Will Dylan, being a public figure, had secretaries and assistants who were experienced in the routine of keeping the press at a distance. Pauline took the additional precaution of removing the gangplank which led to their houseboat.

  But where, in all this, was the principal figure, the man that everyone wanted to talk to?

  When his mother was taken to hospital, Jonas had abandoned the empty house and engaged a room in a small private hotel at Crouch End. The pack, making for it in full cry, had sustained a check.

  The proprietor of the hotel, a former officer in the Royal Navy, had himself suffered from the attentions of the press over an unfortunate incident involving the ramming of a light cruiser by a destroyer at Scapa Flow. He had been waiting for a long time to tell the press what he thought about them, and seized the opportunity with both hands.

  The reporters retired to lick their wounds, keep observation on the hotel and await Jonas’ return.

  They waited in vain, for in fact Jonas had left the hotel on the Friday to attend the conference with Counsel and had not returned.

  He was not hiding, nor was he running away. He knew that all the necessary preparations had been made for the High Court hearing on Monday and that there was nothing more that he personally could do either before it or, since the proceedings would be on affidavit, at it. It seemed to him to be a good opportunity to carry out a plan which had been forming in his mind for some days.

  He caught an evening train from Waterloo to Salisbury, and a bus at Salisbury which ran out in the dusk of yet another long sunlit day, past Old Sarum and Boscombe Down and out on to the Plain. He was making for a small hotel which he had been told of between Netheravon and Upavon which catered mainly for fishermen. He was not interested in fishing but was a dedicated walker, and it had occurred to him that the open spaces of Salisbury Plain would give him the sort of exercise he was looking for.

  He also needed to think, and walking and thinking were things which he had found went well together.

  The hotel – it was little more than an inn really – had four bedrooms and he was lucky enough to find one of them empty. At dinner he met the other residents, two elderly fishermen, two elderly fishermen’s wives and a clergyman and after dinner they all sat together in the lounge which was also the saloon bar, and a number of the local inhabitants drifted in for their evening drinks and stayed to talk.

  Everyone seemed concerned and excited about something in the newspapers and in the end, by piecing scraps of comment together, Jonas gathered what it was. The County Council had published plans for a feeder road to join the A30 at Amesbury, which might bring it through the village. No one approved of this. At half past ten Jonas went up to his attic bedroom and slept.

  Next morning after breakfast, with some sandwiches in his pocket, he set out to walk. The sun was still riding in glory over a parched land, but the heat was a lot less oppressive than it had been in London streets. When he reached the top of Rushall Down a tiny breeze was wandering across the empty miles of green and brown upland, and he could hear guns booming away on the artillery ranges to the south.

  He ate his sandwiches with his back propped up against a concrete structure which was something the army had put up and forgotten about and, in the early afternoon, came down off the escarpment into the village of Sambourne. Its full name, as he discovered from a signpost, was Sambourne-in-the-Vale. It had a single long village street which ran out eventually to the main road where there was a bus shelter. Also there was a church, with an overgrown churchyard, one large house, a couple of dozen smaller ones, a pub called the Eagle and Child, and a general store which was also a post office.

  Jonas found the church open and wandered in. It was a hotchpotch of styles and of no great architectural merit. He gathered from the names on a number of slabs and tablets that the big house had belonged, for many generations, to a family called Lamplough.

  When he came back into the empty, dozing main street his eye was attracted by a handwritten notice in the window of the general store. He walked across to read it and, after he had finished reading, stood there so long, staring into the window, that the owner came to the conclusion that the strange thin man, in a well-worn but citified flannel suit, must be contemplating a smash-and-grab raid.

  There was an element of truth in this. An idea which had come into Jonas’ head on the evening when he had visited Edgar Dyson at his little house in the suburbs of Sheffield and which had taken firmer root when he realized that his mother was dying, appeared now in concrete form.

  He went into the store. One long wall was covered with shelves which held a great variety of goods arranged in no particular order. A counter ran along the opposite side, with other goods, some in cardboard display stands, others heaped at random. The far corner was shut off by a grille, behind which an old lady sat conducting the business of the Postmaster General.

  When she discovered that Jonas had no aggressive intentions she fell into conversation with him. It was half an hour before he emerged, and started the long tramp home.

  Interest in the lounge that night was divided between a speech made by one of the County Councillors, who was opposed to the new road, and a two and a half pound trout caught by one of the elderly fishermen. They also heard a good deal about a much larger trout which the other elderly fisherman had failed to land.

  On Sunday morning Jonas went back to Sambourne by bus, arriving in time for the morning service, at the conclusion of which he buttonholed the vicar and had a long talk which ended with him being invited to lunch at the rectory, a building he had not spotted before since it was hidden, in the manner of country rectories, behind a rampart of laurels.

  In the late afternoon he walked back across Black Heath and Thornham Down. The gunners were observing the Sabbath, and it was quiet enough to hear the larks which, before the army came, had given Larkhill its name.

  The inn, too, was quiet that evening. The fishermen had finished their holiday and gone home. The landlord asked Jonas if he wanted to keep his room. Jonas, who had reached certain tentative conclusions that day, said that he would like to keep the room for at least a week. He said, “I might have to run up to London a couple of times, but I’d aim to be back here each night if possible.”

  “Must be quite a change here after London,” said the landlord. Jonas agreed that this was so.

  After dinner he telephoned the nursing home at Woking and had a reassuring bulletin. The landlord offered to bring his wireless set into the lounge, but Jonas refused.

  “Don’t blame you,” said the landlord. “There’s never much news on a Sunday.”

  21

  “It’s a strong Court,” said Wilfred Cairns.

  Flanking the Lord Chief Justice on one side was Mr Justice Megan, thin and scholarly, with the fleshless face of a hermit, noted for his wit, as dry as the sherry he drank. On the other side was the robust figure of Mr Justice Lamb, ‘Larry’ to the four Inns of Court. He had started the war as a guardsman and had finished as a GSO – and was the soundest academic lawyer of the three.

  “I appear for the appellant, Mr Jonas Killey,” said Cairns. “My learned friend Mr Pallant appears for the respondent magistrate, Mr Cedric Lyon, and the learned Attorney General appears as amicus curiae. My client is seeking an order of this Court, in the form of a writ of mandamus, directing the respondent magistrate to rehear the application which he made before him on June 28th last.”

  The reasons that had led Lambard to choose Wilfred Cairns were apparent in his manner, in his voice, in the way he addressed the Court and in the way the Court listened to him. He possessed the one priceless gift which had destined him for the Bench f
rom the moment he first donned a barrister’s white wig, the gift of gravitas. His courtesy to his opponents was complete, his purpose to defeat them was inflexible.

  “During the course of these proceedings,” he said, “I shall be forced to criticize both the law as propounded by the learned magistrate and his conduct of the case. I will deal with these matters separately, starting with a consideration of the law. In my submission this was correctly stated by the learned magistrate, but unfortunately was not applied by him. He stated, at one point, that all the appellant had to do was to make out a prima facie case. Strict proof of his allegations would only be necessary when the matter came before the appropriate tribunal. This must be right. If it were not right, the same matter would, in effect, have to be tried twice over.”

  “In which case,” said Mr Justice Megan, “might not the appellant put forward a plea of autrefois convict or autrefois acquit on the second occasion?”

  “I had not thought of taking the argument quite so far,” said Cairns with a slight smile, “but it might, I suppose, be so.”

  “I think the Court must grant you that much,” said the Lord Chief Justice. “But the matter still turns on what ought reasonably to be regarded as prima facie proof that an offence has been committed.”

  “I am not proposing to evade that issue. The point I am seeking to make is that strict proof was a matter properly reserved for the hearing of the case. And that this consideration applied, equally, to the evidence which the applicant put forward and to the documents which he produced. I may perhaps remind you that there were three main documents. The first was a set of accounts, made out by Dylan, the man against whom he sought the summons. Dylan was Secretary and Treasurer of what I will call the smaller Union. The second was the amalgamation agreement between the smaller Union and the larger Union. The third was the annual return of the larger Union. The first two of these were, in a sense, private documents, documents of which an outsider would be unlikely to possess the originals. What the appellant did manage to produce was a copy of the first and a made-up draft of the second, both of which had come into his hands in the course of his previous employment in a solicitors’ office in Sheffield. Whether he should have removed them from that office in the first place is, of course, a different matter, but one which does not, in my view, affect their validity.”

  “Even if it were shown that they were stolen?” said Mr Justice Lamb.

  “Even if they were stolen. I shall be referring later to the case of Carfax against Carfax in which a foreign birth certificate was admitted as evidence even though it had been stolen, by force, from the defendant.”

  “But a birth certificate, Mr Cairns,” said the Lord Chief Justice, “is a document of public record which proves itself, from whatever source it is produced.”

  “With respect, my Lord, that would only be so if it was a British birth certificate.”

  The Lord Chief Justice looked out of the corner of his eye at Mr Justice Lamb who nodded imperceptibly.

  The Lord Chief Justice said, “Of course. I had forgotten that it was a foreign certificate. Proceed, Mr Cairns.”

  The main force of police concentrated on the front of the building. Interlocked steel barriers had been set up along the edge of the pavement on the court side of the road, and behind these barriers was ranged a single and continuous line of policemen. What was left of the pavement was free for people who wished to pass, but no one was allowed to loiter. Demonstrators were confined to the pavement on the far side of the road. Reserve contingents of police were stationed at the different entrances to the building, including the entrance to the public galleries, a point which caused a good deal of comment later. A mobile patrol was considered sufficient for Bell Yard, which is separated from the building by a car park flanked by high railings and a padlocked gate. The west side was similarly protected. In both cases entry to the car parks was confined to Court officials with regulation passes.

  The rear of the Court backs on Carey Street. Here the police tenders were parked nose-to-tail. A command post in a wireless car at the junction of Bell Yard and Carey Street kept in touch with the main force in front. There were small groups of policemen at the judges’ entrance and the lawyers’ entrance, which were the only two left open at the rear, but it was not thought necessary to form a continuous line.

  “We’re using over a hundred policemen as it is,” said Chief Superintendent Hallet, who was in charge of the operation. “If trouble does start round the back we can bring reinforcements up through one of the car parks quickly enough.”

  The BBC commentator, whose van was tucked away in Serle Street, said, “There seem to be more policemen about than members of the public. The only difficulty which is being caused is to people who have legitimate business in the courts and are being held up and questioned. A queue is forming at the entrance reserved for barristers and solicitors, and since all the courts start business promptly at ten thirty this has caused a lot of annoyance. Our reporter spoke to one of the people involved.”

  An angry young man appeared on the screen and said, “The whole thing’s nonsensical. No one seems to know what it’s in aid of. If it’s just the Killey case, why don’t they block off that Court. There’s no reason to turn the whole bloody place into a fortress.”

  “Thank you very much,” said the commentator. “I asked the police officer in charge for his views, but he refused to comment–”

  “I think,” said the Lord Chief Justice, glancing at the clock which showed a few minutes after twelve, “that we have heard all the submissions which are likely to be of assistance to us in considering the admissibility and weight of the different documents. I understood you to say, Mr Cairns, that you were going to deal next with the learned magistrate’s conduct of the case.”

  “That is so, my Lord. And I have here to put in an affidavit by a reporter on the staff of the Watchman, to which is exhibited a verbatim transcript of the proceedings.”

  Mr Pallant was already on his feet. “I must object.”

  “Yes, Mr Pallant?”

  “This document, which I have seen, is not an official transcript in the sense in which the expression is understood in these Courts. It is extracts, originally in shorthand, from the notebook of a newspaper reporter who happened to be in Court, which have been transcribed into longhand. In my view such a document would have been totally inadmissible as evidence, and cannot be brought before the Court by the device of exhibiting it to an affidavit.”

  “With respect,” said Cairns, “it is a contemporaneous record kept by a person whose duty it was to keep such a record. He did not happen to be in Court. He was there because it was his duty to be there.”

  “A duty for which, I imagine, he was paid a large sum,” said Mr Justice Megan.

  “I am not sure how much he was paid, my Lord. But he certainly did not keep this record for his own edification or amusement.”

  “Cases in the past bearing on this point,” said Pallant, “have been confined to records kept by deceased functionaries – policemen, warders, probation officers and other persons of this sort – in the course of their official duty. I have found no instance of a written record made by a private person, who is still alive, being admitted.”

  “But is a reporter a private person?” said Mr Justice Lamb.

  “Might I refer you,” said Cairns smoothly, “to the case of Penruddock against the Rochester Bridge Wardens–”

  At half past twelve a middle-aged man, wearing a morning coat, striped trousers, a waistcoat made from a Union Jack, and a top hat which had a notice ‘Liberty of all Citizens’ pasted to the front, advanced along the barricaded pavement in front of the Court to an accompaniment of cheers from the considerable crowd now collected on the pavement opposite. As he came level with the entrance to the public gallery, he swung suddenly to his left and darted through. The manoeuvre took the group of policemen so much by surprise that it almost succeeded. One of them grabbed his flying coat-tails and pulled
him back. The man, wriggling like a gaffed fish, slipped out of his coat but was grabbed by a second policeman round the waist.

  The crowd on the opposite pavement took this badly. There were shouts of “Leave him alone”, “Pick on someone your own age” and “Shame”. A large and overripe tomato sailed across the road and hit a policeman in the face. The crowd started to advance across the road.

  “Reserves from Bell Yard, clear the road,” said Hallet.

  A squad of policemen who had been waiting for the word emerged from the mouth of Bell Yard and forced their way down the street using their combined weight, hustling and treading on toes until the road was clear and the traffic piled up in the Strand and Fleet Street could move on again.

  The middle-aged man, his shirt-tails flapping, but his top hat still wedged defiantly on his head, was carried by four policemen to a tender. Onlookers cheered. Cameras flashed.

  “No trouble really,” said Hallet into the radio-telephone link with Central. “One crackpot who tried to get into the building in fancy dress. He put up some sort of fight and we’re holding him for the moment, but I don’t think we’ll be making a charge. The crowd’s a lot thinner now than it was this morning. We ought to be able to send some of our men home this afternoon.”

  “In the expectation – or perhaps I should say, the hope – that your Lordships would admit Mr Mauger’s record,” said Cairns, “I have had sufficient copies prepared for the Court, and I will ask the usher to hand them up. My learned friend has a copy already.”

  Pallant smiled briefly. He had indeed read Patrick Mauger’s record, had recognized its damaging potentialities and had fought hard, giving back precedent for precedent, to prevent its production. The Attorney General had attempted to support him, but had, in Pallant’s view, been more of a hindrance than a help by trying to pull rank and bully the Lord Chief Justice. It was common knowledge that the Lord Chief Justice loathed him.