Murderers and Other Friends

by John Mortimer

  MURDERERS AND

  OTHER FRIENDS

  Another Part of Life

  John Mortimer

  CHIVERS

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

  Published by arrangement with the Author

  Epub ISBN 9781471302312

  Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 1994

  The publishers would like to thank John Murray (Publishers) Ltd for permission to quote from ‘Myfanwy’ and ‘Christmas’, both published in Collected Poems by John Betjeman; The Hogarth Press with Princeton University Press for permission to quote from ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ from Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Warner Chappell Music Ltd/International Music Publications Limited for permission to quote from ‘I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket’ and ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails’ by Irving Berlin; Faber and Faber Ltd with Random House Inc for permission to quote from ‘New Year’s Letter’ and ‘The Novelist’ from Collected Poems by W.J. Auden, and from The Dyer’s Hand by W.H. Auden

  All rights reserved

  Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  For Penny

  As a general rule, people even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. and we ourselves are, too

  Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  Chapter 1

  I am running down the cold, marble corridors of the Law Courts to do some case I haven’t prepared; in fact I know nothing whatever about it. Not only have I no idea what to say, I am inappropriately dressed. I am wearing a bright blue shirt, bought some years before for a summer holiday, and shorts, or I am in pyjamas. I turn up the collar of the shirt so that it may look as though it were of the stiff and stand-up variety. Someone I pass gives me a pair of crumpled white bands, which I try to tie round my neck, but I can’t undo, or do up, the knot. I borrow a wig which I perch on my head. I haven’t shaved for several days. When I get to the glass-panelled door of the courtroom it’s locked and I rattle it uselessly. Inside I can see nothing but darkness.

  In the years since I stopped being a barrister I have had this dream less often, but it still returns two or three times a year. One day the glass door will be unlocked and I will walk into the dark courtroom to be called on to argue from a brief I haven’t read, on instructions I have never clearly understood.

  I don’t know how many lives you get. Not counting immortality, maybe two. Tolstoy, trying desperately for a third, dropped dead at Astapovo railway station. I had a new life, unlooked-for and no doubt undeserved happiness. Yet I was still in my childhood home, in my parents’ house, trying to keep their garden in the station of life to which it had grown accustomed, and exercising my father’s profession, although in courts he never visited, doing cases which he would have considered just as down market as my mother would have thought the pool which we have implanted at the end of the lawn. To make up for this, we have acquired more woods and a meadow, uncultivated for a hundred years, which are inhabited by strange snails, the Duke of Burgundy’s fritillary butterfly and a number of orchids, one of which has to be guarded, when in flower, by a man from the nature reserve, who lives next to it in a tent and protects it from ruthless and predatory botanists.

  The ghost of my father is a hard one to banish and I still see him down the long borders, feeling for the flowers in his blindness. He is dressed in an ancient tweed suit, darned at the knee where it has worn thin, and an unusual straw hat tinged with blue. He is seated beside my mother on a low, three-legged stool with broad feet to prevent it sinking into the soft earth.

  His presence lingers also in his chambers, Number One, Dr Johnson’s Buildings in the Temple. His room seemed part of our home. I used to go there with my mother when I was a child and the clerks would give us tea and chocolate biscuits as we waited for him to be freed from some sensational divorce case. The room was dark, never very tidy; some of the chairs were broken and the leather bindings on many of the law reports were powdering into dust. When I came home for the school holidays I found my father sitting there in a black jacket and striped trousers, wearing white spats over his boots in the summer, grey ones in the winter, massaging his sightless eyes and listening to my mother reading out the histories of broken marriages. ‘Is it the boy?’ he would ask, and when my mother confirmed the fact he gave me a great shout of welcome. I thought, with gratitude, of how he had never patronized me, always treated me as an equal, and on our long walks had introduced me to the writers he loved and left me with a great store of pleasure for the rest of my life. It was the room I had taken girls to during the war, when my mother and father spent their nights in the country, and we had helped ourselves to the vintage port stored with dusty briefs in the cellar, listened to distant bombs and, occasionally, made love.

  The middle-aged, middle-class Englishman in the thirties had a licence to shout, and my father used his to the full. His rages were legendary, Lear-like and uncontrolled. They were never about his blindness – his temper was as bad before he lost his sight – but were brought on by soft-boiled eggs, cold plates or being kept waiting for anything. He frequently complained that he was surrounded by cretins, but I find myself missing his storms of anger which ceased as suddenly, and as unreasonably, as they had begun.

  I am looking at a picture painted by my mother. It’s of Paris rooftops, greys and blues, in the early morning or at the end of the day, chimney-pots emerging from, or vanishing into, the mist. She must have painted it in 1912, when she was teaching art at Versailles, and it was accepted by the Paris Salon. She’d been to Birmingham School of Art and there she was, in the Paris of Matisse and Picasso and Modigliani, of whom she knew nothing at the time. She had her whole life before her; how was she to guess that she’d end up reading the dubious evidence in divorce cases aloud to a blind husband in a train? How could she know that, after a number of disappointments and miscarriages, she would give birth to a son who, perhaps, never showed his love for her sufficiently?

  She had given up painting by the time I was born, although sometimes, sitting by the fire in the evenings, she made drawings of my father and me. She took me to art galleries when I was very young and I remember looking at Van Gogh’s yellow chair with his pipe on it. I thought it dull and clumsy but I pretended to like it, not only to please her but to appear grown up. She had large, dark eyes, and was in her late thirties by the time she produced a living child. She often wore a blue brooch which I imagined was pinned into her flesh, and I thought it typical of her that she bore the pain of it without complaint. When I was sent away to boarding-school – exiled, it seemed to me, for some crime I didn’t know I had committed – I blamed her and not my father. He was, 1 thought, like all men, including me, naturally selfish and didn’t want to be bothered by a child all the year round. When I told my mother I wanted to come home she smiled tolerantly and went off to help my father get dressed.

  My father and I formed an alliance from which my mother was thought
lessly excluded. She was never asked if execution had been done on Cawdor, his favourite question to me. We went on long walks, had tea together in distant farmhouses, played word games and went through the Sherlock Holmes stories. She stayed at home and cooked meals we weren’t slow to criticize. Once she offered to join in the one-actor plays I did at home, painted a beard and a moustache on her face with a stick of dark brown make-up and took the thankless part of Tubal to my Shylock. The make-up was unnecessary because my father saw neither of us. I felt grateful to her for her trouble but I should have said so louder and more often. I know that I should.

  During his frequent bouts of fury my father shouted at her, not at me. As a child I protested but I could, I think, have done more to protect her, because my father’s rage was grossly inflated and easily punctured. No one could blame her for taking him more seriously than he deserved. Once she left home and he was distraught. She came back after an hour, carrying a pair of whited antlers she had picked up in Stonor Park. He was on his knees, begging her forgiveness and she helped him up, anxious that he shouldn’t appear pathetic and ridiculous in my eyes. Although I never told her, I think it was then I realized that most women are better, calmer and more civilized than most men – a view I have never forsaken, despite occasional evidence to the contrary. I am unable, for instance, to understand the fuss about women priests. Given the record of many men priests, from the Borgia pope downwards, it seems to me that women are best qualified to celebrate Mass and hand out forgiveness. For this reason I have always welcomed women on juries. They are less prejudiced than men and not spurred on by guilt at their own delinquencies to punish others. My views on this subject were not shared by my clients in the dock, who usually felt that a woman’s place was in the home and not out robbing banks or judging bank robbers.

  Although gentle and blushing easily, my mother was a stronger character than my father. After Versailles she saw an advertisement for a girls’ school in South Africa, a kind of colonial attempt to establish Roedean in the Natal midlands, and wrote off for the job. She must have been brave, a thin, big-eyed girl from Leamington Spa, to set off on the long sea voyage to an unknown land, recently torn apart by the Boer War. Eighty years later I was to set off to find traces of her teaching there and I read the pieces she wrote in the school magazine, calling for high standards in the practice of art: ‘We must be very stern judges of our own productions, always careful to realize the difference between what we do and what we would do, and each time more anxious to get nearer to our own idea of perfection.’

  I had visited my father’s room as a child and made use of it as a teenager during the war. When I became a barrister I went there to work for him, drafting paragraphs of cruelty and intolerable behaviour in his divorce petitions or advising on the evidence to be called in his contested will cases. As the years passed and I began to acquire his practice, he spent more and more time in the country, receiving news of the herbaceous border, and I sat alone at his desk, noting briefs, giving opinions (it’s your decisions they pay for, not your doubts, my father told me), and writing novels and stories whenever I got the chance.

  I thought of leaving the bar in the 1960s, when I’d had two plays on in the West End of London and it occurred to me that I could do without the support of adultery in Ruislip, the question of who flung the toast rack in 1952, or the unnecessary inquiry into why a happy, active love affair subsided into a miserable marriage. I told this to Charlie, my clerk, a shrewd operator who starred in farces put on by his amateur group, and he perfectly understood the lure of show business. But although he had been dead for five years, my father’s shadow hadn’t lost its power. I felt I wasn’t ready to leave his room. I became a Queen’s Counsel, as my father had never done, put on the silk stockings and knee-breeches and tailed coat that he had never worn, and was prepared, for the next fifteen years, to continue his career and take it into dark areas of the law where he had never ventured. My legal life changed dramatically. I did my first jury trial and no longer had to woo single judges whose likes and dislikes I had come to know by heart. I began to learn about fingerprints, bloodstains and police verbals. Crime came, at first, gently, with disputes over small quantities of cannabis at Bow Street, the level of alcohol in the blood of my clerk’s brother as he sat in a parked car, affrays between mini-cab drivers, and the defence of a likeable ox of a man known as the Bull of Waltham Cross. He trained trotting ponies and, among his other activities, took part in bare-fist boxing matches in the manner of the pugilists of the Regency, fighting by night on deserted airfields and empty football grounds. In gangland wars, so the prosecution alleged, he used to be sent in first, like a kind of battering-ram.

  And then the time came when I got to know murderers.

  Chapter 2

  A barrister, an experienced and effective defender in criminal trials on a good day, rises to his feet in the Old Bailey. This is not a good day. His life is in tatters. A mental storm, long threatened by gathering black clouds of depression, is about to burst inside his head. He has had a liquid lunch in the pub across the road and, although a large and weighty man, he sways and creaks like a tree in a high wind. It’s a quarter past two in the afternoon and he feels a strong disposition to sleep overcome him.

  ‘Members of the jury’ – his voice is deep and comes softly at first, the half-audible hint of approaching thunder – ‘this is the point in the case at which I am supposed to make a reasoned and persuasive speech on behalf of the accused. That will be followed by an unbiased summing-up from the learned judge, and you will then retire and come to a just decision. But’ – here comes a great sigh and then a louder, clearer burst of thunder – ‘as I am far too drunk to make a reasoned and persuasive speech, and as the judge has never given an unbiased summing-up in his entire career, and as you look far too stupid to come to a just verdict, I shall sit down.’ He does so and, happy at last, closes his eyes.

  That happened but not, thank God, to me. The barrister retired and a retrial was ordered for his client. Beneath all the suave, assured, perhaps pompous, behaviour of advocates in murder cases there is a haunted insecurity, a dread of forgetting to ask a question or, worse still, asking too many and so destroying the future of the client in the dock, who is also giving a more or less convincing performance of quiet confidence and who has become, for the short period of the trial, your dependant and, in some strange way, your friend.

  It’s not, I suppose, what you would call true friendship. I mean, people on trial for murder are not the sort you’d want to go on holiday with, or ask to be godparents to your children, or confide in when plagued by doubt and insecurity. The friendship only lasts for a short time, a few weeks or however long the trial takes. When the trial is over, you say goodbye to them in the cells and they are still full of the adrenalin which kept them going throughout the case – as actors are still in a high mood after the curtain falls on a play in which they have starred. If you have shared a success, the relationship is also over and they will stare straight through you, even though you meet again in the most respectable circumstances, on the terrace of the House of Commons, for example, or in the Crush Bar at Covent Garden. They no longer depend on you, try to impress or even entertain you. When they are out of danger they want to believe you never existed. Those accused of murder are at the best fair-weather, or rather ill-weather, friends.

  What the defending counsel learns – a useful lesson when dealing with all types of friend – is to refrain from judgement. There are plenty of people whose business it is to perform this unpleasant function: judges, juries and, perhaps, God. The defender’s task is to listen and suspend disbelief.

  Filson Young, writing in the Notable British Trials series about Dr Crippen, a murderer who impressed everyone with his politeness and modesty, said that it was ‘what we have in common with a criminal, rather than the subtle insanity which differentiates him from us, that makes us view with such a lively interest a human being who has wandered into these tragic a
nd fatal fields’. The lively interest almost always falls short of understanding. One of my greatest friends, at Oxford and for many years after, was a pacifist, a Greek scholar, a lover of Mozart and a country doctor. He ended his life, after killing his mistress, by committing suicide. I can only think of him as a friend, as a murderer I cannot understand him at all.

  To defend in a murder trial is an unpredictable business; cases can be won or lost because they happen to come on before a certain judge, or because of the random selection of the jury, or because the defendant is likeable or apparently unpleasant. Some trials go well from the start, others seem to attract ill fortune and blunders. Sometimes the luck can change in a most unnerving manner, as it did in the case of a young man whom I’ll call Jimmy O’Neill, although that wasn’t his name. He was accused not only of murder, but of writing a letter to the devil in his victim’s blood.

  Jimmy O’Neill was small, Irish and very young. He looked like an office boy in some huge, bureaucratic department where the work was dull and he saw little of the daylight. He lived around Earls Court in a flat which he shared with a male friend. In his spare time Jimmy read the works of Dennis Wheatley who wrote about satanism and black magic. The night he started on his journey to the dock in Number Two Court down the Old Bailey, he came back to the bed in which he slept with his flatmate and his flatmate’s girlfriend. He announced that he had killed a man, washed his hands and hidden the Malayan dagger which he often carried. His friend seemed to show no great interest in this revelation. In the morning Jimmy was sitting up in bed smoking and no one referred to what had happened the night before.

  Charles Wistey was good-looking, young and well connected. Somewhere or other his family contained a Lord. He had been having dinner with the girl he planned to marry; they had parted in the restaurant and he was on his way home by himself when he was stabbed to death in the portico of a Victorian house in Earls Court. The police made inquiries in the neighbourhood; Jimmy realized they were after him but was too frightened to give himself up. He was eventually found and charged with murder; there was no doubt he had stabbed Charles Wistey with the dagger.