by C. J. Driver
“Yes, the old man himself: and he said he’d meet you outside the Law Courts at 9.15 tomorrow morning, to clear up any problems. The hearing is at 9.30. Can you get in early tomorrow?”
“I’ll have to,” I said. “You seem to have made all the arrangements already.”
“Good man, Tom; I knew I could rely on you,” and after a couple more pleasantries he rang off.
*
It was a nuisance getting up to London an hour earlier than usual; it meant Alison had to drive me to the station, then go back to drop Sarah at school—usually I drop Sarah and then leave the car at the station in time to catch the 8.55 to Victoria. That day I was at my desk by 8.45.
As promised, Peale’s notes—written in old-fashioned copper-plate script on foolscap—were on my desk; they were probably better than an ordinary brief, because they were bare bones, without any of the usual turgid legal prose that solicitors—and barristers too—use to fill out the inadequacies of their knowledge. I read through the notes quickly, making three or four marginal notes and underlining some crucial sentences, then went through them more carefully, getting the details clear in my mind. When I had them more or less sorted out, I went through to the clerk’s office to find out who would be hearing the bail application. Jamie Macqueen, the chief clerk, told me it would be Mr. Justice Impey; he knows more about legal people than anyone else in the Temple, I think.
“You’re in luck,” he said. “He’s got a bit of a reputation for wanting to keep the police on the straight and narrow. He’s a stickler for the Judges’ Rules.”
“Any idea why the police are being sticky about bail?”
“Not really; I suppose the police think he’s a bit of a hard case. But my information doesn’t go far. I’ll keep my ears open.”
“Thanks. That’s something at least.” God knows where barristers would be without their clerks.
Peale was waiting at the Strand for me, a bald old man with a mock-aggressive manner which conceals a great kindness to those of his own kind. We greeted each other and I risked saying, “Unusual to see you out on the job these days.”
“I hope you’re not implying I’m past my prime, young Grace,” he said as ferociously as always.
“Of course not; but you don’t tend to leave the spider’s web these days, do you?”
“What do you pay juniors for in your chambers? And I’m not sure I like your metaphor.”
“Just a manner of speaking. But why are you here, and not a junior?”
“D’you know who’s retained us on behalf of this chap Buckleson?” he said; the banter was over now. “Miss Estella Raymond.” I’d never heard of her then and must have showed my ignorance.
“Her father owns a quarter of the gold-mines in South Africa; she owns a couple herself.”
“Old?”
“No, young; early twenties—good-looking too. She’s tied up with this fellow Buckleson, with the whole crowd—what do they call themselves?—this Free People crowd; why, I really can’t tell. But when the Raymonds retain you, you send out the spider himself.”
I nodded; it was another mystery to add to the list. “But why the trouble about bail?” I asked. “Surely this Raymond girl will put up the necessary?”
“You’ve read my notes?” he asked.
“Of course; I’ll need to look at them again.”
“If you’ve read them, you’ve read them; don’t underestimate your reputation, young man.”
That was nice of him, I thought, though he hadn’t answered my question. But I knew Peale well enough not to repeat myself. He hummed and hawed a moment or two, then said, “Well, I think they—the police—think he’ll kick up a worse stink if they bail him than his friends will do if they don’t; he’s very much the leader of this Free People thing, and I think it would fall apart without him. Or maybe they think if they can make life hard for him, it will quieten down the rest of them. It seems a bit of a misapprehension to me. And their grounds for opposing bail look pretty chancy to me; I think the magistrate was a bit of a fool. I wouldn’t like to be appearing for the police—and I don’t think you’ll have much trouble with this. The main case may be a bit different, though; I give you fair warning of that.”
That was clear enough; no difficulty about bail, and perhaps a difficult trial. I asked about sureties, and was told that Miss Raymond would go to any amount, and that a Dr. Henderson would go up to £2,000.
“Medical doctor?” I asked.
Peale smiled. “In his way—a psychiatrist.”
“Oh,” I said. “Is his interest in Buckleson professional or private?”
“A bit of both, I gather.”
“Is Buckleson a nutter?”
Peale smiled again. “Not so you’d notice. I don’t like his kind of politics at all, you know, Grace—I’m an old-fashioned Tory myself—but there’s no denying the young man has charm. They don’t call it that any more, do they? There’s another word, a foreign-sounding one.”
“Charisma?” I suggested.
“That’s the one. Same as we used to call charm, isn’t it?”
“In a way.”
“Well, I think you’ll find he’s got that.”
“He’s not married, is he?”
“No. I think he and the Raymond girl live together, on and off. That’s one of the problems about bail; the Free People crowd have a sort of communal address—it’s a big disused warehouse south of the river.”
“Parents?” I asked.
“There was no question of my getting on to anyone like that for him.”
I nodded. That wasn’t an answer to my question again, but I was not going to push for an answer since it did not seem very material, except to my own curiosity.
“Anything else, young man?” asked Peale.
“No, I don’t think so,” I answered.
“Tell me something, then; where do you stand yourself, I mean vis-à-vis these people, this whole left-wing lark?”
I smiled at him. “I’m a barrister, Mr. Peale; like a chameleon, I take on the colour of the leaf I’m on.”
“Wynstanley was right, then,” he laughed. “You’ll do us proud, young Grace, and good luck to you. I don’t feel so bad about being called a spider if you call yourself a chameleon. Frankly, I’m glad I don’t have to argue for Buckleson; his lot worries me, with their long hair and silly clothes and anarchy.”
I said nothing; as I say, I liked Peale.
*
As predicted, there was little difficulty in getting Judge Impey to reverse the magistrate’s decision, even less difficulty than I could have expected. It had little to do with my own skill, more to do with the views of Judge Impey himself and, perhaps, with the fact that the police solicitor seemed to have lost heart in his case. I have no evidence of this, but I think someone may have told him about the powerful influence (a euphemism for the money) of Miss Estella Raymond.
I do not much like appearing in Judges’ chambers, whether for a bail application or for sorting out some point of court procedure during a trial; many of my colleagues enjoy the momentary informality of appearances in chambers, of being able to feel for a while that the judge is only a man in a dark suit, like themselves, capable of avuncular humour or fatherly indignation, and that they are getting around the formal and unnecessary rituals of the court-room, to deal with a point sharply and sensibly. I distrust doing without wigs and gowns; I dislike being a barrister without the masking which wig and gown and bands provide; I fear the tendency to informality in chambers. This is not because I am a concealed conservative, but because I know the ritual and the costume protect me—and the people I am serving—from personality and so from involvement.
The police solicitor, a waspish but not very clever man called Cross, was waiting outside Judge Impey’s chambers when I got there; with him was Detective Inspector Williams, a very tall and cadaverously thin man. I had come across Williams before too, in a case where I had been junior to a Treasury counsel; we had lunched togethe
r a couple of times—we were prosecuting a complicated case involving fraudulent dealing by someone who worked in an embassy and either did or did not have diplomatic immunity—and, at the end of the case, when the jury were out for a very long time before bringing in their verdict, had sat together for several hours, talking not only of the case but of other things. We had promised to keep in touch—indeed, had exchanged ’phone numbers—but nothing had come of it. Now, I was sorry to see Williams there, because I liked him very much, in a kind of instinctive way; I suppose we come from very much the same kind of background, more or less working-class risen by way of grammar school, and we are both people who like to work by the rules.
I shook hands with Cross, then with Williams, and we stood talking for a few minutes until we were summoned. Inside, we introduced ourselves, and Cross outlined the reasons the police had for not wanting Buckleson released on bail. They were not unusual reasons: the charges were serious; the prisoner might be difficult to trace, since he lived at what was really a communal address; the prisoner might well abscond, given the nature of the charges; ultimately, the police wished to keep the prisoner in custody for his own protection, since his political associates might threaten him.
It was not much of a case, really, and Cross knew it; while it might do for a magistrate, especially one to whom even the mention of political violence would seem a crime as serious as murder, it would not really do for a judge. I went through the reasons point by point: the charges, though serious, arose from a perfectly legal demonstration, which a number of highly responsible and respectable political figures had organised—I did not mention Herford’s name, but I used the fact that M.P.s had been present and had organised the show; Buckleson himself was an increasingly well-known political figure, who must have considerable interest in clearing himself of these serious charges; while it was true his address was a communal one, he had been living there for some time—and the young did tend, these days, to live in varieties of communes. I stressed that Buckleson would be able to provide excellent sureties if he were bailed and made much play of the name Raymond, which I guessed the judge would have heard of, even if I, in my ignorance of high finance, had not heard it before.
Sure enough, as judges do, so Judge Impey picked up the name. “Is this Miss Raymond, with whom this young man appears to cohabit, the daughter of Charles Raymond, of Imperial Metals? She is prepared to guarantee his bail?”
“Yes, My Lord.” If there was smugness in my voice, I regret it.
Judge Impey sat back in his chair and smiled.
“I would have said she was a golden surety.”
It was a most judicial joke; I looked at Cross—judging by the blankness of his face, he knew I had won the application, whatever the official reason given was. He did try one last tack; he mentioned that Buckleson had spent some time abroad—he mentioned neither the country nor the circumstances—and wondered if this might not be another danger in allowing him bail; I volunteered Buckleson’s passport for him, and that was really that. The judge granted bail, ruled that Buckleson should report to the police once a week, surrender his passport to the court, and provide two sureties to the extent of £500 each.
*
There had been only one oddity in the application I wanted to sort out. When I was making my point about Buckleson’s being a rising political figure who would want to clear his name of the charges, I had stressed he had no criminal record, no form. It was perfectly true, according to Peale’s brief; but I had caught an exchange of glances between Cross and Williams which had made me add, just in case I was wrong, “May I ask my friend, My Lord, to confirm that Buckleson has, in fact, no criminal record of any kind?” Cross said, “It is correct, My Lord; Buckleson has no convictions.”
I pushed the point: “It is not simply a matter of convictions, My Lord; he has never been charged with any offence even.”
Judge Impey cleared his judicial throat. “Surely, Mr. Grace, our assumption is if a man has never been convicted, it is as if he had never been charged.” That is Holy Writ and about as much use as Holy Writ.
“Of course, My Lord. But I wish to establish there has never even been any suspicion concerning my client’s actions, political or otherwise.”
Judge Impey nodded. It was not good law, but I was making a point. I looked at Cross. There was a momentary hesitation before he answered, “It is perfectly true. My Lord; Buckleson has no criminal record of any kind.”
“Has never been charged with any offence?” I pressed; the hesitation worried me still.
“Yes,” Cross answered firmly, but—all the same—I resolved to find out why there was the hesitation.
Once outside. Cross hurried off, and Williams and I stood talking. Peale’s clerk came up, I gave him the glad tidings, and he hurried off to tell his master; I knew Buckleson would be out of Brixton within the hour, if Miss Raymond was as concerned as Peale obviously thought she was. I turned back to Williams as soon as the clerk had disappeared, and said, “One thing I wanted to ask you, Inspector, if you can tell me. Why was there that toing and froing about Buckleson’s form? I was briefed that he was completely clean.”
Williams looked straight at me. “You’ll find out anyway, I suppose,” he said. “No particular secret about it. Still, we had better make this ‘off the record’. All right?”
“Off the record it is,” I answered.
“Buckleson has been in trouble before, years ago—the police came into it, though there wasn’t any question of his being charged.” He smiled his gloomy smile. “At least, there’s no law against what he did, though these days the police are more like nursemaids than anything.”
“What was the trouble?” I nudged him towards an answer.
“Well, we were called in to put an end to what was more or less a riot which was more or less started by Buckleson; it was about, oh, seven years ago now. Buckleson walked into a church—not an Anglican one, unfortunately, because they take oddities in their stride, but one of the Low-Church places—‘Jesus Saves’, you know the kind of place. Right in the middle of the service. He marches up to the pulpit, climbs up into it, and interrupts the service to begin his own sermon. That’s a bit of a shock to the clergyman and to the congregation; but nothing like what comes when Buckleson announces that he’s God.”
“Really?”
“Really and truly. Can you imagine? To an evangelical congregation! He can hardly have chosen worse—or better, I suppose.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, everyone got very excited, and a couple of people started to throw things; and Buckleson just went on, shouting and screaming from the pulpit. I mean, the poor chap was in the middle of a pretty bad breakdown; he was clean off his chump. Thank God, the priest-chap slipped out and phoned the police and they moved in and cleared the place up.”
“What did they do with Buckleson?”
“They took him off, got hold of the university doctor—he had just started his studying then—and Buckleson was shoved into an asylum until he quietened down.”
“Is he still out of his mind?”
Williams looked at me carefully. “I’m no expert on these things, Mr. Grace; but I’d say he was as sane as you or me—he’s nobody’s monkey, Buckleson.”
“A worthy opponent, Inspector?” I was teasing him, I suppose, but Williams doesn’t tease well.
“No,” he said. “I’ve got nothing against Buckleson, Mr. Grace, nothing personal, until he started to teach those kinds who follow him to slip razor-blades into the sides of match-boxes and chuck them at policemen. One of my men got the whole side of his face sliced open, and those cuts don’t heal prettily.”
It was not a conversation I could allow to continue; fraternity breaks down at that point. “I don’t think we’d better go on with this conversation. Inspector, had we? I may get the brief for Buckleson when the trial comes on.”
“I assumed that, Mr. Grace; I just wanted you to know what I felt.” He was a man who worked by
the rules, a scrupulous and honest policeman in days when fewer and fewer of them were either honest or scrupulous; and Buckleson had broken the rules. It was all right for demonstrators to get out of hand, just as it was all right for football crowds to be noisy and even riotous; but match-boxes with razor-blades were outside the unwritten laws which have only a marginal connection with the law. I would indeed have preferred to be dealing with one of Williams’s colleagues, someone who was prepared to bend or even break the rules, someone prepared, say, to plant a small load of cannabis in a suspect’s bathroom in order to get a conviction. You could cheat and lie and wriggle then with no feeling of guilt at all.
And then there was Buckleson, who seven years ago had said he was God. Had he thought he was, or had this been an early attempt at instant theatre, of the same kind as the demonstration in the G.L.C. offices? Was he deluded? Was the man who had made my dreams come alive on a summer’s afternoon in a crowded park only a madman? A nutter? There was no answer to any question, only a sense of unease which was also curiosity.
4
Still I did not meet John Buckleson. The trial would not come on for at least three months, so there was no urgent legal reason for meeting him; yet though I wanted to meet him, I held my desire to do so at arm’s length, for reasons I still only half-understand.
*
I dreamed I was in a hospital; in the bed in front of which I was standing was a man with a bandaged face. All I could see of his head were the dark eyes peering out. Someone, a nurse, I suppose—was it Alison or my mother, or both of them together in one person?—undid the bandages, slowly winding them off. Watching, I was expecting to see some dreadful deformation or disease; but underneath the bandages there was nothing but flesh, as smooth and clear as a woman’s thigh—no nose, no mouth, no chin, no cheeks, no jaw, just a slab of pinkish-grey flesh out of which the eyes peered, helplessly. Was it my own face? I couldn’t tell, but supposed it was. It did not seem a nightmare; I was not afraid at all—it seemed perfectly natural, that featureless blob of flesh which did for a face.
