by C. J. Driver
*
John Buckleson in the dock. Mr. S.D. Ramsey, O.B.E., on the bench. The police solicitor, backed by Inspector Williams with a huge pile of documents. Thomas Grace for the prisoner. The police wish to apply for a remand of the prisoner, in order to question him further. The preliminary charges are read: one. Murder … That the accused did, on the 3rd day of March … Andrew Caister, Two. Aggravated burglary … an arms depot, the property of the Royal Air Force, in the neighbourhood of Reading … on the 18th day of September. Three. Possession of firearms with intent to endanger life … to wit, three pistols. Four. Obtaining by deception and forgery … the licence to obtain aforesaid weapon dishonestly obtained by said John Buckleson by deception namely that he did use a false name … Five. Conspiracy to commit murder and sedition … that the accused did, with others, unlawfully conspire to … Parliament Square … Houses of Parliament … Westminster Abby … the Central Hall … the following places of business …
Thomas Grace, barrister, on his feet. “Sir, I wish to apply for bail for my client, John Buckleson …”
Ramsey, O.B.E., hardly bothers to consult the police. “Application refused,” he says in his smooth tones.
Remand granted. Quickly I turn to John. “Are you all right?” I ask. I should see him in the cells, but somehow I want to ask him here in public.
“You were right that killing a policeman gives you special privileges …” white-faced, dark-eyed John begins; but the policemen attending him start to take him away.
“I want to talk to my client,” I say loudly.
“In that case you will have to apply to see him in his place of custody,” says Williams from behind me. While we were waiting outside, he cut me; now he has relented sufficiently to say, “You said you weren’t going to act for him, Mr. Grace.”
“I didn’t want to, nor do I now. But he says it’s me or no one.”
“No one then. He doesn’t deserve a defence.”
“Oh come on Inspector. You said you were a democrat.” He shakes his head; democracy doesn’t extend to the murderers of policemen. “And what on earth are these charges … aggravated burglary, conspiracy to commit murder, sedition, these fiddles about pistols?” Usually the police will give you a little help, even in the toughest cases.
“You’ll have to find that out, Mr. Grace. If I were you, I’d leave Buckleson alone.”
Now it’s my turn to shake my head. Williams walks away.
*
Matthew sends my letter back. “Don’t be silly. M.W.” is scrawled as a footnote. But he invites me to lunch again and, when I politely refuse, calls me in to his room. Again he advises me to drop Buckleson. I explain the situation and say again that I should leave chambers. He refuses even to discuss it, but still feels I should not defend Buckleson.
“But I’ve told you, Matthew, if I don’t defend, he’ll try defending himself, and you know what that means.”
“Well, let him then.” Matthew must be some kind of blood-brother to Williams.
*
Tella thanks me. Alison thinks I have done right. Henderson takes my decision for granted. Night after night I fill my briefcase with case-books I have borrowed from shelves in chambers and struggle to find a line of defence. Alison has turned the spare room into a study for me; she brings me my supper up there, and sits there with me until I have eaten it.
To plead insanity is the only hope.
*
To Brixton to see John Buckleson. I am kept waiting nearly an hour before they bring him to me. I hardly recognise him; his hair has been cropped short.
“But you’re only on remand,” I tell him. “They’re not allowed to touch you.”
“Medical reasons,” he says. “The prison doctor said I was getting lice in my hair and ordered I get it cut. I tried to stop them; I thumped the barber in the face. I wish I hadn’t. Three warders held me down and the barber had another go. His hand slipped twice. Look,” and John turned his head so I could see two long half-healed cuts under the uneven crop of his hair. “And then he disinfected them with iodine.”
He has all the nervous anxiety to talk that a man has who has been in solitary confinement for weeks, not days.
“And you should see the cell. The bog was broken when they put me in there. So I was given a bucket—‘temporarily!’ The first morning when I put the bucket outside the door ready to empty it, a warder kicked it over into the cell ‘by accident’; he was decent enough to bring me some rags to clean it up. And the food too; it’s not bad, but they give it to me right after everyone else, when it’s so cold it’s congealed.”
“But you can have food sent in; I thought Tella …”
He interrupts. “She did; and the first day someone put a great lump of shit in the middle of it—and the second too. I asked to have it stopped after that.”
“But they can’t do this. Look, you write out an affidavit now, and I’ll witness it, and I’ll put it before a judge in chambers, and we’ll have an order served on the Governor within twelve hours …”
“Don’t you bloody dare,” says John. “It’s beginning to quieten down now a bit. You do that and it’ll start again worse than before.”
I argue; but I know, beneath my own argument, that John is right. If you leave the nastiness alone, it may go away after a while.
*
One day I realise I haven’t done any prosecuting for more than a month. Usually I have a smallish prosecution for the police every week or so, and once a month a bigger one. It’s a steady source of income usually. I tax the clerks with the decline.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Grace,” says Jamie, “I really am. But it’s no go; every time I suggest your name to them, they get a sort of blind-and-deaf look. I’ve been pushing some extra defence work your way; but there won’t be any police work until this chap Buckleson is safely inside—and then maybe not for a while.”
There is nothing to be done. Even if I were to complain to Matthew, what could he say except, “I told you so, Tom”? The system we get briefs on, whether for prosecution or defence, is almost totally informal. If I’m blacked, I’m blacked; I won’t be the first it’s happened to.
I am not entirely powerless: my cross-examination of police witnesses becomes more and more savage, exploring the very edge of what is permitted in a court-room. I overhear one young Flying Squad man tell another, “Christ, that Grace is a bastard—he starts saying you’re lying from the moment you say your name.”
*
To Brixton again. Again the long wait. I am beginning to settle down to get the details of all that happened clearly ordered in my head.
“Tell me again about the garage, John.”
“Again?”
“Yes, I want to see if we’ve missed anything.”
He shrugs. “We rented it.” He looks at me; is this what I want? I nod.
“When we got the stuff from Reading, we put it there.”
“Tell me about the raid.”
“You probably read about it in the papers, you know.”
I shake my head.
“You did, you know; there was that raid on an arms depot in Reading. There wasn’t much about it in the papers but some in all of them; they seemed to think it was an Irish job. It was quite funny really they thought so when it was Lester and Austell and me …”
“Shirley too?”
“She was driving.”
Details, details, details. “Have you told the police all this?”
“Of course; they knew it anyway—that little bastard Austell told them the lot.”
“What were you going to do with the arms you stored?”
“Again?” He has told me this story before.
“Again.”
“Oh, all right.” The voice flat, almost formal. “We were going to take over Parliament Square and the buildings around it—that Abbey place. Central Hall, the one next to it, and then all those shops down the side.”
“Four of you?”
“No, the Free P
eople, those who wanted to anyway. And Lester said he would raise some others too, from Kelso and his lot for instance.”
“Had you talked to Kelso?”
“No, but he knew something big was on. He’d tried to get something from me, but I wasn’t having him put his nose in until the whole thing was set up.”
“When? Just one day when you happened to feel like a rebellion?”
“Of course not; we were waiting for the right time. It’s bound to come soon. You don’t know what the mood’s like in London now.”
“I may not know the mood, but I know you would have been flushed out of there in a couple of hours, and a lot of you would have died.”
“Maybe. But it might also have been the start of a revolution in England.”
“In England? Now? Oh, John, you’re out of your mind.”
“You’ve got to start somewhere, Tom. Even if we’d lost then, we would still be starting somewhere, like it will start anyway whatever happens to me. They lost in Russia in 1908. And only nine years later … and think of Paris in ’68. That failed, but it was a start.”
“But think of England now; and do you really want a Russia here? You know what it’s like. That Czech business for example; look what the Russians did there.”
“I know what I’m told everything’s like; but even if it is as bad as people say, it did once have the chance of getting better. It’s the start we need.”
“The Free People—some of them—in Parliament Square with a dozen machine-guns and some rifles and a box or two of hand-grenades? Honestly, I don’t see why the police are bothering to charge you, it’s all so silly.”
“Maybe they know better than you what we could do.” Before, he would have got angry. Now, he is tired of being questioned. I wish I could see some future in trying to show that these were kids playing a revolutionary game; but Caister denies my argument.
“When did Caister find out? Had you tried to recruit him too?”
“No. He found out. Oh, Tom, do we have to go over this again? I’m bored with it.”
“I’ve got to be sure of everything.”
“All right. He followed us to the garage one night and came in. We were working on the machine-guns, working out how they came apart and so on. He wanted to know what was going on. I wasn’t going to tell him …”
“Because of what I’d said about him?”
“Partly. Partly other things.”
“What other things?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I was just suspicious of him. He never discussed ideas; I’ve told you that. We never really knew what he believed.”
Silence.
“Go on,” I say.
“Go on with what?”
“About Caister.”
“He came in, saw what we were doing, wanted to know what we were planning. I didn’t want to tell him, but Lester did. Then he said we should pack the whole thing in. We argued. After a while he said we had to, because he was a policeman.”
“Did he try to arrest you?”
“No, he didn’t. He just tried to make us give up.”
“Why?”
“I suppose he thought the same as you, that the whole thing would get nowhere.”
“Why didn’t he arrest you? Or go back to the police and get them to arrest you? Why did he tell you? He must have known how dangerous it was.”
“I don’t know. He was a strange chap, Caister. Perhaps he was trying to get all the credit for himself, for promotion or something. Perhaps he thought we would be afraid of him.”
“Do you think he’d come to believe some of your ideas? About a revolution and so on? About the City?”
“I’ve told you again and again. He didn’t talk about ideas; I don’t know what he believed.”
“But he worked bloody hard for you, didn’t he? He was always helping people, wasn’t he?”
“In a way, yes; but … well, it was different, that was all. We could see it afterwards. He only helped us to do legal things, you know, like getting social security and buying food and organising things. He never tried to persuade other people.”
“Did he ever argue against your ideas?”
“No, he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t interested in ideas. He was a doer.”
“But not a revolutionary? Not a fighter?”
“He was a policeman.”
“But you didn’t know then, did you? Wouldn’t someone as good as he was with doing things have been useful to you?”
“Maybe that’s why Lester told him. But I wanted to be sure the people we took in understood the ideas. That’s why I used to trust you.”
“Used to?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You’d better leave me out of it in court.”
“If you say so.” John does not look at me.
“When did you kill Caister?”
“Well, after he told us, there was an argument. Then we started fighting, and Lester hit him with a bit of wood. Then we tied him up and questioned him. And then we told him we were going to blindfold him and leave him locked up there while we moved the stuff to another place. Then I shot him.”
“Just like that!” I can’t help myself bursting out.
“What else could we have done?”
“Anything but that.”
“You don’t understand, Tom: you’re not trying to. We all knew bloody well if we tried to take over Parliament Square and set it up like the Paris Commune we’d probably be killed. But we accepted that. Caister was the same really. He was a policeman; he must have known the risks.”
“Was he afraid?” When you blindfolded him, I mean?”
“No, he just kept on talking all the time, telling us it was no good, that we’d come unstuck.”
“And so he died with a blindfold around his eyes and his hands and legs tied? It’s so … so bloody unfair.”
“What do you think this is, Tom? A game? Fair, unfair? A good show and a bad show? We’re talking about two different worlds.”
“I don’t like your world.”
“Oh, poor Tom.” There is both irony and real pity in his voice; I can stand the irony but not the pity. He will not understand. “I said you’d end in despair. You can’t be sentimental and change the world.”
“I’m not a murderer, if that’s what you mean by sentimental.”
“Nor am I a murderer. Don’t you understand? We’re fighting a war.” Suddenly, through the urgent private voice, the old public voice comes back. Its pausing, hesitating, searching self contradicts the certainty of what it says. “You know … about the City … you know it’s just an … image for what we … want. But we’ll get the City, we’re going … to win. It’s there, Tom, it’s there, it’s … waiting for us. All … we’ve got to do … is to go there.”
“I think you’re mad, John.”
“Oh, go away, Tom. You’re hopeless.” But at least I have killed the public voice again; I cannot bear it now.
“Do you want someone else to defend you?”
“No,” he shakes his head violently. “I’ll have you or I’ll have no one. I’ve said so and I’ll stick to it. No one’s going to get me off this one, not until the revolution comes; but maybe you’ll learn something if you defend me.”
“I can refuse, you know, even now. I can pull out.”
“You can, but you won’t. I’ve told you already, Tom. You’re a sentimentalist.”
*
“Did anyone else know? Tella, for instance?”
“Of course not.”
“Why ‘Of course not’?”
“Because she’s Tella: she’s not a revolutionary.”
“O’Brien?”
“You know he’s a pacifist.”
“Would he have approved?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know bloody well he wouldn’t have.”
John shrugs; he will not look at me.
“Did anyone else know? Anyone?”
John looks up now. “Jiminy
knew,” he says, grinning.
“Bowland?”
John nods. It seems to be a joke.
“Did you tell him? Him of all people?”
“Of course not.”
“Who told him then? How did he know?”
“I don’t know; he followed us, perhaps—like Caister. He’s always following me around. You know what he thinks about me.”
“Why didn’t you kill him too then?”
“Because he’s basically with us.”
“But you know damn well he’s raving mad—a schizophrenic or something. I suppose you gave him a gun too.” I was being sarcastic, or at least thought I was being so—perhaps I had guessed with some invisible part of my mind.
“As a matter of fact, I did.” John is smiling broadly.
“You’re joking.” I am afraid he isn’t.
“Ask Jiminy.”
“He’d blow my head off.”
“No, not Jiminy. Not your head anyway. He just talks. You don’t have to worry about him.”
“Christ, I wouldn’t believe that.”
John shrugged again. “I suppose you’re going to tell the police now.”
“If that nutter is wandering around with a gun, someone had better.”
“It’d be the end for Jiminy, if they put him away again.”
“It may be the end anyway.”
In the end, for all my threats, I don’t do anything; I don’t even tell Tella. Do I forget at the time, or not bother? Or am I just past telling the police anything? John Buckleson gives the gun to Bowland, and Bowland … well, perhaps I could have stopped it after all. But I didn’t. What matters is the here and now, the moment. Time present, nothing past.
*
Everything I know the police know. Except about the City, perhaps, despite Williams. And how can you tell a judge and jury about that? Is there anything else I can find in this sea of detail to give me a line to hold to? Some mould I can use to give the case a shape it does not have at present? Some clue to personality? Some source of ideas? Anything, no matter how complex, how far-fetched. Have the police made a mistake anywhere? Can I use the way they treated John on remand? It’s got nothing to do with the case. Can I use it nonetheless? Can I find some way of showing that Caister was an agent provocateur? Did he never push people into political action? Did he never express extreme ideas?
