by Peter Murphy
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CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR PETER MURPHY
‘Peter Murphy’s novel is an excellent read from start to finish and highly recommended’ – Historical Novel Review
‘Racy legal thrillers lift the lid on sex and racial prejudice at the bar’ – Guardian
‘A gripping, enjoyable and informative read’ – Promoting Crime Fiction
‘The ability of an author to create living characters is always dependent on his knowledge of what they would do and say in any given circumstances – a talent that Peter Murphy possesses in abundance’ – Crime Review UK
‘Murphy’s clever legal thriller revels in the chicanery of the English law courts of the period’ – Independent
‘The forensic process is examined in a light touch, goodhumoured style, which will evoke a constant stream of smiles, and chuckles from nonlawyers and lawyers alike’ – Lord Judge, former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales
‘No one writes with more wit, warmth and insight about the law and its practitioners than Peter Murphy. He has no equal since the great John “Rumpole” Mortimer’ – David Ambrose
‘Though his exasperation is sometimes palpable, what triumphs over everything is his sense of humour. And it is the humour that makes Walden of Bermondsey such a delightful read. Think of him as what “Rumpole” would be like if he ever became a judge, and you get some idea of his self-deprecating wit and indomitable stoicism. Add a dash of Henry Cecil for his situation and AP Herbert for the fun he has with the law, and you get a sense of his literary precedents’ – Paul Magrath
To all our Circuit Judges everywhere, especially our Resident Judges, who, without recognition or tangible reward, labour every day, against overwhelming odds, to save what is left of our court system from the wrecking ball.
FOREWORD
By Baroness Hale of Richmond,
President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom
When Peter Murphy and I were Law students together at Cambridge University, from 1963 to 1966, did it occur to either of us what our later careers would be? Perhaps Peter always knew that he would qualify as a barrister and practise as an advocate, but surely not at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, or that he would crown his career as Resident Judge in the Peterborough Crown Court. It certainly never occurred to me, as I went off to teach Law at the University of Manchester, with a bit of practice on the side, that I would end up as any sort of judge, let alone President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
Life in an appeal court, especially the top appeal court for the whole United Kingdom, is very different from life “at the coal face”, as those who work in trial courts up and down the land tend to call it. We deal in erudite points of law of the sort that Judge Walden, Resident Judge in the Bermondsey Crown Court, tries to avoid if he possibly can. So who would you rather be? Lady Hale, in the Supreme Court, deciding whether outlawing bigamy is incompatible with the rights of (for example) Mormons to manifest their belief that bigamy, indeed, polygamy, is justified in scripture? Or Judge Walden, benignly advising the jury whether duress (of the shotgun sort) is a defence to bigamy? He has a lot more fun than we do.
Bermondsey is an imaginary Crown Court with four permanent judges who fit each of the stereotypes – the wise, benign and seriously cunning Resident Judge, Judge Walden; the elderly, rather old-fashioned but still fundamentally sound member of the Garrick club; the buccaneering barrister turned Judge, still for some unknown reason nicknamed “Legless”; and the seriously clever who-should-go-further-but-with-family-responsibilities woman Judge. All are supported by some wonderful court staff – the hugely savvy listing officer, Stella, who knows everything that is going on, and Judge Walden’s usher, Dawn, always brightly dressed beneath her gown. We all owe these heroines a great debt of gratitude.
What comes over loud and clear is that, despite their differences, each of these judges is equally committed to what the legal process – especially in criminal cases – is all about: the fair trial of those accused of offending against the law. And what also comes over loud and clear is that so are the advocates who appear in front of them. They play by the rules and neither side does dirty tricks – or if they do, they will be found out soon enough and no good will come of it. These stories are a fine description of some sensible and honourable advocacy.
But you mustn’t believe that everything that goes on in these pages would really go on – trial judges in disputes between neighbours do not conduct mediations in nearby pubs while the case is going on, for example – but that does not detract from the essential truth of all these stories, that the law and the courts should always be looking for the right solution, wherever and however it may be found.
Nor must you believe that the “Grey Smoothies” from the Ministry of Justice are always out to undermine the independence of the judiciary. They have their role and Judge Walden has his. But somehow he seems to outsmart them every time, which is just as it should be. That his wife is the local vicar, the Reverend Clara Walden, and he buys his daily coffee, sandwich and newspaper from the local market traders, shows how grounded he is in the life of his local community.
But above all, these stories are really funny! His Honour Judge Walden is surely the next Rumpole, a modern, sensible, fair and compassionate judge, not stuck in the past, even when it comes to mastering the new technology and the “paperless court”, but staying faithful to the values we both learned all those years ago.
PROLOGUE
by Judge Rinder
This book is the closest one can get to the authentic first hand action of a judge’s chambers without having to qualify (perhaps the main reason I love it). The dry wit of Walden and the richly drawn characters, especially his – often frustrating – colleagues, set against the interference of the civil service, make it feel incredibly contemporary.
I don’t especially like comparisons, but working in TV, I am often asked to describe a book or a programme. Walden defies description. It’s like Rumpole meets Agatha Christie, with a bit of Judge John Deed thrown in – only with none of the absurdity. It could only have been written by someone with years of first hand experience, an acute sense of irony, and an ability to listen and absorb facts and convey them to a jury (or reader) with the type of effortless mastery of detail that only the great advocates possess.
Peter Murphy gives the reader an insight into the hidden – often mundane – world of the court with its eccentricities and often amusing banalities, and never forgets that at the heart of any case (and good book) is the story. The mystery is so utterly absorbing: I found myself walking into a train door. I don’t want to give too much away, but Walden is impossible to put down. As soon as you’ve finished, I challenge you not to order the rest in the series immediately.
FEELING ONE’S AGE
Monday morning
In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn…
Like Antonio in Venice, I arrive at court in Bermondsey this morning in a rather subdued mood. It’s a beautiful spring day, and I have all my us
ual comforts – my latte from Jeanie and Elsie’s coffee and sandwich bar in the archway near London Bridge and my copy of The Times from George’s newspaper stand nearby. But neither the aroma of the latte nor the fresh, cool breeze blowing up off the river dispels the mist entirely. While I do hold the world as a stage where every man must play a part, I don’t often see my part as a sad one; and unlike Antonio, I’m pretty sure how I caught it, found it, or came by it. Every year at about this time, my good wife, the Reverend Mrs Walden, priest-in-charge of the church of St Aethelburgh and All Angels in the diocese of Southwark, declares a week to be ‘Remember the Elderly Week’. During Remember the Elderly Week everyone has to be nice to anyone older than they are: so we have all manner of events going on in and around the church for our senior citizens – Take your Nan to Church Day, coffee afternoons in the vicarage, bingo evenings in the church hall, slide shows with reminiscences of Bermondsey in the old days – all of them featuring parishioners full of years, escorted by relatives who would never ordinarily darken the door of a church, and who look bored and out of place. The Reverend Mrs Walden is wonderful with them: she can chat away for hours about the old days, and about their families, and about how things aren’t what they used to be, and about how the country’s going to the dogs, without sounding in any way patronising.
It’s a gift I haven’t been blessed with, I’m afraid. I’m not sure why. Obviously, I have nothing against the elderly: it’s a condition we all face in life barring a worse alternative, and I flatter myself that I can have a decent one-on-one conversation with any elderly person. But I just can’t relax when they descend on the vicarage in their hordes. Perhaps it’s the inevitable stark confrontation with impending decline – mine as well as theirs. Perhaps it’s because I’m only too well aware that some counsel who appear in my court consider me to have reached that stage of life already, my modest age in the mid-sixties notwithstanding, simply because I wear the judicial robe. But whatever the reason, sitting through two services for which the elderly turn out en masse with their minders isn’t my favourite way to spend my Sunday.
Yesterday too, I was aware of the trial I’m starting this morning, and it’s enough to depress even the most cheerful of souls. The Reverend Mrs Walden, rounding off the Week in her climactic Sunday evening sermon, was exhorting the parish to take better care of the elderly: to make sure they are kept safe, are enabled to attend church, and have enough human contact to prevent loneliness and isolation. But my mind was drifting to a different kind of human contact the elderly may encounter in church – and it’s one they need to be protected from rather than exposed to. In my case, the human contact is a woman called Laura Catesby, and her victim is a ninety-two-year-old widow by the name of Muriel Jones. Reflecting on Remember the Elderly Week, I can’t help thinking that my reaction to it has a lot to do with my fear that somewhere down the road, when the Reverend and I are in our dotage and have been put out to pasture, we may fall victim to something similar ourselves. Age and frailty, I reflect, can make a Muriel Jones of any of us. I suppose I’ve reached the point where I’m beginning to feel my age.
There’s another, even more immediate reason for this dampening of my spirits. This morning is one I hoped would never dawn; one I hoped I might be spared. This morning I truly expect to feel, not just older, but like a man becoming a dinosaur, a relic of the past: because today, after years of false starts and unfulfilled promises – or perhaps threats would be a better word – the Grey Smoothies are poised to introduce the ‘Paperless Court’. The Grey Smoothies are the civil servants responsible for the running of our courts. Their twin governing principles, and mantras, are ‘business case’ and ‘value for money for the taxpayer’. Intoning these mantras, they govern the courts using a form of magical thinking, according to which the courts would run just as efficiently, regardless of how much of our infrastructure and resources they degrade or take away, if only we would all just work harder and get on with it. In the universe of the Grey Smoothies, the quality of the courts and of the work we do lacks any quantifiable value. Like Wilde’s cynics, the Grey Smoothies know the price of everything and the value of nothing; and sadly, I fear, by the time they have finished with us, there may be little left of a court system that was once the envy of the world.
The Paperless Court is the Grey Smoothies’ current value-for-money project, and obsession. It is a system in which all court documents are filed, disseminated, and accessed electronically, so that no longer do we need the traditional court file with its huge piles of dog-eared papers stuffed into overworked cardboard folders. The Paperless Court is touted by the Grey Smoothies as a breakthrough akin to penicillin or the theory of relativity; and I must admit, its potential advantages are obvious even to me. You save on the cost of paper, you make documents available with far less delay, you reduce the risk of losing the documents, and best of all, no one has to carry all those heavy files around. All you need is your computer. But that’s where the other side of the equation comes into play.
The Grey Smoothies fondly imagine themselves as inhabiting the same plane as the bankers and commercial wizards of the world, and accordingly, think that the courts should be working with the same technology they use in Canary Wharf or on Wall Street. And unfortunately, someone has convinced them that this is the path to the Grey Smoothie Holy Grail – reducing the cost of running the courts to almost nothing in the interests of value for money for the taxpayer. Unfortunately, whoever told the Grey Smoothies that computerisation was the Holy Grail of cheap and efficient court administration omitted to add an important proviso: that it only works if you spend the money to buy computers and programmes adequate to the complex task of running a court. We’ve been threatened several times before with the advent of the Paperless Court – it’s been an ongoing saga ever since I took over as RJ – but the prototypes the Grey Smoothies have introduced in the past have had the unmistakeable whiff of underfunding about them. They haven’t worked very well, and have been abandoned shortly after being trumpeted as the salvation of the court system. None of these failures has been cheap, and after a while you have to question how much value for money the taxpayer is actually getting out of it all.
In addition to those technical concerns, the Grey Smoothies tend to overestimate the human aspects of making the system work – in other words, the talents of those of us on the bench when it comes to computers. Of the four judges at Bermondsey, only Marjorie Jenkins can claim any real expertise with computers. As a busy commercial silk before she became a judge, she mastered modern forms of communication in a way that most of us who spent our lives at the criminal bar did not. It’s expected in the world of banking and commerce, which has always seemed to me to revolve around three basic assumptions: that the continuance of human existence depends on the availability of twenty-four-hour phone and internet access; that the sum of all human knowledge can be expressed as a multi-coloured pie chart; and that all information must be capable of being transmitted instantaneously to any place on earth – how mankind survived until these conditions could be fulfilled being something of a mystery.
In the world of crime, that’s not exactly the tradition. We work at a slower pace, using such outdated, but time-honoured technology as pens and paper; and most of us think that we are not losing anything because of it. As barristers, many of us were members of chambers that didn’t even have a typist until we were getting quite senior in the profession; and even a few years ago, while most barristers had acquired personal computers, you were still looked on as a bit pretentious if you knew much more than how to turn it on. My colleague Hubert Drake, who is not too far from retirement – and, as far as computers are concerned, a confirmed Luddite – may not even know how to do that. Rory ‘Legless’ Dunblane and I are a little more advanced. We’ve mastered the art of emails and (at least in Legless’s case) texting, and we understand the basics of cutting and pasting and so on. But that’s about it. There is some mitigation, at least fo
r those of us, like Hubert, old enough to have been on the bench for a good few years now. If you started your primary school education writing in chalk on a slate tablet, and were already of mature years when the original steam-powered personal computers were making their debut, I think you can be forgiven for not keeping up with every nuance of the computer revolution. Marjorie, by way of contrast, is up with most of them and so by comparison with most judges she is something of an expert. Typically, when my computer is doing something I don’t understand or can’t control, she’s the person I go to for advice, and usually whatever she tells me to do works.
I had hoped that the old paper system might last just long enough for me to retire and allow a new, more computer-savvy generation of judges to get to grips with the new technology. There are some such judges in place already, like Marjorie; and you can see judges-in-waiting, as counsel, with their laptops on the bench in front of them, their PowerPoint presentations in court, and so on. That’s what I mean when I say that I’m beginning to feel like a relic of the past, a dinosaur in a post-meteor world. But there’s to be no reprieve. We judges, products of another time as we may be, will have to cope with change as best we can. In fairness to the Grey Smoothies, they have done their best to educate us. We’ve received screed after screed of information – electronically, of course – and several seminars from visiting computer nerds; and we have learned something. But it’s a bit like learning a foreign language. If you grow up speaking a language, it’s effortless; if you try to learn as an adult, you may achieve a certain fluency, but it will never become second nature. Or perhaps, at the end of the day, it’s a cultural question: something to do with teaching an old dog new tricks – it’s not that the dog doesn’t understand them; it’s more that sometimes he just doesn’t feel inclined to play ball. I suspect that most of us, when faced with the relentless march of progress, have something of Mr Fezziwig about us.