Crowner and Justice

by Barrie Roberts

  His voice ceased to be puzzled and became business-like. ‘The quicker the better, it seems.’ I heard pages riffle. ‘As it happens, I’m free for lunch. Are you still in that delightful Victorian building down in the Square? What about the Jubilee Room at one? Yes? That’s a date then.’

  That was the easy part. The difficult part was going to be seeing how much he knew about Sylvia’s relationship with Sean, what his attitude had been and how far he was prepared to talk about it. I was going to earn my lunch.

  When I went over to the Victoria Hotel, I found him waiting for me in the Durbar Lounge. He was slightly older than me, say about forty. Tall, tanned, immaculately covered in an expensive dark blue suit. Smiling blue eyes looked out of the tan under a thick head of fair hair only just beginning to turn. His cufflinks must have cost more than my monthly Legal Aid cheque.

  He shook me warmly by the hand and bought me a drink. While we drank the barman took our lunch order.

  When we were seated over a table in the Jubilee Room he looked at me steadily.

  ‘They say you’re not a man who panics,’ he remarked.

  ‘I try not to,’ I said, ‘but I get frightened and I’m frightened now. Where’s your daughter?’

  ‘She’s at home, with my wife and our staff.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Tell them not to let her out of sight.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me why?’

  ‘Look,’ I began, ‘How much do you know about Sylvia’s friendship with Sean McBride?’

  He smiled. ‘I know they were what they would have called an item, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘And did you approve?’

  ‘No. Of course not. Don’t get me wrong. There was nothing I could see wrong about young McBride. He was a skilled mechanic and I’m quite prepared to agree that a skilled mechanic is as good as a skilled lawyer, but most of the rest of the world doesn’t. He wasn’t exactly what my wife and I wanted for Sylvia, I’m sure you understand that.’

  I nodded. ‘Did you take any steps to stop them?’

  He shook his head. ‘Oh, no. I’m not that daft. I wasn’t going to play the heavy father and have Sylvia pregnant and the pair of them running off to Gretna Green. I just let it ride. I was fairly certain that it would burn out in time and someone else would come along.’

  ‘Did they break up before he died?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. As far as I can tell they’d been planning to go away that weekend, but something went wrong. She told us a tale about staying with a friend and she went off on the Saturday morning, but she came back, saying her friend was ill. Then she was buzzing about all weekend, coming and going, then she heard about his death and she broke up completely. We had a dreadful time with her for a few weeks. I sent her to friends in Florida, but she drove them crazy and, anyway, she had to come back for school. She’s still not over it really.’

  ‘So she never gave him the elbow?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Did you know the boy at all?’

  ‘I met him a number of times. In fact, he met Sylvia because I needed a mechanic urgently on a Sunday evening and someone recommended him. He came out to my place and he did a good job. That’s when he first met Sylvia. I saw him a few times with her. He always seemed a reasonable, decent kind of lad.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about him suffering from headaches that worried him?’ He frowned. ‘Nobody ever said anything about that to me. I don’t think Sylvia knew about it. Her uncle’s a doctor, she’d have bothered him about it. Why do you ask?’ ‘Because that’s one of the reasons that the Coroner said “Suicide.”‘

  ‘That man’s too old for his job,’ he said. ‘What was the other?’

  ‘Would you believe a breathalyser charge?’

  He grinned. ‘People don’t top themselves over breathalysers, do they? My clients don’t.’

  ‘My clients sign on till they get their licences back. I imagine yours hire chauffeurs.’

  ‘Stop fighting the class war, Chris, and tell me about the danger to Sylvia.’

  I told him — all of it. He grew more and more thoughtful and less interested in his food as the story went on. When I finished he poured us both more wine.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘This thing stinks of something very peculiar. Even if it turns out to have been something between Sean and the Nesbit lad, I don’t want Sylvia mixed up in it. She’s had enough. I’m going to send her abroad again.’

  I nodded. ‘Good idea,’ I agreed, ‘but there is one thing. If you’re willing, I’d very much like to talk to her.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t know, Chris. I told you — she’s had a very hard time with it. What good will it do, trying to make her go over it again?’

  ‘It might do her a lot of good,’ I said. ‘Survivors always feel guilty, don’t they? She isn’t just someone who survived the death of someone close, Tom, she was his sweetheart. She will be thinking that if anything was worrying him or frightening him or depressing him, she was the one person who should have known, who he would have talked to, who should have been able to make it right for him. But she didn’t and he died. She must be carrying an appalling load of guilt. If I can even make her see that it might have been an accident, then that’s got to relieve a lot of guilt, hasn’t it?’

  He stared at me for a while, then I could see him make his mind up. ‘I’m not going to force her,’ he said, ‘but you can try. It’ll have to be soon. I really am going to get her abroad fast. I can’t keep her on a lead and I want her out of the country until we know what this mess is really about. I’ll talk to her and I’ll come back to you as soon as I can.’

  I couldn’t ask for better. We finished eating and I let him take the bill.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘I thought it was a total waste of time, that meeting. I spent hours trying to convince Capstick that we needed his input at BDS to break the deadlock, but he wouldn’t listen.’

  I was listening to Con Mulvaney’s account of the BDS strike. He was talking about the visit that he and Martin and Mohammed had made to the Union’s National Secretary.

  ‘Utter waste of time,’ he emphasised. ‘All he kept saying was that we’d allowed the Union to get a bad reputation with BDS for wildcat walkouts and it was time we calmed down and talked to management civilly. I kept telling him that we’d tried that and tried it and they still kept up the undermanning and shoving people about from job to job.’

  ‘So, how did it end?’ I asked.

  ‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘We just gave up and came away. It was the next day that things changed.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Capstick rang me. That surprised me, for a start. He isn’t a great one for ringing people out in the provinces, but I was even more surprised when I heard what he wanted to say. He said that he’d been turning the problem over with Fred Goatly, the Midland Secretary, and they’d decided to do something. He said that it was true that BDS had broken the Joint Agreement in the way they sacked Mohammed, and that he and Goatly had decided that Goatly would seek a meeting with BDS at which he would demand Mohammed’s reinstatement and an end to the undermanning. Well, that stunned me for a start, but it got better. Capstick was going to serve notice on BDS of a strike ballot. He reckoned that an official legal warning might put BDS under enough pressure to make them see sense.’

  ‘What’s the Joint Agreement?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the National Joint Agreement on Working Practices. It’s a set of rules drawn up

  between the Union and the Armament Manufacturers’ Alliance years ago, back in the fifties.’

  ‘And how had BDS breached it?’

  ‘Well, there’s a procedure laid down — step by step — in the Agreement, for sacking people. You can’t just lose your rag and throw somebody out, not unless he’s done something bloody awful, but refusing an order, that has to go by the Agreement, step by step. They never even started the procedure. They just threw him out because he
talked back.’

  ‘I’ll need to see the latest version of the National Agreement,’ I said, ‘the one in force when Mohammed was sacked.’

  He peered into the battered briefcase on the chair alongside him and fished out a fat, orange-covered volume.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘The 1992 edition, with the latest amendments. There’s a marker in the Discipline and Dismissal section.’

  I put the book into my own briefcase and looked over my notes.

  ‘What did you think when Capstick changed his tack?’

  ‘I thought he’d had an attack of common-sense, that’s all. What we were trying to say to BDS was quite fair and he always should have backed us.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Well, a few days later Goatly came up from London...’

  ‘He’s based in London? I thought he was the Midland Secretary?’

  ‘Well, he used to stay in Birmingham, but since Capstick’s been ill, Goatly’s been working a lot at Head Office, giving Capstick a hand. Everyone reckons that Capstick’ll resign at the next Conference and recommend Goatly for National Secretary.’

  ‘Would that be a good move?’

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Goatly’s a company man. He’s the kind of bloke who’s got the Union a name as a company union. He’ll do whatever they want. Like he did this time.’

  ‘You were telling me,’ I said. ‘He came up from London...’

  ‘That’s right. He came up and had a meeting with me and Jim and Mohammed and the other Shop Stewards, to make sure he’d got all of our side of the story. Then he had a meeting with BDS.’

  ‘Who did he meet with?’

  ‘The MD, Personnel and the Legal Officer.’

  ‘Were you at that meeting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Goatly said that it’d be better if he came in as a new broom, a fresh face on the problem. He said my history with the company might cause personality problems and stop the matter getting resolved.’

  ‘Is that what you thought?’

  ‘No. I didn’t like the idea of him having a closed meeting with management, but that was the way he wanted it.’

  ‘So he had one, and what happened?’

  ‘Well, Brother Goatly came out of the meeting well pleased. According to him, everything was solved, it was all OK, it was back to the beginning and a fresh start and I don’t know what.’

  ‘But...?’

  ‘But, he’d carved it up with them, hadn’t he? Management had agreed — unofficially and off the record — that they broke the rules when they sacked Mohammed, so he could have his job back and nothing would be held against him.’

  ‘That sounds OK.’

  ‘So it was, but there was another thing. We’d always wanted Mohammed reinstated without any loss, and by this time we’d been fooling about for a couple of weeks. There was a couple of weeks’ pay to think about. So I asked Goatly what was to happen about that.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said he’d got the best deal he was going to get, that BDS wouldn’t pay, they’d only take him back.’

  ‘But that wasn’t a full reinstatement,’ I said. ‘If they didn’t treat him as an employee during the period of absence, they were re-employing him, not reinstating him.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s what I told Goatly. I told him that Mohammed’s pension situation, his promotion, all sorts of things could be affected if he didn’t make them accept a full reinstatement with pay for the intervening period, but he wasn’t going to have it. He just said that you can’t have everything your own way, and that Mohammed might learn to keep his temper in future. And that was it — Goatly just buggered off back to London and left it like that.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘Well, we had a meeting of the Shop Stewards and they went up the wall when I told them what Goatly had done. Some of them were for a walkout, but I stopped that. I said we’d do it properly or not at all.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’

  ‘Well, it dawned on me that Capstick’s notice of a strike ballot was still in place, so we went ahead. We held a strike ballot.’

  ‘Was that legal?’

  ‘You’re the lawyer — you tell me.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I was worried. In fact, I was very worried. I suspected that we had just found a large hole in any case that might be made for Con Mulvaney.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I was furious with Goatly, that’s why.’

  ‘Fine, but did you realise that what you were doing might be illegal?’

  ‘How was it illegal?’ he challenged.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Before Goatly met with BDS, Capstick had served the notice required by law that the branch was going to be balloted for a strike, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed impatiently.

  ‘Then Goatly came to his compromise — on behalf of the Union.’

  ‘He wasn’t acting on behalf of the Union,’ said Mulvaney. ‘He didn’t do what we asked him to do. That was the whole point.’

  ‘You’re missing mine,’ I said. ‘Goatly believed — or at least, he said he believed — that he’d got the best deal available, didn’t he?’

  ‘Right,’ said Mulvaney, ‘but he never intended it to go to a strike ballot and he never really threatened them with it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because he said so. He thought a strike would be destructive to the firm’s interests and would only lose members’ jobs.’

  ‘So he accepted the compromise?’

  ‘Right — and made a victim out of Mohammed.’

  ‘But what was going to happen when Goatly reported back to Capstick in London? Surely, Goatly was going to say that he’d done the best deal that he could in all the circumstances?’

  Mulvaney snorted. ‘Well, of course he was. He wasn’t going to tell Capstick that he’d got it all wrong — deliberately.’

  ‘We can’t challenge Goatly’s honesty in the negotiations unless we can prove it. Can you?’

  ‘Of course not! I wasn’t bloody there, was I?’

  ‘Right, but Capstick accepted Goatly’s version of affairs and withdrew the strike notice? Yes?’

  ‘Well, of course he did. That’s why I went ahead. Sort of pre-emptive strike,’ and he grinned.

  ‘It might have been if you’d had the right to issue a strike notice, but you had no right to go ahead, did you? The notice of no strike was issued from London on behalf of the Union nationally, in the proper form required by law. How could you — as a provincial Branch Secretary — go on without Head Office support?’

  ‘I had to,’ he said. ‘It’s in the Union’s rules.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and delved again into his dogeared briefcase. He emerged with a battered blue book and began to thumb through it. Eventually he passed the open volume across to me.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘After the bit about “Election of Branch Officers” there’s a piece about “Duties of Branch Officers”.

  That’s what I was going under.’

  I read the passage aloud:

  ‘Once elected, Branch Officers are subject in the first place to the wishes of the Membership of their Branch as expressed by a majority vote of a General Meeting of the Branch.’

  ‘That’s it!’ he said, triumphantly. ‘I had no other obligation but to the Branch Membership.’

  ‘Not according to your Rules,’ I agreed, ‘but it isn’t that easy. The Tribunal will say that there’s nothing illegal in these Rules, but they’re subject to statute law and that, I suspect, says differently.’

  He stared at me. ‘I had to do what the Members wanted,’ he said.

  ‘Not if the law of England says differently,’ I said. ‘Statute law takes precedence over anybody’s rules. I think we’ve got a problem. However, I’ll check it out. In the mean
time, what happened about the ballot?’

  ‘I reported to a General Meeting of the Branch on Goatly’s cop out and that was it — the ballot was nearly one hundred per cent for strike action.’

  ‘And it was a proper ballot? Not one of your old-fashioned showing of hands on the works car-park jobs?’

  ‘Do me a favour!’ he said. ‘It was absolutely straight. One member, one ballot paper. Secret voting. All shipshape.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then I issued due notice to BDS that we had voted to strike.’

  ‘Which you had no right to do?’

  ‘Of course I did.’ He pointed at the Rules again. ‘I had an obligation to do it once the Branch had voted, didn’t I?’

  ‘Assuming,’ I said, ‘that the notice of the ballot was legal and that the ballot was legal and that the vote was properly conducted, somebody had an obligation to inform BDS, but shouldn’t it have been Capstick, not you?’

  ‘Somebody had to do it on the Unions behalf. Why shouldn’t it have been me?’

  ‘You’re dodging, Con. You’d already taken on the function of your National Secretary when you went ahead with the ballot. Weren’t you doing the same again when you issued the strike notice to BDS?’

  ‘I had an obligation to the Branch,’ he repeated doggedly.

  ‘OK, OK. So you issued notice of the vote to BDS and the strike went ahead, yes?’

  ‘Right.’

  And on the first day of the strike, you and Martin got into a fight with your boss, right?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not right. It was self-defence.’ I looked at my watch. ‘There’s no time to deal with it now,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to come back again, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing else to do.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I was still worrying about the hole in Mulvaney’s story as I walked home. Mohammed had been sacked for disobeying an order. I thought I could win that argument. Jim Martin had been sacked for assaulting the boss. He and Mulvaney assured me that they had independent witnesses to say it was self-defence, so I might win that one. Mulvaney was sacked for the assault also, but principally for calling an illegal strike, and now it looked as if that was exactly what he had done. Ah well — you can’t win them all.