Crowner and Justice

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘You give up too bloody easily. Look!’ she commanded, and pushed the file across the table. ‘Look at the police photos of the garage.’

  I pulled them out and went through them. Sheila waited, with growing impatience.

  ‘You can’t see it, can you?’ she demanded at last.

  I shook my head.

  ‘And you don’t remember Sylvie saying it, either.’

  ‘Saying what?’ I appealed, now totally bemused.

  She spoke very slowly, as though addressing an idiot. ‘Sylvie said that, when Charlie took her to the garage, he said he believed he could get in. He climbed on the roof and she heard him moving one of the roof slabs. Right?’

  ‘Yes. That’s how he looked in and saw Sean and that’s how the police got in.’

  ‘Look!’ she said, and stabbed a finger at one of the photos. It was a general view of the garage from above, evidently taken from a window in the adjacent tower block. On the roof of the little garage one of the asbestos slabs lay loose, alongside a gap in the roof.

  ‘There’s the slab that Charlie moved, and there’s the space he made to look through.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but...’

  ‘But nothing, cobber. Now look at that rectangular mark on the roof, by the hole. That’s the mark where the loose slab used to lie. That’s where rainwater made a dirt deposit around the edges of the slab while it lay there so that there was always a ventilation gap in the garage roof.’

  She grinned triumphantly, as my mind slowly came up to speed.

  ‘You mean...’ I began.

  ‘I mean, mate, as I have been telling you for hours, that Sean kept that slab loose and pulled aside as a ventilator. The night he died, some bastard climbed on the roof and pushed it back into place so that he died. That’s why Charlie had to move it when he got on the roof.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he have heard if someone climbed on the roof?’

  ‘Not if they did it while Sean and Sylvie were rocking and rolling. Take it from me, Chris Tyroll, Sean McBride was murdered, and Charlie was either a part of it or he came to know it afterwards.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mulvaney passed an envelope across my desk. ‘There it is,’ he said, ‘the next instalment.’

  I counted the notes in the envelope, took out a printed pad and wrote him a receipt. Normally I enjoy receiving bundles of cash from clients, but the fact that Mulvaney’s action was being supported by contributions collected by his former workmates was beginning to depress me.

  He saw the expression on my face as I passed him the receipt. ‘What’s the trouble?’ he asked. ‘It’s what we agreed, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, sure. That’s not the trouble. I just don’t like the idea of all those working blokes having to chip in to support this action.’

  ‘If there’s no other way, they’ll do it,’ he said firmly. ‘They’ve kept it up so far, haven’t they?’

  ‘They have,’ I agreed, ‘but I can see this taking a long time in the Tribunal. This isn’t just one bloke who’s been sacked for one reason. This is three of you who were sacked for a mixture of three reasons. There are five separate cases to be presented here really, with the evidence and arguments to back each one. I hate to think how long it will take, and you won’t be paying me for a couple of interviews a week and a bit of back-up work, you’ll be paying for day after full day in the hearing, plus conferences and interviews on top. It’ll end up costing a bomb, Con.’

  ‘You told us that from the start,’ he said. ‘If the strike had gone on we’d have had to stick it out and put up with short commons. We can stick this out, too.’

  ‘You might have won the strike in the end,’ I said.

  ‘We might have bloody lost it, too,’ he said. ‘Strikes are like horse races — favourites go lame and outsiders romp home. I suppose Tribunal cases are like that, aren’t they?’

  ‘Any case is, before any tribunal,’ I agreed. ‘We’d better hope the outsider wins this time.’

  He grinned over his pipe. ‘So the odds are that bad, are they?’

  ‘They are for you,’ I said. ‘So far as I can see you called an illegal strike, quite apart from bashing the boss.’

  He grinned again. ‘Well, you prove the strike was legal and I’ll prove I thumped Bailey in self-defence.’

  ‘Right,’ I said and reached for a notepad. ‘We’d got as far as the beginning of the strike. Carry on from there.’

  He drew on his pipe. ‘I told you about all the strikes there’d been before, well, BDS kept claiming that those strikes had been organised in such a way as to cause the maximum damage.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘They said that workers had just downed tools and walked out, often in the middle of a continuous process, so that there were incomplete processes and materials lost. They were beginning to hint that there were political reasons for the strikes and since they were a Government defence plant, then political strikes that lost production and wasted materials were akin to sabotage and so on.’

  ‘But that wasn’t the case with your strike, was it?’

  ‘You’re bloody right it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘Personally I think that an employer whose management is so bad that it provokes the workers to walk out ought to put up with any damage caused by their own bad practice, but I wasn’t going to have that old story used against us in the press.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’

  ‘I made it absolutely clear, when we fixed the beginning of the strike, that no section would come out until all production in its hands was complete, so that there couldn’t be any accusations this time.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Me and Jimmy were there to make sure it worked. We checked each section personally, to make sure that production was complete and there were no interruptions and no wastage before we told that section to stand down.’

  ‘That must have taken some organising.’

  ‘It did. All day, Jimmy and I kept going back in and taking another section and making sure it could shut down clean, without wastage. That’s what caused the fight.’

  ‘How so?’ He drew on his pipe. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’d notified the strike in proper form and we told everybody to turn up for their shift on the day.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Most of them. There’s always a few idle buggers who think that a strike is a holiday, but virtually all the usual people clocked on for their shift. So Jimmy Martin and I got started. We went through each section and had a talk with its Shop Steward. We sorted out with them how long it would take their schedule to finish the work they had immediately in hand, without touching any new, incoming stuff. Then we worked out a list of when we expected that section to shut down. We told our people in each section as they weren’t to down tools until the present work was all complete and they weren’t to leave anything in a state that would cause wastage.’

  ‘Was that always possible? Weren’t there any continuous processes?’

  He nodded. ‘Some,’ he agreed. ‘We told them to shut down properly, like they were closing for an annual holiday, leave nothing out of place, you know?’

  I nodded. ‘So you had a schedule of when each section was going to shut down, right?’

  ‘Right. Then Jimmy and I and a couple of the other Stewards went across the road to the cafe opposite the gate. We had a late breakfast and a bit of a chat about how we thought the strike’d go and the others went off, so there was just Jimmy and me.’

  ‘How long were you there?’

  ‘We was there all day,’ he said. ‘We had the list of when each section should finish and we’d told the Stewards to come across and let us know as their section was cleared. We’d see the people from that section coming out the gate and the Steward would come across and confirm that they were finished and that it was all done properly.’

  ‘So how did you get into a punch-up at the gate? Your letter of dismissal says you attacked Bailey inside the gate, after being re
quired to leave the premises.’

  ‘I was getting to that,’ he said. ‘Some of the sections were slower than we expected. If we hadn’t seen them coming out when we expected them, we’d give it a few minutes, then we’d go over and see what was keeping them.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Because we wanted the strike solid,’ he said. ‘Some sections were more solid than others, and we wanted to be sure that no section could carry on working.’

  ‘I thought you said that the general meeting was unanimous for a strike?’

  ‘It was, but the sort who’ll back down on a strike don’t go to general meetings, so we needed to be sure, not just that all production had stopped properly but that it couldn’t be restarted.’

  I paused in my note-taking and looked up.

  ‘When you give evidence,’ I said, ‘you’d better just say that you were extremely anxious to ensure that your instructions about not wasting production were obeyed. If you say you were checking on absolute solidarity and making sure that production couldn’t go on, some of the Tribunal might think that sounds like you were piling on the last straw if you could.’

  ‘Well, I was,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure you were. Just don’t say it in evidence, that’s all.’

  He snorted. ‘I thought you wanted the truth.’

  ‘I do. I want all the truth, but your pals are paying me to present your case as well as I can to the Tribunal. That means that I decide which bits of the truth make the story look best.’

  ‘Sounds bloody tricksy to me,’ he grunted. ‘I don’t mind telling them the truth and taking me chance.’

  I put down my ballpen. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘any worker’s chance before a Tribunal is a bad one. In presenting your case I’ve got to make them believe that you acted as any reasonable person would have done, that there was no emotion, no malice, no secret agenda, that you weren’t under orders from anywhere else, that you just did what you had to do, right? So take the advice your mates are paying for. Now get on telling me about the fight.’

  ‘It wasn’t a fight,’ he said, ‘not as such.’

  ‘He says you thumped him. You say you did, but it was in self-defence. It may have been only a little fight, but it was a fight.’

  ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Like I explained, Jimmy and me were keeping an eye on the shutdown of each section, and a couple of times we went into the works to see what was keeping them.’

  ‘What sort of security is there on the gate?’

  ‘Security? There’s George Barlow on the gate. He’s an ex-copper, been with BDS for years.’

  ‘And he didn’t stop you going in?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not the first couple of times. The first time we went in he asked us what we wanted, but he was alright when we told him. He just told us not to be too long about it.’

  ‘He didn’t think you were coming in to do any mischief — to guarantee that there was wastage, for example?’

  ‘No, of course not. We told him what we were about and he believed us. Then, the third time we went to the gate, about noon, George said we couldn’t come in. He said he’d had orders from the front office to keep us out.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘He said as Bailey — the Managing Director — had said we were coming in to threaten people who were unwilling to join the strike and he wasn’t having any more of it.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well, I told George that he knew quite well why we were coming in and he said he did, but he’d got his orders so we couldn’t come in. He was quite alright about it, he’s a reasonable bloke is George, but he’d been told and he wasn’t going to go against his orders.’

  ‘So, did you leave?’

  ‘Well, we were still talking to George when we heard someone shouting. We looked around and saw Bailey at the window of his office. That’s on the ground floor of the front building, about fifty yards from the gate. He had the window open and he was shouting and waving at us.’

  ‘What was he shouting?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t really know, we couldn’t hear properly. He sounded like he was raving and I suspect it was just a lot of abuse. We just ignored him and he slammed the window to. The next thing we knew he was shouting at us again, but nearer this time. He’d come out of the office and he was running across the tarmac towards the gate. He was waving his arms and yelling at us again.’

  ‘Was there anyone with him?’

  ‘Yes. There were a couple of blokes running after him. One was a bloke called Cheetham — he’s a foreman in one of the machine shops, a real dyed-in-the-wool anti-Union company man — and the other was Cantrell.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘The new security manager. When we took the Retaliator on there was a lot of scuttle about security and BDS brought in a contract firm to handle it. Cantrell’s their manager. He’s always sneaking around with Bailey. The lads call him “Bailey’s bloodhound”’

  ‘What happened when Bailey ran across?’

  ‘Well, Jimmy and I was still by the gate, talking to George. He said, “You’d best go, lads. Bailey’s got his arse on fire and there’s his bloodhound with him”, so we told him good day and we turned to go. Just then Bailey arrives at the gate and grabs me by the shoulder and swung me round.’

  ‘He grabbed hold of you?’

  ‘Yes. He took hold of my shoulder and pulled me round to face him.’

  ‘Where were you at that point? Were you inside or outside the gate?’

  ‘I don’t honestly recall. I suppose we was outside. We’d stood in the gateway talking to George Barlow and then moved off. I’d have thought we was outside when Bailey grabbed me, does it matter?’

  ‘It may matter as to whether you were trespassing when he laid his hand on you. Did he say anything when he grabbed you?’

  ‘Yes. He said something like, “Barlow, I’ve told you to keep this scum out of my works! I’m not having them sabotaging product and spreading their bloody strike!”‘

  ‘What sort of mood was he in?’

  Mulvaney laughed. ‘Mood?’ he said. ‘He was pissed!’

  ‘Pissed?’

  ‘That’s right. You could smell it on his breath. He was reeking of it. Once he’d bawled poor old George out, he started on me, telling me I was scum and a traitor. I remember he said that a sensible country would have locked me up for what I was doing.’

  ‘Did you make any reply?’

  He laughed again. ‘I’m not much for getting into shouting matches with drunks, Chris, but when he’d finished I simply said that George knew why Jimmy and I had been coming back to the works and that was exactly to avoid any unneccessary loss of product.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Then he snarled at me that I was a “smug, hypocritical bastard” and hit me in the face.’

  ‘And you hit him back?’

  He nodded. ‘I certainly did. I ain’t going to stand around and let any drunk take a poke at me, Chris, Works Manager or not.’

  ‘Had he injured you when he hit you? Had he bruised you? Broken the skin?’

  He shook his head. ‘He didn’t break the skin, but I had a damn good bruise for a few days after.’

  ‘Did you injure him?’

  ‘I hope so. I punched him in the mouth and I think a couple of his teeth went. He was bleeding at the mouth afterwards.’

  ‘And what was everyone else doing while you and Bailey were slugging it out? Did Jimmy get involved? Or Mohammed?’

  ‘Mohammed wasn’t even there. He was never with us that day. After he hit me no one did anything. George Barlow said something like, “You shouldn’t do that, Mr Bailey” and Jimmy shouted something, but Cantrell and Cheetham just stood there. Then, after I’d poked him back, George jumped in between us and Cantrell and Cheetham got hold of Bailey and held him back. George said to me, “Go on, Con. This is no good. Go away from here before it gets worse”.’

  ‘And you left?’

/>   ‘That’s right. We went back across to the cafe. George came over after a bit and said that Bailey was raving mad about me and was swearing he’d have me, and Cantrell was saying not to worry, he’d fix the pair of us.’

  ‘So, what it amounts to is that you and Jimmy Martin approached the gate and asked George to let you pass, as he had done previously. He told you that he’d been instructed not to let you in again, yes?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘If George had refused you admission the first time, would you have tried to go in?’

  ‘Of course not. I’d have asked him to write down in the Gate Book that we’d asked to come in to ensure that there was no sabotage of product and that we’d been refused. That’s what I was saying to him when Bailey arrived.’

  ‘So there should be a record of the scrap between you and Bailey in the Gate Book, yes?’

  ‘There is.’ He bent down and took a couple of photocopies out of his briefcase, passing them across the desk to me. They were copies of two pages of a lined ledger, with times entered in the left margin. They read:

  1130 hrs: Chairman of Shop Stewards Mulvaney and Steward Martin requested admission. Reason was to check that D Section was completing all plastics treatment before standing down.

  ADMITTED for 15 mins. GB.

  1142hrs: Mulvaney & Martin OUT.

  1143hrs: D Section shift OUT.

  1215 hrs: Phone from Mr Cantrell. Mr Bailey says that no Shop Stewards are to be admitted again for any reason. GB.

  1240 hrs: Mulvaney & Martin request admission to check stand down of E Section. Told them I could not admit them in the light of Mr Bailey’s order. Mr Bailey appeared at his office window and shouted something unintelligible. Mulvaney asked me to record my refusal in Book which I agreed. Mr Bailey arrived as Mulvaney and Martin were leaving, seized Mulvaney by shoulder and shouted abusive words at him. I tried to calm situation down. Mulvaney explained why he wanted admission. Mr Bailey uttered more abuse and struck Mulvaney in the face. Mulvaney hit him back. I intervened and Mr Cantrell and Foreman Cheetham restrained Mr Bailey. I advised Mulvaney and Martin to leave, then phoned for Nurse to attend Mr Bailey, who was bleeding at the mouth. Mr Cantrell repeated instruction that no Union officers were to be admitted till further notice. GB.