Crowner and Justice

by Barrie Roberts

  1251 hrs. E Section Shift OUT.

  I looked up from reading it. ‘Looks good,’ I said, ‘but it doesn’t record your observation that Bailey was drunk and it doesn’t mention that Mohammed wasn’t there.’

  ‘Have a heart, Chris! It’s a bloody wonder George wrote down what he did. If he’d said that Bailey was drunk Cantrell would have had him taken out and shot. As to Mohammed, I suppose George didn’t mention him because he wasn’t there.’

  ‘I suppose that makes sense.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sheila and I invited John Parry to eat with us, so that we could break the bad news to him — that Sean McBride had been murdered and that there most probably was a connection with Charlie Nesbit’s death. He was not a happy man.

  He glowered at us over his glass. ‘I should have known,’ he said, ‘that when lawyers come bearing free meals there’s a twist in it somewhere. Have you run out of clients? Have you nothing better to do than potter about cluttering up my patch with murder cases? Couldn’t you take up stamp collecting or something?’

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ I said. ‘It was Sheila who put the pieces together.’

  He shook his head, sadly. ‘You used to be such a nice lass when you first came to England. Whatever happened to bring about this morbid instinct for finding murders?’

  ‘I fell into bad company,’ said Sheila brightly, pointing at me.

  ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that your time was gainfully employed in trying to screw the management of BDS on behalf of a bunch of lefty traitors. How’s it going?’

  ‘Well, it’s going. We start the hearing next Monday.’

  ‘And have you got it all wrapped up?’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s never all wrapped up when you go to a hearing, John. You know that. It’s like horse racing — favourites fall and outsiders come up at the last minute. You can do all the preparation you like, you think you’ve mastered all the facts, read all the law...’

  ‘Rehearsed all your witnesses,’ he said, sotto voce.

  ‘...worked out brilliant cross-examinations,’ I continued, ignoring his sarcasm, ‘and then someone says the wrong thing, or forgets to say the right thing, and the whole damn thing falls apart. And it’s worse in a Tribunal.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘Because they allow people to give hearsay evidence.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘In the criminal courts, witnesses are only allowed to testify about what they actually know — what they have personally seen, heard, experienced. They can’t say that they know something because someone else told them. That would be hearsay evidence. In the Tribunals, that kind of rubbish is accepted as evidence.’

  ‘So you’re not looking forward to Monday?’ John asked.

  ‘Not hardly, no. I shall walk in there on Monday morning and find that I’m up against some hugely famous QC that BDS are paying three grand a day to mau-mau my clients and their witnesses, and the Tribunal will smarm all over him because he’s so bloody famous, and he’ll have fifteen assistants with him armed with laptops and stacks of law books, and I shall be there with...’

  ‘...just me and my trusty notebook and pencil,’ piped up Sheila.

  ‘Look on the bright side, boyo,’ said Parry. ‘You’re always telling me about the old fossils who serve on the Tribunals and how some of them sleep half the time. Just get Sheila to pick the sleepiest and smile at him every time he opens his eyes — that’ll get you one vote out of three.’

  ‘Pommy chauvinist!’ she said, and punched him in the arm.

  ‘It wouldn’t work, anyway,’ I said. ‘The old sleepers on the Tribunals only do it so they can get paid for staying away from their wives. The last thing they want to think about is women.’

  John drained his glass. ‘Duw, Duw,’ he said. ‘I am going home now, before the prevailing gloom infects my otherwise happy and equable nature. Best of luck on Monday, boyo, or break a leg or whatever lawyers wish each other before a case.’

  What lawyers wish each other before a case is usually a spectacular failure so the business will come to them next time, but no matter. I suppose it was well meant.

  The Employment Tribunal sits in a faceless office block in the centre of Birmingham, holding its hearings in bland, featureless rooms, furnished with anonymous tables and cheap office chairs. Con, Jimmy and Mohammed had already found their way to the right room before Sheila and I arrived and were waiting for us in the corridor.

  ‘The BDS crew are already in there,’ Con said, ‘but I haven’t seen their lawyer.’

  ‘He’ll probably come sweeping in at the next to last moment,’ I said, ‘all black jacket and striped pants, with a retinue of clerks and pupils carrying his books, just to make an impact from the start.’

  I was wrong. Inside the hearing room a knot of what I took to be BDS people occupied the far end of the lawyers’ tables at the front and, as I walked in, one of them detached himself from the group and approached me with an outstretched hand.

  ‘Mr Tyroll?’ he said, smiling affably, ‘My name is Maddox. I’m the Deputy Head of Legal Services at BDS. I’m presenting the firm’s case.’

  Deputy Head? I thought. Not even the Head. No flashy QCs. No — they were so bloody confident that they hadn’t bothered. They didn’t think that this case was worth spending the money on, it was so obviously a winner for them.

  I smiled back at him and gripped his hand with what I hoped was a firm and confident clasp. ‘Good morning,’ I said, ‘I thought you might have brought in a hired gun.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, no. Management thinks I ought to do it, so here I am. You’ll have to excuse me if my Tribunal procedure is a bit rusty.’

  ‘As long as your evidence is too,’ I said, ‘we shan’t mind a bit.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ Sheila whispered as we spread our books and papers at the near end of the lawyers’ tables.

  ‘He’s a company solicitor from BDS. He’s presenting their case.’

  ‘Ha!’ she said, ‘No big QC’s. They’re afraid of wasting their money.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. They think they can win even if the under assistant teaboy runs the case.’

  ‘Stop talking yourself into a funk, Chris Tyroll. You’ve got an audience at the back and it looks like the blokes who are paying for all this.’

  I turned and looked at the three rows of uncomfortable chairs provided for the public. Most of the seats were full and Con, Jimmy and Mohammed were standing by them, chatting to the occupants. The blokes at BDS had paid their piper and now at least some of them had come to hear the tune.

  The press table at the back of the room was full, which surprised me. Normally the media ignores the administrative tribunals, and the most I recalled seeing was one local freelance, who usually reported the boss’ side of the evidence and ignored the rest. Today he shared the table with two colleagues, both of them strangers to me. Obviously the tabloids were going to get their mileage out of my clients.

  A thin-faced, drably dressed female clerk brought a bundle of papers to her desk in front of the Tribunal’s raised bench, sorted them and left through a back door. Moments later she was back, leading in the members of the Tribunal.

  The chairman I had seen before. A small, plump, fussy little man, who advertised his legal status, even in this supposedly informal hearing, by wearing the barrister’s uniform of black jacket and striped trousers. On his left was a large, broadfaced man, with swept back silver hair, a light tan and an expensive suit. Him I took to be the representative of a management association. The last member to sit was a thin, red-faced man with tufty white hair and watery eyes, apparently the trade union member of the trio.

  ‘Then the Crowner he come and the justice too, with a hue and a cry and a hullabaloo,’ Sheila muttered, in a bad imitation Berkshire accent.

  The clerk looked at Sheila and me severely, then made a short announcement about the procedure to be followed, and the show was u
nder way.

  Maddox called his first witness, Bailey the Managing Director. I was pleased to note that he was larger than Con Mulvaney. I had feared that he might be some little old man that only a maniac would punch, but he was over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, though running to fat. Under thick black hair, his wide pale face showed a thin, hard mouth and two equally hard black eyes.

  Maddox lead his witness through his name and status, together with an outline of his history with BDS, which Bailey had joined as a teenager. Then he went off on what I thought to be a strange tack.

  ‘You’ve told us about yourself,’ he said, ‘and your relationship with BDS. Could you tell us a little about the company itself? It’s very old, I believe?’

  ‘Fairly old, yes,’ said Bailey. ‘It was formed in the 1840s as a simple partnership called Bailey and Wadsworth. The Bailey in question was a direct ancestor of mine.’

  That drew an approving nod from the chairman, as though being descended from a Victorian entrepreneur automatically made Bailey a better witness.

  ‘What did that partnership produce, Mr Bailey?’

  ‘It was simply a small supplier of specialist ammunition, for sporting purposes, shotgun shells and so on, but it diversified and began to produce military ammunition.’

  ‘I believe it changed its name about then.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. It became the Staffordshire Ammunition Company, and continued to trade under that name into this century.’

  ‘And it increased in size, quite considerably I think?’

  ‘That’s right. With Government contracts it opened several factories and diversified into the production of larger shells, so that by the time of the South African war it was a major supplier of artillery shells.’

  ‘That’s the Boer War? About a century ago?’

  Before Bailey could answer I rose. Maddox paused and looked at me with surprise. The chairman frowned. ‘Mr Tyroll?’ he said.

  ‘Sir, I intervene merely to enquire if there is a purpose in this history of BDS. If Mr Maddox proposes to take us through every development in the armaments industry over the past century we shall be here for a very long time.’

  The chairman looked enquiringly at Maddox. ‘I can assure Mr Tyroll that I have no such intention, Mr Chairman. I was merely trying to give the Tribunal a little background on the nature of the company.’

  The chairman looked at me again. ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘we are not concerned with the history or nature of BDS. We are concerned with its present industrial relations and with the particular events surrounding last spring’s strike and the dismissals of my clients. When I call my clients, I shall not be asking them for their entire life histories, nor for the history of their Union, merely for their recollection of the events around which this hearing revolves.’

  The chairman pursed his small mouth. ‘Nevertheless, Mr Tyroll,’ he said, ‘I feel it may help us to have a little background to the specific events which we must consider and I propose to allow Mr Maddox to continue.’

  His colleague on the left nodded. The third member was already looking dozy. I didn’t blame him. Still, I’d tested the water and confirmed that Maddox was going to be given latitude. I doubted that I would meet the same consideration. Maddox continued:

  ‘As the Staffordshire Ammunition Company, the firm expanded even further during the Great War, isn’t that the case?’

  ‘Very much so. We supplied not only the British forces but also Empire and Allied armies and navies.’

  I recalled briefly the British-made shells supplied to Russia in that war, which had cases of foil-covered cardboard instead of brass, because much of the purchasing funds had gone into back pockets, and I wondered if one of the illustrious Baileys had taken his ill-gotten share.

  The mention of the Empire had won another approving nod from the chairman, and a wave to Maddox to carry on.

  ‘The period between the two World Wars was, as we all know, a difficult time economically, but perhaps you can tell us a little about how your company fared, Mr Bailey?’

  ‘Certainly. Consolidation was necessary, and a number of our wartime factories closed, but the firm became a public company as Stamco Limited, under which name we continued to trade until the 1950s.’

  ‘And during the Second World War the company was, again, a major supplier of weaponry to British and Allied forces?’

  Bailey nodded. ‘Of course. It was after the War that we were invited by the Government to involve ourselves in the completely new field of missile development — rocketry. The first of what has been a long line of missiles developed by the company was the Firedrake in 1955.’

  And some time after that, the firm changed its name, I think?’

  ‘Yes. In 1965 we amalgamated with British Control Systems and became British Defence Systems — BDS.’

  And BDS is, at present, involved in the production of a major new weapon known as the Retaliator. Now, Mr Bailey I am sure that the Official Secrets Act prevents you from telling us anything about the nature of Retaliator, but can you give the Tribunal some idea of its importance in the defence of this country?’

  ‘Retaliator, as its name implies, will give Britain the opportunity to respond so fast to any attack, that an enemy may well find his positions destroyed before his own weapons have reached us.’

  Maddox smiled and nodded. Picking up a news cutting he said, ‘So the Daily Telegraph was not exaggerating when it said that “Retaliator will safeguard our shores in a way that has never before been possible”?’

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ said Bailey with an air of satisfaction, and earned himself another approving nod, not just from the chairman but from his left seated colleague as well.

  So, we had BDS established as the defenders of Britain for more than a century and never more so than now. The next move was, I thought, obvious, and I was right.

  ‘Now, Mr Bailey,’ Maddox went on, ‘You heard Mr Tyroll object to my little exploration of the history of BDS, and I am unwilling to give him cause to object again, or’ — with a servile smirk to the chairman — ‘to try the Tribunal’s patience much further. Perhaps you would give us a brief summary of the state of labour relations in BDS and its predecessor firms during its long history.’

  Bailey drew back in his seat, clasping his hands on the table in front of him and clearing his throat. He was evidently about to make an important (and probably rehearsed) announcement.

  ‘As I understand it,’ he said. ‘The original firm were regarded as generous employers by the standard of Victorian England, and, in the twentieth century, policies to benefit the firm’s workers were constantly reviewed and extended. As a result, until recent years, labour relations at BDS were not a problem. The workforce were always well-treated and recognised the national importance of the work we were doing.’

  ‘Do you know, from memory, Mr Bailey, when BDS was first unionised?’

  ‘I can only guess,’ he replied. ‘I believe that it was during or after the First World War.’

  And there has always been union representation in the firm’s works’ since then?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Now, the three Applicants in the present matter, although employed in three different sections of the Belston works, are all, in fact, members of the same trade union, the Munitions Industry Union. Can you explain that, Mr Bailey?’

  ‘Of course. By the time of the amalgamation in 1968 we recognised several different unions in our plants. Some people here may recall the period of so-called ‘demarcation disputes — ‘ arguments between management and a number of unions in various trades as to which operatives should carry out which task. We did not have that in BDS. It is unnecessarily divisive and highly inefficient. For that reason we moved to recognition of one union only — one that specifically represents workers in the armaments industry.’

  ‘I see,’ said Maddox, and nodded. ‘You said, a moment or two ago, that “until recent years” labour relations had no
t been a problem at BDS. Can you tell us how things changed?’

  Bailey looked thoughtful, then began. ‘Commencing a few years ago, we were plagued by a series of instant strikes — wildcat strikes, I believe you would call them.’

  ‘And was the Union involved in this?’

  ‘Oh no, no, not at all. The Union at the time was in complete agreement with BDS that the economic situation required us to keep a tight ship and steer cautiously. The strikes I am talking about were instant action by disaffected workers — immediate walkouts from the shop floor.’

  Now, I could have stopped Maddox and his witness here, because none of this had anything to do with Mulvaney or Martin or the strike that Mulvaney called. Maddox was setting it up as prejudicial background before moving on to Mulvaney’s strike. As it was, it occurred to me to let it run on, because I believed I could make ammunition (to coin a phrase) out of it later.

  ‘Do you recall how many of these incidents there were, Mr Bailey?’

  At least twenty, maybe more. They were extremely disruptive. They dislocated our production schedules and caused us problems with customers, they caused loss of product...’

  ‘In what way did they cause loss of product?’

  ‘Because they would walk out in an instant, leaving whatever process they were working on unfinished. Chemical treatments that could not be stopped were left incomplete, test runnings that needed to be minutely observed and recorded were left running with no observers, and so on.’

  Maddox nodded. ‘Virtually a form of industrial sabotage, then?’

  I waited three seconds for the chairman to rein him in, knew that it wasn’t going to happen and stood up.

  ‘Mr Chairman, we are here to deal with three allegations — that one of my clients disobeyed a legitimate order of Mr Bailey’s, that two of them promoted an illegal strike and that all of them assaulted Mr Bailey. Nowhere have I seen it alleged that any of them were engaged in industrial sabotage, least of all in their letters of dismissal.’