Flashpoint

by Michael Gilbert

  “It wouldn’t be the same members now. A lot of them will have retired. Some of them will be dead.”

  “The fact that a wrong is difficult or troublesome to put right,” I said, quoting from one of the more sanctimonious of the recent judgements in the Court of Appeal, “is no reason, at law, for not correcting it.”

  Laurence took off his glasses and chewed the end of the earpiece for a bit. Then he said, “You must have some idea what he wants.”

  “To be honest,” I said, “I believe that if Will Dylan got up in public and admitted that he was right, Jonas might feel that honour was satisfied.”

  “Will Dylan? How does he come into it?”

  “He was Secretary and Treasurer of ACAT at the time. It was his first Union job.”

  “I saw him on television last night. He seemed a reasonable sort of cove. Do you think he’d play?”

  “He comes from Yorkshire,” I said, “and Yorkshiremen aren’t noted for admitting they were wrong. Look at the troubles they’ve had with their cricket team.”

  I knew this would divert Laurence. It was ten minutes before we got back to the subject in hand. He said, “You’ll have to go down and see Killey. His office is in Wimbledon. It won’t take you long.”

  “What am I meant to do? Brainwash him? He’s even less likely than Dylan to admit that he was wrong. It’s his life’s work. His one-man crusade.”

  “He told me he’d got some new evidence.”

  “What does it matter if he has,” I said. “He’s flogging a dead horse. Not only a dead horse. One that’s died and been buried and forgotten by everyone except him.”

  “We’re here to serve the profession. He says he wants to talk to us. If you don’t go down and see him, he may come up here and see me. And I’m busier than you are.”

  I couldn’t contradict this. When he was going he said, “Didn’t I see something in the Watchman the other day about Dylan?”

  “They’re doing a profile on him. As a matter of fact, it’s my brother-in-law, Patrick Mauger, who’s doing it.”

  “When journalists do these profiles they follow the man round for weeks, don’t they, and chat him up. He must have got to know him quite well by now. Do you think he’d help? Slip in a word that we think this thing ought to be buried.”

  “It’s an idea,” I said.

  “Give him lunch some time. The Law Society will pay. Any reasonable amount,” he added hastily.

  “You really mean that?”

  Laurence looked at the file which was six inches thick and spilled across the whole of one side of my desk. He said, “If you can get this bloody man off our necks, it’ll be cheap at the price.”

  2

  I telephoned Jonas after lunch. He said, “Well, well, fancy hearing from you again. I thought now you’d joined the Establishment you wouldn’t have time to talk to a poor hardworking practitioner.”

  This was Jonas in his playful mood.

  I said that was exactly what I was planning to do. When could I come and see him?

  “You mean that you are prepared to journey all the way down to Wimbledon?”

  “You make it sound like the North Pole. Just name the time and I’ll be there.”

  After that, we had a rigmarole of going through his engagement diary for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, to demonstrate how busy he was.

  “You’re certainly keeping your nose to the grindstone,” I said. “What about today?”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “You mean that an important official of the Law Society is prepared to come down to Wimbledon to see me today?”

  I said patiently, “It looks as if it’s got to be today, or next week. It’s up to you.”

  “Then of course we’ll make it this afternoon.” He was doing me a great favour. “It’s No. 27b Coalporter Street. A few minutes from Wimbledon Station. You won’t find it in the Law List. We haven’t been here very long.”

  I got there at four o’clock. I thought at first that I must have mistaken the number, since the building which was marked as No. 27 appeared to belong entirely to Crompton and Maudling, Surveyors, Auctioneers and Estate Agents. Then I spotted the plate, outside a side door. ‘Jonas Killey, LL B Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. Second Floor.’

  Two flights of linoleum-covered stairs edged with metal ribbing led up to a small landing. A hand-printed notice invited me to Ring and Enter, which I did.

  There was a long thin outer office, just large enough to hold two wooden chairs and a table covered with back numbers of the Law Journal. On the walls were handbills announcing forthcoming sales by Messrs Crompton and Maudling, and there was a hatch on the far side with a frosted glass window to it, and a bell on the ledge in front. Beyond it, I could hear a typewriter being punished.

  I pressed the bell. The typing stopped, the hatch opened, and a middle-aged lady peered out. I told her who I was, and she said would I take a seat as Mr Killey was temporarily engaged with a client.

  None of the walls was very thick. I guessed that I was in what had once been a single large room, now partitioned into three or four. I could hear Jonas’ voice. It had an odd nasal twang to it. He seemed to be doing most of the talking. There was an occasional mumble and grumble from his client, like a double bass interrupting a long saxophone solo. Then a door beside the hatch opened and they came out.

  Jonas was saying, “Really, Mr Huxtable, you have to understand that there are rules and regulations which a solicitor is bound to observe.”

  Mr Huxtable looked as though he didn’t give a hoot for rules and regulations, but wanted something on the cheap. He departed grumbling. Jonas said, “We shall be about half an hour, Mrs Warburton. Tell Willoughby he’ll have to wait.” He held the door open for me, and I walked into the front part of the office which commanded a good view of a betting shop on the other side of Coalporter Street, and was crammed with the papers, files, books and paraphernalia which, in a larger office, might have been kept out of sight.

  Jonas waved me to the client’s chair, inspected me briefly and said, “Your hair’s going back a lot. If you don’t watch it, you’ll be bald before you’re forty.”

  “You’re not looking any younger yourself,” I said.

  “If you gentlemen who sit at ease in Chancery Lane had the faintest conception of the work involved in running a solicitor’s practice you would be a trifle more sympathetic to our problems.”

  “All right. I’m sympathetic. That’s why I’ve come to see you. I gather you want us to pursue your Trade Union case for you. I’ve been reading the papers, and I’m bound to say that I think you’re ploughing the sand.”

  “Do you now?”

  “I don’t think any court in the world would order a Trade Union which, incidentally, no longer exists, to hold a meeting, which took place six years ago, all over again because of a technicality which they failed to observe. If it’s any consolation to you, I think you were probably quite right. Under the 1964 Act the apprentice members should have been allowed to vote.”

  “I’m gratified that you grant me that much.”

  “But have you considered this point? The total number of apprentice members at that date was under fifty.”

  “Forty-seven to be precise.”

  “Right. So even if every one of them had voted against amalgamation, it would not have negatived the resolution.”

  “And you think that is the view the Court would take?”

  There was something here that I didn’t understand. Jonas was not only playing his cards close to his chest, he was playing them as though he had a couple of aces up his sleeve. I said, in a tone that I made intentionally provocative, “I think you’ll find that I’m right about that.”

  “Then of course, that settles it,” said Jonas. “When an official, occupying an important position in the Law Society, comes to a considered conclusion, there is no more to be said about the matter. Except, of course,” he added, “that it is absolut
ely immaterial. I am no longer concerned with what took place at that particular meeting. I am interested in certain events which took place – or possibly I should say, which did not take place – before it and after it. If you would care to cast an eye over these few papers–” He walked across to the safe, and extracted a folder. I was relieved to see that it was a slim one. “You will then be able to give me your considered opinion on a much more important topic. Should Mr William Dylan still be at liberty, or should he be serving a short, but salutary term of imprisonment?”

  The train back to Waterloo, moving against the commuter tide, was slow and almost empty. I was glad of the chance of undisturbed thought. I was trying to make some sense out of what Jonas had told me.

  When I got back to the Society Laurence Fairbrass had gone home. He always slipped away quickly when a Test Match was being played. He liked to see as much as he could of the last hour’s play on television. As soon as stumps had been drawn I rang him up. He was in a good mood. The England bowlers had been tying up the opposition’s tail.

  He said, “It sounds to me like just another silly-Killey. It’s impossible to tell without seeing the figures.”

  “He gave me copies of the accounts.”

  “I’ll look at them in the morning – I shouldn’t lose any sleep over it, if I were you.”

  “Actually, I don’t see why we should worry about it at all,” I said. “It’s nothing to do with us.”

  I said the same thing the next morning, while Laurence examined the photostats I had brought back with me.

  “What are this lot?”

  “They’re the accounts of ACAT for the six years before the amalgamation.”

  “ACAT was Dylan’s Union, wasn’t it?”

  “Dylan’s Union is a good description of it. It was a tiny affair. Never more than six hundred members. He was Secretary, Treasurer and Convenor of the shop stewards.”

  “I can’t read the signature on the certificate.”

  “Jonas says it was an old boy called Mason. He had been a Union member before he retired.”

  “A qualified accountant?”

  “Good heavens no. Nothing like that.”

  Laurence said, “Hmph,” and started to read. He spent half his working life studying accounts and could read a balance sheet as easily as you or I can read any ordinary fairy story.

  He said, “These seem perfectly straightforward. Member’s subscription three pound ten per annum. It doesn’t seem a lot.”

  “Actually it was slightly above the national average at the time.”

  Laurence looked at me over his glasses and said, “And how would you know that?”

  “I looked it up.”

  “I thought you said this was nothing to do with us.”

  I hadn’t any real answer to that. Laurence was doing sums with a pencil on his blotter. He said, “Income from subscriptions, say £2,150. Rents from property £950. What would those be?”

  “Some old buffer died and left them a block of shops and offices. The Union used one of the offices as its headquarters. That’s why you won’t find any figure for rent in the Income and Expenditure account.”

  “Outgoings – lighting, heating, rates, insurance, postage, secretarial and audit expenses, representation at congresses, shop stewards’ expenses – just under two thousand pounds a year. They didn’t waste money, did they?”

  “They seem to have run the whole thing on a shoestring,” I said. “They were regularly saving over a thousand a year. It all went into the Provident Fund. It was pretty healthy when they joined MGM. You can see the figure in the last account, £10,980.”

  “What are these accounts? I mean, who was accounting to whom?”

  “Dylan, as Treasurer, had to account to his own Trustees once a year for the money in his hands.”

  “Not to the Registrar?”

  “No. They weren’t a registered Union. They didn’t have to make an annual return.”

  “So these are nothing more than private accounts, circulated inside the family and audited by a member of the family.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And Killey says these accounts were fudged?”

  “Not a bit of it. They were a bit amateurish, but perfectly accurate as far as they went.”

  “Then what is he saying?”

  “To understand that you have to look at MGM’s annual return. The amalgamation took place in the autumn. The Instrument of Amalgamation was dated October 10th. On this occasion MGM had to split the annual return – you see?”

  “I can see that,” said Laurence. “They show their own assets separately. They had to do that, I expect, to reconcile them with the previous year’s return. And then they show what they took over from ACAT. I imagine in subsequent returns the assets were amalgamated?”

  “Right.”

  “I still don’t see the rabbit.”

  “It’s the Provident Fund. In ACAT’s June account it was shown as £10,980. In the handover it’s down to £10,450. The difference is shown as amalgamation expenses.”

  “Not unreasonable, surely? Solicitors and accountants involved. It could easily have cost £530.”

  “There are two points about that,” I said. “The first is that ACAT was quite regularly saving about a hundred pounds a month. Between June and October they ought to have been four hundred pounds richer, not five hundred poorer. The other is that ACAT didn’t have any amalgamation expenses.”

  “They didn’t?”

  “MGM paid them all. It was in the agreement. Not many people knew it, but Killey did, because he drafted the agreement himself.”

  “Didn’t someone question this at the time?”

  “It wouldn’t have been easy to spot,” I said. “You have to have three separate bits of information. The private June account of ACAT, which only the Trustees saw, the annual return of MGM, which went to the Registrar and a copy of the amalgamation agreement. I don’t know who saw that. Probably only the lawyers. It’s taken Jonas himself all this time to spot the nigger in the woodpile. All the time that he’s wasted beefing about irregularities in voting procedure he could have been making a much more serious allegation against Dylan. Peculation of Union funds.”

  Laurence wasn’t listening to me. He was reading the papers again, considering the figures, puzzling out their significance, weighing probability against improbability, truth against falsehood.

  In the end he said, “It’s plausible, but I don’t think it’ll hold water. There are too many unknown factors. For instance, ACAT had been losing members each year. Not many, but the numbers were dropping. Probably that’s one reason they were keen to join up with MGM. When the news of the amalgamation got about they could easily have lost more. During the four months between June and October they could have been running at a loss.”

  “There’s nothing to show it either way,” I agreed. “I suppose one could find out, if the records still existed.”

  “Another thing, you know very well that when one party undertakes to pay the costs of a transaction it never means every penny. It means direct and necessary costs. Dylan could have had a lot of running about to do. Days, and even weeks in Sheffield. MGM wouldn’t have paid for all that.”

  “Certainly,” I said, “and they could have given a farewell dinner to the outgoing Trustees. There are lots of possible explanations. All Killey is saying is that, on the face of the accounts, several hundred pounds have gone spare, and it’s up to Dylan to explain just where and how they went.”

  “Why Dylan in particular?”

  “Because he was Treasurer and because he had a sole signature on the current account. If any money was extracted, he was the person to do it. And there was something else. He was pretty hard up at the time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Killey says so. He says that at least one of the local solicitors had a writ out against him. It was a debt to a builder for over two hundred pounds. And it was paid off just after the amalgamation. An
d he thought Dylan had a number of other debts – all of which were paid off at the same time. It didn’t bother anyone. The impression was that when MGM took him on as Assistant Secretary they made him a loan, on fairly generous terms, to get his creditors off his neck.”

  “Which they could have done.”

  “Which,” I agreed, “they could have done.”

  “But you don’t believe it?”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” I said unhappily. “Jonas hates Will Dylan so much that anything he says about him is suspect. If we heard the other side of the story the whole accusation could easily evaporate into nothing.”

  “By Hot Air, out of Spite,” said Laurence. “It’s not a horse I’d back myself.”

  “I think he means business this time.”

  “He meant business last time.”

  “Last time there was nothing he could do about it. The only person who can go to the Court and complain that the rules have been broken is a member of the Union. And Jonas wasn’t.”

  “What about the Registrar?”

  “The Registrar has no power to ensure that a Union keeps its own rules.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Mr Cyril Grunfeld in Modern Trade Union Law.”

  “I can see we shall have to make you our expert on Trade Unions,” said Laurence sourly. He thought about it for a bit and savaged his spectacles some more. He got through a pair a year.

  “What you’re saying is that as this is a criminal offence he can open the bowling himself?”

  “All he has to do is to apply to a magistrate for a summons.”

  “And persuade him to grant it. He mightn’t find that so easy.”

  “Agreed. But just think of the publicity when he tries.”

  Laurence thought about it, and said, “This will have to go up to Tom.”

  Tom Buller sent for me later that morning. Tom is Secretary General of the Law Society, which means that he is the man who runs it. In theory the top brass is the Council, but they’re all working solicitors and they turn up when they can. He is there the whole time.

  It’s a tricky job. The Society is liable to be shot at from three different directions at once. By the public, who think that solicitors charge too much; by the politicians who like to get a few cheap votes by pandering to this view, particularly towards election time; and by the solicitors themselves who think the Society isn’t doing enough to stand up to the public and the politicians. Tom has been at the helm long enough to develop an inbuilt radar warning of rocks ahead.