Dunster

by John Mortimer

  ‘Insects?’

  ‘Didn’t you know? It seems they really upset her. That’s why she wouldn’t come out for a walk with you. “Awful buzzing things, hurling themselves at your face the whole time. I think you and I can do without that, can’t we, Lucy?” That’s what she said. All those stories about the things they got up to out watching for firebombs on the roof of Pinewood Studios and she’s scared to death of horseflies!’

  After dinner Cris sat down at the piano under the big stained-glass window in which a pre-Raphaelite girl stood palely loitering while a young knight knelt at her feet. The girl was dark and not red-headed, Jane Morris and not Elizabeth Siddal, and I felt no pang of regret on that untroubled weekend.

  He was playing I don’t know what – Schubert, Chopin, something he knew by heart and could do without the music, with an apologetic but insistent melody. Suddenly he struck a different chord, grinned and pounded the Steinway as though it were a pub piano. The tune was familiar; my father used to sing it in the car on family outings, and then, in a clear, unexpectedly young voice. Angie began to sing as I had never heard her sing before:

  There’ll be bluebirds over

  The white cliffs of Dover

  Tomorrow when the world is free.

  She got up and stood leaning against the piano and gave us a performance at the end of which we clapped. Then her husband called out, ‘Come along, everyone. Sing along with Angie.’ So we took our drinks and stood by the piano too and did our best to join in songs I only half knew and Lucy didn’t know at all. I realized exactly where we were, in a London pub during the war, with Cris on leave and Angie back from a hard day on the set. We went through all the tunes of the time: ‘Run. Rabbit’. ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, ‘Somewhere in France with You’, ‘You are My Sunshine’. ‘Lili Marlene’ and ‘Wish me Luck as You Wave me Goodbye’, which Angie ended with a high operatic trill.

  ‘Well done,’ Cris told her. ‘Almost as good as Gracie Fields!’ At which Lucy delighted him by saying, ‘Who’s Gracie Fields?’ He played another great crashing chord and went into ‘Yesterday’, to the strains of which, I suppose. Lucy might just about have been born.

  ‘One thing I’m sure about,’ she said as I turned out our bedside light, ‘he couldn’t possibly have done what they say he did.’

  ‘I know.’ I said. ‘The idea’s ridiculous. So we’re going to win, aren’t we?’

  ‘Of course.’ She gave me her considered legal opinion. But at that time neither of us knew of the existence of a Mr Derek Midgeley, who was, during the days we had been singing about, a trooper in the Special Air Services regiment.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I had never been in a court of law before Cris’s trial opened, not even to contest a parking ticket, and I don’t know if you ever have. Although no one escapes a visit to the doctor or the dentist, or a punishment session with some such beefy physio as Pam from the Mummers, not everyone has seen the Great British Legal System at work. I must say it came as something of an eye-opener to me.

  I expected a solemn, ecclesiastical atmosphere, a silence in which the slightest cough would be greeted as blasphemy and everyone would sit in reverent awe as the judge and the barristers held forth. In fact Queen’s Bench Court Number Five, in the Law Courts in the Strand, was packed to bursting point by a constantly changing body of spectators, and it reminded me of nothing more awe-inspiring than a section of Victoria Station during the rush hour. The wigged official seated under the judge was making telephone calls; there was constant whispering, coming and going and the passing of notes; Justin Glover’s articled clerk didn’t bother to disguise the fact that he was reading a novel; Marcus Beazeley, our junior counsel, was finishing off The Times crossword; and Mr Justice Sopwith, a small, impatient man, was furiously polishing his glasses and looked like a frustrated commuter waiting for his train. Most of his interjections were made in the tone of someone who is dictating a letter of complaint to the management. Robbie Skeffington, our learned leader, always referred to the judge as Hugo Sopwith, reassuring us by making it clear that they had known each other for years and were probably at school together.

  The jury sat like passengers resigned to the fact that they wouldn’t get home that night, or indeed for a considerable time to come. Only one gaunt young man, wearing a grey cotton jacket, a thin leather tie and carrying the Guardian, had the look of a Dunster supporter. Otherwise they seemed a middle-of-the-road lot, though none of them looked quite old enough to have fought in the war.

  Robbie, on his feet and opening our case, had none of that cool authority that might have been expected from the next chairman of the Bar Council. He stood, a small, hunched figure, whose gown was constantly slipping off his shoulders, pausing to yank it back, or to blow his nose, or slide up his wig and scratch his forehead, or lift his glasses to hold a document as close as possible to his unaided eyes. His opening speech was like a knock-up before a tennis match. He only really got going when the scoring started and the cross-examinations and the arguments began. His opponent Ken Prinsep, not being a QC, sat in a bench behind Robbie. He was making notes industriously throughout the opening speech and he seemed the only one of the lawyers to be taking the case entirely seriously. He was tall, broad-shouldered and with regular, handsome features which made him look more like a comic-strip hero, Superman with glasses, than a civil rights lawyer. He spoke with a barely detectable Canadian accent, something the judge found irritating; but then Ken, who would rush in where even Robbie might fear to tread, irritated Mr Justice Sopwith for most of the trial.

  ‘This Richard Dunster, members of the jury’ – towards the end of his speech Robbie enlivened the knock-up with a foretaste of some of his meaner strokes, skimming low over the net – ‘this small-time scribbler, journalist and television scriptwriter, of whom you may never have heard, took it into his head to publish a sensational story for fame and money. It was money he took from the very man whose reputation he was to slur. Not even Judas, members of the jury, stooped to collect his thirty pieces of silver from the Master he betrayed.’ Looking down the long bench in front of the barristers I could see Dunster in profile at the far end. Beth was next to him, then came his solicitor, then Cris, then Justin Glover and then me, at the furthest extreme from my one-time school friend and enemy. His lock of hair was flopping over his forehead, the collar of his seldom-worn dark suit was turned up at the back, his tie was loose and exposed his shirt button, but on his face was the look of triumphant joy which I had seen when some despised master finally lost his temper with him in class. To be compared with Judas by Robbie Skeffington, QC was a huge compliment to Dunster. He took it, I’m sure, as a sign of the weakness of our case. Cris, who might have been thought to have come out best in the Skeffington comparison, seemed, by contrast, miserably embarrassed.

  ‘No doubt the defendant Dunster thought he’d further his career by publishing these lies. Perhaps he’d be seen, in his unappealing trade, as a fearless journalist. He might have tried to enhance his reputation by destroying someone else’s. Members of the jury, it will be for you to decide, at the end of this extremely painful trial,’ said Robbie, who looked likely to enjoy every minute of it, ‘whose reputation has survived intact and whose lies in tatters. The life or death of a great public figure, members of the jury, that is the issue you have to try. I will now, with the assistance of my learned friend, call our evidence. The first witness will be Sir Crispin Bellhanger.’

  Cris stood in the witness-box, tall and unworried, and took the oath in a voice that was quiet enough to make everyone in court stop whispering and listen. He added the first touch of dignity to the proceedings and the jury looked more confident once he had arrived on the scene. Yes, he was Crispin Henry Bellhanger. He had fought in the last war and had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross and was three times mentioned in dispatches. He had served during the North Africa campaign in the yeomanry and then in
the Special Air Services regiment. He had been parachuted into Italy in the autumn of 1943. Robbie’s manner in eliciting this evidence was that of an old family retainer who smiled and gave a little bow of delight every time his master came out with some impressive item in his history. I knew that this was annoying Cris almost beyond endurance but he managed to control his irritation.

  He told the story I knew by heart and he told it well. He blamed no one openly, not the villagers who had betrayed our prisoners, nor even the German captain who may have been under the intolerable pressure of battle fatigue. He seemed anxious to remove the unfortunate impression of a Judas Dunster. Perhaps the defendant was an inexperienced scriptwriter who had been misled by some wild rumour, or had not entirely understood a story he had been told. At this, Dunster looked, for the first time, wounded. Cris thought he might, himself, have been partly responsible by commissioning a series designed to show that everyone might be capable of atrocities in time of war. He had, of course, been hurt by the circulation of the libel among his colleagues on the Board, and this had made his position as chairman difficult. He had no doubt, however, that he would survive; after all he had survived the battles in the desert and the stealthy operations behind the German lines in the mountains of central Italy. ‘Thank you very much, Sir Crispin.’ The old retainer bowed and added, as though apologizing for the unpleasant and ill-mannered visitor who would be the next to arrive, ‘Just wait there a moment, would you? If you’d be so good.’ Then Robbie sat down and fell to cleaning his nails with the sharpened point of a pencil, and Justin Glover on ray right whispered, ‘My God, if all witnesses were as good as that we’d win every case. No doubt about it.’

  ‘Sir Bellhanger ...I don’t think Ken Prinsep meant to say it. It may well have been a slip of the tongue, brought about by the strain of having to launch an attack on an almost perfect performer in a court crammed full of journalists and expectant lawyers. He was probably over-eager, overworked and overprepared, but the judge’s rebuke rose to a high pitch of intolerance, after he had ostentatiously checked the name of the offending barrister on the list in front of him.

  ‘Mr Prinsep ...’

  ‘My Lord?’

  ‘You will be so good as to use his proper style and title when addressing this witness.’

  ‘I’m sorry, my Lord.’

  ‘I am prepared to make some allowance for your ignorance in these matters. I understand you did not receive your education in this country.’

  ‘I received a good deal of it here, my Lord.’

  ‘Call him Sir Crispin Bellhanger,’ Robbie hissed audibly. He grinned like a merciless old tom-cat offering a momentary respite to a bird of whom he fully intends to make a good meal later.

  ‘Sir Crispin’ – Ken turned, his intensity undiminished – ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. Anyway, not quite so early in my cross-examination.’

  ‘I’m not offended in the least. I’ve always felt the title a little ridiculous. Anyway, most people call me Cris.’

  ‘We will keep to the correct style and title, please, in my court.’ The judge looked startled and somewhat betrayed. ‘Now let’s get on with it, Mr Prinsep. Do you have some questions for this witness?’

  ‘Just a few, my Lord.’ Ken shuffled his notes, page after page, I imagined, of carefully prepared interrogation, the work of several all-night sittings. ‘You know the name of the German captain in the Pomeriggio area at the time of the massacre?’

  ‘I do. He was a Captain Kreutzer.’

  ‘You were able to find that out?’

  ‘I thought it might be helpful to the court to do so.’

  ‘Not helpful to your case?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘You see, I’m going to suggest to you that you have all sorts of information made available to you, as a member of the establishment.’

  ‘My Lord. Perhaps my learned friend can help me.’ Robbie was on his feet behind me, clearly not in need of any help at all. ‘What exactly is it that my client is alleged to be a member of?’

  ‘I am not at all clear, Mr Skeffington.’ The judge managed a faint smile in our direction which changed to a pained frown as he turned his attention to Ken Prinsep. ‘What do you say the witness belongs to?’

  ‘The establishment, my Lord.’

  ‘But which establishment do you mean? You must make yourself clear, you know. You might be talking about anything from a gentleman’s club in St James’s to ordinary licensed premises.’

  Justin Glover and Marcus Beazeley led the sycophantic laughter. Robbie, who had subsided into his seat, shook with silent mirth. Some members of the jury smiled, others looked solemnly puzzled.

  ‘I am suggesting, my Lord,’ Ken Prinsep replied with a self-control I couldn’t help admiring, ‘that this witness moves in the corridors of power. He has many friends and supporters in government departments, including the Ministry of Defence. So it’s easy for him to find out all the facts about Pomeriggio.’

  ‘Perhaps my learned friend could help me just once again.’ Robbie was on his feet and hitching up his gown. ‘Did his client not know the name of the German captain?’

  This led to a whispered conversation between Ken Prinsep and Dunster, which caused the judge to close his eyes and lean back as though suffering from terminal boredom. At last he could bear it no longer and asked, ‘Well, Mr Prinsep. What’s the answer?’

  A few more whispers and Ken straightened up to say, ‘My Lord. My client is a very experienced journalist.’

  ‘What on earth’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘He has been able to find out the name of the German officer, my Lord.’

  Robbie stared triumphantly at the jury and the judge said, ‘Very well, then. Your client and the witness are in the same sort of establishment, whatever that may be. Now, may we please move to some issue of importance in this case.’

  I looked at Dunster then: his jaw was clenched, his pale face set and, at having been called a member of the establishment which included Cris, he looked more deeply wounded than he did at any other stage of the trial.

  It was, I thought, to Ken Prinsep’s credit that he recovered from a disastrous opening and put his case carefully and energetically to Cris. The witness was patient, courteous, didn’t either seek the help the judge was prepared to give him or seem grateful for it, and kept to the account he had always given me. He was nowhere near Pomeriggio on the night when the church was blown up. He and three other men destroyed a German store in an old farm-building at least six kilometres away on the road to Monte di Speranza.

  ‘Did you get back some time after midnight?’ Ken Prinsep asked; he was clearly getting towards the high point of his case, the part of the evidence on which Dunster’s hopes were centred, and he found it hard to keep a note of excitement out of his voice.

  ‘I think it was quite late, yes. I can’t remember the exact time.’

  ‘You joined the rest of the section?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They were camped in the caves up above Pomeriggio?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did you return in the company of Sergeant Blakcr, Maddocks, the demolition expert, and Lance Corporal Sweeting?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Did you have an Italian guide with you?’

  ‘No. The Italian partisans had given us the information about the dump and we found our own way there. It was relatively easy.’

  ‘When you got to the caves, did you find Lieutenant Blair awake?’

  ‘He was awake, yes.’

  ‘Were there sentries posted to guard the position?’

  ‘There would have been, naturally.’

  ‘Did your companions, that is to say Sergeant Blaker, Maddocks and Sweeting, go off to another cave to sleep?’ ‘So far as I can recollect, they did.’

  ‘Did you then have a conversation with Lieutenant Blair?’

  ‘I can remember that. Yes.’

  ‘Sir Crispin. Before you spoke to Li
eutenant Blair, did you know that the church had been blown up in Pomeriggio?’

  The official under the judge stopped telephoning, the whispers ceased; Robbie looked deliberately unconcerned, like a gambler with a high stake at risk waiting for the roulette wheel to stop spinning; and Dunster, a few yards below the witness-box, stared intensely up at Cris, as though willing him to give the answer he wanted. There was a pause, only slightly longer than usual, and Cris said, ‘No. I knew nothing about it until Lieutenant Blair told me. Apparently he’d heard about it from a partisan scout who’d come up from near the town.’

  ‘Just a moment.’ The judge was writing laboriously and when he’d finished Ken also summoned up all his powers of suggestion to ask what was by then a pretty hopeless question. ‘I have to put it to you, Sir Crispin, that you knew perfectly well who’d blown up the church and you told Lieutenant Blair that you and your party had done it.’

  ‘No.’ Cris was smiling now, perfectly at his ease. ‘There is absolutely no truth in that suggestion.’

  ‘Absolutely no truth ...’ The judge was writing with evident satisfaction.

  ‘Do you remember if Trooper Midgeley was one of the sentries on duty outside the cave that night?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t remember that.’

  ‘Really, Mr Prinsep.’ The judge was clearly bored as a spectator and came trotting briskly on to the field of play. ‘We’re talking about a night almost half a century ago. A no doubt confused and dangerous night in wartime. Is Sir Crispin really to be expected to remember the name of every soldier and exactly where he was posted?’

  ‘Then perhaps this will remind him.’ Ken Prinsep spoke like an excited conjuror about to astonish us all. ‘May Mr Derek Midgeley come into court?’

  ‘You have no objection to this, Mr Skeffington?’ the judge asked hopefully.

  ‘No, my Lord.’ Robbie was careful to look unconcerned by any trick his opponent might be capable of playing. ‘I have no idea what this is all about. But if my learned friend thinks that it might possibly help his case, then I have no objection.’ He shrugged his gown back on to his shoulders and sat.