For a few seconds I just sat there and listened, I had no idea where their conversation was going. If they suddenly let off Mrs Vera Watson, then they’d have to let off every other driver as well, and in any event, Mrs Watson had pleaded guilty.
At this point, the door opened and in walked a florid-looking gentleman wearing a heavy tweed coat.
The Colonel had arrived.
‘Ah, Colonel,’ said the Chair, ‘you’ll know the Thetford Bypass.’
‘Indeed I do,’ replied the Colonel, ‘it’s a terrible stretch of road, got one of those damn awful speed cameras on it.’
I now felt as though events were taking on a life of their own. I had spent three years in university and one year at Bar School studying law, and I had no idea whatsoever what role a Colonel could play in events, or indeed whether he was lawfully allowed to play any part at all. Nor was I entirely satisfied that the Magistrates Court had the power to pardon people who had been ‘unluckily’ caught speeding. And to top matters off, I was also now burning hot from the open fire that was rampaging a few feet behind me, threatening to singe the backside of my best Marks and Spencer suit.
I looked to the Clerk for guidance but he seemed happy to let them all get on with it.
Sweaty and confused, I decided to say something.
‘Your Worships,’ I ventured gingerly, ‘I think that the law about speeding is what we call strict liability – I mean, being a bit unlucky isn’t a defence, you’ve either driven over the speed limit or you haven’t.’
The Clerk turned away from me and muttered something to the bench as the Colonel stared at me with his eyes screwed up and his front teeth bared.
‘Yes, very well, Mr Winnock,’ he said reluctantly, ‘we’ll accept that. Please carry on.’
I did carry on, Mrs Vera Watson was fined £60 and given three points to put on her licence – she will never know how close she came to being let off.
By mid-afternoon the open fire had rendered the courtroom a furnace. I was sweating profusely and my face had turned a dark shade of red, whilst the Colonel and at least one of the Magistrates were snoozing happily as I read out the facts of one crime after another.
We’d moved away from the road traffic offences and were on to a series of plea hearings. I, as the prosecutor, opened the facts of various incidents of petty crime, and Mr Mulhearn, who represented every single defendant, told the Magistrates Court what they should do. Fair play to him, he was right on every single occasion. He knew about the people, he knew about the circumstances and he knew what the appropriate sentence should be.
Then we came to a case involving a young backpacker, called Jamie Smith, who had stolen a gemstone from a local girl he had gone home with after a night in the Horse and Feathers Pub. He’d been caught at the bus stop the next morning with the gemstone in his rucksack, trying to get a coach to Norwich.
He appeared before the court a rather contrite and pathetic young man who didn’t seem able to explain why he’d stolen the stone. Mr Mulhearn clearly had little sympathy for him and rushed his mitigation.
The Chair of the bench looked at me. ‘How much was the stone worth, Mr Winnock?’ he asked, which, in fact, was a very fair question, but one to which I didn’t know the answer.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, as I started to leaf through my papers, looking for something that would tell me.
‘Well, shouldn’t we know?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I stuttered, as sweat gathered at the small of my back and I started to worry that my nylon suit trousers were about to go up in flames at any moment. ‘Yes, ah, here we are. The stone is described as being a small lump of green Beryl. I’m afraid that it doesn’t say the value.’
‘Oh,’ said the Chair, then he looked to the two somnolent Justices of the Peace either side of him and muttered sotto voce, ‘Do either of you know the price of Beryl?’
At this point, the Colonel roused himself. ‘Beryl, you say?’
‘Yes,’ we all said.
‘Depends on the quality. If it was one carat then just over a hundred pounds, if it was 30 carats, then closer to a hundred and eighty.’
No one questioned the Colonel, no one questioned his right to give expert evidence. I certainly didn’t and nor did Mr Mulhearn.
‘What do you have to say?’ said the Chair to Jamie Smith.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why I did it, I just saw it there and took it. I didn’t know it was worth that much.’
The Chair sentenced him to do fifty hours community service. ‘If you come to our towns and steal, you’ll do some work as punishment,’ he said, and we all nodded. It seemed like a proper punishment.
I left that day, hot and sticky from the sweat that had dried on my shirt, and got into my car to drive back down south.
I never went back to that court, they’ve closed it down now. Like many of the other small town courts and small town firms of solicitors, the perceived wisdom is that they are too expensive to be trusted with the job of ensuring justice. But with each one that disappears, justice takes a step further into the shadows. You see, justice shouldn’t be about finance or economics, and in some respects it’s not even about the law. It’s about the interaction of people, and the communities that they live in and the way they respond to each other and live side by side. If you remove that link between the law and the people, then you make justice a little bit more remote.
Now everything is heard at a massive Law Centre in Ipswich, where no doubt the Colonel isn’t even allowed through the door. Are the people better served? Is justice done in a better way? I doubt it. What do you think?
The fall of Kenny McCloud
I was eating an apple when I picked up the slim bundle of papers from my pigeonhole. I looked, without thinking too much, at the top sheet, and could see that it was a letter from my instructing solicitors in McCloud’s case. It said simply, ‘Counsel will note the content of the Notice of Additional Evidence sent to us by the Crown!’
The exclamation mark should have told me that something significant was contained in the new evidence. Solicitors don’t usually use exclamation marks.
I opened it and started to read as I made my way up to my room. It was a statement from a DC Simons. My first thought was that it was what we call continuity evidence – when a police officer makes a bland and usually uncontroversial statement saying that he oversaw the placing of tapes or evidence in a safe place, so that no one can suggest that something has been tampered with – but this statement was much, much more significant. In the case of Kenny McCloud, it was absolute dynamite.
I telephoned my solicitor straight away and asked them to arrange a conference with McCloud for the next day. Then I put my head on my desk and tried to chase away the images that were forming in my head of the vile timber yard and the most evil man I had ever met whipping his two little daughters with a dog chain, before tying them up and raping them.
The next day, I met Harry Ashton outside Pentonville for the second time. He looked grim-faced at me. ‘You’ve seen the new evidence then?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Not great for Kenny is it?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘nor his daughters.’
‘No,’ said Harry, and his already grim face became even grimmer.
We entered Pentonville and made our way through the security and the endless heavy locked doors until we reached the room where Kenny McCloud sat waiting for us.
He seemed more alert than last time, but in every other respect was the same crumbling, decaying human wreck as before.
‘Good morning, Kenny,’ I said, deliberately using his Christian name. He nodded in response, then exchanged a look with Harry Ashton. He knew that he might be able to kid me, but he wouldn’t get anything past the old copper.
I sat down opposite him and looked him firmly in the eye, and took a breath. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘Mr McCloud, the last time we met you told me that you were innocent of these allegations.’
‘Aye,’ he said, his head trembling just a little as he fixed his eyes on mine.
‘And I respect that,’ I continued, ‘I respect your right to have a trial. And if we have a trial in this matter, then I can assure you that I’ll do everything I can to put your case before the jury in the best way I can.’
‘If,’ he said, his eyes narrowing as he stared at me, ‘you said if we have a trial.’
I nodded slowly at him, then pushed the Notice of Additional Evidence across the table towards him.
‘We received this yesterday,’ I said, ‘it’s a new statement from the leading Detective in this case.’
He glanced down at it, then back at me.
‘Would you like me to read it out to you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you can just tell me what it says.’
I began, ‘The Detective has acquired your medical records and the medical records of your daughters going back to the 1970s.’
His eyes narrowed further as he considered this.
‘It appears that in 1976, you suffered from genital warts and also venereal disease, syphilis.’
He nodded.
‘Is that true?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve been through the records and it is clear that someone with your name, date of birth and address, was treated for both of these conditions from May 1976.’
He gritted his teeth and began breathing heavily out through his nose.
‘It also appears that both your daughters were also treated for genital warts and syphilis at the same time.’
I watched now as his eyes screwed shut, his breathing becoming heavier. I glanced at Harry Ashton, who sat with his mouth slightly open staring at the sight of Kenny McCloud drowning under the weight of what he was being presented with.
‘Look,’ I continued as gently as I could, more gently than the situation deserved, more gently than this man who had poisoned his own daughters with his inhuman lust deserved.
‘You do realise what this means don’t you?’
Without opening his eyes, without altering his heavy bull-like breathing, he nodded.
‘It means that it is going to be almost impossible for you to win your trial. Medical evidence in a case like this is absolutely damning.’
He continued to nod and I noticed now that tears were pushing themselves through his screwed-up eyes.
‘I will do what you tell me, Mr McCloud,’ I said. ‘If you still want to put this matter before a jury, then I will respect your right to do that, but …’ I paused, and Harry Ashton finished my sentence for me ‘… but you’d be mad to do so.’
At this point something strange happened, something unexpected, something that you could never be taught about in any textbook or university seminar. McCloud reached his hand across the table and placed it on top of mine. It felt cold and clammy. I wanted to move it, I wanted to move away from the table and run as far away from this monster as I could and scrub my hands with hot soapy water. I had never experienced a situation like this, I had never been this close to someone who had so brutalised the lives of two children: my childhood contained nothing like this, my childhood was about bikes and fun and games and being told off for not going to sleep and not doing my homework and then kissed on the forehead before bedtime. My childhood was about being dropped off at school and having sweets on a Friday night and moaning about going to the supermarket with my mum. There was none of this darkness in my childhood, there was no timber yard, no dog lead, no waiting with dread to be told by my stinking father that I had to go for a ‘walk’ with him.
Yet here I was with this man, in his story, the story of him and his weakness and his daughters who had their one and only chance of a happy childhood destroyed by the man who was now holding my hand.
We sat like that for a minute or so, until I had to ask the question, ‘Do you want to plead guilty now, Mr McCloud?’
He nodded, all the while never opening his eyes, all the while keeping his hand on mine.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘look, I’ve got to ask you this as well – you don’t have to answer, but it may help both of us if you do.’
He opened his eyes now and looked at me, finally moving his hand away from mine liberating me from his icy grip, to wipe the tears from his face and smear the lens of his glasses.
‘Are your daughters telling the truth about what happened to them?’
He took a deep breath then averted his eyes from mine to the desk, then shook his head slowly. ‘I won’t answer that, Mr Winnock.’
‘Alright,’ I said, ‘but you realise that I can’t really say much on your behalf when you’re sentenced if you don’t tell me much now.’
He nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘that’s fine.’
I got him to endorse my brief with his instructions that he intended to enter a guilty plea of his own free will, then I shook his hand, feeling once again its clammy stickiness and wishing that I could plunge my own hand in a tub of ice-cold water.
A week later, Kenneth Ernest McCloud was sentenced to sixteen years imprisonment for the rape and indecent assault of his two daughters.
They were both present in court when he was sentenced. They sobbed as the facts of that dark time and that dark place were opened to the court. I turned towards them at one point: two shaking, terrified, middle-aged women, now desperate to grasp what they had left of life, what he had left them to live with.
In mitigation, I simply asked the Judge to give him credit for pleading guilty. There was nothing else I could properly do or say – my job was done.
STRIKE!
On the night before the strike, my dad telephoned me. This was odd. If you asked me how many times my father had picked up a telephone to call me in my adult life, I would have struggled to think of any single occasion. Yet here he was, just before the ten o’clock news, a voice at the end of the line:
‘Hi Russ, it’s Dad.’
My father comes from a time when dads were understated and quietly masculine; men who neither failed nor succeeded but simply existed to add cement to the structure of the family unit. I don’t remember him playing with me, but I’m sure he did; I don’t remember him taking me to places, but I know that’s not true; I don’t remember him teaching me or instilling in me any words of great import, but I know I’m doing him a disservice – because he is responsible for so much that I believe in and hold dear.
He was an English teacher and had retired the year before after forty years in the classroom. Forty years at the same school. They presented him with an original first edition of George Orwell’s 1984 at his retirement do and he had struggled to make a speech, his voice breaking and his eyes watering as he tried to thank everyone.
‘Were you upset, Dad?’ I asked him later. ‘No lad,’ he said, ‘I was overcome by a huge sense of relief that I’d done everything properly.’
That was my father – if a job was worth doing and all that.
He had been the first Winnock ever to go to university in the late 1960s. His dad had been a draper and his grandfather, my great-grandfather, a farm hand. Slowly the Winnocks had moved socially upwards – labourer, artisan, teacher, lawyer. If things continued in this vein, my son would be, what? Member of Parliament? Permanent Private Secretary to the Ministry of Defence? Third member on the left in a Boy Band?
‘I was just reading about the barristers’ strike, Russ, and I wanted to check that you were alright.’
I was surprised by this. ‘Yes, of course, why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it must be difficult. It says in the paper that barristers have never been on strike before.’
‘Technically, we’re not on strike,’ I told him, ‘we’re not allowed to strike – technically, we’re not going to court because we’re all in a meeting.’
‘Oh,’ said my dad, ‘what kind of a meeting?’
‘A meeting to talk about what a bunch of bastards the government
are for cutting our money.’
He chortled, which made me happy. ‘Will you get into trouble?’ he asked. ‘It says in the Guardian that the Bar Council might have to punish anyone who doesn’t show up for court.’ I now realised that he was concerned about me, about my career, he was worried that I might throw it all away – he was being a dad.
‘No,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about that, I’m lucky that I’ve managed to square it with my clerks and the court, I’ll be fine.’
‘That’s good,’ he said, then repeated thoughtfully, ‘that’s good.’ Then there was a pause. Unless we were talking about Huddersfield Town or politics, there were often pauses when we spoke. Eventually he continued, ‘Because we support you, you know, me and your mother – I mean, everyone has the right to withdraw their labour if the conditions and the pay aren’t fair.’
‘Thanks Dad.’
‘Sometimes you’ve got to make a stand.’
‘Thanks.’
There was another pause, before he added quietly, ‘Just as long as you’re going to be alright.’
Then he handed me over to my mother, who asked me the three questions she always asked: did I have a girlfriend yet; was I eating properly; and was I involving myself with any gangsters – her three favourite topics, the answer to each of which was a resounding no.
And so the next day we went on ‘strike’. We marched to the Royal Courts of Justice in our wigs and gowns. The juniors from Extempar Chambers had made a massive cartoon replica of the Minister for Justice out of papier mâché. Bloody show-offs.
We stood and chanted rhymes about saving legal aid and justice for all. The Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association and some friendly and worthy politicians made friendly and worthy speeches telling us how important we all were and how it was a fight to the death to save the system of fair and honest justice for all in our country.
I listened and chanted and clapped, and yes, I felt the exhilaration of being part of a crowd. But I felt sad too, that some of the people I was with, good people, honest people, were being forced to make papier mâché effigies and shout about building bonfires and putting the Minister for Justice in the bonfire, which, strictly speaking, is a threat of violence and probably against the code of conduct.
Confessions of a Lawyer Page 12