Walden of Bermondsey

by Peter Murphy

  ‘In that case, Miss Writtle,’ I say, ‘I don’t think there is any need to send the jury out.’

  I turn to the jury and address the thin, angular gentleman sitting nearest to me in the front row, juror number one, who is about to become the foreman of the jury without being elected in the usual way.

  ‘Members of the jury, you have been put in charge of the case, and it is for you to return a verdict on the indictment. But I have the power to withdraw the case from you if I take the view that the defendant could not safely be convicted, based on the evidence which has been presented.’

  I scan the jury. There is no problem. They know, and they agree.

  ‘In the light of the evidence we have heard this morning, I have formed the view that it would not be safe to allow the case to proceed any further. Would the gentleman in the front row on my side please act as foreman? Please stand and answer the questions the clerk is about to ask you.’

  Carol takes over.

  ‘Mr Foreman, on his Honour’s direction, have you reached a verdict on which you are all agreed? On his Honour’s direction, do you find the defendant Anthony Devonald not guilty of arson being reckless as to whether human life would be endangered?’

  ‘We find the defendant not guilty,’ the foreman confirms.

  ‘You find the defendant not guilty, and that is the verdict of you all?’

  The foreman looks around. Most of the jurors are nodding, which is sufficient in the circumstances, and he confirms that it is indeed the verdict of them all. The jurors are looking a bit confused, as juries always do in this situation. Obviously, the foreman doesn’t really know whether it is the verdict of them all or not. It’s a nervous moment for me too. It is a bloody strange procedure. We don’t allow the clerk to ask the other jurors what they think, just in case some bright spark disagrees with the judge and insists on continuing with the case. I’ve never had that happen, and if it did, I would simply discharge the jury and have my own way in the end. But it’s still very strange to tell a jury that they are responsible for returning the verdict and then tell them what the verdict has to be. I’m not sure it reflects much credit on the law for consistency.

  Be that as it may, Tony Devonald is a free man. I order him to be discharged from the dock. Thinking that the happy moment deserves a judicial witticism, I add, ‘You are free to go. But don’t go moving the knives and forks around again without using your hands.’

  He looks at me almost sadly.

  ‘I can’t do that anymore,’ he replies. ‘The power deserted me about a year ago.’

  I allow a suitable amount of time for Cathy Writtle to receive well-earned praise from her client and his family, before asking Carol to invite both counsel into chambers for a cup of tea. She is walking on air, as she should be. She will be flavour of the month with her instructing solicitors after this. I congratulate her on the victory.

  ‘Did you ever get to the bottom of the mysterious cancellation of choir practice?’ I ask.

  ‘Not entirely,’ she replies. ‘The choir master is pretty sure it was Stringer who phoned to cancel, but whoever it was left a message with one of his children. He would have said that he knew of no reason why choir practice should have been cancelled.’

  I hesitate.

  ‘That was an extraordinary history you brought up about Stringer.’

  She grins. ‘Yes, not bad, Judge, was it?’

  ‘Where did you find all that information about him? On the internet, was it?’

  I swear she is working very hard to suppress a smile. She does not reply immediately. Roderick is looking away into space somewhere.

  ‘It was brought to the attention of my instructing solicitors,’ she replies eventually. ‘Quite unexpectedly.’

  ‘Really?’ I say. ‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it? I would have thought your instructing solicitors might have found it on their own. They are supposed to investigate the case, aren’t they?’

  Cathy nods and finishes her tea.

  ‘Yes, but you know how that goes nowadays,’ she replies. ‘Apparently, someone came forward with it yesterday morning.’

  ‘But who…?’

  She stands rather quickly and replaces her wig.

  ‘Judge, do excuse me. I’m sorry to rush, but my clerk left a message for me to get back to chambers as soon as I could. Thanks for the tea.’

  They are gone. Stella has left the file for Raven on my desk. Having no excuse to avoid it, I begin to read about the delights of contemporary life on the tube.

  And so to lunch, an oasis of calm in a desert of chaos.

  I relate the events of the morning to a spellbound audience. To my surprise, Marjorie and Legless now seem to be getting on like a church on fire, their disagreement about rugby apparently forgotten. Gingerly, I ask about the case.

  ‘Jury’s out,’ Marjorie says. ‘I’m betting they will be back soon after lunch.’

  ‘Which way do you think it will go?’

  ‘Oh, he’s going down,’ she replies cheerfully. ‘The referee had a perfect view, and Chummy was a disaster in the witness box.’

  ‘What are you going to give him?’ Hubert asks. ‘Two years sounds about right to me.’

  ‘That would be a tiny bit over the top, Hubert,’ Marjorie suggests.

  ‘Haven’t you heard, Hubert?’ Legless asks. ‘We have things called sentencing guidelines these days.’

  ‘Complete bloody waste of time,’ Hubert replies. ‘We know how to sentence people without that kind of nonsense. Bloody government has to interfere with everything these days.’

  ‘I’ve talked the sentence over with Legless,’ Marjorie says. ‘I’ll give him a community order for twelve months, with a load of unpaid work, and I will order him to pay compensation to the victim.’

  ‘And?’ Legless says, with a mischievous smile.

  ‘And I will indicate from the bench, even though I have no power to order it, that his club should suspend him for two games, and that he owes the victim a pint in the bar next time their clubs meet.’

  Legless nods with satisfaction.

  ‘And thus is justice done,’ he says.

  * * *

  Thursday evening

  ‘You’ll never guess what happened today,’ I say. I am pouring a glass of Chianti for the Reverend Mrs Walden in the kitchen as she cuts up vegetables for her fettuccine primavera.

  ‘Oh?’ she replies. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Well, it turns out that the defence solicitors for Tony Devonald –’

  ‘That’s the young man in the arson case, isn’t it?’ she asks innocently without looking up.

  ‘Yes. It turns out that they received a visit yesterday morning from a mysterious person who told them about the two previous fires associated with Father Osbert Stringer.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. And, as it turned out, there is a bit more to the story than we thought.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. When he was nine, he burned down his house with both his parents in it. They were both killed, but he was too young to be taken to court.’

  This time she does look up, and suspends the downward stroke of her kitchen knife, which stops, frozen in her hand, in mid air. Then she shakes her head, and suddenly brings the knife down with a vengeance on a head of broccoli.

  ‘What happened in court?’

  ‘The defence recalled Father Stringer for further cross-examination. Cathy Writtle – Tony’s barrister – buried him, six feet under. The police are interviewing him. I wouldn’t be surprised if they charge him.’

  ‘What about Tony?’

  ‘I stopped the case, of course. He is safely back in the bosom of his family.’

  She smiles.

  ‘Well then, it really is just as well that the solicitors found out, isn’t it?’

&nb
sp; She applies the knife to a green pepper.

  ‘When you say it was a mysterious person who told them, do you mean that whoever it was didn’t leave their name?’

  ‘Either that, or asked that their name be kept secret.’

  ‘Well I never,’ she says. ‘Still, it’s a good thing whoever it was went to the solicitors, isn’t it? Otherwise, they might never have known about it. You didn’t say anything, did you?’

  I taste my glass of Chianti. I savour it for a moment.

  ‘As it turned out, it was unnecessary. I’m sure I would have,’ I reply, sounding unconvincing even to myself. ‘I was in chambers, on the point of decision, when they asked for an adjournment yesterday, and again this morning. If they hadn’t known about it by this morning, I would have…’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she replies. ‘All the same, Charlie, I’m glad someone tipped them off. Aren’t you? It would have been quite wrong for that young man to be convicted.’

  ‘It would,’ I agree. ‘Still, wouldn’t you love to know who it was? It’s a bit of a coincidence that someone came forward just after –’

  The Reverend Mrs Walden puts the knife down and sips her Chianti.

  ‘Charlie, there are certain things we are not destined to know.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that it was an angelic visitation?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she replies. ‘In any case, it is something of a miracle, isn’t it? And we all need the odd miracle now and then, don’t we?’

  Well, with my job, I can’t disagree with that, can I?

  FIRST PAST THE POST

  About two months ago

  ‘If you ask me, guv,’ George says as he rifles through a stack of newspapers in a search for my copy of the Times, ‘the last real leader the Labour Party had was Hugh Gaitskell, and that’s going back a few years, that is. Bit before my time, obviously, but I remember my old man going on and on about Hugh Gaitskell; he thought the world of Hugh Gaitskell, he did. He was what a real politician should be, my old man reckoned, a real touch of class. The sort of bloke you would have been proud to have as prime minister, the sort of bloke who wouldn’t have embarrassed you when he was talking to foreigners. They broke the mould with him, my old man reckoned, and I reckon he was right. They don’t make them like that anymore, guv, do they? I mean, who have they had since? Harold Wilson? Blimey, you must be joking. And as for Tony Blair – well, don’t even get me started on Tony Blair…’

  This was about a week before polling day. I don’t know what it is about elections, but for a few weeks every few years, the whole country seems to be obsessed by politics for a short, frantic time, only to forget about it all minutes after the last results have been announced and the lucky winner is having his photograph taken outside number 10 Downing Street. You can’t avoid talking about the election anywhere you go. In the final few weeks of saturation-level news reports, we become a nation of political pundits. The check-out girl at Sainsbury’s can quote you the latest polls. People you run into down the pub, who usually struggle to talk about anything except football, suddenly know how often Oldham West has changed hands since the War, and what swing there would have to be for it to change hands again, and what it would mean for the outcome in the rest of the country if it did. Now, I expect it from George. In all the years I have been buying the Times from him during my daily morning stroll from the vicarage of St Aethelburgh and All Angels to the Bermondsey Crown Court, I have rarely found him wanting for some pithy piece of political wit – usually at the expense of the Labour Party, on whom he is particularly hard, even though he would never vote for anyone else if his life depended on it. But in the last week or two of the campaign, even Elsie and Jeanie are up in arms.

  ‘You can’t trust any of them, can you?’ Jeanie says on the morning before polling day, as she puts the finishing touches to my ham and cheese bap. ‘They’re all the same, aren’t they? They will promise you anything to get your vote, but once they get in, they either do the exact opposite, or they never do anything at all. I don’t know why we waste our time voting for any of them, personally.’

  ‘I think they ought to be tougher on crime,’ Elsie joins in, as she hands me my latte and takes my money. ‘Well, you’d know all about that, in your job, sir, wouldn’t you? But if you ask me, there’s too many criminals walking around on the streets instead of doing their time inside, where they belong.’

  As Elsie’s grandchildren regularly come to the attention of the local police and youth court, I am not quite sure why she would want a government over-keen on law and order, but if I get into that with her I would be there for the rest of the morning. In any case, judges are not meant to express political opinions. We are not supposed to divulge our political views, attend fundraisers, or do anything else which might suggest a party allegiance. We are not even allowed to comment publicly on the government’s generally miserable performance in the field of criminal justice, even though we know more about it than anyone else, and could tell them exactly what they are doing wrong. If any of us were to breathe a word of criticism in the hearing of the press, even accidentally, the Grey Smoothies would have a meltdown and declare the judge in question to be a clear and present danger.

  That doesn’t mean we don’t have political opinions, of course. We are just as entitled to vote as anyone else, and like anyone else we have to make up our minds who to vote for. My preference is no secret to those who know me well, and I don’t think I hide it very well if I get drawn into talking politics. ‘A conservative judge?’ some may scoff. ‘Surely not. Who would have guessed that?’ But that’s just a cliché. We are not all alike. Even within our small community at Bermondsey we have a wide range of opinions. Marjorie has had her flirtations with liberalism. Legless would vote for the Scottish nationalists if he could. And as for Hubert – well, I’m not sure there is a party to represent Hubert’s views. He rather disapproves of democracy as an institution and, if I understand him correctly, would prefer a benevolent oligarchy of the right kind of chaps, who would mostly be members of the Garrick Club.

  I do adhere to the Conservative path. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not an extremist. I don’t read the Telegraph, or anything like that. I do my bit at election time to keep the blue flag flying high, but to be honest it’s a bit of a lost cause; my vote doesn’t have much impact in Bermondsey usually, and in any case the Reverend Mrs Walden and I tend to cancel each other out, she being more of the Liberal/Green persuasion. Sometimes you have to wonder how much it all matters at the end of the day. That’s the problem with the first past the post system, they say. But you have to try, don’t you?

  ‘And if you ask me,’ George says on the morning of polling day as I try to wrest the Times from his grasp in the interests of making it to court on time, ‘Michael Foot could have been a great leader in different circumstances. I mean, they always say he was a natural backbencher, don’t they, and he should never have become a minister. But I think he was a bit unlucky, coming at the time he did. I mean, let’s be fair about it. The odds were stacked against him, weren’t they? And then, of course, there was Jim Callaghan. Now, there was an interesting man, but his problem was…’ Eventually I manage to pull away and leave Jim Callaghan to the next customer.

  * * *

  Monday morning

  As I stroll to court this morning, I wonder what George would have to say about the case I have today. He’s going to have quite a bit to say tomorrow morning, I reflect, by which time it will have been all over the media, including the evening news on TV. The Reverend Mrs Walden has been deputed to record the news for posterity, since her understanding of such technical matters is far superior to mine. Between us we will collect a copy of each of the day’s newspapers. Because I am about to do what the Grey Smoothies call a high profile case. I am going to have my fifteen minutes of fame. I have some reservations about it, of course.

  All judges are a bit camera-shy, bec
ause we know that encounters with the press rarely end well for us. They tell you that when you are sworn in. You do a series of photographs for various official purposes, and they make it clear that there is one particular photograph they will send to the Sun or the Mail if you do something really stupid. And if you do something really stupid, you automatically become a ‘Top Judge’. You may be the lowliest Recorder or a circuit judge sitting in the smallest court in the land, but screw a case up spectacularly and overnight you experience a mystical ascent to the highest echelons of the judicial hierarchy. You’ve all seen the headlines: ‘Top Judge grants bail to Homicidal Maniac’; ‘Top Judge lets Armed Robber off with Suspended Sentence’; ‘Rape Victim asked for it – Top Judge.’ Top Judges, believe me, never come out of it well. But today, it is a risk I am willing to take.

  I could have got rid of it. We did have a tentative inquiry from the Old Bailey about whether we might like to transfer it over there, and from one or two senior Grey Smoothies about whether we might like a High Court judge to sit with us to try it. We declined both offers politely, and we had the perfect excuse. Waste the time of the Central Criminal Court or a High Court judge on two counts of racially aggravated ABH? Not going to happen. In addition, it is a first for Bermondsey, being asked to take a case from off circuit which is too hot to handle locally, and we are not going to give it up.

  Usually, it is the Bailey or more upmarket courts such as Southwark, Manchester, and the like, that get cases which have to be moved away from their home court. But for some reason, the circuit concerned asked us. Hopefully it will set a precedent. Why that decision was taken is anyone’s guess. It is possible that someone thought there might be less press presence, as if the press were incapable of tracking the case down to Bermondsey and then finding their way to the court. I’m willing to bet they won’t have any trouble at all. By the time I get to court there will be reporters and TV vans with those huge aerials parked outside and the whole apparatus of modern-day media coverage of a major event.