Holding his daughter’s arm he said, ‘Let me handle this.’
Lucy obeyed. Joe went downstairs alone. It was only when she looked out and saw two police vans speeding away from the house and squealing round the corner at the end of the street that she wrenched open the door of the flat and ran off downstairs, crying out, ‘William! William!’ As she ran down she was passed by two men in jeans and anoraks racing up. They barged past her.
In the hall the front door still lay flat on the carpet. The small area was full of men in uniform and out of it. By the gaping entrance to the street Joe was talking to a large man in a tweed coat. Standing five stairs up, Lucy cried out, ‘Where’s my husband?’ and a man below her looked up at her slyly and said, ‘We want to ask you about that.’
It was the first time in her life Lucy had ever fainted. The sly man caught her and, coming round after no more than a few seconds, she found herself in her father’s arms.
As she looked into his concerned face she heard him murmur, ‘Don’t say anything, Lucy.’
Joe supported her upstairs, trailed by the large man he’d been talking to. Inside, the sounds of heavy searching could be heard from the bedroom and the kitchen. In the sitting room was Marie, in her nightdress, on her knees by the TV in front of a pile of DVDs heaped on the floor. She looked up brightly when she saw her husband and daughter. ‘Here it is!’ she said brightly, ‘Puss in Boots! We thought we’d lost it.’ And as Joe and Lucy came in, followed by the man in the tweed coat, she said, ‘I’ll put it on.’ Then came a loud noise from the bedroom as the wardrobe was pulled away from the wall. And the sound of music from the set, as brightly coloured images began to flit across the screen.
‘I’ll need a list of what you’re taking,’ Joe said to the tweed-coated officer.
‘You’ll get one within three working days,’ said the man, without interest. ‘In the meanwhile, we need to ask you some questions.’
‘My wife’s ill,’ said Joe, ‘and my daughter’s in no fit state to be questioned.’
A small young man, in jeans and wearing gold-rimmed glasses, appeared in the door of the kitchen. He shook his head at the tweed-coated man and returned to the kitchen.
‘Where’s William?’ Lucy demanded. She was ignored. ‘None of you have any choice, Mr Sutcliffe,’ said the policeman. ‘We need to question you and we need to do it now. We have full powers.’ From the kitchen came a crash of shattered glass.
‘What are your names? What unit do you belong to?’ asked Joe.
‘You’ll have to come with us to Paddington Green,’ said the big man.
Marie turned, ‘It’s too late to go out. We’re watching a DVD.’
‘We’ll look after your wife.’
What followed would have broken a weaker woman than twenty-six-year-old Lucy Frith. She was thirty-six hours in custody, alone in a cell, or under questioning in a very clean, windowless interrogation room. She could not sleep. She spoke to no one but her captors and was racked with anxiety about her husband. She worried, too, about her father, presumably in isolation in another part of the huge police station and her mother, probably alone in a mental hospital.
No one would answer her questions about William. She asked to see her father and a solicitor and got the answer given by officials and parents, ‘All in good time.’ She answered the same questions over and over, having decided that the truth would benefit William more than silence. The questioning was subtle but not subtle enough to conceal from her the fact that her interrogators thought Jemal had been involved in terrorist activities and that William had been giving him information harvested at Sugden’s. It had a frightening plausibility – the theory that William had eavesdropped on the conversations of the politicians and senior civil servants who frequented the restaurant, then passed the information on to Jemal and his group.
And, finally, Lucy and her father were released. As they stood on the steps of the police station with the traffic crawling past them, Lucy was alarmed by her father’s appearance. He was unshaven, his shoulders were bent and he was plainly exhausted. They called a taxi and went back to Shepherd’s Bush, saying little. Lucy asked if Joe had been told anything about William, and he said he had not. At one point he muttered, ‘They have to do their job, I suppose.’ Approaching the grim modern fortress of Paddington Green Police Station, she had half expected to be beaten up during the questioning. As they got nearer to home she squeezed her father’s hand gently and said, ‘I don’t think Mum will be there when we get home. She may be in hospital.’
He said, ‘I know, love, and I wouldn’t get your hopes up about finding William there, either.’
‘I’m not, really,’ she said, though she had.
When they let themselves into the flat it was empty and still strewn with all their possessions. In the kitchen, every packet and jar had been emptied into the sink. Joe rang the local police and was told his wife was again in the psychiatric wing at St Mary’s Hospital. They would not give him any information about William.
For three frantic days Lucy and Joe did all they could to find William – the police would offer them no information except that he was being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act; their MP could not or would not do anything to help, and the solicitor they employed was discouraging. Lucy said she thought that he, too, was afraid of getting involved on the wrong, the dangerous, side.
Then the Friths arrived in London. A week later, incidentally, the Sutcliffes returned to their Yorkshire village. By now, Marie saw leaving London as a way of getting out of hospital and back into her husband’s care. Her ambition for them all to die together seemed to have been relegated to another part of her mind.
Joe was horribly torn. He knew the danger to his wife’s precarious mental health if she was dragged into the terrifying business of William’s disappearance. But he wanted to stay and help his daughter. This was when Lucy told him frankly that she was too upset herself to deal with Marie’s mental health problems and Joe reluctantly agreed to take Marie back to Yorkshire.
The Friths were staying with old friends, former teaching colleagues of Charlie’s, in Hammersmith. They embarked on the same futile enquiries Joe and Lucy had made, with the same results. Grace Frith borrowed her hostess’s bicycle and rode round the back streets to deliver a letter, addressed to the Al Fasis’ friends, at the house where William and Lucy had once rented the flat. They wanted information about Jemal and what trouble he was in and had decided a woman on a bicycle, if spotted, would look less suspicious. The people in the house never got in touch, understandably enough. They didn’t know who Grace was. They might have suspected her story was some complicated Special Branch trick, designed to trap them.
Grace rang me. Why me? The answer’s simple enough.
On the Mediterranean coast, in the small village of Villalba, my father, Felix Arnold, a retired civil servant, runs a small hotel, seven bedrooms, bar and restaurant. He’s been there for twenty years. The Friths live just outside the village. Villalba is an ex-pat colony but ex-pat communities turn in on themselves, read the British papers and denounce the place they came from – which can be trying for an open-minded man like my father, especially in winter when there are no tourists. But the Friths and Dad got along well and this was how I came to meet William, not long after the Friths had moved in and when William was about nineteen. I was a bit of a wreck at that time. I’d been working for fifteen years at the eminent legal firm of Jeffries and Bridges, which specialized in championing people, or their relatives, in cases of official injustice – illegal imprisonments, police corruption, mistrials, deaths in custody. During that short holiday in Spain I suddenly realized exactly how burned out I was. I was thirty-six. I’d brought up my daughter as a single parent, much of that time spent in the legal pressure cooker at J and B. I had no private life. Now I realized I couldn’t go on any longer. I went back to London and resigned from J and B and took a job with a firm of solicitors in north-west London.
The ne
xt time I met William in Villalba he was married to Lucy and I was a high street solicitor and married to my husband, Sam, a doctor.
But Grace and Charlie knew I’d done fifteen years of investigating unexplained deaths and disappearances, beatings by the Auxiliary Police, constant abuse of power by men and women who had been given it and were under little restraint. It only takes a few.
It’s not difficult to get yourself into trouble, something I’ve often had to point out to clients. It’s usually a matter of saying yes instead of no. I said yes when the Friths came to me for help. I knew that at best it would make life hard and at worst, I’d be under surveillance, pressure would be applied to me and, as I told Sam, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if I don’t have a traffic accident in a tunnel.’ It was only half a joke. But I knew William was as likely to get involved in a terrorist plot as fly to the moon. And Lucy and the Friths – Joe, too – were desperate. Like any white, middle-class people, however liberal, deep down inside they’d thought the anti-terrorist legislation would never apply to them, that it was legislation aimed at the Muslim community. Perhaps would be used unjustly. That was wrong and should be put right. But the one thing they did not think was that it would ever affect them. That was what they believed and, like so many after them, they found out they were wrong.
I didn’t realize it then, but when I agreed to represent William I joined the opposition, an opposition I didn’t know existed. Perhaps it didn’t exist then – it just grew, as events progressed. Even Gott, who in a different way accidentally joined the opposition, didn’t know what things would come to. But that was in the future.
I started work, initially going to my old firm, Jeffries and Bridges, to see if George Jeffries, who made these decisions, would take on the Frith case. I spoke first to Jacey Smith, with whom I’d worked closely in the past. He told me that George was unlikely to agree to represent the Friths, but he said he’d talk to him and later a meeting was arranged for me with him. George offered what he could. The firm could not officially represent the Friths, but, if I decided to do so, he told me, he had no objection to Jacey’s helping me. This was something, though not much, and dependent on the overworked Jacey’s goodwill. But Jacey generously offered to give me some of his time.
I asked my own firm to allow me to work a four-day week, with consequent reduction of pay, and they agreed, partly because, as we all know, that arrangement normally means doing five days’ work in four. But I also guessed if things turned sour in the Frith case the firm might find me an embarrassment and ask me to go.
I set up a small office in the back bedroom of our house. And started trying to find William. I was rebuffed every time. Under the law, as it stood, no one had the right to know where William was or why he’d been arrested. He had no right to legal representation – that was at the discretion of the police and the Home Office, and they declined to exercise that discretion. Bluntly, we were stymied.
One bright note was struck by Jack Prentiss, about ten days after I’d started work on the case. William’s ex-boss, who had heard about the affair through Gott – who else?—rang up to offer me a retainer to represent William. He liked William, of course, though self-interest may have played a part – having a former manager among the ‘disappeared’ and likely to be charged, eventually, with terrorism wouldn’t help him or his business. Nevertheless, the money was a help. So, using Prentiss’s money, George Jeffries’ facilities and Jacey’s expertise – and occasionally, taking the name of Jeffries and Bridges in vain, because it was a name which caused tremors in cases where the authorities were, or thought they might be, in a dubious legal position – I soldiered on.
A second good thing was that I had, for reasons too lengthy to go into, an MI5 officer in my debt. Let’s call him X. The day after Jack Prentiss rang I contacted this Mr X. He told me the security people were convinced that Jemal Al Fasi had been among the attackers of Hamscott Common. He had belonged to a small group of Islamic fundamentalists, mostly young British men, who had resolved on direct action because of the terror laws, the increasing use of stop and search and the unexpected raids on offices and houses, because of their expectation that Britain troops would soon be at full strength in Iraq and, perhaps most important of all, because they knew that whatever was available to others in Britain would not, in the current climate, ever be available to them.
X said that formerly, under British law, Jemal would have been charged with an armed raid on a military base and probably murder or attempted murder. Convicted, he would not have seen daylight for at least twenty years. But nowadays, my informant told me during a furtive meeting at the Ritz, Jemal would not get an open trial, and probably not a closed one – three judges pronouncing sentence, no appeals permitted. Because the US was insisting on extradition to America for all those involved. Some of the Hamscott Common captives had already been deported. If caught, Jemal would be handed over to be questioned there and serve time in an American prison, perhaps even face execution. ‘Forty- or fifty-year sentences have been given in other cases,’ he told me unsentimentally. ‘And the questioning’s not funny, either. The Yanks don’t mess about. And whatever applies to Al Fasi will apply to your bloke, William Frith. They’re worried about him because of his job. He could have passed on a lot of sensitive information he picked up at Sugden’s.’ This was not exactly news to me. ‘Your problem is, the more fuss you make, the harder they may come down on your client,’ he told me.
The following day I filed suit with the European Courts of Justice on behalf of William Frith, although that put my client in a queue of two thousand similar complainants, after which the European court would hand down a verdict, of which Britain would take no notice. And by that time William might have disappeared irretrievably into the American justice system.
A month went by – we still didn’t know where William was, officially, though unofficially I’d learned he was in Belmarsh Prison. But none of us were allowed to contact him in any way.
Then, one day, Lucy rang me from her ward in the hospital. She’d gone back to work because staying at home alone worrying was destroying her and, in any case, she needed the money. She’d been approached that morning at work by a well-dressed man in dark glasses. She recognized William’s friend, Jemal’s brother, Mohammed. Wisely, he’d come from Morocco on someone else’s passport, knowing the name Al Fasi would be flagged up at immigration. He told her he was very sorry about what had happened and asked her to contact me.
I met him in a café round the corner from the hospital. He offered me a lot of money to represent his brother. I refused. I had to tell him there seemed little doubt his brother was guilty – he didn’t deny it – and that my client, William, was innocent. I hadn’t the time or resources to represent a guilty client. Mo took this well. He told me the whole family had been doubtful about Jemal and his associates for years. Even before they left London there had been arguments in the family about the people he was associating with, threats that he was going to get into trouble and bring trouble to his family. Jemal had countered by calling them cowards and unfaithful Muslims. He told them that unless the faithful joined forces and struck out, they would be crushed. This was why he had stayed behind when the rest of the family went back to Morocco. And now, Mohammed told me, his parents and brothers were blaming him, Mohammed, for orchestrating the move, saying that if they’d stayed behind they might have restrained Jemal, or at least have been there.
All I could do was give him the names of other solicitors likely to be sympathetic and advise him to leave Britain as fast as he could. He was in danger. I also knew my own client’s interests could be badly affected by being linked with Jemal.
I was being watched now. A sequence of cars parked outside my house at erratic hours during the day and night, cars which were never interfered with by police and traffic wardens, and from which men and women blatantly photographed the comings and goings to my house. Only a few days after my meeting with Mohammed the house at the back of
my own was sold and I heard from neighbours that a group of youngish men and women, too old and well-dressed to be students, had begun to live there. They came and went at varying hours. They had moved in with little furniture. The postman had said they received no post. It seemed fairly obvious that the security services were keeping my house under surveillance from the back. I assumed my phones were tapped and my correspondence and emails read. I don’t know what they think I know, or am about to go and do. It may be my connection with Edward Gott that concerns them.
I was contacted by John Stafford, recovering after a liver transplant. He was still worried about the British soldiers, Bob Carter in particular, who were in custody. Like everyone else he saw their eventual fate as extradition to the US to face the American legal system. I had to turn him down because, as with Mohammed Al Fasi, I felt I could not have my innocent client associated with men who had obviously been involved in the seizing of Hamscott Common.
By now I was in touch with the Muslim Council of Britain, all the civil liberties groups, EU lawyers and a cluster of MPs of all parties who were opposed to the summary nature of the wave of arrests. My workload was heavy. And I was even worried about the effect on our marriage. Sam was a childless widower, my only daughter Chloe was married and a mother herself, so we had busy lives, but we were able to live quietly and contentedly, in a unit of two. Now I was always tired, there was an office in our house, the phone never stopped ringing and Special Branch was taking photos of the laundry on the washing line. But Sam was staunch and, in any case, by summer, when people were getting hungry, tired and ill because of the hardships, he was working under pressure himself. We were both in harness and pulling heavy loads.
To be frank, some parts of this disaster were of benefit to me. A few months into the Frith case, and I knew the pressures were beginning to affect my bread-and-butter work at Jellicoe and Ogunbaye. A few months more, and just as I was thinking I might have to resign before they fired me, routine work at the firm was drying up. By this time fuel, food, jobs and money were all in short supply. Conveyancing was down and people for some reason were less keen to divorce. The bread-and-butter work was in decline. But then the terror really kicked in with a rise in summary arrests, raids, disappearances, deportations and police brutality (the dreaded Auxiliaries were frequently responsible). These measures began to affect our ordinary clients – in other words, people were generally staying in the same houses and flats and not falling out with their marriage partners, but random arrests and forced entries into houses began to affect them, the ordinary clients whose houses we had conveyed, whose wills we had drawn up, whose children we had represented on shoplifting charges. Slowly, in our neck of the woods at any rate, families who had been living in the country for two and three generations were being caught in the huge net being spread by the government. Our clients – shopkeepers, local businessmen, plumbers, electricians, employees of the local council, of banks and building societies – were coming to us with tales of summary arrests and disappearances, of doors being kicked in and searches made. Our clients now needed representation by someone with my kind of experience. This saved my job at Jellicoe and Ogunbaye.
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