Mr Love and Justice

by Colin MacInnes

  ‘The chief obstacles,’ Edward said, ‘are these. Money first. Well – that’s not really a problem with our joint earnings, and you know I’m not a spender; also – you never know – I may get some extra – expenses or something – to help out. Premises. That really shouldn’t be difficult if we look carefully and – here’s the important point – are willing to pay enough: say even five or six a week. Then … well, the whole set-up. If we take care I don’t think we should attract attention, particularly if we get a place in a block that’s big enough: I mean like some council flats, say, with stacks of tenants in them. Of course, everyone who’s interested will know perfectly well why I visit you, but that doesn’t really matter unless there’s any troublemakers among them who start shooting off their mouths. Naturally, I’ll have to check carefully to see if there happen to be any other coppers living in the block. If not, then well and good, let’s go ahead. And remember: we won’t actually be doing anything illegal, will we. The worst I can expect, if the Force should discover, is a good ticking-off – and also, perhaps, some enquiries about you which may very well lead home to your dad.’ (Edward glanced at the window and caught his potential father-in-law’s baleful eye.) ‘But that we’ll have to leave to chance – we can’t foresee everything, can we. The chief question that then remains is – when can I visit you? I’ll have to check in at the section-house to sleep fairly often, and you’ve got your job to go out to during the day. So that leaves us weekends, and also the evenings when I can plead duty or actually be out on it and spare a moment. They don’t check on our time much, see, in the present job: they trust us to get on with it, and all they ask for is results.’

  ‘I think I might know a place,’ the girl said.

  ‘Yeah? What area? Obviously, it can’t be too far – unless I could get hold of a motorbike, which might in a way be better.’

  ‘In Kilburn,’ she said.

  ‘Up there? Well, it’s a nice, quiet … well, neutral sort of area, isn’t it. What particular place had you got in mind?’

  ‘A girl at the workshops lives with her husband and kids there. And she told me you can jump the queue if you give something to the janitor. It’s working-class, you know, but a privately owned block, not the municipal. So the rents are a bit high, too.’

  ‘All this is going to need money,’ Edward said. ‘And that reminds me. Darling, whatever you do, don’t take any from your father.’

  ‘No, I know about that.’

  ‘He’s in the clear now, of course, but if you had even a penny from him, and a bit of it went to me even in a round-about way, it just wouldn’t do.’

  ‘No.’

  Edward finished his fourth tea. ‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘As soon as you’re in, you’d better get on the phone.’

  ‘I’d thought of that,’ she said.

  ‘A lot of our meetings will have to be at short notice, and that’s the best way we can fix them discreetly without wasting time.’

  The girl got up. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you’ve got the time to spare now, Ted, we might take a walk over and have a look at the place.’

  They went in through the back basement entrance and up the inside stairs. The girl opened the kitchen door to say a word to her father, but when Edward tried to say goodbye to him he turned up a radio to a horrid blare. ‘I really don’t know why your dad dislikes me so much,’ Edward said to her as they walked across towards Queen’s Park. ‘I know he’s a copper-hater, but why should he detest me personally?’

  ‘On account of his past,’ said the girl, taking his hand and intimately locking up his fingers. ‘He was framed, so he says, as you know, and you really must make allowances.’

  ‘Oh, they all say that.’

  ‘Yes, Ted: but it does happen, doesn’t it.’

  Edward sighed. The subject had come up before in his life, and by now he’d grown to live with it and it bored him. ‘Well, it does,’ he said. ‘But in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, even more I’d say, a case is never fixed unless we’re absolutely sure the feller did it.’

  ‘If you’re all that sure, why can’t you prove it properly?’

  ‘Because that’s often very, very difficult: you’d be surprised. There’s laws of evidence, and legal quibbles if the case is defended, and sometimes even the old judge, though he may know as well as we do that the prisoner’s guilty, brings up some act of Queen Victoria’s reign or maybe earlier that destroys our case.’

  The girl reflected. ‘But if you fix a case, Edward, then don’t you commit a crime yourself?’

  ‘What crime? Oh, you mean perjury.’

  ‘It is a crime, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, of course! But not, as I see it, for us officers. In the first place let me tell you, if we didn’t use it there’d be stacks of known and previously convicted criminals who we’d never manage to put away at all. And then, there’s another thing. You must remember, dear, that we’re the only people who have to appear constantly in the courts in dozens of cases under oath. Now, if it’s just the single defendant coming up once or twice – or even, let’s say, as many as fifty times in his life – he only has to face the perjury problem – if it is one to him – on those individual occasions. But us, we have to face it every week almost of our lives. Could we ever be all that scrupulous? Then, there’s this. Even suppose the case is straight and all our evidence is kosher. Suddenly, out of the blue, from the counsel who’s cross-examining or even from our own feller for the Crown, you may get a question – one that’s really got little or nothing to do with the case at all – which you simply cannot answer factually without prejudicing the whole issue. And then most of all, dear, there’s your superior officers you’ve got to consider. Suppose Detective-Inspector So-and-so says “Constable, this is the way we’re handling this case” – what do I do? Tell him he’s got it wrong?’

  ‘Yes, I see all that,’ she answered. ‘But doesn’t it mean if you commit perjury yourself that the defendant’s bound to do it too, whether he wants to or not?’

  ‘I don’t see that – how come?’

  ‘According to Dad, when the case was cooked up against him …’

  ‘Cooked up!’

  ‘Well, arranged … his solicitor advised him that if he denied everything the witnesses for the Force said, no one on earth – and certainly no one on the jury – would ever believe him. So he played along with their story part of the way, and just denied certain essentials. But even that didn’t help him in the end …’

  ‘Well, there it is, dear: that’s how it goes.’

  ‘And what’s more, he says the fact you mentioned just now, Ted, that your officers have such a long experience of giving evidence makes any prisoner like an untrained amateur up against professionals.’

  ‘Well – that’s what we are. And really, dearest, the whole question about your old dad is – did he do it or didn’t he? That’s what you’ve really got to decide before you pass any judgement on all of us.’

  They were now out of Queen’s Park. He thought and said (a note of indignation in his voice), ‘You know really, the public expect just a bit too much from us, don’t they? They all want convictions and howl if we don’t succeed in getting them! And all the responsibility for winning the cases by the right presentation of the evidence – which has a certain risk involved, even to us, let alone any question of our own feelings in the matter – well, all that responsibility we take off the public’s shoulders on to our own. And then people turn round and tell us we fix all these cases.’

  His fingers were clutching hers. She took a more gentle grip and said, ‘Don’t be upset, Ted: I do understand. And I dare say the judges and magistrates do as well.’

  ‘But of course!’ he cried. ‘Some of them are quite simple in spite of all their law books, and don’t really understand, maybe. But most of them realise that crime’s got to be suppressed and provided we don’t slip up over the technicalities they never enquire too closely into our actual methods. And tha
t goes for all the top people in the business – I’m not speaking of the thousands of mugs, even the educated quite influential ones – but the people who really know the law and how it operates. They know what we do, and they know why we do it and they accept it. They never say so, of course. And if we slip up, they’re pitiless. But they know.’

  Nearby Paddington cemetery she stopped beside the stones and railings and reached up and kissed him, without reservation of her person, warmly, entirely – a whole gift. He was soothed and enchanted because at such moments she gave him to himself: for not even the Force could offer him such self-realisation as she did when she brought her love to him so utterly that he was unaware of her – only of himself. ‘If only we could marry now,’ he whispered into her hair. She held him closer, yet not tight as some girls do. A professional instinct made him cut short the embrace, though gently, and they entered together the respectable wastes of Kilburn.

  Examining the area, Edward liked it. There is about Kilburn a sort of faded respectability, of self-righteous drabness, that appealed to him. For the true copper’s dominant characteristic, if the truth be known, is neither those daring nor vicious qualities that are sometimes attributed to him by friend or enemy, but an ingrained conservatism, an almost desperate love of the conventional. It is untidiness, disorder, the unusual, that a copper disapproves of most of all: far more, even, than of crime, which is merely a professional matter. Hence his profound dislike of people loitering in streets, dressing extravagantly, speaking with exotic accents, being strange, weak, eccentric or simply any rare minority – of their doing, in short, anything that cannot be safely predicted.

  So Kilburn was reassuring: but on the other hand it had something else that equally appealed to Edward which was that, although proper, it was also in an indefinable way equivocal. As you walked through its same and peeling (though un-slummy) streets, the façades of the houses hinted, somehow, that all was not as it seemed behind those faded doors and walls. This straitlaced seediness, this primped-up exterior behind which lurks something dubious and occasionally horrifying, is the chief feature of whole chunks of mid-twentieth-century London – as, indeed, of many of its inhabitants: the particular English mixture of lunacy and violence flourishing inside persons, and a décor, of impeccable lower-middle-class sedateness. This atmosphere appealed to Edward who, like all coppers, shunned clear pools (and even turbulent torrents) and preferred those whose surface, though quite still, could easily be stirred up into muddy little whirlpools. For if the copper is a worshipper of the conventional (so far as the world at large outside him is concerned), he is also in his inner person (being the arch empiricist) something of an anarch: a lover of stress and strain and conflict, wherein he himself may operate behind that outward, visible order he admires.

  The flats the girl had in mind were of more recent construction – one of those countless, anonymous 1950 blocks which, in spite of their proliferation, have as yet entirely failed to transform London from what it still after years of bombing and rebuilding essentially remains – a late-Victorian city. The block was tall and oblong-square and bleak and domestically adequate: perfect, in fact, for their intentions.

  ‘Okay dear,’ said Edward. ‘You check with your friend and find out what the score is on the financial side, and I’ll consult files and sources – very discreetly, of course – to find if anything’s known to us about it. If both things tally, well, let’s move in. I’m really getting tired, when I see you, of having to act as if I was a criminal.’

  ‘The key money may be quite a bit,’ she said. ‘Something like fifty, I should imagine.’

  Edward winced. ‘Well, that’s not the chief difficulty,’ he said. ‘Our chief obstacle is the place: if we find that’s all right, the money will look after itself – it’ll have to.’

  He pressed her two arms, but only so, because the place was too public now for kissing; and each of them felt as well that the unknown tenants of the block were already curious neighbours. He ran for a bus and sat in a rear seat, eyeing his fellow travellers with the proprietory air of his profession as if they were all (and, indeed, the entire population of our islands) the potential inhabitants of some vast, imaginary jail. Passing the Metropolitan theatre of varieties he glanced out idly, and immediately left the bus. For he had noticed a person there whom an inborn and constantly developing instinct told him he should watch and follow.

  This person set off along the Harrow Road in the direction of the monumental metal bridges over the tangle of lines just outside Paddington railway station. The person’s glances at certain passing citizens, all of a particular nature, confirmed Edward’s suspicions of his hopes. At a square green metal urinal stuck on to a tall wall like a carbuncle, the person paused, gazed around (Edward was standing blandly at a bus stop), and entered. Five minutes elapsed: too long for nature and for innocence, and Edward pounced.

  The design of male urinals, in England, and especially those dating from the heroic period of pre-World War I construction, has to be witnessed to be believed. For this simplest of acts, what one can only describe as temples, or shrines, have been erected. The larva-hued earthenware, the huge brass pipes, the great slate walls dividing the compartments, are all built on an Egyptian scale. Each visitor is isolated from his neighbour, though so close to him and in such physical communion, as if in a sort of lay confessional. Horrendous notices advising not to spit in the only place in the city where it wouldn’t matter in the slightest, and warnings against fell diseases that can nowadays be cured by a few cordial jabs by a nurse in either buttock, abound, as do those reminding visitors about what their mothers taught them when, at the age of three or so, they were put into their first short pants. All this seems to bear witness to a really sensational and alarming fear and hatred of the flesh, even in its most natural functions, that inspired the municipal Pharaohs who designed these places. And from their ludicrous solemnity, ribald inscriptions on the walls of a political, erotic, or merely autobiographical nature are an agreeable light relief.

  As Edward expected, the person he had followed was up to no good at all and taking his place casually and, as it were, sympathetically in the adjacent compartment, he waited for his victim to make a fatal gesture. This, sure enough, he did. Whereupon Edward, making sure they were alone together, stepped quickly back behind the evildoer, said, ‘I’m an officer of the law: I want to speak to you outside,’ and hustled his prisoner out, barely giving him time to obey the injunction of an infantile nature just described.

  Edward hurried his case along with a firm and dexterous grip, yet one which to a casual observer might seem that of a companion – perhaps a bit over-demonstrative, but certainly not ill-disposed. Round a corner, and over the western railway, they reached a lofty and secluded street.

  Edward had said nothing yet (nor had the prisoner) and was, in fact, not quite sure what he was going to say. A charge of this kind, at the station, was always the subject of facetious comment, and on the part of a young CID man would certainly be esteemed detrimental to his prestige. In addition, as Edward well knew, there was the complication that it is very difficult to make such charges stick if the officer arrests the prisoner alone. In such a case, if the prisoner denies with resolution, it is one man’s word against another’s; and though the courts will probably believe the copper’s, they prefer corroborative evidence and are apt to dismiss the case if they don’t get it. The whole exploit was, in fact, an optimistic stab in a considerable darkness, and Edward had already decided to turn the prisoner loose after one of those lecturettes so gratifying to a young officer’s ego. But at this moment the prisoner uttered plaintively the magic words, ‘Officer, can’t we talk this thing over?’

  Any experienced copper knows instantly what this means. For unless the prisoner is an imbecile – that does happen, of course – he will know perfectly well there’s no point whatever in talking anything over once the arrest is made, unless …

  Edward stopped, backed the prisoner ag
ainst a mews wall, still holding him firmly and discreetly, and said to him, ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m in your hands,’ the prisoner said, ‘and I don’t want this thing to go any further. I’m a married man.’

  ‘So?’ Edward said.

  There was a slight pause as they eyed each other well beyond the eyes. ‘I’ve got a fiver in my pocket if you’ll let me get at it,’ the prisoner said.

  ‘Have you?’ said Edward, gazing at his victim with implacable denial. ‘You know what an offer of that nature means?’

  ‘I’ve got six or seven in all,’ the prisoner said. ‘That’s all I’ve got, honest: you can search me.’

  ‘Who are you?’ said Edward.

  ‘I’d rather not say my name.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you! Tell me what’s your job.’

  ‘Salesman.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Vacuum cleaners.’

  ‘With a suit like that? And that wrist watch?’ Edward gave the man a wrench.

  ‘All right. Car salesman. And I’ll make it twenty.’

  Edward, still holding him, put his face closer and said low, slow, and distinctly, ‘You’ll make it fifty. And you’ll tell me where you work, and at exactly this time tomorrow – exactly, you understand me? – I’ll be calling there with a colleague. And you, you’ll have made arrangements to meet us alone in some room there – I don’t care where – and hand me what I said, singles and not new ones and unmarked please, in a plain envelope, and then I’ll forget about the whole matter and so will you. If you’ve got any ideas of seeing a lawyer or having any sort of reception committee for me, that’s up to you. But don’t forget my story will be – and it’ll be ready for filing by tonight at the station – that I was unable to arrest you because on more important duties, but you attempted to commit an offence and attempted bribery to an officer in the due course of his duties. Is that quite clear?’