Mr Love and Justice

by Colin MacInnes

  The Detective-Sergeant lit his pipe and said, ‘Your question was quite all right, lad, but it wasn’t quite the time and place to ask it. Now as for lawyers we have them too, you know, as well as anyone else; they’re very good ones, believe me, and in the more important cases we get the services of the top brains in the land.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Edward.

  ‘I see, of course, the point you were getting at and I don’t object at all to you considering it. A good man in the Force like I believe you to be – or getting to be with time – very naturally wants to secure a conviction if he can. That’s what we’re here for, after all; it’s our duty to the profession and, if you like to put it that way, to society at large. We have also, of course, certain rules and regulations as to how you can get a man convicted – and as to how you can’t – drawn up I don’t know by who and don’t much care because there they are, they exist, they’ve got to be observed.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Observed I said, mark you. But not necessarily, always, in every case to be obeyed.’

  Here the Detective-Sergeant stopped, removed his pipe and contemplated Edward in a fatherly way.

  ‘But the point you’ve got to grasp,’ he continued, ‘is this one. If you knock a man off and don’t follow the book and get a conviction, and no one asks any questions – then, well and good. And if you do it often enough you’ll probably get quick promotion. On the other hand if you chance your arm and do something that’s not in the book of rules and come unstuck in court or elsewhere, please don’t expect anyone to protect you or excuse you; not me or anyone else, and I want to make that perfectly clear.’

  ‘I understand, sir,’ Edward said.

  ‘I hope so. Now, about the particular question that you asked. Obviously, as I need hardly tell you, the longer you can keep a prisoner from his lawyer the better it’s likely to be for your particular purposes. Most cases, in my experience, are lost or won in the first hour of the arrest – or at any rate in the first twenty-four of them. If you can keep the lawyers away from him in this critical period your battle’s already more than halfway over.’

  ‘I see, sir. But … well, sir. If he asks to see his lawyer? What do you do then?’

  ‘Come now, boy, that’s up to you! Don’t ask me to be your brains on top of everything else … It depends on the man, the case, the circumstances – everything! Remember the book – remember the case – and use your judgement. To give you a simple instance. Take formally preferring a charge or warning the person that anything he says will be taken down, etcetera. Well! How many cases couldn’t tell you of when I haven’t bothered to do either! In the matter of the charge, you often don’t know what it’s going to be until you’ve talked to him quite a bit. And as for the warning … well frankly, in most cases I’ve simply forgotten it – I mean forgotten it – and there’s no possible come-back there, because no one outside the Force believes that we don’t warn them. They believe we do just like they believe we wear helmets in our sleep and can tell them the correct time without looking at our watches.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I see.’

  ‘I’d sum it up like this. If you’re a good copper, I mean both as a man and an officer, more or less and allowing for human failings, and you’re alone in a cell with a man who you know for certain is evil and anti-social, well, you must establish your moral right to prepare him for punishment as best you can. That, in my experience, is usually what the situation is: him and you; very simple, really. There are those who believe (and the Detective-Sergeant glanced towards the door whence the others had departed) and who’ll tell you a really good copper, professionally speaking I mean, has no conscience: can’t afford to have one, or something. Well, there are wiser heads than mine in the Force, and admitted, I’ve stuck hitherto at Detective-Sergeant. But all the same my personal conviction is that it’s untrue. To be a good copper, in any sense of the word, you’ve got to have certain basic principles and stick to them.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. Now hop it, sonny, I’ve got work to do.’

  When Edward was at the door, however, the Detective-Sergeant said to him, ‘That girl of yours, by the way. Any developments?’

  Edward blushed, and hoped the reasons for it would be mistaken. ‘I think things are working out, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m bringing her gradually round.’

  ‘Ah. Just another thing: perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this, but I will. One of our colleagues – I leave to your imagination who – has told me – unofficially, if such a thing exists – you’ve set up house already with the lady.’

  Edward said nothing.

  ‘No objection to that, of course,’ the older officer said, ‘provided you’re just visiting her, like, and not living as man and wife, and provided I’m not formally informed by anyone – I mean in a report – and also provided, I’d say, that, as you tell me, the thing’s only temporary and you’ll soon be getting wed.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Edward said.

  ‘Just watch it, son. That’s all.’

  ‘I’d like to thank you, sir,’ Edward said again.

  The Detective-Sergeant smiled. ‘No need to: I may need you one day – who knows? That’s one of the things about the Force, son, as you’ve no doubt probably discovered: it’s hard to have friends. Mates, yes, dozens of them, and professionally good colleagues, too. But not many you can let yourself confide in.’

  MR LOVE

  In her warm and chintzy drawing-room the Madam was serving tea and holding court. If a person’s identifiable with a locality, her appearance was Kensingtonian: neat, conservative, reliable and uncreative with a hint, perhaps, of the monied leisure of the Bournemouth pines. Her shoes were not smart but clean and dependable, her hair was not permed but well laundered and preserved. The tea-things were of silver, and the biscuits (which nobody took) from a Knightsbridge store. Her tones were quiet and authoritative like those of the chairwoman of a ward caucus; and she was also, if anyone had anything relevant to say, an excellent listener. Her guests were Frankie and his girl, a bisexual prostitute who was one of a team sustaining the sensational decline of a once (and in some senses, still) celebrated Lesbian socialite, and there was also present, like the footman behind the ducal chair, her confidential maid.

  ‘So I think,’ Frankie’s girl was saying, ‘you’ll find, as I say, everything will be okay.’

  The Madam gazed steadily at Frankie. ‘I hope, Frank,’ she said, ‘you’ll not take it amiss I asked your young lady to bring you here to see me, and didn’t consider I was asking you to take an unnecessary risk. But the fact is, as I made quite clear to this young girl of yours, that if a girl of mine tells me she has a young man in her life – and I like and expect her to be perfectly frank about who she may be in business with – then before I ask her to help me in my own business here I have to see the young man, or other person in question, to get my own personal impression.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Frankie didn’t very much want to come,’ the girl said, smiling at him a little nervously because, about this, there’d been a really prodigious row. ‘He took a bit of persuading, I can tell you.’

  ‘That’s understandable,’ their hostess said.

  There was a short pause.

  ‘Look, lady,’ Frankie said. ‘My girl’s here on the work, and it’s not in my interest obviously, is it, to stand in her way if she thinks your place is right for her. So I don’t object to this interview if it helps matters and provided, if I can say so without offence, it’s the only one. There’s no need for apologies because I’m not a man who does anything he doesn’t want to, and if I agree to anything I don’t need thanking for that reason.’

  The Madam nodded with reserved approval. The maid looked non-committal, and the bisexual prostitute very dubious.

  ‘This is a select place,’ the Madam said, ‘and I mean select. There are those who think an establishment of this nature has to be noisy, dirty, and generally disreputa
ble. Well, not me or mine. A well-conducted meeting-place such as mine can be every bit as decorous and charming as a hotel is – or ought to be, should I say, because few are as well conducted, though I say so, as my premises.’

  ‘And often have more strangers in the bedrooms I dare say,’ said Frankie’s girl.

  The Madam smiled. ‘Tea or coffee, with the morning and evening newspapers, are served to all our visitors prior to their departure,’ she informed them. ‘Is that not so?’ she said, suddenly looking over her shoulder at her confidential maid.

  ‘Oh, yes. And I press their suits for them, and sometimes wash and dry their socks.’

  ‘Exactly! I set, as a matter of fact, great store by the pleasant character of these departures I’ve referred to. It’s all that happens after rather than before, in my experience, that determines a satisfied client to return to the establishment again and recommend it to the right sort among his friends.’

  ‘No throwing them out before the milk comes,’ said Frankie’s girl.

  The Madam smiled again.

  ‘And what about the law?’ asked Frankie. ‘You got them fixed?’

  His hostess winced slightly and said, ‘We take – I and my girls – all necessary measures and precautions. And one of those is to beg someone like yourself, Frank, who’s concerned indirectly with my business, to exercise, at all times, a more than usual discretion. Especially, if I may say so, in the matter of conversations other than with, very naturally, your own young lady.’

  ‘Check,’ Frankie said.

  ‘They never tap the phones?’ Frankie’s girl asked, impelled by professional curiosity.

  ‘They’re very welcome to,’ the Madam answered. ‘I, my girls, my dear maid here and, I may say, my clients have trained ourselves to say nothing over the telephone that could, even if recorded, be misinterpreted: I mean, constitute any proof before a court of law. In addition, the firm of solicitors who take my instructions have assured me that, as I expect you know, any evidence of this kind is, legally speaking, inadmissible.’

  ‘So they’ll have to fall back on the old tactics,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The coppers.’

  To everyone but Frankie, the note in the conversation now seemed slightly vulgar.

  ‘So far,’ said the Madam with a marked tone of rebuke, ‘as the officers of the law are concerned, I need hardly say that one’s own common-sense would tell one to say nothing whatever to them without legal counsel. The services of my solicitors, need I tell you, are at the call of any girl whom I employ and who may encounter any difficulties, as much as they are to myself who pay them their fees. But there’s no special need, I think, for us to anticipate any special difficulties. The officers of the law understand my position, just as I understand and respect their own. We have both, after all’ – she smiled again – ‘been on this earth for centuries in one form or another.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Frankie.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Your lot has, of course, as we all know, but from what they taught me at school coppers only came into being a hundred years or so ago.’

  ‘You sure of that, Frankie?’ said his girl.

  ‘Well, isn’t it right? Sir Robert Peel?’

  Frankie’s girl was pensive and amazed. ‘A time before there were any coppers?’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘The world,’ Frankie said, ‘seems to have got on very well for thousands of years without them, and some day I dare say they’ll disappear as suddenly as they appeared. We live in the Age of Coppers: but I don’t suppose, like anything else, that it’ll last for ever.’

  The Madam was displeased at such levity. ‘I was of course referring,’ she said, ‘to law enforcement officers who’ve always existed, I believe, whatever they may have at the time been called. Two ancient institutions are involved: the profession of love, and the enforcement of the laws that govern it.’

  ‘I still think we could do without them,’ Frankie said.

  The women all raised brows at this typical masculine irresponsibility (or irrelevant intellectual audacity).

  ‘Anyway,’ said Frankie, ‘they’re the only profession, the coppers, who’ve never had a hero – ever thought of that? They’ve put up statues to Nell Gwynne and Lady Godiva, but never so far as I know to a copper.’

  ‘There may perhaps,’ said the Madam, eyeing him acidly, ‘be yet another male profession that’s not been commemorated by a statue.’

  Frankie laughed: so generous a laugh that it put everyone at ease again. ‘Oh, I grant you that!’ he said. ‘Just imagine it! A public monument to Pal Joey! Still,’ he continued, ‘that’s how I feel. They say that coppers suppress crime. My own belief is they create it: they spread a criminal atmosphere where none existed. After all – look at it from their point of view. A soldier to succeed needs wars, whatever he may say to the contrary. In just the same way as a copper, to get on, needs crime.’

  The Madam, who’d by now decided Frankie was a nuisance but on the whole a comparatively harmless one since his girl seemed to have him well in hand, said in a spirit of compromise, ‘I’m prepared to allow you, Frankie, that the recent changes in the laws, so far as our business is concerned, have led to situations which make corruption very much more probable.’

  ‘Yeah. But try telling the British public that!’

  ‘I should not,’ said the Madam with a faint smile, ‘dream of doing anything of the kind.’

  ‘Maybe not. But until the day when they wake up and find what’s happened, the great British public will continue to believe in coppers. And shall I tell you why?’

  Nobody wanted to hear, but their collective, unspoken female wisdom considered it simpler to let him get it off his chest than to try to interrupt him.

  ‘In the first place,’ said Frankie, ‘it’s not because the public as a whole respects the law, but merely because it’s law-abiding, which is a very different matter.’

  A bell rang, and the confidential maid departed.

  ‘As a matter of fact they’re not even so much law-abiding, as respectable: take away an Englishman’s respectability, and you’ve taken his most cherished possession.’

  The bisexual whore rose silently and also took her leave.

  ‘Now, deep down we English, let me tell you, are a cruel and violent race. Yes, you may look at me like that, but cruel and violent is what we are. But at the same time we’re respectable, like I’ve said, and have to live jam-packed on a microscopic island. So what do we do? We check our violence and cruelty by force: by our own force of will and by employing a force of witch-doctors or high-priests called coppers, who help us to restrain ourselves and who we worship for it.’

  Frankie’s girl shifted a bit uneasily; but the Madam remained calmly poised upon her Louis XXII chair.

  ‘And what is more, just like the tribe does to the witch-doctor, we unload our guilty feelings on the coppers; the law, here in England, is the licensed keeper of our own bad conscience.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘And there’s another aspect. Being cruel and violent, the Englishman knows he might commit a crime: a big one: headline stuff! Of course – he doesn’t. But being at heart something of a criminal, he worships the man that he himself’s set up to punish him if he did so.’

  The Madam at last rose. ‘I see, dear,’ she said gently to the girl, ‘your Frank’s a very thoughtful boy. I hope for your sake his cock is even bigger than his brain.’

  MR JUSTICE

  The habit of coppers of wishing or being ordered to ‘hunt in pairs’ has one great disadvantage to lone-wolves and philosophers in the Force. Long hours shared in isolation with one single other man will cause all but the most resolute or bone-headed to exchange confidences (which they should or would have preferred to have kept to themselves) with their momentary companion. So does the warder chat with the condemned prisoner, the isolated soldier with his erstwhile foe, or do the husband and wife w
ho’ve already signed the deeds of separation if circumstances force them to be alone together.

  The star sleuth sat with Edward in the bread-delivery van: and even his resilient spirit was cracking beneath the strain. He deeply resented, in the first place, that the Detective-Sergeant had given him (him!) this flatfoot job to do. And as for Edward, if the boy had been really stupid as most of them were, or really inspired as he himself was, his company would have been at any rate tolerable. But Edward’s mixture of brains and of professional ignorance and ineptitude (for so the star sleuth esteemed him) were nicely calculated to irritate an expert performer who had but recently himself fathomed many of the major mysteries of the copper’s art.

  ‘Another one going in,’ said Edward, making an entry in his notebook.

  ‘You can see in the dark?’ asked the star sleuth.

  ‘I’ve trained myself to write without a light,’ said Edward.

  ‘Well, you’re wasting your time. I fill up my notebook after the event by use of my well-trained memory, and keep my brains cool for the event itself.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Edward, who was growing sure enough of himself to resent the star sleuth’s patronage quite a bit. ‘But we’ve got to make certain your evidence and mine are going to tally.’

  ‘Time enough for that. Though I might tell you one thing, youngster, that you don’t know yet. They’ll tell you the evidence of two officers will always nail a conviction. Well, in a magistrate’s court that may be so but not, believe me, with a judge and jury – of which I don’t think you’ve yet had a very vast experience.’

  ‘Why?’ Edward asked, vexed not to know.

  ‘Here’s why. Let’s say you and I are on a case – see? – and we’ve both cross-checked our evidence. Right. When I go in to give mine, you have to stay outside. And when you come in to give yours I can stay in court but I can’t speak to you, or alter what I’ve already said.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘And so this. The defending counsel if he’s got any brains, and most of them have or they wouldn’t earn their huge fees, will ask me a-hundred-and-one questions about circumstances we just didn’t think of – like was the prisoner wearing a cap or was it a hat? – and then when you come in, ask you the same questions and very probably get a rather different set of answers. This sows quite a bit of doubt in the jury’s mind. I’ve often seen an acquittal got that way.’