by Peter Murphy
ONE LAW FOR THE REST OF US
When Audrey Marshall sends her daughter Emily to the religious boarding school where she herself was educated a generation before, memories return – memories of a culture of child sexual abuse presided over by a highly-regarded priest. Audrey turns to barrister Ben Schroeder in search of justice for Emily and herself. But there are powerful men involved, men determined to protect themselves at all costs. Will they succeed? Is there indeed one law for the rich and powerful, and one law for…?
About the author
Peter Murphy graduated from Cambridge University and spent a career in the law, as an advocate, teacher, and judge. He has worked both in England and the United States, and served for several years as counsel at the Yugoslavian War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. He has written seven novels: two political thrillers about the US presidency, Removal and Test of Resolve; five historical/legal thrillers featuring Ben Schroeder, A Higher Duty, A Matter for the Jury, And is there Honey Still for Tea?, The Heirs of Owain Glyndwr and Calling Down the Storm. He is also the author of two collections of short stories Walden of Bermondsey and Judge Walden – Back in session. He lives in Cambridgeshire.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR PETER MURPHY
‘Racy legal thrillers lift the lid on sex and racial prejudice at the bar’ – Guardian
‘Murphy’s clever legal thriller revels in the chicanery of the English law courts of the period’ – Independent
‘An intelligent amalgam of spy story and legal drama’ – Times
‘[The Heirs of Owain Glyndwr] illustrates and discusses effectively questions of nationalism and national identity. It is to the author’s credit that this fiction sometimes reads and feels like a dramatic re-telling of a real event’ – Crime Review
‘A gripping, enjoyable and informative read’ – Promoting Crime Fiction
‘If anyone’s looking for the next big courtroom drama… look no further. Murphy is your man’ – ICLR
‘A gripping page-turner. A compelling and disturbing tale of English law courts, lawyers, and their clients, told with the authenticity that only an insider like Murphy can deliver. The best read I’ve come across in a long time’ – David Ambrose
There is no scandal so serious that trying to cover it up won’t make it worse.
Anon
PART ONE
1
Audrey Marshall
If it hasn’t happened to you, I can’t adequately explain what it feels like. You feel like you’ve been struck down without warning: like having a heart attack when you’re young and in the prime of life, and going about your day of work and play and love, as young living people do; like a partner you trusted telling you he’s leaving you for someone else, just when you’ve started to tell him about your day, and the plans you’ve made for dinner or the weekend or the summer, as lovers do. Everything stops. You can’t comprehend it.
Nothing in your range of vision looks the way it did a few seconds before; nothing you hear sounds the same as it did. Your mind and your emotions have frozen, like drops of water on the tip of a stalactite in some sub-zero cavern that solidify before they can fall to ground. For a moment you’re not sure who you are, or where you are: and when your mind and emotions slowly begin to thaw and you start to regain your bearings, you realise that your body has frozen too, and you’re not breathing. You force yourself to breathe, and your body slowly begins to react to your commands; but then you feel like you’re going to faint, so you find something or someone to hold on to; and when the fainting feeling subsides, you feel an urge to throw up; and when the urge to throw up subsides, you scream until you can’t scream any more, a deafening primal scream that seems to last for ever. Then, if you’re one of the lucky ones, you find that you can still cry.
The few experts who claim to understand it call it recovered memory. And this is what I’ve learned about recovered memory: you feel it’s ambushed you and taken you completely by surprise; but in fact, that’s not true. Once you make the connection, you realise that you knew all along. You feel that the memories have sprung from nowhere and have no origins or antecedents in your life. But at the same time you also have the contradictory sense that they have always been with you: like fragments of a dream hovering in the back of your mind as you’re waking up, fragments that you can’t define or identify, but that you somehow know are something more than a dream. That’s when you put two and two together to make four. Four is the revelation that all those elusive grainy images flitting through your mind, images you could never quite hold on to, images so vague that you couldn’t place them in time and space, but that somehow seemed real, were indeed real. And it all starts to make sense.
That sudden feeling of dread when you walked up some curved section of staircase, or entered a small room in someone’s home, when there was nothing to fear.
That momentary panic when a male voice called to you unexpectedly when you were in your bedroom in your nightdress, even though the voice was one you knew and trusted.
That overwhelming urge to reject an approach from a man – even a man you fancied and who might have been just the kind of man you wanted to be with – because of the tone of his voice, or a phrase he used, or the colour of his tie, or a whiff of his cologne.
That feeling of bewilderment, embarrassment, and humiliation when you’d finally found a man you cared about: when you’d undressed each other, and you were lying on the bed together, and you were kissing him with closed eyes, and your hand was working on his cock, and you were feeling and hearing his passion increasing; and he gently slid his fingers inside you to reciprocate, which was what you were hoping he would do, which was what you wanted, because you were hot and wet for him; but when he actually did it, you found yourself closing your legs over his fingers; and then, without any warning, you felt your cunt tighten and slam shut against him, like the door of a bank vault.
You made any excuse you could: it felt painful, you were nervous, you were feeling ticklish that day. You’d even developed a silly giggle to represent feeling ticklish. ‘It’s not your fault,’ you would say, ‘it’s just not working today. Let me…’ And then, to compensate him for rejecting his attempt at intimacy, and to divert his attention, you would desperately transfer his cock from your hand to your mouth; or whisper a saucy invitation, as you licked an ear lobe, to put it in and fuck your brains out. And while you were fucking and while you were lying in his arms afterwards, you were hoping he wouldn’t ask you: why, if you found his fingers so painful or ticklish, didn’t that apply to his cock? Because you didn’t have any answer to that question that made sense.
Later, when he was asleep, you would furtively masturbate, trying desperately to ignore your undeserved feelings of shame and guilt, and you would be faced with the inexplicable fact that there was nothing painful or ticklish about your own fingers touching you. And perhaps once or twice, when you’d had a few drinks and, to your surprise, fell nervously into bed with a woman friend, you found that you could accept the pleasure of her deliciously hesitant, exploring fingers without any contrary feelings at all: for which, when you reflected on the experience after the effects of the drink had worn off, you could also find no explanation.
When you eventually married a man you loved and trusted, you were finally able to allow him to do what no other male lover had been able to do for you. But even with your husband, there were nights when you couldn’t – nights when you had to kick the old defence mechanisms into gear; nights when, yet again, you gave way to the silly giggle, and acted like a skittish teenager with an unpredictable phobia about being touched. And it was only his love and understanding that saved yo
u from the misery that had haunted your love-making for as long in your life as you had been making love.
When I recovered my memories, any sense of mystery about all those experiences instantly vanished into thin air. I saw immediately, and with perfect clarity, that there was the most rational explanation in the world for every feeling of fear or dread I’d ever had in so many situations during my life. It was as if the floodgates had suddenly opened, and I was deluged by wave after wave of high-definition images from my past, images so clear and precise that the events I now remembered might have occurred the day before. They were all so clear that it was incomprehensible to me that I had not remembered at some much earlier time – indeed, it was incomprehensible to me that I had could ever have forgotten them.
But then, of course, I realised that my condition was not one of a simple loss of memory, or the result of any conscious effort on my part to suppress the images. It was a condition of the most profound amnesia, imposed on me subconsciously by my own mind for my protection, to save me from having to relive again and again the pain and humiliation I had endured at such an early age. It was an act of mercy, not a deprivation. But that thought brought little relief.
Worst of all, I felt a crushing, overwhelming guilt that my failure to remember had caused me to expose my daughter to the same horrors to which I myself had been exposed. Ironically, she was the same age then as I’d been when it happened to me. All it took for me to recover my memories was for Emily to speak two sentences, and for those two sentences to swirl around like acid in my mind for a few hours. The experience devastated me, and for hours afterwards I was incapable of rational thought. But, as soon as I recovered some semblance of composure, I swore by all I held sacred that I would protect her from that moment onward, and that I would bring those who had abused us both to justice, if it cost me everything I had.
2
Monday 4 February 1974
‘I asked the clients to come at four thirty,’ Julia Cathermole said, glancing at her watch. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to make sure that we had time to talk among ourselves first. We have forty-five minutes. I think that should give us long enough.’
‘I’m sure it will,’ Ben Schroeder replied.
They had gathered for the conference in Ben’s chambers at Two Wessex Buildings, housed in the magnificent archway at the foot of Middle Temple Lane, from which the few remaining yards of the Lane lead down to the Embankment. Ben’s junior clerk, Alan, had arranged the room so that they could sit as a group in chairs in front of Ben’s desk, around a working table.
Ben was a handsome, dark-haired man, now in his mid-thirties, a rising star at the London criminal bar. His still thin, bony facial features had a way of forcing the observer to focus on his deep-set, piercing, dark brown eyes, eyes which had a discomfiting habit of seeming to bore into the witnesses and judges on whom he trained them in court. He wore an immaculate dark grey three-piece suit, with a light grey and white tie, over a pristine white shirt. The bar was a notoriously snobbish profession, and Ben’s East End origins had been an obstacle earlier in his career; but they also offered intimate access to the best Jewish tailoring available anywhere in London, and he was known for taking full advantage of that craftsmanship. Now, after one or two turbulent years, he enjoyed the best of both worlds. The tailoring remained one of his trademarks, but his roots had long since become irrelevant to his professional success: he had more than proved himself in a series of high-profile cases, and his reputation was continuing to grow.
Julia had brought with her another barrister: Virginia Castle, Ginny to friends and colleagues, with Chambers in King’s Bench Walk in the Inner Temple, who made up for a slight, will-o’-the-wisp figure with a forceful courtroom technique every bit the equal of Ben’s, a sharp wit, and great personal charm, all used to good effect. She, too, favoured the barrister’s dark suit, in her case, a two-piece suit worn over a well-starched white blouse; the effect, with her jet-black hair, tied neatly up at the back, was a striking one.
It was left to Julia to make up for the lack of colour with a light green suit and yellow scarf with matching shoes. The small firm of solicitors she had helped to found had had the confidence to forsake the City in favour of the West End, and her personal style reflected that same confidence. Her vivid outfits were becoming as familiar on the London legal scene as her sophisticated and occasionally outrageous dinner parties, invitations to which were eagerly sought, not only by lawyers and judges, but also by many of the capital’s political and artistic names.
‘It should be more than enough,’ Ginny agreed. ‘Has her husband come down to London with her?’
‘He goes everywhere with her. With all she’s been through, I don’t think she could cope without him at the moment. He was the one who got in touch and asked me – well, my firm, Cathermole and Bridger – to represent them.’
‘He’s a solicitor himself, isn’t he, up where they live, in Ely?’
‘Yes. We had some dealings a year or two ago. He referred us a banking dispute his firm didn’t have the firepower to handle, and we settled it for him. That’s how he knew about us.’
‘Julia, before we get started, do you mind if I ask why you’ve come to me?’ Ben asked.
She laughed. ‘Well, that’s a new one, I must say. Most barristers want to know why it’s taken me so long. It’s rather refreshing.’
Ben smiled. ‘I’m wondering whether you’d thought about a Silk? This is going to be a heavy case, and we’re probably going to offend some powerful people. The only time our paths have crossed before, you’d instructed Ginny and I was on the other side – and you won.’
‘I find that’s the best vantage point from which to observe a barrister,’ Julia replied, returning his smile. ‘The fact that a barrister may lose a case doesn’t interest me. Every barrister wins and loses cases: that’s the nature of the game. It’s how they do it that interests me.’
‘What interested you about me?’
‘The fact that you were determined to get to the truth, and you weren’t going to let anything stand in your way. It can’t have been easy in the case we had against each other.’
Ben laughed. ‘It’s not every day you start out with what you think is a cast-iron case, and then have to stand there and watch as it falls apart overnight.’
‘You didn’t know your client was another Kim Philby: how could you? Neither did the good Professor Hollander, if the truth be known. He suspected that Digby was up to no good, but he didn’t know – and in the end he blew the whistle on Digby without a shred of real evidence.’
‘We more or less begged Hollander to throw his hand in and publish a retraction,’ Ginny smiled.
‘We did everything except go down on bended knee,’ Julia agreed. ‘But, lo and behold, come the first morning of trial, Sir James Digby QC had been unmasked and was nowhere to be found. What happened?’
‘Viktor Stepanov happened,’ Ben replied.
Julia nodded. ‘Exactly: but Stepanov happened because you and Ginny made him happen. But for that, Sir James Digby might still be one of the country’s leading Silks, and Francis Hollander might have crawled back to America with his tail between his legs, with a huge bill for damages and costs in his pocket.’ She paused. ‘Not many junior counsel would have done what you two did, swanning off at short notice with a member of the Secret Intelligence Service to meet a Soviet defector in a foreign safe house, a couple of days before trial.’
‘Stepanov turned the whole case on its head in a couple of hours,’ Ginny recalled. ‘He regaled us with the whole story: how he’d recruited Digby through their common interest in chess, and how they’d used chess symbols to swap secret messages.’ She turned to Ben. ‘I didn’t tell you at the time, but I really admired the calm way you reacted. It must have been a hell of a shock, but you didn’t give anything away.’
‘There was nothing left to give
away, was there?’ Ben replied with a wry smile. ‘The game was up – time to knock your king over and resign – and we told him so as soon as I got back to London; and the next day he took the Burgess and Maclean route to Moscow.’
‘Here’s the point I’m making,’ Julia said. ‘When you two went to The Hague with Baxter, neither of you knew what you would find. The stakes were sky-high, and you had no way of knowing what evidence Baxter had, or whose case that evidence would support. But you wanted the truth, and you weren’t afraid to do whatever it took to get it. That’s what we’re going to need in this case too. Not to mention,’ she continued, more quietly, after some moments, ‘that you took quite a risk, professionally speaking – counsel aren’t allowed to run around gathering evidence, are they? Strictly verboten, as I understand the rules. That’s our job, as solicitors.’
‘Baxter didn’t give us much choice,’ Ben observed.
‘No, I know. He insisted that the two of you should be the ones to go.’ She smiled. ‘I was a bit miffed, I must say. I know it was Baxter’s decision to leave me at home. I’m not sure I’ve forgiven him yet.’
‘With your connections inside MI6?’ Ginny said, smiling. ‘I’m not surprised. You must have been furious.’
‘I would have gone over his head, except that there wasn’t time – we were on the verge of trial. But, looking back on it now, and much though it hurts my wounded professional pride to admit it, Baxter was right. You two were the right choice, and you’re the right choice for this case.’
‘Does that mean we’ll have to go digging for evidence again?’ Ginny asked.
‘Quite possibly: and we’re certainly going to be ruffling some influential feathers, accusing some people in high places of some very nasty things – people who won’t go down without a very hard fight. Audrey Marshall doesn’t need a Silk, Ben. She needs counsel who are not afraid of a fight: and based on everything I’ve seen, the two of you fit that description to a T.’