The Queen v. Karl Mullen

by Michael Gilbert

  When the curtain goes up in Grand Guignol, the theatre of horrors, the members of the audience lean forward in their seats, expecting to be shocked. From the lurid cover of the book and the reputation of its author Roger knew roughly what he would find in it. But even knowing this and making allowance for it, as he read he became conscious of disquiet and chill.

  He was looking at a land of violence and hatred. A land where children were killed in the streets. A land ruled by the armoured car at the corner and the sjambok in the underground interrogation room. A land where people could be arrested and carried off as easily and as arbitrarily as they had been in pre-revolutionary France. A lettre de cachet, a midnight visit, and a man might disappear from human sight for years, or for ever. A land of slaves; yet not of slaves without hope. Rather of slaves working out ways to deliver themselves.

  The two decisive episodes in Young Jack Katanga’s life had followed close upon each other.

  It was in 1975, when he was just sixteen, that his father had been crippled in that mine accident. ‘You who wear bracelets on your wrists and rings on your fingers, count the cost of the gold, paid for in human lives and twisted limbs.’

  His account of the enquiry which had followed the accident was satire worthy of Swift; the so-called independent tribunal, consisting of a senior police officer, a mining engineer and a junior member of the State Legislature, mouthing platitudes and congratulating themselves on safety precautions which existed only on paper.

  If that episode had laid the fuse, the spark had clearly been applied by the Soweto massacre of the following year. From that moment Young Jack had been set on his course. If terror could only be met by terror, he must, in logic, become a terrorist.

  Roger turned over the pages rapidly to get to the incident on which most of the publicity had focused. His third visit to the Witwatersrand, his betrayal, arrest and escape.

  ‘I was sitting on one of the seats in the back of the truck with these two armed policemen on the seat opposite. My hands were manacled, but fortunately in front of me, not behind my back. They must have thought I was tame. I had already been beaten twice and the blood from the second beating was hardly dry on my face. I was suffering from shock and may have been partly concussed, but there was one idea in my mind. I knew that if I was to save my life, I had to act. A gun, a heavy police .38, hung in the unbuckled holster of the nearest of my captors. As the truck swayed, I swung forward and found that my hands were within inches of it. Next time the truck swayed I picked it out, using both hands, lifted it and brought it down on the man’s head. It all happened so quickly that the other policeman took a second or more to register what had happened. Then I saw him reach for his own gun. I was holding the weapon awkwardly between my chained hands and I have no idea how my finger reached the trigger. There was no question of missing. The gun was touching his body. I must have pulled the trigger a split second before he fired. My bullet was already in him. His went through the floor. The truck jerked to a stop. I threw myself out over the tailboard, scrambled to my feet and started to run, as fast as I could with my hands fastened in front of me—’

  Roger read the passage several times, carefully, as though he was in court, reciting it to a judge. If Katanga’s captors had been terrorists or hijackers, then clearly what he did would not only have been justified, but laudable. He was fighting for his life. His opponent was in the act of drawing his own gun. He had acted in self-defence and in the only way open to him. Did the fact that he was dealing with so-called officers of the law make a lot of difference? Men who had already beaten him and were carrying him off to further beatings and possible death. He could not visualise an English jury bringing in a verdict of murder. Manslaughter possibly, more likely justifiable homicide.

  When he had begun reading, the afternoon sun had been shining. Now it was starting to dim, behind the mist which often rolled up from the river on those autumn evenings. Lights were beginning to appear in the windows of Stone Buildings on the other side of the garden. He could see barristers sitting at their desks, hard at work, or making a fair pretence of it. The traffic sounds from Chancery Lane and High Holborn were muted by the surrounding buildings and came only faintly through the gathering mist.

  It was too dark to read any more.

  Roger looked down at the book in his hands with a sudden spasm of distaste. Its shrill, high-coloured violence was an intruder into the cloister in which he sat, cocooned by Law, as enswathed and protected as any learned clerk of old had been by the power and benevolence of mother Church. And a thought was scratching at the back of his mind, like a puppy asking for attention.

  It was something that someone had told him and it was connected with the job he had taken on. Not just casually connected, but connected in a definite and important way.

  In an endeavour to fix it, he cast his mind back over the main stages of his own life. Preparatory school, public school, university. Surely not as long ago as that. The next years were more difficult. He had visited many different lands in the course of his wanderings, but was unlikely to have encountered anyone connected with Mullen and his troubles. He had not been to South Africa. The army, then? Or his more recent years in the law?

  More probable. But no light shone.

  He clambered stiffly to his feet and walked back across New Square to his office.

  4

  “Laugh?” said Harold Ratter. “I’m telling you, I nearly split my sides. Really, I did.”

  Mr. Ratter was a mountainous man, large in every dimension. It was the increase in his girth that had driven him to leave the ranks of the Metropolitan Police and join City Detectives. If he did split his sides, thought Captain Hartshorn, the results would be dramatic.

  “The moment he laid eyes on me, and it was not surprising he did, me being what you might call a conspicuous figure, I could see he had something on his mind. A guilty conscience. With the practice I’ve had I can spot a guilty conscience a mile away, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Excellent,” said Hartshorn. “Then what?”

  “I thought, there’s something on here, so I followed him up. I didn’t atcherly see him pushing that book – the one he’d nicked – back on the shelf.”

  “Pity.”

  “However, I saw him by the shelf. Next best thing.”

  “It would have been even better if you’d seen him putting it back,” said Hartshorn.

  Mr. Ratter considered the suggestion that he should commit perjury and rejected it regretfully. “The way it was, I only got to the door after it was all over. Lucky I did though. He seemed to be thinking of making a break for it, but he couldn’t get past me.”

  It was clear that when Mr. Ratter was standing in a doorway no one was going to get past him at all easily.

  “Then, I suppose, the police were called and he was charged and taken off.”

  “Speaking personally, I was a bit surprised at that. Usually, I mean, normally when someone who’s pretty well-known gets involved in something not too serious – like it might be a member of parliament being done for careless driving – he’d be warned to expect a summons and when it arrived he’d turn up at the court, or instruct his solicitor to do it, and everything would be handled, as you might say, discreetly.”

  “But in this case Mullen was charged?”

  “Well, you see how it was. I had to tell the constable that I thought he’d tried to bolt. So, from that point of view, he didn’t have much option. Any old how, he could see what the manager wanted. A funny little character he was, with a white beard. Like one of them dwarfs in Snow White. The manager, I mean. Well, as soon as he heard that Mullen was not only a South African, but a South African policeman, he was so excited he nearly lost his top set. Charge him! Why, what he really wanted was to have him taken away in chains.”

  “Interesting reaction,” said Hartshorn. “So Mullen was led off to the police station. I don’t suppose he cared for that.”

  “I should say not. He started bl
owing off about international something or other and diplomatic something else. Would have done you good to hear him.”

  “I must congratulate you. You did an excellent job and when I speak to your head man I won’t forget it. However, since I fancy Mullen would recognise you if he saw you again, you’d better put a different man on his tail. Can I leave you to fix that up?”

  “You want us to stay on the job?”

  “More than ever,” said Hartshorn. “Lots for everyone to do.”

  When Mr. Ratter had rolled away he turned to the other men in his office. Even Kabaka, normally pessimistic, was smiling.

  “What do you think, Govan?”

  “Not bad,” said Kabaka. From him this meant ‘very good’.

  “I wonder if you appreciate exactly how good this is. You realise, of course, that the time has come for us to change gear.”

  Mkeba clearly understood him. Kabaka and Masangi tried to look as though they did. Sesolo was baffled.

  Hartshorn said, “So far as the South African government are concerned, apartheid was always a black card. It gave their opponents a moral edge against them, and was, anyway, unenforceable. So – they have proceeded to dismantle it. The Mixed Marriages Act, the Pass Laws and the Immorality Acts have all been repealed and the Homeland strategy has been abandoned. The recent announcement by de Klerk that he was opening the Nationalist Party to black and white alike knocked away the last plank. Apartheid is dead.”

  “So what you’re telling us,” said Mkeba, “is that anti-apartheid is dead, too.”

  It was Boyo Sesolo who took this most hardly. He was a simple soul, and enjoyed combat. He made a grumbling noise deep in his throat and said, “Then who do we fight?”

  “The people who matter,” said Hartshorn. “The only people capable of turning the clock back. The South African police. And one of them has been delivered into our hands.”

  “How do you suggest we go about it?” said Masangi.

  “Let’s think it out,” said Hartshorn. “He’ll appear in court tomorrow morning. But the proceedings will be formal, so we don’t want to get people steamed up. Just a tip-off that this could be the start of something exciting.”

  “One evening paper, one middle-of-the-road daily,” said Kabaka.

  “That sort of thing. Then, by the time he appears on remand they’ll all be waiting for him with their tongues hanging out.”

  “I wouldn’t bank on it,” said Kabaka. “He’ll plead diplomatic immunity and ten-to-one he’ll get away with it. And the defence will ask for a reporting ban on the hearing. That won’t stop them commenting, of course. But they’ll have to watch their step.”

  Mkeba said, “We might be able to help the prosecution. I don’t think, from what your daughter’s told us, that he’s got an open-and-shut case on the diplomatic immunity angle. He’s not an official on a proper posting. Just a visiting fireman.”

  “Nothing to stop them saying what they like about him,” said Kabaka. “They’ve got all the cards in their hands.”

  Hartshorn wasn’t listening. He was lying back in his chair with the look of a child to whom Father Christmas has presented a wonderful unexpected present.

  He said, “Just suppose he can’t wriggle out under some sort of diplomatic cover. Suppose he goes for trial, with Jack Katanga as the main prosecution witness. They’re very hot on shop-lifting these days. Why, he might even get a prison sentence.”

  “It might snow krugerrands,” said Govan Kabaka.

  Fischer Yule was not amused and he took no trouble to hide his feelings. He said, “That was a bloody silly thing to do, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t see how I could help it.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t know – as now seems to be the case – that the detective on the corner was nothing to do with the shop. He’d no status in the matter. So all you had to do was to walk off and drop that stupid book into the river. Trying to put it back was simply childish panic.”

  “If he wasn’t the store detective, who was he? And what was he doing there?”

  “I’d have thought you could have guessed the answer to that. A private detective, no doubt, whose job was to keep an eye on you. Probably hired by our friends in Mornington Square, with instructions to see what you were up to. And, of course, he wasn’t going to turn up a chance of getting you into trouble if the opportunity was presented to him on a plate. As it was.”

  Mullen disliked both the matter and manner of Yule’s comments and in the ordinary way he would not have hesitated to demonstrate his feelings and answer them in kind. Two things restrained him. The first was that he realised that he was in a fix and that Yule and his organisation were probably the only people who could get him out of it. The second reason was disconcerting. In the past his position and his powers had enabled him to frighten a great number of people. Now he was faced with someone who frightened him. If Yule did return to Pretoria as chairman of the prestigious State Security Council, a position for which he had been tipped, the first head to roll might be his own. And heads which rolled in South Africa rolled an uncomfortably long way.

  “We’re getting repercussions from this book, already,” Yule went on. “Copies have been distributed secretly in the Rand.

  “Now it will be required reading for everyone who has any connection with the mines, employers and employed. Katanga’s own boys in the Anti-Forced Labour Movement are busy organising a one-day lightning strike. When the news of what’s happened here reaches them, I doubt if it’ll be confined to one day. It could even have repercussions beyond the mining-belt. I’m sure you understand what I’m saying, Colonel.”

  “Yes,” said Mullen unhappily.

  “So it’s got to be stopped.”

  “By claiming diplomatic privilege, you mean? What do you think the chances are?”

  “Silverborn’s working on that now. We’ll see what he has to say about it in a moment. There’s something else I wanted to tell you first.”

  He brought out the three folders that Mullen had seen before, but this time he selected the red and green ones. He said, “I agreed, you remember, that your historical record of Katanga started sooner than ours and was more detailed. But history, to paraphrase Mr. Ford, isn’t everything. This—” he laid his hand on the green file —“deals with personal affairs. Katanga’s household in Putney, his wife, his wife’s father in Norfolk and like matters. The red file, however, is in some ways the most interesting of the three. It contains medical information. Now, if I have gathered the facts of that unfortunate bookshop incident correctly, the one essential witness for the prosecution is Katanga himself.”

  “That must be right. He’s the only one who claims he saw me touch the book.”

  “So that if, for any reason, he was unable or unwilling to come forward, the case would fall to the ground.”

  “Of course he’ll come forward. Why not? He’ll make a meal of it.”

  “Because it’s just possible that he might die before the case comes on.”

  Mullen stared at him. If this statement had been made to him in South Africa he would have understood its implications. But in England?

  Yule, who had read his mind said, with a slight smile, “No, Colonel. I was not talking about – what is the cant expression? – expedient demise. What I meant was that he might die at any moment from natural causes. Basically, he is a very strong and healthy man, but there are certain precautions he has to take. The details are all in the folder. It seems that, about two years ago, he had an accident. He was, by that time, a regular, possibly a fairly heavy drinker. His preferred tipple was whisky. Sometimes he poured it out himself. Sometimes his wife poured it out for him. On this occasion he came in hot and tired, picked up a glass that was on the table and took a large gulp of its contents, which unfortunately for him, consisted of disinfectant, slightly diluted with water. It had been got ready by his wife to dress the paw of their dog. The result was serious, but not fatal. When he reached hospital it was discovered that hi
s gullet was badly scarred. His windpipe, was not, of course, affected, or not directly. You’ll understand that better if you look at the sketch our doctor drew for me. The red one is the gullet, the blue one is the windpipe. Food down one, air down the other.”

  “I’d no idea they were so close to each other.”

  “Not just close, actually touching. That’s the whole point. Katanga was warned that the scarring in his gullet could lead to oedema.”

  “Come again.”

  Yule, who was enjoying the opportunity of displaying medical expertise, said, “Oedema is the technical name for an unhealthy mass of swollen tissue. If it was allowed to accumulate around the gullet it would not only make swallowing difficult, it might start to exert pressure on the windpipe also.”

  “And that is what it is doing?”

  “Not at the moment. Because, as I said, he is taking precautions. Every two or three days he uses a bougie. That is a plastic affair which can be swallowed and brought up again. It can’t be a very pleasant operation. To help it slip down I understand that it’s dipped into a bowl of olive oil, which is kept handy in the sideboard for this purpose. You get the picture?”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” said Mullen. “What I don’t understand is where you got all this information from. Not from his doctor, surely.”

  “Not from his doctor, no.” Yule closed the red file gently and opened the green one. “The information came to us in the course of our routine enquiries. You must not imagine that we sit about all day doing nothing. No, no. When Katanga arrived in this country five years ago, by a most irregular route, incidentally, and with no proper papers, we naturally devoted close attention to him. Our first endeavours were directed to getting him sent back to Mozambique.”