The Twisted Patriot

by Pirate Irwin

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  If Sebastian was delighted at the thought of crossing swords with his former friend, it was nothing compared to Steiner’s reaction when Ellison had shown in the Lord Chancellor to his chambers and the government’s chief legal officer had explained his presence there. Steiner had earned his reputation as the foremost criminal barrister in the land, thanks to avoiding war service, and instead in his own mind at least aiding the war effort by prosecuting alleged spies and cowards and other ne’er do wells. Others had looked askance at him and his youth and wondered what the hell he was doing cavorting round Middle Temple and the Law Courts when their husbands and sons and in some cases their daughters were risking their lives on foreign fields. However, did he care a jot when a judge or a barrister turned their backs on him in the local pub – not a bit. He had done what his father would be proud of in getting a respectable career after rejecting going into the family business. His father wasn’t in the slightest bit concerned that he had not joined up, judging it only right that others should fight to save Jewry from elimination and to a certain extent his bombastic father had been right when he added the fate of the Jews was a mere sideshow to the real reasons for the Allies fight against the Nazis. “No Adam,” he had said. “Get a head start on all those fighting for their honour and establish yourself before the whole bloody thing is over. Then they will have to catch up and bugger them anyway if they moan about the lack of jobs and they deserve better after fighting for their King and Country. They should have thought about it before they bloody signed up if they had families. After all, you have a wife and child to feed and you are looking after the most important people in your life and their future as well. So go out there and create yourself a successful career and don’t you mind the baleful looks you get for not being in uniform. After all, we have been fighting against prejudice all our lives and as a people all our history.”

  Thus ended the sermon according to papa Steiner, with his obedient mother nodding sagely alongside him as she always did. Boy, had they been proud of him as he won case after case and his victims were taken away to be hanged. Had it been the same case for Mirabelle, then everything would have been perfect but the day that she learnt Sebastian had been posted missing in action she had withdrawn from him almost as if he was to blame for his fate, and she had only started to smile again once it was revealed he had been taken prisoner. Their bastard son Fletcher – his father had forbidden him to be given a Jewish first name – was barely old enough to recognize what was going on between them but it didn’t make Steiner feel any warmer towards him, as every time he saw him the memories of that odious day of betrayal returned. He knew he shouldn’t feel like that as he had realized what he had been taking on when he asked her to marry him. However her reaction to his fate during the war had only aggravated his antipathy and Adam decided he would bide his time before telling his “son” exactly who his father really was.

  Regardless of Sebastian’s success since the end of the war and the heroic tales about his incarceration in Flossenburg, Steiner had studiously avoided any contact with him. If he knew he would be at a particular function he would make his excuses and drop out, not so much for his sake but so Mirabelle didn’t have a chance to renew contact with him, because heaven help everything else he was not going to allow her slip from his grasp. He suspected she still held an affection for Sebastian that was on a different level to the one she held for him. The years had been kind to both him and Mirabelle; he had shed a fair amount of his hair but he retained his tall and angular features and despite his success he had not allowed the wealth that sprung from that to ruin his figure. Mirabelle still looked virtually the same fresh-faced beauty that she had done when they first met, though this probably had more to do with her not having had any more children since Fletcher. Try as they might, a real fully fledged Steiner just wouldn’t come and with them approaching their mid-30s they had all but resigned themselves to giving up. However, the news of Sebastian’s fall from grace and the handing of the brief to him by the government had sparked a new-found passion in him and he swore he would give Mirabelle a night to remember when he returned home that night.

  “Adam, is there something bothering you?” enquired Kilmuir.

  “Sorry, my lord. I was just drifting off thinking about Stuart’s dramatic fall. A little bit like Icarus. Flew too close to the sun when older heads kept their safe distance and he has reaped the result,” replied Adam.

  “Yes. Quite,” said Kilmuir, though he wasn’t quite sure such comments would be understood by the jury. A little bit too clever for his own good, Steiner, he had always thought, but it had been the general consensus that he would be the best man for the case and so he had acquiesced. In any case it was Steiner’s to lose, the government were in the clear once the brief was in his hands, and while unlikely Sebastian would win, it was best in every sense that Macmillan was seen to be as removed from it as was possible. Steiner v Stuart had a nice ring about it, phonetically as well as politically and he would be looking forward to it very much. What Sebastian was alleged to have done was dreadful but he had always found him an interesting and amusing cad, far more colourful than the majority of the stuffed shirts in the cabinet or indeed in politics full stop. Steiner admitted to knowing Sebastian at Oxford but had not seen him since – hardly surprising the Lord Chancellor harrumphed as the former hadn’t even bothered to serve in the armed forces – so there was little danger of it turning into a personal slinging of old insults which could prove embarrassing and not a little tedious. He did, though, decide to ask Steiner one more time, for the record, that there was no personal animosity emanating from their time at university together. Steiner looked hurt at the suggestion, as if he had been accused of lying.

  “Why, of course not, sir. Quite the reverse, actually. He saved my life once by diving into the Isis and literally dragging me out of the water. Otherwise I would have drowned and you would be in a right mess as you would have no other barrister to conduct the case,” he preened. Arrogant little tyke, reflected Kilmuir, but heck, he has sworn to my face and the case is his, though his ambition was quite astounding given he was going to be prosecuting a man who had saved his life and in effect holding his fate in his hands. He gave an involuntary shiver at the callousness of Steiner, despite the warmth of the day, tidied up some of the other loose strings and then bade him good luck before leaving. However, he returned to Macmillan in a gloomy mood, something nagging away at him. While Mac was happy to hear that he had accepted the case, he observed his senior law officer was not so ebullient.

  “What is it?” enquired Macmillan. “It’s me that usually earns the moniker ‘hangdog’, not you!” jested the Prime Minister.

  Kilmuir shrugged before saying: “It may be nothing but I have a bad feeling about this PM. Steiner seems far too confident by half and while he may have used the Icarus analogy for Stuart, to me it would be far better used for him and as he has not yet fallen from the sky, this may be the moment.” Macmillan smiled and patted him on the shoulder, telling him not to worry, that the matter was out of their hands now and Steiner would have to cope with the ramifications of defeat, not them. The Lord Chancellor was not so certain that Macmillan should be so confident of the government escaping the consequences of a not guilty verdict and wished that it had indeed been him and not Steiner conducting the prosecution.

  *

  “How could you do that, Adam? Take on the case because of your bitterness over an event that took place nearly 20 years ago!” yelled Mirabelle. Steiner had been most taken aback by her reaction, hoping that at last she would be happy he was confronting their nemesis, but his worst fears had been confirmed. She was still in love with Sebastian, or at least the embers were still smouldering. He winced under her verbal assault in their beautifully decorated drawing room in Cheyne Walk, all of which had come from his pocket as he endeavoured to give her as comfortable and rewarding life as possible. But it was all thrown back in his face, day
after day, and now he had had enough.

  “For Christ’s sake, Mirabelle. The bastard is a traitor and responsible for the most heinous crimes imaginable!” replied Adam angrily.

  “Alleged, Adam. Alleged. Or have you forgotten the law you are so fond of?” said Mirabelle sarcastically.

  Steiner flashed a withering look at her and rose as if to strike her.

  “You may remember, Mirabelle, that Fletcher comes from a day of betrayal which I have done well to hide from him and to have forgotten so much that I pardoned you. I gave you a roof over your head, rescuing you from a life of poverty, which I believe would have led to you becoming a cheap whore so you could survive,” he said icily.

  Tears started to appear on the edges of Mirabelle’s eyes and began to roll down her cheeks at the viciousness of his words. However, she was made of harder stuff than even her cold and calculating husband imagined and she fought back.

  “Yes, he deserted me when I needed him, but he at least fought in the war and you don’t know what happened to him in the POW camp, what pressure he was under. Also perhaps you have forgotten that he saved your life, or is this some perverse way of saving his by making a hash of prosecuting him. For my part, I sincerely hope so, Adam. Otherwise you are a nastier piece of work than I thought you were before,” she hissed.

  They were interrupted by the sound of the front door opening and then closing as Fletcher returned home. He resembled more his mother than his father, which was a small saving grace for Adam. The young man looked at his mother concernedly and then at his father and sighed.

  “Not another argument,” said the tousle-haired Fletcher with an exasperated air. Mirabelle stroked the back of his thigh, dabbing at her eyes and nodded.

  “Your father has been assigned the case against Sebastian Stuart,” she said somewhat unsteadily.

  Fletcher looked bemused as to why a man they had never mentioned before should be of such importance, or was it that as everything else had been a source of argument they had decided to move onto more distant subjects.

  “What, that traitor?” he exclaimed.

  “Yes, Fletcher. That son of a bastard traitor,” replied Adam, staring at Mirabelle with a look of triumph in his face.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “The State would respectfully ask his honour to give the defendant one last opportunity to seek being represented by counsel,” said Steiner. The judge, Lord Justice Mainwaring, nodded gravely at Steiner and looked to Sebastian, who was standing erect in the dock and waited for his response. Sebastian had no intention of changing his mind but decided to play it for all its theatrical worth by keeping them waiting while he took in his first sighting of Steiner since that fateful day at Oxford, and he was not impressed. If anything, time had narrowed his features into a passable impression of a crow, and his eyes were mere slits now. While his diction was clear, he could sense whatever humour he possessed was sharp but not very deep and that would only be more exposed if he could needle him with some personal affront that only Steiner would comprehend – and he had a full armoury of barbed comments he could use. Steiner for his part thought that the good life had gone to Sebastian’s head and frame, for while his eyes were sunken and bore the marks of the pressure over the past few months, he was probably a bit overweight for a man of his stature and slightly ruddy faced which he put down to a penchant for the bottle. Just as well they kept him out of jail then, he mused. Otherwise I would be facing a tougher and leaner opponent, just as the American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson, had discovered when he came to cross-examine Goering and found the Reichsmarschall a far more formidable foe off the morphine than the one the Royal Air Force had to take on, when he had been reliant on the drug, and as a result Jackson’s White House aspirations evaporated into thin air. Steiner, though, had a low opinion of American lawyers and reckoned if he had been the lead counsel there he would have had Goering condemned within minutes while Albert Speer would not be rotting in Spandau Prison but had his ashes dispersed like the other convicted criminals in some anonymous plot of land.

  “I have no intention of burdening anyone with my defence, M’lud. I am finding it difficult enough to sort it out myself,” replied Sebastian finally, bowing deferentially to the judge while keeping eye contact with the jury to see how they took his light-hearted answer. He liked what he saw, as several of the men nodded approvingly and a couple even smiled, which did not make Steiner feel very happy at all. Sebastian had already succeeded in getting three to four of them to at least sympathize with the man, if not his alleged crimes, and that was a poor base to start from. He also observed that there had been ripples of laughter from behind him in the packed courtroom. The queues had been like for the opening of the Harrods sales, some camping outside overnight, for while the crowds had not had their day in court with the Burgess and Maclean lot, they had landed the rare prize of a fast rising government minister alleged to have fought with the most evil regime of the modern day and probably history and they were not going to miss out, no sir.

  This only fuelled Steiner’s air of self-importance and desire to put up a performance worthy of those titans of the British stage, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, while he thought Sebastian was only capable of an American Hollywood-style show – would he be Humphrey Bogart or would he try and play the Hollywood’s favourite English cad, George Sanders. That was the question Steiner looked forward to being answered, as he believed the facts he had in his possession and the witnesses they had lined-up were so formidable that under this withering assault Sebastian would have nothing to fall back on but his dubious charm and the spurious claim that he had learnt his lesson by refusing the offer from the Communist cell.

  He was also pleased with the choice of the judge as he had appeared before him seven times and never got a bad result; though he was known for the leeway he gave defence counsel he was also a conservative and might not be so generous with Sebastian acting on his own behalf, regardless of his lack of training in law and having been given the opportunity to rethink and take on a barrister.

  “So be it, Mr Stuart. But I must warn you that despite your legal-free background I will be no more lenient on you than I would be on a professional barrister. I would also like it noted that as you are on trial for your life, I would have thought it better advised that you did take professional legal advice, but I also accept your right to represent yourself. This is not to say that during the course of the trial you cannot revise your decision,” said the judge kindly.

  Mainwaring then asked Steiner to commence his case and Adam rose like a proud peacock from the prosecution benches to begin what he predicted would be his finest performance of an already star-filled career.