Murderers and Other Friends (20 page)

‘You mean they want him back?'

‘Oh, no.' He shook his head. ‘They said, “Bloody glad to get rid of him!”'

The trial was long and depressing as it dealt with eight or nine cases of hopeless illness and the termination of life. Mr Lyons did not go into the witness-box, where he might have fallen victim to the plastic bag of cross-examination, but made a statement from the dock. He had been going for what seemed a lifetime – it was, in fact, several hours – when he started to talk about his puppet master who was giving him instructions through a small hole in the top of his head. At this, even the judge, who had been very kind to Mr Lyons, became exasperated and issued a peremptory order from the bench, ‘Mr Lyons, will you please get your puppet master out of my court! I have no wish to hear his evidence.'

In the end, Mr Lyons was acquitted on the murder charges and found guilty of some offences under the Suicide Act. The young man who had taken the telephone calls and given my client his orders got a fairly severe prison sentence. The judge treated Mr Lyons with leniency, and when passing sentence had a singular conversation with the convicted man which, to the best of my recollection, went something like this:

JUDGE
Mr Lyons, you need someone to look after you. Some people seem to take a liking to you. Now, that young Miss Jacobs you met on top of the bus was an extremely attractive young lady...

MR LYONS:
No thank you, sir. I prefer the older woman.

JUDGE:
There, if I may say so, Mr Lyons, I think you're making a mistake. But, at any rate, there seem to be some very nice older ladies in the offices of your organization who might be pleased to keep an eye on you.

The case had an alarming sequel. Geoff Robertson, who had acted for the young organizer at Exit, fell ill with an attack of pneumonia. This fact must have been given some publicity, because Geoff heard a ring at his front door, went down and opened it to Mr Lyons, who was wearing his bobble hat. ‘Oh, Mr Robertson, I heard as you weren't feeling very well lately?' said the old man whom Geoff thought might be eager for tea and bicks.

As I say, I have my doubts about euthanasia. Death may approach in many forms but none, I think, more alarming than Mr Lyons.

I'm sitting talking to an American author in his fifties. He has worked on both
Esquire
and
Playboy
and served in intelligence during the war. He wrote a number of books with titles like
LSD: The Conscious Expanding Drug
and
The Marijuana Papers.
He lived in Cambridge with two pretty daughters who attracted the love and admiration of young students of chemistry. Whether the author became the guru of the group, or was merely anxious to prove his youthful credentials by showing himself part of the drug culture, I'm not sure. He became involved with some of them who took a Welsh farmhouse and there manufactured LSD on such a scale that the police officers, who finally entered the premises, became high on the air they breathed. I am talking to the middle-aged author in a cell.

The police attack on the LSD factory was called Operation Julie, after a dark-haired member of the Thames Valley Force. At an early stage it became clear that one of the chemical constituents of the drug was being imported from Europe and Interpol was alerted. In fact it came from Switzerland and a car was stopped at the border by police who had seen
The French Connection,
a film in which a car hiding drugs is systematically taken to pieces. The gendarmerie spent two days dismantling every bit of the car, and blowing down every tube and pipe, which they laid out on a garage floor. After a minute and lengthy examination, the verdict was pas de stupéfiants, and the young chemists were allowed to go on their way with a briefcase full of the forbidden chemical on the passenger seat. In the course of time, however, the police became more observant and the whole group was arrested.

‘The fuzz treated me very badly.' The author is complaining to me, as many clients do.

‘What did they do, exactly?'

‘They searched my apartment. They took away all my papers. They even analysed my mother.'

‘They did
what
?'

‘Oh, sure. You see, I kept my mother's ashes in a pot on the mantelpiece. They took it away, I guess, to analyse it.'

He has guessed right. Later I find that his mother has been tested at the forensic science laboratory in Reading to see whether she might be a hallucinogenic drug.

Barristers of a certain age get distinctly edgy. They are tired. All that standing up and sweating, that thinking on your feet and putting down questions like a gambler drops counters on the roulette table, has become as exhausting as spending days with an electric drill repairing roads. Most of them want to become judges, to spend the day sitting down, to stop caring who's going to win, and to have a title to take home to their wives. For these benefits, they will endure a life where they spend half their time on circuit, imprisoned in a large house with a butler and three or four other judges, having little to do in the evenings but discuss their cases and go to bed early. If no one makes them judges, old advocates soldier on, getting more forgetful and increasingly tetchy, sliding back to indecent assault and petty theft when they're no longer thought to be up to sensational murders. As the mug on my desk says
OLD LAWYERS NEVER DIE, THEY SIMPLY LOSE THEIR APPEALS.

I knew I didn't want to be a judge. It was the Lord Chancellor's habit to send QCs round the country to do a little part-time judging to see if they had any aptitude for the work. It was after one such session that I told my mother I had spent a week being a judge and she laughed heartily. In fact Penny and I had been in Chester. A congress of florists was meeting in the town and we were hard put to it to find a room in the local motel. I only heard family law cases, so I was never, thank God, compelled to send anyone to prison. It is, as I found, a relief to be sitting down and it is also very strange to be in a courtroom and not have a client. A judge's chief duty is to keep his mouth shut for as long as possible, and this comes very hard to anyone who's spent his life as an advocate. It's the boredom induced by having to sit in silence for days on end which drives judges to say silly things, showing off or playing to the public gallery in a way which gets them into trouble and their names into the papers. I learnt all these painful lessons about judicial behaviour and I hoped I would never have to live by them. I also discovered the work to be fairly restful, and there is no excuse whatever for that lowering fury which so often exploded from the bench in my youth. The proceedings go at the pace you choose if you're a judge, and if you can't understand the law you can always get someone to explain it.

In the early seventies we still did nullity cases, granting decrees to unhappy couples who had failed to consummate their marriages. Either the wife or the husband would have to give evidence about the wedding night and, as they got to the heart of the matter, the court would be cleared and the public asked to leave. Penny, who had, with a slightly ironic smile, stood up and bowed to me as I came into court, left with the public when the preliminaries were over. She went for a walk in the park and when she got back the usher greeted her with ‘The judge said you needn't have gone, but I'm glad you did. A nice girl like you's far better off in the fresh air than listening to all that filth!' I don't know if they still have nullity cases, which were insensitive and unnecessary proceedings.

The last case I was asked to judge concerned the future of two little boys; should they live with their mother, who was an opera singer in Norway, or stay with their father, who kept a garage in Bournemouth? Their entire futures depended on this decision. I begged the parents to put their heads together and come up with an agreed answer. They said that their heads had been together for a considerable period without result and I was being paid to decide the case. If you write a book, you're not called upon to determine the whole course of some child's life. I saw escape from the law as a bright light at the end of a tunnel; even if it were the sort of beautiful and reassuring light that you see at the moment of death.

I wasn't sure that I was going to my final trial when I flew back to Singapore one Boxing Day and arrived jet-lagged, hungover and with no very clear idea what the case was all about. As I had started to read through a mass of papers on the aeroplane, the Singaporean hostess told me that the sleeve of a Rolling Stones record had been banned because it had a picture of a naked woman on it ‘with a tiny black triangle between the legs'. She said, ‘You run across the causeway to Malaysia if you want a good time, but the finest place in the world is Honolulu, if you want my opinion.'

Ben Jeyaretnam, my friend, the Secretary-General of the Workers Party, certainly hadn't been having a good time in Singapore. He enjoyed a triumph which made him the target of a relentless bombardment of legal proceedings, before which any average mortal would have retreated or run up the white flag of surrender. With irrepressible optimism, he soldiered on.

After we had lost his libel action against the prime minister, Ben had somehow contrived to pay his £35,000 of damages and costs. He was delighted when he won the Anson constituency for his party by some six hundred votes. At last he had a seat in parliament, but it was a moment of joy mixed with sadness because his English wife had died. The next morning he served at Holy Communion in St Andrew's Cathedral. Ben's seat in parliament could have done no possible harm to the government; indeed his presence there as a single opposition MP would have enhanced its democratic credentials, but the heaviest legal artillery was trundled out to annihilate him.

First Mr Lee announced that ‘Opposition is all theatre and doesn't make for good government.' Ben was ignored and isolated in parliament, told that he couldn't act as an adviser to the residents' committee in his constituency, and arrested for handing out leaflets with his party newspaper in the street. What had caused me to leave home on Boxing Day, and hover uneasily over the Indian Ocean, was a criminal charge against Ben and his party chairman, alleging their misuse of his party funds. The chairman, Mr Wong, ran the gift shop in the Singapore Hilton and at first I thought that the party funds were lodged in a drawer, with a packet of aspirins, a few condoms and some views of the harbour, and no doubt had got in a bit of a muddle. When I arrived at the hotel, I discovered that the case was far more complex. Very briefly, the trouble started with a debt owed by the party workers for the costs of an unsuccessful libel action lost many years before.

It was never suggested that Ben Jeyaretnam used money given to the party to line his own pockets. What was alleged was that they kept it out of the general fund because that had an order against it for old costs. It was also said that he and Mr Wong had made a false statutory declaration in relation to their accounts. I began to understand the danger for Ben. If he lost badly he could not only go to prison for a long time, he would forfeit his proudest possession, his hard-won seat in parliament. He would also be stripped of his solicitor's practice and his only way of earning a living.

So, after a sleepless and jet-lagged night's work on the case, I stumbled into the robing room of the subordinate court in Singapore. It looked very much like all the robing rooms I had known, from the Old Bailey to Manchester, from Reading to Ibadan. It was a shabby, unswept environment, the floor littered with old law reports and bits of newspaper, the armchairs full of barristers trying to sleep off their hangovers, with other barristers ringing up their wives in a vain attempt to explain where they were the night before. The place was presided over by an elderly Chinese lady who was brewing up Nescafe and pouring out Chinese cough mixture for barristers with sore throats. She took one look at me and called out, ‘There you are, Lumpore of the Bairey!' In a dreadful moment I saw myself spending my declining years slogging round the Far East being called Lumpore. This alarming prospect may have had much to do with my final decision.

We went into court and Ben stood in the dock, looking up at the bench where he had once sat as a judge. Beside him was Mr Wong, whose perpetual smile I felt expressed neither happiness nor hope. The prosecutor seemed highly strung. During one of our differences of opinion he was so appalled by my criticism of his case that he asked for a short adjournment; this request the Chinese judge treated with disdain. If my second trial in Singapore was more pleasant, and seemed more likely to end happily, than the first it was because of Judge Michael Khoo. He was much younger and more talkative than the enigmatic figure who had presided over the libel action. I heard that he and his brother performed to the guitar and were known as the Singing Khoos. He behaved with great fairness and patience, so my last case was as well tried as any I had done at the Old Bailey.

In this trial, my junior was a plump, cheerful, fatalistic Indian lawyer who didn't mind appearing in cases which might annoy the government. After a hard day he asked if I would like to visit his club. ‘The learned leader will find it most relaxing,' he told me. I thought the place would be a relic of the British Raj with peeling leather armchairs, ancient copies of
Punch
and afternoon tea. Instead he took me to the luxurious basement of a high-rise building, divided into small and discreet rooms, where Singaporean girls in thirties Hollywood-style evening-gowns knelt before the guests to serve them gin and tonics. ‘You are English?' one of them asked me. ‘Do you often bump into the Princess of Wales in London? She seems to us a very cheerful sort of person.' Her name was Tracy and during the daytime, she told me, she ‘slept like a pig. I have no boyfriend, you see. I live only for my work.' Living only for my own work, I left her and spent another evening alone in my hotel bedroom with the accounts of the Workers Party.