Sing Like You Know the Words (12 page)

By comparison to the Inns, the
chambers in Leeds were just nondescript rooms, ill-adapted for use
as modern office space. Patricia found them adequate, but not
charming. Her own set was housed in a quaint old terrace in the
main area, where at least there was a little square that was neat
and had some growing things in the miniature park that it
surrounded. As a new girl, Patricia was only entitled to an
oversized cupboard in the basement dedicated for her use. From here
she emerged to run errands and carry books, or make the occasional
foray to the courts or the law library. Most of the time she barely
spoke with the other barristers, and when she did, it was to
experience the same sense of being cast adrift in a state of
ignorance that she felt when she was in court.

Nothing in her studies had
prepared her for this strange new world. The academic success that
she’d bought so dearly was taken for granted, and of everything
else she was ignorant. It was the unwritten rules; what everybody
else but her knew how to say or do, that left her confused and
humiliated. No explanations were offered. She told David that it
was like trying to learn a dance while only being allowed to watch
a few steps at a time. In a courtroom, the only thing she could
feel confident about was that every time she opened her mouth,
stood up, or sat down she was making herself look ridiculous to
someone.

David only commented that the
bar was a club like any other. All clubs wanted to set themselves
up as exclusive and so they developed irrational and pointless
rules to keep the new members off balance until they became old
members who would do to new members the same as had been done to
them. It’s the reason they make you survive on crumbs at first, he
said. They don’t want to let in fellows who actually need to work
to earn money. It lowers the tone of the club.

-You know how it works, he told
her. Make friends with the clerks. That’s the weak point in the
system. A gentleman can’t concern himself with touting for work or
haggling over money, so they have to hire some guy who left school
with four o-levels to manage their business, and that’s who has the
real power. The clerks earn more money than most of their briefs,
just directing traffic and negotiating the fees.

So now Patricia had added
sucking up to the clerks to the list of menial and humiliating
chores she had to perform.

And then one day, not long after
she officially qualified, the door to her cupboard squeezed open
and the face of the most junior clerk presented itself in the
gap.

-Gerry Wiseman wants to see you.
He said now if it’s convenient.

The face was gone before she
could reply.

Gerald was the head of chambers,
a remote figure so far as Patricia was concerned, though he was
universally described as jovial. She’d seen him coming and going;
portly, untidy and energetic, with straggly black hair that usually
looked like it needed washing. He had an improbable reputation as a
ladies’ man. The memory Patricia carried of his physical appearance
was of the damp stains that appeared around the armpits of his
striped shirts on warm afternoons. As for talking to him, they had
barely exchanged more than a few words.

Patricia assumed that he wanted
to see her to congratulate her on finishing pupillage and being
kept on. Probably this meeting was another tradition that she
didn’t know anything about.

Gerald welcomed her into his
room and made a point of brewing the tea himself. He used a cracked
and ugly teapot with a part of the spout missing. She supposed it
had a sentimental value. Gerald selected the least battered looking
from a cluster of mugs that sat on a tin tray next to an electric
kettle. He offered her sugar from a half empty bag and she
declined, noting that the spoon had been used earlier.

His room was not so different to
others in the set, though better appointed. The furniture was
older, grander, more ragged. Patricia knew that some of the other
senior barristers wanted to modernize chambers, but Gerald was
against it. There was a lot of talk just now about bringing the bar
up to date. One day, she supposed, they might even have female
heads of chambers.

In Gerald’s view, which he was
happy to explain to colleagues of whatever seniority, it was no bad
thing for the bar to give the impression of being other worldly and
a little eccentric. Damn it, he would say, we are other worldly and
eccentric; it’s just that most of us don’t realize it. There should
be something of the mad professor about us, or the wizard, better
still. People are a little afraid of wizards; they get respect.

But as Gerald would have it, a
wizard, who breaks his staff, shaves regularly, buys himself a
smart business suit and sits in a modern office; well he’s no more
than a man of business. May as well be a solicitor. Then his
younger colleagues would shake their heads and Gerald would fall
back on the consolation of sentimentalists of all periods: I
suppose it will all have to change but please god not in my
time.

Gerald spent some time
explaining this view of things to Patricia, in his vague elliptical
way. She knew Gerald’s reputation: that his long windedness was
often the bait in a trap; that in a courtroom or a conference he
was suddenly incisive when he chose his time to spring, breaking
out of seeming indolence to make a telling point at exactly the
right moment. Just now she found his manner infuriating. He was
spinning out some anecdote beyond all reasonable expectation and
there seemed to be no point to it at all.

Then he started to talk about
the building, which was as time stained and indifferent to mere
utility as its senior tenant could have wished. Patricia had the
impression that he was repeating bits of conversation that he’d
recently imparted to the other seniors. No response seemed to be
required from her for the time being. Her attention started to
wander as she thought about the structure of chambers; which struck
her as a good analogy for the English legal system

The building was a maze, a
hotchpotch of rooms, vaguely connected by short corridors that
intersected unpredictably with other corridors, and staircases that
the builders seemed to have constructed at random. It was the sort
of layout where in order to get across the building; you must first
go up, then down and around. Ceilings and door frames were set at
varying heights, so that the overall impression was not of a
building at all, more a collection of separate rooms, piled on top
of or alongside each other and loosely jointed in whatever way
seemed convenient.

Had it ever been a house, she
wondered? As a novice in the labyrinth there were parts of the
building that remained mysterious to Patricia. She was not sure
that she could have pointed out the tiny window of her own mostly
underground cupboard from outside the building, so complete was the
disorientation once you began to navigate the internal
arrangements.

The unnatural complexity of the
physical location added to the sense of unreality that she felt all
the time at work; the dizzying notion that she did not belong,
might never belong; that she was in a play where everyone except
her knew the script, and every time she opened her mouth it was to
betray her ignorance. Lately any period of reflection seemed to
bring her to this point and then she would become enraged with
frustration that she couldn’t let anyone see. It was all pointless
rituals and hollow traditions, framed as a defence against
outsiders.

She was angry with this world,
and she was angry with herself for still wanting so badly to be
part of it. The system was fusty and idiotic, but though she might
allow that, it was not for anyone outside of the sanctum to say so,
and already she felt the guilty pride of being an initiate, even as
a novice.

Now Gerald was approaching the
obscure point of his monologue, such as it was. The burden of it
seemed to be that wigs and gowns and rooms with a certain patina of
age (or you could say dust) were what preserved society from a new
barbarian age. Abruptly he changed tack.

-And you, er, Patricia. Settling
in alright? Clerks looking after you?

-Yes, thank you. I’ve some work
coming in. Only bits and pieces, but give it time, they say.

-Indeed. And I hear that your
chap, what was his name?

-David.

-Yes, I hear David is a lawyer
too, on the junior side of the profession. I was talking to Sammy
Marks the other day, from Simpson Rose, and he was saying they have
high hopes of David. Sammy was at your house the other night of
course; very nice he said. Anyway, I hope, if you take my meaning,
that should occasion arise, David knows that he would find our set
very eager to assist him.

-I’ve told him that we offer a
full service.

-Yes. Well perhaps you could
afford to be a little more fulsome in your recommendation; without
becoming vulgar. But in any case, I didn’t ask to see you to talk
about that, and thanks for coming at short notice by the way.
Something else entirely. Tell me what you remember about the Obuswu
case.

Patricia struggled to make any
connection to that name.

-I see you don’t recall. So long
ago. Well maybe that’s a good thing – new thinking for old history.
The point is there’s going to be another inquiry; seven years after
the event, I know. Don’t ask me how these things come about, maybe
someone new comes along and reads the files, maybe they were
waiting until everyone involved had died or moved on. Most likely
it was hoped that everyone would forget about the whole thing, but
that doesn’t seem to have happened for some reason. In any case,
now it is up to you and me to discover the truth of it, eh?

-I don’t follow you.

-Yes, yes of course. Well I, for
my part, have been asked to chair the inquiry, and there will be
quite a lot of work. It needs a bright junior, so naturally I
thought of you. I mean, I should say that a lot of it will be
deadly dull, reading through box loads of files and interviewing
witnesses, if we can find them, and if they can remember anything.
It’s forensic work, not what you are used to. The main thing is
that afterwards we must be able to show that we have left no stone
unturned; followed every clue, so to speak. A lot of detail in
short, and much of it tedious. However, all in a good cause and it
is work with a certain prestige. The sort of thing that you can
point to afterwards and say, I was involved in that. People will
remember. Good for the profile, do you see? So I’ll put you down
for coming on board?

-I suppose so, thank you.

-Good, that’s settled then.

The rest of their chat was very
genial, though it seemed to end quite quickly. Back in her
underground hutch, Patricia mulled over the conversation. Why had
she been chosen for this: was it a good thing or a bad? Of course,
whichever it was, there had never been an option turning the job
down.

***

Patricia started to read through
the case summaries. Over the days that followed she immersed
herself in the case. The agreed facts were simple enough.

There was not much to say about
Mr Obuswu. He was a simple man, described as having learning
difficulties. He had come to the city in the early seventies and
hung around for a few months, sleeping rough wherever he could. He
liked to drink and was not choosy about the quality of alcohol that
came his way. One evening at the beginning of winter, he’d been
taken into police custody after becoming unruly, and the next day
he was found dead in his cell. The cause of death was internal
injuries, but how they were suffered was not clear.

In itself his was not such an
extraordinary tale, but a combination of factors had stamped it
into the public consciousness. Mr Obuswu was black of course, and
even though he had no friends in the city, relations between the
police and what was at that time called the immigrant community had
been tense enough for the case to spark interest. The man’s death,
and the apparent lack of official interest in it, confirmed what
certain neighbourhoods routinely claimed; that they had good reason
to suspect and fear the police. There had been demands for an
independent inquiry, and some articles in the national press about
the case.

Mr Obuswu was vulnerable,
without any history of aggression, and the pathology was consistent
with his having been badly beaten. Trust became the issue: to many,
this was a clear case of police violence, and if nothing could be
done about such an obvious abuse then it was clear that no-one
should not expect justice in any similar circumstance. When the
official investigation made no progress, there was disappointment
but not much surprise: it seemed that incidents like this would
always be swept under the carpet, almost as a matter of routine.
But all this had occurred seven years earlier. Were things any
different now, Patricia wondered?

There was more detail.

From the pathologist’s report,
it was clear that the body had suffered injuries consistent with an
assault. “Serious and sustained” were the words he used. The
statement of the arresting officer described some difficulties
getting the victim into the police van, but nothing of particular
significance. Of course what was described in a report, as a minor
scuffle with a confused drunk might have been something quite
different on the night, but how would anyone learn the truth of
that now?

The victim was not the only
alcoholic derelict known to hang around in the churchyard, and some
of the others could be violent, no doubt. The official view was
that there had probably been a dispute about drink just before the
arrest, and that had been when Mr Obuswu had suffered serious
injuries, though he had not realized it at the time. He had some
old bruises as well as the recent ones: maybe he’d been beaten
before. In any case, later in the evening he wandered into town in
search of another bottle. The police were called because he was
shouting and did not seem able to walk. The report concluded that
the arresting officers were just unlucky enough to pick up a man
who had already been fatally injured.