Mr. Love and Justice (11 page)

Edward said nothing.

‘No objection to that, of course,’ the older officer said, ‘provided you’re just
visiting
her, like, and
not
living as man and wife, and provided I’m not formally informed by anyone – I mean in a report – and also provided, I’d say, that, as you tell me, the thing’s only temporary and you’ll soon be getting wed.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Edward said.

‘Just watch it, son. That’s all.’

‘I’d like to thank you, sir,’ Edward said again.

The Detective-Sergeant smiled. ‘No need to: I may need you one day – who knows? That’s one of the things about the Force, son, as you’ve no doubt probably discovered: it’s hard to have friends. Mates, yes, dozens of them, and professionally good colleagues, too. But not many you can let yourself confide in.’

In her warm and chintzy drawing-room the Madam was serving tea and holding court. If a person’s identifiable with a locality, her appearance was Kensingtonian: neat, conservative, reliable and uncreative with a hint, perhaps, of the monied leisure of the Bournemouth pines. Her shoes were not smart but clean and dependable, her hair was not permed but well laundered and preserved. The tea-things were of silver, and the biscuits (which nobody took) from a Knightsbridge store. Her tones were quiet and authoritative like those of the chairwoman of a ward caucus; and she was also, if anyone had anything relevant to say, an excellent listener. Her guests were Frankie and his girl, a bisexual prostitute who was one of a team sustaining the sensational decline of a once (and in some senses, still) celebrated Lesbian socialite, and there was also present, like the footman behind the ducal chair, her confidential maid.

‘So I think,’ Frankie’s girl was saying, ‘you’ll find, as I say, everything will be okay.’

The Madam gazed steadily at Frankie. ‘I hope, Frank,’ she said, ‘you’ll not take it amiss I asked your young lady to bring you here to see me, and didn’t consider I was asking you to take an unnecessary risk. But the fact is, as I made quite clear to this young girl of yours, that if a girl of mine tells me she has a young man in her life – and I like and expect her to be perfectly frank about who she may be in business with – then before I ask her to help me in my own business here I have to see the young man, or other person in question, to get my own personal impression.’

‘Yeah,’ Frankie said.

‘Frankie didn’t very much want to come,’ the girl said, smiling at him a little nervously because, about this, there’d been a really prodigious row. ‘He took a bit of persuading, I can tell you.’

‘That’s understandable,’ their hostess said.

There was a short pause.

‘Look, lady,’ Frankie said. ‘My girl’s here on the work, and it’s not in my interest obviously, is it, to stand in her way if she thinks your place is right for her. So I don’t object to this interview if it helps matters and provided, if I can say so without offence, it’s the only one. There’s no need for apologies because I’m not a man who does anything he doesn’t want to, and if I agree to anything I don’t need thanking for that reason.’

The Madam nodded with reserved approval. The maid looked non-committal, and the bisexual prostitute very dubious.

‘This is a select place,’ the Madam said, ‘and I
mean
select. There are those who think an establishment of this nature has to be noisy, dirty, and generally disreputable. Well, not me or mine. A well-conducted meeting-place such as mine can be every bit as decorous and charming as a hotel is – or ought to be, should I say, because few are as well conducted, though I say so, as my premises.’

‘
And
often have more strangers in the bedrooms I dare say,’ said Frankie’s girl.

The Madam smiled. ‘Tea or coffee, with the morning and evening newspapers, are served to all our visitors prior to their departure,’ she informed them. ‘Is that not so?’ she said, suddenly looking over her shoulder at her confidential maid.

‘Oh, yes.
And
I press their suits for them, and sometimes wash and dry their socks.’

‘Exactly! I set, as a matter of fact, great store by the pleasant character of these departures I’ve referred to. It’s all that happens
after
rather than
before
, in my experience, that determines a satisfied client to return to the establishment again and recommend it to the right sort among his friends.’

‘No throwing them out before the milk comes,’ said Frankie’s girl.

The Madam smiled again.

‘And what about the law?’ asked Frankie. ‘You got them fixed?’

His hostess winced slightly and said, ‘We take – I and my girls – all necessary measures and precautions. 
And one of those is to beg someone like yourself, Frank, who’s concerned indirectly with my business, to exercise, at all times, a more than usual discretion. Especially, if I may say so, in the matter of conversations other than with, very naturally, your own young lady.’

‘Check,’ Frankie said.

‘They never tap the phones?’ Frankie’s girl asked, impelled by professional curiosity.

‘They’re very welcome to,’ the Madam answered. ‘I, my girls, my dear maid here and, I may say, my clients have trained ourselves to say nothing over the telephone that could, even if recorded, be misinterpreted: I mean, constitute any proof before a court of law. In addition, the firm of solicitors who take my instructions have assured me that, as I expect you know, any evidence of this kind is, legally speaking, inadmissible.’

‘So they’ll have to fall back on the old tactics,’ Frankie said.

‘Who?’

‘The coppers.’

To everyone but Frankie, the note in the conversation now seemed slightly vulgar.

‘So far,’ said the Madam with a marked tone of rebuke, ‘as the officers of the law are concerned, I need hardly say that one’s own common-sense would tell one to say nothing whatever to them without legal counsel. The services of my solicitors, need I tell you, are at the call of any girl whom I employ and who may encounter any difficulties, as much as they are to myself who pay them their fees. But there’s no special need, I think, for
us to anticipate any
special
difficulties. The officers of the law understand my position, just as I understand and respect their own. We have both, after all’ – she smiled again – ‘been on this earth for centuries in one form or another.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Frankie.

‘No?’

‘No. Your lot has, of course, as we all know, but from what they taught me at school coppers only came into being a hundred years or so ago.’

‘You sure of that, Frankie?’ said his girl.

‘Well, isn’t it right? Sir Robert Peel?’

Frankie’s girl was pensive and amazed. ‘A time before there were any coppers?’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘The world,’ Frankie said, ‘seems to have got on very well for thousands of years without them, and some day I dare say they’ll disappear as suddenly as they appeared. We live in the Age of Coppers: but I don’t suppose, like anything else, that it’ll last for ever.’

The Madam was displeased at such levity. ‘I was of course referring,’ she said, ‘to law enforcement officers who’ve always existed, I believe, whatever they may have at the time been called. Two ancient institutions are involved: the profession of love, and the enforcement of the laws that govern it.’

‘I still think we could do without them,’ Frankie said.

The women all raised brows at this typical masculine irresponsibility (or irrelevant intellectual audacity).

‘Anyway,’ said Frankie, ‘they’re the only profession,
the coppers, who’ve never had a hero – ever thought of that? They’ve put up statues to Nell Gwynne and Lady Godiva, but never so far as I know to a copper.’

‘There may perhaps,’ said the Madam, eyeing him acidly, ‘be yet
another
male profession that’s not been commemorated by a statue.’

Frankie laughed: so generous a laugh that it put everyone at ease again. ‘Oh, I grant you that!’ he said. ‘Just imagine it! A public monument to Pal Joey! Still,’ he continued, ‘that’s how I feel. They say that coppers suppress crime. My own belief is they create it: they spread a criminal atmosphere where none existed. After all – look at it from their point of view. A soldier to succeed needs wars, whatever he may say to the contrary. In just the same way as a copper, to get on, needs crime.’

The Madam, who’d by now decided Frankie was a nuisance but on the whole a comparatively harmless one since his girl seemed to have him well in hand, said in a spirit of compromise, ‘I’m prepared to allow you, Frankie, that the recent changes in the laws, so far as our business is concerned, have led to situations which make corruption very much more probable.’

‘Yeah. But try telling the British public that!’

‘I should not,’ said the Madam with a faint smile, ‘dream of doing anything of the kind.’

‘Maybe not. But until the day when they wake up and find what’s happened, the great British public will continue to believe in coppers. And shall I tell you why?’

Nobody wanted to hear, but their collective, unspoken female wisdom considered it simpler to let him get it off his chest than to try to interrupt him.

‘In the first place,’ said Frankie, ‘it’s
not
because the public as a whole respects the law, but merely because it’s law-abiding, which is a very different matter.’

A bell rang, and the confidential maid departed.

‘As a matter of fact they’re not even so much law-abiding, as
respectable
: take away an Englishman’s respectability, and you’ve taken his most cherished possession.’

The bisexual whore rose silently and also took her leave.

‘Now, deep down we English, let me tell you, are a cruel and violent race. Yes, you may look at me like that, but cruel and violent is what we are. But at the same time we’re respectable, like I’ve said, and have to live jam-packed on a microscopic island. So what do we do? We check our violence and cruelty by force: by our own force of will and by employing a force of witch-doctors or high-priests called coppers, who help us to restrain ourselves and who we worship for it.’

Frankie’s girl shifted a bit uneasily; but the Madam remained calmly poised upon her Louis XXII chair.

‘And what is more, just like the tribe does to the witch-doctor, we unload our guilty feelings on the coppers; the law, here in England, is the licensed keeper of our own bad conscience.’

There was a silence. 

‘And there’s another aspect. Being cruel and violent, the Englishman knows he
might
commit a crime: a big one: headline stuff! Of course – he doesn’t. But being at heart something of a criminal, he worships the man that he himself’s set up to punish him if he did so.’

The Madam at last rose. ‘I see, dear,’ she said gently to the girl, ‘your Frank’s a very thoughtful boy. I hope for your sake his cock is even bigger than his brain.’

The habit of coppers of wishing or being ordered to ‘hunt in pairs’ has one great disadvantage to lone-wolves and philosophers in the Force. Long hours shared in isolation with one single other man will cause all but the most resolute or bone-headed to exchange confidences (which they should or would have preferred to have kept to themselves) with their momentary companion. So does the warder chat with the condemned prisoner, the isolated soldier with his erstwhile foe, or do the husband and wife who’ve already signed the deeds of separation if circumstances force them to be alone together.

The star sleuth sat with Edward in the bread-delivery van: and even his resilient spirit was cracking beneath the strain. He deeply resented, in the first place, that the Detective-Sergeant had given him (him!) this flatfoot
job to do. And as for Edward, if the boy had been really stupid as most of them were, or really inspired as he himself was, his company would have been at any rate tolerable. But Edward’s mixture of brains and of professional ignorance and ineptitude (for so the star sleuth esteemed him) were nicely calculated to irritate an expert performer who had but recently himself fathomed many of the major mysteries of the copper’s art.

‘Another one going in,’ said Edward, making an entry in his notebook.

‘You can see in the dark?’ asked the star sleuth.

‘I’ve trained myself to write without a light,’ said Edward.

‘Well, you’re wasting your time.
I
fill up my notebook
after
the event by use of my well-trained memory, and keep my brains cool for the event itself.’

‘Maybe,’ said Edward, who was growing sure enough of himself to resent the star sleuth’s patronage quite a bit. ‘But we’ve got to make certain your evidence and mine are going to tally.’

‘Time enough for that. Though I might tell you one thing, youngster, that you
don’t
know yet. They’ll tell you the evidence of
two
officers will always nail a conviction. Well, in a magistrate’s court that may be so but not, believe me, with a judge and jury – of which I don’t think you’ve yet had a very vast experience.’

‘Why?’ Edward asked, vexed not to know.

‘Here’s why. Let’s say you and I are on a case – see? –
and we’ve both cross-checked our evidence. Right. When
I
go in to give mine,
you
have to stay outside. And when
you
come in to give yours I can stay in court but I can’t speak to you, or alter what I’ve already said.’

‘And so?’

‘And so this. The defending counsel if he’s got any brains, and most of them have or they wouldn’t earn their huge fees, will ask me a-hundred-and-one questions about circumstances we just didn’t think of – like was the prisoner wearing a cap or was it a hat? – and then when you come in, ask you the same questions and very probably get a rather different set of answers. This sows quite a bit of doubt in the jury’s mind. I’ve often seen an acquittal got that way.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘That’s it. One prosecuting witness is often better than two, even if uncorroborated. You can’t contradict yourself, see: that is, provided you remember all you said if there’s a re-examination.’

Edward Justice pondered. ‘The courts are very tricky,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’m beginning to realise what goes on in them’s a much bigger battle than all that takes place before you and the prisoner get there.’

‘Ah! The light’s dawning on you at last! My goodness! If only one young copper in a hundred realised what you’ve just said!’

Edward was silent.

‘I’ll tell you something,’ said the star sleuth. ‘Our real enemy isn’t the criminals: it’s the courts.’

‘Our enemy?’

‘Yes. Here’s how I see it.
We are the law.
I say this because in the whole United Kingdom we’re the only people who really
know
– and I mean
know
– what actually goes on. You admit that’s so?’

‘And then?’

‘Well – picture this. The set-up in the Force we can manipulate, once we know how. And the criminals – well, as you know, there’s a thousand and one ways of controlling them. Even in the courts, so long as it’s only at the lawyer level, there are pressures that can be brought to bear. For instance: suppose you’re a barrister who sometimes prosecutes, sometimes defends. If you win a lot of acquittals you’re not likely to get a lot of prosecuting work to do, are you?’

‘I suppose not, but …’

‘Or take solicitors. Most of those the criminals use are living on criminal money themselves and often getting more of it than they should, in ways their professional bodies mightn’t like to hear about. Now, they know this, they know we know it and pressures can be brought to bear.’

‘Yes, I see that. But when …’

‘All right, I’m coming to that.
But
, as I said at the outset, in the courts there’s one thing we can’t get at all – except in a way that I’ll explain to you: and that’s the magistrates and judges – certainly, at any rate, the judges – and also to a certain extent the juries. Except – and mark my words – for this: we can get at all three by working on their ignorance, fear and vanity.’

‘We can?’

‘We can. As for ignorance, remember this. Judges used to be lawyers, and in their careers there’s not much they haven’t learnt about by seeing it passing before them when they were working in the courts.’

‘And so?’

‘But
seeing
a thing is
not
the same as
living
it. When you go to a theatre you see the show: in fact it’s put on for you, and you’re in the best seats with the actors all facing you and smiling. But you’re still not an actor, are you? You can see a thousand shows, and still know nothing about show-business whatever. Well, with the judges it’s the same: they don’t really
know
; and if they don’t know you can blind them, if only to a limited extent.’

‘But fear, you said. They’re not afraid of us …’

‘No? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The justices, here in England, are the top men in the land: way up above the generals and admirals and cabinet ministers, even. But – never forget – judges in history
have
been tried themselves. In fact, over on the Continent it’s happened in our lifetime – very often, too. They’re way up there, but they’ve got very far to fall! And if ever they
do
, who do you think will call round in the small hours to collect them?’

‘Us?’

‘Exactly. We, boy, you see, are even more permanent than they are and they know it. They’re not fools, and because of this somewhere deep down they fear us.’

‘And their vanity? They’re vain, you’d say?’

‘Well – I ask you! What’s the big, big bribe here in England? Come on – tell me! Is it money? Not a bit of it! Once you get above a certain level it’s
honours
, man, and fancy-dress. You think I’m just being sarcastic? No, boy! To be dressed up in wigs and gowns and call himself lord and be surrounded by pomp and circumstance is worth
millions
to almost any Englishman. And judges – well, they love it! And if a man deep inside himself is vain, and what is worse – or better, from our point of view –
publicly
vain, then you can always play upon that weakness. “Yes, my lord. As you say, my lord.” And, “As your lordship please.”’

Edward reflected deeply, then said to the star sleuth, ‘You don’t think, then, that beyond us and beyond the courts and judges there’s anything like an actual
justice
involved?’

‘No.’

‘It’s all just personalities and procedure?’

‘It’s conventions: social customs, you might say. These change and alter, often radically, as anyone who’s studied history a bit will know. But only one thing doesn’t alter – and that’s us: the men who
enforce
the laws, whatever they may be. And so I tell you:
we
are the courts,
we
are the judges,
we
are
justice
!’ Edward, though highly excited by all this, was not sure by the soft, icy tone of his companion’s voice whether he had a madman or a genius (or both) sitting beside him. Now the star sleuth’s voice dropped to its normal mumble as he added, ‘And even the stupid
public and those fools in parliament, in their own way, admit this. Because according to the acts they’ve passed, if anyone shoots a lawyer – even a judge – and not for robbery, it isn’t capital: but if a man kills one of us for any reason in the world, then – boy, he’s hanged! This sets us up above the rest – above the lot of them, top men and all! Our lives are protected by the hangman’s rope!’

Edward said deferentially but with considerable reserve (as one does when making a remark to anyone which one both wants him to believe and also be able to say, afterwards, one did not mean), ‘So according to you, you should make a suspect feel that we, “the law”,
are
the law.’

‘Yes.’

Then Edward said, ‘That’s not how the Detective-Sergeant sees it, I imagine.’

‘I don’t suppose so. That pensionable clot!’

‘They don’t serve their purpose then, according to you, his type?’

‘Yes – for all sorts of things that don’t really matter. Like clearing the public off the streets as they did so well when old Tito came here, or marshalling crowds when they indulge in political demonstrations, or for horseback parades in Hyde Park when we’re drawn up just as if we were
soldiers
! for a royal inspection. For all that, yes. But for the real work: well – what do
you
think?’

‘I quite like the old boy,’ Edward said.

‘I’m not talking about
liking
. Do you respect him?’

Edward didn’t answer.

‘You’ve got to make up your mind,’ the star sleuth said, ‘right from the outset which kind of copper you’re going to be: a robot or a man with
power
.’

After a short pause Edward said, ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve found the Detective-Sergeant helpful to me.’

‘Yeah? Well, I see nothing against that …’

‘No. He’s put me on guard against one or two little things he’s mentioned.’

‘He has? Such as what? Do you mean that I found out about your girl?’

‘So it was you.’

‘No secret about it, matey. I’m bound to investigate you a bit, aren’t I, if you join our little lot and I’m going to have to put my own life and professional career to a certain extent into your two clumsy hands …’

‘But did you have to tell anyone?’

‘I didn’t: nothing reported, I mean: I just
mentioned
it.’

‘I don’t see the difference.’

‘You don’t? There’s a
lot
of difference, as you’ll grow to learn.’

‘Is there? Well, here’s something for you to learn please, too. I resent your interfering with my private life, and I’ll ask you here and now to stop it.’

‘Oh! So I’m being threatened! Well! Listen to me, boy, I’m not in the habit of giving advice because it’s a thing much too precious to give away and anyhow, the kind of person who
needs
advice never knows how
to
use
it if you give it to him. But I will tell you this, and it’s entirely for your own good because personally I just don’t care a fuck. Drop that girl. Look at it any way you like, if you want to get on – in fact if you want to stay with us at all – well, boy, it’s your only logical solution.’