Mr. Love and Justice (7 page)

‘Something for protection?’

‘District-nurse money, he calls it. For their healing visits. Still, I prefer those fancy vice boys to the poker-faced lot in uniform. They may be crooked, but in my experience a man who’s crooked is in some way or other human. Almost, anyway.’

Frankie looked at the star ponce and said, ‘You afraid of them?’

‘Who – me?’ The star ponce reflected. ‘Well – yes, of course,’ he said, ‘but not of
them
: I mean, I’m not scared of them individually or even several. I’ve been alone in the cells with them, Francis, and no holds barred, and I’ve found I haven’t been afraid. But of the Force – yes, I am. You see, we come and go – and even they do: but the Force – it goes on for ever.’

‘Just like the world does.’

‘Yes, on for ever. There’s always this, you see. If they
really decide to turn the heat on anyone – not just one of us, but I mean on
any
one – well, they can always find
something
, can’t they.’

‘Or say they do … which amounts to much the same.’

The star ponce shook his luscious locks and said, ‘Well, not exactly. If ever they get
you
in the cells, Francis, remember this. The trial’s not there, it’s in the open court. The mistake almost everyone makes, even quite clever people and no doubt because they’re scared, is to fall for the copper’s spiel of pretending it’s
he
who conducts the trial. Well – it’s not: there’s always the lawyers and the judges.’

‘So I’m discovering.’

‘Well – remember it. Anyone can come unstuck, but you lessen the chances quite a bit if you remember …
never
speak to them. If six men try to carve you up – don’t call a copper: grin and bear it. Then, if they knock you off, don’t
talk
: Francis, don’t ever talk. Name, address and age, that’s all: just like the navy or the army. And never plead guilty – never. Because to them, whoever you are, if they take you you
are
guilty, so it makes no difference anyway. If they find you outside the Bank of England with a bag of gold – not guilty. In the courts, there’s always a chance: if you talk to them or commit yourself to any plea, there’s none.’

‘I’ll remember,’ said Frankie, finishing his glass.

The star ponce emptied his too and rose. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘in this business, however careful you may be, you’ve
always
got to listen for the knock on the
front door. Whenever you hear a knock, even if it’s only the Plymouth Brethren calling to save souls, you’ve got to be alert and ready. And take your time before you open up: if they
really
want to see you, don’t be in a hurry: they can always break the door down – and they will.’

Edward longed to escape from the thraldom of the section-house. When he did his military service he didn’t really dislike barrack rooms – realised, in fact, that if you had to be a soldier they were the most practical and even comfortable places to be a soldier in. But in the section-house the men were all rather older, and, except for a few widowers and what is known as ‘hardened’ bachelors, all anxious, like him, not to be there any longer, since it wasn’t really necessary for coppers to live in great male dormitories. Besides, the atmosphere of
randiness
in the place – you could only call it that – depressed him: you could feel it bursting from the rooms at night, and in the mess-hall the conversation (when it wasn’t gossip about the Force) centred on ‘sex’ monotonously. For Edward, sex was a secret and yet a totally splendid thing: something
he felt no need (like some copper puritans) to be uncomfortable about at all – very much the contrary – but one that lost all its glory and delight once it was severed, even in conversation, from the loved person who exchanged it with you.

But how to leave the section-house? The Force didn’t care much for single men in lodgings; and marriage to his girl was for the moment, anyway, impossible. His sexual trysts with her at present took place at her father’s house with his reluctant connivance (a reluctance, in respect of these particular premises, that Edward fully shared), or sometimes dangerously at the houses of several friends (for the trouble with friends is that they can betray you by their quite benevolent intentions), and even, on one or two extremely chancy occasions, in public places: a thing Edward had professionally a horror of, since so many who used the outer woods and gardens did so for reasons that were utterly perverse. It seemed to him that the only (relatively) safe procedure would be for her to take rooms at some discreet address, and for him to visit her there with maximum discretion likewise.

This plan he unfolded in the small back garden of her father’s house in Kensal Green, while the older man morosely eyed them through the back window of the kitchen where he was engaged on his part-time trade of mending radio and telly sets and cameras and high-grade gadgets – a freelance occupation Edward did not approve of since it had something imprecisely
shady
about it. (Somehow all those sets
looked stolen, not left for repair, and anyway, how did the older man make all those contacts to get the jobs? And wasn’t this still, in spite of all his promises, a cover story?) The back garden – yard, really – was hemmed in by walls and windows, but his girl and he were in its most secluded corner, and Edward (though even naked he’d have looked just as much a copper) had on very casual, unprofessional attire. The girl poured tea and
listened
to him in that attentive, respectful way that women have when they hear of some plan to which they may or may not agree, but know it to be dear to their lover’s heart and in its intentions, anyway, conducive to their own interests and a proof of his attachment.

‘The chief obstacles,’ Edward said, ‘are these. Money first. Well – that’s not really a problem with our joint earnings, and you know I’m not a spender; also – you never know – I may get some extra – expenses or something – to help out. Premises. That really shouldn’t be difficult if we look carefully
and
– here’s the important point – are willing to pay enough: say even five or six a week. Then … well, the whole set-up. If we take care I don’t think we should attract attention, particularly if we get a place in a block that’s big enough: I mean like some council flats, say, with stacks of tenants in them. Of course, everyone who’s interested will know perfectly well why I visit you, but that doesn’t really matter unless there’s any troublemakers among them who start shooting off their mouths. Naturally, I’ll have to check carefully to see if there happen to be any other
coppers living in the block. If not, then well and good, let’s go ahead. And remember: we won’t actually be doing anything
illegal
, will we. The worst I can expect, if the Force should discover, is a good ticking-off – and also, perhaps, some enquiries about you which may very well lead home to your dad.’ (Edward glanced at the window and caught his potential father-in-law’s baleful eye.) ‘But that we’ll have to leave to chance – we can’t foresee
every
thing, can we. The chief question that then remains is – when can I visit you? I’ll have to check in at the section-house to sleep fairly often, and you’ve got your job to go out to during the day. So that leaves us weekends, and also the evenings when I can plead duty or actually be out on it and spare a moment. They don’t check on our time much, see, in the present job: they trust us to get on with it, and all they ask for is results.’

‘I think I might know a place,’ the girl said.

‘Yeah? What area? Obviously, it can’t be too far – unless I could get hold of a motorbike, which might in a way be better.’

‘In Kilburn,’ she said.

‘Up there? Well, it’s a nice, quiet … well,
neutral
sort of area, isn’t it. What particular place had you got in mind?’

‘A girl at the workshops lives with her husband and kids there. And she told me you can jump the queue if you give something to the janitor. It’s working-class, you know, but a privately owned block, not the municipal. So the rents are a bit high, too.’

‘All this is going to need money,’ Edward said. ‘And that reminds me. Darling, whatever you do,
don’t
take any from your father.’

‘No, I know about that.’

‘He’s in the clear now, of course, but if you had even a penny from him, and a bit of it went to me even in a round-about way, it just wouldn’t do.’

‘No.’

Edward finished his fourth tea. ‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘As soon as you’re in, you’d better get on the phone.’

‘I’d thought of that,’ she said.

‘A lot of our meetings will have to be at short notice, and that’s the best way we can fix them discreetly without wasting time.’

The girl got up. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you’ve got the time to spare now, Ted, we might take a walk over and have a look at the place.’

They went in through the back basement entrance and up the inside stairs. The girl opened the kitchen door to say a word to her father, but when Edward tried to say goodbye to him he turned up a radio to a horrid blare. ‘I really don’t know why your dad dislikes me so much,’ Edward said to her as they walked across towards Queen’s Park. ‘I know he’s a copper-hater, but why should he detest me personally?’

‘On account of his past,’ said the girl, taking his hand and intimately locking up his fingers. ‘He was framed, so he says, as you know, and you really must make allowances.’

‘Oh, they all say that.’

‘Yes, Ted: but it does happen, doesn’t it.’

Edward sighed. The subject had come up before in his life, and by now he’d grown to live with it and it bored him. ‘Well, it does,’ he said. ‘But in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, even more I’d say, a case is never fixed unless we’re absolutely sure the feller did it.’

‘If you’re all that sure, why can’t you prove it properly?’

‘Because that’s often very, very difficult: you’d be surprised. There’s laws of evidence, and legal quibbles if the case is defended, and sometimes even the old judge, though he may know as well as we do that the prisoner’s guilty, brings up some act of Queen Victoria’s reign or maybe earlier that destroys our case.’

The girl reflected. ‘But if you fix a case, Edward, then don’t you commit a crime yourself?’

‘What crime? Oh, you mean perjury.’

‘It
is
a crime, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, of course! But not, as I see it, for us officers. In the first place let me tell you, if we didn’t use it there’d be stacks of known and previously convicted criminals who we’d never manage to put away at all. And then, there’s another thing. You must remember, dear, that we’re the only people who have to appear constantly in the courts in dozens of cases under oath. Now, if it’s just the single defendant coming up once or twice – or even, let’s say, as many as fifty times
in his life – he only has to face the perjury problem – if it is one to him – on those individual occasions. But us, we have to face it every week almost of our lives. Could we
ever
be all that scrupulous? Then, there’s this. Even suppose the case is straight and all our evidence is kosher. Suddenly, out of the blue, from the counsel who’s cross-examining or even from our own feller for the Crown, you may get a question – one that’s really got little or nothing to do with the case at all – which you simply cannot answer factually without prejudicing the whole issue. And then most of all, dear, there’s your superior officers you’ve got to consider. Suppose Detective-Inspector So-and-so says “Constable, this is the way we’re handling this case” – what do I do? Tell him he’s got it wrong?’

‘Yes, I see all that,’ she answered. ‘But doesn’t it mean if you commit perjury yourself that the defendant’s bound to do it too, whether he wants to or not?’

‘I don’t see that – how come?’

‘According to Dad, when the case was cooked up against him …’

‘Cooked up!’

‘Well, arranged … his solicitor advised him that if he denied everything the witnesses for the Force said, no one on earth – and certainly no one on the jury – would ever believe him. So he played along with their story part of the way, and just denied certain essentials. But even that didn’t help him in the end …’

‘Well, there it is, dear: that’s how it goes.’

‘And what’s more, he says the fact you mentioned just now, Ted, that your officers have such a long experience of giving evidence makes any prisoner like an untrained amateur up against professionals.’

‘Well – that’s what we are. And really, dearest, the whole question about your old dad is – did he do it or didn’t he? That’s what you’ve really got to decide before you pass any judgement on all of us.’

They were now out of Queen’s Park. He thought and said (a note of indignation in his voice), ‘You know
really
, the public expect just a bit too much from us, don’t they? They all want convictions and howl if we don’t succeed in getting them! And all the responsibility for winning the cases by the right presentation of the evidence – which
has
a certain risk involved, even to us, let alone any question of our own feelings in the matter – well,
all
that responsibility
we
take off the public’s shoulders on to our own. And then people turn round and tell us we
fix
all these cases.’

His fingers were clutching hers. She took a more gentle grip and said, ‘Don’t be upset, Ted: I
do
understand. And I dare say the judges and magistrates do as well.’

‘But of course!’ he cried. ‘Some of them are quite simple in spite of all their law books, and don’t really understand, maybe. But most of them realise that crime’s
got
to be suppressed and provided we don’t slip up over the technicalities they never enquire too closely into our actual methods. And that goes for all the top people in the business – I’m not speaking of the
thousands of mugs, even the educated quite influential ones – but the people who really
know
the law and how it operates. They know what we do, and they know why we do it and they accept it. They never say so, of course. And if we slip up, they’re pitiless. But they know.’

Nearby Paddington cemetery she stopped beside the stones and railings and reached up and kissed him, without reservation of her person, warmly, entirely – a whole gift. He was soothed and enchanted because at such moments she gave him to himself: for not even the Force could offer him such self-realisation as she did when she brought her love to him so utterly that he was unaware of her – only of himself. ‘If only we could marry now,’ he whispered into her hair. She held him closer, yet not
tight
as some girls do. A professional instinct made him cut short the embrace, though gently, and they entered together the respectable wastes of Kilburn.

Examining the area, Edward liked it. There is about Kilburn a sort of faded respectability, of self-righteous drabness, that appealed to him. For the true copper’s dominant characteristic, if the truth be known, is neither those daring nor vicious qualities that are sometimes attributed to him by friend or enemy, but an ingrained conservatism, an almost desperate love of the conventional. It is untidiness, disorder, the unusual, that a copper disapproves of most of all: far more, even, than of crime, which is merely a professional matter. Hence his profound dislike of people loitering in streets, dressing
extravagantly, speaking with exotic accents, being strange, weak, eccentric or simply any rare minority – of their doing, in short, anything that cannot be safely predicted.

So Kilburn was reassuring: but on the other hand it had something else that equally appealed to Edward which was that, although proper, it was also in an indefinable way equivocal. As you walked through its same and peeling (though un-slummy) streets, the façades of the houses hinted, somehow, that all was not as it seemed behind those faded doors and walls. This straitlaced seediness, this primped-up exterior behind which lurks something dubious and occasionally horrifying, is the chief feature of whole chunks of mid-twentieth-century London – as, indeed, of many of its inhabitants: the particular English mixture of lunacy and violence flourishing inside persons, and a décor, of impeccable lower-middle-class sedateness. This atmosphere appealed to Edward who, like all coppers, shunned clear pools (and even turbulent torrents) and preferred those whose surface, though quite still, could easily be stirred up into muddy little whirlpools. For if the copper is a worshipper of the conventional (so far as the world at large outside him is concerned), he is also in his inner person (being the arch empiricist) something of an anarch: a lover of stress and strain and conflict, wherein he himself may operate behind that outward, visible order he admires.

The flats the girl had in mind were of more recent construction – one of those countless, anonymous 1950
blocks which, in spite of their proliferation, have as yet entirely failed to transform London from what it still after years of bombing and rebuilding essentially remains – a late-Victorian city. The block was tall and oblong-square and bleak and domestically adequate: perfect, in fact, for their intentions.