Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  ‘Been on a salvage job. Haven’t got pissed or had a white woman for three months.’ The man seated unsteadily on the barstool beside us had, as I remember, ginger hair and flaming cheeks. He also had a look which was not only lean and hungry, but positively desperate. ‘Can you imagine?’ he asked me with considerable hostility. ‘What it’s like not to have had a fucking white woman for three months?’

  ‘You’ve been at sea?’ I tried to sound understanding.

  ‘Fucking sea captain. Salvage. That’s my business. You might as well be in sodding gaol.’

  To my immense relief, I saw an elegant figure in a white suit bearing down on us. This, I profoundly hoped, was Desmond Neil, forty years on. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the sea captain. ‘We’re being taken out for dinner. Best of luck.’

  ‘Ah, John. How good to see you! And you must be Penny. I’ve booked a table,’ Desmond Neil greeted us. ‘Not a fucking white woman!’ the sea captain was muttering, when Desmond interrupted him. ‘We’d better get going. Plenty to drink when we get there. Oh, and do bring your friend.’

  ‘That’s very good of you, sir. Thank you very much.’ The sea captain was delighted to accept the invitation. So we all sank into the back of a long white Mercedes, driven by a uniformed chauffeur to whom Desmond spoke in Mandarin. Then he showed us a photograph of himself and E.P. Thompson, the author of The Making of the British Working Class, as small boys on a football field. This was rapidly followed by pictures of them both in the present. ‘Don’t you think,’ Desmond said, showing these to the sea captain, ‘I’ve worn a great deal better than Palmer Thompson?’

  ‘Poor bugger!’ The sea captain looked at the great historian and CND protester with sympathy. ‘Probably hasn’t had a white woman for years.’

  Dinner passed like a strange dream. The Chinese restaurant on top of a tower rotated slowly, giving us ever-changing views of the harbour. The centre part of the table also revolved, offering us a feast of dishes, a great deal of sake and many bottles of Chinese beer. Throughout this banquet, Desmond would ask questions like ‘What happened to the Mitchison boys?’ ‘What a tragedy about Bill Mann! Did you keep up with him?’ ‘Or was it Winchester that Peter Tranchell went to?’ With perfect courtesy he always included the sea captain in these inquiries but his unexpected, ever more intoxicated guest could only mutter, ‘Any chance of a white woman around here, or are they all Chinks?’ In the end he helped himself to a dish full of a sauce called Dragon’s Blood, went a deep shade of purple which clashed with his ginger hair, hit himself in the chest and cried out, ‘Fucking hot food they give a bloke round here!’, while Desmond was asking if Mr Rety, known to us as Rats, was still teaching dancing at the Dragon School. On our way back to the hotel the white Mercedes took us on a tour of the city, during which the sea captain fell into a deep and deafening sleep. ‘Interesting fellow,’ Desmond Neil whispered, ‘have you known him long?’

  ‘Only about two hours,’ I had to admit, ‘but it seems longer.’ When we stopped at the hotel, the sea captain woke with a start and staggered off into the night. I hope he found some sort of comfort. Desmond Neil never asked about him again and was always a kind host in Singapore.

  When I got to court next morning I discovered that Ben Jeyaretnam had sent a letter to a newspaper suggesting £5,000 damages for something written in a report of the trial. My line that damages for libel were not a thing that any sensible politician should stoop to claim was therefore somewhat weakened. My cross-examination of Mr Lee was not as effective as it had been the day before.

  During my first Singapore trial one of the lawyers helping us was Mrs Murugason who wore a wig and gown and a diamond in her nose. Every morning, when asked, ‘How are you, Mrs Muru?’, she would smile at me and say, ‘Very bright and perky, thank you, sir.’ We had some time off towards the end of the case and I told her I was thinking of going to Bangkok to write my speech. ‘Good idea, sir. And Mrs Mortimer?’ ‘She’s coming with me, of course.’ ‘Oh no!’ Mrs Muru shook her head. ‘Coals to Newcastle, dear sir. Coals to Newcastle!’ Despite this warning, Penny and I went off together, were duly solicited together and declined the invitations.

  I wrote the best speech I could in the Somerset Maugham wing of the hotel and on a boat going down the river. I handed a copy in to the enigmatic judge who, no doubt, read it carefully before he found in favour of the Prime Minister and awarded him 130,000 Singapore dollars, or about £35,000, by way of costs and damages. Ben Jeyaretnam sold his house, made certain economies and managed to pursue his perilous political career. Of my performance, he wrote: ‘Mr John Mortimer’s oratory at the trial won the admiration of many Singaporeans, but did not win my case.’

  At that time, he had only put his toe into the sea which would engulf him and bring me back to Singapore where I would finally fall out of love with my legal career.

  Chapter 11

  Publishing books and expressing any sort of opinion lead to many letters from strangers. Often they enclose bulky manuscripts or ask for advice on how to get into television. Because of my legal past they question me on points of law and wish me to right complicated wrongs. They send piles of documents, photographs of cracked kitchen walls or unsatisfactory partners, press cuttings of unjust court proceedings. Sometimes literature and the law are mixed in these requests. One woman wrote: ‘We thought you’d like to know that our sister has just murdered our mother. Do you think this could be written up into a good play for television?’ Sometimes they are saddened by what I have said and send me books on how to acquire religious faith. Often they are kind, sometimes not. A correspondent who disagreed with something I had said about free speech ended his letter: ‘And I hope you die slowly of a painful cancer. Tours sincerely, A well-wisher.' About once in every two or three months I get a letter from a woman I have never met. She tells me a lot about people unknown to me. 'How Nell and Dave looked daggers when they saw us laughing together in the comer at Heather's place!’, or, ‘Julie couldn't get over how tired and out of sorts you looked and suggested Pam had been giving you a hard time over that business of the car.’ These letters are unsigned, very neatly written and I have never answered them, as she sends no address. When they come, I look at the envelopes with dread, wondering where I've been or what sort of impression I created among so many unknown acquaintances.

  So it seems I have a fictional life which I only learn about in occasional letters. Much of my time has been spent on fiction, and some of it trying to analyse and explain the deceptive nature of art and literature to not entirely sympathetic judges and Courts of Appeal when books went on trial. Courts often found it hard to separate the views of authors from their invented characters. For instance, when he wrote:

  Come, you spirits

  That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

  And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

  Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood;

  Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,

  That no compunctious visitings of nature

  Shake my fell purpose.

  the author was expressing Lady Macbeth’s thoughts and not his own. Indeed, there’s no reason to deduce, from anything in the play, that Shakespeare approved of the murder of house-guests, any more than in Richard III he licenses political assassination. Yet, in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, for instance, it was assumed that every time the gamekeeper opened his mouth it was D.H. Lawrence speaking. It was always very difficult to get courts to separate authors from their characters, even if, as was clearly not the case with Mellors, they were characters the author disliked.

  It was also hard to explain the state of mind of the audience. The courts seemed to assume that if the readers or viewers were submitted to some description of villainy, sexual indulgence or violent cruelty they would immediately rush out and try it for themselves. Yet millions of unadventurous men on commuter trains read the James Bond stories without feeling licensed to kill or sleep with sultry mistresses on Cari
bbean islands; even more millions of law-abiding citizens read Agatha Christie without the slightest temptation to stab the heiress in the library.

  ‘Art is not life,’ Auden wrote, ‘and cannot be / A midwife to society.’ The blurred connections between art and life, their effect on each other, and the distinction between truthful art and mere pretence, were the subjects of discussion in a number of legal cases. The argument became even more complicated when the works themselves were calculated to deceive. The tricks in art that come off appear magical, the failures vulgar frauds. No one in their senses confuses art with reality or thinks they enter a gallery to look at actual sunflowers or live, naked women picnicking on the grass; what they are seeing is an idea of the world presented by a conjuror. But when artists borrow other people’s ideas, or pinch their brand of trickery, they get branded as forgers and are occasionally prosecuted. The concept of forgery would be impossible had not money, in considerable sums, become inappropriately mixed up with the world of art.

  There’s no doubt that the art world welcomes forgeries. The wisest practitioners don’t simply produce a drawing and call it a Rembrandt; they take a suitable drawing they have done to an art expert and ask for his informed opinion. Everyone likes to be present at an important discovery and the expert will no doubt say, ‘Blow me down! I think this is a Rembrandt!’ or words to like effect. The drawing then goes off and takes on a life of its own and art houses and museums will often protest that it’s genuine however often, or however convincingly, the forger confesses. And yet how harmful is this delusion? The flattered lover may be genuinely delighted by his mistress’s faked orgasm and the actor by insincere praise of his performance. The art lover may be deeply moved by a drawing, beautifully executed, in authentic ink on period paper, by a talented art student in Camden Town, which he has every reason to believe is by Rubens.

  This line of thought is not easy to follow, and pursuing it is like walking down an endless passageway lined with mirrors which reflect and often distort each other’s images. The argument is a difficult one to conduct before an Old Bailey judge who learns, to his apparent distress, that Marcel Duchamp, by the simple act of signing a urinal R. Mutt, sold it for more money than the judge was likely to earn from a year of toil at murder, robbery and grievous bodily harm.

  It all started when the National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition of work by a hitherto unknown nineteenth-century photographer named Francis Hetling. The pictures, which were mainly of Victorian beggar children and street waifs, were described as ravishing; the exhibition was an undoubted success and a set of ten prints was later sold to an art dealer who seemed well pleased with his purchase. Unhappily, the National Portait Gallery was visited by a mother who recognized a pool-eyed child, who stood dirty, barefoot and shivering, clutching a shawl around her in the doorway of some Victorian slum dwelling, as the daughter she had driven that morning to school in Battersea.

  Francis Hetling, although posthumously recognized by the National Portrait Gallery, turned out never to have been born. The ‘ravishing’ pictures were the work of Howard Grey, a photographer of Clapham, and Graham Ovenden, a painter of the ruralist movement, a sect devoted to living in the countryside and listening to the works of Sir Edward Elgar. Graham Ovenden was far the more interesting of the two. He was a brilliant artist whose genius was rated by none more highly than himself. One of the questioned photographs turned out not to be a photograph at all but a super-realistic drawing by Ovenden himself, thus adding bewilderingly to the layers of deception. When the judge looked predictably incredulous on being told this, Ovenden dashed off another convincing photographic drawing to add to his bewilderment.

  It was Grey who had taken the photograph of the Victorian slum child. In fact she had been wearing an old T-shirt, was asked to rub dirt on her face and body, posed against a chimney-stack on the roof of his studio and was paid £35 for the session. Ovenden said that he had found Grey in a depressed mood, down on his luck, and wanted to encourage him and prove that his work was as good as that of any of the great Victorians. He put the photographs through various processes, in some cases drawing them and then photographing the drawings. He attributed the Hetlings as coming from the collection of Graham Ovenden and eventually agreed to give the art dealer some of the prints, but didn’t take money for them directly. Instead he asked the dealer to buy some of his own works for the same value. Our defence, readily agreed to by Mr Ovenden, was that he was such a consummate artist that the photographs were far more valuable if he had had a hand in them than if they had been the work of Francis Hetling, an obscure Victorian, who had no real existence anyway. So, to debate questions which have puzzled art historians, confused connoisseurs and bedevilled critics down the centuries, we went down to discuss it all in front of an Old Bailey jury. ‘Works of art,’ I remember suggesting, ‘can’t be approached in the same way as frozen carrots,’ and yet how should they be valued? Peter Blake, a friend of Ovenden’s and, at that time, a fellow ruralist, sat in the public gallery throughout the trial. It further puzzled the judge to discover that Mr Blake only had to sign a postcard, say a sepia-tinted view of the promenade at Torquay, to increase its value astronomically.

  Graham Ovenden, small, bearded, blessed with every talent except modesty, explained a letter of apparent apology he had written to the art dealer by saying, ‘Great men humble themselves,’ and fended off other attacks by agreeing with a smile that, ‘Great men sometimes do things like that.’ He did nothing to simplify life and art for the benefit of the court. Charles Lawson was a thoroughly decent judge with a ramrod straight back, a complexion the colour of vintage claret, a ready smile and a considerable amount of common sense. Given a charge of gross indecency in the Superloo at Euston Station he was in complete charge of the proceedings, saying, on one occasion, that my client, who was called Titus Brown, had ‘the best name for a bugger I’ve ever heard’. On questions of aesthetics he was far less happy. When the prosecuting counsel suggested to Ovenden that a Van Gogh would be a good picture whoever had painted it, my client said, correctly, that there he was on dangerous ground and went off into a long catalogue of the pictures that are ‘of the school of’ or ‘in the manner of’ or simply ‘after’ great artists. The judge was clearly lost and the shorthand writer became too confused to continue her note of the evidence. The prosecutor then held up a photograph by Lewis Carroll, another specialist in portraits of young girls. Ovenden agreed that it was a valuable work of art. But when it was suggested that the Hetlings had no value, Ovenden was able to tell him that he was quite wrong. It seemed that once the Hetlings were known to be Ovendens they were worth more than the art dealer had paid for them.

  The judge summed up the trial as ‘one of the most interesting and unusual in the whole of my judicial experience and in my career at the bar’. At the start of the proceedings he had offered the jury a fascinating and entertaining case, but by the end of it they must have been in a state of utter confusion. I don’t know exactly how they reached their verdict but they acquitted both defendants of conspiracy to defraud. They couldn’t agree if Ovenden had obtained money by deception and the prosecution accepted the judge’s hint and offered no further evidence. Ovenden had successfully pulled the leg of the National Portrait Gallery, fooled the art experts who failed to recognize some of the Victorian photographs as contemporary drawings, and led an unsuspecting judge and jury far away from the simple facts of fraud and theft into the swamps of aesthetics. I remember one moment with particular joy. I presented an art expert with what was said to be a Victorian photograph, by Julia Margaret Cameron, of a nineteenth-century staging of King Arthur at dinner with his Knights of the Round Table. When I asked him to look very carefully at the little knight seated on Sir Lancelot’s right, he had to admit, blushing modestly, that it was himself in fancy-dress. In the world of art nothing is entirely credible and the camera lies with considerable ingenuity.

  Recently I wrote, and Jacquie and our company produced, a ser
ies of television plays about life in an art auction house. For the production we took over a huge, and no longer used, old people’s home somewhere south of London airport, which smelled strongly of urine and was full of rusting Zimmer frames and cranking-up bathroom equipment. We redecorated it, hung it with dark red wallpaper and a man, delicately applying paint with feathers, made the convincing marble archways. On the walls hung paintings of dubious authenticity found in stores of prop-suppliers or hired from owners who made extravagant and unconvincing claims for them. The old people’s home was disguised as a smart auction house named Klinsky’s and fake catalogues advertised the sale of a so-called Raphael that was put together in the art department. Each story dealt with a work of art which might or might not be genuine. To tell these stories, we ordered up an allegory Bronzino never painted and had an alternative salt cellar, which might pass for the work of Benvenuto Cellini, created for us in the Silver Vaults. The end result was, I hope, an expensive but moderately successful con-trick about the everlastingly deceptive world of art.

  Something strange happened that proves not only the potency of the most spurious art but the reckless intoxication induced by auctions. At the end of shooting we gave a party for the unit in the Klinsky’s set and decided to hold a sale of the props for charity. Admittedly a number of Harvey Wallbangers and Tequila Slammers had been consumed, but the bidding for what everyone knew perfectly well were complete fakes rose to dizzy heights. I can faintly remember paying a good deal of money for a pretended drawing by Juan Gris that I knew the young man who wore his gold-embroidered cap back to front had run up in the art department.

  Then the work was finished. We left the old people’s home and the local authority, who owned it, wanted us to restore it to the state in which we had found it. So we stripped off the damask paper, obliterated the marble and an elderly carpenter was strongly tempted to pee up against the walls.