Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  Working for a county lady, the butler was recognized by her footman as someone he’d met during a spell in prison; for this the footman was killed and buried in the rose garden. Later, the lady in question wrote to the court to assure the judge that the butler was an absolute paragon who never failed to take the Labrador out each night for a run in the rose garden. I didn’t act for this tail-coated assassin but for another footman who had been his accomplice. My client, I remember, complained that the butler was treated as a star in prison, enjoying the sort of deference which screws and fellow inmates accorded to such famous figures as the Kray twins, whereas he was treated with contempt and often had scalding cocoa poured over his head. At the end of the trial the judge sentenced the butler to life imprisonment from which ‘you will never be released unless you are in the terminal stages of a fatal illness’. At this the perfect servant smiled faintly, bowed and left the dock as though he had been told that he might serve dinner now.

  The most terrible crimes often take place in mundane surroundings and the evidence is commonplace. The story of one of the first murders I was concerned with started with a cleaning lady, employed by a very upper-class agency, let us say Dusters Ltd of Kensington. She was sent off to clean the Belgravia apartment of a family she had never met and was given the keys to let herself in. Accordingly she went to this select address, walked into the kitchen, took off her coat and hat and hung them neatly in a cupboard. She put on her overall, found the Hoover and emerged in a long passage, at the end of which she saw a young man, who was to be my client, in the act of murdering his mother with a weapon which was referred to during the trial as a ‘salad knife’. Without a moment’s hesitation, the cleaning lady returned to the kitchen, closed the door firmly, put away the Hoover, took off her overall, put on her hat and coat and returned to the offices of Dusters Ltd. When asked why she had come back so soon, she shook her head and said, ‘No, that’s not really the type of family I’d care to work for.’ She told no one about the killing, which was not, in fact, discovered until a considerable time later. When the son was arrested, however, the statement he made to the police came out as a kind of lurid poetry, for he said, ‘I have either buggered a prostitute or killed a peacock in paradise.’ This may have been a lightning flash of lunacy or a well-contrived invention to get him to where he was destined to go, to Broadmoor.

  Sometimes the plots of the dramas in which we took part might have been written, on a day when his fancy was running riot, by Joe Orton. Two young male prostitutes were standing under neighbouring lampposts in Bayswater and they struck up an acquaintance. Their names were Bob and Anthony. Bob was inclined to rob anyone who went home with him and Anthony was in the process of changing his sex. These two fell head over heels in love. Bob took his new friend, by now known as Antoinette, to live with his parents. Bob’s father was a prison warder, a job which provided him with a house, and Bob’s mother, overjoyed that her son had found a nice girlfriend at last, hoped for an early marriage. For a while all went well, but then Antoinette began to stray and took to visiting the Flying Saucer club in Leicester Square. One night Bob, overcome with jealousy, followed her to this resort where he found Antoinette removing her trousers whilst dancing with a young man. Enraged, Bob began to beat his friend about the head with a pink plastic piggy bank in which the club collected money for an annual children’s outing. As a result of this attack Antoinette was fatally injured and the police were sent for. During the course of his questioning, Bob said to the Inspector in charge of the case, ‘Have you got any idea what it’s like to fall in love with a bloke who changes his sex, and you take him to live with your mum and dad, and then find him undressing on the dance floor of the Flying Saucer and making you so mad you hit him with a piggy bank?’ To which the Inspector politely replied, ‘No, sir. I can’t say as I have ever had such an experience.’ At the trial the judge said he was going to treat the case as a perfectly ordinary, run-of-the-mill matrimonial dispute. Bob was found guilty of manslaughter by reason of provocation and leniently treated – the reactions of judges at the Old Bailey were a source of continual surprise.

  There was also a trial in which I got a startling insight into the home life of one particular his Lordship. I had a run of cases which arose from quarrels between married couples in bathrooms. Indeed, the shared bath is fraught with dangers for parties with cooling marriages; the situation in which they find themselves often gives rise to comments of a wounding and personal nature. One such dispute had led to an attempted drowning for which the husband was arrested and I was hard put to it to formulate a defence. Before the trial the judge asked us to his room for coffee and biscuits and a discussion of its probable length. He looked at me as though I was personally in the habit of drowning women in baths and said that it was a most terrible and serious case. ‘Indeed it is, my Lord,’ I told him. ‘My client was seated at the tap end of the bath. He foolishly lost his temper when his wife adversely compared his physical prowess to that of her lover.’

  'What did you say?’ The judge looked at me aghast.

  ‘I said she had made a comment of a personal nature which led to a violent quarrel,’ I repeated, and added, ‘I’m afraid the fight started when he was sitting at the tap end of the bath and

  ‘The tap end!’ By now the judge was seriously perturbed. ‘Does the prosecution accept this evidence?’

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’ Counsel for the Crown admitted it cheerfully, not being altogether sure of what was going on.

  ‘How long had he been in the habit of sitting at the tap end of the bath?’ the judge asked in some distress.

  ‘Throughout the marriage. His wife required him to sit in that position so he could rinse her hair after she’d shampooed it.’

  ‘And how long had they been married?’

  ‘About twenty years,’ I had to tell him.

  ‘For twenty years this woman required her husband to sit at the tap end!’ the judge repeated and bit quite savagely into a digestive biscuit. And so it went on, and we were bound over to keep the peace, or pleaded guilty to common assault, before a judge whose wife had always sat, apparently without complaint, with her naked shoulders pressed against the taps. Eventually I did include this incident in a story, and no one thought it other than an extravagant invention. Rewriting what went on at the Old Bailey as fiction is a constant process of calming down the truth, so that it may achieve some degree of credibility.

  Of course it wasn’t always crime. The civil courts, in the huge, sham Gothic château in the Strand, with its mosaic floor where the secretaries used to play badminton in the gloom after all the judges, litigants and lawyers had gone home, was a far less jolly place than the Old Bailey. Wrangles over money in commercial courts go on in an atmosphere of unalleviated gloom; criminal trials, which concern life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, proceed far more cheerfully. In the Law Courts I argued about wills and, unhappily, about the future of children. Contested custody cases are almost always battlefields in which embittered parents are fighting each other, using Christmas holidays and the choice of schools, days out and weekend visits, as weapons with which to wound each other. These are disputes in which advocacy has little place; lawyers ought to forget their clients for once and think about the children.

  Now, it seems, almost every fought custody case contains allegations of child abuse. When I did them, divorced couples would scrape the barrel of unhappiness and bring up every conceivably hurtful accusation against each other, not leaving out dirty underclothes or demands for sex at inconvenient times and in bizarre outfits and positions. In almost twenty years I can only remember two or three allegations of child abuse. I can’t believe that wives in these circumstances would have kept quiet about it, especially if it might win a custody case. Can these terrible activities have suddenly taken a hold on the British public, or have a few cases caused more to be invented? I have no idea of the answer; but life in the family division today must be far more grim than life in the Old Bailey.


  With tousled grey hair, peering over half-glasses, Richard Ingrams looks like a popular but unpredictable schoolmaster, perhaps from St Cake’s, his version of Beachcomber’s Narkover. He is dressed in a succession of precisely similar tweed jackets, corduroy trousers and rust-coloured sweaters. He also wears a flannel shirt with a tie. His voice is unexpectedly precise, slightly out of tune with his rugged appearance, and he always seems in danger of bursting into laughter. No country but England could have produced him and, like many Englishmen, he is accused of hypocrisy. Private Eye ruined many reputations, mocked many serious people and spread malicious gossip, they say, and Richard went off with a smile and played the organ in his village church. My view of Private Eye has always been that it’s kept a flame of irreverent common sense burning through many dark days, that serious people deserve mockery and that gossip is the stuff of history.

  The magazine would also target various celebrities and, if they complained or threatened legal action, redouble the attack with delighted abandon. One such target was Desmond Wilcox, a television personality and producer, married to Esther Rantzen, also a cause of hilarity to Private Eye because of her habit of suckling her young in public. Desmond Wilcox was accused of plagiarism in that he had turned various scripts about explorers into a book which he published without sufficiently crediting, or rewarding, the script writers. Private Eye, with its tendency not to leave ill alone, also suggested that Desmond Wilcox had done the series in order to pinch the scripts and had, what’s more, purloined a series about the history of the Jews from another producer at the BBC. Mr Wilcox at last sued Private Eye for libel.

  ‘I appear for Mr Desmond Wilcox, my Lord,’ said Anthony Hoolahan, his small, neat and invariably courteous QC, ‘the plaintiff, and he needs no introduction from me.’

  ‘Well, he does to me,’ the judge said, ‘because I have absolutely no idea who he is.’

  So the proceedings started on a cheerful note for Private Eye, but when we came to the Jews, however, the ground began to give way beneath our feet. It seemed that the judge was a tremendous authority and had read every conceivable work on the history of the Jews, and at the drop of a question would lecture us on the diaspora. As the discussion of these matters became more and more detailed, Richard Ingrams passed a number of notes to my opponent, who was on his feet and cross-examining one of our witnesses, suggesting that Mr Hoolahan tell the judge about the ‘diaspora of the Hoolahans, who fled from some Irish bog to scatter and breed all over the world, producing a race of Hoolahans who would bore us all to death in Queen’s Bench Court Seven’. Far from being angered or disconcerted by these messages from the enemy whilst he was in full flow, Tony Hoolahan folded them up neatly, put them in his wallet and took them home to show to his children. I have never seen a client so calm and insouciant during litigation that might have cost him and his paper a very large sum of money. The fact that I lost his case caused no break in our friendship, nor was I targeted by Private Eye, although Richard did say that to lose it obviously called for a high degree of forensic skill.

  Looking back on those days of murder, violence and sudden death, I wonder what that close association with killers did to us. I don’t think it made us callous, lessened our hatred of violence, or diminished our belief of the sanctity of life on earth. I suppose we got a little nearer to understanding the nature of the crime. Very few of the murders I was engaged in were planned, or premeditated in any real sense. They were the result of moments which slid out of control: quarrels in pubs, quarrels between friends and lovers, husbands and wives. Those guilty of them had no time to think of the consequences and would certainly not have been deterred by the death penalty. Taking those pale, calm, curiously remote people out and hanging them would merely add further unnecessary killings to a sufficiently blood-stained society. The death penalty, as an American judge said recently, has nothing to do with deterrence and everything to do with revenge, which, as the man who didn’t write the plays of Shakespeare told us, ‘is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out’. And yet most of us, at the height of a quarrel, however passionate, don’t kill. Why should anyone do so? Is it chemistry or morality, free will or the will of God? These are questions which no trial, however careful or prolonged, can hope to answer and so doesn’t care to ask.

  Chapter 14

  When Laurence Olivier played the cantankerous old painter in The Ebony Tower we took him down to see the artist in Fawley Bottom. As magical in its way as Le Nid du Duc, the Pipers’ house is built, like all old Chiltern farmhouses, with brick and flints. It has a long, high barn where John Piper designed his stained glass windows. His other studio was a converted cowshed attached to the kitchen. There is an enlarged cottage garden – not the sort of gentrified garden which regards colour as vulgarity and all the flowers have to be white, or off-white or greenish (a horticultural and social snob once said, ‘If you want colour in your garden, get your cook to go and buy the seeds!’). The Pipers’ garden glows with huge poppies, peonies, golden rod and deep yellow anemones and petunias, stocks and irises; just as the walls of his studio glow with the great flower pieces he did in his last years and with his paintings of French châteaux, Welsh castles and parish churches under dark and dramatic skies. It was there that the painter showed the actor the movements he might go through while depicting the dark interior of a forest.

  The rest of the house is similarly inviting, with stone floors, log-fires, an army of white candlesticks, flowers in big pots, two pianos (on which John and his son Edward, and sometimes Richard Ingrams, played jazz), tapestries, and one of those lowering portraits of Windsor Castle painted against the typical Piper sky, which caused George VI to tell John he was frightfully sorry about the weather. The kitchen has a great Welsh dresser full of bright mugs; posters for Britten operas, for which Myfanwy Piper wrote the words; and smells of unobtrusive cookery. Myfanwy, now over eighty, dives fearlessly into the pool when she comes to stay in Italy, and she’s still writing – a libretto for an opera based on Easter, one of Strindberg’s relatively cheerful plays – and cooking dinner for an infinite number of friends and her extended family. John Betjeman wrote a poem to Myfanwy whose ‘fortunate bicycle’ he mentioned and went on:

  Golden the lights on the locks of Myfanwy,

  Golden the light on the book on her knee,

  Finger-marked pages of Rackham’s Hans Andersen,

  Time for the children to come down to tea.

  And I remember him saying that he had amorous thoughts of Myfanwy, wearing a white overall with F for Fuller’s embroidered on the bosom, serving him walnut cake in a tea shop. During the war, when petrol was short, Myfanwy drove a pony and trap round the narrow lanes. In her more advanced years, John Piper would ask her to put on exotic underwear and lace-up boots and make drawings of her.

  John is in the house as though he were still alive, his paint table clean, his paints set out neatly, his collection of tapes and records in order. He was thin, grey-haired and aquiline, with a face like a cardinal and a taste for drinking a good deal of red wine with everything. He and Myfanwy met at a holiday cottage rented by another painter, Ivon Hitchens, and fell instantly in love. As they talked and argued, the old days came swimming back – the time when John was an abstract painter and not yet one of England’s great topographical artists. Memories of Kenneth Clark and Sandy Calder, Ben Britten, Osbert Lankester and Betjeman, would come back to them and they would bicker gently about what exactly had happened and when, telling each other that they were completely impossible to live with in a way which showed clearly that their love had never died. All the same, John was a domineering character to whom Myfanwy devoted her life, and deprived herself of much time when she could have been writing. However, she says that without John Piper, she probably wouldn’t have written at all.

  John and I decided we would have a joint birthday party at Fawley Bottom on a summer evening. There were long tables covered
with white cloths and flowers, and ivy climbing up the pillars of the tent. There were many children and grandchildren; small girls in white dresses ran between the tables and out over the grass as the light faded. A number of people met for the first time that evening and fell in love. John had always had a passion for fireworks, which exploded in great profusion at all Piper celebrations. He designed them, chose their colours and falling patterns for royal and state occasions, and a friend of his was a wizard with gunpowder. When the sky was blacker than even he painted it, it was filled with shooting stars and lazily descending coloured cannon-balls, which exploded and divided and reproduced, sending down showers of light and colour. And then, in letters of fire over the Chiltern hill, came the message HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN AND JOHN That night John Piper was eighty, I was sixty – old by anyone’s standards, but I had, I thought, very little excuse for not being entirely happy.