Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  ‘I’m growing old,’ the blonde girl approaching thirty said in a voice of doom. ‘I know it. I’m getting lines. My face is growing old.’

  We were at dinner with Niven in a Chelsea restaurant. He was bronzed by the sun and serene as ever, wearing no tie and a coat and trousers selected at random from different suits. He looked amused as he said, ‘I can’t feel too sorry for you. Even if I take every pill and hormone, and do whatever diet’s going, there’s no way I’m going to be alive in ten years’ time.’

  A few nights later he was interviewed on television. The stories were as funny as ever and even more brightly polished, but his speech was slurred. His doctor, who had watched the programme, left him a note at the Connaught saying that he might have had a slight stroke.

  I don’t remember how much later it was, a year, perhaps two, that I was driving across Switzerland. We had been staying at Verbier and I was on my way to Niven’s other home in Château d’Oex. I knew what had happened. It wasn’t a stroke but the cowardly and treacherous motor-neurone disease, which either takes its time or kills you in a rush. Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, it paralyses the nervous system so you can’t eat or swallow. I knew that Niven had gone to the Mayo Clinic in America and travelled the world in search of a cure, but motor neurone disease, like God, moves in a mysterious way and no one has yet forced it to reveal its secret.

  When I got to the house, a big, wooden chalet on a hillside glittering with snow, Hjordis was telephoning and seemed cheerful. She went out with a friend and then Niven came downstairs, gently, almost soundlessly, like a ghost, and when he spoke only the faintest sounds came out of him. ‘Fundador!’ he greeted me. ‘What about a jar?’ So we sat and drank white wine and he told me about all the cures he had tried. ‘Someone advised me to sit in a bath of ice and water,’ he whispered. ‘So I sat there in misery and watched my lifetime’s friend and companion shrink to the size of a gherkin! Now, tell me again about the dwarf you once defended.’ We really didn’t want to hear new stories; we wanted to enjoy old ones, told again. We sat together for a long time, until the sun had vanished and the snow was freezing hard, and I could hardly hear him when he said, ‘I think it’s having talked far too much during my life that’s taken my voice away.’

  So I drove back to Verbier, to the apartment full of ski boots and anoraks and exhausted children. We slithered down the street to a bar where chalet girls and middle-managers were laughing and shouting and throwing bread, and I never saw Niven again. A paparazzo got a picture of him sitting in his garden in the South of France, a photograph he must have hated, in which he looked even more ghostlike, almost transparent. He died soon afterwards and a great deal of joy and laughter slipped quietly out of the world.

  I’m not sure what Niven felt as he faded slowly. Did he want to hurry on the process? I don’t believe so. Euthanasia, or ‘easing the passing’ as Dr Bodkin Adams, who did away with many of his elderly patients in Eastbourne in the name of mercy, called it, has become a fashionable subject, and keeping old people alive has come to be seen as politically incorrect as fox-hunting or telling women that they look beautiful. I have doubts on this subject. I remember all the will cases I have done and the ruthlessness of relatives harkening after grandma’s savings, or even her sticks of furniture. How easy it would be to persuade the old girl that she really owed it to her family to drift into painless oblivion so that the spoils might be divided. My doubts were greatly strengthened by a case I did, appropriately towards the end of my life as a barrister. I appeared for an elderly man who worked for an organization which exists to persuade the nation that passing should be eased whenever necessary.

  The angel of death was called Mr Lyons. He wore a bobble hat and carried a white stick on account of impaired vision. His teeth were unreliable so he seemed to subsist mainly on tea and biscuits, which he called ‘bicks’. He was the only man, I think ever, to have mixed up fish and chips and boiled sweets in a food processor and eaten the result. He was no great believer in free will but referred frequently to his puppet master, some unseen spirit who was in charge of his destiny. His terrestrial boss was a well-educated, youngish man who had come to a theoretical and philosophical belief in the virtues of euthanasia. People would ring Exit complaining of terrible pain and, the prosecution claimed, he would dispatch

  Mr Lyons to put them out of their misery. This was done by encouraging them to wash down a special brand of sleeping pill with a good deal of whisky. A black plastic bag was then put over their heads and fastened with an elastic band. When they dozed off, the air in the bag would be reduced, they would suffocate and Mr Lyons was able to move on to another customer. If they took a long time dying, Mr Lyons was alleged once to have said something like, ‘Hurry up, please. I’ve got others to go to this afternoon.’ Before he left, he was thoughtful enough to feed any cats that might have been left unattended.

  It’s fair to say that all his clients embraced death voluntarily. Some cases, however, were clearer than others. A talented portrait painter with a brain tumour, knowing he would never work again, painted his last picture and decided to die, surrounded by his family, with the help of the strange man in the bobble hat. Other charges were more difficult. A suicidal young man with a drink problem rang Exit and it was alleged that Mr Lyons arrived to help him. He was also accused of having agreed to help a very sick woman out of this world without either of them telling her husband who came home from work to find his wife suffocated.

  Unhappily, Mr Lyons kept a careful diary of his activities. The entries were short and gave little more than names and addresses, the times when the operation was complete and whether he got tea and ‘bicks’. He also added a note of the money he had laid out on elastic bands and ‘placcy’ bags. Ever eager to provide evidence against himself, he started to tell the story of the passings he had eased to a pretty model he found himself next to on the top of a bus. She invited him into her house, gave him tea and ‘delicious bicks’ and, being a sensible young woman, and the daughter of the radio and television presenter David Jacobs, reported the matter to the police.

  In England suicide was once a felony, and those who committed it would be buried at the crossroads with a stake through their hearts, and their property was forfeited to the Crown. Some unhappy people were imprisoned for unsuccessful attempts at suicide. When the crime of suicide was abolished, an offence of aiding and abetting the act was retained, and this was the charge faced by Mr Lyons and his director in Exit. It’s remarkable that suicide has never been a crime in Scotland, so north of the Border Mr Lyons could have helped invalids on with their plastic bags in perfect innocence.

  Mr Lyons was a verbose, not to say rambling, old man. His behaviour, and his attitude to life, did not make him the most sympathetic of defendants. When I first saw him, he was furious about his treatment in Brixton Prison, where he was remanded awaiting the trial. ‘They pinched my copy of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas,’ he told me. ‘And the tea, well, you could hardly call it tea!’ If the tea was weak, I thought it was hardly a secure foundation for an application for bail, so I told him that if he wanted to he could tell the judge about it. No sooner had the judge sat down and chosen a pencil but Mr Lyons started to harangue him from the dock and went on for a very long time indeed. When, at last, the stream of words ran dry, the judge, to my amazement, turned to me and said, ‘You know, Mr Mortimer, I am extremely concerned about your client’s copy of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas,’ and he granted him bail. The next morning I arrived very early in court and found the judge, alone on his bench, working on his notes. He beckoned to me and, as I approached, leant down from his elevated seat and said confidentially, ‘I say, John, I had a call from Brixton Prison.’

  ‘You mean they want him back?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ He shook his head. ‘They said, “Bloody glad to get rid of him!”’

  The trial was long and depressing as it dealt with eight or nine cases of hopeless illness and the termination of life
. Mr Lyons did not go into the witness-box, where he might have fallen victim to the plastic bag of cross-examination, but made a statement from the dock. He had been going for what seemed a lifetime – it was, in fact, several hours – when he started to talk about his puppet master who was giving him instructions through a small hole in the top of his head. At this, even the judge, who had been very kind to Mr Lyons, became exasperated and issued a peremptory order from the bench, ‘Mr Lyons, will you please get your puppet master out of my court! I have no wish to hear his evidence.’

  In the end, Mr Lyons was acquitted on the murder charges and found guilty of some offences under the Suicide Act. The young man who had taken the telephone calls and given my client his orders got a fairly severe prison sentence. The judge treated Mr Lyons with leniency, and when passing sentence had a singular conversation with the convicted man which, to the best of my recollection, went something like this:

  JUDGE Mr Lyons, you need someone to look after you. Some people seem to take a liking to you. Now, that young Miss Jacobs you met on top of the bus was an extremely attractive young lady...

  MR LYONS: No thank you, sir. I prefer the older woman.

  JUDGE: There, if I may say so, Mr Lyons, I think you’re making a mistake. But, at any rate, there seem to be some very nice older ladies in the offices of your organization who might be pleased to keep an eye on you.

  The case had an alarming sequel. Geoff Robertson, who had acted for the young organizer at Exit, fell ill with an attack of pneumonia. This fact must have been given some publicity, because Geoff heard a ring at his front door, went down and opened it to Mr Lyons, who was wearing his bobble hat. ‘Oh, Mr Robertson, I heard as you weren’t feeling very well lately?’ said the old man whom Geoff thought might be eager for tea and bicks.

  As I say, I have my doubts about euthanasia. Death may approach in many forms but none, I think, more alarming than Mr Lyons.

  Chapter 15

  I’m sitting talking to an American author in his fifties. He has worked on both Esquire and Playboy and served in intelligence during the war. He wrote a number of books with titles like LSD: The Conscious Expanding Drug and The Marijuana Papers. He lived in Cambridge with two pretty daughters who attracted the love and admiration of young students of chemistry. Whether the author became the guru of the group, or was merely anxious to prove his youthful credentials by showing himself part of the drug culture, I’m not sure. He became involved with some of them who took a Welsh farmhouse and there manufactured LSD on such a scale that the police officers, who finally entered the premises, became high on the air they breathed. I am talking to the middle-aged author in a cell.

  The police attack on the LSD factory was called Operation Julie, after a dark-haired member of the Thames Valley Force. At an early stage it became clear that one of the chemical constituents of the drug was being imported from Europe and Interpol was alerted. In fact it came from Switzerland and a car was stopped at the border by police who had seen The French Connection, a film in which a car hiding drugs is systematically taken to pieces. The gendarmerie spent two days dismantling every bit of the car, and blowing down every tube and pipe, which they laid out on a garage floor. After a minute and lengthy examination, the verdict was pas de stupéfiants, and the young chemists were allowed to go on their way with a briefcase full of the forbidden chemical on the passenger seat. In the course of time, however, the police became more observant and the whole group was arrested.

  ‘The fuzz treated me very badly.’ The author is complaining to me, as many clients do.

  ‘What did they do, exactly?’

  ‘They searched my apartment. They took away all my papers. They even analysed my mother.’

  ‘They did what?’

  ‘Oh, sure. You see, I kept my mother’s ashes in a pot on the mantelpiece. They took it away, I guess, to analyse it.’

  He has guessed right. Later I find that his mother has been tested at the forensic science laboratory in Reading to see whether she might be a hallucinogenic drug.

  Barristers of a certain age get distinctly edgy. They are tired. All that standing up and sweating, that thinking on your feet and putting down questions like a gambler drops counters on the roulette table, has become as exhausting as spending days with an electric drill repairing roads. Most of them want to become judges, to spend the day sitting down, to stop caring who’s going to win, and to have a title to take home to their wives. For these benefits, they will endure a life where they spend half their time on circuit, imprisoned in a large house with a butler and three or four other judges, having little to do in the evenings but discuss their cases and go to bed early. If no one makes them judges, old advocates soldier on, getting more forgetful and increasingly tetchy, sliding back to indecent assault and petty theft when they’re no longer thought to be up to sensational murders. As the mug on my desk says OLD LAWYERS NEVER DIE, THEY SIMPLY LOSE THEIR APPEALS.

  I knew I didn’t want to be a judge. It was the Lord Chancellor’s habit to send QCs round the country to do a little part-time judging to see if they had any aptitude for the work. It was after one such session that I told my mother I had spent a week being a judge and she laughed heartily. In fact Penny and I had been in Chester. A congress of florists was meeting in the town and we were hard put to it to find a room in the local motel. I only heard family law cases, so I was never, thank God, compelled to send anyone to prison. It is, as I found, a relief to be sitting down and it is also very strange to be in a courtroom and not have a client. A judge’s chief duty is to keep his mouth shut for as long as possible, and this comes very hard to anyone who’s spent his life as an advocate. It’s the boredom induced by having to sit in silence for days on end which drives judges to say silly things, showing off or playing to the public gallery in a way which gets them into trouble and their names into the papers. I learnt all these painful lessons about judicial behaviour and I hoped I would never have to live by them. I also discovered the work to be fairly restful, and there is no excuse whatever for that lowering fury which so often exploded from the bench in my youth. The proceedings go at the pace you choose if you’re a judge, and if you can’t understand the law you can always get someone to explain it.

  In the early seventies we still did nullity cases, granting decrees to unhappy couples who had failed to consummate their marriages. Either the wife or the husband would have to give evidence about the wedding night and, as they got to the heart of the matter, the court would be cleared and the public asked to leave. Penny, who had, with a slightly ironic smile, stood up and bowed to me as I came into court, left with the public when the preliminaries were over. She went for a walk in the park and when she got back the usher greeted her with ‘The judge said you needn’t have gone, but I’m glad you did. A nice girl like you’s far better off in the fresh air than listening to all that filth!’ I don’t know if they still have nullity cases, which were insensitive and unnecessary proceedings.

  The last case I was asked to judge concerned the future of two little boys; should they live with their mother, who was an opera singer in Norway, or stay with their father, who kept a garage in Bournemouth? Their entire futures depended on this decision. I begged the parents to put their heads together and come up with an agreed answer. They said that their heads had been together for a considerable period without result and I was being paid to decide the case. If you write a book, you’re not called upon to determine the whole course of some child’s life. I saw escape from the law as a bright light at the end of a tunnel; even if it were the sort of beautiful and reassuring light that you see at the moment of death.

  I wasn’t sure that I was going to my final trial when I flew back to Singapore one Boxing Day and arrived jet-lagged, hungover and with no very clear idea what the case was all about. As I had started to read through a mass of papers on the aeroplane, the Singaporean hostess told me that the sleeve of a Rolling Stones record had been banned because it had a picture of a naked woman on i
t ‘with a tiny black triangle between the legs’. She said, ‘You run across the causeway to Malaysia if you want a good time, but the finest place in the world is Honolulu, if you want my opinion.’

  Ben Jeyaretnam, my friend, the Secretary-General of the Workers Party, certainly hadn’t been having a good time in Singapore. He enjoyed a triumph which made him the target of a relentless bombardment of legal proceedings, before which any average mortal would have retreated or run up the white flag of surrender. With irrepressible optimism, he soldiered on.

  After we had lost his libel action against the prime minister, Ben had somehow contrived to pay his £35,000 of damages and costs. He was delighted when he won the Anson constituency for his party by some six hundred votes. At last he had a seat in parliament, but it was a moment of joy mixed with sadness because his English wife had died. The next morning he served at Holy Communion in St Andrew’s Cathedral. Ben’s seat in parliament could have done no possible harm to the government; indeed his presence there as a single opposition MP would have enhanced its democratic credentials, but the heaviest legal artillery was trundled out to annihilate him.

  First Mr Lee announced that ‘Opposition is all theatre and doesn’t make for good government.’ Ben was ignored and isolated in parliament, told that he couldn’t act as an adviser to the residents’ committee in his constituency, and arrested for handing out leaflets with his party newspaper in the street. What had caused me to leave home on Boxing Day, and hover uneasily over the Indian Ocean, was a criminal charge against Ben and his party chairman, alleging their misuse of his party funds. The chairman, Mr Wong, ran the gift shop in the Singapore Hilton and at first I thought that the party funds were lodged in a drawer, with a packet of aspirins, a few condoms and some views of the harbour, and no doubt had got in a bit of a muddle. When I arrived at the hotel, I discovered that the case was far more complex. Very briefly, the trouble started with a debt owed by the party workers for the costs of an unsuccessful libel action lost many years before.