Flashpoint (2 page)

“He’s on television tonight,” said Mutt, as though she was reading my thoughts.

“Jonas?”

“No. Will Dylan. The man Jonas has his knife into. He’s doing a discussion thing. He’s a coming man.”

“Who said so?”

“Patrick. And he ought to know.”

(Patrick is Mutt’s brother. He’s one of the Lobby correspondents on the
Watchman.
)

“Patrick’s doing a profile on him. He says he’s terrific.”

“What’s he going to do tonight? Show us a few conjuring tricks?”

“It’s a discussion. With a Trade Union official and the managing director of ICI and someone from the London School of Economics.”

“It doesn’t sound like my sort of programme.”

“He’s terribly good. I heard him doing the same sort of thing last month. He had them all tied up in knots.”

He came on after the ten o’clock news. I’d heard his name so often in Jonas’ windy diatribes that I was interested to see what sort of person he was.

It was a square face that looked as though it had been cut out of wood by someone with a sharp chisel and a fairly good eye. The chin had a cleft in it, and the thick black hair was touched with grey. It was the sort of face which photographed very well. His voice had an ensnaring Yorkshire burr.

“Isn’t he lovely?” said Mutt.

He was more than a photogenic face. I realized that after listening to him for five minutes. The opposition wasn’t in the same league. It was like watching Bradman bat against minor county bowling. He hit them all over the shop, but managed to do it with a grin on his face which robbed the performance of most of its sting.

He had a way of taking over his opponent’s argument, when it had got a bit tangled, restating it in clearer terms, and then picking it up and shaking it until most of the fallacies had fallen out. His strength was that he seemed to know more about Trade Unions than the trade unionist, and more about how to run a business than the managing director. The economist made whining noises from time to time, but none of the others took much notice of him.

At eleven o’clock the compère called time, and we put the dog out and went to bed.

Mutt was six months pregnant, and making love had become uncomfortable, so I lay on my back beside her, and watched the moon climbing up through the branches of the trees and listened to the owls tuning up for the nightly overture. It was cool and lovely and peaceful and I remembered it, because there was not much coolness or peace in the weeks to come.

The next morning Laurence Fairbrass blew into what was charitably called my office. It was the size of a midshipman’s berth and was all the footage which the Law Society could spare a junior assistant. Laurence had a red face and grey hair and was mad about cricket. He still played a good game although he was fifty plus.

He said, “I understand Killey rang you up last night.”

“He did,” I said. “Incidentally, how did you know?”

“He rang
me
up this morning. He says he’s got a new angle on that business of his.”

“It’s got more angles than Euclid.”

“You’d better look it up.”

“I’ve looked it up a dozen times already.”

“Make it a baker’s dozen,” said Laurence happily and bounced out.

When I had got through the morning post I went down to Filing. Old Reiss extracted the bulging orange-coloured folder which was labelled ‘Killey re ACAT’, and I spent the next two hours looking through the statements and affidavits and Union rule books and accounts and chronological summaries; the debris of an unfought battle.

It was in 1965 that the Mining and General Metalworkers Union had swallowed up little ACAT, otherwise the Aluminium, Copper and Allied Trades Union. ACAT had not struggled very hard to prevent themselves being swallowed. Actually it was fairly clear that they had welcomed the transaction. With their five or six hundred members they hadn’t packed many punches and, on balance, preferred the comfort and security of being a small cog in a large machine; and MGM, which holds the sort of position in the North that the Transport and General Workers do in the South, is very large indeed.

When I first read the papers, it had occurred to me that the marriage had been consummated rather hastily. The 1964 Trade Union (Amalgamations) Act had been passed to make mergers easier, but it was new, and there were pitfalls in it. It did seem possible that the organizers of this merger had fallen into one of them.

The snag was that the rules of ACAT didn’t give apprentice members, who were under twenty-one, a vote. Accordingly, the meetings which had been called to vote on the merger had been confined to full members. What had been overlooked was that Section 2 of the Act laid down that
on this particular issue
all members were entitled to vote, whatever the rule book said.

This produced several of the sort of nice points which lawyers enjoy, and I could see young Jonas Killey licking his lips over them. At that time he was a salaried solicitor with Markstein, Place and Pennington of Sheffield, a firm with a big Union practice, and he had been given the job, under the senior partner, Arnold Markstein, of drafting the Instrument of Amalgamation and the new rule book, and had done most of the preliminary work himself.

Unfortunately, when the actual meetings were held, he was away on sick leave, and when he came back, and studied the record of the proceedings, he had started to fuss. I had in front of me a copy of a memorandum which he had written to his senior partner. It was long, verbose and crammed with references to statutory enactments and decided cases. But what must have annoyed Arnold Markstein most was the suggestion, which underlay every other sentence, that if he, Jonas Killey, had been at the helm things would not have been mishandled in the way they had been.

After this the air grew thick with memoranda. Sections of half a dozen Trade Union Acts were cited, the rule in Foss and Harbottle made its ritual appearance and Natural Justice hovered in the wings.

When Mr Markstein had had enough of this, he introduced a rule of his own into the proceedings, which was that junior employees should be seen and not heard. Jonas was notified that his services were no longer required, and he came South, bringing his case, like King Charles’ head, under one arm. As soon as he was settled in at Sexton and Lambard he took up the cudgels again.

You had to hand it to him, he hadn’t left many stones unturned. He had approached, successively, the Registrar of Friendly Societies, the General Council of the TUC, his own member of parliament, the Lord Chancellor, the Ombudsman and various organs of the press. Finally he tried the Law Society, and the file had landed, with a dull thud, on my desk.

“You knew this chap,” said Laurence who had reappeared. “For God’s sake choke him off. He’s getting the law a bad name.”

“You won’t choke him off easily,” I said. “It’s his life’s work. He explained it all to me on three successive seven-mile walks.”

“What does he want us to
do,
for God’s sake?”

“I think he’s got beyond that stage. He just
knows
that ACAT broke the rules. I suppose the only thing they could do would be to have the meetings all over again.”

“It all happened years ago.”

“Time means very little to Jonas.”

“It wouldn’t be the same members now. A lot of them will have retired. Some of them will be dead.”

“The fact that a wrong is difficult or troublesome to put right,” I said, quoting from one of the more sanctimonious of the recent judgements in the Court of Appeal, “is no reason, at law, for not correcting it.”

Laurence took off his glasses and chewed the end of the earpiece for a bit. Then he said, “You must have
some
idea what he wants.”

“To be honest,” I said, “I believe that if Will Dylan got up in public and admitted that he was right, Jonas might feel that honour was satisfied.”

“Will Dylan? How does he come into it?”

“He was Secretary and Treasurer of ACAT at the time. It was his first Union job.”

“I saw him on television last night. He seemed a reasonable sort of cove. Do you think he’d play?”

“He comes from Yorkshire,” I said, “and Yorkshiremen aren’t noted for admitting they were wrong. Look at the troubles they’ve had with their cricket team.”

I knew this would divert Laurence. It was ten minutes before we got back to the subject in hand. He said, “You’ll have to go down and see Killey. His office is in Wimbledon. It won’t take you long.”

“What am I meant to do? Brainwash him? He’s even less likely than Dylan to admit that he was wrong. It’s his life’s work. His one-man crusade.”

“He told me he’d got some new evidence.”

“What does it matter if he has,” I said. “He’s flogging a dead horse. Not only a dead horse. One that’s died and been buried and forgotten by everyone except him.”

“We’re here to serve the profession. He says he wants to talk to us. If you don’t go down and see him, he may come up here and see
me.
And I’m busier than you are.”

I couldn’t contradict this. When he was going he said, “Didn’t I see something in the
Watchman
the other day about Dylan?”

“They’re doing a profile on him. As a matter of fact, it’s my brother-in-law, Patrick Mauger, who’s doing it.”

“When journalists do these profiles they follow the man round for weeks, don’t they, and chat him up. He must have got to know him quite well by now. Do you think he’d help? Slip in a word that we think this thing ought to be buried.”

“It’s an idea,” I said.

“Give him lunch some time. The Law Society will pay. Any reasonable amount,” he added hastily.

“You really mean that?”

Laurence looked at the file which was six inches thick and spilled across the whole of one side of my desk. He said, “If you can get this bloody man off our necks, it’ll be cheap at the price.”

I telephoned Jonas after lunch. He said, “Well, well, fancy hearing from you again. I thought now you’d joined the Establishment you wouldn’t have time to talk to a poor hardworking practitioner.”

This was Jonas in his playful mood.

I said that was exactly what I
was
planning to do. When could I come and see him?

“You mean that you are prepared to journey all the way down to Wimbledon?”

“You make it sound like the North Pole. Just name the time and I’ll be there.”

After that, we had a rigmarole of going through his engagement diary for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, to demonstrate how busy he was.

“You’re certainly keeping your nose to the grindstone,” I said. “What about today?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“You mean that an important official of the Law Society is prepared to come down to Wimbledon to see me today?”

I said patiently, “It looks as if it’s got to be today, or next week. It’s up to you.”

“Then
of course
we’ll make it this afternoon.” He was doing me a great favour. “It’s No. 27b Coalporter Street. A few minutes from Wimbledon Station. You won’t find it in the Law List. We haven’t been here very long.”

I got there at four o’clock. I thought at first that I must have mistaken the number, since the building which was marked as No. 27 appeared to belong entirely to Crompton and Maudling, Surveyors, Auctioneers and Estate Agents. Then I spotted the plate, outside a side door. ‘Jonas Killey, LL B Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. Second Floor.’

Two flights of linoleum-covered stairs edged with metal ribbing led up to a small landing. A hand-printed notice invited me to Ring and Enter, which I did.

There was a long thin outer office, just large enough to hold two wooden chairs and a table covered with back numbers of the
Law Journal.
On the walls were handbills announcing forthcoming sales by Messrs Crompton and Maudling, and there was a hatch on the far side with a frosted glass window to it, and a bell on the ledge in front. Beyond it, I could hear a typewriter being punished.

I pressed the bell. The typing stopped, the hatch opened, and a middle-aged lady peered out. I told her who I was, and she said would I take a seat as Mr Killey was temporarily engaged with a client.

None of the walls was very thick. I guessed that I was in what had once been a single large room, now partitioned into three or four. I could hear Jonas’ voice. It had an odd nasal twang to it. He seemed to be doing most of the talking. There was an occasional mumble and grumble from his client, like a double bass interrupting a long saxophone solo. Then a door beside the hatch opened and they came out.

Jonas was saying, “Really, Mr Huxtable, you have to understand that there are rules and regulations which a solicitor is bound to observe.”

Mr Huxtable looked as though he didn’t give a hoot for rules and regulations, but wanted something on the cheap. He departed grumbling. Jonas said, “We shall be about half an hour, Mrs Warburton. Tell Willoughby he’ll have to wait.” He held the door open for me, and I walked into the front part of the office which commanded a good view of a betting shop on the other side of Coalporter Street, and was crammed with the papers, files, books and paraphernalia which, in a larger office, might have been kept out of sight.

Jonas waved me to the client’s chair, inspected me briefly and said, “Your hair’s going back a lot. If you don’t watch it, you’ll be bald before you’re forty.”

“You’re not looking any younger yourself,” I said.

“If you gentlemen who sit at ease in Chancery Lane had the faintest conception of the work involved in running a solicitor’s practice you would be a trifle more sympathetic to our problems.”

“All right. I’m sympathetic. That’s why I’ve come to see you. I gather you want us to pursue your Trade Union case for you. I’ve been reading the papers, and I’m bound to say that I think you’re ploughing the sand.”

“Do you now?”

“I don’t think any court in the world would order a Trade Union which, incidentally, no longer exists, to hold a meeting, which took place six years ago, all over again because of a technicality which they failed to observe. If it’s any consolation to you, I think you were probably quite right. Under the 1964 Act the apprentice members
should
have been allowed to vote.”