Murderers and Other Friends (15 page)

Raffles Hotel had already become a place of nostalgic pilgrimage for package tours. A newly decorated bar had been erected on the spot where, it is said, the fearless headmaster of the Raffles institution shot a tiger under the billiard table. There is still a portrait of Noel Coward, looking unmistakably Mongolian, wearing a top hat several sizes too large which rests on his huge ears. Old men remembered the past glories of the place. ‘We always tried to avoid talking to Somerset Maugham,' one of them told us. ‘He was such a tremendously boring old bugger!'

It's dangerous to accept facts about Singapore at their face value, the place has always been capable of deception. The lion that gave its name to the island, when it was fought for by a Sumatran descendant of Alexander the Great, turned out to be a black-headed tiger. The tiger shot under the Raffles billiard table had escaped from a circus. The country that finds chewing-gum decadent can accommodate relaxed nightclubs and the peculiarities of Bugis Street. We stayed in a hotel where a youngish and perfectly active English QC, who had come out to do a case, had been found mysteriously drowned in the swimming-pool. We discovered that you could order haggis for dinner and, if you did so, it would be brought to your table by Malaysian waiters playing bagpipes and wearing kilts. When we ordered shark's fin soup I asked where, in Singapore, you found sharks. ‘In the barristers' room at the High Court,' was the immediate reply.

Robert Alexander is now chairman of the National Westminster which, like all banks, is in need of his skills as an advocate. He is tall, speaks slowly, always looks faintly amused and was extremely effective in court. He had a great success doing some case about cricket for the Australian millionaire Kerry Packer. That, he said, was a ‘fun' case. I'm not sure appearing for Mr Lee Kuan Yew was ‘fun' for him and he may, I think, have been a little embarrassed by the result. At that time I had not done much libel and I had to look up the law. I left the hotel early and travelled, on occasion, by tri-shaw with a man pedalling me and my load of books through the hot and steamy streets around dawn.

I'd work in the empty courtroom, under a huge revolving fan, sweating in a wig and gown, a tailed coat and a collar like a blunt execution. Just before the proceedings started my wife and my opponent arrived together. They'd been playing early morning tennis without a care in the world. I found this very hard. Ben sat behind me with his gentle English wife who kept him relatively calm throughout the proceedings. She was suffering from the cancer from which she died not long afterwards. When the Prime Minister went into the witness-box, he looked long and hard at the Jeyaretnams, then said he thought they would be good for 300,000 Singapore dollars worth of damages.

Mr Lee, a friend of Harold Wilson and a member of the Inner Temple, is extremely intelligent and got a double first at Cambridge. Mrs Lee, who is a solicitor, achieved this distinction even more quickly than her husband. He once lectured the civil service on the superiority of his educational qualifications to those of Harold Macmillan. He was a trades union lawyer who appeared for the bus workers in a lengthy and hotly contested dispute. In those days he could be recognized by the thermos of Chinese tea he always carried with him. He was now a prime minister, a remote figure who, so it was said, bathed twice a day, changed his shirt frequently, disliked America and cold drinks, and meticulously checked the temperature of any room he was in. Unlike most Far-Eastern politicians, he has never been connected with any scandal.

The afternoon I spent with Mr Lee in court was a novel experience for both of us. I had never before cross-examined a prime minister in his own country, and I don't suppose he had ever been cross-examined by anyone. I won't say it was a pleasure, but it was among the most interesting hours I spent at the bar. Our case was extremely difficult. Ben had obviously spoken the words complained of and it was difficult to argue that they weren't defamatory, but we could say that it wasn't a case for heavy damages. As I started to cross-examine the Prime Minister, I remembered my father's advice and tried to get him to agree to as much as possible. Mr Lee was, was he not, a great believer in democracy? His country held regular elections. The point of an election was to allow all sorts of points of view to be expressed freely and without fear. Of course, public speakers at election time get overheated. Politicians perhaps exaggerate and use colourful language to describe their opponents. Mr Lee would understand that, wouldn't he? As a democrat, surely, he wouldn't want it otherwise? Mr Jeyaretnam's words hadn't done him the slightest harm, had they? He went on to win the election by what it would be almost an insult to call a landslide majority. Surely he wasn't out for anything so mercenary and undignified as damages? Would it not be quite unseemly for the prime minister of a democratic republic to grub for money? This, so far as I can remember, was my general line with Mr Lee. I believe he found it a little difficult to deal with and, if it didn't impress the enigmatic Chinese judge, at least it seemed to be going down well with the foreign press. When I sat down, Bob Alexander wrote me a note: ‘You would spend many years, and travel to many courts, before you had such an entertaining afternoon.' I felt very proud, although confident of defeat.

‘There's a man called Neil on the telephone, and he says I'm to tell you Gunga Din.'

I was in the bath, washing away the sweated labour of a day in the Singapore High Court, when Penny answered the telephone. What was this, some coded message from the Workers Party? A spy from the British High Commission warning me not to endanger our diplomatic relations with Lee Kuan Yew. Then I remembered Gunga Din, a north Oxford villa into which my prep school dormitories overflowed. You had to walk across to it in the dark from School House after supper. Desmond Neil had inhabited Gunga Din and when I acted Richard II in the school play, the only unqualified success I've enjoyed, Desmond had been the Duke of York: ‘See, see, King Richard doth himself appear, As doth the blushing, discontented sun' was what he had to say. Many years had passed since this production, but clearly the experience was fresh in our minds. Desmond Neil was now someone very important in a huge beer and soft drinks company with tentacles all over the Far East. He invited us to dinner, so we got dressed and went down to the hotel bar to await his arrival.

‘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.

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.