No Comebacks (26 page)

In the week before the case came up a number of anonymous phone calls were received by the new editors of the main daily, evening and Sunday newspapers in Fleet Street and its environs.

In each case the caller tipped off the news editor that star
Courier
investigator Gaylord Brent would be appearing in connection with an assault case at the North London magistrates' court on the following Monday, in the matter of
The Police versus Chadwick
, and that it might pay dividends for the editor to send his own staffer rather than rely solely on the Press Association court reporting service.

Most of the editors checked the court list for that court on that day, confirmed the name of Chadwick did indeed appear in the list, and assigned a staffer. No one knew what was afoot, but hoped for the best. As in the trade union movement, the theory of camaraderie in Fleet Street stops well short of practical solidarity.

Bill Chadwick surrendered to his bail on the dot of 10 a.m. and was asked to wait until his case was called. It came at a quarter past eleven. When he entered the dock a quick glance at the press benches confirmed they were full to overflowing. He had noticed that Gaylord Brent, summoned as a witness, was sitting outside the courtroom on one of the benches in the main hall. In British law, no witness may enter the court until he is called to give evidence. Only after giving evidence may he take a seat in the rear of the court and listen to the rest of the case. That caused Chadwick a moment of perplexity. He solved the dilemma by pleading not guilty.

He declined the stipendiary magistrate's suggestion that the case be again adjourned until he had professional legal counsel, and explained he wished to conduct his own defence. The magistrate shrugged but agreed.

The prosecuting officer outlined the facts of the case, or as many as were known, and caused a few raised eyebrows when he mentioned that it was Chadwick himself who had approached PC Clarke in Hampstead that morning with news of the assault. Without further ado he then called PC Clarke.

The young officer took the oath and gave evidence of arrest. Chadwick was asked if he wished to cross-examine. He declined. He was urged again. He declined. PC Clarke was dismissed and took a seat in the rear. Gaylord Brent was called. He mounted the witness box and took the oath. Chadwick rose in the dock.

'Your worship,' he said to the magistrate in a clear voice, 'I have been thinking it over, and I wish to change my plea. To one of guilty.'

The magistrate stared at him. The prosecuting officer, who had risen to examine, sat down. In the witness box Gaylord Brent stood silent.

'I see,' said the magistrate. 'You are sure, Mr Chadwick?'

'Yes, sir. Absolutely sure.'

'Mr Cargill, have you any objection?' the magistrate asked counsel for the Crown.

'No objection, your worship,' said Supt. Gill. 'I must assume the defendant no longer disputes the facts of the case as I have outlined them.'

'No dispute at all,' said Chadwick from the dock. 'They are exactly as they happened.'

The magistrate turned to Gaylord Brent. 'I am sorry you have been troubled, Mr Brent,' he said, 'but it appears you will not now be needed as a witness. You may either leave or take a seat in the rear of the court.'

Gaylord Brent nodded and left the box. He exchanged a further nod with the press benches and took a seat at the back, next to the police constable who had already given his evidence. The magistrate addressed Chadwick.

'Mr Chadwick, you have changed your plea to guilty. That means of course that you admit the assault on Mr Brent. Do you wish to call any witnesses on your own behalf?'

'No, your worship.'

'You may call character witnesses if you wish, or give evidence yourself in mitigation.'

'I wish to call no witnesses, sir,' said Chadwick. 'As to mitigation, I wish to make a statement from the dock.'

'This is your privilege and right,' said the magistrate.

Chadwick, by now standing to address the bench, produced a folded cutting from his pocket.

'Your worship, six weeks ago Mr Gaylord Brent published this article in the newspaper for which he works, the
Sunday Courier.
I should be grateful if your worship would glance through it.'

An usher rose from the well, took the cutting and approached the bench.

'Is this germane to the case before the court?' asked the magistrate.

'I assure you, sir, it is. Very much so.'

'Very well,' said the magistrate. He took the proffered cutting from the usher and read it quickly. When he had finished, he put it down and said, 'I see.'

'In that article,' said Chadwick, 'Gaylord Brent perpetrated upon me a vicious and immensely damaging libel. You will observe, sir, that the article deals with a company merchandising a product and then going into liquidation, leaving a number of members of the public in forfeit of their deposits. I unfortunately was one of those businessmen who were also taken in by that company, which I, like many others, believed to be a sound company with a reliable product. The fact is, I also lost money by my mistake, but mistake it was. In this article, out of the blue, I was baselessly accused of some ill-defined complicity in the affair, and accused moreover by a slovenly, lazy and incompetent hack who cannot even be bothered to do his homework properly.'

There was a gasp from the court, then a pause. After the pause the pencils in the press box flew frantically across pads of lined paper.

The prosecuting officer rose. 'Is this really necessary for mitigation, your worship?' he asked plaintively.

Chadwick cut in. 'I assure your worship that I merely seek to explain the background to the case. I simply feel that your worship may be better able to judge the misdemeanour if he understands the reason for it.'

The magistrate contemplated Chadwick for a while.

'Defendant has a point,' he conceded. 'Proceed.'

'Thank you, sir,' said Chadwick. 'Now, had this so-called investigative journalist bothered to contact me before writing this piece of garbage, I could have produced all my files, my accounts and my bank statements to prove to him beyond a doubt that I had been as misled as the purchasers. And had lost substantial sums into the bargain. But he could not even be bothered to contact me, although I am in the phone book and the commercial directory. It seems that behind his veneer of pretentiousness this fearless investigator is more prone to listen to bar gossip than check out his facts ...'

Gaylord Brent, puce with outrage, rose from the back of the court. 'Now look here . . .' he shouted.

'Silence,'
roared the usher, also on his feet.
'Silence in court.'

'I understand your sense of anger, Mr Chadwick,' said the magistrate gravely, 'but I am wondering what this has to do with mitigation.'

'Your worship,' said Chadwick humbly. 'I appeal only to your sense of justice. When a man who has led a peaceable and law-abiding life suddenly strikes another human being, surely it is pertinent to understand his motives for such an uncharacteristic act. This, I submit, must affect the judgement of the man whose duty it is to pass sentence?'

'Very well,' said the magistrate, 'explain your motives. But please moderate your language.'

'Indeed I shall,' said Chadwick. 'After the appearance of this farrago of lies masquerading as serious journalism, my business was badly affected. It was evident that some of my associates, unaware that Mr Gaylord Brent's alleged expos6s emerge less from slogging investigation than from the bottom of a whisky bottle, were even prepared to believe the libel.'

At the back of the court Gaylord Brent was beside himself. He nudged the policeman next to him.

'He can't get away with this, can he?' he hissed.

'Shush,' said the policeman.

Brent rose. 'Your worship,' he called out, 'I would just like to say ...'

'Silence,'
shouted the usher.

'If there are any more disturbances from the body of the court, I shall cause those responsible for them to be removed,' said the magistrate.

'So you see, sir,' proceeded Chadwick, 'I began to brood. I wondered by what right an ill-informed clown too idle to check out his allegations could hide behind the ramparts of legal and financial resources afforded by a major newspaper and from that vantage point ruin a small man he had never even bothered to meet; a man who had worked hard all his life and as honestly as he could.'

'There are other recourses for an alleged libel,' observed the magistrate.

'There are indeed, sir,' said Chadwick, 'but as a man of the law yourself you must be aware that few nowadays can afford the immense burden of trying to take on the might of a national newspaper. So I tried to see the editor to explain, with facts and documents, that his employee had been utterly wrong and had not even made an attempt to be accurate. He refused to see me, then or ever. So I went to see Gaylord Brent personally. As they wouldn't let me see him in the office I went to his home.'

'To hit him on the nose?' said the magistrate. 'You may have been seriously libelled, but violence can never be the answer.'

'Gracious, no, sir,' said Chadwick in surprise. 'Not to hit him at all. To reason with him. To ask him to examine the evidence, which I believed would show him that what he had written was simply untrue.'

'Ah,' said the magistrate with interest. 'Motive at last. You went to his house to appeal to him?'

'That indeed I did, sir,' said Chadwick. He was as aware as the prosecution that, as he had not taken the oath and was speaking from the dock, he could not be cross-examined.

'And why did you not reason with him?' asked the magistrate.

Chadwick's shoulders slumped. 'I tried,' he said. 'But he just treated me with the same dismissive contempt that I had received at the newspaper offices. He knew I was too small a man, a man of no account; that I could not take on the mighty
Courier.'

'Then what happened?' asked the magistrate.

'I confess something inside me snapped,' said Chadwick. 'I did the unforgivable. I dotted him one on the nose. For just one second in all my life I lost control.'

With that he sat down. The magistrate gazed across the court from his bench.

You, my friend, he thought privately, lost control like the Concorde flies on elastic bands. He could not, however, help recalling an incident years earlier when he had been savaged in the press over a judgement he had given in another court; his anger then had been compounded by the knowledge that he had later been proved to be right. Out loud he said, 'This is a very serious case. The court must accept that you felt you had been wronged, and even that you did not proceed from your home to Hampstead that morning with violence in mind. Nevertheless, you did hit Mr Brent, on his own doorstep. As a society, we simply cannot have private citizens feeling able to go around dotting the country's leading journalists on their noses. Fined one hundred pounds with fifty pounds costs.'

Bill Chadwick wrote out his cheque as the press benches emptied and the scribes pelted for telephones and taxis. As he came down the steps of the court building he felt himself seized by one arm.

He turned to find himself facing Gaylord Brent, pale with anger and trembling with shock.

'You bastard,' said the journalist. 'You can't bloody well get away with what you said in there.'

'I can, actually,' said Chadwick. 'Speaking from the dock, yes, I can. It's called absolute privilege.'

'But I'm not all those things you called me,' said Brent. 'You can't call another man things like that.'

'Why not?' said Chadwick mildly. 'You did.'

DUTY

THE CAR'S ENGINE had been spluttering for more than two miles and when it finally began to give up the ghost I found myself heading up a steep and winding hill. I prayed to all my Irish saints that it would not pack in at that point and leave me lost amid the wild beauties of the French countryside.

By my side Bernadette darted alarmed glances at me as I hunched over the wheel, pumping the accelerator to try and coax the last gasp of power from the failing machine. Something was evidently amiss beneath the bonnet and I was surely the most ignorant man on earth about such technological mysteries.

The old Triumph Mayflower just made the brow of the hill, and finally coughed into silence at the peak. I shut off the ignition, put on the handbrake and climbed out. Bernadette joined me and we gazed down the other side of the hill where the country road sloped away towards the valley.

It was undeniably beautiful that summer evening in the early fifties. The area of the Dordogne in those days was completely 'undiscovered' — by the smart set at least. It was an area of rural France where little had changed over the centuries. No factory chimneys or electricity pylons jutted to the sky; no motorways carved a scar through the verdant valley. Hamlets nestled beside narrow lanes, drawing their Jiving from the surrounding fields over which the harvest was drawn in creaking wooden carts hauled by pairs of oxen. It was this region that Bernadette and I had decided to explore in our elderly tourer that summer, our first holiday abroad; that is, beyond Ireland and England.