The Heirs of Owain Glyndwr (34 page)

73

Wednesday 20 May 1970

Ben had asked Merlin
for the first two days of the new week out of court. He told the clerk that he needed time to prepare for a fraud case at the Old Bailey which was scheduled to start within the next few weeks. The reason was plausible enough, but the real reason was not the case he had coming up, but the case he had just finished.

He had asked for time off because he felt tired and drained, and no amount of sleep seemed to repair the damage. Jess had taken care of him throughout a long weekend, sitting or lying quietly with him when he needed her, leaving him alone with his thoughts when he wanted to be alone. But on Monday she had a child custody case in the High Court, and the reality of a new week had set in for both of them. Being at home by himself on Monday and Tuesday did not improve matters. The case of Arianwen Hughes would not go away, and he had not yet come to terms with the fact that he could see no ground of appeal which had any real hope of success. He had made a mental note to consult Gareth about it when he returned to Chambers, but he harboured no illusions that Gareth could magically produce a ground he had overlooked, like a rabbit from a hat. He had enough experience to know a solid conviction when he saw one.

When he returned to Chambers on Wednesday, he found it difficult to concentrate on the fraud case for more than a few minutes at a time. His client had allegedly defrauded one of the London Boroughs of a large sum of money over a period of several years. His small family firm had a contract to repair the Borough's paving stones, and it was alleged that he had systematically invoiced for work his workmen had not done, and inflated invoices for work that had been done. The prosecution had supplied several binders filled with schedules of invoices, and reports by employees who had inspected the work. The client had supplied a confusing account, justifying some, but by no means all, the invoices he had submitted. Under normal circumstances, Ben would have made good progress by now on a chart showing the differences between the prosecution's allegations and his client's version of events, but he had barely started on it, despite sitting resolutely at his desk for most of the day. It was some relief to him that, just after 4.30, his phone rang. He was hoping to hear Jess's voice telling him her case had ended well, and suggesting an early dinner.

‘I have Mr Barratt Davis on the line, sir,' Merlin said. ‘May I put him through?'

‘Yes, of course, Merlin,' Ben replied automatically. There was an eerie, echoing silence on the line for a moment before Barratt's voice came through.

‘Ben, I'm sorry to disturb you,' Barratt said, ‘but something has come up.' He sounded hesitant and tentative; Ben had the impression that he was making an effort not to speak too loudly. ‘I know you're busy, but can you spare a few minutes?'

‘Yes, of course, Barratt,' Ben replied. ‘What is it? Have you heard from Arianwen?'

‘No. Holloway are still keeping her fairly heavily sedated. I'm hoping I may be able to see her on Friday.'

‘I'm still wrestling with possible grounds of appeal,' Ben said. ‘We can talk about it now if you like, but…'

‘No, it's not that. Well, not directly. Actually, I would prefer not to go into it over the phone,' Barratt replied.

‘All right, come to Chambers. I don't have any conferences this afternoon.'

‘Ben… I know this is a bit irregular, but could you possibly come to my office?'

Ben hesitated. ‘Irregular' was no exaggeration. Professional etiquette demanded that Barratt come to Chambers for a conference of any kind. Attending a solicitor's office professionally was not permitted in any but the most exceptional circumstances. Besides, Barratt's office held the uncomfortable memory of just such an exceptional circumstance. It was in that office that Ben, Jess and Barratt had held an all-night vigil for their client Billy Cottage: first while waiting for the Home Secretary to decide whether or not to commute the death sentence imposed on Cottage for a brutal murder; and later, during the few but interminable hours after they had learned of the Home Secretary's decision that the law must take its course. Only when the execution was announced on the morning radio news did the dreadful night at last come to an end. It was a memory which still haunted Ben occasionally, even though it was now almost six years ago.

‘I have someone here you should meet,' Barratt was saying. ‘He is not keen to venture out to Chambers, and in the circumstances I can't say I blame him. I don't want to say any more.'

Ben glanced down at the schedule he had been staring at unproductively for the past hour and suddenly realised how grateful he was for any excuse to leave it behind.

‘Give me ten minutes,' he replied.

The clerk's room was at its busiest at this time in the late afternoon and, without interrupting, Ben opened the door just wide enough to wave to Merlin to indicate that he was leaving. He made his way down the building's main staircase on to Middle Temple Lane, turned left, and cut across in front of Middle Temple Hall to leave by the Little Gate, then left again by the Devereux into Essex Street, where the firm of Bourne & Davis had its offices. Barratt was waiting for him by the main door.

‘Thanks for coming, Ben,' he said, as he held the door open for him.

‘We are not to be disturbed,' he called out to Mandy, the receptionist, as he led Ben across the entrance hall towards the door of his office, ‘unless World War Three breaks out.'

‘Yes, Mr Davis,' Mandy called back.

‘Actually, not even then,' Barratt added, shepherding Ben inside.

Ben smiled. ‘It must be important if we can't be disturbed even for…'

His voice suddenly trailed away as he saw the man standing, facing him, by the bookcase to the left of Barratt's desk. There was no need for Barratt to introduce him. They had never met, but his face was familiar from any number of photographs.

‘Trevor Hughes,' he said quietly.

Barratt had closed the door and made his way to his desk.

Hughes nodded, and tentatively approached Ben, his hand outstretched. Just as tentatively, Ben took it, and they shook hands briefly.

‘Why don't you both sit down?' Barratt suggested. ‘Ben, Mr Hughes came to my office about two hours ago. He…'

Ben held up a hand to silence him.

‘No,' he said. ‘Barratt, Mr Hughes is a fugitive from justice. There is a warrant out for his arrest. We can't talk to him.'

‘Just hear me out, Ben. I had my hand on the phone myself the moment he walked in, believe me. But that was before I heard what he had to say.'

‘It doesn't matter what he has to say,' Ben insisted. ‘He is an indicted co-conspirator in the case we have just tried. If he says anything, it should be to the police – and to his own solicitor, if he has one.'

‘Don't you want to hear why I came to see Mr Davis instead of my own solicitor, Mr Schroeder?' Hughes asked.

‘It's not a matter of what I want, Mr Hughes,' Ben replied. ‘You are a fugitive. Mr Davis and I can't talk to you. In fact, we have a duty to inform a police officer…'

‘I
am
a police officer,' Hughes interrupted, quietly. ‘For the time being, anyway.'

74

Ben stopped abruptly. He
felt himself going hot and cold in turn. For some moments, he was completely speechless. Very slowly, he sat down.

‘What?' he whispered.

‘My name is Trevor Finch. I am a detective constable in the Met, but I have been working in Wales on assignment with Special Branch since 1961.'

Ben stared blankly, first at Finch, and then at Barratt.

‘This is not possible,' he said eventually.

‘DC Finch brought this with him,' Barratt replied. He handed Ben a large brown envelope and two sheets of white paper, stapled together. ‘This is a copy of the first two pages of his personnel file at Scotland Yard. I believe it is genuine. I have represented one or two police officers in disciplinary matters and I have seen forms like this before.'

Ben studied the papers carefully. The copy of the photograph was indistinct, but recognisable. The form contained a good deal of personal information, all of which could easily be checked. If it was a forgery, it was a completely pointless one which could be exposed very easily. As Barratt had said, it was very likely to be genuine. He tried to speak, but no words would come.

‘Please tell Mr Schroeder what you told me earlier,' Barratt said.

‘I was seconded to Special Branch in 1961 because they were worried about the rise of militant nationalism in Wales,' Finch began. ‘I'm not sure why, really. Most of it was harmless enough at that time. Almost all the activity was in support of the Welsh language, and it was mainly peaceful protests, a bit of low-level property damage at worst, nothing the local police couldn't handle.

‘It started to get a lot more serious after the flooding of the Tryweryn valley in 1965. It was a stupid thing for the Government to do. Many people in Wales – not just the extremists – were appalled by it, and, as we know, nationalist activity has continued since then, lawfully and otherwise.'

‘I understand why the police would want to have someone in place,' Barratt said. ‘But why you? Why not a Welsh police officer?'

‘I am Welsh. I grew up in England and I'm with the Met, but I am from a Welsh family. I was given to understand that Special Branch didn't trust the Welsh forces a hundred per cent, and they wanted someone from outside.'

‘And obviously, you speak Welsh,' Barratt said.

Finch smiled.

‘Yes, though when I first went to Caernarfon my Welsh was rusty, to put it mildly. They talk ninety to the dozen up there, and the accent was strange to me. My family is from South Wales, and the accent there is very different. Even the language is different to some extent. Arianwen came to my rescue. She spoke Welsh to me which was straight out of
Teach Yourself Welsh
. Nobody actually speaks Welsh like that, but hearing real grammatical Welsh spoken slowly made the language come back to me, and once I got the language back, it all fell into place.'

Ben tested his voice.

‘Were you sent to keep watch specifically on Caradog Prys-Jones and Dafydd Prosser?'

‘No, no. That was pure chance, and actually, I don't think they had any thoughts of violent resistance back then. That came much later. They certainly weren't on our radar when I arrived in Caernarfon. But then, back in 1961, not much
was
on our radar. Back then, we were fumbling in the dark – we had hardly any worthwhile intelligence at all. We had no real idea who we were dealing with. We got the occasional tip from one of the Welsh forces but, as I said, Special Branch never really trusted them and half the time they didn't even bother to pass it on to me.

‘It was total chaos at first. Most of the time, we didn't even know who the players were. There was the Free Wales Army, but they didn't have any real structure. Any two or three lads who could get hold of a couple of air rifles could call themselves FWA. There was no real chain of command that we could ever find. Then you had the
Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru
, the Movement for the Defence of Wales – the MAC, we used to call them. They were much better organised, so they didn't give much away. And it wasn't only the groups who had military-style names. You also had cultural groups like
Cymdeithas yr iaith
, the Welsh Language Society, and there were even some people on the fringes of Plaid Cymru we suspected of having violent tendencies. And then there were people who belonged to groups that didn't have names at all, or at least none they talked about in public.

‘Such as the Heirs of Owain Glyndŵr?' Ben asked.

Finch smiled and shook his head. ‘
Etifeddion
Owain Glyndŵr.
Yes. As I say, they weren't on the radar at all in 1961. They came much later. They came from nowhere, out of the blue, and they took me completely by surprise.'

75

Finch sat down in
a chair by the side of Barratt's desk and leaned back.

‘Because we didn't have much to go on, Special Branch decided on deep cover, a long-term assignment. They set me up with a detailed legend – a personal history – and threw me in at the deep end in Caernarfon, to see what I could come up with. Some bright spark found out that the
Tywysog
book shop was up for sale and convinced the High Command that it would be a good idea to fork out a large sum of the taxpayers' money to set me up in it.'

‘Quite an assignment,' Barratt said quietly.

‘You can say that again.'

‘According to your legend you had spent years in the book trade at Foyles.'

Finch laughed. ‘Right. One week of training, that was it. The manager did his best, but how much can you learn in a week? They did give me a contact at Foyles to call if I needed to know something, and believe me, I made a lot of use of him. The rest I learned by running the shop.'

Barratt shook his head. ‘And then what? You just kept your ears and eyes open?'

‘Yes, basically, that was it. I wasn't getting much guidance from London. At times I got the feeling that Welsh nationalism wasn't exactly at the top of the urgent list. But as it turned out, the shop was a brilliant idea. Most nationalists are not talkative people. It takes a long time to gain their trust, if you ever do. And the book shop brought them in. The previous owner, Madog, knew all of them. God only knows what they talked about in the basement in his day. Actually, Madog was a lovely old guy. He loved the shop and his books, and there was always a twinkle in his eye. I really liked him.

‘So, I made sure I continued to stock the same radical titles – books and magazines, Welsh, English, whatever; and I sat back and waited for someone to come and talk to me, waited for something to report back to London.'

‘Like moths to the candle,' Barratt said.

‘Yes. You might say that. It was the same with everyone who came into the shop. I didn't push. I just gave them space to cultivate me if they wanted to. Look, all the nationalists, whether it was the
Mudiad
or anyone else, wanted two things from the
Tywysog
. They wanted a place where they could find radical publications, including the real hard-core stuff – revolutionary and anarchist materials, even materials about weapons and explosives. And they wanted a place to meet where the police weren't likely to pry too much. I was able to offer them both.'

‘But they had to make sure it was safe before they opened up to you,' Barratt said.

‘Exactly. They had to come into the shop time after time. They would buy innocuous stuff at first – Welsh translations of crime novels and the like. Then, if they felt safe with that, they would graduate to overtly nationalist authors. And all the time they were trying to read me, trying to find out how I felt about nationalism, a question here, a question there, what did I think about this or that thing the Government was doing? What did I think about the Welsh language protests or about Plaid Cymru? And I would give them the answers they wanted to hear, and eventually they would show their hand.'

He laughed.

‘But they had a lot of questions for me. Believe me, I was very grateful for the legend Special Branch had given me. It was very detailed, and it was based on people and places I know. It's the only way to make a story work. You have to be able to answer questions without thinking about them too much.'

‘And were Caradog and Dai Bach a couple of moths?' Ben asked.

Finch nodded. ‘Undercover work is like that,' he replied. ‘Sometimes, you can toil away for months, or years, and come up with nothing, and then the next day it falls into your lap.'

‘But there was nothing to make you suspect them when you first met them?'

‘No. Perhaps I just didn't know what to look for then, so perhaps I missed it, but I don't think so. Unless I totally misread them, I don't think they had any violent intentions until much later. You know, they were nothing like the FWA types – antisocial 20-year-olds with air rifles trying to act like hard men, like something out of a bad film. You could see them coming a mile away. These two were nothing like that. They were thinking men, reasonable, cultured. Caradog invited me to dinner at the house as soon as he met me, and they made no effort to hide the fact that they were intellectual nationalists. They weren't shy about their nationalism at all. But violence wasn't on their agenda then, I'm sure of that. Something changed for them later.'

‘But you didn't see it coming? If anyone had sensed a change, it would have been you, surely?' Barratt suggested. ‘After all, they became your friends, and Caradog became your brother-in-law. You were close to them, weren't you? You saw them every day?'

‘Yes. But I swear, Mr Davis, I didn't see it coming. One day everything was normal, and we're talking about family and work and rugby and having a couple of pints, and the next day, there we are in the basement and they are talking to me about planting a bomb in Caernarfon Castle.'

‘That must have come as something of a shock, then.'

‘That doesn't even begin to describe it. I was completely blown away. And the worst thing was… I could see my job and my life colliding head on. I could see it as clear as day, and there was nothing I could do about it.

‘On the one hand, it was the kind of opportunity undercover officers dream about. That's when the job gets really easy, when the suspects take you into their confidence and you know exactly what they're going to do, where and when, every step of the way. It doesn't get any better than that. Caradog and Dai Bach didn't know it, but their fate was sealed the moment they tried to recruit me. We were going to monitor their every move, and when the time was right we would jump. And it wasn't as though I had a choice. What they were planning was as serious as it gets. I was a police officer. I had to take action.'

He paused.

‘But at the same time, I hated it. I wanted to talk them out of it, I tried to talk them out of it, I tried to reason with them, I gave them every reason to think again, to back out. I shouldn't have. I wouldn't have done that for anyone else who approached me with a proposition like that. But I couldn't help myself. I liked these men. They were friends, family, they were a big part of my life…'

There was a silence for some time.

‘You were too close to them,' Barratt said.

Finch nodded. ‘Not intentionally,' he replied, ‘but I was too close.'

‘And then there was Arianwen', Ben said.

‘Yes,' Finch replied. ‘Then there was Arianwen.'