Murphy Judge Walden: Back in Session

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-0-85730-204-5
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 416 Seiten

Reihe: Walden of Bermondsey

Judge Walden is back, to preside over five new cases at Bermondsey Crown Court. Retired resident judge Peter Murphy takes us back to the world of criminal trials in South London for another session with Charlie keeping the peace between his fellow judges - Marjorie, 'Legless' and Hubert - while fighting off the attacks of the Grey Smoothies, the civil servants who seem intent on reducing the court's dwindling resources to vanishing point in the name of 'business cases' and 'value for money'. Meet the rum and memorable characters who pop into Charlie's domain, including Lester Fogle from one of London's Disorganised Crime Families, Arthur Swivell the one-time Bermondsey singing legend and the very unbardlike Elias Shakespeare. And you will never feel the same about 'The Owl and the Pussycat' or the Entente Cordiale again. Fortunately, Charlie has Elsie and Jeanie's lattes and ham and cheese baps, and newspaper vendor George's witty banter, to sustain him in the mornings; and in the evenings, the Delights of the Raj, or La Bella Napoli, to enjoy with the Reverend Mrs Walden.

Born in 1946, Peter Murphy graduated from Cambridge University and pursued a career in the law in England, the United States and The Hague. He practised as a barrister in London for a decade, then took up a professorship at a law school in Texas, a position he held for more than twenty years. Towards the end of that period he returned to Europe as counsel at the Yugoslavian War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague for almost a decade. In 2007 he returned to England to take up an appointment as a judge of the Crown Court. He retired as Resident Judge and Honorary Recorder of Peterborough in 2015. Peter started writing fiction more than twenty years ago, but following his retirement from the bench he became a full-time author, often drawing on the many experiences of his former career. Two political thrillers about the American presidency: Removal and Test of Resolve were followed by eight legal thrillers in the Ben Schroeder series about a barrister practising in London in the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside those he also penned the light-hearted series of short story collections featuring Judge Walden of Bermondsey in the 'Rumpole' tradition, based in part on his own experiences as a lawyer and judge, and recently published A Statue for Jacob, based on the true story of Jacob de Haven. Peter passed away in July 2022.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Murphy, Peter

Leseproben

ARTHUR SWIVELL SINGS COLE PORTER

Monday morning

Sitting as I do most Sundays in my pew at the church of St Aethelburgh and All Angels in the Diocese of Southwark, I’m often tempted to compare what the Reverend Mrs Walden does when she delivers her sermons with what I do when I sum a case up to a jury. You might not think there’s much of a connection between the two, but in my experience there’s a remarkable degree of similarity. We both get dressed up in our robes of office; we both have an essentially captive audience; and we both spend a lot of time talking about law and the consequences of breaking it. True, she has a significant advantage when it comes to influencing our audience; I’m confined to the uncertain remedy of contempt of court, whereas she can summon up far greater powers. But all in all, the two processes have a lot in common, not the least of which is that we both repeat ourselves endlessly using time-honoured language: much of hers from the Bible, and much of mine from Archbold, which in the Crown Court is more or less the same thing.

There are substantial parts of any summing-up that hardly change from case to case. It’s one of the comforting aspects of summing-up, that there is always quite a bit I could do in my sleep and that I can trot out without really having to think about it. This is a great boon if I have to start late in the afternoon; I can get half an hour’s worth in by rote, after which I can respectably leave the parts that require some thought until I’m fresh in the morning. For example, the burden and standard of proof: the jury can’t convict unless the prosecution prove the defendant’s guilt so that they are sure; anything short of that and the defendant must be acquitted. Once you’ve got a form of words that works to convey that idea, you can use it in every case. It seems to be much the same with the Reverend’s sermons. There are certain constants, such as sin, repentance, and forgiveness, which always seem to attract the same familiar words and phrases.

The detailed content of a sermon or summing-up, on the other hand, varies considerably from case to case, and that’s where the work comes in. In my case, the work consists of going over the law and my note of the evidence, and trying to summarise it so that it makes sense to twelve people with no legal training. For the Reverend Mrs Walden it involves summarising theological propositions so that they make sense to a church full – well, half full, anyway – of people with no theological training. One advantage the Reverend Mrs Walden has is that she’s free to seek inspiration outside her study. I can’t visit the crime scene, however much it might inspire me; I’m not allowed to, unless we have a formal view and I’m accompanied by counsel and the jury and the whole panoply of the court – a potential forensic disaster, and a mercifully rare occurrence. But the Reverend is free to seek inspiration in places which in her mind have some connection with the theme of the sermon. She often takes me with her on such quests. One of the staple themes of her sermons each year is the old chestnut of trying to serve God and Mammon at the same time, and whenever it comes time to retrieve those sermons from the archives, we seem to find ourselves prowling around Bermondsey market.

Bermondsey market is one of the great institutions of South London. It’s a vast sprawling street market, not too far from Elsie and Jeanie’s archway coffee and sandwich bar, with canvas-covered stalls selling anything you could ever want to buy. We’re all hooked on internet shopping these days, but I reckon Bermondsey market could give Amazon a run for their money when it comes to being able to find almost anything you want. Some of the stalls are small, basic affairs, and some are huge, almost like permanent shops, that make you wonder how on earth they ever get them assembled and disassembled in a single day, trading profitably in between. I’m always fascinated by the fruit and veg vendors with their exotic wares from foreign climes. I can browse around for an hour and not find more than one or two kinds of fruit and veg I can actually identify. Then you have your bakers and butchers and candlestick makers – literally – not to mention your fishmongers and your clothing retailers, offering complete wardrobes for the price of a decent lunch. And, speaking of lunch, there are several stalls providing refreshments, everything from burgers and fish and chips to kebabs, from curries to paella. There are stalls selling ordinary household items like sets of kitchen scales, tea and dinner services, coffee pots, mugs and plates featuring happy events in the life of the Royal Family down the ages, and things your parents and grandparents gave away because surely no one would ever want them. There’s even a chap – he’s not there every day, but often enough – with a selection of antiquarian books for sale.

And then, there are the vendors of electrical goods, tapes, DVDs and the like, which is usually where the courts and the church can get involved. In this area of the market, you have a fair chance of running into items that have fallen off the back of a lorry – or, in this day and age, more likely through the bottom of an ocean-going container. If you have the right contacts, the market is a perfect place to fence stolen goods of this kind; and so in addition to the traditional fencing of everyday commodities, which has been with us since the dawn of time, you now have the more sophisticated trade in counterfeit goods, everything from electrical devices to tapes, CDs and DVDs. All of this interests both the Reverend Mrs Walden and myself; in her case as an example of a blatant preference for Mammon over God, and in my case as a blatant example of the commission of criminal offences. One of those who’s flirted with danger, both legal and theological, from time to time is Bert Coggins, an old market hand who, over the years, has sailed close to the wind in terms of suspect goods with some success. But one Saturday morning, his ship was finally blown on to the rocks. Bert’s stall was visited by the local council’s Weights and Measures Inspectors, and now he’s in trouble on both fronts. The Reverend gave a God vs Mammon sermon yesterday; today, I’m dealing with his case.

To my frustration, I can’t get to it until almost eleven-thirty. Today I had all the preliminary hearings listed in my court instead of spreading them among all four judges as I normally would. I’ll explain why later. It took some time to get through them all, and meanwhile I had a jury panel cooling their heels upstairs, wondering whether we’d forgotten about them. But as I will explain, I had my reasons, and eventually, I’m ready to start Bert Coggins.

I’m amused, and pleased, to see that he’s represented by Julian Blanquette. Julian has a reputation in the field of cases involving artistic themes, as he demonstrated some time ago when successfully defending the court’s portrait artist, Jan van Planck, on a charge of fraud over a doubtful Dutch master. He’s elegant, witty, and acerbic, and has an infectious energy about him. Prosecuting is Julian’s antithesis, Piers Drayford. Piers is dry and methodical and rather lacking in style, but he is dependable and thorough, which more than makes up for any defects he may have. It should be an interesting case.

We swear in the jury, having interrogated each juror to ensure that none of them has more than a passing familiarity with Bermondsey market and, specifically, has never bought so much as a pair of bootlaces from Bert Coggins. And then it’s time for Piers to take us all for a trip on his forensic magic carpet to the mystical land of bootlegged musical albums.

‘Members of the jury, my name is Piers Drayford. I appear to prosecute in this case. My learned friend Mr Julian Blanquette represents the defendant Bert Coggins. Members of the jury, this case is about fraudulent trading and bootlegged CD Roms – albums of music offered for sale as being something they are not. This may all seem rather strange to you now, but I promise you, by the end of the trial you are going to need to know all you need to know about this dishonest trade.

‘Members of the jury, the defendant Bert Coggins has a stall in Bermondsey market. He’s been selling his wares in the market for more than thirty years; he’s well known to the other merchants and to the public, and he’s noted for that witty market trader banter immortalised by Del Boy in the classic TV show Only Fools and Horses.’

I see Julian think about rising to his feet to object to the comparison between Bert Coggins and Del Boy, but he rightly calculates that it’s not going to score Piers any real points; and in the end he takes the far better approach of turning to the jury and sharing a smile with them, which scores one or two for him. Del Boy has many admirers in Bermondsey and I won’t be a bit surprised if he comes back to bite the prosecution later in the trial.

‘You’ve all seen stalls like Mr Coggins’s at some time or other. He deals mainly in electrical goods, everything from televisions to CD and DVD players, smart phones and tablets, adapters and transformers; and I make clear at once that most of the merchandise Bert Coggins sells, though mostly second-hand, is genuine and above board. But when Weights and Measures Inspectors visited his stall one Saturday morning about six months ago, they found some merchandise that was neither genuine nor above board. This merchandise consisted of a consignment of one hundred bootlegged CD Roms, a musical album to which someone had given the title of Arthur Swivell Sings Cole...