Exposure (20 page)

' Why,
Alistair?'

'Why? Well, it's complicated.'

Alistair knew he had about thirty seconds of his former life left. He clung to them, blinking, feeling his heart beating, studying his poised wife.

Just inside the entrance to the newer wing of the Old Bailey there is a line of policemen behind a long window of bulletproof glass. Beside them is an airport-style X-ray machine and a metal-detector security arch. After coming through the rotating doors, jury members, judges, reporters, barristers and solicitors, court clerks and QCs, canteen workers and expert witnesses must all pass through this second gateway under the weary scrutiny of the policemen's eyes.

No one is exempt from suspicion. Years of IRA trials mean the child with the pink rucksack, the spectacled lady with the embroidered shoulder-bag may very well be carrying the bomb. Each person is checked for guns, or explosives or knives or drugs. In the eyes of the police by the X-ray machine, there is a joyless knowledge, which comes of years of looking into strangers' bags.

At times it is a delicate procedure and, as the barristers come through, the policemen's faces carefully imply neither judgement nor suspicion. For their part, the barristers appear preoccupied with more ethereal concerns, submitting only their physical selves to this security check, with its faintly absurd implications; the younger ones are vague and intellectual, the older ones place their bags on the conveyor-belt with an air of sympathetic efficiency. These modes of detachment are all that preserve them from the amazing things people do every day. To a barrister, amazement is a professional hazard, a risk to the healthy legal mind, and it must be suppressed, along with fear and hate and despair. The Old Bailey is a building dedicated at every level to the punishment of instinct and the suppression of instinct, in the name of law and order.

Alistair and the junior barrister who was assisting him, Sandra Bachelor, and her pupil, Ryan Townsend, had been going through these twin entrances every day for two weeks now. The case of Regina v. Giorgiou was the kind of trial barristers hope to get—long and lucrative, genuinely interesting—and there was the not insignificant allure of seeing one's name in the papers. It was a kidnap trial, one that involved the only son of a wealthy Greek shipping family often photographed in
Hello!
magazine. Alexis Giorgiou was a handsome young man in his early thirties with a devastating gambling habit to feed.

Throughout the traumatic period of ransom demands, the police sat with Mr and Mrs Giorgiou, both of whom were predictably distraught about their son. Had it not been for the kidnappers' unguarded insistence that, in spite of his protests, Mr Giorgiou certainly could lay his hands on two million pounds in cash, because he need only 'flog that fucking Reardon sketch', there would have been no reason for them to suspect their own son's criminal involvement. But, as Mr Giorgiou said, his face visibly draining of blood while he loosened his cravat and groped like a blind man for his wife's hand, no one knew about this hidden treasure. The sketch was kept in a bank vault in Switzerland and the documents concerning it were in one of the files in a locked compartment in his dressing room, to which only his son and his wife had been given a key. To discover the existence of the sketch would have required a thorough and premeditated search by one or the other of them.

The police subsequently raided the kidnappers' address, which they had long ago traced, and discovered both the kidnappers and Alexis Giorgiou himself sharing a bottle of claret and playing five-card stud.

Alistair couldn't help being affected by Ryan Townsend's naive excitement about the case. The boy sent text messages to his mother if there was a chance she might spot him on the London news. It was a different sort of excitement from that with which he had started his career. Ryan seemed modestly thrilled to be included: he watched the court proceedings as if they were a spectacular show to which he had won a ticket. Alistair had always been defensive and vain really; he had always brandished his ticket and focused his attention on the effect his career was having on his personality, his demeanour, his quest for self-improvement. Essentially, Ryan looked outwards while Alistair looked inwards and, like all introverts, Alistair perceived a moral sweetness in the extrovert's cheery smile.

Sandra Bachelor turned out to be extremely able. She was good and useful to work with and Alistair enjoyed debating points of law with her. But the real pleasure, as always for him, was the immense satisfaction of turning the lead weight of fifteen ring-binder files into the pure gold of an argument. When he was working, and he was almost always working, he thought in these terms: of lead and gold, right and wrong, guilty or not guilty. The expulsion of vagueness left him at peace.

Alistair loved his life as a barrister. The collegiate feel of the Inner Temple; the camaraderie of the barristers' robing room; the defiant fried eggs and cigarettes in the bar mess before court; the friendly teasing—
'Langford?
Good God—you still allowed in?'

It was a congenial atmosphere. He liked the lunches out with clever solicitors and grateful clients. He liked having drinks at El Vino, where women were still not allowed to order at the bar and men had to wear a tie. He enjoyed a good steak and a glass of claret at a restaurant on Fleet Street, often alone, with his papers spread out on the table in front of him. And it pleased him to use Latin phrases in his everyday work—who else could claim that privilege?
Prima facie, sui generis, mutates mutandes:
the words themselves carried the scent of old books and churches. They were old and trusted; they authenticated the user. To speak them in an argument was to hit the meeting-point between intellectual and sensual pleasure.

When dusk fell, Alistair could look out of the window of his room in chambers at the courtyard, which was much like an Oxford quad and still gas-lit at night. From there he could watch the eternal London rain as it fell indifferently both on the barristers' cars and on the barristers themselves, who were hurrying, always hurrying, with their red bags slung over their shoulders. It was good to watch, a familiar dance, and the steps had the dignity of centuries of English law.

To Alistair, what was old was safe—archaic phrases, traditions, buildings, laws ... Like artefacts in a museum, what was old was protected by a thick cord over which the mob was not allowed to lean in too close.

But modernity crept in everywhere. Your mobile phone went off in your pocket and threw you off your speech. 'My pacemaker, my lord,' he had once wittily explained when this happened, much to the amusement of the courtroom. But he hadn't got into his stride again and felt he had lost the jury. He never forgave the flashy little machine. Even so, he had learnt how to use his email, when chambers set up work accounts for them all. But he had done it joylessly, with the aggressive thoroughness he had developed early in life to challenge his fear of change. Alistair was never easy on himself: he had always suspected he was prone to disproportionate fears.

Around his room were bookshelves crammed with mass upon mass of law reports, legal textbooks and piles of briefs tied with ribbon; dark pink was a defence, white was a prosecution. His desk was Victorian mahogany with an inlay of walnut and pieces of ivory. There was a carved lion's head at each corner: big, solid carvings—roaring lions.

Of course, it was not a working life without frustrations. He had not been made a Queen's Counsel or 'silk' until the relatively late age of fifty-two. Barristers waiting hopefully for silk are known as 'senior juniors', which has a ring of disappointment to it. It had always made Alistair picture trouser legs an inch too short.

Given his excellent record, he felt sure the delay had been caused by a letter he had written to
The Times
when he was buoyed up after an argument—or, rather, an extended and euphoric agreement—between himself and two colleagues at El Vino. The letter complained, in precisely the terms that had caused his colleagues to order a fourth bottle of burgundy in his honour, about the prevalence of prosecution-minded judges at the Old Bailey. What were we all to make, the letter asked, of judges repeatedly interrupting defence counsel, judges virtually cross-examining defence witnesses themselves, of judges whose theatrical summing-up to the jury cast
lurid
doubt over the defence case?

The issue had come to the front of his mind because he had just appeared in a murder trial before the most notable example of this species of judge. Alistair knew he had been stupid not to see that his words would be taken personally. He would always remember the thud of dismay when his clerk winked at him the next Monday morning and said, 'Susan showed us all your letter, sir. That'll put the wind up old Hanging Judge Simpson, won't it?'

Simpson was a fiercely insecure man who always smelt faintly of whisky. He was also a great friend of the Home Secretary, who was himself an ex-barrister, and of the newly appointed director of public prosecutions. It turned out that the three of them had been inseparable at Cambridge. The good cases Alistair's clerk had grown used to receiving for him simply dried up. This went on for five years and it took Alistair another three to regain his previous sure footing.

He regretted writing the letter because it had changed precisely nothing—and he had only sent it because he had been particularly pleased with the way it was phrased. He had liked the thought of colleagues reading it over their toast and marmalade on Sunday morning. And he had thought it would healthily banish any residual shame he felt about his speech at last year's Bar conference. He still suffered this shame because he had forgotten a whole section of what he had meant to say, even though he knew the points he had made were widely thought to be excellent.

Alistair's letter inspired a few articles about the issue and he had to endure the increasingly irksome mention of his name again and again in connection with it, along with the back thumps of colleagues whom he knew to feel he had acted rashly. 'Good for you,' they said, 'bloody well written letter.'

This was the darker side of the camaraderie: the potent sympathy for a colleague's failures.

Aside from the loss of earnings involved in missing out on good long trials, Alistair was forced to see many friends take silk before him. Each of them asked him to have a drink with them to celebrate. Sometimes there were dinners. He raised his glass and felt himself passed over.

But it finally happened—after a nine-year delay. At last came the ceremony at the House of Lords, where he was sworn in by the Lord Chancellor. Rosalind came along and looked very beautiful in a pale blue suit. He was aware that the picture his daughter Sophie took that afternoon had caught in one moment the satisfaction of nearly all of his ambitions. How many people could say they had as much?

He went to the House of Lords loo and had to suppress nervous laughter as he stood at the urinal. Did anyone ever lose the sense of having sneaked in uninvited? He straightened his shirt and reminded himself that he had earned his invitation to this place fair and square. It was a satisfying thought, although, by implication, it threw out a net of uncertainty over the rest of his life. He went out again brightly and knocked back his glass of champagne.

And now the defining photograph of that day sat on his desk, beside one of Rosalind on a boat in Crete and one of Luke and Sophie in their ski-clothes aged around fourteen and sixteen. Alistair found he looked at these photographs to remind himself of himself—just as Luke did when he stared into his fridge. The comparison would not have rung true to Alistair, though: he thought himself irrevocably unlike his athletic and mildly dyslexic son. He was also of the opinion that this kind of thinking was, philosophically speaking, meaningless, and so he was surprised by how often he did it. He did not like the implication that he was somehow separate from his own mind, that in some sense it ran on without him. This sounded chaotic, risky—and, of course, philosophically meaningless. Who exactly was making this implication, after all? The question made him feel tired. It sent him over to the shelves for a volume of
Blackstone's,
thick and leather-bound and heavy in the hand.

In the House of Lords photograph, Rosalind was holding down her pale blue hat in the breeze and Alistair had noticed recently that there was a single bird in the fragment of sky above her head.

The satisfaction of nearly all my ambitions,
he thought ...

What was left? He had been a QC now for eleven years. He had been offered the chance to become a judge but had felt he would miss the life of a barrister and that judicial solitude would not suit him.

He was a popular man at the Bar, well respected, and even though he liked to eat alone sometimes, he was just as likely to ask colleagues along or to hear a genial knock at his door on the days he worked in chambers. It was agreeable to be among so many like-minds. It was reminiscent of his Oxford days, only he knew how to talk now: he had all the right accessories.

Seeing his clothes, his house in Holland Park, his impeccable wife, his children, no one would have suspected that he had grown up in a shabby boarding-house and that he did not know who his father was. Alistair had a silk bag for his wig and gown, just like everyone else.

Ian, his clerk, had made quite a show of the kidnap case. 'This'll have you in the papers,' he said, when he handed over the brief and the first box of ring binders. And Alistair had soon thought it was possible Ian was right, though one never knew what would seize press attention. At any rate, it was an interesting case. The Crown Prosecution Service had sent it to him at the express request of the junior barrister in the case, a woman named Sandra Bachelor, who had particularly wanted Alistair to lead her. He had never met her before. It was always a pleasure to meet new barristers, particularly when they had paid you this professional compliment.

She was in her mid-thirties with frizzy brown hair and acne scars on her cheeks. Sandra's intelligence made her stutter, as if she was hurriedly bailing out her observations for fear of drowning in them. Sometimes she blinked too hard in the frenzy and dislodged a contact lens—she carried spares for this eventuality. Her pupil, Ryan, was twenty-four and had just finished his law conversion course, having done his first degree in history at Edinburgh University. He did not speak very fluently and Alistair suspected he would not be offered a tenancy at Sandra's chambers. It was so competitive, these days. Perhaps there would be a backstage career for him in the Crown Prosecution Service.