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Overview
Charlie Walden, the irrepressible Resident Judge (RJ) of Bermondsey Crown Court is back to preside over five new cases. As ever, there is little rest for the RJ as he does his best to deal with: the church-going carer who steals from the old lady under her care, the cleaver-wielding chefs wth different ideas about how to make a Caesar salad, the man with a penchant for 'marrying' multiple women, and the astrological guru accused of fraud. Not to mention the shock-horror when colleagues get into trouble - Judge Hubert Drake for writing an angry letter to the press, and Judge Marjorie Jenkins for storing suspected pornography on her judicial computer. Oh, and the ongoing wars against the Grey Smoothies, who try to frustrate Charlie at every turn with their bureaucracy and their endless quest for value for money for the taxpayer.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780857302984 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | No Exit Press |
| Publication date: | 07/24/2019 |
| Series: | Walden of Bermondsey , #3 |
| Sold by: | Bookwire |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
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 colllections 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 September 2022.
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.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FEELING ONE'S AGE
Monday morning
In sooth, I know not why I am so sad: It wearies me; you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn ...
Like Antonio in Venice, I arrive at court in Bermondsey this morning in a rather subdued mood. It's a beautiful spring day, and I have all my usual comforts — my latte from Jeanie and Elsie's coffee and sandwich bar in the archway near London Bridge and my copy of The Times from George's newspaper stand nearby. But neither the aroma of the latte nor the fresh, cool breeze blowing up off the river dispels the mist entirely. While I do hold the world as a stage where every man must play a part, I don't often see my part as a sad one; and unlike Antonio, I'm pretty sure how I caught it, found it, or came by it. Every year at about this time, my good wife, the Reverend Mrs Walden, priest-in-charge of the church of St Aethelburgh and All Angels in the diocese of Southwark, declares a week to be 'Remember the Elderly Week'. During Remember the Elderly Week everyone has to be nice to anyone older than they are: so we have all manner of events going on in and around the church for our senior citizens — Take your Nan to Church Day, coffee afternoons in the vicarage, bingo evenings in the church hall, slide shows with reminiscences of Bermondsey in the old days — all of them featuring parishioners full of years, escorted by relatives who would never ordinarily darken the door of a church, and who look bored and out of place. The Reverend Mrs Walden is wonderful with them: she can chat away for hours about the old days, and about their families, and about how things aren't what they used to be, and about how the country's going to the dogs, without sounding in any way patronising.
It's a gift I haven't been blessed with, I'm afraid. I'm not sure why. Obviously, I have nothing against the elderly: it's a condition we all face in life barring a worse alternative, and I flatter myself that I can have a decent one-on-one conversation with any elderly person. But I just can't relax when they descend on the vicarage in their hordes. Perhaps it's the inevitable stark confrontation with impending decline — mine as well as theirs. Perhaps it's because I'm only too well aware that some counsel who appear in my court consider me to have reached that stage of life already, my modest age in the mid-sixties notwithstanding, simply because I wear the judicial robe. But whatever the reason, sitting through two services for which the elderly turn out en masse with their minders isn't my favourite way to spend my Sunday.
Yesterday too, I was aware of the trial I'm starting this morning, and it's enough to depress even the most cheerful of souls. The Reverend Mrs Walden, rounding off the Week in her climactic Sunday evening sermon, was exhorting the parish to take better care of the elderly: to make sure they are kept safe, are enabled to attend church, and have enough human contact to prevent loneliness and isolation. But my mind was drifting to a different kind of human contact the elderly may encounter in church — and it's one they need to be protected from rather than exposed to. In my case, the human contact is a woman called Laura Catesby, and her victim is a ninety-two-year-old widow by the name of Muriel Jones. Reflecting on Remember the Elderly Week, I can't help thinking that my reaction to it has a lot to do with my fear that somewhere down the road, when the Reverend and I are in our dotage and have been put out to pasture, we may fall victim to something similar ourselves. Age and frailty, I reflect, can make a Muriel Jones of any of us. I suppose I've reached the point where I'm beginning to feel my age.
There's another, even more immediate reason for this dampening of my spirits. This morning is one I hoped would never dawn; one I hoped I might be spared. This morning I truly expect to feel, not just older, but like a man becoming a dinosaur, a relic of the past: because today, after years of false starts and unfulfilled promises — or perhaps threats would be a better word — the Grey Smoothies are poised to introduce the 'Paperless Court'. The Grey Smoothies are the civil servants responsible for the running of our courts. Their twin governing principles, and mantras, are 'business case' and 'value for money for the taxpayer'. Intoning these mantras, they govern the courts using a form of magical thinking, according to which the courts would run just as efficiently, regardless of how much of our infrastructure and resources they degrade or take away, if only we would all just work harder and get on with it. In the universe of the Grey Smoothies, the quality of the courts and of the work we do lacks any quantifiable value. Like Wilde's cynics, the Grey Smoothies know the price of everything and the value of nothing; and sadly, I fear, by the time they have finished with us, there may be little left of a court system that was once the envy of the world.
The Paperless Court is the Grey Smoothies' current value-for-money project, and obsession. It is a system in which all court documents are filed, disseminated, and accessed electronically, so that no longer do we need the traditional court file with its huge piles of dog-eared papers stuffed into overworked cardboard folders. The Paperless Court is touted by the Grey Smoothies as a breakthrough akin to penicillin or the theory of relativity; and I must admit, its potential advantages are obvious even to me. You save on the cost of paper, you make documents available with far less delay, you reduce the risk of losing the documents, and best of all, no one has to carry all those heavy files around. All you need is your computer. But that's where the other side of the equation comes into play.
The Grey Smoothies fondly imagine themselves as inhabiting the same plane as the bankers and commercial wizards of the world, and accordingly, think that the courts should be working with the same technology they use in Canary Wharf or on Wall Street. And unfortunately, someone has convinced them that this is the path to the Grey Smoothie Holy Grail — reducing the cost of running the courts to almost nothing in the interests of value for money for the taxpayer. Unfortunately, whoever told the Grey Smoothies that computerisation was the Holy Grail of cheap and efficient court administration omitted to add an important proviso: that it only works if you spend the money to buy computers and programmes adequate to the complex task of running a court. We've been threatened several times before with the advent of the Paperless Court — it's been an ongoing saga ever since I took over as RJ — but the prototypes the Grey Smoothies have introduced in the past have had the unmistakeable whiff of underfunding about them. They haven't worked very well, and have been abandoned shortly after being trumpeted as the salvation of the court system. None of these failures has been cheap, and after a while you have to question how much value for money the taxpayer is actually getting out of it all.
In addition to those technical concerns, the Grey Smoothies tend to overestimate the human aspects of making the system work — in other words, the talents of those of us on the bench when it comes to computers. Of the four judges at Bermondsey, only Marjorie Jenkins can claim any real expertise with computers. As a busy commercial silk before she became a judge, she mastered modern forms of communication in a way that most of us who spent our lives at the criminal bar did not. It's expected in the world of banking and commerce, which has always seemed to me to revolve around three basic assumptions: that the continuance of human existence depends on the availability of twenty-four-hour phone and internet access; that the sum of all human knowledge can be expressed as a multi-coloured pie chart; and that all information must be capable of being transmitted instantaneously to any place on earth — how mankind survived until these conditions could be fulfilled being something of a mystery.
In the world of crime, that's not exactly the tradition. We work at a slower pace, using such outdated, but time-honoured technology as pens and paper; and most of us think that we are not losing anything because of it. As barristers, many of us were members of chambers that didn't even have a typist until we were getting quite senior in the profession; and even a few years ago, while most barristers had acquired personal computers, you were still looked on as a bit pretentious if you knew much more than how to turn it on. My colleague Hubert Drake, who is not too far from retirement — and, as far as computers are concerned, a confirmed Luddite — may not even know how to do that. Rory 'Legless' Dunblane and I are a little more advanced. We've mastered the art of emails and (at least in Legless's case) texting, and we understand the basics of cutting and pasting and so on. But that's about it. There is some mitigation, at least for those of us, like Hubert, old enough to have been on the bench for a good few years now. If you started your primary school education writing in chalk on a slate tablet, and were already of mature years when the original steam-powered personal computers were making their debut, I think you can be forgiven for not keeping up with every nuance of the computer revolution. Marjorie, by way of contrast, is up with most of them and so by comparison with most judges she is something of an expert. Typically, when my computer is doing something I don't understand or can't control, she's the person I go to for advice, and usually whatever she tells me to do works.
I had hoped that the old paper system might last just long enough for me to retire and allow a new, more computer-savvy generation of judges to get to grips with the new technology. There are some such judges in place already, like Marjorie; and you can see judges-in-waiting, as counsel, with their laptops on the bench in front of them, their PowerPoint presentations in court, and so on. That's what I mean when I say that I'm beginning to feel like a relic of the past, a dinosaur in a post-meteor world. But there's to be no reprieve. We judges, products of another time as we may be, will have to cope with change as best we can. In fairness to the Grey Smoothies, they have done their best to educate us. We've received screed after screed of information — electronically, of course — and several seminars from visiting computer nerds; and we have learned something. But it's a bit like learning a foreign language. If you grow up speaking a language, it's effortless; if you try to learn as an adult, you may achieve a certain fluency, but it will never become second nature. Or perhaps, at the end of the day, it's a cultural question: something to do with teaching an old dog new tricks — it's not that the dog doesn't understand them; it's more that sometimes he just doesn't feel inclined to play ball. I suspect that most of us, when faced with the relentless march of progress, have something of Mr Fezziwig about us.
But you can't tell the Grey Smoothies any of that. As far as they're concerned, they're on the road to the Holy Grail, and now they think they've ironed out the teething troubles that held back Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain and the rest of them. So the Paperless Court is about to be rolled out, as the phrase is in Grey Smoothie-speak; and Stella, who's done a whole day of training in Cardiff to prepare her for this new era of technological wonders, has been deputed to show all of us how it works this morning, so that we can take our computers into court for the first time. Her presentation ends just before ten thirty — the appointed hour at which the Paperless Court is to be switched on for us simultaneously, rather like the Blackpool Illuminations.
All four judges will be doing a test hearing with our computers in place on the bench. Mine is a plea and case management hearing in the case of a thirty-something defendant called Gerry Farmer. Gerry Farmer is charged with three counts of handling stolen goods, to which Emily Phipson, who's prosecuting, tells me he is about to plead guilty. I've got Stella sitting up on the bench with me, just to make sure that I get off to a good start. Stella is our brilliant list officer, who almost single-handedly keeps the work of the court flowing: scheduling trials and pleas of guilty, and applications of every kind; making sure that each of the four judges has the right amount of work; arguing with solicitors, the CPS, and anyone else who tries to stand in her way. She's also my confidante in sensitive matters, such as those affecting the other judges and the court staff. She is the one person in the building without whom the place would actually fall apart.
Stella has summoned up the file in Mr Farmer's case for me on the screen. I'm feeling less than comfortable about having my computer with me on the bench. It's invading my personal space, taking up room in front of me and to my left, room I'm used to having available for Archbold and my notebook. Once the file has come up, Stella whispers to me that if I want to take notes, there's another file I can go to. Together we press a letter on my keyboard, and sure enough up it comes — a blank screen inviting the taking of a judicial note. But I'm not sure I could find my way back to the case file without Stella, and I'm aware of Emily and Piers Drayford, who's defending, grinning up at me. They've been told what's going on, and asked to be patient: but to them, switching between files is second nature and their patience isn't going to last indefinitely. Besides which, I can't spend all day on Gerry Farmer. I need to get on with the case of Muriel Jones before lunch if I'm to finish her evidence today and not have to drag her back to court tomorrow. So the habit of a lifetime prevails: I grab a pen and make my notes in my notebook. Now I need to go back to the Farmer file to look at the indictment, but when I try to return, the screen goes a bright blue colour and there's a message saying, 'Please sign in'. I glance at Stella, panicking slightly.
'I have signed in,' I protest quietly.
'Enter your password again,' she whispers.
Recently, I've taken a simple approach to passwords. Until someone told me that the Grey Smoothies insist on frequent changes of password, I opted for rather complicated ones designed to thwart even the most ingenious hacker — like Marjorie, who is working her way through the pantheon of Greek and Roman deities. But when I had to change them regularly, it all started to seem unduly complicated and since then I've resorted to CharlieWOne, CharlieWTwo, and so on. That seems to work well enough. But not today. When I type in 'CharlieWFour', the current version, I get the message, 'Incorrect password: try again'.
'No, it's asking for your new "Paperless" password,' Stella whispers; and belatedly, I remember that Paperless requires a second password, beginning with a capital letter and containing at least eight digits and including at least one numeral and one other symbol. I duly selected such a password this morning, and I confess that in frustration I went with 'Sodthis!'. I duly type this in the space provided, and the Farmer file pops back up. Stella smiles benevolently, and points to where it says 'Indictment'. I tap again, and hey presto, there it is.
Perusing the indictment, I see that we have a problem we never seemed to have before draft indictments were sent electronically: namely, that no one ever seems to proofread them before sending them to the court. In the present case, Emily is in the embarrassing position of having to ask for leave to amend the statement of offence in count one, so that it reads: 'Handling stolen goods, contrary to section 22(1) of the Theft Act 1968' in place of the current text, 'Ask counsel to insert appropriate details'. I allow the amendment with a deliberate show of ill grace; only to move to count two and find something that doesn't feel quite right in the particulars of the offence. The particulars of offence in count two allege that Mr Farmer: 'Dishonestly received a solar gorilla, knowing or believing the same to be stolen goods'. My court clerk, Carol, duly puts count two to Mr Farmer, who looks a bit bemused, but as Piers has advised, duly proffers a plea of guilty.
'Are we sure that's correct, Miss Phipson?' I ask.
'Your Honour?'
'Has anyone been in touch with the London Zoo?' Both counsel are staring at me. 'To ask whether they have a record of such a creature going missing,' I explain. 'It sounds like the kind of thing they would notice, don't you think?'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Judge Walden Call the Next Case"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Peter Murphy.
Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
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