A change in the laws does not fundamentally affect a copper’s work: the only things that could do that are profound social and political changes, or (if such a thing, in mid-twentieth-century England, is conceivable) essential religious changes – not just of fashion (which happen so frequently and meaninglessly) but of basic form. Otherwise, if the moral structure of the nation does not alter, a change of its laws means merely, for the Force, a modification of its tactics, not its strategy (nor of its very self): the same crimes remain and the same criminals, but merely operate in different ways which have to be anticipated and assailed with fresh techniques.
This was the reason for a ‘conference’ (as he called his staff meetings) in the Detective-Sergeant’s office. There were present the star sleuth, Edward Justice, a plain-clothes copperess and one civilian: or rather, a hybrid creature – a former copper, now retired from the Force, who’d gone into business (quadrupling his income) as a private detective, while still (very naturally) maintaining his contacts among his former comrades who (knowing that only death could sunder one of their kind for ever from his calling) were prepared to trust – and use – him up to a certain point.
The Detective-Sergeant addressed the little group. ‘The problem as I see it’s this,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to crack down on the Madams. More and more of these girls are going on the phone, and it’s the Madams who are picking out the best earners among them and organising these high-grade semi-brothels. They’re crafty, of course. There’s no girls living on the premises, and they change them round so much, by calling them on the blower for a particular appointment with a client, that it’s hard to log their visits if you keep watch – and play it straight, of course – to get the necessary number for a prosecution. Then there’s the clients, too. The particular Madam we’ve chosen as our trial target seems to specialise in the bowler hat and rolled umbrella category, mostly elderly and – from the enquiries we’ve already made – the sort of mug you have to handle carefully, as they’ve got connections. So that’s why,’ the Detective-Sergeant continued, eyeing the ex-copper detective with a friendly, mocking air, ‘we’ve thought of enlisting the aid and assistance of our friend here.’
They all looked at the semi-civilian who smiled and said, ‘Always happy to help you beginners out of your predicaments.’
‘Now, here’s the plan,’ said the Detective-Sergeant after a wry, polite, and not very pleasant smile. ‘It’s a three-pronged attack, as you’ll see. Number one, we keep watch in the routine manner, naturally, and for that we’ll be using the bread-delivery van.’
There was a muffled groan.
‘Yes?’ said the Detective-Sergeant sharply.
‘Sir,’ someone said. ‘If that van of ours keeps breaking down on bread rounds in every suspect street in north-west London, won’t someone soon start to rumble us?’
‘It’s all we’ve got,’ the Detective-Sergeant said severely: as with so many strategists, ‘the plan’ already was, for him, a reality to which reality itself must needs conform; besides which – as he was scarcely able to divulge – the watchers outside were not really one of his ‘prongs’ at all, but were intended to serve as a decoy to the sharp-eyed Madam who, he hoped, would imagine them to be her only danger.
‘The second attack,’ said the Detective-Sergeant, ‘will be from this lassie here’ – and he indicated with a sexy but official leer the horse-faced copperess who sat primly on her kitchen chair, showing a regulation inchage of her bony and well-exercised legs. ‘Her task will be to follow the girls home, try to locate their addresses, if possible identify their ponces and – well, I wouldn’t put it past so experienced an officer – get on friendly terms with them.’
There were discreet and cordial chortles, and the copperess, smiling slightly, showed her teeth in a grimace that hinted this feat was far from being beyond her professional (and womanly) competence.
‘There’s only one thing,’ said the star sleuth, who hitherto had maintained an aloof and almost disdainful silence.
‘Well?’
‘I’ve checked on one or two,’ he said, ‘and this Madam’s got a thing about using girls whose ponces we’d find it difficult to get at.’
‘Lesbian girls?’ said the ex-copper detective.
The star sleuth nodded.
‘Yes, that’s a difficulty,’ the ex-officer said. ‘You can get them for procuring if you’re lucky, but with a living on immoral earnings charge, juries just wouldn’t understand the situation. Even magistrates are sometimes a bit slow to grasp it.’
‘Also,’ the star sleuth continued, ‘there’s one girl, I know, who’s shacked up with a teenager: and you realise how hard it is to pin a thing like that on one of them.’
‘These teenagers!’ said the ex-copper, sighing. ‘They’re a caution!’
The Detective-Sergeant broke in with some vexation. ‘I’ve considered these various angles,’ he said, ‘and as for you’ – and he pointed a blunt index in the star sleuth’s direction – ‘I hope your private investigations haven’t buggered up the situation prematurely.’
The copperess looked at the varnished ceiling. ‘Oh, pardon,’ the Detective-Sergeant said. ‘It’s still hard, after all these years, to remember we have ladies in the Force.’ He gave her a cracked grin, and proceeded: ‘So – attack number three: the place itself, and that’s where our friend here (smile at the ex-copper) comes into the picture. Perhaps, then, you’d just tell these young officers in your own words the essential gist of our earlier private conversation.’
The ex-cop, his moment come, beamed with the bonhomie of someone who knows all the inner secrets but is freed from the servitude demanded to acquire them.
‘As I see the picture,’ he explained, ‘I’m a randy guinea-pig.’
He paused for effect: but the laughter coming from the gallery, not the stalls or circle, he continued – suddenly very grave – ‘The spiel is this. I’m a client – yes? I’ve got her phone number, and I’ve got the name of a kosher client that you pinched for parking as my alleged sponsor, so my call to the premises won’t seem untoward. I get in the place on several occasions, over a period of time, until I know the set-up in all its aspects and we’re ready for the raid. When that comes – well, I’m the Roman legionary inside the Trojan horse.’
‘We won’t ask,’ said the Detective-Sergeant gaily, ‘what, apart from your duties, you actually do in there.’
‘Oh, I should think not! My report on that part of the business is strictly private for my missus.’
‘Any questions?’ said the Detective-Sergeant.
After the traditional pause, the star sleuth said, ‘So we don’t touch the clients?’
‘Not at all. Strictly not at all.’
‘You’ll excuse me, sir,’ said the star sleuth very deferentially, ‘but I do think there’s one reason why you should consider it. It’s this. They’re the weak link. They’re not doing anything illegal, as we know, like the girls and Madam are, but unlike them they’re mugs, after all, and have their respectability to consider. And when a man’s attached to that I’ve always found he’ll talk with very little persuasion.’
‘They’re not guilty of anything,’ said the ex-copper.
‘I know that: I’ve just said so. But don’t forget, sir. You can always arouse a sense of guilt, especially in a respectable man. Almost everyone feels guilty about something. And you can work on that.’
‘All a bit over my head,’ said the Detective-Sergeant nastily. ‘The orders are as I said. Anything else?’
Edward Justice said, ‘Sir: what about the lawyers?’
‘What lawyers? I don’t get it, sonny.’
Edward looked round, feeling a lot of eyes on him, gulped, and said, ‘These girls, sir, some of them, are earning several hundreds untaxed every week – they or their ponces are, I mean. And this Madam, sir, she must have a fabulous income and I dare say she’ll try to protect them to a certain extent. Well, sir, if they’re raided that means lawyers – big ones. And all I wanted to ask was, what the procedure in the event of arrest should be.’
Like so many young men new to a business, Edward had committed the solecism of asking a highly intelligent question that it was not appropriate he should ask, for several reasons. Firstly, because that wasn’t what the particular briefing was about: one thing at a time in the Force as anywhere else. Next, because the whole subject of the triangle of criminal, copper and the courts is so intricate, practically and philosophically, that it can’t possibly be explained in a short answer. Thirdly, there were aspects of this relationship so delicate that they have, in the Force, to be learnt by experience rather than taught specifically.
The Detective-Sergeant, eyeing Edward and remembering his own young days, said quite kindly, ‘The procedure, Constable, is as laid down: just follow that.’
‘All I wanted to get at, sir,’ said Edward, feeling from the slight electricity in the atmosphere he was ‘on to’ something and unable to resist the risk of burning his fingers on it, ‘was this. When we detain them, how long do we keep them before we let them see their lawyers?’
The Detective-Sergeant looked at him hard. ‘As long as the book allows,’ he said. ‘Any further questions?’
There were none, and the little group dispersed. The ex-copper wanted to stay and chat to the Detective-Sergeant but this officer, exercising the privilege of an active if junior rank to a retired even if formerly senior colleague, turfed him politely out, detaining Edward. ‘Sit down, son,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you.’
The Detective-Sergeant lit his pipe and said, ‘Your question was quite all right, lad, but it wasn’t quite the time and place to ask it. Now as for lawyers we have them too, you know, as well as anyone else; they’re very good ones, believe me, and in the more important cases we get the services of the top brains in the land.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Edward.
‘I see, of course, the point you were getting at and I don’t object at all to you considering it. A good man in the Force like I believe you to be – or getting to be with time – very naturally wants to secure a conviction if he can. That’s what we’re here for, after all; it’s our duty to the profession and, if you like to put it that way, to society at large. We have also, of course, certain rules and regulations as to how you can get a man convicted – and as to how you can’t – drawn up I don’t know by who and don’t much care because there they are, they exist, they’ve got to be observed.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Observed I said, mark you. But not necessarily, always, in every case to be obeyed.’
Here the Detective-Sergeant stopped, removed his pipe and contemplated Edward in a fatherly way.
‘But the point you’ve got to grasp,’ he continued, ‘is this one. If you knock a man off and don’t follow the book and get a conviction, and no one asks any questions – then, well and good. And if you do it often enough you’ll probably get quick promotion. On the other hand if you chance your arm and do something that’s not in the book of rules and come unstuck in court or elsewhere, please don’t expect anyone to protect you or excuse you; not me or anyone else, and I want to make that perfectly clear.’
‘I understand, sir,’ Edward said.
‘I hope so. Now, about the particular question that you asked. Obviously, as I need hardly tell you, the longer you can keep a prisoner from his lawyer the better it’s likely to be for your particular purposes. Most cases, in my experience, are lost or won in the first hour of the arrest – or at any rate in the first twenty-four of them. If you can keep the lawyers away from him in this critical period your battle’s already more than halfway over.’
‘I see, sir. But … well, sir. If he asks to see his lawyer? What do you do then?’
‘Come now, boy, that’s up to you! Don’t ask me to be your brains on top of everything else … It depends on the man, the case, the circumstances – everything! Remember the book – remember the case – and use your judgement. To give you a simple instance. Take formally preferring a charge or warning the person that anything he says will be taken down, etcetera. Well! How many cases couldn’t tell you of when I haven’t bothered to do either! In the matter of the charge, you often don’t know what it’s going to be until you’ve talked to him quite a bit. And as for the warning … well frankly, in most cases I’ve simply forgotten it – I mean forgotten it – and there’s no possible come-back there, because no one outside the Force believes that we don’t warn them. They believe we do just like they believe we wear helmets in our sleep and can tell them the correct time without looking at our watches.’
‘Yes, sir, I see.’
‘I’d sum it up like this. If you’re a good copper, I mean both as a man and an officer, more or less and allowing for human failings, and you’re alone in a cell with a man who you know for certain is evil and anti-social, well, you must establish your moral right to prepare him for punishment as best you can. That, in my experience, is usually what the situation is: him and you; very simple, really. There are those who believe (and the Detective-Sergeant glanced towards the door whence the others had departed) and who’ll tell you a really good copper, professionally speaking I mean, has no conscience: can’t afford to have one, or something. Well, there are wiser heads than mine in the Force, and admitted, I’ve stuck hitherto at Detective-Sergeant. But all the same my personal conviction is that it’s untrue. To be a good copper, in any sense of the word, you’ve got to have certain basic principles and stick to them.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Now hop it, sonny, I’ve got work to do.’
When Edward was at the door, however, the Detective-Sergeant said to him, ‘That girl of yours, by the way. Any developments?’
Edward blushed, and hoped the reasons for it would be mistaken. ‘I think things are working out, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m bringing her gradually round.’
‘Ah. Just another thing: perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this, but I will. One of our colleagues – I leave to your imagination who – has told me – unofficially, if such a thing exists – you’ve set up house already with the lady.’
Edward said nothing.
‘No objection to that, of course,’ the older officer said, ‘provided you’re just visiting her, like, and not living as man and wife, and provided I’m not formally informed by anyone – I mean in a report – and also provided, I’d say, that, as you tell me, the thing’s only temporary and you’ll soon be getting wed.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Edward said.
‘Just watch it, son. That’s all.’
‘I’d like to thank you, sir,’ Edward said again.
The Detective-Sergeant smiled. ‘No need to: I may need you one day – who knows? That’s one of the things about the Force, son, as you’ve no doubt probably discovered: it’s hard to have friends. Mates, yes, dozens of them, and professionally good colleagues, too. But not many you can let yourself confide in.’