Confessions of a Barrister
A door slammed and a fat man stormed into the reception area. He turned and shouted back towards the door, pointing at it angrily. ‘I don’t care what you or anyone else says, I don’t bloody care.’ Then he flung his hands in the air and made a kind of growling noise, interspersed with various swear words.
I sighed and wondered if in ten or twenty years’ time, one of the toddler’s abiding memories of childhood will be of a Yucca plant and a man shouting at the City Family Court.
I’d been told to expect a trainee solicitor called Kelly. I looked around for her, then back at the growling man who was now being moved away by a court usher, when she made herself known to me.
‘Are you Russell Winnock?’
I turned around.
‘I am,’ I said, ‘are you Kelly?’
She didn’t smile as she acknowledged me, instead she looked at me with total disinterest. Kelly Backworth was quite stunningly beautiful. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, eyes that wouldn’t sit still and full lips. She had colour and youth and hope and expectation that shone out amongst the grey despondency of the waiting room. I wondered what she looked like when she smiled. I wished she had smiled at me.
‘I’ve put Mrs West in a conference room around there,’ she told me and I beamed back at her.
She then led me into a small conference room where Mrs Phi West was waiting.
Christ, Mrs West was stunningly beautiful as well. She had a long slick of black hair that made its way down the side of her unfeasibly perfect face and onto her chest. She didn’t smile at me either.
Kelly Backworth sat down next to Phi West and they both looked at me with grim disinterest, which was confusing – surely, they both need me for what was about to happen.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘Mrs West. Can I call you Phi?’ I pronounced her name Fee, as in fee-fi-fo-fum.
‘It pronounced “pie”,’ she replied in a surprisingly grating, heavily accented voice, ‘but no call me Porky Pie.’ She looked venomously at me as she said this. ‘He call me Porky Pie. No call me Porky Pie.’
‘Of course,’ I stuttered, ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
I introduced myself, as Kelly started making notes and Phi, not Porky Phi, stared at me.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘today’s hearing should be fairly straightforward.’
I then tried to describe the procedure I think the court will follow. Although, to be honest, it’d been that long since I’d done a Family Court injunction, I could be kidding all of us, so I’m glad when I’m interrupted by a knock on the door. It’s my opponent, Vicky Smith. Vicky is from my chambers. She is friendly, a few years senior to me, and a very good family barrister.
She smiled at me. ‘Can I have a word?’ she asked, and I mumbled something to Porky Phi and Kelly and made my way out of the room – I have to admit it’s a big relief.
‘Russ,’ she said, ‘Clem told me that you were doing this – what’s that all about?’
‘Just doing the solicitors a favour,’ I proffered unconvincingly.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘well you’re going to love this.’ She added, ‘Follow me.’
I followed Vicky into another small conference room further up the corridor. In it sat a nervous-looking man with strawberry-blonde hair. He is Mr Graeme West. He didn’t look at all like I imagined. He looked respectable and normal, handsome too, to be fair, in an outdoors type of way. I find it difficult to picture him leafing through his wife’s iPhone or grabbing her around the neck.
‘Mr West,’ said Vicky, ‘this is Mr Winnock, he is representing your wife today. Will you please show him what you showed me earlier.’
Mr West unbuttoned his shirt and revealed a perfect and newly scabbed burn mark in the shape of a large sausage branded into his chest. Ouch.
‘I don’t suppose your client’s mentioned this to you, has she?’ asked Vicky.
I shook my head.
‘Let’s go outside.’ I followed Vicky outside and she immediately adopted a quiet, informal tone – ‘Russ,’ she said, ‘that’s where she attacked him with a pair of curling tongs just the other day after a row about a new car she wanted.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Surely not.’ I wasn’t sure if I could quite picture Porky Phi carrying out such a venomous act of violence.
‘He’s absolutely terrified of her,’ Vicky continued. ‘I’ll be straight with you – as soon as a Judge sees that, there’s no way on God’s green earth that he’s going to give you your injunction.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, which I realised straight away was rubbish – Vicky was absolutely right.
‘Look,’ Vicky continued, ‘he just wants out. He thinks next time she’ll kill him in his sleep. He tells me that if you drop the injunction, he’ll accept cross-undertakings not to see or hurt each other – and he’ll bung in the house.’
I considered this quickly before I responded.
‘The house?’
‘Yes, and it’s mortgage free. He tells me that as far as he’s concerned, she can have it all. It’s a really great offer for her; it’ll mean that when the marriage ends, they won’t have to go through a prolonged process of ancillary relief.’
I nodded, trying to remember what a prolonged process of ancillary relief was.
‘So, let me get this right,’ I said carefully, ‘no injunction, he agrees not to hurt her, she agrees not to hurt him, and he gives her the house.’
‘Precisely.’
I wondered if there was a catch in this, if I was being done up like a kipper by a more experienced hand. But Vicky wasn’t like that, and she was right, any Judge worth his salt was not going to be impressed by the fact that the supposed victim attacked her assailant with a hairdressing appliance.
‘I’ll take instructions.’
I made my way back to the conference room, where Porky Phi and the incredibly aloof Kelly were still sat.
‘Hi,’ I said with forced positivity. ‘Good news, I think.’
Porky’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as she awaited my ‘good news’.
‘Mr West’s barrister has told me that if you drop your injunction and the two of you make what’s known as cross-undertakings, which are a promise that you make before a Judge, not to use violence against each other, he’ll give you the house.’
‘The house?’ said Phi.
‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘That’s pretty good, isn’t it?’
‘I have to promise not to use any violence?’
I nodded again as Phi contemplated this, biting her bottom lip as she did.
‘I want the car as well,’ she said.
‘The car?’
‘Yes,’ said Phi, ‘the shiny silver one with no roof.’
I looked at her, then looked at Kelly for some kind of reaction – there was none. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘the shiny silver car. Leave it with me.’
I went back to speak to Vicky. ‘She wants the silver car with no roof,’ I said.
Vicky’s face formed itself into an expression of exasperation. ‘Bitch,’ she said, ‘I’ve half a mind to tell her to sling her hook and advise my lad to take her on before a Judge.’
I shrugged. ‘Those are my instructions.’
‘Right,’ said Vicky, ‘stay here.’
Five minutes later, Vicky returned to tell me, grudgingly, that Phi can have the silver convertible, which actually turns out to be a pretty nifty Audi TT.
Half an hour after that, we were before a District Judge, a rather kindly fella called Pertwie, who nodded with indifference as we told him that both parties had agreed not to use or threaten violence against each other, and Mr West had agreed to give his wife a five hundred thousand pound mortgage-free house and a fancy German sports car.
I left court feeling fairly happy with my day’s work. As I did, Mrs West smiled and shook my hand. ‘Thank you, Mr Winnock,’ she said.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ I said, modestly, ‘just doing my job.’
She smiled again. I turned to Kelly, hoping for an equally gushing response from her, but I didn’t get one.
I walked back to chambers with a spring in my step. I wondered if I’d get any more work from Whinstanleys, I wondered what I’d have to do to make the lovely Kelly Backworth smile at me. I quickly forgot about Mr West and his burnt chest.
NIHWTLBOE
After rewarding myself with lunch of beef and ale pie and a pint of bitter, I returned to chambers, walking in through the old front door and checking my pigeonhole, where I found a cheque for 55 pounds, payment for a bail application I did six months ago, and a note telling me to go immediately to the Senior Clerk’s room.
I assumed that I was going to be praised. I assumed that I was going to be thanked for doing a sterling job securing my client a car and a house worth nearly half a million quid. In my mind I was about to have a conversation with Clem, in which he begged me to do more Family Court work and I told him that I’d think about it.
I was wrong. I was so wrong.
As I entered his office, I could see that Clem was accompanied by two women. One was the surly Kelly Backworth, who was sat looking sheepishly at her feet, and next to her was a rather butch- looking woman whose facial expression reminded me of a volcano that had been grumbling for a few months and had now forced the evacuation of a nearby town. Clem was sat at his desk. As I walked in, smiling, he and Butch woman looked up at me.
It was at this point I realised that I was not about to be praised.
‘Please close the door, Mr Winnock,’ said Clem. He shot me one of his looks inviting me to guess what was about to happen.
‘This is Mrs Murdoch from Whinstanley and Cooper,’ he told me. He ignored Kelly Backworth.
‘To cut to the chase,’ he continued, ‘she’s not very happy with the way you conducted the case of Mrs West this morning.’
‘That I am not, Mr Wilson,’ she said, turning from Clem to me.
I felt my face drop. In fact I felt my whole being drop, my soul, my consciousness, the very essence of my existence, all hit the floor as I realised that not only was I about to be bollocked by the volcanic Mrs Murdoch, but that she had actually left her office and made her way across town to deliver the bollocking in person. This was unprecedented.
‘Mr Winnock,’ continued the volcanic Mrs Murdoch, ‘when I instruct someone to go to court and get an injunction, that is what I expect them to do.’
I was truly gobsmacked. Porky Phi left court with a house, a car and a big grin on her chops.
‘I don’t understand,’ I muttered.
‘It’s quite straightforward,’ said Clem, ‘you’ve got yourself confused, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘no, I haven’t.’
I looked at Kelly, hoping for some support, but she continued to look at her shoes. Mrs Murdoch wasn’t buying the confused line either. ‘My instructions couldn’t have been more simple,’ she growled, ‘this was a woman who needed the protection of the court, that is why we sought an injunction, and when we instruct Counsel we expect those instructions to be followed.’
‘But,’ I stammered, ‘Mrs West left court with a car and a house.’
‘Those were undertakings, Mr Winnock, they don’t count for anything. If Mr West changes his mind then they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.’
Mrs Murdoch had a point, but she hadn’t been there, she hadn’t seen the fear in the eyes of Mr West, she hadn’t seen the way he had capitulated so readily to his wife’s demands. Bloody hell, she hadn’t seen the perfect sausage-shaped burn mark on his chest. There was no way Mr West was going to change his mind, all he wanted was to get out of his marriage and as far away from his lunatic curling-tong-wielding wife as he could.
‘Have you spoken to Mrs West?’ I asked.
‘Her thoughts are irrelevant,’ Mrs Murdoch barked back at me, ‘but when her husband next has his hands around her throat, I’m sure she’ll want to know why her barrister didn’t bother to obtain an injunction to prevent that from happening.’
‘It won’t happen,’ I said. But I didn’t sound sure. I didn’t sound confident at all.
I knew that Ronnie Sherman would have told her where to go and remind her that he knew best, but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t confident enough to say that. I wasn’t experienced enough. I didn’t have a red bag.
Instead I just shrugged and muttered an apology.
Clem tried his best to appease her. ‘Is there anything else that we can do to remedy this?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Mrs Murdoch forcefully, ‘you’ve done quite enough already.’ She turned to me. ‘Mr Winnock,’ she said, ‘I can assure you that you will never receive another brief from Whinstanley Cooper.’ And, with that, she got up and left, her nose in the air. Kelly followed her, but as she went she shot me a look, a slight movement of her head – did it denote sympathy? Or perhaps pity?
‘You muppet,’ said Clem.
‘Look, Clem,’ I said, ‘my client had branded her husband with a hair-curling device. Even if I had carried out my instructions, there’s not a Judge in the world that I could have persuaded that she was in need of any protection. And besides, she got the house and the car.’
‘Yes, and Whinstanley’s are denied the drawn out and lucrative divorce case that would have happened if you hadn’t sorted it out for them in half an hour this morning. They’ve lost out on thousands of pounds of legal fees because of you.’
The penny dropped.
He gave me a cold look. ‘You do realise, Mr Winnock, that when it comes to Whinstanley’s, you are now NIHWTLBOE.’
He spat out each of the letters.
‘NI what?’ I asked.
‘It stands for “Not If He Was The Last Barrister On Earth”. Every firm of solicitors has its NIHWTLBOE list.’ He now pronounced it newt-ill-bow. ‘You lost them money, you won’t work for them again, and you’ve just got to hope that Mrs Murdoch doesn’t tell her friends about this the next time the Law Society has one of its shindigs.’
I started to mumble a tentative defence – I started to tell him how my instinct told me that I was doing the right thing – but he had already lost interest, he had already turned away from me and was looking at a computer screen. He completely ignored my protestations of innocence.
‘You’d better check in later to see what you’re doing tomorrow, Mr Winnock. At the moment you’re free.’
I nodded. I had always thought that these were the most damning words that a junior barrister could possibly hear: ‘You are free tomorrow.’ They meant that tomorrow no one wants to employ you, no one wants you to represent them, you will be out of court, unemployed, earning absolutely zilch.
I now knew that these were not the most damning words a barrister could hear, I now knew that the most damning words were, ‘Not If He Was The Last Barrister On Earth.’
Instinct and the case of Harvey Mannerley
Back in my room at chambers, my three roommates Amir, Jenny and Angus were crouched over Amir’s desk looking at some photographs of a pavement.
As I walked in, Amir shouted across at me, ‘What do you think, Russ,’ he said, ‘we’re having a debate as to whether this paving stone is a hazard or not. Angus thinks that it is, Jenny thinks that it isn’t.’
‘Course it bloody isn’t,’ interjected Jenny, ‘only if you were completely pissed and wearing high heels, and then it’s your own fault, frankly.’
‘Was the complainant wearing high-heeled shoes and pissed?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Amir, ‘he was a pensioner.’
‘Well they’re always falling over,’ said Jenny.
‘They need to be protected,’ said Angus, ‘the duty of care is totally with the council on this.’
‘What do you think, Ammie?’ I asked.
He looked back at the pavement – ‘My instinct says that this will settle,’ he told me.
And there it is, that word: instinct. It’s absolutely fundamental to our line of work. The ability to sniff the air and guess correctly what’s being blown towards you; the ability, learned from experience, to accurately predict what will happen in a given case.
Instinct is vital because, as barristers, we are often in a state of ignorance. Think about it: I am not allowed to converse with a jury, I have to guess what they will make of evidence, what they will understand and what they will not. Similarly, I have to second-guess the position of a Judge. I have to instinctively know what will annoy him or her, and what will soothe. And finally, I occasionally have to reach into the mind of a criminal or a client, work out what they are thinking and what advice will be best for them in their particular circumstances.
I’m not saying that I always get it right, what I am saying is that instinct is important and it’s not something that can be taught in a book or in a lecture theatre, it is something that is acquired over years of practice, it is something that is honed by getting things wrong, by irritating Judges, by watching others.
It is one of the reasons why barristers get so cross when successive governments have tried to undermine our profession by reducing our rates of pay and allowing others who are not as qualified, not as experienced, who don’t possess the instinct, to do our job.
In the case of Porky Pie West my instinct told me that she would not get the injunction she wanted, my instinct also told me that the deal that was being offered was a good one, and that she should take it.
Okay, it was a quick decision. It could turn out to be the wrong decision. As Mrs Murdoch said, I’ll only know if Mr West comes back and throttles his wife. But, somehow, I don’t think that that will happen – somehow, my instinct tells me that out of Porky and her branded husband, the most likely person to see the inside of a courtroom again will be her.
As my colleagues discuss pavements, my mind goes back to the case of Harvey Mannerley.
It was one of my first cases, and it showed me just how important instinct was going to be in my career as a barrister.
Harvey Mannerley was a rather pathetic individual in his mid-twenties. He was accused of harassing an eighteen-year-old girl he had met whilst they were both working in a supermarket warehouse. The girl was called India Williams. She was about to go off to university and found herself, as part of a summer job, working alongside Harvey – well, I say alongside, the reality is that India didn’t really take much notice of Harvey.
Where she was young and beautiful with a radiant, gleamingly effervescent smile that was just about to be unleashed onto the world in a million exciting ways, Harvey was a sad man with pallid grey skin and black hair that sat on his head as a greasy afterthought. He was thin and gaunt and had the look of someone who spent hours in his own bedroom, wanking.
He convinced himself that India was smiling for him and he embarked upon a campaign of letter writing. He would send her long, sinister anonymous letters in which he would tell her in fairly unsubtle detail what he wanted to do to her. In short, he was a stalker.
The evidence was overwhelming – his fingerprints were found on some of the envelopes and a handwriting expert had stated that there was extremely strong evidence to suggest that the handwriting on the letters belonged to Harvey Mannerley.
The case took place in small town Magistrates Court. I was young, barely 24, fresh out of Bar School – with very little experience and very little instinct. I was told that I wouldn’t have a solicitor with me – you rarely do in the Magistrates Court – and my instructions simply invited me to do my best in the face of very strong evidence.
I met Harvey in the reception area and took him down to a small, airless, windowless conference room in the basement. He wouldn’t look me in the eye; something that now, with a few years under my belt, I know is a bad sign. Back then, I knew nothing.
I sat him down and after introducing myself decided to tell him how grave the evidence was. ‘I’ve got be honest with you, Mr Mannerley,’ I said, ‘I think you’ve got a few problems today.’
At this he looked up at me, seething. ‘I’m not going guilty,’ he spat, ‘there’s no way I’m going guilty.’
‘No one’s trying to make you plead to anything,’ I said.
I paused. The pause was a mistake, a sign of my weakness, my inexperience and lack of confidence, a sign that I wasn’t in control. I now continued in a rather stuttering way. ‘I respect and appreciate that, that’s fine, but, Mr Mannerley—’
Before I could say anything more, he interjected again, ‘I ain’t pleading guilty. No way. I ain’t done nothing.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘then can you tell me why your fingerprints are on those envelopes?’
He shrugged. ‘Whoever was sending them must have got them from the supermarket where I was working – I used to handle hundreds of envelopes – it doesn’t prove anything.’
I sucked my lips in and nodded as enthusiastically as I could.
‘Okay, that’s fine.’ I paused again. It allowed Mannerley to look at me and work out that I wasn’t quite as experienced as I was trying to make out.
‘How long have you been doing this for?’ he asked.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said.
‘It bloody does to me,’ said Mannerley, ‘you fucking come in here, telling me to plead guilty.’
‘Look, Mr Mannerley, I haven’t told you to plead anything. I’m simply pointing out that the evidence is strong.’
‘No it’s not, it’s shit, they can’t prove anything. No one has seen me do anything.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘not only are there the fingerprints, but there’s also a handwriting expert who says that your handwriting is the same as that in the letters.’
‘That’s just his opinion.’
‘Well, he is an expert. He spends his life having opinions about people’s handwriting. And,’ I continued, ‘the girl herself is convinced it’s you – because of some of the things that you’d said to her.’
He snorted contemptuously at this, then put his hands over his ears and shouted at me – ‘I am not fucking pleading guilty. Do. You. Understand?’
At this point, I was actually quite nervous. I realised that I was sitting in a room with a man who may have been capable of anything. I decided that the best thing to do was to simply go into court. ‘Come on then, Mr Mannerley,’ I said and we made our way into the courtroom where I would mount the defence of ‘it wasn’t me, Guv,’ despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The Magistrates sat looking at us: the usual three upstanding pillars of the community who are plucked from their day jobs to pass judgement over petty criminals, speeding motorists and those who pose a nuisance to their communities. In this case, the Chairman of the Bench was a tall angular man called The Doctor, because, well, he was a doctor. To the right of him was a man who looked a bit like a frog, and to his left was a woman who looked like she should have been at the Conservative Party Conference lamenting the passing of Margaret Thatcher.
Harvey Mannerley sat on a chair behind a desk to my left. Further along sat the prosecutor. The prosecutor was a Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advocate by the name of Joe Hunter. I’d only ever been against him once before when he spent most of the time telling the Clerk of the Court how much he was looking forward to his retirement. He was grey and bored and clearly under-prepared. He stuttered as he told the Magistrates what the case was all about – then he called his first witness: Miss India Williams.
India made her way, nervously, into the courtroom and towards the witness box. She was attractive, dignified and harmless – everything that Harvey Mannerley was not. I looked over to my client and saw that he was staring intently at her; he seemed to rise slightly in his chair, as though trying to get a better look. It was creepy.
The prosecutor, Hunter, started to question the witness, inviting her to tell the court her version of events. At first everything was normal. She told of how she was working at Shopsmart Warehouse as a stock clerk and receptionist in the summer before she was due to go to university (the bench love the reference to university, they always do – in their eyes, it instantly makes her a more compelling and credible witness). She told them that Mannerley had also worked there and that she had been friendly to him, but not in a special way.