Field of 13

Corkscrew

The road to justice is winding, long, expensive and slow, and sometimes never arrives. Corkscrew gets there, more or less, scattering lessons on the way.

First lesson: if you aim to be kind, be careful.

Sandy Nutbridge leaned on the white-painted rails of a private training circuit in the American state of South Carolina and tried to size up the undemonstrative man beside him.

Both were English. Sandy Nutbridge was trying to sell to the other (Jules Reginald Harlow) the two-year-old South Carolina-bred filly presently being fast-cantered round the track by the top-ranking exercise groom employed by Sandy Nutbridge whenever he wanted to make a multi-nought sale.

His spiel and patter about the filly’s breeding and early showing of speed were for once truthful. The fervour he put into his admiration of the fine-boned skull, the kindly-slanted eye and the deep-capacity chest was in fact justified. The filly at that moment was earning every compliment paid her — it was only the future, as in all of life, that couldn’t be foretold.

Jules Reginald Harlow watched the filly’s smooth action and listened to the genuine enthusiasm in the salesman’s voice. He thought Sandy Nutbridge good at his job, but beyond that paid more attention to the scudding two-year-old that seemed to be all he needed.

The exercise groom finished two circuits — one walking and trotting, one a fast canter — and, pulling up, trotted to the two watchers on the rails.

‘Thanks, Pete,’ Nutbridge nodded.

‘And thanks,’ Jules Harlow added. He turned to the salesman. ‘Subject to a vet passing the filly sound, I’ll have her at the price we agreed.’

The two men shook hands on the deal and Jules Harlow without excitement climbed into the dark green Lincoln Town Car waiting near by and drove away.

Sandy Nutbridge telephoned the bloodstock agency for whom he acted and reported the successful sale. His principal, Ray Wichelsea, who owned the agency, greatly esteemed Sandy Nutbridge, chiefly as a salesman but partly as a man. Ray Wichelsea saw Sandy’s thickset body, wiry greying hair and sensible English voice as reassuring assets encouraging customers to put their faith in the agency and their money on the line.

‘Our Mr Harlow,’ Sandy Nutbridge reported, ‘is one of your silent types. I wouldn’t say he knows a whole lot about horses. He shook hands on the deal for the filly but, like you told me not to, I didn’t ask him for an up-front deposit.’

‘No. What did he look like?’

Puzzled, Sandy Nutbridge did his best. ‘Well... he was shortish. I suppose about fifty. Ordinary. Sort of posh English accent, though. Wore a grey suit, and a tie. He wouldn’t stand out in a crowd.’

‘Our Mr Harlow,’ Ray Wichelsea said with peaceful emphasis, ‘the Mr Harlow you’ve just described, is, I am almost certain, a computer originator. An inventor. An entrepreneur.’

‘How does that affect us?’ Nutbridge asked.

‘He can afford a whole bunch of fillies.’

The quiet Mr Harlow was buying the splendid two-year-old as an engagement gift for the lively widow who had decided he should be her husband number three. Numbers one and two had bossed her around and then died and left her huge fortunes: Jules Harlow, richer yet, found pleasure in letting her run the show. The widow adored him.

She knew all about horses and spent days of delight at the racetrack. Before he met her, Jules had been barely aware of the Kentucky Derby. He spent his days inventing and developing microchip circuits and was quiet because of the depth of his thoughts.

When these two had first dined and slept together, their different interests and personalities had surprisingly meshed. Time had thoroughly cemented their coalition.

In England, Sandy Nutbridge’s mother packed her own suitcase with excitement and tried unsuccessfully to damp down the high spirits of her two grandchildren, Bob and Miranda (10 and 8), who were to accompany her to South Carolina to spend two weeks of the Easter school holidays with their father.

Sandy Nutbridge, divorced, seldom saw his children. The forthcoming visit, and that of his mother, filled him with genuine joy. Two whole weeks! He had told Ray Wichelsea not to line him up for any work during that time.

He had sent the money for all his family’s fares: his widowed mother lived on a meagre pension, and his ex-wife, remarried, had said if he wanted to have the children to stay, he could pay for them. He went to meet them at the airport and in hugs and kisses considered every dollar well spent. His mother, in new clothes, wiped tears from her eyes, and the children, who had never left England before, stared at the surprising spaciousness of America and were open-mouthed with ingenuous awe.

Sandy Nutbridge lived in a rented fourth floor two-bedroomed lakeside condominium apartment with entrancing views of sailboats, forests, blue-grey water and the setting sun. An hour’s drive over easy rolling roads took him to the centre of horse country where, in Ray Wichelsea’s office, he regularly put his feet up on a desk and drank coffee from disposable cups. Ray Wichelsea paid him by commission, not salary, and he collected his commissions in cash.

The Nutbridge life, on the day the children arrived, was coasting along comfortably at a fair standard of prosperity: the life of a reasonably honest operator with no political ambitions.

The children — and his mother — although tired from the transatlantic flight, were ecstatic over a real American fast-food chain supper of burgers and fries, learning the idiom ‘Hold the mayo’, with innocent glee.

That was Tuesday. At breakfast time on Wednesday morning, Sandy Nutbridge put on a thin dressing-gown over his pyjamas and, leaving his family exploring unfamiliar breeds of cereal, went down in slippers to the condominium lobby, as he always did, to buy a daily paper from the vending machine there.

Behind a desk in the lobby sat the blue-uniformed condominium many-job factotum, who acted as security guard, receptionist, lister of callers and message taker. Sandy Nutbridge casually said, ‘Hi, Bill,’ as he always did and turned to go back to the elevator, paying no attention to the two armed policemen leaning on Bill’s desk.

Bill, however, said, ‘That’s him,’ to the policemen who, as if galvanised by puppet strings, straightened up fast and pounced on Sandy Nutbridge, slamming him face first against the green-patterned wall paper and shouting at him to raise his hands and spread his legs apart.

Sandy Nutbridge had lived long enough in the United States to know that protest was futile. The policemen out of fear needed to know there were no hand-guns concealed in the sleeping pyjamas. Sandy might think it ludicrous that with maximum roughness they handcuffed his wrists behind his back and ‘read him his rights’, which mostly appeared to consist of a threat that if he said anything it would be held against him in court, but that seemed to be the American way of the world.

‘What am I supposed to have done?’ he asked.

The policemen didn’t know. They had been dispatched merely to ‘bring Nutbridge in for questioning’.

Sandy Nutbridge asked if they would accompany him upstairs so that he could dress and also tell his kids he would be gone for a couple of hours. The policemen didn’t bother to answer but shoved him towards the outside doors.

‘Tell my mother, Bill,’ Sandy called over his shoulder, but wasn’t sure his request would be granted. Bill couldn’t be relied on for the slightest favour.

Sandy Nutbridge still didn’t take the farcical arrest seriously and laughed a good deal to himself when the policemen drove in circles because they’d lost the way back to the main road into town. But stupidly hilarious or not, the situation hardened into seriously worrying when, at police headquarters, he was unceremoniously pushed into a barred cell and locked there.

Vigorously protesting, he was finally allowed one phone call, which he spent on alerting a friend who was also a lawyer to come at once to his aid after reassuring his no doubt frightened family.

Sandy Nutbridge had never before needed the services of a lawyer in criminal proceedings (had never in fact been arrested before) and wasn’t aware that his friend was a better drinking companion than advocate. Wasn’t aware either that his friend had got him arrested in the first place by sounding off within range of the wrong ears.

Patrick Green, the lawyer friend, saying he was trying to find out on what charge Sandy was being held, came no nearer pin-pointery than, ‘The IRS wants you on a three-year-old tax matter involving drug money deposits in your bank.’

Baffled and by then deeply alarmed, Sandy Nutbridge found himself in court on Thursday morning (after a wretched night in the cells) before a judge who seemed equally unsure of the evidence for his presence there but who had a solution for everything. To Patrick Green’s plea that Sandy be released at once, the public prosecutor responded that as Nutbridge was a British citizen with a resident alien ‘green card’ (which was in fact white) he might slip out of the country before the IRS completed its investigation. The public prosecutor, therefore, opposed setting Nutbridge free on bail.

The judge, with years of weary cases behind him, banged his gavel and set bail at one hundred thousand dollars.

Patrick Green had expected it, but to Sandy Nutbridge such a sum was a disaster. He didn’t have a hundred thousand dollars, nor would his bank lend it to him without collateral. Unless he raised the money, however, he would stay behind bars until he came up for trial, and as no one seemed to be able to say accurately what he was being accused of, no trial date could be set.

Patrick Green reassured his friend Sandy that the bail money could quickly be raised: it would, after all, be repaid to the people lending it as soon as a trial date was set and Sandy appeared in court.

Between them, they did sums: so much from Sandy himself, so much from his mother, who telephoned and borrowed from neighbours and against her pension from her sympathetic bank in England; and so much from Ray Wichelsea, who lent his own money, not his firm’s, because of his faith in Sandy’s strong declaration of his innocence of any crime he could think of.

When all was added up, by Thursday late afternoon, they were still ten thousand dollars short. The money so far on its way by wire from England and the amounts already collected in cashier’s cheques in South Carolina were considered by nightfall to be in the hands of the US District Clerk, who would authorise the setting free from custody of Sandy Nutbridge but only when he physically held the complete one hundred thousand. If, he added not unkindly, if the missing ten thousand dollars were in his hands by noon on Friday, he would alert the facility holding Sandy Nutbridge behind bars, and if they received the instruction by two o’clock they would do the necessary paperwork and free Nutbridge that afternoon so that he could spend the weekend and the rest of their intended stay with his mother and children.

Mrs Nutbridge, in tears, telephoned Ray Wichelsea, whom she had never actually met, and begged him to get Sandy out of jail. Ray Wichelsea could afford no more than the substantial sum he had already sent. ‘But...’ he said slowly, ‘if it’s a last resort, you might try a man to whom Sandy sold a horse a couple of weeks ago. He’s rich and he’s British. He might listen to you, you never know.’

So Mrs Nutbridge telephoned Jules Reginald Harlow and poured her sensible heart out in sob-laden local-accent English.

‘Sandy said I wasn’t to bother you,’ she finished despairingly. ‘He was adamant, when I talked to him on the telephone. He says Mr Wichelsea should never have suggested I ask you, but the children have come such a long way from home, and they are frightened... and I don’t know what to do...’ Bewilderment and overwhelming distress closed her throat, and it was for her, the beleaguered grandmother, that Jules Harlow felt sympathy, not for her salesman son, who was probably guilty (he thought) of whatever he’d been hauled in for. Jules Harlow still had faith that justice ruled.

He said ‘No promises’ to Mrs Nutbridge, but wrote down the address and phone number of Sandy’s condominium and said he would ring her back.

Harlow sat for a while with the receiver in his hand rehearing the desperation that he could alleviate. Then he phoned Ray Wichelsea and asked for his opinion.

‘If Sandy says he’ll surrender to his bail when the time comes,’ Wichelsea said, ‘then he will. I totally trust him. What’s more, his mother has borrowed money all over the place in England towards that iniquitous hundred thousand dollars, and there’s no way he’s going to default and leave her in bankruptcy and disgrace. If you put up money for his bail, you’ll definitely get it back. I wouldn’t have put up my own personal savings if I hadn’t been certain of it.’

‘But,’ Jules Harlow responded, ‘what has he done?’

‘He says he hasn’t done anything wrong. He says he thinks the tax people believe he’s been laundering drug money, but he hasn’t.’

‘Well...’ Jules Harlow hesitated, ‘has he?’

‘If he says not, then he hasn’t.’

Ray Wichelsea’s certainty didn’t altogether convince Jules Harlow, but as the computer genius realised that the essential question wasn’t guilt or innocence but whether or not Sandy Nutbridge would surrender to his bail, he telephoned his accountant and asked him what he thought.

‘If you want to do it, then do it,’ the accountant said. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.’

It was by then well after going-home time in the city’s Thursday afternoon offices: Jules Harlow’s day-to-day jobbing attorney had left and would be out of town until Monday, unavailable for advice. Jules Reginald Harlow drummed his fingers and looked out of the window and thought of poor Mrs Nutbridge, and finally dialled her number and put her miseries to rest.

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, bereft of breath. ‘Oh! Do you mean it? Do you really?’

‘You’ll have to tell me what to do.’

‘Oh. Oh...’ She slowly recovered. ‘Sandy’s lawyer,’ she said. ‘His name is Patrick Green. Well, he’s gone to Texas.’

‘He’s done what?’

‘He had another case there. He said he had to go tonight. But he’s told a sort of colleague of his... well, at any rate, someone who shares office space with him... to deal with Sandy’s bail.’ Her voice wavered with uncertainty and doubt, a mirror reflection of Jules Harlow’s own feelings. He wished bleakly that he’d never bought the filly from Sandy Nutbridge: that he’d never in the first place thought of giving his fiancée a horse.

Mrs Nutbridge said hastily, ‘It’s all right, I’m sure it is. Sandy’s friend says if you get to his office with a cashier’s cheque in time for him to courier it round to the District Clerk by twelve o’clock tomorrow morning Sandy will be freed in the afternoon.’

‘Well, who is this friend?’

‘He’s a lawyer, too. His name is Carl Corunna. He said I should give you his phone number, and ask you to ring him just before nine tomorrow morning when he will be in his office.’

Jules Harlow, frowning, wrote down the number, and felt he couldn’t honourably retreat, much as he would have liked.

‘I’ll see to it, Mrs Nutbridge,’ he assured her. ‘Do you have an\^r money for food?’

‘Mr Wichelsea gave us some. Ever so kind, he’s been.’

On Friday morning before nine, Jules Reginald Harlow telephoned the lawyer who shared office space with Patrick Green and asked him how to proceed.

The colleague, Carl Corunna, gave simple instructions without emotion: Jules Harlow should go to his bank and withdraw ten thousand dollars on a cashier’s cheque. Mr Harlow should then motor to his — Carl Corunna’s — office on the outskirts of the financial centre. He, Carl Corunna, would receive the cheque, give Mr Harlow a receipt for it, and courier it round immediately to the courthouse.

Corunna the colleague gave detailed directions to his office and said he was sure all would go well. The collection of bail money was so common as to be routine.

‘Um,’ Jules Harlow said, ‘do I make the cashier’s cheque payable to you?’

‘No, no. I’m only acting for Patrick Green as he’s away. Get your bank to make it out to him. Come as soon as you can. My office is a good hour’s drive from where you are, and time is of the essence, as you know.’

With a sigh of mild reluctance Jules Harlow followed all the instructions and reached a thoroughly conventional suite of attorneys’ offices in a building a mile or so from the city centre. He parked outside at eleven twenty-five.

A bustling receptionist showed him into the book-lined domain of Carl Corunna, who proved to be bulky, bearded and approximately his own age, fifty.

Jules Harlow, reassured, shook his hand. Carl Corunna saw a smallish, slight, unimpressive-looking man whose somewhat fluffy hair was turning grey; and as usual he had no trouble in dominating and conducting the meeting.

‘You brought the cheque?’ he asked, waving Harlow to a chair, and when he held the expensive piece of paper in his big hands he examined it line by line, nodding his assent.

He pushed buttons on his telephone and told Jules Harlow that he was without delay talking to the US District Clerk’s office in the Federal courthouse.

‘Yes,’ he said into the mouthpiece, ‘the last ten thousand for Nutbridge is here. Cashier’s cheque, yes. I’ll courier it round to you at once. And you do confirm that Nutbridge will be freed this afternoon? Great. Thanks very much.’

He put down the receiver, called for his secretary to make a photo-copy of the cheque, and wrote and signed a receipt, giving it to Harlow.

‘What’s next?’ Harlow asked.

‘Nothing,’ Corunna told him. ‘When Sandy Nutbridge gives himself up for trial, you’ll get your money back. Until then, you just wait.’

With a sense of anticlimax after the rush, Jules Harlow drove uneventfully home. Sandy Nutbridge was released at three o’clock from the cells. Mrs Nutbridge wept with relief when he walked in through his front door, and the children demanded and ate endless comfort burgers and fries.

Mrs Nutbridge telephoned Jules Harlow to thank him, and after joyful boat trips on the lake for the rest of their holiday, Sandy’s family flew safely home to England. Sandy sold more horses. The court moved on to other cases, the Nutbridge urgency quietly receding. Jules Harlow, entranced with his fiancée, only thought about his bail adventure when the filly Sandy had sold him kicked up her tough little heels and won repeatedly.

Three months passed.

Towards the end of that time Jules Reginald Harlow married his delicious horse-racing lady and took her on a wedding trip to Paris. While they were away Sandy Nutbridge was summoned for trial.

Sandy Nutbridge, supported by his lawyer-friend Patrick Green (long ago returned from Texas), successfully proved in court that the IRS (Internal Revenue Service — the tax people) had done its sums wrong and was prosecuting him in error. The judge agreed and dismissed the case. As Nutbridge had surrendered to his bail, the District Clerk duly dug out and distributed the one hundred thousand dollars in his care.

And that should have been the end of a fairly unremarkable no-crime event — except that it was only the beginning.

When Jules Harlow in good spirits returned from France he telephoned Ray Wichelsea, engaging him to find him another good young thoroughbred as a wedding gift for his new wife.

‘And by the way,’ Jules Harlow added, ‘any news of Sandy Nutbridge? Is his trial date set yet?’

Ray Wichelsea related the dismissal of the charges and said that all was well. The US District Clerk had returned his — Ray Wichelsea’s — money, and Jules Harlow would no doubt receive his own in a few days’ time, now that he was home again.

The few days passed and became three weeks. Jules Harlow wrote to Patrick Green, Sandy’s lawyer, and explained that as he was in residence again, he was ready to receive his ten thousand dollars.

A week later he received not ten thousand dollars but a short sharp letter:

Mild Jules Harlow positively gasped. Very seldom did he lose his temper, but when he did it was in a cold sweat of fury, not a red-roaring rampage. He walked tautly into Ray Wichelsea’s office and laid the letter on his desk.

Ray Wichelsea, not wanting to lose a top customer, but alarmed by his manner, read the page apprehensively and went pale in his turn. Sandy Nutbridge, summoned urgently by mobile phone, found himself facing two tight-faced hostile men.

He gave the letter on the desk barely a glance and he shook with his own rage as he forestalled accusation.

‘It’s not true,’ he declared intensely. ‘I never said that. What’s more, he sent a letter like that to my mother, and I’ve had her on the phone... she’s frantic. She borrowed that money. She borrowed fifty-seven thousand dollars... and however will she pay it back if Patrick Green keeps the money? She borrowed against her pension left by my dad. She borrowed from her neighbours and friends and on the security of her sister’s house... and I’ve yelled in Green’s face but all he does is give me a soppy grin, and says he’ll have me back in court if I make a fuss...’

‘Could he?’ Jules Harlow interrupted. ‘Could he have you back in court? And on what charge?’

‘Laundering drug money and selling drugs,’ Sandy Nutbridge said fiercely. ‘Which I didn’t do. But when he tells lies, people believe him.’

Patrick Green felt secure in embezzling fifty-seven thousand dollars from Mrs Nutbridge and ten thousand dollars from Jules Harlow because he believed both of them to be weak foreigners who wouldn’t do much beyond the first agitated squawking. He could make them believe that he wouldn’t be able to disprove further IRS allegations of money-laundering and drug-dealing against Sandy Nutbridge if his fees weren’t paid for the first case. The IRS had believed and acted on his allegations the first time and, because of its habitually suspicious outlook, he had faith it would do it again.

Patrick Green, well pleased with his clever scheme, used the Nutbridge bail money to pay off his own personally threatening debts. He had borrowed too much at exorbitant interest rates from dangerous people, and had come frighteningly close to their debt-collection methods, but no longer now need he fear being punched to pulp in a dark alley. Not a violent man himself, he shrank from even the thought of the crunch of fists. He felt very relieved indeed to have been able to steal the feeble old British people’s money to get himself out of the certainty of pain, and no flutter of remorse troubled his self-satisfaction.

Patrick Green had reckoned correctly that Sandy Nutbridge would month by month send to his mother instalments to pay off what she’d borrowed on his behalf. Green knew it would cost Sandy Nutbridge far more then he could afford to pay lawyers to try to recover his mother’s money through the courts. What Patrick Green had totally overlooked was the nature of the small quiet man whose ten thousand dollars he had pocketed with the help of his colleague Carl Corunna.

Carl Corunna, big and bearded, had reported Jules Harlow, after their meeting, to be an ineffectual mouse, ignorant and easily defeated. Carl Corunna had then insisted that he had earned half the embezzled ten thousand dollars for instructing Harlow to make the cashier’s cheque payable to Patrick Green himself, and not more safely directly to the US District Clerk. Patrick Green, bitterly arguing, finally offered one thousand: they settled on two.

Jules Reginald Harlow, though he might be unworldly in matters of bail bonds, still had an implacable belief that justice should be done. He set about finding himself an attorney of sufficient brain to out-think frauds, and via businessmen with inside understanding came finally to a meeting with a young good-looking electric coil of energy called David T. Vynn.

‘Mr Harlow,’ Vynn said, ‘even if you get your money back, which I have to tell you is doubtful, it will cost you maybe double in lawyers’ fees.’

‘Your fees, do you mean?’

‘Yes, my fees. My advice to you is to write off the loss and put it down to experience. It will cost you less in the end.’

Jules Harlow spent a long minute looking at the boyish outcome of his attorney search. He had expected David T. Vynn to be more substantial, both in body and years: someone more like big, bearded Carl Corunna, he realised. He also remembered, however, that physicists, mathematicians, poets, painters, composers and nearly all innovators (including himself) had been struck by divine revelation in their twenties. He had asked for the best: he must trust that in David T. Vynn he had got it.

David T. Vynn (29) spent the same minute remembering what he’d been told about Jules Harlow (51): that a chamois on a mountainside couldn’t leap as fast or as far as this grey man’s intellect. He had taken this — to him — minor case out of interest in the computer-genius mind.

‘Mr Vynn,’ the grey man said, ‘it isn’t a matter of money.’

‘Of pride?’ The question was nearly an insult, but the attorney wanted to know the strength and origin of his client’s motivation.

Jules Harlow smiled. ‘Perhaps of pride. But of principle, certainly.’ He paused, then said, ‘I don’t know my way around the corkscrews of the American law. I need a champion who does. I want Patrick Green to curse the day he thought of robbing me, and I won’t give up on you unless you yourself admit defeat.’

David T. Vynn thought drily, with inner delight, that Patrick Green had robbed the wrong man.

Client and attorney met again a week later.

David T. Vynn reported, ‘To prevent the movement of large amounts of drug money, there is a law in America that says banks and other financial institutions must inform the IRS, the tax people, whenever ten thousand dollars or more in cash is either deposited or withdrawn from a private account in any one day.’

‘Yes,’ Jules Harlow nodded, ‘I know.’

‘Sandy Nutbridge was arrested because nearly three years ago he had paid into his account three large sums of cash within two days. The payments aggregated twenty-two thousand dollars. The case against him was dismissed not because there was no evidence but because of affidavits from Ray Wichelsea and others that various legitimate commissions on horse sales had by coincidence been paid to him in cash in that time. He had declared the cash as income and paid tax on it. Case then dismissed.’

‘End of story.’

‘Not quite.’ David Vynn smiled thinly. ‘The IRS had had Sandy Nutbridge arrested in the first place because of information laid against him by a so-called friend in whom he had unwisely confided. A lawyer friend who saw all sorts of ways to profit.’

Jules Harlow said, ‘Dear God.’

‘Quite.’ His attorney nodded. ‘Patrick Green got Sandy Nutbridge first jailed and then bailed and is, I’m told, now stoking things up to have Nutbridge back behind bars on a charge of selling cocaine, that is if he doesn’t pay Green something near another thirty thousand dollars for a fee. I have to say that in Green’s leech-like machinations, your ten thousand is chicken feed.’

Jules Harlow said blankly, ‘What can we do?’

‘There are two roads to go.’ David T. Vynn was cheerful: he liked a good fight. ‘You can sue him for the money in court, and you can complain to the South Carolina Bar Association in an effort to get him disqualified from practising law.’

‘Which do you suggest?’

‘Both.’

Hearing nothing from Jules Reginald Harlow for quite some time, Patrick Green told himself complacently that he’d been absolutely right, the pathetic little guy from England had discovered it would cost him too much to kick up a storm and had caved in without making trouble.

Patrick Green, approaching forty, had for many years scavenged on the fringes of the law, never achieving the recognition he thought his due. He dreamed of brilliantly defending successfully in major murder trials but more typically lost misdemeanour cases in county courts. Most of his work, by this stage in his unsatisfactory career, consisted of carrying out dishonest tasks for other dishonest lawyers. ‘Gifts’ like Sandy Nutbridge came along rarely.

It was a nasty shock for him when he received notice that Jules Harlow was suing him for conversion, civil theft and breach of constructive trust in the matter of his ten thousand dollars. He didn’t like it that an attorney, David T. Vynn, was requesting a deposition. The grey little Englishman, Green frowned, should have learned his lesson and cut his losses. He, Green, would make sure that the little man not only lost his case, but would be much the poorer for having brought it.

Patrick Green didn’t much fear the deposition itself: he would swear on oath to tell the truth and then lie from start to finish. He had done it many times. People tended to believe what was said in a deposition (a sworn statement of fact) because lying under oath constituted perjury punishable by imprisonment.

Patrick Green, skilful at misrepresentation and evasion, told believable lies for nearly two hours at his deposition, with an appearance throughout of sincerity and conviction.

Jules Reginald Harlow met his attorney David T. Vynn for breakfast in a hotel. David T. Vynn preferred dining-rooms to offices, first because no ‘bugs’ could be listening and second because he was permanently hungry.

Over cereal, eggs Benedict and bacon on the side he described Patrick Green at his deposition as ingratiating, smooth-eyed and plausible, and over strawberries, waffles and maple syrup he outlined Green’s reply to Harlow’s charges, which was that Jules Harlow on the telephone had told him — Green — to apply the ten thousand dollars to his — Green’s — fees. He — Green — couldn’t understand why Harlow should want to go back on the deal.

‘Green was attended at his deposition by the attorney acting in his defence,’ David Vynn said. ‘He gave his name as Carl Corunna. Is he the person who told you to make your cashier’s cheque payable to Green? Is he the one who received the cheque and gave you a receipt for it, and couriered it round to the court?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘How is it good?’ Harlow asked.

‘Because I can get him disqualified as defendant’s counsel. Er...’ he explained, seeing Harlow’s mystification, ‘Carl Corunna is also a witness, right? If we go before a judge in his chambers — that’s just a room smaller than the whole court — I would hope to persuade him to make Green get himself a different attorney to defend him in court, and that will cost Mr Patrick Green a whole bucketful of his own cash, which I’m told he can’t afford, as he has already spent the thousands he stole.’

‘It seemed such a simple matter,’ Jules Harlow sighed, ‘to put up a bit of money towards a bail bond.’

‘Don’t despair.’

David Vynn ate warm English muffins spread with apple jelly and watched the slightly gloomy expression of his client change to radiant pleasure as they were joined by a vibrant woman who wore couture clothes as casually as overalls.

‘My wife,’ Harlow said, introducing her with pride. ‘She thinks I was crazy to listen to poor Mrs Nutbridge, and she’s fascinated by Patrick Green.’

‘It was for your wife,’ David Vynn asked, ‘that you bought the filly and met Sandy Nutbridge?’

Jules Harlow nodded. David Vynn looked from one to the other and thought Patrick Green hadn’t a hope of pinning drug-dealing sleaze onto people like this.

Even though the judge in chambers did agree with David Vynn that Patrick Green should engage a different counsel to defend him at trial, it was still Carl Corunna who acted for him when he demanded a deposition in his turn from Jules Reginald Harlow.

‘I’ll be sitting beside you,’ young David Vynn told his client, ‘but I’m not allowed to answer the questions. It will be you who does that. Remember that you’ll have sworn on oath to speak the truth. Think before you answer. They’ll be trying to trap you. Tricky questions. If they succeed in muddling you up, we’ll lose in court.’

So reassuring, Jules Harlow thought. He and David Vynn went to the office suite of Carl Corunna and in a boardroom there Jules Reginald Harlow came face to face with Patrick Green for the first time. He had expected perhaps to see deviousness, but Green’s success in the world was based on a plausibly persuasive exterior.

Green looked at Harlow as a fool throwing good money down the drain and didn’t in the least understand the mind of the man he was facing. In the context of the war-torn famine-racked world, Jules Harlow considered the disputed ownership of ten thousand dollars to be an irrelevance. Yet he still believed that justice mattered, whether on a huge or a tiny scale, and he would try to the end to prove it existed.

Apart from the four men sitting opposite each other in side-by-side pairs at one end of a long polished table — Corunna and Green opposite Harlow and Vynn — there was a woman court reporter who, on her swift typing machine, wrote down every word verbatim. There was also a video camera recording the proceedings, so that if necessary the spoken words could be synchronised with the video tape, to prove there had been no illegal editing.

Jules Harlow swore on oath to tell the truth, and did so. Carl Corunna tried to get him to admit he had agreed that, when the District Clerk returned the bail money, Green should keep it as part of his fee.

‘Absolutely not,’ Jules Harlow said.

‘You made the cashier’s cheque out personally to Mr Green, did you not?’

‘Yes, you told me to.’

‘Did you stipulate on the cheque that it was to be used for any particular purpose?’

‘You yourself knew that its purpose was to complete the bail bond so that Sandy Nutbridge could be freed to enjoy his family’s visit.’

‘Answer the question,’ Corunna instructed. ‘Did you stipulate on the cheque for what purpose it was to be used?’

‘Well... no.’

‘Did you stipulate on the cheque that you expected it to be returned to you?’

‘No,’ Harlow said. ‘And why,’ he added bitterly, ‘why didn’t you as a lawyer advise me to make out the cheque directly to the District Clerk? Ray Wichelsea did that, and had his money returned without trouble. You yourself told me to have the cheque made out to Patrick Green personally. If you knew that what I was doing on your instruction was inadvisable, why did you so instruct me?’

Carl Corunna refused to answer. It was he, he said, who was asking the questions.

The session lasted forty-five minutes.

‘They won’t want to use that deposition in court,’ David T. Vynn said with satisfaction afterwards. ‘You sounded much too genuine.’

‘I spoke the truth.’

‘It’s not always the truth that’s believed.’

The wheels of the justice system revolved with the speed of tortoises. It was well over two years from the day that Jules Harlow had bought the filly that he received a phone call from David T. Vynn saying that the grievance committee of the South Carolina Bar was ready to hear his plea for probable cause.

‘My what?’ Jules Harlow asked blankly. His mind at the time resonated with visions of storing personality and memory on microchips that could be implanted to restore order in confused brains. His loving wife, happy with her horses, held his elbow on kerbsides so that he wouldn’t absent-mindedly step off in front of buses.

David Vynn said, ‘Three weeks next Tuesday, in the evening, eight o’clock, in the hotel where we meet for breakfast.’

‘I thought we were going to court.’

‘No, no,’ his attorney told him patiently. ‘If you remember, I told you at the beginning there were two ways to go. One is to file suit and make the depositions and wind the way slowly into court, and the other is to file a grievance with the South Carolina Bar Association. That grievance — your grievance against Patrick Green — has now reached the top of the pile.’

‘Double helix,’ Jules Harlow murmured.

‘What? Yes, I suppose so. You will turn up for the Bar hearing, won’t you?’

Sandy Nutbridge, during the same two years, had been in and out of jail. Patrick Green, his one-time friend, had again invented information against him and delivered him to arrest with an approximation of a Judas kiss, but this time Sandy, with his family safe in England, had made no attempt to raise bail money, choosing instead to wait resignedly behind bars for the date of his trial.

He chose also to be defended not by Green but by an attorney appointed pro bono by the court, and although he lost his case and was found guilty of minor money irregularities through horse sales, the worse charge of selling cocaine didn’t stick. He was sentenced only to time served, which meant he was freed immediately. Ray Wichelsea gladly put sales his way as before — but paid him commission with regular cheques, not cash.

As Sandy Nutbridge, on behalf of his mother, had also made a complaint to the South Carolina Bar along the same lines as David T. Vynn, the committee had decided to hear both complaints together. Mrs Nutbridge, as sturdily determined in her way as Jules Harlow in his, emptied the last few pounds from her piggy bank back home and on coupons for free-flier miles from her local supermarket, made her way again across the Atlantic.

She met Jules Harlow for the first time in the waiting-room of the extensive business suite in the hotel chosen by the South Carolina Bar Association for their enquiry. No one formally introduced them, but tentatively they approached each other until Jules Harlow (as ever in a grey suit) said to the grey-haired grandmother in her best print wool dress, ‘Are you... er...?’ and she replied self-consciously ‘Mr Harlow, is it?’

Without heat, they exchanged sorrows. Sandy Nutbridge was faithfully sending small amounts to help repay her borrowings, though to do it he had had to abandon his expensive lakeside home. She thought Patrick Green an unspeakable villain. Jules Reginald Harlow looked back to the day when he’d succumbed to her sobs and supposed he would do it again if he had to.

Jules Harlow’s vivacious wife, who said she wouldn’t have missed the Bar Association gathering for all the thoroughbreds in Kentucky, immediately offered sympathy and lighthearted jokes to Mrs Nutbridge, the two women surprising and dissipating the general run of long faces. Mrs Nutbridge visibly strengthened from jitters to determination. Jules Harlow’s wife said, ‘Attagirl!’

Jules Harlow gradually understood that the grievance committee was already in session in the large boardroom across the suite’s lobby and, when David T. Vynn arrived, he confirmed it. The fourteen lawyers at present forming the grievance committee had been listening to Patrick Green’s lies and twisted version of things for almost an hour.

‘They’ll believe him!’ Jules Harlow exclaimed, depressed.

David T. Vynn looked from him to Mrs Nutbridge. ‘It’s up to you two to convince them there’s probable cause.’

Jules Harlow asked again, ‘What is probable cause?’

‘Basically if the committee finds there is probable cause, they may try a colleague among themselves at a later date and disbar him or her from practising as a lawyer if he or she has, say, disgraced his or her profession.’

‘Like doctors?’ Mrs Nutbridge asked.

David Vynn nodded. ‘Like that.’

The committee called Mrs Nutbridge first, alone. Jules Harlow’s summons came half an hour later. Each of them in turn walked into a big brightly-lit room where the fourteen unsmiling lawyers sat round a long boardroom-like table. The committee chairman, at one end of the table, invited Mrs Nutbridge and later Jules Harlow to sit on one of the few empty chairs and answer questions.

Mrs Nutbridge was seated halfway down the table, but the chairman waved Jules Harlow to the only remaining empty seat at the far end which, to his alarm, was next to Patrick Green. Beyond Green sat Carl Corunna. Worse and worse. Expressionlessly, Jules Harlow took his allotted place and, rather woodenly, because of Green’s physical nearness, began to answer the chairman’s questions, most of which assumed Green’s lies to be the faces.

Jules Harlow knew he was doing badly. The assembled lawyers looked disbelieving at his answers and Green, beside him, relaxed. Carl Corunna sniffed.

Jules Harlow, in his memory, heard David Vynn’s voice. ‘It’s not always the truth that’s believed.’ If I’m not believed, he thought, it’s my own fault.

The chairman, consulting notes spread on the table in front of him, asked Jules Harlow on which day he had promised Patrick Green, on the telephone, that he could keep the ten thousand dollars on its return from the court.

The chairman, overweight and suffering from chronic indigestion, was finding the proceedings tedious. Half of the rest of the committee were fighting cat-naps. Patrick Green was smiling.

Jules Harlow took a deep breath and said loudly, ‘I would never have agreed to pay any fees whatsoever for Sandy Nutbridge.’

One of the dozing lawyers opened his eyes wide and said, ‘Why not?’

‘Because I didn’t know him.’

‘But—’

‘When I advanced the money for his bail, I had met him only once. That was on the day I bought a horse from him. Quite a good horse, as it turned out. A mare. You might like a bet on her tomorrow in the fourth race.’

A ripple of amusement finished off the cat-naps.

‘If you didn’t know Nutbridge...’ the chairman frowned ‘...why did you put up money for his bail?’

‘Because of his mother’s distress. I did it for her.’ Jules gestured towards her. ‘I did it because she was crying. I did it because she’s English, and so am I. You yourselves might have come to the aid of a fellow American if one begged you for help in a foreign country. I did it simply because I wanted to.’

There was a short moment of open-mouthed silence, then a lady among the committee cleared her throat and said with humour, ‘If you don’t mind me asking you, Mr Harlow, is ten thousand dollars a great deal of money to you?’

Jules Harlow smiled. ‘Not really. It is not because I need the money that I ask you to make Patrick Green give back what he owes me. It’s because of the principle involved. It’s because he is letting you all down.’

Harlow took another deep breath and into a continuing silence said, ‘If I hadn’t been able to afford to lose ten thousand dollars, I wouldn’t have gone to Mrs Nutbridge’s aid. But I would absolutely never have agreed to pay her son’s legal fees. Why should I? I did not at any time discuss fees with anyone, not Patrick Green nor Carl Corunna nor Sandy Nutbridge. I trusted Sandy Nutbridge to surrender to his bail, which he did. I trusted a lawyer to return the money he knew I’d put up in good faith for a bail bond, and he has kept it. I trusted a horse salesman and I trusted a lawyer. Which would you have put your money on, out of those two?’

The grievance committee debated among themselves and the following day announced that they found no ‘probable cause’ and that the subject was closed.

‘I blew it,’ Jules Harlow said gloomily at breakfast later in the week.

‘You certainly did not,’ David Vynn assured him. ‘I’ve been told the committee nearly all believed you, not Patrick Green.’

‘But... then why?’

‘They almost never disbar a fellow lawyer. They may know Green is as guilty as hell, but if there’s the slightest possibility of inserting any doubt into their deliberations, they’ll let him off. All doubt is reasonable, didn’t you know?’

Jules Harlow watched David T. Vynn begin to demolish a pile of buckwheat pancakes with bananas.

‘All the same,’ Jules Harlow said, ‘Patrick Green has got away with it.’

David Vynn spooned whipped butter onto his pancakes and, enjoying a dramatic moment, extravagantly flourished his fork. ‘Patrick Green,’ he said, ‘has done nothing of the sort.’

‘He still has my money.’

‘I did warn you at the beginning that you were unlikely to get it back.’

‘Then how can you say he hasn’t got away with it?’

David Vynn attended thoughtfully to his pancakes. ‘I have incredibly knowledgeable sources. I’m told things, you know. I’m told you stunned the grievance committee. They say you are I transparently honest witness.’ He paused. ‘They all know it is you who will be believed if Patrick Green is tried in court.’

‘If!’

‘That’s what I want to talk to you about. The path to court leads from accusation to deposition, and after that point there’s an offer of mediation to settle out of court. Only if that fails does the case come to trial. Well, Patrick Green has agreed to mediation.’

‘I don’t understand why you’re so upbeat,’ Harlow said.

‘You will.’

The tortoise wheels rotated slowly along the road to mediation but eventually David Vynn took his client to a meeting with a mediator who proved to be a sophisticated version of grandmotherly Mrs Nutbridge.

‘Our aim,’ she said, ‘is to agree the terms of settlement between Mr Green and Mr Harlow without the time or expense of a trial in court.’ She paused. ‘I’ve spoken to Mr Green.’

Silence.

‘He is willing to negotiate,’ she said.

David Vynn with irony commented, ‘I suppose that means he’s willing to avoid the loss of his house and car and his office equipment and all that he owns. He’s willing to avoid triple penalties, in fines. He’s willing not to have to pay punitive damages. How generous of him!’

‘What can he offer that you will accept?’

Dear Heaven, Jules Harlow thought in a burst of understanding, Patrick Green is admitting his guilt.

Patrick Green, indeed, brought face to face with a stark choice between a sentence for conversion, civil theft and breach of constructive trust, followed by the automatic revocation of his licence to practise law — between that and the repaying of some at least of what he’d embezzled from Jules Harlow and Mrs Nutbridge, had discovered all of a sudden that there were dollars to be earned in the outside world, even if it meant stocking supermarket shelves.

The mediator said, ‘Mr Green offers you five thousand dollars: half of the sum you put up for the bail bond.’

‘Mr Green,’ David Vynn said pleasantly, ‘can multiply that by two. If my client was vengeful, he could multiply by four.’

‘Mr Green spent the bond money paying off debtors who would otherwise have beaten him up.’

‘Let’s all weep,’ David Vynn told her. ‘Mr Green stole Mrs Nutbridge’s pension fund.’

Jules Harlow listened in fascination.

‘Sandy Nutbridge,’ the mediator riposted, ‘is paying to her what she advanced to free him. Mrs Nutbridge’s debts are her son’s affair.’

‘Patrick Green twice betrayed Sandy Nutbridge to the IRS,’ David Vynn drily pointed out. ‘His purpose from the beginning was to steal a fortune in unnecessary legal fees from his so-called friend. Mr Harlow’s ten thousand dollars bond money came along as an unplanned bonus.’

‘Mr Green will repay half of Mr Harlow’s involvement.’

‘No,’ David Vynn said calmly. ‘All of it.’

‘He has no money.’

‘Mr Harlow will wait.’

From old experienced eyes she looked with amusement at bright David T. Vynn; young enough to be her son, too young to feel pity for a crook. She set a future date for a final settlement.

Jules Harlow’s devoted wife decided that as Jules was offering her a new horse for their third wedding anniversary she would go to Ray Wichelsea himself, to the head of the agency, for advice.

Ray Wichelsea, valuing her custom above all others, found her a two-year-old of starry promise for the following year’s Triple Crown.

Mrs Harlow asked if there were any news of Mrs Nutbridge, whom she had immediately liked at the grievance committee meeting. Sandy Nutbridge had eventually saved enough to ask advice from David Vynn, Ray Wichelsea told her, and now Patrick Green had furiously agreed to mediation in her case, too.

Mrs Harlow said to Jules at bedtime, ‘Even if she gets most of her money back, I don’t suppose Mrs Nutbridge will put up bail for anyone ever again.’

Her husband thought of what he’d learned, and of the thousands he had quite gladly paid in attorneys’ fees to defeat Patrick Green. ‘I’m told,’ he said, ‘that there’s a way to bail people out by merely pledging the bail money and paying up in full only if the accused absconds, but it’s expensive. It might be better, might be worse. I’ll have to ask our young marvel, David Vynn.’

They met quietly across yet another boardroom table, paired as before: Patrick Green and Carl Corunna opposite Jules Reginald Harlow and David T. Vynn.

The grandmotherly mediator, dressed in a grey business suit as formal as Jules Harlow’s, as anonymous as the lawyers’, shook hands briefly all round and, sitting at the table’s head, distributed simple documents, asking them all to sign.

Jules Harlow, despite his losses, felt himself strongly filled by a sense of justice. Here they all were, he thought as he signed, fighting a battle to the death with pens, not guns. Patrick Green might rob people, but he didn’t shoot.

Glumly Patrick Green admitted to himself that he’d underestimated both Jules Harlow’s persistence and David Vynn’s skill with the law. The chairman of the grievance committee, furthermore, had uttered fearsome threats: the slightest whisper of misdoing would find the Green licence in the bin. But in time, Patrick Green thought, in time he would rake up another sting; would find another mug...

He irritably signed the paper that committed him to re-paying his debt to Jules Harlow in four chunks of twenty-five hundred bucks each.

The paper was in effect a full confession.

The law turned its back on Patrick Green and put no more work his way.

For a year he laboured in low-paid jobs, resentfully repaying Jules Harlow on time rather than finding himself in court.

For four more years, he sweated to repay Mrs Nutbridge.

Punitive damages though, he knew, would have been much worse.

Freed at last from debt, but still dishonest at heart, he moved to another state and sold small-print insurance.

A man he swindled there took a more direct route to justice than Jules Reginald Harlow, and in a dark alley beat Patrick Green to pulp.