Skinner's rules

82

Martin rang Kenny Duff at 8.45 next morning to arrange for another look at Mortimer’s word processor. ‘You’re just in time,’ he said. ‘The family asked me to give some things to the Social Work Department, or to charities, and that will be one of them.’

The team all arrived promptly. Mackie and McIlhenney looked refreshed; Maggie and McGuire looked even more tired than they had the day before.

Martin told Mackie to begin with Yellow Pages, and to split the hotel and guest-house entries into groups. ‘Then pick up a copy of the B-and-B list from the local tourist office and allocate that too. Do everything by telephone at first. We’ll never get through them all otherwise. Let’s keep the story simple. We can only check one name, and that’ll be Fazal Mahmoud, Lebanese. We say that he is a freelance journalist, touring in Scotland. We need to speak to him because there’s been bad news at home. We tell people to call us at once if the man checks in, but not to mention our call. This is because we don’t want him to panic before we have a chance to break the news. Happy with that?’

Mackie nodded in agreement.

‘Well, go to it, and good luck.’

The weather had broken when Skinner and Martin arrived at Mortimer’s flat. It was cold and depressing, dead like its owner. Skinner switched on the computer, and loaded the software. Eventually, the menu appeared on the green screen.

He loaded the first data disk, and followed the procedure which Alex had explained to him. He pressed F5. The screen changed, and additional files appeared, each with the word ‘limbo’ after its title. He performed the recovery drill, then chose a document and pressed E for Edit followed by Enter. The file related to a holiday booking.

‘This could take a long time,’ he said to Martin. He had no great expectations. But it was part of the search, and it had to be done, even if it meant a long, boring day staring at a computer screen.

As superstition would have it, his third choice was the lucky one. He slid the thin plastic wafer into the drive slot and pressed the disk change button. The menu appeared on the screen. ‘Not much on this one,’ he muttered to himself. There were only three small files on the menu, each titled by a surname, month and year. He guessed that they probably related to criminal trials.

He pressed F5. The choice of options was displayed. He told the machine to ‘show limbo files’ and pressed the Enter key.

Seven new files flashed up before him, each one styled ‘Limbo’. Each was named ‘Israel’, and was followed in sequence by a number from one to seven.

Skinner sensed Martin tense, then stand bolt upright beside him. Carefully, making certain not to press the wrong button and erase them forever, he recovered the documents.

When the ‘limbo’ tag had disappeared from the screen, he checked the size of each document. They ranged in size from 15K to 88K. He totalled them. In all, the ’Israel’ series occupied 327K of memory, more than one third of the disk’s respectable storage space.

He sent the cursor to ‘Israel 1’, and pressed E for Edit followed swiftly by the Enter key. After eight long seconds of clicks and hums from the computer and its printer, the screen changed.

Martin yelled aloud. Skinner grinned broadly, but stayed in his chair. The two detectives read, incredulous, Skinner moving the cursor to scroll the pages.

The green lettering was clear and precise, to match the language of the document.

It began:

The Case against Israel

‘An opinion for the Governments of Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq by Rachel Jameson, Advocate, and Michael Mortimer, Advocate, on the legal basis for the foundation of the State of Israel.

This opinion establishes, beyond what its authors believe to be reasonable doubt, that the signatories to the Treaty and Declaration by which Israel was established in 1948 as a so-called sovereign state, acted without any legal jurisdiction or authority, and in contravention of the principles and practice of international law and of many treaties stretching back over the centuries.

It will demonstrate that the Jewish tribes had no prior right to the territories which they were allocated in 1948, and that the so-called ancient Jewish homeland was never more than territory seized by force by bands of nomads and held, for a time, against the will of its native occupants.

It will demonstrate that Israel exists as a state today only by force of arms and oppression, and that there is no basis in law for its occupancy of any territory, not just the occupied territories in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, on the Golan Heights, and in Lebanon, but of any of the lands which it now controls, when this is set against the justifiable claims of the descendants of the people who were the original indigenous occupants of the land known as Palestine.

This opinion will be followed by notes on differences in the methods of presentation required for the presentation of the case to the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Warmth was beginning to return to the room from the log-effect gas fire set in the fine, high, marble-topped fireplace. Skinner took off his jacket, draped it over the back of his chair, as he and Martin settled down for a long read.

Long before it was over, their eyes were smarting from the strain of the screen. Martin removed his contact lens and put on his spectacles. They were mesmerised by the detail which was spread out before them. Each had a policeman’s grasp of the law, and could follow the complex arguments.

Through them all, there emerged with clarity, a powerful case for the eviction of the Israelis from the government and domination of the land they now called home, and for the right of settlement and enfranchisement to be extended to all Palestinians as well as to all Jews, leading to free elections in time.

The conclusion of the document was that since the Israelis had followed a systematic policy of oppression of the Palestinian population, and since it was clear that they would never grant this right of free settlement, or amend their constitution, the just solution of the Palestinian problem, on the basis of the precedent established in 1948, could be enforced by the nations in the region, acting in concert.

After three hours they finished reading. The documents, in total, were over three hundred pages long.

When they had finished, Skinner leaned back in his chair. His face was drawn. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered to Martin, ‘this is dynamite!’

He looked at the dot matrix printer. It had a tractor feed for loading fan-fold paper. He looked around the room, and found eventually, under the desk, a deep box of computer paper. It was almost full.

Clumsily he fed the first sheet into the machine. He pressed the key marked ‘Printer’ and found a new menu. He set the printer to run on continuous stationery.

It took almost five hours to run the full series of documents. Throughout that time, Skinner sat by the printer like a father-to-be in the labour ward. It had been dark for two hours by the time the print-run came to an end.

They looked at it in wonder. Could this be the Holy Grail? Could this really have cost all those lives? It was, at the end of the day, no more than an excellent piece of research, and a seemingly sound, if controversial, legal view, which any one or two among hundreds of advocates in Scotland, and thousands beyond, might have prepared. Yet, it seemed, it could kill. It had killed. It was still killing.

In a desk drawer Martin found some brightly-coloured Christmas wrapping paper. Neatly he packaged the discovery. Skinner withdrew the disk from the drive and slipped it, with the system disk, into his pocket.

They left the flat ostensibly as they had found it, but in fact relieved of an awesome secret.