DANDO, BULGER, SHIPMAN...
All massive cases. Yet this courtroom memoir is so lacking in drama it’s criminal
From Crime to Crime Richard Henriques Hodder & Stoughton £25 ★★★★★
On the cover, the publishers have given this book a racy subtitle: ‘Harold Shipman To Operation Midland: 17 Cases That Shocked The World.’ This is, as it turns out, only slightly overstated. The trials with which the author has been involved, either as a barrister or a judge, include the murders of Jill Dando and James Bulger, Jeremy Bamber’s appeal against his multiple convictions, the deaths of the Morecambe Bay Cockle Pickers and the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Any publisher would have leapt at the chance to print a memoir by a man so closely connected to such notorious cases.
But they would have reckoned without the author, who seems almost perversely keen to rid his narrative of any suspicion of excitement. ‘This is not a memoir,’ begins his introduction. ‘It is not about me…’ Instead, he insists that his intention in writing it is ‘to demonstrate how the justice process has worked through the prism of cases with which I have been closely associated’.
Yet it is clearly impossible to write 300-odd pages about the cases you have worked on without mentioning yourself. By page two, he has already broken his own rule, letting slip that his grandfather was a magistrate, his greatuncle a QC and his father a barrister on the Northern Circuit, and that he himself ‘was fascinated with the criminal courts from an early age. I was aged ten when the Blackpool poisoner Mrs Merrifield was convicted of murder and hanged at Strangeways. I read every word of the trial’. Shortly afterwards, when his family home was visited by Mrs Merrifield’s defence counsel, ‘I soon knew exactly what I wanted to do in my life’.
But this sense of the drama of the courtroom is soon replaced by a stodgy narrative tone pitched awkwardly between self-effacement and self-regard. Henriques is particularly keen on the lawyerly double-negative, which means you sometimes have to reread a phrase in order to work out what he is for or against. ‘Listening to Rodney’s speeches at Bar Mess was no hardship’… ‘I have no recollection of a judge failing to say something to a defendant prior to sentence’… ‘I am certain that it crossed none of our minds that we were participating in an unfair trial’… ‘at no stage of the case did any member of the court entertain the slightest doubt as to the guilt of the appellant’.
For some reason, he has chosen to expunge the book of virtually all the cut-and-thrust, the characters and the drama that make courtrooms so gripping.
By and large, he eschews proper character description in favour of gushing tributes to his fellow judges and barristers. In one case, he finds that ‘both the judge and my opponent were of the very highest calibre’; in another, his opposite number was ‘a consummate performer’ while the judge ‘enjoys the very highest reputation’. And so on. In his propensity to gush, he makes Kate Winslet seem tight-lipped.
The longest and liveliest chapter is devoted to the trial of Dr Harold Shipman, in which Henriques acted as chief counsel for the prosecution. Even his doggedly downbeat narration cannot deaden the drama of this chilling case, in which a run-of-the-mill GP, ‘displaying an arrogance ill-fitting his predicament’, was charged with six murders, though he clearly committed many hundreds more – 888, in the estimation of Dame Janet Smith’s official inquiry.
Perhaps it is the extra length that has let Henriques loosen up a bit, adding bits of incidental detail that help bring the case alive. There are, of course, parallels between the trial of Dr Shipman and the trial of Dr Bodkin Adams, the Eastbourne GP who was tried in 1957 for murdering his patients. That case was later the subject of a brilliant book, Easing The Passing, by Patrick Devlin, who had been the judge.
Devlin showed the workings of the judicial process while also offering wonderfully sharp descriptions of those involved, not least the prosecuting counsel, Reginald Manningham-Buller: ‘What was almost unique about him and makes his career so fascinating is that what the ordinary careerist achieves by making himself agreeable, falsely or otherwise, Reggie achieved by making himself disagreeable. Sections of the press, which he permanently antagonised, liked to parody his name by calling him Sir Bullying Manner. This was wrong. He was a bully without a bullying manner. His bludgeoning was quiet. He could be downright rude but he did not shout or bluster. Yet his disagreeableness was so pervasive, his persistence so interminable, the obstructions he manned so far flung, his objectives apparently so insignificant, that sooner or later you would be tempted to ask yourself whether the game was worth the candle: if you asked yourself that, you were finished.’
Nothing in Henriques’s book comes close to this. Possibly Henriques would argue, as others did when Devlin’s book was published, that it was too gossipy and vindictive, and compromised the solemnity required of a judge. Some think that the courts are best served by sombre, disinterested prose. But Henriques’s account of the Shipman trial comes to life when he is at his least restrained, when he comes closest to writing a memoir, and furthest from writing a textbook.
For instance, I liked his beady description of Shipman’s behaviour when a fellow doctor was giving evidence against him. ‘Shipman was almost in permanent motion, scribbling notes and grabbing [defence counsel] Ian Winter’s gown furiously, emphasising points he wished to be made on his behalf. He was at his most animated when Dr Grenville was in the witness box, feeling no doubt that a professional colleague was showing a degree of disloyalty.’
And this chapter also benefits from impromptu moments, barely touched upon in other chapters, such as when, in a coffee break, a medical adviser observes ‘rather
drily that when Shipman was not killing his patients, he was an extremely competent and caring doctor’. At times like these, you realise that this type of gallows humour, employed by paramedics, is also what sustains criminal lawyers.
At another point in the trial, Shipman is confronted with evidence that he simply cannot deny. As Henriques recalls: ‘A very long pause followed, and a scribbled note was placed before me by (fellow counsel) Peter Wright. It read, “Ask Shipman if he would like to phone a friend.” I resisted the temptation and simply allowed the pause to continue for a considerable time. Eventually he replied: ‘A: I have no knowledge.
‘Q: There is simply no sensible answer, is there?
‘A: I do not know of any explanation.
‘At that moment, I concluded that any remote chance of an acquittal had been comprehensively eliminated.’
It’s a shame that this combination of trial transcript, private jokes and shrewd estimation of turning-points is not echoed elsewhere in the book. And he is shrewd about Shipman’s character, too: ‘Having observed Shipman in the witness box… I have no doubt that his arrogance, conceit and contempt for those he considered to be his intellectual inferiors, coupled with his precious professional reputation, would in no circumstances permit Shipman either to confess his guilt or admit to an abnormality of mind.’
Henriques also allows justified anger to emerge – ‘I find it shameful…’ – when, after the verdict, it emerges that, back in 1976, Shipman was convicted of countless charges of forgery and deception, but the General Medical Council hadn’t even bothered to refer him to their Disciplinary Committee.
In a final chapter, he also vents his fury against the police for their absurdly gullible handling of Carl Beech’s revolting lies against, among others, Leon Brittan and Lord Bramall. It’s in these few moments, when he is prepared to be unbuttoned, that his book sheds its Sunday best, and roars into life.