'What do you reckon?'
'You want it straight up, Ozzie?'
'Straight up? Course I bloody do.'
'Then I have to say that you're shafted — and I can see no different outcome for Ollie. Both of you, well and truly shafted.'
As a hard-working solicitor who represented a superior strata of the criminal classes — if they had the resources to pay for his services, and pay substantial sums — Nathaniel Wilson had a potent reputation. A serious facet of it, alongside his willingness to beaver away all the hours of the day and week on behalf of his clients, was frankness.
'You can't see any way out?' A cloud had settled over the elder Curtis brother's face. They were dinosaurs, from a world long extinct. Armed robbery, waving handguns in the faces of the staff at a jeweller's — it was the stuff of fossils.
The solicitor shrugged. 'We'll try, your brief and I. If there was going to be a happy ending I'd be the first to tell you…and I'll be the first to tell you when you're going down.'
Ozzie Curtis turned to his younger brother. 'Be a good lad, do us a Dolly.'
Singing, good cadences, burst from Ollie's mouth. Nat Wilson thought the younger brother, must be the hero of every pub karaoke night he patronized. Dolly Parton bounced off the cell walls. 'I Will Always Love You' filled the space from the mesh-covered ceiling light to the scarred floor tiles on to which they flicked cigarette ash. No way that any detective from the Robbery Squad would deliberately bug the confidentiality of a meeting between a legal representative and his clients, but there might just happen to be an old wire going to a device fitted into the cell bars, or the light casing, or the panic button. And that old wire might just lead to a tape-recorder that happened to be loaded. So Ollie Curtis sang 'I Will Always Love You' and placed his back so that it covered the cell door's spy-hole, and Ozzie Curtis leaned close from the mattress bed on which he sat to Nat on the hard chair. 'It's as bad as that? We're shafted?'
'Not looking very clever — not just my opinion but the brief's as well. Goes right back to that star, the little bitch, because we didn't shift her, and you could see the jury believed her. They lapped her up. I watched them again this afternoon. I have to tell you, Ozzie, we didn't score any points with them. They're getting bored, want it over, want to get their lives back, and when they're bored they're not open to argument…Sorry, you're going down.'
Every client of Nathaniel Wilson knew of his loyalty to them. They paid well for his commitment to causes beyond the hopeless, and because he never gave them the crap they might want to hear. He worked from behind a battered door in east London's Hackney, and lived with his wife in the flat above. Nathaniel and Diane, who did the books, the paperwork and the filing, grossed in excess of a quarter of a million a year. They were hugely wealthy but had no extravagant tastes; they took an annual fortnight's holiday on the Isle of Wight in a guesthouse, and in their wills everything they owned was destined for the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals.
'That stuff about Mum…'
'Didn't cut any ice. I watched their faces. A complete contrary reaction, like it was so obvious, so manufactured. One even laughed to herself. We're not getting to them.'
He heard Ollie starting again, back on the first verse of 'I Will Always Love You', and perhaps his voice or his enthusiasm was failing because Ozzie had swung towards him and lifted his arms, gestured that more was wanted and louder.
Ozzie Curtis's mouth was less than an inch from Nathaniel Wilson's right ear. 'If you're right, and I'm not saying you're wrong, we need Benny in on the act.'
Nathaniel Wilson's breath hissed as he sucked it in between narrowed lips. 'That's fighting talk, Ozzie.'
'For fuck's sake, if I'm going away for an eighteen or a twenty — I'm bloody going to go down fighting.'
'And not long to set it up.'
'You said three weeks for this to run.'
'I said, Ozzie, the trial will be complete within three more weeks, not a day more and likely less.'
'So we need Benny, need him on the move now.'
Seldom a demonstrative man, Nathaniel Wilson raised his eyebrows and let a frown furrow his forehead. For a moment he seemed to lose the odour of the cell, and the smell of Ozzie Curtis's body lotion. 'Not with the time that's available — and he'd have to drop everything else. It won't come cheap.'
Ozzie's chin jutted in defiance. 'Nothing about me is cheap — too fucking right it isn't.'
'You'd be looking at a hundred for an acquittal, and seventy-five for a retrial.'
'Not a problem. Get Benny. You do that, Mr Wilson.'
'If that's what you want.'
'Can't see another option — I want it. Hey, Ollie, shut that fucking row.'
The singing died. Nathaniel Wilson stood, lifted his briefcase and rang the bell beside the door. He smiled at the guard who unlocked it, then said that his legal consultation was complete. As he stepped out into the corridor he saw two detectives lounging at the far end, the bastards, and he was happy that Ollie Curtis was an uncrowned karaoke champion.
He went out of the court building, into the growing dusk. In half an hour, inside a security ring of guns, the brothers would be leaving for HMP Belmarsh and another night on remand. In an hour he would be making a first contact with Benny Edwards, with the promise of big bucks to attract the man's interest — and his own fee would be ratcheting up. He faced spending his old age in a cell alongside the brothers, and being struck off all Law Society lists, if it became public knowledge in the Robbery Squad that Nathaniel Wilson was, on behalf of clients, in touch with the man better known as the Nobbler.
29 October 1936
We are still at Albacete. I have written little of the first days here because we are worked hard and with all that is fitted into each day there seems little time to put down on paper my thoughts and experiences, but the commandant is away this afternoon and we have been allowed time off.
At Albacete, a good-sized town inland from the coast and Valencia, we are housed in the old barracks of the Civil Guards. I do not see any point in writing a diary dictated by self-censorship. When we arrived here the building was in a quite disgusting state — not just filth but worse. Government forces took the barracks from the Civil Guards, but they did not just put the defeated men into a prison cage: they killed them. The Civil Guards who surrendered were then massacred. My German comrade who was on the train with me, Karl, told me that the first of the International Brigade volunteers to arrive here after the slaughter were his fellow countrymen. These Germans were so horrified with what they found that they cleaned the barracks. They scrubbed its walls and floors to cleanse it of blood, bones and flesh. They even found dried-out brain matter from the Civil Guards who had been bludgeoned. Then they painted over the worst of the stains with whitewash.
The same slogan is now written on those walls. Where I sleep there is 'Proletarios de todos Paises! Unios!' (Spanish); 'Proletarier Lander, vereinigt euch!' (German); 'Proletari di tutti i Paesi, Unitevi!' (Italian); and 'Workers of the World, Unite!' So, from the walls around me, I am already something of a linguist! I am also shown the truly international quality of the struggle to turn back the tide of Fascism.
The commandant at Albacete is André Marty. He is Spanish or French, I don't know which, and comes from the Pyrenees. He has a white moustache, is short but with a big stomach. I have never spoken to him. He is not a man you approach. He has a bad reputation. Discipline here is enforced with what I suppose would be called 'an iron fist'. Discipline is everything and is enforced with brutal beatings — some volunteers have died from their injuries. I have never before seen beatings of such ferocity, and they are done by men we call the 'commissars': they wear a uniform of black leather jackets and blue berets and have heavy pistols hanging from their polished leather belts. We avoid them.