The Queen v. Karl Mullen by Michael Gilbert Page A

impressed by Rosemary’s pursuit of learning and therefore missed no opportunity to make fun of it.
    At this point Mr. Silverborn came out of the inner office on the way back to his own room. He beamed vaguely at the three girls. Rosemary put down her pencil and shut her shorthand notebook. She said, “Yesterday evening we got to the point where the Pope decided that St. George couldn’t keep his sainthood, on the grounds that he never really existed.”
    “The Pope actually said that?” said Mavis.
    “About our St. George,” said Kathleen.
    “Apparently so.”
    Mavis said something very rude about the Pope.

 
5
    In the early evening of that Friday a cabinet meeting was being held at No. 11 Mornington Square. Captain Hartshorn was in the chair, with Andrew Mkeba beside him and the three departmental chiefs opposite.
    Hartshorn said, “You will all have seen copies of the cable which I sent to the press chief at the ANC. It went through the Eastern Tourist Agency and will, with luck, have reached Lusaka by now.”
    “I noticed,” said Govan Kabaka, “that you didn’t ask them to take any particular action.”
    “There was no necessity. They are not stupid. They will appreciate the possibilities of the situation as clearly as we do. The publishers managed to supply them with nearly a thousand copies of Katanga’s book. I am told that the open demand through Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana, coupled with an even larger underground demand in South Africa – particularly in the Transvaal – has already forced them to ask for a further two thousand copies. The book has, of course, been banned by Pretoria and possession of a copy is a criminal offence. That won’t stop people reading it.”
    “On the contrary. Splendid publicity,” said Govan.
    “I agree,” said Hartshorn, “and it puts us on our mettle. Our job is to see that this case gets as much publicity as the book.”
    “If Mullen is convicted,” said Kabaka, “the publicity will be self-generating.”
    “Maybe. But this is no time for relaxing. We may be winning, but we haven’t won yet.”
    “In a tug-of-war,” said Sesolo, in his deep voice, “if you stop pulling, you find yourself on your back.”
    “We’ve been presented,” said Hartshorn “with a wonderful chance of demonstrating, to the people of this country, just what sort of characters are running your country. And it’s a two-way chance. If Mullen is convicted, a senior police-officer will have been found guilty of a mean piece of petty thieving. If he wriggles out under diplomatic privilege, that’s not going to make him popular, either. Far from it.”
    “It would be better if he was convicted,” said Kabaka. “It’s just that I don’t quite see what we can do about it.”
    “I think we may be able to help the prosecution. I’ve had two reports from my daughter. You all know what she’s doing and are all, I hope, aware of the need for absolute discretion.”
    This was aimed primarily at Sesolo. Discretion was not his strongest point.
    “The first report is of a conversation on Wednesday afternoon. You must understand that when Yule is talking to Mullen, the conversation is in Afrikaans and my daughter can only pick up a general idea of what is said. There was something about an accident with a drink and treatment in hospital and she picked up the name Anna Masai. The second part of the conversation, which started with the arrival of their legal man, was all in English. My daughter took it down in shorthand and you have seen the transcription.”
    Four heads nodded.
    “I’d like to draw your attention to something which comes at the end of the morning’s transcript. It’s not long. Please read it, to see if you get the same impression that I did.”
    There were a few minutes of silence, broken only by the rustle of pages and the hard breathing of Boyo Sesolo, whose grasp of English was not on a par with that of his colleagues.
    Mkeba, who had finished a lap ahead