From what I gathered, he shared his son’s view that he himself was at least a part of the reason why the Messenger had wanted to run the original excerpt from Julia’s memoir. Years earlier they’d published an article attacking him after his defense maneuvers in a terrorist case at the Old Bailey almost caused a mistrial. Later, when his clients were exonerated and freed from jail, the editors were forced to run a groveling retraction, prompting (so he believed) their everlasting enmity. I still had my doubts about this supposed vendetta; the scenario smacked of grandiosity to me, but in any case Sir Alec apparently took a particular pleasure in his son’s victory over Mel Sauer.

“That’ll teach them to go after a Rosedale!” he’d chortled, delighted at Marco’s account of that incident. He seemed to regard Renata Shenker, however, as a more dangerous adversary. “She’s a tough bird,” he’d told Marco. He’d known her former business partner, who’d parted from her acrimoniously, and he used to run into Renata herself occasionally at social events in London.

“I doubt she’ll back down as easily as the Messenger,” he’d warned his son. “She’ll know, or her counsel will, that a jury’s going to look sympathetically on a spirited senior citizen running a high-minded little independent publishing company. It’ll be expensive to go to trial of course, and I don’t imagine her pockets are deep, but they’ll award her costs if she wins, and she’ll probably have a best seller on her hands, too, what with the publicity these things generate, so she might decide it’s worth the gamble. I don’t mean to alarm you; I’m just thinking aloud, but we’re going to have a battle on our hands.”

The battle was swift and, it appears, hard-fought on both sides. Sir Alec, acting with a former junior from his days as a busy QC, as well as a team of solicitors and a private detective, had cease and desist letters sent to Whitethorne Press and their printers, and an application for a preliminary injunction against publication delivered to the High Court. Marco’s correspondence with Mel Sauer, along with a copy of Gerald Woolley’s letter about Julia, were offered as a basis for the injunction, on the grounds that whatever compelling legal reasons had caused the Messenger not to publish, could be presumed to apply equally in the case of Whitethorne Press.