A Rumpole Christmas

by John Mortimer

  “He seems to have been quite open about it, yes.”

  “That’s hardly consistent with the behaviour of someone about to commit a brutal murder, is it?”

  “I suppose it was a little surprising, yes,” Jack Gregory was fair enough to admit.

  “Very surprising, isn’t it? And of course by the time this murder took place, everyone knew he had written the letter. He’d been sent down for doing so.”

  “That’s right.”

  The Gravestone intervened. “Did it not occur to you, Superintendent Gregory, that being sent down might have provided an additional motive for the murder?”

  The judge clearly thought he was on to something, and was deeply gratified when the superintendent answered, “That might have been so, My Lord.”

  “That might have been so,” Graves dictated to himself as he wrote the answer down. Then he thought of another point that might be of use to the hardly struggling prosecution. “Of course, if a man thinks he’s justified, for religious or moral reasons, in killing someone, he might have no inhibitions about boasting of the fact?”

  I knew it. Soapy Sam must have known it, and the jury had better be told it. The judge had gone too far. I rose to my feet, as quickly as my weight and the passage of the years would allow, and uttered a sharp protest.

  “My Lord, the prosecution is in the able hands of Samuel Ballard QC. I’m sure he can manage to present the case against my client without Your Lordship’s continued help and encouragement.”

  This was followed by a terrible silence, the sort of stillness that precedes a storm.

  “Mr Rumpole.” His Lordship’s words were as warm as hailstones. “That was a most outrageous remark.”

  “It was a point I felt I should make,” I told him, “in fairness to my client.”

  “As I have said, I realize you have an extremely difficult case to argue, Mr Rumpole.” Once more Graves was reminding the jury that I was on a certain loser. “But I cannot overlook your inappropriate and disrespectful attitude towards the court. I shall have to consider whether your conduct should be reported to the proper authority.”

  After these dire remarks and a few more unimportant questions to the superintendent, Graves turned to the jury and reminded them that this no doubt painful and shocking case would be resumed after the Christmas break. He said this in the solemn and sympathetic tones of someone announcing the death of a dear friend or relative, then he wished them a “Happy Christmas.”

  The Tube train for home was packed and I stood, swaying uneasily, sandwiched between an eighteen-stone man in a donkey jacket with a heavy cold and an elderly woman with a pair of the sharpest elbows I have ever encountered on the Circle Line.

  No doubt all of the other passengers had hard, perhaps unrewarding, lives but they didn’t have to spend their days acting as a sort of human buffer between a possibly fatal fanatic and a hostile judge who certainly wanted to end the career of the inconveniently argumentative Rumpole. The train, apparently as exhausted as I felt, ground to a halt between Embankment and Westminster, and as the lights went out I’d almost decided to give up the Bar. Then the lights glowed again faintly and the train jerked on. I supposed I would have to go on as well—wouldn’t I?—not being the sort of character who could retire to the country and plant strawberries.

  When I reached the so-called “Mansion Flat” in the Gloucester Road I was, I have to say, not a little surprised by the warmth of the welcome I received. My formidable wife Hilda, known to me only as “She Who Must Be Obeyed” said, “Sit down, Rumpole. You look tired out.” And she lit the gas fire. A few minutes later, she brought me a glass of my usual refreshment—the very ordinary claret available from Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street, a vintage known to me as “Château Thames Embankment.” I suspected that all this attention meant that she had some uncomfortable news to break and I was right.

  “This year,” she told me, with the firmness of The Old Gravestone pronouncing judgement, “I’m not going to do Christmas. It’s getting too much for me.”

  Christmas was not usually much of a “do” in the Rumpole household. There is the usual exchange of presents; I get a tie and Hilda receives the statutory bottle of lavender water, which seems to be for laying down rather than immediate use. She cooks the turkey and I open the Château Thames Embankment, and so our Saviour’s birth is celebrated.

  “I have booked us this year,” Hilda announced, “into Cherry Picker’s Hall. You look in need of a rest, Rumpole.”

  What was this place she spoke of? A retirement home? Sheltered accommodation? “I’m in the middle of an important murder. I can’t pack up and go into a home.”

  “It’s not a home, Rumpole. It’s a country house hotel. In the Cotswolds. They’re doing a special offer—four nights with full board. A children’s party. Christmas lunch with crackers and a dance on Christmas Eve. It’ll be something to look forward to.”

  “I don’t really think so. We haven’t got any children and I don’t want to dance at Christmas. So shall we say no to the Cherry Picker’s?”

  “Whether you dance or not is entirely up to you, Rumpole. But you can’t say no because I’ve already booked it and paid the deposit. And I’ve collected your old dinner jacket from the cleaners.”

  So I was unusually silent. Not for nothing is my wife entitled “She Who Must Be Obeyed.”

  I was unusually silent on the way to the Cotswolds too, but as we approached this country house hotel, I felt that perhaps, after all, She Who Must Be Obeyed had made a wise decision and that the considerable financial outlay on the “Budget Christmas Offer” might turn out, in spite of all my apprehensions, to be justified.

  We took a taxi from the station. As we made our way down deep into the countryside, the sun was shining and the trees were throwing a dark pattern against a clear sky. We passed green fields where cows were munching and a stream trickling over rocks. A stray deer crossed the road in front of us and a single kite (at least, Hilda said it was a kite) wheeled across the sky. We had, it seemed, entered a better, more peaceful world far from the problems of terrorists, the bloodstained letter containing a sentence of death, the impossible client and the no less difficult judge I struggled with down at the Old Bailey. In spite of all my troubles, I felt a kind of contentment stealing over me.

  Happily, the contentment only deepened as our taxi scrunched the gravel by the entrance to Cherry Picker’s Hall. The old grey stones of the one-time manor house were gilded by the last of the winter sun. We were greeted warmly by a friendly manageress and our things were taken up to a comfortable room overlooking a wintry garden. Then, in no time at all, I was sitting by a blazing log fire in the residents’ lounge, eating anchovy paste sandwiches with the prospect of a dark and alcoholic fruit cake to follow. Even my appalling client, Hussein Khan, might, I thought, if brought into such an environment, forget his calling as a messenger of terror and relax after dinner.

  “It’s wonderful to be away from the Old Bailey. I just had the most terrible quarrel with a particularly unlearned judge,” I told Hilda, who was reading a back number of Country Life.

  “You keep quarrelling with judges, don’t you? Why don’t you take up fishing, Rumpole? Lazy days by a trout stream might help you forget all those squalid cases you do.” She had clearly got to the country sports section of the magazine.

  “This quarrel went a bit further than usual. He threatened to report me for professional misconduct. I didn’t like the way he kept telling the jury my client was guilty.”

  “Well, isn’t he guilty, Rumpole?” In all innocence, Hilda had asked the awkward question.

  “Well. Quite possibly. But that’s for the jury of twelve honest citizens to decide, not Mr Justice Gravestone.”

  “Gravestone? Is that his name?”

  “No. His name’s Graves. I call him Gravestone.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you, Rumpole?”

  “He speaks like a voice from the tomb. It’s my personal belief th
at he urinates iced water!”

  “Really, Rumpole. Do try not to be vulgar. So what did you say to Mr Justice Graves? You might as well tell me the truth.”

  She was right, of course. The only way of appeasing She Who Must was to plead guilty and throw oneself on the mercy of the court. “I told him to come down off the bench and join Soapy Sam Ballard on the prosecution team.”

  “Rumpole, that was terribly rude of you!”

  “Yes,” I said, with considerable satisfaction. “It really was.”

  “So no wonder he’s cross with you.”

  “Very cross indeed.” Once again I couldn’t keep the note of triumph out of my voice.

  “I should think he probably hates you, Rumpole.”

  “I should think he probably does.”

  “Well, you’re safe here anyway. You can forget all about your precious Mr Justice Gravestone and just enjoy Christ mas.”

  She was, as usual, right. I stretched my legs towards the fire and took a gulp of Earl Grey and a large bite of rich, dark cake.

  And then I heard a voice call out, a voice from the tomb.

  “Rumpole!” it said. “What an extraordinary coincidence. Are you here for Christmas? You and your good lady?”

  I turned my head. I had not, alas, been mistaken. There he was, in person—Mr Justice Gravestone. He was wearing a tweed suit and some type of regimental or old school tie. His usually lugubrious features wore the sort of smile only previously stimulated by a long succession of guilty verdicts. And the next thing he said came as such a surprise that I almost choked on my slice of fruit cake.

  “I say,” he said, and I promise you these were Gravestone’s exact words, “this is fun, isn’t it?”

  II

  “I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be married to Rumpole.”

  It was a lie, of course. I dare swear that the Honourable Gravestone never spent one minute of his time wondering what it would be like to be Mrs Rumpole. But there he was, having pulled up a chair, tucking into our anchovy paste sandwiches and smiling at She Who Must Be Obeyed with as much joy as if she had just returned twenty guilty verdicts—one of them being in the case of the Judge versus Rumpole.

  “He can be a bit difficult at times, of course,” Hilda weighed in for the prosecution.

  “A little difficult! That’s putting it mildly, Mrs Rumpole. You can’t imagine the trouble we have with him in court.”

  To my considerable irritation, my wife and the judge were smiling together as though they were discussing, with tolerant amusement, the irrational behaviour of a difficult child.

  “Of course we mustn’t discuss the case before me at the moment,” Graves said.

  “That ghastly terrorist.” Hilda had already reached a verdict.

  “Exactly! We won’t say a word about him.”

  “Just as well,” Hilda agreed. “We get far too much discussion of Rumpole’s cases.”

  “Really? Poor Mrs Rumpole.” The judge gave her a look of what I found to be quite sickening sympathy. “Brings his work home with him, does he?”

  “Oh, absolutely! He’ll do anything in the world for some ghastly murderer or other, but can I get him to help me redecorate the bathroom?”

  “You redecorate bathrooms?” The judge looked at Hilda with admiration as though she had just admitted to sailing round the world in a hot air balloon. Then he turned to me. “You’re a lucky man, Rumpole!”

  “He won’t tell you that.” Hilda was clearly enjoying our Christmas break even more than she had expected. “By the way, I hope he wasn’t too rude to you in court.”

  “I thought we weren’t meant to discuss the case,” I tried to make an objection, which was entirely disregarded by my wife and the unlearned judge.

  “Oh, that wasn’t Rumpole being merely rude. It was Rumpole trying to impress his client by showing him how fearlessly he can stand up to judges. We’re quite used to that.”

  “He says,” Hilda still seemed to find the situation amusing, “that you threatened to report him for professional misconduct. You really ought to be more careful, shouldn’t you, Rumpole?”

  “Oh, I said that,” Graves had the audacity to admit, “just to give your husband a bit of a shock. He did go a little green, I thought, when I made the suggestion.”

  “I did not go green!” By now I was losing patience with the judge Hilda was treating like a long-lost friend. “I made a perfectly reasonable protest against a flagrant act of premature adjudication! You had obviously decided that my client is guilty and you were going to let the jury know it.”

  “But isn’t he guilty, Rumpole? Isn’t that obvious?”

  “Of course he’s not guilty. He’s completely innocent. And will remain so until the jury come back into court and convict him. And that is to be their decision. And what the judge wants will have absolutely nothing to do with it!”

  I may have gone too far, but I felt strongly on the subject. Judge Graves, however, seemed completely impervious to my attack. He stood, still smiling, warming his tweed-covered backside at the fire and repeated, “We really mustn’t discuss the case we’re involved in at the moment. Let’s remember, it is Christmas.”

  “Yes, Rumpole. It is Christmas.” Hilda had cast herself, it seemed, as Little Lady Echo to His Lordship.

  “That’s settled, then. Look, why don’t I book a table for three at dinner?” The judge was still smiling. “Wouldn’t that be tremendous fun?”

  “What a perfectly charming man Judge Graves is.”

  These were words I never expected to hear spoken, but they contained the considered verdict of She Who Must Be Obeyed before we settled down for the first night of our Christmas holiday. The food at dinner had been simple but good. (The entrecôte steak had not been arranged in a little tower swamped by tomato coulis and there had been a complete absence of rocket and all the idiocy of smart restaurants.) The Gravestone was clearly on the most friendly of terms with “Lorraine,” the manageress, and he and Hilda enjoyed a lengthy conversation on the subject of fishing, which sport Graves practised and on which Hilda was expert after her study of the back number of Country Life in the residents’ lounge.

  Now and again I was asked why I didn’t go out on a day’s fishing with Hilda’s newfound friend the judge, a question I found as easy to answer as “Why don’t you take part in the London Marathon wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and a wig?” For a greater part of the dinner I had sat, unusually silent, listening to the ceaseless chatter of the newfound friends, feeling as superfluous as a maiden aunt at a lovers’ meeting.

  Soon after telling me how charming she had found The Gravestone, Hilda sank into a deep and contented sleep. As the moonlight streamed in at the window and I heard the faraway hooting of an owl, I began to worry about the case we hadn’t discussed at dinner.

  I couldn’t forget my first meeting in Brixton Prison with my client, Hussein Khan. Although undoubtedly the author of the fatal letter, he didn’t seem, when I met him in the company of my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard, to be the sort who would strike terror into the heart of anyone. He was short and unsmiling with soft brown eyes, a quiet monotonous voice and unusually small hands. He wasn’t only uncomplaining, he seemed to find it the most natural thing in the world that he should find himself locked up and facing the most serious of all charges. It was, he told us early in the interview, the will of Allah, and if Allah willed, who was he, a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate in computer studies, to ask questions? I was, throughout the case, amazed at the combination, in my inexplicable client, of the most complicated knowledge of modern technology and the most primitive and merciless religious beliefs.

  “I wrote the letter. Of course I did. It was not my decision that she should die. It was the will of God.”

  “The will of God that a harmless woman should be shot for writing something critical in a book?”

  “Die for blasphemy, yes.”

  “And they say you were her executioner, that you carri
ed out the sentence.”

  “I didn’t do that.” He was looking at me patiently, as though I still had much to learn about the faith of Hussein Khan. “I knew that death would come to her in time. It came sooner than I had expected.”

  So, was I defending a man who had issued a death threat which had then been obediently carried out by some person or persons unknown in the peaceful precincts of an East London university? It seemed an unlikely story, and I had not been looking forward to the murder trial which started at the Old Bailey during the run-up to Christmas.

  At the heart of the case there was, I thought, a mystery. The letter, I knew, was clear evidence of Hussein’s guilt, and yet there was no forensic evidence—no bloodstains on his clothing, no traces of his having fired a pistol with a silencer (there must have been a silencer, because no one in the building had heard a shot). This was evidence in Hussein’s favour, but I had to remember that he had been in the university building when the murder had taken place, although he’d already been sent down for writing the letter.

  As the owl hooted, Hilda breathed deeply. Sleep eluded me. I went through Hussein Khan’s story again. He had received a phone call, he said, when he was at his parents’ restaurant. (He had answered the phone himself, so there was no one to confirm the call.) It had been, it seemed, from a girl who said she was the senior tutor’s secretary and that the tutor wanted to meet him in the university library at ten o’clock that evening to discuss his future.

  He had arrived at the William Morris building at nine thirty and had told Mr Luttrell, the man at the main reception area, that he was there to meet the senior tutor at the library. He said that when he had arrived at the library, the tutor wasn’t there and that he had waited for over an hour and then gone home, having never been near Honoria Glossop’s office.

  Of course the senior tutor and his secretary denied that either had made such a telephone call. The implication was that Hussein was lying through his teeth and that he had gone to the university because he had known that Professor Glossop worked in her office until late at night and he had intended to kill her.