The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  A few mornings later I picked up the collection of demands, final demands and positively final demands which constitutes our post and among the hostile brown envelopes I found a gilded and embossed invitation card. I took the whole lot into the kitchen to file away in the tidy bin when She Who Must Be Obeyed entered and caught me at it.

  ‘Horace,’ She said severely. ‘Whatever are you doing with the post?’

  ‘Just throwing it away. Always throw bills away the first time they come in. Otherwise you only encourage them.’

  ‘If you had a few decent cases, Rumpole, if you weren’t always slumming round the Magistrates Courts, you might not be throwing away bills all the time.’ At which she pedalled open the tidy bin and spotted the fatal invitation.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I think it’s the gas.’ It was too late, She had picked the card out from among the potato peelings.

  ‘I never saw a gas bill with a gold embossed crest before. It’s an invitation! To the Savoy Hotel!’ She started to read the thing. ‘Horace Rumpole and Lady.’

  ‘You wouldn’t enjoy it,’ I hastened to assure her.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I enjoy it?’ She wiped the odd fragment of potato off the card, carried it into the living-room in state, and gave it pride of place on the mantelpiece. I followed her, protesting.

  ‘You know what it is. Boiled shirts. Prawn cocktail. Watching a lot of judges pushing their wives round the parquet to selections from Oklahoma.’

  ‘It’ll do you good Rumpole. That’s the sort of place you ought to be seen in: the Scales of Justice ball.’

  ‘It’s quite impossible.’ The situation was becoming desperate.

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  I had an inspiration, and assumed an expression of disgust. ‘We’re invited by Marigold Featherstone.’

  ‘The wife of your Head of Chambers?’

  ‘An old boot! A domestic tyrant. You know what the wretched Guthrie calls her? She Who Must Be Obeyed. No. The ball is out, Hilda. You and Marigold wouldn’t hit it off at all.’

  Well, I thought, She and sweet Marigold would never meet, so I was risking nothing. I seized the hat and prepared to retreat. ‘Got to leave you now. Murder calls.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me we were back to murder? This is good news.’ Hilda was remarkably cheerful that morning.

  ‘Murder,’ I told her, ‘is certainly better than dancing.’ And I was gone about my business. Little did I know that the moment my back was turned Hilda looked up the Featherstone’s number in the telephone book.

  ‘You can’t do it to Peter! I tell you, you can’t do it! Fight the case? How can he fight the case?’ Leslie Delgardo had quite lost the cool and knowing air of a successful East End businessman. His face was flushed and he thumped his fist on my table, jangling his identity bracelet and disturbing the notice of additional evidence I was reading, that of Bernard Whelpton, known as ‘Four Eyes’.

  ‘Whelpton’s evidence doesn’t help. I’m sure you’ll agree, Mr Rumpole,’ Nooks said gloomily.

  ‘You read that! You read what “Four Eyes” has to say.’ Leslie collapsed breathless into my client’s chair. I read the document which ran roughly as follows. ‘Tosher MacBride used to take the mick out of Peter on account he stammered and didn’t have no girl friends. One night I saw Peter try to speak to a girl in the Paradise Rooms. He was asking the girl to have a drink but his stutter was so terrible. Tosher said to her, “Come on, darling… It’ll be breakfast time before the silly git finishes asking for a light ale.” After I heard Peter Delgardo say as he’d get Tosher. He said he’d like to cut him one night.’

  ‘He’s not a well boy,’ Leslie was wiping his forehead with a mauve silk handkerchief.

  ‘When I came out of the Old Justice pub that night I see Tosher on the pavement and Petey Delgardo was kneeling beside him. There was blood all over.’ I looked up at Nooks. ‘You know it’s odd. No one actually saw the stabbing.’

  ‘But Petey was there wasn’t he?’ Leslie was returning the handkerchief to his breast pocket. ‘And what’s the answer about the knife?’

  ‘In my humble opinion,’ Nooks’s opinions were often humble, ‘the knife in the car is completely damning.’

  ‘Oh completely.’ I got up, lit a small cigar, and told Leslie my own far from humble opinion. ‘You know, I’d have had no doubts about this case if you hadn’t just proved your brother innocent.’

  ‘I did?’ The big man in the chair looked at me in a wild surmise.

  ‘When you sent Doctor Lewis Bleen, the world-famous trick cyclist, the head shrinker extraordinaire, down to see Petey in Brixton. If you’d done a stabbing, and you were offered a nice quiet trip to hospital, wouldn’t you take it? If the evidence was dead against you?’

  ‘You mean Peter turned it down?’ Leslie Delgardo clearly couldn’t believe his ears.

  ‘Of course he did!’ I told him cheerfully. ‘Petey may not be all that bright, poor old darling, but he knows he didn’t kill Tosher MacBride.’

  The committal was at Stepney Magistrates Court and Henry told me that there was a good deal of interest and that the vultures of the press might be there.

  ‘I thought I should warn you sir. Just in case you wanted to buy…’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I interrupted him. ‘Perhaps, Henry, there’s a certain amount of force in your argument. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” said the preacher.’ Here was I a barrister of a certain standing, doing a notable murder alone and without a leader, the type of person whose picture might appear in the Evening Standard, and I came to the reluctant conclusion that my present headgear was regrettably unphotogenic. I took a taxi to St James’ Street and invested in a bowler, which clamped itself to the head like a vice but which caused Henry, when he saw it, to give me a smile of genuine gratitude.

  That evening I had forgotten the whole subject of hats and was concerned with a matter that interests me far more deeply: blood. I had soaked the rubber sponge that helps with the washing up and, standing at the kitchen sink, stabbed violently down into it with a table knife. It produced, as I had suspected, a spray of water, leaving small spots all over my shirt and waistcoat.

  ‘Horace! Horace, you look quite different.’ Hilda was looking at the evening paper in which there was a picture of Pete Del-gardo’s heroic defender arriving at Court. ‘I know what it is, Horace! You went out. And bought a new hat. Without me.’

  I stabbed again, having re-soaked the sponge.

  ‘A bowler. Daddy used to wear a bowler. It’s an improvement.’ Hilda was positively purring at my dapper appearance in the paper.

  ‘Little splashes. All over the place,’ I observed, committing further mayhem on the sponge.

  ‘Horace. Whatever are you doing to the washing up?’

  ‘All over. In little drops. Not one great stain. Little drops. Like a fine rain. And plenty on the cuff.’

  ‘Your cuff’s soaking. Oh, why couldn’t you roll up your sleeve?’

  I felt the crook of my arm, and was delighted to discover that it was completely dry.

  ‘Now I know why you didn’t want to take me to the Scales of Justice annual ball.’ Hilda looked at the Evening Standard with less pleasure. ‘You’re too grand now, aren’t you Rumpole? New hat! Picture in the paper! Big case! “Horace Rumpole. Defender of the Stepney Road Stabber”. Big noise at the Bar. I suppose you didn’t think I’d do you credit.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Hilda.’ I mopped up some of the mess round the sink, and dried my hands.

  ‘Then why?’

  I went and sat beside her, and tried to comfort her with Keats. ‘Look. We’re in the Autumn of our years. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…’ ”

  ‘I really can’t understand why]’

  ‘ “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not on them, thou hast thy music too.” But not jigging about like a couple of Punk Rockers. At a dance!’

&nbs
p; ‘I very much doubt if they have Punk Rockers at the Savoy. Doesn’t it occur to you, Rumpole? We never go out!’

  ‘I’m perfectly happy. I’m not longing to go to the ball, like bloody Cinderella.’

  ‘Well, I am!’

  I thought Hilda was being most unreasonable, and I decided to point out the fatal flaw in the entire scheme concerning the Scales of Justice ball.

  ‘Hilda. I can’t dance.’

  ‘You can’t what?’

  ‘Dance. I can’t do it.’

  ‘You’re lying, Rumpole!’

  The accusation was so unexpected that I looked at her in a wild surmise. And then she said,

  ‘Would you mind casting your mind back to the 14th of August 1938?’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘You proposed to me, Rumpole. As a matter of fact, it was when you proposed. I shouldn’t expect you to remember.’

  ‘1938. Of course! The year I did the “Euston Bank Robbery”. Led by your father.’

  ‘Led by Daddy. You were young, Rumpole. Comparatively young. And where did you propose, exactly? Can’t you try and remember that?’

  As I have said, I have no actual memory of proposing to Hilda at all. It seemed to me that I slid into the lifetime contract unconsciously, as a weary man drifts off into sleep. Any words, I felt sure, were spoken by her. I also had temporarily forgotten where the incident took place and hazarded a guess.

  ‘At a bus stop?’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t at a bus stop.’

  ‘It’s just that your father always seemed to be detaining me at bus stops. I thought you might have been with him at the time.’

  ‘You proposed to me in a tent.’ Hilda came to my aid at last. ‘There was a band. And champagne. And some sort of cold collation. Daddy had taken me to the Inns of Court ball to meet some of the bright young men in Chambers. He told me then, you’d been very helpful to him on blood groups.’

  ‘It was the year before I did the “Penge Bungalow Murder”,’ I remembered vaguely. ‘Hopeless on blood, your father, he could never bring himself to look at the photographs.’

  ‘And we danced together. We actually waltzed together.’

  ‘That’s simple! That’s just a matter of circling round and round. None of your bloody jigging about concerned with it!’

  It was then that Hilda stood up and took my breath away. ‘Well, we can waltz again. Rumpole. You’d better get into training for it. I rang up Marigold Featherstone and I told her we’d be delighted to accept the invitation.’ She gave me a little smile of victory. ‘And I tell you what. She didn’t sound like an old boot at all.’

  I was speechless, filled with mute resentment. I’d been double-crossed.

  My toilette for the Delgardo murder case went no further than the acquisition of a new hat. As I sat in Court listening to the evidence for the prosecution of Bernard ‘Four Eyes’ Whelpton, I was vaguely conscious of the collapsed state of the wig (bought secondhand from an ex Chief Justice of Tonga in the early thirties), the traces of small cigar and breakfast egg on the waistcoat, and the fact that the bands had lost their pristine crispness and were forever sagging to reveal the glitter of the brass collar-stud.

  I looked up and saw the judge staring at me with bleak disapproval and felt desperately to ensure that the fly buttons were safely fastened. Fate span her bloody wheel, and I had drawn Mr Justice Prestcold; Frank Prestcold, who took such grave exception to my hat, and who now looked without any apparent enthusiasm at the rest of my appearance. Well, I couldn’t help him, I couldn’t even hold up the bowler to prove I’d tried. I did my best to ignore the judge and concentrate on the evidence. Mr Hilary Painswick, Q.c, the perfectly decent old darling who led for the prosecution, was just concreting in ‘Four Eyes’ story.

  ‘Mr Whelpton. I take it you haven’t given this evidence in any spirit of enmity against the man in the dock?’

  The man in the dock looked, as usual, as if he’d just been struck between the eyes with a heavy weight. Bernie Whelpton smiled charmingly, and said indiscreetly, ‘No. I’m Petey’s friend. We was at university together.’

  At which Rumpole rose up like thunder and, to Prestcold J.’s intense displeasure, asked for the jury to be removed so that he could lodge an objection. When the jury had gone out the judge forced himself to look at me.

  ‘What is the basis of your objection, Mr Rumpole? On the face of it the evidence that this gentleman was at university with your client seems fairly harmless.’

  ‘This may come as a surprise to your Lordship.’

  ‘May it, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘My client is not an old King’s man. He didn’t meet Mr “Four Eyes” Whelpton at a May Ball during Eights Week. The university referred to is, in fact, Parkhurst Prison.’

  The judge applied his razor-sharp mind and saw a way of over-ruling my objection.

  ‘Mr Rumpole! I very much doubt whether the average juryman has your intimate knowledge of the argot of the underworld.’

  ‘Your Lordship is too complimentary.’ I gave him a bow and a brassy flash of the collar-stud.

  ‘I think no harm has been done. I appreciate your anxiety to keep your client’s past record out of the case. Shall we have the jury back?’

  Before the jury came back I got a note from Leslie Delgardo telling me, as I knew very well, that Whelpton had a conviction for perjury. I ignored this information, and did my best to make a friend of the little Cockney who gazed at me through spectacles thick as ginger beer bottles.

  ‘Mr Whelpton, when you saw my client, Peter Delgardo, kneeling beside Tosher MacBride, did he have his arm round Mr MacBride’s neck?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Supporting his head from behind?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Rather in the attitude of a nurse or a doctor who was trying to bring help to the wounded man?’

  ‘I didn’t know your client had any medical qualifications!’ Mr Justice Prestcold was trying one of his glacial jokes. I pretended I hadn’t heard it, and concentrated on Bernie Whelpton.

  ‘Were you able to see Peter Delgardo’s hands when he was holding Tosher?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything in them, was there?’

  ‘Not as I saw.’

  ‘He wasn’t holding this knife, for instance?’ I had the murder weapon on the desk in front of me and held it up for the jury to see.

  ‘I tell you. I didn’t see no knife.’

  ‘I don’t know whether my learned friend remembers.’ Hilary Painswick uncoiled himself beside me. ‘The knife was found in the car.’

  ‘Exactly!’ I smiled gratefully at Painswick. ‘So my client stabbed Tosher. Ran to his car. Dropped the murder weapon in by the driver’s seat and then came back across the pavement to hold Tosher in his arms and comfort his dying moments.’ I turned back to the witness. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘He might have slipped the knife in his pocket.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’ Prestcold J. had something to communicate.

  ‘Yes, my Lord?’

  ‘This is not the time for arguing your case. This is the time for asking questions. If you think this point has any substance you will no doubt remind the jury of it when you come to make up your final address; at some time in the no doubt distant future.’

  ‘I’m grateful. And no doubt your Lordship will also remind the jury of it in your summing up, should it slip my memory. It really is such an unanswerable point for the defence.’

  I saw the Prestcold mouth open for another piece of snappy repartee, and forestalled him by rapidly re-starting the cross-examination.

  ‘Mr Whelpton. You didn’t see Tosher stabbed?’

  ‘I was in the Old Justice wasn’t I?’

  ‘You tell us. And when you came out, Tosher…’

  ‘Might it not be more respectful to call that good man, the deceased, “Mr MacBride”?’ the judge interrupted wearily.

  ‘If you like. “That good man Mr Mac
Bride” was bleeding in my client’s arms?’

  ‘That was the first I saw of him. Yes.’

  ‘And when he saw you Mr Delgardo let go of Tosher, of that good man Mr MacBride, ran to his car and got into it?’

  ‘And then he drove away.’

  ‘Exactly. You saw him get into his car. How did he do it?’

  ‘Just turned the handle and pulled the door open.’

  ‘So the car was unlocked?’

  ‘I suppose it was. I didn’t really think.’

  ‘You suppose the door was unlocked.’ I looked at the judge who appeared to have gone into some sort of a trance. ‘Don’t go too fast, Mr Whelpton. My Lord wants an opportunity to make a note.’ At which the judge returned to earth and was forced to take up his pencil. As he wrote, Leslie Delgardo leaned forward from the seat behind me and said,

  ‘Here, Mr Rumpole. What do you think you’re doing?’ ‘Having a bit of fun. You don’t grudge it to me, do you?’

  The next item on the agenda was the officer in charge of the case, a perfectly reasonable fellow with a grey suit, who looked like the better type of bank manager.

  ‘Detective Inspector. You photographed Mr Delgardo’s antique Daimler when you got it back to the station?’

  ‘Yes.’ The officer leafed through a bundle of photographs.

  ‘Was it then exactly as you found it outside the Old Justice?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Unlocked? With the driver’s window open?’

  ‘Yes. We found the car unlocked.’

  ‘Then it would have been easy for anyone to have thrown something in through the driver’s window, or even put something in through the door?’

  ‘I don’t follow you, sir. Something?’

  I found my prop and held it up. Exhibit i, a flick knife. ‘Something like this knife could have been dropped into Peter Delgardo’s car, in a matter of moments?’

  I saw the judge actually writing.