The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘1967. Pichon-Longueville? Celebrating, George?’

  ‘In a way. We have a glass or two in the room now. Can’t get anything decent in the restaurant.’ George was storing the nectar away in his brief-case with the air of a practised boulevardier.

  ‘George. Look. My dear fellow. Look… will you have a drink?’

  ‘It’s really much more comfortable, up in the room,’ George babbled on regardless. ‘And we listen to the BBC Overseas Service, old Victor Sylvester records requested from Nigeria. They only seem to care for ballroom dancing in the Third World nowadays.’ My old friend was moving away from me, although I did all I could to stop him.

  ‘Please, George. It’ll only take a minute. Something… you really ought to know.’

  ‘Sorry to desert you, Rumpole. It would never do to keep Ida waiting.’

  He was gone, as Jack Pommeroy with his purple face and the rose-bud in his buttonhole asked what was my pleasure.

  ‘Red plonk,’ I told him. ‘Chateau Fleet Street. A large glass. I’ve got nothing to celebrate.’

  After that I found it increasingly difficult to break the news to George, although I knew I had to do so.

  The Reverend Mordred Skinner was duly sent for trial at the Inner London Sessions, Newington Causeway in the South East corner of London. Wherever civilization ends it is, I have always felt, somewhere just north of the Inner London Sessions. It is a strange thing but I always look forward with a certain eagerness to an appearance at the Old Bailey. I walk down Newgate Street, as often as not, with a spring in my stride and there it is, in all its glory, a stately law court, decreed by the City Fathers, an Edwardian palace with a modern extension to deal with the increase in human fallibility. Terrible things go on down the Bailey, horrifying things. Why is it I never go through its revolving door without a thrill of pleasure, a slight tremble of excitement? Why does it seem a much jollier place than my flat in Gloucester Road under the strict rule of She Who Must Be Obeyed?

  Such pleasurable sensations, I must confess, are never connec- ted with my visits to the Inner London Sessions. While a hint of spring sunshine often touches the figure of Justice on the dome of the Bailey it always seems to be a wet Monday in November at Inner London. The Sessions House is stuck in a sort of urban desert down the Old Kent Road, with nowhere to go for a decent bit of steak-and-kidney pud during the lunch hour. It is a sad sort of Court, with all the cheeky Cockney sparrows turned into silent figures waiting for the burglary to come on in Court 2, and the juries there look as if they relied on the work to eke out their social security.

  I met the Reverend gentleman after I had donned the formal dress (yellowing wig bought second-hand from an ex-Attorney General of Tonga in 1932, somewhat frayed gown, collar like a blunt extension). He seemed unconcerned and was even smiling a little, although his sister Evelyn looked like one about to attend a burning at the stake; Mr Morse looked thoroughly uncomfortable and as if he’d like to get back to a nice discussion of the Almshouse charity in Chipping Sodbury.

  I tried to instil a suitable sense of the solemnity of the occasion in my clerical customer by telling him that God, with that won- derful talent for practical joking which has shown itself throughout recorded history, had dealt us His Honour Judge Bullingham.

  ‘Is he very dreadful?’ Mr Skinner asked almost hopefully.

  ‘Why he was ever made a judge is one of the unsolved mys- teries of the universe.’ I was determined not to sound reassuring. ‘I can only suppose that his unreasoning prejudice against all black persons, defence lawyers and probation officers, comes from some deep psychological cause. Perhaps his mother, if such a person can be imagined, was once assaulted by a black probation officer who was on his way to give evidence for the defence.’

  ‘I wonder how he feels about parsons.’ My client seemed not at all put out.

  ‘God knows. I rather doubt if he’s ever met one. The Bull’s leisure taste runs to strong drink and all-in wrestling. Come along, we might as well enter the corrida.’

  A couple of hours later, His Honour Judge Bullingham, with his thick neck and complexion of a beetroot past its first youth, was calmly exploring his inner ear with his little finger and tolerantly allowing me to cross-examine a large gentleman named Pratt, resident flatfoot at the Oxford Street Bazaar.

  ‘Mr Pratt? How long have you been a detective in this particular store?’

  ‘Ten years, sir.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘I was with the Metropolitan Police.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  ‘Pay and conditions, sir, were hardly satisfactory.’

  ‘Oh, really? You found it more profitable to keep your beady eye on the ladies’ lingerie counter than do battle in the streets with serious crime?’

  ‘Are you suggesting that this isn’t a serious crime, Mr Rum-pole?’ The learned judge, who pots villains with all the subtlety of his namesake animal charging a gate, growled this question at me with his face going a darker purple than ever, and his jowls trembling.

  ‘For many people, my Lord,’ I turned to the jury and gave them the message, ‘six shirts might be a mere triviality. For the Reverend Mordred Skinner, they represent the possibility of total ruin, disgrace and disaster. In this case my client’s whole life hangs in the balance.’ I turned a flattering gaze on the twelve honest citizens who had been chosen to pronounce on the sanctity or otherwise of the Reverend Mordred. ‘That is why we must cling to our most cherished institution, trial by jury. It is not the value of the property stolen, it is the priceless matter of a man’s good reputation.’

  ‘Mister Rumpole,’ the Bull lifted his head as if for the charge. ‘You should know your business by now. This is not the time for making speeches, you will have an opportunity at the end of the case.’

  ‘And as your Honour will have an opportunity after me to make a speech, I thought it as well to make clear who the judges of fact in this matter are.’ I continued to look at the jury with an expression of flattering devotion.

  ‘Yes. Very well. Let’s get on with it.’ The Bull retreated momentarily. I rubbed in the victory.

  ‘Certainly. That is what I was attempting to do.’ I turned to the witness. ‘Mr Pratt. When you were in the gents’ haberdashery…’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You didn’t see my client remove the shirts from the counter and make off with them?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘If he had, no doubt he would have told us about it,’ Bull-ingham could not resist growling. I gave him a little bow.

  ‘Your Honour is always so quick to notice points in favour of the defence.’ I went back to work on the store detective. ‘So why did you follow my client?’

  ‘The Supervisor noticed a pile of shirts missing. She said there was a Reverend been turning them over, your Honour.’

  This tit-bit delighted the Bull, he snatched at it greedily. ‘He might not have told us that, if you hadn’t asked the wrong question, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘No question is wrong, if it -reveals the truth,’ I informed the jury, and then turned to Pratt. I had an idea, an uncomfortable feeling that I might just have guessed the truth of this peculiar case. ‘So you don’t know if he was carrying the basket when he left the shirt department?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was he carrying it when you first spotted him, on the moving staircase?’

  ‘I only saw his head and shoulders…’

  The pieces were fitting together. I would have to face my client with my growing notion of a defence as soon as possible. ‘So you first saw him with the basket in the Hall of Food?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  At which point Bullingham stirred dangerously and raised the curtain of his top lip on some large yellowing teeth. He was about to make a joke. ‘Are you suggesting, Mr Rumpole, that a basket full of shirts mysteriously materialized in your client’s hand in the Tinned Meat Department?’

  At which the jury laughed obsequiou
sly. Rumpole silenced them in a voice of enormous gravity.

  ‘Might I remind your Honour of what he said. This is a serious case.’

  ‘As you cross-examined, Mr Rumpole, I was beginning to wonder.’ Bullingham was still grinning.

  ‘The art of cross-examination, your Honour, is a little like walking a tight-rope.’

  ‘Oh is it?’

  ‘One gets on so much better if one isn’t continually interrupted.’

  At which Bullingham relapsed into a sullen silence and I got on with the work in hand.

  ‘It would have been quite impossible for Mr Skinner to have paid at the shirt counter, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘No, sir. There were two assistants behind the counter.’

  ‘Young ladies?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘When you saw them, what were they doing?’

  ‘I… I can’t exactly recall.’

  ‘Well then, let me jog your memory.’ Here I made an informed guess at what any two young lady assistants would be doing at the height of business during the summer sales. ‘Were they not huddled together in an act of total recall of last night in the disco or Palais de Hop? Were they not blind and deaf to the cries of shirt-buying clerics? Were they not utterly oblivious to the life around them?’

  The jury was looking at me and smiling, and some of the ladies nodded understandingly. I could feel that the old darlings knew all about young lady non-assistants in Oxford Street.

  ‘Well, Mr Pratt. Isn’t that exactly what they were doing?’

  ‘It may have been, your Honour.’

  ‘So is it surprising that my client took his purchase and went off in search of some more attentive assistance?’

  ‘But I followed him downstairs, to the Hall of Food.’

  ‘Have you any reason to suppose he wouldn’t have paid for his shirts there, given the slightest opportunity?’

  ‘I saw no sign of his attempting to do so.’

  ‘Just as you saw no sign of the sales-ladies attempting to take his money?’

  ‘No but…’

  ‘It’s a risky business entering your store, isn’t it, Pratt?’ I put it to him. ‘You can’t get served and no one speaks to you except to tell you that you’re under arrest.’

  I sat down to some smiles from the jury and a glance from the Bull. An eager young man named Ken Rydal was prosecuting. I had run up against this Rydal, a ginger-haired, spectacled wonder who might once have been a senior scout, and won the Duke of Edinburgh award for being left out on the mountainside for a week. ‘Ken’ felt a strong sense of team spirit and loyalty to the Metropolitan Police, and he was keen as mustard to add the Reverend Mordred Skinner to the notches on his woggle.

  ‘Did you see Mr Skinner make any attempt to pay for his shirts in the Hall of Food?’ Ken asked Pratt.

  I read a note from my client that had finally arrived by way of the usher.

  ‘No. No, I didn’t,’ said Pratt.

  Ken was smiling, about to make a little scout-like funny. ‘He didn’t ask for them to be wrapped up with a pound of ham, for instance?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Pratt laughed and looked round the Court, to see that no one was laughing. And the Bull was glaring at Ken.

  ‘This is not a music hall, Mr Rydal. As Mr Rumpole has reminded us, this is an extremely serious case. The whole of the Reverend gentleman’s future is at stake.’ The judge glanced at the clock, as if daring it not to be time for lunch. The clock cooperated, and the Bull rose, muttering ‘Ten past two, members of the jury.’

  I crumpled my client’s note with some disgust and threw it on the floor as I stood to bow to the Bull. The Reverend Mordred had just told me he wasn’t prepared to give evidence in his own defence. I would have to get him on his own and twist his arm a little.

  ‘I simply couldn’t take the oath.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Have you no religion?’

  The cleric smiled politely and said, less as a question than a statement of fact, ‘You don’t like me very much, do you?’

  We were sitting in one of the brighter hostelries in Newington Causeway. The bleak and sour-smelling saloon bar was sparsely populated by two ailing cleaning-ladies drinking stout, another senior citizen who was smoking the dog ends he kept in an old Oxo tin and exercising his talents as a Cougher for England, and a large drunk in a woolly bobble-hat who kept banging in and out the Gents with an expression of increasing euphoria. I had entrusted to Mr Morse the solicitor the tricky task of taking Miss Evelyn Skinner to lunch in the public canteen at the Sessions House. I imagined he’d get the full blast of her anxiety over the grey, unidentifiable meat and two veg. Meanwhile I had whisked the Reverend out to the pub where he sat with the intolerably matey expression vicars always assume in licensed premises.

  ‘I felt you might tell me the truth. You of all people. Having your collar on back to front must mean something.’

  ‘Truth is often dangerous. It must be approached cautiously, don’t you think?’ My client bit nervously into a singularly unattractive sausage. I tried to approach the matter cautiously.

  ‘I’ve noticed with women,’ I told him, ‘with my wife, for instance, when we go out on our dreaded Saturday morning shopping expeditions, that She Who Must Be Obeyed is in charge of the shopping-basket. She makes the big decisions. How much Vim goes in it and so forth. When the shopping’s bought, I get the job of carrying the damn thing home.’

  ‘Simple faith is far more important than the constant scramble after unimportant facts.’ Mordred was back on the old theology. ‘I believe that’s what the lives of the Saints tell us.’

  Enough of this Cathedral gossip. We were due back in Court in half an hour and I let him have it between the eyes. ‘Well, my simple faith tells me that your sister had the basket in the shirt department.’

  ‘Does it?’ He blinked most of the time, but not then.

  ‘When Pratt saw you in the Hall of Food you were carrying the shopping-basket, which she’d handed you on the escalator.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Because she’d taken the shirts and put them in the bag when you were too busy composing your sermon on the Problem of Evil to notice.’ I lit a small cigar at that point, and Mordred took a sip of sour bitter. He was still smiling as he started to talk, almost shyly at first, then with increasing confidence.

  ‘She was a pretty child. It’s difficult to believe it now. She was attracted to bright things, boiled sweets, red apples, jewellery in Woolworth’s. As she grew older it became worse. She would take things she couldn’t possibly need… Spectacles, bead handbags, cigarette cases although she never smoked. She was like a magpie. I thought she’d improved. I try to watch her as much as I can, although you’re right, on that day I was involved with my sermon. As a matter of fact, I had no need of such shirts. I may be old-fashioned but I always wear a dog collar. Always.’

  ‘Even on rambles with the Lads’ Brigade?’

  ‘All the same,’ my client said firmly, ‘I believe she did it out of love.’

  Well, now we had a defence: althought he didn’t seem to be totally aware of it.

  ‘Those are the facts?’

  ‘They seem to be of no interest to anyone - except my immediate family. But that’s what I’m bound to say, if I take my oath on the Bible.’

  ‘But you were prepared to lie to me,’ I reminded him. He smiled again, that small, maddening smile.

  ‘Mr Rumpole. I have the greatest respect for your skill as an advocate, but I have never been in danger of mistaking you for Almighty God.’

  ‘Tell the truth now. She’ll only get a fine. Nothing!’

  He seemed to consider the possibility, then he shook his head.

  ‘To her it would be everything. She couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘What about you? You’d give up your whole life?’

  ‘It seems the least I can do for her.’ He was smiling again, hanging that patient little grin out like an advertisement for his humility and his d
eep sense of spiritual superiority to a worldly Old Bailey Hack.

  I ground out my small cigar in the overflowing ashtray and almost shouted. ‘Good God! I don’t know how I keep my temper.’

  ‘I do sympathize. He found His ideas irritated people dreadfully. Particularly lawyers.’ He was almost laughing now. ‘But you do understand? I am quite unable to give evidence on oath to the jury.’

  As every criminal lawyer knows it’s very difficult to get a client off unless he’s prepared to take the trouble of going into the witness-box, to face up to the prosecution, and to demonstrate his innocence or at least his credentials as a fairly likeable character who might buy you a pint after work and whom you would not really want to see festering in the nick. After all fair’s fair, the jury have just seen the prosecution witnesses put through it, so why should the prisoner at the Bar sit in solemn silence in the dock? I knew that if the Reverend told his story, with suitable modesty and regret, I could get him off and Evelyn would merely get a well-earned talking to. When he refused to give evidence I could almost hear the rustle of unfrocking in the distance.

  Short of having my client dragged to the Bible by a sturdy usher, when he would no doubt stand mute of malice, there was nothing I could do other than address the jury in the unlikely hope of persuading them that there was no reliable evidence on which they could possibly convict the silent vicar. I was warming to my work as Bullingham sat inert, breathing hoarsely, apparently about to erupt.

  ‘Members of the jury,’ I told them. ‘There is a Golden Thread that runs throughout British justice. The prosecution must prove its case. The defence has to prove nothing.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole…’ A sound came from the judge like the first rumble they once heard from Mount Vesuvius.