The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘What?’

  ‘You never did charge her, did you?’

  ‘Well, there was no need to after…’

  ‘No need to after Percy had signed his statement. Is that what you mean?’

  I saw the jury look at Broome as if some of them were beginning to doubt the doctrine of the infallibility of the Police.

  ‘No need to after that. No.’ Broome admitted.

  ‘After he’d fallen into your trap, the bait could be thrown away. You’d got what you wanted, hadn’t you?’

  ‘What had I wanted?’ The defensive position didn’t suit D.I. Broome.

  ‘An untrue confession. Signed in the hope of saving his wife from the unwelcoming gates of Holloway Prison.’

  It was clearly the moment for his Lordship to come to the prosecution’s rescue, and he did with some skill.

  ‘Mr Rumpole?’ The politeness from the Bench was icy.

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something? This admirable example of Italian Renaissance art was actually found in your client’s garage! Isn’t that the point?’ At which he gave the jury a meaningful look. ‘Yes, members of the jury. Shall we say five past two?’

  ‘Isn’t that the point, Dad?’ Nick and I were enjoying a sustaining steak pie with boiled cabbage, washed down with a pint of draught Guinness in the pub opposite the Bailey. On a corner table the Timson men were consuming brown ales and buying snowballs for their ladies, and in the middle distance the officers in charge of the case were scoffing Harp Lagers and cold sausage.

  ‘But I mean if he’s guilty anyway…’ Nick continued to cross-examine his father.

  ‘If he’s guilty anyway, why bother to squeeze a confession out of him?’ I looked across at the Timson table. ‘You see, Nick, I know the Timson family. Their activities paid your school fees for years. They never sign confessions.’

  ‘You’ll be able to lecture on that,’ Nick was laughing.

  ‘Lecture?’ I didn’t follow his drift.

  ‘You met Julius Kramer?’

  ‘Was that your doing, Nick?’ For the first time I got a sniff of some kind of plot.

  ‘You must come to Baltimore. Really, there’s a lot of room in the new house. Erica’d be thrilled to have you.’

  ‘Well, if I can get away…’ I was doubtful.

  ‘Of course you can get away. You’ve really got to get away.’

  ‘Got to?’

  ‘Ma says, you’ve been so tired lately.’ Nick was looking at me, concerned. At which moment D.I. Broome was passing us on his way back to Court, and he stopped for an unfriendly chat.

  ‘Enjoying the pantomime, Mr Rumpole?’ he asked.

  ‘Is that what you call it?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No. I call it a trial. Based on the quaint, old-fashioned notion that a man’s innocent until you prove him guilty. This is my son…’

  ‘Oh, really? Following in father’s footsteps?’ It was clear that the D.I. didn’t consider that such a course would provide Nick with a satisfactory or even an honourable career.

  ‘No… actually, I’m not.’

  The Inspector turned to me, satisfied of Nick’s innocence. ‘Come on, sir. You know Percy Timson’s been a fence for years…’ D.I. Broome was trying the realistic approach. The Timson family fell silent at their table.

  ‘So what should we do?’ I asked politely. ‘Convict him on a certificate signed by the Chief Constable?’

  ‘Of course it all makes money for you gentlemen. I suppose you’ll still be going through the motions again. This afternoon.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll be going through the motions.’

  ‘Man of his age.’ The D.I. looked at Nick. ‘I really don’t know why he bothers.’ On which parting shot he left. I finished my Guinness and lit a small cigar.

  ‘Detective Inspector Broome! The new Broome. Trials are just an unnecessary interruption, in his fearless battle against crime.’

  ‘All the same…’ Nick sounded doubtful.

  ‘AH the same what, Nick?’

  ‘Well, it’s not as if it was one of the murders you used to take me to. I mean. They were serious cases.’

  ‘Yes. You enjoyed those murders, didn’t you, Nick?’

  ‘I mean, if Percy Timson really is a professional fence…’

  ‘Oh, he is. Quite professional.’

  Nick looked at me, he was smiling gently. ‘Well then, why bother really?’ he said.

  The Timson case proceeded slowly, we kept having days off due to the fact that Mr Justice Vosper was dividing his time between us and a Government Committee on ‘The Treatment of the Young Offender’ (they were discussing the possibility of building a number of detention centres where the less friendly features of H.M.S. Bounty, Devil’s Island and nineteenth-century Eton would be combined for the purpose of delivering ‘a short salutary shock’ to Jamaican teenagers).

  Meanwhile a deep-laid plot was going on involving my wife, Nick, and the mysterious Professor Kramer of which I had no more than an inkling. It’s true that, when I was alone in my flat, an unknown woman rang the bell, came in and nosed about, asked impertinent questions about the built-in cupboards and the central heating, and then drifted away. I took her for some busybody from a government department; but I suppose I should have realized then that her visit had one clear meaning. ‘This flat has been put up for sale.’ I only learned months later that Mrs Erskine-Brown (Miss Phillida Trant in real life) had been invited for tea in Gloucester Road, had gone there, received the matinee jacket on behalf of the baby, and been involved in the following conversation concerning the future of Rumpole.

  ‘I really wonder you had time to come over to tea,’ Hilda began obliquely, ‘what with the baby.’

  ‘They had a day off Court. So Claude’s holding the fort. Actually he enjoys it.’

  ‘Rumpole’s not having a day off. He’s gone for a conference in Wandsworth. Well, he’s doing far too much, for a man of his age.’

  ‘He looks tired,’ Nick told Phillida. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘I think he looks… well, just as usual.’

  ‘He is desperately tired! We just can’t wait to get him away!’

  ‘Get Rumpole away? Where to exactly?’

  ‘America.’

  ‘I want them both to come and live with us. In Baltimore,’ Nick said.

  ‘You want Rumpole to give up the Bar?’ Mrs Erskine-Brown was astonished.

  ‘Well, to retire. Everyone retires, don’t they?’

  ‘Everyone possibly. But Rumpole?’ Clearly Chambers had never considered the possibility.

  ‘He’s not immortal, you know! Rumpole’s hardly immortal. Anyway, not a word to him at the moment. We’re luring him across the “Herring Pond” by an offer of lectures in Nick’s University,’ Hilda told her.

  ‘I’ve got him an offer from one of our professors. He’s going to lecture on law.’ Nick revealed the full details of the plot.

  ‘Rumpole? On law?’ Apparently my learned friend Miss Trant sounded incredulous.

  ‘Well really, Miss Trant! Surely he knows about the law.’ She bridled a little.

  The way Mrs Erskine-Brown answered her wasn’t entirely flattering, but no doubt it contained a certain amount of truth.

  ‘Hardly anything. Oh, he could lecture on how to tear up paper in the prosecution speech, or how to trick his opponent into boring the Court with a lot of unnecessary cases. That’s the one he played on me, when I first started. He knows all about how to cross-examine and which members of the jury to get on his side, but if you ask my honest opinion, Rumpole doesn’t know anything about the law.’

  ‘But it’s only the bait, for getting him over. And I’ve put this flat on the market. So we’ll have a little money, and living with Nick…’ Hilda seemed to see no problems.

  ‘I’m sure once he sees the house he’ll stay,’ Nick said.

  ‘Nick has a swimming-pool, he was telling me. And a sort of camp fire.’


  ‘Barbecue, mother.’

  ‘Is Rumpole tremendously keen on swimming?’ Their visitor was doubtful.

  ‘If you ask me, he’s bored to tears with the sort of cases he’s doing nowadays.’ Nick seemed to have no doubt about the matter. ‘An obvious receiver! And the defence is, he didn’t do it because he’s finished the last job and was preparing for the next. Now how could that interest anybody?’

  ‘I’m not sure…’ Miss Trant as-was knew me, I’m sad to say, perhaps better than my son.

  ‘Dad’s in a hopeless position, with the judge and the police dead against him.’

  ‘Are they? Oh well then. I know exactly how he’s feeling…’

  ‘Pretty depressed, I imagine.’ Nick supplied his answer, but the lady lawyer had hers.

  ‘I should think, by now, he’s just starting to have fun.’

  The conversation at that tea-time was, as I say, unknown to me for many months. And unconscious of my consignment, by my nearest and dearest, to the scrapheap of rusty and worn-out barristers I was, in fact, having a certain amount of quiet pleasure in pursuing a line of inquiry with that well-known expert on stolen art-treasures Mr Melvin Glassworth, whom I had gone to visit in Wandsworth, ostensibly to discuss the matter of his appeal.

  ‘Screws treating you all right, are they?’ I asked him as we met among the pot plants of the prison interview-room, and offered him a small cigar.

  ‘Some of them are rather sweet. But you’ve got to get me out of here, Mr Rumpole. Sorry I was a bit irritable last time.’

  ‘I’d be a bit irritable, if I’d just got three years,’ I assured him.

  ‘You can get me out, Mr Rumpole. I know you can.’

  ‘I have been considering your appeal…’ I started judicially.

  ‘I hope to God you’ve come up with a few bright ideas.’

  ‘I have found at least ten places in which the judge misdirected the jury as to our defence.’

  ‘Then you’ll tell the Court of Appeal for me. You will, won’t you, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘I may not be able to take your case on, Mr Glassworth,’ I sounded doubtful. ‘Pressure of other work.’

  ‘But if you’ve found ten good points. He’s duty bound, isn’t he, Mr Barnard?’ The plump man, paler but no thinner since his conviction, looked appealingly at my instructing solicitor.

  ‘I’ll have to see.’ I paused and then said casually. ‘Meanwhile, perhaps you can help me. As an expert in stolen art-works.’

  ‘An expert, me? Well, I suppose I am. What do you want to know?’

  ‘A very valuable painting might be too well-known to dispose of?’ I made a guess.

  ‘You get that trouble, yes. It’s hopeless trying to flog a Goya for instance.’

  ‘Or a Taddeo di Bartolo. Nicknamed “II Zoppo”?’ I inquired casually.

  ‘They’re never charging me with that one, are they, Mr Rumpole? Me?’ Mr Glassworth was appalled.

  ‘Not as yet.’ I looked at him, speculatively. ‘What would you do if you had a well-known di Bartolo? “The Benediction”, for instance?’

  ‘Well. You’d never sell it. Too well-known…’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But what would you do?’

  ‘You mean, what would whoever had purloined such an artwork do, Mr Rumpole?’ My art expert was cautious.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Dump it!’ Melvin Glassworth had no hesitation.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Only thing to do with it. Of course. It might pay you to let the insurance company know where it got left.’

  ‘Dump it,’ I wondered. ‘In what sort of place exactly?’

  ‘Somewhere anonymous, I suppose. Somewhere that couldn’t be connected with you. The municipal rubbish tip…’

  ‘Has that ever been used?’

  ‘It has been known. Look, about this appeal. It’s bloody impossible in here. You can’t get a decent shampoo. I wash my hair daily, me!’

  I promised to deal with his appeal. He had given me a little help with Percy Timson’s case, but I got a lot more assistance when I was met at the prison gates by Mrs Vi Timson (on her way to pay a family visit to her brother Charlie who had just got a two for carrying housebreaking implements by night). Vi said she wanted an urgent word in my ear in private, so I sent Barnard walking up the road and withdrew with her to a corner of the prison wall.

  ‘I’ll never forget Mr Rumpole,’ she started, ‘how you got my young Jim out of that nasty robbery of the Butchers.’ *

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, of course. How is Jim?’

  ‘Oh, doing very well Mr Rumpole. Yes, thank you. He’s got his own little window-cleaning firm now.’

  ‘Oh dear. I’m sorry to hear it.’ Window-cleaning is, of course, the best way to reconnoitre possible breaks and enters.

  ‘The thing is. I wanted to tell you,’ Vi burst out, ‘I never agreed with what the family done to Uncle Percy!’

  ‘What the family did?’ I frowned, bewildered.

  ‘Poor old Auntie Noreen. She’s up the wall about it. It wasn’t all the family exactly. It was Dennis mainly. You know Den was hopping mad when Percy let all that rubber-backed carpet go for twenty pounds…’ The words were rushing out of her, I put a calming hand on her arm.

  ‘Mrs Timson. Vi… Perhaps you’d better tell me all about it.’

  The family plot or ‘Put-Rumpole-out-to-grass movement’ gathered impetus in the next few days. Mrs Erskine-Brown, the baby’s mother, told Erskine-Brown, the father, presumably when they met briefly over the Cow-and-Gate tin, that Rumpole was on the verge of retirement. Erskine-Brown told Guthrie Featherstone, Q.C., M.P., and our learned Head of Chambers met Mr Justice Vosper, who was having a drink with his tall, lanky and singularly unattractive son Simon, in their Club, the Sheridan. What had happened then was also something I did not discover till much later.

  ‘Simon’s just finished his pupillage,’ the judge told Feather-stone. ‘Naturally he’s looking for a seat in Chambers. Aren’t you, Simon?’

  ‘Yes, Daddy,’ said Master Vosper, whose legal experience consisted in sitting next to his father on the Bench, and industriously sharpening his pencils.

  ‘There might be a vacancy, Judge.’ Featherstone was anxious to help. ‘Apparently Rumpole’s retiring. He’s going to live with his son in America.’

  ‘Rumpole retiring!’ The judge thought this scheme over and, so Featherstone told me later, approved of it. ‘Can’t be too soon for me. I’ve got him before me at the moment. Rumpole simply hogs the limelight. Hopeless case, but you can’t stop the fellow fighting.’

  Whilst Featherstone was selling my birthright to Master Simon Vosper in the Sheridan Club, I was entertaining the Timson family (all except Noreen who had gone to deliver a clean shirt and an ounce of ‘Golden Bar’ to Percy in the cells) to tea in the cafe opposite the Old Bailey. As Vi sorted out beverages I called the meeting to order.

  ‘I wanted to discuss with you, as members of the family,’ I said, ‘your Uncle Percy Timson’s defence.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Rumpole. Has that got two lumps, dear?’ Fred was pleasantly co-operative.

  ‘Well. We rely on you, Mr Rumpole.’ Cyril smiled.

  ‘The Timson family has always been able to rely on Mr Rumpole,’ Dennis assured me.

  ‘Yes. But can Mr Rumpole rely on the Timson family?’

  ‘Mine’s the lemon tea, Vi,’ Dennis said and asked me. ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  ‘As you well know,’ I explained, ‘half a million nicker and art-works from the Italian Quattrocentro are quite out of Uncle Percy’s league. Therefore I shall have to put him into the witness-box to explain exactly what his league is.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mr Rumpole?’ For the first time Fred Timson sounded uneasy.

  ‘I mean,’ I warned them, ‘Percy’s going to tell the judge he disposed of four thousand Green Shield stamps for you, Fred. And a couple of lorryloads of nylon tights for you, Cyril. And innumerable canteens of cutlery. And twenty-
five yards of rubber-backed carpet from the local Odeon for Dennis. As well as the electric blankets and the three freezer-loads of stolen scampi.’

  ‘I ain’t got no convictions,’ Dennis protested breaking the appalled silence, and he had the grace to add, ‘thanks to you, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘And I understand you’ve even got a legitimate job now, Dennis. What is it?’

  ‘Den’s a crane-driver,’ Cyril said, ‘on the municipal muck heap.’

  ‘On the municipal muck heap! Now isn’t that a coincidence?’ I looked round the embarrassed family.

  ‘What do you mean, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘I mean that it was on a municipal muck heap that some far more cultivated villain than any of you dumped “The Benediction” by Taddeo di Bartolo. Uncle Percy hasn’t been doing too well as a fence lately, has he?’

  ‘Not too brilliant. No.’ Freddy admitted.

  ‘Percy’s past it.’ It was Dennis who said it.

  ‘Getting past it.’ I gave it to him then. ‘Oh, I know. Letting your hard-won consignment of electric blankets go half-price. Gossiping away in pubs when some minor grass is listening.’

  ‘He got our lad Jim six months, chattering away like that, Mr Rumpole,’ Fred was deeply hurt.

  ‘Silly old fool,’ said Cyril.

  ‘He’s a menace to everyone is Uncle Percy.’ Dennis pronounced judgement.

  ‘Is that why you decided he ought to be retired?’ I asked them, and was answered by a nasty silence. ‘You decided to put Uncle Percy out to grass,’ I went on, ‘give him his cards. Rusticate him. Put him on the shelf. You all decided Uncle Percy was past it, didn’t you? The whole family. So you wanted him to retire, quickly.’

  There was another lengthy, and guilty, pause, and then Fred Timson made an admission.

  ‘We couldn’t persuade Percy it was time to go, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Honest. He wouldn’t listen to reason,’ Dennis protested.

  ‘The man was bloody dangerous, carrying on at his age,’ Cyril told me.

  I gave them all a cold look, and told them.

  ‘So Den with the clean record plants a picture on him and rings up D.I. Broome with the information. Hardly a golden handshake, was it? Not even a gold watch from the company. The trouble with you all is you’re none of you Bernard Berenson.’