The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’

  I paused. There was a smarter of applause.

  ‘Well. Is that it?’ Uncle Tom asked, but I had the final clear announcement to make.

  ‘This handsome time-piece will encourage me, my old friends,’ I told them, ‘to forget all thought of surrender and retirement, and not to yield in all my future cases at the Old Bailey, London Sessions, Luton Crown – or even before the Uxbridge Magistrates! And I shall never be late. This will always get me to the Court on time!’

  I was standing, holding the clock proudly whilst the assembled company stared at me with mingled hostility and amazement. At last Uncle Tom spoke, to no one in particular.

  ‘If Rumpole’s not retiring,’ he said, ‘does he really mean to hang on to our clock?’

  Rumpole’s Return

  For Penny

  Else I my state should much mistake

  To harbour a divided thought

  From all my kind - that, for my sake,

  There should a miracle be wrought.

  No, I do know that I was born

  To age, misfortune, sickness, grief:

  But I will bear these with that scorn

  As shall not need thy false relief.

  Nor for my peace will I go far,

  As wanderers do, that still do roam;

  But make my strengths, such as they are,

  Here in my bosom, and at home.

  Ben Jonson: ‘A Farewell to the World’

  Chapter One

  One dark, wet and almost arctic night in springtime (in fact it was Thursday, 13 March, and the sort of brutal English weather which ought to have made me profoundly grateful for where I was at the time) a 35-year-old clerk in the Inland Revenue named Percival Simpson left his evening class in Notting Hill Gate and went, as he always did on Thursday nights, into the Delectable Drumstick to buy his take-away supper. The meal in question consisted of a cardboard box in which was stowed a pale and hairy portion of greasy, battery-fed chicken and a number of soggy chips. It was, in short, the sort of mass-produced, Americanized food which tastes at the best of wet blotting-paper and at the worst of very old bicycle tyres: such a dinner as makes me more than ever anxious for the speedy collapse of Civilization As We Know It. Having secured this repellent repast, Simpson paid for it with money from the purse which he always carried about his person and made his way out of the neon-lit splendours of the Delectable Drumstick into the stormy unpleasantness of the street. He was going, as usual, to take the tube to his bed-sitting room in Paddington.

  Exactly what followed never became altogether clear. Prosecuting counsel failed to elicit a coherent story from the various witnesses, and the defence was, as usual, only too happy to allow the picture to remain somewhat opaque. As Simpson walked along the broad and fairly well-lit pavement, he passed a large and rather muddy vehicle (it was later shown to be a Volvo estate car with a Hampshire registration) which drew up behind him. A man got out, of no more than Simpson’s age but of an entirely different appearance. He was large and burly, a first class Rugby football player, whereas Simpson was on the skinny side and his game, on the rare occasions when he could find a partner, was draughts. The man from the estate car wore a suit made by Huntsman’s in Savile Row, a hat from Lock’s and made-to-measure shoes from Lobb; Simpson was dressed in a nondescript manner by courtesy of the January sales in the Civil Service Stores. The man from the Volvo was a product of Eton, Sandhurst and the Brigade of Guards; Simpson had acquired his mastery of mathematics at Stanmore Comprehensive and the North London Poly. It would be difficult to think of two more dissimilar young men than Percival Simpson and the Honourable Roderick (known to his many friends as Rory) Canter, younger son of the late Marquess of Freith. And yet they were to be inextricably joined in a famous double act, playing the parts of corpse and defendant in a trial staged before a large public at the Old Bailey.

  We can now go conveniently to the evidence of Mr Byron MacDonald, the Jamaican guard of a train which was waiting at the platform of Notting Hill Gate station, bound for Pad-dington. Mr MacDonald was standing looking out of the open door of his compartment when he saw the fresh-faced Honourable Rory, with his well-cut clothes and general air of a gentleman farmer, come down onto the platform. Mr MacDonald waited for this late passenger to get onto the train, but Rory Canter showed no signs of doing so, and instead moved to a place on the platform where there was a bench set in a kind of small cave of lavatory tiling. He stood in the alcove, as the guard Byron MacDonald shouted, ‘Mind the doors please!’ and gave the signal for the train to move out of the station.

  As the doors shut and the train sighed heavily and lumbered rheumatically forward, Mr MacDonald saw Simpson come onto the platform in his shapeless raincoat, still clutching his plastic dinner-bag, which bore on it the well-known symbol of the Delectable Drumstick. Simpson looked round, and then stepped back towards the alcove where Rory Canter was standing. The last sight that Byron MacDonald saw, as the train carried him off into the darkness of the tunnel, was two apparent strangers struggling together, locked in some inexplicable combat or embrace.

  James ‘Peanuts’ Anderson and Dianna ‘Smokey’ Revere were part of a group of young people who came down to the platform about four minutes later on pleasure bent. They were variously dressed in black leather, safety-pins and a job lot of Iron Crosses and other emblems of the Wehrmacht. Peanuts’ cropped hair was of a light green shade and Dianna’s was tinted orange. They both wore heavy eye-shadow and, with their companions, were deriving such innocent pleasure as they could from kicking an empty lager can down the stairs and along the platform. From time to time during their progress, they punched or kicked each other in an affectionate manner.

  Dianna Smokey Revere remembered seeing the man in the mackintosh move away from the seat on which the man in the trilby hat and the tweed suit was left sitting. At that moment another train came in, the doors opened and the young people kicked their beer can into an empty compartment. They went into the same compartment and milled around at one end, refreshing themselves from other tins of lager which they had brought with them. The girl Smokey remembered seeing Simpson sitting alone at the other end of the carriage, his plastic bag of dinner on the floor between his knees. He was carrying some object, what it was she could not exactly see, but it seemed to her to be about a foot long. She saw him drop it, whatever it was, into the plastic bag, inside which it hit the floor with a metallic clang. Her final view of the platform included the sight of a pale Rory Canter slipping sideways on the seat where he was sitting, so that he hit the lavatory tiles and then slithered to the ground. From the moving train it looked as though he were drunk; and so he seemed not at all out of place on Notting Hill Gate tube station at night.

  Smokey, Peanuts and their friends scarcely paid any attention to Simpson when he left the train at Paddington. When he got out of the station, he made a few turnings away from the main thoroughfare into a short cul-de-sac called Alexander Herzen Road. Number 2 was the tall, crumbling, Victorian house which contained his bed-sit. By the stone steps which led up to the front door there was a row of dustbins, round which had gathered the debris left by resentful dustmen who never got a Christmas box. Percival Simpson opened the lid of one of these dustbins and dropped into it his plastic bag of dinner untasted. When he had done this he seemed somewhat relieved in his mind, and went, as always, up to his room alone.

  Although these events might, in the old days, have provided a certain amount of grist to the Rumpole mill, and might have been expected to yield the good things of the earth such as briefs, and money to pay the tax man and my clerk Henry, and the ever-increasing tick at Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, and even keep my wife Hilda, known to me in awe as She Who Must Be Obeyed, in Vim for a month or two, they were now as remote from my sphere as the alleged delinquencies of little green men in outer space. At the time when Simpson caught his tube t
rain and left the collapsing Hon. Rory on his bench, I was in a deck chair gently ripening to a roseate hue in the brilliant sunshine of southern Florida, looking out past the golden sand and assorted geriatrics to the Atlantic Ocean. I was in a strange condition which could be described as neither life nor death but something in between; a kind of air-conditioned purgatory. Not to put too fine a point on it, I had retired and gone to live in America.

  The summons to this lotus-eating existence had come from my son, Nick, always the brains of the family, who had crowned his academic career by becoming Head of the Department of Social Studies in the University of Miami. He had also acquired a sizeable house with a swimming bath in the garden, a place which his wife Erica mysteriously referred to as the ‘back yard’. When I add that Erica was expecting the Rumpole grandchild, and that Nick was constantly arguing that the time had come for me to hang up my old wig, give up the unequal struggle against the forces of law and order and join him and his wife in a sun-blessed haven far from the piercing draughts of our old mansion flat in Gloucester Road, and the cold winds and brutal proceedings of the Uxbridge Magistrates Court, you will understand why my wife Hilda was naturally and persistently in favour of this scheme. However, she would never have persuaded me if it hadn’t been for the powerful argument advanced by his Honour Judge Roger Bullingham.

  I lost ten cases in a row before Judge Bullingham. Bullingham, or the mad Bull, was, some years ago, elevated from his relative obscurity in the London Sessions to perform in the more popular arena of the Central Criminal Court. Far from maturing into any sort of civilization, the Bull relapsed into a deeper barbarity in his new post. He growled savagely at witnesses, he shouted and reduced young male barristers to stammering jellies and made lady barristers weep (Miss Trant, the Portia of our Chambers, once fled in tears from Bullingham’s Court, saying that the cause of justice there would be advanced if they brought back trial by ordeal). He smiled with crawling sycophancy at juries, commiserated with them on the length of defence cross-examinations and told them the Test Match score, hoping to woo them to a conviction. During defence speeches he slept ostentatiously, or explored his ear with his little finger, or industriously picked his nose. When welfare officers suggested probation, he trumpeted with contempt; when police officers gave their evidence of improbable verbal admissions, he passed it on to the jury with the solemnity of Moses relaying the Tablets of the Law. His sentences were invariably greeted with outbursts of hysterical weeping by women in the public gallery.

  I have always said that if you could choose your judge you could win most cases, and to avoid this undesirable result the authorities award judges to cases by some mysterious system of chance. The night before a case your clerk tells you which judge you have drawn in the lottery, and when I got his Honour Judge Bullingham for the tenth time I felt like some Monte Carlo gambler who, against all the odds, faces a record run on the black, leading to bankruptcy and a pistol shot on the terrace. All the same, my client was a Post Office worker of hitherto unblemished reputation, his wife was suffering from a long illness and the amount he was alleged to have fiddled was no more than two hundred pounds. The Bull, however, was at his worst. He fawned on the jury, constantly interrupted my cross-examination and forced me to make my final speech on Friday afternoon, so that the jury would have forgotten it by Monday morning when he made the ferocious prosecution plea which he called his summing-up. The jury obediently convicted, and my back and head were aching as I heaved myself to my hind legs in a vain attempt to appeal to the Bull’s better nature in the matter of sentence. Eventually I subsided with the familiar Bull phrases ringing in my ears: ‘Very serious crime… Gross breach of trust by a public servant… It is quite inappropriate for counsel to ask for leniency in this class of case… Post Office frauds are going to be stamped out as far as this Court is concerned… The least sentence I can pass is one of four years’ imprisonment…’

  My client’s daughter sobbed in the public gallery as he was led down to the cells. ‘And the least sentence I can pass on you, Bull,’ I said, only just under my breath, ‘is banishment for life. Avaunt and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee. Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold. Thou hast no speculation in those eyes that thou dost glare with!’ and a good deal more to the like effect. It was clear, of course, that the only way I could really banish Judge Bullingham from my life was to hang up my wig and leave the Old Bailey for ever. So we accepted Nick’s invitation and moved to southern Florida.

  On our shopping days, after a somewhat insubstantial and teeth-freezing lunch of a mountainous salad (jumbo prawns, inflatable tomatoes, Icelandic lettuce - the stuff to avoid is ‘Thousand Island Dressing’: so many islands, you might have thought, are hardly needed to provide a mixture of salad cream and tomato ketchup), Hilda and I would take chairs on the beach and go through the back numbers of The Times that my old friend George Frobisher posted to us from time to time. Around us ‘Senior Citizens’, old men wearing long shorts, peaked cotton caps and eye shields, antique ladies whose shrunken arms and necks were loaded with jewellery, $at blinking in the sun or queued for the three dollar blood pressure service which was available to warn of a sudden heart attack as the Dow Jones average plummeted, or the microchip in charge of our destinies mischievously ordered up a nuclear war.

  ‘That is nice,’ said She Who Must Be Obeyed, clucking approvingly at her copy of The Times. ‘Queen’s Birthday Honours go to Mrs Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher’s milkman.’

  There are moments when I scarcely regret my exile from England, and this was one of them. But then I began to read the account of an unsolved London crime: ‘ “Notting Hill Gate Mystery. The Honourable Rory Canter, younger brother of Lord Freith and wealthy Hampshire landowner, stabbed in underground station.” My God. It is a mystery. What’s an Honourable doing down the tube, like a common barrister?’

  The smile put on it by the elevation of the Prime Minister’s milkman faded from Hilda’s face.

  ‘I wish you’d stop worrying about that sort of thing, Rumpole, now I’ve persuaded you to retire.’

  ‘You didn’t persuade me to retire. His Honour Judge Bull-ingham persuaded me to retire. Anyway, I was losing my touch. I couldn’t’ve shovelled more customers into Wandsworth if I’d joined the Old Bill.’ I tried to forget Bullingham by reading the account of a more or less decent crime. ‘ “Mr Canter had abandoned his Volvo estate car and gone down the underground.” The Honourable gentleman must have been a tube-spotter.’

  ‘I think Nick and I rescued you from murders just in time, Rumpole. You were looking distinctly seedy.’

  ‘Not half as seedy as my clients. I’d leave the Temple every night, like Napoleon making a quick retreat from Moscow, abandoning the dead and dying to their fate…’

  ‘You should be grateful to Nick. Thanks to him we shall have Christmas in this wonderful climate.’

  I looked up at the relentlessly blue sky for signs of rain. ‘Excellent climate, I’m sure,’ I told Hilda, ‘if you happen to be an orange.’

  ‘And Nick’s inviting his university friends over for a barbecue tonight. Poolside,’ Hilda reminded me. It was true that my son had acquired a strange habit of cooking meals on a sort of camp-fire beside the swimming bath. ‘The Professor of Law’s coming. You’ll have someone to talk to.’

  ‘What can I say? I’m not a lawyer… any more.’ I looked back, a little puzzled, at the Times account of the Notting Hill Gate murder. ‘Now why should a man abandon his Volvo estate car and dive down the tube…? Oh well… Never mind! It can’t possibly be my business any more. Rumpole’s occupation’s gone.’

  ‘What did you say, Rumpole?’

  ‘Nothing, Hilda. Nothing at all.’ I closed my eyes and tried to rewrite Othello.

  ‘Farewell the Ancient Court,

  Farewell the wigged troup and the old Judge,

  That made oppression virtue. Oh farewell,

  Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious London Sessions…�
��

  By this time I felt further pangs of nostalgia, even at the mention of that desolate courthouse down past the Elephant and Castle. So I tried to remember the things I missed least about my life in the law: such as Bullingham passing sentence and Chambers meetings, presided over by my learned ex-Head of Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone, Q.C, M.P.

  Chapter Two

  At about the time that I was reading the prodigiously delayed account of the Notting Hill Underground Murder Mystery, the evening peace of the Temple was shattered by the roar of a powerful motor-bicycle and a figure, hugely helmeted and dressed from neck to ankle in black leather, astride an overpowered Japanese Honda, came thundering in through the Embankment gates, waved a gauntleted greeting at the startled porter on duty and did a racing turn into Kings Bench Walk, narrowly missing a collision with the hearse-like vintage Daimler of a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. The Dirt Track Rider screamed to a halt, dismounted and unfastened a black briefcase from his pillion. He then proceeded on foot towards Equity Court, where my old Chambers is situated.

  Entering Number Two, the Speedway King passed the door on which the list of familiar names was painted. Guthrie Feather-stone, Q.C, M.P., led all the rest, beating by a short head the name Horace Rumpole, which had been crossed out in biro, the Temple sign-painter having never got around to painting it out and moving the other names, Thomas Cartwright (Uncle Tom), Judge George Frobisher, Claude Erskine-Brown, Phillida Trant (who has now, in the make-believe world of married life, adopted the pseudonym of Mrs Erskine-Brown), Clement Hos-kins, Flavius Quint, etc. The motor-bicyclist, who had now removed the huge plastic balloon from his head and emerged as a reasonably good-looking young man of thirty with a tumbling lock of black hair, thick eyebrows and the expression of one who constantly believes that he is about to be insulted and doesn’t intend to stand for it, glanced at the list of names, as he had done on many occasions, appeared to notice a glaring omission and continued on into the clerk’s room, looking more resentful than ever.