The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘I’m not sure peace of mind interests me exactly. You see,’ I did my best to explain, ‘after a life of crime, I suppose I’m finding it difficult to go straight.’ Again she made me feel I was talking too much about myself, and even wallowing in nostalgie de /’Old Bailey. She seemed a particularly nice girl, and I wanted to find out more about her. ‘What department are you in up at the University, Miss… Jones?’

  ‘Oh please, “Tiffany”.’ She put a long-fingered brown hand on my arm as she spoke, and I avoided looking for any reaction from She Who Must Be Obeyed. ‘I’m in social economics and statistics.’ It had to be admitted that the confession was not romantic, although the manner in which she made it was. ‘I’ve always had a head for figures. Since I was a kid, I guess. I cover the economic statistics for Nick’s Department of Sociology.’

  ‘How many one-parent families in inner-city areas take to pinching milk bottles.’ I knew what she meant: I once had a twelve-year-old delinquent for a client who told me his trouble was he couldn’t ‘relate to his mother in a one-to-one supportive relationship’.

  ‘That kind of thing.’ Tiffany grinned. ‘I like the statistics… but the rest of it’s a lot of crap, isn’t it? I mean, wherever you come from, you can always choose between God and the Devil.’ Although she was still looking happy and radiant, her words had a sudden, almost chilling seriousness.

  ‘Can we choose?’ I asked her. ‘Fate dealt me an old devil called Judge Bullingham for ten cases running.’

  ‘No matter what luck you have, there’s always a choice between light and darkness. The choice is yours, as sure as the seed grows in the sunshine.’

  I frowned, trying to remember. Her words troubled me, like an unfamiliar quotation; but when she spoke again, of course, I got the source immediately.

  ‘We must meet and talk on this subject, friend and brother,’ Tiffany Jones said. ‘You and I must meet and talk.’

  ‘Did you hear that, Rumpole?’ Hilda interrupted from the middle distance. I looked down and noticed, with mingled regret and relief, that Tiffany’s hand had left my arm. ‘Erica says it’s wonderful to feel that we don’t have to rush off back to England. Haven’t you got anything to say to that?’

  ‘Have you got anything to say, why sentence of death should not be passed upon you?’ Her words had put me in mind of an old legal anecdote, and as Professor Blowfield was then refilling my glass with Chateau Vieux Frontier, or whatever strange name it went by, I decided to give him the benefit of it. ‘I’ll tell you a bit of law, Professor. A bit of legal history…’

  ‘I sure wish my students could hear it, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘He was a devil!’ I told them. ‘The old Lord Chief Justice! When I was first at the Bar. An enormously unlovable character. Used to order muffins for tea at his Club after passing death sentences. Anyway, this old Lord Chief was about to pass sentence in his usual manner…’

  ‘I’m going to get your husband to give a seminar to the Law Faculty,’ I heard Professor Blowfield tell Hilda with some pride, to which she answered shortly, ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Professor Blowfield. But I do want Rumpole to rest.’

  Undeterred I battled on with the anecdote. ‘And the clerk of the Court intoned, “Have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon you?” “Bugger all, my Lord,” the murderer muttered. Whereupon the old Lord Chief turned to this murderer’s counsel, a nervous sort of individual called Bleaks. “Did your client say something, Mr Bleaks?” “Bugger all, my Lord”, Bleaks stammered. “That’s distinctly odd,” grunted the old Lord Chief. “I could’ve sworn I heard him say something.” ’

  I can’t say the Rumpole comic turn brought a standing ovation. I laughed, as I have for years at that particular story, and I was flattered to find that Tiffany laughed with me. Nick made an effort and smiled; Hilda also made an effort and didn’t. Paul Gilpin, the Blowfields and Erica all looked seriously puzzled.

  ‘Poor old Nick,’ I said, feeling sorry for my son. ‘He was brought up on that story. That story was “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” to my son Nicholas.’

  Professor Blowfield cleared his throat. He had, it seemed, decided to open the seminar. ‘Mr Rumpole, in your experience, what was the most important case in Britain during your long career?’

  That was an easy one, and I had no doubt at all as to the answer. ‘The most important case was undoubtedly the Penge Bungalow Murder.’

  ‘The Penge Bungalow? What did that decide exactly?’ The Professor tried in vain to recall his legal textbooks.

  ‘It decided,’ I told him, ‘that I was able to win a murder, alone and without a leader. It was the start - of the Rumpole career.’

  ‘Did it turn on a nice point of law?’ the Professor asked eagerly.

  ‘Law?’ I had to disillusion him. ‘There was no law about it. It turned on a nice point of blood.’

  Chapter Four

  Blood, of course, was to prove the undoing of Percival Simpson; blood and the fact that he possessed an extremely observant landlady who had never liked him and had always found his natural shyness and reserve deeply suspicious. As I was giving Professor Blowfield a Golden Oldie from my collection of legal anecdotes, Simpson was coming down the stairs of his lodgings in Alexander Herzen Road with his mackintosh over his arm to meet the inquisitive landlady hoovering in the hall.

  ‘Just slipping out to the cleaners, Mrs O’Dwyer.’ Simpson said it in a half-hearted attempt at friendliness, but the unsolicited information immediately attracted her attention to the mackintosh over his arm, and to what seemed to her to be, although faintly, a pinkish stain only half hidden by a fold in the cloth. So, as soon as her lodger was safely out of the house, Mrs O’Dwyer abandoned her Hoover and went up to his room for a good look round. She saw what she had often seen, and disapproved of, on previous visits when she did her minimal cleaning. On Simpson’s dressing-table was a crude and amateurish water-colour, cheaply framed, of a naked couple, hands stretched upwards towards a flaming yellow sun in a deep-blue sky. Beside it was, also framed, the coloured portrait photograph of a cleric with crinkly white hair, kindly eyes beaming behind rimless glasses and a deep and healthy suntan. In front of the photograph stood, in a votive position, a half-burned candle in a china holder; beside it lay an ornately handled and curved Moroccan dagger in a bronze sheath, and, carefully folded and kept in place by the handle of the dagger, was a square of white paper through which some scrawled, red lettering was just visible.

  Mrs O’Dwyer looked at this collection, the only pool of colour in the drab room, and saw nothing that she had not seen before. She looked at the narrow divan-bed with its porridge-coloured hessian bedspread, and the shelf over it on which were lodged a Bible and several volumes on revenue law, together with a tattered copy of The House at Pooh Corner, a relic of Simpson’s childhood. Then she opened the wardrobe. There were very few clothes hanging in it: an old jacket, a suit for very best, a few shirts and underclothes; but Mrs O’Dwyer looked down at a pile of dirty washing at the bottom of the cupboard. She picked up a shirt and looked at the cuff, and there she found, to her considerable excitement and enormous satisfaction, a stain that was a deeper pink, in which the attempt at washing had been less successful than the mark on the mackintosh that her secretive lodger had been taking to the cleaners. She went straight down to the hall and lifted the telephone.

  The wail of police sirens is not an unknown noise around Alexander Herzen Road near Paddington. The neighbours paid only casual attention to the posse of uniformed officers and to the police dogs nosing round the area’s steps. No one saw the treasure that dogs and men recovered from one of the dustbins; a plastic bag from the Delectable Drumstick inside which, beside a box of mouldering chicken, lay an army sheath knife, found, on forensic examination, to be liberally stained with blood of the same group as that which once flowed in the veins of the Honourable Rory Canter. When he returned to the house and found police officers waiting for him, Percival Simpson s
miled a little wearily, but did not seem at all surprised.

  The officers in charge of the Notting Hill Gate Underground Murder were led by Detective Inspector Wargrave, a friendly and comfortable-looking copper who sang bass-baritone in the) Gilbert and Sullivan put on by his local operatic society and always cast himself as the Dutch uncle in interviews. Young Detective Constable Jarwood, on the other hand, was pale, sharp-featured and unsmiling, and conducted interviews as if the responsibility of fighting crime rested on him alone.

  ‘Want a cup of tea, lad, do you?’ D.I. Wargrave started the interrogation of Simpson with the soft approach.

  ‘I know,’ the arrested man looked at the D.I. as though he hadn’t heard, ‘I have sinned.’

  ‘You’re telling us you’re guilty, then?’ D.C. Jarwood sounded almost disappointed as he made a note; like an eager huntsman who sees the fox come trotting up to the meet and lie down. Simpson seemed to have fallen into a sort of reverie from which the D.I. sought to awaken him.

  ‘How long have you known him, Percy?’

  ‘How long have you known the Honourable Rory Canter?’ Jarwood repeated the question, more insistently. ‘The one you cut.’

  Simpson shook his head and said, quite gently, ‘I didn’t know him.’

  ‘Don’t lie to us, Simpson,’ the Detective Constable came in dead on cue.

  ‘It’s true. I’d never seen him before.’ Simpson sounded as if he didn’t really care whether they believed him or not. ‘Of course, I knew he’d come… sometime.’

  ‘So you went after him?’ Jarwood asked.

  ‘No!’ Simpson said it quite positively; but then he sighed and added, ‘What’s the use? They’ll never let me escape now. Never!’

  At which point the Detective Inspector took a plastic envelope from a file and carefully withdrew from it the folded sheet of paper he had found on Simpson’s dressing-table, on which a curious message had been printed in blotchy and uneven capitals.

  ‘This is your handwriting, Percy?’ Simpson nodded his head, making no attempt to deny it.

  ‘Strange sort of letter, isn’t it?’ Jarvis suggested.

  ‘Perhaps. To you.’ Simpson’s interest in the proceedings seemed hard to retain.

  ‘It’s written in blood, isn’t it, Percy?’ Wargrave said it as though he were inviting Simpson to another cup of tea. ‘We had the forensic on it, you see. You wrote this in the blood of the gentleman you knifed.’

  At which Simpson looked up at him surprised, and for the first time since the interview began he seemed to be genuinely afraid. ‘No! Not his blood. Unless…’ He looked at the sheet of paper almost in awe. ‘Something miraculous!’

  ‘You’re lying to us again, Percy. That’s no use to you, you know.’ Jarwood’s reaction was predictable, but Simpson looked at him without dissent.

  ‘Of course,’ he nodded. ‘Nothing’s any use. They’ve got the power! I can’t fight it.’

  ‘It’s just no good. He can’t fight it. He tells the police he’s guilty. The bloody knife’s in the dustbin. He’s identified by at least three witnesses at the tube station and he writes some spooky letter in his victim’s blood. The case is as dead as mutton.’

  ‘Just the sort of case Rumpole would have enjoyed.’

  In due course Percival Simpson had made his first appearance in the Magistrates Court; it was a short and silent appearance as far as he was concerned and he seemed to show little interest in the proceedings. He was, as was inevitable on a murder charge, granted legal aid and his case was passed to an eager young solicitor, Labour councillor and leading light of the local Law Centre called Michael, or Mike, Mowbray. Mike knew Ken Cracknell (they had been fellow students at the London School of Economics) and, as anxious to advance his friend’s career as his own, he gave the brief in this desirable murder (the sort of case for which in my early years at the Bar I would have been tempted to go out and do the deed myself) to the ex-squatter, Dirt Track Rider, now tenant of my old room, K. Cracknell, Esq. Cracknell, although naturally excited as he undid the pink tape which bound the important brief, became increasingly depressed as he calculated the odds stacked against the defence. So he was now sitting in Rex’s Cafe, opposite the Old Bailey, eating some of the superb scrambled eggs that they serve there from dawn on, telling his troubles to the Portia of our Chambers, Mrs Phillida Erskine-Brown (née Trant).

  As for Miss Trant, she had taken to setting out from home early, leaving the feeding of the Erskine-Brown infant in the hands of her husband and a large and unsmiling au pair from Iceland who would, as Miss Trant feared, give notice if she gave her the opportunity of the briefest conversation. ‘Got to read a brief for 10.30/ Miss Trant would call over her shoulder as she fled the domestic scene. ‘I’ll grab a cup of coffee at Rex’s.’ And off she would go, leaving the child, her husband Claude and Miss Reykjavik to form a gloomy and abandoned alliance. It may also be said that her step lightened as she put an increasing distance between herself and family life in South Kensington, not only because she loved her work, which she did, but because she had grown agreeably used to breakfast with Ken Cracknell, who looked this morning, with his dark hair and smouldering eyes, like a young Heathcliff of the legal aid system.

  ‘Just my luck!’ Cracknell continued to complain. ‘I thought I’d do my first murder on my own and score a triumphant victory. Now… no way! I’ll be a triumphant loser.’

  ‘That letter…!’ Miss Trant had eagerly and helpfully read her friend Ken Cracknell’s brief and had seen the photostat of the strange missive that Percy Simpson appeared to have written in his victim’s blood.

  ‘The jury’s going to love that!’ Cracknell filled his mouth with scrambled egg on a slice and chewed bitterly. ‘He doesn’t only knife a member of the aristocracy, he uses him as an inkwell to write his correspondence.’ Ken looked, if possible, more savagely depressed. ‘It’s a case that’s going to do my career at the Bar no sort of good at all.’

  Miss Trant looked at him, smiled and put a hand on his arm.’I must say, Ken,’ she said, ‘you’re frightfully ambitious. For a radical lawyer.’

  ‘Even radical lawyers are meant to win their cases.’ He looked at her, pleased with her obvious concern. ‘Why don’t we have a hamburger tonight and talk about it. I could show you the commune.’

  ‘I can’t, Ken, honestly.’ Miss Trant sounded genuinely dis-appointed. ‘My husband’ll have dinner all ready. He’s started to cook French traditional from the Observer colour supplement.’

  ‘Ringhim and say you’ve been kept late in Chambers. A late con.’

  ‘No, I can’t. Another time.’ She squeezed his arm and let it

  go, so she could deal better with her marmalade and double toast.

  ‘Another time. You promise?’ Ken Cracknell smiled, the effect of which upon Miss Trant was powerful.

  ‘All right. I promise,’ she said. She lit a thoughtful, low tar, filter-tipped and quite tasteless cigarette, and added thoughtfully, ‘Ken. About that defence of yours… There is someone who really knows about blood stains.’

  ‘You mean Professor Andrew Ackerman?’ Cracknell mentioned the Prince of the Morgues, the best forensic science witness in the business. ‘He’s giving evidence for the prosecution.’

  ‘No.’ And Miss Trant breathed out smoke through elegantly flaring nostrils. ‘But someone as good as Ackerman. I could write to him, if you like.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘Dear Rumpole. It seems ages since you left us and of course we all miss you.’ My correspondent, as an advocate, was more ready to say what she thought the tribunal might like to hear than to stick to the strict truth; but let that pass. ‘We have got a new fellow in Chambers though, a rather super bloke called Ken Cracknell (he’s always called Ken, which shows that there’s simply no side or snobbery about him). He always defends, or appears for, tenants, or Indian teachers in front of the Race Relations Boards, and all that sort of thing. In fact, Ken’s a real radical lawyer, just like you used to be
.’ Wrong. In fact there has never been a moment in my long and chequered career in which I have ever borne the remotest resemblance to Kenneth Cracknell, Esq.; but let that pass also. ‘Your old enemy the Mad Bull is now a senior Old Bailey Judge.’ As I read this the Florida sun seemed warmer and more delightful, the grass on the neat front lawns under the rainbow-hued sprinklers greener and more pleasant. ‘Now what I want to ask your advice about, Rumpole, is this.’ I turned another page; the round, schoolgirlish hand served to make the letter more bulky. ‘Ken’s got a murder and it’s his first and naturally he wants to win, so I feel it’s up to us to give him all the help we can. It all happened at Notting Hill Gate tube station (see the enclosed cuttings from The Times and the News of the World which will give you all the gen). But where you come in is with your marvellous expertise on questions of blood. It seems the client wrote a gruesome sort of letter, probably to the Devil or something equally creepy, in the victim’s blood. What we want to know is, is this possible? I mean, wouldn’t it congeal or something? And have you ever had a case of blood stains on paper? I don’t really want Ken to know that I’ve asked your advice as he’s awfully proud and touchy (like all radical barristers, I suppose) and really wants to feel that he’s done it all himself. Claude is really quite well and very proud of Tristan.’ Who the hell was Tristan, I wondered? ‘As you say, he’ll soon be old enough to sit up and draft an affidavit. Tristan, I mean.’ Oh, of course, Tristan. The son and heir the Erskine-Browns conceived after one of their nights out at Covent Garden. ‘At the moment we’ve got a most alarming Icelandic au pair and I have to keep out of her way in case she gives in her notice…’

  ‘Rumpole!’ Hilda was calling to me from the other side of the lawn sprinkler as I stood by the postbox on the road at the end of the garden and read this letter which seemed to smell, even as I held it, comfortingly of fog and damp and old law reports and breakfast in Rex’s Cafe. ‘Is there anything in the post?’