Rumpole and the Primrose Path

by John Mortimer

  ‘Nothing like that. Theology.’

  I was thinking hard then, about the Primrose Path and young Gavin, occasionally present at the desk downstairs, doing his best to discover how to justify the ways of God to Man. I had advice for Dotty.

  ‘Then I think you should go to the degree ceremony. Definitely. Get a good seat and keep your eyes open.’

  And at long last I was ready to return along the Primrose Path. It was an afternoon in early spring, with the trees covered in a green mist of young shoots and pale sunshine on the garden of the home, where a patient or two had been pushed out in wheelchairs to snooze away the few afternoons that were left to them. The front door was open and I stepped into the familiar smell of furniture polish, disinfectant and an air freshener in which the scent of early flowers and budding leaves had been strongly sterilized. I thought, again, how easy it was to get in and out of the Primrose Path without attracting any particular attention. I stood for a minute alone in the hallway, thinking about the eventful night which had led to Dotty’s tears, and then a young nurse, one I had not seen before, asked my name and said that Sister Sheila was expecting me in her office.

  She didn’t move from behind her desk when I came in and her face was set in a frown of stern disapproval, her lips closed as tight as tweezers, so I felt as though I had absconded from some place of conviction and been brought back under escort to face the consequences. Nanki-Poo, a hairy heap in his basket, slept through most of our interview, only occasionally opening an eye and uttering a small snort of disapproval.

  ‘I suppose you’ve come to apologize for the way you left us, slinking away like a thief in the night. It merely goes to show that you are still seriously unwell, Mr Rumpole. By the way, there is a bill for extras which you left unpaid.’

  I was sitting in a chair opposite her, my hat on the floor, as she pushed a piece of paper towards me.

  ‘I haven’t come here to apologize, exactly. I’ve come here to discuss one of your patients. Frederick Fairweather.’

  She gave a short sigh, a quick formal acknowledgement of another death at the Primrose Path. ‘Mr Fairweather sadly died, Mr Rumpole, as I believe you know. He had trouble with his heart, as you have. Now, is there anything else you want to say to me?’

  So that was her evidence in chief and, as in a courtroom, I was about to cross-examine the witness. I felt a stir of the old excitement, setting out on a series of questions which just might, possibly, expose the truth. I wasn’t in Court, of course, and what I was about to do was calculated only to avoid the trial of Dotty on the unsubstantial charge against her. Greater love, I thought, has no man than this, that he give up a defence brief at the Old Bailey for a friend.

  ‘I wonder if you could help me. There are a few little things I’d like to ask about Freddy.’ The art of cross-examining, I have always believed, is not the art of examining crossly, and I started in my politest, gentlest and most respectful tone of voice. Lull the witness into a false sense of security was my way, and ask questions she has to agree to before you spring the surprises. ‘Mr Fairweather had a company selling private pensions up in Leeds, hadn’t he?’

  ‘That was his business, was it? Then you know more than I do.’ Sheila was expressionless, and now Nanki-Poo snorted.

  ‘Oh, I doubt that. And his business was called Primrose Personal Pensions, wasn’t it? And this is the Primrose Path Home.’

  ‘A pure coincidence.’ Sister Sheila was, for the first time, on the defensive.

  ‘Really? There are a lot of coincidences, aren’t there, about that eventful night? But let’s stick to his business for a moment. Didn’t he buy this home as an investment about ten years ago? That was when you’d started to run it, and you got to know him rather well. Isn’t that the truth of the matter?’

  ‘I really don’t see why I should sit here answering questions about the home’s private business. That is absolutely no concern of yours, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is my business, Mrs Fairweather.’

  There was a silence then. A heavy stillness, during which the dog made no sound and Sister Sheila moved not at all. She sat looking at her undrunk cup of coffee, and the plate on which four chocolate biscuits lay in a neat pattern. Then she managed to whisper, ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘By your name. You married Freddy last year, didn’t you, at a Leeds Register Office? He was the divorced husband of Barbara Elizabeth Threadwell, by whom he had one son, Gavin. A quiet boy who got into university to read theology and is occasionally on duty at the desk in the hallway. I suppose you got Freddy to marry you as part of the deal.’

  ‘Deal?’ The witness was now making the mistake of asking me questions. ‘What sort of a deal are you suggesting?’

  So I told her. ‘Primrose Personal Pensions is in serious trouble, isn’t it? The pensions just aren’t there any more. The poor devils who subscribed to Primrose have no comfortable income to look forward to. God knows what’ll happen to them. They’ll be sleeping in doorways and dying on the National Health because the truth of the matter is that Freddy trousered their money. Then he had nowhere to hide, except a quiet nursing home run by his wife, where he could be treated by his company doctor, who would issue endless chits assuring the world and the Fraud Squad that Freddy was far too ill to come to Court.

  Had I been advising Sister Sheila at that moment, she would have refused to answer further questions on the grounds that they might incriminate her. Without the advantages of my advice, she tried to discover the strength of the evidence against her.

  ‘Mr Rumpole, are you telling me you knew Mr Fairweather well?’

  ‘Since I left here I’ve got to know him very well indeed.’

  ‘You must be seriously ill, Mr Rumpole.’ A faint smile appeared on Sister Sheila’s face, a smile of derision. ‘Since you left here Mr Fairweather has, as you well know, been dead.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure?’ She spoke as though there was no possible doubt about the matter. ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  ‘It would have been what he wanted.’ I seemed to surprise her.

  ‘You think he wanted to die?’ The smile was overtaken by a brief, mirthless laugh. ‘People who come here don’t want to die, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Not everyone has the Fraud Squad and the Pensions Watchdog breathing down their necks. Not everyone has filched thousands of pensioners’ money. The time was coming when Dr Lucas’s chits and Freddy’s shelter in the Primrose Path might not have been enough. There was only one place left for him to hide in. Death.’

  ‘Are you suggesting my patient committed suicide?’

  ‘Of course not. Freddy wouldn’t give up as easily as that. His way out, and I think you know this as well as I do, was a death which was as much a fake as his pensions.’

  ‘That’s a most outrageous suggestion!’ Sister Sheila, as so many witnesses do when they strike a sticky patch, fell back on righteous indignation. ‘My lawyers will make sure you pay for it. And never repeat it.’

  ‘Oh, I think your lawyers will have more important business on their hands. I’m sure Freddy’s death was discussed, but not planned exactly. No one could have planned the great opportunity of that night. It was more by luck, wasn’t it, than good management?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole,’ Sister Sheila gave a magnificent display of patience with a questioner in an advanced stage of senile decay, ‘Mr Fairweather died of heart failure. Confirmed by Doctor Lucas. His body was cremated, an event which was witnessed by your friend, Nurse Albright, who says he promised her something in his will.’

  ‘Let me first deal with that.’ I fed her tightly controlled fury by smiling tolerantly as I counted off the points on my fingers. ‘Doctor Lucas had spent years as the official medical adviser to a fraudulent pension company. Like you, I’m sure he expected to share in the spoils. You did your best to keep the date and place of Freddy’s funeral a secret, but Dotty made her own enquiries. It’s true she saw a coffin slide into the ever
lasting bonfire, but whose coffin was it, exactly?’

  ‘Freddy’s, of course.’ By now the witness was standing, furious, all pretence that we were just discussing another unfortunate patient gone. ‘Who else could it have been?’

  ‘A man called Masklyn?’ I suggested. ‘A transfer from a crowded hospital. A man no one knew much about. No apparent friends. No traceable relatives. He left the hospital that night. Was it, perhaps, the night he happened to die? I’m not saying you and Lucas killed him. I don’t think you did, I just think his death was a stroke of luck. It meant that one of you could tell the undertaker that the dead man’s name was Frederick Fairweather.

  ‘And now, do you want to know why I’ve gone to the trouble of finding all this out? Because you got in a panic when you thought Dotty was asking too many questions and finding out too much about that dubious event in the crematorium. So what did you do? You decided Dotty would lose her credibility if she was a murder suspect and not a reliable witness. So you spun the police some ridiculous story about too much digitalis, as though she would have killed Freddy because he’d promised to remember her in his will! I’m sure he liked her. But there wasn’t any will, any more than there was any fatal heart attack. When you next see Freddy, give him my regards and ask him if he’s enjoying his death.’

  I got up to go then, and the room, which had seemed so still, was suddenly full of movement. Nanki-Poo jumped out of his basket and started to bark, a high-pitched, irritable yelp like a particularly difficult patient complaining hysterically. At the same time, the door opened and Doctor Sydney Lucas stood in my way. He was looking at me in what I took to be a distinctly unfriendly fashion.

  ‘He’s mad!’ I heard Sister Sheila tell him. ‘He’s come back to us and he’s seriously insane. He’s been talking nonsense to me about poor Freddy.’

  Doctor Lucas filled the doorway, considerably younger, taller and a great deal stronger than I am.

  ‘Excuse me’ was all I could think of to say. ‘Detective Inspector Maundy of the local Force is waiting for me outside. He’ll be very worried if I don’t emerge. I did warn him that I might have some difficulty leaving ...’

  Whatever they had done to help a crooked businessman disappear from the face of the earth, however outrageous and reckless that plan had been, and however dishonest the doctor’s conduct, the mention of the local constabulary made him step away from the door. I walked past him and out into air no longer freshened by chemicals. A cloud had covered the sun, there was a stirring of wind and I felt heavy drops of rain. Wheelchairs were being hurriedly pushed into shelter. I walked away from the Primrose Path for the last time and towards the forces of law and order. I was prepared to make a statement.

  The University of North Sussex is not an old foundation. The main hall is a modern glass and concrete building, in front of which stands a large piece of abstract statuary built, so far as I could see, of flattened and twisted girders and bits and pieces of motionless machinery. But inside the steeply raked amphitheatre the Chancellor, professors and lecturers were decked out in pink and scarlet gowns with slung-back mediaeval hoods.

  I sat with Dotty among the parents, behind the rows of students. A cleric in a purple gown, the head of the theology department, was calling out names, and the Chairman of the local waste-disposal company, earlier granted an Honorary Doctorate of Literature, handed out the scrolls. Gavin, in his clean white shirt and rarely worn suit, looked younger than ever, hardly more than a schoolboy. As he waited his turn in the queue, his eyes were searching the audience. When he saw Dotty he gave her a small, grateful wave and a smile. Then his name was called and he stepped forward.

  ‘Look now,’ I gave Dotty an urgent instruction. ‘Look at the entrances.’

  She turned and I turned with her. High above us, at the top of the raked seats, there were three doorways. He was standing in the middle one. He must have just moved to where he could see his son, far below him, get his degree. He stood there, a small, broad-shouldered, square figure with a broken nose. It was a moment of pride he had not been able to resist and, as a great chancer, why shouldn’t he have taken this risk to see Gavin get what he had never had - a university degree? Gavin shook hands with the waste-disposal magnate and went off with his scroll. Freddy Fairweather turned away, meaning to disappear again into the world of the dead. But he was stopped by Fig Newton and DS Thorndike, who had been waiting for him at my suggestion.

  So the case of the Primrose Path never got me a brief. Neither Sister Sheila nor Doctor Sydney Lucas, when arraigned for their various offences, thought of employing Rumpole to defend them. Freddy Fairweather ended up in an open prison, from which he may expect an early release owing to the unexpected onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Gavin has taken Holy Orders and returned to Leeds. I still meet Dotty, from time to time, for tea in the Waldorf Hotel, where we sing, quietly but with pleasure, the old standards together.

  The day after Freddy Fairweather was arrested, Henry brought a brief into my room. ‘Good news at last, Mr Rumpole,’ he said. ‘R. v. Denis Timson. Receiving stolen DVDs. It should be interesting. You won’t get cases like that from our so-called Marketing Director.’ But I have to say, it was to the Marketing Director I owed my greatest debt of gratitude when I came back to the land of the living and solved the mystery of the Primrose Path Home.

  Rumpole and the New Year’s Resolutions

  ‘Offer her your seat, Rumpole.’ These were the instructions of my wife Hilda, known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed. ‘Have you forgotten your New Year’s resolution?’

  ‘It’s only New Year’s Eve,’ I complained. We were on a crowded tube train on our way south of the river. ‘The resolutions don’t come into force until tomorrow.’ I was rather fond of my seat. Seats were in short supply and I had laid claim to mine as soon as we got on.

  ‘You’d better start now and get into practice. Go over and offer that woman your seat.’

  The woman in question seemed to be surrounded by as many children as the one who lived in a shoe. There were perhaps a dozen or more, scattered about the carriage, laughing, shouting, quarrelling, reluctantly sharing sweets, bombarding her for more as she hung to a strap. They were of assorted sexes and colours, mainly in the ten-to-thirteen-year-old bracket. I thought she might have been a schoolteacher taking them to some improving play or concert. But as I approached her I got a whiff of a perfume that seemed, even to my untutored nose, an expensive luxury for a schoolteacher. Another noticeable thing about her was a white lock, a straight line like a dove’s feather across black hair. She was also, and I thought this unusual, wearing gloves of a colour to match her suit.

  ‘Excuse me.’ The train had picked up speed and gave a sudden lurch which, although I had my feet planted firmly apart, almost toppled me. I put out a hand and grabbed an arm clothed in soft velvet.

  The woman was engaged in urgent conversation with a small boy, who, while asking her whether they were getting out at the next station, seemed to be offering her something, perhaps some sort of note or message, which she took from him with a smile. Then she turned to me with an expression of amused concern. ‘I say,’ she said, ‘are you all right?’

  ‘I’m not doing badly,’ I reassured her, ‘but I just wanted to make sure you were all right.’

  ‘Yes, of course I am. But shouldn’t you sit down?’

  ‘No, no.’ I felt the situation sliding out of control. ‘Shouldn’t you sit down?’ Her smile was about to turn into laughter. ‘I’ve come to offer you my seat.’

  ‘Please don’t! Why don’t you go back and sit on it? Your need is obviously far greater than mine. Anyway, we’re all getting out at the Oval.’

  It was an embarrassing moment. I knew how Saint George might have felt if, when he was about to release the beautiful princess, she’d told him to go home and that she was far happier tied up to a tree with the dragon.

  ‘Your first gentlemanly act, Rumpole,’ Hilda was unforgiving when I returned to my seat, ‘and y
ou couldn’t pull it off.’

  We climbed up from the bowels of the earth into the moderately fresh air of fashionable Kennington. The street was full on New Year’s Eve, crowded with faces lit by the strip lights in front of betting shops and pizza parlours. Collars were turned up and hands deep in pockets on a cold end to the year during which I had undergone a near-death experience. This had led to my return to Chambers and solving - a certain sign that a full complement of marbles had been returned to me - the complicated mystery of the Primrose Path.

  At the corner of the street, where Luci Gribble, the Chambers’ new Director of Marketing and Administration, was giving the New Year’s Eve party to which we had been invited, I saw, in a dark doorway, somebody sleeping. This in itself was no surprise. In enough London doorways tattered sleeping bags were being unrolled, newspapers folded in for extra cover, as the occupying army of the homeless camped for the night. But in this particular doorway a large dog was curled up and, embracing it, as though for warmth, was a pale-faced boy, about twelve years old.

  Of course I stopped, of course I told Hilda we should do something. But, again of course, like all the passers-by on that cold New Year’s evening, we did nothing.

  ‘We don’t know the full story, Rumpole.’ She Who Must was happily free from doubt. ‘He’s probably with someone. Perhaps they’re coming back for him.’

  ‘Coming back from where?’ I asked her.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know. How can we know the whole history of everyone who’s sheltering in a doorway? Now, are we going to this party we’ve come all this way for, or aren’t we?’

  I don’t blame Hilda in the least for this. I blame myself for going on, down the dark street of small, Victorian houses, to Luci’s party, while the picture of the pale boy sleeping curled round a stray dog was left hanging in my mind.