Rumpole and the Primrose Path

by John Mortimer

  One memorable day, Ballard appeared in my room with a look of sublime satisfaction and the air of a born commander about to issue battle orders. I have to say that he had smartened up a good deal since I let him know that our Director of Marketing and Administration nursed tender feelings for him. He had invested in a new suit, his hair was more dashingly trimmed by a Unisex Stylist, and he arrived in a chemical haze of aftershave which happily evaporated during the course of the day.

  ‘This, Rumpole,’ he told me, ‘will probably be the most famous case of my career. The story, you’ll have to admit, is quite sensational.’

  ‘What’s happened, Ballard?’ I had no wish to fuel Soapy Sam’s glowing self-satisfaction. ‘What’ve you landed now? Another seven days before the rating tribunal?’

  ‘I have been offered, Rumpole,’ the man was blissfully unaware of any note of sarcasm; he was genuinely proud of his eventful days in Court with rateable values, ‘the leading brief for the defence in R. v. Durden. It is, of course, tragic that a fine police officer should fall so low.’

  Of course, I realized that the case called for a Q C (Queer Customer is what I call them) and, as I have said, that the defendant policeman would never turn to Rumpole in a time of trouble. I couldn’t help, however, feeling a momentary stab of jealousy at the thought of Ballard landing such a front-page, sensational cause célèbre.

  ‘He hasn’t fallen low yet.’ I thought it right to remind our Head of Chambers of the elementary rules of our trade. ‘And he won’t until the Jury come back to Court and pronounce him guilty. It’s your job to make sure they never do that.’

  ‘I know, Rumpole.’ Soapy Sam looked enormously brave. ‘I realize I have taken on an almost superhuman task and a tremendous responsibility. But I’ve been able to do you a good turn.’

  ‘What sort of good turn, exactly?’ I was doubtful about Ballard’s gifts, but then he told me.

  ‘You see, the Commander went to a local solicitor, Henry Crozier - we were at university together - and Henry knew that Durden wouldn’t want any flashy sort of clever-dick, defence Q C. The sort he’s spoken out against so effectively on the television.’

  ‘You mean he picked you because you’re not a clever dick?’

  ‘Dependable, Rumpole. And, I flatter myself, trusted by the Courts. And as I believe your practice has slowed down a bit since ...’

  ‘You mean since I died?’

  ‘Since you came back to us, I persuaded Henry Crozier to give you the Junior brief. Naturally, in a case of this importance, I shall do most of it myself. If the chance arises you might be able to call some formal, undisputed evidence. And of course you’ll take a note of my cross-examination. You’ll be capable of that, won’t you?’

  ‘My near-death experience has left me more than capable of conducting the most difficult trial.’

  ‘Don’t worry, old fellow.’ Soapy Sam was smiling at me in a way I found quite unendurable. ‘You won’t be called on to do anything like that.’

  As I have said, Commander Durden’s patch was an area not far from London, and certain important villains had moved into it when London’s East End was no longer the crime capital. They ran chains of minicab firms, clubs and wine bars, they were shadowy figures behind Thai restaurants and garden centres. They dealt in hard drugs and protection rackets in what may have seemed, to a casual observer, to be the heart of Middle England. And no one could have been more Middle English than Doctor Petrus Wakefield, who carried on his practice in Chivering. This had once been a small market town with a broad main street, and had now had its heart ripped out to make way for a pedestrian precinct with a multi-storey car park, identical shops and strict regulations against public meetings or yobbish behaviour.

  Doctor Wakefield, I was to discover, was a pillar of this community, tall, good-looking, in his fifties. He was a leading light in the Amateur Dramatic Society, chairman of various charities and the doting husband of Judy, pretty, blonde and twenty years his junior. Their two children, Simon and Sarah, were high achievers at a local private school. Nothing could have been more quietly successful, some might even say boring, than the Wakefields’ lives up to the moment when, so it was alleged, Commander Bob Durden took out a contract on the doctor’s life.

  The local police force, as local forces did, relied on a body of informers, many of whom came with long strings of previous convictions attached to them, to keep them abreast of the crimes and misdemeanours which took place in this apparently prosperous and law-abiding community. According to my instructions, the use of police informers hadn’t been entirely satisfactory. There was a suspicion that some officers had been using them to form relationships with local villains, to warn them of likely searches and arrests and to arrange, in the worst cases, for a share of the spoils.

  Commander Bob Durden was commended in the local paper ‘for the firm line he was taking and the investigation he was carrying out into the rumours of police corruption’. One of the informers involved was a certain Len ‘the Silencer’ Luxford, so called because of his old connections with quietened firearms, but who had, it seemed, retired from serious crime and started a window-cleaning business in Chivering. He was still able occasionally to pass on information, heard in pubs and clubs from his old associates, to the police.

  According to Detective Inspector Mynot, Bob Durden met Len the Silencer in connection with his enquiry into police informers. Unusually, he saw Len alone and without any other officer being present. According to Len’s statement, the Commander then offered him five thousand pounds to ‘silence’ Doctor Wakefield, half down and half on completion of the task, the choice of weapons being left to the Silencer. Instead of carrying out these fatal instructions, Len, who owed, he said, a debt of gratitude to the doctor for the way he’d treated Len’s mother, warned his prospective victim, who reported the whole matter to Detective Inspector Mynot. The case might have been thought slender if Doctor Wakefield hadn’t been able to produce a letter from the Commander he’d found in his wife’s possession, telling Judy how blissfully happy they might be together if Petrus Wakefield vanished from the face of the earth.

  Such were the facts which led to Bob Durden, who thought all Old Bailey defence hacks nothing but spanners in the smooth works of justice, employing me, as Ballard had made painfully clear, as his junior counsel.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you this. Did you write this letter to Doctor Wakefield’s wife?’

  ‘I wrote the letter, yes. She must have left it lying about somewhere.’

  ‘You said you’d both be happy if Doctor Wakefield vanished from the face of the earth. Why did you want that?’

  We were assembled in Ballard’s room for a conference. The Commander, on bail and suspended from his duties on full pay, wearing a business suit, was looking smaller than in his full-dress appearance on the television screen. His solicitor, Mr Crozier, a local man and apparently Ballard’s old university friend, had a vaguely religious appearance to go with his name; that is to say he had a warm smile, a crumpled grey suit and an expression of sadness at the sins of the world. His client’s answer to my leader’s question did absolutely nothing to cheer him up.

  ‘You see, Mr Ballard, we were in love. You write silly things when you’re in love, don’t you?’ The bark of authority we had heard on television was gone. The Commander’s frown had been smoothed away. He spoke quietly, almost gently.

  ‘And send silly e-mails to people who fancy you,’ I hoped Soapy Sam might say, but of course he didn’t. Instead he said, in his best Lawyers as Christians tone of deep solemnity, ‘You, a married man, wrote like that to a married woman?’

  ‘I’m afraid things like that do happen, Mr Ballard. Judy Wakefield’s an extremely attractive woman.’

  There had been a picture of her in the paper, a small, smiling mother of two who had, apparently, fallen in love with a policeman.

  ‘And you, a police commander, wrote in that way to a doctor’s wife?’

  ‘I’m not par
ticularly proud of how we behaved. But as I told you, we were crazy about each other. We just wanted to be together, that was all.’

  Ballard apparently remained deeply shocked, so I ventured to ask a question.

  ‘When you wrote that you’d both be much happier if he vanished from the face of the earth, you weren’t suggesting the doctor would die. You simply meant that he’d get out of her life and leave you to each other. Wasn’t that it?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ The Commander looked grateful. ‘You’re putting it absolutely correctly.’

  ‘That’s all right. It’s just a defence barrister’s way of putting it,’ I was glad to be able to say.

  Soapy Sam, however, still looked displeased. ‘You can be assured,’ he told our client, ‘that I shall be asking you the questions, Mr Durden. Mr Rumpole will be with me to take note of the evidence. I’m quite sure the Jury won’t want to hear sordid details of your matrimonial infidelity. It won’t do our case any good at all if we dwell on that aspect of the matter.’

  Ballard was turning over his papers, preparing to venture on to another subject.

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying so,’ I interrupted, I hoped not too rudely, ‘I think the Commander’s affair with the doctor’s wife the most important factor in the case, whichever way you look at it. I think we need to know all we can about it.’

  At this Ballard gave a thin, watery smile and once again bleated, ‘As I said I shall be asking the questions in Court. Now, we can obviously attack the witness Luxford on the basis of his previous convictions, which include two charges of dishonesty. If you could just take us through your meeting with this man ...’

  ‘Did you use him much as an informer?’ I interrupted, much to Ballard’s annoyance.

  But the Commander answered me, ‘Hardly at all. In fact, I think it was a year or two since he’d given us anything. I thought he’d more or less retired. That was why I was surprised when he came to me with all that information about one of my officers.’

  Durden then went through his conversation with the Silencer, which contained no reference to any proposed assassination. This was made quite clear in our instructions, so I excused myself and slipped out of the door, counted up to two hundred in my head and re-entered to tell Soapy Sam that our Director of Marketing and Administration wished to see him without delay on a matter of extreme urgency. Our leader excused himself, straightened his tie, patted down his hair and made for the door.

  ‘Now then,’ I gave our instructing solicitor some quick instructions as I settled myself in Ballard’s chair, ‘have a look at our client’s bank statements, Mr Crozier. Make sure that an inexplicable two and a half thousand didn’t get drawn out in cash. If the account’s clean tell the prosecution you’ll disclose it providing they give us the good Doctor’s.’

  ‘Very well, Mr Rumpole, but why ... ?’

  ‘Never mind about why for the moment. You might help me a bit more about Doctor Wakefield. I suppose he is pretty well known in the town. Has he practised there for years?’

  ‘A good many years. I think he started off in London. A practice in the East End - Bethnal Green, that’s what he told us. Apparently a pretty rough area. Then he came out to Chivering.’

  ‘To get away from the East End?’

  ‘I don’t know. He always said he enjoyed working there.’

  ‘I’m sure he did. One other thing. He is a pillar of the Dramatic Society, isn’t he? What sort of parts does he play?’

  ‘Oh, leads.’ The solicitor seemed to brighten up considerably when he told me about it. ‘The Chivering Mummers are rather ambitious, you know. We did a quite creditable Othello when it was the A-level play.’

  ‘And the Doctor took the lead? You’re not suggesting he blacked up? That’s not allowed nowadays.’

  ‘Oh, no. The other great part.’

  ‘Of course.’ I made a mental note. ‘That’s most interesting.’

  A minute later, a flustered Ballard returned to the room and I moved politely out of his chair. He hadn’t been able to find Luci with an ‘i’ anywhere in Chambers, a fact which came as no surprise to me at all.

  When I got home to Froxbury Mansions, I happened to mention, over the shepherd’s pie and cabbage, that Commander Bob Durden had admitted to an affair with the Doctor’s attractive and much younger wife.

  ‘That comes as no surprise to me at all,’ Hilda told me. ‘As soon as he appeared on the television I was sure there was something fishy about that man.’

  I was glad to discover that, when it comes to telling lies, Hilda can do it as brazenly as any of my clients.

  In the weeks before the trial, I thought a good deal about Doctor Petrus Wakefield. Petrus was, you will have to admit, a most unusual Christian name, perhaps bestowed by a pedantic Latin master and his classically educated wife on a child they didn’t want to call anything as commonplace as Peter. What bothered me, when I first read the papers in R. v. Durden, was where and when I had heard it before. And then I remembered old cases, forgotten crimes and gang rivalry in a part of London to the east of Ludgate Circus in the days when I was making something of a name for myself as a defender at the Criminal Bar. These thoughts led me to remember Bill ‘Knuckles’ Huckersley, a heavyweight part-time boxer, full-time bouncer, and general factotum of a minicab organization in Bethnal Green. I had done him some service, such as getting his father off a charge of attempting to smuggle breaking-out instruments into Pentonville while Bill was detained there. This unlooked-for success moved him to send me a Christmas card every year and, as I kept his latest among my trophies, I had his address.

  I thought he would be more likely to confide in me than in some professional investigator such as the admirable Fig Newton. Accordingly, I forsook Pommeroy’s one evening after Court and made instead for the Black Spot pub in the Bethnal Green Road. There I sat staring moodily into a pint of Guinness as a bank of slot machines whirred and flashed and loud music filled a room, encrusted with faded gilt, which had become known, since a famous shooting had occurred there in its historic past, as the Luger and Lime Bar.

  Knuckles arrived dead on time, a large, broad-shouldered man who seemed to move as lightly as an inflated balloon across the bar to where I sat. He pulled up a stool beside me and said, ‘Mr Rumpole! This is an honour, sir. I told Dad you’d rang up for a meeting and he was over the moon about it. Eighty-nine now and still going. He sends his good wishes, of course.’

  ‘Send him mine.’ I bought Knuckles the Diet Coke and packet of curry-flavoured crisps he’d asked for and, as he crunched his way through them, the conversation turned to Doctor Petrus Wakefield. ‘Petrus,’ I reminded him. ‘Not a name you’d forget. It seemed to turn up in a number of cases I did in my earlier years.’

  ‘He treated friends of mine.’ Knuckles lifted a fistful of crisps to his mouth and a sound emerged like an army marching through a field of dead bracken. ‘They did get a few injuries in their line of business.’

  ‘What do you mean by that, exactly?’

  ‘Knife wounds. Bullet holes. Some of them I went around with used to attract those sort of complaints. You needed a doctor who wasn’t going to get inquisitive.’

  ‘And that was Doctor Petrus Wakefield?’

  ‘He always gave you the first name, didn’t he? Like he was proud of it. You got any further questions, Mr Rumpole? Don’t they say that in Court?’

  ‘Sometimes. Yes, I have. About Len Luxford. He used to come in here, didn’t he?’

  ‘The old Silencer? He certainly did. He’s long gone, though. Got a window-cleaning business somewhere outside London.’

  ‘Do you see him occasionally?’

  ‘We keep in touch. Quite regular.’

  ‘And he was a patient of Doctor Petrus?’

  ‘We all were.’

  ‘Anything else you can tell me about the Doctor?’

  ‘Nothing much. Except that he was always on about acting.

  He wanted to get the boys in the nick into actin
g plays. I had it when I was in the Scrubs. He’d visit the place and start drama groups. I used to steer clear of them. Lot of dodgy blokes dressing up like females.’

  ‘Did he ever try to teach Len Luxford acting?’

  My source grinned, coughed, covered his mouth with a huge hand, gulped Diet Coke and said with a meaningful grin, ‘Not till recently, I reckon.’

  ‘You mean since they both lived at Chivering?’

  ‘Something like that, yes. Last time I had a drink with Len he told me a bit about it.’

  ‘What sort of acting are you talking about?’ I tried not to show my feeling that my visit to the deafening Luger and Lime Bar was about to become a huge success, but Knuckles had a sudden attack of shyness.

  ‘I can’t tell you that, Mr Rumpole. I honestly can’t remember.’

  ‘Might you remember if we called you as a witness down the Old Bailey?’

  My source was smiling as he answered, but for the first time since I’d known him his smile was seriously alarming. ‘You try and get me as a witness down the Old Bailey and you’ll never live to see me again. Not in this world you won’t.’

  After that I bought him another Diet Coke and then I left him. I’d got something out of Knuckles. Not very much, but something.

  ‘This is one of those unhappy cases, Members of the Jury. One of those very rare cases when a member of the Police Force, in this case a very senior member of the Police Force, seems to have lost all his respect for the law and sets about to plot and plan an inexcusable and indeed a cruel crime.’

  This was Marston Dawlish QC, a large, beefy man, much given to false smiles and unconvincing bonhomie, opening the case for the prosecution to an attentive Jury. On the Bench we had drawn the short straw in the person of the aptly named Mr Justice Graves. A pale, unsmiling figure with hollow cheeks and bony fingers, he sat with his eyes closed as though to shut out the painful vision of a dishonest senior copper.