Rumpole and the Primrose Path

by John Mortimer

  The most encouraging way of approaching Neville Skeate’s case was to consider the prosecution evidence. There were plenty of witnesses to the death threats directed particularly at Pamela outside the Candy Crocodile, but none of the act itself. He had been identified as having been often seen on Hampstead Heath, where it seems he went not to run for exercise but to denounce, whenever he could, the male homosexuals who met, and occasionally made love, in certain remote and wooded areas. He agreed that he had once or twice seen Pamela jogging, but denied he had ever accosted or threatened her on the heath. When the trainers and tracksuit trousers he wore on such rural visits were inspected, minute particles of sandy soil similar to that where Pamela was found were discovered clinging to the soles and sides of his shoes. So the case against Neville Skeate seemed to come down to his threats specifically directed at the dead woman and his possible presence at the scene of the crime.

  ‘You called her the Whore of Babylon?’ I asked him when we met in Brixton Prison.

  ‘On many occasions, when I was outside the house of slime pits.’

  ‘You promised her an early death?’

  ‘I did. And my promise was fulfilled.’

  ‘Because you killed her?’

  Did I have a hope, contrary to all my principles as a defending hack, that he would admit it and have to plead guilty and we would soon be rid of him? But, for better or for worse, we remained in business as he said, ‘No, Mr Rumpole. I never killed her.’

  ‘Would you be prepared to say you greatly regret her death?’ I’d hoped for some reasonable words he might repeat to the Jury; but I hoped in vain.

  ‘Do I regret the death of weeds that are thrown on the bonfire? No, I don’t regret her death, Mr Rumpole. In fact, I rejoice in it.’

  ‘You think she deserved to die because she went, what do they call it, lap dancing?’

  ‘She behaved as I named her. The Whore of Babylon.’

  ‘How do you know? I’ve never seen anyone lap dancing. Have you?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t.’

  ‘So you would have condemned her to death for something you know absolutely nothing about. Is that what you’re really saying?’

  ‘I know very well what she did. She revelled in it. That’s what I know. She revelled in the sins of the city.’

  ‘So she had to die?’

  ‘Not my decision, Mr Rumpole. The decision of one greater than I.’

  ‘What the prosecution are saying is that you might have taken her life in your hands and strangled Pamela.’

  ‘I might have, Mr Rumpole. I might have done anything. But those above me had other plans for her. That is all I have to say.’

  I looked at my client. What on earth was I to do about him? I had never, in all the long years I had spent round the criminal Courts, come across a customer for whom I felt more good, old-fashioned, honest loathing. So the answer to my question was, of course, that I must defend him to the very best of my ability.

  There seemed to me to have been a time, in my boyhood, when bicycling was a source of pleasure. Not struggling up a hill, of course, not pedalling through rain with frozen fingers on a slithery road, but coasting down a gradual incline on a spring morning with a light breeze behind you and the three-speed Raleigh ticking happily. This was an experience to be ranked with the first gulp of Chateau Thames Embankment after a satisfactory verdict for a grateful client. But bicycling in the Lysander Club was a different story. There was no fresh breeze, no bright green leaves of spring, merely air conditioning, a pervading smell of massage oil and piped Caribbean music. What was worse was that after the most prolonged and industrious pedalling you found yourself going nowhere at all. It was a most frustrating experience, only to be compared to conducting a trial in an empty courtroom, with no Judge, no Jury, and absolutely no end in view.

  There was a little clock on the handlebars of the bike, which I was instructed to keep flickering above a certain mark. It was, I’m afraid, dropping like my spirits, as my journey began to feel like a long path uphill to infinity, when a voice behind me called, ‘Well done, Rumpole! We’ll have you in the Tour de France yet.’

  I turned to see Luci with an ‘i’, wearing thick leggings as though equipped for a hike through Outer Mongolia.

  ‘Luci! You’re not a fellow sufferer at the Lysander Club?’ It was a Saturday morning, and an odd way, I thought, for anyone, including me, to spend their day off work.

  ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’ She had taken to repeating these three affirmations rapidly, like machine-gun fire. ‘I persuaded Hilda to join at the last Chambers party. We have such fun here together, whenever I can get time off.’

  ‘Fun?’ I was, I must confess, puzzled. ‘You have fun with Hilda?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t you?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. She went off shopping. She said she’d feed me on nothing but organically grown rocket salad and vegetarian rissoles unless I promised to spend at least an hour in the gym. I suppose you might call that “fun”.’

  ‘It’s because she loves you, Rumpole. She wants you to keep fit, now that it seems you’re not going to die. Come on, I’ll buy you a coffee.’

  I had dismounted, perhaps in the hope of some such invitation. The bike didn’t need parking, or pushing round to the sheds, and I left it standing, ready for the next traveller with nowhere to go.

  I sat with Luci in a small bar where people in white dressing-gowns were whispering into their mobile phones and reading newspapers. I was trying to grapple with a new thought Luci had put in my mind. I had assumed (was it too rashly?) that Hilda wanted to send me bicycling because that would prevent me slinking off to Pommeroy’s under the pretence of having to pick up a brief in Chambers, or as an exercise in the power of her will to unfix my determination. Had I, for too long, totally misunderstood She Who Must Be Obeyed? I drank coffee that was so weak it needed a long go on the bicycle machine, and changed the subject. ‘All going well in the Marketing of Chambers, is it?’ It had to be one of the dullest questions I had ever asked.

  ‘All right. Henry still looks at me as though I was in there to pinch the cheques and insult the solicitors. Sam Ballard’s as charming as always ...’

  I thought about that. Could someone who found Soapy Sam charming be trusted in her interpretation of Hilda’s motives?

  ‘Erskine-Brown’s started to hug me for longer than it takes to show corporate solidarity and wants to take me out to lunch. Oh, hello, Dermot. You’re looking good!’

  The man she addressed as Dermot had a red face, against which his hair and moustache seemed as white as the driven snow. He was wearing scarlet shorts and a T-shirt which said, ‘My wife went to Eilat and all she bought me was this lousy T-shirt’. I couldn’t tell from a casual glance whether he was as good as Luci thought. He may have been a fraudster with an engaging appearance.

  ‘Hilda’s not here.’ Dermot stated an obvious fact.

  ‘Not today,’ Luci told him. ‘This is Hilda’s husband. Rumpole, this is Dermot. He does the sport on Thamesway Radio.’

  ‘Pity, that!’ He gave me a quick smile, a flash of pure white dentures. ‘We have a lot of fun when Hilda’s around, don’t we, Luci?’

  ‘A few laughs, yes.’

  ‘A few laughs?’ I was longing for further particulars, but Dermot, looking at me as though my grey flannels and striped shirt were in some way humorous, said, ‘Oh, you’re the legal beagle, aren’t you? The chap who defends all those crooks.’

  ‘He’s defending that man for the murder on Hampstead Heath,’ Luci told him.

  ‘That lovely girl!’ Dermot looked at me with stern disapproval. ‘And that creepy little bastard strangled her!’

  ‘I’m not sure doing that case does much good for the image of Chambers.’ Luci was equally disapproving.

  ‘Of course it does. It shows the world that even creepy little bastards need defending, just as much as beautiful girls, sports commentators or anyone else. And the creepier they are, the more
they need help. They’re innocent until they’re proved guilty.’ I had said it all before, but I’d go on saying it to anyone who didn’t understand.

  ‘I suppose you think you’ll get him off.’ Dermot the sports commentator sounded contemptuous.

  ‘I may do,’ I told him. But the day before, we had been served an additional statement which made creepy Neville’s chances of walking free considerably less likely.

  In a bizarre world of fire and brimstone, cities fallen into sin, a beautiful woman condemned to an arbitrary death, a child left motherless and a lonely clerk acting in what he conceived to be the service of a vengeful God, Court Number One at the Old Bailey seemed, on the morning the trial began, an oasis of sanity. It was presided over by Mr Justice Sloper, known as Beetle because of the strong lenses which gave his eyes a bulging and insect-like appearance. He did his best not to interrupt and was reasonably civil to barristers. I remember him as a prosecution Junior in the Penge Bungalow Murders, when we used to buy each other a Guinness during the lunchtime adjournment, much to the annoyance of our clients who thought, quite wrongly, that we were doing a deal behind their backs.

  Now the prosecution was in the hands of Adrian Hoddinot, a tall and languid learned friend, who always said he merely stayed at the Bar for the sake of keeping his Great Dane, Ophelia, in the comfortable state to which she had become accustomed. He was high on my list of decent prosecutors and had, in fact, been a considerable help to me in the case of the Teenage Werewolf. The Jury looked seriously impressed by the horror and seriousness of the case they had read about in the papers; but I had no reason to think they wouldn’t listen to anything the defence might have to offer. All this is only to say that the trial of Neville Skeate was about to be conducted by a reasonable body of men and women, the only representative of the fire-and-brimstone attitude to justice being the quiet clerk sitting in the dock with his great hands neatly folded.

  The Court clerk read out the names of the jurors and they answered to them briskly. My future friend and ally was Number Four in the Jury box, sitting between a grey-haired man with a slight limp, who might have been a retired school-master, and a fidgety young man in an unstructured suit, perhaps a dealer in options and futures, who was no doubt counting the money he was missing in the City and wishing he was elsewhere. Number Four was asked if her name was Kathleen Brewster, to which she answered with a smiling ‘Yes’ as though it were her pleasure and privilege to be there. With the Jury roll-call over, she settled down to listen to Adrian Hoddinot as he opened the case for the prosecution.

  After describing the finding of the body, and telling the Jury about the murdered girl, the prosecutor started to deal with the case against my client. ‘The defendant Skeate ...’ No doubt determined to be fair, the dog-loving Adrian still couldn’t keep a note of anger and contempt out of his voice, ‘adopted the habit of shouting abuse in such places as gay bars and massage parlours ...’

  At this point I thought it right to rise and offer an objection. ‘My Lord,’ I said, ‘may I, in all humility -’ (a meaningless phrase, inserted merely to give me time to decide how to frame my objection. I didn’t feel in the least humble that morning), ‘may I submit that this case has nothing whatever to do with gay bars and massage parlours. A person may object to many institutions, in my case it might be banks and fast-food outlets, but such strong feelings might well fall far short of the tendency to murder.’

  I saw Kathleen Brewster stifle a giggle with the back of her hand. Beetle Sloper glanced at her from the Bench and seemed impressed with the success of my objection with a front-row juror. ‘Yes, Mr Hoddinot, I think Mr Rumpole has a point there. Perhaps you should confine your evidence to the place of entertainment where it is suggested that death threats were uttered against Pamela McDonnell. The Candy Caterpillar.’

  ‘Crocodile, my Lord.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘It’s called the Candy Crocodile.’

  ‘Yes, of course it is.’ The Beetle seemed only mildly irritated in an exchange typical of the vague misunderstandings which haunt all criminal trials. What was more unusual was what I noticed in other parts of the Court. Recovered from her giggle, Kathleen was looking up at the public gallery, which was well filled, as were the press benches. The character who seemed to have attracted her attention was a fair-haired man, perhaps in his thirties, wearing a dark suit but with a tan which looked as though he might have lived in a climate sunnier than that of London, the city of sin. He was sitting in the first row of the public gallery. Listening carefully and taking notes, he seemed to have some deep interest in the trial.

  ‘Did you hear my client call Pamela McDonnell a Slime Pit?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  ‘And the Whore of Babylon?’

  ‘I believe Babylon did come into it.’

  ‘Was there a good deal about smiting the cities of sin?’

  ‘He was threatening her. There were a lot of words. I didn’t pay all that much attention to them.’

  I was cross-examining the doorman and bouncer of the Candy Crocodile. Number Four juror, Kathleen Brewster, was watching my performance with approval.

  ‘Perhaps you could help us about this, Mr Henry Parkin.’ I gave the bouncer his full name. ‘Wasn’t a great deal of what he was saying quoted from the Old Testament of the Bible?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that. It sounded like threats to me.’

  ‘A great deal of the Old Testament does consist of threats, does it not, Mr Rumpole?’ The Beetle on the Bench was doing his best to follow the evidence.

  ‘In a historical context, my Lord. There may be some mention of smiting and destroying with fire and brimstone, but I don’t believe anyone feels threatened when they hear it read out in church on Sundays.’

  My fan in the Jury box gave me a small chuckle, although most of her fellow jurors remained stony-faced.

  ‘What I’m suggesting is that Neville Skeate was denouncing London as a wicked city, in a general sort of way.’

  ‘He has told us,’ the Beetle Judge was determined, unfortunately for my client, to see that the whole of the bouncer’s evidence was remembered, ‘that he heard your client threatening to kill Pamela McDonnell.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s when I punched him.’ My fan was no longer smiling and most of her fellow jurors looked as though they approved strongly of the bouncer’s reaction to the Ninth Day Elamite’s sermon.

  ‘Are you sure you heard him threaten to kill her?’ I was trying to make the best of a bad job.

  ‘I heard that. Yes.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever heard these words used by people who mean nothing of the sort?’

  ‘What’re you saying, exactly?’ Mr Parkin was puzzled.

  ‘A mother angry with her child may say, “I’ll kill you if you don’t sit still on the bus.” Or someone at work, “I’ll kill that plumber if he doesn’t turn up this afternoon.”’

  I looked at the Jury box. Number Four seemed to be trying hard to find this part of my cross-examination convincing, but she was the only one. Mr Parkin the bouncer was more helpful.

  ‘I suppose I’ve heard something like that. At times.’

  ‘And let’s be quite clear about this. You never saw him attack her, or even touch her in any way?’

  ‘He never touched her so far as I could see. No.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Parkin.’

  I sat down. What more could I do? The dog-loving Adrian Hoddinot got up for a cunning re-examination.

  ‘Mr Parkin, Mr Rumpole has suggested that some people might use the words “I’ll kill you” without them necessarily meaning much at all.’

  ‘I heard that, yes.’

  ‘Is the difference between the child on the bus and the plumber and Pamela McDonnell that she actually ended up dead?’

  Of course, I objected. Of course, the Judge disapproved. But the prosecutor had made an obvious point. Well, you can’t possibly win them all down the Old Bailey, but Nu
mber Four in the Jury box looked sadly disappointed.

  Through all this, Neville Skeate sat in the dock motionless, his great crude hands folded in his lap, his face only betraying the satisfied smile of those who feel sure they have God on their side.

  I had an easier task with the soil expert found by the forensic science department of the Metropolitan Police to report on the specks of dirt found on the soles of Neville Skeate’s trainers.

  ‘There were no footprints that matched his shoes found near the body?’

  ‘It had rained in the night. I understand there were no clear footprints.’ The forensic witness was young and considerably overweight. He had a thin, reedy voice and the bright, enquiring eyes of someone who spends their time examining minute particles of dirt in the hope of finding some evidence of guilt.

  ‘You say there was some soil and grass on Skeate’s shoes?’

  ‘He had been standing on grass, yes.’

  ‘A fascinating discovery!’ I congratulated him. ‘So he might have been standing on any lawn or bit of grassland in England? Not much of a help in this enquiry, is it?’

  ‘No. But the soil. It was acidic clay, basically.’

  ‘Ah yes, of course. The soil. Can you tell us how many spots in Greater London or the Home Counties might have similar patches of acidic clay soil?’

  ‘Not all that many, perhaps, with exactly the same pH acidity figure of 5.5. Not in precisely those proportions.’

  ‘Not all that many. But some?’

  ‘Perhaps some.’

  ‘So it’s possible that Neville Skeate had been standing on some of these other patches of sandy soil, and was nowhere near Hampstead Heath when Pamela McDonnell met her untimely death? Can we rule that out?’

  ‘I suppose,’ the young master of the speck of dirt had to admit, ‘we can’t rule that out entirely.’

  ‘Bricks without straw,’ I had to tell Bonny Bernard when we emerged for lunchtime adjournment from Court Number One.