Rumpole and the Primrose Path

by John Mortimer

The music had grown louder. Bernard handed Christine a ten-pound note, which she slipped neatly into the garter on her bare thigh. Then she was gone, back to slither down the fireman’s pole and wait for another customer.

  We finished our fish and chips. Bonny Bernard decided to invest in another dancer and I set off, through the darkness and with the music pounding in my ears, in search of the Gents’.

  Outside the dining and dancing area, I encountered a maze of shadowy corridors, with lines of unmarked doors. Growing desperate, I pulled open one of them, hoping to strike lucky or at least find someone to ask. I saw no gleaming porcelain and heard no trickling water, all I saw was an untidy, ill-lit room. There was a table full of loaded ashtrays, half-emptied glasses and bits and pieces of abbreviated costumes. Two girls, taking time off, were huddled into sweaters, smoking busily and chatting to another, older woman. She was sitting beside a table lamp with a broken shade, stitching away at some minute article of clothing. At first her face was in the shadows, but as she raised her head to look, in considerable surprise, at me, I had no difficulty in recognizing her as Number Four in the Jury and my number-one fan.

  Before I could ask a question, or even greet her, my arm was seized, and I was yanked back into the passage by a muscular-looking, crop-headed bouncer who had even less appeal than the witness Phelps. He slammed the door and, when I told him I was only looking for the loo, jerked a thumb towards the other side of the passage and grunted, I thought unnecessarily, ‘On your way, peeping Tom. And don’t do any more wandering.’

  ‘Kathleen Brewster!’

  No answer. The Clerk of the Court called again, and, once again, answer came there none. The clerk raised his head, saw the empty number-four place and called her name once more, as though she might have been loitering, gossiping behind some door. But no Kathleen came bustling in, smiling apologetically and then sitting down and looking around as though she’d been waiting a long time and wondered why we didn’t all get on with it.

  Now the clerk was talking to the Judge, probably telling him that no message from Kathleen had been received. I looked up at the public gallery and, as I had somehow suspected, the seat in the front row was empty. The sun-tanned stranger had vanished. Now the assiduous Beetle began the slow process of dealing with the case of a vanished juror. His first thought, naturally, was to adjourn so that we could all drink coffee and await events.

  Adrian Hoddinot went up to discuss such legally important matters as fly fishing and deer stalking with fellow animal-lovers in the Bar Mess. I went to the public canteen, a place which smelled strongly of furniture polish and yesterday’s hot dinners, in the hope of finding the officer in charge of the case alone and accessible to a bit of well-intentioned advice.

  I was lucky; Detective Superintendent Leeming sat at a table with a cup of coffee, carefully unwrapping a KitKat, and seemed grateful for my company.

  ‘Typical, isn’t it, Mr Rumpole? People don’t even take Jury duty seriously any more.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I slurped coffee and longed to light a small cigar. Sadly, the Old Bailey canteen had also been designated a smoke-free zone. ‘Perhaps there are some things in life that are even more important than Jury service.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Leeming paused in the unwrapping of his KitKat. He was a fairly plump officer with a cheerful expression, even when concerned with the most tragic and horrifying crimes. He liked nothing better than press conferences, where he could appear before the television cameras and hint at sensational knowledge which he wasn’t yet at liberty to impart and extraordinary developments which were also, for the moment, under wraps.

  ‘I just mean,’ I was anxious to feed his curiosity, ‘that there might be some surprising news for you to announce to the press. And I could possibly suggest a lead to the vanishing juror.’

  ‘You’ve said nothing to the press about this as yet?’ Leeming was worried.

  ‘I came to you first, naturally.’

  ‘Very wise, Mr Rumpole. Very wise of you indeed to cooperate with us. Surprising news, you say?’

  ‘That might fill tomorrow’s headlines.’

  ‘Go on then, Mr Rumpole. Tell me more.’ He bit into his KitKat then, as though looking forward to an even more nourishing feast of publicity.

  So I told him where I thought he should look, and who he should look for, as soon as possible. He should, I thought, find the missing juror and much else besides.

  ‘We might have something to announce at a press conference, do you think, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘I think you might have quite a lot to announce at a press conference.’

  Some time later, when delays on the Tube had been accounted for and Kathleen’s home number had provided no answer, the Beetle summoned us back into Court and, in the absence of the rest of the Jury, asked if we would agree to go on with a mere eleven good and honest citizens. Adrian Hoddinot, who now seemed desperately anxious to get the whole distressing business over, as he had, he told me, a far more lucrative disputed claim on an insurance company starting on Monday, agreed to dispense with my favourite juror.

  ‘You have no objection to that, have you, Mr Rumpole?’ The Beetle’s eyes swivelled on to me.

  ‘Yes I have, my Lord. A most serious objection.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d let us know what it is?’

  ‘She’s the only person in the Jury box who’s at all likely to vote for my client,’ was what I couldn’t say. Instead I told the Beetle, ‘That particular juror has listened most attentively throughout the case. Indeed, she may well have been more attentive, and have the facts more clearly in mind, than most of the other jurors. It would be a great pity to lose her services because of some minor accident or misunderstanding which may be cleared up by tomorrow morning.’

  ‘It may be.’ The Beetle looked doubtful. ‘Or it may not.’

  ‘Besides which,’ I added for good measure, ‘I understand that the police are making certain enquiries today which may have fruitful results.’

  ‘Enquiries relating to the missing juror?’

  ‘I understand so, my Lord.’

  ‘Is that so?’ the Beetle asked Adrian, who consulted Detective Superintendent Leeming, who whispered a confirmation. Counsel for the Prosecution looked disappointed. His prospects of being free to do a serious money brief on Monday seemed to be fading by the minute.

  ‘I understand there are enquiries being made today, my Lord,’ he agreed, ‘as Mr Rumpole has suggested.’

  ‘Very well, then. Ten-thirty tomorrow morning. But if there’s no further news of Miss Brewster then,’ the Judge was determined, ‘we’ll have to go on with the remaining eleven.’

  So there was a short stay of execution, during which much had to be revealed. I hadn’t told the Beetle a particularly cogent reason for wanting a delay. The month was April and, although we were back at work at the Old Bailey, it was still the school holidays.

  What happened that day at the basement flat in West Heath Road where Pamela McDonnell had lived in happiness with her son Cameron had nothing further to do with me. All I had done was to point D S Leeming in what I hoped was the right direction, and await results.

  Kathleen Brewster, I had discovered from the Jury list, lived in Reddington Gardens, only a short walk from Pamela’s flat in West Heath Road. Kathleen worked at home on translations from and into French, which, it seemed, she spoke fluently. She was also an addict of fringe theatre, and had met Pam at a party in the venue over a pub in Kilburn. She had got to know Cameron and, having no children of her own, took to him greatly. It was she who gave him French lessons, his guitar lessons being in the hands of the elderly member of a once successful rock group who lived in Childs Hill.

  Kathleen had spent the night before her disappearance from the Jury in West Heath Road, where she had put Cameron to bed. Early in the morning, however, the phone rang and a man’s voice announced briskly that he was Cameron’s father and he would be round to collect his son at midday. He wanted
Cameron’s clothes packed and the boy ready to travel. If there were things that couldn’t be easily transported they would be sent for later. The man had then rung off, as though he was in a considerable. hurry and expected his instructions to be carried out to the letter.

  Kathleen was in a panic. She remembered Pam telling her about Cameron’s father, a man with an uncontrollable temper and given to violence, who rarely appeared, but when he did often threatened to take his son away from a ‘world of tarts, ponces and gay actors’ to join him abroad, where the boy would have ‘a chance of mixing with some decent people’ and might be able to look forward to ‘a job with a future in an oil company’. None of these threats had come to anything, but shortly before her death Pamela had heard from a mutual friend that Cameron’s father was about to get married and start a new home in the Middle East. This might, she had told Kathleen, be good news or bad. It would be good if he wanted to acquire a new family and so would forget about Cameron, bad if he wanted Cameron to join him in a new home with a new wife.

  No one had been with Pamela on the night she died. She had put Cameron to bed and that was the last time he had seen his mother. Somehow she must have left the boy sleeping, gone out for a walk on the Heath and met her terrible death. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence when Kathleen was summoned to Jury service and found herself as one of the judges of fact in her friend’s murder trial. All I can tell you is that such coincidences are not unknown. It’s enough to say that she had her suspicions about Pam’s murderer, and such suspicions didn’t include Neville Skeate, the Ninth Day Elamite. For this reason, and this reason alone, she didn’t want Neville convicted. She smiled at me because she feared the guilt lay elsewhere, not, I’m afraid, because she was overcome by the charm and power of my advocacy.

  But on that morning when Cameron was to be taken from her, Kathleen Brewster forgot the trial. She had no time to worry about her failure to appear in the Jury box. She phoned Dick Catford, the ageing guitarist, and Christine, who had got home at four a.m. from the Candy Crocodile but was glad to be called up for the protection of Pam’s son. Kathleen also rang the local police, warning them of the proposed abduction of a child. The weary voice listening to her at first said it was a matrimonial dispute with which the police couldn’t become concerned. Later she was able to get in touch with another department, which promised to send a social worker, who never arrived. Cameron was collected by another friend from the Candy Crocodile, who offered to take him for lunch at McDonald’s and then to The Lord of the Rings at the Odeon Swiss Cottage. Short of nailing up the doors and borrowing a shotgun, Kathleen and her friends felt they could do no more.

  Access to Pam’s flat was to be discovered down a dark and slippery flight of steps from the front of a large Edwardian house. A door in the area led into her basement flat. At a quarter to twelve, Christine and Dick the guitarist were waiting behind an open bedroom door, while Kathleen stood bravely by the entrance. At exactly twelve o’clock a man came down the steps into this area.

  She opened the door to him, and he was exactly whom she had feared. The man she thought she might have been able to recognize from a half-forgotten photograph Pam had once showed her, the man she had sat opposite in Court and had looked up at ever since the trial began. He was the man with the helmet of fair hair and the fashionable suit, the brilliant cufflinks and the expensive watch, and, as I couldn’t help noticing when he picked up his change from the pub counter, the large and powerful hands.

  What happened then became the subject of witness statements and depositions, and some of the words may have been challenged, confused and misremembered. But I’m certain that the man, the father, asked if Cameron was ready to go, and sure that Kathleen told him that the boy wasn’t there and wouldn’t be handed over. At which the well-dressed, up to then quietly spoken lawyer with a Middle Eastern oil company was maddened with rage. He shouted, and what he shouted was clearly audible to the waiting witnesses in the bedroom. ‘She wouldn’t agree to let me have him. And you know what happened to her! She said she’d stop him leaving the country. You want a bit of the same, do you?’ His face was distorted with fury, the face that Pam had seen for a last time when, helpless with rage and frustration, he had taken her by the throat as they walked together on Hampstead Heath.

  His hands were on Kathleen’s neck when Christine and Dick the guitarist came down the passage towards him. He turned, and saw Detective Superintendent Leeming, with his Inspector and Sergeant, coming down the steps, and he dropped his hands. Surrounded by witnesses, he started on the long legal journey which ended in his taking Neville Skeate’s place in the Old Bailey dock as the true killer of Pamela McDonnell.

  ‘After he killed Pamela he went back abroad. It was only when he heard they’d arrested someone else he thought it was safe to come back to England. He took risks, of course he took risks. He turned up at the Old Bailey every day to make sure that the Ninth Day Elamite was convicted. It was when I’d cross-examined the Brixton grass that he thought Neville might, just possibly, be acquitted. So he decided to grab his son and shoot back to the Arab Emirates.’

  ‘But why did Mrs Brewster want to meet at the flat? She’d sent the boy away. Why didn’t she just stay clear of the whole business?’

  ‘I think she hoped he’d give himself away. She wanted him out of Cameron’s life for a long time. She’d decided to solve the mystery of Pamela’s death. And she felt there was something in life more important, even, than Jury service.’

  ‘What do you mean, Rumpole?

  ‘I’m talking about a child. A young boy, accomplished on the guitar, whose father had killed his mother. I think Kathleen would have done anything for him. Of course, she wanted Neville Skeate to get off during the trial, so the real murderer could be convicted. She should have left that to Rumpole.’

  ‘Nonsense! You told me you thought you were on a loser.’

  ‘That’s what Cameron’s father hoped. But I disappointed him. No one should ever underestimate Rumpole, when he’s doing a murder alone and without a leader.’

  But Hilda had lost her unusual interest in my work and she was smiling at some other thought. ‘I’m afraid I’ll be out again this evening.’

  ‘Let me guess. Young Tom needs a babysitter?’

  ‘He’s so clever. He calls me Mrs Rumpy!’

  Is that a sign of high intellectual attainment, I wondered? But of course I didn’t say it. I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be perfectly all right.’

  ‘You won’t make that joke about lap dancing again, will you, Rumpole?’

  ‘No, Hilda. Never again.’

  My lap-dancing days were over, and I tried to keep any note of regret from my voice.

  After the long legal process ahead, Neville Skeate was liberated,but I never heard that he returned to the Candy Crocodile.I believe his voice was still heard from time to time at various other sinks of iniquity, condemning London to destruction by fire and brimstone. But his abuse had become quieter, his fellow Elamites had drifted away, and life in our city of the plain went on unrepentant.

  Rumpole Redeemed

  ‘By the way, Rumpole, have you been keeping up with your exercises at the Lysander Club?’ The cross-examination started, as the best do, in a quiet and casual manner; but I sniffed danger.

  ‘Of course,’ I answered boldly and then, to cover myself, added, ‘whenever I get the chance.’

  ‘So what is it that stops you going regularly?’

  ‘Pressure of work.’ I kept it vague, but hoped that would settle the matter.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Hilda sounded unconvinced. ‘I thought I heard you complain about the shortage of work lately, the rare appearance of briefs. And yet Dermot Fletcher tells me he never sees you on the bicycle!’

  I quietly cursed the grey-haired sports commentator whose small boy had become Hilda’s favourite person. Weren’t there football matches, had cricket been abandoned so that this man could spend his life noticing my absence from the stationary bicyc
le?

  ‘I get round to the Lysander whenever I can.’ It was time to call my best evidence. ‘If you look at the book you’ll see I’m signed in.’

  ‘I have looked at the book. And I’ve seen you signed in by Luci Gribble. Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me how many times you went to the club with Luci?’

  ‘Off and on. Look, I’d better be getting down to Chambers. See what’s around. I believe Henry’s got me a dangerous driving.’

  ‘Don’t prevaricate, Rumpole.’ It was a word Hilda’s father had liked to use in Court; I suppose he sometimes took it home with him. At least she didn’t say ‘Don’t fence with me!’ ‘I have spoken to Luci Gribble.’

  That was it, then. I stood and watched my defence collapse like a tent in a tornado.

  ‘I have spoken to Luci Gribble,’ Hilda repeated, ‘and she had to admit that on most of the occasions when you asked her to sign you in, you didn’t join her. You were notably absent, Rumpole, but no doubt shortening your life overdosing on red wine in that favourite wine bar of yours.’

  ‘Can I change my plea?’ I took a quick legal decision. ‘Guilty.’

  ‘Of course you are. What can we do about you, Rumpole?’ she sighed heavily. My case was clearly hopeless.

  ‘I can only say,’ I started to mitigate, ‘I do find bicycling nowhere to Caribbean music, even with an occasional word from your friend the sports commentator, deeply boring.’

  ‘Boring? Oh, I’m so sorry.’ Hilda had now adopted the retort contemptuous. ‘I’m sorry I can’t provide a few murders, or a bank robbery, or a nice long fraud to keep you entertained, Rumpole. You can’t live entirely for pleasure. You’ve got to put up with a bit of boredom occasionally, if you want to keep yourself alive. So it’s entirely up to you. I can no longer take any responsibility for you.’

  At which she left the kitchen where breakfast, together with much else, was over. Shortly after that I heard the sound of angry hoovering from the sitting-room. My case of non-compliance with exercise requirements was clearly lost and I was free to go.