‘I don’t suppose you’d get Nick off if he’d beaten you to death with a golf club.’
‘If he’d beaten me to death I’d scarcely be in a position to stand up and defend him.’ Rumpole had the intolerable expression he puts on when he thinks he’s said something clever, so I ignored this and opened another window.
‘And, by the way, Danny’s invited me to dine with him at the Sheridan Club next Thursday. He said he wanted to get to know me better.’
‘If that’s what he wants, he’d be better off talking to me. At least he’d get an unbiased opinion.’
‘Oh, you’re coming too.’
‘You mean, he’s invited me?’
‘“And do bring your lovely wife.” I assume it was you he had in mind.’
‘But, Rumpole! You hate going to dinner at the Sheridan Club. You say it is full of pompous bores and . . .’
‘Hilda! We all have to make sacrifices if we are to rise to the top in the legal profession, and for the sake of a brief from Newcombe, Pouncefort & Delaney, I would willingly rent a dog-collar and go to dinner with the Archbishop of Canterbury. My God! There’s a wind whistling round my knees that must have come straight from the Ural Mountains.’
‘I told you, Rumpole. If you’re feeling cold, then go and put on warm clothing.’
He left me then, his lips forming those syllables which, I had come to understand, spelt out She Who Must Be Obeyed.
‘I’m sorry to drag you to my club, which I’m afraid you’ll find desperately dull, Hilda. My excuse is, we need girls like you to lighten the old place up occasionally. Don’t we, Horace?’ Danny fished the bottle of Chablis out of the ice-bucket and considerately refilled my glass when I was only halfway through the potted shrimps.
‘I really don’t know.’ I think it was the first time I’d known Rumpole short of an answer to a question. ‘I’m not a member here.’
‘Not a member here?’ Danny seemed genuinely surprised. ‘We must do something about that. Or are you against Horace joining the Sheridan, Hilda? Do you want to keep an eye on him at home?’
‘I wouldn’t mind in the least. Life at home’s far more peaceful without him. That’s provided he can spare time from his other port of call.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Pommeroy’s Wine Bar.’
‘I don’t know it, I’m afraid,’ Danny smiled. ‘But it sounds interesting.’ I felt a sudden affection for a lawyer who’d never heard of Pommeroy’s. ‘Is that white Burgundy all right for you?’ he was asking Rumpole with what I thought was admirable consideration. To which my husband replied, if you can believe this, Dodo, ‘Thanks. If you’re asking, I’d rather have a slurp of the red. A couple of slurps, if that’s at all possible.’ I suppose I should count myself lucky that Rumpole and I don’t go out to dinner very much.
When the red wine came Rumpole said thoughtfully, ‘From the photographs it’s obvious there’d been a hell of a fight in the hall. The grandfather clock was knocked over and stopped at ten forty-five. You noticed that, of course?’
‘Horace, please! We didn’t come here to talk shop.’ Danny put a hand on his Counsel’s sleeve and I noticed how clean and well-manicured his fingernails were, something you could hardly say for Rumpole. ‘We came here to get to know each other. Thee are some pretty dusty old members here, Hilda. But we do boast of quite decent pictures. There’ – he turned to look at the portrait of a man in a wig, smiling in what I thought rather a condescending way, over the mantelpiece – ‘Richard Brinsley himself, a true wit like you, Horace, and a man of many love affairs.’ Not like Horace, I thought. I began to wonder about Danny ... I must confess, Dodo, he seemed a great deal more interesting than any other lawyer I’d met. He had come alone, and there had been no mention of a Mrs Newcombe. Later I remember him saying that he dreaded going back to his empty flat. ‘Since I lost Deirdre it’s been lonely. I mean, you can’t have much of a conversation with the television. Television is full of discussion programmes, but you can’t discuss anything with it. It’s not like a wife. It never answers back.’ When Danny said this, I had to fight a curious impulse to put my arm round his shoulder to cheer him up. But, of course, I couldn’t do that. Not in the Sheridan Club, not with Rumpole sitting there slurping his claret and asking a really charming Indian waiter if he had anything remotely resembling a toothpick about him.
‘And over there,’ Danny said, ‘is the portrait of Elizabeth Linley, whom Sheridan loved. There’s a difference in years, of course, but don’t you think, Horace, she has a distinct look of Hilda about her?’ Rumpole looked surprised and said, ‘No.’
At the weekend Rumpole and I went shopping in Safeway’s. I’d honestly rather he’d stayed at home but he’d become strangely attentive since our dinner at the Sheridan and had insisted on coming with me ‘to help lug the heavy stuff. As I wandered round the shelves – I have to tell you, Dodo, I wasn’t even comparing prices, I was shopping in a kind of dream – I couldn’t help thinking of Danny (whom I no longer thought of as Mr Newcombe). I wondered how old he might be and thought he was timeless, anything from the late fifties to the early seventies. His skin was a healthy pink and as free from wrinkles, apart from laugh lines around the eyes, as it would’ve been if Michael Skelton’s father had been at it, which I was quite sure he hadn’t. His eyes had a strange brilliance, an almost unearthly blue, I remembered as I reached for a tin of pineapple chunks which turned out to be Japanese bean shoots when I got them home. Danny’s eyes were as blue as the clearest of seas on the sunniest of days. No reflection, Dodo, on the wonderful way you painted a wet afternoon in Lamorna. I thought about the well-cut tweed suit, the highly polished brogues, the silk handkerchief in the breast pocket and the slight whiff of some completely masculine eau de cologne. And I thought of the way he leant towards me, one ear always turned in my direction, seriously interested in anything I might have to say.
And then I saw Rumpole come padding towards me down the long alleyway between the fancy breads and the pet food, wearing his weekend uniform of a woollen shirt and cardigan, tubular grey flannels and battered Hush Puppies, worn with the feet turned distinctively outwards. He shouted at me from some distance, ‘Blood, Hilda! I’ve been thinking about blood.’
‘Stop making an exhibition of yourself, Rumpole! Everyone can hear you,’ I rebuked him in my most penetrating whisper as soon as he was in earshot.
‘You know why Michael Skelton didn’t want to be a doctor like his father?’
‘Young people nowadays are always trying to be different from their parents.’
‘It was the blood. He couldn’t stand the sight of blood.’
‘Well, some people are squeamish, Rumpole. We all know you’re not squeamish about anything. Now, have you achieved that simple little list I gave you?’
‘Of course I have. Perfectly painless business, shopping – if you’ve got a system. I can’t imagine why women make such a song and dance about it.’ At the checkout he returned to his favourite subject. ‘The hallway was covered in blood. Splashes on the walls, pictures, everything in sight.’
‘I see you forgot the washing powder, Rumpole, and I said frozen potato chips not potato cakes. Is that the result of your wonderful system?’ The girl at the till was looking a little green and I wanted to shut my husband up. Bloodstains are not the thing to talk about on a Saturday morning in Safeway’s.
‘How would a boy who couldn’t stand the sight of blood commit a murder? Poison, perhaps. An electric fire dropped in the bath, even. Hire a contract killer and he wouldn’t have had the embarrassment of taking any part in it. Surely the last thing he’d choose is the way they deal with pigs in an abattoir?’
‘Rage, Rumpole,’ I told him, ‘can drive people to forget squeamishness. Now, give me the list and I’ll finish off the shopping properly.’
How would you react, Dodo, to being called a girl? I’m quite sure Mizz Liz Probert, the young radical lawyer in Rumpole’s Chambers, would have found it patroniz
ing at best and probably deeply insulting. And yet we were girls, weren’t we, Dodo, when we passed notes to each other in the back row during Gertie Green’s French lesson, or when we used watercolours as experimental make-up in the art room? I don’t know how it is with you, but I don’t feel that we’ve changed much over the years. A little stiffer when I wake up perhaps, a lot more weight to push up off the sofa, and a few hopes dashed. Do you remember when I made a desperate plan to marry Stewart Granger – I was going to bump into him, one morning, quite casually, during the Christmas holidays in Cornwall Gardens, where that awful little show-off Dorothy Bliss told us, quite erroneously, he lived at the time. So far as I remember, Dodo, you were after James Mason? So you’ve ended up unmarried and I’m landed with Rumpole, and sometimes I find myself wondering which of us is more lonely. But I think we’re still girls at heart, time has never robbed us of that, and when Danny called me one in the Sheridan, I felt, to be quite honest with you, nothing but pleasure.
All the same, it was a huge surprise as the telephone rang one morning, when I was looking forward to keeping myself company in Froxbury Mansions, and some secretary’s voice said, ‘Mrs Rumpole? I’ve got Mr Daniel Newcombe on the line.’
‘It must be some mistake. Mr Rumpole’s in Court and . . .’
She told me there was no mistake. He’d asked for Mrs Rumpole particularly. I was surprised, Dodo, and even more surprised when I found myself alone with Danny at a corner table at the Brasserie San Quentin, and Danny, who had a meeting with clients in Knightsbridge – a millionaire from Kuwait, who, he told me, was accused of pinching nighties from Harrods – was pouring out Beaujolais for me. He had a double-breasted suit on this time, and gleaming black brogues instead of brown, and some regimental or old school tie, and the same bright blue eyes glittered at me.
‘Bit of luck,’ he said, ‘you happened to be free.’
‘It wasn’t luck at all. I’m free nearly always.’
‘And your husband’s in Court?’
‘Luckily. When he isn’t, you’d think there’d been a death in the family.’
‘And when he’s busy, it’s because there’s been a death in someone else’s family?’ This was rather neatly phrased, don’t you think, Dodo?
‘Oh, he doesn’t always do murders. It’s usually thieving, or something or other indecent. Murder is a rare treat for Rumpole. Of course, he’s full of himself because you decided to let him do Skelton alone and without a leader.’
‘I didn’t want the Jury to think Michael’s a poor little rich boy.’ Danny looked at me and I saw the wrinkles at the corner of his blue eyes. ‘If I’d had a top Q.C., they’d’ve said, “That’s what he does with his father’s money!” Your husband, with his gravy stains and torn gown, might make the good citizens of East Sussex feel quite sorry for the lad.’
‘Is that the reason?’
‘I’m sure I can be honest with you, Hilda.’
‘I’m sure you can but I don’t think I’ll tell Rumpole.’
‘It might be more tactful not to.’ I don’t know why I felt a sort of excitement then, Dodo. It wasn’t only because I was drinking wine in the middle of the day – something I never do. It was, I’d better admit it, because Danny and I were sharing a secret, something which Rumpole would never know. I mean, to put it far more bluntly than he’d have liked, it seemed he had been chosen because of the state of his waistcoat.
‘Rumpole seems to have found a defence.’
‘Good for him. I’ve been racking my brains.’
‘Apparently Dimitri Skelton was desperate for Michael to become a surgeon.’
‘Naturally the father wanted his only son to follow in his footsteps. Didn’t Rumpole’s son . . .?’
‘Oh, Nick had seen quite enough of the law to put him off it for ever. It seems that Michael Skelton almost fainted at the sight of blood.’
‘So he told me.’
‘So how, Rumpole’s going to ask, could he have committed such a blood-stained murder?’
Danny didn’t answer my question, or Rumpole’s question, for a while, but when he did, he was still smiling. ‘I suppose money overcomes a lot of finer feelings. A terrible lot of money.’
‘You mean . . .?’
‘About three million in the estate. New faces can be expensive. And the profits from the beauty treatment had been cleverly invested.’
‘So it wasn’t just a quarrel about the boy’s career?’
‘More serious than that. Dimitri’s wife died of cancer five years ago. It seems he never got on with her family. Michael was his sole heir. He stood to gain a huge amount of money from his father’s death. That’s the big hurdle Rumpole’s got to get over. I don’t envy him that, however much I envy him other things.’
‘I can’t imagine what sort of other things.’
‘Like your companionship.’ I have to say, Dodo, I found Danny’s answer strangely disturbing. ‘By the way, Hilda,’ he went on, in quite a businesslike way, to cover my confusion, ‘I’ve got seats at Covent Garden next Thursday. If you happen to have a free evening?’
‘Underneath these granite crosses
No one counts their gains and losses –
But they whisper underground
All the answers they have found.
How else can our quarrels end?
Our enemy become our friend?
The dead around us all reply
Peace be with you – you must die.’
‘What’s that, Rumpole? Poetry?’
‘Hardly. Not really poetry. Not the sort of stuff that gets into The Oxford Book of English Verse, the Quiller-Couch edition.’
‘I thought it was quite good. At least it rhymes. Who wrote it?’
‘It’s called “In a Sussex Graveyard” by Michael Skelton.’
‘He’s a poet?’
‘He wants to be. His father wanted him to be a plastic surgeon. Personally, I don’t believe he was suited to either profession. If you’re going to be a poet you’ve got to be able to stand the sight of blood.’ This was one of Rumpole’s epigrams – or bons mots, as Gertie Green used to call them, Dodo. So, as you may imagine, I ignored it. I was more than a little irritated by him. He had a load of new instructions open on the kitchen table so I could hardly get at my chops and mash, and he was slightly above himself, as he always is after he’s been to see a customer in prison in an important case, and he seemed to regard his day trip to Sussex as something of a day out.
‘A strange young man, Hilda. He seems to think that because he writes poetry he exists in a world of his own, rather above ordinary mortals. Can you believe it, he hardly bothered to answer my questions? He didn’t seem nervous or frightened or even especially concerned about the case. Just bored by it. But he’s wrong, you know. In my opinion poetry is written by people who live quite ordinary lives and have a way with words:
“Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
‘The man who wrote that went to the pub and worried about his bank account.’
‘You must be a poet then, Rumpole. You spend enough time in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. Was that another bit of young Skelton?’
‘No, another bit of old Shakespeare.’ You know, Dodo, Eng. Lit. was never my strongest subject, but Rumpole needn’t have sounded so patronizing.
‘You’re not telling me this boy killed his father because he wanted to be a poet, are you, Rumpole?’
‘I’m not telling you he killed his father full stop. That is a fact which still has to be decided by twelve honest citizens of East Sussex.’
I gave a heavy sigh, signalling that I’d heard quite enough of Rumpole on the burden of proof to last a lifetime. Then I said, ‘I should think he probably killed his father for the money.’
‘Hilda, have you accepted a brief for the Prosecution?’
‘Well, he was his father’s sole heir, wasn’t he? And I don’t suppose cosmetic surgery comes cheap.’ In my anxiety to put Rumpole dow
n I had said rather more than I intended.
‘How did you know that?’ Rumpole gave me his sharp crossexaminer’s look.
‘I really can’t remember. Hadn’t the mother died and Michael was the only child? It said that in the Daily Telegraph.’
‘It’s not quite true that he’s the sole heir.’ Rumpole ferreted about among his papers for a copy of the will. ‘Skelton left £100,000 to his secretary – an attractive girl, Michael tells me: “And all the rest and residue of my estate to my son, Michael Lymington Skelton, or if he should predecease me to my cousin Ivan Lymington Skelton, now resident in Sydney, Australia.”’
‘Well, Michael didn’t predecease him, did he? Otherwise you wouldn’t be defending him.’
‘Oh, Hilda, what a wonderful grasp of legal principles you have!’ It was at moments like these that I was strongly tempted to tell Rumpole why he’d been chosen to defend young Skelton alone and without a leader. However, I contented myself with saying, ‘I don’t really know what kind of defence you’ve got.’
‘The grandfather clock’ – Rumpole produced the photograph of the bloodstained hall – ‘stopped at ten forty-five. I told you that was important.’
‘Why?’
‘Michael’s got an alibi for ten forty-five.’
‘Really. What is it?’
‘That poem. He was walking in the beechwoods, about half a mile from the house. Composing it.’
‘But you said it wasn’t even a good poem.’
‘Or convincing evidence. In itself. But there were witnesses.’
‘Who?’
‘New Age travellers. That’s what they call themselves. Sort of politically correct gypsies. They were camping in the woods and Michael stopped to talk to them. He even recited his poem to them, so they might remember him.’
‘So have you found these gypsies?’
‘Not yet. But today, after we’d seen Michael in Lewes gaol, old Turnbull took me for a walk to the beechwoods near Long Acre, the Skeltons’ home.’
‘Who’s Turnbull?’
‘Newcombe’s clerk or legal executive – I think that’s what they call themselves now. I really don’t know what you find so funny, Hilda.’
Rumpole and the Angel of Death Page 11