‘Oh, he’s busy.’ Dot emerged from behind her hand. ‘He said he wasn’t to be disturbed.’
‘Then it will be my pleasure and privilege to disturb him.’
‘Have you “eaten on the insane root”,’ I asked the egregious Ballard, with what I hoped sounded like genuine concern,
‘ “That takes the reason prisoner?” ’
‘What do you mean, Rumpole?’
‘I mean no one who has retained one single marble would dream of introducing the blight Blewitt into Equity Court.’
‘I thought you’d come to me about that eventually.’
‘Then you thought right.’
‘If you had bothered to attend the Chambers’ meeting you might have been privy to the selection of Vincent Blewitt.’
‘I have only a few years of active life left to me,’ I told the man with some dignity. ‘And they are too precious to be wasted on Chambers’ meetings. If I’d been there, I’d certainly have banned Blewitt.’
‘Then you’d have been outvoted.’
‘You mean those learned but idiotic friends decided to put their affairs in the hands of this second-rate, second-hand car salesman.’
‘Catering.’ Ballard smiled tolerantly.
‘What?’
‘Vincent Blewitt was in catering, not cars.’
‘Then I wouldn’t buy a second-hand cake off him.’
‘Horace’ – Soapy Sam Ballard rose and placed a considerate and totally unwelcome hand on my shoulder – ‘we all know that you’re a great old warhorse and that you’ve had a long, long career at the Bar. But you have to face it, my dear old Horace, you don’t understand the modem world.’
‘I understand it well enough to be able to tell a decent, honest, efficient, if rather over-amorous, clerk from the dubious flogger of suspect and probably mouldy canteen dinners.’ I shrugged the unwelcome hand off my shoulder.
‘The clerking system,’ Ballard told me then, with a look of intolerable condescension, ‘is out of date, Horace. We are moving towards the millennium.’
‘You move towards it if you like. I prefer to stay where I am.’
‘Why should we pay Henry a percentage when we can get an experienced businessman for a salary?’
‘What sort of salary?’
‘Vincent Blewitt was good enough to agree to a hundred, to be reviewed at the end of one year. The contract will be signed when the month’s trial period is over.’
‘A hundred pounds? Far too much!’
‘A hundred thousand, Rumpole. It’s far less than he would expect to earn in the private sector of industry.’
‘Let him go back to the private sector then. If you want to be robbed, I could lend you one of the Timsons. They only deal in petty theft.’
‘Vincent Blewitt has been very good to join us. At some personal financial sacrifice . . .’
‘Did you check on what his screw was in the canteen?’
‘I took his word for it.’ Ballard looked only momentarily embarrassed.
‘Famous last words of the fraudster’s victim.’
‘Vincent Blewitt isn’t a fraudster, Rumpole. He’s a businessman.’
‘That’s the polite word for it.’
‘He says we must earn our keep by a rise in productivity.’
‘How do you measure our productivity?’
‘By the turnover in trials.’
‘In your case, by the amazing turnover in defeats.’ It was below the belt, I have to confess, but it didn’t send Ballard staggering to the ropes. He came back, pluckily, I suppose. ‘Business, Rumpole,’ he told me, ‘makes the world go round.’ Later I discovered he’d got these words of wisdom from some ludicrous television advertisement.
‘Rubbish. Justice might make the world go round. Or poetry. Or love. Or even God. You might think it’s God, Bollard, as a founder member of the Lawyers As Christians Society.’
‘As a Christian, Rumpole, I remember the parable of the talents. The Bible points out that you can’t fight market forces.’
‘Didn’t the Bible also say something like Blessed are the poor? Or do you wish it hadn’t said that?’
‘I’ve got no time to trade texts with you, Rumpole.’ Soapy Sam looked nettled.
I was suddenly tired, half in love, perhaps for a moment, with easeful death. ‘Oh, let’s stop arguing. Get rid of the blot, confirm Henry in the job and we need say no more about it.’
‘I’m sure you’ll find Vincent Blewitt a great asset to Chambers, Rumpole. He’s a very human son of person. He likes his joke, I understand. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of laughs together.’
‘If he stays . . .’
‘He is staying . . .’
‘Then I’ll take a handful of pills, washed down with a glass of whisky, and cease upon the midnight with no pain.’
‘If you wish to do that, Rumpole’ – our learned Head of Chambers sat down at his desk and pretended to be busy with a set of papers – ‘that is entirely a matter for you.’
That evening, before the news, Ballard’s favourite commercial about business making the world go round came on. Later there were some pictures of a Pro-Life demonstration outside an abortion clinic in St John’s Wood. Prominent among those present was a serious, long-faced woman with reddish hair. Nurse Pargey was waving a placard on which was written the words THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
‘Alzheimer’s isn’t a killer in itself. Certainly the patient gets weaker and more forgetful. Helpless, in fact. But it would need something more to kill Chippy.’
‘Like an overdose of sleeping pills, for instance?’
‘Evidently that’s what did it.’ Dr Betty was one of those awkward clients, it seemed, who felt impelled to tell the truth. And what she went on to say wasn’t particularly helpful. ‘I might have given Chippy an overdose of something when the time came, but it hadn’t come on the night he died. You must believe that, Horace.’
‘Whether I believe it or not isn’t exactly the point. What matters is whether the Jury believe it.’
‘That’s for them to decide, isn’t it?’
‘I’m afraid it is.’ At which moment there was a rapid knock on the door which immediately opened to admit Blewitt’s head. He took a quick look at the assembled company and said, ‘Sorry folks! Mustn’t interrupt the workers’ productivity. Speak to you later, Horace.’ At which, as rare things will, he vanished.
‘Who on earth was that extraordinary man?’ For the first time Dr Betty looked shaken.
‘A temporary visitor,’ I told her. ‘Nothing for you to worry about. Now tell me about the sleeping pills.’
‘I gave him two.’
‘And you saw him drink his whisky?’
‘A small whisky-and-soda. Yes.’
‘And then . . .?’
‘Well, I settled him down for the night.’
‘Did he go to sleep?’
‘He seemed tired and dreamy. He’d been quite contented that day, in fact. But incontinent, of course. Quite soon after he’d settled down, I heard the Chippenhams come home from their dinner-party, so I went downstairs to meet them.’
‘What happened to the bottle of pills?’
‘Well, that was kept in the house so that the Chippenhams or Nurse Pargeter could give Chippy his pills when I wasn’t there.’
‘Kept where in the house?’
‘I put them back in the bathroom cupboard.’
‘Are there two bathrooms?’
‘Yes. The one next to the Judge’s bedroom. You know the house?’ Dr Betty looked surprised.
‘I have a certain nodding acquaintance with it. And young Andrew?’
‘His mother had sent him up to bed before they went out. But I’m afraid he hadn’t gone to sleep.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘When I went to put the pills back in the bathroom, I saw his light on and his bedroom door open. He was still reading – or playing with his model aeroplanes more likely.’
‘Quite likely, yes. Oh, one other thing. Ha
d you ever spoken to Chippy about Lethe?’
‘No, certainly not. I told you, Horace. The time had not come.’
‘And was anyone else Chippy knew a member of Lethe? Any friends or his family?’
‘Oh, no, I’m sure they weren’t.’
‘I think it might be just worth getting a statement from a Dr Eames.’ I turned to Bonny Bernard, my instructing solicitor. ‘Oh, and a few inquiries about the firm of Marcellus & Chippenham, house agents and surveyors.’
‘David Eames?’ Dr Betty looked doubtful.
‘He treated Chippy before you came on the scene. He might know if he’d ever talked of suicide.’
Dr Betty once again spurned a line of defence. ‘As I told you, I’m quite sure he never contemplated such a thing.’
‘So if you didn’t kill him, Dr Betty, who do you think did?’ She was looking at me, quite serious then, as she said, ‘Well, that’s not for me to say, is it?’
‘Sorry to have intruded on your conference. Although it may be no bad thing for me to make spot checks on the human resource in the workplace.’
I had hardly recovered from the gloomy prospect of defending Dr Betty when the Blight was with me again. I sat, sunk in thought.
‘Cheer up, Horace.’ Vince’s laugh was like a bath running out. ‘It may never happen.’ As he said that, I regretted having used the same fatuous words of encouragement to Henry, our condemned clerk. Most of the worst things in life are absolutely bound to happen, the trial of the cheerful doctor, for instance, or death itself.
‘I wanted a word or two with you about formalizing staff holidays. You thinking of getting away to the sun yourself?’
‘Hardly,’ I told him, ‘having glanced at the brochure you gave Dot Clapton.’
‘Sea, sand and sex, Rumpole. You’d enjoy that. Very relaxing,’ Vince gurgled.
‘I’m hardly a single.’
‘Well, send the wife on a tour of the Lake District or something, and you head off to the Costa del Sol. That’s my advice. I mean, when you’re invited to a gourmet dinner, why take a ham sandwich?’
I looked at Vincent Blewitt with a wild surmise. Was there no limit to the awfulness of the man? I could imagine no matrimonial situation, however grim, in which I could tell Hilda that she was a ham sandwich.
‘I’ve rota’d Dot early July in the format,’ Vince told me. ‘I don’t think she can wait to join me and assorted singles.’
I thought of telling him that Dot didn’t even like the Costa del Sol. That she didn’t think that sex and sand made a good mix. That she had a romantic nature and she wanted to drift past the castles on the Rhine listening to the Lorelei’s mystic note. Some glimmering hope, a faint idea of a plan, led me to encourage the Blot. ‘Considerable fun, these singles holidays, are they, Vincent?’
‘You’re not joking!’ He had now sunk into my client’s armchair and stuck out his legs in anticipation of delight. ‘First day you get there, as soon as you’ve got checked in, it’s down to the beach for games to break the ice.’
‘Games?’
‘I’ll just tell you one. Whet your appetite.’
‘Carry on.’
‘The fellas get to blow up balloons inside the girls’ bikini bottoms. And then the girls do it vice versa in our shorts. By the time we’ve played that, everyone’s a swinger.’
I looked longingly at the door, thinking how restful theforthcoming murder trial would be, compared with a quiet chat with our legal administrator.
‘It sounds very tasteful.’
‘I think you’ve got the message. I’ll rota you for a couple of weeks then. After Dot and I have left the Costa, of course. I never knew you were a swinger, Horace.’
‘Oh, we all have our joys and desires.’
‘Don’t we just!’ Vincent looked at me, I thought, with unusual respect. ‘Heard any good ones lately?’
‘Ones?’
‘You know. Jokes. You’ve got hidden talents, Horace. I bet you know about rib-ticklers.’
‘You mean’ – I looked at him seriously – ‘like the one about the sleeveless woman?’
‘Isn’t that agreatstory?’ Happily Vincent knew this anecdote and he gurgled again. ‘Laughed like a drain when I first heard it. Whoever told you that one, Horace?’
I looked him straight in the eye and lied with complete conviction, ‘Oh, Sam told me that. It’s just his type of humour.’
‘Sam?’ Vincent was puzzled.
‘You know, our learned Head of Chambers, Soapy Sam Ballard.’
I have often noticed that before any big and important cause or matter – and no one could doubt the size and importance ofR.v.Dr Betty –a kind of peace descends on my legal business. In other words, I hit a slump. I had nothing in Court, not even the smallest spot of indecency at Uxbridge. I had no conferences booked and those scurrying about their business in the Temple, or waiting in the corridors of the Old Bailey, might well have come to the conclusion that old Rumpole had ceased upon the midnight hour with no pain. In fact I was docked in Froxbury Mansions with my ham – no, I will not be infected by Vince’s vulgarity – with She Who Must Be Obeyed.
Needless to say, I had no wish to spend twenty-four hours a day closeted with Hilda, so I went on a number of errands to the newsagent in search of small cigars, to the off-licence at the other end of Gloucester Road to purchase plonk, stretch my legs and breathe in the petrol fumes.
I was walking, wrapped in thought, through Canning Place, when I saw the familiar sight of purple blazers marching towards me in strict battle formation, led by a sharp-faced young female wearing a tweed skirt and an anorak, who uttered words of command or turned to rebuke stragglers. I stood politely in the gutter to let them pass, raising my umbrella in a kind of salute when I saw, taking up the rearguard, Andrew Chippenham.
‘Andrew!’ I called out in my matiest tones, ‘how are you, old boy? Marching up with your regiment to lay siege to the Albert Hall, are you? Or on the hunt for bin bags?’
It was not at all, I’m sure you’ll agree, an alarming sally. I intended to be friendly and jocular, but when he heard my voice young Andrew stopped, apparently frozen, his head down. He raised it slowly and what I saw was a small, serious boy frozen in terror. Before I could speak again, he had turned and run off after his vanishing crocodile.
I was finding this enforced home leave so tedious that, a few days later, I took a trip on the tube back to my Chambers in the Temple, although I had no business engagements. I was sunk in the swing chair with my feet on the desktop workspace, trying to fathom out the depths of ingenuity to which the setter of The Times crossword puzzle might have sunk, when the Blot oozed through the door and defiled my carpet.
‘I thought it might be rather appropriate,’ he said in the sort of solemn voice people use when they’re discussing funeral arrangements, ‘if we gave a great party in Chambers to mark Henry’s career change.’
‘What’s that called?’ I asked him. ‘Easing the passing?’
‘At least give him a smashing send-off.’
‘I suppose he can live on that as his retirement pension.’
‘I’m sure Henry has got a bit put by.’
‘He hasn’t got a job put by. I happen to know that.’ And then some sort of a plan began to take shape in my mind. ‘Why does it have to be a great party?’
‘Because’ – and then Vince looked at me in a horribly conspiratorial fashion as the penny dropped. ‘Horace, you’re not suggesting?’
‘A bit of a singles do, why not?’
‘Leave the ham sandwiches at home, eh?’
‘Exactly!’ I forced myself to say it, although it stuck in my throat.
‘I mean, we’d ask Dot Clapton, wouldn’t we?’
‘Of course,’ I reassured him.
‘And some of the gorgeous bits that float around the Temple.’
‘As many of them as you can cram in. We’ll make it a real send-off for Henry.’
‘Something he’ll remember all his
life.’
‘Certainly.’
‘Only one drawback, as far as I know.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We’ll have to ask permission from the Head of Chambers.’ Vincent looked doubtful and disappointed.
‘The Head of Chambers would be furious if he weren’t included,’ I assured him, and the gurgling laughter was turned on again.
‘Of course. I remember what you told me about Sam Ballard. A bit of a swinger, didn’t you indicate?’
‘Bollard,’ I said, remembering an old song of my middle age, ‘“swings as the pendulum do”. Put the whole proposition to him, Vincent. Put it in detail, not forgetting the balloons blown up in the trousers, and then watch his eyes light up.’
‘We’re in for a good time, then?’
‘I think so. At very long last.’
After the Blot had left me, suitably encouraged, I went home on the Underground. Emerging from Gloucester Road station, I saw the formation of purple blazers bearing down on me remorselessly on what must have been the last route-march of the day. I stood aside to let them pass, but the C.O. halted the column and looked at me, through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, with obvious distaste. ‘Are you the person who spoke to Chippenham the other day, down at the end of the line?’ she asked me. ‘The boys told me he had spoken to somebody strange.’
‘It just so happened’ – I decided to overlook the description – ‘that I know the family.’
‘Whether you do or you don’t’ – she frowned severely – ‘he was clearly upset by what you said to him. It’s most unusual for people to speak to my Bolingbrokers in the street. He was obviously shocked, the other boys said so. Ever since he met you, Chippenham’s been away sick.’
‘But I honestly didn’t say anything,’ I started to explain but, before I could finish the sentence, the word of command had been given and the column quick-marched away from me.
When I got back to the seclusion of the mansion flat (there were times when I felt that our chilly matrimonial home was more a mausoleum than a mansion), I found Hilda had gone to her bridge club and left a message for me to ring my instructing solicitor and ‘make sure neither of you slip up on Dr Betty’s case’. When I got through to Bonny Bernard, he had news which interested me greatly. The puritanical Dr Eames had, it seemed, returned to care for the Chippenham family and, in particular, he was looking after young Andrew, who was suffering from some sort of nervous illness and was off school. As a witness, Bernard told me, Dr Eames was of the talkative variety and seemed to have something he was a strangely anxious to tell me. I hoped he would become even more talkative in the days before the trial.
Rumpole and the Angel of Death Page 27