Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

by John Mortimer

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  By the Same Author

  Charade

  Rumming Park

  Answer Yes or No

  Like Men Betrayed

  Three Winters

  The Narrowing Stream

  Will Shakespeare

  (An Entertainment)

  Paradise Postponed

  Summer’s Lease

  Titmuss Regained

  Dunster

  Felix in the Underworld

  The Sound of Trumpets

  Rumpole of the Bailey

  The Trials of Rumpole

  Rumpole for the Defence

  Rumpole’s Return

  Rumpole and the Golden Thread

  Rumpole’s Last Case

  Rumpole and the Age of Miracles

  Rumpole à la Carte

  Rumpole on Trial

  The Best of Rumpole

  Rumpole and the Angel of Death

  Rumpole Rests His Case

  Rumpole and the Primrose Path

  Under the Hammer

  With Love and Lizards

  (with Penelope Mortimer)

  Clinging to the Wreckage

  Murderers and Other Friends

  The Summer of a Dormouse

  Where There’s a Will

  In Character

  Character Parts

  Plays

  A Voyage Round My Father

  The Dock Brief

  What Shall We Tell Caroline?

  The Wrong Side of the Park

  Two Stars for Comfort

  The Judge

  Collaborators

  Edwin, Bermondsey, Marble

  Arch, Fear of Heaven

  The Prince of Darkness

  Naked Justice

  Hock and Soda Water

  Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 2004

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or

  dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CIP data available.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67926-1

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Penny

  Will no one tell me what she sings?—

  Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

  For old, unhappy, far-off things,

  And battles long ago:

  Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’

  1

  ‘Claude Erskine-Brown told my pupil she had extraordinarily nice legs.’

  ‘What’re her legs like, then? Rather gnarled tree trunks, are they?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Rumpole! Lala Ingolsby is a very good-looking girl.’

  ‘With a name like Lala Ingolsby I should have thought she wouldn’t mind having her legs complimented.’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind! That’s what you all say, don’t you, Rumpole? Just like a man! Anyway, I have reported Erskine-Brown’s conduct to the Chair of the Society of Women Barristers.’

  The speaker was Mizz Liz Probert, my one-time pupil and in many ways a helpful and hard-working barrister, when she was not determined to throw the book at Claude Erskine-Brown. He was being tried in absentia, having left early to catch about twenty-four hours of the Ring Cycle at Covent Garden.

  ‘Through the Chair!’ Luci Gribble, our chambers Director of Marketing and Administration, spoke urgently to Soapy Sam Ballard, our Head of Chambers.

  He looked both pained and startled, as though this ‘Through the Chair’ form of address involved some kind of physical attack and penetration.

  ‘Through the Chair!’ Luci (who spelled her name with an inexplicable ‘i’) repeated. ‘It will be no good at all for our chambers’ image if we get a reputation in the Society of Women Barristers for acts of sexual harassment.’

  It’s rare indeed that I am present at chambers meetings, held under the chairmanship of Soapy Sam Ballard and dealing often with such vital matters as the expenditure on instant coffee in the clerk’s room or the importance of leaving a signed bit of paper on the library shelves when borrowing a book. But these were the dog days in the cold, wet and bleak start of the year, the criminals of England seemed to have all gone off for a winter break to Marbella or the Seychelles, and I had wandered into Ballard’s room as an alternative to yet another struggle with the crossword puzzle.

  ‘I suppose I must have words with Erskine-Brown on the subject.’ Soapy Sam sounded despondent, as though he were being asked to take immediate action about the condition of the downstairs lavatory in Equity Court.

  ‘You could tell Miss Ingolsby that if nothing worse happens to her, in her life in the law, she’ll have been remarkably lucky. Come to think of it, at about her age I was doing the Penge Bungalow Murders, alone and without a leader.’

  As I said this, the chambers meeting and all its concerns seemed to fade away. For a moment I was back long ago. I remembered myself sitting in an interview room under the Old Bailey, looking into the terrified eyes of a young man who had realized that the great engine of the criminal law was intent on driving him towards a grim execution shed and ceremoniously breaking his neck.

  Then Luci Gribble startled me with an extraordinary question. ‘What on earth,’ she asked, without a note of shame in her voice, ‘were the Penge Bungalow Murders?’

  I was, I have to confess, shaken by such ignorance of one of the most remarkable trials of the post-war years; but in all fairness I had to concede that Luci Gribble was a lay person with no legal training. The story would take too long if I went into it myself and so I appointed Liz Probert to act for me.

  ‘You tell her, Liz.’

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’ For the first time in the meeting, the politically correct Mizz Probert was caught off her guard. ‘I’m not sure I ever knew the facts,’ she astounded me by admitting. ‘Before my time, of course.’

  ‘Ballard?’ I appealed to our so-called Head of Chambers.

  ‘I’m not sure I ever knew what went on in the Penge bungalows either,’ he said, as thoug
h one of my greatest legal triumphs were something that just slips the mind, like where you put the bus ticket. ‘I’ve heard you speak of it, Rumpole, of course, on many occasions. You clearly remember it.’

  ‘Old men forget,’ I gave the meeting a well-deserved thought from Henry V, ‘and all shall be forgot. Yet I’ll remember with advantages what feats I did that day.’

  Of course, I altered the quotation a little to suit my purpose. But it was then that I realized it was high time I added the full story of the Penge Bungalow affair to my memoirs. So much of history is being lost. Young people nowadays are vague as to the identity of Hitler and Churchill, and although the murders at Penge were once headline material, the details of that remarkable case may have become lost in the mists of time.

  We’re looking back, down the long corridor of history, to the early 1950s. The war had been over for several years, but it still seemed part of our lives. Films featured life and death in the skies during the Battle of Britain, and heroes or heroines of the Resistance. It was a period when those who had enjoyed an unheroic war continued to feel pangs of guilt, and we all congratulated ourselves on having survived the Blitz, bread rationing, the Labour chancellor telling us all to ‘tighten our belts’ and clothes on coupons.

  It was, in many ways, an age of obedience when the government, the royal family and judges were treated with what was sometimes ill-deserved respect. It was also the time when the only sentence available for murder was death.

  My own war had been unheroic. I had spent some years in the RAF ground staff (where I was well known as ‘Grounded Rumpole’) and, when hostilities ended, I had taken a law degree at Keble College, Oxford. As learning law in those days entailed an intimate knowledge of the Roman rules for freeing a slave and the rights of ‘turfage’ over common land (scraps of information which I have never found of the slightest use in the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court) and as I never at Keble experienced the excitement of rising on my then young hind legs to address a jury, I turned in a fairly honourable third-class degree. It has always been my view that knowing too much law is not only no help but also a considerable handicap to the courtroom advocate. Juries, on the whole, have little interest in freeing slaves or the Roman law governing the ownership of chariots.

  My tutor at Keble had been Septimus Porter. I had loved his shy and nervous, but sometimes unexpectedly liberated, daughter dearly. In fact we were engaged to be married, but this engagement had to be broken off because of Ivy Porter’s early death during the cold winter and fuel shortages after the war. Septimus Porter found me a place in the chambers of C. H. Wystan, QC, the father of that Hilda Wystan who was to become known to me, during a long life of argument and dispute both in and away from the courtroom, as She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  Wystan’s importance, therefore, both in the events surrounding the Penge Bungalow affair and in my future career and life, cannot be exaggerated.

  2

  The appearance of C. H. Wystan always made me think of some harmless crustacean, perhaps a lobster who had been snatched from a peaceful existence at the bottom of the sea and plunged into boiling water. His face and bald head were of a uniform pink, his mouth was turned down as though in sudden shock and his small beady eyes gave him a look of pained surprise. When he spoke he often moved his arms in the slow, disconnected way that lobsters have. But I have no wish to be overly critical of my future father-in-law. It was not after all his fault that he had, to my eye at least, the appearance of something that might be cooled down and served up with a hard-boiled egg and a dab of mayonnaise.

  C. H. Wystan was in no way a bad man. In fact he treated me, during my early years as a white wig, with a sort of remote and distant kindness. The trouble was that he regarded the whole business of being a barrister, and following in what he called ‘the fine traditions and great fellowship of the bar’ (such rules as ‘We don’t shake hands’ or ‘We don’t lunch with our instructing solicitor’), as more important than the Bill of Rights or the presumption of innocence. Like Soapy Sam Ballard, our present Head of Chambers, the niceties and formalities of life in the law were to him more precious than justice. Law courts were places where honourable men (there were, as yet, no female barristers in Equity Court), dressed in wigs, gowns and appropriately dark trousers, lived up to their finest traditions. He found the cases in which we dabbled, the adulterous, fraudulent or violent acts alleged against our clients, the indecencies or even the murders they might have committed, of less interest than the correct behaviour of the barristers and judges sent to try them. He dined frequently in his Inn and was always available to take a bishop or a senior politician in to dinner on his arm. Judges found his behaviour in court impeccable, but his score of victories was low. All the same, he was considered so trustworthy that the Lord Chancellor felt able to give him a silk gown, so that he now proudly bore the letters QC (Queer Customer, I’m inclined to call them) after his name. Solicitors thought of him as ‘a safe pair of hands’.

  The hands I was put into when I first arrived at number 4 Equity Court were not so much safe as inactive. ‘We’ve fixed up a pupillage for you with T. C. Rowley,’ Wystan said. ‘You’ll find him an agreeable pupil master. He’s very well liked in chambers, where he’s affectionately known as “Uncle Tom”. It would be wrong to describe him as a busy practitioner, but he’ll have plenty of time to iron out problems and give you the benefit of his long experience.’

  After introducing me to the clerk’s room and to one or two important-looking barristers, who were apparently too busy to iron out the problems of a white wig, he showed me into T. C. Rowley’s room, where I sat expectantly at a small table in the corner to await events.

  Events, as such, were extremely slow in arriving, as indeed was T. C. Rowley himself. ‘We’re expecting Uncle Tom in before the end of the month,’ was the constant answer in the clerk’s room when I asked if he was likely to drop in to chambers. So I sat alone and got to know our room by heart, the few legal textbooks and law reports, the reproduction of The Stag at Bay over the fireplace, the tin box which no doubt contained Uncle Tom’s apparently little-used wig, the bottom drawer of the desk, which concealed a few back numbers of Naturist magazine, and, most puzzling of all, a golf club in the umbrella stand.

  Each morning I stared out of the window and watched busy barristers, chattering importantly, setting out for court with their junior clerks carrying briefs or pushing trolleyloads of books. Each evening I stayed until the lamplighter, with a flaming rod, lit the gas lamps in Equity Court. When it became apparent that I was not going to have many problems to iron out if I remained closeted in Uncle Tom’s quarters, I began to haunt the clerk’s room, which I rightly guessed to be the centre of chambers activity, much in the way that dogs sniff around kitchen floors in the faint hope of picking up a few scraps.

  Albert Handyside, then our head clerk, was a large, slow-moving man whose pockets were overflowing with cause lists, notes of fees, messages from solicitors and packets of small cigars. His apparently gloomy outlook on life concealed a deep inner hilarity. If, by some joke of fate, C. H. Wystan found himself briefed in two different cases at the same time, Albert would shake with silent mirth but then, after a tactful visit to the Old Bailey list office, solve the problem by persuading a judge to sit later or a prosecutor to agree to prolong his final speech. Most of his business was conducted with solicitors’ clerks in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, where they swapped stories and pints of Guinness. There he persuaded them, or so I hoped, to sample, perhaps in a little matter of assault and affray at East Ham Quarter Sessions, the talents of a white wig new to chambers by the name of Horace Rumpole.

  I have to say I did my very best to cultivate the friendship of Albert Handyside, who I knew would be of far more use to me than the elusive Uncle Tom, or even C. H. Wystan himself. I spent time, and money I could ill afford, in Pommeroy’s seeing that Albert’s glass of Guinness was continually refilled. My attentions were rewarded. He sent me off to fix a date for tria
l at London Sessions. I did this, after an evening of anxious rehearsal, apparently to everyone’s satisfaction.

  It was when I came back from this courtroom triumph that I heard, as I approached my usually lonely room, the sound of a golf club striking a ball. I opened the door to see a tall, even a gangling, grey-haired man smiling with delight as a golf ball sailed into a wastepaper basket. ‘Hello, young fellow,’ he greeted me. ‘I’m Uncle Tom and you’re my pupil.’

  I had to admit that this was indeed the truth of the matter.

  ‘I was waiting for you to come in,’ he said. ‘In fact I wondered where the hell you’d got to. Having a lie-in, were you - after a heavy night?’

  ‘Not really. I was making an application at London Sessions.’

  ‘An application! At your stage?’ Uncle Tom gave a small whistle of admiration as he put his golf balls back in the oval black and gold box which was built to contain a wig. ‘Bit of a fast mover, aren’t you, Rumbelow?’

  ‘The name,’ I told him, ‘is Rumpole.’

  ‘I hope you weren’t waiting for me to come with you. Show you the ropes. You managed it on your own?’

  ‘I managed it,’ I told him, ‘entirely on my own.’

  ‘Good for you, then. I’ll tell Wystan that I’ve got a most promising pupil.’

  In those far-off days young barristers had to pay £100 to be ‘taught’ by their pupil masters. Uncle Tom had it from a legacy my old father received from my great-aunt. I didn’t begrudge him this money, although he told me it came in very useful in settling his golf club subscription at a time when the secretary had given him ‘a couple of old-fashioned looks’. He wasn’t entirely without work: he had two long-running divorce cases and an extremely slow-moving post office fraud in which he had occasional conferences with a solicitor called ‘Nobby’ Noakes, who chatted to Uncle Tom about his golf handicap, much to the boredom of their client. In time we came to an unspoken agreement. Uncle Tom visited the room even less often and I was in sole possession of his desk as my practice didn’t exactly flower but put out a few tender and tentative shoots.