Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

by John Mortimer

  ‘As far as your father’s case is concerned -’ Wystan looked up to the ceiling as he spoke, as though seeking inspiration from heaven - ‘it would help if he had threatened you again, perhaps attacked you when you got up to get water from the kitchen. We might, might we not, Mr Barnsley Gough, go for provocation?’

  ‘Seems about the only thing we could go for. I agree with Mr Wystan,’ our sharp solicitor told Simon.

  ‘It would only reduce murder to manslaughter, of course. But we might avoid the worst consequence.’ Wystan seemed shy of mentioning the great obscenity, hanging by the neck.

  ‘I’ve put this to you, Simon, haven’t I? That he attacked you and that’s why you shot him?’ Barnsley Gough had been, apparently, one step ahead of my leader.

  ‘He couldn’t have attacked me.’ Simon sighed, as though tired of explaining a simple fact. ‘He was dead. And I never shot him, never!’ Was this a client, I wondered, who refused to tell a lie even in the hope of saving his life?

  ‘Mr Wystan,’ Barnsley Gough was persistent, ‘is only suggesting what might have happened.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t!’ Simon was equally persistent. ‘I’m quite sure of that.’

  ‘What will happen,’ Wystan gave us his idea of a smooth solution to a difficult problem, ‘is that we shall listen to all the evidence about the party and the medical evidence. We really don’t need to challenge any of it. And then, when the time comes for him to give evidence, our client may have a clearer memory of the events of that terrible night. In the fullness of time.’

  At which Simon only repeated, ‘I never shot him.’ And the conference was over.

  On my way back to the Temple I said to C. H. Wystan, ‘So you wanted him to say his father attacked him in the night?’ Suggesting this story hadn’t seemed, I had to admit, in strict accordance with the finest traditions of the bar.

  My leader, however, was unashamed. ‘He may remember that’s what happened in the fullness of time,’ he said.

  ‘How does that fit in with Charlie Weston’s murder? Are we suggesting Simon went round to his bungalow and got attacked by him too?’

  ‘He may remember more about that. You’ll have to rely on me to conduct this case in my own way, unless you can suggest a better sort of defence.’

  I had to confess that I couldn’t, although I made a silent vow to do so. In the fullness of time.

  6

  ‘You should sit, best part of the day, Mr Rumpole, with your leg elevated.’

  ‘That’s quite impossible.’

  ‘Of course it’s not impossible. Just get a low stool, put a cushion on it and elevate your leg. It doesn’t require great athletic skill.’

  I had visited Dr McClintock, our local quack, on my wife Hilda’s (known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed) often repeated insistence. Check-ups are, in my experience, a grave mistake; all they do is allow the quack of your choice to tell you that you have some sort of complaint that you were far happier not knowing about. Or else they prescribe some totally impossible course of conduct, as was the case with McClintock, who looked at me as though I might soon become a blank space on his National Health list.

  ‘Why on earth should you want me to do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because,’ McClintock spoke very slowly as though explaining the secrets of the universe to a small halfwit, ‘it’ll be good for your circulation.’

  ‘It may be good for my circulation, but it’ll be extremely bad for my practice at the bar.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m quite clear what you mean, Mr Rumpole.’ He was puzzled but tolerant, as though the halfwit had started to babble.

  ‘Do you think I could address a jury with my leg elevated? Could I cross-examine with my foot in the air?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole, I don’t think you quite understand . . .’

  ‘You don’t think I understand?’ By now the quack had touched a nerve. He had challenged all I had learned from a lifetime’s experience ever since . . . well, ever since the case which confirmed me as a force to be reckoned with down the Old Bailey. ‘Do you imagine,’ I asked the final question that would blow his medical theories to the winds, ‘do you honestly imagine that I could have done the Penge Bungalow Murders, alone and without a leader, but with one leg cocked up on a joint stool?’

  ‘I’m not concerned with how many murders you might have done in the suburbs of London, Mr Rumpole. I’m concerned about your circulation.’

  It was to escape the rule of the eccentric Dr McClintock, and to be able to write with both feet firmly planted on the ground, that I took my memoirs down to chambers and started to write in my room there. I was about to have another great remembrance of things past, when my sweet silent thoughts were interrupted by a brisk knock at the door and the entrance of a personable young lady carrying a mug which she put down carefully on the corner of my Archbold on Criminal Law and Procedure.

  ‘Albert told me black with no sugar. Is that how you like it, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘That’s exactly how I like it. Do you work for any of our solicitors?’ I was hoping she might be bringing a brief to go with the coffee.

  ‘Afraid not. I’m Lala Ingolsby, Liz Probert’s pupil. She told me you know more about the practice of the criminal law than anyone in the Temple.’

  ‘That’s strictly true.’

  ‘So she’s sure you can give me some excellent advice.’

  ‘Possibly.’ I took out a small cigar to go with the coffee. ‘Do you mind?’ I remembered to say as I struck a match.

  ‘Not at all. In fact I rather like it.’

  I began to warm to this Lala Ingolsby.

  ‘What’s that you’re working on now?’ Lala was inspecting the pieces of virgin paper, across which that day my pen had scarcely travelled.

  ‘My memoirs. I am recalling the Penge Bungalow Murders. You won’t have heard of the case.’

  ‘Wasn’t that the one about the two ex-air force officers found shot?’

  ‘You know that?’ Lala’s approval rating continued to rise.

  ‘Oh, yes, we had books at home called Notable British Trials. You were in that case, weren’t you?’

  ‘When my wig was as white as yours, Miss Ingolsby.’

  ‘And you did it without a leader?’

  ‘It was all a long time ago.’

  ‘How can I get into a case like that?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait until someone gets killed in an interesting way in the suburbs. Then get led by your Head of Chambers.’

  ‘By Mr Ballard?’

  Soapy Sam, I thought, would make an excellent lost leader, but I resisted the temptation of pointing this out to my new-found and young learned friend. All I said was, ‘Someone with Sam Ballard’s qualities, yes.’

  Lala thought this over and said, ‘There’s something else I’d like your advice about.’

  ‘You probably need my advice on the subject of bloodstains?’

  ‘It’s not bloodstains. It’s Claude Erskine-Brown.’

  Again I resisted the temptation to say, ‘Much the same thing.’ So I said, ‘Liz Probert has reported him to the Society of Women Barristers. Re the matter of your legs.’

  ‘I didn’t really mind that. It’s just that he keeps on about it. And quite honestly I don’t fancy Erskine-Brown.’

  ‘Quite honestly,’ I had to admit, ‘neither do I.’

  ‘I know Liz got excited about it. I just want him to stop. It’s become embarrassing.’

  ‘Embarrassing to have him making flattering remarks about your personal appearance?’

  ‘Well, it is. Quite honestly.’

  ‘And you want him to stop?’

  ‘Quite honestly, yes. What do you think I ought to do, Mr Rumpole? You’ve had so much experience of life.’

  ‘A life of crime,’ I had to admit.

  ‘So what should I do?’

  ‘You really want to stop Claude dead in his tracks?’

  ‘That sort of thing, yes.’

  ‘Then tell him
you love him passionately. Tell him you want him to get a divorce and marry you. Above all, tell him you’re going to ring up Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown, once the Portia of our chambers and my long-ago pupil, now married to Claude.’

  ‘Why should I want to ring her up?’

  ‘Tell him it’s to beg her to set him free because you can’t live without each other.’

  ‘What do you think will happen if I tell him all that?’

  ‘I think he’ll run a mile. I think he’ll drop your legs as a topic of conversation. I think he’ll never speak to you as you’re standing by the notice board again.’

  ‘It’s not very flattering to think he’d react like that.’

  ‘It may well not be flattering, but it’ll work,’ and I added, in words she could understand, ‘quite honestly.’

  ‘I suppose I might try it.’ At which she left me, grinning broadly.

  I no longer thought of what havoc I might have wreaked on the love lives of the present members of our chambers. I picked up my pen and dived back in time to the days when my wig was as white as Miss Lala Ingolsby’s. I summed up the situation and carried on my narrative in the following way.

  Looking back at Equity Court in the days when C. H. Wystan was our Head and Uncle Tom was chipping golf balls into the wastepaper basket, I miss the figures who have become so much a part of my life and seem inseparable from the building. Claude Erskine-Brown had not arrived to bore us about his nights at the opera and fall hopelessly in love at least once a month, nor had our Portia, Phillida Trant, who remarkably married him. Guthrie Featherstone, QC, MP, was still to take us over and Soapy Sam Ballard was organizing debates among his fellow law students on such subjects as ‘Is adultery a quasi-criminal offence?’ and ‘A Christian approach to smoking’.

  Most of the members of chambers at the time of the Penge Bungalow affair have died or become judges or, in other ways, put an end to their active lives. Their faces, plump and self-satisfied or sharp-nosed and inquisitive, have drifted into that great gallery of past learned friends I have been against and judges I have found irritating. Little labels which might have given me a clue as to their names and identities have got rubbed smooth and become illegible over the course of the years.

  A character who sticks in my mind, however, and had some influence on events surrounding the Penge Bungalow affair, was Teddy Singleton. He was by far the most elegant member of Equity Court. He lived in South Kensington with someone he always referred to as ‘Mumsie’ and rarely left chambers without putting on a fawn overcoat with a velvet collar and carrying a tightly rolled umbrella. He spoke in a voice which, having hit on an effective note of amused contempt, was disinclined to try any change of expression.

  Uncle Tom, defeated by the wastepaper basket, had drifted off home and the gas lights were being lit. I sat on in our room, turning the pages of the forensic science book, trying not to look at the photographs of battered babies and strangled women, but to concentrate on the information to be gained from bloodstains and the spattering of blood, making a note which I hoped C. H. Wystan would find useful. Teddy Singleton glided into the room and asked me what I was doing. I was good enough to tell him but he dismissed my efforts with a short, staccato burst of laughter.

  ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about that, Rumpole. You might think you’ve got an important job. Case in the public eye. Head of Chambers leading you. I tell you, I’ve been led by Wystan and he won’t even let his junior read out an agreed statement.’

  ‘I’m just seeing if we can get anything from the blood.’

  ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head.’ It was the sort of remark that would get Erskine-Brown in trouble with the sisterhood these days, and it seemed peculiarly inappropriate when applied to me, as he soon realized. Teddy gave me a more critical examination. ‘Your head’s not exactly pretty, is it? All the same, I’m going to offer you a speaking part. Dear old con, spent half his life in chokey, so it won’t come as much of a shock to him. I can’t do it. I’m in a fun divorce case across the road.’

  ‘You mean he’s pleading guilty?’ My interest in Teddy’s brief was already shrinking. ‘Why’s he doing that?’

  ‘You think you’ll find that rather dull? Never mind. It doesn’t much matter what you say. You could say this isn’t a case of juvenile crime. It’s elderly, non-violent and extremely unsuccessful crime. You could ask the court to take into consideration the fact that your client is one of the most unsuccessful burglars who ever failed to break and enter a fish and chip shop with the door left open. Anyway, I’m giving you the opportunity. Aren’t you going to thank me?’

  ‘If I’m supposed to,’ I conceded.

  ‘Of course you are! Life’s not all junior briefs in sensational murders, you know.’ At which Teddy Singleton went off, swinging his rolled umbrella, to his ‘fun divorce case’ or some other source of entertainment. In due course I got the brief from Albert in R. v. Timson. At that time the name meant nothing to me.

  After Singleton had left me, I decided it was time I let my learned leader know my thoughts on the bloodstains in R. v. Jerold. I trudged along to his room, knocked at the door and was invited to come in by a commanding but strangely high-pitched voice. As I did so, I was greeted with the spectacle of Hilda seated comfortably behind her father’s desk, filing her nails and reading a magazine.

  ‘Hello there, Rumpole!’ She called to me as though she was hailing some small ship in difficulties from the comparative safety of the shore. ‘I thought I might bump into you again while I was here. I’m waiting for Daddy to come back from court and take me out to dinner. Got any particular message for him, have you?’

  ‘Blood.’ I tried to put the matter as shortly as possible.

  ‘What’s blood got to do with it?’

  ‘It’s about the bloodstains in the Penge Bungalow affair.’

  ‘Well, of course there were bloodstains, Daddy knows that, if that wretched boy shot his father.’

  ‘If he did? We have to presume he didn’t do it.’

  ‘Why on earth should we presume that?’ Hilda Wystan was giving me her look of tolerant amusement.

  ‘Because the law tells us to.’

  I suppose I was being pompous, but she smiled tolerantly and said, ‘The presumption of innocence doesn’t mean that some people aren’t guilty.’

  The Wystan daughter had a point there, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of admitting it. So I said, ‘If you could just tell your father that I’ve had some ideas about the blood.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think Daddy’ll be very interested in ideas about the blood.’

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me what part of the defence does interest your daddy?’ I thought of that terrified boy, alone in a cell, expecting death, and I have to confess to a distinct rise in the supply of righteous indignation.

  ‘Daddy always says that the job of a defending counsel is to wrap the client in a cloak of respectability,’ Hilda told me.

  ‘I just happen to believe that bloodstains might be more useful to Simon than a cloak of respectability.’

  ‘Who’s Simon?’

  ‘Young Simon. The prisoner at the bar.’

  ‘Daddy calls him “Jerold”. I don’t think he’s ever referred to him as “Simon”.’

  ‘Perhaps he should. Then the jury might think of him as a human being. A boy. Perhaps they’ve got sons his age.’ Although, of course, I had never done a murder trial, I had given the matter a good deal of serious thought.

  ‘Rumpole!’ My learned leader’s daughter stopped me as though I was a runaway pony, galloping completely out of control. ‘I think for your future career, after R. v. Jerold’s over of course, you should concentrate on the civil law.’

  ‘Civil law? I hardly know any civil law.’ It was true: I had scraped through contract after a humiliating retake.

  ‘Then I think you should brush up on it, Rumpole. Daddy always says that civil law is so much cleaner than crime.’

&n
bsp; ‘I don’t agree,’ I had no hesitation in telling her.

  ‘Don’t you, Rumpole?’ She still looked at me in an amused sort of way, as though I was a young but harmless eccentric.

  ‘To me criminal law is all about life, love and the pursuit of happiness. Civil law’s only about money, an uninteresting subject.’ It was a sentence I had used in one of my examination papers to cover my profound ignorance of the rules governing bills of exchange.

  ‘Do you really think money an uninteresting subject, Rumpole?’ Hilda’s tolerant smile was now a permanent fixture. ‘You’ll probably think differently when it comes to getting married.’

  ‘If I ever do, I’m sure I’ll be able to rub along on a life of crime,’ I was unwise enough to tell her.

  ‘Rubbing along doesn’t sound quite good enough, Rumpole. I’m sure your wife will expect more than that. By the way, you know how you landed the junior brief in R. v. Jerold?’

  ‘Your father said,’ I remembered the conversation over the Wystan port, ‘that you recommended me.’

  ‘I did, Rumpole. You can be sure that, when it comes to questions of your career, I have your interests at heart.’

  The telephone rang then and I gathered it was Daddy, telling his daughter to meet him for dinner at Simpson’s in the Strand. Hilda departed in a hurry and I was left worrying more about the bloodstains in the Penge bungalows and less than perhaps I should about why Hilda Wystan was planning my future career at the bar. In my comparative innocence, I hadn’t noticed that the dark clouds were gathering not only over Simon Jerold but over much of Rumpole’s life to come.

  7

  ‘It’s quite like old times,’ Daisy Sampson said as we were dealing with a late breakfast (bun and butter washed down by watery coffee) in the canteen at London Sessions as a prelude to a visit to my client, Cyril Timson, in the cells in order to search for some more or less lovable act to mitigate the effects of his confession of guilt.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the old times before you danced away from me.’