Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

by John Mortimer

  I tried not to sound bitter, and Daisy drew back the scarlet lips on her slightly protuberant teeth and gave me a brilliant smile. ‘That was only a bit of fun,’ she started to mitigate for herself. ‘That was the “Gentlemen’s Excuse Me”.’

  ‘That gentleman excused himself far too much, if you want my opinion.’

  ‘Well, you weren’t alone for long. That other girl seemed dead keen to dance with you.’

  ‘That “other girl”, as you call her, happens to be the daughter of my Head of Chambers.’

  ‘Well, that didn’t stop her being dead keen on dancing with you.’

  I bit into my bun. What Daisy had just said seemed to point to a road down which I was not yet prepared to travel. I was determined to return the conversation to the safer subject of crime.

  ‘Anyway, you sent the brief to Teddy Singleton.’

  ‘When he couldn’t do it, I suggested he passed it on to you.’

  ‘Thank you, Daisy.’ I supposed a brief was a fair substitute for a dance.

  ‘I thought it would be good for you to meet the Timsons.’

  ‘There’s more than one of them?’

  ‘Oh, a huge number. They’re great on family values. Look, over there, they’ve all turned up to see Uncle Cyril sent back to prison. They reckon he needs a lot of support.’

  She nodded towards a table in the corner at which a number of respectable-looking citizens of various ages and sexes were talking in quiet, concerned voices and drinking coffee.

  ‘They look a reliable group,’ I said. ‘Shall I call some of them as character witnesses?’

  ‘Better not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They’ve all got more convictions than you’ve had hot dinners, Horace.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Crime. Oh, no violence. Nothing spectacular. Just ordinary, decent breaking and entering, that sort of thing. That’s why they look so respectable. But the best thing about them is they provide an enormous amount of work for the legal profession.’

  It was when she said this that I was prepared to forgive Daisy her infidelity at the Inner Temple ball. ‘If that’s the case,’ I said, ‘let’s not hang about here. Let’s go straight down and talk to Uncle Cyril.’

  ‘The charge is that you broke into Sound Universe, in spite of its title a comparatively small radio and television shop in Coldharbour Lane, at two in the morning of 3 March and stole six radios, one television set, five alarm clocks, four electric kettles, oh, and one small egg-timer.’

  ‘Two o’clock in the morning, is that what it says?’ Uncle Cyril was short and plump with greying hair. I judged him to be in his sixties. He smiled a lot, seemed grateful for my visit and was clearly amused by the time the burglary had allegedly taken place.

  ‘Yes,’ I assured him. ‘It was a night-time job.’

  ‘But two in the morning! I never been out of bed at two in the morning! Never in my life. Why’ve they put that in? It’s just silly.’

  ‘Presumably it’s because that’s when Mr Rochford says he saw you putting the stuff in your van . . .’

  ‘Van?’ Uncle Cyril seemed even more amused. ‘I haven’t got a van. Not one that’s roadworthy anyway.’

  A great wave of relief had come over me. We were going to have a fight on our hands, a battle in court, during which I intended to startle Daisy and the hard-working Timson family with my brilliance. C. H. Wystan may have condemned me to silence in the Penge Bungalow affair, but I had a chance of winning the Queen against Uncle Cyril, alone and without a leader.

  ‘So you want to plead not guilty?’ I was prepared to take formal instructions from the client.

  ‘Guilty!’

  ‘What?’ Had I heard him correctly?

  ‘I’m going to say guilty.’

  ‘But if you were in bed and you haven’t got a van that works, why on earth . . . ?’

  ‘Because it’s safer.’

  ‘You’ll be sent back to prison.’

  ‘That,’ Uncle Cyril was no longer smiling, ‘will be much safer.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Uncle Cyril answered with a single word: ‘Molloys.’

  As our conversation had wandered into paths I no longer understood, I turned to Daisy for help.

  ‘The Molloys,’ she explained the mystery, ‘and the Timsons hate each other.’

  ‘Who are these Molloys?’

  ‘Another big family in the same south London patch. The Molloys, on the whole, do crime that’s neither ordinary nor decent.’

  ‘Too right,’ Uncle Cyril added, while I suggested, ‘Violent and unusual?’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ Daisy assured me.

  ‘The Molloys won’t forgive me over the Meadowsweet Building Society job.’

  ‘What was that?’ I now asked Daisy.

  ‘The offices got robbed. And one of the Molloys was arrested.’

  ‘It was Jimmy Molloy. And I happened to mention his name to “Persil” White,’ Uncle Cyril told me.

  ‘“Persil”?’ Again I turned to my interpreter for assistance.

  ‘Detective Inspector White. He’s always telling people he’s whiter than white, so they’ve named him after a soap powder,’ Daisy explained.

  ‘I happened to bump into “Persil” down the Needle Arms and he said, “You got anything for me, Cyril?”’

  ‘He wanted an alarm clock?’ I asked. In my salad days I still had a lot to learn.

  ‘No, I guess he wanted information, didn’t he, Cyril?’ Daisy asked our client.

  ‘Too right he did.’

  ‘And I suppose you gave him a few titbits?’

  ‘I know it’s not right. Of course I do. But I’m getting too old for all this breaking and entering, across roofs and stuff. And I’ve got to an age when I prefer my bed of a night-time. So I’m glad of a bit of regular income.’

  ‘And what did you tell “Persil” this time?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘I just happened to mention, casual, that there was talk of Jimmy Molloy in connection with the Meadowsweet job.’

  ‘For which Jimmy got three years, if I remember.’ Once again Daisy revealed her encyclopedic knowledge of the affairs of the criminal classes in the south Brixton area.

  ‘So they give me the Sound Universe as a bit, like, of revenge.’

  ‘Who gave it to you?’ I felt it was time I took charge of the conference.

  ‘Well, the Molloys, you see. Course it was one of them fingering me to “Persil” in the Needle Arms. I can’t fight them, Mr Rumpole. Not at my age. I can’t do battle with them, not the Molloys.’

  ‘But if you didn’t do it?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t do it, but they’ll get me anyway. That’s why I want to go inside. I’ll be much safer there.’

  ‘Can I get this clear?’ I needed to be sure, because I had serious doubts about Uncle Cyril’s sanity. ‘You want to go to prison?’

  ‘Safest place for me, Mr Rumpole. I reckons I’ll be looked after there. I’m used to it, of course. Reckon I’ll get Wandsworth. Jimmy Molloy got sent up north somewhere.’

  ‘So in order to get to what you regard as safety in prison, you’re ready to plead guilty to a crime you didn’t commit?’

  ‘Seems the only way, Mr Rumpole. They don’t let you into them places, not just by kicking at the door and asking if they got any cells to spare.’

  ‘And you tell me you never broke into the radio shop in Coldharbour Lane?’

  ‘Never. At any time!’

  ‘Then I can’t do it.’

  ‘Can’t do what, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Let you plead guilty.’ The finest traditions of the bar, whatever they were, seemed at that moment a lot more important than the exact shade of trousers to wear when addressing the Court of Appeal.

  ‘That’s my business, isn’t it, what I admits to?’

  ‘We’re here to take the client’s instructions, aren’t we?’ Daisy seemed to think I was being unnecessarily difficult. />
  ‘The world is full,’ I told her from the mountains, or at least the molehill, of my experience, ‘of stories about barristers who defend people they know are guilty. I absolutely refuse to be the first barrister who’s pleaded guilty for a customer he knows is innocent. However attractive you find the idea of prison, Mr Timson.’

  ‘You reckon I ought to fight it?’ Uncle Cyril seemed puzzled at my objecting to his retreat to a cell in Wandsworth.

  ‘I know you have to fight it,’ I assured him.

  ‘Pity we couldn’t get Teddy Singleton.’ Daisy stared at me, whether in admiration or irritation I couldn’t be sure. ‘He wouldn’t have been quite so picky.’

  ‘I’m scared of the Molloys, Mr Rumpole. That’s the truth of it.’

  ‘Perhaps you are. But pleading guilty’s not the answer.’

  ‘It’s the only answer I’ve got.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ I told him. Then I had an idea. ‘If you won’t listen to me, perhaps I might have a word with your family. They looked a fairly sensible lot.’

  They were all assembled in the canteen. Harry Timson, then the head of the clan, was there with his wife, Brenda, a spreading grandmother with bright, beady eyes. The much younger Fred, who was in line to succeed his father as the top Timson, was there with his warm-hearted wife, Vi, whom I was to defend on many a shoplifting charge in the future. There was Fred’s brother Dennis, an expert on forged log books and ‘clocking cars’, as I was to discover in the years to come, and Dennis’s wife, Doris, with a glamorous and heavy-lidded expression, a tight sweater and enough perfume to drown a small furry animal. It was Doris who, much later, I had to defend in a difficult case concerning the receiving of a large quantity of frozen shellfish, luxury goods as befitted Doris: langoustines, scampi, crayfish and the like.

  I was only a white wig, taking on a Timson brief at the last moment, but I have to say I have never been listened to with as much courteous attention by any of the judges who deal in crime as I received from the Timson family.

  For a while the evidence called concerned the Molloys, their tyrannical behaviour and desire to impose a reign of terror on south Brixton. The evidence was clear, uncontested and all one way. After twenty minutes, and the consumption of another coffee, bun and butter, I decided it was time I made my final speech. Accordingly, I tapped my coffee cup with a teaspoon and went straight to what seemed to me to be the heart of the matter.

  ‘May it please you, members of the Timson family,’ I began in a low, conversational tone, ‘what Cyril is asking for is an ignominious surrender to the forces of evil. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, it’s only a few years since we emerged victorious from a war with a ruthless enemy with whom I’m sure the Molloys would have had much in common. Did we quietly surrender to the Wehrmacht and to the SS? Did we say politely, “It’s all our fault, so please walk over us with your storm troopers and your jackboots?”’ At this point I distinctly heard Doris ask her husband what jackboots were, as though they might be some sort of fashion accessory. ‘We did not! We fought back and told the truth and, in the end, we won! And if we hadn’t, I ask you, what would have happened? The world would have been ruled by the Nazis.’ As I was in a Churchillian mood I pronounced the word Narzeez, as he did. ‘So, if we turn tail and run from the Molloys now, they’ll rule Brixton, doing what they like, bearing false witness and making accusations whenever it suits them.’

  ‘We don’t want that.’ Fred Timson gave me an encouraging mutter.

  Then I embarked on a peroration, borrowed, I have to confess, from our wartime leader. ‘We must fight them in Coldharbour Lane, we must fight them on Streatham Hill and we must fight them in Clapham. We must never surrender!’ And after a suitable pause I added, in what I hoped were quieter but even more persuasive tones, ‘And your Uncle Cyril must never give aid and comfort to the enemy by pleading guilty just because he’s frightened of the Molloys. And if you want time to discuss this among yourselves, I will step over to the slot machine and buy myself a small bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.’

  I had hardly persuaded the machine to deliver up the goods before I was called back to the table by Fred Timson. It seemed they had a verdict; but first they had a question.

  ‘If Cyril does a “not guilty”, Mr Rumpole, will you be here to defend him?’

  ‘While I can stand on my hind legs,’ I assured him, ‘and while I can still speak, I will defend Uncle Cyril to the death.’

  ‘Then he’ll do a “not guilty”. That’s what we’ve all decided and Uncle Cyril was never one to give any trouble to the family.’

  The London Sessions judge, a small foxy-faced individual known as ‘Custodial Cookson’ because of his lengthy sentences, was not best pleased at Uncle Cyril’s apparent change of heart.

  ‘This case was listed as a plea of guilty, Mr Rumpole. Now another date will have to be fixed for the trial. Your client is causing a good deal of trouble with the lists.’

  ‘Any amount of trouble with the lists,’ I felt entitled to say, ‘is less important than Mr Timson’s right to a fair hearing.’

  ‘You are of quite recent call to the bar, I think, Mr Rumpole.’ ‘Custodial Cookson’ had a voice like dead twigs blown over a frosty window. ‘Perhaps in the future you will be able to control your clients’ inconvenient changes of mind.’

  ‘I hope not, Your Honour.’

  The custodial judge looked as though he would have liked to say a good deal more. Instead he told me we’d be informed of the new date and refused bail. So Uncle Cyril was remanded, for a while at least, within the safety of the prison walls.

  As we crossed Blackfriars Bridge on the way back to Daisy’s office and my chambers, she said, ‘You did well there, didn’t you, Horace?’

  ‘You mean I upheld the finest traditions of the bar?’

  ‘No, I mean you won yourself another brief.’

  8

  Back at my desk, having committed my recollections of the first of many Timson defences to the pages of these memoirs, I was once again interrupted by the voices of the present day. Claude Erskine-Brown entered without knocking, flopped himself down in my client’s chair and gave a heavy and, I thought, somewhat self-satisfied sigh.

  ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that I’ve done it again, Rumpole.’

  ‘I know you have. And got into deep trouble with the sisterhood of the bar.’

  ‘It’s not them I’m worried about, Rumpole. They’ve got nothing to complain about. Not now.’

  ‘So what can ail thee, Erskine-Brown, alone and palely loitering?’ I suppose I might have said that, but I kept quiet, hoping that the man would leave me sooner. He was, however, determined to tell me what ailed him.

  ‘Have you broken anyone’s heart, Rumpole?’

  ‘No,’ I had to confess, ‘I’ve had rather a poor record in the heart-breaking department.’

  ‘It happens to me all too often. People fall in love with me and of course, having regard to my present situation, it can never be.’

  ‘What can never be?’

  ‘What they all want.’

  ‘And what is that exactly?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Erskine-Brown said in all modesty, ‘me.’

  ‘And you think you’ve broken a heart?’

  Now Claude gave vent to a heavy sigh and tried to sound suitably regretful. ‘It’s the effect I seem to have on people.’

  ‘Is it really? I don’t think you’ve broken my heart yet, Erskine-Brown.’

  ‘Of course not, Rumpole. Your heart’s probably reinforced concrete for all I know. I’m speaking now of younger women.’

  ‘Do you have one particular younger woman in mind?’

  ‘Haven’t I told you? It’s Lala Ingolsby. Probert’s pupil.’

  ‘And what are the precise symptoms of her heart trouble?’

  ‘You won’t spread this around chambers, will you, Rumpole? It’s not the sort of story one wants to have repeated in the clerk’s room.’ Claude struck a cautionar
y note.

  ‘My lips will be sealed. In perpetuity.’

  ‘Well, then, of course she’s fallen head over heels -’

  ‘A nasty accident?’ I hadn’t really misunderstood him.

  ‘No, in love. She wanted us to be together - for always.’

  ‘A long time,’ I agreed.

  ‘What’s more, she wanted to ring up Philly and tell her we wanted a divorce. I had to put a stop to it, Rumpole. You do see that, don’t you?’

  ‘Embarrassment all round, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m glad you agree. I mean, you simply don’t get a divorce from your wife if that wife is a High Court judge. Besides which, there are the children to consider.’

  ‘Tristan and Isolde?’ I knew their operatically inspired names, having taken them to the pantomime.

  ‘One simply can’t wreck their faith in family life.’

  ‘I suppose that’s on your mind all the time?’

  ‘Of course it is. That’s why I had to tell the poor girl -’

  ‘Lala?’

  ‘Probert’s pupil. It can never be.’

  ‘And when she heard that she went, I suppose, into a decline, took a long holiday in Thailand, joined the French Foreign Legion?’

  ‘She’s being incredibly brave about it, Rumpole. She turned up for work just as though nothing had happened.’

  ‘And you made no reference whatever to the shape of her legs?’

  ‘Never again, Rumpole, those days are over. Never again.’

  To the accompaniment of another heavy sigh, I took up my pen again to attack these memoirs. When I next looked up, Erskine-Brown had palely loitered out of the room.

  After the visit to London Sessions and my speech designed to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood of the Timson family in their fight against the tyranny of the Molloys, I felt a vague pang of regret that I hadn’t ended the speech in question with a cry of ‘God for Rumpole! England and Saint George!’ After all that excitement, time seemed to stand still.

  So I was alone in Uncle Tom’s room, long after he’d gone home. I was gazing once again at the photographs of the scene of the crime, what my old law tutor at Keble, Septimus Porter, had taught me to call the ‘locus in quo’. For what seemed to me like the hundredth time, I was staring at the dead pilot officer slumped in his armchair with a half-open door behind him. I was wondering whether to go for a chop in the Charing Cross Lyon’s Corner House before returning to my lonely bedsit off Southampton Row when a question occurred to me which called, as I thought, for an immediate answer. Accordingly, I put a call through to the offices of our Penge solicitors.