Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

by John Mortimer

  ‘The hanging judge?’

  ‘Oddly enough, there was something about him I found strangely encouraging. I thought we had views in common.’

  ‘You’re not telling me that you’re going to start taking snuff, are you, Rumpole?’

  ‘No, it’s not the snuff. That’s a disgusting habit. It’s the presumption of innocence.’

  Daisy Sampson, toying with her glass of Mateus Rosé, gave me an inquisitive look and said, ‘You seem to be doing a lot of preparation for the Jerold case.’

  ‘Do you think that’s at all odd?’

  ‘Just a bit. When your leader’s told you that you won’t be called on to say a single word. And he doesn’t seem to take much notice of your suggestions.’

  I told Daisy that I was trying to find an answer to Wystan’s question to me.

  ‘Oh, yes? And what question was that?’ Daisy had both elbows on the table and, cradling her glass in both hands, smiled at me over it.

  ‘If Simon didn’t kill his father and “Tail-End” Charlie, who on earth did?’

  ‘And do you think you’ve got any answers?’

  ‘Not yet. We don’t know enough about them. Everyone’s convinced that Simon did it. They haven’t asked nearly enough questions about the lives of Jerry and Charlie. Did they have any enemies?’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Is that why you were trying to get in touch with the other chap in the bomber - the navigator?’

  ‘Did I tell you that?’

  ‘Didn’t you? You keep on talking about your great case.’

  ‘I may have done. Anyway, he’s no help. He died when the plane crashed and caught fire.’ I was puzzled. I couldn’t remember discussing David Galloway with Daisy. ‘By some miracle, Jerry and Charlie escaped from the blazing plane.’

  ‘So they were lucky?’

  ‘Perhaps not so lucky. Death got them in the end.’

  But we weren’t there to discuss our cases. Halfway through the Black Forest gâteau I said, ‘You wanted to see where I live.’

  ‘Did I?’ Daisy looked momentarily confused. ‘Oh, yes, I believe I did.’

  ‘And you said it would be so convenient having the bed in the sitting room.’

  ‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Exactly!’ I agreed with enthusiasm. ‘So would you like to see it now?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She sounded doubtful. ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Not at all. Just off Southampton Row.’

  ‘I mean, will it take long?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I smiled at her, ‘just as long as we want it to take.’

  ‘Oh, well then,’ she said as I asked the waiter for the bill, which turned out to be unexpectedly steep on account of Daisy’s insistence on a couple of gin and Its to precede the Mateus Rosé and a crème de menthe frappé to go after the pudding.

  ‘I suppose I can manage it if it won’t take too long.’ It was not the most tender or most encouraging way to start a love affair, but I called a taxi to take us to the convenient bedsit of our choice.

  I didn’t know how my landlady would react to late-night visitors, so I asked Daisy to be quiet on the stairs. She reacted with exaggerated caution, tiptoeing up in solemn silence. When we got to the top I threw open my door, gave a low bow and said, ‘Welcome to my convenient home.’

  I had honestly done my best with it. The electric fire had all bars glowing and it provided a warm welcome. The bed, with fresh sheets, was turned invitingly down. The papers on my desk were neatly arranged. I had done a good deal of dusting and even got a jug of slightly overblown chrysanths on the bedside table. I had considered scattering rose petals, but decided against it for reasons of economy.

  ‘It’s very nice, Rumpole.’ Daisy gave it a quick look-around. ‘I’m sure you’re very happy here.’

  ‘Very happy now,’ I assured her, and planted a quick kiss on her scarlet lips.

  She returned it briefly and then withdrew.

  ‘I’ve got another Mateus Rosé,’ I assured her. ‘It’s not exactly cold, but would you like a drink?’ I looked at the glowing bars of the fire but, to my amazement, Daisy was consulting her watch.

  ‘Terribly sorry, Rumpole. Can’t possibly stay. This wretched party at the Four Hundred. Important clients. I promised to join them after dinner. Shop talk.’ And she was off down the stairs with a clatter calculated to wake the dead.

  It’s right, of course, that these memoirs should contain disasters as well as triumphs. Now I had nothing to look forward to except an apparently hopeless trial at the Old Bailey. I sat on the bed and drank the wine, which was sweet, warm and did nothing to enhance the situation.

  I don’t know what you think about being young. To me, it’s a time for growing used to disappointment.

  12

  The British can be relied on to produce regular events for the entertainment of the public, as much a part of our tradition as cricket at Lord’s, stockings hung out on Christmas Eve and the pantomime on Boxing Day. A regular event, preferably in early autumn, is the famous murder trial. Staged in Court Number One at the Old Bailey, it plays to packed houses, news of it fills the daily papers and then, usually after ‘guilty’ headlines, it disappears into history, coming out perhaps in the Notable British Trials series, and then is remembered only by a few lawyers who are writing their memoirs, as I am, or by the families tragically involved.

  R. v. Jerold could have been invented to fill this sensational slot. It is perhaps a sign of our times that in those faraway days there were only four courts at the Old Bailey. At the last count the number had gone up to eighteen. But even when trials were a great deal fewer Court Number One could always be relied on to produce an annual entertainment for the nation.

  The summer was over, the children were back at school, the golden leaves of September drifted slowly down on a country anxious to read all about it in the Sunday tabloids, while the broadsheets were full of articles on ‘Patricide since the story of Oedipus’ and ‘What the good people of Penge think about their sudden fame’. No wonder, with all those column inches to fill, the press benches were packed.

  I sat behind my so-called leader, Hilda’s daddy, who was carefully winding and unwinding the pink tape which came around his brief, an occupation which would concern him for much of the first day. I glanced up at the public gallery and saw Hilda, clearly excited and making herself comfortable in the front row of the dress circle.

  Next to Wystan sat the prosecutor, the Chief Treasury Counsel, Thomas Winterbourne, protected by a wall of files and notebooks, underlining parts of his opening speech with variously coloured pencils. He was a large, untidy man who spoke in a deep, monotonous rumble which had, at times, a soporific effect like the distant sound of the sea. He was known to eat huge meals in the bar mess and mountains of sandwiches in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. He was also fond of gossip and fast motorbikes.

  ‘Morning to you, Sherlock Rumpole. Think you know all the answers now, do you?’ It was the bray of the wretched Reggie Proudfoot, one of the prosecution juniors, who was sitting beside me in the second row. ‘I hear you’ve been doing more detective work. Wasting your time, my lad. Simply wasting your time.’

  I had no intention of replying to Proudfoot’s idiotic attack. Now an usher called, ‘Silence! All stand!’ and was met by the sound of a court filled with people of ranging degrees of mobility rising to their feet. In the ensuing clatter a small scarlet figure emerged from a door, bobbed us half a formal bow and half a small smile, and Lord Jessup composed himself on the bench and then gave a little nod as he took up a pencil and opened his notebook.

  ‘The Queen against Jerold,’ the clerk of the court intoned. ‘Put up Simon Jerold.’

  So Simon was ‘put up’ in the dock as though he was a glove puppet and part of a Punch and Judy show, and indeed, looking back on it, I suppose that was what he was, a hollowed-out figure manipulated to perform a plot worked out by lawyers. He looked pale
and exhausted, lacking sleep and about to face a long and ancient procedure from which he suspected that no good would come.

  I had met him with my leader earlier that day briefly in the cells, together with our solicitor, Barnsley Gough, and the industrious youth Bonny Bernard. Simon asked for a cigarette and Bernard gave him one, which he smoked awkwardly, punctuated by coughs, like someone who has just started the habit and means to continue with it for as long as he has left.

  ‘Now, Jerold,’ Hilda’s daddy was doing his best to sound avuncular, ‘you’re not to worry.’

  This instruction was so fatuous that it even produced a faint smile from the pallid young man we were defending.

  ‘I mean, you’re not to worry for today in any event. Mr Winterbourne will open the case for the prosecution, and he’ll be perfectly fair, as he always is. There may just be time for a short witness this afternoon. You won’t be surprised, I’m sure, if I don’t ask any questions. Now, have you remembered at all about an attack by your father later that night? Anything that might have led you to defend yourself?’

  ‘I told you. He never attacked me then. And I never shot him.’ For a moment, Simon came to life.

  ‘We’ll see what you remember later on. In the meantime . . .’

  ‘You’re not going to ask any questions?’ Simon spoke as though his worst fears had been confirmed.

  ‘Let me tell you this, Jerold,’ C. H. Wystan seemed about to take our client into his confidence, ‘and this is something I have learned from a long life at the bar, a life, I may say, during which I have enjoyed a certain amount of success, that more cases are lost by lawyers asking questions than for any other reason. Is that not right, Mr Barnsley Gough?’

  ‘Perfectly right, Mr Wystan.’ Regrettably, our solicitor agreed.

  ‘You see,’ Wystan was about to explain, largely in words of one syllable, the situation as he saw it, ‘the main facts of this case are agreed. You picked up a gun and threatened your father. The gun was taken away from you and in the morning your father was found dead in his chair, shot through his heart. If we start asking questions on these facts we will only irritate the judge and bore the jury.’

  Then Simon emerged again from his shell of silence and said quite loudly, ‘So you’re not going to help me?’

  Wystan stared at the prisoner, speechless, as though the young man had just snatched his wig and was ready to tear off his gown. Barnsley Gough did his best to mend matters by saying, ‘You’ve got the best legal team to help you, Simon. Mr Wystan has a vast experience of these cases.’

  I, to my eternal shame, said nothing, but vowed to give my client as much of my help as possible. C. H. Wystan looked at his watch and said, ‘Quarter past ten! We’d better be getting into court.’ And so we all trooped out of the cells, up into the safer surroundings of Court Number One, where my learned leader would no longer have to speak to his client.

  ‘Members of the jury,’ Tom Winterbourne said in his opening speech, ‘we shall call the ex-RAF officers who attended the theatrical night-out. All of those who survived will tell you that they saw Simon Jerold, the young man in the dock, pointing the Luger pistol at his father and, I’m afraid, threatening to kill.’

  The appointed twelve (nine men and three women, in those distant days when only rate-payers could serve on juries) had entered the jury box looking as though they couldn’t believe what had happened to them. They were minding their own business and leading their private lives when they were unexpectedly called upon to decide that year’s sensational case. They had taken the oath to ‘well and truly try the issues between our Sovereign Lady the Queen and the prisoner at the bar’ and then sat looking serious but enigmatic as though they had little doubt, I suspected, in the contest between the Queen and Simon Jerold, who was most likely to win.

  Hilda’s daddy had charged me to take a note and I was determined to do at least that. So I was writing down almost every word of Winterbourne’s, whose speech was being spoken slowly enough for my pen to follow.

  ‘The prosecution case,’ he rumbled and I wrote, ‘is that when all the guests had gone, this boy, this unnatural son, came out of his bedroom, regained possession of this Luger pistol that I am holding up, Prosecution Exhibit One, and, seeing his father still sitting at the fireside, he stood over him and shot him through the heart as he sat there at his ease. So ended the life of one of our unsung wartime heroes.’

  This was a passage I underlined heavily. At least we’d have something to argue about. I was going to call this to my leader’s attention, but I found him in whispered conversation with our clerk, Albert, who had arrived with some news which caused the Wystan head to nod in sage agreement. Accordingly I kept what I thought might at least cause the rumbling Winterbourne some trouble until a more appropriate moment.

  At the end of his opening speech, Winterbourne announced that he would first be calling one of the officers from the fatal evening, but there was a problem about the medical evidence. Dr Philimore, who carried out the post-mortems, was only available ‘first thing tomorrow morning’, after which he was flying out to Australia on an important case. The old rumbler hoped this wouldn’t ‘cause any inconvenience’.

  ‘Mr Wystan?’ The judge paused in the act of taking snuff to greet my leader in a friendly fashion.

  ‘I’m in some difficulty myself, My Lord. My clerk has just told me I have an important application in the Court of Appeal tomorrow morning. A planning application.’ He seemed unnaturally proud of the fact. ‘However, there is no controversy about the medical evidence in this case, so my learned junior, Mr Horace Rumpole, will be able to take a careful note of what the doctor says.’

  ‘No controversy? I’m glad to hear it.’ His vellum-coloured Lordship had now snuffled up the dark brown powder from the back of his hand and was dabbing his upper lip with the silk handkerchief. ‘I’m delighted to hear that and I’m sure the jury are too.’ Here he swivelled round to smile confidentially at the twelve honest citizens. ‘Happily we are to be spared the confusion of medical men who may disagree, members of the jury.’

  A day or two into the trial, they would have nodded wisely and smiled back at a judge anxious to woo them. Now they looked merely mystified.

  The atmosphere in court changed when the first ex-RAF officer entered the witness box and the lawyers were no longer centre stage. He gave his name as Timothy Wardle and his occupation as salesman in the business of double-glazing. He had pink cheeks, curly hair and, since the war, he had put on weight so that his blue suit fitted tightly. He had the appearance of a middle-aged cherub who was finding the double-glazing business a hard nut to crack.

  He had flown in Bristols during the war and knew Jerold and Weston. He lived in Sutton and he met both of them after the war at local events. It was at one of these that Jerold suggested the evening out in London. We heard the all-too-familiar story of the quarrel when Simon was summoned from his bed and the jury was told how he held the Luger pistol pointed at his father and uttered a threat to kill. Simon was disarmed by ex-Pilot Officer Benson and they didn’t see him again. The party broke up about an hour later and they went their separate ways.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Wardle.’ The prosecutor seemed sincerely grateful, and the judge asked my leader if he had any questions.

  ‘The magazine!’ I whispered at the back of Wystan’s left shoulder. ‘Ask him about the magazine!’

  ‘What was that, Rumpole?’ he muttered without turning round.

  ‘It’s in the notes I gave you. Ask him about the magazine. ’

  It seemed I might just as well have been enquiring about the latest copy of the Tatler, and at that moment the judge told us he had been looking at the clock and, it being just on four, he intended to pack up for the day. ‘The jury have no doubt had a great deal to digest. However, as there appears to be a disagreement in the defence team, perhaps the prosecution would have Mr Wardle available tomorrow morning when you, Mr Wystan, return from the Court of Appeal. Is that agreeabl
e to you, Mr Winterbourne?’

  ‘Certainly, My Lord,’ the agreeable rumble came from the other side of the court.

  ‘Very well then, ten-thirty tomorrow morning, members of the jury.’ At which, we were all upstanding and the Lord Chief Justice deprived us of his company.

  ‘I just thought that the evidence about the magazine was important,’ I tried to explain to Hilda’s daddy as we left the court.

  ‘We agree with everything that happened at that party, as I’ve tried to tell you, Rumpole.’ My leader was a little tetchy. ‘Now you promise me you won’t attack the doctor’s evidence.’

  ‘Of course I won’t attack his evidence.’

  ‘Excellent! I’ll be back from the Appeal Court as soon as I can be. It is, as I’m sure you realize, an important matter. Do you think the client understands that?’

  The client, when we said goodbye to him that day, seemed to understand nothing, or care very much either. He stared at the ground between his feet in silence. But I felt a kind of excitement, as though the next day offered a chance, if I could only grab it, of great importance in the Rumpole career.

  13

  In many cases to come I was to argue, across a crowded courtroom, on the topics of bloodstains, the direction of wounds and the time of death with Dr Ackerman, whom I christened ‘King of the Morgues’ and whose company I greatly enjoyed. His predecessor and teacher was the great Dr Philimore, soon to become Sir Percival, whose pronouncements on matters of forensic medicine were to be received with the respect paid to Holy Writ. At the time of the Penge Bungalow trial the future Sir Percival had already assumed the mantle of major prophet. He was of no great height, broad-shouldered and deepchested, he wore the sort of greyish beard favoured by the late King George V and he spoke with such certainty and persuasion that few judges, let alone barristers, felt able to contradict or even interrupt him.

  He went through his evidence in chief. Jerold died from a bullet wound in the heart. Death would have occurred very shortly after the shot. He was unable to give the court an accurate time of death, but it must have occurred at least six hours before the body was brought into the mortuary, where notes were taken of its temperature and the state of rigor. The wound had clearly been made by the German bullets preserved and exhibited. Much the same diagnosis appeared in his post-mortem examination of ‘Tail-End’ Charlie.