Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

by John Mortimer

  ‘They don’t look particularly friendly.’

  ‘They used to roam the earth. You should remember that about them. It was nothing but a swamp with those monsters roaming about. Nothing changes, does it, Mr Rumpole?’

  I thought this was a rather too pessimistic view of our situation so I said nothing.

  ‘They made those statues from fossils found in the British Museum. You knew that, I suppose?’

  ‘I’m afraid I didn’t.’

  ‘That’s the old pterodactyl Jimmy’s looking at now.’

  The monster did, I thought, have a legal look, with wings sprouting from legs like the folds of a gown and a long beak open to discuss fees or deliver judgements.

  ‘So many of you living in the same part of south London.’ I started some gentle probing. ‘The address on your card was Norwood, and then there were Jerry and Charlie at Penge of course. And Peter Benson over at Sutton.’

  ‘Now he’s having a good look at the iguanodon.’ Small legs supported the huge animal with a monstrous pointed tail and a hungry grin. ‘That’s meant to be the master-piece, but they got it wrong,’ Don told me. ‘That sort of horn arrangement shouldn’t be on its nose. It should be a kind of gigantic thumb.’

  ‘That’s all very interesting, but we were talking about Jerry Jerold. Did you keep in touch with him after the war?’

  ‘From time to time, yes. And I want you to get this clear, Mr Rumpole, whatever you call yourself. Jerry never did anything wrong. He never did anything that would make him deserve shooting. He was a brave officer who crashed his plane and got taken prisoner. That’s all Jerry was.’

  ‘His son says that he turned against the war.’

  ‘His son! After he shot his own father, he’d tell you anything, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, you can be sure of one thing. It’s no good you asking around to find bad things about Jerry. Because there aren’t any.’ Don took his son’s hand and said, ‘We’ll have to get going soon, Jimmy.’ The boy nodded, now gazing at the iguanodon as though it was about to waddle hugely towards us.

  ‘Sam Dougherty told me how scared people were in bomber command.’ I tried to keep the subject open.

  ‘Scared? Of course we were scared!’

  ‘What else can you tell me about Jerry?’

  ‘Tell you? I can’t tell you anything else. Peter Benson knew Jerry best. You’ll have to ask him.’

  Peter Benson, who had disarmed Simon and who spent evenings in the pub with Jerry. ‘He got on well with Jerry, didn’t he?’

  ‘They were great friends. If you want to know more about Jerry, you’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘I’ll have to do that in court,’ I told him. ‘But I’ve got a young man, a solicitor’s clerk. His name’s Bernard and I call him Bonny. Could he get a statement from you? You may be able to remember more about Jerry then.’

  ‘I’m not going near any lawyers or any court of any sort. Not ever. Not after the battle we had over Jimmy. Why should I?’

  I gave him what I thought was the inescapable reason. ‘They want to hang young Simon. Suppose someone wanted to do that to your Jimmy when he was grown up? You’d do anything in the world to save him, wouldn’t you? Just try and remember!’

  ‘I don’t know who you are, Mr Rumpole.’ Don’s voice was still gentle, but his meaning was perfectly clear. ‘I’ve told you absolutely nothing. If you get me in court I’ll say just that you must have made our conversation up. I told you, I’m not going near any court or answering questions from lawyers, not ever again as long as I live. Come on, Jimmy. I’ve got to take you back to her, and we don’t want to be one minute late, do we?’ He dismissed me with a brief, ‘You’ll excuse me, Mr Rumpole.’

  I left him then, uncomfortably aware that I had been brought to a meeting that had told me nothing. The puzzle remained without a solution. The question of whoever had a reason to kill Jerry Jerold, apart from his son, remained unanswered. So why had Don Charleston troubled to leave his number with Bobby O’Keefe, and why was I led to the park to learn about nothing but prehistoric animals? Was it, I wondered, a meeting arranged to tell me that there was nothing to tell? Even if that was the truth of the matter, it brought me no nearer to a defence for Simon.

  Just before I left the park I turned back to look at the enigmatic Don. By then he was deep in conversation with a tall man in a long blue overcoat who had a pale face and a lock of black hair falling across his forehead.

  18

  To add to my troubles, Hilda’s daddy had turfed me out of chambers, so I was going through my brief, checking my notes for cross-examination, in the Tastee Bite in Fleet Street. There I was at breakfast, satisfying myself on eggs on a fried slice, sausage, tomatoes and bacon, with some strong coffee, an intake of carbohydrates which was to see me through decades of difficult mornings down the Old Bailey in the times to come.

  I had polished off the main part of this strengthening meal when I heard a sharp cry of ‘Rumpole!’ and Hilda, carrying a cup of coffee, came and plumped herself down beside me. ‘I’ve been watching you, Rumpole. If you go on eating breakfasts like that, do you know what you’re going to be, without doubt, in the future?’

  ‘I hope a successful defender of those in trouble with the law. A man with a mantelpiece loaded with briefs.’

  ‘No. You’re going to be fat.’

  ‘I’m going to fight for young Simon’s life,’ I told her. ‘I need a certain amount of nourishment to do it properly. Whether I become fat in the process is a matter of no concern to me.’

  ‘But it may be of some concern to your wife.’

  ‘My wife? I have no wife in view at the moment.’

  ‘Have you not?’ She gave me the sort of patient smile of which I was to see more in the future. It was a smile that said, ‘You have very little idea of what’s going on at the moment and I really can’t be bothered to explain, but you’ll probably see sense in the end.’ Then she said, ‘I’ve been talking to Daddy.’

  ‘Your daddy,’ I was bold enough to tell her, ‘turfed me out of chambers. It’s because of your daddy that I have to prepare a day’s work in the Tastee Bite eatery, or in the robing room at the Old Bailey. I am homeless as a result of your daddy.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have taken over his case. He’s not too pleased about that, Rumpole.’

  ‘So he told me.’

  ‘All the same I managed to have a word with him on the subject of you.’

  ‘On the subject of me?’

  ‘I told him you were doing a difficult case . . .’

  ‘Didn’t he know that already?’

  ‘If you could stop talking for a moment, Rumpole, and just try to listen. I got him to agree you could go on using Uncle Tom’s room while you’re doing R. v. Jerold. Uncle Tom’s hardly ever there.’

  ‘I know. That was kind of you. Did Daddy take a lot of persuading?’

  ‘He was against it at first.’ And Hilda added with pride, ‘I wore him down.’

  ‘You did very well.’ I had to admit Hilda at her best would have worn any court down and forced any judge or jury into submission. I was about to tell her how utterly mistaken her daddy was, both in his conduct of the trial and in denying her a seat in Chambers, when her voice rose in a tone of accusation and disapproval. I had my wallet open on the table beside me, preparatory to drawing out a ten-bob note towards the Tastee Bite’s terms for breakfast. As I picked it up, the recent purchases from my landlady’s shop slipped from their moorings and three rubber johnnies, still regrettably in their packets, were exposed to the view of the future She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  ‘Not before it’s legal, Rumpole. We can’t think of that sort of thing yet, can we? Only when it’s legal, don’t you agree?’

  By now my thoughts were on the day in court ahead and I didn’t feel I could spare time discussing the illegality of rubber johnnies.

  ‘Oh, I suppose so,’ I said, and, ‘Sorry, I’ve got to pay the
bill and get down the Old Bailey.’

  As I left Hilda was smiling in a way that seemed almost triumphant. She had, after all, retrieved my room for me, at least for the duration of the trial, and so I smiled back.

  I was walking down to Ludgate Circus on one of the last of the golden September mornings, with my brief in a very junior barrister’s blue bag slung over my shoulder. All the facts it contained were, as usual, circulating in my head and still coming to no very coherent conclusion.

  Outside the old Palais de Justice, flashes went off from a few cameras, because the newspapers now knew I was defending Simon alone and without a leader. I felt a moment of pride, which I knew immediately was no substitute for a decent defence, and dived in through the swing doors and took the lift up to the robing room.

  There various barristers were getting wigs and gowns out of their lockers, standing in front of mirrors, fastening winged collars to their studs, tying on crisp white bands and doing their best to turn from a haphazard collection of odds and sods into a solid and uniformed body of learned friends. As I was tying the bands and adjusting the wig I heard, with my usual irritation, the Old Etonian bray of the prosecution junior.

  ‘How are you today, Sherlock Rumpole? Getting ready to go down with all your guns blazing? Dressing up to sink beneath the waves?’

  ‘Rumpole?’ I heard the voice of a stranger who was tying on his bands close to Reggie Proudfoot. ‘Isn’t he the chap that’s agin you in the Penge Bungalow Murders?’

  ‘Of course he is. The boy in question fired his leader and so he’s got Rumpole. Rumpole’s a most useful defender if you want to get convicted. You’ve heard the story about Rumpole at London Sessions, haven’t you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ It was the voice of the stranger.

  ‘Vincent Caraway told me. Rumpole was defending some old codger who was just longing to go to prison. Of course Rumpole obliged and got him two years.’

  And then suddenly, as Reggie Proudfoot said that, an extraordinary thing happened. It was as if a hand had given a final shake to the kaleidoscope and a new pattern emerged; as though all the questions and statements and speculation of the last weeks had settled down into one, perhaps almost credible, explanation, and the connection between Uncle Cyril’s defence and the deaths of Jerry Jerold and ‘Tail-End’ Charlie became clear. Now I had a lot more to think about, but first I had to express my gratitude.

  ‘Thank you, Proudfoot!’ I said, clasping the wig to my head. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for saying that!’ And with that, I pulled my gown about me and left the abominable Proudfoot in a state of considerable surprise.

  I took the lift down to Court Number One and there, in the usual crowd of people waiting for the entertainment to start again, I saw Bonny Bernard.

  ‘You seem very cheerful this morning.’ Young Bernard was not quite able to understand it.

  ‘I feel,’ I told him, ‘like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.

  ‘Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’

  So, with a bit of Keats for company, I strode into court in an unexpected mood of hope.

  19

  ‘How is old Rumpole?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  Dodo Mackintosh was chiefly remarkable for her small pointed nose, thick woolly cardigans and her habit of smiling broadly at any item of bad news. She lived near Lamorna Cove in Cornwall, where, so far as I could discover, she spent her time scrambling over the rocks and painting in watercolours. It was one of her works, which showed this beauty spot in what looked like a fine rain, that hung over our mantelpiece.

  ‘You won’t be well, will you, Rumpole,’ She Who Must had to chip in with a discussion of my health, ‘if you don’t do what the doctor told you and keep your leg elevated.’

  ‘Circulation?’ Dodo asked with her head cocked on one side, a broad grin and a knowing look.

  ‘Of course.’ She Who Must nodded in serious agreement.

  ‘If you don’t keep that old leg of yours up, you may have to lose it, Rumpole.’ The idea seemed to cause Dodo increased amusement. She fairly bubbled with laughter and I had to remember her help in preparing cheesy bits for chambers’ parties before I could find her in any way tolerable.

  ‘Rumpole is working on his memoirs,’ Hilda explained. ‘He says he can’t keep his leg up and write at the same time.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ Dodo seemed to find the situation funnier than ever. ‘Hundreds of people must have written their memoirs with their legs up. What are your memoirs about anyway, Rumpole?’

  ‘The Penge Bungalow Murders. You won’t have heard of them.’ I insured myself against the danger of another good laugh from Dodo and a denial that any such epoch-making case ever existed.

  ‘She’s heard you talk about it often enough,’ said Hilda. ‘Come along, Dodo. We’ve got to go shopping.’

  ‘Shopping?’ I was wary. ‘Surely we’ve got everything we need.’

  ‘Don’t you remember? We’ve got all the girls coming for the after-theatre party.’

  ‘Who’s coming exactly?’ Dodo was curious.

  ‘Sandy Butterworth and -’

  ‘Not Sandy Butterworth?’

  ‘Yes. What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘She was the one who spread terrible rumours about Miss Bigsby and the school janitor.’

  ‘Miss Bigsby the maths mistress?’

  ‘Science and biology.’

  ‘It wasn’t Sandy that said that. It was Emma Glastonbury, ’ Hilda thought.

  ‘No. I’m sure it was Sandy Butterworth.’ Dodo stood her ground.

  ‘Or was it one of the Gage twins? That janitor was rather handsome.’

  ‘Dunc the hunk we called him. His name was Duncan.’

  ‘Of course it was.’

  So they went off, discussing the evidence in the case of Miss Bigsby and the janitor, and I pushed my chair nearer to the gas fire and contemplated my memoirs, in which the issues were far more serious than the question of who’d slandered Miss Bigsby.

  I went into Court Number One at the Old Bailey, as I have reported, after a sudden enlightening feeling, as chuffed as stout Cortez when taking his first view of the Pacific. What had been said by Reggie Proudfoot in the robing room had suddenly thrown a bright light on what was, up until then, only a dark suspicion in the corner of the Rumpole mind. It seemed to be the simple answer to a simple question, but how I was to get it into the evidence, or what I could do with it if I got it there, remained a mystery as yet unsolved.

  So when I got up to cross-examine an important witness, the hands were once again damp and the mouth dry. In a way the idea I had made the job more difficult. All I could do was to fire off as many questions as possible in the faint hope that one of them would startle a cowering covey of truths and send them flying out into the open. The witness in question had given his name as Martyn Dempsy and his occupation as curator of a small geology museum attached to a south London civic centre. He had studied the subject, he told the court with a good deal of pride, after he left the air force. He also declined to take the oath as he thought all swearing was an insult to God and Lord Jessup allowed him to affirm. All of this made him, I felt sure, a serious witness the jury would instinctively trust. He stood, a gaunt figure in the witness box, suddenly removed from the rocks and fossils of his small and rarely visited museum.

  ‘Mr Dempsy,’ I began in a tone which I hoped was friendly, ‘you were in the same squadron as Jerry Jerold and Charles Weston?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Did you get to know Jerry Jerold well?’

  ‘Pretty well, yes.’

  ‘Tell me this. Was there a time when he got, shall we say, pessimistic about the war?’

  ‘He had his gloomy times, yes. Some of us did.’

&nbs
p; ‘But did he take it further and say Hitler was bound to win?’

  ‘I can remember him saying that once or twice,’ the reliable witness agreed reluctantly.

  ‘What did you say to him on those occasions?’

  ‘I told him to stop talking like that and get on with the job.’

  ‘Very commendable. And did he take your advice?’

  ‘Until his plane was shot down. Yes, I believe he did.’

  ‘Until his plane was shot down.’ I repeated this for the benefit of the jury, and then asked, ‘Did you see much of Jerry Jerold after the war?’

  ‘Not very much. We met at a few reunion dinners, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Was it a surprise when he asked you to this theatre party?’

  ‘A bit of a surprise, yes. He asked a number of people from the squadron. We all paid our way.’

  ‘And what was the purpose of this party, do you think?’

  Here Winterbourne rumbled to his feet and objected that the witness couldn’t possibly know what was in the deceased’s mind. The judge, unfairly I thought, said, ‘Yes, Mr Rumpole. You have only recently become familiar with the rules of evidence. Apply your knowledge to this case, would you be so good?’ After which, he snuffed a large helping off the back of his hand. I waited for this operation to be over, and when the silk handkerchief had been applied to the judge’s nostrils I rephrased the question. ‘Was there a discussion of your wartime experiences? ’

  ‘Not a general discussion, no.’

  ‘Did you hear the deceased, Jerry Jerold, say anything about his wartime experiences that evening?’

  Winterbourne rumbled another objection, but I was able to argue that, as Simon was accused of murdering his father during a quarrel about the war, the deceased’s views on this subject should be relevant. The question was allowed.

  ‘I heard Peter -’

  ‘That’s Peter Benson?’