Forever Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  By the time he had pulled open the door his wife, Roz, had appeared on the stairs behind him, so she was able to hear Mirabelle telling her husband, after the parties had identified each other, that she had ‘come about young Tracy’. From the statements which I was able to read later it appears that the dialogue then went something like this. It began with a panic-stricken cry from Roz of ‘Tracy? What about our Tracy? She’s asleep upstairs. Isn’t she asleep upstairs?’

  ‘Are you Mum?’ Mirabelle then asked.

  ‘What do you mean, am I Mum? Course I’m Tracy’s mum. What do you want?’ Roz clearly spoke with rising hysteria and Mirabelle’s reply sounded, as always, reasonable.

  ‘We want to look after your Tracy, Mum. We feel she needs rather special care. I’m sure you’re both going to help us. We do rely on Mum and Dad to be very sensible.’

  Roz was not deceived by the soothing tones and concerned smile. She got the awful message and the shock of it brought her coldly to her senses. ‘You come to take Tracy away, haven’t you?’ And before the question was answered she shouted, ‘You’re not bloody taking her away!’

  ‘We just want to do the very best for your little girl. That’s all, Mum.’ At which Mirabelle detached a dreaded and official-looking document from the clipboard she was carrying. ‘We do have a court order. Now shall we go and wake Tracy up? Ever so gently.’

  It would be unnecessarily painful to dwell on the scene that followed. Roz fought like a tigress for her young and had to be restrained, at first by her husband, who had learnt, as a juvenile, the penalty for assaulting the powers of justice, and then by the uniformed officer who was called in from the car. The Timsons were told that they would be able to argue the case in court eventually, the woman police officer helped pack a few clothes for Tracy in a small case and, as the child was removed from the house, Mirabelle took the Barbie doll from her, explaining that it was bad for children in such circumstances to have too many things that reminded them of home. So young Tracy Timson was taken into custody and her parents came nearer to heartbreak than they ever had in their lives, even when Cary got a totally unexpected two years’ for the theft of a clapped-out Volvo Estate from Safeway’s car park. Throughout it all it’s fair to say that Miss Mirabelle Jones behaved with the tact and consideration which made her such a star of the Social Services and such a dangerous witness in the Juvenile Court.

  Tracy Timson was removed to a gloomy Victorian villa now known as the Lilacs, Crockthorpe Council Children’s Home, where she will stay for the remainder of this story, and Mirabelle set out to interview what she called Tracy’s peers, by which she meant the other kids Tracy was at school with, and, in the course of her activities, she called at another house in Morrison Close, this one being occupied by the father and mother of young Dominic Molloy. Now anyone who knows anything about the world we live in, anyone who keeps his or her ear to the ground and picks up as much information as possible about family rivalry in the Crockthorpe area, will know that the Molloys and the Timsons are chalk and cheese and as deadly rivals as the Montagues and the Capulets, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, or York and Lancaster. The Molloys are an extended family; they are also villains, but of a more purposeful and efficient variety. To the Timsons’ record of small-time thieving the Molloys added wounding, grievous bodily harm and an occasional murder. Now Mirabelle called on the eight-year-old Dominic Molloy and, after a preliminary consultation with him and his parents, he agreed to help her with her enquiries. This, in turn, led to a further interview in an office at the school with young Dominic which was immortalized on videotape.

  I remember my first conference with Tracy’s parents, because on that morning Hilda and I had a slight difference of opinion on the subject of the Scales of Justice Ball. This somewhat grizzly occasion is announced annually on a heavily embossed card which arrived, with the gas bill and various invitations to insure my life and go on Mediterranean cruises, on the Rumpole breakfast table.

  I had launched this invitation towards the tidy-bin to join the tea-leaves and the eggshells when Hilda, whose eagle eye misses nothing, immediately retrieved it, shook various particles of food off it and challenged me with, ‘And why are you throwing this away, Rumpole?’

  ‘You don’t want to go, Hilda.’ I did my best to persuade her. ‘Disgusting sight, Her Majesty’s judges, creaking round in the foxtrot at the Savoy Hotel. You wouldn’t enjoy it.’

  ‘I suppose not, Rumpole. Not in the circumstances.’

  ‘Not in what circumstances?’

  ‘It’s too humiliating.’

  ‘I quite agree.’ I saw her point at once. ‘When Mr Justice Graves breaks into the veleta I hang my head in shame.’

  ‘It’s humiliating for me, Rumpole, when other chaps in chambers lead their wives out on to the floor.’

  ‘Not a pretty sight, I have to agree, the waltzing Bollards, the pirouetting Erskine-Browns.’

  ‘Why do you never lead me out on to the dance floor nowadays, Rumpole?’ She asked me the question direct. ‘I sometimes dream about it. We’re at the Scales of Justice Ball. At the Savoy Hotel. And you lead me out on to the floor, as the first lady in chambers.’

  ‘You are, Hilda,’ I hastened to agree with her, ‘you’re quite definitely the senior …’

  ‘But you never lead me out, Rumpole! We have to sit there, staring at each other across the table, while all around us couples are dancing the night away.’

  ‘Hilda’ – I decided to disclose my defence – ‘I have, as you know, many talents, but I’m not Nijinsky. Anyway, we don’t get much practice at dancing down the Old Bailey.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. When is the ball? Marigold Featherstone told me but I can’t quite remember.’ I saw, with a sort of dread, that she was checking the food-stained invitation to answer her question. ‘November the eighteenth! It just happens to be my birthday. Well, we’ll stay at home, as usual. At least I won’t have to sit and watch other happy people dancing together.’ And now she applied the corner of a handkerchief to her eye.

  ‘Please, Hilda,’ I begged, ‘not the waterworks!’ At which she sniffed bravely and dismissed me from her presence.

  ‘No, of course not. Go along now. You’ve got to get to work. Work’s the only thing that matters to you. You’d rather defend a murderer than dance with your wife.’

  ‘Well, yes. Perhaps,’ I had to admit. ‘Look, do cheer up, old thing. Please.’ She gave me her last lament as I moved towards the door.

  ‘Old, yes, I suppose. We’re both too old for a party. And I’ll just have to get used to the fact that I didn’t marry a dancer.’

  ‘Sorry, Hilda.’

  So I left She Who Must Be Obeyed, sitting alone in the kitchen and looking, as I thought, genuinely unhappy. I had seen her miffed before. I had seen her outraged. I had seen her, all too frequently, intensely displeased at some item of Rumpole’s behaviour which fell short of perfection. But I was unprepared for the sadness which seemed to have engulfed her. Had she spent her life imagining she was Ginger Rogers, and was she at last reconciled to the fact that I had neither the figure nor the top hat to play whatever his name was – Astaire? For a moment a sensation to which I am quite unused came over me. I felt inadequate. However, I pulled myself together and pointed myself in the direction of my chambers in the Temple, where I knew I had a conference with a couple of Timsons in what I imagined would be no more than a routine case of petty thievery.

  I had acted for Cary before in a little matter of lead removed from the roof of Crockthorpe Methodist Church. He was tall and thin, and usually spoke in a slow, mocking way as though he found the whole of life slightly amusing. He didn’t look amused now. His wife, Roz, was a solid girl in her mid twenties with broad cheek-bones and capable hands. In attendance was the faithful Mr Bernard, who, from time immemorial, has acted as the solicitor-general to the Timson family.

  ‘They wouldn’t let Tracy take even a doll. Not one of her Barbies. How do you think people could do th
at to a child?’ Roz asked me when Mr Bernard had outlined the facts of the case. Her eyes were red and swollen and, as she sat in my client’s chair, nervously twisting her wedding ring, she looked not much older than a child herself.

  ‘Nicking your kid. That’s what it’s come to. Well, I’ll allow us Timsons may have done a fair bit of mischief in our time. But no one in the family’s ever stooped to that, Mr Rumpole.’ And Cary Timson added for greater emphasis, ‘People what nick kids get boiling cocoa poured on their heads, when they’re inside like.’

  ‘Cary worships that girl, Mr Rumpole,’ Roz told me. ‘No matter what they say.’

  ‘Take a look at these’ – her husband was already pulling out his wallet – ‘and you’ll see the reason why.’ So the brightly coloured snaps were laid proudly on my desk and I saw the three of them on a Spanish beach, at a theme park or on days out in the country. The mother and father held their child aloft, in the manner of successful athletes with a golden prize, triumphantly and with unmistakable delight.

  ‘Bloody marvellous, isn’t it?’ Cary’s gentle mocking had turned to genuine anger. ‘Eight years old and our Trace needs a brief.’

  ‘You’ll get Tracy back for us, won’t you, Mr Rumpole?’ I thought Roz must have given birth to this much-loved daughter when she was about seventeen. ‘She’ll be that unhappy.’

  ‘You seen the photos, Mr Rumpole.’ And Cary asked, ‘Does she have the look of a villain?’

  ‘I’d say not a hardened criminal,’ I had to admit.

  ‘What’s her crime, Mr Rumpole? That’s what Roz and I wants to know. It’s not as though she nicked things ever.’

  ‘Well, not really –’ And Roz admitted, ‘She’ll take a Jaffa cake when I’m not looking, or a few sweets occasionally.’

  ‘Our Tracy’s too young for any serious nicking.’ Her father was sure of it. ‘What you reckon she done, Mr Rumpole? What they got on her charge-sheet?’

  ‘Childhood itself seems a crime to some people.’ It’s a point that has often struck me.

  ‘We can’t seem to get any sense out of that Miss Jones.’ Roz looked helpless.

  ‘Jones?’

  ‘Officer in charge of case. Tracy’s social worker.’

  ‘One of the “caring” community.’ I was sure of it.

  ‘All she’ll say is that she’s making further enquiries,’ Mr Bernard told me.

  ‘I never discovered what I’d done when they banged me up in a draughty great boarding-school at the age of eight.’ I looked back down the long corridor of years and began to reminisce.

  ‘Hear that, Roz?’ Cary turned to his wife. ‘They banged up Mr Rumpole when he was a kid.’

  ‘Did they, Mr Rumpole? Did they really?’

  But before I could give them further and better particulars of the bird I had done at Linklaters, that downmarket public school I attended on the Norfolk coast, Mr Bernard brought us back to the fantastic facts of the case and the nature of the charges against Tracy. ‘I’ve been talking to the solicitor for the local authority,’ he reported, ‘and their case is that the juvenile Timson has been indulging in devil-worship, hellish rituals and satanic rights.’

  It might be convenient if I were to give you an account of that filmed interview with Dominic Molloy which, as I have told you, we finally saw at the trial. Before that, Mr Bernard had acquired a transcript of this dramatic scene, so we were, by bits and pieces, made aware of the bizarre charges against young Tracy, a case which began to look as though it should be transferred from Crockthorpe Juvenile Court to Seville to be decided by hooded inquisitors in the darkest days of the Spanish Inquisition.

  The scene was set in the headmistress’s office in Stafford Cripps Junior. Mirabelle Jones, at her most reassuring, sat smiling on one side of the desk, while young Dominic Molloy, beaming with self-importance, played the starring role on the other.

  ‘You remember the children wearing those horrid masks at school, do you, Dominic?’ Mirabelle kicked off the proceedings.

  ‘They scared me!’ Dominic gave a realistic shudder.

  ‘I’m sure they did.’ The social worker made a note, gave the camera – no doubt installed in the corner of the room – the benefit of her smile and then returned to the work in hand.

  ‘Did you see who was leading those children?’

  ‘In the end I did.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Trace.’

  ‘Tracy Timson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your mum said you went round to Tracy Timson’s a few times. After school, was that?’

  ‘Yes. After school like.’

  ‘And then you said you went somewhere else. Where else, exactly?’

  ‘Where they put people.’

  ‘A churchyard. Was it a churchyard?’ Mirabelle gave us a classic example of a leading question. Dominic nodded approval and she made a note. ‘The one in Crockthorpe Road, the church past the roundabout? St Elphick’s?’ Mirabelle suggested and Dominic nodded again. ‘It was the churchyard. Was it dark?’ Dominic nodded so eagerly that his whole body seemed to rock backwards and forwards and he was in danger of falling off his chair.

  ‘After school and late. A month ago? So it was dark. Did a grown-up come with you? A man, perhaps. Did a man come with you?’

  ‘He said we was to play a game.’ Now Dominic had resorted to a kind of throaty whisper, guaranteed to make the flesh creep.

  ‘What sort of game?’

  ‘He put something on his face.’

  ‘A mask?’

  ‘Red and horns on it.’

  ‘A devil’s mask.’ Mirabelle was scribbling enthusiastically. ‘Is that right, Dominic? He wanted you to play at devils? This man did?’

  ‘He said he was the devil. Yes.’

  ‘He was to be the devil. And what were you supposed to be?’

  Dominic didn’t answer that, but sat as if afraid to move.

  ‘Perhaps you were the devil’s children?’

  At this point Dominic’s silence was more effective than any answer.

  ‘What was the game you had to play?’ Mirabelle tried another approach.

  ‘Dance around.’ The answer came in a whisper.

  ‘Dance around. Now I want you to tell me, Dominic, when did you meet this man? At Tracy Timson’s house? Is that where you met him?’ More silence from Dominic, so Mirabelle tried again. ‘Do you know who he was, Dominic?’ At which Dominic nodded and looked round fearfully.

  ‘Who was he, Dominic? You’ve been such a help to me so far. Can’t you tell me who he was?’

  ‘Tracy’s dad.’

  Everything changes and with ever-increasing rapidity. Human beings no longer sell tickets at the Temple tube station. Machines and not disillusioned waitresses dispense the so-called coffee in the Old Bailey canteen and, when I became aware that Dianne, our long-time typist and close personal friend to Henry, our clerk, had left the service, I feared and expected that she might be replaced by a robot. However, what I found behind the typewriter, when I blew into the clerk’s room after a hard day’s work on an actual bodily harm in Acton a few weeks after my conference with Tracy’s parents, was nothing more mechanical than an unusually pretty and very young woman, wearing a skirt as short as a suspended sentence and a smile so ready that it seemed never to leave her features entirely but to be waiting around for the next opportunity to beam. Henry introduced her as Miss Clapton. ‘Taken over from Dianne, Mr Rumpole, who has just got herself married. I don’t know if you’ve heard the news.’

  ‘Married? Henry, I’m sorry.’

  ‘To a junior clerk in a bankruptcy set.’ He spoke with considerable disgust. ‘I told her she’d live to regret it.’

  ‘Welcome to Equity Court, Miss Clapton,’ I said. ‘If you behave really well, you might get parole in about ten years.’ She gave me the smile at full strength, but my attention was diverted by the sight of Mizz Liz Probert who had just picked up a brief from the mantelpiece and was looking at it with every
sign of rapture. Liz, the daughter of Red Ron Probert, Labour leader on Crockthorpe Council, is the most radical member of our chambers. I greeted her with, ‘Soft you now! The fair Mizz Probert! What are you fondling there, old thing?’ Or words to that effect.

  ‘What does it look like, Rumpole?’

  ‘It looks suspiciously like a brief.’

  ‘Got it in one!’ Mizz Liz was in a perky mood that evening.

  ‘Time marches on! My ex-pupil has begun to acquire briefs. What is it? Bad case of non-renewed dog licence?’

  ‘A bit more serious than that. I’m for the Crockthorpe local authority, Rumpole.’

  ‘I am suitably overawed.’ I didn’t ask whether the presence of Red Ron on the council had anything to do with this manna from heaven, and Mizz Liz went on to tell a familiar story.

  ‘A little girl had to be taken into care. She’s in terrible danger in the home. You know what it is – the father’s got a criminal record. As a matter of fact, it’s a name that might be familiar to you. Timson.’

  ‘So they took away a Timson child because the father’s got form?’ I asked innocently, hoping for further information.

  ‘Not just that. Something rather awful was going on. Devil-worship! The family were deeply into it. Quite seriously. It’s a shocking case.’

  ‘Is it really? Tell me, do you believe in the devil?’

  ‘Of course I don’t, Rumpole. Don’t be so ridiculous! Anyway, that’s hardly the point.’

  ‘Isn’t it? It interests me, though. You see, I’m likely to be against you in the Juvenile Court.’

  ‘You, Rumpole! On the side of the devil?’ Mizz Probert seemed genuinely shocked.