‘Mr Glossop, you said your marriage to your wife Honoria was a happy one?’
‘As far as I was concerned it was very happy.’ Here he smiled at the jury and some of them nodded back approvingly.
‘Did you know that on the afternoon before she was murdered, your wife had consulted a solicitor, Mr Anthony Hawkin of Henshaw and Hawkin?’
‘I didn’t know that, no.’
‘Can you guess why?’
‘I’m afraid not. My wife had considerable financial interests under her father’s will. It might have been about that.’
‘You mean it might have been about money?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know that Anthony Hawkin is well known as an expert on divorce and family law?’
‘I didn’t know that either.’
‘And you didn’t know that your wife was considering proceedings for divorce?’
‘I certainly didn’t.’
I looked at the jury. They were now, I thought, at least interested. I remembered the frightened blonde girl I had seen outside the court and the hand he had put on hers as he had tried to comfort her.
‘Was there any trouble between your wife and yourself because of her secretary, Sue Blackmore?’
‘So far as I know, none whatever.’
‘Mr Rumpole. I’m wondering, and I expect the jury may be wondering as well, what on earth these questions have to do with your client’s trial for murder,’ the judge interjected.
‘Then wonder on,’ I might have quoted Shakespeare to Graves, ‘till truth make all things plain.’ But I did not do that. I merely said, ‘I’m putting these questions to test the credibility of this witness, my Lord.’
‘And why, Mr Rumpole, are you attacking his credibility? Which part of this gentleman’s evidence are you disputing?’
‘If I may be allowed to cross-examine in the usual way, I hope it may become clear,’ I said, and then I’m afraid I also said, ‘even to your Lordship.’
At this, Gravestone gave me the look that meant, ‘You just wait until we come to the summing up, and I’ll tell the jury what I think of your attack on this charming husband.’ But for the moment he remained as silent as a block of ice, so I soldiered on.
‘Mr Glossop. Your wife’s secretary delivered this threatening letter to her.’
‘Yes. Honoria was working at home and Sue brought it over from her pigeonhole at the university.’
‘You’ve told us that she was very brave, of course. That she had said it was probably from some nutcase and that she intended to ignore it. But you insisted on taking the letter to the police.’
‘An extremely wise decision, if I may say so,’ Graves took it upon himself to note.
‘And I think you gave the story to the Press Association so that this death threat received wide publicity.’
‘I thought Honoria would be safer if it was all out in the open. People would be on their guard.’
‘Another wise decision, the members of the jury might think.’ Graves was making sure the jury thought it.
‘And when the letter was traced to my client, everyone knew that it was Hussein Khan who was the author of the letter?’
‘He was dismissed from the university, so I suppose a lot of people knew, yes.’
‘So, if anything were to have happened to your wife after that, if she were to have been attacked or killed, Hussein Khan would have been the most likely suspect?’
‘I think that has been obvious throughout this trial.’ Graves couldn’t resist it.
‘My Lord, I’d really much rather get the answers to my questions from the witness than receive them from your Lordship.’ I went on quickly before the judge could get in his two pennies’ worth. ‘You took your wife to the university on that fatal night?’
‘I often did. If I was going somewhere and she had work to do in her office, I’d drop her off and then collect her later on my way home.’
‘But you didn’t just drop her off, did you? You went inside the building with her. You took her up to her office?’
‘Yes. We’d been talking about something in the car and we went on discussing it as I went up to her office with her.’
‘He escorted her, Mr Rumpole,’ the sepulchral voice boomed from the bench. ‘A very gentlemanly thing to do.’
‘Thank you, my Lord.’ Ricky’s smile was still full of charm.
‘And what were you discussing?’ I asked him. ‘Was it divorce?’
‘It certainly wasn’t divorce. I can’t remember what it was exactly.’
‘Then perhaps you can remember this. How long did you stay in the office with your wife?’
‘Perhaps five, maybe ten minutes. I can’t remember exactly.’
‘And when you left, was she still alive?’
There was a small silence.
The witness looked at me and seemed to catch his breath.
Then he gave us the invariably charming smile.
‘Of course she was.’
‘You spoke to Mr Luttrell at the reception area on your way out?’
‘I did, yes.’
‘He says you asked him if Hussein Khan was in the building?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘I suppose I’d heard from someone that he might have been there.’
‘And what did Mr Luttrell tell you?’
‘He said that Khan was in the building, yes.’
‘You knew that Hussein Khan’s presence in that building was a potential danger to your wife.’
‘I suppose I knew. Yes.’
‘I suppose you did. And yet you left and drove off in your car without warning her?’
There was a longer silence then and Ricky’s smile seemed to droop.
‘I didn’t go back to the office, no.’
‘Why not, Mr Glossop? Why not warn her? Why didn’t you see that Khan left before you went off?’
And then Ricky Glossop said something which changed the atmosphere in court in a moment, even silencing the judge.
‘I suppose I was in a hurry. I was on my way to a party.’
After a suitable pause I asked, ‘There was no lock on your wife’s office door, was there?’
‘There might have been. But she never locked it.’
‘So you left her unprotected, with the man who had threatened her life still in the building, because you were on your way to a party?’
The smile came again, but it had no effect now on the jury.
‘I think I heard he was with the senior tutor in the library. I suppose I thought that was safe.’
‘Mr Glossop, were you not worried by the possibility that the senior tutor might leave first, leaving the man who threatened your wife still in the building with her?’
‘I suppose I didn’t think of that,’ was all he could say.
I let the answer sink in and then turned to more dangerous and uncharted territory.
‘I believe you’re interested in various country sports.’
‘That’s right, my Lord.’ The witness, seeming to feel the ground was now safer, smiled at the judge.
‘You used to go shooting, I believe.’
‘Well, I go shooting, Mr Rumpole.’ A ghastly twitch of the lips was, from the bench, Graves’s concession towards a smile. ‘And I hope you’re not accusing me of complicity in any sort of a crime?’
I let the jury have their sycophantic laugh, then went on to ask, ‘Did you ever belong to a pistol shooting club, Mr Glossop?’ Fig Newton, the private eye, had done his work well.
‘When such clubs were legal, yes.’
‘And do you still own a handgun?’
‘Certainly not.’ The witness seemed enraged. ‘I wouldn’t do anything that broke the law.’
I turned to look at the jury with my eyebrows raised, but for the moment the witness was saved by the bell as the judge announced that he could see by the clock that it was time we broke for lunch.
Before we parted, h
owever, Soapy Sam got up to tell us that his next witness would be Mrs Glossop’s secretary, Sue Blackmore, who would merely give evidence about the receipt of the letter and the deceased’s reaction to it. Miss Blackmore was, apparently, likely to be a very nervous witness, and perhaps his learned friend Mr Rumpole would agree to her evidence being read.
Mr Rumpole did not agree. Mr Rumpole wanted Miss Sue Blackmore to be present in the flesh and he was ready to cross-examine her at length. And so we parted, expecting the trial of Hussein Khan for murder to start again at two o’clock.
But Khan’s trial for murder didn’t start again at two o’clock or at any other time. I was toying with a plate of steak and kidney pie and a pint of Guinness in the pub opposite the Old Bailey when I saw the furtive figure of Sam Ballard oozing through the crowd. He came to me obviously heavy with news.
‘Rumpole! You don’t drink at lunchtime, do you?’
‘Yes. But not too much at lunchtime. Can I buy you a pint of stout?’
‘Certainly not, Rumpole. Mineral water, if you have to. And could we move to that little table in the corner? This is news for your ears alone.’
After I had transported my lunch to a more secluded spot and supplied our head of chambers with mineral water, he brought me up to date on that lunch hour’s developments.
‘It’s Sue, the secretary, Rumpole. When we told her that she’d have to go into the witness box, she panicked and asked to see Superintendent Gregory. By this time, she was in tears and, he told me, almost incomprehensible. However, Gregory managed to calm her down and she said she knew you’d get it out of her in the witness box, so she might as well confess that she was the one who had made the telephone call.’
‘Which telephone call was that?’
Soapy Sam was demonstrating his usual talent for making a simple statement of fact utterly confusing.
‘The telephone call to your client. Telling him to go and meet the senior tutor.’
‘You mean … ?’ The mists that had hung over the case of Khan the terrorist were beginning to clear. ‘She pretended to be …’
‘The senior tutor’s secretary. Yes. The idea was to get Khan into the building while Glossop …’
‘Murdered his wife?’ I spoke the words that Ballard seemed reluctant to use.
‘I think she’s prepared to give evidence against him,’ Soapy Sam said, looking thoughtfully towards future briefs. ‘Well, she’ll have to, unless she wants to go to prison as an accessory.’
‘Has handsome Ricky heard the news yet?’ I wondered.
‘Mr Glossop has been detained. He’s helping the police with their enquiries.’
So many people I know, who help the police with their enquiries, are in dire need of help themselves. ‘So you’ll agree to a verdict of not guilty of murder?’ I asked Ballard, as though it was a request to pass the mustard.
‘Perhaps. Eventually. And you’ll agree to guilty of making death threats in a letter?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I admitted. ‘We’ll have to plead guilty to that.’
But there was no hurry. I could finish my steak and kidney and order another Guinness in peace.
‘It started off,’ I was telling Hilda over a glass of Château Thames Embankment that evening, ‘as an act of terrorism, of mad, religious fanaticism, of what has become the new terror of our times. And it ends up as an old-fashioned murder by a man who wanted to dispose of his rich wife for her money and be free to marry a pretty young woman. It was a case, you might say, of Dr Crippen meeting Osama Bin Laden.’
‘It’s hard to say which is worse.’ She Who Must Be Obeyed was thoughtful.
‘Both of them,’ I told her. ‘Both of them are worse. But I suppose we understand Dr Crippen better. Only one thing we can be grateful for.’
‘What’s that, Rumpole?’
‘The terrorist got a fair trial. And the whole truth came out in the end. The day when a suspected terrorist doesn’t get a fair trial will be the day they’ve won the battle.’
I refilled our glasses, having delivered my own particular verdict on the terrible events of that night at William Morris University.
‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘it was your friend Gerald Graves who put me on to the truth of the matter.’
‘Oh, really.’ Hilda sounded unusually cool on the subject of the judge.
‘It was when he was playing Father Christmas. He was standing in for someone else. And I thought, what if the real murderer thought he’d stand in for someone else. Hussein Khan had uttered the death threat and was there to take the blame. All Ricky had to do was go to work quickly. So that’s what he did – he committed murder in Hussein Khan’s name. That death threat was a gift from heaven for him.’
One of our usual silences fell between us, and then Hilda said, ‘I don’t know why you call Mr Justice Graves my friend.’
‘You got on so well at Christmas.’
‘Well, yes we did. And then he said we must keep in touch. So I telephoned his clerk and the message came back that the judge was busy for months ahead but he hoped we might meet again eventually. I have to tell you, Rumpole, that precious judge of yours does not treat women well.’
I did my best. I tried to think of the Old Gravestone as a heartbreaker, a sort of Don Juan who picked women up and dropped them without mercy, but I failed miserably.
‘I’m better off with you, Rumpole,’ Hilda told me. ‘I can always rely on you to be unreliable.’
Rumpole and the Brave New World
When he died in January 2009 John Mortimer had just begun writing a new Rumpole novel, Rumpole and the Brave New World. This is the text he left.
1
At my age I’m about as far from childhood as it’s possible to be. I’m nearer toppling off the peg than joining in adolescent games, but there was one case which gave me an alarming and, I hope, interesting insight into the world of the youth of today.
It began when one of Hilda’s innumerable relatives, her niece Cynthia, a student at Oxford, was taking part in a performance of the Messiah and sent an invitation to Hilda saying that she wished we would both come. Naturally I did my best to have an important legal fixture on the date specified, but work was as plentiful as Manhattan cocktails in the desert. When I told Hilda that my practice was more important than the concert she went down to my chambers and checked up with Henry, my clerk, in the most treacherous manner. I was therefore condemned to the oratorio. So I was to be found on that particular Thursday, not in Number One Court in the Old Bailey, or even before the Snaresbrook magistrates, but in the vast auditorium which is the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. It was there, many years ago, that I had taken my degree, kneeling and being bumped on the head with a Bible.
I remember my days at Keble College as peaceful and untroubled, and I can’t say that I was taught anything that would help me to become known throughout the Temple as one of the deadliest cross-examiners in the trade. Instead, the tutors and lecturers wanted to discuss property laws, the more obscure provisions of banking acts and rights of way. Despite all this I did reasonably well in criminal law with the help of useful little text books such as Murder in a Nutshell and All You Need to Know About Offences Against the Person.
I did learn one important lesson. I had become addicted to the college sherry and, as a ridiculous and useless gesture, I boasted that I could drink a tankard full of it. I did so and fell to the ground and found the religious character who shared my rooms kneeling beside me in silent prayer. Since then I have resolutely refused sherry.
Looking back on it I am grateful for Hilda’s persistence. If we hadn’t gone to the concert I would have missed an occasion which led, through a tangle of possibilities, to one of the most curious and unusual crimes in the Rumpole history.
So there I was, wondering why old Handel or his scriptwriter couldn’t say a thing once and let it go at that. Every line in the Messiah seemed to be repeated again and again. I looked around the crowded auditorium and was curious to see so many children
assembled, all below undergraduate age. There was a certain amount of giggling and pinching between them, but on the whole they sat quietly until the music came to an end.
During the interval a woman came on to the stage and asked for further contributions to ‘Music in Oxford’. ‘I’ve only got folding money.’ ‘Of course you’ll give them folding money, a ten-pound note will be adequate,’ Hilda told me. So I pulled out my wallet and parted with the cash. I tell you this only because of what happened when we were leaving the hall.
We left through a crowded doorway. My attention was diverted by Hilda calling out, ‘Cynthia’s here, Rumpole. I’ve told her how proud you are of her.’ I remember being bumped into as she spoke and I felt some movement under my jacket pocket, the home of the Rumpole wallet. I felt for it, and any hand that might have been on it was quickly withdrawn. I looked round at the faces of laughing children and solemn-music lovers and wondered why it was that almost everything in the Rumpole existence seemed to lead, in one way or another, to an experience of crime.
‘Oxford is thought of as a city of dreaming spires, quiet quadrangles and lofty ceilinged dining halls.’ Cynthia’s friend Harriet, a good-looking, dark-haired woman in her forties, had joined us for supper at Browns restaurant, which Cynthia had recommended. Harriet then reminded us of the other Oxford.
‘These kids have got stepfathers who beat them up or worse and mothers who are too drunk to notice it. They get moved around by the social services and don’t know where they’re going to be spending the next night. We do our best to help.’
‘Harriet founded All in the Family. It’s an organization to help these children. Take them out into the country,’ Cynthia told me. ‘I go with them whenever I can.’
‘Some of them have never seen a horse and others seem surprised to learn that their school dinners were not born in a fridge but started life grazing in the fields,’ Harriet explained. ‘Taking them to the Messiah was all part of widening their horizons.’
‘Their horizons seem to have become wide enough to include a quick dive for my wallet,’ I reminded her.
‘It’s a slow business, Mr Rumpole, but we’ve got to keep trying.’
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