Rumpole Rests His Case

by John Mortimer

  Instead of a smile, I got another question. ‘Does anyone say I did?’

  ‘You quarrelled. She disappeared. She seems to have been found buried under the hearth in your living-room. They will ask the Jury to draw the inference that you killed her.’

  ‘You mean, ask them to guess?’

  ‘An informed guess. Yes. That's what they'll decide. Unless you tell them a different story.’

  ‘What sort of story would you suggest?’

  This was blasphemy! My religious beliefs, such as they are, had been deeply insulted. As an old black cab plying for hire, I had been engaged by some pretty dubious customers, shysters, fraudsters and con men to whom the truth was, like the Virgin Birth, a remote myth. But I had never met a customer who had asked me to invent a defence for him, nor would I ever have consented to do so. Fired by indignation, I asked an unusual and risky question. ‘How about telling me the truth?’

  ‘About the night Josephine and I quarrelled?’

  ‘All about it.’

  ‘What happened that night… is one of the mysteries.’

  ‘Juries don't like mysteries.’

  ‘How much should I tell? I shall pray for guidance.’

  ‘Well, all I can say is do it soon. Otherwise I'll give you a prophecy to think about.’

  ‘What is your prophecy?’ For the first time, our client seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say.

  ‘I see,’ I told William Twineham, ‘through a glass and not so darkly, you spending most of your remaining life locked in a cell, probably with some unstable psychopathic killer, in a sink prison with drug dealing, unchecked violence and screws who may take an instant dislike to you. So get your guidance, return of post, and we'll be back.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Bernard told him forcefully, gathering up his papers, ‘we'll be back.’

  ‘Have you finished, Mr Rumpole?’ A screw opened the glass door and enquired politely.

  ‘Not really. In fact we've hardly begun.’ And so we left William Twineham to his prayers.

  ‘Thirty-three years ago. Just imagine what it'd be like to be tried for something after all those years, perhaps when you were an entirely different person.’ What had that overworked, meticulous and respectable solicitor Mr Bernard done some forty years ago that he wouldn't have liked to admit to in Court? It wasn't long after the disappearance of Jo that we first met. What was the first case he sent me? One of the Timson clan, now grey-haired and walking with the aid of a stick, sowing his wild oats in the theft of lead off a church roof.

  ‘I mean, Will Twineham must have thought the past was all over,’ Bernard went on. ‘Dead and buried.’

  ‘To coin a phrase,’ I muttered, refilling our glasses from the bottle of Château Thames Embankment which Jack Pommeroy had agreed to put on my somewhat overcrowded slate. ‘You're right, though. If some remote town-planner or some faceless committee hadn't decided to widen the road into London, Jo Twineham would have slept under the floor undisturbed and our client could remain a pillar of the Apostolic Church.’

  ‘It's the shock of that all coming out that's turned his mind, wouldn't you reckon?’

  ‘Either that or he's decided to take cover behind the Book of Revelations.’

  ‘The evidence of identification,’ Bernard tried to sound helpful, ‘it's not all that convincing.’

  ‘You mean some complete stranger might have broken into the house and buried a woman we know absolutely nothing about in the front parlour? I know you're trying to be helpful…’

  ‘That line's no use to us?’

  ‘Probably not. What I'd like most is…’

  ‘Is what, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘To get to know him. To get to know both of them, in fact. He's so serious and she was so beautiful. What did they quarrel about all those years ago?’

  Before Mr Bernard could offer any help, we were rudely interrupted by a voice crying from the other end of the bar, in a penetrating Welsh accent, ‘It's Roly Poly Rumpole, by all that's wonderful!’

  I looked round to find myself being approached by a stranger with a toothy grin, strong bifocals and a shock of blond hair going grey. He had, in spite of his age, the cheerful look of a schoolboy in some long-gone comic, famous for his jolly japes and teasing of housemasters.

  ‘Owen Oswald! Remember me, don't you?’

  ‘I'm afraid I don't.’

  ‘Dangerous driving. Swansea. 1981. You defended me. I chose you.’

  He had advanced and was very close to me, one hand gripping my lapel as though to hold himself upright and breathing out the sweet smell of gin and tonic. ‘I chose you because my solicitor said you'd get the whole bench of magistrates laughing my case out. Said you were a dab hand with the jokes, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean. So did I get them laughing?’

  ‘You did, my dear old Roly Poly. You most certainly did. And when you suggested to the other driver that he had his car painted in his racing colours…’

  ‘They laughed at that?’ It sounded improbable.

  ‘Tickled pink, they were.’

  ‘So we won?’

  ‘We didn't win. They enjoyed a good laugh and banned me for two years. Thousand-pound fine. You were the most expensive entertainment I ever went to.’

  By now I was anxious to be rid of the Welsh joker with his memories of past failure and get on with Mr Bernard, the bottle of Chateau Thames Embankment and the fatal relationship of Jo and Will Twineham. But what Owen Oswald said next grabbed my attention and eventually, I thought, put me permanently in his debt.

  ‘Just up here for a conference on a business matter, and they told me you were in old Bonzo Ballard's Chambers.’

  ‘I am in Chambers supposedly led by a person called Ballard. But I know nothing of “Bonzo”.’

  ‘No one calls him Bonzo any more?’

  ‘“Soapy Sam”, is that who you mean?’

  ‘It's obvious you weren't at the University of Wales in Cardiff, 1966–69.’

  ‘I have a vague memory of Soapy Sam telling me that the Law Faculty in Cardiff was miles ahead of anything Oxford or Edinburgh had to offer, which is why he'd honoured it with his presence…’

  ‘I can't remember him talking much about the law. It was the band. That was the great thing with Bonzo.’

  ‘The band?’ What was the fellow talking about – some earnest group dedicated to Christian fellowship? ‘What sort of band?’

  ‘Bonzo Ballard and the Pithead Stompers. Enthusiastic but, in my humble opinion, they couldn't hold a candle to The Swinging Blue Jeans, let alone Frank Zappa.’

  ‘Are you telling me that Soapy Sam Ballard played in a band?’ I felt, at this moment, some blessed hope of which I had long been unaware.

  ‘All over the place. Uni dances, working men's clubs, Saturday night pubs, old people's homes, till the old people went on strike.’

  ‘Are you telling me that Soapy Sam played some instrument?’

  ‘Slapped away at a guitar. You know the sort of thing. And sang – not badly.’

  ‘Sang?’ I couldn't believe my luck. ‘Are there no recordings available? Perhaps an old '78?’

  ‘I don't think they were ever let into a recording studio. But I've got a photograph.’

  ‘A photograph – featuring Ballard?’

  ‘A photograph starring Bonzo. He had hair down to his shoulders at the time.’

  ‘You keep it as some sort of memento?’

  ‘I keep it because I was a member of the Pithead Stompers. On drums.’

  I looked at the man as a mountaineer clinging to the edge of a cliff might greet the guide come to haul him to safety. ‘I'm not a rich man’, I confessed to Oswald. ‘I do Legal Aid crime and we only get paid now and then. But I'm prepared to spend good money on a copy of this photograph.’

  ‘I'll send you one.’ The rescuing Welshman had his arm round my shoulder. ‘You can buy me a drink next time we meet.’

  ‘I think I'm on a winner,’ I
told Bernard, after I'd given my saviour the Chambers address.

  ‘You mean with Twineham?’ He was incredulous.

  ‘No. I mean with Ballard.’ But I had earned my solicitor's look of disapproval. I had forgotten a young woman with flowers in her hair, dead and buried under a living-room floor. And all because I was engaged in a fight, with no holds barred, to stop having to smoke small cigars in the rain.

  ‘You've taken on his case, Rumpole?’ My wife, Hilda, known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed, cross-examined me over the breakfast table.

  ‘He's taken on me.’

  ‘How could you? A man like that!’

  ‘I'm not sure I can manage it,’ I confessed to Hilda. ‘Apart from quoting the Book of Revelations, he hasn't given me the slightest hint of a defence.’

  ‘I always knew you'd stoop to anything, Rumpole… but I never dreamed you'd side with men who bury their wives under the floor!’

  What did she think? That I approved in any way of such conduct? That I could ever, in a million years, become such a husband? For a nightmare moment, I pictured myself trying to inter Hilda somehow below the well-worn Axminster, and rejected the idea as a physical impossibility. Then I heard a heavy sigh on the other side of the toast and marmalade. Hilda's mood had swung from the usual brisk attack on Rumpole's conduct to a note of sadness and regret as she looked down at the letter in her hand.

  ‘I can't possibly go now. It would be too embarrassing.’

  ‘You can't go where, Hilda?’

  ‘The Old Saint Elfreda's dinner.’

  ‘But you always go.’ It was a reunion Hilda never missed, a party at which her innumerable old schoolfriends relived their gymslip years and which I welcomed as an opportunity for a quietly convivial evening in Pommeroy's Wine Bar.

  ‘Not now. Look at this.’ She handed me the embossed invitation as though it were the announcement of a death. ‘President of the OEs this year, Lady Shiplake, Chrissie Snelling as was. It's so not fair! She never came to OE reunions, but as she married this Labour Lord, they've made her President. Neither Dodo Mackintosh nor I will be able to go now!’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  There was a long and solemn pause, and then Hilda uttered a word which I didn't know existed in her vocabulary.

  ‘Guilt.’

  ‘You mean this Chrissie has a criminal record?’

  ‘No. Dodo and I.’

  ‘Hilda.’ The breath had been knocked out of me. ‘You're confessing to something?’

  ‘Dodo and I did it together.’

  ‘You were fellow conspirators?’

  ‘We called her Smelling, of course. “Here comes Chrissie Smelling.” And we held our noses. We pretended there was a rule that everyone had to run round the hockey field three times before breakfast, and Chrissie did it. We sent her fake Valentine cards, making dates with non-existent chaps from the boys' school. We pinched her knicker linings and punctured her hot-water bottle. Halfway through one term a car with a chauffeur came and took Chrissie away. It was all our fault, Rumpole.’

  ‘Any other offences to be taken into consideration?’ I hope I looked suitably shocked.

  ‘I can't think of any more at the moment.’

  ‘It's a formidable charge sheet.’

  ‘I know. Dodo and I simply couldn't face her again. Neither of us could.’

  ‘That's exactly why you've got to go!’ For once in my married life, I was occupying the moral high ground, where the air was fresh and intoxicating.

  ‘Oh, Rumpole!’ Could it be that She Who Must Be Obeyed was capable of a cry for help? ‘Don't make me!’

  Could I make her? Could I turn Judge Bullingham into a soft-hearted, do-gooding member of the Howard League for Penal Reform? Of course I couldn't. All the same, I meant to put up a fight for an evening with a few well-chosen solicitors and convivial crime reporters in Pommeroy's.

  ‘I just think,’ I gave Hilda the Rumpole look of gentle but serious concern, ‘you have the honour of Saint Elfreda's to consider.’

  ‘Dodo and I have always been intensely loyal to the old school.’

  ‘Always in the past, perhaps. But not now. Or is it part of the Saint Elfreda's tradition to run away from your responsibilities?’

  ‘What do you want me to do, Rumpole?’ Another record broken: such a question had never been asked before, in the long, windy history of our married life.

  ‘Face up to it, Hilda. Confess everything and throw yourselves on the mercy of the Court. I am convinced,’ and now Rumpole was at his most judicial, ‘that you and Dodo Mackintosh will feel the better, the purer for it.’

  For a long moment, the fate of my free evening hung in the balance. Then she said, ‘I'll ring Dodo and ask her what she thinks.’

  ‘You won't. You'll tell her what you think,’ I said, but not out loud. By now, I was satisfied that ringing Dodo would end in a summons to face the music.

  ‘After he had told us that his wife had left home, Will Twineham lived alone. We never saw a sign of another woman or girlfriend staying the night. I must say, he kept the house spotless. There was always a big jug of flowers kept on the hearth of the fireplace in the front room. He bought flowers at the Tube station on his way home from work. Will never lit a fire. It seemed that he could endure any amount of cold. Indeed, he said he enjoyed it.’

  I was reading, once again, the statements of the semi-detached neighbours. I thought about flowers in the hearth and couldn't help remembering the flower-sellers at the gates of the great London cemeteries, the dying chrysanthemums and fading daffodils on the granite chips, within the marble frame on the grave. Whilst I was having these disturbing thoughts, the door swung open and Soapy Sam Ballard glided in. ‘Rumpole,’ he said, ‘a word with you.’

  ‘You've come to free us from political correctness? Small cheroots may be lit again in 1 Equity Court?’ I asked with quiet confidence.

  ‘Will nothing make you, Rumpole, take some responsibility for the universe?’

  ‘I seem to remember floods in Noah's day, when very few people were smoking whiffs. Have you forgotten your Bible, old darling?’

  ‘Rumpole, please don't quote the Scriptures to excuse your filthy habit.’

  ‘I wouldn't dream of it. I'll only remind you that the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Light Up” appears nowhere, from Genesis to Revelations.’

  ‘If you can be serious for a moment…’

  ‘I'll try. If you promise not to make me laugh.’

  ‘This is entirely serious. I heard in the clerks' room that you are defending Twineham.’

  ‘You heard right.’

  ‘A difficult case.’

  ‘One it would be all too easy to lose.’

  ‘Have you got a defence?’

  ‘Not yet. One may come to me if you'd be good enough to tiptoe away and close the door very quietly after you.’ I couldn't have put it more plainly, but the man loitered on, like the last guest at a party who wants a bed for the night.

  ‘Two heads, Rumpole, are considerably better than one.’

  ‘Doesn't that rather depend on whose heads they are?’

  ‘I assume that you're not thinking of doing this case alone and without a leader?’ Soapy Sam announced the purpose of his visit. He was a QC, a fact which confirmed my definition of the whole genus as ‘Queer Customers’. As such, he would be entitled to play the lead in the defence team, leaving Rumpole, one of the oldest and, if I may say it, most accomplished juniors, to carry a spear, in the way of making notes, calling the odd witness and bringing the learned leader's coffee to him. There was clearly no place for Ballard in the curious drama of 35 Primrose Drive.

  ‘I did the Penge Bungalow Murders without a leader when I was an upwardly mobile white-wig. I don't think that, over the years, I've lost any of my powers.’

  ‘I'll ask our clerk to speak to your solicitor. I'm sure he'll be delighted to brief me as your leader.’

  ‘I very much doubt it. Bernard likes to enjoy his cases dow
n the Old Bailey.’

  Soapy Sam had nothing more to say. He stood goggling at me for a moment, and then made, slowly and thoughtfully, for the exit.

  ‘Shut the door,’ I said, ‘Bonzo.’

  He froze. His hand poised over the door handle, he turned to me, satisfactorily anxious. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing very much, I reassured him. It was not yet time to strike. ‘I'm sorry. Silly of me. I must have been calling some old dog. Forgot myself for a moment. I'll see you around.’

  Soapy Sam gave me a quick stare and left. I had, I felt sure, unnerved the man and fired a warning shot across his brow.

  The weighty matter of Hilda's guilt and the consequent acceptance or refusal of the Old Girls' Reunion Dinner invitation was of too earthshaking importance to be decided by one telephone call, however prolonged. An invitation was given, and accepted, from Dodo Mackintosh for a week's visit to Lamorna Cove, where the issue could be tried at length, no doubt over cups of Ovaltine far into the night, and a definite verdict arrived at.

  ‘Will you be all right, Rumpole?’ Hilda asked with unusual solicitude, as though afraid I might disappear by chauffeur-driven car and never return to the so-called mansion flat in Froxbury Mansions.

  ‘Quite all right,’ I reassured her. ‘Take your time, this is not the sort of decision that can be taken in a hurry. Much, including the honour of the old school, depends upon it.’

  So, as well as the possibility of an evening off if the dinner was on, I had a whole week on my own. And this was convenient, because Bernard had met a solicitor named Tony Thrale who had revealed, over lunch at the Law Society, that when he was a young articled clerk working and living round Perivale, he had met, in various clubs and all-night parties, Jo Twineham, whose name was now splashed across the tabloids in preparation for the reporting of a sensational murder trial. He had invited us both to dinner, as he thought he might be able to help us, provided we undertook to keep him out of Court.

  ‘Dinner?’ I was surprised at this offer of hospitality from a potential witness. ‘What's that going to be like?’

  ‘They live in Maida Vale now. It'll be dinner with a big company lawyer. Good food. Handsome wife in a black frock. Candles. After-dinner mints.’