Rumpole Rests His Case

by John Mortimer

  ‘Don't give me “buts”, Rumpole. I remember that was one of the first things you said to me when I was a pupil. “You're an old taxicab, Miss Trant,” you said. I took it as something of an affront to my personal appearance.’

  There was a pause and she looked at me. She was no longer the daring Judge who had flicked a lock of hair as she looked at herself in the mirror. Now the moment of the youthful pupil she spoke of seemed to be vanishing further into the past.

  ‘Look, Rumpole. I know you don't like anything about Dr Gurnley…’

  ‘It's odd how retaining the title “Doctor” is a mark of some unlovable people. When you come to think of Dr Goebbels, Dr Fu Manchu, Dr Crippen, Dr Death…’ I could have gone further but decided to comfort her distressed ladyship. ‘He must make lots of money from all these articles. It'll be a headline case. He can brief an expensive silk.’ Why didn't the spliff-smoking hard-liner employ a Queen's Counsel? ‘I suppose if I really wanted to do him down I could offer him Soapy Sam Ballard QC, the so-called Head of our Chambers.’

  ‘I've told Tom. The worst thing he could do is choose some high-profiled, high-priced and famous silk. He'll look as though he's buying his way out of trouble.’

  ‘And he won't look like that if he hires me?’

  ‘Well hardly, Rumpole.’ She gave me a faint smile.

  ‘So he wants justice on the cheap?’ I was, I have to confess, a little riled, a touch put out at the suggestion that I was, to put it as kindly as possible, the bargain basement of the legal profession.

  ‘It's not that either, Rumpole. He wants to win.’

  ‘And he thinks I can do that for him?’

  ‘I told him that if I were ever in trouble, I'd rather have you appearing for me than the most famous silk in the business.’

  This was flattery, pure and unadulterated. Naturally I lapped it up.

  ‘You honestly told him that?’

  ‘Cross my heart.’

  ‘And you have all that faith in me?’

  ‘I've always had faith in you, Rumpole. As an advocate, I mean. I know little of your private life.’

  ‘My private life? There's really not much to know.’ But then, more out of habit than anything else, I asked her, ‘Has he got a defence?’

  ‘Why don't you see him and find out?’

  ‘You mean put my toe in the water?’

  ‘Before taking the plunge.’

  ‘Just tell him one thing. Tell him to go for Trial by Jury.’

  ‘You think he needs a Jury?’

  ‘Yes. Explain to him, Juries are the things he wants to abolish. But now he needs one.’

  As I left, something happened which I had never expected in all my years at the Bar. I was kissed firmly on the cheek by a High Court Judge.

  ‘It was a trap, Mr Rumpole! A ruthless, deceptive, bloody-minded trap by a gutter journalist. That's exactly what it was. And I want the Court to know.’

  ‘So you were caught in a trap?’

  ‘A trap was set for me.’

  ‘And you walked into it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Dr Gurnley looked suddenly wary.

  ‘I mean you walked into this trap, and lit up a large, fat Camberwell Carrot.’

  ‘I never lit up anything of the sort!’ And then he seemed to feel there was something missing from his answer. ‘What do you mean by a Camberwell Carrot, Mr Rumpole? Are we here discussing vegetables?’

  ‘I realize this is your first visit to the Criminal Courts, Doctor,’ I told him. ‘But if you'd been round them for as long as I have, you'd know that a Camberwell Carrot is an extremely fat spliff, a king-sized cannabis cigarette, as costly as a large Havana cigar. I don't know whether they have particularly large carrots in Camberwell, but that's what it's called.’

  ‘Look here, Mr Rumpole.’ The Doctor spoke as if he were using the name of whoever was interviewing him on the Today programme and he had started some particularly irrelevant, evasive non-answer with a desperately friendly, ‘Look here, Jim…’ Anyway, it was ‘Look here, Mr Rumpole' this time and ‘I have devoted my life to speaking my mind. Particularly about drugs. If a young person smokes a “bit of pot”, that leads on to a life of evil. A life of crime, madness, hard drugs, juvenile delinquency, mugging in the streets, probably –’ He seemed to be searching for the ultimate depravity, ‘same-sex intercourse, disease and death. The way is open to everything that's illegal and immoral, and a million small businessmen have to support it through their taxes because it creates an intolerable burden on the National Health Service. So that's why, and I'll say this in print and in Parliament, we have to have prison for the first offence. We must have a real deterrent because that's the first step on the slippery slope…’

  ‘There's nothing wrong,’ I interrupted him like an interviewer who sees the time's running out, ‘with a bit of hypocrisy.’

  ‘What do you mean, hypocrisy?’

  ‘The world's full of Christians who fail to give all their worldly goods to the poor,’ I told him, ‘Communists who deal on the stock exchange, Catholic priests who surrender to their housekeepers, and vegetarians who fall to the temptations of a rasher of bacon. It doesn't make their beliefs any less valid. It just means that humanity is weak.’

  ‘I don't know what you're talking about.’ The Doctor looked deeply insulted.

  ‘I'm just saying it's understandable. Very few people practise exactly what they preach.’

  ‘How many times have I got to tell you? I have always called for prison for a first offence of cannabis possession.’ Like a very old gramophone record, my conference with Dr Gurnley seemed to have got stuck in a groove.

  I had been sneaking recently, I felt, round the corridors of power. I'd gone up the back stairs of the Royal Courts of Justice to the private room of a distressed Judge. Now I and Bonny Bernard, whom I had appointed solicitor in the case, had penetrated through some sort of tropical forest planted under glass in the MP's new and luxurious accommodation. There Tom Gurnley had waved us to a seat and treated us, for the first ten minutes, to the story of his life. Born the fourth son of a South London plumber, he had made his way up in the world by way of boxing and evening classes. He was, he told us, in favour of boxing being made part of the national curriculum.

  ‘I had my nose broken before I was twenty. Every man should.’

  We heard of his climb through an accountants' office to a successful business career, his chairmanship of the Croydon Wanderers football club and his emergence as a public figure.

  ‘I say what I mean, Mr Rumpole. I think people appreciate that. They don't get that feeling with the present leadership, to whom I am, by the way, completely loyal, never mind what the papers say.’

  At last we got through the life story to the night in question. He gave a party at his house in Smith Square to celebrate a win by the Wanderers. Some star players were present, together with their model girlfriends, and members of the Shadow Cabinet, who were only too pleased to have their photographs taken with a striker who looked like an old-time pirate, ear-ringed and shaven headed, and his girlfriend, the entire back of whose dress had unexpectedly gone missing. Despite the glamour of the guests, the party seemed to have been about as eventful, and with less of an undercurrent of seething passion, than our Christmas office do in Equity Court. There was no evidence of any illicit substances making their appearance until all but one of the guests had left.

  She was a girl who had come, she said, with one of the Wanderers and his girlfriend. She had been in the loo at the time of the general exodus and, whether by accident or design, found herself alone with Tom Gurnley. She turned out to be Angela Illsley, principal prosecution witness and star reporter of the Daily Beacon.

  ‘She wasn't there long. She thanked me for the party and gave me a kiss.’

  ‘She kissed you?’ I wondered what Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown would have said to that. ‘How long did she stay?’

  ‘Only about ten minutes, quarter of an hour.’

 
; And when I asked him if he had happened to light up a Camberwell Carrot during that period, he gave me, once again, his speech on the misuse of drugs.

  When our meeting reached this less than satisfactory conclusion, there was one further question I had to ask.

  ‘Dr Gurnley, what are you a Doctor of? Heart transplants? Hip replacements?’

  ‘I am a Doctor of Communication and Verbal Persuasion at the Rogers University of Manitoba,’ he announced with pride.

  ‘Really. Did you enjoy Manitoba?’

  ‘I never went there. I took the course entirely by post.’

  I should have known better – ask a silly question and you get a silly answer.

  *

  Time passed. Mizz Liz Probert allowed herself to be taken to the opera. She said it lasted a long time and she slept through most of it. Every time she woke up, the Gods were still at it and Claude was holding her hand. She released herself gently and went back to sleep.

  The days lengthened and I walked down Fleet Street to the Bailey in bright sunshine. We sweated in Court and the wigs scratched our thinning skulls. The daffodils in the Temple gardens gave way to roses, and a date was fixed at London Sessions for the trial of a popular MP on a charge of possession of a class-B drug. He had taken my advice and opted for a Jury.

  Neither the sunshine nor the flowers had done much to cheer up Claude Erskine-Brown. The under-employed QC still loitered palely about Chambers in search of someone to talk to, or take out to dinner, or at least for a drink at Pommeroy's, so that checking back into the Sheridan Club might be delayed as long as possible. There was, however, something more determined about the man. He had, it seemed, come to some decision, fuelled, I was to discover, by equal parts of optimism and despair.

  ‘I've made up my mind, Rumpole. I'm going for a divorce.’

  Claude was sitting in my client's chair. Indeed, there seemed to be very few hours of the day when he wasn't sitting in my client's chair, hungry for company and consolation.

  ‘Isn't that a bit desperate? I mean, it was only a trial separation.’

  ‘Philly's had her chance.’ Claude was doing his best to look ruthless. ‘It's about time I got a life.’

  I remembered where I'd heard that expression before, and a terrible suspicion entered my mind.

  ‘The trouble is that Philly and I are about the same age, and, you must see this Rumpole, it's difficult for a man to be married to a Judge.’

  I tried to listen to him sympathetically, and I didn't tell him that it was a position I'd got used to over the years.

  ‘I had the feeling that she was judging me all the time. Well, no one likes being judged, do they, Rumpole?’

  ‘None of my clients are very keen on it.’

  ‘So I'm thinking of marriage to someone younger. Someone more at the start of her career.’

  ‘Have you asked her yet?’

  ‘Asked who?’

  ‘Liz Probert.’

  ‘I don't know why you should think it's Liz I have in mind.’ Claude looked flattered, however, as though I had recognized that he had a reasonable chance of Mizz Probert. ‘I haven't asked her yet. Naturally I'm not free to do so. But she has given me a certain amount of encouragement.’

  ‘You mean she let you take her to the Twilight of the Gods?’

  ‘She leapt at the idea of coming to Covent Garden with me. Wagner, a half-bottle and sandwiches in the Floral Hall. She loved every minute of it! That's the sort of life I can offer her, Rumpole.’

  ‘And you think she'll leap at that?’

  ‘What girl wouldn't?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose – hardly any.’ I didn't disillusion the poor old QC, who felt happiness was within his grasp. And then his voice became more resolute and he frowned in a way he might have thought was merciless.

  ‘I have a strong suspicion,’ he said, ‘that Phillida's seeing someone else. I mean why else would she want a separation?’

  ‘I can't imagine.’

  ‘I'm not hanging around for her agreement to a divorce, Rumpole. I've instructed my solicitor and I'm going to have her watched. She won't get away with this. I'm keeping her under close observation.’

  ‘You weren't invited to Dr Gurnley's party?’

  ‘Not actually invited. No. I told you. My friend, Anthea, happens to be the girlfriend of Keith Fawcett who plays for the Wanderers. They took me with them.’

  ‘Did you ask Anthea to do that?’

  ‘I asked her. Yes.’

  ‘Simply because you wanted to go to a party?’

  ‘I was in a party mood. Yes.’

  ‘It wasn't just that, was it?’

  There was a moment's pause. Angela Illsley, ‘our reporter on the Beacon’, stood in the witness box at London Sessions and looked towards the prosecution counsel as though for advice. She was, I thought, in her early thirties, her naturally pretty face marred, at that moment, by a frown of irritation. Her evidence in chief had been clear, precise and given with every sign of conviction. But she didn't like to be contradicted.

  ‘Why else would I want to go?’

  ‘Let me tell you. You were a fairly junior reporter at the Beacon, weren't you?’

  ‘I do my job well, Mr Rumpole, and I'm proud of it.’

  ‘Did you want to do your job even better and see if you could get a story about a well-known politician?’

  ‘I'm always on the look out for stories, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘So you didn't just go because you were in a party mood. You went there in search of a story.’

  ‘If you put it that way, yes.’

  Seldom have I played to a larger audience. The press benches were stuffed and seasoned Court reporters were squashed in with the public. Lawyers waiting for their cases to come on had dropped in to catch the highlights of our trial. Seated in the dock, wearing a dark suit and a Croydon Wanderers tie, my client indulged in rather too much smiling at the Jury. They looked a reasonable lot, a selection of variously coloured faces. There was a large, motherly black woman whom I had seen reading the Guardian, two young women who might have been schoolteachers, and a scholarly looking young Indian who took copious notes. They were men and women, I thought, who lived in a world more real than that inhabited by the Honourable Member.

  ‘The sort of story you were after wouldn't be one about what a thoroughly decent, kindly and upright citizen Dr Gurnley was and how the canapés were delicious.’

  ‘How the what were delicious, Mr Rumpole?’ His Honour Stephen Millichip was a soft-voiced, gentle Judge who seemed to be constantly surprised by the rough and often brutal world to which his modest practice in the law of landlord and tenant had brought him. ‘Did you say the cannabis?’ He named the drug as though the word might itself cause some sort of dangerous intoxication in Court.

  ‘No, Your Honour. Canapés. We'll get to the cannabis later.’

  There was a little breeze of laughter from the Jury, and Angela Illsley got briskly back to business. ‘I don't think my editor would have wanted a story like that.’

  ‘What your editor wanted was a story that proved my client to be a complete hypocrite.’

  ‘I don't know what you mean, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Do you not? After three years working on the Daily Beacon, are you really telling this Jury you don't know what a hypocrite is?’

  It was a mistake. The black Guardian reader smiled broadly, but the scholarly Indian frowned with disapproval. Adrian Hoddinot, a singularly fair-minded prosecutor, who looked owlish in thick pebble glasses and always said he only kept on working to provide adequately for his Great Dane, rose with a mild rebuke.

  ‘Your Honour, I'm sure we all enjoy Mr Rumpole's sense of humour in the robing room. I just don't think he should make jokes at the expense of the witness.’

  ‘Yes. You mustn't think of this Court simply as a place of entertainment, Mr Rumpole.’ The Judge had, perhaps, put his finger on a flaw in my character. I stood looking suitably rebuked and he went on, as though regretting some ju
dicial severity, ‘I know you'll want to rephrase the question.’

  ‘Certainly, I'll rephrase it.’ I turned back to the Beacon reporter. ‘You wanted a story that would show my client doesn't practise what he preaches. That all his high moral talk about family life and cracking down on drugs was pure hogwash.’

  ‘Pure what, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Hogwash, Your Honour.’

  I must have stopped being entertaining. The Judge wrote the word down carefully.

  ‘When I went to the party…’

  ‘When you gate-crashed the party.’

  ‘I told you, I went with my friend Anthea.’

  ‘Did my client know you were coming?’

  ‘I don't know. Perhaps not…’

  ‘So when you turned up uninvited, that was the story you were after.’

  ‘I didn't know what sort of story there'd be, or if there'd be a story at all.’

  There was an obvious answer to this, but now was not the moment to accuse her of invention. I embarked on the slow approach, the line of questions the witness agrees to, until, in the end, she is fixed with one she doesn't want to agree to but may be left with no reasonable alternative.

  ‘You stayed on in the house after all the other guests had left?’

  ‘I told you, I was in the toilet.’

  ‘You told us that. Yes. Let's get this clear. Up to the time when you emerged from the lavatory, there'd been no sign of anyone smoking cannabis.’

  ‘No one was doing drugs. No.’

  ‘Had you told your friend, Anthea, you wanted to stay on after she and her friend had gone?’

  ‘She knew I did.’

  ‘So it was a carefully arranged plan?’

  ‘It was a plan. Yes.’

  ‘Where did you go, after you were the only one left?’

  ‘I went into the sitting-room. Tom was sitting on the sofa. I think he was having a drink.’

  ‘Did you sit beside him, and tell him it was a lovely party?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Had you spoken to him before?’

  ‘Not really. Not actually spoken. He'd smiled at me.’

  ‘Did you tell him your name?’

  ‘He didn't ask me.’