Rumpole Rests His Case

by John Mortimer

  ‘Did you kiss him?’

  ‘I gave him a nice kiss.’ She looked at the Jury and gave them a small, confidential smile and said, ‘I think he enjoyed it very much.’ It was her first mistake. The motherly Guardian reader looked disapproving, the studious Indian mildly surprised.

  ‘A Judas kiss was it?’

  Adrian the prosecution rose, half-apologetic. ‘I think my learned friend should explain…’

  ‘Certainly I'll explain. A traitor's kiss. You kissed him and made up your mind to write a story which you knew would ruin his career.’

  ‘It's not my fault he's ruined his career.’

  ‘Isn't it? What did you hope for when you kissed him?’

  ‘I suppose I hoped we'd get friendly,’ again she gave an unreturned smile to the Jury, ‘and he'd give me a story.’

  ‘So was the kiss enough… to unlock his secrets?’

  ‘It didn't seem to be. He looked happy, as I say, but he was quiet.’ A rare moment, I thought, in the life of Tom Gurnley, MP.

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘After that nothing much happened and I asked him if he minded me smoking.’

  ‘Did he mind?’

  ‘Not at all. So I got out cigarette papers and I had some…’ She paused, and it was time to take a risk, to ask a question without knowing the answer.

  ‘You said in your statement to the police, and in your evidence in chief, that you rolled a cigarette. That wasn't the truth, was it?’

  ‘It was a sort of cigarette.’

  ‘A spliff?’

  She looked at the prosecutor for help, but he sighed and looked away.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Cannabis. A class-B drug?’

  ‘Well, yes. But the police know. They gave me a warning.’

  ‘So not being a well-known Member of Parliament means you don't have to face the inconvenience of a prosecution?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole.’ The Judge, unused to the ways of the world, asked me, in the politest possible manner, for some basic education. ‘Perhaps there are some Members of the Jury who know nothing about the making of “spliffs”, as you have called them. Can you help me?’

  ‘Certainly, Your Honour. Someone has a packet of papers and rolls a cigarette packed with the dope, which may be of varying quality. It's lit and passed round among the participants, who are meant to breathe the smoke in deeply. This produces a feeling of satisfaction and giggles, although by now the end of the joint may, perhaps, be unpleasantly moist…’

  I stopped there. Some Members of the Jury were looking at me in wild surmise. Even the well-meaning Judge had raised his eyebrows and the prosecutor said, in a penetrating whisper, ‘Are you an expert witness, Rumpole?’ Had I drawn too deeply on my experience of dinner with relics of the sixties during the case concerning Mrs Twineham's skeleton? To avoid further dangerous speculation, I passed quickly on to the next question.

  ‘Did you offer him the wet end of your spliff?’

  ‘Yes I did.’

  She had the Jury's full attention. Their disapproval was now reserved entirely for the witness.

  ‘Was that calculated to tempt him?’

  ‘I thought it might be fun to see how he'd react.’

  ‘Fun? Is this whole case fun to you? Fun to see a public figure humiliated and perhaps destroyed?’

  ‘All right then. I wanted to show him up.’

  ‘And you were determined to do that, weren't you? You had given him the Judas kiss and you were going to sell him for thirty pieces of silver.’ Was I making an absurd comparison between the Honourable Member and the founder of a great religion? Undoubtedly. But the Jury, and in particular the Guardian reader, seemed to relish my quoting scripture in the case of the Camberwell Carrot.

  ‘I don't know about pieces of silver…’

  ‘How much did the Beacon pay you?’

  ‘I got ten thousand.’

  ‘Not bad, for a beginner. And a job?’

  ‘I was promoted. Yes.’

  ‘And let off your own drug offence.’

  ‘I told you, I was warned. And I told you, he said he'd got better stuff of his own. He went to a drawer in his desk and unlocked it. He made himself this huge…’

  ‘Camberwell Carrot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A name, Your Honour,’ I hastened to bring the learned Judge up to date, ‘for a particularly large marijuana cigarette.’

  ‘Smoked in Camberwell?’ The Judge was doing his best to keep up with the evidence.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ but here I turned back to the witness, ‘but never smoked in front of you in my client's house. Did he lecture you on the dangers of using drugs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How did it end?’

  ‘Well, we chatted a bit and then he seemed sleepy. So I left.’

  ‘Left to write a piece of rather poor fiction for ten thousand pounds. Yes? Thank you, Miss Illsley. I have no further questions.’

  *

  ‘The defence is often at its best at the end of the prosecution case. It is now. The Jury don't like Angela at all. They're perfectly prepared to disbelieve her. They don't like her kissing you, or getting away with smoking pot. They're not at all keen on traps set by newspapers. It's my belief that she sank the prosecution. As I say, they don't like her. I'm afraid they might like you even less.’

  ‘Why shouldn't they like me?’ Tom Gurnley was genuinely puzzled. ‘I'm a straightforward, plain-speaking, very ordinary sort of chap.’

  ‘If you were very ordinary they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of prosecuting you. The point of this case is to show the world that the Crown Prosecution Service can act without fear or favour.’

  ‘I'll just go into the witness box and let them know what I think about drugs.’

  ‘I advise against it.’

  ‘You want to shut me up?’ He looked hurt.

  ‘In a word, yes.’

  ‘I'm not doing it. No one's ever been able to shut me up before.’ He began to shout, as though at a Party Conference.

  ‘Perhaps they haven't really tried.’

  Decent restaurants round London Sessions are few and far between, and instead of propping up some nearby saloon bar, like the other ordinary chaps, the down-to-earth MP had booked a private room in a smart hotel. So we sat before a sweeping view of the river on its way to the Thames Barrier, past Greenwich Palace to Gravesend and the sea. We toyed with lobster mayonnaise, washed down with the sort of white Burgundy unavailable in Pommeroy's Wine Bar, and discussed our tactics for the afternoon.

  ‘Have you taken a good look at the Jury?’ I asked him.

  ‘There are two or three serious young women who might well have one-parent families. There's a powerful black matriarch who reads the Guardian. There's a serious-minded Indian who might remember you saying that most of London was becoming indistinguishable from the back streets of Bangladesh. I'm just afraid that you may not be a complete hit with these honest citizens.’

  ‘I'm not afraid of them.’ The MP cracked a claw as though it were the entire judicial system. ‘What do you think they'll ask me?’

  ‘How you reacted when Miss Angela Illsley kissed you. She's quite a personable young woman.’

  ‘I returned her kiss, in a friendly way. As though I were her uncle.’

  ‘And when she rolled up a joint?’

  ‘I warned her about the dangers of cannabis.’

  ‘She says you had better stuff of your own.’

  ‘I didn't say that. I told her, I've spent a lot of my precious time fighting a war against drugs.’

  ‘That's what you always say. All I want to know is, did you or did you not produce a Camberwell Carrot?’

  As usual, the direct question seemed to silence him. I looked out at the river that had floated queens and politicians to the Tower for beheading, received desperate young prostitutes driven to suicide, and held pirates in chains waiting for the rising tide to drown them, and here I was trying to save a public figure who did
n't seem able to tell me if he'd puffed at a king-sized spliff or not.

  When he spoke at last he said, ‘I have a friend who's a Judge.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know you have.’

  ‘She said you could get me off.’

  ‘Perhaps I can. What I can't do is call you to give evidence if I know you can't deny the charge against you.’

  ‘But you can tell them that bloody little Angela hasn't proved the case.’

  ‘Oh yes, I can tell them that. But if you want to give evidence, you'll have to do it on your own.’

  Not for the first time, I wondered why the one-time Portia of our Chambers could ever have fallen for my client's charm. It was time for me to say, ‘So, thank you for the lobster.’ I rose to my feet. ‘I have better things to do, more serious crimes to discuss, than you and the Camberwell Carrot.’

  ‘Rumpole.’ He put a hand on my arm. He was as near, I suppose, as he ever would get to begging for help. ‘My friend the Judge was right, I'm sure. I'll take your advice on this.’

  So it was still on. I gave my best legal advice. ‘Then keep your mouth shut,’ I said. ‘You can bore the House of Commons to your heart's content. Just don't start boring this Jury. I'll do my best for you.’

  Whether it was the white Burgundy or the stimulating effect on the brain of a massive intake of cold fish, I was at my best with the Jury. The Judas kiss and the thirty pieces of silver figured again in my final speech. ‘Is my client's whole career, his public life and his reputation, to be at the mercy of a ruthless young journalist on the make, a self-confessed drug-taker whose unreliable evidence was sold to the highest bidder? Some of you may disagree with Tom Gurnley's politics, but as a tolerant, fair-minded Jury you will still give him the benefit of the doubt in this dubious and tarnished prosecution.’ And then I remembered a criminal defender who had been in his day almost as good as Rumpole, and how he had ended his final speech on behalf of a politician. ‘My client,’ I told them, ‘got twenty-five thousand votes at the last election. But now' (and I pointed at each Member of the Jury in turn) ‘he wants YOUR VOTE and YOUR VOTE and YOUR VOTE…’ And so on until I came to the last of the twelve.

  Champagne glasses were being filled in the hotel room looking out over the Thames. All had gone according to plan. Adrian the prosecutor, with his cross-examination well prepared, had looked like a golfer whose ball, teed up and ready to be sent flying towards the green, had suddenly been snapped up by a passing eagle. He was left flailing the air when the Honourable Member remained modestly out of the witness box.

  The great matriarch, having emerged as foreman of the Jury, said ‘Not guilty' in ringing tones whilst looking with distaste at the ambitious young reporter from the Daily Beacon.

  ‘I've just about had it with this country.’ My successful client, with a glass in his hand, joined me as I stood looking out across the water.

  Where was the aggressive Britishness, the refusal to be part of the decadent and corrupt bureaucracy which he imagined started at Calais, the determination to keep the streets of Croydon free from the exiled snake charmers, the devious Chinese street traders, the foreign pimps he feared were marching in their millions towards the white cliffs of Dover?

  ‘I've been thinking for a long time. It's about time I got out.’

  I appeared to consider this, watching the grey river, now dimpled with rain. Then I gave my verdict. ‘I think you might be wise.’

  ‘Do you really?’ He looked at me, as though in surprise. ‘Well, I must say, your advice has been pretty good up to now.’

  ‘Someone's out to get you,’ I told him. ‘Someone doesn't want you in line to lead your Party. Someone with friends in the Crown Prosecution Service. It's a bit of a compliment, really. Not many of the nameless multitude of dabblers in class-B drugs would be paid the compliment of a full-blown Jury trial for a few puffs of a Camberwell Carrot.’

  ‘That's what I was thinking. They might try and cook up another case.’

  Only, I couldn't help feeling, because there might be something left around to cook.

  ‘I've been offered,’ he lowered his voice so that Bonny Bernard and the waiter might not overhear the story and tell the newspapers, ‘the chairmanship of a very large sports and leisurewear company in New South Wales. I know it's not the Party leadership. It may not lead to Downing Street. But the pay's good, and I might get a look at the sun occasionally.’

  ‘Take it,’ I told him without hesitation. ‘If you want my advice, you'll take it.’

  ‘Caroline!’ He called loudly to his secretary as he moved briskly away from me. ‘Get the Aussies on the mobile. Wake them up if necessary.’

  He left me staring at the river. I thought of the hulks packed with poachers, pickpockets, stealers of watches and handkerchiefs, who chose deportation as an alternative to hanging, and who floated down the grey river as their first stage on a journey to an unknown and almost empty continent. Then Tom Gurnley returned to me, smiling.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘from the way you described smoking a spliff to that Judge, I'm sure you've had a bit of experience of the stuff too, haven't you?’ And then he winked. That did it.

  ‘I will eat with you, drink with you, defend you in Court. But I won't wink with you,’ I told him, and so I left.

  ‘It's ridiculous, Rumpole! Just look at it. Isn't it absurd?’

  Claude handed me a document, and a glance revealed that it was a private detective's report. I remembered that he had threatened to have his wife kept under close observation. I looked at the end and saw that it was signed by no less a person than ‘Fig' Newton. Ferdinand Ian Gilmour Newton had dug out golden nuggets of information in many of my cases. He is, I have always maintained, the best of the somewhat unreliable band of private eyes. His ancient mackintosh, collapsing hat, lantern jaw, watchful eye and occasionally dripping nose, the product of much open-air observation in all weathers, don't make him an immediately attractive figure, but he is a bloodhound after a guilty secret. As I began to read his report, I was dreading the revelation of some amorous encounter between the Phillida I had known and loved and the Honourable Member due for deportation.

  ‘I'm pleased to be able to report that I think we have struck gold at last,’ Fig Newton began his account in a typically modest manner, ‘due to skilled observation maintained in difficult conditions.’

  ‘Have you ever met Fig Newton?’ I asked Claude.

  ‘Never set eyes on the fellow. Go on, Rumpole, read it.’

  It was a different Claude that had entered my room, no longer palely loitering but purposeful, lively and suffering from a deep sense of outrage.

  I commenced observation on the house in Islington at 19.00 hours. At 19.15 the young girl I know as a part-time babysitter rang at the bell and was admitted by Hedwig, the au pair, whom I knew from past enquiries to be due for her evening off. At 19.30 a radio taxicab arrived. At 19.35 Dame Phillida Erskine-Brown (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Judge’) emerged from the house and entered the said radio cab. I followed in the vehicle in which I had kept observation (details of petrol charges and mileage are included in the overall sum set out at the foot of this report). The taxi took the Judge to the Ivy restaurant in West Street. I was able to observe her enter the restaurant and I should at this juncture make it clear that the Judge was dressed, as I would phrase it, ‘up to the nines’. She was wearing a well-cut black dress, with several pieces of jewellery. I came to the conclusion that she had come to meet ‘someone special’, and subsequent events confirmed this view.

  I was fortunate to secure a parking spot and I approached the Ivy restaurant on foot. A man of Irish extraction wearing a top hat tried to prevent my entry but I told him I was booked in and walked past him. The young lady in charge of the coats was similarly discouraging. However, I got past the glass doors into the dining area and was met by a further young woman in a black trouser suit. I again claimed to have a booking and, as she went to check at the desk, I was able to obtain a view of the
assembled diners.

  I have to report that the Judge was there with another man. They were both smiling, and talking in an animated manner. Her hand was on the table and he was holding it. During the minutes for which I kept observation, the Judge made no attempt to withdraw her hand. I would describe the man in question as ‘furtive’, ‘sly looking’, ‘talkative' and not, I would have thought, ‘attractive to women’. He had mouse-coloured, receding hair, a weak chin and wore spectacles and a dark, pinstriped suit. Before I could approach the table more closely, the girl in the black trouser suit, by now accompanied by a small Maître d' with a determined look and a trace of a cockney accent, told me in no uncertain terms that I had no booking for that night or indeed any other night, and he invited me to leave immediately. As I left the Ivy restaurant, the man in the top hat suggested he call me a cab. I declined, having my own transport and not wishing to put the client to further expense.

  At 22.00 hours the Judge left the Ivy restaurant with the ‘furtive-looking' man I have previously described. He seemed to be looking about him in some fear of observation, but he didn't notice me in my vehicle parked up in the shadows of West Street. The parties got into another cab. I noticed that the Judge gave money to the man in the top hat, her date of the evening having clearly protested that he had ‘no change’.

  At 22.15 the parties stopped outside a large building, in clear need of a lick of paint, in one of the streets behind Whitehall. I was able to follow them into the hallway, where the ‘furtive man' asked a sleepy porter for ‘The key to my bedroom.’ They both then took a lift to an upper floor. I was unable to follow as the sleepy porter asked me my business, and when I said, ‘Just looking around. What is this place?’, he said, ‘The Sheridan Club. Members Only' and instructed me, again in no uncertain terms, to leave. Seated in my vehicle, I kept observation on the entrance of the Sheridan Club until 03.00 hours on the nineteenth. Neither the Judge nor the ‘furtive' companion had emerged by that time, from which I deduced that intimacy had undoubtedly taken place.

  ‘“Furtive! Sly looking! Weak-chinned! Not attractive to women.” Would you describe me like that, Rumpole?’