The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  His looks betrayed nothing. He was still smiling charmingly, looking a little puzzled, but not in the least offended.

  ‘Because if you don’t tell the truth about you and Sir Michael, the jury will never believe you about the blackmail.’

  We then went into another bout of silence. Although I had got rid of our solicitor, her presence, like her perfume, was still vaguely about us. I tried the approach direct.

  ‘Look. What do you think? Would Miss Sue Galton rather marry a free man who’s had a few strange experiences or wait for four years for a convicted blackmailer? Anyway, there’s no defence unless you did it. You went to bed together and he gave you presents for it. Isn’t that the story?’

  Peter Vernon was no longer smiling. He took another cigarette and lit it carefully.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because that’s always the story, in your sort of case.’ There is no experience, I thought, like the experience of an Old Bailey hack.

  ‘So you don’t believe it?’

  For the first time Peter Vernon looked put out. No one likes to be told that his defence is just Number Two, Standard Size.

  ‘You tell me. And then I’ll see if I believe it.’

  So then, my client began to tell me the story.

  ‘It happened that first night. After Siegfried. I suppose I did it out of politeness. You know. Like the way you’re taught to say “thank you” after a children’s party.’

  ‘You didn’t care for him?’ For a moment I almost felt sorry for Sir Michael.

  ‘I don’t think it was him I liked, ever. It was his whole world. Oh, the way he talked, and the music he played me and even that freezing old Club with the Regency paintings and the rotten food. I was grateful to him for showing me all that. The rest didn’t seem terribly important.’

  ‘He gave you money?’ I was anxious to return to the charge on the indictment.

  ‘Yes. Cheques a few times. He must have been mad to do that, mustn’t he?’ Peter Vernon asked me.

  ‘And you were mad to pay them into your bank account. Why did you keep the money? I mean if you were not a blackmailer?’

  ‘I just kept it…’ He smiled vaguely.

  ‘And the cigarette case?’

  ‘Yes. That was the last thing he gave me. I kept it all because… Well, you know Sue and I are going to get married. We’ve got a lot to save up for.’

  It was, I suppose, an unusual way to furnish a bottom drawer. Oddly enough, he made it sound completely natural. At this point Miss Sue Galton returned to us and said that although she had telephoned my clerk, Henry, he seemed to know nothing about a breathalyser at Chelmsford the next day. I looked suitably puzzled and said I supposed my clerk was always the last to know.

  I took my leave of the young engaged couple, having given Peter Vernon a piece of advice which would have been fatal to most of my clients. I counselled, if he wanted to have any prospect of an early marriage, to tell the truth. If there were any lies to be told, they were best left to the Professor of Moral Philosophy, who might even be better at it.

  I had expected a quiet drink with Fosdyke and Simpson in one of their rooms, and felt distinctly embarrassed when, having given my name to the porter at St Joseph’s (some spotty youth, clearly far too young for the job), I was sent over to the Senior Common Room where a whole flock of dons, looking, with tattered gowns drooping from their shoulders, like bedraggled birds were sniffing the sherry and pecking at the biscuits. I was well into the aperitifs before I realized that I was expected to dine at High Table, in embarrassing proximity to the principal witness for the prosecution in R. v. Vernon. It was really, I told Fozzy Fosdyke, not on.

  ‘Of course it is,’ Fosdyke filled my glass. ‘The food’s not bad at all. Ah. You’d like to meet Humphrey Grice, our Senior Law Tutor. This is my old friend, Horace Rumpole. It seems he’s known as “Rumpole of the Old Bailey”.’

  The man to whom I was introduced was the most raven-like of all the dons. He had almost jet-black hair, hardly going grey, which also grew from his ears and on the back of his hands. He had strong yellow teeth.

  ‘ “Rumpole of the Old Bailey”, eh? How very amusing,’ said the law tutor Grice. ‘What do you think of academic lawyers down at the Old Bailey?’

  ‘Well to tell you the truth,’ I had to admit, ‘we hardly think of them at all.’

  ‘But you’ll have read my paper on “The Concept of Constructive Intent and Mens Rea in Murder and Manslaughter” in the Harvard Law Review?’ Humphrey Grice looked puzzled and not a little hurt.

  ‘Oh rather!’ I lied to him. ‘Your average East End jury finds it absolutely riveting.’

  Further badinage along these lines was prevented by Simpson who came up with a distinguished-looking grey-haired man in a black velvet dinner jacket, to whom he introduced me.

  ‘Rumpole, this is our Principal. Sir Michael Tuffnell. My friend, “Rumpole of the Old Bailey”.’

  ‘How are you, Rumpole? So glad you could join us.’

  Sir Michael had the knack of making you feel that you were just the sort of valued companion he’d been hoping might drop in for dinner. Without switching off the charm for a second he turned to Humphrey Grice: ‘Gulls’ eggs, tonight, isn’t it, Humphrey? We usually have gulls’ eggs on the first Thursday in Lent, and we make ourselves stop at three…’

  I couldn’t let this extremely gracious old telly star feed me gulls’ eggs on false pretences, so I muttered, ‘Sir Michael, could I have a word?’

  ‘Fasting is a state of mind. I do believe that,’ the Principal said to the world at large, and then to me, ‘Yes, what is it, Rumpole?’

  ‘Fosdyke invited me to dinner, but I should tell you that I’m appearing for young Peter Vernon on the blackmail charge.’ I let him into the secret. If the news caused Sir Michael the faintest distress, he didn’t show it. In fact he didn’t even bother to lower his voice as he said, ‘Oh good. Do your best for him, won’t you? I feel genuinely sorry for the lad.’

  ‘But it’s no doubt embarrassing for you, Sir Michael, having me here…’ I felt rather awkward myself, carrying on a conversation in a whisper.

  ‘Embarrassing? Why should it be? We shall be drinking some rather seductive Sancerre with the eggs.’

  And as Sir Michael took my arm to lead me into dinner, he said: ‘And of course, Rumpole, we won’t talk “shop”.’

  So we went into hall, to High Table, where the oak and the old silver glowed in the candle light, and the Principal said grace standing in front of the paintings of former heads of St Joseph’s, who had concealed in their gentler academic lives who knows what strange secrets without ever having to give evidence in a criminal Court.

  For the first, and I hope the last, time I sat down to gulls’ eggs and Sancerre, to be followed by saddle of lamb and Margaux, with a major prosecution witness a week or two before a criminal trial. But Sir Michael was consistently charming to everyone, although he did show, from time to time, an understandable impatience with the academic lawyer, Humphrey Grice. When we returned to the Senior Common Room (coffee, Romeo & Juliettas and vintage Cockburn) the talk was brought round by Grice to what I thought was an uncomfortable subject. He was talking to Fosdyke, but in a voice which carried across the room.

  ‘Interesting piece on Sir Charles Dilke in the Historical Review, Fosdyke. Tell me, do you think Dilke might have made a great Liberal prime minister, if he hadn’t been caught out by his sexual indiscretions?’

  ‘Dilke was an extraordinary talent.’ Fosdyke sniffed his port.

  ‘You know Keir Hardie invited him to lead the Independent Labour Party?’

  ‘Humphrey Grice probably finds that far more shocking than hopping into bed with a couple of ladies at once.’ Sir Michael joined fearlessly in the discussion of an ancient scandal.

  ‘If a man is a natural leader, I don’t believe his private life makes the smallest difference,’ Fosdyke insisted. ‘So the answer to your question, Humphrey, is undoubtedly “
Yes”.’

  This didn’t seem to please Grice particularly, so he turned to me for support. ‘If a man can’t run his private life, it’s quite obvious that he can’t run his country. Wouldn’t you agree, Rumpole?’

  I looked at the Principal, took a gulp of strengthening port and tried to sound neutral.

  ‘I suppose we’ve all got things we’d rather not have broadcast to the nation. It’s probably just bad luck if you get found out.’

  ‘Quite right. Dilke and Parnell had bad luck. Lloyd George had the luck of the devil.’ Simpson’s voice came with its muted scream, out of the depths of a chair in the corner of the room.

  ‘It’s not luck, in my opinion. It’s the use of a little common sense.’ Sir Michael was carefully cutting the end off a cigar.

  ‘Yes, Principal. Let’s hear your expert opinion.’ Grice was stuffing a charred pipe with Old Holborn and giving a yellow smile. Sir Michael settled himself for an elegant oration.

  ‘What is a scandal, if I may ask the rhetorical question? A scandal is a secret that gets found out. It’s a subject for lies and cover-ups. If you don’t lie, if you don’t try and conceal, then there’s no scandal. Take Watergate…’

  ‘Oh really, Principal. Do we have to?’ Simpson shrilled from his corner.

  ‘A tragedy, in my opinion. Those two complacent little scribblers got rid of America’s only competent President.’ Grice’s voice was like a rusty nail on a slate, but Sir Michael came melodiously in to agree with him entirely.

  ‘Exactly! Who’d have given tuppence about Watergate if Nixon had told the truth about it? What was it, a trivial bit of housebreaking, almost a student prank? It became a scandal because of the lies. The moral is, if you want to kill a scandal, tell the truth.’

  Sir Michael looked triumphantly round his colleagues. No one spoke, except of course Grice, who said:

  ‘Is that what you intend to do, Principal?’

  There was an awkward pause. The dons looked at Grice with varying degrees of antagonism, but Sir Michael said, unperturbed :

  ‘Since you have the bad taste to ask the question, Humphrey, after dinner and in the presence of a guest, the answer is unquestionably “Yes”.’

  As he said this, the Principal gave me a glowing smile, and an invitation to put up for the night in a College guest room. I telephoned She Who Must Be Obeyed, who didn’t seem unduly aggrieved, and walked with Fosdyke and Simpson across the moonlit quadrangle, past the fountain, towards the crumbling golden stone of Founder’s Buildings.

  ‘Sir Michael was very charming,’ I said. ‘I mean I must have been a bit of a spectre at the feast, in all the circumstances.’

  ‘You know we all felt frightfully sorry for him,’ Fosdyke told me. ‘But he’s been so bloody honest about the thing that I don’t think it’ll do him the slightest harm.’

  I thought that on the whole, Sir Michael Tuffnell had handled the scandal which had broken over St Joseph’s College with intelligence and skill.

  ‘It’ll be so much water off the back of a particularly fly old duck. Is that what you think, Fosdyke?’ I asked.

  ‘Much to the fury of Humphrey Grice,’ Simpson squawked from the shadows.

  ‘The academic lawyer?’

  ‘He’s been after the Principal’s job for years.’

  At the whiff of college politics, Simpson became audibly excited. ‘Grice was the runner-up when Michael was elected. It was Grice who started the scandal really. Went round telling everyone about the Principal’s jaunts to London with the gardening boy. All perfectly innocent, of course, but it laid poor Michael wide open to blackmail from two ruthless neurotics.’

  ‘Two…?’ I didn’t follow.

  ‘That’s how I’d describe Humphrey Grice.’ Simpson was positive. ‘And your client too, I’m sorry to say, Rumpole.’

  I ignored that. Peter Vernon had more on his plate than Simpson’s ill will. Instead I asked, innocently enough, ‘So you believe your Principal, when he says nothing happened?’

  ‘The Professor of Moral Philosophy!’ Fosdyke sounded shocked. ‘Who wouldn’t believe him?’

  ‘Yes, I know, Fozzy,’ I said, for P. J. Fosdyke had hit on the Achilles’ heel of our defence. ‘That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.’

  ‘And no one’s going to believe Vernon, are they?’ Monty Simpson turned the knife in the wound. ‘No one can stand a blackmailer.’

  The next morning I had a leisurely breakfast with Fosdyke and Simpson, and then wandered through the town to land up breathing in the dust and powdered leather of a secondhand bookshop in the Turl. There I propped myself up to read a tattered volume of memoirs by some long dead legal hack, recalling life on the old south-eastern circuit (when, in his experience, no case seemed to last more than a day, and most ended with the black cap at twilight). I was enjoying myself in a mild sort of way, postponing the evil hour of my return to my clerk, Henry, and She Who Must Be Obeyed when a voice like tearing metal pierced the calm of the bookshop.

  ‘You do actually read books then? Your life isn’t entirely practical?’ Grice blew a sweet cloud of Old Holborn all over me. It was the academic lawyer, crept out of his lair on a shopping spree. He gave me a cunning and conspiratorial sort of smile as he said, ‘I say, a bit of a cheek you turning up to dinner with the Principal. Fosdyke tells me you’re defending young Vernon.’

  ‘I’m afraid I got trapped. I apologized. It was most embarrassing.’

  ‘Not at all. Tuffnell needs reminding,’ said Grice. ‘The case isn’t far off.’ At which he grinned in a way I can only describe as ghoulish. He seemed to relish the idea of my playing Banquo’s Ghost at Sir Michael’s dinner table. ‘I don’t think he realizes just how serious it is.’

  ‘For my client?’

  ‘Oh no. For the Principal’s career. There’s no possible doubt, you know, that he’s guilty.’

  ‘My client?’ I asked again innocently, knowing quite well what the answer would be.

  ‘Oh no, Sir Michael Tuffnell, “Star of Television”. The relationship was definitely physical.’

  Fortunately, apart from an antique and no doubt deaf cleric reading an illustrated Boccaccio in a corner, the shop was empty. Otherwise, the Senior Law Tutor might have been involved in a quite non-academic action for slander.

  ‘Oh yes.’ He piled on the defamation like a starving man filling his plate at a cafeteria. ‘Jemms, the porter, distinctly saw the boy Vernon coming out of the Principal’s lodge at dawn.’

  ‘Well,’ I tried to put the opposing view, ‘I came out of Founder’s Buildings, which houses P. J. Fosdyke, at dawn, but I hope no one thinks that the relationship is definitely physical.’

  ‘And I have had a long talk with the Principal’s cleaning lady…’ Grice was clearly prepared to call evidence.

  ‘Have you indeed…?’

  ‘I just thought,’ he ended triumphantly, ‘that someone should see the truth come out at the trial. What do you think, Rumpole?’

  As he stood in front of me, he looked less like a raven and more like an old vulture getting a far-off whiff of recently killed zebra. I said, ‘I think, if I may say so, Grice, that your interest in the law doesn’t appear to be entirely academic.’

  In the weeks that intervened before the trial, my wife Hilda again tried to raise the subject of the loose covers for the drawing-room chairs.

  ‘Rumpole,’ she said, ‘I wonder you’re not ashamed to be sitting on those tattered remnants.’

  ‘I went to Oxford,’ I said hastily, ‘and I met my two dear old friends, Monty Simpson and Fozzy Fosdyke. We were inseparable you know. We used to set off with a bottle of beer and a slice of cold Christmas pudding, and tramp to Woodstock.’

  ‘If the Featherstones ever came here, they’d think the place was a tip.’

  ‘ “Two scholars whom at College, erst he knew” ’ –

  I did my best to drown her in Matthew Arnold –

  ‘ “Met him, and of his way of life inquired…” ’

/>   ‘They’d think you were down on your luck, Rumpole,’ she persisted, but I gave her more of the ‘Scholar Gypsy’.

  ‘ “Whereat he answered that the Gypsy crew,

  His mates had arts to rule as they desired,

  The workings of men’s brains…” ’

  ‘Couldn’t you give me a cheque, Rumpole?’

  ‘Not that my mates are a Gypsy crew, you couldn’t call Guthrie Featherstone a Gypsy crew, and we can’t rule the workings of men’s brains, although I might put certain things to a jury, entirely for their consideration of course.’

  Under the cover of this nonsense, I had made it to the door, and was almost clear of Froxbury Court when Hilda uttered her final threat.

  ‘If I don’t have a cheque for new loose covers, Rumpole, the consequences will be serious.’

  ‘What will the consequences be?’

  ‘I told you. Serious.’

  You see my wife had absolutely no understanding of the art of blackmail. For Sir Michael Tuffnell, it was alleged, the consequences of his failure to pay up had been spelled out with the utmost clarity.

  I sat in chambers toying with the brief R. v. Vernon, and thought about St Joseph’s. By my third year I had forsaken the company of Fozzy and Shrimpson. I no longer walked to the Cumnor Hills or Bablock-hithe. I had become engaged to the eldest daughter of Septimus Porter, my tutor in Roman law.

  Unhappily my engagement to poor Cissie Porter had to be broken off by reason of her early death. But had she lived, had we married, how would history have been altered? I couldn’t believe that Miss Porter, so docile and eager to agree, would have ended up by blackmailing me over a matter of loose covers.

  ‘You were at St Joseph’s too weren’t you, Rumpole?’

  I looked up and saw that Guthrie Featherstone, Q.C., M.P., our learned Head of Chambers, had manifested himself beside my desk.

  ‘What do you mean, too?’

  ‘Well, I was at St Joseph’s, as you know, from 1952 to 1955.’