The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Certainly, my Lord.’ I called Glazier to provide an explanation and asked him, ‘You thought Charlie was involved in the Fresh Foods job, didn’t you?’

  ‘Shall we say he was under suspicion.’

  ‘Did you tell him his fingerprints were on the store-room door at Fresh Foods?’

  ‘I think I may have done.’ Glazier admitted that a little less readily.

  ‘So you interviewed him, did you? Long before he told you that Inspector Dobbs was asking for a bribe?’

  There was a long pause; then Glazier saw that the Judge was looking at him, waiting for an answer. He gave one at last.

  ‘I may have done.’

  ‘Yes, you may have done. And told him he might be involved in a serious charge?’

  ‘Is that what Pointer has said?’ Glazier looked a little confused and I blessed the day we had the officer in charge out of Court.

  ‘Don’t you worry about what Pointer has said. You just try to tell us the truth, Superintendent. Oh, I’m sorry…’

  ‘Why are you apologizing, Mr Rumpole?’ the Judge asked, and I smiled at Mister Glazier with some sympathy. ‘It’s no longer Superintendent, is it? You’ve been demoted.’ Martin Colefax had the grace to look slightly guilty then, and the jury were clearly interested.

  ‘I have been… re-ranked. Yes.’

  ‘After a disciplinary hearing?’

  ‘My Lord, has that got anything to do with this case?…’ Glazier tried appealing to the Judge, but I interrupted him.

  ‘I suggest it has everything to do with this case. There was a complaint, wasn’t there, that you had failed to investigate? Was it a little matter of an officer receiving bribes? Your superiors took the view that you had been culpably negligent.’

  ‘There was a complaint.’ The witness agreed cautiously.

  ‘And the prosecution have tried to conceal your demotion by referring to you in Court as plain “Mister”, and not disclosing your new rank?’

  ‘My Lord, I really must protest.’ The elegant Colefax shimmered to his feet, but I motioned him to subside.

  ‘Oh, don’t bother,’ I said. ‘The jury know the truth about that now. Just as they will soon learn the whole truth about this case!’

  ‘Mr Rumpole.’ The Judge felt, perhaps, that he was losing his grasp of the proceedings. ‘If he was once negligent in investigating bribery, this officer has surely made up for it by the thoroughness with which he has had your client investigated.’

  ‘Or was my client investigated so thoroughly, Mister Glazier,’ I ignored the Judge and asked the witness, ‘because he wasn’t taking bribes?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Mr Rumpole.’ Glazier played for safety.

  ‘Do you not? Let me make it clear to you. My client, Inspector Dobbs, was a “swede”, wasn’t he?’

  ‘You are saying your client’s not English?’ Poor old Vosper. He had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with the dialogue.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ll interpret again, for the benefit of your Lordship. A “swede” is an old-fashioned policeman, a “turnip-head”, a “vegetable”, one who is honest according to his lights, and never takes bribes. Have you heard that description used by less scrupulous officers?’ I asked Glazier.

  ‘I have heard it. Yes.’

  ‘But the “swede” was getting suspicious. Old Dobbsy was starting to smell a rat. Was it Inspector Dobbs who made the first complaint against you? Don’t bother to lie, Mr Glazier, I can call for the record…’

  ‘I’m not at all sure if this is relevant.’ Colefax was stirring again, but I interrupted him by almost shouting at the witness, ‘Will you answer?’

  ‘I think it was. Yes.’ The words came out of Glazier like pulled teeth.

  ‘You think it was! So Dobbsy had to be shut up. You put pressure on Charlie Pointer! You threatened to do him for the Fresh Foods job, which was one of those he hadn’t done. You lied and told him you had his fingerprints on the frozen-food store, and got him to help you frame Inspector Dobbs. Oh, by the way, does the word “frame” require translation for your Lordship?’

  ‘No thank you, Mr Rumpole. I understand it perfectly well.’ At last the Judge appeared to be cooperating. I helped him to understand the rest of the case.

  ‘Pointer offered Inspector Dobbs information and took him to the Chinese restaurant where he led him into some answers you could slot into the other tape you made later. It was careful of you to make that second tape in the same restaurant, so you could get the right background noises.’

  ‘It’s not true! I never went to that restaurant with Charlie – with Pointer. I swear that on my oath!’

  It was when he talked about his oath that I knew the witness was lying, and I told him so. ‘You are rather a careless officer, aren’t you, Mr Glazier? You see, I shall be calling a Mr Wah Li Po, who remembers Charlie eating in the Swinging Bamboo with certain solid gentlemen in plain clothes, among them your good self, on a number of occasions. Perhaps Mr Wah would just step into Court, so that we can make quite sure he identifies you later.’

  The next day I returned from the Old Bailey in good spirits. After a quick and refreshing glass at Pommeroy’s Wine Bar I wandered into Chambers and joined our Head, Guthrie Featherstone, Mr and Mrs Claude Erskine-Brown, Uncle Tom and various barristers for one of those meetings in which we decide high and important matters of Chambers policy. As I entered the room, Guthrie noticed my cheerful appearance and asked if I’d had another triumph at the Bailey.

  ‘A bit of a triumph, I suppose, Featherstone.’ Well, there was no point in being modest about it. ‘You see, they were looking for a rotten apple. They found the right one in the end. Ex-Superintendent Glazier’ll end up in an open prison, spreading muck and slipping out to the pub on Saturdays.’

  ‘It’s the question of a rotten apple which I have to raise at this Chambers meeting,’ Erskine-Brown weighed in. ‘It’s also a question of morality in Chambers.’

  ‘Claude Erskine-Brown has a problem about the coffee made in the clerk’s room,’ Featherstone explained.

  ‘And I have a problem about trousers,’ I told the meeting.

  ‘What on earth do you mean, Rumpole?’ Our Head of Chambers wanted to be put in the picture.

  ‘Pin-striped trousers, barristers, for the use of. What would you say if I, if anyone, charged the Commissioners of Inland Revenue for the purchase of two brand new pairs of pin-striped trousers a year, and went on sporting the same faded old bags that had been run up for us on our call to the Bar.’

  ‘I’d say that would clearly amount to deception, and making a false return.’ Featherstone pronounced judgement severely.

  ‘I suppose we all have to live with a certain amount of deception,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Gingering up the verbals or the coffee money. It can go too far though, like false tape-recordings, or profiting from non-existent trousers.’

  ‘Horace. I’m not sure I follow.’ Featherstone looked left behind.

  ‘Never mind. Let’s go on with the Chambers meeting. Claude did you want to raise the question of coffee money?’ There was a long pause before Claude Erskine-Brown had the decency and good sense to answer:

  ‘No. I don’t think so. On second thoughts… I don’t think so.’

  I took a bottle of claret home to share with Hilda. I even bought her a handful of ruinously expensive chrysanths at the Tube station, but She still wasn’t communicative, even when I told her about my excellent win in the case of R. v. Dobson.

  ‘The worst part of it all was, Hilda, that Glazier recommended me as a barrister to poor old Dobbsy. He must’ve thought that I’d got such a dislike for the police, having attacked them so often, that I wouldn’t defend a copper properly. Doesn’t he know my religious faith? A client is a client, no matter how disreputable and unattractive his profession. You understand that, Hilda, don’t you?’ Silence. ‘Hilda. Would you mind telling me. What’s eating you?’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ She Who Must Be Obeyed spoke o
ut at last. ‘It was your answer to my question.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A month ago. You were off to a conference with that policeman.’

  ‘Inspector Dobbs?’

  ‘Yes. You were leaving to see him. And I asked you, “Will you come straight back this evening, Rumpole?” And you said…’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You said, “I bloody well hope not.” ’

  I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Normal relations might at last be resumed with She.

  ‘Nonsense. I said that when you asked me if I’d be late back.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘I didn’t hear any other question.’

  ‘Rumpole. Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure? Of course I’m sure. It’s the questions that are important, you see Hilda. Never the answers.’

  Rumpole and the Expert Witness

  Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

  Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

  Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

  And with some sweet oblivious antidote

  Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

  Which weighs upon the heart…

  Certainly not young Dr Ned Dacre, the popular G.P. of Hunter’s Hill, that delightful little dormitory town in Surrey, where nothing is heard but the whirr of the kitchen mixers running up Provençal specialities from the Sunday supplements and the purr of the Hi Fis playing baroque music to go with the Buck’s Fizz.

  Ned Dacre lived in a world removed from my usual clients, the Old Bailey villains whose most common disease is a criminal conviction. He had a beautiful wife, two cars, two fair-haired children called Simon and Sara at rather nice schools, an au pair girl, an Old English sheepdog, a swimming pool, a car port and a machine for recording television programmes so that he didn’t have to keep watching television. His father, Dr Henry Dacre, had settled in Hunter’s Hill just after the war and had built up an excellent practice. When his son grew up and qualified he was taken into the partnership and father and son were the two most popular doctors for many miles around, the inhabitants being almost equally divided as to whether, in times of sickness, they preferred the attentions of ‘Dr Harry’ or ‘Dr Ned’. With all these advantages it seemed that Ned Dacre had all that the heart of man could desire, except that he had an unhappy wife. One night, after they had enjoyed a quiet supper together at home, Dr Ned’s wife Sally became extremely ill. As she appeared to lose consciousness, he heard her say,

  ‘I loved you Ned… I really did.’

  These were her last words, for although her husband rang the casualty department of the local hospital, and an ambulance was quickly dispatched, the beautiful Mrs Sally Dacre never spoke again, and died before she was taken out of the house.

  I learned, as did the world, about the death of Sally Dacre and its unfortunate consequences from The Times. I was seated at breakfast in the matrimonial home at Froxbury Court in the Gloucester Road, looking forward without a great deal of excitement to a fairly ordinary day practising the law, ingesting Darjeeling tea, toast and Oxford marmalade, when the news item caught my eye and I gave a discreet whistle of surprise. My wife, Hilda, who was reading her correspondence (one letter on mauve paper from an old schoolfriend) wanted her share of the news.

  ‘What’s the news in The Times, Rumpole? Has war started?’

  ‘A Dr Dacre has been arrested in Hunter’s Hill, Surrey. He’s charged with murdering his wife.’

  Hilda didn’t seem to find the intelligence immediately gripping. In fact she waved her correspondence at me.

  ‘There’s a letter from Dodo. You know, my friend Dodo, Rumpole?’

  ‘The one who keeps the tea-shop in Devon?’ I had a vague recollection of an unfriendly female in tweed who seemed to imagine that I tyrannized somewhat over She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  ‘She’s always asking me to pop down and stay.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’ I muttered hopefully, and then returned to the Home News. ‘ “Dr Dacre…? Dacre!” The name’s distinctly familiar.’

  ‘Dodo never cared for you, Rumpole,’ Hilda said firmly.

  ‘The feeling’s mutual. Isn’t she the one who wears amber beads and smells of scones?’ I repeated the name, hoping to stir some hidden memory, ‘Harry Dacre.’

  ‘Dodo’s been suffering from depression,’ Hilda rambled on. ‘Of course, she never married.’

  ‘Then I can’t think what she’s got to be depressed about!’ I couldn’t resist saying it, perhaps not quite audibly from behind the cover of The Times. ‘Dr Harry Dacre!’ I suddenly remembered. ‘He gave evidence in my greatest triumph, the Penge Bungalow Murders! He’d seen my client’s bruises. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Dodo writes that she’s taking a new sort of pill for her depression. They’re helping her, but she mustn’t eat cheese.’

  ‘Poor old Dodo,’ I said, ‘deprived of cheese.’ I read the story in the paper again. ‘It couldn’t be him. This is Dr “Ned” Dacre. Oh well, it’s just another nice little murder that’s never going to come my way. “Cause of death, cerebral haemorrhage”, that’s the evidence in the Magistrates’ Court, “sustained in an alleged attack…” ’

  As I read, Hilda was casting a critical eye over my appearance.

  ‘You’re never going to Chambers like that, are you, Rumpole?’

  ‘Like what, Hilda?’ I was wondering what sort of a savage attack by a local doctor could explain his wife’s cerebral haemorrhage.

  ‘Well, your stud’s showing and you’ve got marmalade on your waistcoat, and do you have to have that old silk handker-chief half falling out of your top pocket?’

  ‘That was the silk handkerchief I used to blow my nose on three times, tearfully, in my final speech in the double murder in the Deptford Old People’s Home. It has a certain sentimental value. Will you leave me alone, Hilda?’ She was dabbing at my waistcoat with a corner of a table napkin she had soaked in the hot water jug.

  ‘I just want you to look your best, Rumpole.’

  ‘You mean, in case I get run over?’

  ‘And I’ll put that old hanky in the wash.’ She snatched the venerable bandana out of my breast pocket. ‘You’d be much better off with a few nice, clean tissues.’

  ‘You know what that fellow Dacre’s been accused of, Hilda?’ I thought I might as well remind her. ‘Murdering his wife.’

  As I had no pressing engagement until two thirty, when I was due for a rather dull touch of defrauding the Customs and Excise at the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court, I loitered on my way to the Tube station, walked up through the Temple gardens smoking a small cigar, and went into the clerk’s room to complain to Henry of the run-of-the-mill nature of my legal diet.

  ‘No nice murders on the menu, are there?’ When I asked him this, Henry smiled in a secretive sort of way and said,

  ‘I’m not sure, sir.’

  ‘You’re not sure?’

  ‘There’s a Dr Henry Dacre phoned to come and see you urgently, sir. It seems his son’s in a bit of trouble. He’s come with Mr Cossett, solicitor of Hunter’s Hill. I’ve put them in your room, Mr Rumpole.’

  Old Dr Dacre in my room! I began to sniff the memory of ancient battles and a never-to-be-forgotten victory. When I opened my door, I was greeted by a healthy-looking country solicitor, and a greying version of a witness whose evidence marked a turning point in the Penge Bungalow affair. Dr Harry Dacre held out his hand and said,

  ‘Mr Rumpole. It’s been a long time, sir.’

  How long, was it, perhaps a legal lifetime, since I did R. v. Samuel Poulteny, better known as the Penge Bungalow Murders, which altered the course of legal history by proving that Horace Rumpole could win a capital case, alone and without a leader? Young Dr Harry Dacre, then a G.P. at Penge, gave valuable evidence for the defence, and young Rumpole made the most of it. I motioned the good doctor to my client’s chair and invited Mr Cossett, the instructing solicitor, to take a seat.<
br />
  ‘Well now, Doctor,’ I said, ‘what can I do for you?’

  ‘You may have read about my son’s little trouble?’ The old doctor spoke of the charge of wife murder as though it were a touch of the flu which might be cured by a couple of aspirin and a day in bed.

  ‘Yes. Was it a stormy sort of marriage?’ I asked him.

  The doctor shook his head.

  ‘Sally was an extraordinarily pretty girl. Terribly spoilt, of course. Ned gave her everything she wanted.’

  I wondered if that included a cerebral haemorrhage, and then told myself to keep my mouth shut and listen quietly.

  ‘She had her problems, of course,’ Dr Dacre went on. ‘Nervous trouble. Well. Half the women in Hunter’s Hill have got a touch of the nervy. All these labour-saving devices in the kitchen, gives them too much time to think.’

  Not a pioneer of women’s lib., I thought, old Dr Harry. And I asked him, ‘Was she taking anything for her nerves?’

  ‘Sally was scared of pills,’ the doctor shook his head. ‘Afraid she might get hooked, although she didn’t mind taking the odd drink too many.’

  ‘Do you think she needed medical treatment?’

  ‘Ned and I discussed it. He thought of a course of treatment but Sally wouldn’t cooperate. So he, well, I suppose he just put up with her.’ Dr Harry seemed to think that no one would have found his daughter-in-law particularly easy to live with.

  ‘And on, as the prosecutors say, the night in question?’ I decided it was time to get down to the facts.

  ‘Mr Rumpole! That’s why we need you,’ Dr Harry said flatteringly enough. ‘I know from past experience. You’re the man who can destroy the pathologist’s evidence! I’ll never forget the Penge Bungalow case, and the way you pulverized that expert witness for the Crown.’

  I wouldn’t have minded a lengthy reminiscence of that memorable cross-examination, but I felt we should get on with the work in hand.

  ‘Just remind me of the medical evidence. We don’t disagree with the Crown about the cause of death?’