The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Sorry about that, sir. Still, win a few, lose a few. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘In my case lately, it’s been win a few, lose a lot!’

  ‘You couldn’t have this one, sir. You see, Mr Wrigglesworth had promised it to me.’

  ‘He had what?’

  ‘Well, I’m retiring, as you know. And Mr Wrigglesworth promised me faithfully that my last case would be a win. He promised me that, in a manner of speaking, as a Christmas present. Great man is our Mr Wrigglesworth, sir, for the spirit of Christmas.’

  I looked across at the Mad Monk and a terrible suspicion entered my head. What was all that about a present for the Bishop? I searched my memory and I could find no trace of our having, in fact, bought wine for any sort of cleric. And was Wrigglesworth as inexperienced as he would have had me believe in the art of selecting claret?

  As I watched him pour and sniff a glass from his superior bottle, and hold it critically to the light, a horrible suspicion crossed my mind. Had the whole evening’s events been nothing but a deception, a sinister attempt to nobble Rumpole, to present him with such a stupendous hangover that he would stumble in his legal argument? Was it all in aid of D.I. Wainwright’s Christmas present?

  I looked at Wrigglesworth, and it would be no exaggeration to say the mind boggled. He was, of course, perfectly right about me. I just didn’t recognize evil when I saw it.

  Rumpole and the Boat People

  ‘You’ll have to do it, Rumpole. You’ll be a different man.’

  I considered the possibilities. I was far from satisfied, naturally, with the man I was, but I had grown, over the years, used to his ways. I knew his taste in claret, his rate of consumption of small cigars, and I had grown to have some respect for his mastery of the art of cross-examination. Difficult, almost impossible, as he was to live with on occasions, I thought we could manage to rub along together for our few remaining years.

  ‘A different man, did you say?’

  Dr MacClintock, the slow-speaking, Edinburgh-bred quack to whom my wife, Hilda turns in times of sickness, took a generous gulp of the sherry she always pours him when he visits our mansion flat, (It’s lucky that all his N.H.S. patients aren’t so generous or the sick of Gloucester Road would be tended by a reeling medico, yellow about the gills and sloshed on amontillado.) Then he said,

  ‘If you follow my simple instructions, Rumpole, you’ll become a different man entirely.’

  Being Horace Rumpole in his sixties, still slogging round the Old Bailey with sore feet, a modest daily hangover and an aching back was certainly no great shakes, but who else could I be? I considered the possibilities of becoming Guthrie Featherstone, Q.C., M.P., our learned Head of Chambers, or Claude Erskine-Brown, or Uncle Tom, or even Dr MacClintock, and retreated rapidly into the familiar flesh.

  ‘All you have to do, old man, is lose two or three stone,’ the doctor told me.

  ‘ “Old man”?’ I looked closely at the sherry-swilling sawbones and saw no chicken.

  ‘Just two or three stone, Rumpole. That’s all you have to lose.’ Hilda was warming to her latest theme, that there was too much Rumpole.

  ‘It’s a very simple diet, perfectly simple. I’ve got it printed here.’ Dr MacClintock produced a card with the deftness of a conjurer. The trick was known as the vanishing Rumpole, and the rapid materialization of a thinner and more eager barrister.

  ‘No fat, of course.’ The doctor repeated the oath on the card. ‘Because it makes you fat. No meat, too rich in protein. No bread or potatoes, too many calories. No pastries, puddings, sweetmeats or sugar. No biscuits. No salt on the food. Steer clear of cheese. I don’t recommend fruit to my patients because of its acid qualities. Eggs are perfectly all right if hard-boiled. Not too many though, or you won’t do your business.’

  ‘My business in the courts?’ I didn’t follow.

  ‘No. Your business in the lavatory.’

  ‘Didn’t you say,’ Hilda put in encouragingly, ‘that Rumpole could eat spinach?’

  ‘Oh yes. As much spinach as he likes. And brown rice for roughage. Now you could manage a diet like that, couldn’t you, Rumpole? Otherwise I can’t be responsible for your heart.’

  ‘I suppose I might manage it for a while.’ The Rumpole ticker, I knew, had come to resent the pressure put on it during a number of hard-fought battles in front of the mad Judge Bullingham down the Bailey. ‘Of course, it’d have to be washed down by a good deal of claret. Château-bottled. I could afford that with all this saving on pastries and puddings.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens!’ The quack held his sherry glass out for a refill. ‘No alcohol!’

  ‘You’re asking me to give up claret?’

  ‘No alcohol of any sort!’

  ‘Certainly not, Rumpole.’ Hilda was determined.

  ‘But you might as well ask me to give up breathing.’

  ‘It’ll come quite easily to you, after a couple of days.’

  ‘I suppose when you’ve been dead a couple of days you find it quite easy to give up breathing.’

  ‘It’s you that mentioned death, Rumpole.’ The doctor smiled at me tolerantly. ‘I haven’t said a word about it. Now why not get your wife to take you away for a holiday? You could spare a couple of weeks at the seaside, surely? It’s always easier to give things up when you’re on holiday.’

  Brown rice, spinach and a holiday were not an appetizing combination, but Hilda seemed delighted at the prospect.

  ‘We could go down to Shenstone, Doctor. I’ve always wanted to go to Shenstone-on-Sea. My old friend Jackie Bateman, you know I’ve told you, Rumpole, Jackie Hopkins as was, we were at school together, runs a little business at Shenstone with her husband. Jackie’s always writing begging me to come down to Shenstone. Apparently it’s a dear little place and extremely quiet.’

  ‘My partner, Dr Entwhistle keeps his boat at Shenstone.’ Dr MacClintock seemed to think this fact might lend some glamour to the hole. ‘It’s quite a place for the boating community.’

  ‘I don’t boat,’ I said gloomily.

  ‘Better not, Rumpole,’ the doctor was actually laughing. ‘Better not take out a small dinghy. You might sink it! Shenstone sounds just the place for you to get a bit of rest. Pick a small hotel. A temperance hotel. That’s all you’ll be needing.’

  That night, Hilda booked us in to the Fairview Private Hotel in Shenstone-on-Sea, and wrote off to Mrs Bateman, the former Miss Jackie Hopkins, announcing the glad tidings. I viewed the approaching visit with some dismay, tempered by the knowledge that it did seem to be becoming a minor Everest expedition for me to mount the shortest staircase. My bones ached, my head seemed stuffed with cotton wool and buttons were flying off me like bullets at the smallest unexpected move. Perhaps desperate measures were called for and a holiday would do me good. We set out for Shenstone armed with umbrellas, mackintoshes, heavy pullovers and, in my case, the Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories, Marjoribanks’s Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall and The Oxford Book of English Verse (I make it a rule not to read anything I haven’t read before, except for The Times and briefs). We launched ourselves into the unknown as, up to the time of our departure, Mrs Jackie Bateman hadn’t been heard from.

  Shenstone-on-Sea, in the county of Norfolk, was to be seen, like most English pleasure resorts, through a fine haze of perpetual rain. However, the main feature of Shenstone-on-Sea was undoubtedly the wind. It blew straight at you from the Ural mountains, crossing some very icy steppes, parky portions of Poland, draughty country round Dortmund and the flats of Holland, on the way. In this cruel climate the inhabitants gathered, stowing spinnakers and splicing ropes with bluish fingers, the wind blowing out their oilskins tight as a trumpeter’s cheeks and almost doffing their bobble hats. For Shenstone-on-Sea was, as my Scottish medical man had said, quite the place for the boat community.

  Apart from watching the daily armada of small boats set out, there was little or nothing to do at Shenstone. Hilda and I sat in the residents’ lounge at the Fairvi
ew Hotel, and I read or did the crossword while she knitted or wrote postcards to other old schoolfriends and we listened to the rain driven across the windows by the prevailing wind. On our arrival we telephoned Jackie Bateman and got no reply. Then we called on her at the address Hilda had, which turned out to be a shop on the harbour called Father Neptune’s Boutique, a place for the sale of bobble hats, seamen’s sweaters, yellow gum boots, tea mugs with the words ‘Galley Slave’ written on them and such-like nautical equipment. The Batemans, according to Hilda, owned this business and had a flat above the shop. We called, as I have said, but found the place silent and locked up, and got no answer when we rattled the door handle.

  Hilda wrote a note for her elusive schoolfriend, and put it through the door. We were standing looking helplessly at the silent shop, when someone spoke to us.

  ‘She’s moved. Gone away.’

  A tallish, thin person clad in a Balaclava helmet and a belted mackintosh, and sporting a large pair of field-glasses, came by pushing a gaunt bicycle.

  ‘Mrs Bateman’s not here?’ Hilda seemed slow to absorb the information.

  ‘I tell you. She moved away. After it happened. Well. They reckoned she couldn’t abide the place after that.’

  ‘After what?’ Hilda hadn’t heard from Jackie Bateman since, she now remembered, the previous Christmas, and seemed not have been kept au courant with the major developments in her friend’s life.

  ‘Why, after the accident. When her husband got drowned. Hadn’t you heard?’

  ‘No, we hadn’t. Oh dear.’ Hilda looked surprised and shocked. ‘What a terrible thing.’

  The tall man pushed his bicycle away from us and we were left staring through the rain at the harbour where the frail boats were again putting out full of those, it now seemed, in considerable peril on the sea.

  That night I was pecking away at a minute quantity of fish, almost entirely surrounded by spinach, in our private hotel, and moodily sipping water (an excellent fluid no doubt, most useful for filling radiators and washing socks, but of absolutely no value as a drink) when Hilda said,

  ‘She was devoted to him, you know.’

  ‘Devoted to whom?’

  ‘To Barney. To her husband Barney Bateman. Jackie was. She always said he was such a wonderful man, and a terrific sailor with a really good sense of humour. Of course, he had your problem, Rumpole.’

  ‘What’s that? Judge Bullingham?’

  ‘Don’t be silly! Of course, I never met Barney, but Jackie told me he was a big man.’

  ‘You mean fat?’

  ‘That’s what I think she meant. Jackie was always afraid he was going to get too heavy for dinghy racing. And he simply refused to go on a diet!’

  ‘Sensible fellow.’

  ‘How can you say he was sensible, Rumpole? Don’t you remember, poor Jackie’s husband’s dead.’

  Did Mr Bateman’s weight become so gross that he simply sank with all hands? As I gave the lining of my stomach the unusual shock of a cascade of cold water, I decided not to ask the question, but to try at the earliest opportunity to get a little free time from She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  My chance came the next day when Hilda said that she had a cold coming on, and I would have to take the morning walk alone. I sympathized with Hilda (although I supposed that the natural state of an inhabitant of Shenstone must be a streaming nose and a raised temperature) and left carefully in the direction of the cliffs, as a direct route towards licensed premises would have raised a questioning cry from the window of the residents’ lounge.

  I struggled up a path in a mist of rain and came, a little way out of town, upon the thin man with the Balaclava helmet. He was staring through his powerful field-glasses out to sea. I gave him a moderately depressed ‘good morning’, but he was too engrossed in watching something far out on the grey water to return my greeting. Then I took the next turn, down to the harbour and the Crab and Lobster, a large, old-fashioned pub with a welcoming appearance.

  It was clearly the warmest place in Shenstone and the place was crowded. In very little time the landlord had supplied me with a life-restoring bottle of St Émilion and a couple of ham rolls, and I sat among the boat people in a cheerful fug, away from the knife-edged wind and the whining children in life-jackets, among the polished brass and dangling lobster pots, looking at the signed photographs of regatta winners, all dedicated to ‘Sam’, whom I took to be the landlord. In pride of place among these pictures was one of a windswept but resolutely smiling couple in oilskins, proudly clutching a silver trophy with “love from Jackie and Barney, to Sam and all the crowd at the Lobster” scrawled across it. The man seemed considerably and cheerfully overweight, and the colour print showed his flaming red hair and bushy beard. Jackie, Hilda’s schoolfriend, also looked extremely cheerful. She had clear blue eyes, short hair which must have been fair but was now going grey, and the sort of skin which showed its long exposure to force-nine gales. Such, I thought, were the women who flew round the world in primitive planes, crossed deserts or rode over No Man’s Land on a bicycle. I bought Sam, the landlord, a large whisky and water, and in no time at all we were talking about the Batemans, a conversation in which a number of the regulars at the Crab and Lobster, also supplied with their favourite tipples, seemed anxious to join.

  ‘One thing I could never understand about Jackie,’ Sam said. ‘I mean, she lost a wonderful personality like Barney Bateman, and they thought the world of each other. Never a cross word between the two of them!’

  ‘And Barney was a man who always had a drink and a story for everyone. Never fumbled or rang the wife when it came to his round.’ A red-faced man in an anorak whom the others called Buster told me. ‘As I say, I can’t understand why after being married to Barney, the winner of the Shenstone regatta five years running, she ended up with a four-letter man like Freddy Jason! Hope he’s not a friend of yours, is he?’

  ‘Jason.’ The name was entirely new to me.

  ‘Jackie married him just six months after Barney died. We couldn’t believe it.’ A voluminous blonde bulging out of a pair of jeans and a fisherman’s jersey shouted, ‘Of course, I’ve never actually met Mr Jason. He’s moved her up to Cricklewood.’

  ‘Dreadful house,’ said Buster. ‘Absolutely miles from the sea.’

  ‘Well, it is Cricklewood.’ The blonde lady seemed prepared to excuse the house.

  ‘Like I told you, Dora. I went there once when I was up in London. On business.’

  ‘What business, Buster? Dirty weekend?’ the seafaring woman addressed as Dora screamed, and after laughter from the boat people, Buster continued.

  ‘Never you mind, Dora! Anyway, I looked up Freddy Jason in the book and rang Cricklewood. Finally Jackie came on the phone. Well, you remember what Jackie used to be like? “Come on over, Buster; stew’s in the oven. We’ll have a couple of bottles of rum and a sing-up round the piano.” Not a bit of it. “Ever so sorry, dear. Freddy’s not been all that well. We’re not seeing visitors.” ’

  ‘Can you imagine that coming from Jackie Bateman? “We’re not seeing visitors!” ’ Dora bawled at me, as though I would be bound to know. She was clearly used to conversation far out to sea, during gale-force winds.

  ‘What you’re saying is, there was a bit of a contrast between the two husbands?’ I was beginning to get the sense of the meeting. ‘At least she didn’t repeat the same mistake; that’s what most people do.’

  ‘Barney wasn’t a mistake,’ Dora hailed me. ‘Barney was a terrific yachtsman. And a perfect gent.’

  I didn’t repeat all this information to She Who Must Be Obeyed. To do so would only have invited a searching and awkward cross-examination about where I had heard it. But when we were back in London and recovering from our seaside holiday, Hilda told me she had had an unexpected telephone call from Jackie Bateman, Hopkins as was, Jason, as she had now discovered she had become. Apparently the boat woman had got our note by some means, and she wanted to bring her new husband to tea on Sund
ay to get ‘a few legal tips’ from Rumpole of the Bailey.

  Hilda spent a great deal of Saturday with her baking tins in celebration of this unusual visit, and produced a good many rock cakes, jam tarts and a large chocolate sponge.

  ‘Not for you, Rumpole,’ she said in a threatening fashion. ‘Remember, you’re on a diet.’

  In due course, Jackie turned up looking exactly like her photograph, bringing with her a thin and rather dowdy middle-aged man introduced as Freddy, who could not have been a greater contrast to the previous yachtsman and gent. Jason was dark, mouse-coloured and not red-haired; his one contribution to the conversation was to tell us that going out in any sort of boat made him seasick, and we discovered that he was a retired chartered accountant, whose hobby was doing chess problems. When Hilda pressed rock cakes and chocolate sponge on him, he waved her confections aside.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him gloomily. ‘Not on a diet too, are you?’

  ‘Freddy never has to go on a diet,’ his wife said with some sort of mysterious pride. ‘He’s one of nature’s thin people.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Freddy Jason told us. ‘I simply never never put on weight.’ All the same, I noticed that he didn’t do any sort of justice to Hilda’s baking, and he took his tea neat, without milk or sugar.

  After some general chat we came on to the legal motive for the party.

  ‘It’s awfully boring, but naturally Barney was insured, and the insurance company paid out. That’s how we were able to get married and buy the house. But now it seems that Chad Bateman, that’s Barney’s brother in New Zealand, has raised some sort of question about the estate. Look, can I leave you the letters? You see, we really don’t know any lawyers we can trust.’

  I had to say that I had only done one will case (in which I had been instructed from beyond the grave by a deceased military man) and that my speciality was violent death and classification of blood. However, I was prepared to get the opinion of Claude Erskine-Brown, the civil lawyer in our Chambers (civil lawyers are concerned with money, criminal practitioners with questions of life and death) and I would give Mrs Jason, whose clear-eyed and sensible look of perfect trust I found appealing, the benefit of his deliberations in due course.