The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  Before I had time to keep my promise, however, something happened of a dramatic nature. Hilda’s old schoolfriend Jackie was arrested, as we heard the next week on the television news, on a charge of the wilful murder of her late husband, Barney Bateman.

  We heard no more of Jackie Jason, Bateman, Hopkins and her troubles for a considerable period. And then, one morning, as I was walking into my Chambers in a state of some depression brought about by having mislaid about a stone of Rumpole in the course of my prolonged fast, my clerk Henry uttered words which were music to my ears.

  ‘There’s a new case for you, Mr Rumpole. A murder, from a new firm of solicitors.’

  It was good news indeed. A new firm of solicitors meant a new source of work, claret and small cigars, and of all the dishes that figure on the Criminal Menu, murder is still the main course, or pièce de résistance.

  ‘It’s an interesting case, Mr Tonkin was telling me.’ Henry handed me the bulky set of papers.

  ‘Tonkin?’

  ‘Of Teleman, Tonkin and Bird. That’s the new firm from Norfolk. He says the odd thing about this murder is, they never found the body.’

  ‘No corpse?’ Without a corpse the thing should not, I thought, present much difficulty, although like all cases it would probably be easier without a client also. I looked down at the brief in my hands and saw the title on it ‘R. v. Jason’.

  In due course, I read the papers and issued out into Fleet Street to find a taxi prepared to take me to Holloway prison for an interview with Jackie Jason and Mr Tonkin. Waiting on the curb, I was accosted by a tall figure wearing a bowler hat and an overcoat with a velvet collar, none other than our learned Head of Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone Q.C., M.P.

  ‘Hullo there, Horace!’

  ‘Sorry, Guthrie. I’m just off to Holloway. Got a rather jolly murder.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Henry told you, did he? Strange thing, when I married She Who Must Be Obeyed, I never thought she’d be much help in providing me with work. But she’s turned up trumps! She had the good luck to go to an excellent school where one of her form mates grew up to be charged with an extremely interesting… ’

  ‘I know.’ Guthrie repeated himself. ‘Jackie Jason.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Was Featherstone, I wondered, a spare-time boat person? His reply quite wiped off my grin of triumph and added, I thought, new difficulties to our defence.

  ‘Because I’m leading you, of course. It’ll be a pleasure to have you sitting behind me again, Horace. Ah, there’s a cab. Holloway prison, please.’

  Because I never took silk and was not rewarded by the Lord Chancellor with a long wig and a pair of ceremonial knee breeches I am compelled, in certain cases, to sit behind some Queen’s Counsel and, although I am old enough to be Featherstone’s father, I must be his ‘junior’, and sit behind the Q.C, M.P. and listen, with what patience I can muster, to him asking the wrong questions. In the Shenstone-on-Sea murder, it would hardly be a pleasure. No doubt with his talent for agreeing with the Judge, Guthrie Featherstone could manage to lose even a corpseless case, in the nicest possible way.

  ‘The evidence against us is pretty strong,’ Featherstone said, as we sat together in the taxi bound for the ladies’ nick. ‘Two heads are better than one in a matter like this, Horace.’

  ‘I didn’t find that,’ I told him, ‘when I won the Penge Bungalow Murders, entirely on my own.’

  ‘Penge Bungalow? Oh, I think you told me. That was one of your old cases, wasn’t it? Well, people couldn’t afford leading counsel in those days. It was before legal aid.’

  So, Q.C.s have become one of the advantages of our new affluence, I was about to say, like fish fingers and piped music in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. However, I thought better of it and we reached the castellated turreted entrance to Holloway prison in silence.

  I may be, indeed I am, extremely old fashioned. No doubt an army of feminists are prepared to march for women to have equal rights to long-term imprisonment, but I dislike the sight of ladies in the cooler. For a start, Holloway is a far less jovial place than Brixton. The lady screws look more masculine and malignant than gentleman screws, and female hands never seem made for slopping out.

  When we got to the Holloway interview room, my new solicitor Tonkin rose to greet us. He was an upright, military-looking man with a ginger moustache and an M.C.C. tie.

  ‘Mr Featherstone. Mr Rumpole. Good of you to come, gentlemen. This is the client.’

  Jackie Jason was looking as tanned and healthy as if she’d just stepped off a boat on a sunny day into the Crab and Lobster. She smiled at me from a corner of the room and said, ‘I’m so glad I could find you a legal problem more in your line, Horace.’

  I looked at her with gratitude. No doubt it was Jackie who had had the wisdom to choose Rumpole for the defence, and her solicitor Tonkin who had been weak-minded enough to choose Featherstone as a leader.

  ‘I think it would help if you were just to tell us your story in your own way,’ Featherstone kicked off the conference. I was sure that it would help him; no doubt he’d been far too busy with his parliamentary duties to read the brief.

  ‘Well, Barney and I,’ Jackie started.

  ‘That was the late Mr Barney Bateman?’ Featherstone asked laboriously.

  ‘Yes. We used to live at Shenstone-on-Sea. Well, we were boat people.’

  ‘Mrs Jason doesn’t mean far-eastern refugees,’ I explained to my leader. ‘She means those who take to the water in yellow oilskins and sailing dinghies, with toddlers in inflated life-jackets, and usually call out the lifeboat to answer their cries of distress.’

  ‘Barney and I never had toddlers,’ Jackie said firmly.

  ‘Horace, if I could put the questions?’ Featherstone tried to assert his leadership.

  ‘And we were pretty experienced sailors.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘of course you were. And yet your husband died in a yachting accident.’

  ‘Just remind me…’ Featherstone continued to grope for the facts.

  ‘We went out very early that day. We wanted to sail the regatta course without anyone watching.’

  ‘You and your late… husband?’ Featherstone was examining the witness.

  ‘Barney and I.’

  ‘You were on good terms?’

  ‘Always. He was a marvellous man, Barney. Anyone’d tell you, anyone in the crowd in the Crab and Lobster at Shenstone. We were the best of pals.’

  Dear old pals, jolly old pals. Everyone in the Crab and Lobster agreed with that. And yet one pal fell out of the boat and his body was never recovered.

  ‘You say there was a sudden gust of wind?’ Featherstone was making a nodding acquaintance with his brief.

  ‘Yes,’ Jackie told him. ‘It came out of nowhere. Well, it will in that bit of sea. Barney was on his feet and the boom must have hit his head. It was all so unexpected. The boat went over and there I was in the drink.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘Stunned, I suppose. By the boom, you see. I looked for him for ten minutes, swimming, and then, well, I clung to the boat. I couldn’t get her righted, not on my own I couldn’t. I waited almost half an hour like that and then the harbour motor boat came out. They’d got a phone call. Someone must have seen us. I was lucky, really. There aren’t many people around in Shenstone at six o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘But if you and your husband were on perfectly good terms…’ Featherstone was frowning, puzzled, when Mr Tonkin gave him some unhelpful clarification.

  ‘That’s not really the point, is it, Mr Featherstone? It’s the policy with the Colossus Mercantile that made them bring this prosecution.’ He was referring to the subject of the correspondence that Jackie Jason had given me when she was still at liberty, so I knew a little about the Colossus policy. Featherstone looked blank. If he hadn’t been a politician he would have said, ‘All-night sitting last night. I never got round to reading the brief.’ As it was, he said,
/>
  ‘Do just remind me…’

  ‘Mrs Jason insured her first husband’s life with the Colossus Mercantile just two weeks before the accident,’ Tonkin explained. ‘Before these inquiries got going she had remarried and collected the money.’

  ‘How much was it? Just remind me,’ Featherstone asked.

  Mr Tonkin gave us the motive which had undoubtedly led to the prosecution of the yachtswoman.

  ‘Just about two hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘You know I’m going to Norfolk today,’ I reminded Hilda at breakfast some weeks later. ‘It’s Jackie’s trial.’

  ‘You will get her off, won’t you, Rumpole? She’s relying on you, you know.’ Hilda said it as if the case presented no particular problem.

  ‘I might get her off. I don’t know about my friend.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were taking a friend with you.’ Hilda looked at me with sudden suspicion

  ‘Didn’t I? I’m taking Guthrie Featherstone. It’s a secret romance. We’ve been passionately in love for years, Guthrie and I.’

  ‘Rumpole, I don’t know why you deliberately say things you know will annoy me. Also, it’s not in the least degree funny!’

  ‘I thought it was a little funny.’

  ‘This is a letter from Lucy Loman.’ This time Hilda showed me a pale green envelope.

  ‘Is it really? I thought it was your pools.’

  ‘Do stop being silly, Rumpole! I was at school with “Lanky” Loman!’ As I wondered if there were anyone that Hilda hadn’t been at school with, she went on, ‘She tells me her daughter Tessa has just divorced a bankrupt garage proprietor with a foul temper and a taste for whisky.’

  ‘Sounds a reasonable thing to do.’

  ‘The problem is that Tessa has remarried.’

  ‘Has she indeed?’

  ‘Yes. A bankrupt ex-launderette owner with a much worse temper and a taste for gin.’

  ‘So there’s been no real change?’

  ‘No. People don’t change, do they?’

  I was beginning to find She Who Must Be Obeyed unusually depressing that morning, when she went on thoughtfully,

  ‘When they change partners, they always go for the same again, only slightly worse.’

  Was there some similar, but even more ferocious version of She waiting to entrap me the second time around? The thought was too terrible to contemplate. I prepared to take self and brief off to Liverpool Street. On my way out, I said,

  ‘Well, if you’re going to change husbands while I’m gone…’

  ‘Please don’t be silly, Rumpole. I’ve had to tell you that once already. I’m quite prepared to make do with you, provided you’re a good deal thinner.’

  Make do for the rest of our natural lives, I thought. Matrimony and murder both carry a mandatory life sentence.

  In the train from Liverpool Street Featherstone looked at me in a docile and trusting manner, as though he were depending on his learned junior to get him and his client out of trouble.

  ‘I suppose you’ve read the birdwatcher’s evidence?’ he started gloomily.

  ‘Mr “Nosey-Parker” Spong? Saw the whole thing through a pair of strong opera-glasses? Yes, I’ve read it.’

  ‘Odd he never went to the police straight away.’

  ‘The whole timetable’s odd. The police and the insurance company accept her story of an accident. Colossus Mercantile pays out, she collects her two hundred thousand, calls herself a widow, marries Mr Jason, a retired accountant, buys a small house in Cricklewood and then…’

  ‘The long-lost brother turns up from New Zealand.’

  ‘Mr Chad Bateman. Hungry for his brother’s estate which our client won’t get if she’s a murderess. So he disputes the insurance payment and starts inquiries. Advertises for the long-lost birdwatcher and puts together a case.’

  ‘Puts together far too good a case for my liking.’

  A silence fell between us, and somewhere in East Anglia I said,

  ‘Featherstone?’

  ‘Yes, Horace?’

  ‘I get the feeling sometimes that you don’t like me very much.’

  ‘Now, whatever could have given you that idea?’ My learned leader looked pained.

  ‘We don’t see eye to eye always on the running of Chambers. I find your cross-examination feeble and your politics anaemic and I don’t mind saying so. I do ask you, however, to win this case. If you don’t I may be in for a very rough time indeed from She Who Must Be Obeyed. She doesn’t like having her old school chums convicted of murder.’

  ‘You’ve got to help me, Horace.’ The man looked positively desperate, so I gave my learned leader the benefit of a full account of my conversation with the habitués of the Crab and Lobster on the day I broke into my diet. When I had finished, Featherstone didn’t look any more cheerful.

  ‘Does that tell us anything?’

  ‘Oh yes. Three things to be precise.’

  ‘What on earth?’

  ‘That the Batemans never had a cross word. That Jackie’s second husband doesn’t like visitors and that Barney Bateman won the regatta five times.’

  ‘I don’t see how that helps.’

  ‘You’re right. It doesn’t help at all.’

  ‘Now who’s being depressing, Horace?’

  ‘I know,’ I told him perfectly frankly. ‘I find the whole business very depressing indeed.’

  In due course, I found myself sitting in the ancient, panelled Norfolk courtroom, in a place of importance behind my undecided leader, with a jury of solid East Anglian citizens and old Piers Craxton, a reasonably polite Judge, sent to try us. Our opponent was a jovial local silk named Gerald Gaunt who, being for the prosecution and with a strongish case, looked a great deal less gloomy than the nervous artificial silk in front of me. The witness-box was occupied by a figure familiar to me from my visit to Shenstone, the birdwatcher whom I had last seen surveying the North Sea with a pair of strong field-glasses. Without his Balaclava helmet, he looked older and slightly less dotty than when I had first seen him.

  ‘Your name is Henry Arthur Spong?’ Gaunt asked the ornithologist in the witness-box.

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘Do you remember being out very early one morning in July two years ago?’

  ‘Tell him not to bloody well lead!’ I whispered in a vain attempt to keep my learned leader on his toes.

  ‘Ssh, Rumpole. I don’t like to interrupt. It creates a bad impression.’ Featherstone sounded deeply embarrassed.

  ‘Creates a damn sight worse impression to let him lead the witness.’

  ‘I remember it clearly. It was quite light at six a.m. and the date was July the sixth, ‘Mr Spong intruded on our private dialogue.

  ‘How can he remember that?’ I whispered to Guthrie Featherstone, and Mr Spong supplied the answer.

  ‘I wrote a note in my diary. I saw a number of kittiwake and gannets and I thought I saw a Mediterranean shearwater. I have all that noted down in my birdwatcher’s diary. I was looking out to sea through a pair of powerful field-glasses.’

  ‘Did you happen to spot a boat?’ Gaunt asked and I prodded Featherstone again.

  ‘Don’t let him lead!’

  ‘Please, Rumpole! Leave it to me.’

  ‘Mr Spong. Out of deference to my learned friend’s learned junior, I will frame the question in a non-leading form.’ Gerald Gaunt raised a titter in Court. ‘Did you see anything unusual?’

  ‘Yes.’ Spong clearly knew what he was being asked about. ‘I saw a boat.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise!’ I whispered to Featherstone, who tried not to hear me.

  ‘I noticed it because…’

  ‘Yes. Tell us why you noticed it.’ Gaunt encouraged the birdwatcher.

  ‘There were two people standing up in it. One, I thought, was a man. He had a red beard. The other was a woman.’

  ‘What did they appear to be doing?’

  ‘I would say, struggling together. I couldn’t see all that cle
arly.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then the man seemed to fall from the side of the boat.’ Gaunt, as any good barrister would, allowed a substantial pause for that to sink in, and then he asked,

  ‘Tell me, Mr Spong. Was there any wind at the time?’

  ‘No wind at all. No. It had been gusty a little earlier, but at the time the man fell from the boat it was perfectly calm.’ It wasn’t a helpful answer, being clean contrary to our client’s instructions.

  ‘And after he fell?’

  ‘The woman waited for about five minutes.’

  ‘She didn’t dive in after him?’

  ‘No.’

  I saw the Judge make a note and the jury looked at the woman in the dock with no particular sympathy.

  ‘What did she do then?’

  ‘She deliberately upset the boat.’

  During Gaunt’s next and even longer pause, not only the Judge but the reporters were writing hard and the jury looked even less friendly.

  ‘What do you mean by that, exactly?’

  ‘She stood on the side and then swung herself out, pulling on the side ropes. She seemed to me to capsize the boat deliberately.’

  ‘And after it had capsized?’

  ‘She went into the water, of course. Then I saw her clinging to the boat.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well, I thought she might be in some danger, so I bicycled off to telephone the police.’

  ‘To the harbour?’

  ‘Yes. The harbour office was locked up. It was so early you see. It took me some time to wake anyone in the cottages.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Spong.’

  Gaunt sat down, clearly delighted with his witness and Guthrie Featherstone rose to cross-examine. Tall and distinguished, at least he managed to look like a barrister.