The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘My Lord,’ the witness said, ‘you can’t go on trying Jackie for murder. I’m still alive, you see.’ He smiled then, and I got a hint of the old Barney Bateman. ‘Still alive and living in Cricklewood.’

  It took another couple of days, of course, for the whole story to be told and for the good citizens of East Anglia to find Jackie Bateman (as she always was) not guilty of the murder with which she had been charged. Featherstone and I were eventually released and sat opposite each other in the British Rail tea car. My leader looked at me with a contented smile.

  ‘Well, Horace,’ he said. ‘I think that can be notched up among my successes.’

  ‘Oh yes, Guthrie,’ I agreed. ‘Many congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks. Of course one depends a good deal on one’s learned junior. Two heads are better than one, Horace. That’s what I always say.’

  ‘Three heads. Don’t forget Hilda’s.’

  ‘Your wife’s, Horace?’

  ‘You can’t fool She Who Must Be Obeyed,’ I said. ‘She told me that people don’t change, they keep on marrying the same husband. Jackie Bateman did exactly that.’

  It was quite a touching story, really. I was right about what they were doing when the birdwatcher spotted them. Not fighting, of course, but kissing each other goodbye. It was only to be a temporary parting. Barney was to swim ashore, to some quiet little bit of beach. Then he shaved off his beard, went on a diet, dyed his hair and waited for his loving wife to collect the boodle. The murder trial was a nasty gust of wind, but she thought she’d sail through it. He knew she wasn’t going to. So he had to tell the truth.

  ‘They’ll charge her with the insurance swindle,’ my leader reminded me.

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid they will,’ I said, biting into another tea-cake. ‘I think I’ll do that case, Featherstone, if you don’t mind – alone and without a leader.’

  That night, still grateful to Hilda, I took her out for a celebration dinner at my favourite restaurant in the Strand. She looked at me, somewhat aghast as I placed my order.

  ‘Potted shrimps, I think. With plenty of hot toast. Oh, and steak and kidney pud, potatoes, swedes and Brussels sprouts. After that, we might consider the sweet trolley and I’ll have the wine list, please.’

  ‘Rumpole! You mustn’t eat all that,’ said She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  ‘Oh yes I must. You’re married to Rumpole, you know. Not some skinny ex-chartered accountant. You’re stuck with him and so am I. We can’t alter him, can we? Jackie’s case proved that. You can’t just change people entirely to suit your own convenience.’

  Rumpole

  and the

  Golden Thread

  For Jacqueline Davis

  Contents

  Rumpole and the Genuine Article

  Rumpole and the Golden Thread

  Rumpole and the Old Boy Net

  Rumpole and the Female of the Species

  Rumpole and the Sporting Life

  Rumpole and the Last Resort

  Rumpole and the Genuine Article

  I would like to dedicate this small volume of reminiscences to a much-abused and under-appreciated body of men. They practise many of the virtues most in fashion today. They rely strictly on free enterprise and individual effort. They adhere to strong monetarist principles. They do not join trade unions. Far from being in favour of closed shops, they do their best to see that most shops remain open, particularly during the hours of darkness. They are against state interference of any kind, being rugged individualists to a man. No. I’m not referring to lawyers. Will you please charge your glasses, ladies and gentlemen, and drink to absent friends, to the criminals of England. Without these invaluable citizens there would be no lawyers, no judges, no policemen, no writers of detective stories and absolutely nothing to put in the News of the World.

  It is better, I suppose, that I raise a solitary glass. I once proposed such a toast at a Chambers party, and my speech was greeted by a studied silence. Claude Erskine-Brown examined his fingernails, our clerk, Henry, buried his nose in his Cinzano Bianco. Uncle Tom, our oldest inhabitant, looked as though he was about to enter a terminal condition. Dianne, who does what passes for typing in our little establishment at Equity Court in the Temple, giggled, it is true, but then Dianne will giggle at almost anything and only becomes serious, I have noticed, whenever I make a joke. A devout barrister known to me as Sam Bollard (of whom more, unfortunately, in the following pages) took me aside afterwards and told me that he considered my remarks to be in excessively bad taste, calculated to cause a breach of the peace and bring our Chambers into disrepute.

  Well, where would he be, I asked him, should the carrying of house-breaking implements by night vanish from the face of the earth? He told me that he could manage very well with his civil practice and happily didn’t have to rely on the sordid grubbing for a living round the Old Bailey which I appeared to enjoy. I left him, having regretted the fact that men with civil practices are often so remarkably un-civil when addressing their elders.

  So, as the night wears on, and as my wife Hilda (whom I must be careful not to refer to as ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ – not, at any rate, when she is in earshot) sleeps in her hairnet, dreaming of those far-off happy days when she cantered down the playing fields of Cheltenham Ladies College cradling her lacrosse net and aiming a sneaky pass at her old friend Dodo Perkins; as I sit at the kitchen table filling a barrister’s notebook with reminiscences (I see the bare bones of a nasty little manslaughter on the opposite page), I pour a glass of Château Thames Embankmnent (on special offer this week at Pommeroy’s Wine Bar – how else would Jack Pommeroy get anyone to buy it?) and drink, alone and in silence, to those industrious lawbreakers who seem to be participating in the one growth industry in our present period of recession. I can safely write that here. Whoever may eventually read these pages, you can bet your life that it won’t be Sam Bollard.

  I have been back in harness a good three years since my abortive retirement. I had, as you may remember, upped sticks to join my son Nick and his wife Erica in Florida, the Sunshine State.*

  She Who Must Be Obeyed apparently enjoyed life in that curious part of the world and was starting, somewhat painfully at first, to learn the language. I, as others have done before me, found that Miami had very little to offer unless you happened to be a piece of citrus fruit, and I began to feel an unendurable nostalgia for rain, secretaries rubbing their noses pink with crumpled paper handkerchieves on the platform at Temple Station and the congealed steak and mushroom pie for luncheon in the pub opposite the Old Bailey. I got bored with cross-examining the nut-brown octogenarians we met on the beach, and longed for a good up-and-downer with the Detective Inspector in charge of the case, or even a dramatic dust up with his Honour Judge Bullingham (otherwise known as the Mad Bull). I was a matador with nothing left to do but tease the cat. I needed a foeman worthy of my steel.

  It was a nice problem of bloodstains which brought me home to real life at the Old Bailey, and a good deal of diplomatic skill and dogged endurance which eased me back into the peeling leather chair behind the desk in my old room in Equity Court. When I returned, our Head of Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone, Q.C., M.P. (S.D.P.), didn’t actually unroll the red carpet for me. In fact, and in the nicest possible way, of course, he informed me that there was no room at the Inn, and would have left me to carry on what was left of my practice from a barrow in Shepherd’s Bush Market, if I hadn’t seen a way back into my old tenancy.

  Well, that’s all water under the bridge by now, and the last three years have gone much as the last what is it, almost half a century? That is to say they have passed with a few triumphant moments when the jury came back and said in clear and ringing tones, ‘Not Guilty’, and a few nasty ones when you have to bid goodbye to a client in the cells (what do you say: ‘Win a few, lose a few’, or ‘See you again in about eight years’?). I have spent some enjoyable evenings in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, and my health has been no worse than usual, my only medi
cal problem being a feeling of pronounced somnolence when listening to my learned friends making speeches, and a distinct nausea when hearing his Honour Judge Bullingham sum up.

  So life was going on much as usual, and I was pursuing the even tenor of my way in Equity Court, when I was faced with a somewhat unusual case which caused a good deal of a stir in artistic circles at the time, it being concerned, as so many artistic and, indeed, legal problems are, with the question so easily put yet answered with such confusion, ‘What is real and what is the most diabolical fake?’

  I first had the unnerving feeling that I was drifting away from reality, and that many of my assumptions were being challenged, when Guthrie Featherstone, Q.C., M.P., knocked briefly on my door and almost immediately inserted his face, which wore an expression of profound, not to say haunted anxiety, into my room.

  ‘Rumpole!’ he said, gliding in and closing the door softly behind him, no doubt to block out eavesdroppers. ‘I say, Horace, are you working?’

  ‘Oh no, Featherstone,’ I said, ‘I’m standing on my head playing the bagpipes.’ The sarcasm was intentional. In fact I was wrestling with a nasty set of accounts, carefully doctored by a delinquent bank clerk. As, like the great apes, my mathematical abilities stop somewhere short at ‘one, two, three, many’, I have a rooted aversion to fraud cases. Studying accounts leads me to a good deal of blood, tears and the consumption of boxloads of small cigars.

  Quite undeterred by the sharpness of my reply, the recently committed Social Democrat moved soundlessly towards my desk and ran a critical eye over my blurred and inaccurate calculations.

  ‘Well,’ said Featherstone, ‘fraud’s a nice clean crime really. Not like most of your practice. No blood. No sex.’

  ‘Do you think so, Featherstone?’ I asked casually, the Q.C., M.P., having failed to grip my full attention. ‘A bank cashier seems to have lost about half a million pounds. Probably his adding up was no better than mine.’

  ‘Still, it’s almost a respectable crime. Your practice has become quite decent lately. We may even see you prosecuting.’

  ‘No thank you,’ I said with the determined air of a man who has to draw the line somewhere.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘I’m not going to use my skills, such as they are, to force some poor devil into a condemned Victorian slum where he can be banged up with a couple of psychopaths and his own chamber pot.’ I gave my learned Head of Chambers Article One of the Rumpole Creed.

  ‘All the same, you being comparatively quiet of late, Horace, has led the Lord Chancellor’s office, I know, to look on these Chambers with a certain amount of, shall we say, “good will”?’

  I looked at Featherstone. He was wearing an expression which I can only describe as ‘coy’. ‘Shall we? Then I’d better get up to something noisy.’ I was joking, of course, but Featherstone became distinctly agitated.

  ‘Please, Horace. No. I beg you. Please. You heard about the awful thing that happened to old Moreton Colefax?’

  ‘Featherstone! I’m trying to add up.’ I tried to be firm with the fellow, but he sat himself down in my client’s chair and started to unburden himself as though he were revealing a dire plot he’d recently stumbled on involving the assassination of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the theft of the Crown Jewels.

  ‘The Lord Chancellor told Moreton that he was going to make him a judge. But the rule is, you mustn’t tell anyone till the appointment’s official. Well, Moreton told Sam Arbuckle, and Arbuckle told Grantley Simpson and Grantley told Ian and Jasper Rugeley over in Paper Buildings, and Ian and Jasper told Walter Gains whom he happened to meet in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, and…’

  ‘What is this, Featherstone? Some sort of round game?’ My attention was not exactly held by this complicated account.

  ‘Not for Moreton Colefax, it wasn’t,’ Guthrie Featherstone chuckled, and then went serious again. ‘The thing became the talk of the Temple and the upshot was, poor old Moreton never got appointed. So if the Lord Chancellor sends for a fellow to make him a judge, Horace, that fellow’s lips are sealed. He just mustn’t tell a soul!’

  ‘Why are you telling me then?’ I only asked for information, I wasn’t following the fellow’s drift. But the effect was extraordinary. Guthrie sprang to his feet, paling beneath his non-existent tan. ‘I’m not telling you anything, Horace. Good heavens, my dear man! What ever gave you the idea I was telling you anything?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, returning to the calculations. ‘I should have realized you were just babbling away meaninglessly. What are you, Featherstone, a sort of background noise, like Muzak?’

  ‘Horace, it is vital that you should understand that I have said nothing to you whatsoever.’ Featherstone’s voice sank to a horrified whisper. ‘Just as it is essential to preserve the quiet, respectable image of our Chambers. There was that difficult period we went through when the Erskine-Browns were expecting, rather too early on in their married lives.’*

  ‘They weren’t married.’ I recalled the happy event.

  ‘Well, exactly! And of course that all passed over quite satisfactorily. We had a marquee in the Temple Gardens, if you remember, for the wedding. I believe I said a few words.’

  ‘A few words, Guthrie? That’s hardly like you.’

  The above somewhat enigmatic conversation was interrupted by the telephone on my desk ringing and, after a few deft passes by Dianne on the intercom in our clerk’s room, my wife Hilda’s voice came over the line, loud, clear, and unusually displeased.

  ‘There’s a young girl here, Rumpole,’ She Who Must Be Obeyed was reading out the indictment over the phone. ‘She is sitting in the kitchen, asking for you. Well, she’s making her own cigarettes, and they smell of burnt carpets.’

  ‘But any sort of breath of scandal now. At this historic moment in the life of our Chambers.’ Looking, if possible, more ashen than ever, Guthrie was still burbling in the background. And he didn’t look particularly cheered up when he heard me address the instrument in my hand along the following lines:

  ‘Something sort of arty-tarty, is she, do you say, Hilda? A young girl who says she’s in trouble. What kind of trouble? Well, perhaps I haven’t got your vivid imagination, but I quite honestly can’t… Well, of course I’m coming home. Don’t I always come home in the end?’ I put down the telephone. Featherstone was looking at me, appalled, and started to say, in a voice of deep concern, ‘I couldn’t help overhearing.’

  ‘Couldn’t you?’ Well I thought he might, if he were a man of tact, have filtered out of the room.

  ‘Horace, is your home life completely satisfactory?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course it isn’t.’ I don’t know what the man was thinking about. ‘It’s exactly as usual. Some girl seems to have aroused the wrath of She Who Must Be Obeyed.’

  ‘Did you say… some girl?’

  ‘Friend of yours, Guthrie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought it might be someone you had your eye on, from the typing pool, perhaps. I mean, I remember when…’ But before I could call the Featherstone mind to remembrance of things past, he went on firmly, ‘This is not a time for looking backwards, Horace. Let us look forward! To the fine reputation of this set of Chambers.’

  He went to the door and opened it, but before he left the Rumpole presence he said, as though it were a full explanation, ‘And do please remember, I haven’t told you anything!’

  I suppose that was true, in a manner of speaking.

  As, from the sound of She Who Must Be Obeyed’s voice, there appeared to be a bit of a cold wind blowing in Casa Rumpole (our so-called ‘mansion’ flat in the Gloucester Road, which bears about as much relation to a mansion as Pommeroy’s plonk does to Château Pichon Longueville), I delayed my return home and wandered into my usual retreat, where I saw our clerk Henry there before me. He was leaning nonchalantly against the bar, toying with his usual Cinzano Bianco, taken with ice and a twist of lemon. I began to press him for information which
might throw some faint light on the great Featherstone mystery.

  ‘As a barrister’s clerk, Henry,’ I said, ‘you might be said to be at the very heart of the legal profession. You have your finger on the Lord Chancellor’s pulse, to coin a phrase. Tell me honestly, has the old fellow lost his marbles?’

  ‘Which old fellow, sir?’ Henry seemed mystified. It was an evening for mystification.

  ‘The Lord Chancellor, Henry! Has he gone off his rocker?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say, is it?’ Our clerk Henry was ever the diplomat, but I pressed on. ‘Is his Lordship seriously thinking of making Guthrie Feathersone, Q.C., M.P., a Red Judge? I mean, I know our learned Head of Chambers has given up politics…’

  ‘He’s joined the S.D.P.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean. But a judge!’

  ‘Speaking entirely for myself, Mr Rumpole, and I have no inside information…’ Henry had decided to play it cautiously.

  ‘Oh, come on. Don’t be so pompous and legal, Henry.’

  ‘I would say that Mr Featherstone would cut a fine figure on the Bench.’ Our clerk had the sort of voice which could express nothing whatsoever, a genuinely neutral tone.

  ‘Oh, he’d look all right,’ I agreed. ‘He’d fit the costume. But is he, Henry? That’s what I want to know. Is he?’

  ‘Is he what, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘He may look like a judge, but is he really the genuine article?’

  So I left Henry, having hit, almost by chance I suppose, on one of the questions which troubled old Plato, led Bishop Berkeley to some of his more eccentric opinions, and brought a few laughs to Bertrand Russell and a whole trainload of ideas to A. J. Ayer. It was that little matter of the difference between appearance and reality which lay at the heart of the strange case which was about to engage my attention.

  As I say, I didn’t expect much of a welcome from She Who Must Be Obeyed when I put into port at 25 B Froxbury Court, and I wasn’t disappointed. I had brought a peace offering in the shape of the last bunch of tulips I had found gasping for air in the shop at the Temple tube station.