Disturbing, no doubt, but hardly an answer to my question, which I repeated. ‘But did our David do it?’
‘I don’t know whether we’ve actually asked him that.’ Miss Pinkerton flipped vaguely through her file. ‘Oh, here’s Pam.’ A secretary, a younger but equally eager version of Miss Pinkerton, who seemed to have bought her clothing at an army surplus store instead of an oriental bazaar, came into the restaurant at that moment in a state of high excitement.
‘We’ve had a cable from Jonathan Mazenze,’ Pam announced.
‘David’s younger brother,’ Miss Pinkerton explained. ‘He’s been a tower of strength. What’s it say, Pam?’
At which Pam pulled the cable from the pocket of her fatigues and read, ‘ “Barrister Rumpole will be allowed to represent David at trial. Visa being arranged. Greetings, Jonathan Mazenze.” ’
‘We’re in luck!’ said Miss Pinkerton. ‘Is there anything else you want to know?’
‘Only one thing,’ I said. ‘What do they give a chap for murder, in those particular parts?’
‘It’s death, isn’t it, Mandy?’ Pam asked casually. I closed my eyes. I was back in the shadow of the gallows which fell, every day, over my conduct of the Penge Bungalow Murders and I didn’t know whether I was still strong enough to face it.
‘Oh yes.’ Miss Pinkerton sounded almost cheerful. ‘The Prime Minister can’t wait to hang David. You’ve got to save his life.’
So that was all I had to do. It was enough worry to be going on with, so I didn’t think of the fact that should have concerned me most. If I had done so I might have wondered why Horace Rumpole, an elderly junior barrister, and not even an artificial silk, had been admitted so easily to the Nerangan Bar.
I was in the clerk’s room next morning, sorting through the circulars, advertisements for life insurance and filing systems, together with billets-doux from Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue, which seem to constitute the bulk of my mail, and I happened to ask Henry, our clerk, in a casual sort of way, if he had any exciting work in store for me.
‘Not according to my diary, Mr Rumpole.’ Henry flipped through his book of engagements. ‘There’s a little murder down the Bailey. But that won’t be for a few weeks.’
‘Mysterious crime done with a broken Guinness bottle in a crowded pub in Kilburn. Routine stuff. Legal Spam!’ I spoke of the ‘little murder’ with some contempt. ‘It’s a pity with all your talents as a clerk, Henry, that you can’t find me something more exotic.’
‘Perhaps you’d care to find your own exotica, if you’re not satisfied with my clerking, Mr Rumpole!’ Henry sounded distinctly nettled.
‘I have done. A brief will be arriving, Henry, from Justitia International. I am defending the Minister of Home Affairs in the High Court of Neranga.’ It sounded, as I said it, fairly impressive.
‘You’ll be away from Chambers?’ I was afraid I detected a note of relief in Henry’s voice, the clear inference being that it was not altogether a picnic clerking for Rumpole. ‘Certainly I shall be away, Henry,’ I reassured him. ‘They will look round Innner London Sessions and they will find me gone. They will whisper, “Travels Rumpole East Away?” ’
‘You seem very cheerful about it, Mr Rumpole.’ Dianne paused in her non-stop rattling of her typewriter.
‘My camels sniff the evening, Dianne, and are glad,’ I told her, and then turned, more confidently, to Henry. ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’s old school friend, Dodo Mackintosh, will be coming for a short stay next week and I will have to miss the jollifications. Adventure calls, Henry, and how can Rumpole be deaf to it?’ I moved to the door, anxious to be on my way. ‘Send a cable if there’s anything urgent.’
‘A cable?’ Henry sounded as though he’d never heard of the device.
‘Or at least a pigeon.’ As I finally left the clerk’s room, a grey and unremarkable barrister called Hoskins came in and nearly knocked me over. ‘Look out, Rumpole,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’
I passed on, declaiming,
‘For what land
Leave I the dim-moon city of delight?
I make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.’
‘It’s too bad, Rumpole. You’ll miss Dodo,’ Hilda said a few evenings later.
‘Hilda! Africa is waiting. The smoke-signals are drifting up from the hills and in the jungle, the tom-toms are beating. The message is, “Rumpole is coming, the Great Man of Law.” What message am I to send back? “Sorry, visit cancelled owing to the arrival of Dodo Mackintosh in Gloucester Road”?’
‘But why you, Rumpole?’
‘There was something to be said for the old days of the Empire. Almost all African politicians were students in the Temple. Gandhi started it.’
‘Was Gandhi African?’ Hilda quibbled.
‘Maybe not. But they returned to their native bush with an intimate knowledge of the ABC tea-rooms, Pommeroy’s Wine Bar and the Penge Bungalow Murders.’
‘You’ll have to have shots.’
‘Why, Hilda? I’m not going to a war.’
‘Against tropical diseases. I’ll send you round to Dr MacClintock [this was our Scottish quack who had once tried to psychoanalyse my alleged libidinous tendencies*] and I’ll go to D. H. Evans in the morning and get three yards of butter muslin.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Mosquitoes,’ Hilda said darkly. ‘We don’t want to lose you to the malaria, Rumpole. And for heaven’s sake don’t eat lettuce.’
I had forgotten – one forgets pain so quickly – about the delights of long-distance air travel, which I have described, when I suffered it between London and Miami, as offering all the joys of the rush hour on the Bakerloo Line plus the element of fear. There I was now, packed into an airless cigar-shaped tube which hurtled through space playing selections from The Sound of Music or showing an unwatchable film about little green men from outer space. Now and again food, which after some careful processing had been robbed of all taste, was pushed in front of me by ladies in some type of paramilitary uniform, who had clearly been trained by a period of supervising a recalcitrant pack of Brownies. Eventually, with the aid of about four half-bottles of claret (Château Heathrow), I fell into a sort of coma, shot through with lurid and fearful considerations of the penalty for failure in the David Mazenze case. I mean, how do you do a case of capital murder? Death, if you ask a wrong question. Death, if you don’t object to the right bit of evidence. Death, round every legal corner. How can you do it? Answer: do it like every other case. Win it if you can. Win it, or else. As I began to doze, I spoke to myself severely, ‘Pull yourself together, Rumpole! There was a death sentence when you did the Penge Bungalow Murders. Your finest hour.’ Penge… Death… We take the Golden Road… to the Death Penalty.
Claret-induced sleep began to overtake me when I was woken by the trumpet call of the Brownie supervisor.
‘Wakey, wakey, sir! Don’t we want our meal?’
The Customs Hall at Nova Lombaro’s ‘Mabile Airport’, named, of course, after the Prime Minister, was a large echoing shed. Even at night it was breathlessly hot without air conditioning. I was crumpled, sweating, exhausted and still trembling in time to the engines and The Sound of Music. My mouth was dry, and as I lugged my red bag in which my wig and gown travelled, my battered suitcase and my briefcase towards a customs officer apparently wearing the uniform of a Major-General in the Neranga Army, I smelled the dry, sweet smell of Africa and felt, weakened as I was by lack of sleep, sudden and irrational fear.
‘Object of visit?’ The customs officer looked at me with considerable contempt.
‘Justice,’ I murmured sleepily and he pointed at my suitcase. ‘Open!’
I struggled with the battered and rusty fastenings and then the case flew open, disgorging what seemed to be about a mile of white muslin, bought for me by Hilda at D. H. Evans.
‘Your dress?’ the customs officer appeared to be giggling.
‘No. My mosquito net. My wife got it f
or me.’ After the muslin, a whole chemist’s shop of pill bottles was revealed.
‘Drugs? Stupefiants.’ The official was understandably suspicious, particularly when he discovered a hypodermic syringe which Dr MacClintock had supplied for me to give myself some ‘shots in case of tropical disease’.
‘Certainly not! Just my wife’s going-away present.’
I might have been in serious trouble, but an extremely elegant African, whom I judged to be about forty, came up; he was wearing a grey suit with a silkish sheen to it, carrying a crocodile-skin briefcase, and smoking a cigarette through an ivory holder. He was followed by a porter with a couple of matching suitcases and surrounded by the aura of an enormously elegant aftershave. He had clearly jetted in from some Third World jamboree, and after he had exchanged a few words with the customs man in their native tongue, not only was his luggage passed, but my own traps were chalkmarked as fit for importation into Neranga. My deliverer looked at me in some amusement and said, ‘Horace Rumpole?’
‘A piece of him,’ I admitted.
‘I’m agin you in the Mazenze case. Looking forward to seeing how you Old Bailey fellows handle a homicide.’ At which he flipped out a wallet and gave me a card on which was engraved, with many flourishes, ‘The Honourable Rupert Taboro. Attorney-General of the Independent State of Neranga.’ ‘Anything you need,’ Taboro said, ‘just ask for the Attorney-General.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Don’t mention it, old fellow. After all, we learned friends have got to stick together.’
The law officer swanned off and I humped my bags out of customs and was immediately greeted by a young man in a white shirt and dark trousers who had a huge glittering smile of welcome ready for me.
‘Mr Rumpole?’
I admitted it again.
‘I am Freddy Ruingo, sir, instructing solicitor. You got through all the formalities?’
‘Surprisingly.’
‘Come on, I’ll take you to the car. Then we go to the prison. Then we have a reception David’s wife and brother give for you. You’ll meet the leaders of our Apu People’s Party.’
‘It sounds,’ I said, ‘an evening packed with excitement.’
So we walked out into the hot African night, and heard the deafening racket set up by insects, howling dogs, the starting of reluctant cars and the scream of brakes at unseen accidents. Freddy Ruingo piled my luggage into the boot of a rusty old Jaguar, whose rear window was a hole surrounded by splintered glass. I sat beside Freddy, still feeling that I was in a sort of dream, as he drove, very fast, out of the town and down a long pot-holed road surrounded by darkness, along which, regardless of the danger to their lives from my instructing solicitor’s driving, a stream of people – women with loads on their heads or carrying babies, men laughing and pushing bicycles – were walking in an endless procession.
‘I can’t understand why your Mr Mazenze hasn’t got some smart British Q.C. to defend him,’ I shouted over the rattling and roaring of the Jaguar.
‘Oh, David believes in the very common man, Mr Rumpole,’ Freddy Ruingo assured me. ‘He just wanted some ordinary little lawyer like yourself. A perfectly lowly fellow.’
‘Thank you very much!’ I gasped as we ricocheted across a pot-hole.
‘But someone typical of British justice. Quite incorruptible. Not draughty in this car, are you?’
‘No!’ In fact I was sweating and mopping my brow with the old red spotted handkerchief.
‘Some clever Matatu chucked an assegai through the back window of my Jag. They fell out of the trees, those fellows,’ Freddy said contemptuously.
None too soon we arrived at a long, low building in the middle of a collection of huts. It was, apparently, some District Police Headquarters, which was considered more secure than the prison in Nova Lombaro. After a considerable wait we entered the Superintendent’s office and met another youngish African, wearing knife-edged grey flannel trousers, suede shoes and a blazer with brass buttons. He also sported what might well have been a rowing club tie. After he and Freddy had exchanged a few Nerangan greetings, this officer nodded in my direction and said, ‘You’ve come to see David?’
‘Let me introduce Mr Horace Rumpole. Barrister-at-law. Inner Temple.’ Freddy did the honours. ‘Superintendent Akimbu. Special Branch.’
‘You see, we’ve got David at District Police Headquarters,’ Superintendent Akimbu explained. ‘We don’t want him mixed up with the plebs in Lombaro jail. You want to visit our dungeons, Mr Rumpole?’
He was smiling, but I looked back at him with strong disfavour. I had been warned of this by Miss Amanda Pinkerton in the Fleet Street trattoria. Human rights, I had already begun to suspect, might count for very little in Neranga.
‘I want to see my client, yes.’
The Superintendent rose to his feet. He was taller than I had expected, and very thin. ‘It’s an honour to meet you, Mr Rumpole. You know Croydon well?’
‘Not too well, actually.’ I was a little taken aback by the question.
‘I did six months with your Special Branch in London. The Old Baptist’s Head in Croydon. Wonderful draught Bass! Remember me to it. This way please.’
He led me out of a side door and down a passage to another door guarded by a policeman in khaki shorts, who was carrying an automatic rifle.
‘We’ve got your client chained to the wall in here.’ The Superintendent was still smiling. ‘Better watch out for the rats, you know, and the water dripping from the ceiling!’ He nodded to the policeman, who unlocked the door. We were greeted by the sound of some celestial music, which David Mazenze later told me was his favourite Fauré Requiem. ‘Justitia International,’ the Superintendent said as he left Freddy Ruingo and me with our client. ‘Poor dears. They have such vivid imaginations.’
The room we had been shown into was large and airy. There were table lamps and a big electric fan, some of David Mazenze’s own pictures hung on the walls and on a table were bottles of wine, a bowl of fruit and a gramophone, which was playing as we came in. There was a photograph of David’s wife, Grace, and their children beside a pile of records. The man in the chair, smoking a pipe and listening to the music, hadn’t moved as we came in, but now he stood up slowly, switched off the music and came towards us.
When I had known him he had been a young, rather over-eager African student. Now he was a grey-haired man who looked as if he had great reserves of physical energy and was a natural leader. His voice was low, melodious but compelling, and his manner was very gentle, as though he were used to getting his own way without being violently assertive.
‘Dear old Horace Rumpole! What’s your tipple? Bordeaux, if my memory serves me right?’
‘I won’t say no.’
‘You too, Freddy?’ I was looking round the room as David Mazenze set about opening what seemed to be a very reasonable bit of the château-bottled.
‘Wait until they hear about this in Wormwood Scrubs!’ I said.
‘I have a few friends in the French Embassy,’ David Mazenze handed me a glass.
‘Your friends at Justitia however…’ I drank, and decided it was probably the best glass of Margaux to be had in Central Africa.
‘Such good chaps. If not all that experienced politically.’ David Mazenze smiled.
‘They said I’d find you in the Château d’If. With rising damp and the bread and water just out of reach.’
‘Even Dr Death wouldn’t dare to do that to me.’
‘Dr?’
‘Le bon docteur Christopher Mabile. The Prime Minister whose culture is firmly founded on the Inquisition and the K.G.B.’
‘Stirred up with some of the basic cannibalism of the Matatu tribe.’ Freddy Ruingo had found a chair in a corner and was grinning at us over his claret glass.
‘Forgive Freddy. He makes such primitive remarks! Tribalism is our curse, however. Just as the British class system is yours. Horace, do find yourself a pew, why don’t you?’ David Mazenze went back t
o his armchair, but I was wandering round the room looking at the titles of his books.
‘P. G. Wodehouse.’ I picked up a paperback.
‘I think of England so often.’ David Mazenze was puffing on his pipe. ‘I long for your Cotswolds. If Dr Death ever lets me see them again. If I’m hanged, think of this, Horace. There is some corner of a Nerangan jail house that is forever Moreton-in-Marsh.’ He took out his pipe and laughed. I thought that I had never seen a man facing a death sentence looking so confoundedly cheerful. I wondered if it was courage, or the certainty of innocence, or had he, perhaps, spent a day with the wine? It was time to get down to business, so I sat and started to undo the tape on my brief. David Mazenze waited politely for me to begin.
‘The dead man. Bishop Kareele…’ I thought that was as good a starting-point as any.
‘A trouble-maker!’ David Mazenze frowned slightly. ‘As only an African bishop can be. He wanted the Prime Minister’s job. He wanted my job. He was always causing trouble between my Apus and the Matatu people. I told you, Horace. Tribal hatred is the curse of our politics!’
‘The evidence is that you threatened him,’ I was turning over the statements. ‘You quarrelled outside the Parliament building and you said to the Bishop, “I’ll kill you.” ’
‘All right, I quarrelled with the man.’ David Mazenze shrugged. ‘He quarrelled with everyone.’
‘Death is fixed at around 9.30 p.m. on the 13th. That’s when the shots were heard. Where were you then, exactly?’
He knocked out his pipe, got up and walked over to the window, where he stood looking out into the noisy darkness.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Of course it matters.’ I hoped he remembered my basic training on alibis.
‘I had a speech to make the next day. An important statement of policy at our Apu People’s Party Congress. I went out in my car to drive around and think about it.’
‘What time did you go out?’ I lit a small cigar and began to make some notes.
‘I’ve said in my statement. About 8.30.’
‘What time did you get home?’
The Second Rumpole Omnibus Page 27