The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Goodnight, Portia.’

  It was then that I looked down at the letter she’d just written. The envelope was addressed to ‘The Lord Chancellor, The Lord Chancellor’s Office, The House of Lords, London, S.W.I.’

  A good deal, I thought, was going on under the calm surface of life in our Chambers at Equity Court. I was speculating on the precise nature of such movements with considerable pleasure as I started to walk to the Temple station. On my way I found Miss Fiona Allways waiting for a bus.

  ‘I say,’ she hailed me. ‘Any more news about my getting into Chambers?’

  ‘There is a tide in the affairs of women barristers, Fiona,’ I told her, ‘which, taken at the flood, leads God knows where.’

  ‘What’s that mean, exactly?’

  ‘It means that they’ll either let you in, or they’ll throw me out.’ I moved on towards Hilda and home. ‘Best of luck,’ I said, ‘to both of us.’

  His Honour Judge Leonard Dover was a fairly recent appointment to the collection of Old Bailey judges. He was a youngish man, in his mid forties perhaps, certainly young enough to be my son, had fate chosen to inflict such a blow. He wore rimless glasses and was a fairly rimless character. He was the sort of judge who has about as many laughs in him as a digital computer, and seemed to have been programmed by the Civil Service. Press all the right buttons – you know the type – and he gives you seven years in the Nick. I have often thought that if he were plugged into the mains, Judge Dover could go on passing stiff sentences for ever.

  On my way into Dover’s Court I had passed Mrs April Timson, made up to the nines and wearing a sky-blue trouser suit, come to celebrate her husband’s day of fame. She accosted me anxiously.

  ‘Tony says you’ve never let the Timsons down, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Mrs Timson!’ I greeted her. ‘Where’s young Vincent today? Otherwise engaged?’

  ‘He’s with my friend, Chrissie. She’s my neighbour and she’s minding him. What are our chances, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Talk to you later,’ I said, not caring to commit myself.

  After the jury had been sworn in, Judge Dover leant towards them and said, in his usual unremarkable monotone, ‘Nothing that I am going to say now must be taken against the defendant in any way…’

  I stirred in my seat. Whatever was going on, I didn’t like the sound of it.

  ‘This is a case in which it seems there is a particular danger of your being approached… by someone,’ Dover went on, sounding grave. ‘That often happens in trials of alleged armed robbery by what is known as a “gang” of serious professional criminals.’

  It was time to throw a spanner in his programming. ‘My Lord,’ I said firmly, and rose to the hind legs, but Dover was locked in conversation with the jury.

  ‘You will be particularly on your guard, and purely for your assistance, of course, you will be kept under police observation.’ He seemed to notice me at long last. ‘What is it, Mr Rumpole? Don’t you want this jury to be protected from interference?’

  ‘I don’t want the jury to be told this is a case concerning a serious crime before they’ve heard one word of evidence,’ I said with all possible vehemence. ‘I don’t want hints that my client belongs to a gang of serious professionals when the truth may be that he’s nothing but a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. I don’t want the jury nobbled, but nobbled they have already been, in my respectful submission, by your Lordship’s warning.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole! That’s an extraordinary suggestion, coming from you.’

  ‘It was made to answer an extraordinary statement coming from your Lordship.’

  ‘What is your application, Mr Rumpole?’ Judge Dover asked in a voice several degrees below zero.

  ‘My Lord, I ask that a fresh jury be empanelled, who will have heard no prejudicial suggestions against my client.’

  ‘Your application is refused.’ I had pressed the wrong button and got the automatic print-out. There was nothing for it but to sit down looking extremely hard done by.

  ‘Members of the jury.’ The Judge turned back to them. ‘I have already made it perfectly clear to you that nothing I have said contains any suggestion whatever against Mr Timson. Does that satisfy you, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘About as much as a glass of cold carrot juice, old darling,’ I muttered to Phillida.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘I said, I suppose it will have to, my Lord.’ I rose in a perfunctory manner.

  ‘Yes, Mr Rumpole,’ the Judge said. ‘I suppose it will.’

  Back in the alleged mansion flat things weren’t going too well either. Hilda, in the course of tidying up, found my old Oxford Book of English Verse on a chair (I had been seeking solace in the ‘Intimations of Immortality’ the night before), and she put it on my excellent shelf. No doubt she thumped it down a fair bit, for my elegant carpentry creaked and then collapsed, casting a good many books and a certain amount of wine to the ground. I have spoken already of the strength of my wife’s character. Apparently she went out, purchased a number of rawlplugs and an electric drill and started a career as a handyman, the full effects of which weren’t noticed by me for some time.

  In Court, the prosecution was in the hands of Mr Hilary Onslow, a languid-looking young man whose fair curly hair came sprouting out from under his wig. In spite of his air of well-born indifference, he could be, at times, a formidable opponent. One of the earliest witnesses was the supergrass, Gerry Molloy, an overweight character with a red face and glossy black hair, who sweated a good deal and seemed about to burst out of his buttons.

  ‘Mr Molloy. I want to come now to the facts of the Pond Hill bank raid.’

  ‘The Pond Hill job. Yes, sir.’ Gerry sounded only too eager to help.

  ‘How many of you were engaged on that particular enterprise?’

  ‘There was two with sawn-offs. One collector…’

  ‘And you with the sledgehammer?’ Onslow asked.

  ‘I was the sledge man, yes. There was five of us altogether.’

  ‘Five of you counting the driver?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you see the driver?’

  ‘Course I did.’ The witness sounded very sure of himself. ‘The driver picked me up at the meet.’

  ‘Had you seen him before?’

  ‘Seen him before?’ Molloy thought carefully, and then answered, ‘No, sir…’

  ‘Some weeks later did you attend an identification parade?’ Onslow turned to me and asked languidly, ‘Is there any dispute as to whom he picked out at the I.D.?’

  ‘No dispute as to that. No,’ I granted him.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Rumpole.’ The Judge gave me a faint look of approval.

  ‘Delighted to be of assistance, my Lord,’ I rose to say, and sank back into my seat as quickly as possible.

  ‘Did you pick out the defendant, Mr Timson?’ Onslow asked.

  Tony Timson was staring at the witness from the dock. Gerry Molloy looked away to avoid his accusing eyes and met a glare from April Timson in the public gallery.

  ‘Yes.’ The answer was a little muted. ‘I pointed to him. I got no hesitation.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Molloy.’

  Hilary Onslow sat and crossed his long legs elegantly. I rose, full of righteous indignation, and looked at the jury in a pained manner as I cast my questions in the general direction of the witness-box.

  ‘Mr Molloy. You have turned Queen’s Evidence in this case?’

  ‘Come again?’ The answer was impertinent, so I put my voice up several decibels. ‘Translated into everyday language, Mr Molloy, you are a grass. Not even a “supergrass”. A common or garden ordinary bit of a grass.’

  There was a welcome stir of laughter from the jury, immediately silenced by the computer on the Bench.

  ‘Members of the jury,’ Judge Dover reminded them, if they needed reminding, ‘this is not a place of public entertainment. This witness is giving evidence for the prosecution,’ he ad
ded, as though that covered the matter.

  ‘You’re giving evidence for the prosecution because you were caught.’ I turned to the witness-box then. ‘Not being a particularly efficient sledge, you tripped over your holdall in the street and missed the getaway car. You were apprehended, Mr Molloy, in the gutter!’

  ‘They nicked me, yes,’ Molloy admitted.

  ‘And you have already been sentenced to two years for your part in the robbery?’

  ‘I got a two, yes.’

  ‘A considerable reduction because you agreed with the police to grass on your colleagues,’ I suggested.

  ‘I got under the odds, yes,’ he agreed, less readily.

  ‘Considerably under the odds, Mr Molloy, and for that you were prepared to betray your own family?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Three of your colleagues were members of the clan Molloy.’

  ‘They were Molloys, yes.’

  ‘And only one Timson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And as the Montagues to the Capulets, I put it to you, so are the Timsons to the Molloys.’

  ‘Did you say the “Montagues”, Mr Rumpole?’ The Judge seemed puzzled by a name he hadn’t heard in the case before, so my literary reference was lost on the computer.

  ‘I simply meant that the Molloys hate and despise the Timsons. Isn’t that so, Mr Gerry Molloy?’ I asked the witness.

  ‘We never got on, no. It’s traditional. Although…’

  ‘Although what?’

  ‘I believe my cousin Shawn’s wife what he’s separated from lives quite close to Tony Timson and his wife and…’

  I interrupted a speech which I thought might somewhat blur the picture I had just painted. ‘Apart from that, it’s true, isn’t it, that the Molloys are in a different league from the Timsons?’

  ‘What league is that, Mr Rumpole?’ Judge Dover looked puzzled.

  ‘The big league, my Lord.’ I helped him understand. ‘You and your relations, according to your evidence, did the Barclays Bank in Penge, the Midland, Croydon, and the NatWest in Barking…’ I was back with the witness.

  ‘That’s what I’ve said.’ He was sweating more now, and two of his lower shirt buttons had gone off about their own affairs.

  ‘Spreading your favours evenly round the money market. Have you ever known a Timson to be present at a bank robbery before, Mr Molloy?’

  ‘Not as I can remember. But my brother Charlie was off sick and we was short of a driver.’

  ‘Perhaps you were. Unhappily all your Molloy colleagues seem to have vanished.’

  At which point my learned friend, Mr Hilary Onslow, felt it right to unwind his legs and draw himself to his great height. ‘My Lord,’ he said, ‘I explained to the jury that determined efforts to trace the other participants in this robbery are still being made by the police…’

  ‘If my learned friend wishes to give evidence, perhaps your Lordship would like him to go into the witness-box,’ I said, and got the automatic judicial rebuke: ‘Mr Rumpole. That comment was quite uncalled-for.’

  ‘Steady on, Rumpole. Don’t tease him.’ Phillida whispered a bit of sound advice, so I said, with deep humility, ‘So it was, my Lord. I entirely agree.’ I turned back, with no humility at all, to Gerry Molloy. ‘With your relations all gone to ground you had to have a victim, didn’t you, to justify your privileged treatment as a grass?’ The jury, who looked extremely interested, clearly saw the point. The witness pretended that he didn’t.

  ‘A victim?’ He was playing for time, I gave him none.

  ‘So you decided to pick one out of the despised Timsons and put him in the frame.’

  ‘Put him in the what, Mr Rumpole?’ The Judge affected not to understand. I hadn’t time to teach him plain English.

  ‘Put him in the driver’s seat, where he certainly never was,’ I suggested to the supergrass.

  ‘He was there. I told you.’ Gerry Molloy was growing indignant.

  ‘Where did you meet?’

  ‘One of the Molloy houses,’ he said, after a pause.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I think it was Michael’s… Or Vic’s. I can’t be sure.’

  ‘Can’t you…?’

  ‘It was Shawn’s,’ he decided.

  ‘And having decided to frame Tony,’ I went on quickly, ‘was it some member of the Molloy family who planted a packet of stolen banknotes in the Timson home?’

  ‘It couldn’t have been him, could it, Mr Rumpole?’ The Judge was looking back in his notes. ‘This witness has been in custody ever since…’

  ‘Since the robbery, yes, my Lord,’ I agreed, and then asked Molloy, ‘Did you receive visits in prison, before you made your statement?’

  ‘A few visits, yes.’

  ‘From your wife?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘And was it through her that the word was sent out to plant the money on Tony Timson?’

  I made the suggestion for the benefit of the jury, but it deeply shocked Gerald Supergrass Molloy. ‘I wouldn’t ask my wife to do them sort of messages,’ he said, deeply pained.

  Back at home Hilda, swathed in an overall, was drilling the wall to receive a new consignment of ‘Easy-Do’ shelving in a completely professional manner. I was also plugging away in Court, asking a few pertinent questions of Detective Inspector Broome, the officer in charge of the case.

  ‘Gerry Molloy made his statement two days after the robbery, at about 2.30 in the afternoon?’ I suggested.

  ‘2.35, to be precise.’ The D.I. put me right.

  ‘Oh, please. I’m sure my Lord would like you to be very precise. You went straight round to Tony Timson’s house?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘In a police car, with the siren blaring?’

  ‘I think we had the siren on for some of the time. We were in a hurry.’

  ‘And you were lucky enough to find him at home?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t out doing window-cleaning, sir.’

  There was a small titter from the jury. I interrupted it as soon as possible.

  ‘My client opened the door to you at once?’

  ‘Soon as we knocked. Yes.’

  ‘No sort of interval while he tried to move the money to a more sensible hiding place, for instance?’

  ‘Perhaps he was happy with it where it was.’

  Before he got another laugh, I came in quickly with ‘Or perhaps, Inspector, he had no idea that the money had been put there.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Don’t you? One last matter. Was it Gerry Molloy who told you that Tony Timson was a dangerous member of a big-time robbery firm who might try and nobble the jury?’

  ‘Molloy told us that, yes.’ Inspector Broome was a little reluctant to answer.

  ‘So a solemn warning was given by the learned Judge on the word of a self-confessed sledgehammer man who has already been convicted of malicious wounding, robbery and grievous bodily harm.’

  ‘Yes.’ The short answer came even more reluctantly from the Inspector.

  ‘And doesn’t that solemn warning give a quite unfair impression of Tony Timson?’

  ‘Unfair, sir?’ Broome did his best to look puzzled.

  ‘You’d never put Tony Timson in for the serious crime award, would you? He’s a small-time thief, who specializes in relieving householders of their home entertainment, video machines, teasmades and the like…’

  ‘That would seem to be so, yes,’ the Inspector admitted.

  ‘So if I said to you that this robbery was quite out of Tony Timson’s league, how would you translate that suggestion?’

  ‘I would say it’s out of his character, sir. Judging by past form.’ So I sat down with some heartfelt thanks to Detective Inspector Broome.

  At the end of the day I went with Phillida and Bernard to visit our client in the cells. He appeared pleased with our progress, but I hadn’t yet an answer to what seemed to me the single important question in the case.


  ‘The money in the washing machine, Tony,’ I asked him. ‘It must have been put there by someone. Does April go out much?’

  ‘She takes young Vince round her friend’s.’

  ‘Her friend Chrissie?’ The question seemed important to me, but Tony answered vaguely, ‘I think that’s her name. I don’t know the woman.’

  ‘Money found in the kitchen,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t suppose you do much cooking, do you, Tony?’

  ‘Oh, leave it out, Mr Rumpole!’ Tony found the suggestion highly diverting.

  ‘Never wash up?’

  ‘Course I don’t!’ He could hardly suppress his laughter. ‘That’s April’s job, innit?’

  ‘I suppose it’s only barristers who spend the evenings up to their wrists in the Fairy Liquid. Yes… And of course you don’t run young Vince’s smalls through the washing machine?’

  ‘Now would I be expected to do a job like that?’ He looked to Mrs Erskine-Brown for support. ‘Would I?’

  ‘You mean, it would be a bit like having a woman defend you?’ Phillida asked in a pointed sort of way. Tony Timson had the grace to look apologetic.

  ‘I never meant nothing personal,’ he said. ‘It just doesn’t seem natural.’

  ‘Really.’ Phillida was unappeased. ‘As a matter of fact my husband is quite a good performer on the spindrier.’

  ‘Poor bloke!’ Tony was laughing again.

  I interrupted the badinage. ‘Let’s take it that you leave such matters to April. When does she do the washing, Tony? On a Monday?’

  ‘Suppose so.’ He didn’t sound particularly interested.

  ‘The bank raid was on Monday. Gerry Molloy made his statement on Wednesday afternoon and the police were round at once. Whoever put it there didn’t have much time.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ and he added hopelessly, ‘I just never go near the bleeding washing machine.’

  I gathered up my brief and prepared to return to the free world.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Tony,’ I said. ‘Come on, Portia. I think we’ve got what we wanted.’

  When I left the Old Bailey that evening and stepped off the pavement, a small white sports car, driven with great speed and expertise, flashed past me, almost cutting me off somewhere past my prime, and, passing two or three slowly moving taxis on the inside, zipped off and was lost in the traffic. I caught sight of a blonde head behind the wheel and deduced that the driver was none other than that devoted housewife, Mrs April Timson.