The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Perhaps your big chance of ingratiating yourself with the local police by agreeing with their conclusions?’ I suggested.

  ‘I did agree with their conclusions, yes.’

  ‘And with their view that Jonathan Postern’s body had received the impact of one, and only one, shotgun wound.’

  ‘That was my conclusion.’ The doctor gave the Judge another small bow, and Twyburne gave him a shadowy smile of approval.

  ‘From which we may draw the inference that it was the shot from Mrs Postern’s gun which caused his death, either deliberately, or by accident?’

  ‘Yes.’ Dr Overton felt it was quite safe to agree.

  ‘Shotgun pellets enter the body at one central point surrounded by an area of scatter?’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And the area of scatter is larger if the gun has been fired from a greater distance.’ Elementary, of course, but I wanted also to give the jury a lesson in first principles.

  ‘I agree.’ Dr Overton was clearly feeling that he was emerging from my cross-examination unscathed. I was doing my best to lure him into a false sense of security. ‘I’m glad you do. Take Photograph Three, if you will.’

  The witness, the Judge and the jury opened the volume of mortuary photographs.

  ‘You have made a pencil circle round the entry hole which you consider fatal. It’s the right side of the chest in the jury’s photograph.’

  ‘I see that, yes.’

  ‘That is where you consider the fatal shot entered?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Absolutely positive?’

  ‘I have no doubts whatever on the subject, Mr Rumpole.’ For a moment I felt sorry for the young doctor – he was so sure of everything. I hardened my heart and said, ‘There is another, smaller wound to the left, and a little above that, is there not? Perhaps you would like to borrow my glass?’ I held out a magnifying glass, but the doctor scorned its assistance.

  ‘No. I can see perfectly well, thank you.’

  ‘Is that the darker spot on the photograph? Just show us where you’re looking.’ Twyburne was following carefully. Dr Overton held up his photograph and pointed and then gave another little bow.

  ‘Yes. At about two o’clock from the pencil circle, members of the jury,’ said the Judge. The jury found it and some nodded.

  ‘What did you take that to be?’ I asked the witness.

  ‘I took that to be part of the scatter,’ the doctor said very positively, hoping that would settle the matter. It didn’t.

  ‘Could it not be the central wound of a second shot, fired, perhaps, from some yards further away?’ I suggested. I was rewarded by a considerable pause and when Dr Overton spoke again it was with rather less confidence. ‘I suppose that’s a possibility.’

  ‘It wasn’t a minute ago, was it, Dr Overton?’

  ‘Just a possibility, my Lord,’ the witness appealed to the Judge, but got no help.

  ‘So when you told us you were absolutely certain there was only one shot, you were giving this jury an opinion which was not entirely reliable.’ I saw the jury looking fairly sternly at the witness.

  ‘I see no reason to suppose that there was more than one shot.’ Dr Overton tried a retreat to his previously held position.

  ‘But it’s a possibility!’

  ‘Yes,’ he had to admit.

  ‘What would turn that possibility into a probability, Dr Overton?’

  ‘Well, I suppose if there was some strong additional evidence.’ He made a concession which he clearly believed was safe.

  ‘And you say there is none?’

  ‘Not so far as I know, my Lord.’ Another small bow to the Judge was received in sepulchral silence by Twyburne.

  ‘What this jury has to consider, Dr Overton, is the extent of your knowledge. How many pellets, on an average, are there in a twenty-bore shotgun cartridge?’ I had the satisfying feeling that I had fired him a question he wasn’t prepared for. The doctor frowned, and answered with extreme care, ‘I would say… about an ounce of shot.’

  ‘Well done. Very promising.’ Now I was being the teacher. ‘And so how many pellets are there in an ounce of shot?’

  ‘How many pellets?’ he frowned.

  ‘Are you hard of hearing, Dr Overton?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘Then could you force yourself to tell this jury the answer to my question.’

  ‘I think, my Lord,’ he said with a small bow of apology now, ‘I would have to look that up.’

  It was time for a bit of carefully controlled indignation, and I said, ‘It didn’t occur to you to look it up before you came here to give so-called expert evidence against a lady of unblemished character on a charge of murder?’

  ‘No,’ was the only answer possible.

  ‘Then let us see if you remember this. When you carried out your post mortem examination you found a large number of shotgun pellets in the body, did you not?’

  ‘A very large number indeed.’ He seemed pleased by the fact; so was I.

  ‘I’m obliged. Did you count them?’

  ‘May I look at my notes?’ But Dr Overton was now looking at Inspector Clover, sitting in the well of the Court, for help.

  ‘Look at anything you like,’ I said, ‘except the Inspector in charge of the case. He’s not going to be able to help, you know.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’ I heard a dry voice from the Bench and apologized at once, of course. ‘Your Lordship objected to that observation? Then I will withdraw it and we can get on with something more interesting. How many pellets did you find in the deceased’s body, Dr Overton?’

  ‘About four hundred and eighty, my Lord…’ he said, and the Judge made a careful note.

  ‘And there may have been others you didn’t find?’

  ‘There may well have been.’

  ‘Now let me tell you something, doctor, which may be a help to you if you ever come to give evidence in a murder trial again. Your average cartridge for a twenty-bore shotgun contains two hundred and fifty pellets.’

  ‘Well, I must accept that, of course.’ The doctor couldn’t very well do anything else. It was all in Ackerman.

  ‘So does not the presence in the deceased’s body of almost double that number of pellets indicate to you that there were probably two shots?’

  The silence seemed endless. The Judge sat with his pencil poised over his notebook. In the dock Jennifer Postern looked as though the answer concerned her not at all. Then Dr Overton said, ‘It might do so…’

  ‘Might it not?’ I came down on the answer quickly. ‘And if Mrs Postern only fired one shot, might not some other person have fired the other?’

  ‘Surely that is a conclusion for the jury, Mr Rumpole,’ Twyburne suggested, but this time it was not a rebuke.

  ‘My Lord, it will be my submission that it is the only conclusion. Thank you, Dr Overton.’ I started to sit down, then changed my mind. ‘Oh, doctor, before you go…’ Dr Overton was leaving the witness-box with considerable relief. He paused disconcertedly as I held up the small volume which had been my inspiration for the day. ‘If you intend to continue in your present line of work, I would recommend a study by Professor Andrew Ackerman on Gunshot Wounds in Forensic Medicine. Such a useful little volume, and quite easy reading for the beginner.’

  ‘Of course, that cross-examination was wonderful entertainment, Rumpole.’ Miss Allways had come up to me after the Judge left Court, and I was packing up my brief for another evening of quiet contemplation.

  ‘One of my best, Fiona,’ I said with becoming modesty. ‘Perhaps my very best of a medical witness. Luckily I couldn’t warm to Dr Overton.’

  ‘But where does it get my sister?’ Fiona asked.

  ‘Just possibly, off.’

  She frowned, as though she couldn’t see it personally. ‘Sprod says it was an accident. Are you suggesting that there were two accidents?’

  ‘No, Fiona. Only one accident.’

  ‘What ar
e you getting at?’

  ‘Your sister’s not too keen on the truth coming out in this case, is she, Fiona? Tell her I’ll be down to the cells to see her first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Why not tonight?’

  ‘Not tonight. No. I’m going back to the Tester Arms. I’ve got to see somebody else first.’

  I had seen Fishbourne hanging about in the back of the Court when I was talking to Fiona, which is why I had announced my evening’s plans in as loud a voice as possible. But when I turned away from her he had gone and I couldn’t find him in the corridor or waiting for me outside the building. So I went back to the hotel, had a bath to wash away the courtroom atmosphere and changed into an old pair of grey flannels and a tweed jacket that had seen better days. No one rang to say that I had a visitor and, as I struggled through the appalling grapefruit segments, battery hen and frozen veg, no one came up to my table.

  Only as I sat in the residents’ lounge, with a bottle of less than average claret and a small cigar, was my patience rewarded. He was coming towards me through a maze of deserted coffee tables.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Mr Fishbourne,’ I said. ‘Do please sit down.’

  He sat, refused a drink, and looked at me as though desperate for good news. ‘Y… y… you can’t get her off, can you?’ he said.

  ‘Suppose you tell me the answer to that, Mr Fishbourne.’

  ‘I mean, I d… don’t see how you can. She said she did it.’

  ‘What she said was, “I did it,” ’ I reminded him. ‘Who else did she think might have done it, do you suppose?’

  He looked at me then, I was glad to see, with considerable surprise. My suggestion, it seemed was one that hadn’t occurred to him before.

  ‘It couldn’t possibly’ve been me.’ He spoke quite calmly, without indignation or protest.

  ‘Couldn’t?’

  ‘I d… didn’t see him. I’d gone up to London. Quite unexpectedly. I had a call from our solicitors and I went up just after lunch. All sorts of people saw me.’

  I had no doubt they had, and felt a surge of relief. ‘That’s what we call an alibi in the trade,’ I told him. ‘Our first bit of luck in this case. But you know why Postern came to see you, don’t you? I mean, it wasn’t to criticize your riding abilities.’

  ‘N… n… no. It wasn’t for that.’ He was looking at me, deciding to trust me. Then he accepted a glass of wine and started to tell me the whole story.

  ‘How did you guess?’ Jennifer Postern asked me when we met, early the next morning, in the cells under Tester Court. We had been given thick mugs of tea by the lady dock officer, and I felt easier in my mind than I had since the trial began.

  ‘I saw you when Fishface fell at the last fence,’ I told her. ‘I thought you were his wife. Then you laughed at him with the others, so I knew you were hiding something. I suppose Jonathan found out about you and Maurice Fishbourne.’

  ‘It’s such a mess.’ For the first time, she lost her extraordinary composure. She bowed her head, her hands were over her face and her shoulders shaking. Then she made a great effort, looked up, and said, ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Why not try telling the truth? Sometimes people win cases like that. What do you say – shall we give it a try?’

  So, when the Court assembled, I called Jennifer Postern into the witness-box, and she swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  ‘Mrs Postern,’ I went straight to the heart of the case, ‘the afternoon your husband died you had a quarrel. What was that quarrel about?’

  ‘About Maurice Fishbourne.’

  Twyburne looked up at a new name; the jury were puzzled. I explained with a question, ‘He is your next-door neighbour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you tell your husband?’

  ‘I told Jonno that I loved Maurice and if he would divorce me we hoped to marry. I had been unhappy with my husband for a long time.’ Now she had made up her mind to tell her story, Jennifer spoke simply and convincingly.

  ‘Had Jonathan Postern been violent to you?’

  ‘Yes. Quite often.’

  ‘And so, on the afternoon you quarrelled…?’

  ‘Jonno said he’d go over and see Maurice and tell him never to see me again. He threatened to beat Maurice up. I knew Maurice could have a violent temper and that he hated Jonno. I think I shouted at my husband that if he went, Maurice might kill him.’

  ‘Was Mrs Hempe in the house when you shouted that?’

  ‘She was, yes.’

  ‘And might have heard part of it?’

  ‘Yes. Easily.’

  ‘Had Maurice told you he might kill your husband?’

  ‘When he heard how Jonno had treated me. Yes.’

  ‘Did you take these threats seriously?’

  ‘I knew that Maurice was a very determined man. He has a very strong will.’

  ‘Let’s come to the time when your husband left the house.’

  ‘Jonno said he was going out to cool off, but after a while I thought he’d gone to Maurice’s, so I decided to follow him. I got as far as the track by Figgis’s cottage and I saw Jonathan. There was blood…’ She paused, seemed unable to go on, and then controlled herself. ‘I saw that he was dead.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Of course I thought that Maurice had done it.’ She looked at the jury. ‘It was just by Maurice’s wood. I thought he’d met Jonathan there and they quarrelled and…’ For a moment her voice faded.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I knew Maurice wouldn’t be able to get away with it.’ She was summoning up reserves of strength. ‘I thought he’d be convicted of murdering Jonathan. Oh, I was in a sort of panic, I suppose.’

  ‘So what did you decide to do?’ I asked her very quietly.

  The Court and the jury were totally silent, almost breathless with attention as Jennifer answered, ‘I decided to pretend I’d shot Jonathan. By mistake. In an accident. I went back to the house and got my shotgun. When I got to the wood again Jonathan was still there. I put in one cartridge and I fired.’ Now she’d said it, the witness looked enormously relieved.

  ‘One shot only?’

  ‘Yes, only one.’

  ‘Into his dead body?’

  Jennifer’s answer was hardly above a whisper. ‘Yes.’

  In the course of time my task was done, and I sat listening to Mr Justice Twyburne summing up to the jury. He spoke quietly: at times we had to strain our ears to hear him. With his lined face and thin neck emerging from a stiff collar that seemed too big for him, he looked like an aged tortoise. He was a lonely old Judge who refused to retire and who had come to me, of all people, for reassurance. And then he looked at me, and I gave his words my full attention.

  ‘Members of the jury,’ the Judge was saying, ‘contrary to the views of some people, a British criminal trial cannot be compared in any way to a horse race.’ He turned back to the jury. ‘You do not get the result by closing your eyes and sticking a pin into the list of runners. If you are sure that, for whatever reason, Mrs Postern deliberately shot at her husband with the intention of killing him or doing him serious harm, why then you must convict her. But if you think that the account she gave you might be true, I say might be true, then she is entitled to be acquitted. There is some support for Mrs Postern’s story, is there not, in the medical evidence?’ Twyburne paused, searching for a place in his notebook. I was filled with amazement, as I slowly realized we were getting a fair, even a favourable summing up. I wondered for a moment if we had Martin Muschamp to thank for it. Then Twyburne went on to the jury, ‘You have to consider the possibility that, in an accident caused by the man Figgis shooting from the window of his cottage, Mr Postern met his death on that woodland track. That Mrs Postern, coming on the body, assumed her lover to have been responsible, and took extraordinary steps to cover up what she thought had been a crime. This is not a Court of morals, members of the jury, and it is not a racetrack. What
we are concerned with is certainty, and the truth.’

  Hilda had the television on as I let myself into Casa Rumpole at Froxbury Court. It was booming news from Tester Assizes, and telling a waiting world that Jennifer Postern had been acquitted.

  ‘Well, Rumpole,’ said Hilda. ‘I suppose you think you’ve done something frightfully clever.’

  She was standing by the mantelpiece, on which she had put the photograph of a gentleman’s lodge near Tester, cut carefully out of Country Life. Hilda was still hankering, quite clearly, for rural living and membership of the County set.

  ‘No.’ I told her, ‘I think I’ve done something absolutely “brill”.’

  I went into the kitchen, opened a well-earned bottle of Pommeroy’s plonk, and brought my wife a brimming glassful. Then I raised my own beaker in a toast. ‘To Jennifer Postern,’ I said. ‘A wonderful woman in some ways. She took the most extraordinary risks to protect the man she loved.’

  ‘Fiona’s sister?’ Hilda was frowning.

  ‘Yes. Doesn’t look all that much like Fiona.’ I was staring at the cutting on the mantelpiece. ‘Far more beautiful, don’t you think? Fine-looking woman. We’ll be able to see a good deal of her if we take that gentleman’s lodge arrangement near Tester you’re always talking about. Jennifer promises to give me shooting lessons.’

  ‘Shooting lessons? You, Rumpole?’ She was clearly worried.

  ‘Oh yes. We plan to spend a good deal of time together. You’ll be kept busy, I suppose, bottling fruit.’

  Hilda went to the mantelpiece. She looked thoughtful.

  ‘Rumpole. I’ve been thinking. It’s really very convenient for us, this flat in the Gloucester Road.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘We can always have days out in the country.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true, but…’

  ‘I think I’ve decided against Tester.’

  She Who Must Be Obeyed took the advertisement, crumpled it up and threw it into the waste-paper basket.

  ‘Well, Hilda,’ I said. ‘It’s entirely your decision, but perhaps it’ll be better for our health, living quietly in London.’