‘I shall be recalling the Detective Inspector, my Lord,’ Rumpole said triumphantly, ‘as a witness for the defence.’
Well in the end, of course, the jury saw the point. Brother Fred had set out to ruin brother Frank’s business by interfering with the computers so that they sold non-existent holidays, or removed existing caravans. With Frank in prison Fred could have got hold of the Cornish mobile home site and a great deal of tin. It wasn’t one of Rumpole’s greatest cases, but a jolly satisfying win. Horace Rumpole has taught me a lot about criminal procedure, but I don’t think I’d ever dare try his way of getting an adjournment.
Well, I’ve written my bit. I hope it’s all right and that someone will check it through for grammar. It tells what happened so far as I knew it at the time, or almost as far as I knew it.
(Signed) Fiona Patience Allways, barrister-at-law.
3 Equity Court
Temple
London, E.C.4
I’m extremely grateful to my learned friend, Miss Fiona Allways, for dealing with that part of the story. It had been necessary, as I expect you have guessed, to take her into my confidence (a little earlier than she divulges in her account) when I decided to lie doggo, to feign death and lure the wretched Perivale Blythe out of hiding. Of course I saw Hilda as soon as she got back from her ‘bachelor holiday’ in the Lake District and I had to let her in on the scheme. But I must say, She was something of a sport about the whole business and the way she dealt with the appalling Blythe, much of which I heard from a point of vantage near our bedroom door, seemed to me masterly. When She Who Must Be Obeyed is on form, no lawyer can possibly stand up to her.
On the whole the incident gave me enormous pleasure. One of the many drawbacks of actually snuffing it will be that you can’t hear the things people say about you when they think you’re safe in your box. I enormously enjoyed Fiona’s account of the Chambers meeting and the silent prayer which marked my passing – just as I will never let Judge Bullingham forget his funeral oration.
Oh, and one other marvellous moment: Hilda and I were sitting at tea one afternoon when I was out of circulation and a ring came at the door bell. Some boy was delivering Hilda a socking great wreath from Chambers, compliments of Sam Ballard and all the learned friends. The deeply respectful note to Hilda explained that the tribute was sent to her home as they didn’t quite know when the interment was due to take place.
After I had won Frank Armstrong’s case I walked up to Chambers and called on our learned Head. For some reason my appearance in the flesh seemed to irritate the man almost beyond endurance.
‘Rumpole,’ he said, ‘I think you’ve behaved disgracefully.’
‘I don’t know why you should say that,’ I told him. ‘Isn’t there a Biblical precedent for this sort of thing?’
‘I suppose you’re very proud of yourself,’ Ballard boomed on.
‘Well, it wasn’t a bad win.’ I lit a small cigar. ‘Got the Sun-Sand Mobile Homes owner away and clear. Made the world safe for a few more ghastly holidays.’
‘I am not referring to your case, Rumpole. You caused us all… You caused me personally… a great deal of unnecessary grief!’
‘Oh, come off it, Bollard. I understand you couldn’t wait to relet my room to young Archie Featherstone.
A little month; or ere those shoes were old
With which you follow’d poor old Rumpole’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears…’
I gave him a slice of Hamlet which he didn’t appreciate.
‘We had to plan for the future, Rumpole. Deeply distressed as we all were…’
‘Deeply distressed indeed! I hear that Uncle Tom suggested a memorial service in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar.’
Ballard had the decency to look a little embarrassed. ‘I never approved of that,’ he said.
‘Well, it’s not a bad idea. And I happen to be in funds at the moment. Why don’t I invite you all to a piss-up at Pommeroy’s?’
Ballard looked at me sadly. ‘And I thought you had finally found faith!’ he said. ‘That’s what I can never forgive.’
In due course the learned friends assembled in Pommeroy’s at the end of a working day. I had invited Hilda to join us. We were on friendly terms at the time and, as a result of Blythe’s cheque, her bank balance was in a considerably more healthy state than mine. So I got Jack Pommeroy to dispense the plonk with a liberal hand and during the celebrations I heard She Who Must Be Obeyed talking to our Head of Chambers.
‘It was very naughty of Rumpole, of course,’ She said, ‘but there was just no other way of getting his fees from that appalling man, Perivale Blythe.’
‘Mrs Rumpole. Can I get this clear? You were a knowing party to this extraordinary conspiracy?’
‘Oh yes.’ And Hilda sounded proud of it.
‘I’ll have you after my job, Mrs Rumpole,’ Henry said. ‘I couldn’t get Mr Blythe to pay up. Not till we got this idea.’
‘Henry! You’re not saying you knew?’
‘I’m not saying anything, Mr Ballard,’ Henry answered with a true clerk’s diplomacy. ‘But perhaps I had an inkling.’
‘Allways! You took Rumpole home. You must have thought…’ Ballard clearly guessed that he was on to an appalling conspiracy.
‘That he’d died?’ Fiona smiled at him. ‘Oh, I can’t see how anyone could think that. He’d never die in the middle of a case, would he?’
‘It was exactly the same when we believed he’d retired,’ Uncle Tom told the world in general. ‘Rumpole kept popping back, like a bloody opera singer!’
At which point I felt moved to address them and banged a glass on the bar for silence.
‘Well, my learned friends!’ I said in my final speech. ‘Since no one else seems inclined to, it falls on me to say a few words. After the distressing news you have heard, it comes as a great pleasure to welcome Horace Rumpole back to the land of the living. When he was deceased he was constantly in your thoughts. Some of you wanted his room. Some of you wanted his work. Some, I know, couldn’t wait to get their fingers on the old boy’s hatstand. You are all nonetheless welcome to drink to his long life and continued success in a glass of Château Thames Embankment!’
I must say that they all raised their glasses and drank with every appearance of enjoyment. Then I went over to Jack Pommeroy and asked him to bring out, from behind the bar, the tribute from Ballard which I had concealed there before the party began.
‘Bollard,’ I said as I handed it to him, ‘this came to my home address. I’m afraid you went to some expense over the thing. Never mind. As I shan’t be needing it now, keep it for one of your friends.’
So, at the end of the day, Sam Ballard was left holding the wreath.
Rumpole’s
Last Case
To all the friends, learned and otherwise, I made down the Old Bailey and especially to the criminal defenders Jeremy Hutchinson who, like me, has done his last case and Geoffrey Robertson who certainly hasn’t.
Contents
Rumpole and the Blind Tasting
Rumpole and the Old, Old Story
Rumpole and the Official Secret
Rumpole and the Judge’s Elbow
Rumpole and the Bright Seraphim
Rumpole and the Winter Break
Rumpole’s Last Case
Rumpole and the Blind Tasting
‘Rumpole! How could you drink that stuff?’
‘Perfectly easy, Erskine-Brown. Raise the glass to the lips, incline the head slightly backwards, and let the liquid flow gently past the tonsils.’ I gave the man a practical demonstration. ‘I admit I’ve had a good deal of practice, but even you may come to it in time.’
‘Of course you can drink it, Rumpole. Presumably it’s possible to drink methylated spirits shaken up with a little ice and a dash of angostura bitters.’ Erskine-Brown smiled at me from over the edge of the glass of Côte de Nuits Villages ’79, which he had been ordering in his newly acquired wine-buff’s voice from Jack Pommeroy, before he se
ttled himself at the bar; I couldn’t help noticing that his dialogue was showing some unaccustomed vivacity. ‘I fully appreciate that you can drink Pommeroy’s Very Ordinary. But the point is, Rumpole, why should you want to?’
‘Forgetfulness, Erskine-Brown. The consignment of a day in front of his Honour Judge Bullingham to the Lethe of forgotten things. The Mad Bull,’ I told him, as I drained the large glass of Château Fleet Street Jack Pommeroy had obligingly put on my slate until the next legal aid cheque came in, ‘constantly interrupted my speech to the Jury. I am defending an alleged receiver of stolen sugarbowls. With this stuff, not to put too fine a point on it, you have a reasonable chance of getting blotto.’
It is a good few years now since I adopted the habit of noting down the facts of some of my outstanding cases, the splendours and miseries of an Old Bailey hack, and those of you who may have cast an eye over some of my previous works of reminiscence may well be muttering ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ or words to the like effect. After so many cross-examinations, speeches to the Jury, verdicts of guilty or not guilty, legal aid cheques long-awaited and quickly disposed of down the bottomless pit of the overdraft at the Caring Bank, no great change in the Rumpole fortunes had taken place, the texture of life remained much as it always had been and would, no doubt, do so until after my positively last case when I sit waiting to be called on in the Great Circuit Court of the Skies, if such a tribunal exists.
Take that evening as typical. I had been involved in the defence of one Hugh Snakelegs Timson. The Timsons, you may remember, are an extended family of South London villains who practise crime in the stolid, hard-working, but not particularly successful manner in which a large number of middle-of-the-road advocates practise at the Bar. The Timsons are not high-fliers; not for them the bullion raids or the skilled emptying of the Rembrandts out of ducal mansions. The Timsons inhabit the everyday world of purloined video-recorders, bent log-books and stolen Cortinas. They also provide me and my wife, Hilda (known to me, quite off the record, and occasionally behind the hand, as She Who Must Be Obeyed), with our bread and butter. When prospects are looking bleak, when my tray in the clerk’s room is bare of briefs but loaded with those unpleasant-looking buff envelopes doshed out at regular intervals by Her Majesty the Queen, it is comforting to know that somewhere in the Greater London area, some Timson will be up to some sort of minor villainy and, owing to the general incompetence of the clan, the malefactor concerned will no doubt be in immediate need of legal representation.
Hugh Snakelegs Timson was, at that time, the family’s official fence, having taken over the post from his Uncle Percy Timson,* who was getting a good deal past it, and had retired to live in Benidorm. Snakelegs, a thin, elegant man in his forties, a former winner of the Mr Debonair contest at Butlin’s Holiday Camp, had earned his name from his talent at the tango. He lived with his wife, Hetty, in a semi-detached house in Bromley to which Detective Inspector Broome, the well-known terror of the Timsons, set out on a voyage of discovery with his faithful Detective Sergeant Cosgrove. At first Inspector ‘New’ Broome had drawn a blank at the Timson home; even the huge coffin-shaped freezer seemed to contain nothing but innumerable bags full of frozen vegetables. The eager Inspector had the bright idea of thawing some of these provisions however, and was rewarded by the spectacle of articles of Georgian silver arising from the saucepans of boiling peas in the manner of Venus arising from the Sea.
The defence of Hugh Snakelegs Timson had not been going particularly well. The standard receiver’s story, ‘I got the whole lot from a bloke in a pub who was selling them off cheap, and whose name I cannot for the life of me recall’, was treated with undisguised contempt by his Honour, Judge Roger Bullingham, who asked, with the ponderous cynicism accompanied by an undoubted wink at the Jury, of which he is master, if I were not going to suggest that there had been a shower of sugar-sifters, cream jugs and the like from the back of a lorry? Anyway, if got innocently, why was the silverware in the deep-freezer? I told the Jury that an Englishman’s freezer was his castle and that there was no reason on earth why a citizen shouldn’t keep his valuables in a bag of Bird’s Eye peas at a low temperature. Indeed, I added, as I thought helpfully, I had an old aunt who kept odd pound notes in the tea-caddy, and constantly risked boiling up her savings in a pot of Darjeeling. At this the Mad Bull went an even darker shade of purple, his neck swelled visibly so that it seemed about to burst his yellowing winged collar, and he told the Jury that my aunt was ‘not evidence’, and that they must in reaching a decision ‘dismiss entirely anything Mr Rumpole may have said about his curious family’, adding, with a whole battery of near-nudges and almost-winks, ‘I expect our saner relatives know the proper place for their valuables. In the bank.’
At this point the Bull decided to interrupt my final speech by adjourning for tea and television in his private room, and I was left to wander disconsolately in the direction of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, where I met that notable opera buff and wine connoisseur, half-hearted prosecutor and inept defender, the spouse and helpmeet of Phillida Erskine-Brown, Q.C. Phillida Trant, as was, the Portia of our Chambers, had put his nose somewhat out of joint by taking silk and leaving poor old Claude, ten years older than she, a humble Junior. So there I was, raising yet another glass of Château Thames Embankment to my lips and telling Claude that the only real advantage of this particular vintage was that it was quite likely to get you drunk.
‘The purpose of drinking wine is not intoxication, Rumpole.’ Erskine-Brown looked as pained as a prelate who is told that his congregation only came to church because of the central heating. ‘The point is to get in touch with one of the major influences of western civilization, to taste sunlight trapped in a bottle, and to remember some stony slope in Tuscany or a village by the Gironde.’
I thought with a momentary distaste of the bit of barren soil, no doubt placed between the cowshed and the pissoir, where the Château Pommeroy grape struggled for existence. And then, Erskine-Brown, long-time member of our Chambers in Equity Court, went considerably too far.
‘You see, Rumpole,’ he said, ‘it’s the terrible nose.’
Now I make no particular claim for my nose and I am far from suggesting that it’s a thing of beauty and a joy forever. When I was in my perambulator it may, for all I can remember, have had a sort of tip-tilted and impertinent charm. In my youth it was no doubt pinkish and healthy-looking. In my early days at the Bar it had a sharp and inquisitive quality which made prosecution witnesses feel they could keep no secrets from it. Today it is perhaps past its prime, it has spread somewhat; it has, in part at least, gone mauve; it is, after all, a nose that has seen a considerable quantity of life. But man and boy it has served me well, and I had no intention of having my appearance insulted by Claude Erskine-Brown, barrister-at-law, who looks, in certain unfavourable lights, not unlike an abbess with a bad period.
‘We may disagree about Pommeroy’s plonk,’ I told him, ‘but that’s no reason why you should descend to personal abuse.’
‘No, I don’t mean your nose, Rumpole. I mean the wine’s nose.’
I looked suspiciously into the glass; did this wine possess qualities I hadn’t guessed at? ‘Don’t babble, Erskine-Brown.’
‘ “Nose”, Rumpole! The bouquet. That’s one of the expressions you have to learn to use about wine. Together with the “length”.’
‘Length?’ I looked down at the glass in my hand; the length seemed to be about one inch and shrinking rapidly.
‘The “length” a great wine lingers in the mouth, Rumpole. Look, why don’t you let me educate you? My friend, Martyn Vanberry, organizes tastings in the City. Terrifically good fun. You get to try about a dozen wines.’
‘A dozen?’ I was doubtful. ‘An expensive business.’
‘No, Rumpole. Absolutely free. They are blind tastings. He’s got one on tomorrow afternoon, as it so happens.’
‘You mean they make you blind drunk?’ I couldn’t resist asking.
‘Sounds exactly what I need.’ At that moment the promise of Martyn Vanberry and his blind tastings were a vague hope for the future. My immediate prospects included an evening drink with She Who Must Be Obeyed and finishing my speech for Snakelegs to the Jury against the Mad Bull’s barracking. I emptied Pommeroy’s dull opiate to the drains and aimed Lethe-wards.
It might be said that the story of the unknown vendor of Georgian silver in the pub lacked originality, and that the inside of a freezer-pack was not the most obvious place for storing valuable antiques, but there was one point of significance in the defence of Hugh Snakelegs Timson. Detective Inspector Broome was, as I have already suggested, an enthusiastic officer and one who regarded convictions with as much pride as the late Don Giovanni regarded his conquests of the female sex. No doubt he notched them up on his braces. He had given evidence that there had been thefts of silver from various country houses in Kent, but all the Detective Inspector’s industry and persistence had not produced one householder who could be called by the Prosecution to identify the booty from the freezer as his stolen silverware. So where, I was able to ask, was the evidence that the property undoubtedly received by Snakelegs had been stolen? Unless the old idea that the burden lay on the Prosecution to prove its case had gone out of fashion in his Lordship’s court (distant rumblings as of a volcano limbering up for an eruption from the Bull), then perhaps, I ventured to suggest, Snakelegs was entitled to squeeze his way out of trouble.
Whether it was this thought, or Judge Bullingham’s frenzied eagerness to secure a conviction (Kane himself might have got off his murder rap if he’d only been fortunate enough to receive a really biased summing up), the Jury came back with a cheerful verdict of not guilty. After only a brief fit of minor apoplexy, and a vague threat to bring the inordinate length of defending counsel’s speeches to the attention of the legal aid authorities, the Bull released the prisoner to his semi-detached and his wife Hetty. I was strolling along the corridor, puffing a small cigar with a modest feeling of triumph, when a small, eager young lady, her fairly pleasing face decorated with a pair of steel-rimmed specs and a look of great seriousness, rather as though she was not quite certain which problem to tackle first, world starvation or nuclear war, came panting up alongside.
The Second Rumpole Omnibus Page 48