The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  It wasn’t, of course, but the next minute it was on the law report which Mizz Probert put in front of me. ‘ “Swinglehurst against the Queen…” Of course. Ah, yes. I’ve got it at my fingertips, as always, Mr Bernard. “Doctrine of impossible attempts examined – R. v. Dewdrop and Banister distinguished”.’ I read him a few nuggets from the headnote of the case. ‘All this is good stuff, Bernard, couched in fine rich prose…’

  ‘So how does that affect Tony Timson trying to steal three non-existent telly sets?’

  ‘How does it?’ I stood then, to end the interview. ‘I think it would be more helpful to you, Mr Bernard, if I gave you a written opinion. I may have to go into other authorities in some depth.’

  So it became obvious that, as far as I was concerned, Mizz Liz Probert would be a valuable, perhaps an indispensable, member of Chambers. When I asked her to write the opinion I had promised Bernard, she told me that she had been the top student of her year and won the Cicero scholarship. With Probert’s knowledge of the law and my irresistible way with a jury, we might, I felt, become a team which could have got the Macbeths off regicide.

  A happy chance furthered my plans. Owing to the presence on the domestic scene of Dodo Mackintosh (not the sort of spectacle a barrister wishes to encounter early in the mornings), I was taking my breakfast in the Taste-Ee-Bite, one of the newer and more garish serve-yourself eateries in Fleet Street. I was just getting outside two eggs and bacon on a fried slice, when Soapy Sam Bollard plonked himself down opposite me with a cup of coffee.

  ‘Do you read the Church Times, Rumpole?’ he started improbably, waving a copy of that organ in the general direction of my full English breakfast.

  ‘Only for the racing results.’

  ‘There’s a first-class fellow writing on legal matters. This week’s piece is headed VENGEANCE IS MINE. I WILL REPAY. This is what Canon Probert says…’

  ‘Canon who?’

  ‘Probert.’

  ‘That’s what I thought you said.’

  ‘Society is fully entitled to be revenged upon the criminal.’ Ballard gave me a taste of the Canon’s style. ‘Even the speeding motorist is a fit object for the legalized vengeance of the outraged pedestrian.’

  ‘What does the good Canon recommend? Bring back the thumb-screw for parking on a double yellow line?’

  ‘ “Too often the crafty lawyer frustrates the angel of retribution”,’ Ballard went on reading.

  ‘Too often the angel of retribution makes a complete balls up of the burden of proof.’

  ‘You may mock, Rumpole. You may well mock!’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What we need is someone with the spirit of Canon Probert in Chambers. Someone to convince the public that lawyers still have a bit of moral fibre.’ Ballard’s further mention of this name put quite a ruthless scheme into my head. ‘Probert,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘did you say Probert?’

  ‘Canon Probert.’ Ballard supplied the details.

  ‘Odd, that,’ I told him. ‘The name seems strangely familiar…’

  Later, when Mizz Probert handed in a highly expert and profound legal opinion in the obscure subject of impossible attempt, often known in the trade as ‘stealing from an empty purse’, I had a few words with her on the subject of her parentage.

  ‘Is your father,’ I asked, ‘by any chance the Canon Probert who writes for the Church Times?’ And then I gave her an appropriate warning: ‘Don’t answer that.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because our Head of Chambers is quite ridiculously prejudiced against women pupils whose fathers aren’t canons who write for the Church Times. You may go now, Mizz Probert. Thank you for the excellent work.’ She left me then. Clearly I had given her much food for thought.

  So, in due course, a meeting was called in Sam Ballard’s room to consider the intake of new pupils into Chambers. Those present were Rumpole, Erskine-Brown and Hoskins, a grey and somewhat fussy barrister, much worried by the expensive upbringing of his numerous daughters.

  ‘Elizabeth Probert,’ Ballard, Q.C., being in the Chair, read out the next name on his list. ‘Does anyone know her?’

  ‘I have seen her hanging about the clerk’s room,’ Erskine-Brown admitted. ‘Remove the glasses and she might have a certain elfin charm.’ Poor old Claude was ever hopelessly susceptible to a whiff of beauty in a lady barrister. ‘I wonder if she could help me with my County Court practice…’

  ‘That’s all you think about, Erskine-Brown!’ Hoskins sounded disapproving. ‘Wine, women and your County Court practice.’

  ‘That is distinctly unfair!’

  ‘So far as I remember your wife didn’t care for Fiona Allways.’ Hoskins reminded him of his moment of tenderness for a young lady barrister now married to a merchant banker and living in Cheltenham.

  ‘Yes. Well. Of course, Phillida can’t be here today. She’s got a long firm fraud in Doncaster,’ Claude apologized for his wife.

  ‘She might not take to anyone who looked at all elfin without her glasses.’ Hoskins struck a further warning note.

  ‘It was just a casual observation…’

  ‘And I’m not sure we want any new intake in Chambers. Even in the form of pupils. I mean, is there enough work to go round? I speak as a member with daughters to support,’ Hoskins reminded us.

  ‘Thinking the matter over’ – Erskine-Brown was clearly losing his bottle – ‘I’m afraid Philly might be rather against her.’

  It was then that I struck my blow for the highly qualified Mizz. ‘I would be against her too,’ I said, ‘if it weren’t for the name. Ballard, isn’t that canon you admire so tremendously, the one we all read in the Church Times, called Probert?’

  ‘You mean she’s some relation?’ Ballard was clearly excited.

  ‘She hasn’t said she isn’t.’

  ‘Not his daughter.’ By now he was positively awe-struck.

  ‘She hasn’t denied it.’

  Then Ballard looked like one whose eyes had seen his and my salvation. ‘Then Elizabeth Probert comes from a family with enormously sound views on the religious virtue of retribution as part of our criminal law. I see her as an admirable pupil for Rumpole!’

  ‘You think he might teach her some of his courtroom antics?’ Erskine-Brown sounded sceptical.

  ‘I think she might’ – Ballard spoke with deep conviction – ‘just possibly save his soul!’

  So it came about that I was driven to my next conference at Brixton Prison in a very small runabout, something like a swaying biscuit box, referred to by Mizz Probert as her Deux Chevaux, and I supposed there was something to be said for having a pupil on wheels. Apart from the matter of transport, there was nothing particularly new or unusual about the conference in question, for I had once again been summoned to the aid of Hugh Snakelegs Timson who had, once again, been found in possession of a quantity of property alleged to have been stolen. Once again, D.I. Broome and D.C. Cosgrove had called at the Bromley semi to find the Cortina parked out in the street, and the lock-up garage full of cases of a fine wine, none other than St Emilion Château Cheval Blanc 1971.

  ‘Hugh Timson seems to be always getting into trouble.’ Mizz Probert was steering us, with a good deal of dexterity, round the Elephant and Castle.

  ‘I suppose he takes the usual business risks.’

  ‘Have you ever found out the root of the problem?’

  ‘The root of the problem would seem to be Detective Inspector Broome who’s rapidly becoming the terror of the Timsons.’

  ‘I bet you’ll find that he comes from a broken home.’

  ‘Inspector Broome? Probably.’

  ‘No. I meant Hugh Timson. In an inner-city area. With an anti-social norm among his peer group, most likely. He must always have felt alienated from society.’

  Was Mizz Probert right, and is it nurture and not nature that shapes our ends? I suppose I was brought up in appalling conditions, in an ice-cold vicarage with no mod cons or central heating. My o
ld father, being a priest of the Church of England, had only the sketchiest notion of morality, and my mother was too occupied with jam-making and the Women’s Institute to notice my existence. Is it any real wonder that I have taken to crime?

  When we had met Mr Bernard at the gates of Brixton and settled down with the ex-Mr Debonair in the interview room, I thought I would put Mizz Probert’s theories to the test. ‘Come from a broken home, did you?’ I asked Snakelegs.

  ‘Broken home?’ The client looked displeased. ‘I don’t know what you mean. Mum and Dad was married forty years, and he never so much as looked at another woman. Hetty and I, we’re the same. What you on about, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘At least you were born in an inner-city area.’

  ‘My old dad wouldn’t have tolerated it. Bromley was really nice in those days. More green fields and that. What’s it got to do with my case?’

  ‘Not much. Just setting my pupil’s mind at rest. Why was your garage being used as a cellar for fine wines?’

  ‘Bit of good stuff, was it?’ Snakelegs seemed proud of the fact.

  ‘Didn’t you try it?’

  ‘Teetotal, me. You know that.’ The client sounded shocked. ‘Although the wife, she will take a drop of tawny port at Christmas. Not that I think it’s right. It’s drink that leads to crime. We all know that, don’t we, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘So how…?’

  ‘Well, I got them all a bit cheap. Not for myself, you understand. They’d be no good for Hetty and me. But I thought it was a drop of stuff I might sell on to anyone having a bit of a wedding – anything like that.’

  ‘And where did you get it? The Judge might be curious to know.’ I felt a sudden weariness, such as whoever it was among the ancient Greeks who had just pushed a stone up a hill, and seen it come rolling down again for the three-millionth time, must have felt. It was one thing to win a case because the prosecution evidence wasn’t strong enough for a conviction. It was another, and far more depressing matter, to be putting forward the same distinctly shop-worn defence throughout a working life. I just hoped to God that Snakelegs wasn’t going to babble on about a man in a pub.

  ‘Well, there was this fellow what I ran into down the Needle Arms… What’s the matter, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Please, Snakelegs’ – my boredom must have become evident –‘can’t we have some sort of variation? Judge Bullingham’s getting tremendously tired of that story.’

  ‘Bullingham?’ Snakelegs was understandably alarmed. ‘We’re not getting him again, are we?’

  ‘Not if I can help it. This character in the Needle Arms – not anyone whose name you happen to remember?’ I lit a small cigar and waited in hope.

  ‘Afraid I can’t help you there, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘You can’t help me? And he sold you all these crates of stuff. Who’s got the list of exhibits?’ Mizz Probert handed it to me immediately. ‘Cheval Blanc. St Emilion…’

  ‘No. That wasn’t the name. It was more like, something Irish…’ Snakelegs looked at me. ‘What’s our chances, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Our chances?’ I gave him my considered opinion. ‘Well, you’ve heard about snowballs in hell?’

  ‘You saw me right last time.’

  ‘Last time the losers didn’t come forward to claim their property.’

  ‘Because of the insurance.’ Liz filled in the details.

  ‘Mizz Probert remembers. This time the loser of the wine is principal witness for the Prosecution.’

  ‘Martyn Vanberry.’ Bernard was looking at the prosecution witness statements. First among them was indeed the proprietor of Vanberry’s – purveyors of fine wines, Prentice Alley in the City of London – not a specially attractive character, the highly respectable public-school bully.

  Back in the Deux Chevaux, I felt a little guilty about disillusioning Liz Probert and depriving Snakelegs of an unhappy childhood. I complimented her on her runabout and asked if it weren’t by any chance a present from her father, the Canon. It was then that she told me that her father was, in fact, the leader of the South-East London Council widely known as Red Ron Probert. He was a man, no doubt, whose own article of religion was the divine right of the local Labour Party to govern that area of London, and he frequently appeared on television chat-shows to speak up for minority rights. His ideal voter was apparently an immigrant Eskimo lesbian, who strongly supported the I.R.A.

  ‘Is there anything wrong with Ron Probert being my father?’

  ‘Nothing at all provided you don’t chatter about it to our learned Head of Chambers. Do you think you could point this machine in the general direction of Luton? I’m going to take a nap.’

  ‘What are we doing in Luton?’

  ‘Seeing a witness.’

  ‘I thought we weren’t allowed to see witnesses.’

  ‘This is an expert witness. We’re allowed to see them.’

  Luton is not exactly one of the Jewels of Southern England. American tourists don’t brave the terrorists to loiter in its elegant parks or snap each other in the Cathedral Close, but its inhabitants seem friendly enough and the first police officer we met was delighted to direct us to the Monty Mantis Service Station. It was a large and clearly thriving concern, selling not only petrol but new and secondhand cars, cuddly toys, garden furniture, blow-up paddling pools, furry dice and anoraks. The proprietor remembered my face from Vanberry’s, and when I gave him a hint of what we wanted, invited us into his luxuriously appointed office, where we sat on plastic zebra-skin covered furniture, gazing at pictures of peeing children and crying clowns, while he poured us out a couple of glasses of Cheval Blanc from his own cellar, so that I might understand the experience. When I made my delight clear, he said it was always a pleasure to meet a genuine enthusiast.

  ‘And you, Mr Mantis,’ I ventured to ask him, ‘I’ve been wondering how you became so extraordinarily well informed in wine lore. I mean, where did you get your training?’

  ‘Day trip to Boulogne. 1963. With the Luton Technical.’ He refilled our glasses. ‘Unattractive bunch of kids, we must have been. Full of terminal acne and lavatory jokes. Enough to drive “sir” what took us into the funny farm. We were all off giving him the slip. Trying to chase girls that didn’t exist, or was even fatter and spottier than the local talent round the Wimpy. Anyway, I ended up in the station buffet for some reason, and spent what I’d been saving up for an unavailable knees’ trembler, if you’ll pardon my French, Miss Probert. I bought a half bottle. God knows what it was. Ordinaire de la Gare, French railways perpetual standby. And there was I, brought up on Tizer and Coke that tastes of old pennies, and sweet tea you could stand the spoon up in, and it came as a bit of a revelation to me, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Tasting of Flora and the country green… Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!…’

  ‘Shame you can’t ever talk about the stuff without sounding like them toffee noses round Vanberry’s. Well, I bought four bottles and kept a cellar under my bed and shared it out in toothmugs with a chosen few. Then when I started work at the garage, I didn’t go round the pub Friday nights. I began investing…’

  ‘And acquired your knowledge?’

  ‘I don’t know football teams, you see. Haven’t got a clue about the Cup. But I reckon I know my vintages.’

  ‘Such as the Cheval Blanc 1971.’ I sampled it again.

  ‘All right, is it?’

  ‘It seems perfectly all right.’

  ‘You’re sure you won’t, Miss Probert?’

  ‘I never have.’

  Liz Probert, I thought, a hard worker, with all the puritanism of youth.

  ‘This is better, perhaps’ – I held my glass to the light – ‘than the Cheval Blanc round Vanberry’s?’

  Monty Mantis looked at me then and began to laugh. It was not unkind, but genuinely amused laughter, coming from a man who no doubt knew his wines.

  Our clerk, Henry, is a star of his local amateur dramatic society, and is famous, as I understand it, for the Noël
Coward roles he undertakes. Henry’s life in the theatre has its uses for us as a fellow Thespian is Miss Osgood, who, when she is not appearing in some role made famous by the late Gertrude Lawrence, is in charge of the lists down the Old Bailey. Miss Osgood can exercise some sort of control on which case comes before which judge, and when the wheel of fortune spins to decide such matters, she can sometimes lay a finger on it. I had fortunately hit on a time when Henry and Miss Osgood were playing opposite each other in Private Lives and I asked our clerk to use his best endeavours with his co-star to see that R. v. Snakelegs Timson did not come up for trial before Judge Bullingham. On the night before the hearing, Henry rang Froxbury Court to give me the glad news that the case was fixed to come on before a judge known to his many friends and admirers as Moley Molesworth.

  ‘A wonderful judge for us,’ I told Bernard and Liz Probert as we assembled at the door of the Court the next morning. ‘I’ll have Moley eating out of my hand. Mildest-mannered chap that ever thought in terms of probation.’

  ‘For receiving stolen wine?’ Bernard sounded doubtful.

  ‘Oh, yes. I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Community service is his equivalent of dispatching chaps to the galleys.’

  But just when everything seemed set fair, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand blew up in the shape of Miss Osgood, who came to announce that his Honour Judge Molesworth was confined to bed with a severe cold and would not, therefore, be trying Snakelegs.

  ‘A severe cold? What’s the matter with the old idiot, can’t he wrap up warm?’

  ‘It’s all right, Mr Rumpole. We can transfer you to another Court immediately.’ Miss Osgood smiled with the charm of the late Gertrude Lawrence. ‘Judge Bullingham’s free.’

  Why is it that whoever dishes out severe colds invariably gives them to the wrong person?

  ‘Mr Rumpole. Do you wish to detain this gentleman in the witness-box?’

  The Bull had clearly recognized Snakelegs, and remembered the antiques in the frozen peas. He looked with equal disfavour at the dock and at defending counsel. It was only when his eye lit upon young Tristram Paulet for the Prosecution, or the chief prosecution witness, Martyn Vanberry, who was now standing, at the end of his evidence-in-chief, awaiting my attention, that he exposed his yellowing teeth in that appalling smirk which represents Bullingham’s nearest approximation to moments of charm.