The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Why not take it in here,’ I called after her.

  ‘Isn’t a person entitled to a little privacy,’ she called back, and kicked the door shut. I was left alone to wonder if even She Who Must Be Obeyed had secrets and what on earth those secrets could be. Was our mansion flat sheltering a mole, and could Hilda be selling off the secrets of my defence briefs to the Prosecution? My curiosity got the better of me and I gingerly lifted the sitting-room phone, but I got only an angry buzz and Hilda’s voice behind me calling, ‘Rumpole!’ as she returned to the room. ‘What’s the matter with our phone?’

  ‘It looks perfectly all right to me.’ I surveyed the instrument I had hastily returned to its rest.

  ‘It makes little hiccuping sounds. Have you paid the bill, Rumpole?’

  ‘Perhaps not… Pressure of work lately.’

  ‘If you haven’t paid the bill it ought to be cut right off. It ought not to hiccup.’ She looked at me severely as though any malaise of our telephone was undoubtedly my fault.

  ‘To hear is to obey, O Mistress of the Blue Horizons,’ I said, but not out loud.

  The next day my journey to work was unusually eventful. I got off the tube, as usual, at Temple station and stopped to buy a Times. (They had been sold out at Gloucester Road.) A man in a cap and mackintosh, whom I had noticed on the train, seemed to loiter by the newsagent, and when I had bought my newspaper and set off towards Middle Temple Gardens, Fountain Court, and so to Equity Court, he seemed to be in casual pursuit. When I stopped to do up a shoelace, he stopped also. When I paused to admire the roses, he admired them also. I was wondering what I had done to earn the attention of the man with the cap, when a voice called out ‘Rumpole’, and Mizz Liz Probert engaged me in conversation. As we ambled on together, my unknown follower put on a sudden spurt, and walked past us.

  ‘I wanted to tell you something.’ Liz Probert was clearly in a confiding mood.

  ‘Not a secret?’ How many more could I take?

  ‘It’s about Claude Erskine-Brown. He’s asked me to the Opera.’

  ‘To Meistersinger?’ I hazarded a guess.

  ‘I think it’s at Covent Garden actually.’ Mizz Probert was clearly not a Wagnerite. ‘What do you think…?’

  ‘Well, at your age it’s probably all right. For me, well, life’s getting a bit short for Wagner.’

  ‘It might be terribly embarrassing.’

  ‘Why? I don’t remember that they did much stripping-off at Nuremberg.’

  ‘You don’t think he’d use it as an excuse to project some sort of masculine aggression? Might he say I’ve got extremely nice eyes, or something horrible?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you need worry about that.’ It was kindly meant, but I realize it wasn’t exactly well put.

  ‘Don’t you?’ She smiled.

  ‘I didn’t mean… they’re not nice.’

  ‘Rumpole’ – she was no longer smiling – ‘don’t you start presenting as a male stereotype!’

  ‘No, of course not. God forbid! Purely functional eyes, yours. Scarcely worth a mention.’

  We had reached the door of Chambers and Mizz Probert changed the subject. ‘How’s your Secrets case?’

  ‘A farce!’ I told her. ‘Anyone who calls it a Secrets case has had their brains addled by too many spy stories.’

  I carried my battered old brief-case into the clerk’s room to collect my letters which were mainly buff envelopes and sent to me by Her Majesty. As I filed a couple of them in the waste-paper basket, I noticed some sort of workman, a black man as I remember it, standing on a step-ladder and doing something to the electric light. I also saw Uncle Tom, our oldest inhabitant, who had just arrived with his brief-case, which, being dark brown and equally battered, seemed to be the twin of mine. As Uncle Tom had not, to my certain knowledge, received a brief of any sort for the last twenty years, I was prompted to ask what he carried in his brief-case, a question which had long been troubling me. ‘Care to have a look?’ Uncle Tom was ever obliging. He opened his luggage to reveal a carton of milk, the green muffler his sister always insisted he took with him to Chambers, two golf balls, a packet of cheese and tomato sandwiches, the Times and a tin of throat pastilles.

  ‘What are the zubes for?’

  ‘Really, Rumpole! Doesn’t your voice get tired when you speak in Court?’

  ‘Yes. But you don’t speak in Court.’

  ‘One never knows, does one, when one might not get called on?’

  As we left the clerk’s room Uncle Tom said, ‘That chap up the ladder was like you.’

  ‘Well, not very like me.’

  ‘He seemed extraordinarily interested in my brief-case.’

  Events continued their unusual course when I got up to my room. I was hanging up the hat and mac when our Head of Chambers, Soapy Sam Ballard, slid in at the door and almost whispered, ‘Thought I’d call in on you up here. Walls have ears you know, especially in the clerk’s room. I’m prosecuting you in the Secrets case.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the Biscuits case?’

  ‘No, the Secrets.’

  ‘The secret biscuits.’ Entering into the spirit of the thing, I stabbed at the curtains with my umbrella and a cry of ‘Dead for a ducat, dead!’

  ‘What are you doing, Rumpole?’

  ‘I thought there might be a couple of Russians behind the arras.’

  ‘It’s a particularly serious case.’ Ballard looked pained; well he usually does. ‘What’s at stake isn’t merely biscuits.’

  ‘I know that. It’s lavatory paper too.’

  ‘Rumpole!’

  ‘And cups of tea, naturally, and free holidays. And entertaining named persons.’

  ‘It’s a question of loyalty to the Crown. I’m sorry to have to tell you this but the Attorney-General himself takes a serious view.’

  ‘Is the old darling keen on biscuits?’ I suppose I shouldn’t have said that, but as I did so Ballard became unexpectedly friendly. ‘Look here, Rumpole, Horace…’ he said. ‘I don’t know whether you know, I’ve just been elected to the Sheridan Club.’

  ‘Great news, Bollard. Was it on telly?’

  ‘I just wondered whether you’d care to join me there for a spot of luncheon.’

  Usually I fear prosecuting counsel when they come offering lunch, but Ballard was extremely insistent and even paid for the taxi to the Sheridan, a rambling, grey building in the hinterland behind Trafalgar Square in need of a spring-clean, decorated with portraits of old actors and judges (the Judges looked more theatrical and the actors considerably more judicial), where that small, stage army of persons most closely engaged in running the nation’s affairs meet to get mildly sloshed at lunchtime. In the small and crowded bar Sir Frank Fawcett from the M.O.D. was having a gin and tonic with Oliver Bowling, the Assistant Under-Secretary; an ex-Cabinet Minister was trying to persuade a publisher to buy his unreadable memoirs; Mr Chatterbox of the Sunday Fortress was giggling with a little group of journalists in the corner; and Ballard became almost unbearably excited when a sleepy-eyed, longish-haired man in a double-breasted suit and striped shirt – a middle-aged debs’ delight – came wafting over to us. ‘Mr Attorney!’ Ballard greeted him loudly. ‘This is Horace Rumpole. He’s defending Tuttle.’

  ‘Pink gin, thanks Sam. Lots of ice.’ And when Ballard had gone about his business, Sir Lambert Syme, Her Majesty’s Attorney-General, said, ‘I imagine Tuttle’s a plea of guilty.’

  ‘Absolutely no harm in imagining.’

  ‘It’s only the tip of the iceberg, you know.’

  ‘Of course. There’s something far more serious at stake. Swiss Roll.’

  ‘Molesworth!’ The Attorney shook his head. He wasn’t smiling.

  ‘My name’s Rumpole.’

  ‘No. Molesworth.’

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘The American Air Force Base,’ he explained carefully, ‘where alleged protesters camp out with their thermoses, or is it “thermi”? I must say, if they’re all genuine C.N.D. p
rotesters, my name’s Gorbachev. No point in going into Molesworth. I imagine Sam would take a plea on the biscuits. If she confesses to that, Lord Chief’ll probably keep the old bat out of chokey.’

  ‘The Lord Chief!’ I was amazed at the compliment paid to me and Miss Tuttle. ‘He’s coming down to try it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Question of loyalty in the Civil Service. The Government’s pretty concerned about it. It’ll be quite a party.’ And as Ballard returned to us with the drinks, the Attorney asked, ‘Wouldn’t you, Sam? Take a plea on the biscuits?’

  ‘I’d be guided, of course, by the Law Officers of the Crown.’ Ballard meant that he’d do as he was told.

  Before we left him and went down to lunch, I had one other question to ask the Attorney-General: ‘It’s about my telephone at home,’ I said. ‘It’s started to hiccup.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s had rather too much claret.’ He looked down at the glass in my hand.

  ‘What’s more, I got a red notice at least a month ago and they haven’t cut it off yet.’

  ‘Well, you’re in luck’s way, aren’t you, Rumpole?’ The Attorney-General smiled and moved away from us. Ballard then bought me a perfectly good luncheon during which he continued to tell me how extremely grateful the Government of the day would be if Miss Tuttle put her hands up, and thus saved herself and all of us from further embarrassing revelations. I ploughed through the boiled beef, carrots and a suet dumpling, topped up with treacle tart, and offered the Government of the day no sort of comfort at all.

  Miss Rosemary Tuttle used to keep her own portable Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter in her office at the Ministry of Defence, and used it to do her own letters and reports when the typing pool was busy. This machine, a prosecution exhibit, was now incarcerated in New Scotland Yard, to which Jasper James and I took our client so that we might conduct our own typewriting test. While she sat typing placidly in her peasant attire, Detective Inspector Fallowes, the Officer-in-Charge of the case, started up a new mystery, drawing me a little apart from the clatter of the Olivetti.

  ‘By the way, Mr Rumpole,’ he muttered confidentially. ‘A word of warning, sir. A gentleman of your stamp has to be careful of his position when he’s on a sensitive case like this.’

  ‘Has he?’ I was perplexed.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. Does the name of O’Rourke mean anything to you? Seamus O’Rourke? Suspected I.R.A. sympathizer.’

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said truthfully, whilst Miss Tuttle was resolutely typing I’LL BE ON THE FIRST BENCH TO THE RIGHT AFTER YOU’VE CROSSED THE BRIDGE.

  ‘Perhaps it means something to your wife then.’ Detective Inspector Fallowes smiled in a friendly fashion. ‘We’d just like you to be extremely careful. There now’ – he picked up Miss Tuttle’s finished sheet and gave it to me – ‘look at it all ways up, Mr Rumpole; no doubt it comes from the same machine as the note to the Fortress. So glad to have been able to help you.’

  ‘Tea and scandal.’ The words bothered me again, as I read them in the note Miss Tuttle had just typed. Back in Froxbury Court I looked up tea in the Index of my old Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘is there honey still for t.?’ no, ‘sometimes counsel take – and sometimes t.,’ not that; and then I saw it: ‘t. and scandal’. Rather an obscure phrase in fact from Congreve’s dedication to his play The Double Dealer: ‘Retired to their tea and scandal, according to their ancient custom’. Well, there it was, but I couldn’t see, for the moment, how it helped Miss Tuttle. So I called for my wife’s assistance on another mystery. ‘Hilda. It just crossed my mind. Have you by any chance an Irish friend called Seamus O’Rourke?’

  ‘What sort of friend?’

  ‘Any sort of friend.’

  ‘Why do you ask that, Rumpole?’ We were seated in the kitchen of our mansion flat, and She was dishing out stew.

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘God knows why I ask. It’s some sort of Official Secret.’

  ‘What’s that meant to mean?’

  ‘That no one knows what the hell it’s about except the Government and probably it’s not of the slightest importance anyway.’ Hilda sat down to her steaming plateful and looked at me, doubtfully.

  ‘They haven’t heard about the hatch, have they?’ She wondered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Government haven’t heard about my idea for a new kitchen hatch?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so, Hilda. I expect your idea for a kitchen hatch ranks high in the list of classified information. Along with biscuits and the next American attack on somewhere or another!’

  ‘I wish you’d stop talking nonsense, Rumpole.’ Hilda then attacked her dinner and I could get no more out of her.

  When I bought the next morning’s Times and sat reading it on my journey to Temple station, I discovered that Whitehall was buzzing with rumours of a serious new leak from the Ministry of Defence. An article in the American magazine Newsweek had suggested that information concerning the sensitive N.A.T.O. ‘Operation Blueberry’ was already in the hands of the Russians. The matter was expected to be raised in Parliament during Prime Minister’s Question Time… So one mystery was solved at least; I thought I knew why the Lord Chief Justice of England was descending on the Old Bailey in person to try Miss Rosemary Tuttle.

  Perhaps I had absorbed some of the general air of mystery surrounding the case, but I decided to carry my brief in R. v. Tuttle enclosed in my old brief-case, which I left for a while in the clerk’s room whilst I went to refresh my memory of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act. So I arrived at the door of the Court, with Liz Probert, who was to take a note for me, fully robed and carrying my brief-case, and there I met for the first time, Oliver Bowling, the pleasing and cultivated head of Miss Tuttle’s department, who had the good sense of having me briefed in the case. Although he had apparently borne the nickname Batty Bowling when at school with Claude, I could see no basis for any suggestion of insanity.

  ‘This is a most ridiculous business,’ Bowling told me. ‘It’s not going to do anyone the slightest good.’ He was a quietly spoken man in a tweed suit which must have cost a good deal in its day, and he had wrinkles of amusement at the corners of his eyes; I thought Miss Tuttle was lucky to have him on her side. ‘If there’s anything I can do to help?’ he said. ‘Character witness. That sort of thing…?’

  ‘There is something you can tell me. Miss Tuttle was eating her sandwiches in St James’s Park. Is that where she always took her lunch?’

  ‘Oh, I believe so. She was very regular in her habits.’

  ‘By regular, you mean she always left the park at the same time?’

  ‘Back in the office by ten past two. You could set your watch by her. Pretty rare nowadays…’

  ‘Outdoor sandwich-eaters?’

  ‘I really mean someone you can depend on. Utterly.’ And then he excused himself saying he had to get back to the Ministry. Nearer the door of the Court I had a far less pleasant encounter. A pale and deeply disturbed Sam Ballard, Q.C., waylaid me.

  ‘A word in your ear.’ He took my arm and steered me apart.

  ‘Bollard!’ I sighed. ‘We’re not going into secret session again?’ He was looking across at Liz, who was chattering to Jasper James, our solicitor, and he almost hissed, ‘That girl Probert, she can’t possibly come into Court!’

  ‘She’s taking a note for me.’

  ‘Impossible!’

  ‘She’s a member of the Bar, Bollard. You can’t keep her out.’

  ‘We were grossly deceived.’ Ballard’s voice sank to a note of low tragedy. ‘She’s not a clergyman’s daughter!’

  ‘Oh? Is the Court only open to clergymen’s daughters today? You and I’d better clear off home.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Fallowes has just told me who she is.’

  ‘Is it any of the Detective Inspector’s business?’

  ‘She’s the daughter of Red Ron Probert!’ The news came from him in an appalled whisper. ‘Socialist Chairman of South-East
London Council. Well, you do see? We can’t have a girl like that in Court on a sensitive case.’

  ‘You mean a case about sensitive biscuits?’

  ‘It may not just be biscuits any more.’ He sounded most grave. ‘We may have to apply to add new charges!’

  ‘Why don’t you? And make this prosecution look even more fatuous.’

  ‘Look, Rumpole. I would advise you to take this matter seriously. In the national interest!’

  Then I used a phrase which I had planned for some time, and this seemed an ideal moment to trot it out: ‘And I’d advise you, Bollard, if you can find a taxidermist willing to take on the work, to get stuffed.’ I then called loudly to Mizz Liz Probert to follow me, and swept into Court.

  We were only just in time. Ballard and his team followed us in, and then, at exactly twenty-nine minutes past ten, Lord Wantage took his seat on the Bench. I knew the Lord Chief Justice was a healthy-looking fellow who spent most of his spare time on the golf course, and who dispatched his business with a great reliance on short judgements and long sentences. His bluff and cheerful manner concealed an extremely conventional and sometimes brutal lawyer. He was also not noted for his criticisms of the Government’s legislation, and I suspected that I would have to get the Jury, and not his Lordship, to laugh the case out of Court.

  So, as Ballard rose to apply for certain parts of the evidence to be heard behind closed doors, I settled in my seat and opened the battered brief-case I had brought in with me, and as I did I gave what must have been an audible gasp of horror. My brief was notably absent, and all I had was a green muffler, a carton of milk, a Times, a packet of cheese and tomato sandwiches, two golf balls and some throat pastilles. Uncle Tom’s brief-case had, at long last, got into Court.

  Those who know me best around the Bailey will know that, when in full flood, I rarely consult my brief, and I did have most of the simple facts in R. v. Tuttle at my fingers’ ends. However, it is somewhat unnerving to be in a Court crowded with reporters, appearing before the Lord Chief Justice of England, with nothing much to consult except a green muffler and a cheese sandwich. I sent Liz Probert off to phone Henry and get my effects sorted out, and then sat through an uneasy half-hour. Before the Jury was sworn in, the Lord Chief, who clearly knew more about the case than he let on, asked Ballard if he were applying to add more charges. Ballard answered that he wasn’t going to do so for the moment, and although I reared up to protest, the Chief allowed the Prosecution to keep this threat of unknown and mysteriously serious allegations dangling.