The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

‘Your statement says the place was dark and very crowded. Are you sure you recognized the Sergeant?’

  ‘I could tell that bastard anywhere.’ At least he was sure about that, but I thought he could do with a little training as a witness. ‘When you give your evidence, Trooper Boyne,’ I told him, ‘please try not to call the dear departed a bastard. It won’t exactly endear you to the tribunal. How was the Sergeant dressed?’

  ‘Casual – a sports jacket, I think. A shirt without a tie.’

  ‘Not in a frock?’

  ‘Not when I saw him.’ He seemed a little puzzled, but when I asked, ‘And then you saw this other man?’, he answered with quiet conviction, ‘I saw this German.’

  ‘How did you know he was German?’

  ‘He was speaking Kraut to the girl by the door. Then he spotted Wilson and went over to his table.’

  ‘A man in a black leather jacket. With spiky hair…’ I read from the statement our client had made to the Investigating Officer.

  ‘This punk.’ Danny spoke with a good deal of dislike. Basically, I thought, he was a very conventional young man.

  ‘Did the Sergeant speak to him at all?’

  ‘Just “Helmut”. We heard him call out, “Helmut.” ’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘We didn’t hear what they said. They sat together in the corner; they were still there when we left.’

  ‘Which was at, approximately?’

  ‘01.00 hours, wasn’t it, Danny?’ Again Captain Sandy Ransom supplied the time and our client nodded his head.

  ‘And you never saw Sergeant Jumbo Wilson alive again?’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘And you got back into the barracks over the back wall?’

  ‘We don’t bother about booking in and out at the guard room.’

  ‘Especially as you were confined to barracks.’ Sandy smiled indulgently as a schoolmaster might at the prank of a favourite pupil.

  ‘That was after a wee fight I had. A couple of weeks ago. Down at the disco…’ Danny started to explain, but again the Defending Officer took up the story. ‘That was the fight when he got the blood on his cuff. It’s in the evidence.’

  ‘Tell me’ – I spoke to our client who wouldn’t have a favourite captain to help him give evidence in Court – ‘just tell me in your own words.’

  ‘It was a German boy what was taking the mickey out of my wife. Out of Hanni. I took him outside and gave him a couple of taps. He must have bled a bit.’

  ‘A German boy with a Class A B Blood Group just like the Sergeant’s?’ I asked, feeling my side was getting over-confident. ‘A blood group only enjoyed by 3 to 4 per cent of the population?’ I stood up, put away my pen and started to tie up my brief. ‘So it comes to this. You saw the Sergeant alive at one in the morning. And he was found at 4 a.m. after the Military Police got an anonymous phone call.’

  ‘From a German,’ Sandy reminded me.

  ‘In German, anyway. So. Giving the Sergeant time to leave the bar, slip into his frock – wherever he did that – quarrel with whoever he quarrelled with…’ ‘His friend, Helmut. Isn’t that the most likely explanation?’ Sandy interrupted, but I went on. ‘When he was found he couldn’t have been dead much more than two and a half hours.’

  ‘The fellows prosecuting accept that.’ Sandy was reassuring me.

  ‘But do I accept it?’ I asked, and Danny, who had been looking at me doubtfully, spoke, for the first time I thought, his mind. ‘Don’t you believe me, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘I’m not here to believe anything, I’m here to defend you,’ I told my client. ‘But some time or another it might be a bit of a help, old darling, if you started to tell me the truth.’

  After we had left our client, I asked Sandy to drive me to the scene of the crime. The Rosenkavalier disco-bar looked small and somewhat dingy by daylight with its neon sign – an outline of a silver rose – switched off. The place was locked up and we inspected the side alley which was, in fact, a narrow lane which joined the streets in front of and behind the disco, so a body might have been driven up from behind the building and delivered at the side entrance. On the other side of the lane was the high wall and regular windows of a tallish block of flats. Sandy’s lurcher was sniffing at the side entrance, perhaps scenting old blood. I asked the Captain, ‘None of the neighbours saw or heard anything?’

  ‘They wouldn’t, would they?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘They’re all Germans.’

  ‘The telephone call was made in German.’

  ‘By his boyfriend perhaps.’ The Defending Officer clearly had his own explanation of the crime.

  ‘Boyfriend?’

  ‘Helmut. He might not have been sure if he’d killed Jumbo Wilson. Perhaps he had a fit of remorse.’

  ‘Why do you think “Jumbo” had a boyfriend? He was married.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Sandy smiled and then said seriously, ‘You were right, of course, Danny wasn’t telling you the whole truth. You know why Jumbo picked on him?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Because the Sar’nt made a heavy pass and Danny Boy told him to satisfy his lust on the regimental goat, or words to that effect.’

  I tried to think of the sequence of events. The Sergeant had left the disco and gone somewhere, perhaps into the block of flats, changed into a bizarre costume, been knifed and dumped in the lane. ‘So Helmut stabbed Jumbo in a lovers’ quarrel after a bit of convivial dressing up?’ I considered the Captain’s theory.

  ‘Isn’t that the obvious solution?’ Sandy obviously regarded the problem as solved.

  ‘I suppose it’d get you out of trouble,’ I said, and when he laughed and asked, ‘Me?’, I explained, ‘I mean, the Regiment, of course.’

  I was tired that night and I left the Mess early. I got a torch from Borrow, the Mess Attendant, to light my way across the darkened square. As I left, Sandy had sat down to the piano, and I heard him singing: ‘Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant Wilson, Tuck me in my little wooden bed…’

  I came to the corner of the married quarters wing. I could hear the thin wail of the Boynes’ baby, awake and crying, and I saw a curtain pulled back for a moment and a grey-haired, handsome woman, whom I took to be Mrs Wilson, looked out frowning with anger towards the source of the sound. Then she twitched the curtain across the window again, and I sank to my knees behind the dustbins at the foot of the iron staircase, and made a close examination, with the help of Borrow’s torch, of the ground and the bottom stair.

  I was in that position when Lieutenant Tony Ross, the Duty Officer in uniform that night, discovered me and looked down, as I thought, rather strangely. ‘Hail to thee, bright seraph,’ I greeted him. ‘Thought I’d dropped a few marks down here. Must’ve had a hole in my pocket.’

  ‘Can I help at all,. sir?’ The young officer asked.

  ‘Not at all. No.’ I struggled to my feet. ‘Sleep well, Lieutenant. It’s only money, isn’t it?’

  The court martial, which I don’t think anyone suspected was my first, took place in an ornate nineteenth-century German civic building, and in a room with a great deal of carved stonework and a painted ceiling. Everyone was clearly identified, like the members of a television chat-show panel, by a little board with their title painted on it set on the table in front of them. The tribunal appointed to try Danny Boyne consisted of a president (a Brigadier Humphries of the Transport Corps, Sandy told me), a lieutenant-colonel, a major and two captains, one of whom was a uniformed, lady W.R.A.C. officer. And seated beside the President, I was surprised to see my old friend and one-time Chamber mate, George Frobisher, who had deserted the dusty arena down the Bailey (well, George was never much of a cross-examiner) for the security of the Circuit Bench, and then, apparently in search of adventure, become a judge advocate, stationed in Germany advising court martials on the legal aspects of soldiers’ trials. George sat beside the President now, wearing his wig and gown, and explained every point in the proceedi
ngs with tireless courtesy to the accused trooper, in a way which seemed to show the Military as more civilized than some of the learned judges down the Bailey, notably his Honour Roger Bullingham known to me as the Mad Bull.

  So, 04916323, Trooper Boyne of the 37th and 39th, the Duke of Clarence’s Own Lancers, was charged with ‘a civilian offence contrary to Section 70 of the Army Act 1955, that is to say, murder, in that on the 22nd and 23rd days of November last he murdered 75334188, Sergeant J. Wilson of the Duke of Clarence’s Own’. A plea of not guilty was entered and after George had painstakingly explained the roles of everyone in Court, and advised Danny to relax and sit comfortably and make any comment that occurred to him to Mr Rumpole, his barrister, Lieutenant-Colonel Watford, was invited to rise from the prosecution table and outline the case against the Trooper.

  Sandy Ransom (at last parted from his lurcher, who was being cared for in the Special Investigations Branch Office) and I sat at the defence table next to our client, who had an N.C.O. beside, and one behind him, holding his hat and belt, which he wouldn’t wear, so Sandy explained, until he gave evidence. There was no dock, which again seemed a better arrangement than at the Bailey, where an accused person is penned into a sort of eminence which hints at their guilt. Taking George’s advice, I sat comfortably and let the Prosecuting Officer begin.

  And here was another plus. Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Watford, O.B.E., the Army Legal Services, was tall, youngish (almost everyone seems youngish to me), bespectacled and sensible. He had trained as a solicitor, and had, as it so happened, been well known to me as young Mike Watford, articled clerk with Butchers & Stringfellow, a firm who had often briefed me at the Bailey and who sent young Mike out to help with taking notes and witness statements, a task he performed a great deal better than the senior partners. So, from the whirligig of time, Mike Watford was known to me as a good egg; in fact, I would go so far as to say that he was a double yoker.

  As Lieutenant-Colonel Mike outlined his case, my eyes strayed to our judges or, would they more correctly be called, the Jury of Army Officers, because they would decide all the facts and leave the law to George. I had never had to face a jury in uniform before. I tried flashing a charming smile at the W.R.A.C. officer but it had no effect on her whatever. She was listening to Mike’s opening with a frown of fierce concentration.

  Mike’s first witness was a young lady with a good deal of rather dried-up blonde hair, tricked out in tight, artificial leopard-skin trousers and a low-cut black silk vest. Chains and bracelets clinked as she moved, and she looked as though she had better things to do than take part in the army exercises of a foreign power. Her English was, however, so much better than my non-existent German that it was fully equal to all the demands made on it that day.

  Mike Watford got her to admit that her name was Greta Schmerz, and she worked at hanging up the coats in the Rosenkavalier; when business was brisk, apparently, she also helped out at the bar. She identified the photograph of Sergeant Wilson as someone she had seen on occasions at the disco-bar. Mike then went so far as to tell her that we knew that, on the night in question the Sergeant was stabbed outside the disco-bar.

  ‘We know nothing of the sort,’ I rose to protest, and drove on through a mild ‘Don’t we, Mr Rumpole?’ from George. ‘We know he was found dead outside the disco. We haven’t the foggiest idea where he was stabbed.’

  ‘Very well’ – Mike Watford conceded the point – ‘he was found dead. Had you seen him in the disco that night?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Greta told us after a pause.

  ‘And that young man, Trooper Boyne, sitting there, was he in the disco that night?’ the Prosecutor asked.

  ‘He was there, I remember him.’ Miss Schmerz was sure. Having achieved this, Watford sat down and Rumpole arose.

  ‘Fraulein Schmerz. So far as Sergeant Wilson, the man in the photograph, was concerned, he may have been there that night, or he may not. You simply don’t know?’

  ‘He was there. Danny and the other two saw him.’ I got a loudly whispered reminder from the Defending Officer.

  ‘Please, Captain. I do know your case!’ I quietened Sandy and addressed the witness. ‘Do you remember someone coming to the disco with spiky hair and black leather jacket?’

  ‘I do remember.’

  ‘Helmut!’ Sandy whispered again triumphantly, and I muttered, ‘I know it’s much more exciting than manoeuvres, but do try and stay relatively calm.’ I asked Miss Schmerz, ‘What time did you see him?’

  ‘How should I know that?’

  ‘How indeed? Was it late?’

  ‘I think… perhaps midnight…’

  ‘Well, that’s very helpful. Did he speak to you?’

  ‘The punk man? He spoke to me.’

  ‘In German?’

  ‘Yes. He asked if I had seen the English sergeant.’

  ‘Did he say the name Wilson?’

  ‘He said that.’

  ‘Tell me, Fraulein Schmerz.’ I was curious to know. ‘All the soldiers came to the disco in civilian clothes, didn’t they? Jeans and anoraks and plimsolls – that sort of costume?’

  ‘They weren’t in soldier’s dress,’ she agreed.

  ‘So you couldn’t tell if that man in the photograph was a sergeant or not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you know his name was Wilson?’

  ‘I didn’t know his name.’

  ‘So there seems very little point in the punk asking you the question? Yes, thank you, Fraulein Schmerz.’

  I sat down, and Sandy looked at me with obvious displeasure. I was, it must have seemed to him, a very ordinary barrister indeed. ‘What are you trying to do?’ he asked me, and all I could whisper back was, ‘Strangely enough, my dear old Defending Officer, I think I’m trying to find out the truth.’

  The Court was still and respectful when the Sergeant’s widow was called to give her evidence. George asked her if she’d care to sit, and when she preferred to stand, tall, grey-haired and dignified, by the witness chair, he assured her that she wouldn’t be kept there long. In fact, Mike Watford only asked her a few questions. She identified the photograph of her dead husband, whom she had last seen alive when he left their flat in the married quarters not very long after nine o’clock on the night of 22 November. When I rose to cross-examine I told the witness that we all sympathized with her in the tragic situation in which she found herself, and went on to ask if Trooper Boyne and his German wife, Hanni, didn’t live very near her little flat?

  ‘Almost next door.’ The voice was disapproving and the face stony.

  ‘Did you see anything of them?’

  ‘She was always at the dustbins. Putting things in them. Things the baby dirtied, most like.’

  ‘Most likely.’ I turned to another topic. ‘You were at home all the evening and the night when your husband died?’

  ‘Yes, I was. I never went out.’

  ‘And Trooper Boyne was never in your flat at any time?’

  ‘No.’ The answer was decided.

  ‘Did you ever ask either Mr or Mrs Boyne to your home?’

  ‘Of course not.’ The suggestion clearly struck her as ridiculous.

  ‘Did you not invite them because your husband was a sergeant and my client was a humble trooper?’

  ‘Not just because of that. She was one of them, wasn’t she?’

  ‘One of what?’

  ‘One of them Germans.’

  ‘You don’t like Germans, Mrs Wilson?’ The question seemed unnecessary; I asked it all the same.

  ‘They did it.’

  ‘They did what?’

  ‘That’s why he was out there in the street, out there dressed like that! They took him… He… He was gone… Gone…’

  ‘Don’t distress yourself, Madam.’ George was using his best bedside manner. ‘Which Germans do you mean killed your husband?’

  ‘I don’t know. How could I know?’ She was talking very quietly and calmly, like someone, I thought, o
n the verge of tears.

  ‘You say some Germans killed him?’

  ‘With respect’ – I had to correct him – ‘she didn’t say that. She said Germans “took” him. Perhaps the shorthand writer…’ The lady with the shorthand book stood and found the phrase with unusual rapidity. ‘She said “they took him… He was gone…” ’

  ‘I assume by “took” she meant kill.’ George seemed to have little patience with my interruption.

  ‘In my submission it would be extremely dangerous to assume anything of the sort,’ I had to tell him. ‘She said “took”. The person who killed him may be someone entirely different.’

  ‘What exactly are you suggesting, Mr Rumpole?’ George frowned at me. It wasn’t a fair question to an old Chambers mate who was, as yet, not entirely clear what he was suggesting. ‘I hope that may become quite clear in my cross-examination of other witnesses,’ I said to keep him quiet. ‘I really don’t want to prolong this witness’s ordeal by keeping her in the witness-box a moment longer.’ So I sat down and Sandy gave me another of his cross whispers, ‘Why don’t you ask her the vital question?’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Wasn’t Jumbo Wilson a pooftah?’

  ‘For a soldier, old darling,’ I whispered back, ‘you really know so little about murder. You don’t endear yourself to the Court by asking the weeping widow if her husband wasn’t a pooftah. It sort of adds insult to injury. No, I didn’t ask the vital question. But I got the vital answer.’

  ‘What was that?’ Captain Sandy looked doubtful.

  ‘They “took” him. That’s what she said. Now wasn’t that rather a curious way of putting it?’ And as we sat in silence waiting for the next witness, some lines of old Robert Browning wandered idly into my mind: ‘Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,/ Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun…’ So did Mrs Wilson mean that death had taken Jumbo, or did she mean something else entirely?

  Now the door opened and an important-looking gentleman in the uniform of the Royal Army Medical Corps came to the witness table and was sworn by a member of the Court. I knew he would be the subject of my most important cross-examination, and I gazed at him with the close attention a matador gives to a bull as it enters the ring and does its preliminary business with the picadors. Lieutenant-Colonel Basil Borders, Doctor of Medicine and Fellow of The Royal College of Pathologists, was a tall, pale man with a thickening waist, ginger hair going thin, and rimless spectacles. He appeared, from the way he took the oath and answered Mike Watford’s early questions, to have a considerable opinion of his own importance, and when he was asked to give his post-mortem findings he answered clearly enough.