John Mortimer - Rumpole A La Carte

by Rumpole A La Carte(lit)

  'He got rid of her photograph,' Swainton did his best to explain, because he means to get rid ofher.' 'That is a most serious suggestion.' Graves greeted it with obvious relish, whilst I, slurping my soup, said, 'Balderdash, my Lord!' 'What?' The little novelist looked hurt.

  'The product of a mind addled with detective stories,' I suggested.

  'All right!' Swainton yapped at me impatiently. 'If you know so much, tell us this. Where do you think Mrs Mavis Britwell is? Still in bed with her clothes on?' 'Why don't you go and have a peep through the keyhole?' I suggested.

  'I wasn't thinking of that, exactly. But I was thinking...' " 'Oh, do try not to,' I warned him. 'It overexcites his Lordship.' 'The steward does up the cabins along our corridor at about 148 Btei?

  this time,' Swainton remembered. 'If we happened to be passing we might just see something extremely interesting.' 'You mean we might take a view?' The Judge was clearly enthusiastic and I tried to calm him down by saying,', Of the scene of a crime that hasn't been committed?' 'It's clearly our duty to investigate any sort of irregularity.' Graves was at his most self-important.

  'And no doubt your delight,' I suggested.

  'What did you say, Rumpole?' The Judge frowned.

  'I said you're perfectly right, my Lord. And no doubt you would wish the Defence to be represented at the scene of any possible crime.' 'Have you briefed yourself, Rumpole?' Swainton gave me an unfriendly smile. I took a final gulp of soup and told him, 'I certainly have, as there's no one else to do it for me.' When we got down to the corridor outside the cabins, the trolley with clean towels and sheets was outside the Graves's residence, where work was being carried out. We loitered around, trying to look casual, and then Bill Britwell greatly helped the Prosecution by emerging from his door, which he shut carefully behind him. He looked at Graves in a startled and troubled sort of way and said, 'Oh. It's you! Good morning, Judge.' 'My dear Britwell. And how's your wife this morning?' The Judge smiled with patent insincerity, as though meaning. We certainly don't hope she's well, as that would be far too boring.

  'I'm afraid she's no better,' Britwell reassured them. 'No better at all. In fact she's got to stay in bed very quietly. No visitors, I'm afraid. Now, if you'll excuse me.' He made his way quickly down the corridor and away from us on some errand or other, and Hilda opened the door of our cabin which, you will remember, was dead opposite the berth of the Britwells. 'Ah, Mrs Rumpole.' His Lordship was delighted to see her. 'Perhaps you'd allow us to be your guests, just for a moment?' and, although I gave Hilda a warning about helping the Prosecution, She eagerly invited the judicial team in, al, fhough she asked them to forgive 'the terrible mess'. 'Oh, we can put up with any little inconvenience,' the Judge boomed in 149 his most lugubrious courtroom accent, 'in our quest for the truth!' So the search party took refuge in our cabin until the steward pushed his trolley up to the Britwells' door, unlocked it with his pass key and went inside, leaving the door open. Graves waited for a decent interval to elapse and then he led Swainton and me across the corridor and through the door, while the steward was putting towels in the bathroom. There was no one in either of the twin beds, and only one of them seemed to have been slept in. There was no powder, make-up or perfume on the dressing-table and, so far as one quick look could discover, no sign of Mrs Mavis Britwell at all.

  'Can I help you, gentlemen?' The steward came in from the bathroom, surprised by the invasion. 'Oh, I'm sorry!' Swainton apologized with total lack of conviction. 'We must have got the wrong cabin. They all look so alike. Particularly,' he added with deep meaning, 'those with only a single occupant.' That night, in the Old Salts' bar. Graves and Swainton were seated at the counter, and Gloria was drawing towards the end of her act, when I intruded again on their discussion of the state of the evidence.

  'Britwell told us a deliberate lie,' the Judge was saying.

  'He distinctly said she was in the room,' Swainton agreed.

  'In my view his evidence has to be accepted with extreme caution,' Graves ruled. 'On any subject.' 'I don't see why.' I put my oar in and Swainton gave a little yapping laugh and said, 'Here comes the perpetual defender.' 'We all tell the odd lie, don't we?' I suggested, and then I ordered a large glass of claret, which I had christened Chateau Bilgewater, from Alfred, the barman.

  'Speak for yourself, Rumpole.' Graves looked at me as though I was probably as big a liar as the Reverend Bill. I wasn't going to let him get away with that without a spot of doss-examination, so I put this to his Lordship. 'When you met my wife on the deck the other morning, didn't you tell her that you had no idea she was on the boat?' 'I may have said that,' the Judge conceded.

  'And I distinctly saw you at the Captain's cocktail party the night before. You caught sight of Mrs Hilda Rumpole and went beetling out of the room because you recognized her!' 'Rumpole! That is...' The Judge seemed unable to find words to describe my conduct so I supplied them for him. 'I know. A grossly improper argument. You may have to report it to the proper authorities.' "".v, 'Gentlemen!' Swainton was, unusually, acting as a peacemaker. 'We may all tell the odd white lie occasionally, but this is a far more serious matter. We have to face the fact that Mrs Britwell has apparently disappeared.' 'In the midst of the words she was trying to say,' I suggested: 'In the midst of her laughter and glee, She softly and suddenly vanished away For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.' 'The question is', Swainton was in no mood for Lewis Carroll, 'what action should we take?' 'But who exactly is the Boojum, or the Snark, come to that?' This, I felt, was the important question.

  'The circumstances are no doubt very suspicious.' Graves had his head on one side, his lips pursed, his brandy glass in his hand, and was doing his best to sound extremely judicial.

  'Suspicious of what?' I had to put the question. 'Is the theory that Bill Britwell pushed his wife overboard for the sake of a little life insurance and then kept quiet about it? What's the point of that?' 'It's possible he may have got rid of her,' Swainton persisted, 'for whatever reason...' 'If you think that, stop the boat,' I told them. 'Send for helicopters. Organize a rescue operation.' 'I'm afraid it's a little late for that.' Swainton looked extremely serious. 'If he did anything, my feeling is, he did it last night. In some way, I think, the event may have been connected with the photographs that were thrown into the water.' So they sat on their bar stools and thought it over, the Judge an" the fiction writer, like an old eagle and a young sparrow on I' 151 their perches, and then Graves rather lost his bottle. 'The circumstances are highly suspicious, of course,' he spoke carefully, 'but can we say they amount to a certainty?' 'Of course we can't,' I told them, and then launched my attack on the learned Judge. 'The trouble with the Judiciary is that you see crime in everything. It's the way an entomologist goes out for walks in the countryside and only notices the beetles.' Graves thought this over in silence and then made a cautious pronouncement. 'If we were sure, of course, we could inform the police at Gibraltar. It might be a case for Interpol.' But Swainton had dreamed up another drama. 'I have a suggestion to make. Judge. If you agree. Tomorrow I'm giving my lecture, "How I Think Up My Plots". I presume you're all coming?' 'Don't bet on it!' I told him. But he went on, undeterred. 'I may add something to my text for Britwell's benefit. Keep your eyes on him when I say it.' 'You mean, observe his demeanour?' The Judge got the point.

  Looking down the bar, I saw Gloria talking to Alfred, the barman, while beside me Swainton was babbling with delight at his ingenious plan. 'See if he looks guilty,' he said. 'Do you think that's an idea?' ' 'Not exactly original,' I told him. 'Shakespeare used it in Hamlet.' 'Did he, really?' The little author seemed surprised. 'It might be even better in my lecture.' By now I had had about as much as I could take of the Judge and his side-kick, so I excused myself and moved to join Gloria, who was giving some final instructions to the barman.

  'A bottle of my usual to take away, Alfred,' I heard her say.

  'The old and tawny. Oh, and a couple of glasses, could you let us have? They keep getting broken.' '
Miss Gloria de la Have?' I greeted her, and she gave me a smile of recognition. 'Aren't you the gentleman that requested my old song?' A 'I haven't heard you sing it for years,' I told her. 'Music halls don't exist any more, dc they?' 'Worse luck!' She pulled a sour face. 'It's a drag, this is, 152 having to do an act afloat. Turns your stomach when the sea oets choppy? and there's not much life around here, is there?' She looked along the bar. 'More like a floating old people's home. I'm prepared to scream if anyone else requests "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes". I want to say it soon will, in yours, dear, in the crematorium!' 'I remember going to the Metropolitan in the Edgware Road.' 'You went to the old Met.?' Gloria was smiling.

  ' "Who's that kicking up a noise?"' I intoned the first line of the song and she joined me in a way that made the Judge stare at us with surprise and disapproval: 'Who's that giggling with the boys?

  My little sister!' 'That was my act, the long and short of it,' Gloria confirmed my recollection. 'Betty Dee and Buttercup. I was Buttercup's straight man.' •'' 'Wasn't an alleged comic on the same bill?' I asked her.

  'Happy Harry someone. A man who did a rather embarrassing drunk act, if I remember.' 'Was there?' Gloria stopped smiling. 'I can't recall, exactly.' 'And about Buttercup?' I asked. 'Rather a pretty girl, wasn't she? What's happened to her?' 'Can't tell you that, I'm afraid. We haven't kept in touch.' And Gloria turned back to the barman. 'My old and tawny, Alfred?' She picked up the bottle of port and the glasses the barman had put in front of her and went out of the bar. I let her get a start and then I decided to follow her. She went down corridors between cabin doors and down a flight of stairs to a lower deck where a notice on the wall read second-class passengers. From the bottom of the stairs I watched as she walked down a long corridor, a tall, sequined woman with a muscular back. Then she opened a cabin door and went inside.

  n the normal course of events, a lecture 'How I Think Up My lots by Howard Swainton would have commanded my atteni on somewhat less than an address by Soapy Sam Bollard to 153 the Lawyers As Christians Society on the home-life of the Prophet Amos. However, Swainton's threatened reenactment of the play scene from Hamlet seemed likely to add a certain bizarre interest to an otherwise tedious occasion, so I found myself duly seated in the ship's library alongside Hilda and Judge Graves.

  Bill Britwell, whom Swainton had pressed to attend, was a few rows behind us. Dead on the appointed hour, the bestselling author bobbed up behind a podium and, after a polite smattering of applause, told us how difficult plots were to come by and how hard he had to work on their invention in order to feed his vast and eager public's appetite for a constant diet of Swainton. An author's work, he told us, was never done, and although he might seem to be enjoying himself, drinking soup on the deck and assisting at the evening's entertainment in the Old Salts' bar, he was, in fact, hard at work on his latest masterpiece. Absence of Body, the story of a mysterious disappearance at sea. This led him to dilate on the question of whether a conviction for murder is possible if the corpse fails to put in an appearance.

  'The old idea of the corpus delicti as a defence has now been laid, like the presumably missing corpse, to rest.' Swainton was in full flow. 'The defence is dead and buried, if not the body. Some years ago a steward on an ocean-going liner was tried for the murder of a woman passenger. It was alleged that he'd made love to her, either with or without her consent, and then pushed her through a porthole out into the darkness of the sea. Her body was never recovered. The Defence relied heavily on the theory of the corpus delicti. Without a body, the ingenious barrister paid to defend the steward said, there could be no conviction.' At this. Graves couldn't resist turning round in his seat to stare at Bill Britwell, who was in fact stirring restlessly. 'The Judge and the Jury would have none of this,' Swainton went on. 'The steward was condemned to death, although, luckily for him, the death sentence was then abolished. This case gave me the germ of an idea for the new tale which I am going to introduce to you tonight. Ladies and Gentlemen. You are 154 privileged to be the first audience to whom I shall read chapter one of the brand-new Stainton mystery entitled Absence of Body.' He produced a wodge of typescript and Linda Milsom gazed up at him adoringly as he started to read: ' "When Joe Andrews suggested to his wife that they go on a cruise for their honeymoon, she was delighted. She might not have been so pleased if she had had an inkling of the plan that was already forming itself at the back of his mind..."' At which point there was the sound of a gasp and a chair being scraped back behind us. Obediently playing the part of guilty King Claudius, Bill Britwell rose from his seat and fled from the room.

  'You saw that, Rumpole,' the Judge whispered to me with great satisfaction. 'Isn't that evidence of guilt?' 'Either of guilt,' I told him, 'or terminal boredom.' The ship's gift shop, as well as stocking a large selection of Howard Swainton, and others of those authors whose books are most frequently on show at airports, railway stations and supermarket checkouts, sold all sorts of sweets, tobacco, sun oil (not yet needed), ashtrays, table mats and T-shirts embellished with portraits of the late Queen Boadicea, giant pandas and teddy bears, cassettes and other articles of doubtful utility.

  On the day of the first fancy-dress ball, which was to take place on the evening before our arrival at Gibraltar, the gift shop put on display a selection of hats, false beards, noses, head-dresses and other accoutrements for those who lacked the skill or ingenuity to make their own costumes. In the afternoon the shop was full of passengers in search of disguises in which they could raise a laugh, cut a dash, or realize a childhood longing to be someone quite different from whoever they eventually turned out to be.

  Rumpole,' Hilda was kind enough to say, 'you look quite romantic.' I had put a black patch over one eye and sported a three-cornered hat with a skull and cross-bones on the front.

  Looking in the shop mirror, I saw Jolly Roger Rumpole or olack Cap'n Rumpole of the Bailey. And then She looked across the shop to where the Reverend Bill was picking over a selection of funny hats. 'You wouldn't think he'd have the pounds 155 nerve to dress up this evening, would you?' She said with a disapproving click of her tongue. I left her and joined Britwell.

  I spoke to him in confidential but, I hope, cheering tones.

  'You must be getting tired of it,' I said sympathetically.

  'Tired of what?' 'People asking "How's your wife?"' 'They're very kind.' If he were putting on an act, he was doing it well. 'Extremely considerate.' 'It must be spoiling your trip.' 'Mavis being ill?' He beamed at me vaguely through his spectacles. 'Yes, it is rather.' 'Mr Justice Graves,' I began and he looked suddenly nervous and said, 'The Judge?' 'Yes, the Judge. He seems very worried about your wife.' 'Why's he worried?' Britwell asked anxiously.

  'About her illness, I suppose. He wants to see her.' 'Why should he want that?' 'You know what judges are,' I told him. 'Always poking their noses into things that don't really concern them. Shall we see your wife tonight at the fancy-dress party?' 'Well. No. I'm afraid not. Mavis won't be up to it. Such a pity. It's the sort of thing she'd love so much, if she were only feeling herself.' And then Hilda joined us, looking, although I say it myself, superb. She was wearing a helmet and breastplate and carrying a golden trident and a shield emblazoned with the Union Jack. Staring at my wife with undisguised admiration, I could only express myself in song: 'Rule Britannia!

  Britannia rules the waves, (I warbled) Britain never, never, never shall be...' 'Is it going too far?' She asked nervously. But I shook my head and looked at Bill Britwell as I completed the verse: f, 'Marri-ed to a mermaied, At the bottom of the deep blue seal' There was a sound of considerable revelry by night and as that 156 old terror of the Spanish Main, Pirate Cap'n Rumpole made his way in the company of assorted pierrots, slave girls, pashas, clowns, Neptunes and mermaids towards the big saloon from which the strains of dance music were sounding, I passed an office doorway from which a Chinese mandarin emerged in the company of Captain Order, who was attending the festivities disguised as a ship's captain. As I passed them I heard
Order saw 'The police at Gib have the message, sir. So if he can't produce the lady...' 'Yes, yes. Captain.' The mandarin, who looked only a little less snooty and superior than Mr Justice Graves in his normal guise, did his best to shut the officer up as he saw this old sea-dog approaching from windward. 'Why there you are, Rumpole! Have you had some sort of an accident to your eye? Nothing serious, I hope.' Hilda and I have not danced together since our first honeymoon. As I have already indicated, the exercise was not a startling success and that night, with all the other excitement going on, she seemed content not to repeat the experiment. We sat in front of a bottle of the Bilgewater red, to which I had grown quite attached in an appalling sort of way, and we watched the dancers. Howard Swainton, as an undersized Viking, was steering the lanky Linda Milsom, a slave girl, who towered over him. It might be an exaggeration to say his eyelevel was that of the jewel in her navel, but not too much of one. Across the room we could see the Reverend Bill holding a glass and admiring the scene. He was wearing a turban, a scimitar and a lurid beard. 'Bluebeard!' Hilda said. 'How very appropriate.' 'Oh, for heaven's sake!' I told her, 'don't you start imagining things.' And then a familiarly icy voice cut into our conversation.