The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  ‘I wants you to f … f … fight it. I’m not going into any nuthouse.’ Peter Delgardo’s instructions were perfectly clear.

  ‘And if we fight we might very well lose. You understand that?’

  ‘My b … b … brothers have told me … You’re hot stuff, they told me … Tip-top l … awyer.’

  Once again I was puzzled by the height of my reputation with the Delgardos. But I wasn’t going to argue. ‘Tip-top? Really? Well, let’s say I’ve got to know a trick or two, over the years … a few wrinkles … Sit down, Peter.’

  Peter sat down slowly, and I sat opposite him, ignoring the restive Nooks and his articled clerk.

  ‘Now, hadn’t you better tell me exactly what happened, the night Tosher MacBride got stabbed?’

  I was working overtime a few days later when my door opened and in walked no less a person than Guthrie Featherstone, QC, MP, our Head of Chambers. My relations with Featherstone, ever since he pipped me at the post for the position of Head, have always been somewhat uneasy, and were not exactly improved when I seized command of the ship when he was leading me in the matter of the ‘Dartford Post Office Robbery’. We have little enough in common. Featherstone, as Henry pointed out, wears a nice bowler and a black velvet collar on his overcoat; his nails are well manicured, his voice is carefully controlled, as are his politics. He gets on very well with judges and solicitors and not so well with the criminal clientele. He has never been less than polite to me, even at my most mutinous moments, and now he smiled with considerable bonhomie.

  ‘Rumpole! You’re a late bird!’

  ‘Just trying to feather my nest. With a rather juicy little murder.’

  Featherstone dropped into my tattered leather armchair, reserved for clients, and carefully examined his well-polished black brogues.

  ‘Maurice Nooks told me, he’s not taking in a leader.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I know the last time I led you wasn’t succès fou.’

  ‘I’m a bit of a back-seat driver, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Of course, you’re an old hand at crime,’ Featherstone conceded.

  ‘An old lag you might say.’

  ‘But it’s a question of tactics in this case. Maurice said, if I appeared, it might look as if they’d rather over-egged the pudding.’

  ‘You think the jury might prefer – a bit of good plain cooking?’ I looked at him and he smiled delightfully.

  ‘You put things rather well, sometimes.’

  There was a pause, and then the learned leader got down to what was, I suppose, the nub and the purpose of his visit.

  ‘Horace. I’m anxious to put an end to any sort of rift between the two senior men in Chambers. It doesn’t make for a happy ship.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’ I gave him a brief nautical salute from my position at the desk.

  ‘I’m glad you agree. Sérieusement, Horace, we don’t see enough of each other socially.’ He paused again, but I could find nothing to say. ‘I’ve got a couple of tickets for the Scales of Justice ball at the Savoy. Would you join me and Marigold?’

  To say I was taken aback would be an understatement. I was astonished. ‘Let’s get this quite clear, Featherstone.’

  ‘Oh “Guthrie”, please.’

  ‘Very well, Guthrie. You’re asking me to trip the light fantastic toe … with your wife?’

  ‘And if you’d like to bring your good lady.’

  I looked at Featherstone in total amazement. ‘My …’

  ‘Your missus.’

  ‘Are you referring, at all, to my wife? She Who Must Be Obeyed? Do I take it you actually want to spend an evening out with She!’

  ‘It’ll be great fun.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ He had lost me now. I went to the door and unhooked the mac and the old hat, preparatory to calling it a day. However, Featherstone had some urgent matter to communicate, apparently of an embarrassing nature.

  ‘Oh, and Horace … this is rather embarrassing. It’s just that … It’s well … your name came up on the Bench at our Inn only last week. I was lunching with Mr Justice Prestcold.’

  ‘That must have been a jolly occasion,’ I told him. ‘Like dinner with the Macbeths.’ I knew Mr Justice Prestcold of old, and he and I had never hit it off, or seen eye to eye. In fact you might say there was always a cold wind blowing in Court between Counsel and the Bench whenever Rumpole rose to his feet before Prestcold, J. He could be guaranteed to ruin my cross-examination, interrupt my speech, fail to sum up the defence and send any Rumpole client down for a hefty six if he could find the slightest excuse for it. Prestcold was an extraordinarily clean man, his cuffs and bands were whiter than white, he was forever polishing his rimless glasses on a succession of snowy handkerchiefs. They say, and God knows what truth there is in it, that Prestcold travels on circuit with a portable loo seat wrapped in plastic. His clerk has the unenviable job of seeing that it is screwed in at the lodgings, so his Lordship may not sit where less fastidious judges have sat before.

  ‘He was asking who we had in Chambers and I was able to tell him Horace Rumpole, inter alia.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Frank Prestcold eating. I suppose he might just be brought to sniff the bouquet of a grated carrot.’

  ‘And he said, “You mean the fellow with the disgraceful hat?” ’

  ‘Mr Justice Prestcold was talking about my hat?’ I couldn’t believe my ears.

  ‘He seemed to think, forgive me for raising this, that your hat set the worst possible example to younger men at the Bar.’

  With enormous self-control I kept my temper. ‘Well, you can tell Mr Justice Prestcold – the next time you’re sharing the Benchers’ Vegetarian Platter … That when I was last before him I took strong exception to his cufflinks. They looked to me just as cheap and glassy as his eyes!’

  ‘Don’t take offence, Horace. It’s just not worth it, you know, taking offence at Her Majesty’s judges. We’ll look forward to the Savoy. Best to your good lady.’

  I crammed on the hat, gave him a farewell wave and left him. I felt, that evening, that I was falling out of love with the law. I really couldn’t believe that Mr Justice Prestcold had been discussing my hat. I mean, wasn’t the crime rate rising? Wasn’t the State encroaching on our liberties? Wasn’t Magna Carta tottering? Whither Habeus Corpus? What was to be done about the number of twelve-year-old girls who are making advances to old men in cinemas? What I thought was, hadn’t judges of England got enough on their plates without worrying about my hat! I gave the matter mature consideration on my way home on the Inner Circle, and decided that they probably hadn’t.

  A few mornings later I picked up the collection of demands, final demands and positively final demands which constitutes our post and among the hostile brown envelopes I found a gilded and embossed invitation card. I took the whole lot into the kitchen to file away in the tidy bin when She Who Must Be Obeyed entered and caught me at it.

  ‘Horace,’ She said severely. ‘Whatever are you doing with the post?’

  ‘Just throwing it away. Always throw bills away the first time they come in. Otherwise you only encourage them.’

  ‘If you had a few decent cases, Rumpole, if you weren’t always slumming round the Magistrates’ Courts, you might not be throwing away bills all the time.’ At which she pedalled open the tidy bin and spotted the fatal invitation.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I think it’s the gas.’ It was too late, She had picked the card out from among the potato peelings.

  ‘I never saw a gas bill with a gold embossed crest before. It’s an invitation! To the Savoy Hotel!’ She started to read the thing. ‘Horace Rumpole and Lady.’

  ‘You wouldn’t enjoy it,’ I hastened to assure her.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I enjoy it?’ She wiped the odd fragment of potato off the card, carried it into the living room in state, and gave it pride of place on the mantelpiece. I followed her, protesting.

  ‘You know what it is. Boi
led shirts. Prawn cocktail. Watching a lot of judges pushing their wives round the parquet to selections from Oklahoma.’

  ‘It’ll do you good, Rumpole. That’s the sort of place you ought to be seen in: the Scales of Justice ball.’

  ‘It’s quite impossible.’ The situation was becoming desperate.

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  I had an inspiration, and assumed an expression of disgust. ‘We’re invited by Marigold Featherstone.’

  ‘The wife of your Head of Chambers?’

  ‘An old boot! A domestic tyrant. You know what the wretched Guthrie calls her? She Who Must Be Obeyed. No. The ball is out, Hilda. You and Marigold wouldn’t hit it off at all.’

  Well, I thought, She and sweet Marigold would never meet, so I was risking nothing. I seized the hat and prepared to retreat. ‘Got to leave you now. Murder calls.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me we were back to murder? This is good news.’ Hilda was remarkably cheerful that morning.

  ‘Murder,’ I told her, ‘is certainly better than dancing.’ And I was gone about my business. Little did I know that the moment my back was turned Hilda looked up the Featherstones’ number in the telephone book.

  ‘You can’t do it to Peter! I tell you, you can’t do it! Fight the case? How can he fight the case?’ Leslie Delgardo had quite lost the cool and knowing air of a successful East End businessman. His face was flushed and he thumped his fist on my table, jangling his identity bracelet and disturbing the notice of additional evidence I was reading, that of Bernard Whelpton, known as ‘Four Eyes’.

  ‘Whelpton’s evidence doesn’t help. I’m sure you’ll agree, Mr Rumpole,’ Nooks said gloomily.

  ‘You read that! You read what “Four Eyes” has to say.’ Leslie collapsed breathless into my client’s chair. I read the document which ran roughly as follows. ‘Tosher MacBride used to take the mick out of Peter on account he stammered and didn’t have no girlfriends. One night I saw Peter try to speak to a girl in the Paradise Rooms. He was asking the girl to have a drink but his stutter was so terrible. Tosher said to her, “Come on, darling … It’ll be breakfast time before the silly git finishes asking for a light ale.” After I heard Peter Delgardo say as he’d get Tosher. He said he’d like to cut him one night.’

  ‘He’s not a well boy.’ Leslie was wiping his forehead with a mauve silk handkerchief.

  ‘When I came out of the Old Justice pub that night I see Tosher on the pavement and Petey Delgardo was kneeling beside him. There was blood all over.’ I looked up at Nooks. ‘You know it’s odd. No one actually saw the stabbing.’

  ‘But Petey was there wasn’t he?’ Leslie was returning the handkerchief to his breast pocket. ‘And what’s the answer about the knife?’

  ‘In my humble opinion,’ Nooks’s opinions were often humble, ‘the knife in the car is completely damning.’

  ‘Oh completely.’ I got up, lit a small cigar and told Leslie my own far from humble opinion. ‘You know, I’d have had no doubts about this case if you hadn’t just proved your brother innocent.’

  ‘I did?’ The big man in the chair looked at me in a wild surmise.

  ‘When you sent Doctor Lewis Bleen, the world-famous trick cyclist, the head-shrinker extraordinaire, down to see Petey in Brixton. If you’d done a stabbing, and you were offered a nice quiet trip to hospital, wouldn’t you take it? If the evidence was dead against you?’

  ‘You mean Peter turned it down?’ Leslie Delgardo clearly couldn’t believe his ears.

  ‘Of course he did!’ I told him cheerfully. ‘Petey may not be all that bright, poor old darling, but he knows he didn’t kill Tosher MacBride.’

  The committal was at Stepney Magistrates’ Court and Henry told me that there was a good deal of interest and that the vultures of the press might be there.

  ‘I thought I should warn you, sir. Just in case you wanted to buy …’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I interrupted him. ‘Perhaps, Henry, there’s a certain amount of force in your argument. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” said the preacher.’ Here was I a barrister of a certain standing, doing a notable murder alone and without a leader, the type of person whose picture might appear in the Evening Standard, and I came to the reluctant conclusion that my present headgear was regrettably unphotogenic. I took a taxi to St James’s Street and invested in a bowler, which clamped itself to the head like a vice but which caused Henry, when he saw it, to give me a smile of genuine gratitude.

  That evening I had forgotten the whole subject of hats and was concerned with a matter that interests me far more deeply: blood. I had soaked the rubber sponge that helps with the washing-up and, standing at the kitchen sink, stabbed violently down into it with a table knife. It produced, as I had suspected, a spray of water, leaving small spots all over my shirt and waistcoat.

  ‘Horace! Horace, you look quite different.’ Hilda was looking at the evening paper in which there was a picture of Pete Delgardo’s heroic defender arriving at Court. ‘I know what it is, Horace! You went out. And bought a new hat. Without me.’

  I stabbed again, having resoaked the sponge.

  ‘A bowler. Daddy used to wear a bowler. It’s an improvement.’ Hilda was positively purring at my dapper appearance in the paper.

  ‘Little splashes. All over the place,’ I observed, committing further mayhem on the sponge.

  ‘Horace. Whatever are you doing to the washing-up?’

  ‘All over. In little drops. Not one great stain. Little drops. Like a fine rain. And plenty on the cuff.’

  ‘Your cuff’s soaking. Oh, why couldn’t you roll up your sleeve?’

  I felt the crook of my arm, and was delighted to discover that it was completely dry.

  ‘Now I know why you didn’t want to take me to the Scales of Justice annual ball.’ Hilda looked at the Evening Standard with less pleasure. ‘You’re too grand now, aren’t you, Rumpole? New hat! Picture in the paper! Big case! “Horace Rumpole. Defender of the Stepney Road Stabber”. Big noise at the Bar. I suppose you didn’t think I’d do you credit.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Hilda.’ I mopped up some of the mess round the sink, and dried my hands.

  ‘Then why?’

  I went and sat beside her, and tried to comfort her with Keats. ‘Look. We’re in the Autumn of our years. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,/Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun … ’

  ‘I really can’t understand why!’

  ‘Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?/Think not on them, thou hast thy music too. But not jigging about like a couple of Punk Rockers. At a dance!’

  ‘I very much doubt if they have Punk Rockers at the Savoy. Doesn’t it occur to you, Rumpole? We never go out!’

  ‘I’m perfectly happy. I’m not longing to go to the ball, like bloody Cinderella.’

  ‘Well, I am!’

  I thought Hilda was being most unreasonable, and I decided to point out the fatal flaw in the entire scheme concerning the Scales of Justice ball.

  ‘Hilda. I can’t dance.’

  ‘You can’t what?’

  ‘Dance. I can’t do it.’

  ‘You’re lying, Rumpole!’

  The accusation was so unexpected that I looked at her in a wild surmise. And then she said,

  ‘Would you mind casting your mind back to the 14th of August 1938?’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘You proposed to me, Rumpole. As a matter of fact, it was when you proposed. I shouldn’t expect you to remember.’

  ‘1938. Of course! The year I did the “Euston Bank Robbery”. Led by your father.’

  ‘Led by Daddy. You were young, Rumpole. Comparatively young. And where did you propose, exactly? Can’t you try and remember that?’

  As I have said, I have no actual memory of proposing to Hilda at all. It seemed to me that I slid into the lifetime contract unconsciously, as a weary man drifts off into sleep. Any words, I felt sure, were spoken by her. I also had temporarily forgotten
where the incident took place and hazarded a guess.

  ‘At a bus stop?’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t at a bus stop.’

  ‘It’s just that your father always seemed to be detaining me at bus stops. I thought you might have been with him at the time.’

  ‘You proposed to me in a tent.’ Hilda came to my aid at last. ‘There was a band. And champagne. And some sort of cold collation. Daddy had taken me to the Inns of Court ball to meet some of the bright young men in Chambers. He told me then, you’d been very helpful to him on blood groups.’

  ‘It was the year before I did the “Penge Bungalow Murders”,’ I remembered vaguely. ‘Hopeless on blood, your father, he could never bring himself to look at the photographs.’

  ‘And we danced together. We actually waltzed together.’

  ‘That’s simple! That’s just a matter of circling round and round. None of your bloody jigging about concerned with it!’

  It was then that Hilda stood up and took my breath away. ‘Well, we can waltz again, Rumpole. You’d better get into training for it. I rang up Marigold Featherstone and I told her we’d be delighted to accept the invitation.’ She gave me a little smile of victory. ‘And I tell you what. She didn’t sound like an old boot at all.’

  I was speechless, filled with mute resentment. I’d been double-crossed.

  My toilette for the Delgardo murder case went no further than the acquisition of a new hat. As I sat in Court listening to the evidence for the prosecution of Bernard ‘Four Eyes’ Whelpton, I was vaguely conscious of the collapsed state of the wig (bought second-hand from an ex-Chief Justice of Tonga in the early thirties), the traces of small cigar and breakfast egg on the waistcoat, and the fact that the bands had lost their pristine crispness and were forever sagging to reveal the glitter of the brass collar-stud.

  I looked up and saw the Judge staring at me with bleak disapproval and felt desperately to ensure that the fly buttons were safely fastened. Fate span her bloody wheel, and I had drawn Mr Justice Prestcold; Frank Prestcold, who took such grave exception to my hat, and who now looked without any apparent enthusiasm at the rest of my appearance. Well, I couldn’t help him, I couldn’t even hold up the bowler to prove I’d tried. I did my best to ignore the Judge and concentrate on the evidence. Mr Hilary Painswick, QC, the perfectly decent old darling who led for the prosecution, was just concreting in ‘Four Eyes’s story.