The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

‘See you here in the morning. We’ll talk about our witness.’

  I left my puzzled leader and caught an Inter-City train. I sat munching an illicit teacake as a railway guard, pretending to be an air hostess, came over the intercom, and announced that we were due on the ground at Liverpool Street approximately twenty minutes late, and apologized for the delay. (I waited to be told to fasten my seat belt because of a spot of turbulence around Bishop’s Stortford.) What I was doing was strictly unprofessional. We legal hacks are not supposed to chatter to witnesses in criminal matters, and Featherstone would have been deeply pained if he had known where I was going. And yet I was on a quest for the truth and justice for Jackie, although she, also, would not have thought my journey really necessary. We arrived at Liverpool Street Station after half an hour’s delay (Please collect all your hand baggage and thank you for flying British Rail), and I persuaded a taxi to take me to Cricklewood.

  When we stopped at the anonymous surburban house, I was glad to see a light on in a downstairs room. Freddy Jason came to the door when I rang the electric chime. He was wearing an old sweater and a pair of bedroom slippers. He led me into a room where a television set was booming, and I noticed a tray decorated with the remains of a pork pie, French bread and cheese, and a couple of bottles of Guinness.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid,’ I asked him, ‘of putting on weight?’

  ‘I told you. I don’t.’ He clicked the television set into silence.

  ‘How long can you keep it up, I wonder?’

  ‘Keep what up?’

  ‘Being a thin person.’

  He looked at me, the skinny, mousy ex-accountant and said, with real anxiety,

  ‘How’s the trial going? Jackie won’t let me near the place. Is it going well?’ He had a dry, impersonal voice like the click of a computer adding up an overdraft.

  ‘It’s going down the drain.’

  He sat down then. He seemed exhausted.

  ‘I warned her,’ he said. ‘I was afraid of that. What can I do?’

  ‘Do? Come and give evidence for her!’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jason looked at me helplessly. ‘What can I say? I didn’t get to know Jackie until after Barney’s accident. I don’t think I’d be much help in the witness-box, do you?’

  ‘It depends,’ I said, ‘on what you mean by help.’

  ‘Well. Does Jackie want me to come?’

  ‘Jackie doesn’t know I’m asking you.’

  ‘Well, then. I can’t help.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Do you want your wife to do a life sentence in Holloway? For a murder she didn’t commit?’

  He looked deeply unhappy. A thin man who had become, however unwillingly, involved in a fat man’s death.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t want that.’

  ‘Then you’d better come back on the Inter-City to Norfolk. You might as well finish off your supper. I mean, you don’t have to worry, do you? About your weight.’

  When I got to the Court the next morning I found Featherstone and Mr Tonkin anxiously pacing the hall. I gave them what comfort I could.

  ‘Cheer up, old darlings. Things may not be as bad as you think. Her husband’s here. He’ll have to give evidence.’

  ‘Freddy Jason?’ Tonkin frowned.

  ‘What on earth can he do for us?’ Featherstone asked.

  ‘Well, he certainly can’t make things any worse. He can say he didn’t get to know Jackie until after the accident. At least we can scotch the idea that she pushed Barney out to marry another man.’

  ‘I suppose he could say that.’ Mr Tonkin sounded doubtful. ‘You think we need this evidence, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m sure we need it.’ I turned to my leader. ‘Featherstone, I have a certain experience in this profession. I did win the Penge Bungalow Murders alone and without a leader.’

  ‘So you’re fond of telling me.’

  ‘In any case, the junior is accorded the privilege of calling at least one witness in a serious case, with the permission of his learned leader, of course.’

  ‘You want to call Jason?’ In fact, Featherstone sounded extremely grateful. If the witness turned out a disaster, at least I should get the blame.

  ‘Would you leave him to me?’ I asked politely.

  ‘All right, Rumpole. You call him. If you think it’ll do the slightest good. At least you won’t be whispering instructions to me the whole time.’

  When the Court had reassembled, and the Judge had been settled down on his seat, found his place in his notebook, been given a sharp, new pencil and put on his glasses, he looked at my leader encouragingly and said,

  ‘Yes, Mr Featherstone.’

  ‘My Lord,’ Featherstone said with a good deal of detachment, ‘my learned junior, Mr Rumpole, will call the next witness.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Rumpole?’ His Lordship switched his attention to my humble self.

  For the first and last time in the Shenstone-on-Sea murder trial, I staggered to my feet. The calm woman in the dock gave me a little smile of welcome.

  ‘Yes, my Lord,’ I said. ‘I will call the next witness. Call Frederick Jason.’

  ‘No!’ Jackie was no longer smiling. As the usher went out to fetch her husband I whispered to Tonkin to keep our client quiet and tell her that the evidence I was about to call was vital to her case. In fact, it was one of those rare defences which depended on nothing less than the truth.

  Tonkin was busy whispering to the lady in the dock when her pale and nervous second husband was brought into the Court and climbed into the witness-box. He took the oath very quietly.

  ‘I swear to God that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

  It was then that I asked the question which I had been waiting to put throughout the trial.

  ‘Is your name Barney Bateman?’

  The reactions were varied. The Judge looked shocked. Showing some tolerance towards an ageing junior who was undoubtedly past it, he said,

  ‘Haven’t you made a mistake, Mr Rumpole?’

  Featherstone felt it was his turn to whisper disapproving instructions and said,

  ‘Jason, Rumpole. His name’s Jason.’

  My client remained silent. I asked the question again.

  ‘I repeat. Is your name Barney Bateman?’ Then the witness looked, for the first time, at the prisoner with a sort of apology. She seemed, suddenly, much older and too tired to protest. I reflected that there is a strange thing about taking the oath, it sometimes makes people tell the truth. Anyway, we had at least found the corpse in the Shenstone murder. It was now speaking, with increasing liveliness, to the learned Judge.

  ‘My Lord,’ the witness said, ‘you can’t go on trying Jackie for murder. I’m still alive, you see.’ He smiled then, and I got a hint of the old Barney Bateman. ‘Still alive and living in Cricklewood.’

  It took another couple of days, of course, for the whole story to be told and for the good citizens of East Anglia to find Jackie Bateman (as she always was) not guilty of the murder with which she had been charged. Featherstone and I were eventually released and sat opposite each other in the British Rail tea car. My leader looked at me with a contented smile.

  ‘Well, Horace,’ he said. ‘I think that can be notched up among my successes.’

  ‘Oh yes, Guthrie,’ I agreed. ‘Many congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks. Of course one depends a good deal on one’s learned junior. Two heads are better than one, Horace. That’s what I always say.’

  ‘Three heads. Don’t forget Hilda’s.’

  ‘Your wife’s, Horace?’

  ‘You can’t fool She Who Must Be Obeyed,’ I said. ‘She told me that people don’t change, they keep on marrying the same husband. Jackie Bateman did exactly that.’

  It was quite a touching story, really. I was right about what they were doing when the birdwatcher spotted them. Not fighting, of course, but kissing each other goodbye. It was only to be a temporary parting.
Barney was to swim ashore, to some quiet little bit of beach. Then he shaved off his beard, went on a diet, dyed his hair and waited for his loving wife to collect the boodle. The murder trial was a nasty gust of wind, but she thought she’d sail through it. He knew she wasn’t going to. So he had to tell the truth.

  ‘They’ll charge her with the insurance swindle,’ my leader reminded me.

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid they will,’ I said, biting into another teacake. ‘I think I’ll do that case, Featherstone, if you don’t mind – alone and without a leader.’

  That night, still grateful to Hilda, I took her out for a celebration dinner at my favourite restaurant in the Strand. She looked at me, somewhat aghast as I placed my order.

  ‘Potted shrimps, I think. With plenty of hot toast. Oh, and steak-and-kidney pud, potatoes, swedes and Brussels sprouts. After that, we might consider the sweet trolley and I’ll have the wine list, please.’

  ‘Rumpole! You mustn’t eat all that,’ said She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  ‘Oh yes I must. You’re married to Rumpole, you know. Not some skinny ex-chartered accountant. You’re stuck with him and so am I. We can’t alter him, can we? Jackie’s case proved that. You can’t just change people entirely to suit your own convenience.’

  Rumpole and the Genuine Article

  I would like to dedicate this small volume of reminiscences to a much-abused and under-appreciated body of men. They practise many of the virtues most in fashion today. They rely strictly on free enterprise and individual effort. They adhere to strong monetarist principles. They do not join trade unions. Far from being in favour of closed shops, they do their best to see that most shops remain open, particularly during the hours of darkness. They are against state interference of any kind, being rugged individualists to a man. No. I’m not referring to lawyers. Will you please charge your glasses, ladies and gentlemen, and drink to absent friends, to the criminals of England. Without these invaluable citizens there would be no lawyers, no judges, no policemen, no writers of detective stories and absolutely nothing to put in the News of the World.

  It is better, I suppose, that I raise a solitary glass. I once proposed such a toast at a Chambers party, and my speech was greeted by a studied silence. Claude Erskine-Brown examined his fingernails, our clerk Henry, buried his nose in his Cinzano Bianco. Uncle Tom, our oldest inhabitant, looked as though he was about to enter a terminal condition. Dianne, who does what passes for typing in our little establishment at Equity Court in the Temple, giggled, it is true, but then Dianne will giggle at almost anything and only becomes serious, I have noticed, whenever I make a joke. A devout barrister known to me as Sam Bollard (of whom more, unfortunately, in the following pages) took me aside afterwards and told me that he considered my remarks to be in excessively bad taste, calculated to cause a breach of the peace and bring our Chambers into disrepute.

  Well, where would he be, I asked him, should the carrying of house-breaking implements by night vanish from the face of the earth? He told me that he could manage very well with his civil practice and happily didn’t have to rely on the sordid grubbing for a living round the Old Bailey which I appeared to enjoy. I left him, having regretted the fact that men with civil practices are often so remarkably un-civil when addressing their elders.

  So, as the night wears on, and as my wife Hilda (whom I must be careful not to refer to as ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ – not, at any rate, when she is in earshot) sleeps in her hairnet, dreaming of those far-off happy days when she cantered down the playing fields of Cheltenham Ladies College cradling her lacrosse net and aiming a sneaky pass at her old friend Dodo Perkins; as I sit at the kitchen table filling a barrister’s notebook with reminiscences (I see the bare bones of a nasty little manslaughter on the opposite page), I pour a glass of Château Thames Embankment (on special offer this week at Pommeroy’s Wine Bar – how else would Jack Pommeroy get anyone to buy it?) and drink, alone and in silence, to those industrious lawbreakers who seem to be participating in the one growth industry in our present period of recession. I can safely write that here. Whoever may eventually read these pages, you can bet your life that it won’t be Sam Bollard.

  I have been back in harness a good three years since my abortive retirement. I had, as you may remember, upped sticks to join my son Nick and his wife Erica in Florida, the Sunshine State.*

  She Who Must Be Obeyed apparently enjoyed life in that curious part of the world and was starting, somewhat painfully at first, to learn the language. I, as others have done before me, found that Miami had very little to offer unless you happened to be a piece of citrus fruit, and I began to feel an unendurable nostalgia for rain, secretaries rubbing their noses pink with crumpled paper handkerchiefs on the platform at Temple Station and the congealed steak-and-mushroom pie for luncheon in the pub opposite the Old Bailey. I got bored with cross-examining the nut-brown octogenarians we met on the beach, and longed for a good up-and-downer with the Detective Inspector in charge of the case, or even a dramatic dust-up with his Honour Judge Bullingham (otherwise known as the Mad Bull). I was a matador with nothing left to do but tease the cat. I needed a foeman worthy of my steel.

  It was a nice problem of bloodstains which brought me home to real life at the Old Bailey, and a good deal of diplomatic skill and dogged endurance which eased me back into the peeling leather chair behind the desk in my old room in Equity Court. When I returned, our Head of Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone, QC, MP (SDP), didn’t actually unroll the red carpet for me. In fact, and in the nicest possible way, of course, he informed me that there was no room at the Inn, and would have left me to carry on what was left of my practice from a barrow in Shepherd’s Bush Market, if I hadn’t seen a way back into my old tenancy.

  Well, that’s all water under the bridge by now, and the last three years have gone much as the last what is it, almost half a century? That is to say they have passed with a few triumphant moments when the jury came back and said in clear and ringing tones, ‘Not Guilty’, and a few nasty ones when you have to bid goodbye to a client in the cells (what do you say: ‘Win a few, lose a few’, or ‘See you again in about eight years’?). I have spent some enjoyable evenings in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, and my health has been no worse than usual, my only medical problem being a feeling of pronounced somnolence when listening to my learned friends making speeches, and a distinct nausea when hearing his Honour Judge Bullingham sum up.

  So life was going on much as usual, and I was pursuing the even tenor of my way in Equity Court, when I was faced with a somewhat unusual case which caused a good deal of a stir in artistic circles at the time, it being concerned, as so many artistic and, indeed, legal problems are, with the question so easily put yet answered with such confusion, ‘What is real and what is the most diabolical fake?’

  I first had the unnerving feeling that I was drifting away from reality, and that many of my assumptions were being challenged, when Guthrie Featherstone, QC, MP, knocked briefly on my door and almost immediately inserted his face, which wore an expression of profound, not to say haunted anxiety, into my room.

  ‘Rumpole!’ he said, gliding in and closing the door softly behind him, no doubt to block out eavesdroppers. ‘I say, Horace, are you working?’

  ‘Oh no, Featherstone,’ I said, ‘I’m standing on my head playing the bagpipes.’ The sarcasm was intentional. In fact I was wrestling with a nasty set of accounts, carefully doctored by a delinquent bank clerk. As, like the great apes, my mathematical abilities stop somewhere short at ‘one, two, three, many’, I have a rooted aversion to fraud cases. Studying accounts leads me to a good deal of blood, tears and the consumption of box loads of small cigars.

  Quite undeterred by the sharpness of my reply, the recently committed Social Democrat moved soundlessly towards my desk and ran a critical eye over my blurred and inaccurate calculations.

  ‘Well,’ said Featherstone, ‘fraud’s a nice clean crime really. Not like most of your practice. No blood. No sex.’

 
‘Do you think so, Featherstone?’ I asked casually, the QC, MP having failed to grip my full attention. ‘A bank cashier seems to have lost about half a million pounds. Probably his adding up was no better than mine.’

  ‘Still, it’s almost a respectable crime. Your practice has become quite decent lately. We may even see you prosecuting.’

  ‘No thank you,’ I said with the determined air of a man who has to draw the line somewhere.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘I’m not going to use my skills, such as they are, to force some poor devil into a condemned Victorian slum where he can be banged up with a couple of psychopaths and his own chamber pot.’ I gave my learned Head of Chambers Article One of the Rumpole Creed.

  ‘All the same, you being comparatively quiet of late, Horace, has led the Lord Chancellor’s office, I know, to look on these Chambers with a certain amount of, shall we say, “goodwill”?’

  I looked at Featherstone. He was wearing an expression which I can only describe as ‘coy’. ‘Shall we? Then I’d better get up to something noisy.’ I was joking, of course, but Featherstone became distinctly agitated.

  ‘Please, Horace. No. I beg you. Please. You heard about the awful thing that happened to old Moreton Colefax?’

  ‘Featherstone! I’m trying to add up.’ I tried to be firm with the fellow, but he sat himself down in my client’s chair and started to unburden himself as though he were revealing a dire plot he’d recently stumbled on involving the assassination of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the theft of the Crown Jewels.

  ‘The Lord Chancellor told Moreton that he was going to make him a judge. But the rule is, you mustn’t tell anyone till the appointment’s official. Well, Moreton told Sam Arbuckle, and Arbuckle told Grantley Simpson and Grantley told Ian and Jasper Rugeley over in Paper Buildings, and Ian and Jasper told Walter Gains whom he happened to meet in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, and …’

  ‘What is this, Featherstone? Some sort of round game?’ My attention was not exactly held by this complicated account.

  ‘Not for Moreton Colefax, it wasn’t,’ Guthrie Featherstone chuckled, and then went serious again. ‘The thing became the talk of the Temple and the upshot was, poor old Moreton never got appointed. So if the Lord Chancellor sends for a fellow to make him a judge, Horace, that fellow’s lips are sealed. He just mustn’t tell a soul!’