‘Damn hard work, La Vie de Bohème,’ I told him. ‘By the way, Erskine-Brown, what’s the news from Mrs DeMoyne?’
‘Oh, she remembered the name as soon as the Inspector put it to her. Blanco Basnet. Odd sort of name, isn’t it?’
‘Distinctly odd,’ I agreed. But before he could ask for any further explanation the usher called, ‘Be upstanding’, and upstanding we all were, as the learned Judge manifested himself upon the Bench, was put in position by his learned clerk, supplied with a notebook and sharpened pencils, and then leant forward to ask me, with a brief wince at the sight of the hands in the Rumpole pockets, ‘Is there another witness for the defence?’
‘Yes, my Lord,’ I said, as casually as possible. ‘I will now call Mrs Nancy Brittling.’
As the usher left the Court to fetch the witness in question I heard sounds, as of a ginger-beer bottle exploding on a hot day, from the dock, to which Harold Brittling had summoned the obedient Myers.
Then the courtroom door opened and the extremely old lady with whom I had sung around Goodge Street made her appearance, not much smartened up for the occasion, although she did wear, as a tribute to the learned Judge, a small straw hat perched inappropriately upon her tousled grey curls. As she took the oath, Myers was whispering to me. ‘The client doesn’t want this witness called, Mr Rumpole.’
‘Tell the client to belt up and draw a picture, Myersy. Leave me to do my work in peace.’ Then I turned to the witness-box. ‘Are you Mrs Nancy Brittling?’
‘Yes, dear. You know that.’ The old lady smiled at me and I went on in a voice of formal severity, to discourage any possible revelation about the night before.
‘Please address yourself to the learned Judge. Were you married to my client, Harold Reynolds Gainsborough Brittling?’
‘It seems a long time ago now, my Lordship.’ Nancy confided to Featherstone, J.
‘Did Mr Brittling introduce you to the painter Septimus Cragg at Rottingdean?’
‘I remember that.’ Nancy smiled happily. ‘It was my nineteenth birthday. I had red hair then, and lots of it. I remember he said I was a stunner.’
‘Who said you were a “stunner”,’ I asked for clarification, ‘your husband or …?’
‘Oh, Septimus said that, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘And Septimus asked me to pop across to Dieppe with him the next weekend,’ Nancy said proudly.
‘What did you feel about that?’ The old lady turned to the jury and I could see them respond to a smile that still had in it, after more than half a century, some relic of the warmth of a nineteen-year-old girl.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I was thrilled to bits.’
‘And what was Harold Brittling’s reaction to the course of events?’
‘He was sick as a dog, my Lordship.’ It was an answer which found considerable favour with the jury, so naturally Erskine-Brown rose to protest.
‘My Lord, I don’t know what the relevance of this is. We seem to be wandering into some rather sordid divorce matter.’
‘Mr Erskine-Brown!’ I gave it to him between the eyebrows. ‘My client has already heard the cell door bang behind him as a result of this charge, of which he is wholly innocent. And when I am proving his innocence, I will not be interrupted!’
‘My Lord, it’s quite intolerable that Mr Rumpole should talk to the jury about cell doors banging!’
‘Is it really? I thought that was what this case is all about.’
At which point the learned Judge came in to pour a little oil.
‘I think we must let Mr Rumpole take his own course, Mr Erskine-Brown,’ he said. ‘It may be quicker in the end.’
‘I am much obliged to your Lordship.’ I gave a servile little bow, and even took my hands out of my pockets. Then I turned to the witness. ‘Mrs Brittling, did you go to Dieppe with Septimus Cragg, and while you were there together, did he paint you in the bedroom of the Hôtel du Vieux Port?’
‘He painted me in the nude, my Lordship. I tell you, I was a bit of something worth painting in those days.’
Laughter from the jury, and a discreet smile from the learned Judge, were accompanied by a pained sigh from Erskine-Brown. I asked the usher to take Exhibit 1 to the witness, and Nancy looked at the picture and smiled, happily lost, for a moment, in the remembrance of things past.
‘Will you look at Exhibit 1, Mrs Brittling?’
‘Yes. That’s the picture. I saw Septimus paint that. In the bedroom at Dieppe.’
‘And the signature …?’ Erskine-Brown had told the jury that all forged pictures carried large signatures, as this one did. But Nancy Brittling was there to prove him wrong.
‘I saw Septimus paint his signature. And, we were so happy together, just for a bit of fun, he let me paint my name too.’
‘Let his Lordship see.’
So the usher trundled up to the learned Judge with the picture, and once again Guthrie raised his magnifying glass respectfully to it.
‘It’s a bit dark. I did it in sort of purple, at the edge of the carpet. I just wrote “Nancy”, that’s all.’
‘Mr Rumpole,’ Featherstone, J, said, and I blessed him for it. ‘I think she’s right about that.’
‘Yes, my Lord. I have looked and I think she is. Mrs Brittling, do you know how your husband got hold of that picture?’
Once again, the evidence was accompanied by popping and fizzing noises from the dock as the prisoner’s wife explained, with some gentle amusement, ‘Oh yes. Septimus gave it to me, but when I brought it home to Harold he fussed so much that in the end I let him have the picture. Well, after a time Harold and I separated and I suppose he kept hold of it until he wanted to pretend he’d painted it himself.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Brittling.’ I sat down, happy in my work. The sledgehammer had quietened and I stretched out my legs, preparing to watch Erskine-Brown beat his head against the brick wall of a truthful witness.
‘Mrs Brittling,’ he began. ‘Why have you come here to give this evidence? It must be painful for you, to remember those rather sordid events.’
‘Painful? Oh, no!’ Nancy looked at him and smiled. ‘It’s a pure pleasure, my dear, to see that picture again and to remember what I looked like, when I was nineteen and happy.’
The next morning I addressed the jury, and I was able to offer them the solution to the mystery of Harold Brittling and the disputed Septimus Cragg. I started by reminding them of one of Nancy’s answers: ‘ “… he kept hold of it until he wanted to pretend he’d painted it himself.” Harold Brittling, you may think, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,’ I said, ‘had one driving passion in his life – his almost insane jealousy of Septimus Cragg. Cragg became his young wife’s lover. But worse than that in Brittling’s eyes, Cragg was a great painter and Brittling was second rate, with no style of his own. So now, years after Cragg’s death, Brittling planned his revenge. He was going to prove that he could paint a better Cragg than Cragg ever painted. He would prove that this fine picture was his work and not Cragg’s. That was his revenge for a weekend in Dieppe, and a lifetime’s humiliation. To achieve that revenge Brittling was prepared to sell his Cragg in a devious way that would be bound to attract suspicion. He was prepared to get a friend of his named Blanco Basnet to telephone Mrs DeMoyne and claim that the picture was not a genuine Cragg, but something a great deal better. He was prepared to face a charge of forgery. He was prepared to go to prison. He was prepared to give his evidence to you in such a way as to lead you to believe that he was the true painter of a work of genius. Don’t be deceived, members of the jury, Brittling is no forger. He is a fake criminal and not a real one. He is not guilty of the crime he is charged with. He is guilty only of the bitterness felt for men of genius by the merely talented. You may think, members of the jury, as you bring in your verdict of “Not Guilty”, that that is an understandable emotion. You may even feel pity for a poor painter who could not even produce a forgery of his own.’
As I sat down
, the ginger-beer bottle in the dock finally exploded and Brittling shouted, in an unmannerly way, at his defending Counsel, ‘You bastard, Rumpole!’ he yelled, ‘you’ve joined the con-o-sewers!’
‘Good win, Horace. Of course, I always thought your client was innocent.’
‘Did you now?’
The Judge had invited me in for a glass of very reasonable amontillado after the jury brought in their verdict and, as the case was now over, we were alone in his room.
‘Oh yes. One gets a nose for these things. One can soon assess a witness and know if he’s telling the truth. Have to do that all the time in this job. Oh, and Horace …’
‘Yes, Judge?’
His Lordship continued in some embarrassment. ‘That bit of a tizz I was in, about the great secret getting out. No need to mention that to anyone, eh?’
‘Oh, I rang the Lord Chancellor’s office about that. The day after we met in Pommeroy’s,’ I told him, and casually slipped my hands into my pockets.
‘You what?’ Featherstone looked at me in a wild surmise.
‘I assured them you hadn’t said a word to anyone and it was just a sort of silly joke put about by Claude Erskine-Brown. I mean, no one in the Temple ever dreamed that they’d make you a Judge.’
‘Horace! Did you say that?’
‘Of course I did.’ He took time to consider the matter and then pronounced judgement. ‘Then you got me out of a nasty spot! I was afraid Marigold had been a bit indiscreet. Horace, I owe you an immense debt of gratitude.’
‘Yes. You do,’ I agreed. His Lordship looked closely at me, and some doubt seemed to have crept into his voice as he said, ‘Horace. Did you ring the Lord Chancellor’s office? Are you telling me the truth?’
I looked at him with the clear eyes of a reliable witness. ‘Can’t you tell, Judge? I thought you had such an infallible judicial eye for discovering if a witness is lying or not. Not slipping a bit, are you?’
‘What is it, Rumpole. Not flowers again?’
‘Bubbly! Non-vintage. Pommeroy’s sparkling – on special offer. And I paid for it myself!’ I had brought Hilda a peace offering which I set about opening on the kitchen table as soon as I returned to the matrimonial home.
‘Where’s that girl now?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘God knows. Gone off into the sunset with the old chump. He’ll never forgive me for getting him acquitted, so I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing either of them again.’
The cork came out with a satisfying pop, and I began to fill a couple of glasses with the health-giving bubbles.
‘I should have thought you’d had quite enough to drink with her last night!’ Hilda was only a little mortified.
‘Oh, forget her. She was a girl with soft eyes, and red hair, who passed through the Old Bailey and then was heard no more.’
I handed Hilda a glass, and raised mine in a toast.
‘ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
I looked at She Who Must Be Obeyed and then I said, ‘It isn’t, is it, though? We need to know a damn sight more than that!’
Rumpole and the Last Resort
I have almost caught up with myself. Decent crime has not been too thick on the ground recently, and time has been hanging a little heavily on the Rumpole hands. I have had a good deal of leisure to spend on these chronicles of the splendours and miseries of an Old Bailey Hack and, although I have enjoyed writing them, describing and remembering is something of a second-hand occupation. I am happiest, I must confess, with the whiff of battle in my nostrils, with the Judge and the prosecuting Counsel stacked against me, with the jury unconvinced, and everything to play for as I rear to my hind legs and start to cross-examine the principal witness for the Crown. There has been a notable decrease in the number of briefs in my tray in Chambers of late, and I have often set out for Number 3 Equity Court with nothing but The Times crossword and the notebook in which I have spent otherwise undemanding days recalling old murders and other offences. A barrister’s triumphs are short-lived: a notable victory may provide gossip round the Temple for a week or two; a row with the Judge may be remembered a little longer; but those you have got off don’t wish to be reminded of the cells where they met you, and those whose cases you have lost aren’t often keen to share memories. By and large, trials are over and done with when you pack up your robes and leave Court after the verdict. For that reason it has been some satisfaction to me to write these accounts, although the truth of the matter is, as I have already hinted, that I haven’t had very much else to do.
So up to date have I become that I can recount no more cases of sufficient interest and importance which have engaged my talents since my unexpected return from retirement. All I have left to do is something new to me – that is, to write about a case as I am doing it, in the hope that it will turn out to be sufficiently unusual to be included among these papers which will form some sort of memorial to the transient life of Horace Rumpole, barrister-at-law. I am soon to go into Court with one of my dwindling number of briefs, as Counsel for the defence of a young businessman named Frank Armstrong, Chairman and Managing Director of Sun-Sand Holidays Ltd, an organization which supplies mobile homes to holidaymakers in allegedly desirable sites in the West Country, the Lake District and other places which have every known inconvenience, including being much too far away from Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. The case itself may have some points of interest, including the mysterious mobility of Sun-Sand Mobile Homes, and the period about which I am writing contains another minor mystery, that is to say, the disappearance of a Mr Perivale Blythe, solicitor of the Supreme Court, a fellow who, so far as I am concerned, is fully entitled to disappear off the face of the earth, were it not for the fact that he has, for longer than I care to remember, owed me money.
One of the many drawbacks of life at the Bar is the length of time it takes to get paid for services rendered. As the loyal punter may not appreciate, he pays the solicitor for the hire of a barrister and, in theory at any rate, the solicitor passes the loot on to the member of the Bar, the front-line warrior in the courtroom battle, with the greatest possible dispatch. In many cases, unhappily, the money lingers along the line and months, even years, may pass before it percolates into the barrister’s bank account. There is really nothing much the average advocate can do about this. In the old days, when barristering was regarded as a gentlemanly pursuit for persons of private means, rather like fox hunting or collecting rare seaweed, the rule grew up that barristers couldn’t sue for their fees, on the basis that to be seen suing a solicitor would be as unthinkable as to be found dancing with your cook.
So it was not only a decline in the number of briefs bearing the Rumpole name, but a considerable slowing down in the paying process, which caused my account at the Temple branch of the United Metropolitan Bank to blush an embarrassing red. One day I called in to cash a fifty-pound cheque, mainly to defray the costs of those luxuries Hilda indulges in, matters such as bread and soap powder, and I stood at the counter breathing a silent prayer that the cashier might see fit to pay me out. Having presented my cheque, I heard the man behind the grille say, to my considerable relief, ‘How would you like the money, sir?’
‘Oh, preferably in enormous quantities.’ Of course it was a stupid thing to say. As soon as the words had passed my lips, I thought he’d take my cheque off to the back of the shop and discover the extent of the Rumpole debt. Why was he reading the thing so attentively? The art of cheque cashing is to appear totally unconcerned.
‘How would I like the money?’ I said rapidly. ‘Oh, I’ll take it as it comes. Nothing fancy, thank you. Not doubloons. Or pieces of eight. Just pour me out a moderate measure of pounds sterling.’
To my relief the notes came out on a little wheel under the glass window. I scooped up the boodle and told myself that the great thing was not to run. Break into any sort of jogtrot on the way to the door and they check up on the overdraft at
once. The secret is to walk casually and even whistle in a carefree manner.
I was doing exactly that when I was stopped with a far from cheery good morning by Mr Medway, the Assistant Manager. I should have made a dash for it.
‘Paying in or drawing out today, are we?’ Medway looked at the money in my hand. ‘Oh. Drawing out, I see. Could you step into my office, sir?’
‘Not now. Got to get to Court. A money brief, of course.’ I was hastily stuffing the notes into my pocket.
‘Just a moment of your time, Mr Rumpole.’ Medway was not to be put off. Within a trice I found myself closeted with him as I was grilled as to my financial position.
‘Gone right over the limit of our overdraft, haven’t we, Mr Rumpole?’ The man smiled unpleasantly.
‘My overdraft? A flea bite, compared with what you chaps are lending the Poles.’
I searched for a packet of cigars, feeling that I rather had him there.
‘I don’t think the Poles are making out quite so many cheques in favour of Jack Pommeroy of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar.’
‘Those are for the bare necessities of life. Look here, Medway. A fellow’s got to live!’
‘There’s bound to come a time, Mr Rumpole, when that may not be necessary at the expense of the United Metropolitan Bank.’ A peculiarly heartless financier, this Medway.
‘ “The Bank with the Friendly Ear”.’ I quoted his commercial, lit the cigar and blew out smoke.
‘There comes a time, Mr Rumpole, when the United Metropolitan goes deaf.’
‘That little overdraft of mine. Peanuts! Quite laughable compared to my outstanding fees.’ It was my time to bring out the defence. ‘My fees’ll come in. Of course they will. You know how long solicitors keep owing us money? Why, there’s one firm who still hasn’t paid me for a private indecency I did for them ten years ago. No names, of course, but …’
‘Is that Mr Perivale Blythe?’ Medway was consulting my criminal record. ‘Of Blythe, Winterbottom and Paisley?’
‘Yes. I believe that’s the fellow. Slow payer, but the money’s there, of course.’
The Collected Stories of Rumpole Page 28