The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  ‘Forgetfulness, Erskine-Brown. The consignment of a day in front of his Honour Judge Bullingham to the Lethe of forgotten things. The Mad Bull,’ I told him, as I drained the large glass of Château Fleet Street Jack Pommeroy had obligingly put on my slate until the next legal aid cheque came in, ‘constantly interrupted my speech to the jury. I am defending an alleged receiver of stolen sugar bowls. With this stuff, not to put too fine a point on it, you have a reasonable chance of getting blotto.’

  It is a good few years now since I adopted the habit of noting down the facts of some of my outstanding cases, the splendours and miseries of an Old Bailey Hack, and those of you who may have cast an eye over some of my previous works of reminiscence may well be muttering ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ or words to the like effect. After so many cross-examinations, speeches to the jury, verdicts of guilty or not guilty, legal aid cheques long-awaited and quickly disposed of down the bottomless pit of the overdraft at the Caring Bank, no great change in the Rumpole fortunes had taken place, the texture of life remained much as it always had been and would, no doubt, do so until after my positively last case when I sit waiting to be called on in the Great Circuit Court of the Skies, if such a tribunal exists.

  Take that evening as typical. I had been involved in the defence of one Hugh Snakelegs Timson. The Timsons, you may remember, are an extended family of South London villains who practise crime in the stolid, hard-working, but not particularly successful manner in which a large number of middle-of-the-road advocates practise at the Bar. The Timsons are not high-flyers; not for them the bullion raids or the skilled emptying of the Rembrandts out of ducal mansions. The Timsons inhabit the everyday world of purloined video recorders, bent log-books and stolen Cortinas. They also provide me and my wife Hilda (known to me, quite off the record, and occasionally behind the hand, as She Who Must Be Obeyed) with our bread and butter. When prospects are looking bleak, when my tray in the clerk’s room is bare of briefs but loaded with those unpleasant-looking buff envelopes doshed out at regular intervals by Her Majesty the Queen, it is comforting to know that somewhere in the Greater London area, some Timson will be up to some sort of minor villainy and, owing to the general incompetence of the clan, the malefactor concerned will no doubt be in immediate need of legal representation.

  Hugh Snakelegs Timson was, at that time, the family’s official fence, having taken over the post from his Uncle Percy Timson,* who was getting a good deal past it, and had retired to live in Benidorm. Snakelegs, a thin, elegant man in his forties, a former winner of the Mr Debonair contest at Butlin’s Holiday Camp, had earned his name from his talent at the tango. He lived with his wife, Hetty, in a semi-detached house in Bromley to which Detective Inspector Broome, the well-known terror of the Timsons, set out on a voyage of discovery with his faithful Detective Sergeant Cosgrove. At first Inspector ‘New’ Broome had drawn a blank at the Timson home; even the huge coffin-shaped freezer seemed to contain nothing but innumerable bags full of frozen vegetables. The eager Inspector had the bright idea of thawing some of these provisions however, and was rewarded by the spectacle of articles of Georgian silver arising from the saucepans of boiling peas in the manner of Venus arising from the Sea.

  The defence of Hugh Snakelegs Timson had not been going particularly well. The standard receiver’s story, ‘I got the whole lot from a bloke in a pub who was selling them off cheap, and whose name I cannot for the life of me recall’, was treated with undisguised contempt by his Honour, Judge Roger Bullingham, who asked, with the ponderous cynicism accompanied by an undoubted wink at the jury, of which he is master, if I were not going to suggest that there had been a shower of sugar-sifters, cream jugs and the like from the back of a lorry? Anyway, if got innocently, why was the silverware in the deep freezer? I told the jury that an Englishman’s freezer was his castle and that there was no reason on earth why a citizen shouldn’t keep his valuables in a bag of Birds Eye peas at a low temperature. Indeed, I added, as I thought helpfully, I had an old aunt who kept odd pound notes in the tea caddy, and constantly risked boiling up her savings in a pot of Darjeeling. At this the Mad Bull went an even darker shade of purple, his neck swelled visibly so that it seemed about to burst his yellowing winged collar and he told the jury that my aunt was ‘not evidence’, and that they must in reaching a decision ‘dismiss entirely anything Mr Rumpole may have said about his curious family’, adding, with a whole battery of near-nudges and almost-winks, ‘I expect our saner relatives know the proper place for their valuables. In the bank.’

  At this point the Bull decided to interrupt my final speech by adjourning for tea and television in his private room, and I was left to wander disconsolately in the direction of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, where I met that notable opera buff and wine connoisseur, half-hearted prosecutor and inept defender, the spouse and helpmeet of Phillida Erskine-Brown, QC. Phillida Trant, as was, the Portia of our Chambers, had put his nose somewhat out of joint by taking silk and leaving poor old Claude, ten years older than she, a humble junior. So there I was, raising yet another glass of Château Thames Embankment to my lips and telling Claude that the only real advantage of this particular vintage was that it was quite likely to get you drunk.

  ‘The purpose of drinking wine is not intoxication, Rumpole.’ Erskine-Brown looked as pained as a prelate who is told that his congregation only came to church because of the central heating. ‘The point is to get in touch with one of the major influences of western civilization, to taste sunlight trapped in a bottle and to remember some stony slope in Tuscany or a village by the Gironde.’

  I thought with a momentary distaste of the bit of barren soil, no doubt placed between the cowshed and the pissoir, where the Château Pommeroy grape struggled for existence. And then, Erskine-Brown, long-time member of our Chambers in Equity Court, went considerably too far.

  ‘You see, Rumpole,’ he said, ‘it’s the terrible nose.’

  Now I make no particular claim for my nose and I am far from suggesting that it’s a thing of beauty and a joy forever. When I was in my perambulator it may, for all I can remember, have had a sort of tip-tilted and impertinent charm. In my youth it was no doubt pinkish and healthy-looking. In my early days at the Bar it had a sharp and inquisitive quality which made prosecution witnesses feel they could keep no secrets from it. Today it is perhaps past its prime, it has spread somewhat; it has, in part at least, gone mauve; it is, after all, a nose that has seen a considerable quantity of life. But man and boy it has served me well, and I had no intention of having my appearance insulted by Claude Erskine-Brown, barrister-at-law, who looks, in certain unfavourable lights, not unlike an abbess with a bad period.

  ‘We may disagree about Pommeroy’s plonk,’ I told him, ‘but that’s no reason why you should descend to personal abuse.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean your nose, Rumpole. I mean the wine’s nose.’

  I looked suspiciously into the glass; did this wine possess qualities I hadn’t guessed at? ‘Don’t babble, Erskine-Brown.’

  ‘ “Nose”, Rumpole! The bouquet. That’s one of the expressions you have to learn to use about wine. Together with the “length”.’

  ‘Length?’ I looked down at the glass in my hand; the length seemed to be about one inch and shrinking rapidly.

  ‘The “length” a great wine lingers in the mouth, Rumpole. Look, why don’t you let me educate you? My friend, Martyn Vanberry, organizes tastings in the City. Terrifically good fun. You get to try about a dozen wines.’

  ‘A dozen?’ I was doubtful. ‘An expensive business.’

  ‘No, Rumpole. Absolutely free. They are blind tastings. He’s got one on tomorrow afternoon, as it so happens.’

  ‘You mean they make you blind drunk?’ I couldn’t resist asking. ‘Sounds exactly what I need.’ At that moment the promise of Martyn Vanberry and his blind tastings were a vague hope for the future. My immediate prospects included an evening drink with She Who Must Be Obeyed and finishing my speech fo
r Snakelegs to the jury against the Mad Bull’s barracking. I emptied Pommeroy’s dull opiate to the drains and aimed Lethe-wards.

  It might be said that the story of the unknown vendor of Georgian silver in the pub lacked originality, and that the inside of a freezer-pack was not the most obvious place for storing valuable antiques, but there was one point of significance in the defence of Hugh Snakelegs Timson. Detective Inspector Broome was, as I have already suggested, an enthusiastic officer and one who regarded convictions with as much pride as the late Don Giovanni regarded his conquests of the female sex. No doubt he notched them up on his braces. He had given evidence that there had been thefts of silver from various country houses in Kent, but all the Detective Inspector’s industry and persistence had not produced one householder who could be called by the prosecution to identify the booty from the freezer as his stolen silverware. So where, I was able to ask, was the evidence that the property undoubtedly received by Snakelegs had been stolen? Unless the old idea that the burden lay on the prosecution to prove its case had gone out of fashion in his Lordship’s Court (distant rumblings as of a volcano limbering up for an eruption from the Bull), then perhaps, I ventured to suggest, Snakelegs was entitled to squeeze his way out of trouble.

  Whether it was this thought, or Judge Bullingham’s frenzied eagerness to secure a conviction (Kane himself might have got off his murder rap if he’d only been fortunate enough to receive a really biased summing-up), the jury came back with a cheerful verdict of not guilty. After only a brief fit of minor apoplexy, and a vague threat to bring the inordinate length of defending Counsel’s speeches to the attention of the legal aid authorities, the Bull released the prisoner to his semi-detached and his wife Hetty. I was strolling along the corridor, puffing a small cigar with a modest feeling of triumph, when a small, eager young lady, her fairly pleasing face decorated with a pair of steel-rimmed specs and a look of great seriousness, rather as though she was not quite certain which problem to tackle first, world starvation or nuclear war, came panting up alongside.

  ‘Mr Rumpole,’ she said, ‘you did an absolutely first-class job!’

  I paused in my tracks, looked at her more closely, and remembered that she had been sitting in Court paying close attention throughtout R. v. Snakelegs Timson.

  ‘I just gave my usual service.’

  ‘And I,’ she said, sticking out her hand in a gesture of camaraderie, ‘have just passed the Bar exams.’

  ‘Then we don’t shake hands,’ I had to tell her, avoiding physical contact. ‘Clients don’t like it you see. Think we might be doing secret deals with each other. All the same, welcome to the treadmill.’

  I moved away from her then, towards the lift, pressed the button, and as I waited for nothing very much to happen, she accosted me again.

  ‘You don’t stereotype that much, do you, Mr Rumpole?’ She looked as though she were already beginning to lose a little faith in my infallibility.

  ‘And you don’t call me Mister Rumpole. Leave that to the dotty Bull,’ I corrected her, perhaps a little sharply.

  ‘I thought you were too busy fighting the class war to care about outdated behaviour patterns.’

  ‘Fighting the what?’

  ‘Protecting working people against middle-class judges.’

  The lift was still dawdling away in the basement and I thought it would be kind now to put this recruit right on a few of the basic principles of our legal system. ‘The Timsons would hate to be called “working people”,’ I told her. ‘They’re entirely middle-class villains. Very Conservative, in fact. They live by strict monetarist principles and the free market economy. They’re also against the closed shop; they believe that shops should be open at all hours of the night. Preferably by jemmy.’

  ‘My name’s Liz Probert,’ she said, failing to smile at the jest I was not making for the first time. At this point the lift arrived. ‘Good day Mizz’ – I took her for a definite Mizz – I said, as I stepped into it. Rather to my surprise she strode in after me, still chattering. ‘I want to defend like you. But I must still have a lot to learn. I never noticed the point about the owners not identifying the stolen silver.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ I had to admit, ‘until it was almost too late. And you know why they didn’t?’ I was prepared to tell this neophyte the secrets of my astonishing success. That, after all, is part of the Great Tradition of the Bar, otherwise known as showing off to the younger white-wigs. ‘They’d all got the insurance money, you see, and done very nicely out of it, thank you. The last thing they wanted was to see their old sugar bowls back and have to return the money. Life’s a bit more complicated than they tell you in the Bar exams.’

  We had reached the robing-room floor and I made for the Gents with Mizz Probert following me like the hound, or at least the puppy, of heaven. ‘I was wondering if you could possibly give me some counselling in my career area.’

  ‘Not now, I’m afraid. I’ve got a blind date, with some rather attractive bottles.’ I opened the door and saw the gleaming porcelain fittings which had been in my mind since I got out of Court. ‘Men only in here, I’m afraid,’ I had to tell Mizz Probert, who still seemed to be at my heels. ‘It’s one of the quaint old traditions of the Bar.’

  The surprisingly rapid and successful conclusion of the Queen v. Snakelegs had liberated me, and I set off with some eagerness to Prentice Alley in the City of London, and the premises of Vanberry’s Fine Wines & Spirits Ltd, where I was to meet Claude Erskine-Brown, and sample, for the first time in my life, the mysterious joys of a blind tasting. After my credentials had been checked, I was shown into a small drinks party which had about it all the gaiety of an assembly of the bereaved, when the corpse in question has left his entire fortune to the Cats’ Home.

  The meeting took place in a brilliantly lit basement room with glaring white tiles. It seemed a suitable location for a post-mortem, but, in place of the usual deceased person on the table, there were a number of bottles, all shrouded in brown-paper bags. It was there I saw my learned friend Erskine-Brown, already in place among the tasters, who were twirling minute quantities of wine in their glasses, holding them nervously up to the light, sniffing at them with deep suspicion and finally allowing a small quantity to pass their lips. They were mainly solemn-looking characters in dark three-piece suits, although there was one female in a tweed coat and skirt, a sort of white silk stock, sensible shoes and a monocle. She looked as though she’d be happier judging hunters at a country gymkhana than fine wines, and she was, so Erskine-Brown whispered to me, Miss Honoria Bird, the distinguished wine correspondent of the Sunday Mercury. Before the tasting competition began in earnest we were invited to sample a few specimens from the Vanberry claret collection. So I took my first taste and experienced what, without doubt, was a draft of vintage that hath been ‘Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,/Tasting of Flora and the country green, …’ And it was whilst I was enjoying the flavour of Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth, mixed with a dash of wild strawberries, that a voice beside me boomed, ‘What’s the matter with you? Can’t you spit?’

  Miss Honoria Bird was at my elbow and in my mouth was what? Something so far above my price range that it seemed like some new concoction altogether, as far removed from Pommeroy’s Very Ordinary as a brief for Gulf Oil in the House of Lords is from a small matter of indecency before the Uxbridge Magistrates.

  ‘Over there, in case you’re looking for it. Expectoration corner!’ Miss Bird waved me to a wooden wine-box, half-filled with sawdust into which the gents in dark suitings were directing mouthfuls of purplish liquid. I moved away from her, reluctant to admit that the small quantity of the true, the blushful Hippocrene I had been able to win had long since disappeared down the little red lane.

  ‘Collie brought you, didn’t he?’ Martyn Vanberry, the wine merchant, caught me as I was about to swallow a second helping. He was a thin streak of a chap, in a dark suit and a stiff collar, whose faint smile, I thought, was th
in-lipped and patronizing. Beside him stood a pleasant enough young man who was in charge of the mechanics of the thing, brought the bottles and the glasses and was referred to as Ken.

  ‘Collie?’ The name meant nothing to me.

  ‘Erskine-Brown. We called him Collie at school.’

  ‘After the dog?’ I saw my Chambers companion insert the tip of his pale nose into the aperture of his wine glass.

  ‘No. After the Doctor. Collis-Brown. You know, the medicine? Old Claude was always a bit of a pill really. We used to kick him around at Winchester.’

  Now I am far from saying that, in my long relationship with Claude Erskine-Brown, irritation has not sometimes got the better of me, but as a long-time member of our Chambers at Equity Court he has, over the years, become as familiar and uncomfortable as the furniture. I resented the strictures of this public-school bully on my learned friend and was about to say so when the gloomy proceedings were interrupted by the arrival of an unlikely guest wearing tartan trousers, rubber-soled canvas shoes of the type which I believe are generally known as ‘trainers’, and a zipped jacket which bore on its back the legend MONTY MANTIS SERVICE STATION LUTON BEDS. Inside this costume was a squat, ginger-haired and youngish man who called out, ‘Which way to the antifreeze? At least we can get warmed up for the winter.’ This was a clear reference to recent scandals in the wine trade, and it was greeted, in the rarefied air of Vanberry’s tasting room, with as much jollity as an advertisement for contraceptive appliances in the Vatican.