The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  I have it on the good authority of Harry Shrimpton, the Court Clerk, that after he rose, Bullingham said to him, ‘A really most attractive advocate, Mrs Erskine-Brown. Do you think it would be entirely inappropriate if I sent her down a box of chocolates?’

  ‘Yes, Judge,’ Shrimpton felt it his duty to tell him.

  ‘You mean, “Yes”, I can?’

  ‘No. I mean “Yes”, it would be entirely inappropriate.’

  ‘Hm. She hasn’t a sweet tooth?’ The Bull was puzzled.

  ‘The Lord Chancellor wouldn’t like it.’ The Court Clerk was expert on such matters, but the Judge merely growled, ‘I wasn’t going to send chocolates to the Lord Chancellor.’

  Whilst the learned female QC was being threatened by unsolicited chocolates from the Judge, she was sitting, at his express invitation, with Charlie Hearthstoke, in a quiet corner of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in the company of two glasses and a gold-paper-necked bottle in an ice bucket. The ruthless Counsel for the prosecution, she was able to tell me much later, had invited her there so that he could tell her that my client, Dennis, possessed a firearm without a licence, although it was unfortunately a shotgun and not a revolver, and that he had done malicious damage with an air rifle when he was fourteen. It was also thought that he had rung the hospital to inquire about Huggins’s health; an event which, as interpreted by Hearthrug, showed not natural sympathy, but a desire to discover if he were likely to be charged with murder. All these facts were put at Phillida’s disposal, so that she might be the better able to cut my client’s throat. Then Charlie Hearthstoke told Phillida what a superb ‘Courtroom technician’ she was. ‘The way you handled Bullingham was superb. He’s dotty about you, naturally. Well, I can’t blame him. I suppose everyone is.’

  There was more of such flattery, apparently, and Hearthstoke made it clear that he wished he’d got to know Phillida better when he was in our Chambers, but of course she was always doing such important cases, and was ‘very much married, naturally’.

  ‘Not all that married,’ Phillida now agrees she replied, and who knows what course the conversation might not have taken had I not hoved to with Liz Probert, seen the bottle in the bucket and asked Jack Pommeroy’s girl Barbara to bring us another couple of glasses. ‘Champagne all round, eh, Hearthrug?’ I said, as we settled in our places. ‘And I know exactly what you’re celebrating.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what that could be.’ Phillida tried to sound innocent.

  ‘Come off it,’ I told her. ‘You’re celebrating the unholy alliance between Cyril Timson and the prosecution, with a full exchange of information designed to send poor old Dennis away for at least fourteen years.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’

  ‘Of course it’s not fair, Portia. But it’s true. And as the quality of mercy doesn’t seem to be dropping like the gentle rain from heaven around here, we’ll have to make do with Pommeroy’s bubbly.’ I pulled the bottle out of the bucket and looked at it with dismay. ‘Méthode Champenoise. Oh, Hearthrug. You disappoint me.’

  ‘Actually, Charles, it’s quite delicious.’ I saw Phillida smile at the odious prosecutor.

  ‘Grape juice and gas,’ I warned her. ‘Wait for the headache. You know Mizz Probert, of course?’ Of course she knew Liz only too well, but I wasn’t in a mood to make life easy for Cyril Timson’s silk.

  ‘Of course,’ Phillida spoke from the deep freeze.

  ‘There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to ask you, Phillida.’ Liz being extremely nervous, started to chatter. ‘Now you’re a QC and all that. But when you started at the Bar, wasn’t it terribly difficult being a woman?’

  ‘Oh, no. Being a woman comes quite naturally, to some of us.’ She smiled at Hearthstoke who laughed encouragingly. ‘Not that I had much choice in the matter.’

  ‘But didn’t you come up against a load of fixed male attitudes?’ Liz stumbled on, doing herself no good at all. ‘That’s what made it all such tremendous fun,’ Phillida told her. ‘If you really want to know, I didn’t get a particularly brilliant law degree but I never had the slightest trouble getting on with men.’

  ‘Clearly not.’ Hearthrug was prepared to corroborate her story. ‘Oh, yes’ – Phillida smiled at Liz in a particularly lethal way – ‘and there’s one question I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘About the exploitation of women at the Bar?’ A simple-minded girl, Mizz Probert.

  ‘No. Just … seen any good operas lately?’ A deep old-fashioned blush spread across the face of that liberated lady Liz Probert, and I tried to help her by saying, ‘You could have learned a great lesson from Portia today, Mizz Probert. How to succeed at the Bar by reducing Judge Bullingham to a trembling blob of sexual excitement. I’ve never been able to manage it myself.’ Gazing idly about me, I saw Claude enter Pommeroy’s, and I happened to tell his wife that he looked as though he’d lost her, a remark not lost on the egregious Hearthrug.

  ‘Rumpole, lay off!’ Phillida’s aside was unusually angry. ‘Are you going to lay off Dennis?’ I was prepared to strike a bargain with her, but as she made no response, I invited Erskine-Brown to draw up a chair and sit next to Mizz Probert. He declined to do this, but squeezed himself, in a way welcomed by neither of the parties, between his wife and Hearthstoke. When we were all more or less uncomfortably settled, I asked Claude if I could borrow the copy of the Standard, which he was holding much as a drowning man clings to a raft.

  ‘I went back to Chambers, Philly,’ the unhappy man was saying. ‘They said you hadn’t been in.’

  ‘No. I came straight here. I was discussing the case with prosecuting Counsel.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Erskine-Brown was clearly cowed. ‘Oh, yes. Of course.’

  I wasn’t listening to them. I was gazing like a man entranced at a stop-press item on the back of the Standard. The golden words read LATE RESULT FROM REDCAR. NUMBER ONE, MOTHER’S RUIN. Two down and two to go! Things were going so well that I suggested to Hearthrug he might order a bottle of the real stuff.

  ‘Why? What are you celebrating?’ Phillida asked.

  ‘I don’t know about you fellows,’ I told them. ‘But I’ve made a few investments which seem to have turned out rather well. In fact, my future is almost entirely secure. Perhaps I won’t have to do this job any more.’ I looked round the table, smiling. ‘Suppose this should turn out to be Rumpole’s positively last case!’ At which point my learned friends, and one of my learned enemies, looked at me with a wild surmise, silent at a table in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, faced with what might well count as the most significant moment in recent legal history.

  Events were moving quickly. Diogenes had won the Derby the previous Wednesday, and on Monday morning Henry had paid out my little bit of capital when I called into Chambers on my way to participate in R. v. Timson. By Monday night, two of my favoured horses had brought home the bacon: Pretty Balloon at Goodwood, and Mother’s Ruin most recently at Redcar. The speed of my success had somewhat stunned me, but I began to feel, as anyone must halfway through a successful four-horse accumulator, that I had the Midas touch. I had listened to Dennis’s advice perhaps, but I could certainly pick them. As I settled in my armchair at the gas fireside in the Gloucester Road area that Monday evening I had no real doubt that Hilda and I were bound for some easy retirement by a sun-kissed lagoon. We should soon, I thought, be boarding an aeroplane for the Seychelles. ‘I’ve got it, Rumpole.’ She broke into my reverie.

  ‘What’ve you got, Hilda?’

  ‘What I’ve been wanting for a long time, that little hearthrug. It looks smart, doesn’t it?’

  ‘If that’s what you always wanted, I think you might be rather more ambitious!’ The new arrival at our ‘mansion’ flat seemed hardly appropriate to our new-found wealth.

  ‘Just don’t you dare throw your cigar ends at it!’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ I told her. ‘I shall be chucking my cigar ends, my Havana cigar ends, my Romeo y Julieta cigar ends, at the sparkling ocean, as I wander barefoot alo
ng the beach in a pair of old white ducks and knock the sweet oysters off the rocks.’

  ‘You’re hardly going to do that in the Gloucester Road.’ Hilda seemed not to be following my drift.

  ‘Forget the Gloucester Road! We’ll move somewhere far away from Gloucester Road and the Old Bailey.’ I rose to get a glass of Château Fleet Street from the bottle on the sideboard. ‘It’s not real Persian, of course, but I think it’s a traditional pattern,’ Hilda told me.

  ‘ “Courage!” he said,’ – I gave her a taste of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’:

  ‘and pointed toward the land,

  “This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.”

  And in the afternoon they came unto a land

  In which it seemed always afternoon.

  All round the coast the languid air did swoon,

  Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea what you mean,’ Hilda sighed and turned her attention to the Daily Telegraph.

  ‘It’s not the meaning, Hilda, it’s the sounds we shall hear: the chatter of monkeys, the screech of parrots in the jungle, the hum of dragonflies, the rattle of grasshoppers rubbing their little legs together, the boom of breakers on the coral reef. And we shall sit out on the hotel verandah, drinking Planter’s Punch and never having to wear a bloody winged collar again.’

  ‘I don’t wear a winged collar now.’ Hilda tends to think first of herself. Then she said, as I thought, a little sharply, ‘I wonder if the bank manager will have anything to say about the hearthrug.’

  ‘Hardly, Hilda!’ I reassured her. ‘I rather suspect that when I next run into Mr Truscott of the Caring Bank, he’ll be inviting me for a light lunch at the Savoy Grill. I just hope I can make time for him.’

  ‘The bank manager inviting you to lunch? That’ll be the day!’ She suddenly looked at me. ‘You have got the hundred pounds for our hearthrug, haven’t you, Rumpole?’

  ‘Fear not, Hilda … I do expect return/Of thrice three times the value of this bond.’

  ‘That’s all very well. But have you got the hundred pounds?’

  Tuesday dawned with only the case and Yarmouth races to worry about, but soon a new drama was unfolding itself before my eyes. I got to Chambers a little too late for my breakfast at the Taste-Ee-Bite in Fleet Street, so, once trapped again in the robes and the winged collar, I went down to the Old Bailey canteen, took my solitary coffee and bun to a corner table and sank behind The Times. I was soon aware of voices at the next table. It was Phillida again, but this time her companion was Charlie Hearthrug, and they both seemed blissfully unaware of old Rumpole at the table behind them.

  ‘You might come back into the fold?’ I heard Phillida say, and Hearthstoke answered, ‘Well, without Rumpole there, I don’t see why I shouldn’t find my way back into your Chambers at Equity Court.’

  ‘That’d be something to look forward to. I used to think nothing would ever change. Marriage and building up the practice and having the kids and taking silk and perhaps becoming one of the statutory women on the Circuit Bench – Circus Bench, Rumpole calls it …’ Phillida was clearly choosing this unlikely time and place to pour out her heart to Hearthstoke, who encouraged her by asking in soft and meaningful tones, like a poorish actor, ‘Doesn’t that seem enough for you now?’

  ‘Not really. You know’ – more confidences were clearly to come from Mrs Erskine-Brown – ‘sometimes I envy my clients getting into trouble and leaving home and doing extraordinary things, dreadful things sometimes. But their lives aren’t dull. Nothing happens to us! Nothing adventurous, really.’

  ‘Perhaps it will if this is really Rumpole’s last case and we’re in Chambers together. Almost anything can happen then.’

  ‘Almost anything?’ I saw Phillida’s elegant hand, with its rosy nails and sparkling cuff, descend gently on to Hearthrug’s. It was time to clear the throat, stand up and approach the couple.

  ‘How are you enjoying our duel to the death, Portia?’

  ‘Fighting you, Rumpole’ – she withdrew her hand as casually as possible – ‘is always a pleasure.’

  ‘Of course, you’ve got one great advantage,’ I told her.

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Oh yes. You’ve got an excellent junior. Good old Claude. He’s always behind you. Working hard. I think you should remember that.’ And with a brief nod to both of them, I swept on towards the corrida for another day’s battle with the Bull.

  When I rose to cross-examine Inspector Broome, the Officer-in-Charge of the case, a glance up at the Public Gallery told me that Peanuts Molloy was still in situ and apparently enjoying the proceedings. My gaze lingered on him for but a moment and then I turned my attention to the Inspector as I had done over so many cases and confronted a middle-aged, somewhat sardonic man who was capable of rare moments of humour and even rarer moments of humanity. He looked back at me, as always, with a sort of weary patience. Defence barristers in general, and Horace Rumpole in particular, were not among the Inspector’s favourite characters.

  ‘Inspector Broome,’ I began my cross-examination. ‘I understand that no fingerprints were found on the gun.’ At which point the Bull couldn’t resist weighing in with ‘I imagine, Mr Rumpole, that these gentry would be too …’ – for a wild moment I hoped he was going to say ‘experienced’ and then I’d have him on toast in the Court of Appeal, but his dread of that unjust tribunal made him say ‘too intelligent to leave fingerprints?’

  Something, perhaps it was the success I was enjoying with the horses, emboldened me to protest at the Judge’s constant interruptions at the expense of my client. ‘My Lord,’ I ventured to point out, ‘the prosecution in this case is in the hands of my learned friend, Mr Hearthrug.’

  ‘Hearthstoke.’ The young gentleman in question rose to correct me. ‘Beg his pardon. Hearthstone. I’m sure he needs no assistance from your Lordship.’

  There was the usual pause while the Bull lowered his head, snorted, pawed the ground and so on. Then he charged in with ‘Mr Rumpole. That was an outrageous remark! It is one I may have to consider reporting as professional misconduct!’

  Of course, by the time he did that, I might be safely on my way to the Seychelles, but I still had to get through Yarmouth that day and Newbury the next. I thought it best to return the retort courteous. ‘I’m sorry if anything I might have said could possibly be construed as critical of your Lordship …’

  ‘Very well! Let’s get on with it.’ Bullingham suspended his attack for the moment and I returned to the witness. ‘Were the other areas of the strongroom examined for fingerprints, in particular the safe?’

  ‘Yes, they were,’ the Inspector told me.

  ‘And again no fingerprints of either Mr Cyril or Mr Dennis Timson were found?’ Bullingham roused himself to interrupt again, so I went on quickly, ‘My Lord is about to say, of course, that they’d still be wearing their gloves when they opened the safe and that is a perfectly fair point. I needn’t trouble your Lordship to make that interjection.’

  ‘Isn’t Rumpole going rather over the top?’ I heard Phillida whispering to her husband, and she got the sensible reply, ‘He’s behaving like a chap who’s got a secure future from investments.’

  ‘No fingerprints identifiable as the defendant’s were found, my Lord. That is true,’ Broome told the Court.

  ‘But no doubt a number of fingerprints were found on the door of the safe?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And they were photographed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No doubt many of them came from bank employees?’

  ‘No doubt about that, my Lord.’

  ‘But did you take the trouble to check any of those fingerprints with criminal records?’

  ‘Why should we have done that?’ The Inspector looked somewhat pained at the suggestion.

  ‘To see if they corresponded to the fingerprints of any known criminal, other than the two Mr Timsons.’

  �
��No. We didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The two Mr Timsons were the only men we found at the scene of the crime and we had established that they were wearing gloves.’

  ‘Because they had gloves on them when you caught them,’ Bullingham explained to me as though I were a child, for the benefit of the jury.

  ‘We are so much obliged to the learned Judge for his most helpful interjection, aren’t we, Inspector? Otherwise you might have had to think of the answer for yourself.’

  Of course that brought the usual warning rumble from the Bench, but I pressed on, more or less regardless, with, ‘Let me ask you something else, Inspector. When the defendants were apprehended, they were carrying about three-thousand-pounds-worth of cash and other valuables from various deposit boxes?’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘Was that the total amount missing from the safe?’

  ‘No. No, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t.’ For the first time Broome sounded puzzled. ‘That particular safe had been almost entirely emptied when we came to inspect it.’

  ‘Were its entire contents valued at something over sixty thousand pounds?’

  ‘Well over that, my Lord.’

  ‘Well over that …’ The Judge made a grateful note.

  ‘You have no idea when the sixty-thousand-pound-worth was taken?’ I heard Bullingham start with a menacing ‘Perhaps …’ and went on, ‘My Lord is about to say perhaps they took it first and carried it out by the tunnel. That would be a sound point for my Lord to make.’