The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  ‘Thank you, Mr Rumpole.’ The Judge tried the retort ironical.

  ‘Not at all, my Lord. I’m only too glad to be of assistance.’ I smiled at him charmingly. ‘But let me ask you this, Inspector. Your men came to the bank because an alarm went off in the strongroom?’

  ‘That is so. The signal was received at Tooting Central at …’

  ‘About 3 a.m. We know that. But it’s clear, isn’t it, that when your men invaded the bank they knew nothing about the tunnel?’

  ‘That is quite right.’

  ‘So they were admitted by the second guard on duty and went down to the vaults.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No police officer ever entered by the tunnel?’

  ‘Not so far as I am aware.’

  ‘We all heard that evidence, Mr Rumpole. Or perhaps you weren’t listening?’ Nothing subtle, you see, about Judge Bullingham’s little sallies.

  ‘On the contrary, my Lord. I was listening most intently.’ I turned back to the Inspector. ‘And when your officers entered the vaults they found there two men running down a passage towards them?’

  ‘That’s what they reported.’

  ‘Running away from the entrance to the tunnel.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘That is all I have to ask’ – I gave Bullingham another of my smiles – ‘unless your Lordship wishes to correct any of those answers …’

  ‘Hadn’t you better sit down, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Sit down? Yes, of course. I’d be glad to. Your Lordship is most kind and considerate as always …’ As I sat I thought that dear old Ever So Grateful had better get a spurt on or I would find myself up on a charge of professional misconduct. These thoughts were interrupted by Charlie Hearthstoke’s re-examination of the witness.

  ‘Mr Rumpole has asked you if you consulted criminal records on any of the fingerprints you did find on the safe.’

  ‘Yes. I remember him asking me that,’ Broome answered.

  ‘Mr Rumpole no doubt felt that he had to ask a large number of questions in order to justify his fee from the legal aid.’ Bullingham did one of his usual jokes to the jury; it was a moderate success only with the twelve honest citizens.

  ‘I suppose you could compare the photographs of fingerprints you have with criminal records, couldn’t you?’ Hearthstoke suggested, greatly to my relief.

  ‘I could, my Lord. If the Court wishes it.’ Inspector Broome turned politely to the Bench for guidance and the Judge did his best to sound judicial. ‘Mr Hearthstoke has made a very fair suggestion, Inspector, as one would expect of a totally impartial prosecutor.’ He said graciously, ‘Perhaps you would be so kind as to make the inquiry. We don’t want to give Mr Rumpole any legitimate cause for complaint.’

  When we left Court at lunchtime, I followed the Inspector down the corridor in pursuit of the line of defence I had decided to adopt for Dennis Timson. When I caught up with him, I ventured to tell Inspector ‘New’ Broome what a thoroughly dependable and straightforward officer I had always found him. Quite rightly he suspected that I wanted something out of him and he asked me precisely what I had in my mind.

  ‘A small favour,’ I suggested.

  ‘Why should I do you a favour, Mr Rumpole? You have been a bit of a thorn in my flesh over the years, if I have to be honest.’

  ‘Oh yes, you have to be honest. But if I promised never to be a thorn in your flesh ever again?’

  ‘Not making me and my officers look Charlies in front of the jury?’ Broome asked suspiciously.

  ‘Never again.’

  ‘Not letting the Timsons get away with murder?’

  ‘Never murder, Inspector! Perhaps, occasionally, stolen fish.’

  ‘Not getting my young DCs tied up in their own notebooks?’ He pressed for specific assurances.

  ‘If I swore on my old wig never to do anything of the sort again. In fact, Inspector Broome, if I were to promise you that this would be positively my last case!’

  ‘Your last case, Mr Rumpole?’ The Inspector was clearly reluctant to believe his ears.

  ‘My positively last case!’

  ‘You’d be leaving the Bailey after this for good?’ Hope sprang in the officer’s breast.

  ‘I was thinking in terms of a warmer climate. So if I were to leave and never trouble you again …’

  ‘Then I suppose I might be more inclined to help out,’ Inspector Broome conceded. ‘But if it’s that fingerprint business!’

  ‘Oh, you won’t get anything out of that. I just wanted to get somebody worried. No respectable thief’s ever going to leave their prints on a Peter. No, what I was going to suggest, old darling, is something entirely different.’

  ‘Nothing illegal, of course?’

  ‘Illegal! Ask Detective Inspector Broome to do anything illegal?’ I hope I sounded suitably appalled at the idea. ‘Certainly not. This is only guaranteed to serve the interests of justice.’

  After lunch, and after I had made my most respectful suggestions to the Inspector, Hearthstoke closed the prosecution case and Phillida called Cyril Timson to the witness-box. He agreed with most of the prosecution case and accepted the evidence, which we had heard, of Mr Huggins of having been shot at by some person and wounded in the foot. Phillida held the revolver in her hand and asked in her most solemn tones, ‘Cyril Timson. Did you take this weapon with you when you tunnelled into the Penny-Wise Bank?’ When he had, not unexpectedly, answered, ‘No. I never,’ I whispered a request to her to sit down and resist the temptation of cutting Dennis’s throat. She was not in a temptation resisting mood.

  ‘Did you ever,’ she asked Cyril, ‘have any idea that your cousin, the co-defendant, Dennis Timson, was armed with a pistol?’

  ‘My Lord,’ I objected, ‘there is absolutely no evidence that Dennis was armed with anything!’

  ‘The pistol was there at the scene of the crime, Mr Rumpole. Someone must have brought it,’ Bullingham reasoned.

  ‘Someone perhaps. But the question assumes …’

  ‘Please continue, Mrs Erskine-Brown.’ The Judge, ignoring me, almost simpered at Phillida, ‘You may ask your question.’

  ‘But you don’t have to, Portia,’ I whispered to her as I sat down. ‘Remember the quality of mercy!’

  ‘Did you have any idea that Dennis was armed?’ She forgot it.

  ‘No idea at all.’ Cyril looked pained.

  ‘And what would you have said if you had known?’

  ‘My Lord’ – I had another go – ‘how can this be evidence? It’s pure speculation!’

  ‘Please, Mrs Erskine-Brown.’ Again, I was ignored. ‘Do ask the question.’

  ‘What would you have said?’

  ‘Leave that thing at home, Den.’ Cyril sounded extraordinarily righteous. ‘That’s not the way we carry on our business.’

  ‘Can you tell us if Dennis ever owned a firearm?’

  ‘I don’t object, my Lord. All objections are obviously perfectly useless.’ I rose to tell the Court and got a look from the Judge which meant ‘And that’s another one for the report.’ But now Cyril was saying, ‘Dennis was always pretty keen on shooters. When he was a kid he had an airgun.’

  ‘And probably a catapult as well,’ I whispered as I subsided.

  ‘Did you say something, Mr Rumpole?’ The Judge was kind enough to ask.

  ‘Nothing whatever, my Lord.’

  ‘In his later years he bought a shotgun.’ Cyril added to the indictment of his cousin.

  ‘Did you know what he used that for?’ Phillida asked.

  ‘He said clay pigeons, my Lord.’

  ‘He said clay pigeons. Did you believe him?’ the Judge asked and, looking up at the Public Gallery, I again saw Peanuts Molloy smiling.

  ‘I had no means of checking the veracity of Cousin Den’s statement.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Timson, just wait there.’ Phillida sat down, happily conscious of having done her worst, and I rose to cross-examine the witness. Bullingham sat back to
enjoy further bloodshed.

  ‘Mr Timson. When you were removing some of the property from the safe, you suddenly ran out of the strongroom into the corridor. Why was that?’

  ‘We thought we heard a noise behind us.’ Cyril frowned, as though he still found the situation puzzling.

  ‘Coming from where?’

  ‘He said “behind us”, Mr Rumpole,’ Bullingham reminded me.

  ‘Thank you, your Lordship, so much! And it was that sound that made you retreat?’

  ‘We thought we was being copped, like.’

  ‘Why didn’t you retreat back into the tunnel you came from? Was it by any chance because the sound was coming from that direction?’

  ‘Yes. It might have been,’ Cyril admitted.

  ‘When you ran out into that corridor you were holding some boxes containing money and valuables.’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘And so was your Cousin Dennis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You saw that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You never saw him with a gun in his hand?’

  ‘No. I never saw it, like. But I knew I didn’t have it.’

  ‘Mr Cyril Timson, may I say at once that I accept the truth of that statement …’ The Court went strangely silent; Bullingham looked disappointed, as though I had announced that throat-cutting was off and the afternoon would be devoted to halma. Phillida whispered to me, ‘Rumpole, have you gone soft in your old age?’

  ‘Not soft, Portia, I just thought it might be nice to win my last case,’ I whispered back. Then I spoke to the witness, ‘I agree that you didn’t have the gun, and Dennis certainly didn’t.’

  ‘So where did it come from, Mr Rumpole?’ The Judge gave me the retort sarcastic. ‘Did it drop from the sky?’

  ‘Yes, my Lord. In a manner of speaking, it did. Thank you, Mr Cyril Timson.’

  I shot out of the Old Bailey, when Judge Bullingham rose at the end of that day, like a bat leaving hell. That was not my usual manner of departure, but careful inquiry at the sporting kiosk in the alley off Ludgate Circus had led me to believe that The Punter’s Guide, out late on Tuesday afternoon, carried a full printout of that very afternoon’s results. If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, you will have some idea what I felt like as I hastened towards the news-stand and to what had rapidly become my favourite reading.

  Meanwhile as Peanuts Molloy came out of the entrance of the Public Gallery, DS Garsington, an officer in plain clothes, peeled himself off a wall and followed at a discreet distance. When Peanuts mounted a bus going south of the river, the Detective Sergeant was also in attendance. This close watch on Peanuts’s movements was something that the Detective Inspector had authorized on the understanding that I would be leaving the Bar after the present case and so would trouble the authorities no more.

  While Peanuts was off on his bus journey with DS Garsington in attendance, I was watching the elderly, partially blind lady with the bobble hat try to undo the newly arrived parcel of The Punter’s Guide, with swollen and arthritic fingers. At last I could bear it no longer. I seized the string and broke it for her. I fluttered The Punter’s pages for the fly-away leaf of that afternoon’s results, and there was the printout from Yarmouth: 1.30 FIRST EVER SO GRATEFUL. ‘Oh, my God,’ I said devoutly as I paid the old lady. ‘Thanks most awfully!’

  At about opening time Peanuts Molloy was in a gym used to train young boxers over the Venerable Bede pub along the Old Kent Road. Peanuts was neither sparring nor skipping; he was reporting back to another deeply interested member of the clan Molloy. What he said, as later recalled by DS Garsington, went something like this: ‘Like I told you. No sweat. They’re still just blaming it on each other. There’s one old brief that thinks different, but the Judge don’t take a blind bit of notice. Not of him.’ At which point the Detective Sergeant intruded and asked, ‘Are you Peter James Molloy?’

  ‘What if I am?’ said Peanuts.

  ‘I must ask you to accompany me. My Inspector would like to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Oh yes. What about?’

  ‘I believe …’ – DS Garsington was suitably vague – ‘it’s about a fingerprint.’

  Wednesday morning passed as slowly as a discourse on the Christian attitude to Tort from Soapy Sam Ballard, or an afternoon in a rain-soaked holiday hotel with She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  First of all, Judge Bullingham had some applications in another case to deal with and so we started late, and then Phillida had some other evidence of a particularly unimportant nature to call. At last it was lunchtime and I was ready for the final throw; this was the crunch, the crisis, the moment to win or lose it all. I couldn’t get away to Newbury to cheer Kissogram on, but I had decided to do the next best thing. Discreet inquiries from the ushers at the Bailey had revealed the fact that there was a betting shop recently opened by Blackfriars Station. I found it a curious establishment with painted-over windows and only a few visitors, who looked to be of no particular occupation, watching the television at lunchtime. They were joined by an ageing barrister in bands and a winged collar, who put a small cigar into his mouth but forgot to light it while watching the one-thirty.

  I find it hard to recall my exact feelings while the race was going on and I supposed I have had worse times waiting for juries to come back with a verdict. Somewhere in the depths of my being I felt that I had come so far that nothing could stop me now, nor could it – Kissogram pulled it off by three lengths.

  I hurried back to the Bailey repeating Dennis’s magic figure: ‘Let’s say, three hundred and thirty grand! Give or take a fiver.’ It was, of course, an extraordinary happening, and one which I intended to keep entirely to myself for the moment or God only knew how many learned friends would remember old Rumpole and touch him for a loan. Uppermost in my mind was the opening speech I was due to make of Dennis Timson’s defence when the Bull, full of the City of London’s roast beef and claret, returned to the seat of Judgement. It would be the last time I opened a defence in my positively last case. Why should I not do what a barrister who has his future at the Bar to think of can never do? Why should I not say exactly what I thought?

  As I took the lift up to the robing room, the idea appealed to me more and more; it became even more attractive than the prospect of wandering along palm-fringed beaches beside the booming surf, although, of course, I meant to do that as well. Phrases, heartfelt sentiments, began to form in my mind. I was going to make the speech of a lifetime, Rumpole’s last opening, and the Bull would have to listen. So, at exactly ten past two, I rose to my feet, glanced up at the Public Gallery, found that ‘Peanuts’ Molloy was no longer in his place and began.

  ‘Members of the jury. You heard the prosecution case opened by my learned friend Mr Hearth—stoke. And I wish, now, to make a few remarks of a general nature before calling Mr Dennis Timson into the witness-box. I hope they will be helpful.’

  ‘I hope so, too, Mr Rumpole. The defence doesn’t have to indulge in opening speeches.’ The Judge was scarcely encouraging, but no power on earth was going to stop me now.

  ‘Members of the jury. You have no doubt heard of the presumption of innocence, the golden thread that runs through British justice. Everyone in this fair land of ours is presumed to be innocent until they’re proved to be guilty, but against this presumption there is another mighty legal doctrine,’ I told them. ‘It is known as the Bullingham factor. Everyone who is put into that dock before this particular learned Judge is naturally assumed to have done the deed, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. Not only are those in the dock presumed to be guilty, defending barristers are assumed to be only interested in wasting time so they can share in the rich pickings of the legal aid system, an organization which allows criminal advocates to live almost as high on the hog as well-qualified shorthand typists. For this princely remuneration, members of the jury, we are asked to defend the liberty of the subject, carry on the fine traditions of Magn
a Carta, make sure that all our citizens are tried by their peers and no man nor woman suffers unjust imprisonment, and knock our heads, day in day out, against the rock solid wall of the Bullingham factor! For this we have to contend with a Judge who invariably briefs himself for the prosecution …’

  During the flow of my oratory, I had been conscious of two main events in Court. One was the arrival of Detective Inspector Broome, who was in urgent and whispered consultation with Charlie Hearthstoke. The other was the swelling of the Bull like a purple gas balloon, which I had been pumping up to bursting point. Now he exploded with a deafening ‘Mr Rumpole!’ But before he could deliver the full fury of his Judgement against me, Hearthstoke had risen and was saying, ‘My Lord. I wonder if I may intervene? With the greatest respect …’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Hearthstoke.’ The Judge subsided with a gentle hiss of escaping air. ‘Certainly you may. Perhaps you have a suggestion to offer on how I might best deal with this outrageous contempt?’

  ‘I was only about to say, my Lord, that what I am going to tell your Lordship may make the rest of Mr Rumpole’s opening speech unnecessary.’

  ‘I have no doubt that all of his opening speech is unnecessary!’ Judge Bullingham glared in my general direction.

  ‘I am informed by Detective Inspector Broome, my Lord, that, after further inquiries, we should no longer proceed on the allegation that either Cyril or Dennis Timson used, or indeed carried, the automatic pistol which wounded Mr Huggins the bank guard.’

  ‘Neither of them?’ The Bull looked as though his constitution might not stand another shock.

  ‘It seems that further charges will be brought, with regard to that offence, against another “firm”, if I may use that expression,’ Hearthstoke explained. ‘In those circumstances, the only charge is one of theft.’

  ‘To which Mr Cyril Timson has always been prepared to plead guilty,’ Phillida stood up and admitted charmingly.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Erskine-Brown,’ the Judge cooed, and then turned reluctantly to me. ‘Mister Rumpole?’