‘Something extremely serious has happened.’ Sam Ballard, QC, made the announcement as though war had broken out. He is a pallid sort of person who usually looks as though he has just bitten into a sour apple. His hair, I have to tell you, seems to be slicked down with some kind of pomade.
‘Someone nicked the nail-brush in the Chambers loo?’ I suggested helpfully.
‘How did you guess?’ He turned on me, amazed, as though I had the gift of second sight.
‘It corresponds to your idea of something serious. Also I notice such things.’
‘Odd that you should know immediately what I was talking about, Rumpole.’ By now Ballard’s amazement had turned to deep suspicion.
‘Not guilty, my Lord,’ I assured him. ‘Didn’t you have a meeting of your God-bothering society here last week?’
‘The Lawyers As Christians committee. We met here. What of it?’
‘ “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Isn’t that their motto? The devout are notable nail-brush nickers.’ As I said this, I watched Erskine-Brown lay the telephone to rest and leave the room with the air of a man who has merely postponed the evil hour. Ballard was still on the subject of serious crime in the facilities. ‘It’s of vital importance in any place of work, Henry,’ he batted on, ‘that the highest standards of hygiene are maintained! Now I’ve been instructed by the City Health Authority in an important case, it would be extremely embarrassing to me personally if my Chambers were found wanting in the matter of a nail-brush.’
‘Well, don’t look at me, Mr Ballard.’ Henry was not taking this lecture well.
‘I am accusing nobody.’ Ballard sounded unconvincing. ‘But look to it, Henry. Please, look to it.’
Then our Head of Chambers left us. Feeling my usual reluctance to start work, I asked Uncle Tom, as something of an expert in these matters, if it would be fair to call me a ‘character’.
‘A what, Rumpole?’
‘A “character”, Uncle Tom.’
‘Oh, they had one of those in old Sniffy Greengrass’s Chambers in Lamb Court,’ Uncle Tom remembered. ‘Fellow called Dalrymple. Lived in an absolutely filthy flat over a chemist’s shop in Chancery Lane and used to lead a cat round the Temple on a long piece of pink tape. “Old Dalrymple’s a character,” they used to say, and the other fellows in Chambers were rather proud of him.’
‘I don’t do anything like that, do I?’ I asked for reassurance.
‘I hope not,’ Uncle Tom was kind enough to say. ‘This Dalrymple finally went across the road to do an undefended divorce. In his pyjamas! I believe they had to lock him up. I wouldn’t say you were a “character”, Rumpole. Not yet, anyway.’
‘Thank you, Uncle Tom. Perhaps you could mention that to She Who Must?’
And then the day took a distinct turn for the better. Henry put down his phone after yet another call and my heart leapt up when I heard that Mr Bernard, my favourite instructing solicitor (because he keeps quiet, does what he’s told and hardly ever tells me about his bad back), was coming over and was anxious to instruct me in a new case which was ‘not on the legal aid’. As I left the room to go about this business, I had one final question for Uncle Tom. ‘That fellow Dalrymple. He didn’t play golf in the clerk’s room did he?’
‘Good heavens, no.’ Uncle Tom seemed amused at my ignorance of the world. ‘He was a character, do you see? He’d hardly do anything normal.’
Mr Bernard, balding, pinstriped, with a greying moustache and a kindly eye, through all our triumphs and disasters remained imperturbable. No confession made by any client, however bizarre, seemed to surprise him, nor had any revelation of evil shocked him. He lived through our days of murder, mayhem and fraud as though he were listening to ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’. He was interested in growing roses and in his daughter’s nursing career. He spent his holidays in remote spots like Bangkok and the Seychelles. He always went away, he told me, ‘on a package’ and returned with considerable relief. I was always pleased to see Mr Bernard, but that day he seemed to have brought me something far from my usual line of country.
‘My client, Mr Rumpole, first consulted me because his marriage was on the rocks, not to put too fine a point on it.’
‘It happens, Mr Bernard. Many marriages are seldom off them.’
‘Particularly so if, as in this case, the wife’s of foreign extraction. It’s long been my experience, Mr Rumpole, that you can’t beat foreign wives for being vengeful. In this case, extremely vengeful.’
‘Hell hath no fury, Mr Bernard?’ I suggested.
‘Exactly, Mr Rumpole. You’ve put your finger on the nub of the case. As you would say yourself.’
‘I haven’t done a matrimonial for years. My divorce may be a little rusty,’ I told him modestly.
‘Oh, we’re not asking you to do the divorce. We’re sending that to Mr Tite-Smith in Crown Office Row.’
Oh, well, I thought, with only a slight pang of disappointment, good luck to little Tite-Smith.
‘The matrimonial is not my client’s only problem,’ Mr Bernard told me.
‘When sorrows come, Mr Bernard, they come not single spies, But in battalions! Your chap got something else on his plate, has he?’
‘On his plate!’ The phrase seemed to cause my solicitor some amusement. ‘That’s very apt, that is. And apter than you know, Mr Rumpole.’
‘Don’t keep me in suspense! Who is this mysterious client?’
‘I wasn’t to divulge the name, Mr Rumpole, in case you should refuse to act for him. He thought you might’ve taken against him, so he’s coming to appeal to you in person. I asked Henry if he’d show him up as soon as he arrived.’
And, dead on cue, Dianne knocked on my door, threw it open and announced, ‘Mr O’Higgins.’ The large man, dressed now in a deafening checked tweed jacket and a green turtlenecked sweater, looking less like a chef than an Irish horse coper, advanced on me with a broad grin and his hand extended in a greeting, which was in strong contrast to our last encounter.
‘I rely on you to save me, Mr Rumpole,’ he boomed. ‘You’re the man to do it, sir. The great criminal defender!’
‘Oh? I thought I was the criminal in your restaurant,’ I reminded him.
‘I have to tell you, Mr Rumpole, your courage took my breath away! Do you know what he did, Mr Bernard? Do you know what this little fellow here had the pluck to do?’ He seemed determined to impress my solicitor with an account of my daring in the face of adversity. ‘He only ordered mashed spuds in La Maison Jean-Pierre. A risk no one else has taken in all the time I’ve been maître de cuisine.’
‘It didn’t seem to be particularly heroic,’ I told Bernard, but O’Higgins would have none of that. ‘I tell you, Mr Bernard’ – he moved very close to my solicitor and towered over him – ‘a man who could do that to Jean-Pierre couldn’t be intimidated by all the Judges of the Queen’s Bench. What do you say then, Mr Horace Rumpole? Will you take me on?’
I didn’t answer him immediately but sat at my desk, lit a small cigar and looked at him critically. ‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Is it my personality that puts you off?’ My prospective client folded himself into my armchair, with one leg draped over an arm. He grinned even more broadly, displaying a judiciously placed gold tooth. ‘Do you find me objectionable?’
‘Mr O’Higgins.’ I decided to give judgement at length. ‘I think your restaurant pretentious and your portions skimpy. Your customers eat in a dim, religious atmosphere which seems to be more like Evensong than a good night out. You appear to be a self-opinionated and self-satisfied bully. I have known many murderers who could teach you a lesson in courtesy. However, Mr Bernard tells me that you are prepared to pay my fee and, in accordance with the great traditions of the Bar, I am on hire to even the most unattractive customer.’
There was a silence and I wondered if the inflammable restaurateur were about to rise and hit me. But he turned to Bernard with even greater enthusiasm. ‘Just listen to that! How’s th
at for eloquence? We picked the right one here, Mr Bernard!’
‘Well, now. I gather you’re in some sort of trouble. Apart from your marriage, that is.’ I unscrewed my pen and prepared to take a note.
‘This has nothing to do with my marriage.’ But then he frowned unhappily. ‘Anyway, I don’t think it has.’
‘You haven’t done away with this vengeful wife of yours?’ Was I to be presented with a murder?
‘I should have, long ago,’ Jean-Pierre admitted. ‘But no. Simone is still alive and suing. Isn’t that right, Mr Bernard?’
‘It is, Mr O’Higgins,’ Bernard assured him gloomily. ‘It is indeed. But this is something quite different. My client, Mr Rumpole, is being charged under the Food and Hygiene Regulations 1970 for offences relating to dirty and dangerous practices at La Maison. I have received a telephone call from the Environmental Health Officer.’
It was then, I’m afraid, that I started to laugh. I named the guilty party. ‘The mouse!’
‘Got it in one.’ Jean-Pierre didn’t seem inclined to join in the joke.
‘The wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,’ I quoted at him. ‘How delightful! We’ll elect for trial before a jury. If we can’t get you off, Mr O’Higgins, at least we’ll give them a little harmless entertainment.’
Of course it wasn’t really funny. A mouse in the wrong place, like too many milk bottles on a doorstep, might be a sign of passions stretched beyond control.
I have always found it useful, before forming a view about a case, to inspect the scene of the crime. Accordingly I visited La Maison Jean-Pierre one evening to study the ritual serving of dinner.
Mr Bernard and I stood in a corner of the kitchen at La Maison Jean-Pierre with our client. We were interested in the two waiters who had attended table eight, the site of the Erskine-Brown assignation. The senior of the two was Gaston, the station waiter, who had four tables under his command. ‘Gaston Leblanc,’ Jean-Pierre told us, as he identified the small, fat, cheerful, middle-aged man who trotted between the tables. ‘Been with me for ever. Works all the hours God gave to keep a sick wife and their kid at university. Does all sorts of other jobs in the daytime. I don’t inquire too closely. Georges Pitou, the head waiter, takes the orders, of course, and leaves a copy of the note on the table.’
We saw Georges move, in a stately fashion, into the kitchen and hand the order for table eight to a young cook in a white hat, who stuck it up on the kitchen wall with a magnet. This was Ian, the sous chef. Jean-Pierre had ‘discovered’ him in a Scottish hotel and wanted to encourage his talent. That night the bustle in the kitchen was muted, and as I looked through the circular window into the dining room I saw that most of the white-clothed tables were standing empty, like small icebergs in a desolate polar region. When the prosecution had been announced, there had been a headline in the Evening Standard which read GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER? MOUSE SERVED IN TOP LONDON RESTAURANT and since then attendances at La Maison had dropped off sharply.
The runner between Gaston’s station and the kitchen was the commis waiter, Alphonse Pascal, a painfully thin, dark-eyed young man with a falling lock of hair who looked like the hero of some nineteenth-century French novel, interesting and doomed. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Jean-Pierre told us, ‘Alphonse is full of ambition. He’s starting at the bottom and wants to work his way up to running a hotel. Been with me for about a year.’
We watched as Ian put the two orders for table eight on the serving table. In due course Alphonse came into the kitchen and called out, ‘Number Eight!’ ‘Ready, frog face,’ Ian told him politely, and Alphonse came back with, ‘Merci, idiot.’
‘Are they friends?’ I asked my client.
‘Not really. They’re both much too fond of Mary.’
‘Mary?’
‘Mary Skelton. The English girl who makes up the bills in the restaurant.’
I looked again through the circular window and saw the unmemorable girl, her head bent over her calculator. She seemed an unlikely subject for such rivalry. I saw Alphonse pass her with a tray, carrying two domed dishes and, although he looked in her direction, she didn’t glance up from her work. Alphonse then took the dishes to the serving table at Gaston’s station. Gaston looked under one dome to check its contents and then the plates were put on the table. Gaston mouthed an inaudible ‘Un, deux, trois!’, the domes were lifted before the diners and not a mouse stirred.
‘On the night in question,’ Bernard reminded me, ‘Gaston says in his statement that he looked under the dome on the gentleman’s plate.’
‘And saw no side order of mouse,’ I remembered.
‘Exactly! So he gave the other to Alphonse, who took it to the lady.’
‘And then … Hysterics!’
‘And then the reputation of England’s greatest maître de cuisine crumbled to dust!’ Jean-Pierre spoke as though announcing a national disaster.
‘Nonsense!’ I did my best to cheer him up. ‘You’re forgetting the reputation of Horace Rumpole.’
‘You think we’ve got a defence?’ my client asked eagerly. ‘I mean, now that you’ve looked at the kitchen?’
‘Can’t think of one for the moment,’ I admitted, ‘but I expect we’ll cook up something in the end.’
Unencouraged, Jean-Pierre looked out into the dining room, muttered, ‘I’d better go and keep those lonely people company’, and left us. I watched him pass the desk, where Mary looked up and smiled and I thought, however brutal he was with his customers, at least Jean-Pierre’s staff seemed to find him a tolerable employer. And then, to my surprise, I saw him approach the couple at table eight, grinning in a most ingratiating manner, and stand chatting and bowing as though they could have ordered doner kebab and chips and that would have been perfectly all right by him.
‘You know,’ I said to Mr Bernard, ‘it’s quite extraordinary, the power that can be wielded by one of the smaller rodents.’
‘You mean it’s wrecked his business?’
‘No. More amazing than that. It’s forced Jean-Pierre O’Higgins to be polite to his clientele.’
After my second visit to La Maison events began to unfold at breakneck speed. First our Head of Chambers, Soapy Sam Ballard, made it known to me that the brief he had accepted on behalf of the Health Authority, and of which he had boasted so flagrantly during the nail-brush incident, was in fact the prosecution of J.-P. O’Higgins for the serious crime of being in charge of a rodent-infested restaurant. Then She Who Must Be Obeyed, true to her word, packed her grip and went off on a gastronomic tour with the man from Saskatoon. I was left to enjoy a lonely high-calorie breakfast, with no fear of criticism over the matter of a fourth sausage, in the Taste-Ee-Bite café, Fleet Street. Seated there one morning, enjoying the company of The Times crossword, I happened to overhear Mizz Liz Probert, the dedicated young radical barrister in our Chambers, talking to her close friend, David Inchcape, whom she had persuaded us to take on in a somewhat devious manner – a barrister as young but, I think, at heart, a touch less radical than Mizz Liz herself.*
‘You don’t really care, do you, Dave?’ she was saying.
‘Of course, I care. I care about you, Liz. Deeply.’ He reached out over their plates of muesli and cups of decaff to grasp her fingers.
‘That’s just physical.’
‘Well. Not just physical. I don’t suppose it’s just. Mainly physical, perhaps.’
‘No one cares about old people.’
‘But you’re not old people, Liz. Thank God!’
‘You see. You don’t care about them. My Dad was saying there’s old people dying in tower blocks every day. Nobody knows about it for weeks, until they decompose!’ And I saw Dave release her hand and say, ‘Please, Liz. I am having my breakfast.’
‘You see! You don’t want to know. It’s just something you don’t want to hear about. It’s the same with battery hens.’
‘What’s the same about battery hens?’
‘No one wants to know. That�
��s all.’
‘But surely, Liz. Battery hens don’t get lonely.’
‘Perhaps they do. There’s an awful lot of loneliness about.’ She looked in my direction. ‘Get off to Court then, if you have to. But do think about it, Dave.’ Then she got up, crossed to my table, and asked what I was doing. I was having my breakfast, I assured her, and not doing my yoga meditation.
‘Do you always have breakfast alone, Rumpole?’ She spoke, in the tones of a deeply supportive social worker, as she sat down opposite me.
‘It’s not always possible. Much easier now, of course.’
‘Now. Why now, exactly?’ She looked seriously concerned.
‘Well. Now my wife’s left me,’ I told her cheerfully.
‘Hilda!’ Mizz Probert was shocked, being a conventional girl at heart.
‘As you would say, Mizz Liz, she is no longer sharing a one-on-one relationship with me. In any meaningful way.’
‘Where does that leave you, Rumpole?’
‘Alone. To enjoy my breakfast and contemplate the crossword puzzle.’
‘Where’s Hilda gone?’
‘Oh, in search of gracious living with her Cousin Everard from Saskatoon. A fellow with about as many jokes in him as the Dow Jones Average.’
‘You mean, she’s gone off with another man?’ Liz seemed unable to believe that infidelity was not confined to the young.
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘But, Rumpole. Why?’
The Collected Stories of Rumpole Page 58