A Rumpole Christmas

by John Mortimer

  “Not necessarily,” I told him. “It’s just that my wife has many old school friends and Poppy Longstaff is one of them. Well now, you seem to have done pretty well for yourself. Solid citizens still misconducting themselves around Old Compton Street, are they?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I gave all that up and went into the property business.”

  “Really? Where did you do that? Canada?”

  “I never saw Canada.” He shook his head. “Garwick Prison. Up-and-coming area in the Home Counties. The screws there were ready and willing to do the deals on the outside. I paid them embarrassingly small commissions.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Four years. By the time I came out I’d got my first million.”

  “Well, then, I did you a good turn, losing your case. A bit of luck His Honour Judge Bullingham didn’t believe in the remission of sins.”

  “You think I got what I deserved?”

  I stretched my hands to the fire. I could hear the cocktail chatter from the marble hall of the eighteenth-century manor. “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” I quoted Hamlet at him.

  “Then I can trust you, Rumpole? The Lord Chancellor’s going to put me on the local bench.”

  “The Lord Chancellor lives in a world of his own.”

  “You don’t think I’d do well as a magistrate?”

  “I suppose you’d speak from personal experience of crime. And have some respect for the quality of mercy.”

  “I’ve got no time for that, Rumpole.” His voice became quieter but harder. The brown eyes lost their softness. That, I thought, was how he must have looked when one of his clip joint girls was caught with the punters’ cash stuffed in her tights. “It’s about time we cracked down on crime. Well, now, I can trust you not to go out there and spread the word about the last time we met?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “How well you have understood the Christmas message.”

  “Which is?”

  “Perhaps, generosity.”

  “I see. So you want your bung?”

  “Oh, not me, Dicko. I’ve been paid, inadequately, by Legal Aid. But there’s an impoverished church tower in urgent need of resuscitation.”

  “That Eric Longstaff, our rector—he’s not a patriot!”

  “And are you?”

  “I do a good deal of work locally for the British Legion.”

  “And, I’m sure, next Poppy Day they’ll appreciate what you’ve done for the church tower.”

  He looked at me for a long minute in silence, and I thought that if this scene had been taking place in a back room in Soho there might, quite soon, have been the flash of a knife. Instead, his hand went to an inside pocket and produced nothing more lethal than a chequebook.

  “While you’re in a giving mood,” I said, “the rectory’s in desperate need of central heating.”

  “This is bloody blackmail!” Dicko Perducci, now known as Donald Compton, said.

  “Well,” I told him, “you should know.”

  Christmas was over. The year turned, stirred itself and opened its eyes on a bleak January. Crimes were committed, arrests were made and the courtrooms were filled, once again, with the sounds of argument. I went down to the Old Bailey on a trifling matter of fixing the date of a trial before Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown. As I was leaving, the usher came and told me that the judge wanted to see me in her private room on a matter of urgency.

  Such summonses always fill me with apprehension and a vague feeling of guilt. What had I done? Got the date of the trial hopelessly muddled? Addressed the Court with my trousers carelessly unzipped? I was relieved when the learned Phillida greeted me warmly and even offered me a glass of sherry, poured from her own personal decanter. “It was so kind of you to offer, Rumpole,” she said unexpectedly.

  “Offer what?” I was puzzled.

  “You told us how much you adored the traditional British pantomime.”

  “So I did.” For a happy moment I imagined Her Ladyship as Principal Boy, her shapely legs encased in black tights, her neat little wig slightly askew, slapping her thigh and calling out, in bell-like tones, “Cheer up, Rumpole, Portia’s not far away.”

  “The twins are looking forward to it enormously.”

  “Looking forward to what?”

  “Aladdin at the Tufnell Park Empire. I’ve got tickets for the nineteenth of January. You do remember promising to take them, don’t you?”

  “Well, of course.” What else might I have said after the fifth glass of Erskine-Brown St Emilion? “I’d love to be of the party. And will old Claude be buying us a dinner afterwards?”

  “I really don’t think you should go around calling people ‘old,’ Rumpole.” Phillida now looked miffed, and I downed the sherry before she took it into her head to deprive me of it. “Claude’s got us tickets for Pavarotti—L’Elisir d’Amore. You might buy the children a burger after the show. Oh, and it’s not far from us on the Tube. It really was sweet of you to invite them.” At which she smiled at me and refilled my glass in a way which made it clear she was not prepared to hear further argument.

  It all turned out better than I could have hoped. Tristan and Isolde, unlike their Wagnerian namesakes, were cheerful, reasonably polite and only seemed anxious to disassociate themselves, as far as possible, from the old fart who was es corting them. At every available opportunity they would touch me for cash and then scamper off to buy ice cream, chocolates, sandwiches or Sprite. I was left in reasonable peace to enjoy the performance.

  And enjoy it I did. Aladdin was a personable young woman with an upturned nose, a voice which could have been used to wake up patients coming round from their anaesthesia and memorable thighs. Uncle Abanazer was played, Isolde told me, by an actor who portrayed a social worker with domestic problems in a long-running television series. Wishy and Washy did sing to electric guitars (deafeningly amplified) but Widow Twankey, played by a certain Jim Diamond, was all a dame should be—a nimble little Cockney, fitted up with a sizeable false bosom, a flaming red wig, sweeping eyelashes and scarlet lips. Never have I heard the immortal line “Where’s that naughty boy Aladdin got to?” better delivered. I joined in loudly (Tristan and Isolde sat silent and embarrassed) when the Widow and Aladdin conducted us in the singing of “Please Don’t Pinch My Tomatoes.” It was, in fact and in fairness, all a traditional pantomime should be, and yet I had a vague feeling that something was wrong, that an element was missing. But, as the cast came down a white staircase in glittering costumes to enthusiastic applause, it seemed the sort of pantomime I’d grown up with and which Tristan and Isolde should be content to inherit.

  After so much excitement I felt in need of a stiff brandy and soda, but the eatery the children had selected for their evening’s entertainment had apparently gone teetotal and alcohol was not on the menu. Once they were confronted by their mammoth burgers and fries I made my excuses, said I’d be back in a moment and slipped into a nearby pub which was, I noticed, opposite the stage door of the Empire.

  As the life-giving draught was being poured I found myself standing next to Washy and Uncle Abanazer, now out of costume, who were discussing Jim the Dame. “Very unfriendly tonight,” Washy said. “Locked himself in his dressing room before the show and wouldn’t join us for a drink.”

  “Perhaps he’s had a bust-up with Molly?”

  “Unlikely. Molly and Jim never have a cross word.”

  “Lucky she’s never found out he’s been polishing Aladdin’s wonderful lamp,” Abanazer said, and they both laughed.

  As I asked the girl behind the bar to refill my glass, in which the tide had sunk to a dangerous low, I heard them laugh again about the Widow Twankey’s voluminous bosom. “Strapped-on polystyrene,” Abanazer was saying. “Almost bruises me when I dance with her. Funny thing, tonight it was quite soft.”

  “Perhaps she borrowed one from a blow-up woman?” Washy was laughing as I gulped my
brandy and legged it back to the hamburgers. In the dark passage outside the stage door I saw a small, nimble figure in hurried retreat—Jim Diamond, who for some reason hadn’t wanted to join the boys at the bar.

  After I had restored the children to the Erskine-Browns’ au pair I sat in the Tube on my way back to Gloucester Road and read the programme. Jim Diamond, it seemed, had started his life in industry before taking up show business. He had a busy career in clubs and turned down appearances on television. “I only enjoy the living show,” Jim says. “I want to have the audience where I can see them.” His photograph, without the exaggerated female make-up, showed a pale, thin-nosed, in some way disagreeable little man with a lip curled either in scorn or triumph. I wondered how such an unfriendly-looking character could become an ebullient and warm-hearted widow. Stripped of his make-up, there was something about this comic’s unsmiling face which brought back memories of another meeting in totally different circumstances. It was the second time within a few weeks that I had found an old familiar face cast in a new and unexpected part.

  The memory I couldn’t quite grasp preyed on my mind until I was tucked up in bed. Then, as Hilda’s latest historical romance dropped from her weary fingers and she turned her back on me and switched out the light, I saw the face again quite clearly but in a different setting. Not Diamond. Sparker? No, Sparksman. A logical progression. Widow Twankey had been played by Harry Sparksman, a man who had trained as a professional entertainer, if my memory was correct, not in clubs, but in Her Majesty’s prisons. It was, it seemed, an interesting career change, but I thought no more of it at the time and once satisfied with my identification I fell asleep.

  “The boy couldn’t have done it, Mr Rumpole. Not a complicated bloody great job to that extent. His only way of getting at a safe was to dig it out of the wall and remove it bodily. He did that in a Barkingside boutique and what he found in it hardly covered the petrol. Young Denis couldn’t have got into the Croydon supermarket peter. No one in our family could have.”

  Uncle Fred, the experienced and cautious head of the Timson clan, had no regard for the safe-breaking talents of Denis, his nephew, and, on the whole, an unskilled recruit in the Timson enterprise. The Croydon supermarket job had been highly complicated and expertly carried out and had yielded, for its perpetrators, thousands of pounds. Peanuts Molloy was arrested as one of the lookouts after falling and twisting an ankle when chased by a night watchman during the getaway. He said he didn’t know any of the skilled operators who had engaged him except Denis Timson who, he alleged, was in general charge of the operation. Denis alone, he said, had silenced the burglar alarm and deftly penetrated the lock on the safe with an oxyacetylene blowtorch.

  It has to be remembered, though, that the clan Molloy had been sworn enemies of the Timson family from time immemorial. Peanuts’ story sounded implausible when I met Denis Timson in the Brixton Prison interview room. A puzzled twenty-five-year-old with a shaven head and a poor attempt at a moustache, he seemed more upset by his Uncle Fred’s low opinion of him than the danger of a conviction and subsequent prolonged absence from the family.

  Denis’s case was to come up for committal at the South London Magistrates’ Court before “Skimpy” Simpson, whose lack of success at the Bar had driven him to a job as a stipendiary beak. His nickname had been earned by the fact that he had not, within living memory, been known to splash out on a round of drinks at Pommeroy’s Wine Bar.

  In the usual course of events, there is no future in fighting proceedings which are only there to commit the customer to trial. I had resolved to attend solely to pour a little well-deserved contempt on the testimony of Peanuts Molloy. As I started to prepare the case, I made a note of the date of the Croydon supermarket break-in. As soon as I had done so, I consulted my diary. I turned the virgin pages, as yet unstained by notes of trials, ideas for cross-examinations, splodges of tea, or spilled glasses of Pom meroy’s Very Ordinary. It was as I had thought. While some virtuoso had been at work on the Croydon safe, I had been enjoying Aladdin in the company of Tristan and Isolde.

  “Detective Inspector Grimble, would you agree that whoever blew the safe in the Croydon supermarket did an extraordinarily skilful job?”

  “Mr Rumpole, are we meant to congratulate your client on his professional skill?”

  God moves in mysterious ways, and it wasn’t Skimpy Simpson’s fault that he was born with thin lips and a voice which sounded like the rusty hinge of a rusty gate swinging in the wind. I decided to ignore him and concentrate on a friendly chat with DI Grimble, a large, comfortable, ginger haired officer. We had both lived, over the years, with the clan Timson and their misdoings. He was known to them as a decent and fair-minded cop, as disapproving of the younger, Panda-racing, evidence-massaging intake to the force as they were of the lack of discretion and criminal skills which marked the younger Timsons.

  “I mean, the thieves were well informed. They knew that there would be a week’s money in the safe.”

  “They knew that, yes.”

  “And wasn’t there a complex burglar alarm system? You couldn’t put it out of action simply by cutting wires, could you?”

  “Cutting the wires would have set it off.”

  “So putting the burglar alarm out of action would have required special skills?”

  “It would have done.”

  “Putting it out of action also stopped a clock in the office. So we know that occurred at 8.45?”

  “We know that. Yes.”

  “And at 9.20 young Molloy was caught as he fell while running to a getaway car.”

  “That is so.”

  “So this heavy safe was burned open in a little over half an hour?”

  “I fail to see the relevance of this, Mr Rumpole.” Skimpy was getting restless.

  “I’m sure the officer does. That shows a very high degree of technical skill, doesn’t it, Detective Inspector?”

  “I’d agree with that.”

  “Exercised by a highly experienced peterman?”

  “Who is this Mr Peterman?” Skimpy was puzzled. “We haven’t heard of him before.”

  “Not Mr Peterman.” I marvelled at the ignorance of the basic facts of life displayed by the magistrate. “A man expert at blowing safes, known to the trade as a ‘peter,’ ” I told him and turned back to DI Grimble. “So we’re agreed that this was a highly expert piece of work?”

  “It must have been done by someone who knew his job pretty well. Yes.”

  “Denis Timson’s record shows convictions for shoplifting, bag-snatching and stealing a radio from an unlocked car. In all of these simple enterprises, he managed to get caught.”

  “Your client’s criminal record!” Skimpy looked happy for the first time. “You’re allowing that to go into evidence, are you, Mr Rumpole?”

  “Certainly, sir.” I explained the obvious point. “Because there’s absolutely no indication that he was capable of blowing a safe in record time, or silencing a complicated burglar alarm, is there, Detective Inspector?”

  “No. There’s nothing to show anything like that in his record ...”

  “Mr Rumpole.” Skimpy was looking at the clock; was he in danger of missing his usual train back home to Haywards Heath? “Where’s all this heading?”

  “Back a good many years,” I told him, “to the Sweet-Home Building Society job at Carshalton, when Harry Sparksman blew a safe so quietly that even the dogs slept through it.”

  “You were in on that case, weren’t you, Mr Rumpole?” Inspector Grimble was pleased to remember. “Sparksman got five years.”

  “Not one of your great successes.” Skimpy was also delighted. “Perhaps you wasted the court’s time with unnecessary questions. Have you anything else to ask this officer?”

  “Not till the Old Bailey, Sir. I may have thought of a few more by then.” With great satisfaction, Skimpy committed Denis Timson, a minor villain who would have had difficulty changing a fuse, let alone blowing a safe, for trial at the Cen
tral Criminal Court.

  “Funny you mentioned Harry Sparksman. Do you know, the same thought occurred to me. An expert like him could’ve done that job in the time.”

  “Great minds think alike,” I assured DI Grimble. We were washing away the memory of an hour or two before Skimpy with two pints of nourishing stout in the pub opposite the beak’s Court. “You know Harry took up a new career?” I needn’t have asked the question. DI Grimble had a groupie’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the criminal stars.

  “Oh, yes. Now a comic called Jim Diamond. Got up a concert party in the nick. Apparently gave him a taste for show business.”

  “I did hear,” I took Grimble into my confidence, “that he made a comeback for the Croydon job.” It had been a throwaway line from Uncle Fred Timson—“I heard talk they got Harry back out of retirement”—but it was a thought worth examining.

  “I heard the same. So we did a bit of checking. But Sparksman, known as Diamond, has got a cast-iron alibi.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “At the time when the Croydon job was done, he was performing in a pantomime. On stage nearly all the evening, it seems, playing the Dame.”

  “Aladdin,” I said, “at the Tufnell Park Empire. It might just be worth your while to go into that alibi a little more thoroughly. I’d suggest you have a private word with Mrs Molly Diamond. It’s just possible she may have noticed his attraction to Aladdin’s lamp.”

  “Now then, Mr Rumpole.” Grimble was wiping the froth from his lips with a neatly folded handkerchief. “You mustn’t tell me how to do my job.”

  “I’m only trying to serve,” I managed to look pained, “the interests of justice!”

  “You mean, the interests of your client?”

  “Sometimes they’re the same thing,” I told him, but I had to admit it wasn’t often.

  As it happened, the truth emerged without Detective Inspector Grimble having to do much of a job. Harry had, in fact, fallen victim to a tip-tilted nose and memorable thighs; he’d left home and moved into Aladdin’s Kensal Rise flat. Molly, taking a terrible revenge, blew his alibi wide open.