Rumpole at Christmas

by John Mortimer

These were words I never expected to hear spoken, but they contained the considered verdict of She Who Must Be Obeyed before we settled down for the first night of our Christmas holiday. The food at dinner had been simple but good. (The entrecôte steak had not been arranged in a little tower swamped by tomato coulis and there had been a complete absence of rocket and all the idiocy of smart restaurants.) The Gravestone was clearly on the most friendly of terms with ‘Lorraine’, the manageress, and he and Hilda enjoyed a lengthy conversation on the subject of fishing, which sport Graves practised and on which Hilda was expert after her study of the back number of Country Life in the residents’ lounge.

  Now and again I was asked why I didn’t go out on a day’s fishing with Hilda’s newfound friend the judge, a question I found as easy to answer as ‘Why don’t you take part in the London Marathon wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and a wig?’ For a greater part of the dinner I had sat, unusually silent, listening to the ceaseless chatter of the newfound friends, feeling as superfluous as a maiden aunt at a lovers’ meeting.

  Soon after telling me how charming she had found The Gravestone, Hilda sank into a deep and contented sleep. As the moonlight streamed in at the window and I heard the faraway hooting of an owl, I began to worry about the case we hadn’t discussed at dinner.

  I couldn’t forget my first meeting in Brixton Prison with my client, Hussein Khan. Although undoubtedly the author of the fatal letter, he didn’t seem, when I met him in the company of my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard, to be the sort who would strike terror into the heart of anyone. He was short and unsmiling with soft brown eyes, a quiet monotonous voice and unusually small hands. He wasn’t only uncomplaining, he seemed to find it the most natural thing in the world that he should find himself locked up and facing the most serious of all charges. It was, he told us early in the interview, the will of Allah, and if Allah willed, who was he, a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate in computer studies, to ask questions? I was, throughout the case, amazed at the combination, in my inexplicable client, of the most complicated knowledge of modern technology and the most primitive and merciless religious beliefs.

  ‘I wrote the letter. Of course I did. It was not my decision that she should die. It was the will of God.’

  ‘The will of God that a harmless woman should be shot for writing something critical in a book?’

  ‘Die for blasphemy, yes.’

  ‘And they say you were her executioner, that you carried out the sentence.’

  ‘I didn’t do that.’ He was looking at me patiently, as though I still had much to learn about the faith of Hussein Khan. ‘I knew that death would come to her in time. It came sooner than I had expected.’

  So, was I defending a man who had issued a death threat which had then been obediently carried out by some person or persons unknown in the peaceful precincts of an East London university? It seemed an unlikely story, and I had not been looking forward to the murder trial which started at the Old Bailey during the run-up to Christmas.

  At the heart of the case there was, I thought, a mystery. The letter, I knew, was clear evidence of Hussein’s guilt, and yet there was no forensic evidence – no bloodstains on his clothing, no traces of his having fired a pistol with a silencer (there must have been a silencer, because no one in the building had heard a shot). This was evidence in Hussein’s favour, but I had to remember that he had been in the university building when the murder had taken place, although he’d already been sent down for writing the letter.

  As the owl hooted, Hilda breathed deeply. Sleep eluded me. I went through Hussein Khan’s story again. He had received a phone call, he said, when he was at his parents’ restaurant. (He had answered the phone himself, so there was no one to confirm the call.) It had been, it seemed, from a girl who said she was the senior tutor’s secretary and that the tutor wanted to meet him in the university library at ten o’clock that evening to discuss his future.

  He had arrived at the William Morris building at nine thirty and had told Mr Luttrell, the man at the main reception area, that he was there to meet the senior tutor at the library. He said that when he had arrived at the library, the tutor wasn’t there and that he had waited for over an hour and then gone home, having never been near Honoria Glossop’s office.

  Of course the senior tutor and his secretary denied that either had made such a telephone call. The implication was that Hussein was lying through his teeth and that he had gone to the university because he had known that Professor Glossop worked in her office until late at night and he had intended to kill her.

  At last I fell into a restless sleep. In my dreams I saw myself being prosecuted by Soapy Sam Ballard who was wearing a long beard and arguing for my conviction under sharia law.

  I woke early to the first faint flush of daylight as a distant cock crowed. I got up, tiptoed across the room, and extracted from the bottom of my case the papers in R. v. Khan. I was looking for the answer to a problem as yet undefined, going through the prosecution statement again, and finding nothing very much.

  I reminded myself that Mr Luttrell, at his reception desk, had seen Honoria and her husband arrive together and go to her office. Ricky Glossop had left not more than fifteen minutes later, and later still he had telephoned and couldn’t get an answer from his wife. He had asked Luttrell to go to Honoria’s office because she wasn’t answering her phone. The receptionist had gone to her office and found her lying across her desk, her hand close to the bloodstained letter.

  Next I read the statement from Honoria’s secretary, Sue Blackmore, describing how she had found the letter in Honoria’s university pigeonhole and taken it to Honoria at her home. Of Honoria’s reaction on receiving it, Ms Blackmore commented, ‘She didn’t take the note all that seriously and wouldn’t even tell the police.’ Ricky Glossop had finally rung the anti-terrorist department in Scotland Yard and showed them the letter.

  None of this was new. There was only one piece of evidence which I might have overlooked.

  In the senior tutor’s statement he said he had spoken to Honoria on the morning of the day she had died. She had told him that she couldn’t be at a seminar that afternoon because she had ‘an urgent appointment with Tony Hawkin’. Hawkin, as the senior tutor knew, was a solicitor who acted for the university, and had also acted for Honoria Glossop in a private capacity. The senior tutor had no idea why she had wanted to see her solicitor. He never saw his colleague alive again.

  I was giving that last document some thought when Hilda stirred, opened an eye, and instructed me to ring for breakfast.

  ‘You’ll have to look after yourself today, Rumpole,’ she told me. ‘Gerald’s going to take me fishing for grayling.’

  ‘Gerald?’ Was there some new man in Hilda’s life who had turned up in the Cotswolds?

  ‘You know. The charming judge you introduced me to last night.’

  ‘You can’t mean Gravestone?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I mean Gerald Graves.’

  ‘You’re going fishing with him?’

  ‘He’s very kindly going to take me to a bit of river he shares with a friend.’

  ‘How delightful.’ I adopted the ironic tone. ‘If you catch anything, bring it back for supper.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not going to do any fishing. I’m simply going to watch Gerald from the bank. He’s going to show me how he ties his flies.’

  ‘How absolutely fascinating.’

  She didn’t seem to think she’d said anything at all amusing and began to lever herself briskly out of bed.

  ‘Do ring up about that breakfast, Rumpole!’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get ready for Gerald.’

  He may be Gerald to you, I thought, but he will always be The Old Gravestone to me.

  After Hilda had gone to meet her newfound friend, I finished the bacon and eggs with sausage and fried slice – which I had ordered as an organic, low calorie breakfast – and put a telephone call through to my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard. I found him a
t his home talking over a background of shrill and excited children eager for the next morning and the well-filled stockings.

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’ The man sounded shocked by my call. ‘Don’t you ever take a day off? It’s Christmas Eve!’

  ‘I know it’s Christmas Eve. I know that perfectly well,’ I told him. ‘And my wife has gone fishing with our sepulchral judge, whom she calls “Gerald”. Meanwhile, have you got any close friends or associates working at Hawkin’s, the solicitor?’

  ‘Barry Tuck used to be our legal executive – moved there about three years ago.’

  ‘A cooperative sort of character is he, Tuck?’

  ‘We got on very well. Yes.’

  ‘Then get him to find out why Honoria Glossop went to see Tony Hawkin the afternoon before she was shot. It must have been something fairly urgent. She missed a seminar in order to go.’

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘Probably not, but it just might be something we ought to know.’

  ‘I hope you’re enjoying your Christmas break, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Quite enjoying it. I’d like it better without a certain member of the judiciary. Oh, and I’ve got a hard time ahead.’

  ‘Working?’

  ‘No,’ I told my patient solicitor gloomily. ‘Dancing.’

  ‘Quick, quick, slow, Rumpole. That’s better. Now chassé! Don’t you remember, Rumpole? This is where you chassé.’

  The truth was that I remembered little about it. It had been so long ago. How many years could it have been since Hilda and I had trodden across a dance floor? Yet here I was in a dinner jacket, which was now uncomfortably tight around the waist, doing my best to walk round this small area of polished parquet in time to the music with one arm around Hilda’s satin-covered waist and my other hand gripping one of hers. Although for much of the time she was walking backwards, she was undoubtedly the one in command of the enterprise. I heard a voice singing, seemingly from far off, above the music of the five-piece band laid on for the hotel’s dinner dance. It was a strange sound and one that I hadn’t heard for what seemed many years – She Who Must Be Obeyed was singing. I looked towards my table, rather as someone lost at sea might look towards a distant shore, and I saw Mr Justice Gravestone smiling at us with approval.

  ‘Well done, Hilda! And you came through that quite creditably, I thought, Rumpole. I mean, at least you managed to remain upright, although there were a few dodgy moments coming round that far corner.’

  ‘That was when I told him chassé. Rumpole couldn’t quite manage it.’

  As they were both enjoying a laugh I realized that, during a long day by the river which had, it seemed, produced nothing more than two fish so small that they had had to be returned to their natural environment, Mrs Rumpole had become ‘Hilda’ to the judge, who had already become ‘Gerald’.

  ‘You know, when you retire, Rumpole,’ the judge was sounding sympathetic in the most irritating kind of way, ‘you could take dancing lessons.’

  ‘There’s so much Rumpole could do if he retired. I keep telling him,’ was Hilda’s contribution. ‘He could have wonderful days like we had, Gerald. Outdoors, close to nature and fishing.’

  ‘Catching two small grayling you had to put back in the water?’ I was bold enough to ask. ‘It would’ve been easier to pay a quick visit to the fishmonger’s.’

  ‘Catching fish is not the point of fishing,’ Hilda told me.

  Before I could ask her what the point of it was, the judge came up with a suggestion. ‘When you retire, I could teach you fishing, Rumpole. We could have a few days out together.’

  ‘Now, then. Isn’t that kind of Gerald, Rumpole?’ Hilda beamed and I had to mutter, ‘Very kind,’ although the judge’s offer had made me more determined than ever to die with my wig on.

  It was at this point that Lorraine the manageress came to the judge with a message. He read it quickly and then said, ‘Poor old Leslie Mulliner. You know him, don’t you, Rumpole? He sits in the Chancery Division.’

  I had to confess I didn’t know anyone who sat in the Chancery Division.

  ‘He was going to join us here tomorrow but his wife’s not well.’

  ‘He said on the phone that you’d do the job for him tomorrow.’ Lorraine seemed anxious.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Graves hurried to reassure her. ‘I’ll stand in for him.’

  Before I could get any further explanation of the ‘job’, the music had struck up a more contemporary note. Foxtrots were out, and with a cry of ‘Come along, Hilda’ Graves was strutting the dance floor, making curious rhythmic movements with his hands. And Hilda, walking free and unfastened from her partner, was also strutting and waving her arms, smiling with pleasure. It wasn’t, I’m sure, the most up-to-date form of dancing, but it was, I suppose, a gesture from two sedate citizens who were doing their best to become, for a wine-filled moment on Christmas Eve, a couple of teenagers.

  Christmas Day at Cherry Picker’s Hall was uneventful. The judge suggested church, and I stood while he and Hilda bellowed out ‘O come, all ye faithful…’ Then we sat among the faithful under the Norman arches, beside the plaques and monuments to so many vanished rectors and country squires, looking out upon the holly around the pulpit and the flowers on the altar. I tried to understand, not for the first time, how a religious belief could become so perverted as to lead to death threats, terror and a harmless professor shot through the head.

  We had lunch in a pub and then the judge announced he had work to do and left us.

  After a long and satisfactory sleep, Hilda and I woke around teatime and went to the residents’ lounge. Long before we got to the door, we could hear the excited cries of children, and when we went in we saw them crowded round the Christmas tree. And there, stooping among the presents, was the expected figure in a red dressing gown (trimmed with white fur), wellington boots, a white beard and a long red hat. As he picked up a present and turned towards us, I felt that fate had played the greatest practical joke it could have thought up to enliven the festive season.

  Standing in for his friend Mulliner from the Chancery Division, the sepulchral, unforgiving, prosecution-minded Mr Justice Gravestone, my old enemy, had become Father Christmas.

  On Boxing Day, I rang a persistent, dogged, ever-useful private detective who, sickened by divorce, now specialized in the cleaner world of crime – Ferdinand Ian Gilmour Newton, known in legal circles as ‘Fig Newton’. I told him that, as was the truth, my wife Hilda was planning a long country walk and lunch in a distant village with a judge whom I had spent a lifetime trying to avoid. And I asked him, if he had no previous engagements, if he’d like to sample the table d’hôte at Cherry Picker’s Hall.

  Fig Newton is a lugubrious character of indeterminate age, usually dressed in an old mackintosh and an even older hat, with a drip at the end of his nose caused by a seemingly perpetual cold – most likely caught while keeping observation in all weathers. But today he had shed his outer garments, his nose was dry, and he was tucking into the lamb cutlets with something approaching enthusiasm. ‘Bit of a step up from your usual pub lunch, this, isn’t it, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘It certainly is, Fig. We’re splashing out this Christmas. Now this case I’m doing down the Bailey…’

  ‘The terrorist?’

  ‘Yes, the terrorist.’

  ‘You’re on to a loser with that one, Mr Rumpole.’ Fig was gloomily relishing the fact.

  ‘Most probably. All the same, there are a few stones I don’t want to leave unturned.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Find out what you can about the Glossops.’

  ‘The dead woman’s family?’

  ‘That’s right. See what’s known about their lives, hobbies, interests. That sort of thing. I need to get more of a picture of their lives together. Oh, and see if the senior tutor knows more about the Glossops. Pick up any gossip going around the university. I’ll let you know if Bonny Bernard has found out why Honoria had a date with her solicitor.
’

  ‘So when do you want all this done by, Mr Rumpole?’ Fig picked up a cutlet bone and chewed gloomily. ‘Tomorrow morning, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, sooner than that if possible,’ I told him.

  It was not that I felt that the appalling Hussein Khan had a defence – in fact he might well turn out to have no defence at all. But something at the children’s Christmas party had suggested a possibility to my mind.

  That something was the sight of Mr Justice Graves standing in for someone else.

  III

  Christmas was over, and I wondered if the season of goodwill was over with it. The Christmas cards had left the mantelpiece, the holly and the mistletoe had been tidied away, we had exchanged green fields for Gloucester Road, and Cherry Picker’s Hall was nothing but a memory. The judge was back on the bench to steer the case of R. v. Khan towards its inevitable guilty verdict.

  The Christmas decorations were not all that had gone. Gerald the cheerful dinner guest, Gerald the energetic dancing partner of She Who Must Be Obeyed, Gerald the fisherman and, in particular, Gerald as Santa Claus had all gone as well, leaving behind only the old thin-lipped, unsmiling Mr Justice Gravestone with the voice of doom, determined to make a difficult case harder than ever.

  All the same there was something of a spring in the Rumpole step. This was not only the result of the Christmas break but also due to a suspicion that the case R. v. Khan might not be quite as horrifyingly simple as it had at first appeared.

  As I crossed the hall on my way to Court Number One, I saw Ricky Glossop – the dashingly handsome husband of the murdered professor – with a pretty blonde girl whom I took to be Sue Blackmore, Honoria’s secretary, who was due to give evidence about her employer’s reception of the fatal letter. She seemed, so far as I could tell from a passing examination, to be a girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She lit a cigarette with trembling fingers, then almost immediately stamped it out. She kept looking, with a kind of desperation, towards the door of the court, and then turning, with a sob, to Ricky Glossop and choking out what I took to be some sort of complaint. He had laid a consoling hand on hers and was talking in the sort of low, exaggeratedly calm tone that a dentist uses when he says, ‘This isn’t going to hurt.’