The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  A slightly hurt waiter took the bottle from me and continued my work.

  ‘Don’t you help them?’ Marigold looked at me, doubtfully.

  “Don’t what ?”

  ‘Help them. Doing all these crimes. After all. You get them off.’

  ‘Today,’ I said, not without a certain pride. ‘Today, let me tell you, Marigold, I was no help to them at all. I showed them… no gratitude!’

  ‘You got him off!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You got Peter Delgardo off.’

  ‘Just for one reason.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘He happened to be innocent.’

  ‘Come on, Horace. How can you be sure of that?’ Feath-erstone was smiling tolerantly but I leant forward and gave him the truth of the matter.

  ‘You know, it’s a terrifying thing, my learned friend. We go through all that mumbo jumbo. We put on our wigs and gowns and mutter the ritual prayers. “My Lord, I humbly submit.” “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have listened with admirable patience…’ Abracadabra. Fee Fo Fi Bloody Fum. And just when everyone thinks you’re going to produce the most ludicrously faked bit of cheese-cloth ectoplasm, or a phoney rap on the table, it comes. Clear as a bell. Quite unexpected. The voice of truth!’

  I was vaguely aware of a worried figure in a dinner jacket coming towards us across the floor.

  ‘Have you ever found that, Featherstone? Bloody scaring sometimes. All the trouble we take to cloud the issues and divert the attention. Suddenly we’ve done it. There it is! Naked and embarrassing. The truth!’

  I looked up as the figure joined us. It was my late instructing solicitor.

  ‘Nooks. “Shady” Nooks!’ I greeted him, but he seemed in no mood to notice me. He pulled up a chair and sat down beside Featherstone.

  ‘Apparently it was on the nine o’clock news. They’ve just arrested Leslie Delgardo. Charged him with the murder of Tosher MacBride. I’ll want a con with you in the morning.’

  I was left out of this conversation, but I didn’t mind. Music started again, playing a tune which I found vaguely familiar. Nooks was muttering on; it seemed that the police now knew Tosher worked for Leslie, and that some member of the rival Watson family may have spotted him at the scene of the crime. An extraordinary sensation overcame me, something I hadn’t felt for a long time, which could only be described as happiness.

  ‘I don’t know whether you’ll want to brief me for Leslie, Nooks,’ I raised a glass to old ‘Shady’. ‘Or would that be rather . over-egging the pudding?’

  And then an even more extraordinary sensation, a totally irrational impulse for which I can find no logical explanation, overcame me. I put out a hand and touched She Who Must Be Obeyed on the powdered shoulder.

  ‘Hilda.’

  ‘Oh yes, Rumpole?’ It seemed I was interrupting some confidential chat with Marigold. ‘What do you want now?’

  ‘I honestly think,’ I could find no coherent explanation, ‘I think I want to dance with you.’

  I suppose it was a waltz. As I steered Hilda out onto the great open spaces it seemed quite easy to go round and round, vaguely in time to the music. I heard a strange sound, as if from a long way off.

  ‘I’ll have the last waltz with you, Two sleepy people together…’ Or words to that effect. I was fact singing. Singing and dancing to celebrate a great victory in a case I was never meant to win.

  The Trials of Rumpole

  For Leo McKern,

  Rumpole and the Man of God

  As I take up my pen during a brief and unfortunate lull in Crime (taking their cue from the car-workers, the villains of this city appear to have downed tools causing a regrettable series of layoffs, redundancies and slow-time workings down the Old Bailey), I wonder which of my most recent Trials to chronicle. Sitting in Chambers on a quiet Sunday morning (I never write these memories at home for fear that She Who Must Be Obeyed, my wife Hilda, should glance over my shoulder and take exception to the manner in which I have felt it right, in the strict interests of truth and accuracy, to describe domestic life a cote de Chez Rumpole); seated, as I say, in my Chambers I thought of going to the archives and consulting the mementoes of some of my more notorious victories. However when I opened the cupboard it was bare, and I remembered that it was during my defence of a South London clergyman on a shoplifting rap that I had felt bound to expunge all traces of my past, and destroy my souvenirs. It is the curse, as well as the fascination of the law, that lawyers get to know more than is good for them about their fellow human beings, and this truth was driven home to me during the time that I was engaged in the affair that I have called ‘Rumpole and the Man of God’.

  When I was called to the Bar, too long ago now for me to remember with any degree of comfort, I may have had high-flown ideas of a general practice of a more or less lush variety, divorcing duchesses, defending stars of stage and screen from imputations of unchastity, getting shipping companies out of scrapes. But I soon found that it’s crime which not only pays moderately well, but which is also by far the greatest fun. Give me a murder on a spring morning with a decent run and a tolerably sympathetic jury, and Rumpole’s happiness is complete. Like most decent advocates, I have no great taste for the law; but I flatter myself I can cross-examine a copper on his notebook, or charm the Uxbridge Magistrates off their Bench, or have the old darling sitting number four in the jury-box sighing with pity for an embezzler with two wives and six starving children. I am also, and I say it with absolutely no desire to boast, about the best man in the Temple on the subject of bloodstains. There is really nothing you can tell Rumpole about blood, particularly when its out of the body and on to the clothing in the forensic laboratory.

  The old Head of my Chambers, C. H. Wystan, now deceased (also known reluctantly to me as ‘Daddy’, being the father of Hilda Wystan, whom I married after an absent-minded proposal at an Inns of Court Ball. Hilda now rules the Rumpole household and rejoices in the dread title of ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’), old C. H. Wystan simply couldn’t stand bloodstains. He even felt queasy looking at the photographs, so I started by helping him out with his criminal work and soon won my spurs round the London Sessions, Bow Street and the Old Bailey.

  By the time I was called on to defend this particular cleric, I was so well-known in the Ludgate Circus Palais de Justice that many people, to my certain knowledge, called Horace Rumpole an Old Bailey Hack. I am now famous for chain-smoking small cigars, and for the resulting avalanche of ash which falls down the waistcoat and smothers the watch chain, for my habit of frequently quoting from the Oxford Book of English Verse, and for my fearlessness in front of the more savage type of Circuit Judge (I fix the old darlings with my glittering eye and whisper ‘Down Fido’ when they grow over-excited).

  Picture me then in my late sixties, well-nourished on a diet consisting largely of pub lunches, steak-and-kidney pud, and the cooking claret from Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street, which keeps me astonishingly regular. My reputation stands very high in the remand wing of Brixton Nick, where many of my regular clients, fraudsmen, safe-blowers, breakers-in and carriers of offensive weapons, smile with everlasting hope when their solicitors breathe the magic words, ‘We’re taking in Horace Rumpole’.

  I remember walking through the Temple Gardens to my Chambers one late-September morning, with the pale sun on the roses and the first golden leaves floating down on the young solicitors’ clerks and their girlfriends, and I was in a moderately expansive mood. Morning was at seven, or rather around 9.45, the hillside was undoubtedly dew-pearled, God was in his heaven, and with a little luck there was a small crime or two going on somewhere in the world. As soon as I got into the clerk’s department of my Chambers at Number 3 Equity Court Erskine-Brown said ‘Rumpole. I saw a priest going into your room.’

  Our clerk’s room was as busy as Paddington Station with our young and energetic clerk Henry sending barristers rushing off to distant destinations. Erskine-Brown, in striped shir
t, double-breasted waistcoat and what I believe are known as ‘Chelsea Boots’, was propped up against the mantelpiece reading the particulars of some building claim Henry had just given him.

  ‘That’s your con, Mr Rumpole,’ said Henry, explaining the curious manifestation of a Holy Man.

  ‘Your conversion? Have you seen the light, Rumpole? Is Number 3 Equity Court your Road to Damascus?’

  I cannot care for Erskine-Brown, especially when he makes jokes. I chose to ignore this and go to the mantelpiece to collect my brief, where I found old Uncle Tom (T. C. Rowley), the oldest member of our Chambers, who looks in because almost anything is preferable to life with his married sister in Croydon.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Uncle Tom. ‘A vicar in trouble. I suppose it’s the choirboys again. I always think the Church runs a terrible risk having choirboys. They’d be far safer with a lot of middle-aged lady sopranos.’

  I had slid the pink tape off the brief and was getting the gist of the clerical slip-up when Miss Trant, the bright young Portia of Equity Court (if Portias now have rimmed specs and speak with a Roedean accent) said that she didn’t think vicars were exactly my line of country.

  ‘Of course they’re my line of country,’ I told her with delight. ‘Anyone accused of nicking half a dozen shirts is my line of country.’ I had gone through the brief instructions by this time. It seems that the cleric in question was called by the somewhat Arthurian name of the Reverend Mordred Skinner. He had gone to the summer sales in Oxford Street (a scene of carnage and rapine in which no amount of gold would have persuaded Rum-pole to participate), been let off the leash in the gents’ haberdashery, and later apprehended in the Hall of Food with a pile of moderately garish shirtings for which he hadn’t paid.

  Having spent a tough ten minutes digesting the facts of this far from complex matter (well, it showed no signs of becoming a State trial or House of Lords material) I set off in the general direction of my room, but on the way I was met by my old friend George Frobisher exuding an almost audible smell of ‘bay rum’ or some similar unguent.

  I am not myself against a little Eau de Cologne on the handkerchief, but the idea of any sort of cosmetic on my friend George was like finding a Bishop ‘e’ travestie’, or saucy seaside postcards on sale in the vestry. George is an old friend and a dear good fellow, a gentle soul who stands up in Court with all the confidence of a sacrificial virgin waiting for the sunrise over Stonehenge, but a dab hand at The Times crossword and a companionable fellow for a drink after Court in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar off Fleet Street. I was surprised to see he appeared to have a new suit on, a silvery tie, and a silk bandana peeping from his top pocket.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten about tonight, have you?’ George asked anxiously.

  ‘We’re going off for a bottle of Chateau Fleet Street in Pommeroy’s?’

  ‘No… I’m bringing a friend to dinner. With you and Hilda.’

  I had to confess that this social engagement had slipped my mind. In any event it seemed unlikely that anyone would wish to spend an evening with She Who Must Be Obeyed unless they were tied to her by bonds of matrimony, but it seemed that George had invited himself some weeks before and that he was keenly looking forward to the occasion.

  ‘No Pommeroy’s then?’ I felt cheated of the conviviality.

  ‘No, but… We might bring a bottle with us! I have a little news. And I’d like you and Hilda to be the first to know.’ He stopped then, enigmatically, and I gave a pointed sniff at the perfume-laden haze about him.

  ‘George… You haven’t taken to brilliantine by any chance?’ ‘We’ll be there for seven-thirty.’ George smiled in a sheepish sort of fashion and went off whistling something that someone might have mistaken for the ‘Tennessee Waltz’ if he happened to be tone deaf. I passed on to keep my rendezvous with the Reverend Mordred Skinner.

  The Man of God came with a sister, Miss Evelyn Skinner, a brisk woman in sensible shoes who had.foolishly let him out of her sight in the haberdashery, and Mr Morse, a grey-haired solicitor who did a lot of work for the Church Commissioners and whose idea of a thrilling trial was a gentle dispute about how many candles you can put over the High Altar on the third Sunday in Lent. My client himself was a pale, timid individual who looked, with watery eyes and a pinkish tinge to his nostrils, as if he had caught a severe cold during his childhood and had never quite got over it. He also seemed puzzled by the mysteries of the Universe, the greatest of which was the arrival of six shirts in the shopping-bag he was carrying through the Hall of Food. I suggested that the whole thing might be explained by absent-mindedness.

  ‘Those sales,’ I said, ‘would induce panic in the hardiest housewife.’

  ‘Would they?’ Mordred stared at me. His eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses seemed strangely amused. ‘I must say I found the scene lively and quite entertaining.’

  ‘No doubt you took the shirts to the cash desk, meaning to pay for them.’

  ‘There were two assistants behind the counter. Two young ladies, to take money from customers,’ he said discouragingly. ‘I mean there was no need for me to take the shirts to any cash desk at all, Mr Rumpole.’

  I looked at the Reverend Mordred Skinner and re-lit the dying cheroot with some irritation. I am used to grateful clients, cooperative clients, clients who are willing to pull their weight and put their backs to the wheel in the great cause of Victory for Rumpole. The many murderers I have known, for instance, have all been touchingly eager to help, and although one draws the line at simulated madness or futile and misleading alibis, at least such efforts show that the customer has a will to win. The cleric in my armchair seemed, by contrast, determined to put every possible obstacle in my way.

  ‘I don’t suppose you realized that,’ I told him firmly. ‘You’re hardly an habitue of the sales, are you? I expect you wandered off looking for a cash desk, and then your mind filled with next week’s sermon, or whose turn it was to do the flowers in the chancel, and the whole mundane business of shopping simply slipped your memory.’

  ‘It is true,’ the Reverend Mordred admitted, ‘that I was thinking a great deal, at the time, of the Problem of Evil.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  With the best will in the world I didn’t see how the Problem of Evil was going to help the defence.

  ‘What puzzles the ordinary fellow is,’ he frowned in be- wilderment, ‘if God is all-wise and perfectly good - why on earth did he put evil in the world?’

  ‘May I suggest an answer?’ I wanted to gain the poor cleric’s confidence by showing that I had no objection to a spot of theology. ‘So that an ordinary fellow like me can get plenty of briefs round the Old Bailey and London Sessions.’

  Mordred considered the matter carefully and then expressed his doubts.

  ‘No… No, I can’t think that’s what He had in mind.’

  ‘It may seem a very trivial little case to you Mr Rumpole…’ Evelyn Skinner dragged us back from pure thought, ‘but it’s life and death to Mordred.’ At which I stood and gave them all a bit of the Rumpole mind.

  ‘A man’s reputation is never trivial,’ I told them. ‘I must beg you both to take it extremely seriously. Mr Skinner, may I ask you to address your mind to one vital question? Given the fact that there were six shirts in the shopping-basket you were carry- ing, how the hell did they get there?’

  Mordred looked hopeless and said, ‘I can’t tell you. I’ve prayed about it.’

  ‘You think they might have leapt off the counter, by the power of prayer? I mean, something like the loaves and fishes?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole.’ Mordred smiled at me. ‘Yours would seem to be an extremely literal faith.’

  I thought that was a little rich coming from a man of such painful simplicity, so I lit another small cigar, and found myself gazing into the hostile and somewhat fishy eyes of the sister.

  ‘Are you suggesting, Mr Rumpole, that my brother is guilty?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I assured her. ‘Your brother’s innoc
ent. And he’ll be so until twelve commonsensical old darlings picked at random off Newington Causeway find him otherwise.’

  ‘I rather thought – a quick hearing before the Magistrates. With the least possible publicity.’ Mr Morse showed his sad lack of experience in crime.

  ‘A quick hearing before the Magistrates is as good as pleading guilty.’

  ‘You think you might win this case, with a jury?’ I thought there was a faint flicker of interest in Mordred’s pink-rimmed eyes.

  ‘Juries are like Almighty God, Mr Skinner. Totally unpredictable.’

  So the conference wound to an end without divulging any particular answer to the charge, and I asked Mordred to apply through the usual channels for some sort of defence when he was next at prayer. He rewarded this suggestion with a wintry smile and my visitors left me just as She Who Must Be Obeyed came through on the blower to remind me that George was coming to dinner and bringing a friend, and would I buy two pounds of cooking apples at the tube station, and would I also remember not to loiter in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar taking any sort of pleasure.

  As I put the phone down I noticed that Miss Evelyn Skinner had filtered back into my room, apparently desiring a word with Rumpole alone. She started in a tone of pity.

  ‘I don’t think you quite understand my brother…’

  ‘Oh. Miss Skinner. Yes, well… I never felt totally at home with vicars.’ I felt some sort of apology was in order.

  ‘He’s like a child in many ways.’

  ‘The Peter Pan of the Pulpit?’