Rumpole and the Primrose Path

by John Mortimer

  ‘And now she’s cross about what Mercy wrote?’

  ‘No. She’s cross about what Mercy didn’t write.’

  ‘Well, go on. Tell me. What didn’t Mercy write?’

  ‘She wrote nothing about me, Rumpole.’

  ‘Nothing, Claude?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing. She dealt with her days in the Grimsby Rep. in considerable detail. But there was no mention of my name, even. And certainly not of the great experience which has remained with me all my life.’

  ‘It’s possible, isn’t it, she was just being discreet?’

  ‘You haven’t read The Wandering Star, Rumpole. There’s absolutely nothing discreet about it. No. Philly thinks she left it out because it wasn’t of the slightest importance to her.’

  ‘Your wife takes a harsh view?’

  ‘Merciless. “This great affair you’re so proud of, Claude,” she said. “You see your old girlfriend’s simply forgotten all about it.”’

  ‘You should never have told her, Claude,’ was all I could find to say.

  ‘I know, Rumpole. I jumped before I came to the stile.’

  ‘An unwise thing to do. Don’t worry, it’ll pass. Dame Phillida can make mistakes with the best of us. She had a momentary affection for a crooked bed-maker, but it’s all over now. She’ll forget Mercy.’

  ‘Just like Mercy’s forgotten me.’ Erskine-Brown’s tone was bitter.

  ‘It’s the private life, Claude. Just let it rest in peace. It’s a great mistake to try to protect it. It always leads to trouble.’

  Rumpole and the Vanishing Juror

  The proudest of our national treasures, to rank with Wordsworth, the plays of Shakespeare and the great British breakfast - that is to say the Jury - is not, of course, a single twelve-headed monster, swinging from one side to the other until it arrives, with ponderous deliberation, at its single-minded decision. It’s a random collection of disparate individuals, and may include a Telegraph-reading accountant, a well-meaning sociology teacher who started the day with organic muesli and the Guardian, a jobbing builder who would like to see the Black Cap put on at the end of murder trials, a Sikh minicab driver, a trouser-suited businesswoman with the Financial Times, a hair stylist from a unisex hairdressing salon whose jeans seem in constant danger of sliding off her narrow hips, and a worried grandmother. Often these apparently predictable types can spring surprising verdicts. The muesli-eating teacher may believe that prison works, and the builder may be a stickler for the presumption of innocence.

  Their verdicts may be unpredictable, but the experienced Old Bailey hack can usually identify his friends and spot his enemies. The friendly juror often smiles at him first thing in the morning, smiles, at least, at his jokes, and even shows signs of impatience when the hack’s flow is interrupted by an unsympathetic Judge. The hostile juror will cross his or her arms and stare at the ceiling during your most persuasive speeches, and raise his or her eyebrows and sigh heavily during your client’s story that what might have looked like house-breaking implements were merely in his car for repairs to the shed in his allotment, and laugh sycophantically at the Judge’s poor attempts at comedy.

  The difficult decision is whether to encourage your friends, to favour them with the first meaningful look when you score a palpable hit in cross-examination and so strengthen their sinews and summon up their blood for a fearless acquittal ; or should you devote all your energies to converting your enemies? You can flatter them with the meaningful looks and intimate smiles and hope against hope that they haven’t decided you’re an insincere and money-grabbing protector of the criminals who ought, if there was any real justice in the world, to be in the dock beside the undoubtedly guilty customer.

  In the case of R. v. Skeate, another murder which I managed to do alone and without a leader, the crime was so savagely pointless, the victim so beautiful, that hostility to the admittedly unattractive man in the dock blew like an icy wind from the Jury box, and friendly faces were as hard to find as contraceptives in the Vatican. There was, however, one exception to the general line-up of pursed lips and folded arms. Number four juror sat listening to me with a smile that shone like a good deed in a naughty world.

  The name she answered to, when the Clerk of the Court read out the list of jurors, was Kathleen Brewster. She was a woman probably in her fifties, who always arrived a little late, as though she had overslept, or had to get a small grandchild ready for school, or been involved in the usual immobility of the Circle Line, or left her glasses somewhere and turned up, in a moment of confusion, in the wrong Court. She would push her way, murmuring apologies, past the knees of frozen-faced jurors and then flash the friendliest smile, one that not only wished me well but promised me her full attention.

  So as you can imagine, I concentrated on stoking the fires of Kathleen Brewster’s admiration in the hope that she would warm the cold hearts of fellow members of the Jury. All was going well until, one morning in the middle of the trial, as rare things will she vanished.

  The events that led to the untimely disappearance of Kathleen Brewster had begun many months before on Hampstead Heath. Two middle-aged men were jogging together early on a Sunday morning, accompanied by their long-haired terrier, Gloria. She was seen to leave the two friends and disappear, yapping excitedly, into a patch of scrub near to what’s called, inappropriately in this particular instance, the Vale of Health. When they tried to extricate their dog from the bushes, the two friends uncovered a long, slim leg, dressed in jeans and trainers. Further investigation revealed, to their horror, the body of a slim, dark-skinned woman, perhaps in her early thirties, her undoubted beauty disfigured by what was later described as manual strangulation. Her neck was badly bruised and her face bloated. The police investigation started with a stroke of luck: one jeans pocket was found to contain some loose change, a crumpled ten-pound note, a driving licence in the name of Pamela McDonnell, and an address in West Heath Road.

  When they went to the address, the police found an eight-year-old boy being looked after by two of Pamela’s girlfriends, who were waiting, with increasing anxiety, for the return of his mother ... She never came back, but pictures of her, unwounded and unblemished, a sparkling Jamaican beauty, began to appear in all the papers and, not unexpectedly, the nation took her to its heart.

  Pamela was born in Kilburn, the child of immigrant parents. Her mother cleaned hospitals, her father worked on the buses. She went to school regularly and sang in the church choir. After her son Cameron was born, she worked for all sorts of charitable organizations. She also had theatrical ambitions and had given her Helen of Troy in Doctor Faustus in a venue over a pub in Kilburn.

  It then emerged that to add to her income, and to pay for extra lessons for Cameron, she worked on three evenings a week as a lap dancer in the Candy Crocodile restaurant in a narrow street behind Leicester Square, which provided such entertainment for its customers. Her work in this department of show business did nothing to detract from her posthumous popularity. Her beauty, her hard work for her son, even her athletic dancing in a venue where the customers were strictly ordered to look but not to touch, won her nothing but sympathy, and her cruel and inexplicable death cried out for revenge. The Daily Post offered fifty thousand pounds for information leading to the conviction of her murderer and the police were under constant pressure to find a likely suspect. It came as a relief to everyone when, before very long, such a suspect was found. The public breathed a sigh of relief and looked forward eagerly to the trial at the Old Bailey. As the Daily Post headline put it, ‘Let Justice be done for Pamela at last’.

  The man arrested was billed as Neville J. Skeate, aged thirty-two, unmarried, a clerk, living in Streatham. He appeared briefly in a South London Magistrates Court, where he was described as wearing a dark business suit, a white shirt and a tie. He answered to his name in a loud, clear voice and was remanded for the police to make further enquiries. What was significant, from the point of view of the Rumpole career since my resur
rection, was the fact that the solicitor on duty at the local Court was none other than my old friend and provider of life-giving briefs, Bonny Bernard. I got an early insight into the police enquiries and the case against the man who had made only a fleeting appearance in the Magistrates Court. The facts, if true, were enough to chill the blood, even that of an Old Bailey hack well used to the horror and violence which bubble too near the surface of our so-called civilized society.

  Neville Skeate was more than just a clerk. He was, he was proud to proclaim, the founder and leading light of the Ninth Day Elamites, a small and completely ineffective group of what appeared, to an old barrister dedicated to the vital importance of reasonable doubt, to be religious nut cases. The cause they had adopted was that of purging the Greater London area, including the adjacent suburbs, of sin, corruption, perverse and lustful behaviour and the ‘worship of false Gods’. They took their title from the people of Elam who, led by their king, made war upon the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, the sinful cities of the plain whose punishment and destruction is described in the book of Genesis. So Skeate was by day a harmless and useful clerk in the Public Records Office; but by night he sallied forth to denounce gay bars in Soho, strip clubs, massage parlours and such centres of the esoteric art of lap dancing as the Candy Crocodile off Leicester Square. He would hand out leaflets filled with dreadful warnings about the dire fate of citizens of Sodom, with which town London was now undoubtedly twinned. He and his adherents would shout abuse and biblical texts at the patrons or the performers as they came out of such places. The reaction of most of the citizens greeted with such alarming threats was to hurry past with an embarrassed smile in search of the last train back to Beckenham or Crouch End and so out of the brimstone area. Unlike most of my clients, Neville Skeate made no effort to conceal his identity. All his pamphlets bore his name as ‘Chief Witness of the Ninth Day Elamites’. He signed letters to the various night haunts he visited and to the local newspapers, which hardly ever printed them.

  The Candy Crocodile was, it seemed, a sink of iniquity which attracted Neville Skeate’s particular attention. He would wait outside it until, almost at dawn, the last customers and then the girls emerged to climb into their waiting minicabs and be driven home to bed. He denounced them all, but shouted loudest at Pamela, easily distinguishable as the only Jamaican girl in the group. What he said seemed ridiculous when I came to read it in print, but called out in an empty street by a pale-faced man filled with hatred it must have sounded alarming. ‘Look at her!’ he would call out. ‘The Slime Pit! ... The Strumpet !... The Daughter of Adultery.... The Whore of Babylon!’ And, after other such terms of endearment, he threatened, according to the girls who worked with Pamela, to strike her with blindness, and condemned her to fire, brimstone and an early death.

  Not all of these threats were intelligible to the girls from the Candy Crocodile, who had, at best, only a sketchy knowledge of the book of Genesis. Some of them reacted with fury and outrage, and looked, always in vain, for a wandering policeman. The bouncer from the club sometimes came out and chased Neville away, and once caught him and beat him up, causing bruises which Neville wore with the pride of a wounded soldier when he resumed, and even increased, his attacks. Pamela, according to her friends and fellow workers, laughed at him, and took his threats of her death and destruction as a joke. The case for the prosecution was that they were made, in fact, in deadly earnest.

  ‘Rumpole!’ Hilda said this in the brisk, call-to-order voice which I knew from experience would not be the prelude to good news. ‘I’ve been talking to Doctor McClintock about you. I was right.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ I tried to say it in a casual manner, as though it were an event of the smallest significance. ‘Pleased, was he, that I’m back again in full working order?’

  ‘I’m not sure you are in full working order, Rumpole. Not sure at all. That’s why I had a word with Doctor McClintock.’

  ‘And he reassured you, did he?’

  ‘No. He didn’t reassure me. He said he hadn’t seen you for some time. Not this year, he said. Can that be true?’

  ‘Possibly.’ At my age you steer clear of the quack in case he tells you you’ve got something you didn’t want to know about. Of course, I didn’t tell She Who Must Be Obeyed that. She is the fearless sort, who positively enjoys check-ups. ‘There’s been a considerable pressure of work lately. I may have this rather sensational murder case.’

  ‘Don’t worry about murders for the moment, Rumpole. You should concentrate on keeping yourself alive. Doctor McClintock asked me if you seemed to be short of breath after taking exercise.’

  ‘Well, you know the answer to that. I never take exercise.’

  ‘Exactly! Peter McClintock was deeply shocked. He wouldn’t believe it at first. But I swore it was true.’

  ‘And you were right, Hilda. Absolutely right.’

  ‘Peter insists that you should take some sort of exercise.’

  ‘Quite right! I’ll remember that. I do take a brisk stroll round to the tobacconist in Fleet Street to buy my small cigars.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Rumpole! What the Doctor recommends in your case is some light bicycling.’

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid that’s impossible.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Of course it’s not impossible.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. To go bicycling nowadays you have to wear a hat shaped like a peanut. That’s enforced by law, I believe. And rubber shorts. Black with a sort of white line down them. I mean I couldn’t possibly turn up in Chambers dressed like that. Besides which I might be run into by a bus and asphyxiated by petrol fumes. I gave up bicycling long before I did the Penge Bungalow Murders.’

  ‘You’re not going to bicycle out on the street, Rumpole. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that.’

  ‘Where do you want me to do it, then? On some sort of bicycle racetrack?’

  ‘Of course not. You will be on a stationary bicycle. It won’t be going anywhere.’

  ‘What on earth’s the point of that, then? Has his anxiety about my health caused the good Doctor McClintock to lose his marbles?’

  ‘The point of it, Rumpole, is to help you to train yourself up, to lose some of that unnecessary weight. To open up your tubes and help your breathing. To make you sweat a little and get to know your own body. I’ve taken up joint married membership at the Lysander Health Club in Iverna Gardens. They do special terms for married couples. Two for the price of one. They’ve got exercise bikes, of course, as well as all the other equipment.’

  ‘All the other equipment’ sounded, I thought, extremely sinister.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go,’ I told Hilda as I made for the door. ‘A conference in Brixton.’

  At that moment prison sounded a far more attractive proposition than the Lysander Health Club.

  ‘If they could find ten Just Men in Sodom and Gomorrah, Mr Rumpole, the Lord promised not to send down fire.

  They couldn’t be found, Mr Rumpole. So the cities of the plain were destroyed by fire and brimstone. You remember that?’

  ‘Not personally. I may be getting on a bit, but -’

  ‘They looked, but ten Just Men couldn’t be found.’

  ‘Are you saying that there are less than ten Just Men in Greater London? Please don’t tell the Jury that. There’ll be twelve of them and I’m sure they’ll like to think of themselves as Just Men. And Women, of course.’

  Neville Skeate looked at me as though he couldn’t understand a word I was saying. He was tall, colourless, with a pale face, glasses, and large, bony hands kept folded on his lap. He looked what he was, a minor clerk in a government department, someone no one noticed or paid much attention to. He went home, I suspected, to a lonely bedsit, a meal to reheat bought from the supermarket on the way home. A man with few relatives, and a friend or two from the office, he was apparently nondescript and inoffensive. And yet when he spoke, a disturbingly rich and deep voice came out of him - a voice capable of issuing comman
ds to the few dotty adherents of the Ninth Day Elamites. It was a voice, and this was the most alarming thing about him, of passionate conviction.

  ‘I shall tell the Jury that the slime pits of this city shall be destroyed utterly and sinners shall taste death.’

  ‘If that’s what you’re going to say,’ I looked at him with as much detachment as I could manage, ‘I’d better keep you out of the witness box.’

  Bonny Bernard had brought me the Ninth Day Elamite like a birthday present which I would unwrap with eager anticipation. He thought I would be overjoyed by a brief in a sensational murder which was bound to hit the headlines.

  ‘Legal Aid said we could either have a QC or a Senior Junior,’ Bernard told me. ‘I said we would settle for you as the Senior Junior, Mr Rumpole. Well, it’ll save them a bit of money and I was sure you’d jump at the offer.’

  ‘That was good of you. Extremely good.’ I had read the papers and wasn’t sure that I ought not to be more wary of Bonny bearing gifts.

  ‘I knew you’d be grateful. A case like this, I told your clerk Henry, will bring the snap back into Mr Rumpole’s celery. It’ll do him more good than all the tonics and treatments in the world.’

  Would it? Perhaps I was getting past it, but I couldn’t open the papers in Skeate without a feeling of almost unbearable sadness at the senselessness of the murdered beauty, the loneliness of the waiting child and the terrible obsession of the clerk whose mind had been turned to hatred disguised as religion. Civilization may not have come all that far, I thought, but at least we no longer use fire and brimstone as the answer to unconventional sex or tasteless entertainment. My first thought had been a plea of insanity, or at least diminished responsibility, but the doctors could find no recognized mental illness. No doubt Neville Skeate had an unfortunate tendency to take the Scriptures too literally, they said, but this was a view shared by creationists all over the world, and they couldn’t all be certified insane.