Rumpole and the Reign of Terror

by John Mortimer

  'Do you really think so?'

  I was beginning to find his conversation quite agreeable and decided that Peter Plaistow didn't deserve the abuse he got from Hilda's tabloid for being, so they said, the arch sucker-up to the Prime Minister. I accordingly took a generous swig of the wine, which was also extremely pleasant and entirely without jokes.

  'It wouldn't be going too far to say,' he said after the steak had appeared before us and he was halfway through his first chew, 'that you are, in legal circles, well on the way to becoming a national treasure.'

  This, I felt, was going a bit far. Was Plaistow in some sort of trouble? Was he after a loan from an improbable source? Was he looking for a substantial contribution to the Labour Party? Would I be landed with the bill?

  'I wouldn't say that,' I told him cautiously.

  'Oh, I would. I definitely would. And by the way, I've got good news about your client Dr Khan.'

  'Have you indeed?' I was prepared not to believe it.

  'The Court of Human Rights has come out against us detaining suspects in Belmarsh. He's been set free.'

  'That's entirely satisfactory.' I celebrated with a generous gulp of the wine. 'I'm glad to hear it.'

  'I thought you would be. And in return for that I … well, we have a favour to ask you.'

  'What's that?'

  'My new job in government will be agreed very soon, so of course I have an interest. We don't need a lawyer of your age and stature, one well known for his great performances at the criminal bar, to rock the boat.'

  There was a pause while we both ate, then I had to ask, 'Which boat is that exactly?'

  'The ship of state, Rumpole. The Prime Minister is doing his best. He's fighting the battle against terrorism night and day. He can't fight with his hands tied behind his back. He can't be handicapped by medieval laws.'

  'Magna Carta. The Bill of Rights. You call these medieval laws?'

  'I heard what you said in the SIAC hearing.' Peter was still smiling. 'It was a great blessing it was held in private. But if a lawyer of your standing, Rumpole, one who is, as they say, a national treasure, were to go on attacking us in public, well, as I say, it wouldn't be helpful.'

  'Why exactly should I want to be helpful to your government?' I was genuinely puzzled.

  'I'll tell you why,' Plaistow smiled. 'I'm soon to become the Minister of Justice.'

  'I suppose I ought to congratulate you.'

  'No need. But I thought I'd give you a good reason for helping me and the PM in the great struggle. I can't speak in terms of a High Court judge …'

  'I imagine not.' His point was not yet altogether clear.

  'But you're working very hard, Rumpole. Too hard for your age.'

  'Unfortunately, I'm not. Briefs are a little thin on the ground.'

  'Then what about a job with some security? The pace of the bench after the rough and tumble of the bar. Now, the life of a circuit judge …'

  'Circus judge is what I call them.'

  'I've heard you do that. But consider the security, Rumpole. A few years and then a reasonable pension. Of course, it would be quite inappropriate for you to make political statements. How does 'His Honour Judge Rumpole' sound to you?'

  I consumed the last of my steak and then I let him have it.

  'To me,' I said, 'it sounds disgusting.'

  My answer seemed to surprise him and then he said, 'I'm disappointed in you, Rumpole.'

  'Not half as disappointed,' I told him, 'as I am with your precious Prime Minister. I shall continue to document the law-breaking conduct of your government. If necessary, from the rooftops.'

  'If that's the way you feel …'

  'It certainly is.'

  'Then I'm afraid I can't do much to help either you or your client.'

  'Don't worry,' I said. We'll do our best to take advantage of the little amount of law still left to us.'

  After that conversation began to flow like cement. Plaistow suddenly remembered he had an urgent appointment at the Home Office, so I had to go without pudding. I was relieved to see that he signed the bill before he left me and I saw him winding his way between the tables, shaking some hands and kissing some cheeks by way of greeting his many friends, of whom I was certainly no longer one.

  Further embarrassment was spared by the head waiter telling me of a telephone message received from my clerk Henry. An urgent conference in the case of Khan. The clients would be waiting for me on my return to chambers.

  14

  I STARTED TO WALK back to my chambers (my present bleak financial situation made it unwise to indulge in a taxi) with feelings of considerable indignation. Everyone, they say, has his price and there just might be some huge bribe or gigantic offer which could delicately be mentioned in conversation with the intention of corrupting Rumpole. But a circus judgeship! To offer me such a bribe as that for betraying my dedication to the basic principles of our legal system was an insult, even in the world of political chicanery. In fact, it showed how inept the government was, even in its most dishonest behaviour. Did they imagine that I, Rumpole of the Bailey, would forsake Magna Carta for the pleasure of sitting in some stuffy suburban courtroom, trying petty crimes and disputes about …

  Such were my thoughts as I walked through Covent Garden. Then I remembered the days when this was the fruit and vegetable market where farmers set out their produce, where the pubs were open at five o'clock in the morning and barrow boys shouted about their wares and the pavements were littered with discarded boxes and cabbage leaves. Regrettably, it had been tidied up, the market moved to a distant part of London.

  I emerged into the traffic of the Strand and then turned into the Temple, under the archway where the newsagent used, in days gone by, to offer the occasional pornographic magazine to solitary barristers. Inside the arch all was quiet. The buildings no doubt contained rooms where tales of vicious murder, fraud and matrimonial infidelities were being discussed, but those doors were kept closed and the courtyards were silent.

  When I looked into my chambers room, Henry said, 'At last you're back.'

  'I was discussing matters of high political importance.' This failed to impress Henry, who said, 'There's four of them been waiting in your room. Mr Bernard with Mrs Khan and Mr and Mrs Barrington Whiteside. I offered them coffee, which was declined.'

  'Thank you, Henry. You did very well.'

  I had expected the conference in the case of Khan to be an occasion of rejoicing. For whatever obscure political reason, Plaistow had told me that the good doctor was out of prison, and I expected some totally undeserved but nevertheless pleasing congratulations on the result. I wouldn't have been surprised if the location of the meeting hadn't moved, once again, to Pommeroy's Wine Bar, where the doctor's friend Barrington Whiteside might have placed an order for champagne.

  Nothing of the sort occurred. The faces that greeted me in my chambers room were far from joyful. Bonny Bernard looked unusually grim. Tiffany had actually been weeping and her hand clutched a little ball of wet handkerchief. Barrington Whiteside was frowning furiously. Only his wife, Benazir, seemed calm and, I thought, detached from the proceedings. She was a woman in perhaps her fifties. Unlike Dr Khan, she hadn't surrendered to the civilization of Kilburn and the north London suburbs: she wore a bright sari, which was at that moment the only cheerful thing in the room.

  'Well,' I said, trying to sound cheerful, 'bit of good luck at last. Dr Khan has been sent home from Belmarsh.'

  Bernard made it clear that it was not altogether good news. 'He's under house arrest.'

  'It's an outrage,' Barrington Whiteside exploded. 'A complete outrage.'

  'He can have visitors,' Tiffany explained. 'He can't leave the house, of course, and I think they are always watching him, the constant telephone calls we receive. He is unemployed now. He's a good doctor and he can't do the work he loves. He can't earn a living for us all. They have cut him off from everything.'

  'I'm trying to get my board to agree to go on paying hi
s salary,' Barrington told me. 'But it's going to be difficult.'

  'I've written to the Home Office, of course.' Bernard was defensive. 'We've done all we can. Of course they won't tell us anything.'

  'It seems your country is as bad as ours.' Benazir Whiteside spoke for the first time. 'They lock you up and don't tell you why.'

  'It's not always as bad as that.' I did my best to defend our legal system. 'We still have jury trials where the prosecution has to present its case. We've got to get that sort of trial for Dr Khan.'

  'It's all we're asking for,' Barrington said. 'A trial by jury. Of course they'll acquit him.'

  'Get him a fair trial, Mr Rumpole,' Tiffany was pleading.

  'We've come for your advice.' The usually helpful Bernard put his finger on the weakness of my attempt to clear up the proceedings. 'How do we persuade the authorities to charge him with some criminal offence?'

  'I don't know yet, but I'm going to find a way.'

  I looked round at their faces. Had I made them a promise I couldn't keep? Might it not, after all, be preferable to retire quietly from the scene and reappear as a circus judge? They had come to me for help and I had been afraid to admit that the situation was hopeless.

  15

  Extract from Hilda Rumpole's Memoirs

  I REALLY DON'T KNOW which is worse, Rumpole cock-a-hoop after getting some highly dubious character found not guilty or Rumpole in a dark and melancholy mood after he's lost a case. I suppose cock-a-hoop is better because, although it's a bit annoying when he tells me how cleverly he did it, he's probably quite busy and I don't have him round the mansion flat with nothing particular to do but smoke too many small cigars and make it more difficult for me to lock myself into the boxroom to get on with my memoirs.

  He's at a pretty low ebb at the moment because he says he lost the terrorist case. I tell him it's no loss at all. The dangerous doctor (he must be dangerous or the government wouldn't have arrested him in the first place) has been let out of prison on the condition he stays at home, home being, according to Rumpole, an extremely comfortable and roomy house 'at the better end of Kilburn'. This seems to me to be very generous of the government under the circumstances, and I asked if the terrorist's wife, that pool-eyed person Rumpole is always going on about, was confined to their house too.

  Apparently not. Apparently she's free to come to Rumpole's chambers whenever she wants, crying her eyes out. I suppose if I had Rumpole in here all day and all night, unable to leave Froxbury Mansions, I might cry my eyes out too but there it is. I tell Rumpole that it's all over now and there's really nothing more he can do about it, but he doesn't seem to be able to put the case behind him and cheer up.

  Another annoying thing. Rumpole told me that he was offered 'a circus judgeship'. The offer came through a QC called Peter Plaistow, who is apparently very close to the Prime Minister and who comes across so well when he talks about politics on television. Well, a circuit judge may not be the grandest job in the land. Rumpole would only get to be called 'Your Honour' and not 'My Lord', like a High Court judge. But in my opinion Rumpole ought to be quite flattered to be called 'Your Honour', and it would provide him with a safe job and a pension for us when he retired. 'Why not take it,' I put to him quite tactfully, 'and spare yourself all this anxiety about losing or winning cases?'

  'I don't want to do it,' he said. And when I asked him why ever not, he said, 'I might develop "judgeitis".'

  Of course, I asked him what that was.

  'A ridiculous inflation of self-importance, with increased intolerance; a fatal tendency to suck up to juries, to interfere with the cross-examinations by defending counsel; and doing your best to find all the customers in the dock guilty.'

  'That's nonsense, Rumpole,' I told him. 'Leonard's a judge at the Old Bailey and he's not a bit like that.'

  'Leonard who?'

  'Leonard Bullingham. I met him playing bridge with Mash. He was perfectly charming.'

  'You're talking about Judge Bullingham? The Mad Bull?' Rumpole apparently couldn't believe his ears.

  'He didn't seem at all mad. He said he enjoyed having you before him, Rumpole. He said he gave you a run for your money.'

  'He said that?'

  'So far as I remember.'

  'Judgeitis.' Rumpole seemed sure of it.

  'He sounded perfectly sane to me. In fact, he didn't seem to be suffering from any sort of disease.'

  'That's the terrible thing about judgeitis,' Rumpole told me. 'The sufferers don't know that there's anything wrong with them!'

  Quite often I really can't understand what Rumpole's talking about. But I will say one thing for him. He's been much better at taking his Omni Vite. It seems, in some ways, as though the fight's gone out of him. At the end of the conversation about Judge Bullingham he actually thanked me.

  'You mean thanks for telling you he enjoyed having you appear before him?'

  'No,' he said. 'Thank you for telling me his name's Leonard. We always thought he was a Ronnie.'

  'Leonard is his second name,' I told him firmly. 'And he definitely prefers it.'

  16

  THERE FOLLOWED A BLEAK period in the Rumpole career. Not since the early days, when I had sat in what was then Hilda's daddy's chambers, had I faced such an alarming absence of paid employment. I arrived at chambers each day and did The Times crossword too quickly. Then I carried on with my memoirs until it was time for the shot of pie and Guinness in the pub, which I began to wonder if I could still afford. Back in chambers I had the first small cigar and fell into a light doze. At around teatime I would go into the clerk's room and ask Henry if I had anything 'in the list for tomorrow'.

  'No, Mr Rumpole. You're in luck's way – they're giving you a holiday tomorrow.' This was said, I suppose, in a vain and hopeless attempt to cheer me up. The most encouraging call I had during that doleful period was from Bonny Bernard, who offered to buy me a drink at Pommeroy's that evening at six o'clock. The time-honoured tradition of the drinks at Pommeroy's was that they were marked down on my slate and my most loyal solicitor didn't even bother to look as though he was fumbling for the cash. That he was undertaking to foot the bill raised my hopes of there being a big money brief somewhere in the offing.

  These hopes increased as Bonny Bernard handed over the cash for a bottle of Château Thames Embankment. I complimented him on his generosity.

  'That's quite all right. I felt sorry for you after that last conference in Khan.'

  'Really? Why?'

  'You didn't know what to do next, did you?'

  It was an awkward question and I quite failed to give my friend the solicitor a satisfactory answer. 'After Mrs Barrington Whiteside told me to fight on … Well, I didn't feel like arguing with her at that particular moment.'

  'She's a remarkable woman,' Bernard had to admit. 'She wants to go on fighting and she's paying for it.'

  'Really? Is she rich?'

  'Her father was. He came from Pakistan, just like the Khans. Apparently he did well in business and left Benazir a packet of money.'

  'A rich woman married to the hospital administrator. How did they meet?'

  Bereft of a new idea I wanted to spend the time getting to know as much as possible about the enigmatic doctor and his friends.

  'Tiffany told me Benazir was always very nice to her after both fathers died. She said the fathers had been friends and she vowed to keep up the friendship. She'd come to the house in Kilburn and say what a lovely house it was, and baby-sit for them. All that sort of thing.'

  'And Barrington Whiteside?'

  'It seems the Khans invited Benazir to some sort of charity do at the hospital. A dance – that's what I think it was. She met Barry and they fell for each other. Got married within a month or two, Tiffany told me.'

  'So with a rich wife – Barrington carried on his hospital job?'

  'That's entirely to his credit, wouldn't you agree?'

  'Oh yes. Entirely to his credit.'

  'They're a caring couple.
' The word 'caring', I thought, was an expression used by Mrs Bernard, who worried about the environment and helped her husband get off small cigars.

  'Of course,' I agreed. 'That's why I felt I had to promise some further activity. But what, exactly?'

  'If you could persuade the Home Secretary…' Bernard had downed another glass of Pommeroy's Very Ordinary and was, I thought, letting his imagination run riot.

  'Me? Persuade … You know who the Home Secretary is, don't you? The Right Honourable Fred, don't you dare call him Frederick, Sugden. The man who has announced he distrusts all lawyers, including judges. The working-class Fred from the back streets of Bristol who made his way up through Reading University to the top ranks of the Labour Party. The friendly statesman who abolished the hearsay rules and allowed the police to impose fines without the necessity of a trial. The statesman who apparently believes Magna Carta should be banned as an obscene publication. I've got about as much chance of persuading him as I have of becoming Lord High Chancellor of England.'

  'You'll think of something.' Bernard received my bleak picture of the person in charge without apparent concern. 'That's what I tell clients. Mr Rumpole will think of something.' He drained his glass and added, 'I'm on my way to deliver a brief at your chambers. The Timsons are in trouble again.'

  'There's nothing new under the sun. Which one is it this time?'

  'He's called Will. I didn't really remember him.'

  I remembered him. The Timson who loved Tiffany and hated her husband. All the same, I wasn't about to reject a client.

  'I'm glad the Timsons have forgiven me.'

  The little flicker of hope which had warmed me when my instructing solicitor mentioned the Timsons died out when he said, 'Oh no. I'm afraid they haven't forgiven you. I'm delivering the brief to Mr Claude Erskine-Brown.'

  17

  'NOW ARE YOU GOING to give up trying to get that ghastly little Dr Khan out of trouble?'

  'Not quite yet, Hilda. I don't think quite yet.'