Rumpole and the Angel of Death

by John Mortimer

  Michael’s performance wasn’t, of course, anything like as good as Rumpole’s. He remained strangely aloof, but he looked pale, proud and vulnerable. He retold his story quite clearly and when Claude came to cross-examine him he seemed suddenly bored, as though he thought it quite unnecessary to go through the whole thing again, and was privately composing a poem. Claude didn’t really get anywhere, but when Michael left the witness-box, the Jury probably still thought that he’d killed his father. And then Rumpole surprised everyone, and particularly Danny, by saying, ‘My next witness will be my instructing solicitor, Mr Daniel Newcombe.’

  Sitting next to me, but as far away as possible now, as though we were a married couple in bed after a quarrel, Danny gave a little gasp of surprise and turned round to Rumpole. ‘You don’t mean you’re calling me?’

  ‘That’s the general idea. Will you just step into the witness-box?’

  Danny had no choice then, but I thought he walked as grimly as a soldier crossing a minefield. When he reached the exposed little platform, he raised the Bible with a great air of confidence and, encouraged by a rare smile from the Gravestone, promised to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  ‘Mr Newcombe’ – Rumpole was quietly courteous – ‘you are familiar with the late Dimitri Skelton’s will?’

  ‘I should be. I drafted it.’

  ‘He drafted it, Mr Rumpole.’ His Lordship did his best to raise a small laugh against Rumpole. Claude even obliged.

  ‘I am aware of that, my Lord.’ Rumpole gave a small bow and then turned to Danny. ‘Now, in the event of this Jury finding Michael guilty, he won’t be able to inherit under his father’s will, will he?’

  ‘We all know that, Mr Rumpole, don’t we? A murderer can’t profit from his crime.’ The Judge did his best to patronize Rumpole, who replied with elaborate courtesy, ‘Exactly, my Lord! I do so congratulate your Lordship. You have put your finger upon the nub, the very heart, of this case. Now, who is to benefit if my client is found guilty of murder?’

  ‘Well, Elizabeth Ashton will still get her hundred thousand pounds legacy.’ Danny looked as though he now felt that the witness-box wouldn’t be so dangerous after all.

  ‘Miss Elizabeth Ashton. Remind us. She is Dimitri Skelton’s secretary, is she not?’

  ‘That is so, my Lord.’ Danny chose to give his answer to the Judge.

  ‘And the residue of the estate?’

  ‘That would all go to the deceased’s cousin in Australia, Ivan Skelton.’

  ‘About three million pounds, isn’t it?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  ‘Lucky old Ivan.’

  The Jury giggled slightly and the Judge looked deeply pained.

  ‘Of course, if Michael Skelton is acquitted,’ Danny added in all fairness, ‘Ivan doesn’t get a penny.’

  ‘So Ivan must be praying for a guilty verdict, mustn’t he? This jury comes back and says Guilty, my Lord and, Bingo, the old darling’s worth three million.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole’ – Graves was deeply distressed – ‘is this a subject for joking?’

  ‘Certainly not, my Lord. It is extremely serious. Mr Newcombe, Ivan Skelton is taking a considerable interest in the outcome of this case, isn’t he?’

  ‘I imagine he is concerned about it, yes,’ Danny had to admit.

  ‘You’ve met Ivan Skelton, haven’t you?’

  ‘Please don’t lead.’ It was Claude’s turn to grumble.

  ‘Very well. Mr Newcombe, have you ever met Ivan Skelton?’

  ‘I met him when he came to England, yes.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Well, it’s a little difficult to describe . . .’

  ‘It is? Is it? Doesn’t he look exactly like this?’ At which Rumpole held up the murdered Dimitri’s photograph for all to see, and Claude stood up to whinge.

  ‘My Lord, Mr Rumpole is cross-examining this witness.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m refreshing his memory. This is a picture of the dead man, isn’t it? Does his cousin look almost exactly like him?’

  ‘They are about the same age. Yes. There is a family resemblance.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Rumpole began to rummage among his papers and Danny looked only moderately worried.

  ‘Is that all, Mr Rumpole?’ Graves sighed.

  ‘Not quite, my Lord.’

  ‘I’m just wondering, Mr Rumpole, how far this line is taking you in your defence?’

  ‘It’s taking me to the truth, my Lord. Never mind about the Defence. Now, Mr Newcombe’ – he turned to the witness-box, looking far more pugnacious – ‘you’re the trusted old family solicitor?’

  ‘I’m the family solicitor. And I suppose I’m old . . .’

  ‘Indeed you are! This secretary, Miss Elizabeth Ashton, she comes from Australia, doesn’t she?’

  ‘I rather think so.’

  ‘And is she engaged to be married to Ivan Skelton? So he recommended her to his cousin for the job? He’s planning to come over later this year and marry her, is he not?’

  ‘I have heard that.’

  ‘Engaged to be married and she spent weekends with his cousin Dimitri and became his mistress?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole’ – Mr Justice Graves intruded like the dead general who came to dinner with the Don – ‘I wonder what this has to do with the charge against your client?’

  ‘Then wonder on, my Lord, till truth makes all things plain.’ I suppose Rumpole was quoting poetry of some sort, as he went on quickly, ‘When did you last see Ivan Skelton, Mr Newcombe?’

  ‘I forget. . .’

  ‘Oh, come now. Your memory’s not quite as short as that. There are others in Court’ – he looked down at me, and I suddenly became others – ‘who can tell us, if you don’t want to. When did you last see him?’ Danny looked at me, I thought sadly, as though I had betrayed him.

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Court.’

  ‘In this Court?’ The Judge raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Yes, my Lord. In the public gallery.’

  ‘No doubt anxious to see if he was going to get his money. And you spoke to him?’

  Danny looked at me again, pleadingly. I stared back and he had to answer yes.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole, that’s pure hearsay.’ Graves was doing Claude’s job for him.

  ‘Of course it is, my Lord. One can always trust your Lordship, with his great experience, to be right on a point of law. Mr Newcombe, I advised your firm to advertise for the New Age travellers and you have not done so?’

  ‘That is right. I’m afraid it got overlooked.’

  ‘You declared that the deceased’s doctor couldn’t be found and he has been found now, without your help?’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’

  ‘Are you, Mr Newcombe? I shall be calling Mr Beazley to say that a strange car was parked in the yard at Long Acre on the night of the murder. Did you tell him that evidence was irrelevant?’

  ‘My Lord’ – Claude was stung into activity at last – ‘Mr Rumpole is cross-examining his own witness!’

  ‘Not at all! At the moment I’m making no attack on Mr Newcombe. He may genuinely have thought that the presence of a car hired by the murdered man’s cousin was quite irrelevant. And I shall be calling Mr Beazley.’

  ‘I may have said something . . .’ Danny was about to agree but Graves did his best to save him. ‘Mr Rumpole,’ he said, ‘I agree that this question is an attack on your own witness. It is quite improper.’

  ‘Then let me ask you a quite proper question. Have you, Mr Daniel Newcombe, been offered a share of Ivan Skelton’s winnings to make sure that this young man who stands before us in the dock is convicted of murder?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole.’ The pale judge seemed, in his indignation, to be rising in his seat, again, I thought, like some spectre arising from the tomb. He glared at Rumpole with such terrible disapproval that if you or I, Dodo,
had been in his place I honestly think we’d have simply collapsed, as we felt like doing when Stalky Sullivan gave us one of her looks and said she’d have to let our unfortunate parents know we were a disgrace to the school. Rumpole just stood there, smiling in an unusually polite way and, I have to say, I rather admired him as Graves went on, ‘This cross-examination is going from bad to worse.’

  ‘Oh, I agree with every word that has fallen from your

  Lordship.’ Rumpole was still smiling. ‘We are dealing here with something very bad indeed.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’ The old Gravestone unclenched his teeth in a vain attempt to call my husband to order. ‘Do I understand that you are accusing your own solicitor of entering into a criminal conspiracy to get this young man falsely convicted for murder?’

  ‘Ah, your Lordship puts the matter far more eloquently than I ever could. It is that gift for words that brought your Lordship such success at the Bar.’

  In fact Graves hadn’t been much of a success at the Bar. I remember Rumpole telling me that he’d got ‘his bottom on the Bench thanks to his skill in winning a safe Conservative seat’. I had to admire his Lordship’s self-control. The temptation to shout at Rumpole at that point is one which personally I would have found irresistible. ‘At least Mr Newcombe is entitled to refuse to answer a question likely to incriminate him, is he not?’

  ‘Of course.’ Rumpole got more polite as Graves became more irate. ‘As always your Lordship is perfectly right.’

  ‘Then I fully intend to warn him.’

  ‘Your Lordship can take no other course.’

  So the Judge warned the witness that he needn’t answer this incriminating question. Danny suddenly looked very old – I wondered why I had even put him in his sixties – and much smaller. He was hardly audible when he said, ‘My Lord, I prefer not to answer.’

  ‘You prefer not to? That is probably extremely wise.’ And Rumpole sat down in triumph, looking meaningfully at the Jury. Danny Newcombe never returned to sit between me and Mr Turnbull but, as soon as he left the witness-box, scuttled out of Court and, to be honest with you, Dodo, I never saw him again. But when I looked up to the public gallery I saw, not Danny talking to Ivan Skelton this time, but a woman with a stubbly head, who looked quite young from a distance, and who had come to tell the truth in spite of Mr Turnbull.

  The rest, of course, is history, and I’m sure you read about it in the papers. I don’t know whether they gave you Rumpole’s final speech or the bit which began so quietly that the Jury had to strain their ears to hear it: ‘A young man is walking in the woods, making up poetry and reciting it to some modern-day gypsies when one of Rudyard’s Cars drives up to Long Acre. Out of it gets the man who had hired it, Mr Ivan Skelton from Sydney, Australia. Why has he come there? Because he has heard of the love affair between Dimitri Skelton and Elizabeth Ashton whom Ivan was to marry, the girl who came over to work for his cousin and wait for him to join her.

  ‘Nobody heard the quarrel, Members of the Jury. The Beazleys were too busy listening to ancient warfare and the house was empty. Overcome with rage and jealousy did Ivan lift this fatal weapon’ – by now Rumpole had the golf club high above his head – ‘and strike! And strike! And strike again in the terrible and fatal fight that followed. No one saw Ivan after that fight or gave evidence as to the bloodstains on him. But when young Michael came home and found his father dead, and was stained by his father’s blood as he knelt beside the body, was it not natural that he should be suspected?

  ‘And how very convenient for Ivan that he was. Because if Michael was convicted, Ivan would inherit a fortune. And remember, he was here with us the other day, Members of the Jury, the man you might think is possibly, quite, quite possibly, even probably, guilty. That man was in the public gallery making sure his inheritance was safe. And then, when he had been warned by my solicitor, did he not slink away, as he had on the night of the murder, in one of Mr Rudyard’s hired cars to await the news of that young poet’s wrongful conviction?

  ‘If you think that’s what may have happened, Members of the Jury, let us deny Ivan Skelton his final satisfaction and his undeserved wealth. Let us find young Michael Skelton not guilty of the terrible crime of murdering his father. And, remember, it is your decision’ – here Rumpole glared at the Judge who, sitting motionless, had closed his eyes as though in pain – ‘and not the decision of anyone else in the Court.’

  And so the next day we were home again and sitting on either side of the gas fire at Froxbury Mansions in the evening. I’m glad to say there had been no further requests for salad.

  Rumpole had done full justice to the shepherd’s pie and cabbage I had cooked for him, taken with a great deal of mustard and tomato sauce. Now he said, ‘Thank you, Hilda. Thank you for the work you put in to R. v. Skelton. Some of your ideas were surprisingly helpful.’

  ‘Only some of them?’ And, when he didn’t answer, I said, ‘I have to say you didn’t seem able to follow up some fairly obvious clues. At least not until I got on the case.’

  ‘I was distracted,’ Rumpole had to admit. ‘I was suffering from certain anxieties.’

  ‘What sort of anxieties, Rumpole?’

  ‘Matters of a domestic nature.’

  ‘You mean, you thought it was about time we had the kitchen redecorated? I’ve been thinking that too.’

  ‘No. I was concerned . . . Well, damn it all, Hilda. I thought you might have grown tired of life here . . . with me.’

  ‘Life with you in Froxbury Mansions? Good heavens, how could anyone be tired of that?’

  ‘You said . . . Well, anyway, you told me . . .’ It was the first time in my entire life I had seen Rumpole stumped for words. ‘What was all that about Newcombe having taken a shine to you?’

  ‘No, I was wrong about that. He hadn’t taken a shine to me. He wanted to win me over so I could be his spy.’

  ‘His what?’ I had surprised Rumpole.

  ‘So I could spy on you. Tell him if you were getting too near the truth in R. v. Skelton. And there was something else I didn’t like him for.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Well, he called me a girl, which I thought was very patronizing. And I know why he gave you the brief.’

  ‘Well, I do have a certain reputation . . . Ever since that little problem at the Penge Bungalow.’

  ‘He thought because you aren’t a Q.C. you wouldn’t do the job properly.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Of course it is.’ There was silence for a while. Rumpole considered my extraordinary suggestion and rejected it. Then he said, ‘I shan’t include R. v. Skelton in my memoirs.’

  ‘Whyever not? It was one of your greatest triumphs.’

  ‘No, Hilda.’ He picked up his brief in a little receiving job at Acton. ‘The triumph was yours.’

  This is the story that Rumpole will never write. So I’m writing it for you, Dodo, and for you only. It’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  Rumpole and the Little Boy Lost

  ‘Whoever did that,’ Dot Clapton said, ‘deserves burning at the stake!’

  ‘I’m afraid they abolished that a few years ago.’ I took the Daily Trumpet Dot was offering me across her typewriter. ‘Although, given the reforming zeal of the appalling Ken Fry’ – I winced as I invariably do when I mention the name of the current Home Secretary – ‘we might get it back in the next Criminal Justice Act.’

  What I saw was a big photograph, almost the whole tabloid front page. A young woman, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, was looking into the camera, trying to smile; a husband only a few years older, puzzled and frowning, had his arm protectively round her shoulder. Behind them was the blur of an ordinary semi-detached and a small, ordinary car, but they were the victims of an extraordinary crime. Their child had been snatched away from them, hidden among strangers and perhaps ... It was the awful perhaps which made Steve Constant put his arm round his wife and why her smile might turn so easily i
nto a scream, SHEENA CONSTANT TALKS EXCLUSIVELY TO THE TRUMPET, the front page told the world, SEE CENTRE STORY.

  ‘If they catch the old witch who did it, you wouldn’t speak up for her in Court, would you? I mean you’d let her hang herself out of her own mouth, wouldn’t you, Mr Rumpole?’

  I had turned over to the central spread, entirely devoted to the little boy lost. There was an enlarged picture of little Tommy in the strangely metallic washed-out colours in which photographs appear in newspapers: an ordinary, carrot-haired three-year-old with a wide grin, no doubt a singular miracle to the Constants whose first and only child he was. There were snaps of the family at the seaside, by a swing in the garden of the semi and a picture of the huge South London hospital, gaunt and unfriendly as a nuclear power station, from which Tommy Constant had unaccountably disappeared. As I glanced over these apparently harmless records of a tragedy, I was trying to remind Dot of an Old Bailey hack’s credo. ‘I’m a black taxi, Dot,’ I told her, ‘plying for hire. I’m bound to accept anyone, however repulsive, who waves me down and asks for a lift. I do my best to take them to their destination, although the choice of route, of course, is entirely mine.’

  ‘The destination of her who nicked that child’ – Dot was unshakeable in her demand for a conviction, she was not the sort you’d want called up for jury duty – ‘would be burning at the stake. If you want my honest opinion.’

  I have to confess that I wasn’t giving Dot my full attention. There wasn’t a long story between the pictures, but what there was had been written in the simple, energetic style of the Daily Trumpet which, I thought, might be appreciated by a jury.

  Twenty-four-year-old Sheena Constant spoke through her tears: ‘After he was seen by the doctor, I put him on the kiddies’ mechanical donkey in the out-patients assembly. He’s been on it before, so I left him with Steve while I went to the toilet. Steve just crossed over to buy a packet of Marlboro. He was in sight of Tommy and only turned away for about a minute. It was during that minute our little son was stolen off us. He sort of vanished clutching a little yellow flop-eared rabbit which was his favourite toy!’