Rumpole and the Angel of Death

by John Mortimer

  Police investigations continue. Who was the pale-faced woman in a black beret and black plastic mac carrying a toddler away from out-patients? Police Superintendent Greengross hadn’t yet found her. Where were the social workers? Drinking carrot juice and knitting pullovers? Where were the hospital managers? Upstairs with their noses in the trough? Where was hospital security? Out to lunch? These are the questions the Trumpet will be asking during the coming week.

  Tomorrow: WHY MY DAUGHTER’S HEART IS BROKEN. Tommy’s gran talks exclusively to the Trumpet.

  ‘We’ve got her!’ Claude Erskine-Brown had entered the clerk’s room in a state of high excitement. ‘Got her, at last.’

  ‘The woman who stole little Tommy?’ I was still absorbing the Trumpet’s simple story. I had supped full of horrors at Equity Court, but there seemed to be something peculiarly tragic about this young couple’s loss.

  ‘Of course not. She didn’t steal anything. Can’t you get your mind off crime for a single moment? Does the wonderful world of art mean nothing to you? We’ve got Katerina Regen to sing to us in the Outer Temple Hall.’

  ‘Have you, by God?’ I folded the Daily Trumpet neatly and put it back on Dot’s typewriter. I thought I might have to forget Steve and Sheena Constant and fill my mind with other people’s troubles. ‘I doubt whether I shall be among those present.’

  ‘She will give us Schubert.’

  ‘So far as I’m concerned, she can keep him.’

  ‘And the Bar Musical Society, of which by a strange quirk of fate I seem to have become president’ – here I can only say that Erskine-Brown gave a modest simper – ‘will be hosting a small champagne reception afterwards. The eighteenth of this month. Put it in your diary, Horace.’

  For a moment my strong resolution wavered. Any invitation to take me to your lieder is one which, as a general rule, I have no difficulty in declining. But I have no such fears of a champagne reception. However, the preliminary trills seemed a highish price to pay for a glass or two of bubbles, so I sent an apology. ‘I’m sorry but Hilda and I will be entertaining.’

  ‘Entertaining who?’

  ‘Each other. To a couple of chops in Froxbury Mansions. Awfully sorry, old darling, previous engagement.’

  That night we were settled in front of the television in the mansion flat when Hilda said, ‘I hope you’ve got the eighteenth marked down in your diary, Rumpole?’

  ‘Yes, I have. I’m staying at home.’

  ‘Oh no, you’re not.’

  Sometimes the dialogue of She Who Must Be Obeyed becomes strongly reminiscent of the pantomimes my old father used to take me to in my extreme youth. Don’t I remember some such witty line having been used by the Widow Twankey?

  ‘Hilda,’ I reassured her, ‘you don’t want to spend a couple of hours on a hard chair in the Outer Temple Hall listening to some overweight diva trilling about departed love.’

  ‘You know nothing, Rumpole,’ she told me. (Had she forgotten my encyclopaedic knowledge of bloodstains?) ‘Katerina Regen is not only Covent Garden’s new Mimi but she’s as slender as a bluebell.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Claude Erskine-Brown, when he rang up. I told him to put us down for two tickets.’

  ‘How much is he paying us to go?’

  ‘Nothing, Rumpole. We are paying. It will be extremely good for you. You have so little art in your life.’

  ‘I have poetry.’

  ‘Some poetry. And it’s like your jokes, always the same.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘How much the same? Exactly.’

  ‘No, how much are the tickets, Hilda! Erskine-Brown didn’t con you out of a tenner?’

  ‘The tickets were fifty pounds each and that includes two glasses of a really good Méthode Champenoise, which I think’s a bargain considering how much you’d pay to listen to Regen at the Garden.’

  And considering the happy evenings I might have had at Pommeroy’s with the Méthode Fleet Streetoise for half that enormous expenditure. I might have said that but thought better of it. And then my attention was grabbed by the television on which an astonishingly young superintendent was holding a press conference. He sat between Sheena and Steve Constant – he in an ornate pullover, she in what must have been her best outfit, trying not to weep.

  ‘I just want to say . . .’ The superintendent had longish fair hair and protruding eyes. He looked as though he’d be much happier sharing jokes with his mates in the pub. However, he managed to sound both serious and sincere. ‘. . . to whoever’s got Tommy, we can understand your problems. Maybe you’re longing for a little boy of your own and can’t have one. Perhaps you even lost a little boy in tragic circumstances. We understand and we’re all sympathetic. We think you may need help and we’ll see to it that you get it. So will you ring us at the number we’ll put up on the screen in a minute and tell us where Tommy is? We’re sure he’s alive and well. (Here Sheena looked down, a hand to her forehead, covering her eyes.) We’re sure you’ve been looking after him really well. But just tell us where he is, that’s all. Give Tommy what he really needs: his mum and dad.’

  As he talked I remembered some of the old poetry She Who Must Be Obeyed was tired of.

  ‘Father! father! where are you going?

  ‘O do not walk so fast.

  ‘Speak father, speak to your little boy,

  ‘Or else I shall be lost.’

  The light was dark, no father was there;

  The child was wet with dew;

  The mire was deep, & the child did weep, . . .

  Sheena lowered her hand and shook her head bravely, like a diver shaking the water out of her eyes as she emerges from beneath the sea. Steve’s teeth were clenched, his jaw set, his face a mask of misery.

  I didn’t know why I felt so concerned about the Tommy Constant case. Had I fallen a little, perhaps, in love with Sheena’s face and looked forward, when the good news came, to seeing it light up with joy? I dreaded the pictures of the police with dogs crossing parkland or rubber-suited figures flopping into canals. I was even more afraid that they might find something. Whatever the reason, I found myself taking the Chambers’ stairs like a two-year-old and arrived panting in the clerk’s room feeling every day of seventy-four. I could hardly find enough breath to ask Dot for a quick loan of her Daily Trumpet.

  There was a notable absence of hard news. Mrs Bellew, Sheena’s mum, was reminiscing. Sheena had been a model child who did well at school and had a really lovely singing voice and was so pretty that the family hoped she might end up on television. She’d gone in for a few beauty competitions:

  ‘Just local ones. I wouldn’t have let her near the Albert Hall.’ And a schoolfriend who knew the drummer in Stolen or Strayed (musicians whom I have to confess I’d never heard of) thought she might get her a job singing with the group, but nothing came of it. Tommy, it seemed, had inherited his mother’s talents and, although only three, could perform ‘Ooh! Aah! Cantona’ as a solo number without prompting. Anyway Sheena gave up her chance of becoming famous when she met Steve at a party – a young computer salesman who was going to do very well for himself in the fullness of time. She started going out with him. Tommy’s gran had always thought they were an ideal little family: ‘Every night in my prayers I thanked God for their luck, until this horrible thing had to happen.’ The double-spread was filled out with pictures of Granny Bellew stirring a cup of tea and five-year-old Sheena stumbling across the sands carrying a bigger beach-ball than she could cope with. We also saw Sheena singing in a school production of Jesus Christ Superstar, heavily jewelled and wearing an unexpected sari (no doubt to keep the school play ethnically neutral). There was a picture of Stolen or Strayed – a quartet I wouldn’t care to have met on a dark night and whose music, I felt sure, would have made an evening of Katerina Regen’s trilling sound like the song the sirens sang – and a photograph of the Constant wedding.

  Wednesday brought a hard-hitting article entitled NUT-CUTLET L
AYABOUTS: THE SOCIAL WORKERS WHO HAVE DONE B-ALL TO HELP FIND SHEENA’Ss BABY. Thursday was devoted to Steve’s family, including his aunt Brenda Constant, who had never married but was gifted with psychic powers, practised as a clairvoyant, and had asked for help and guidance, in finding young Tommy, from the spirit world.

  On Black Friday a man from the Daily Trumpet had been out with the police and the chilling pictures of frogmen and tracker dogs duly appeared. Young Superintendent Greengross gave a gloomy interview: ‘We still hope for the best,’ he said, ‘and we are pursuing every possible line of inquiry to establish that young Tommy is still alive. But it’s no use hiding the fact that, the more the days pass by, the more reason we have to fear the worst.’

  On Saturday Chambers was shut and Dot’s Trumpet was not available. On my way to Safeway’s with She Who Must Be Obeyed for shopping duty, I read the posters and crossed the road to buy the paper. I saw a young mother with her face lit up and an apparently unharmed child in her arms. I thought the huge headline surprisingly literary: LITTLE BOY FOUND, it said. I gave a great cry of joy.

  ‘Rumpole!’ the captain of my fate called briskly from the other side of the road. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘I am whooping,’ I told her, ‘whooping with delight. Tommy Constant has been found and all is more or less right with the world!’

  I learnt how Tommy had been discovered by reading that day’s Daily Trumpet, and the following Sunday’s papers. Next week the story was retold, in considerable detail, in a long interview with Sheena, which took up more pages of Dot’s favourite publication. Later, some time later, I was to learn even more about the great kidnapping case.

  It was a hot night in late summer, near midnight apparently, when the Constants got the telephone call. It was too hot, Sheena said, and anyway they were too worried to sleep. When the phone rang, Steve looked at it, frozen, expecting the worst news. Sheena took a deep breath and grabbed it. She said she felt a moment of relief when she didn’t hear the voice of Superintendent Greengross. What she heard was much fainter, a woman’s voice, with an attempt at disguise, as though the caller were speaking through a handkerchief. ‘Nineteen Swansdown Avenue,’ was all it said. ‘You’d better get there quick.’ Later, the call was traced to a phone box at the end of nearby Swansdown Avenue. Later still, Sheena said that she thought she recognized the mystery voice.

  The street used to be quiet and well kept, the home of middle managers and owners of small businesses who cleaned their cars on Sunday mornings and decked out their back gardens with oven-ready blooms from the local garden centre. Many of the middle managers had been made redundant and the small businesses gone broke. The houses had been repossessed by the banks and the For Sale notices had grown weather-stained as the houses decayed. At one end of the avenue, a speculator was building flats – otherwise the street’s sleep was more or less undisturbed, except when there was an improvised rave-up in number 19, which had been broken into so many times that the bank, which had evicted the previous owners, now hardly bothered to change the locks or mend the windows.

  The Constants drove at high speed to Swansdown Avenue, less than a mile from their house. They didn’t dare to hope, but couldn’t help but fear. The padlock on the front gate was broken, the back door swung on its hinges. The electricity had been cut off, but a street light enhanced the moonlight and left hard shadows in the corners of the rooms. ‘The place was a tip,’ Sheena said in her interview. ‘There were piles of discarded clothes, stained mattresses with their innards protruding, piles of bottles, half-empty Coke cans all over the place and cardboard plates of half-eaten takeaways, and needles scattered everywhere.’ The couple went from room to room, Sheena said, fearing what they might see in the shadows, and for a long while they avoided the garden, terrified of signs of recent digging.

  And then, sickened by the lingering smell of unwashed bodies and rotting food, Sheena pushed open a bedroom window and found herself looking down into the rank garden. She saw more bottles and syringes glistening in the moonlight, and then she heard a child cry. She had heard it often in her imagination since Tommy vanished, but now she fancied it was real and she hoped she was not mistaken. It seemed that he had been playing quite happily in the dark garden until he stung his hand on a clump of nettles. He was wearing the same red anorak and blue jeans and red boots, together with the smallStar Trek T-shirt, which Sheena had put on him to go to the hospital. In that filthy house he was clean, well-dressed and seemed in excellent health. He greeted his mother and father without visible surprise.

  A week later Superintendent Greengross told the Daily Trumpet that Thelma Ropner of 17 Swansdown Avenue was helping him with his inquiries. We got little further information about her, except that she was twenty-six and had recently given birth to a baby son, who died four weeks later. Later still, she was charged and hurried into the local magistrates court with a blanket over her head. Her defence was reserved and, after a good deal of argument from Mr Bernard, her solicitor, she was granted bail.

  ‘For this song, I am a young peasant girl going to the well in my village. My lover is a soldier who has deserted me and gone away to the wars. I sing, “Oh dear, I wish I could draw my lover back to me on a rope, as easily as I draw water from this well.” “Der Brunnen” is the name of this beautiful song.’

  There was a polite smattering of applause from the audience assembled in the Outer Temple Hall, among which Erskine-Brown’s fevered clapping sounded like a volley of rifle-fire during a church service. The gratified chanteuse flashed a healthy set of white teeth in Claude’s direction and then leaned for a reviving moment against the grand piano, her hand spread over her chest, her eyes closed, breathing in deeply. During the pause for rest and inspiration, her perky little accompanist suspended his fingers over the keys and sat with his eyes bright and his head on one side like a hen waiting for the egg to drop. Then Miss Regen fixed her smile and the first note rang out among the oak panelling and portraits of dead judges.

  She was giving us the sad story once more, but this time with plenty of trills and repetitions, and in German. She was certainly not your standard fat opera singer, but rather beautiful with blonde hair, a suntan and clear blue eyes. Everything was, however, larger than life, not only her teeth but her hands, her eyes and her mouth. She was as tall as most of the men in the audience and, I thought, any lover who tried to escape from her and join the army would have been hauled in rapidly with a rope around his neck. And then, I have to say, my attention wandered.

  He kissed the child & by the hand led

  And to his mother brought,

  Who in sorrow pale, thro the lonely dale,

  Her little boy weeping sought.

  I remembered the lines and the mysterious figure of a God dressed in white who returned the child in Blake’s poem. I wondered who had made the telephone call to the Constants. Was it a friend, or a contrite enemy? Then I fell into a light doze.

  I was woken by the final applause, sufficiently rested to join in the scrum for the champagne-style refreshments. The clapping was renewed when Miss Regen appeared, smiling with immeasurable courage, in spite of her exhaustion, and was immediately pounced on by Claude, who greeted her with such effusive praise that she might have sung her way through the role of Brünnhilde while winning the long-distance Olympic hurdles. Our sensitive Claude seemed to be quivering with excitement, and I thought she undoubtedly had a rope round his neck if ever she wanted to haul him in.

  ‘All through that beautiful music, Rumpole’ – Hilda was in a confessional mood – ‘I couldn’t help thinking of something else.’

  ‘Couldn’t you? I was pretty riveted by the girl at the well, as it so happens.’

  ‘I couldn’t help thinking of that poor woman who lost her baby.’

  ‘She’s got it back now, Hilda.’

  ‘I know. But the person who did it, can you think of a worse crime?’

  ‘Scarcely.’

  ‘Even you couldn’t defe
nd a woman like that, could you, Rumpole?’

  ‘Even I might find it difficult; but she hasn’t been tried yet.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. She’s clearly guilty. It sticks out a mile. And please don’t start a long speech about the burden of proof. You’re so childish, sometimes, Rumpole. You imagine everyone in the world’s as innocent as little Tommy Constant.’

  Before I could refresh the memory of She Who Must on the presumption of innocence, our ears were shattered by a yell of, ‘Thank you, Fräulein Regen, for bringing sunshine into this dusty old hall. I’m so glad I persuaded my fellow benchers to invite you.’ It was Barrington McTear, Q.C. (known to me as Cut Above, because he regards himself as a very superior

  person), who had approached the diva and, in a gesture which I thought went out with old Scarlet Pimpernel films, kissed her hand. She glowed back at him and these two immense people seemed, for a moment, like the meeting of a male and female giant in some unreadable Nordic saga. Then Cut Above straightened up, patted the hand he had been kissing, and responded to a call of ‘Barrington!’ from a sharp-featured woman, no doubt his wife, who looked as though she found life with Cut Above no picnic. ‘Coming, Leonora.’ The exrugby football blue of a Q.C. turned reluctantly from the singing star and went bellowing off into the distance. Claude, who had looked somewhat miffed during this encounter, moved to fill the gap left by his fellow Q.C. and started to address the Fräulein in confidential tones. On our way out I heard him mention the fatal word lunch. Whenever Claude speaks of this meal to any female, the consequences are usually dire.

  But I had more to worry about than Claude’s tentative and no doubt embarrassing romances. That afternoon Bonny Bernard, my trusty instructing solicitor with a thriving practice in the Timson country south of Streatham, had booked a conference in R. v. Thelma Ropner. I was heavily pencilled in as Counsel for the Defence, and the faggots round the stake were no doubt ready for lighting.