Rumpole and the Angel of Death

by John Mortimer

  ‘She’s in your room, Mr Rumpole. And she’s wearing the black mac.’

  That morning Dot Clapton’s Botticelli face was set in anger and contempt, a young angel determined to drive the sinners out of the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword.

  ‘It is raining, Dot, as usual.’

  ‘So does she have to wear the same mac? Some sort of nerve she must have, mustn’t she? But I can’t stay chatting, Mr Rumpole. Some of us has got work to do.’ And Dot attacked her typewriter as though it were my client’s throat.

  Some of us did have work – hard, unpleasant work – and the prospect, at some time in the not-too-distant future, of being treated in Court as though we were personally responsible for pinching defenceless infants from hospitals. I pushed open the door of my room and it seemed, in some curious and quite evil way, to be dominated by Miss Thelma Ropner.

  Thinking back, it seems absurd to have felt so instantly chilled. Thelma was almost a caricature from a movie and I might even, in other circumstances, have found her appearance comic. She was very pale, with rust-coloured, lank hair, and her features seemed curiously misplaced: her eyes too small, her nose slightly crooked and her mouth turned downwards. She looked both unpleasant and unhappy. And she wore, as Dot had said, with what was either bravado or sheer stupidity, the black beret set at what might have been intended as a cheeky angle, and the unmistakable shiny, crackly, black plastic mac which protected her like the armour of a crustacean. One thing was absolutely certain. She could never have got out of a hospital carrying a child unnoticed.

  So vivid was the effect of Miss Ropner that the rest of my room seemed to sink into shadow. Somewhere, dear old Bernard was sorting through the file on his lap and chewing peppermints. Even I, taking my place on the swing chair, felt colourless – an Old Bailey hack quite outshone by the lurid vision of evil in front of him.

  ‘It’s all a complete waste of time, Mr Rumpole. I never ever took Sheena’s child.’ Thelma Ropner spoke in a curiously girlish, high-pitched little voice, as though the possible child- stealer were herself a child, and added, ‘I wouldn’t want to.’

  ‘You call Mrs Constant Sheena, I couldn’t help noticing. Do you know her?’

  ‘Know her. Of course I know her. We were at Cripps together.’

  ‘Cripps?’

  ‘Cripping Comprehensive. I’m sure it was nothing like the academy for the sons of gentlemen you attended.’

  ‘And probably a great deal more comfortable than my draughty boarding-school. Better lunches, too, I should imagine.’ She didn’t smile. I never saw her smile. What I got was a mood of petulance or a sarcastic sigh. I was in for a difficult trial with a difficult client and wondered if Hilda or Dot Clapton would ever forgive me if I won.

  ‘You mean you were close friends?’ Bernard sucked his peppermint and looked in the statement he had taken for any reference to their friendship, and didn’t find it.

  ‘We got on all right. Sheena was quite good fun until she met Steve and lost her femininity.’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure what you mean . . .’ I have kept my patience under more trying circumstances. ‘She got married and had a baby. Was that losing her femininity?’

  ‘Of course it was.’ Thelma sighed again at my question. ‘She got the one kid and the boring young man in computers, the semi and the Daf – and she was well stuck in a male-dominated rut, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Do you think Sheena felt in a rut?’ I wondered.

  ‘Of course she did. She was awfully envious of Tina Santos when she got her name in all the papers for bonking some dreadful little government minister. Sheena always wanted to be famous like a telly star or something. Well, I suppose she is now, in a way. Famous.’

  ‘Not in the way she’d like, I’m sure.’

  ‘Probably not.’ Miss Ropner turned away from me and looked out of the window, as though she had lost interest in me and Mr Bernard, and the tedious workings of the criminal law.

  I renewed my attack, to gain at least a little of her attention. ‘You think everyone who has a baby gets stuck in a male- dominated rut?’

  She looked at me then and said, ‘You mean I had one?’

  ‘So you say in your statement.’

  ‘And they’re going to use it against me?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re going to use it against me that Damon died. They’ll say it’s because my little boy died that I wanted to steal Sheena’s. That’s what they’re going to say, aren’t they?’

  ‘I suppose it might provide a motive.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you, Mr Legal-Eagle, that if I’d wanted to nick a child I certainly wouldn’t have chosen Sheena’s. I’d’ve found one with a far more interesting father.’

  It’s not often that I am to be found sitting in a stunned silence, but this was such an occasion. Bernard was also immobile. He had his tube of peppermints open, but didn’t lift one to his mouth.

  Then I recovered sufficiently to tell the client, ‘I have known witnesses sink themselves with one unwise answer, probably more times than you’ve had hot dinners. But if you say anything like that in Court we might as well plead guilty and start your sentence as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Lawyer.’ Thelma gave a bizarre impression of a little girl’s pout. ‘So sorry I can’t give you all the answers you’d like.’

  ‘Don’t bother about what I’d like. It’s the jury who’ve got to like you. And they’re fairly ordinary men and women stuck in various kinds of a rut.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry for them, that’s all I’ve got to say. Now, is there anything you want to ask me?’

  ‘Just a few things. You live at seventeen Swansdown Avenue?’

  ‘That’s what it says there, doesn’t it?’

  ‘If the uneven numbers are all down one side of the street, nineteen is next door.’

  ‘I can see it from my window.’

  ‘On that moonlit night, did you see Tommy Constant down there among the nettles?’

  ‘Hardly. On that moonlit night I was fast asleep. Or as fast as you can get in the Edmunds’s house with Classic FM always on the go and that woman getting up at all hours to feed her unattractive baby on demand.’

  ‘Brian Edmunds is your landlord? A professor?’

  ‘Professor! He teaches Communication Studies at some rotten poly that now calls itself the University of South-West London.’

  ‘The Edmundses.’ I picked up another statement. ‘Both say that they didn’t see you in their house at all during the week Tommy Constant went missing.’

  ‘I was there every night! I’ve got my own key, you know. I am a grown-up, free and independent spirit, Mr Rumpole. I don’t have to report to Mr Brian Edmunds every time I go out or come back. As a matter of fact I avoid them both as much as possible. I don’t particularly enjoy conversation with the brain dead.’

  ‘They say they couldn’t tell if you slept in your bed during that week.’ I thought the Edmundses must be cursing the day they took in Thelma as a lodger. ‘Because your bed is hardly ever made, anyway.’

  ‘I’ve told them not to look into my room.’ Thelma clearly felt that her civil rights had been outraged. ‘In fact I’ve expressly forbidden it!’

  ‘What were you doing during that week?’

  ‘I do work, Mr Rumpole. I have to work to live. We can’t all sit around in nice comfortable rooms in the Outer Temple waiting for someone to get into trouble.’

  Thelma Ropner’s resentment was like a high-pitched ringing, a perpetual noise in the ear like the disease of tinnitus. I ignored it with an effort. ‘Where do you work, Miss Ropner?’

  ‘Anywhere that’s interesting, and worthwhile, and exciting. I help out a lot at groups.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘The Stick-Up Theatre Company. They’re based in Croydon. Friends of the Earth. Animal Rights. Outings – that’s an organization for gay and lesbian groups of retired people. I organize events for them. Some of us, Mr
Lawyer, think that work should have a social context.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole’s work’ – my defence came, unexpectedly, from Bonny Bernard, who had sat, up till then, quietly sucking peppermints – ‘is done in the interests of justice. I’m sure you understand that, Miss Ropner.’

  ‘It’s also done in the interests of meeting this quarter’s gas bill and financing Saturday’s trip to Safeway’s.’ I hastened to reassure my client that my interest in her case was not based on any abstract conception. A too fervent attachment to the interests of justice, I began to suspect, might not help me to keep the disagreeable Thelma out of chokey.

  ‘During each night that little Tommy was missing’ – I wanted to get her story entirely clear – ‘you tell me you were sleeping at the Edmunds’s house?’

  ‘Entirely alone, Mr Lawyer. Without even a three-year-old in bed with me.’

  ‘Very well.’ I shuffled through the bundle of statements again. ‘On the night young Tommy was found in the garden of number nineteen, Mrs Edmunds says she was up with her baby . . .’

  ‘Surprise, surprise.’ Thelma Ropner gave a small, mirthless laugh.

  ‘She was looking out of the first-floor bedroom window. “I saw someone under the street lamp in front of number nineteen,”’ I read aloud. ‘“It looked like a woman in a black plastic mac and a beret. I thought it was Thelma, but she was pushing something, a pram or a pushchair, I couldn’t be sure. Then my baby started crying again, and when I looked back the woman had gone.” ’

  ‘Why didn’t she call the police? Everyone was on the lookout for someone in a mac like mine, who’d pinched Sheena’s precious little Tommy. If Polly Edmunds thought she’d seen me, why didn’t she rush down, or at least call the police?’ To my surprise, my client now sounded quite calm and sensible.

  ‘That’s a very good point for cross-examination. Thank you.’ I was polite enough to let her think I hadn’t thought of it.

  ‘That’s all right. I’m sure you need a bit of help. Anyway, why didn’t she knock on my door if she thought it was me? She’d’ve found me tucked up with myself, wouldn’t she?’

  I thought I knew the answer. With a lodger like Thelma Ropner, the Edmundses must have blessed the hours when she was either out or asleep. They wouldn’t have gone looking for her. I sorted through a number of police officer’s statements and found the description of number nineteen’s unlovely garden patch: ‘“The police found wheel-marks on the wet ground which might have been made by a pushchair. There were plenty of footprints . . .’”

  ‘And body prints too.’ Thelma’s smile was so chilling that I thought, for a moment, she was talking about death and not the pleasures of sexual conquests in an urban tip. ‘You know they came and took my shoes away? Haven’t we got any civil rights left? Haven’t we?’

  ‘Only a few. And that’s because I keep on shouting about them down the Old Bailey.’ My strength to be polite to Thelma seemed likely to run out before her resentment. ‘. . . Prints that fitted a pair of your shoes were found in the garden of number nineteen.’

  ‘Of course they were. I was there the night before. It was pretty muddy then.’

  ‘You went into the garden?’

  ‘Lots of people did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Number nineteen’s the only place you meet interesting people. It was the house for free spirits.’

  So was that why the three-year-old little boy lost had been dumped there, I wondered. To meet interesting people?

  After a session with Thelma Ropner, there was only one place to go and I stumbled towards it as a wounded, thirsty lion might crawl to the water-hole. The first two glasses of liquid hardly banished her chilly memory, but by the third I felt some inner warmth returning. Jack Pommeroy’s new and untried barmaid, who seemed a nice girl, gave me a smile of apparently genuine concern and asked unnecessarily if I would care for another. And then a strange voice said, ‘Got you, Mr Rumpole. Trapped you in your lair, sir.’ At the same time a card was slapped on the bar in front of me bearing the legend: JONATHAN ARGENT, Daily Trumpet.

  I looked up, expecting to be staring at the craggy features and moist eyes of a tabloid journalist marinated in whisky, a sweat-stained trilby and a dirty mac. I saw what seemed to be an impertinent sixth former who had just, more by luck than hard work, done rather well in his A-levels – the sort of youth who would be in constant minor trouble, but usually forgiven. He had a small, upturned nose, a bang of dark hair that strayed across his forehead, and lips that were fuller and redder than might have been expected. He wore a suit with a rather long jacket and a double-breasted waistcoat, and across a stomach which hardly deserved the name a gold watchchain dangled. Young Mr Argent seemed to see himself as an Edwardian dandy. ‘So, this is Fleet Street.’ He looked around at the assembled legal hacks, their solicitors, whom they were flirting with energetically, and their secretaries whom they probably intended to flirt with later. ‘I wasn’t quite sure I’d be able to find it.’

  ‘There was a time,’ I told him, ‘when your newspaper and practically every other rag was in this street. That was before you all pushed off to some nightmare electronic city on the Isle of Dogs where you could stay safely away from the news.’

  ‘I thought you’d talk like that,’ the infant Argent said.

  ‘Like what, exactly?’

  ‘Like starting every sentence “There was a time”.’

  ‘Time was,’ I said, rather grandly, I thought – the Chateau Fleet Street was loosening the throat and somewhat inflating the prose – ‘is by now far the longest and most important part of my life.’

  ‘There’s an old chap at the Trumpet who remembers when it was in Fleet Street. They put him on to the Saturday para Down the Garden Path, but now he’s been made redundant.’ Time to come, I thought, is not something I wish to sit here thinking about, taking a quick glance towards the end. Then Argent said, ‘Why not ditch that ghastly-looking cough mixture and join me in a bottle of the Dom?’

  ‘Of the what?’

  ‘Dom Perignon? He was an old monk who had a cunning sort of a way with champagne. I don’t know if you ever met him round Fleet Street?’

  ‘Why on earth’ – I was puzzled by this curious encounter – ‘should you want to buy me expensive champagne?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not me, sir.’ He used the word sir as though he was speaking to a schoolmaster for whom he’d long lost respect. ‘The Trumpet wants to stand us both a drink. After that peculiar plonk you might be in the mood for a bit of blotting paper, so I’m sure the scandal sheet would run to a couple of cheese sandwiches to go with the bubbles.’

  I am, I hope, a fair-minded man and I thought I should consider his offer without prejudice, and come to a fair conclusion. ‘I must admit that your paper gave the Tommy Constant case very thorough coverage,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh, we want it to be much more serious than that, sir. I think there’s an empty table in the corner. Shall I take your arm to steady you?’

  ‘Certainly not’ – I was quite brusque with the lad – ‘I am perfectly steady, thank you very much indeed.’

  Young Argent said when we landed safely at the table, ‘I’m glad you thought we told Sheena’s story well, sir. Now we want to do the same for Thelma.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Tell her story.’

  ‘It’ll be told in Court.’

  ‘We’d like the Trumpet to be on the inside track with Thelma. You’ve got to admit she’s got an even bigger circulation potential than Sheena. Thelma’s story has got an added dimension.’

  ‘Oh? What dimension’s that?’

  ‘Well, quite honestly, sir, her baby died.’ He gave me his candid, boyish look, half amused, as though he had to confess that he planned to raid the tuck shop.

  I did my best to suppress rage. ‘Do you call that a plus? There should have been a Daily Trumpet around in the days of Herod the King. You might have broken all circulation records.’

  ‘We want to do The
lma’s story’ – Jonathan Argent looked very serious and sincere, his eyes wide and his voice particularly quiet – ‘in a way which will be a hundred per cent fair and sympathetic. We all know how women get after childbirth. We’ve got stuff from a psychiatrist. It’s jolly understandable, really.’

  Thirty-five years after childbirth, I thought, She Who Must Be Obeyed could still spring some surprises; but I didn’t encourage the upper-crust young Jonno by telling him that. ‘If Miss Ropner wants to tell you her story when the trial’s over, that’s entirely up to her.’

  ‘I don’t think Miss Ropner’s going to be in much of a position to speak to anyone when the trial is over.’ Jonathan Argent was smiling.

  ‘Why? Do you assume she’s going to be convicted?’

  ‘Surprise me, then. You’ve got some brilliant defence tucked away under that old hat of yours? Have you, quite honestly, sir?’

  How many more people would have to remind me of the burden of proof? I took a generous gulp of the old monk’s recipe and said, ‘Thelma Ropner is innocent and will be until the Jury down the Bailey comes back with a verdict.’

  ‘You’re expecting the thumbs up?’

  ‘We shall see,’ I said – champagne after plonk is no recipe for epigrams – ‘what we shall see.’

  ‘Quite honestly, Mr Rumpole, it’s not so much Thelma we’re after.’

  ‘Who are you after, then? You seemed to have squeezed the best out of the Constant family.’

  ‘We’re after you.’

  He was very young, probably quite silly and looked harmless enough. I don’t know why but when he said this I felt, in some curious way, trapped; he spoke modestly, but as though he had an immense power behind him.

  ‘I’m an old taxi’ – I embarked on the much-loved speech – ‘plying for hire. If the Trumpet wants to brief me in some lucrative action, provided it doesn’t conflict with the interests of my client, well and good. I make it a rule to represent all riff-raff, underdogs and social outcasts.’