Rumpole and the Angel of Death

by John Mortimer

  ‘We don’t want to employ you, sir. We want to tell your story.’

  ‘You mean the “Have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed against you?” And the chap in the dock says, “Bugger all, my Lord.” And the Judge says to his counsel, “What did your client say, Mr Smith?”’ My stories, by now, have achieved a pretty wide circulation.

  ‘Not exactly that, sir.’ Argent shook his wise young head sadly, unable to understand the wilful old. ‘Your story in Tom’s case: WHY I’M DEFENDING THELMA ROPNER, THE MOST HATED WOMAN IN ENGLAND. Your taxi bit can come in there: I PUT MY TALENT AT THE DISPOSAL OF THE RIFF-RAFF AND THE UNDERDOG. And then: THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL. HOW I FOUND A DEFENCE IN A HOPELESS CASE.’

  ‘What are you suggesting I do? Spill all the beans? I can’t do it.’

  ‘Whyever not? I’d write it for you.’

  ‘It would be against all the best traditions of the Bar.’

  ‘You might find it extremely profitable.’

  ‘How profitable? I only ask out of idle curiosity.’

  The young hack looked around conspiratorially, made sure no one was listening and then offered me a sum of money, expressed in Ks, which I took to be thousands. I saw myself retiring, moving from icy Froxbury Mansions to a place with a small pool and a microwave on the Malaga coast, sitting in the bar with a group of accountants who had taken voluntary redundancy, drinking sangria. I stifled a huge yawn.

  ‘No thanks,’ I told him politely, ‘it’s too late for all that sort of thing.’

  ‘That isn’t the end of the story, sir. With syndication it might be much more.’

  I drained my glass. ‘In the circumstances I think it best if I pay for the Dom Perignon.’

  ‘There’s absolutely no need, sir, for that sort of gesture. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to talk to you.’

  I saw the man’s point. ‘Then I’ll be getting back to work.’ I rose from the table. He smiled at me as though I had agreed to all his ridiculous propositions. As I was walking towards the door I heard him call after me, ‘And we’ll keep in very close touch indeed.’

  I discovered later, a good deal later, that when I was being given the expensive sauce, and offered all the kingdoms of Southern Spain, by the schoolboy journalist, my learned but incautious friend Claude Erskine-Brown, Q.C., was engaged in his first romantic encounter with the statuesque Regen. The place chosen for this tryst was hardly discreet, no small spaghetti house in the purlieus of Victoria station but the glittering glass and brass 1930s Galaxy Hotel in the middle of Mayfair, where the nomadic diva was pigging it during her Covent Garden visit. By a chance which turned out to be less than happy, she arrived back from shopping just as Claude’s taxi drew up and then enjoyed a notable encounter on the marble steps in front of the Galaxy’s top-hatted commissionaire and revolving door.

  Of course, I wasn’t a spectator at this event which assumed an importance rather like Solomon’s greeting to the Queen of Sheba, or King David’s ‘Hallo, there’ to Bathsheba. I imagine that Claude was effusive and pathetically grateful that his suggestion of lunch, made at the Outer Temple concert, had been accepted and that the singing star was a little confused and perhaps unable to remember who her visitor was. Claude, however, announced himself in clear and ringing tones and swooped at her with two kisses on both cheeks, which, he imagined, would be acceptable to a jet-setting soprano. I believe Katerina Regen made a brisk movement, whether of greeting or avoidance I’m not altogether sure, and Claude stumbled on a shallow, marble step, with the result that their mouths collided in a manner which looked a great deal friendlier than it was. This mischance didn’t embarrass the singer, who didn’t embarrass easily. She gave a resonant laugh down the scale of C, put her arm in Claude’s and dragged him in through the revolving door as though she was hauling him up from a well. And there, for a moment, and for the purpose of this narrative, we must leave the happy couple.

  I decided to visit the scene, or rather the scenes, of the crime – a stretch of South London which took the place of the lonely fen in which the little boy was lost in William Blake’s strange poem. We went in Bonny Bernard’s unwashed Fiesta which seems to contain, in a state of unexpected chaos, all the elements of his life. Files, bulging envelopes, cardboard boxes, were piled on the back seat, together with a squash racket and a zipped-up bag of some sort of sportswear which I had never seen moved.

  Our first call was the Springtide General Hospital. At my direction Bernard parked his motor in a space clearly marked RESERVED FOR HOSPITAL HEAD OF HUMAN RESOURCES and joined the throng pouring in at the main entrance, a huge space which resembled a town centre during late-night shopping when all the traffic lights are out of order and the local constabulary have gone on holiday.

  Visitors sat on benches eating takeaway meals, and patients, long ago forgotten, were slumped in wheelchairs. Hospital trolleys rattled past, some heavy with sheeted figures. Other trolleys stood parked with old persons, belly upwards, staring hopelessly at the ceiling. A doctor or two, a little posse of clattering nurses, hugging their cardigans about them, were somewhere glimpsed. Otherwise, the crowd was notably civilian. The predominant smell was of rubber, disinfectant and popcorn.

  We passed a row of shops selling plastic toys, girlie magazines and best-selling paperbacks. In the concourse in front of the out-patients, there was a children’s corner: a broken playpen, a huge pink teddy bear and the mechanical donkey on which a small child might enjoy a stationary trip for fifty pence. At that moment, a shaven-headed, earringed nineteen-year-old was sitting astride it, swigging mineral water from a kingsize bottle. As I took in the locus in quo, the wonder was not how a child could be stolen there but how a small and adventurous boy could ever be kept safe.

  ‘God protect me’ – I shared my prayers with my instructing solicitor – ‘from having to die in a place like this.’

  ‘Is there anything you want me to do here?’ Bernard was as anxious as I was to get out of this house of healing.

  ‘Find out what was wrong with little Tommy. I mean, why did they take him to the out-patients that morning?’ I looked towards the newspaper and tobacconist shop where Steve had turned his back on his son to buy fags, and where great piles of the Daily Trumpet were on sale. ‘It wasn’t an accident. We knew that. Sudden sickness. Sheena says that in her statement. What sort of sickness exactly? Find that out, Bonny Bernard, in the fullness of time.’

  ‘Where to next, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Up to Redwood Road, I think. Just for a glance at the matrimonial home.’

  In the car park the Head of Human Resources was standing beside his unparked B.M.W. and swearing at us. I smiled sweetly and told him that we were official inspectors sent by Mrs Lavinia Lyndon, the glamorous and lethal Minister of Health, to report on his hospital’s efficiency, and that shut him up effectively.

  I had seen the semi-detached in Redwood Road before, faintly in that first picture in the Trumpet. Now it seemed bigger and brighter than I had expected. The front garden looked as though it had been recently trimmed and rhododendrons and bright azaleas, already in flower, had been brought in from a garden centre. Parked in front of the garage was a low-lined, bright-red and sporty model with a number Mr Bernard knew to be recent. If the Constants had come into a bit of money, I saw no reason, after their week of misery, why they shouldn’t enjoy it. We didn’t see little Tommy, or either of his parents, although we waited for about ten minutes on the other side of the road. Then a middle-aged women in a bright yellow dress came out of the house and started to snip a bunch of early, straight-stalked and military tulips in the front garden. She had reddish hair, a pale face and a sharp nose. I thought she condemned the flowers to death in the house without mercy or regret.

  On the way to Swansdown Avenue, threading our way along streets of identical pink-and-white houses (they looked, I thought, like carefully packed and identical packets of streaky bacon), round crescents and across wider roads, we stopped
at traffic lights beside a row of small shops that no doubt were struggling for existence against the mass attack of the supermarkets and the shopping malls. As I looked idly out of the window, I saw a shoe mender’s, a dry cleaner’s with a window display of wire coathangers and paper flowers, and a shop called Snappy Print: COPIES MADE AND FAXES SENT. In the window I saw a poster offering a course in computer and business studies: ONE WEEK IN A COUNTRY HOUSE NEAR TUNBRIDGE WELLS CAN PUT YOU ON THE TOP EXECUTIVE LADDER OF SUCCESS. SALESMANSHIP AND COMPETITIVE MARKETING THOROUGHLY TAUGHT. After the printer’s came a peeling hut with blackened windows and a sign advertising THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE AND SAUNA. The door was padlocked. The next shop, so narrow it seemed to have been squashed in after the rest of the row was finished, had a surprising and half-broken neon sign, PSYCHIC it must have once said when all the letters were fully operational, ASTROLOGICAL SIGNS CHARTED AND CONSIDERED, CLAIRVOYANT ADVICE GIVEN. The shop window was empty except for a white vase which contained three wilting tulips and a photograph. It was a glimpse of that photograph that made me ask Bernard to park, and I got out and stood examining it and the window display. In the shadows of the small room behind it I was sure I saw something of importance to our case. I tried the door but it was locked and, when I got back to the car, Bernard said, ‘What did you want, Mr Rumpole? To know our future in R. v. Thelma Ropner?’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ I told him, ‘that we don’t need a chart to tell us that the omens are against us. The star sign of the Constants, however, is definitely in the ascendant.’ As we drove off towards Thelma’s pad, another sporty car turned from under a sparse clump of trees. The driver seemed a very young man and I made sure he was following us.

  Swansdown Avenue produced no surprises. The tip in which young Tommy had been discovered lived up to its sordid reputation, and the front garden of number seventeen next door was not much tidier. The grass was uncut, the paths weedy, and there was a pram blocking the front door. The garage doors were open and I imagined that the head of communication studies had taken the car off to the University of South-West London. There was the thin, insistent cry of a baby and I saw an upstairs window from which Mrs Edmunds would have had a clear view of the front gate of number nineteen, which was opposite a street lamp. I imagined the academic’s house, and the perpetual smell of milk, vegetable soup and soaking nappies. I decided that my legal team and I couldn’t go on much longer without a drink.

  We found the Old Pickwick at a crossroads about half a mile from Swansdown Avenue and Dickens’s fat hero would have thought it considerably less warm and welcoming than the Fleet Prison. Bernard and I sat in a cavernous bar where banks of electronic games squeaked and flashed and muttered angrily around us. The barmaid, a ferocious girl with a spiky hairdo, was heavily engaged on the telephone and avoided a glance in our direction. At long last she finished her call, switched on her favourite tape, and allowed me to yell a request for two pints of Guinness to a musical accompaniment which sounded like the outbreak of World War III. I had barely put my lips to the froth when I heard a penetrating word in my ear.

  ‘Sherlock Rumpole? Have you brought the magnifying glass and the deerstalker?’

  I turned to find young Argent of the Trumpet breathing down my neck. ‘I’m here,’ I told him rather grandly, ‘to consult with my instructing solicitor. Our conversation is, as I’m sure you’ll understand, entirely privileged.’

  ‘Kill the karaoke, sweetheart.’ The reporter’s voice rose high above the music, and to my amazement Miss Spiky smiled sweetly at him and plunged us into silence. ‘A word in your ear if I might, a very private word.’ Argent ignored Bernard and ordered himself a brandy and soda.

  ‘I have no secrets from my instructing solicitor.’

  ‘Oh, but the lawyer we’re going to talk about probably has. And this hasn’t got anything to do with little Tommy Constant. Not for the moment, anyway.’ Bernard, who could take a hint almost before it was dropped, filtered off to telephone his office and the man from the Trumpet opened a slim leather briefcase and laid a glossy photograph on the bar. I didn’t look at it.

  ‘Are you offering me money?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ve already done that. We’d pay you awfully well for the How I’m Defending Baby-snatcher story. Might even run to a new hat, Mr Rumpole. No, what we’re offering now is for information.’

  ‘What information?’

  ‘Take a look.’

  I glanced down. What I saw was the prize idiot and Queen’s Counsel, Claude Erskine-Brown, locked in the sturdy embrace of Ms Katerina Regen, and apparently administering mouth- to-mouth resuscitation to her on the front step of the Galaxy Hotel.

  ‘Top lawyer and judge’s husband in afternoon bonk with German nightingale. Not a bad little story for us.’

  ‘They are simply friends,’ I hastened to assure him. ‘I know he admires her voice.’

  ‘Admires her silver tongue so much that they went up to Room 307 together and didn’t emerge from the Galaxy until five-thirty in the afternoon.’

  ‘He probably had nothing on in Court. It often happens.’

  ‘He might try to have something on in Court if we tell him we’re publishing this. You wouldn’t want us to do that, would you?’

  I couldn’t believe that after so many disastrously fumbled and frustrated attempts, Claude had actually succeeded in consummating an extramarital romance. ‘I don’t see why I should care,’ I told Argent. ‘You’re not suggesting I was bonking anyone, I sincerely hope?’

  ‘The honour of your Chambers is at stake, sir. Its reputation for high morals and respectability. And think of the effect on her Ladyship, the learned Judge. Just about blow her wig off, wouldn’t you say?’

  He was right, of course. Phillida Erskine-Brown would be deeply distressed at seeing her husband splashed across the Trumpet as a post-prandial bonker. I will never lose a long and lingering affection for the Portia of our Chambers, now a High Court Judge, and I wanted to spare her pain.

  ‘I can’t see that this’ – I pushed the photograph back towards Argent – ‘is of the slightest interest to your readers.’

  ‘You don’t know our readers, sir. They love reading about the great and good bonking. Saves them all the trouble of doing it for themselves.’

  ‘But you won’t publish it?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘On whether you’re going to give us another story: How I Defended Thelma.’

  There was a long silence. Miss Spiky was baring her lips to a mirror, seriously examining her teeth. I said, ‘When would you want it?’

  ‘Run the first instalment the day before the trial. No desperate hurry.’

  ‘Can I have that picture?’ I asked him. ‘Of course, you’ve got the negative.’

  ‘Of course.’ He pushed Claude and the diva towards me. I stored them away in an inside pocket before Bernard came back.

  ‘One thing you might do for us,’ Argent said, ‘if we keep your learned friend off the front page . ..’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Couldn’t you just give me a little taster? Just a hint, you understand, of your approach to the defence of the wicked witch?’

  ‘Perhaps I’d say that if I were a wicked witch I think I’d be careful not to dress as one. But you can’t print that yet.’

  ‘Understood! We’ll save it for your first instalment. Anything else?’

  ‘Just that I wonder where Thelma Ropner is meant to have kept Tommy locked up, fed, cleaned and watered for a week.’

  ‘Have you any ideas?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Let me know when you have. We’ll be in constant touch.’ Argent drained his brandy and left, leaving me, in spite of all the Trumpet’s promises to make my fortune, to pay for it.

  ‘My name coupled with that of Katerina Regen?’ Claude Erskine-Brown said, and I detected an unmistakable note of pride in his voice.

  ‘Not only are your names coupled,’ I
assured him, ‘everything about you is said to have been coupled also.’

  The chump picked up the photograph and examined it closely. ‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’ he purred at it. ‘And don’t you think I’m looking rather young?’

  ‘Positively childlike,’ I told him. ‘I’m sure Phillida will tell you what a spring chicken you look when she sees the front page of the Trumpet.’

  ‘That would not be a good thing.’ Claude put the photograph back on my desk and I saw that his hand was now trembling. ‘Please put it away, Rumpole. In a sealed envelope, in case the clerk sees it. They won’t really publish it, will they? Not in a tabloid?’

  ‘If I let them.’

  ‘You have some influence over the Trumpet, Rumpole?’ Claude’s voice was full of hope.

  ‘Perhaps a little.’

  ‘You would act for me in this matter?’

  ‘You obviously need help.’

  ‘On the whole,’ he said, after having given the matter deep thought, ‘I think it’s better that the very beautiful thing Katerina and I have for each other should remain a secret. It would be better for Chambers.’

  ‘And considerably better for you.’

  ‘I’m not in the least ashamed of loving Katerina.’

  ‘But Mrs Justice Phillida Erskine-Brown would condemn you to a long stretch of withering contempt if she got to hear about it.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. Perhaps you’ll let me look at this from time to time, though? Just to remember.’

  ‘To remember what?’

  ‘The day I had lunch with Katerina.’

  ‘At the Trumpet they don’t think that’s all that you had.’

  ‘Don’t they?’ Claude was smiling complacently. He seemed, poor chump, to be deeply flattered. ‘It was a wonderful experience.’

  ‘How wonderful exactly?’

  ‘Well, we went into the restaurant.’

  ‘You would do if you were having lunch.’