Rumpole and the Angel of Death

by John Mortimer

  ‘And sat down.’

  ‘You amaze me.’

  ‘And talked about Schubert.’

  ‘Please, Erskine-Brown, spare me the embarrassing details.’

  ‘And then . . . Well, I touched her hand and I was about to tell her how much I really fancied her and I hadn’t felt so, well, uplifted by any other woman. And then we were interrupted, rather rudely I thought.’

  ‘By her husband?’

  ‘Of course not. She hasn’t got one. No. By the waiter who told us about that day’s specials.’

  ‘Talkative bloke, was he?’

  ‘Honestly, Rumpole, he went on for what seemed like hours, all about sea bass grilled with aubergines and served with a light pesto and tomato coulis – and that sort of thing.’

  ‘He broke the spell?’

  ‘Exactly. And when I got back in my stride and said I felt my whole life in love and music was simply a prelude to that golden moment, that bloody waiter came back.’

  ‘And interrupted?’

  ‘He said, “Who’s having the fish?” ’

  ‘Put you off your stroke again.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. But we got very close after that. She asked me up to her room.’

  ‘So you did . .

  ‘Well, not exactly. I mean, she asked me up to give me her new CD. Strauss’s last songs.’ There was a lengthy pause.

  ‘Is that the end of the story?’

  ‘Until the next time.’

  ‘Next time?’

  ‘She said we must have lunch again. I knew exactly what she meant. She said, “I’ll have longer for you next time.” I think she had another appointment that particular afternoon.’

  ‘The Trumpet thinks you strayed till five-thirty when you came out again and kissed.’

  ‘Does it think that?’ Erskine-Brown gave me another chance to study his self-satisfied smirk. ‘Then it understands exactly how close we are to each other.’ He made for the door and, on the way out, had another attack of anxiety. ‘I say, Rumpole. About that lovely photograph ... Of course, it would be a great deal better if Philly didn’t see it in the paper.’

  ‘I’m bound to agree with you.’

  ‘So will you act for me in this rather delicate matter, Rumpole?’

  ‘I suppose I’d better. I must say you seem quite incapable of acting for yourself. What time did you leave the Galaxy Hotel?’

  ‘About two-thirty, I think. I went out of the back entrance.’ As soon as the door had closed on him, I forgot Claude and his troubles. I had other things to think of. I thought of them for a long time and then I rang Bonny Bernard and asked him to send round copies of every piece the Trumpet had published about Sheena Constant and the Little Boy Lost. There was something in one of them, I felt sure, which was of great importance for me to remember. And then, to complete the story, I told him to get all they had written about Tina Santos.

  ‘Now, when I think about it again, I am sure that the voice I heard on the telephone the night we found Tommy, the voice that told us to go to nineteen Swansdown Avenue, was Thelma Ropner’s. I was at school for many years with Thelma and we used to be close friends. I am prepared to give this evidence on oath in Court.’ The Prosecution had served Sheena’s additional statement on us and, with considerable reluctance, I had told Bernard to get Thelma in for another conference.

  ‘Is that what Sheena says?’ Miss Ropner laughed, an eerie and not very comfortable sound. ‘Then Sheena is lying.’

  ‘Why would she lie?’

  ‘Because she doesn’t like me. She’s never liked me since I told her what a boring little company creep her precious Steve was.’

  Another of Miss Ropner’s insults had come home to roost, but there was no point in going on about it. Instead I said, ‘I just hope you’ve told me the truth. If you haven’t, it’s going to make life very difficult for me.’

  ‘Poor old you!’ She was still laughing. ‘Can’t you cope with difficult cases? Anyway, it’s true. I didn’t take Tommy.’

  ‘Did you tell us the truth about what you were doing during the week he went missing?’

  ‘I told you I was sleeping at the Edmundses and working during the day.’

  ‘Working at what exactly? Will you give Mr Bernard a list, with dates?’

  ‘Oh, you can’t expect me to remember dates.’

  ‘I think you’d better try. And I don’t suppose you’ll have any difficulty in telling us where you’re working now.’

  ‘Now?’ The question seemed to shock her.

  ‘Yes. Where?’ I lifted a pencil.

  ‘I told you!’ She was making an exaggerated effort to control her irritation. ‘The Stick-Up Theatre Company. We’ve got a tour of Welsh community centres at the planning stage.’

  ‘What do you do with a client who won’t stop lying to you?’ I asked Bonny Bernard when Miss Ropner had gone off with no goodbye, only a look of undying resentment. Bernard smiled sadly, as though the truth was rare and unhoped-for among his clientele. Then I told him to engage the services of a seasoned, not to say elderly, private eye to discover exactly what Thelma had been up to during the week of Tommy’s captivity. Ferdinand Isaac Gerald Newton (known to his many grateful customers as Fig Newton) was well known and respected by Bernard, who doubted if the legal aid authorities would pay him and dared we ask Thelma to dig into her handbag because we seriously doubted her word? ‘Try my friends on the Trumpet’ I told him. ‘If they can afford Dom Perignon, they can afford Fig. I think it’s the least they can do for us.’

  ‘I sent for you, Rumpole, as a senior member of Chambers, because I have had some most unhappy news.’

  ‘Then I’ll be going. I’ve got quite enough worries at the moment.’

  ‘Claude Erskine-Brown,’ Soapy Sam Ballard rabbited on, ‘has dishonoured his silk! He is likely to bring Equity Court into scandal and disrespect.’ Pacing the room in a disturbed fashion, he had now blocked my passage to the door.

  ‘He’s never pinched the nailbrush from the downstairs loo?’

  ‘These are serious matters, Rumpole. He has broken the Seventh Commandment. He has committed adultery – in the afternoon.’

  ‘Is that so much worse than adultery in the morning?’

  ‘He has been flagrantly unfaithful – to a High Court Judge.’

  ‘That’s not his fault.’

  ‘Of course it’s his fault.’

  ‘Not his fault that his wife’s a High Court Judge.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll say it’s not his fault he’s committed adultery! I suppose you’ll put forward some ridiculous defence.’

  ‘Claude’s no more capable of adultery than he is of winning a difficult case. His extramarital coitus is perpetually and incurably interruptus. I ask for – no, I demand – a verdict of not guilty.’

  ‘Rumpole! I have it from his own mouth.’

  ‘Then he’s an unreliable witness.’

  ‘He has told me that this scandalous liaison is about to be exposed in the national press.’

  ‘In the Trumpet?’

  ‘I think that’s what he said.’

  ‘Why do you suppose he told you that?’

  ‘I imagine because he sincerely regretted his sin and wanted to throw himself on my mercy.’

  ‘Nonsense! He was boasting.’

  ‘Boasting?’ Soapy Sam looked entirely confused.

  ‘Showing off. Bragging, wanting us all to think that he’s a gay young dog, when in truth he’s an entirely domesticated animal that’s almost never off the lead.’

  ‘Are you saying that people would boast of breaking the Seventh Commandment?’

  ‘They do it on practically every page of the Trumpet.’

  Ballard sat down then, as though his legs had become weak with amazement. He gasped for breath. ‘I have told Erskine-Brown that if this scandal becomes public knowledge, there will be no room for him in Chambers.’

  ‘I thought he’d thrown himself on your mercy.’

  ‘He did.’
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  ‘And your mercy wasn’t there?’

  ‘God may forgive Erskine-Brown. After repentance.’

  ‘But you won’t.’

  ‘I have Chambers to consider.’

  ‘I suggest you leave Chambers alone and get on with your practice, what there is of it.’ I rose and made for the door whilst the path to it was unimpeded. ‘Oh, and don’t worry your pretty little head, Sam. There isn’t going to be a scandal.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  ‘Because if Claude’s Don Giovanni, I’m Tarzan of the Apes. No need for you to envy the poor blighter, Bollard. He didn’t get around to bonking anybody.’

  And I left before he could argue.

  The Psychic Shop was open at three the next afternoon when I pushed open the door. What on earth did I think I was doing? When young Argent called me Sherlock Rumpole, had the title completely unhinged me? Was I trying to outdo the incomparable Fig Newton, or was this a mission of such delicacy that I didn’t feel I could leave it to him? I had nothing in Court and for the day I was no longer a barrister; in fact I had put on the old tweed jacket, grey flannel bags and comforting Hush Puppies to prove it. I was an anonymous old man after information. If I was rumbled, I had my cover-story pat. I had just dropped in for a clairvoyant reading because I was seriously interested in the future.

  A bell pinged faintly as I opened the door, but the shop was empty. I stood for a moment breathing in a smell which seemed to be a mixture of incense, Dettol and drains. There were some printed astrological charts pinned on the walls, otherwise the shop was dim and sparsely furnished. There was no sign of what I had noticed on the day when I had asked Bernard to park his car and stood looking in at the window. There was a bead curtain at the back of the shop. It rattled and a woman entered like a burst of sunlight. She had reddish hair, a bright yellow dress and the fixed, somewhat desperate smile of someone who is constantly in touch with those who have passed over and who has learnt to make the best of it. She was the woman I had seen in the Constants’ front garden, snipping tulips, the woman whose photograph was in the window of the Psychic Shop. She was Steve’s Aunt Brenda, who’d been in touch with the spirit world for news of the Little Boy Lost.

  ‘Welcome, stranger,’ she said. ‘Have you come for a reading?’

  ‘If you have time.’

  ‘Perhaps you have an anxiety about your future.’

  ‘Always. An extreme anxiety.’

  ‘And you want your birth chart analysed?’

  ‘That would be extremely helpful.’

  ‘You have an interest in clairvoyancy?’

  ‘A lifetime’s interest.’

  ‘Then, if you’ll follow me, I’ll see if I can fit you in.’

  She led me into a sudden blaze of colour. The inner room had huge vivid green leaves on its wallpaper, and bright red, blue and yellow astrological charts. The table was covered with pink formica on which a glass ball on a bright blue stand presumably provided an entrance to a Technicolor spirit world for those with sufficient imagination to switch on to its channel. Death, I thought, in this small and lurid world was an endless soap opera in primary colours. I said, ‘You are Miss Brenda Constant, aren’t you?’

  She was not at all surprised. ‘I suppose I’ve got to get used to the fact that I’ve become famous.’ She was middle-aged, but she giggled like a young girl. ‘I can’t complain. It’s brought me a lot of customers.’

  ‘Because of little Tommy?’

  ‘Because the spirit people were able to tell us who’d got the baby.’

  ‘And who had?’

  ‘Thelma Ropner, of course. She was always jealous of Sheena. Now then, do please sit down and tell me your name.’

  ‘Samuel Ballard.’ I couldn’t help it. It just occurred to me as I sat on a hard and shiny plastic chair and rested my elbows on the pink formica.

  ‘Samuel. That’s a very nice name.’ She unrolled some sort of chart of the heavens and sat opposite me, ready to voyage into the unknown. ‘There are plenty of Samuels in the spirit world.’

  I told her that didn’t surprise me in the least. I was looking past her at a narrow window which seemed to overlook a small, paved strip and a high wooden fence.

  ‘Birth sign?’ She was about to fill in a form.

  ‘Cancer, the crab.’ I thought that might be appropriate for Bollard.

  ‘Birthdate?’

  ‘The twenty-ninth of June 1940. It was a stormy night and there was a partial eclipse of the moon. Apparently a dead owl fell out of the sky and into my parents’ garden in Waltham Cross.’ From then on I was inventing and Auntie Brenda was taking copious notes. I didn’t have to go on too long before the shop door pinged again. She put down her scarlet Biro, sighed heavily and said, ‘Everyone wants a reading since the story came out in the Trumpet’ and exited through the bead curtain. I got up and crossed to the window. It was then I saw, on the strip of crazy paving, what I thought I had once seen in the shop, a child’s pushchair with something on the seat which, I was sure, could be described as a yellow flop-eared rabbit, much clutched and frequently caressed.

  I could hear Auntie Brenda’s grand and busy greeting to a prospective customer in the shop. There was a long cupboard built against one wall of the astrological consulting room. I slid back the door as quietly as possible and was surprised, as I often am, by the casual way in which many people preserve evidence. Hanging uncertainly on a wire coat-hanger, I saw a shiny, black plastic mackintosh and, on the shelf above it, a dark beret.

  I got the door shut as Auntie Brenda came back to peer into Samuel Ballard’s future.

  ‘One last question, Mrs Sheena Constant. Looking back on that telephone call in which you were told to go and look in nineteen Swansdown Avenue, can you now say who you think called you?’

  ‘Don’t let’s have what she thought, my Lord.’ I was up on my hind legs in no time. ‘Don’t let’s have pure speculation.’

  ‘The witness is fully entitled to say who she thinks telephoned her, Mr Rumpole. There is no need to delay this trial with unnecessary objections.’ His Honour Judge Pick bore, in my opinion, a singular resemblance to a parakeet. He had a high colour, a small and beaky nose, a bright and malignant eye, and his usual reaction to my contributions to the proceedings was a flurried and resentful squawk.

  ‘I’m quite sure who it was now.’ Sheena smiled from the witness-box. ‘It was someone I’d known from school.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Thelma Ropner.’

  ‘The defendant Ropner whom we now see in the dock?’ The bird on the Bench rubbed it in quite unnecessarily. My learned friend, Leonard Fanner (known to us down the Bailey as Lenny the Lion because of his extreme nervousness in Court and general lack of roaring power), appearing for the Prosecution, said, ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Constant,’ and sat down gratefully.

  I rose to cross-examine Mrs Constant. ‘You say you were at school with my client, Thelma Ropner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And were you also at school with a girl called Tina Santos?’

  ‘Tina? Yes, I knew her.’

  ‘And did she become the secretary of a local MP called David Bangor, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Enterprise?’

  ‘She worked for a politician. I think that’s what Tina did.’

  ‘You know what Tina did, don’t you? She had a well-publi- cized love affair with the Honourable Member.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’

  I ignored the squawk from the Bench and continued, ‘And then told the whole story to the Trumpet because he wouldn’t leave his wife and marry her.’

  Sheena frowned a little and said, ‘I think I did read something about it, yes.’

  ‘The whole nation read something about it.’ I picked up a cutting: ‘ “I shared a shower with Minister in Commons’ bathroom. Skinny-dipping during the debate on Post Office privatization.”’

  ‘Mr Fanner, are you not objecting to this cross-examination?’
The Judge turned to my learned friend for help.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure where it’s leading, my Lord.’ Lenny the Lion stood up, magnificent in his indecision.

  ‘Exactly where is it leading, Mr Rumpole? Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain.’ The Judge was pecking away at me, but I rose above it.

  ‘It’s leading, my Lord, to a vital issue in this case.’ I turned to give my full attention to the mother for whom I had felt such sympathy. ‘Do you know how much Tina Santos got paid for that story?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’

  ‘I think it was quite a lot. A ridiculous lot of money, it was.’

  ‘Exactly. For that parliamentary shower bath, Tina Santos earned thousands of pounds. Wasn’t that common knowledge among the old girls of Cripping Comprehensive?’

  ‘She told us she got a lot of money, yes.’

  ‘Easy money, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Much too easy, I’d say, for Tina.’

  ‘Mrs Constant, how much did the Trumpet pay you for the exclusive rights to the story of your Little Boy Lost?’

  Up to then the witness had been quiet, composed, a young woman reliving a painful event with commendable courage. For a moment, I saw another Sheena, hard and angry. ‘That’s no business of yours, that isn’t! I don’t have to tell him that, do I?’ She turned, for escape, to the Judge, who offered it to her eagerly.

  ‘Certainly not. The question was entirely irrelevant. Members of the Jury, you will ignore Mr Rumpole’s last question. I’m looking at the clock, Mr Fanner.’

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’ Lenny the Lion confirmed that that was exactly what the old bird was doing.

  ‘I shall adjourn now. Mr Rumpole, by tomorrow morning, perhaps you will have thought of some relevant questions to ask this witness.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, my Lord, I shall hope to demonstrate that the question I just asked was entirely relevant.’

  ‘I have ruled on that, Mr Rumpole. I trust that the Jury will put it completely out of their minds.’

  But I knew the Jury wouldn’t.

  I emerged from that bout in Court panting slightly, bruised a little, but undaunted, mopping the brow and removing the wig to give the top of my head an airing. The researches of the admirable Fig Newton had allowed me to serve an alibi notice on the Prosecution, and I asked Lenny the Lionhearted if the forces of law and order had been able to check the story it contained.