Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

by John Mortimer

  ‘I won’t have difficulties, Rumpole.’ Here Wystan let a note of sadness in. ‘I will have impossibilities! Two war heroes murdered, men who saved our nation. A couple of “the few” who went on fearless bombing raids.’

  I swallowed a sweet and sticky gulp of port and became bold enough to say, ‘Weren’t “the few” fighter pilots?’

  ‘Men shot down over occupied France who managed to get back to England at the end of the war.’ Wystan ignored my interruption. ‘Victims of an apparently completely senseless shooting by the boy Simon Jerold.’

  ‘Would you rather he’d shot a couple of conscientious objectors?’ was what I felt I ought to have said. Once again, for reasons of youth, I didn’t.

  ‘My daughter, Hilda, as you may have noticed,’ C. H. Wystan seemed to have felt there was no more to be said on the subject of murder and our attention should be turned to more important matters, ‘takes a lively interest in all that is going on in chambers. She was appointed a school monitor at an unusually early age.’

  I did my best to look suitably impressed.

  Wystan continued, ‘Now, as you probably know, I’ve been offered the leading brief in R. v. Jerold by a perfectly decent firm of solicitors in Penge.’

  ‘Albert told me that.’ I tried as hard as I could to keep the note of hopeless envy out of my voice.

  ‘I am telling you, Rumpole. It might be better if you waited for me to give you the news rather than pick up tittle-tattle from the clerk’s room. The point is that in this case the solicitors have taken the rather unusual step of asking me to nominate a junior, from our chambers of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ I repeated. I felt another twinge of envy at the luck of some other, older member of number 4 Equity Court.

  ‘It was Hilda who put your name forward. She said, “Why not give young Rumpole a chance to prove himself, Daddy?” She always calls me Daddy, you know.’ He sounded more pleased than apologetic.

  ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘I know.’ The pang of envy had become a rush of adrenalin. This drained away like used bathwater as C. H. Wystan made my terms of employment clear. ‘You’ll be expected to take a full note of the evidence and look up any points of law that may arise. But you’re not to worry, Rumpole. I shan’t expect you to deal with witnesses, or indeed open your mouth at any point in the trial.’

  5

  For the first time in my legal career my brief contained photographs of a dead man. ‘Jerry’ Jerold had been found by the police photographer, sitting in a chair in the bungalow’s living room. Behind him was the door which opened on to a narrow hallway. You could see the corner of the mantelpiece and part of Jerry’s collection of war memorabilia. The man in the chair looked still at his ease: his Brylcreemed hair was neatly brushed back, his glazed eyes seemed to express nothing but mild surprise. He wore a blazer with flannel trousers and an RAF tie. Only the dark stain on his shirt, spreading across his chest, indicated the cause of death.

  ‘Making a note for your learned leader in that Jerold case, are you?’ Uncle Tom placed a golf ball carefully on the carpet and appeared to threaten it with his golf club.

  ‘Making a note for myself, as a matter of fact,’ was what I longed to tell him, but didn’t yet have the courage.

  In the last photograph Jerry was naked on a mortuary slab, his hair still neatly in place as though glued. I turned to the prosecution witness statements, the account of how he arrived, after missing death in the skies during the war, at this final humiliating end. The story was told in the greatest detail by Pilot Officer Peter Benson, who had been at the reunion party and gone back with Jerry to his bungalow at Penge.

  They had met, a dozen of them in all, including Peter and ‘Tail-End’ Charlie, in the bar of the Cafe Royal. By the time they got to the Palladium they were not entirely sober and ‘Tail-End’ insisted on joining Judy Garland in her songs. After the theatre they had a few more drinks at a bar near Victoria Station and they all arrived at Jerry’s bungalow just before midnight.

  Young Simon Jerold was in bed and asleep when they got there, but his father woke him up and set him to making tea and pouring more drinks for the old companions of the war in the air. Jerry, Peter Benson insisted, was ‘getting at’ his son, telling him to drink a couple of large whiskies like a man and letting the assembled company know that his son not only had no idea what a war was like but had funked his national service.

  ‘The boy’s more scared of his sergeant on the parade ground than ever we were of German fighters,’ Jerry apparently said. It was then, it seemed, that the boy had lost his temper. Benson remembered him ‘shouting his mouth off’ and telling his father, ‘National service is ridiculous, there isn’t going to be another war anyway.’ Simon also said, ‘What’s the point of wasting your youth learning how to kill people?’ and announced he wasn’t going back to his army station anyway.

  At this point the war survivors were indignant, there was a cry of ‘go for his trousers’, which seemed to indicate that some sort of debagging or other humiliation was intended, and Simon picked up the German pistol from the mantelpiece and pointed it at his father, saying, to the best of Benson’s recollection, ‘You’re so keen on teaching people to kill people. I promise you I’ll kill the first of you that touches me. So you’d better watch out.’

  This threat, uttered by a hysterical boy holding a pistol, seemed to have produced an unusual silence from his tormentors, during which it was Benson who went up to Simon and took the gun out of his hand. The boy released it and immediately went back into his bedroom, banging the door.

  After this the party continued for some time before the revellers went to their homes. It wasn’t until next morning that Simon rang the police to tell them that he had woken up to find his father dead in a chair. Joan Plumpton, a cleaning lady who worked at both bungalows, opened ‘Tail-End’ Charlie’s door at nine-thirty to find him lying in the small hallway also shot through the heart. A German bullet was found in the bodies of the two wartime companions and the Luger pistol, having been recently fired, was found in a dustbin outside Jerry’s bungalow. That, in brief, was the story of the Penge Bungalow Murders.

  ‘I shouldn’t waste too much of your time over that bundle of papers, my boy.’ Uncle Tom had just failed to chip his golf ball into the wastepaper basket. ‘From what I’ve read about it you’ve got no defence.’

  ‘I think we have,’ I was now bold enough to answer. ‘It’s called the presumption of innocence.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to get you very far, to be honest.’

  I had a gloomy feeling that he was probably right. All the same, I went across to the library and tried to find some comfort in the forensic science book (this was in the days before my old friend Professor Ackerman had composed his great work), and I read every word concerning gunshot wounds, the effect of bleeding and the time of death. I was still reading when the daylight dimmed and the man with the flaming rod was round to light the lamps, and still I hadn’t found any satisfactory answer to our problem.

  I had been in prisons before, of course, visiting minor villains involved in more or less trivial offences. I hadn’t met anyone accused of murder in the Scrubs or seen the pride mixed with a kind of awe with which wardens produce a star prisoner, in this case the boy accused of patricide and double murder who was featured in the pages of the News of the World. When he was brought into the interview room he seemed remote, like a spirit on its way to becoming disembodied. He was wearing prison clothes at least a couple of sizes too large for his slim body. He had his father’s good looks but softened, almost feminine, and no brilliantine controlled his bright, straying hair. He hardly raised his eyes to us but sat staring at his hands, which he held crossed in his lap, as though wondering if they could have been guilty of two violent crimes.

  The room was bleak, furnished with a plain wooden table at which Simon Jerold’s legal team all sat. C. H. Wystan was at the head of the table, wearing what was, even for him, a particularly som
bre look. With the tips of his fingers touching and his hands steepled, he was about to forget he was there as an advocate and became a judge. I, the young Rumpole, was beside him, having supplied him with the detailed notes I wasn’t sure he had read.

  Further down the table, as it might be under the salt, was our instructing solicitor, Barnsley Gough, who carried on his business at Penge and congratulated himself on being sharp. Indeed most of what he said was calculated to show how sharp he was. He had sharp features, a particularly sharp nose and a small bristling moustache that looked as though it might draw blood at a touch. He came with a clerk, almost a boy, who looked as young as, if not younger than, our client, whom he called Bernard, with a distinct emphasis on the second syllable, so I didn’t know if it was a first or second name. I did notice, however, that it was Bernard who was able to find any documents in a bundle with which Barnsley Gough seemed surprisingly unfamiliar.

  Our client sat apart from us, isolated on a chair in the middle of the room, under a light which was there to help out the grey end of a rainy late afternoon.

  ‘I think we’re all agreed, Jerold,’ Wystan summed up the situation, ‘that it’s going to be extremely difficult to provide a successful defence in your particular case.’

  It was then that Simon looked up, and I saw the terror in his eyes that I could still remember so many decades later in a chambers meeting.

  ‘But I didn’t do it.’ His voice was so weak it was almost a whisper. ‘I never shot Dad or Charlie.’

  ‘You were heard to threaten your father with the gun. A number of witnesses saw that, you know.’ Wystan said this slowly, again as though explaining a complicated situation to an errant child.

  ‘But I never shot Dad. I never did it.’

  ‘You’ve told us that.’ Barnsley Gough took over the role of a patient teacher. ‘And of course we have to accept what you say. But it’s the evidence! That’s what I’ve had to explain to you. The evidence is dead against you. What Mr Wystan is trying to tell you - and, as you know, Mr Wystan has enormous experience of these matters -’ here my leader gave a brief but learned nod - ‘Mr Wystan takes the view that the evidence is so black against us that we must . . . well, we must . . .’ Here our instructing solicitor, for all his sharpness, balked at mentioning the terrible conclusion.

  ‘You must be prepared,’ Wystan took over the proceedings, ‘for the worst. It’s my duty to give you that warning.’

  Simon seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Aren’t you here to defend me?’

  ‘Of course I am.’ Wystan looked pained. ‘And rest assured, I shall take every point in your favour, in the fine tradition of the bar. It’s my duty to warn you, that’s all. Now, I suppose I can tell the jury you loved your father?’

  ‘Once I loved him. Sometimes I hardly liked him at all.’ I could see that we had a client with a possibly fatal tendency to tell the truth.

  ‘Then I shan’t ask that question.’ Wystan was making a note, but when Simon went on he stopped writing.

  ‘He was always shouting at Mum when she was alive. She cried a lot. He made her cry.’

  ‘You’re not going to be asked that, so don’t go into details,’ Barnsley Gough tried to stop him sharply, but Simon went on, ‘It seemed like he couldn’t forgive me for not being old enough to get killed in the war.’

  ‘We had considered,’ Wystan was naturally anxious to change the subject, ‘trying to prove insanity.’

  ‘Dad was insane.’ For once Simon seemed to agree with his defender. ‘Filling the bungalow with all those relics of death.’

  ‘Mr Wystan was referring to your state of mind, Jerold,’ Gough explained patiently. ‘We considered guilty but insane, but the doctors wouldn’t play ball. Unfortunately they gave you high marks for intelligence.’

  ‘So we are thrown back on the facts.’ Wystan was resigned.

  Our client looked out of the window to see, in the early shadows, dogs patrolling the prison yard, and then at the door, where the back view of a warder filled the glass panel. I guessed he would have done anything he could to escape having to repeat the story he had told so often without finding anyone to believe him.

  As he did so, I did my best to picture the scene. The resentful boy hounded out of bed in his pyjamas and dressing gown to wait on the half-drunken group of his father’s friends. As he did so, he admitted, he poured himself a couple of furtive but large whiskies, which fuelled his anger when his father attacked him, and he picked up the Luger. I tried to imagine the flushed, suddenly alarmed faces of the wartime heroes as the boy’s hand shook and he turned towards his father.

  ‘Did you say, “I promise you I’ll kill the first of you that touches me”?’ Wystan was going through Simon’s statement to the police, producing nothing new or surprising.

  ‘They were going to do something . . . pull my trousers off or something. Charlie was the worst.’

  ‘Were they all threatening you?’

  ‘Practically all. I think one of them said, “Leave the boy alone.”’

  ‘Really? Which one was that?’ I heard myself asking.

  ‘His name was Harry. Harry Daniels.’

  I made a note on my brief.

  ‘Then what happened?’ Wystan didn’t seem best pleased with my interruption.

  ‘I told Dad that if he was so keen on teaching people to kill people, he’d better watch out.’

  ‘You admit that?’ Wystan sadly underlined part of the statement.

  ‘The client admits all that.’ Gough encouraged the underlining. ‘And that he had the gun pointed at his father.’

  ‘Until you were relieved of it by whom?’ I asked.

  ‘Ex-Pilot Officer Benson.’

  I was only trying to be helpful but Wystan sighed even more heavily. ‘Thank you, Rumpole. I can read the prosecution statements. Yes, please go on, Jerold.’

  So we heard how Simon went back to bed after he’d been disarmed and slept heavily. Something woke him in the night, but he’d gone to sleep to the sound of the party and, still dazed by whisky, he thought it was the party continuing. He woke up at about six with a dry mouth and got up for a drink of water. On his way to the kitchen he saw his father dead in the chair, the bloodstain on his shirt spread across his chest.

  ‘What did you do then?’ Wystan asked.

  ‘I got dressed and left the bungalow.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘About six-thirty. It was just starting to get light.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call for help for your father? Why didn’t you call the police?’

  ‘I thought I’d get the blame because of what happened with the gun. They’d think I’d done it.’

  ‘You were right there anyway, my lad!’ Barnsley Gough couldn’t resist it.

  ‘Yes, I was. I walked round for a bit and then I thought they’d pick me up in the end so I’d better tell them what had happened. That was when I rang the police.’

  ‘Did you go to Charlie Weston’s bungalow during the night?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Did you shoot the man Weston in his bungalow?’

  ‘Never. I promise you I never shot either of them.’

  There was a long silence. Then my leader hammered another nail in Simon’s coffin. ‘You do realize that your failure to call for an ambulance or the police when you saw your father dead adds considerably to our difficulties. You would agree with that, Mr Gough, I’m sure?’

  ‘I certainly would.’ Barnsley Gough was quick to answer. ‘It’s the stumbling block, as you might say. You must realize that, my lad.’

  ‘You mean, you can’t help me?’ Simon had been surprisingly calm when he was telling his story. Now the terror had returned and he looked at his leading counsel, who was saying nothing. In this silence, I heard my voice, it seemed from far away, asking a question.

  ‘When you found your father dead, where was the German gun?’

  ‘Nowhere. I mean, I didn’t see it anywhere.’ Simon was looking at me
now, and answered my question with a kind of hope.

  ‘It wasn’t with the rest of the war museum on the mantelpiece?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I didn’t really look.’

  ‘And two bullets had been fired, Mr Rumpole.’ Our solicitor spoke as though explaining the basic facts of the case to someone who could never be as sharp as himself. ‘The expert evidence tells us that.’

  ‘Yes, I know it does. What I want to ask you,’ I tried to speak to Simon Jerold as though we were alone in the room, ‘is, did you wipe your fingerprints off the gun and the magazine?’

  ‘I never did that.’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Rumpole?’ Again my leader didn’t sound altogether pleased by my interruption. ‘Who says they were wiped off?’

  ‘Forensic science report,’ I said, and Bernard, the young office boy, supplied the reference. ‘Page 56 of the depositions. ’

  Wystan looked it up reluctantly and then rebuked me. ‘The gun and magazine had evidently been wiped. There were no fingerprints of any sort.’

  ‘Exactly!’ I told him.

  ‘In any event, everyone had seen our client holding the gun. What would have been the point of his wiping off his own fingerprints?’

  ‘That was the question I felt sure you’d want to ask,’ I told Wystan, hoping I sounded respectful.

  ‘Well, Jerold. Did you wipe the handle of the gun to remove fingerprints?’

  ‘No, sir. Never.’

  ‘That’s your answer, Rumpole. I know you were trying to help.’ Then Wystan turned to the client with what I supposed he thought were consoling words. ‘Mr Rumpole, Jerold, is, like yourself, a young man. But you’re not to worry. Mr Rumpole will be a great help to me by taking a full note of the evidence. But all the questions will be asked by me and I will, of course, make the final speech to the jury on your behalf. Now, does that set your mind at rest?’

  Simon Jerold didn’t look as though his mind was at rest. He gazed at me as though I had asked a new question which might, just possibly, supply some sort of chink of light in the darkness which surrounded him. But Wystan hadn’t entirely finished with young Simon, and he seemed, at last, ready to sound a more positive note.