Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

by John Mortimer

  He had managed to catch the attention of our prosecutor, otherwise engaged in reading his brief in another case. So the experienced, languid Caraway stood up, murmured, ‘Your Honour puts it so much better than I could,’ and sank back into his seat.

  ‘So there you are, Mr Rumpole! May I say that I entirely agree with Mr Caraway’s cogent argument. Let’s have no mention of this officer’s conversation with any Molloy.’

  ‘Very well, Your Honour. Then let me ask you this, Detective Inspector. Did my client, Cyril Timson, say to you that he bet the Molloys accused him of the Sound Universe job because he’d fingered Jimmy Molloy for the Meadowsweet break-in? And before there is any objection to that, may I make it clear that I will be calling my client, and so what he said certainly isn’t hearsay.’

  ‘Are you objecting, Mr Caraway?’ ‘Custodial Cookson’ looked hopefully at the prosecution.

  ‘Not really, Your Honour. The jury will remember that this witness has already told them that Cyril Timson admitted his guilt, and this case first came on as a mere plea in mitigation.’ After this comparatively long speech, Vincent Caraway sank back in his seat, exhausted. But His Honour was delighted.

  ‘Yes, of course he did. You will remember that, won’t you, members of the jury? Mr Timson, in the dock over there, originally admitted this charge.’

  And, in the end, they remembered it.

  It’s painful to contemplate your disasters, and as I sat alone that evening I was tempted to ask my landlady if there was any sort of opening for me in the rubber johnnie shop and give up the bar entirely.

  It was no use telling myself I’d done my best, that I’d got DI White to agree that the Molloys hated the Timsons, that I had got most of Cyril’s story into evidence in the face of a hail of small-arms fire from the bench, that I’d called Uncle Cyril to explain that he’d only felt safe in prison, which was why he had pleaded guilty to an offence he didn’t commit. I had carefully prepared my final speech to the jury.

  ‘This case has only taken us a few days,’ I told them. ‘Soon you will be back to your normal lives and you’ll have forgotten all about the radio and television shop in Coldharbour Lane and the Needle Arms and the Molloys, who we say were prepared to arrange a break-in at their own premises in order to punish old Cyril Timson, who might have informed on them. All these things are only part of your lives, and a small part at that. But for Cyril Timson, the frightened, elderly man I represent, this is one of the most important moments of his life. Can you send him to prison on this evidence, in this strange and unusual case? Members of the jury, I leave the future life of Uncle Cyril Timson in your hands, for you and not His Honour are the sole judges of the facts in this case, and I am confident that your verdict will be “Not guilty”.’

  This peroration was one I have since used, with a few essential adjustments, in hundreds of cases. I have always found it effective, but in R. v. Timson it failed to work the oracle.

  Uncle Tom told me that, in the old days at London Sessions, the jury would merely be asked to turn to each other and, after a few whispered words, agree on a verdict. ‘Custodial Cookson’ at least allowed them to retire; but after half an hour they were back to give Cyril what he had always said he wanted, two years safe inside.

  ‘I’m very sorry.’ I felt I could hardly bring myself to face Harry Timson. I have to say I was surprised by his reaction to the result.

  ‘You did great, Mr Rumpole! We never had a brief who put a judge in his place the way you did. And that speech! It brought my wife, Brenda, near to tears. Let’s just hope this case is the first of many you do for the Timson family.’

  ‘But you don’t seem to understand. I lost!’

  ‘That’s immaterial, that is. Old Uncle Cyril, he’s happy with the result anyway. Lost you may have done, but it’s the way you lost impressed us!’.

  I didn’t find these words of Harry Timson, kindly meant I’m sure, any particular comfort. Back in my lonely bedsit, I struck my boiled eggs hard and viciously with the spoon. Before falling asleep, I flicked though the Oxford Book of English Verse (the old Arthur Quiller-Couch edition) that has been my constant companion since my schooldays, and found one of my favourite bits of Wordsworth, the Old Sheep of the Lake District.

  For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

  It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be

  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

  I closed my eyes. All was silent. Of old Triton blowing his wreathèd horn there was not a squeak.

  The next day in chambers, I was still thinking about the two cases: the one I had lost and the other my leader, C. H. Wystan, was clearly prepared to lose. And then I had a telephone call from Bonny Bernard.

  ‘Just got an answer from the RAF, Mr Rumpole. You wanted to know about the third chap in the bomber. The navigator.’

  ‘Well, Jerry Jerold and “Tail-End” Charlie were so close, I just thought the third man in their plane might be able to tell us a bit more about them.’

  ‘His name was David Galloway.’

  ‘It might just be worthwhile getting a statement off him.’

  ‘Can’t be done, I’m afraid, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Why ever not? The prosecution couldn’t object.’

  ‘It’s not that, they’ve got it in the records. Galloway went missing, believed dead.’

  So that doorway of enquiry was closed. But now I had every confidence in Bonny Bernard’s powers of research. ‘Listen carefully,’ I said, as though I had masterminded a hundred murder trials. ‘I want you to find out all you can about the backgrounds and war records of all the officers who were at the party that night after the theatre. Can you do that?’

  ‘I’ll do it for you, Mr Rumpole,’ Bonny Bernard was quick enough to answer. ‘I’ll certainly do it. But will you ever be able to use all that information?’

  ‘Who knows?’ I did my best to encourage his labours. ‘In a trial like this, who knows what’s going to happen?’

  I said this, of course, because I still had no clear idea of what I was looking for.

  11

  ‘What are you doing, Rumpole?’

  ‘Remembering.’

  ‘Well try and remember with your leg elevated. You know what Dr McClintock said.’

  ‘Dr McClintock never tried to write his memoirs with one leg cocked up on a joint stool.’ I thought this a fair point to put to She Who Must Be Obeyed, although I accommodated her by raising my leg.

  ‘What are these memoirs you’re talking about, Rumpole?’

  ‘The most important time of my life, when I did the Penge Bungalow Murders.’

  ‘And when we met?’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘Or had you forgotten?’

  ‘Of course not, Hilda,’ I hastened to reassure her. ‘You changed my life, you and the Penge Bungalow case.’

  ‘It changed mine too, but whether it was for the better is a matter of opinion.’

  ‘Is it, Hilda?’

  ‘At any rate I had high hopes of you at that time. Extremely high hopes. So stick that in your memoirs, Rumpole.’

  ‘Well, of course you did,’ I didn’t want to boast, ‘when I got the Penge Bungalow job.’

  ‘Yes, but what about me? What did I get exactly?’ She looked at me, I thought, with a kind of amused pity. ‘A husband who can’t even keep his leg elevated.’

  She left me then. I gently lowered my leg from the joint stool and put it on the ground in the regular writing position and did my best to describe the alarming weeks which led up to the trial of Simon Jerold on charges of double murder. As a tribute to the importance of the trial, and the great public interest in it, the Chief Justice, Lord Jessup, had consented to go slumming down the Old Bailey and try the case.

>   ‘It doesn’t matter a scrap what you do or have to say,’ Teddy Singleton of our chambers told me. ‘Theobald Jessup will see your boy hangs as sure as next week will have a Thursday. There’s a rumour he orders crumpets for tea at his club after he’s passed a death sentence.’

  I heard even more sinister rumours in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, suggesting that death sentences and sex produced the same results with the Lord Chief Justice. I also knew that Theo Jessup made jokes which I thought were in horribly bad taste. When a barrister wanted a short adjournment in a long murder trial to settle a will case, he said the prisoner should be removed from court as he probably didn’t want to hear about ‘due execution’. In an after-dinner speech, apparently intending to amuse the audience, he said that he had no trouble ending telephone calls because he was quite used to ‘hanging up’. Whatever fate was in store for Simon, I couldn’t bear the thought of him becoming a joke in an after-dinner speech.

  As part of my preparation for the case I decided to take a preliminary look at Theobald Jessup. I dropped in to the Court of Criminal Appeal at which he was presiding. What I saw, in the central position, between the two ‘bookends’ of lesser judges, was a small, thick-set man with bright beady eyes, a nose that looked as though it might have been flattened in some long-distant football game or boxing bout, and skin the colour of old vellum. From time to time he dipped, as some judges still did in those days, into the scarlet depths of his gown and retrieved a small silver box on which he tapped. He then sniffed a pinch of snuff from the back of his hand. After he had absorbed whatever pleasure this practice brought him, he wiped his nose gently on an ornate silk handkerchief.

  They were deciding an appeal against a conviction for murder, but it was the way the Lord Chief Justice began his judgement that I found, strangely enough, encouraging. ‘It’s a time-honoured precept of our criminal law,’ he had a surprisingly high-pitched voice for a man so greatly feared, ‘that it’s far more intolerable and unjust for an innocent man to be convicted than for a guilty man, or indeed woman, to be let off.’ After which hopeful start, there was a lengthy pause while the Lord Chief Justice took snuff. ‘Even giving full weight to this cherished precept, I cannot find anything unsafe or unsound in the learned judge’s summing up or the jury’s verdict in this case.’ After he had given his reasons, which appeared well argued, the two ‘bookends’ announced that they thoroughly agreed with ‘every word that had fallen from the learned Chief Justice’. The subject of this decision, a small colourless man wearing spectacles, was removed from the dock and taken down the steps to meet his death.

  ‘You never ask me out nowadays, Rumpole.’ Daisy Sampson positively purred at me and then uttered a small sigh of regret. We were sitting side by side on a bench in the hallway of the Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court, waiting to do a matrimonial dispute which, because of a long list of drunk drivers and soliciting prostitutes, gave no immediate prospect of being called on for trial. ‘And I’ve done all I can to give you my briefs in the most flagrant fashion.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The old joke was still around and I ignored it.

  ‘The Timsons think the sun shines out of your backside, Rumpole. They’re decent, hard-working minor criminals. And they should give you lots of jobs. So why don’t you ask me out?’

  ‘Because the last time I did that, you waltzed away from me. With Reggie Proudfoot!’

  ‘Reggie Proudfoot? Don’t talk to me about Reggie Proudfoot! He’s not a gent, that Reggie Proudfoot, definitely not a gent.’

  As this was the view I took of my fellow barrister, I looked more favourably on Daisy.

  ‘You know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He took me out to dinner. The Regent Palace Hotel. And at the end of quite a top-class meal with wine, he just fumbled. That’s all he did!’

  ‘Fumbled?’

  ‘Pretended he’d forgotten his wallet. So I had to pay every penny. And do you think he ever paid me back?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Your doubts, Rumpole, are fully justified. You’d never treat a girl like that, would you?’

  ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t.’ I looked at her inviting red lips drawn back from the teeth that had never suffered restraint, the small heart-shaped face and the eyes full of mischief. I made a quick calculation of the fees I’d already received from small jobs plus what I was likely to gain from losing the Timson case, and thought of how much might be saved by more evenings boiling eggs on the gas ring. I decided to make a desperate bid for Daisy. ‘Perhaps you’d like to have dinner with me?’ I put down my stake.

  ‘Perhaps I’d love it. The Regent Palace?’

  ‘I was thinking more in terms of the Hibernian Hostelry.’

  ‘Suits me.’ Now she looked thoughtful. ‘I’ve never seen where you live.’

  ‘Off Southampton Row. I’ve got a bedsit.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Not too bad. It’s got a gas ring and, well, of course, the bed’s in the sitting room.’

  ‘That sounds convenient.’ She continued to smile.

  ‘And my landlady,’ I was doing my best to keep her entertained, ‘owns a shop that sells trusses, wooden legs, sex manuals and rubber johnnies.’

  ‘That sounds very convenient!’ Daisy said, and by now she was laughing.

  On which happy note, we settled on a date for dinner.

  After an hour of a hearing, our matrimonial was adjourned for another month, during which the couple could live in silent loathing, communicating with little notes left on the cooker or stuck to the parrot’s cage, such as ‘Get her down your office to cook your dinner. She seems to do everything else for you’ or ‘This bird is far better at conversation than you, you dumb person! I wish I’d married it!’

  I was recovering from this weary day in court in Uncle Tom’s room, going through, with considerable interest I have to say, the information that can be derived from the direction of bullet wounds. I was lifting a cup of instant coffee, run up for me in the clerk’s room, when the door was flung open and Hilda Wystan came bounding in and sank down in a chair used by clients, when we had clients to visit us. She was, of course, the Hilda that was, and not the one introduced by me at the beginning of this chapter. That is to say, she took no exception to my having my feet firmly on the ground and didn’t ask me to elevate either of my legs; instead she plumped herself down in our client’s chair, blew out her cheeks so that her face assumed the proportions of a rather flushed balloon and said, ‘Aren’t you excited, Rumpole?’

  Why should I be? Was she suggesting in the blowing out of her cheeks some sort of sensual intent. It was a question I was determined to duck.

  ‘The Jerold murder business has just been fixed for three weeks’ time. I called in at the clerk’s room and Albert told me.’

  ‘Well, he hasn’t told me yet.’

  ‘He likes to keep the good news to himself. I had quite a job squeezing it out of him.’

  ‘I’m afraid it won’t be particularly good news for Simon.’

  ‘Of course not. Good news for me, though. I’ll be there watching you.’

  ‘And your father.’

  ‘And watching Daddy, yes, of course. Although he’s not always been frightfully keen on my interest in the law.’

  ‘Has he not?’ I remembered, with a pang of guilt, that it was Hilda’s interest that had, it seemed, won me the junior brief in this famous murder trial.

  ‘I did think of becoming a barrister, but Daddy said that Equity Court was not quite ready for a woman.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Apart from his choice of me as his junior, I had so far found it difficult to defend the actions, or rather the inactive side, of Hilda’s father. Now I felt a rush of sympathy for his daughter. ‘Of course you should have been a barrister, if that’s what you wanted.’

  ‘Umm!’ She looked thoughtful. ‘Albert said there weren’t the toilet facilities.’

  ‘A trivial detail!’ I assured her. ‘Those
things might have been arranged.’

  ‘I thought about it, of course. But I decided it would be more sensible to get married.’

  ‘There are plenty of married women barristers.’

  ‘Oh, yes. But I thought marriage might be more satisfying than a life in the law. If I found someone who had a promising career, I could help them rise to the top.’ There she gave a modest smile. ‘The power behind the throne. You know the sort of thing?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure I do know.’

  ‘Well, if it were someone who might even become Head of Chambers, when Daddy goes of course . . .’

  ‘So who,’ for my own peace of mind I felt I needed immediate clarification, ‘are we talking about?’

  ‘Don’t worry your head about that now, Rumpole. You’ve got an important case starting. That’s your foot on the first rung of the ladder, isn’t it?’

  Daisy was only half an hour late at the Hibernian Hostelry and she arrived in a neat black dress with dark eyeshadow and a determined smile. ‘What a treat! I’ve been so looking forward to this.’ We ordered the food of that period - prawn cocktail, steak and chips, topped off with Black Forest gâteau, washed down by a pink wine called Mateus Rosé, best remembered because people of that time saved the strange, circular bottles to make into side-table lamps. Daisy seemed happy enough and I, remembering how she had welcomed my landlady’s convenient bedsit, was looking forward enormously to the after-dinner hour. I had prepared myself by visiting my landlady’s shop and, instead of asking, in the old music-hall tradition, for something for the weekend, I bought three rubber johnnies, hoping for their immediate assistance.

  But we were still spooning prawns out of glass bowls of pink sauce and Daisy was showing a remarkable interest in the Penge Bungalow trial. I told her that I’d been to see the judge in action.