Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

by John Mortimer

  ‘Yes. I heard them discussing prison.’

  ‘We’ve heard from my learned friend in opening this case that Jerry Jerold was a prisoner of war.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know that he was?’

  ‘Yes, of course. He talked about it often.’

  ‘Often?’

  ‘Whenever we talked about the war.’

  ‘On the night of the murder was anything more said by Jerry Jerold about his wartime experiences?’

  ‘Only when Peter Benson proposed a toast to the memory of David Galloway.’

  ‘David Galloway being the navigator who died when the plane caught fire.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who proposed the toast?’

  ‘Peter Benson. In the Cafe Royal, before we went to the Palladium. It was rather peculiar.’

  ‘How peculiar?’

  ‘Peter Benson proposed a toast to David’s memory. Then he congratulated Jerry and Charlie Weston on their extraordinary luck in getting out of a burning plane without catching fire. He said it was a pity David didn’t have their luck.’

  ‘How did the party take that?’

  ‘I would say with embarrassment.’

  ‘And how did Jerold react?’

  ‘He asked us to raise a glass to David, “a good friend and a brave officer”. I think by that time Jerry had had a good deal to drink.’

  ‘And did you raise a glass to David Galloway?’

  ‘I do not touch alcohol.’ As though to illustrate this, the witness took a great gulp of water from the glass provided.

  ‘Mr Dempsy, if we could come to the night of the alleged murder -’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that!’ The judge’s voice was as silky as his handkerchief. ‘I have allowed you a good deal of latitude, Mr Rumpole. The jury may think that the evidence we have just heard has some connection with the quarrel about the war. On the other hand, they may not. They may feel that you have been wasting the court’s time.’

  ‘On the other hand, My Lord,’ I was by now calm enough to reply, ‘they may not. By the end of the case, they may have found it extremely helpful.’

  The Lord Chief Justice’s eyebrows shot up towards his wig. ‘This is not the time, Mr Rumpole, for you to comment on the evidence one way or the other.’

  ‘I’m sorry, My Lord. I thought as you were commenting -’

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’ The silk handkerchief had gone from the judge’s voice, which was now as soothing as a Brillopad. ‘One of the lessons you apparently still have to learn is to be careful what you say in the presence of the jury.’

  ‘Careful? If I ever became as careful as C. H. Wystan, you might as well fix the date of Simon’s execution now. I have absolutely no desire to become what is known as a “safe pair of hands”!’ I didn’t, of course, say any of this, but I thought it as I moved to safer ground, the party in the bungalow. ‘Mr Dempsy, when the party got back to the bungalow had all the others drunk a good deal?’

  ‘They drank in the interval at the Palladium. And we stopped at a bar before we got the train, yes.’

  ‘And when they got Simon out of bed, he poured out whisky.’

  ‘That is so, yes.’

  ‘But you saw all that was going on with a clear and sober eye?’

  This got a few smiles from the jury but the geologist, sipping water again, remained serious.

  ‘I can remember what was going on, yes.’

  ‘What was going on was a father blaming his son for being too young to fight in the war.’

  ‘You could put it like that.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting you joined in, but some of the others did, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was there a man called Harry Daniels there?’

  ‘Yes. I knew him in the war.’

  ‘Did he tell the others to leave the boy alone?’

  ‘I think he did.’

  ‘Have you seen Harry Daniels lately?’

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve lost touch since the murder.’

  ‘I understand. We’ve rather lost touch with him too.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’ The judge clearly showed his displeasure. ‘If you want to give evidence, you should go into the witness box. Whether you could get in touch with this man Daniels is quite irrelevant.’

  ‘If Your Lordship says so,’ I gave him the retort humble, ‘then of course I accept it. Mr Dempsy -’ I turned back to the witness to indicate that, as far as I was concerned, the matter was closed - ‘let me take you to the moment when there was talk about killing.’

  ‘“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.”’ The judge was reading from his notebook.

  ‘Exactly.’ I gave His Lordship a small bow and tried to keep any suspicion of irony out of my voice. ‘I’m grateful to Your Lordship for reminding the witness.’

  All I got there was a glare and the judge took out his irritation on the lid of his snuff box, to which he administered a severe tap.

  ‘You heard him say that, Mr Dempsy?’

  ‘Well, the boy -’

  ‘Simon Jerold?’

  ‘Yes. He picked up the gun and pointed it at his father.’

  ‘Mr Dempsy, we know that there was a separate magazine that held the bullets. Did you see young Simon fit the magazine on to the gun?’

  ‘No, I didn’t see that.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t?’

  ‘Yes.’ The witness thought it over again. ‘I’m sure he didn’t.’

  ‘So you would agree with Mr Wardle, who gave evidence last week, that Simon was threatening his father with an empty gun?’

  ‘I suppose he was, yes.’

  I waited patiently for His Lordship to make the note I expected of him. After he had done that without too much of a show of reluctance, I allowed myself to turn to the jury with a look of moderate triumph. Up to this moment I was enjoying the cross-examination, but I was about to move into a dangerous area and ask questions when I didn’t know the answers.

  ‘The gun was taken from Simon by Peter Benson.’

  ‘I saw that, yes.’

  ‘Did young Simon Jerold put up any sort of struggle for the gun? Did Mr Benson have any difficulty taking it away from him?’

  ‘Not so far as I could see, no.’

  ‘Not so far as I could see.’ The judge repeated the qualification while he made the note. Young white wig as I was, I wasn’t having that. ‘Were you looking at the couple as the gun was taken away?’ was what I asked the witness.

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘If there had been a struggle for the gun, would you have seen it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure that I would.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Mr Dempsy. Now, let me ask you this. After the gun had been removed from Simon, what happened to it?’

  Dempsy frowned. ‘I really couldn’t say.’

  ‘Was it put back on the mantelpiece, for instance?’

  ‘I didn’t see that, I’m sure.’

  ‘What about the magazine? Did that stay on the mantelpiece? ’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t remember that. We saw Simon bang back into his room.’

  ‘How long did the party go on after Simon left it?’

  ‘Everyone stayed on for about an hour.’

  ‘About an hour after the business with the gun?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘So doesn’t that mean that no one took that young man’s behaviour with the gun particularly seriously?’

  ‘I don’t think we did take it too seriously. At the time.’

  I paused then to make sure the answer sank into the minds of the jury. Then I asked, ‘Was it a happy party, after the gun incident?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Will you tell the jury what you mean exactly?’

  ‘Jerry Jerold was drinking quite a lot . . .’

  ‘Ever since Peter Benson had proposed a toast to the
navigator?’

  ‘Yes, after that. Jerry seemed on edge. Excited at times. At others, well, he could be quite rude. He got at me for not drinking and then became, well, morose. Perhaps he felt guilty about the way he’d treated his son.’

  ‘Perhaps?’

  ‘Or perhaps I’m just imagining things.’

  ‘No, Mr Dempsy, I don’t think you are. When did you leave?’

  ‘In fact I was almost the last to go.’

  ‘Tell us about that.’

  ‘I’d ordered a taxi because I knew I’d be late and it was held up or something. Only Peter Benson, Jerry and Charlie were left. The atmosphere seemed worse. I can’t explain why.’

  ‘Just tell us what happened, if you would.’

  ‘I’d been to the bathroom and I was washing my hands with the door open. The bungalow’s quite small. You can hear what’s going on in other rooms.’

  ‘Tell us what you heard.’

  ‘Well, I heard Peter Benson say something more about David Galloway.’

  ‘Tell us.’

  ‘Peter said, “He just wouldn’t play ball with you, would he?” Then there was a bit I didn’t hear, until I heard Peter say something about “surrender” and “execution”.’

  ‘Execution?’ There was a sudden complete silence in Court Number One at the word, all of us, no doubt, thinking of the young man alone in the dock.

  ‘That was what he said. Then someone called me, I think it was Charlie, to say my taxi had arrived.’

  ‘And you never saw Jerry Jerold or Charles Weston again?’

  ‘Never.’

  I suppressed a whoop of joy, I even tried not to smile. Whichever god looks after white-wigged barristers out of their depth in an important criminal trial had just handed me an unexpected slice of luck. Martyn Dempsy the geologist had turned up trumps. I gathered my gown about me and sat down, giving the jury a look which meant, ‘There you are. I told you so, and we’ll hear a great deal more about that before the case is over.’ Meanwhile, Winterbourne had rumbled to his feet and sounded as though he thought it extremely bad form for one of his witnesses to give unexpected evidence apparently so satisfactory to the defence.

  ‘Mr Dempsy,’ he began to re-examine in a pained growl, ‘you said nothing about what you heard from the . . .’

  ‘Bathroom?’ The witness helped him out.

  ‘Yes, from the bathroom, in your statement to the police.’

  ‘I wasn’t asked about that.’ Dempsy supplied the answer. ‘They were only interested in the time young Simon Jerold picked up the gun. That’s all they asked me about.’

  ‘You say you heard some talk about the navigator, Galloway, and then you picked up the words “surrender” and “execution”.’

  ‘Yes. It was Peter Benson I heard say something like that.’

  ‘Something like that? I shall be calling Peter Benson later in this trial and he may tell us about that conversation. But did it mean anything to you?’

  ‘Not at the time, no.’

  ‘I must confess it makes no sense to me either.’ The judge was tapping his snuff box in a dismissive sort of way. ‘Nor do I suppose that it makes sense to the jury. We can only hope that the time may come when Mr Rumpole will tell us what his defence to these serious charges is exactly.’ At this he snuffed up a generous pinch of brown powder and said, ‘Ten-thirty tomorrow morning, members of the jury,’ and rose to his feet.

  As I stood up and bowed, I told myself that the time when Mr Rumpole could disclose his defence had come considerably nearer.

  The next morning we started on the evidence of other guests at the party, but I won’t weary you, or give myself the trouble of going through all their testimony in these memoirs. It’s enough to say that they agreed that Simon had given up the pistol without any trouble, that they couldn’t remember seeing it put back on the mantelpiece and that the party continued for about an hour or more after this dramatic incident.

  Another week had almost passed. Tom Winterbourne announced that on the following morning he would call his most important witness. He spoke as though it was his treat, saved up until the end of the meal on Friday afternoon. Accordingly, when we knocked off on Thursday, Bonny Bernard and I descended once more to the cells to get final instructions from our client.

  20

  I remembered, when I first saw Simon Jerold in prison and in prison clothes, he seemed like a disembodied spirit, a young man on his way to almost certain death, remote, incomprehensible, entirely different from us, his legal team, who, whatever verdict the jury came to, would be allowed to go on living.

  He had been given his best suit for his days in court: a dark blue jacket and trousers suitable for going to church on Sundays, or starting work in a bank, getting married or facing a trial for double murder. At the start of the trial it seemed that the same disembodied spirit inhabited this formal suiting, which was a size too large for it. But when I went down to the cells after court that Thursday our client seemed to have signed a new lease on life. If he wasn’t entirely cheerful, a smile lit up his face from time to time. He looked as though, like me, he was a young man who had just joined the defence team and was now convinced of the possibility of success.

  ‘You got that Martyn Dempsy, Mr Rumpole. You really got him! He had to admit that he never took my threat with the gun seriously. Of course I’d never have shot anybody.’

  ‘He didn’t take it seriously at the time. When he read in the papers that your father had been shot in the night, I should think he took it very seriously indeed.’ Luckily the rumbling Winterbourne didn’t put that to Dempsy in re-examination. In fact I didn’t say this to Simon, allowing him to feel a moment of optimism instead of plunging him back into a world of despair. I asked him to tell me a little more about Peter Benson, who’d be in the witness box the following afternoon.

  ‘I always liked him.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘He used to talk to me a lot, more than some of Dad’s friends did when I saw them. They hardly seemed to notice my existence.’

  ‘He took the gun away from you.’

  ‘He did the right thing. I was stupid. I should never have picked it up. If I hadn’t done that, I shouldn’t be where I am today, should I?’ He said this with a sort of surprise, as though he had just woken up to this simple fact from some confusing nightmare.

  ‘So you liked him and he was one of your father’s best friends?’

  ‘He was,’ Simon sounded doubtful, ‘until they began to, well, not quarrel exactly, disagree.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Oh, not too long ago. I’d say a few months before Dad got shot. Peter was talking a lot about David Galloway.’

  ‘The navigator who died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Well, he said Galloway’s family had never been satisfied with the “missing, believed dead” story. And it seems one of them was in France lately, near the place where the plane came down, and he heard something, some old rumour from members of the Resistance, about an English flying officer who’d been found dead, shot near an abandoned plane.’

  ‘Shot?’

  ‘Dad told Peter that couldn’t possibly have been David Galloway, because he died when the plane caught fire.’

  ‘Did that finish the argument?’

  ‘Not quite. Peter also said someone in the family thought he might have been a prisoner. Of course they never heard, but neither did we hear about Dad.’

  ‘How did it end?’

  ‘Well, for some reason Peter wanted to get the records of Dad being a prisoner, and he couldn’t get them without Dad’s consent.’

  ‘So did Jerry give his consent?’

  ‘No. I think he found it a bit of a cheek that Peter asked.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Were you there when they disagreed?’

  ‘I heard some of it. Then I went into my bedroom.’

  ‘And there was no one else around?’

 
; ‘Only Joanie.’

  ‘Joan Plumpton, the cleaning lady?’

  ‘Yes. We shared her with Charlie. I know she was in and out cleaning. I don’t suppose she understood what it was all about.’

  ‘We can find out. They’ll be calling her as a prosecution witness. Did Peter and your father say anything else you can remember?’

  ‘Not really. Dad refused to let Peter look into the records, so they parted.’

  ‘No longer friends?’

  ‘I don’t know. Dad often said he regretted not seeing Peter. I think the idea behind the night out at the Palladium was to show he still wanted to be friends. He was very pleased when Peter accepted the invitation.’

  ‘Perhaps he was.’ I thought this over and then I asked Simon a question which no doubt surprised him. ‘Can you remember what Peter Benson was wearing when they came back to the bungalow?’

  Simon closed his eyes as though that made it easier to remember. At last he said, ‘His overcoat.’

  ‘What sort of overcoat?’

  ‘Long, dark, I think. I remember he kept it on after they got back. He said the bungalow was cold, which it wasn’t at all.’

  ‘You got any more jobs for me, Mr Rumpole? Nothing else to make enquiries about?’

  ‘I don’t think so. We’re about as ready as we’re ever likely to be.’

  We had come up, Bonny Bernard and I, from the cells at the Old Bailey and in the entrance hall I saw Daisy Sampson in close conversation with Reginald Proudfoot, the prosecution junior. She peeled herself away from this particular pain and, as she approached me, she was full of congratulations. ‘Well done, Rumpole! You were going great guns in there this afternoon.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘In the back of the court. I had an hour to kill, so I squeezed in.’

  ‘To see your friend Reggie, the prosecution pain?’

  ‘To see you both.’

  ‘He doesn’t perform much. His leader hasn’t let him call a single witness.’

  ‘And you’re on your feet all the time, aren’t you, Rumpole?’

  ‘I’m alone and without a leader.’

  ‘So I bet you’ve got some devastating stuff to throw at Reggie’s star witness.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘What’s he called? Benson?’