Rumpole on Trial
I have often wondered how my career as an Old Bailey hack would terminate. Would I drop dead at the triumphant end of my most moving final speech? ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, my task is done. I have said my say. This trial has been but a few days out of your life, but for me it is the whole of my life. And that life I leave, with the utmost confidence, in your hands,’ and then keel over and out. ‘Rumpole snuffs it in court’; the news would run like wild fire round the Inns of Court and I would challenge any jury to dare to convict after that forensic trick had been played upon them. Or will I die in an apoplexy after a particularly heated disagreement with Mr Injustice Graves, or Sir Oliver Oliphant? One thing I’m sure of, I shall not drift into retirement and spend my days hanging around Froxbury Mansions in a dressing-gown, nor shall I ever repair to the Golden Gate Retirement Home, Weston-super-Mare, and sit in the sun lounge retelling the extraordinary case of the Judge’s Elbow, or the Miracle in the Ecclesiastical Court which saved a vicar from an unfrocking. No, my conclusion had better come swiftly, and Rumpole’s career should end with a bang rather than a whimper. When thinking of the alternatives available, I never expected I would finish by being kicked out of the Bar, dismissed for unprofessional conduct and drummed out of the monstrous regiment of learned friends. And yet this conclusion became a distinct possibility on that dreadful day when, apparently, even I went too far and brought that weighty edifice, the legal establishment, crashing down upon my head.
The day dawned grey and wet after I had been kept awake most of the night by a raging toothache. I rang my dentist, Mr Lionel Leering, a practitioner whose company I manage to shun until the pain becomes unbearable, and he agreed to meet me at his Harley Street rooms at nine o’clock, so giving me time to get to the Old Bailey, where I was engaged in a particularly tricky case. So picture me at the start of what was undoubtedly the worst in a long career of difficult days, stretched out on the chair of pain and terror beside the bubbling spittoon. Mr Leering, the smooth, grey-haired master of the drill, who seemed perpetually tanned from a trip to his holiday home in Ibiza, was fiddling about inside my mouth while subliminal baroque music tinkled on the cassette player and the blonde nurse looked on with well-simulated concern.
‘Busy day ahead of you, Mr Rumpole?’ Mr Leering was keeping up the bright chatter. ‘Open just a little wider for me, will you? What sort of terrible crime are you on today then?’
‘Ans … lorter,’ I did my best to tell him.
‘My daughter?’ Leering purred with satisfaction. ‘How kind of you to remember. Well, Jessica’s just done her A-levels and she’s off to Florence doing the history of art. You should hear her on the quattrocento. Knows a great deal more than I ever did. And of course, being blonde, the Italians are mad about her.’
‘I said … Ans … lorter. Down the Ole … Ailey,’ I tried to explain before he started the drill.
‘My old lady? Oh, you mean Yolande. I’m not sure she’d be too keen on being called that. She’s better now. Gone in for acupuncture. What were you saying?’
‘An … cord … Tong …’
‘Your tongue? Not hurting you, am I?’
‘An … supposed … Illed is ife.’
‘Something she did to her back,’ Leering explained patiently. ‘Playing golf. Golf covers a multitude of sins. Particularly for the women of Hampstead Garden Suburb.’
‘Ell on the ender …’
The drill had stopped now, and he pulled the cotton wool rolls away from my gums. My effort to tell him about my life and work had obviously gone for nothing because he asked politely, ‘Send her what? Your love? Yolande’ll be tickled to death. Of course, she’s never met you. But she’ll still be tickled to death. Rinse now, will you? Now what were we talking about?’
‘Manslaughter,’ I told him once again as I spat out pink and chemicated fluid.
‘Oh, no. Not really? Yolande can be extremely irritating at times. What woman can’t? But I’m not actually tempted to bash her across the head.’
‘No’ – I was showing remarkable patience with this slow-witted dentist – ‘I said I’m doing a case at the Old Bailey. My client’s a man called Tong. Accused of manslaughter. Killed his wife, Mrs Tong. She fell down and her head hit the fender.’
‘Oh, really? How fascinating.’ Now he knew what I was talking about, Mr Leering had lost all interest in my case. ‘I’ve just done a temporary stopping. That should see you through the day. But ring me up if you’re in any trouble.’
‘I think it’s going to take a great deal more than a temporary stopping to see me through today,’ I said as I got out of the chair and struggled into the well-worn black jacket. ‘I’m before Mr Justice “Ollie” Oliphant.’
As I was walking towards the Old Bailey I felt a familiar stab of pain, warning me that the stopping might be extremely temporary. As I was going through the revolving doors, Mizz Liz Probert came flying in behind me, sent the door spinning, collided into my back, then went dashing up the stairs, calling, ‘Sorry, Rumpole!’ and vanished.
‘Sorry, Rumpole!’ I grumbled to myself. Mizz Probert cannons into you, nearly sends your brief flying and all she does is call out ‘Sorry, Rumpole!’ on the trot. Everyone, it seemed to me, said ‘Sorry, Rumpole!’ and didn’t mean a word of it. They were sorry for sending my clients to chokey, sorry for not showing me all the prosecution statements, sorry for standing on my foot in the Underground, and now, no doubt, sorry for stealing my bands. For I had reached the robing-room and, while climbing into the fancy-dress, searched for the little white hanging tabs that ornament a legal hack’s neck and, lo and behold, these precious bands had been nicked. I looked down the robing-room in desperation and saw young Dave Inchcape, Mizz Liz Probert’s lover and co-mortgagee, carefully tie a snow-white pair of crisp linen bands around his winged collar. I approached him in a hostile manner.
‘Inchcape’ – I lost no time in coming to the point – ‘have you pinched my bands?’
‘Sorry, Rumpole?’ He pretended to know nothing of the matter.
‘You have!’ I regarded the case as proved. ‘Honestly, Inchcape. Nowadays the barristers’ robing-room is little better than a den of thieves!’
‘These are my bands, Rumpole. There are some bands over there on the table. Slightly soiled. They’re probably yours.’
‘Slightly soiled? Sorry, Rumpole! Sorry, whoever they belonged to,’ and I put them on. ‘The bloody man’s presumably got mine, anyway.’
When I got down, correctly if sordidly decorated about the throat, to Ollie Oliphant’s Court One I found Claude Erskine-Brown all tricked out as an artificial silk and his junior, Mizz She Who Cannons Into You Probert.
‘I want to ask you, Rumpole,’ Claude said in his newly acquired QC’s voice, ‘about calling your client.’
‘Mr Tong.’
‘Yes. Are you calling him?’
‘I call him Mr Tong because that’s his name.’
‘I mean,’ he said with exaggerated patience, as though explaining the law to a white wig, ‘are you going to put him in the witness-box? You don’t have to, you know. You see, I’ve been asked to do a murder in Lewes. One does have so many demands on one’s time in silk. So if you’re not going to call Mr Tong, I thought, well, perhaps we might finish today.’
While he was drooling on, I was looking closely at the man’s neck. Then I came out with the accusation direct. ‘Are those my bands you’re wearing?’ I took hold of the suspect tabs, lifted them and examined them closely. ‘They look like my bands. They are my bands! What’s that written on them?’
‘C.E.B. stands for Claude Erskine-Brown.’ This was apparently his defence.
‘When did you write that?’
‘Oh really, Rumpole! We don’t even share the same robing-room now I’m in silk. How could I have got at your bands? Just tell me, are you calling your client?’
I wasn’t satisfied with his explanation, but the usher was hurrying us in as the judge was
straining at the leash. I pushed my way into court, telling Erskine-Brown nothing of my plans.
I knew what I’d like to call my client. I’d like to call him a grade A, hundred-per-cent pain in the neck. In any team chosen to bore for England he would have been first in to bat. He was a retired civil servant and his hair, face, business suit and spectacles were of a uniform grey. When he spoke, he did so in a dreary monotone and never used one word when twenty would suffice. The only unexpected thing about him was that he ever got involved in the colourful crime of manslaughter. I had considered a long time before deciding to call Mr Tong as a witness in his own defence. I knew he would bore the jury to distraction and no doubt drive that North Country comedian Mr Justice Oliphant into an apoplexy. However, Mrs Tong had been found dead from a head wound in the sitting-room of their semi-detached house in Rickmansworth, and I felt her husband was called upon to provide some sort of an explanation.
You will have gathered that things hadn’t gone well from the start of that day for Rumpole, and matters didn’t improve when my client Tong stepped into the witness-box, raised the Testament on high and gave us what appeared to be a shortened version of the oath. ‘I swear by,’ he said, carefully omitting any reference to the deity, ‘that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’
‘Mr Rumpole. Your client has left something out of the oath.’ Mr Justice Oliphant might not have been a great lawyer but at least he knew the oath by heart.
‘So I noticed, my Lord.’
‘Well, see to it, Mr Rumpole. Use your common sense.’
‘Mr Tong,’ I asked the witness, ‘who is it you swear by?’
‘One I wouldn’t drag down to the level of this place, my Lord.’
‘What’s he mean, Mr Rumpole? Drag down to the level of this court? What’s he mean by that?’ The judge’s common sense was giving way to uncommon anger.
‘I suppose he means that the Almighty might not wish to be seen in Court Number One at the Old Bailey,’ I suggested.
‘Not wish to be seen? I never heard of such a thing!’
‘Mr Tong has some rather original ideas about theology, my Lord.’ I did my best to deter further conversation on the subject. ‘I’m sure he would go into the matter at considerable length if your Lordship were interested.’
‘I’m not, Mr Rumpole, not interested in the least.’ And here his Lordship turned on the witness with ‘Are you saying, Mr … What’s your name again?’
‘Tong, my Lord. Henry Sebastian Tong.’
‘Are you saying my court isn’t good enough for God? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I am saying that this court, my Lord, is a place of sin and worldliness and we should not involve a Certain Being in these proceedings. May I remind you of the Book of Ezekiel: “And it shall be unto them a false divination in their sight, to them that have sworn oaths.” ’
‘Don’t let’s worry about the Book of Ezekiel.’ This work clearly wasn’t Ollie Oliphant’s bedtime reading. ‘Mr Rumpole, can’t you control your client?’
‘Unfortunately not, my Lord.’
‘When I was a young lad, the first thing we learnt at the Bar was to control our clients.’ The judge was back on more familiar territory. ‘It’s a great pity you weren’t brought up in a good old commonsensical chambers in Leeds, Mr Rumpole.’
‘I suppose I might have acquired some of your Lordship’s charm and polish,’ I said respectfully.
‘Let’s use our common sense about this, shall we? Mr Tong, do you understand what it is to tell the truth?’
‘I have always told the truth. During my thirty years in the ministry.’
‘Ministry?’ The judge turned to me in some alarm. ‘Is your client a man of the cloth, Mr Rumpole?’
‘I think he’s referring to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, where he was a clerk for many years.’
‘Are you going to tell the truth?’ The judge addressed my client in a common-sense shout.
‘Yes.’ Mr Tong even managed to make a monosyllable sound boring.
‘There you are, Mr Rumpole!’ The judge was triumphant. ‘That’s the way to do it. Now, let’s get on with it, shall we?’
‘I assure your Lordship, I can’t wait. Ouch!’ The tooth Mr Leering had said would see me through the day disagreed with a sharp stab of pain. I put a hand to my cheek and muttered to my instructing solicitor, the faithful Mr Bernard, ‘It’s the temporary stopping.’
‘Stopping? Why are you stopping, Mr Rumpole?’ The judge was deeply suspicious.
Now I knew what hell was, examining a prize bore before Ollie Oliphant with a raging toothache. All the same, I soldiered on and asked Tong, ‘Were you married to the late Sarah Tong?’
‘We had met in the Min of Ag and Fish, where Sarah Pennington, as she then was, held a post in the typing pool. We were adjacent, as I well remember, on one occasion for the hot meal in the canteen.’
‘I don’t want to hurry you.’
‘You hurry him, Mr Rumpole.’
‘Let’s come to your marriage,’ I begged the witness.
‘The thirteenth of March 1950, at the Church of St Joseph and All Angels, in what was then the village of Pinner.’ Mr Tong supplied all the details. ‘The weather, as I remember it, was particularly inclement. Dark skies and a late snow flurry.’
‘Don’t let’s worry about the weather.’ Ollie was using his common sense and longing to get on with it.
‘I took it as a portent, my Lord, of storms to come.’
‘Could you just describe your married life to the jury?’ I tried a shortcut.
‘I can only, with the greatest respect and due deference, adopt the words of the psalmist. No doubt they are well known to his Lordship?’
‘I shouldn’t bet on it, Mr Tong,’ I warned him, and, ignoring Ollie’s apparent displeasure, added, ‘Perhaps you could just remind us what the Good Book says?’
‘ “It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house,” ’ Mr Tong recited. ‘ “It is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and angry woman.” ’
So my client’s evidence wound on, accompanied by toothache and an angry judge, and I felt that I had finally fallen out of love with the art of advocacy. I didn’t want to have to worry about Mr Tong or the precise circumstances in which Mrs Tong had been released from this world. I wanted to sit down, to shut up and to close my eyes in peace. She Who Must Be Obeyed had something of the same idea. She wanted me to become a judge. Without taking me into her confidence, she met Marigold Featherstone, the judge’s wife, for coffee in Harrods for the purpose of furthering her plan. ‘Rumpole gets so terribly tired at night,’ Hilda said in the Silver Grill, and Marigold, with a heavy sigh, agreed.
‘So does Guthrie. At night he’s as flat as a pancake. Is Rumpole flat as a pancake too?’
‘Well, not exactly.’ Hilda told me she wasn’t sure of the exact meaning of this phrase. ‘But he’s so irritable these days. So edgy, and then he’s had this trouble with his teeth. If only he could have a job sitting down.’
‘You mean, like a clerk or something?’
‘Something like a judge.’
‘Really?’ Marigold was astonished at the idea.
‘Oh, I don’t mean a Red Judge,’ Hilda explained. ‘Not a really posh judge like Guthrie. But an ordinary sort of circus judge. And Guthrie does know such important people. You said he’s always calling in at the Lord Chancellor’s office.’
‘Only when he’s in trouble,’ Marigold said grimly. ‘But I suppose I might ask if he could put in a word about your Horace.’
‘Oh, Marigold. Would you?’
‘Why not? I’ll wake the old fellow up and tell him.’
As it happened, my possible escape from the agonies of the Bar was not by such an honourable way out as that sought by Hilda in the Silver Grill. The route began to appear as Mr Tong staggered slowly towards the high point o
f his evidence. We had enjoyed numerous quotations from the Old Testament. We had been treated to a blow-by-blow account of a quarrel between him and his wife during a holiday in Clacton-on-Sea and many other such incidents. We had learnt a great deal more about the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries than we ever needed to know. And then Ollie, driven beyond endurance, said, ‘For God’s sake –’
‘My Lord?’ Mr Tong looked deeply pained.
‘All right, for all our sakes. When are we going to come to the facts of this manslaughter?’
So I asked the witness, ‘Now, Mr Tong, on the night this accident took place.’
‘Accident! That’s a matter for the jury to decide!’ Ollie exploded. ‘Why do you call it an accident?’
‘Why did your Lordship call it manslaughter? Isn’t that a matter for the jury to decide?’
‘Did I say that?’ the judge asked. ‘Did I say that, Mr Erskine-Brown?’
‘Yes, you did,’ I told him before Claude could stagger to his feet. ‘I wondered if your Lordship had joined the prosecution team, or was it a single-handed effort to prejudice the jury?’
There was a terrible silence and I suppose I should never have said it. Mr Bernard hid his head in shame, Erskine-Brown looked disapproving and Liz appeared deeply worried. The judge controlled himself with difficulty and then spoke in quiet but dangerous tones. ‘Mr Rumpole, that was a quite intolerable thing to say.’
‘My Lord. That was a quite intolerable thing to do.’ I was determined to fight on.
‘I may have had a momentary slip of the tongue.’ It seemed that the judge was about to retreat, but I had no intention of allowing him to do so gracefully. ‘Or,’ I said, ‘your Lordship’s well-known common sense may have deserted you.’
There was another sharp intake of breath from the attendant legal hacks and then the judge kindly let me know what was in his mind. ‘Mr Rumpole. I think you should be warned. One of these days you may go too far and behaviour such as yours can have certain consequences. Now, can we get on?’
Forever Rumpole Page 27
