Ursula Chippenham drifted off to greet some late arrivals. ‘Are you family?’ the nurse asked in a surprisingly deep and unyielding voice, with a trace of a Scottish accent.
‘No, I’m a barrister. An old friend of Chippy’s …’
‘Mr Rumpole? I think I’ve heard him mention you.’
‘I’m glad. And then, of course, I have the unenviable task of defending Dr Betty Ireton. Mrs Chippenham says she got on rather well with the old boy.’
‘Defend her?’ Nurse Pargeter suddenly looked as relentless as John Knox about to denounce the monstrous regiment of women. ‘She cannot be defended. I warned the Chippenhams against her. They can’t say I didn’t warn them. I told them all about that dreadful Lethe.’
‘Everyone can be defended,’ I corrected her as gently as possible. ‘Of course whether the defence is successful is entirely another matter.’
‘I prefer to remember the Ten Commandments on the subject.’ Pargey was clearly of a religious persuasion.
Those nicknames, I thought – Pargey and Chippy – you might as well be in a school dormitory or at a gathering of very old actors.
‘Oh, the Ten Commandments.’ I tried not to sound dismissive of this ancient code of desert law. ‘Not too closely observed nowadays, are they? I mean adultery’s about the only subject that seems to interest the newspapers, and coveting other people’s oxen and asses is called leaving everything to market forces. And, as for worshipping graven images, think of the prices some of them fetch at Sotheby’s. As for Thou shalt not kill – well, some people think that the terminally ill should be helped out of their misery.’
‘And some people happen to believe in the sanctity of life. And now, if you’ll excuse me, Mr Rumpole, I have an important meeting to go to.’
As I watched her leave, I thought that I hadn’t been a conspicuous success with Nurse Pargeter. Then a small boy piped up at my elbow, ‘Would you like one of these, sir? I don’t know what they are actually.’ It was young Andrew Chippenham, with a plate of small brown envelope arrangements made of brittle pastry. I took one, bit into it and found, hardly to my delight, goat’s cheese and some green, seaweed-like substance.
‘You must be Andrew,’ I said. The only genuine schoolboy around wasn’t called Andy or Drew, or even Chippy, but kept his whole name, uncorrupted. ‘And you go to Bolingbroke House?’ I recognized the purple blazer with brass buttons. Bolingbroke was an expensive prep school in Kensington, which I thought must be so over-subscribed that the classrooms were used in a rota system and the unaccommodated pupils were sent out for walks in a crocodile formation, under the care of some bothered and junior teacher, round the streets of London. I had seen regiments of purple blazers marching dolefully as far as Gloucester Road; the exit from Bolingbroke House had a distinct look of the retreat from Moscow.
‘How do you like being a waiter?’ I asked Andrew, thinking it must be better than the daily urban trudge.
‘Not much. I’d like to get back to my painting.’
‘You’re an artist?’
‘Of course not.’ He looked extremely serious. ‘I mean painting my model aeroplanes.’
‘How fascinating.’ And then I lied as manfully as any unreliable witness. ‘I was absolutely crazy about model aeroplanes when I was your age. Of course, that was a bit before Concorde.’
‘Did you ever go in a Spitfire?’ Andrew looked at me as though I had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade or was some old warrior from the dawn of time.
‘Spitfires? I know all about Spitfires from my time in the RAF.’ I forgot to tell him I was ground staff only. And then I said, ‘I say, Andrew, I’d love to see your collection.’ So he put down his plate of goat’s cheese envelopes and we escaped from the party.
Andrew’s room was on the third floor, at the back of the house. In the front, a door was open and I got a glimpse of a big, airy room with a bed stripped and the windows open. When I asked who slept there, he answered casually and without any particular emotion, ‘That was Great-uncle Chippy’s room. He’s the one who died, you know.’
‘I know. I suppose your parents’ bedroom’s on the floor below?’ It wasn’t the subtlest way of getting information.
‘Oh, yes. I’m all alone up here now.’ Andrew opened the door of his room which smelt strongly of glue and, I thought for a moment, was full of brightly coloured birds which, as I focused on them, became model aeroplanes swinging in the breeze from an open window. From what seemed to be every inch of the ceiling, a thread had been tied or tacked to hold up a fighter or an old-fashioned seaplane in full flight.
‘That’s the sort of Spitfire you piloted,’ Andrew said, to my silent embarrassment. ‘And that’s a Wellington bomber like you had in the war.’ I did remember the planes returning, when they were lucky, with a rear-gunner dead or wounded and the stink of blood and fear when the doors were opened. I had been young then, unbearably young, and I banished the memory for more immediate concerns.
‘Are these all the models you’ve made?’ I asked Andrew. ‘Or have you got lots more packed away in black bin bags?’
‘Bin bags?’ He was fiddling with a half-painted Concorde on his desk. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘You know, the plastic bags the dustmen leave after they’ve taken away the rubbish. Don’t you collect them? A lot of boys do.’
‘Collect plastic bags? What a funny thing to do.’ Andrew had his head down and was still fiddling with his model. ‘That wouldn’t interest me, I’m afraid. I haven’t got any plastic bags at all.’
Back in chambers that afternoon I found Dot Clapton alone in front of her typewriter, frowning as she looked over a brightly coloured brochure, on the cover of which a bikinied blonde was to be seen playing leapfrog with a younger, fitter version of Vincent Blewitt on a stretch of golden sand.
‘I’m afraid Henry’s just slipped out, Mr Rumpole. I don’t know what it is. His heart doesn’t seem to be in his work nowadays.’ She looked up at me in genuine distress and I saw the perfectly oval face, sculptured eyelids and blonde curls that might have been painted by some such artistic old darling as Sandro Botticelli, and heard the accent which might have been learnt from the Timson family somewhere south of Brixton. I didn’t tell her that not only Henry’s heart, but our learned clerk himself, might not be in his work very soon. Instead I asked, ‘Thinking of going on holiday, Dot?’
She handed me the brochure in silence. On the front of it was emblazoned THE FIVE S HOLIDAYS: SEA, SUN, SAND, SINGLES AND SEX ON THE COSTA DEL SOL. WHY NOT GO FOR IT? ‘Quite honestly, is that your idea of a holiday, Mr Rumpole?’
‘It sounds,’ I had to tell her, ‘like my idea of hell.’
‘I’ve got to agree with you. I mean, if I want burger and chips with a pint of lager, I might as well stay in Streatham.’
‘Very sensible.’
‘If I’m going to be on holiday, I want something a bit romantic.’
‘I understand. Sand and sex are as unappealing as sand in the sandwiches?’
‘My boyfriend’s planning to take me to the castles down the Rhine. Of course, I don’t want to upset him.’
‘Upset your boyfriend?’
‘No. Upset Mr Blewitt.’
‘Upsetting Mr Blewitt – I have to say this, Dot – is my idea of a perfect summer holiday.’
‘Oh, don’t say that, Mr Rumpole.’ Dot Clapton looked nervously round the room as though the blot might be concealed behind the arras. ‘He is my boss now, isn’t he?’
‘Not my boss, Dot. No one’s my boss, and particularly not Blewitt.’
‘He’s mine then. And he told me these singles holidays are a whole lot of fun.’
‘Did he now?’ I felt that there was something in this fragment of information which might be of great value.
‘I don’t know, though. Vince … Well, he asked me to call him Vince.’
‘And you agreed?’
‘I didn’t have much choice. Does he honestly think I haven’t got a
boyfriend?’
‘If he thinks that, Dot, he can’t be capable of organizing a piss-up in a brewery, let alone a barristers’ chambers.’
‘Piss-up in a brewery!’ Dot covered her mouth with her hand and giggled. ‘How do you think of these things, Mr Rumpole?’
I didn’t tell her that they’d been thought of and forgotten long before she was born, but took my leave of her, saying I was on my way to see Mr Ballard.
‘Oh, he’s busy.’ Dot emerged from behind her hand. ‘He said he wasn’t to be disturbed.’
‘Then it will be my pleasure and privilege to disturb him.’
‘Have you “eaten on the insane root”,’ I asked the egregious Ballard, with what I hoped sounded like genuine concern, ‘ “That takes the reason prisoner”?’
‘What do you mean, Rumpole?’
‘I mean no one who has retained one single marble would dream of introducing the blight Blewitt into Equity Court.’
‘I thought you’d come to me about that eventually.’
‘Then you thought right.’
‘If you had bothered to attend the chambers meeting you might have been privy to the selection of Vincent Blewitt.’
‘I have only a few years of active life left to me,’ I told the man with some dignity. ‘And they are too precious to be wasted on chambers meetings. If I’d been there, I’d certainly have banned Blewitt.’
‘Then you’d have been outvoted.’
‘You mean those learned but idiotic friends decided to put their affairs in the hands of this second-rate, second-hand car salesman.’
‘Catering.’ Ballard smiled tolerantly.
‘What?’
‘Vincent Blewitt was in catering, not cars.’
‘Then I wouldn’t buy a second-hand cake off him.’
‘Horace’ – Soapy Sam Ballard rose and placed a considerate and totally unwelcome hand on my shoulder – ‘we all know that you’re a great old warhorse and that you’ve had a long, long career at the Bar. But you have to face it, my dear old Horace, you don’t understand the modern world.’
‘I understand it well enough to be able to tell a decent, honest, efficient, if rather over-amorous, clerk from the dubious flogger of suspect and probably mouldy canteen dinners.’ I shrugged the unwelcome hand off my shoulder.
‘The clerking system,’ Ballard told me then, with a look of intolerable condescension, ‘is out of date, Horace. We are moving towards the millennium.’
‘You move towards it if you like. I prefer to stay where I am.’
‘Why should we pay Henry a percentage when we can get an experienced businessman for a salary?’
‘What sort of salary?’
‘Vincent Blewitt was good enough to agree to a hundred, to be reviewed at the end of one year. The contract will be signed when the month’s trial period is over.’
‘A hundred pounds? Far too much!’
‘A hundred thousand, Rumpole. It’s far less than he would expect to earn in the private sector of industry.’
‘Let him go back to the private sector then. If you want to be robbed, I could lend you one of the Timsons. They only deal in petty theft.’
‘Vincent Blewitt has been very good to join us. At some personal financial sacrifice …’
‘Did you check on what his screw was in the canteen?’
‘I took his word for it.’ Ballard looked only momentarily embarrassed.
‘Famous last words of the fraudster’s victim.’
‘Vincent Blewitt isn’t a fraudster, Rumpole. He’s a businessman.’
‘That’s the polite word for it.’
‘He says we must earn our keep by a rise in productivity.’
‘How do you measure our productivity?’
‘By the turnover in trials.’
‘In your case, by the amazing turnover in defeats.’ It was below the belt, I have to confess, but it didn’t send Ballard staggering to the ropes. He came back, pluckily, I suppose. ‘Business, Rumpole,’ he told me, ‘makes the world go round.’ Later I discovered he’d got these words of wisdom from some ludicrous television advertisement.
‘Rubbish. Justice might make the world go round. Or poetry. Or love. Or even God. You might think it’s God, Bollard, as a founder member of the Lawyers As Christians Society.’
‘As a Christian, Rumpole, I remember the parable of the talents. The Bible points out that you can’t fight market forces.’
‘Didn’t the Bible also say something like blessed are the poor? Or do you wish it hadn’t said that?’
‘I’ve got no time to trade texts with you, Rumpole.’ Soapy Sam looked nettled.
I was suddenly tired, half in love, perhaps for a moment, with easeful death. ‘Oh, let’s stop arguing. Get rid of the blot, confirm Henry in the job and we need say no more about it.’
‘I’m sure you’ll find Vincent Blewitt a great asset to chambers, Rumpole. He’s a very human sort of person. He likes his joke, I understand. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of laughs together.’
‘If he stays …’
‘He is staying …’
‘Then I’ll take a handful of pills, washed down with a glass of whisky, and cease upon the midnight with no pain.’
‘If you wish to do that, Rumpole’ – our learned head of chambers sat down at his desk and pretended to be busy with a set of papers – ‘that is entirely a matter for you.’
That evening, before the news, Ballard’s favourite commercial about business making the world go round came on. Later there were some pictures of a Pro-Life demonstration outside an abortion clinic in St John’s Wood. Prominent among those present was a serious, long-faced woman with reddish hair. Nurse Pargey was waving a placard on which were written the words THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
‘Alzheimer’s isn’t a killer in itself. Certainly the patient gets weaker and more forgetful. Helpless, in fact. But it would need something more to kill Chippy.’
‘Like an overdose of sleeping pills, for instance?’
‘Evidently that’s what did it.’ Dr Betty was one of those awkward clients, it seemed, who felt impelled to tell the truth. And what she went on to say wasn’t particularly helpful. ‘I might have given Chippy an overdose of something when the time came, but it hadn’t come on the night he died. You must believe that, Horace.’
‘Whether I believe it or not isn’t exactly the point. What matters is whether the jury believe it.’
‘That’s for them to decide, isn’t it?’
‘I’m afraid it is.’ At which moment there was a rapid knock on the door which immediately opened to admit Blewitt’s head. He took a quick look at the assembled company and said, ‘Sorry folks! Mustn’t interrupt the workers’ productivity. Speak to you later, Horace.’ At which, as rare things will, he vanished.
‘Who on earth was that extraordinary man?’ For the first time Dr Betty looked shaken.
‘A temporary visitor,’ I told her. ‘Nothing for you to worry about. Now tell me about the sleeping pills.’
‘I gave him two.’
‘And you saw him drink his whisky?’
‘A small whisky and soda. Yes.’
‘And then … ?’
‘Well, I settled him down for the night.’
‘Did he go to sleep?’
‘He seemed tired and dreamy. He’d been quite contented that day, in fact. But incontinent, of course. Quite soon after he’d settled down, I heard the Chippenhams come home from their dinner party, so I went downstairs to meet them.’
‘What happened to the bottle of pills?’
‘Well, that was kept in the house so that the Chippenhams or Nurse Pargeter could give Chippy his pills when I wasn’t there.’
‘Kept where in the house?’
‘I put them back in the bathroom cupboard.’
‘Are there two bathrooms?’
‘Yes. The one next to the judge’s bedroom. You know the house?’ Dr Betty looked surprised.
‘I have a certain nodding ac
quaintance with it. And young Andrew?’
‘His mother had sent him up to bed before they went out. But I’m afraid he hadn’t gone to sleep.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘When I went to put the pills back in the bathroom, I saw his light on and his bedroom door open. He was still reading – or playing with his model aeroplanes more likely.’
‘Quite likely, yes. Oh, one other thing. Had you ever spoken to Chippy about Lethe?’
‘No, certainly not. I told you, Horace. The time had not come.’
‘And was anyone else Chippy knew a member of Lethe? Any friends or his family?’
‘Oh, no, I’m sure they weren’t.’
‘I think it might be just worth getting a statement from a Dr Eames.’ I turned to Bonny Bernard, my instructing solicitor. ‘Oh, and a few enquiries about the firm of Marcellus & Chippenham, house agents and surveyors.’
‘David Eames?’ Dr Betty looked doubtful.
‘He treated Chippy before you came on the scene. He might know if he’d ever talked of suicide.’
Dr Betty once again spurned a line of defence. ‘As I told you, I’m quite sure he never contemplated such a thing.’
‘So if you didn’t kill him, Dr Betty, who do you think did?’
She was looking at me, quite serious then, as she said, ‘Well, that’s not for me to say, is it?’
‘Sorry to have intruded on your conference. Although it may be no bad thing for me to make spot checks on the human resource in the workplace.’
I had hardly recovered from the gloomy prospect of defending Dr Betty when the Blight was with me again. I sat, sunk in thought.
‘Cheer up, Horace.’ Vince’s laugh was like a bath running out. ‘It may never happen.’ As he said that, I regretted having used the same fatuous words of encouragement to Henry, our condemned clerk. Most of the worst things in life are absolutely bound to happen, the trial of the cheerful doctor, for instance, or death itself.
‘I wanted a word or two with you about formalizing staff holidays. You thinking of getting away to the sun yourself?’
‘Hardly,’ I told him, ‘having glanced at the brochure you gave Dot Clapton.’
‘Sea, sand and sex, Rumpole. You’d enjoy that. Very relaxing,’ Vince gurgled.
Forever Rumpole Page 38
