Forever Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  ‘I’d agree with that.’

  ‘Exercised by a highly experienced peterman?’

  ‘Who is this Mr Peterman?’ Skimpy was puzzled. ‘We haven’t heard of him before.’

  ‘Not Mr Peterman.’ I marvelled at the ignorance of the basic facts of life displayed by the magistrate. ‘A man expert at blowing safes, known to the trade as “peters”,’ I told him and turned back to DI Grimble. ‘So we’re agreed that this was a highly expert piece of work?’

  ‘It must have been done by someone who knew his job pretty well. Yes.’

  ‘Denis Timson’s record shows convictions for shoplifting, bag-snatching and stealing a radio from an unlocked car. In all of these simple enterprises, he managed to get caught.’

  ‘Your client’s criminal record!’ Skimpy looked happy for the first time. ‘You’re allowing that to go into evidence, are you, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’ I explained the obvious point. ‘Because there’s absolutely no indication he was capable of blowing a safe in record time, or silencing a complicated burglar alarm, is there, Detective Inspector?’

  ‘No. There’s nothing to show anything like that in his record …’

  ‘Mr Rumpole,’ Skimpy was looking at the clock; was he in danger of missing his usual train back home to Haywards Heath? ‘Where’s all this heading?’

  ‘Back a good many years,’ I told him, ‘to the Sweet-Home Building Society job at Carshalton. When Harry Sparksman blew a safe so quietly that even the dogs slept through it.’

  ‘You were in that case, weren’t you, Mr Rumpole?’ Inspector Grimble was pleased to remember. ‘Sparksman got five years.’

  ‘Not one of your great successes.’ Skimpy was also delighted. ‘Perhaps you wasted the court’s time with unnecessary questions. Have you anything else to ask this officer?’

  ‘Not till the Old Bailey, sir. I may have thought of a few more by then.’

  With great satisfaction, Skimpy committed Dennis Timson, a minor villain who would have had difficulty changing a fuse, let alone blowing a safe, for trial at the Central Criminal Court.

  ‘Funny you mentioned Harry Sparksman. Do you know, the same thought occurred to me. An expert like him could’ve done that job in the time.’

  ‘Great minds think alike,’ I assured DI Grimble. We were washing away the memory of an hour or two before Skimpy with two pints of nourishing stout in the pub opposite the beak’s court. ‘You know Harry took up a new career?’ I needn’t have asked the question. DI Grimble had a groupie’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the criminal stars.

  ‘Oh yes. Now a comic called Jim Diamond. Got up a concert party in the nick. Apparently gave him a taste for show business.’

  ‘I did hear,’ I took Grimble into my confidence, ‘that he made a comeback for the Croydon job.’ It had been a throwaway line from Uncle Fred Timson – ‘I heard talk they got Harry back out of retirement’ – but it was a thought worth examining.

  ‘I heard the same. So we did a bit of checking. But Sparksman, known as Diamond, has got a cast-iron alibi.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘The time when the Croydon job was done, he was performing in a pantomime. On stage nearly all the evening, it seems, playing the Dame.’

  ‘Aladdin,’ I said, ‘at the Tufnell Park Empire. It might just be worth your while to go into that alibi a little more thoroughly. I’d suggest you have a private word with Mrs Molly Diamond. It’s just possible she may have noticed his attraction to Aladdin’s lamp.’

  ‘Now then, Mr Rumpole,’ Grimble was wiping the froth from his lips with a neatly folded handkerchief, ‘you mustn’t tell me how to do my job.’

  ‘I’m only trying to serve,’ I managed to look pained, ‘the interests of justice!’

  ‘You mean, the interests of your client?’

  ‘Sometimes they’re the same thing,’ I told him, but I had to admit it wasn’t often.

  As it happened, the truth emerged without Detective Inspector Grimble having to do much of a job. Harry had, in fact, fallen victim to a tip-tilted nose and memorable thighs; he’d left home and moved into Aladdin’s Kensal Rise flat. Molly, taking a terrible revenge, blew his alibi wide open. She had watched many rehearsals and knew every word, every gag, every nudge, wink and shrill complaint of the Dame’s part. She had played it to perfection to give her husband an alibi while he went back to his old job in Croydon. It all went perfectly, even though Uncle Abanazer, dancing with her, had felt an unexpected softness.

  I had known, instinctively, that something was very wrong. It had, however, taken some time for me to realize what I had really seen that night at the Tufnell Park Empire. It was nothing less than an outrage to a Great British tradition. The Widow Twankey was a woman.

  DI Grimble made his arrest and the case against Denis Timson was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. As spring came to the Temple gardens, Hilda opened a letter in the other case which turned on the recognition of old, familiar faces and read it out to me.

  ‘The repointing’s going well on the tower and we hope to have it finished by Easter,’ Poppy Longstaff had written. ‘And I have to tell you, Hilda, the oil-fired heating has changed our lives. Eric says it’s like living in the tropics. Cooking supper last night, I had to peel off at least one of my cardigans.’ She Who Must Be Obeyed put down the letter from her old school-friend and said, thoughtfully, ‘Noblesse Oblige.’

  ‘What was that, Hilda?’

  ‘I could tell at once that Donald Compton was a true gentleman. The sort that does good by stealth. Of course, poor old Eric thought he’d never get the tower mended, but I somehow felt that Donald wouldn’t fail him. It was noblesse.’

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ I conceded, ‘but in this case the noblesse was Rumpole’s.’

  ‘Rumpole! What on earth do you mean? You hardly paid to have the church tower repointed, did you?’

  ‘In one sense, yes.’

  ‘I can’t believe that. After all the years it took you to have the bathroom decorated. What on earth do you mean about your noblesse?’

  ‘It’d take too long to explain, old darling. Besides, I’ve got a conference in chambers. Tricky case of receiving stolen surgical appliances. I suppose,’ I added doubtfully, ‘it may lead, at some time in the distant future, to an act of charity.’

  Easter came, the work on the tower was successfully completed, and I was walking back to chambers after a gruelling day down the Bailey when I saw, wafting through the Temple cloisters, the unlikely apparition of the Rev. Eric Longstaff. He chirruped a greeting and said he’d come up to consult some legal brains on the proper investment of what remained of the Church Restoration Fund. ‘I’m so profoundly grateful,’ he told me, ‘that I decided to invite you down to the rectory last Christmas.’

  ‘You decided?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘I thought your wife Poppy extended the invitation to She …’

  ‘Oh yes. But I thought of the idea. It was the result of a good deal of hard knee-work and guidance from above. I knew you were the right man for the job.’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘The Compton job.’

  What was this? The rector was speaking like an old con. The Coldsands caper? ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘I just mean that I knew you’d defended Donald Compton. In a previous existence.’

  ‘How on earth did you know that?’

  Eric drew himself up to his full, willowy height. ‘I’m not a prison visitor for nothing,’ he said proudly, ‘so I thought you were just the chap to put the fear of God into him. You were the very person to put the squeeze on the lord of the manor.’

  ‘Put the squeeze on him?’ Words were beginning to fail me.

  ‘That was the idea. It came to me as a result of knee-work.’

  ‘So you brought us down to that freezing rectory just so I could blackmail the local benefactor?’

  ‘Didn’t it turn out well!’

  ‘May the Lord
forgive you.’

  ‘He’s very forgiving.’

  ‘Next time,’ I spoke to the man of God severely, ‘the church can do its blackmailing for itself.’

  ‘Oh, we’re quite used to that.’ The rector smiled at me in what I thought was a lofty manner. ‘Particularly around Christmas.’

  Rumpole Rests His Case

  ‘Members of the jury. This case has occupied only ten days of your lives. In a week or two you will have forgotten every detail about the dead budgerigar, the torn-up photograph of Sean Connery, the mouldering poached egg on toast behind the sitting-room curtain and the mysterious cry (was it a call for help, as the prosecution invite you to believe, or the delighted shriek produced by a moment of sexual ecstasy?) which could be heard issuing from 42B Mandela Buildings on that sultry and fatal night of July the twenty-third. All this has been but a part, a fleeting moment perhaps, of your lives, but for the woman I represent, the woman who has endured every scrap of innuendo, scandal and abuse the almighty Crown Prosecution Service can dredge up, with the vast resources of the state at their disposal, for her this case represents the whole of her future life. That and nothing less than that is at stake in this trial. And it is her life I now leave, Members of the Jury, in your hands, confident that she will hear from your foreman, in the fullness of time, the words that will give the remainder of her life back to her: “Not guilty!” So I thank you for listening to me, Members of the Jury. I rest my case.’

  The sweetest moment of an advocate’s life comes when he sits down after his final speech, legs tired of standing, shirt damp with honest sweat, mouth dried up with words. He sits back and a great weight slides off his shoulders. There’s absolutely nothing more that he can do. All the decisions, the unanswered questions, the responsibility for banging up a fellow human being, have now shifted to the judge and the jury. The defence has rested and the Old Bailey hack can rest with it.

  As I sat, relaxed, and placed my neck comfortably against the wooden rail behind me, I removed the wig, scratched my head for comfort, and put it on again. As I rested, I looked for a moment at His Honour Judge Bullingham, an Old Bailey judge now promoted to trying murders. To call them trials is perhaps to flatter the learned judge, who conducts the proceedings as though the Old Bailey were a somewhat prejudiced and summary offshoot of the Spanish Inquisition. One of my first jobs as a defending counsel in the present case was to taunt and tempt, by many daring passes of the cape and neat side-steps in the sand, the bellowing and red-eyed bull to come out as such a tireless fighter on behalf of the prosecution that the jury began to see him as I did. They might, perhaps, acquit my client because an ill-tempered judge was making it so desperately clear that he wanted her convicted.

  But who had killed the budgerigar, a bird which, it seemed, had stood equally high in the regard of both the husband and the wife? It was as I toyed with this question, in an increasingly detached sort of way, that I closed my eyes and found not darkness but a sudden flood of bright golden light into which the familiar furnishings of Court Number One at the Old Bailey seemed to have melted away and vanished. Then I saw a small black dot which, rushing towards me like a shooting star, grew rapidly into the face of His Honour Judge Bullingham, who filled the landscape wearing the complacent expression of a man about to pass a sentence of life imprisonment. Then I heard a voice, deeper and more alarming than that of any clerk of the court I had ever heard before, saying, ‘Have you reached a verdict on which you all agree?’ ‘We have,’ some faint voice answered. ‘Do you find the defendant Rumpole guilty or not guilty?’ But before the answer could be given, the great light faded, and Bullingham’s face melted away with it. There was a stab of pain in my chest, night fell and I became, I suppose, unconscious.

  Undoubtedly, this was a dramatic way of ending a closing speech. Mrs Ballard, known round the Bailey as ‘Matey’, was soon on the scene, as I understand it loosening my collar and pulling off my wig. The prosecutor rose to ask His Honour what steps he wished to take in view of the complete collapse of Mr Rumpole.

  ‘He’s not dead. I’m sure of that.’ Bullingham declined to accept the evidence. ‘He’s tried that one on me before.’ This was strictly true, when, many years before, the stubborn old Bull dug his heels in and refused an adjournment, so I had to feign death as the only legal loophole left if I wanted to delay the proceedings. I put on, as I thought, a pretty good performance on that occasion. But this was no gesture of theatrical advocacy. Matey made the appropriate telephone call. An ambulance, howling with delight, was enjoying its usual dangerous driving round Ludgate Circus. Strong men in uniform, impeded by offers of incompetent help from the prosecution team no doubt thankful to see the back of me, rolled me out of my usual seat and on to a stretcher. So I left court (was it for the last time?) feet first.

  ‘I know what this is,’ I thought as I looked upon the vision of hell. My chest was still crunching with pain. There was a freezing draught blowing scraps of torn-up and discarded paper across the lino, and a strong smell composed of equal parts rubber and disinfectant. I saw some shadowy figures, a mother with a child on her lap, a white-faced girl with staring eyes and a scarlet mouth, and old man, his tattered coat tied with string, who seemed to have abandoned all hope and was muttering to himself, a patient Chinese couple, the woman holding up a hand swathed in a bloodstained bandage. They all sat beneath a notice which read: ‘Warning. The average waiting time here is four and a half hours.’ It seemed a relatively short period measured against eternity. If this place wasn’t hell, I thought, it was, at least, some purgatorial anteroom.

  When I had opened my eyes I had found myself staring at the ceiling, yellow plaster mysteriously stained, a globe surrounding a light in which, it seemed, all the neighbourhood insects had come to die. Then I realized, with a sudden pang, that I was lying on some particularly hard surface. It felt like metal and plastic and I was more or less covered with a blanket. Then a vision appeared, a beautiful Indian girl with a clipboard, wearing a white coat and a look of heavenly confusion. Perhaps this wasn’t hell after all.

  ‘Hello, Mr Robinson. Are you quite comfortable?’

  ‘No.’ I still had, so it seemed, retained the gift of speech.

  ‘No, you’re not comfortable?’

  ‘No, and I’m not Mr Robinson either.’

  ‘Oh. So that’s all right then.’ She made a tick somewhere on her clipboard and vanished. I missed her but could no longer worry. I stirred with discomfort and went back to sleep.

  When I woke up again, it must have been much later. The windows which once let in faint daylight were now black. The old man who had once sat quietly was now wandering round the room, muttering complaints and, from time to time, shouting, ‘Vengeance is mine!’ or ‘Up the Arsenal!’ There was a clattering as of a milk cart parking, and a formidable machine was wheeled up beside me, a thing of dials and trailing wires steered by a young man this time, also in a white coat. He had a large chin, gingery hair and an expression of thinly disguised panic. He also had another clipboard which he consulted.

  ‘Ted Robinson?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Collapsed in the workplace?’

  ‘If you call the Old Bailey a workplace. Which I certainly never do.’

  ‘All the same, you collapsed, didn’t you?’

  He’d got me there. ‘Yes,’ I had to admit. ‘I collapsed completely.’

  ‘All right, Mr Robinson. I’ll just get you wired up.’

  ‘But I’m really not …’

  ‘You’ll make it much easier for both of us if you don’t talk. Just lie still and relax.’

  I lay still as wires were fixed to me. I watched a line on a flickering screen which seemed to be on a perpetual downward curve. The stranger in the white coat was also watching. In the end the machine handed him a scrap of paper.

  ‘Rest. A time in bed,’ he told me. ‘That’s the best we can do for you.’

  ‘But I haven’t got a bed.’

  ‘Neither ha
ve we.’ He began to laugh, holding on to my arm as though he wanted me to join in the joke. ‘Neither have we.’ He repeated the phrase, as though to squeeze the last drops of laughter out of it. ‘I expect someone, sometime, will do something about it. In the meantime, your job is to rest. Have you got that, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘You know my name?’

  ‘Of course I do. We’ve got it written down. I don’t know why you kept calling yourself Robinson all the time.’

  No doubt the man worked unsociable hours. He wandered away from me in a sort of daze. Everything became terribly silent and, once again, I fell asleep despite the crunching pain.

  My sleep was not undisturbed. Half awake and only a little conscious, I felt that I was on the move. I opened my eyes for a moment and saw the ceiling of a long passage gliding past. Then gates clanged. Was I at last going the way of too many of my customers? Was I being banged up? It was a possibility I chose to ignore until I felt myself rolled over again. I caught a glimpse of a kindly black face, the brilliant white teeth and hands pulling, in a determined way, at what was left of my clothing. Then I was alone again in the darkness, and I heard, like the waves of a distant sea, the sounds of low incessant snores, and the expulsion of breath was like the rattle of small stones on the beach as the waves retreat.

  ‘I didn’t bring you grapes, Rumpole. I thought you wouldn’t want grapes.’

  ‘No interest in grapes.’ My voice, as I heard it, came out in a hoarse whisper, a ghostly shadow of the rich courtroom baritone which had charmed juries and rattled the smoothest bent copper telling the smoothest lies. ‘I’m only interested in grapes when they’ve been trodden underfoot, carefully fermented and bottled for use in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar.’

  ‘Don’t talk so much. That’s a lesson you’ll have to learn from now on, Rumpole.’

  I looked at Hilda. She had smartened herself up for this hospital visit, wearing her earrings, a new silk blouse and smelling a great deal more strongly than usual of her Violetta Eau de Toilette.