Forever Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t want flowers, Rumpole.’

  ‘No. You’re right, Hilda, I wouldn’t want flowers.’ Plenty of time for flowers, I thought, later.

  ‘Flowers always look so sick in a hospital.’

  ‘That’s right, of course. Most of us do!’

  Conversation between myself and She Who Must Be Obeyed was flowing like cement. It wasn’t that we were embarrassed by the presence of other men on the ward. The snorer, the tooth-grinder, the serial urinator had headphones glued to their ears, their heads nodding gently to the beat of the easy listening. The young man who had lost a kidney held the hand of his visiting girlfriend; they only spoke occasionally and in whispers. The other youngish man, perhaps in his thirties, brown-haired with soft, appealing eyes and a perpetually puzzled expression, lay in the bed next to mine. His was a face I recognized from newspapers and the television, and I knew his name was David Stoker and that he had been operated on as a result of gunshot wounds.

  ‘Let this be a lesson to you, Rumpole,’ Hilda went on remorselessly. ‘You’ve got to give it all up.’

  This was how she spoke to me at home and she made no effort to moderate her tone, although the much-bandaged Stoker was well within earshot.

  ‘Give what up, Hilda? I don’t really mind giving up anything, so long as it’s not small cigars or Pommeroy’s Very Ordinary or the Bar.’

  ‘That’s the one!’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The Bar. That’s what you’ve got to give up. Well, after this business it’s perfectly obvious you can’t go on with it. All these criminals you’re so fond of defending will just have to go off to prison quietly, and about time too, if you want my opinion, Rumpole.’

  ‘Of course I want your opinion, Hilda. But …’

  ‘No “but” about it. I’ve spoken to the doctor here.’

  ‘That was nice of you. How is he?’

  ‘He’s perfectly well, Rumpole. Which is more than can be said about you. It’s your heart. You’ve put too great a strain on it. You do understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘His very words.’

  ‘He called me Robinson.’ I thought of the most likely explanation for this ridiculous verdict. ‘He’s seriously overworked. I don’t think, Hilda, you should attach the slightest importance to his evidence.’

  ‘That woman you were defending when you passed out. Your last case, Rumpole. The woman who stabbed her husband. You got her off.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘They let me read the Sunday papers. The jury found she didn’t mean to stab him. She held the knife to keep him away and he stumbled and fell on it. That’s what the jury believed.’

  ‘What you persuaded them to believe.’

  ‘I have a certain skill, as an advocate.’

  ‘A skill that’ll finish you off, Rumpole, if you don’t give it up entirely.’

  ‘Anyway, he wasn’t a particularly nice man. He wrung her budgerigar’s neck.’

  ‘Oh, well, then I suppose he deserved it.’ She was easily persuaded. ‘But now you’ve given it all up, you’ll be able to enjoy life.’

  ‘Enjoy life doing what?’

  ‘Well, you can rest. Help around the flat. I’ve always thought we ought to go in for window boxes. If you make a good recovery you could help me with the shopping.’ I couldn’t think of a weaker incentive for a return to health. But I didn’t say so. A silence fell between us and then she said, ‘I bumped into Chappy Bowers the other day.’

  ‘Who?’ The name meant little to me at first.

  ‘You must remember Chappy. He was in Daddy’s chambers when you joined. He didn’t get much work. It was rather sad. He said he just couldn’t bear spinning improbable stories for ungrateful people.’

  ‘Then he clearly had absolutely no talent for the law.’

  ‘He went into the City and did a number of jobs. Then he fell on his feet. They made him secretary of his local golf club. Chappy Bowers loves his golf.’

  ‘And where did you bump into him – on the thirteenth green?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Rumpole. He rang me up when he read about your collapse in the Evening Standard. He agrees with me that you must have a complete rest. It’s the only answer.’

  ‘Has he got any medical qualifications, this Chappy person?’

  ‘Not that I know of, but he’s truly understanding, and, what’s more, he’s asked me out for dinner.’

  ‘Where to – the club house?’

  ‘Of course not. He knows this little place in Soho. Very intimate and excellent cooking. He’s told me I’ll adore Chez Achille … Good heavens!’

  This last breathed, barely whispered exclamation arose from Hilda’s observation of the bed next to mine. David Stoker had been called for an X-ray. He couldn’t immediately get up and go. A thin chain, about eight-foot long, was cuffed to his wrist and the wrist of an overweight screw who, dressed informally in a sweater and tracksuit trousers, sat at the end of David Stoker’s bed, easy listening also fastened to his ears. The screw rose and this mini-chaingang left us.

  ‘He’s in chains, Rumpole!’ Hilda couldn’t get over it. ‘That patient is in chains!’

  ‘That’s right.’ I did my best to reassure her. ‘He’s not dangerous. It’s just that he had his operation while awaiting trial and the prison hospital’s full up. He’s got a bit of previous form, I know. Apart from that he’s not a bad sort of young fellow.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Hilda repeated her prayer. ‘What’s he waiting trial for?’

  ‘House-breaking by night, I think it is. Armed with a pistol.’

  She looked at me then, and said, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘You just can’t keep away from them, can you, Rumpole? The criminal classes. You just can’t keep away from them at all.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole.’ The voice in the darkness came from the chained man in the bed beside me. ‘Was that your wife, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Well, I hardly thought it was your girlfriend.’ He laughed softly but I didn’t join in his laughter. ‘She’s a member of the public, isn’t she? All members of the public hate me for what they think I’ve done.’

  ‘What have you done, exactly?’

  ‘Only got shot up so badly I had to have two hours on the operating table. Only got pumped as full of lead as a fucking pencil. And for getting that done to me, I’ll probably get four years. That’s what they tell me my brief’s thinking of, four to five he reckons. That’s my youth gone, all that’s left of it.’

  ‘Who’s this brief you speak of?’

  ‘It’s a Mr Erskine-Brown QC. He’s a senior man.’

  ‘QC? I’ve always thought those letters stand for “Queer Customer”. If you’ve got Claude defending you, you might as well plead guilty. He’ll probably do you a very nice plea in mitigation.’ As soon as I’d said that I regretted it. It wasn’t worthy of me. The onset of death, I thought, brings out the worst in you.

  ‘I’m joking of course,’ I told him. ‘Claude Erskine-Brown is a man of considerable experience.’ And I restrained myself from adding, ‘Of opera.’

  There was silence then. At last my neighbour spoke in a smaller voice. ‘I always heard you were a fighter, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘Round the Scrubs. When I was in there. They were talking about it.’

  ‘You’ve got a bit of previous, haven’t you?’

  ‘Quite a bit, to be honest. I was a bad lad in my younger years. Before I decided to straighten myself out.’

  ‘Why don’t you two shut the fuck up.’ It was the snorer, to whom I owed quite a few sleepless nights, sending us a message from the other side of the ward.

  I had read enough, when I was alive and kicking, in the newspaper accounts of the shooting at Badgershide Wood to recall David Stoker’s past, both as instigator and victim of the affair, and to be able to inform Hilda of my neighbour’s problem. The next
day he opened his locker and brought out a bundle of press cuttings, copies of the indictment and statements of evidence, so I was able to sit up in bed and read the details of the events which had led my neighbour to the operating table and would take him to my familiar hunting ground at the Old Bailey and, in all probability, to a long term of imprisonment.

  Badgershide Wood, from what I found out about it, did its best to claim that it was still a country village, an island in the suburban sprawl that stretched from the north-west of London towards the Chiltern Hills. It had a small Norman church, a main street, two pubs, four antiques shops, a hairdressing salon called Snippers and a Thai restaurant. In the middle of the village, larger and more imposing than the church, was a Georgian house which had been the home of the Dunkerton family for generations. The present heir, Major Ben Dunkerton, was the hero who had peppered Stoker with shots and confined him to bed in chains.

  Major Ben Dunkerton, who succeeded in behaving like an eccentric but amiable country squire in what had, in fact, become a suburb of London, did a great deal to preserve Badgershide Wood’s claim to be a rural community. He was old enough to have joined the army in the last years of the war and had been honourably wounded after D-Day as a very young officer. He stayed on in the army until he took over the family business and became the chairman of a local firm of estate agents. During his long retirement he was a favourite customer at the Badger’s Arms, had a kind word for everyone in the village street and penetrated more deeply into the countryside to shoot with his old friends. He fished in Scotland and, although childless and a long-time widower, gave a lavish party for all the Badgershide Wood children at Christmas. He was spoken of with great affection as a thoroughly good chap, one who enjoyed his malt whisky and still, God bless him, had an eye for the girls.

  Major Dunkerton’s account of the night of the fifth of March was a simple one. He’d gone upstairs to get ready for bed when he heard sounds of breaking glass and something knocked over in the kitchen. He kept a shotgun upstairs, since there had been a number of cases of armed robbery in well-known country houses. He loaded the shotgun and went downstairs, calling first at the kitchen, where he saw a pane of glass broken, a window forced open and crockery smashed. Someone had undoubtedly crawled in through the window. The light had been left on.

  Then he crossed the hall to the library, which was also lit. The door was open and he could see someone standing by his desk, a man he had no difficulty in identifying as Stoker. As the intruder turned, the major saw he had what looked like an old army pistol in his hand. Before Stoker could shoot, the major fired the shotgun and he fell, as the major thought at first, dead. Before he could fully examine the fallen body, there was a loud knocking at the front door. It was Doctor Jefferson who, on his way to his home next door, had heard the shot and, when the major opened the door to him, saw what at first sight he also thought was a dead body.

  The police and the ambulance were called. When it was discovered that the shots hadn’t killed Stoker, the major was, to quote Doctor Jefferson, ‘in a terrible state of anxiety as to whether the wretched robber was going to live or die’. What was clear from the newspaper cuttings, however, was that the great British public couldn’t care less about the fate of my neighbour in the ward, and Major Ben Dunkerton was a national hero. His right to defend his house against an armed intruder was trumpeted. MAJOR’S HOUSE HIS CASTLE; HE GOT HIS SHOT IN FIRST; 76-YEAR-OLD MAJOR SHOOTS FOR HIS LIFE; ARMED THUGS BETTER NOT MESS WITH MAJOR BEN: such were the headlines in all the papers.

  The major was charged with unlawful wounding, grievous bodily harm and a firearms offence. It was clear that the press regarded his trial as a short preliminary before a triumphant acquittal and the receipt of a George Medal for bravery. Stoker, the armed robber, however, was sure to be sent to prison for a sizeable chunk of the foreseeable future, once he was well enough to leave hospital.

  Stoker’s statement told a very different story – and one which, in contrast to Major Ben’s clear account, seemed hard to swallow. His childhood had been perfectly happy. The only child of an insurance salesman and a devoted mother, he had done well at school and seemed set for a decent job, a first home on a mortgage and holidays on the Costa Brava. He was only seventeen, however, when, in the course of a night’s clubbing, he fell in with a group of boys a year or two older, who had graduated from nicking car radios and snatching unattended handbags to house-breaking. ‘It’s the excitement, Mr Rumpole,’ Stoker told me during one of our many conversations. ‘There’s no drug, no drink you can take like it. Standing in someone else’s place when you know anything you fancy is yours to pick up, and them snoring upstairs. All right, it’s dangerous. That’s what’s exciting about it. Dangerous but so easy, sometimes I had a hard job not to laugh out loud.’ By the time he was twenty-five, Stoker had half a dozen convictions and got four years.

  It was in prison that he began to write a wry, unselfpitying account of life in the nick and the memories of a house-breaker, which led, apparently, to his reform. His book was serialized in a Sunday paper. He became, in the public eye, the statutory reformed con, the hard man gone soft, who appeared on television chat shows, took part in Any Questions and was rung up to comment yet again on the latest Criminal Justice Act introduced by New Labour. So, instead of coming out of prison with a few pounds and an irresistible temptation to return to crime, Stoker had a flat in now fashionable Hackney and a steady income from his writing and as an adviser to a spate of British gangster films. He was held up as an example of how prison can work and how a long dose of it produces a reformed citizen wanting to appear on Newsnight. Such hopes were dashed by the appearance of David Stoker, not answering the questions of the day but armed and having broken into an elderly stranger’s house by night.

  As I say, Stoker’s explanation would have seemed way beyond the bounds of probability, even in the gangster films on which he gave advice. There was a girl named Dawn, once the girlfriend of one of his burgling mates, whom he had always fancied. They had met again by chance in a club round Notting Hill Gate and she had told him that she had tired of London and had a flat in a town near Badgershide Wood, where she had satisfied a long-held ambition to open a hairdressing salon. Now she had a thriving business offering up-to-the-minute hairdos to a large catchment area. So far so bad. Stoker’s knowledge of the village, and the presence of a large and robbable house, was now explained.

  From there on his story got stranger. He had, he said, met Major Ben Dunkerton before. Dawn was busy with a customer and he had gone for a walk in the woods, where an elderly man with a tweed cap and a walking stick came up to him and said he recognized him from the television.

  ‘I’ve seen you around the village from time to time,’ the major said. ‘Attractive place, isn’t it?’ And he added, with a particular emphasis, ‘I’m sure it must have many attractions for you.’

  Then he went on to be extremely complimentary to Stoker on his reform and his literary skills. ‘Wouldn’t your book make a tremendously exciting film?’ the major asked him, before mentioning a hugely famous, although also elderly, film director whom he said he had known ‘since our National Service days’, who would love to meet David. And so a meeting was arranged for one of the few nights when the director would be touching down in Badgershide Wood between Los Angeles and his current location in Morocco.

  ‘Have to be a bit late, I’m afraid. Sam is having dinner with the money people. But he’ll be back at my house around ten thirty, if you’d like to call in for a nightcap?’

  Stoker said he took all this in, including the major’s improbable demand for secrecy.

  ‘Sam would hate there to be any sort of publicity about meeting you before a deal’s done. So if you could keep quiet about all this, to everyone?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Better not even tell your friend the hairdresser. You know how quickly these stories get about.’

  ‘All right, I won’t tell her. I’m going back to London
tonight anyway.’

  ‘So why not drive straight to my house tomorrow evening? You can park round the back. Not a word to anybody.’

  Not unnaturally, Stoker was surprised at the complexity of these arrangements. ‘Why are you doing all this for me?’

  ‘Because I think, from what I’ve heard and read about you,’ the major told him, ‘you’re a decent lad that’s doing his best to go straight, and I want to encourage you.’

  Stoker put it down to being so used to obeying orders and having everything arranged for him in prison that he obeyed the major’s curious instructions. He drove down the next evening, straight from his flat in Hackney. He got to the major’s house at ten twenty-five, parked behind it and walked round to ring at the front door.

  Before he could touch the bell the door was opened by the smiling major, who showed him into the study, a book-lined room. On the desk, carefully laid out on the blotter between the paperweight and a letter-opener, lay an old service revolver.

  ‘Used to be mine in my army days. I brought it home when I was demobbed. I know you’re interested in guns.’

  ‘I never went tooled up,’ Stoker said he assured the major.

  ‘Just feel it. Perfect balance, hasn’t it? For an outdated weapon.’

  Again obedient, Stoker picked up the pistol, felt its weight as directed and put it down as quickly as possible. ‘I know Sam will want guns in his picture,’ the major said. ‘By the way he’s just gone upstairs for something. I’ll go and hurry him up.’

  The major left then, but returned almost immediately. What happened next was, according to Stoker, quite inexplicable. As he turned to face the door, his host lifted a shotgun and fired. Stoker remembered a blow like a kick from a horse, a sudden and terrible pain, and then darkness – until he came to, bumping in the back of an ambulance in such agony that he wished he’d never woken up.

  One other fact emerged from the mass of papers he’d handed me. Sam, the famous film director, was nowhere near England on the date of the shooting and, when asked, denied all knowledge of Badgershide or Major Dunkerton. All this proved was that either David Stoker or the major was lying prodigiously. That was no help to either of them.