Rumpole Rests His Case

by John Mortimer

  ‘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 Sparks-man 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 Denis 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 D. I. 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. D. I. 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 come-back 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 Sparks-man, 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.

  D. I. 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 and the Remembrance of Things Past

  There are no sadder relics of the past than the rows of small, semi-detached houses that line one of the western approaches to London. Once they were lived in and alive. Minis were washed on Sunday mornings inside their lean-to garages, bright dahlias and tea roses grew in their front gardens, their doorbells chimed and, on winter evenings, lights glowed from the stained-glass portholes in their front doors.

  Now their blind windows are stuffed with hardb
oard, their front doors nailed up, their gardens piled with rubble and their garages collapsed. They are derelict victims of a long-delayed scheme to widen the main road, and some of these houses have already been pulled out like rotten teeth. When it came to be the turn of 35 Primrose Drive, a digger, prising up the sitting-room floor, lifted, with apparent tenderness, the well-preserved and complete skeleton of a young woman. Reports were made to the police and the coroner's office. D. I. Winthrop, an enthusiastic young officer, started an inquiry which led, to his great satisfaction, to the arrest of William Twineham, the sole owner of the house since its birth in the sixties. Twineham's wife Josephine had, the D. I. discovered, vanished unaccountably some thirty-three years previously.

  *

  I was standing outside my Chambers in Equity Court, wearing my hat to protect the thinning top of my head from the drizzle and thinking, as my old darling Wordsworth would say, of old, unhappy, far-off things and crimes so long ago.

  Around me in the doorways, under the arches or leaning against a sheltered wall, were many poor souls like me, driven out of doors. Most of them were girls. Short-skirted, high-heeled, with cigarettes dangling from their lips, they would seem to any passer-by to be ladies of the street, and the same casual observer might have been forgiven for supposing that the Outer Temple, home of the legal profession, had become a red-light district in the manner of downtown Amsterdam. The casual observer would have been wrong. Neither they nor I were out of doors to offer sexual services. We were temporary exiles from Chambers which had become smoke-free zones.

  The Inn was all for it, as was Soapy Sam Ballard. Mizz Liz Probert, who has now taken to coming to work on a daunting motorbike which pumps more gas into the atmosphere than a lifetime's small cigars, went over to the Green Party. Claude Erskine-Brown blamed my cheroots for the fact that his aunt had been flooded out by a climate change in Surrey. In vain I argued for the democratic rights of minorities. The smoking ban was introduced by a tyrannical majority, so I basked in the warmth of a small cigar as the rain settled in the brim of my hat.

  ‘Loitering with intent, Rumpole?’

  ‘Still polluting the atmosphere…?’

  Two grey, almost ghost-like figures approached through the rain. They were the opera-loving, wine-tasting, inadequate advocate Claude Erskine-Brown and none other than Soapy Sam Ballard, the unworthy Head of my Chambers.

  These were the two who had undertaken to save the planet earth from extinction by kicking Rumpole, and our junior secretary Dawn, out into a storm to have a puff, an act which, in my humble submission, bore a close resemblance to the way Goneril and Regan treated their old Dad.

  ‘I'm glad you're showing some respect for the rules, Rumpole. Respect for the rules is the vital ingredient of a happy ship.’

  ‘What do you mean, respect for the rules?’ I found Ballard's description of me as a rules respecter particularly offensive. ‘I simply came out here to think.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Erskine-Brown was unconvinced. ‘What were you thinking about, exactly?’

  ‘Skeletons. And how many family homes in respectable areas may have skeletons under the floorboards. God knows what goes on behind the double locks and burglar alarms. Have you ever looked under your floorboards, Ballard?’

  The question, I was glad to see, had Soapy Sam looking momentarily worried. Erskine-Brown, like a faithful hound, came to his master's rescue with a piece of irrelevant information. ‘You just put one of those disgusting whiffs into your mouth, Rumpole. You clearly came out here to smoke.’

  ‘I came out here to be alone,’ I assured the man with what dignity I could muster. ‘Clearly I failed miserably.’

  ‘Just try and remember – smoke causes global warming even out of doors. Did you see the pictures of Godalming?’

  ‘No, I didn't. I don't go about searching for pictures of Godalming, Erskine-Brown.’

  ‘My aunt,’ Claude's voice sank to the doom-laden level of a news reader announcing the end of the world, ‘had to be taken shopping in a collapsible canoe.’

  *

  ‘Here's your man, Mr Rumpole.’

  The screw on duty at the Brixton interview room was used to delivering a succession of alleged murderers, rapists and receivers of stolen laptops to me and my faithful instructing solicitor, ‘Bonny' Bernard, where a chair awaited them by the Formica-covered table which bore my brief, Bernard's packet of courtesy Marlboro Lights and the top of a tin of Oxo cubes which served as an ashtray.

  The captive now delivered was markedly different from the usual run of Rumpole's clientele, in that he was neither angry, cocky, chippy nor overly anxious to please his brief. He didn't, as some customers do, appear eager to pretend that his dire situation was a bit of a joke. To begin with he was tall, well over six foot, causing me to look up at him. He was old, I should have said in his late sixties. He was also handsome, with clear-cut features, unblinking blue eyes and a head of white hair, well brushed, as perhaps his only vanity. He stood looking at me and Bonny Bernard with the half-smile of an Old Testament prophet who had arrived in Gomorrah and found it just as sad and disgusting as he had been led to believe.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Twineham.’ I waved him to a chair. ‘Do have one of Mr Bernard's cigarettes.’

  ‘Thank you. I do not care to pollute the lovely world the good Lord has given us.’ Another of them! I accepted the fact, then I thought that at least no one in prison had to go out into the street to smoke.

  ‘This is Mr Rumpole.’ Mr Bernard made the introduction. ‘He'll be defending you at the trial.’

  ‘The Lord has sent you.’ William Twineham looked at me as though he had been given a warning of my arrival into his life and thought there was, after all, nothing much he could do about it. ‘It's not for me to question the inscrutable ways of Providence.’

  ‘You and your wife moved into number 35 Primrose Drive, as I understand, as soon as it was built.’ It was time, I thought, to move away from the concerns of God to such mundane details as might interest an Old Bailey Jury.

  ‘Certainly. She was known as Jo in certain quarters.’ And then the alleged murderer gave us a sudden smile. It was modest, unexpectedly charming and seemed to illuminate the shadowy interview room. ‘To me she was always Josephine.’ He said it tenderly; whether he meant it or was treating us to an expert professional performance was not yet clear.

  ‘So there were no previous occupants of the house?’ No one else, was what I meant, to have stowed an unwanted wife under the floorboards.

  ‘We watched it being built after we'd put down our deposit. It was to be our house together for the next five years.’

  ‘And your home until the Council took over all the houses. You lived there alone?’

  ‘I still felt Josephine was there. The memories.’

  ‘In fact she left you in 1968. I'm looking at the statement of Paul and Louisa Arkwright, your semi-detached neighbours. You told them you didn't know where your wife had gone. Or with whom?’

  ‘I told them that. Yes!’

  ‘Was that true?’

  ‘It seemed true. She had left me!’

  ‘What does that mean – “seemed”?’

  ‘How much can we ever truly know, Mr Rumpole, this side of the grave? When we see through a glass darkly.’

  Looking at the next-door neighbours' statements, I felt I could see through a glass altogether too clearly.

  ‘The Arkwrights say they heard sounds of a violent quarrel shortly before your wife disappeared. Is that true…?’

  William Twineham's smile died: His eyes were closed, his body moved as though in time to unheard music as he recited in a muted singsong, ‘And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time from the face of the serpent.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Saint John the Divine.’

  ‘What's it meant to mean?’

  ‘We must w
ait, Mr Rumpole, you and I must wait, until all things are made clear.’

  ‘We can't wait, I'm afraid.’ Bonny Bernard seemed to have found the Book of Revelations singularly unrevealing. ‘Your trial's fixed for Tuesday the seventeenth. We've got just about three weeks.’

  But I was looking back over thirty-three years. I had the prosecution album of photographs. The first was taken from one framed on William Twineham's mantelpiece in the bedsit he had moved to when number 35 was taken over. I saw a girl laughing, with long, curly hair, which shone on some faraway summer afternoon, crowned with a daisy chain. I turned the page, and there on a mortuary table was the completely reassembled skeleton, the empty ribcage, the skull with dark sockets, all that was left of Josephine Twineham, known to everyone except her husband as Jo.

  I took a deep breath and tried again. ‘Mr Twineham, I don't know exactly what your religious beliefs might be…’

  ‘He regularly attends his church in Pinner.’ Bernard had a note in his file.

  ‘The True Church Apostolic. I know nothing of your religious beliefs, Mr Rumpole.’

  I wondered how much I knew myself. My creed included a simple faith in trial by Jury and the presumption of innocence. The eleventh commandment was, ‘Thou Shalt Not Plead Guilty’. I had a faint hope that the Day of Judgment, if there was ever to be a Day of Judgment, would not entail a day in Court as ferocious and unjust as a bad time before Judge Bullingham down the Old Bailey. I decided to avoid the issue. ‘I don't think my beliefs are strictly relevant.’

  ‘Beliefs, Mr Rumpole,’ our client was smiling again now, ‘are always relevant. My church has taught me to interpret Revelations and understand the gift of prophecy.’

  ‘Then perhaps you will reveal this to us. Did you kill your wife?’

  Mr Twineham was looking at me steadily, his smile undimmed. ‘Josephine's death was an act of God.’

  ‘And did you give God any sort of assistance at the time?’