Rumpole Rests His Case

by John Mortimer

  ‘All right then.’ He was looking at me, as though accepting an inevitable conclusion. ‘You'll do, right? You're cool.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ I looked at old Beazely and confirmed my engagement. ‘That's settled then.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Ben looked longingly back to the table where the other student waiters and waitresses were laughing, or blowing across the top of a bottle to produce a strange boom. None of them, so far as I knew, was on bail awaiting trial. Ben wanted to get away to join them, I thought, and not to go home.

  ‘For the moment. Come and see me in London, and don't vanish this time. You can send Mr Beazely an e-mail, just to confirm you'll be there.’

  ‘All right then.’ Ben couldn't wait to get up. ‘Thank you very much.’ It was an automatic thank you, his mother must have taught him to say it when he went to his first party. ‘Thank you very much for having me.’ He was not so very much older when it was a thank you for doing his case of harassment and assault.

  ‘Just one more question.’ I looked up at the young man who seemed, in many ways, still a child. ‘Do you like poetry?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He looked puzzled and I had to explain.

  ‘Stuff in short lines. It rhymes quite often.. Do you read it ever?’

  ‘Not really. I'm not bothered with it.’ He still looked longingly towards his friends.

  ‘But you read some at school?’

  ‘At school, yes. Most of it's boring.’

  ‘Have you read Yeats, for instance?’

  ‘Yeats? Never heard of him. Sorry, I've got to go now.’ And he was away, back in his own world, with the young people of the college who found poetry boring and helped out at II Paradiso in the evenings.

  ‘It's hopeless though, isn't it? All the e-mails have got his name on them, for God's sake,’ Beazely said, as we stood on the windy platform of Hartscombe station waiting for the last train to London. ‘They all came from his machine.’

  ‘He called her “Prune”,’ I remembered.

  ‘What's that got to do with it?’

  ‘If you nursed a secret, powerful lust for a girl, so strong that you bombarded her with passionate and sexually explicit e-mails, if you were tormented with such urgent longings, do you think you'd call her “Prune”?’

  Beazely frowned, puzzled. Clearly I had invited him to speculate on an alien world, a territory far from his quiet, orderly life as a country solicitor. ‘I still think we're on a loser. Is this Prune business your only point?’

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘Not quite the only one.’

  It was about two in the morning when I undressed in the bathroom, climbed into my pyjamas and fitted myself into my side of the bed as far as possible from the sleeping Hilda.

  ‘Rumpole,’ her voice boomed out of the darkness, ‘where do you think you've been?’

  ‘I'm not sure. Probably dinner at the Ivy with a couple of starlets and then to Stringfellow's for the lap dancing. Oh, and I caught a bit of a cold playing chemmy. We'll have to take out a second mortgage.’

  ‘Absolute stuff and nonsense! You tell as many lies as your clients. It must be catching.’

  The voice of She Who Must Be Obeyed died away into the night. I had a momentary vision of a young girl, gazing up to heaven in mixed terror and joy, as a god, disguised as a swan, swooped down to ravish her. And then I, too, fell asleep.

  ‘Naturally we want to be with him when he sees you, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘It's worried his mother almost to death.’

  ‘It's worried you too, darling. I told you, Mr Rumpole, Chris treats him exactly as though he was his own son.’

  Beazely the solicitor, looking unusually embarrassed, had brought the Swithins to my room.

  ‘I can understand exactly how worried you are.’ I started to pour a little oil on the troubled parents who appeared outraged.

  ‘He's given us such an incredibly hard time for years. And now this. Have you no idea what we are going through?’

  ‘I'm sure it's been horrible,’ I hastened to reassure Chris. ‘So why not take a little time off. Drop into a cinema. Have tea at a posh hotel. I just need to see my client alone. Otherwise he might be reluctant to say things you'd find hurtful.’

  ‘Believe me, Mr Rumpole,’ Chris gave me a sad little smile, ‘he's perfectly capable of saying things we find hurtful to our faces. He's quite prepared to tell his mother she's fat, or me that I'm drunk when I just happen to open another bottle of wine at dinner.’

  ‘Then I ask you to leave to save yourselves further pain.’

  Hermione, with a sigh of resignation, moved towards the door. Chris followed her with displeasure. ‘I suppose you'll allow us to attend our son's trial?’ he said. ‘That'll be far the most painful moment for us.’

  ‘Of course I want you to be there. I'm sure,’ I told Chris, ‘that you'll be ready and willing to give evidence of Ben's good character.’

  As soon as they left me, the telephone rang. A miracle had taken place and the werewolf was downstairs. I told Henry to bring him up as soon as his mother and Chris were clear of the building. Then I opened the brief and read the last document, an e-mail from our client to Beazely. It was headed ‘chimes@fishnet.co.uk and the message, which I took a minute to decode, read ‘HOPE 2CUB4 5PM 2MORROW’. It was signed with nothing but a smiling face which appeared, together with the address at the top of the document, on all the messages which were the subject of the prosecution case.

  Ben Swithin had dressed down for the occasion, wearing jeans with ink writing on the knees, a baggy sweater with holes in it and trainers that might have been used for a marathon run through mud. He looked even younger than usual, a face unmarked by the years, a contrast to the carefully, perhaps expensively preserved good looks of his mother and stepfather.

  So I turned from the face of innocence to the pile of printed-out e-mails which dealt with an encyclopaedia of sexual fantasies, the penetration of every orifice, the ritual humiliations to be inflicted on the innocent Prune, a girl doing her A-levels at Hartscombe college. The language was constantly obscene, frequently ugly but, from time to time, as I had suggested to Chris, unexpectedly poetic. The werewolf read through them and appeared genuinely shocked. ‘That,’ he said with all the outrage of youth, ‘is disgusting! Whoever wrote that needs locking up.’

  However, Ben admitted that the messages were headed by his e-mail address and that he used the name ‘Chimes’. ‘Dad suggested that when he gave me the computer. It was a sort of joke about the Chimes of Big Ben. He thought it was like a clever idea so I went along with it. “Fishnet” is my provider.’

  ‘So they all seem to come from you. Did you write them?’

  ‘I never even heard,’ he was looking at me steadily, ‘of doing half these things to anybody.’

  So we went through the dates and times the messages were sent. The times were late at night and Ben tried to remember which dates he was at home, or when he worked very late at the restaurant and stayed with friends, sleeping on other people's floors in Hartscombe. The task of trying to get Ben and his friends to remember dates and places with any accuracy whatever was one I was happy to leave to old Beazely, who had read the e-mails with a certain detachment, even going so far as to say after the werewolf had left us, ‘I never saw any point in bondage, but there are one or two things in here I might suggest to my wife Avril. She used to be a bit of a goer in her day.’

  Before we parted, I asked him to get hold of that persistent sleuth Fig Newton, and get him to keep a discreet watch with a view to satisfying my curiosity about certain aspects of our case.

  Unlike Beazely, I found nothing in the documents I could possibly have suggested to Hilda who, as far as I knew, would not care to be a receptacle for honey. When I told her that I was defending a boy accused of bombarding a schoolgirl with obscene messages, she looked at me as though she had always known I followed a sordid and debased profession, and announced that she would be off to visit her old schoolfriend Do
do Mackintosh in Cornwall. ‘I don't want to be about, Rumpole, while you're reading disgusting things, even to yourself. I'll enjoy a breath of fresh air in Lamorna Cove.’

  Some nights later, I was discussing the wear and tear of married life with Claude Erskine-Brown in Pommeroy's when Soapy Sam Ballard joined us in his new companionable ex-Bonzo mode. I told them both that my wife was fleeing to Land's End rather than be near me when I was reading erotic material.

  ‘Does that mean,’ Ballard looked hopeful, ‘that your flat will be empty?’

  ‘Not altogether empty. I'll be there.’

  ‘Oh, I don't mind about you,’ our Head of Chambers was kind enough to say. ‘I was planning a little gathering. Just a few old friends. And we're looking for a venue.’

  ‘What about the desirable family home in Belsize Park?’

  ‘Wouldn't do at all. My wife wouldn't entertain the idea. Can we gather at yours? Of course you'd be very welcome to join us.’

  ‘There's just one condition.’ I was determined to sell the mansion flat for a high price. ‘Are small cigars permissible in my room in Chambers from now on?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose so.’ The new, reconstituted, ex-Bonzo Ballard, the character who pined for his youth and gazed longingly at girls' bottoms, gave his permission and we had a deal.

  There are certain cases undertaken by a criminal defender in which, on entering Court, you feel you've stepped into a giant refrigerator into which you're shut, freezing, for the rest of the trial. The cold winds of disapproval howl at you from all sides and every time you stand up you feel as if you are clearly identified as a septic sore on the body of the nation, closely related to the alleged sex offender in the dock. Such was my feeling when I entered the Crown Court, His Honour Judge Denis Wintergreen presiding, sitting at Hartscombe in the Home Counties.

  The Swithins were, of course, there, sitting in front of me, holding hands to support each other in what everyone realized was the final and bitterest blow struck by the evil teenager in the dock. The prosecution was in the friendly hands of the owlish Adrian Hoddinot, who at least had the decency not to look at me as though I were a serial rapist who happened to have a wig on his head.

  Adrian opened the case and read out some of the most horrific e-mails to a stony-faced Judge who wouldn't have minded saying ‘Guilty' right away. I asked him to read one more, page thirty-two of the bundle. Obligingly the prosecutor read, without emotion:

  How can your terrified, vague fingers push my feathered glory from your loosening thighs? I will produce a shudder in your loins. Ours will be an historic moment when I, the great bird God, swoop down on you.

  ‘Is there any particular reason why you want that one read, Mr Rumpole?’ Wintergreen was a hefty, square-jawed Judge who had played rugby football for his country. He clearly thought that any defence of this werewolf in the dock would be nothing but an unnecessary waste of time.

  ‘The words don't suggest anything to you, Your Honour?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nothing more than that whoever wrote them must have a peculiarly filthy mind.’

  ‘That may not be fair to the particular author concerned.’

  ‘That will be a matter for the Jury to decide, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Exactly! So wouldn't it be best if Your Honour would refrain from comment until that time comes?’

  ‘Continue with your opening, Mr Hoddinot.’ Wintergreen cut me dead and looked only at the prosecution. ‘Perhaps we may be spared any further interruption from Mr Rumpole.’ I'd have to face it, relations between me and the learned judge during this trial were not going to be friendly.

  Prunella Haviland gave evidence. She had received all the e-mails. At first she tried to ignore them, but finally she told her parents and, when the messages kept on coming, they told the police. She stood in the witness box, a slim, sensible, pretty girl with clear features who gave her evidence calmly, sensibly and without embarrassment. You could see her, when the bloom of her youth had faded a little, as a loyal wife and, like Hermione, a frequenter of charity dinners and coffee mornings in Hartscombe.

  ‘What effect did receiving all these messages have on you – on your state of mind?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘Well, to start with I didn't take them too seriously. But then I got worried, of course. I didn't want to go out on my own at night. Particularly after what happened down the passage off the market square…’

  ‘Tell the Jury about that.’

  So she told them, clearly, calmly, without exaggeration. She'd been to American Pie, the club in Thames Street. She left early because she had an essay to finish, but it was dark when she walked through the market square and even darker when she got to the narrow passage I'd found with Mr Beazely on our way to the station. She was walking quickly, already nervous in the dark, when she felt strong arms gripping her from behind and a quick, damp kiss on the back of her neck. She struggled and freed herself. Then she ran, fast and without turning back, until she reached the main road.

  ‘You never saw his face?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you've no idea who he was?’

  ‘I couldn't tell. He was just someone strong. He had a smell. I noticed that.’

  ‘What sort of smell?’

  ‘An aftershave. Machismo Three. I know it because my dad uses it. It's quite a nice smell, really.’

  ‘But it wasn't nice being attacked in the dark alley?’

  ‘Please don't ask leading questions.’ I rose wearily to my feet.

  ‘Have you some objection, Mr Rumpole?’ Wintergreen could see me standing there with my mouth open – I don't know what His Honour thought I was doing.

  ‘My learned friend asked a question which suggests an answer to the witness. That's called a “leading question” and I object to it.’ I explained, to the best of my ability, the situation to the rugger-playing Judge.

  ‘I will allow the question.’ And His Honour asked it again, from the bench. ‘Was it nice being attacked in that way, Miss Haviland?’

  ‘No, Sir. It certainly was not.’

  ‘“It certainly was not.”’ His Honour repeated the words loudly and clearly, just in case we had the odd deaf juror, as he wrote them down. And then he asked, as though expecting the answer ‘No’, ‘Have you any questions of this witness, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Just a few, my Lord.’ I turned to Prunella and became, I hope, Rumpole at his most gentle, charming and polite. ‘Miss Haviland, I realize how upsetting these dreadful messages must have been to you. I suppose, at first, all you knew was that they were from someone called “Chimes”?’

  ‘Yes. That's right.’

  ‘Thank you. When did you discover that “Chimes” was in fact Ben Swithin?’

  ‘When my dad told the police. They found that out.’

  ‘Was that after the attack in the dark passage?’

  ‘It was after that, yes.’

  ‘So when you were attacked, you didn't think it was Ben who was sending you these obscene messages.’

  ‘I didn't know that. No.’

  ‘So it might have been any man in the world who happened to use Machismo aftershave?’

  ‘Well,’ Prunella differed from the learned Judge in that she had a completely fair attitude to her case, ‘I suppose that's right.’

  ‘But now you know what you know,’ the rugger player couldn't help joining in this scrum, ‘who do you think attacked you?’

  ‘I think it was Ben Swithin.’

  ‘“ think it was Ben Swithin,”’ His Honour repeated very loudly, for the benefit of the deaf juror, as he wrote it down. Then he turned on me, careful to sound more in sorrow than in anger.

  ‘Mr Rumpole. Hasn't this young lady suffered enough?’

  ‘She has certainly suffered. I quite agree with that.’

  ‘Then why add to her suffering by making her go over all these painful matters again? Can't you leave it at that, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Your Honour is telling me I shouldn't cross-examine?’
/>   ‘Not to cause this young girl pain, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Then how about the pain inflicted on the young boy in the dock if he's convicted of a crime he didn't commit?’

  ‘Naturally, when it comes to sentence I shall have regard to the amount of embarrassment caused to Miss Haviland at the trial.’

  ‘You mean you intend to punish my client for the way I choose to conduct his case?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole, that was an outrageous remark!’

  ‘Then it was very like Your Honour's intervention.’

  The learned Judge was staring at me, strongly tempted, I believe, to hurl himself from the bench and tackle me low. So I decided to take preventive action. As I was considering this, I saw Chris Swithin writing a note which he turned and handed up to me. Before reading it, I assured the not-so-learned Judge, ‘If Your Honour stops my cross-examination, I shall have to ask for an adjournment so I can go straight to the Court of Appeal.’ It was this threat that tackled the Judge, perhaps temporarily stunned him. The Appeal Court had spoken unkindly of recent Wintergreen summings up. ‘Slipshod,’ they had said. ‘Misleading… Clearly not thought out.’ As he picked himself up and regained consciousness, I read the note from Chris.

  ‘Don't ask any more questions!’ was what my client's stepfather said. I squashed his note into a small ball and dropped it on the floor as the Judge kicked the case into touch. ‘You may cross-examine, Mr Rumpole. Whether your questions help your case is quite another matter.’

  ‘Miss Haviland, have you known Ben for a long time?’

  ‘We were at primary school together.’

  ‘And at secondary school. And then you were getting ready for A-levels at Hartscombe College together.’

  ‘That's right.’

  ‘At any time at all, when you were with Ben, has he done anything you would complain of?’

  ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘Did you like him, until you got these messages?’

  ‘He was all right. I mean, well, yes. We were good friends.’

  ‘Did he ever try to kiss you?’