by Merry Murder
“I did hear the Reverend Mother say—” Wrigglesworth was gazing vacantly at the empty Macon bottle “—that the Bishop likes his glass of port.”
“Then in the spirit of Christmas tolerance I’ll help you to sample some of Pommeroy’s Light and Tawny.”
A little later, Wrigglesworth held up his port glass in a reverent sort of fashion.
“You’re suggesting, are you, that I should make some special concession in this case because it’s Christmastime?”
“Look here, old darling.” I absorbed half my glass, relishing the gentle fruitiness and the slight tang of wood. “If you spent your whole life in that highrise hell-hole called Keir Hardie Court, if you had no fat prosecutions to occupy your attention and no prospect of any job at all, if you had no sort of occupation except war with the O’Dowds—”
“My own flat isn’t particularly comfortable. I don’t know a great deal about your home life, Rumpole. but you don’t seem to be in a tearing hurry to experience it.”
“Touché, Wrigglesworth, my old darling.” I ordered us a couple of refills of Pommeroy’s port to further postpone the encounter with She Who Must Be Obeyed and her rissoles.
“But we don’t have to fight to the death on the staircase,” Wrigglesworth pointed out.
“We don’t have to fight at all, Wrigglesworth.”
“As your client did.”
“As my client may have done. Remember the presumption of innocence.”
“This is rather funny, this is.” The prosecutor pulled back his lips to reveal strong, yellowish teeth and laughed appreciatively. “You know why your man Timson is called ‘Turpin’ ?”
“No.” I drank port uneasily, fearing an unwelcome revelation.
“Because he’s always fighting with that sword of his. He’s called after Dick Turpin, you see, who’s always dueling on television. Do you watch television, Rumpole?”
“Hardly at all.”
“I watch a great deal of television, as I’m alone rather a lot.” Wrigglesworth referred to the box as though it were a sort of penance, like fasting or flagellation. “Detective Inspector Wainwright told me about your client. Rather amusing, I thought it was. He’s retiring this Christmas.”
“My client?”
“No. D. I. Wainwright. Do you think we should settle on this port for the Bishop? Or would you like to try a glass of something else?”
“Christmas,” I told Wrigglesworth severely as we sampled the Cockburn, “is not just a material, pagan celebration. It’s not just an occasion for absorbing superior vintages, old darling. It must be a time when you try to do good, spiritual good to our enemies.”
“To your client, you mean?”
“And to me.”
“To you, Rumpole?”
“For God’s sake, Wrigglesworth!” I was conscious of the fact that my appeal was growing desperate. “I’ve had six losers in a row down the Old Bailey. Can’t I be included in any Christmas spirit that’s going around?”
“You mean, at Christmas especially it is more blessed to give than to receive?”
“I mean exactly that.” I was glad that he seemed, at last, to be following my drift.
“And you think I might give this case to someone, like a Christmas present?”
“If you care to put it that way, yes.”
“I do not care to put it in exactly that way.” He turned his pale-blue eyes on me with what I thought was genuine sympathy. “But I shall try and do the case of R. v. Timson in the way most appropriate to the greatest feast of the Christian year. It is a time, I quite agree, for the giving of presents.”
When they finally threw us out of Pommeroy’s, and after we had considered the possibility of buying the Bishop brandy in the Cock Tavern, and even beer in the Devereux, I let my instinct, like an aged horse, carry me on to the Underground and home to Gloucester Road, and there discovered the rissoles, like some traces of a vanished civilization, fossilized in the oven. She Who Must Be Obeyed was already in bed. feigning sleep. When I climbed in beside her, she opened a hostile eye.
“You’re drunk, Rumpole!” she said. “What on earth have you been doing?”
“I’ve been having a legal discussion,” I told her, “on the subject of the admissibility of certain evidence. Vital, from my client’s point of view. And, just for a change, Hilda, I think I’ve won.”
“Well, you’d better try and get some sleep.” And she added with a sort of satisfaction, “I’m sure you’ll be feeling quite terrible in the morning.”
As with all the grimmer predictions of She Who Must Be Obeyed, this one turned out to be true. I sat in the Court the next day with the wig feeling like a lead weight on the brain and the stiff collar sawing the neck like a blunt execution. My mouth tasted of matured birdcage and from a long way off I heard Wrigglesworth say to Bridget O’Dowd, who stood looking particularly saintly and virginal in the witness box, “About a week before this, did you see the defendant, Edward Timson, on your staircase flourishing any sort of weapon?”
It is no exaggeration to say that I felt deeply shocked and considerably betrayed. After his promise to me, Wrigglesworth had turned his back on the spirit of the great Christmas festival. He came not to bring peace but a sword.
I clambered with some difficulty to my feet. After my forensic efforts of the evening before, I was scarcely in the mood for a legal argument. Mr. Justice Vosper looked up in surprise and greeted me in his usual chilly fashion.
“Yes, Mr. Rumpole. Do you object to this evidence?”
Of course I object, I wanted to say. It’s inhuman, unnecessary, unmerciful, and likely to lead to my losing another case. Also, it’s clearly contrary to a solemn and binding contract entered into after a number of glasses of the Bishop’s putative port. All I seemed to manage was a strangled, “Yes.”
“I suppose Mr. Wrigglesworth would say—” Vosper, J., was, as ever, anxious to supply any argument that might not yet have occurred to the prosecution “—that it is evidence of ‘system.‘ “
“System?” I heard my voice faintly and from a long way off. “It may be, I suppose. But the Court has a discretion to omit evidence which may be irrelevant and purely prejudicial.”
“I feel sure Mr. Wrigglesworth has considered the matter most carefully and that he would not lead this evidence unless he considered it entirely relevant.”
I looked at the Mad Monk on the seat beside me. He was smiling at me with a mixture of hearty cheerfulness and supreme pity, as though I were sinking rapidly and he had come to administer extreme unction. I made a few ill-chosen remarks to the Court, but I was in no condition, that morning, to enter into a complicated legal argument on the admissibility of evidence.
It wasn’t long before Bridget O’Dowd had told a deeply disapproving jury all about Eddie “Turpin” Timson’s sword. “A man.” the judge said later in his summing up about young Edward, “clearly prepared to attack with cold steel whenever it suited him.”
When the trial was over, I called in for refreshment at my favorite watering hole and there, to my surprise, was my opponent Wrigglesworth, sharing an expensive-looking bottle with Detective Inspector Wainwright. the officer in charge of the case. I stood at the bar, absorbing a consoling glass of Pommeroy’s ordinary, when the D. I. came up to the bar for cigarettes. He gave me a friendly and maddeningly sympathetic smile.
“Sorry about that, sir. Still, win a few, lose a few. Isn’t that it?”
“In my case lately, it’s been win a few, lose a lot!”
“You couldn’t have this one, sir. You see, Mr. Wrigglesworth had promised it to me.”
“He had what?”
“Well, I’m retiring, as you know. And Mr. Wrigglesworth promised me faithfully that my last case would be a win. He promised me that, in a manner of speaking, as a Christmas present. Great man is our Mr. Wrigglesworth, sir, for the spirit of Christmas.”
I looked across at the Mad Monk and a terrible suspicion entered my head. What was all that abou
t a present for the Bishop? I searched my memory and I could find no trace of our having, in fact, bought wine for any sort of cleric. And was Wrigglesworth as inexperienced as he would have had me believe in the art of selecting claret?
As I watched him pour and sniff a glass from his superior bottle and hold it critically to the light, a horrible suspicion crossed my mind. Had the whole evening’s events been nothing but a deception, a sinister attempt to nobble Rumpole, to present him with such a stupendous hangover that he would stumble in his legal argument? Was it all in aid of D. I. Wainwright’s Christmas present?
I looked at Wrigglesworth, and it would be no exaggeration to say the mind boggled. He was, of course, perfectly right about me. I just didn’t recognize evil when I saw it.
SUPPER WITH MISS SHIVERS - Peter Lovesey
The door was stuck. Something inside was stopping it from opening, and Fran was numb with cold. School had broken up for Christmas that afternoon—”Lord dismiss us with Thy blessing”— and the jubilant kids had given her a blinding headache. She’d wobbled on her bike through the London traffic, two carriers filled with books suspended from the handlebars. She’d endured exhaust fumes and maniac motorists, and now she couldn’t get into her own flat. She cursed, let the bike rest against her hip, and attacked the door with both hands.
“It was quite scary, actually.” she told Jim when he got in later. “I mean, the door opened perfectly well when we left this morning. We could have been burgled. Or it could have been a body lying in the hall.”
Jim, who worked as a systems analyst, didn’t have the kind of imagination that expected bodies behind doors. “So what was it—the doormat?”
“Get knotted. It was a great bundle of Christmas cards wedged under the door. Look at them. I blame you for this, James Palmer.”
“Me?”
Now that she was over the headache and warm again, she enjoyed poking gentle fun at Jim. “Putting our address book on your computer and running the envelopes through the printer. This is the result. We’re going to be up to our eyeballs in cards. I don’t know how many you sent, but we’ve heard from the plumber, the dentist, the television repairman, and the people who moved us in, apart from family and friends. You must have gone straight through the address book. I won’t even ask how many stamps you used.”
“What an idiot,” Jim admitted. “I forgot to use the sorting function.”
“I left some for you to open.”
“I bet you’ve opened all the ones with checks inside,” said Jim. “I’d rather eat first.”
“I’m slightly mystified by one,” said Fran. “Do you remember sending to someone called Miss Shivers?”
“No. I’ll check if you like. Curious name.”
“It means nothing to me. but she’s invited us to a meal.”
Fran handed him the card—one of those desolate, old-fashioned snow scenes of someone dragging home a log. Inside, under the printed greetings, was the signature E. Shivers (Miss) followed by Please make my Christmas— come for supper seven next Sunday, 23rd. In the corner was an address label.
“Never heard of her,” said Jim. “Must be a mistake.”
“Maybe she sends her cards by computer,” said Fran, and added, before he waded in. “I don’t think it’s a mistake, Jim. She named us on the envelope. I’d like to go.”
“For crying out loud—Didmarsh is miles away. Berkshire or somewhere. We’re far too busy.”
“Thanks to your computer, we’ve got time in hand,” Fran told him with a smile.
The moment she’d seen the invitation, she’d known she would accept. Three or four times in her life she’d felt a similar impulse and each time she had been right. She didn’t think of herself as psychic or telepathic, but sometimes she felt guided by some force that couldn’t be explained scientifically. A good force, she was certain. It had convinced her that she should marry no one else but Jim, and after three years together she had no doubts. Their love was unshakable. And because he loved her. he would take her to supper with Miss Shivers. He wouldn’t understand why she was so keen to go, but he would see that she was in earnest, and that would be enough...
“By the way, I checked the computer,” he told her in front of the destinations board on Paddington Station next Sunday. “We definitely didn’t send a card to anyone called Shivers.”
“Makes it all the more exciting, doesn’t it?” Fran said, squeezing his arm.
Jim was the first man she had trusted. Trust was her top requirement of the opposite sex. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t particularly tall and that his nose came to a point. He was loyal. And didn’t Clint Eastwood have a pointed nose?
She’d learned from her mother’s three disastrous marriages to be ultra-wary of men. The first—Fran’s father. Harry—had started the rot. He’d died in a train crash just a few days before Fran was born. You’d think he couldn’t be blamed for that, but he could. Fran’s mother had been admitted to hospital with complications in the eighth month, and Harry, the rat, had found someone else within a week. On the night of the crash he’d been in London with his mistress, buying her expensive clothes. He’d even lied to his pregnant wife, stuck in hospital, about working overtime.
For years Fran’s mother had fended off the questions any child asks about a father she has never seen, telling Fran to forget him and love her step father instead. Stepfather the First had turned into a violent alcoholic. The divorce had taken nine years to achieve. Stepfather the Second—a Finn called Bengt (Fran called him Bent)—had treated their Wimbledon terraced house as if it were a sauna, insisting on communal baths and parading naked around the place. When Fran was reaching puberty, there were terrible rows because she wanted privacy. Her mother had sided with Bengt until one terrible night when he’d crept into Fran’s bedroom and groped her. Bengt walked out of their lives the next day, but, incredibly to Fran, a lot of the blame seemed to be heaped on her, and her relationship with her mother had been damaged forever. At forty-three, her mother, deeply depressed, had taken a fatal overdose.
The hurts and horrors of those years had not disappeared, but marriage to Jim had provided a fresh start. Fran nestled against him in the carriage and he fingered a strand of her dark hair. It was supposed to be an Intercity train, but B. R. were using old rolling-stock for some of the Christmas period and Fran and Jim had this compartment to themselves.
“Did you let this Shivers woman know we’re coming?”
She nodded. “I phoned. She’s over the moon that I answered. She’s going to meet us at the station.”
“What’s it all about, then?”
“She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”
“You didn’t? Why not, for God’s sake?”
“It’s a mystery trip—a Christmas mystery. I’d rather keep it that way.”
“Sometimes, Fran, you leave me speechless.”
“Kiss me instead, then.”
A whistle blew somewhere and the line of taxis beside the platform appeared to be moving forward. Fran saw no more of the illusion because Jim had put his lips to hers.
Somewhere beyond Westbourne Park Station, they noticed how foggy the late afternoon had become. After days of mild, damp weather, a proper December chill had set in. The heating in the carriage was working only in fits and starts and Fran was beginning to wish she’d worn trousers instead of opting decorously for her corduroy skirt and boots.
“Do you think it’s warmer farther up the train?”
“Want me to look?”
Jim slid aside the door. Before starting along the corridor, he joked, “If I’m not back in half an hour, send for Miss Marple.”
“No need,” said Fran. “I’ll find you in the bar and mine’s a hot cuppa.”
She pressed herself into the warm space Jim had left in the corner and rubbed a spy-hole in the condensation. There wasn’t anything to spy. She shivered and wondered if she’d been right to trust her hunch and come on this trip. It was more than a hunch, she told herse
lf. It was intuition.
It wasn’t long before she heard the door pulled back. She expected to see Jim. or perhaps the man who checked the tickets. Instead, there was a fellow about her own age. twenty-five, with a pink carrier bag containing something about the size of a box file. “Do you mind?” he asked. “The heating’s given up altogether next door.”
Fran gave a shrug. “I’ve got my doubts about the whole carriage.”
He took the corner seat by the door and placed the bag beside him. Fran took stock of him rapidly, hoping Jim would soon return. She didn’t feel threatened. but she wasn’t used to these old-fashioned compartments. She rarely used the trains these days except the tube occasionally.
She decided the young man must have kitted himself in an Oxfam shop. He had a dark-blue car coat, black trousers with flares, and crepe-soled ankle boots. Around his neck was one of those striped scarves that college students wore in the sixties, one end slung over his left shoulder. And his thick, dark hair matched the image. Fran guessed he was unemployed. She wondered if he was going to ask her for money.
But he said, “Been up to town for the day?”
“I live there.” She added quickly. “With my husband. He’ll be back presently.”
“I’m married, too.” he said, and there was a chink of amusement in his eyes that Fran found reassuring. “I’m up from the country, smelling the wellies and cowdung. Don’t care much for London. It’s crazy in Bond Street this time of year.”
“Bond Street?” repeated Fran. She hadn’t got him down as a big spender.
“This once.” he explained. “It’s special, this Christmas. We’re expecting our first, my wife and I.”
“Congratulations.”
He smiled. A self-conscious smile. “My wife. Pearlie—that’s my name for her—Pearlie made all her own maternity clothes, but she’s really looking forward to being slim again. She calls herself the frump with a lump. After the baby arrives. I want her to have something glamorous, really special. She deserves it. I’ve been putting money aside for months. Do you want to see what I got? I found it in Elaine Ducharme.”
