You know what life at the Old Bailey blunts? It blunts the sensitivity. When you’ve been round the place as long as I have the sensitivity comes out like hair on the comb. Mr Gladstone was brought to us in the interview room. He was wearing a sharp suit and had a small trilby hat perched on his head. His smile was wide and he looked determinedly brave. He greeted me with, ‘Who are you, dad?’
‘This is Mr Rumpole, your counsel; he’s defending you,’ Mr Winter explained and Oswald Gladstone said proudly, ‘I don’t need no brief. I’ll just tell the Judge, Ginger done it, didn’t he?’
‘Ginger Robertson,’ Winter explained to me, ‘is one of the boys that went missing. That’s our defence. If you can destroy the police evidence.’ I looked at my watch, we hadn’t got all the time in the world, if I was to meet Nick in the Army and Navy and keep our appointment for lunch.
‘How do you know Ginger did it?’ I asked. ‘Did you see him with the knife?’
‘After. I see him with the cutter after. Ginger throwed it away, didn’t he?’
‘You tell us, old dear. Did you know he was going to use it?’
‘Use it? What you mean?’
‘Did you know Ginger might use the cutter?’
‘I tell you, dad. I know nothing about that.’ Young Oswald Gladstone looked round at us, three men all there because of him, and said proudly, ‘Got me in a big Court, haven’t they? Number One Court.’
‘Oh yes, Mr Gladstone. You’re a star,’ I assured him. ‘Why did Ginger do it?’
‘Why?’
‘Yes. Why stab a man whom none of you apparently knew?’
‘I guess Ginger didn’t like them M.C.C. supporters.’
I stared at Oswald then, and Mr Winter supplied his usual explanation. ‘There was anti-coloured feeling on the ground. I told you, Mr Rumpole. This case has political undertones.’
‘But this old darling at the bus queue. He hadn’t even been on the ground!’ Oswald smiled and blew out smoke from the cigarette Jo had given him. ‘Guess Ginger couldn’t find any M.C.C. supporters, and this fellow was there like. So Ginger said, “I might as well cut him.” ’
‘Oh, dear me. How would jolly Jean-Jacques Rousseau explain all that?’ I heard myself saying it aloud, and Oswald looked at Mr Winter. ‘What’s he on about,’ he asked.
‘Mr Rumpole is a very experienced counsel. If we can destroy the police here, sir…’ Mr Winter turned to me.
‘ “If”, "if”. And if the Judge turns out to be a Jamaican teenager with form we might have a chance. Speaking for myself,’ – I looked at the diminutive client, and said – ‘I don’t believe Mr Gladstone meant to kill him.’
‘Ginger carried the knife! That’s what he says.’ Jo was still fighting.
‘Ginger formed the intention, quite clearly,’ Mr Winter argued.
‘See, dad,’ Ossie told me. ‘Ginger don’t take all the trouble to carry no knife unless he use it sometimes.’
‘They carry these knives,’ Jo gave his favourite explanation, ‘to prove their virility.’
‘I’ll tell the Judge that. In his day it was conkers.’ I had to think of a way of saving Mr Gladstone a long stretch and I had Nick’s farewell to consider. So I asked, ‘Who’s prosecuting?’ At which Mr Winter went through his papers again and said, ‘Mr… Piecan.’
‘Magnus Piecan? What a bit of luck! I might just get him to swallow A.B.H.?’
‘Actual Bodily Harm,’ Winter explained to Oswald, and I asked our client, ‘You’d plead to that, of course?’
‘What they give me for that?’ Mr Gladstone sounded interested.
‘Nine months – a year. That suit you?’
‘You want me to do a year? For something I never done?’
‘You’d rather fight, and do four years for what you say you never done? The Judge’ll give you full credit for admitting…’
‘Admitting? What I didn’t do.’
‘Look at it this way. What’s the credit in admitting something you did do. Not much credit in that, is there?’
‘Are you taking the mick out of me?’ Mr Gladstone was right of course. It was a joke in poor taste, and I apologized. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a bad habit.’
‘I tell you truth, dad. I never done this cutting.’
For an answer I dived into my brief (always a rash thing to do) and brought out a single, but most unfortunate, sheet of paper, and started to read from it aloud.
‘My name is Oswald Montgomery Gladstone, though in our gang they calls me “Blades”,’ I read, and then asked Ossie, ‘Is that what they call you?’
‘Blades,’ Mr Gladstone answered proudly. ‘That’s right. That’s my name, with the others like!’
‘ “I mean,” ’ I went on reading, sure that Oswald’s denials wouldn’t survive in the face of his confession, ‘ “I know you found the dagger so I better come clean, guv’nor. Anyway if you nabs Ginger he’ll grass on me. We was mad at the M.C.C. supporters what annoyed us. So when I left the ground I had my knife ready but the M.C.C. blokes all scarpered. ‘Cos I had the weapon I felt a bit of a fool not using it. And there was this bloke standing. So I just let him have it in the Auntie Nellie. I’m very sorry for all the trouble I caused.” Signed O. Gladstone and witnessed D.I. Arthur and D.S. Shaw.’
‘I told them.’ Mr Gladstone shook his head. ‘Ginger done all that.’
‘Did you read this written confession, when you were in the police station?’
‘ ’Course I did.’ Now Oswald seemed vaguely annoyed at my questions.
‘Did you understand it?’ I asked.
‘I read it through, didn’t I?’ Oswald was becoming belligerent.
‘I wasn’t there. You’ve got to tell me.’
‘Yes. I read it through.’
‘Why did you sign it. If it wasn’t true?’
‘I got bored. They was going on so long. You ever had questioning in the nick?’
‘Not… as far as I remember.’
‘It gets boring. You’d do like anything to get it over with.’
‘To get back to reading a comic in the cell?’ I wondered, and again my question had a curious result. Oswald seemed delighted by it. ‘Reading!’ Ossie said proudly. ‘That’s it. I was doing reading. Tell you what. If I signed that, they promised me a smoke.’
‘Didn’t it strike you as a rather expensive cigarette?’
I looked sadly at Oswald, and decided that my only course was an approach to my learned friend, Mr Magnus Piecan. My worst suspicions about sport had been confirmed, it brings out the very worst in people. Football leads to violence and cricket to murder. God knows what ludo would do to a man.
Magnus Piecan spends his life trying to be a Judge. I believe that he thinks that a Judge is the only person in Court whose hands don’t sweat and whose mouth isn’t dry with panic, which may not be entirely true. Dear old Magnus is so afraid of doing the wrong thing that he makes notes with ten different coloured pencils, and never gets to his feet without checking his fly buttons.
‘You for the black teenager, Rumpole?’ he asked me, when we tracked him down, pacing nervously in front of old Bates’s Court, waiting for the case in front of us to finish.
‘Yes, I am, as it so happens,’ and I tried an old gambit calculated to increase his nervous tension. ‘As a matter of fact I heard from the Judge’s clerk, Bates, j., wants to get away early today.’
‘Tickets for Glyndebourne?’ Piecan made the assumption.
‘Glyndebourne? Probably all-in wrestling at the Wembley public baths. His clerk hopes very much the Judge isn’t going to be kept late.’
‘Well, this isn’t going to take long, is it?’ Piecan asked nervously.
‘Long?’
‘I mean, I can’t really see where the defence…’
‘Give it a couple of weeks,’ I interrupted him airily. ‘Three possibly. It’s not a long point, but I’ll have to go into it in a little detail. You appreciate the point, of course?’
‘The point?’ Poo
r old Piecan looked totally confused.
‘The point of law,’ I said, mysteriously. ‘It’s rather a nice one, isn’t it? You spotted it, of course.’
‘The point of law, Rumpole?’
‘I knew you would, you clever old sweetheart, you dear old brain box. I made sure the point would not have eluded you. So we may get a pretty rough ride from the Judge, and you’ll have to bear the brunt, of course, opening a two-week case before an impatient chap like Bates. Well, good luck to you.’
‘Is it really going to take two weeks?’ Piecan’s voice was tremulous.
‘Up to you, old fellow. Entirely up to you, if you want to shorten it.’
‘I mean, I told my clerk it might be a plea.’ Piecan sounded hopeful.
‘That’s what I told my client as well,’ I chimed in gleefully. ‘This is a case, I told him, where the prosecution will almost certainly make us an offer. Now, old love, what are you offering us?’
‘I don’t quite see what I can offer.’ Piecan was puzzled and not happy.
‘Don’t you? Use your imagination, Piecan. Consider the mind of a boy! You see they were only playing games!’ I made a few sword passes with my Pentel, to demonstrate. ‘Rapier and dagger, that’s two of your weapons! Have at you! Cardinal’s lackey! Take that! From Rupert of Hentzau! You know how boys play games, don’t you?’
‘I suppose so,’ said the mystified Piecan. Of course he didn’t know; he was born aged forty with a thorough knowledge of the law of torts. ‘What you’re saying is, no criminal intent?’ Piecan put it in the legal language he understood.
‘They were fooling about,’ I told him. ‘My boy lunged at an imaginary musketeer, and winged a real live accountant from Muswell Hill.’ I put my arm through his and walked him out of my instructing solicitors’ hearing.
‘As we lawyers say, Magnus, no bloody criminal intent whatsoever. What does that make it? You were at the crammers last.’
‘Actual Bodily Harm.’
‘I thought you might accept “Possessing an Offensive Weapon”.’ I tried to look gloomy.
‘It’ll have to be A.B.H.’ Piecan was determined to be tough with me.
‘Hard-hearted Magnus! Ah well, you’ve got your job to do.’
‘I’ll have to take instructions.’
‘Take them, then, quickly.’
‘By the way, Rumpole,’ Piecan paused with a sudden doubt. ‘Why’s your chap called “Blades”? Because he’s the one that carries the knife?’
‘Of course not. The old dear’s a snappy dresser. A masher. A dandy. A blade! Don’t you know the expression?’
Anyway Piecan filtered off to consult his prosecution masters. I was lighting a small cigar as Mr Winter came up to me, and again showed his ignorance of the perilous nature of our position.
‘What’re they up to, Mr Rumpole? Got cold feet, have they?’ I looked at my watch. It was nearly ten. By eleven, it should all be over. ‘I’m meeting my son, you know, Nick,’ I told Mr Winter. ‘He’s off to the United States, to study social sciences, which are a mystery you probably understand. Yes. I think it’ll turn out to be a plea.’
‘You mean they’ll want us to accept Actual Bodily Harm?’ Mr Winter looked less than pleased that an agreement was in sight.
‘Given a following wind, we might edge them into it.’
‘I don’t think Gladstone’s the type who’ll want to play ball, Mr Rumpole.’ Mr Winter shook his head gloomily.
‘Play ball? He’s being offered a remarkably easy way out. He’d be a lunatic not to take it.’
One thing you can never guarantee about clients is that they won’t behave like lunatics. Piecan came back and offered us a nice quick and easy plea to Actual Bodily Harm. Lunch with Nick now seemed a certainty. But when we put the deal and all its advantages to Mr Oswald Gladstone, he simply said, ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Look, Ossie. Blades. Mind if I call you Oswald?’ I started.
‘Call me what you like, dad.’
‘If only you had someone you trusted. I wish your family were here to advise you. Perhaps your mother?’
‘She gave him to the Brixton magistrates,’ Mr Winter reminded me.
‘That’s right. Yes. Well, your father.’
‘My baby father?’
‘The man his mother was living with at that time,’ Winter translated. ‘He’s back in Jamaica, and his mother is living with Oswald’s social worker, a Mr Hammurabi.’
‘Well, get Hammurabi here.’
I wanted someone to advise Oswald for his own good, but Mr Winter opened his file again and gave us another jewel. ‘Mr Hammurabi wrote us a report. He thinks Oswald should never have been let out of the detention centre.’
‘Isn’t there anyone in your family to advise you?’ I asked Oswald, almost desperately.
‘You my brief, ain’t you? You tell me what to do.’
He was absolutely right of course. I took a deep breath and said. ‘All right, Mr Gladstone, I’ll advise you, to the best of my poor ability, as your counsel. Plead guilty to Actual Bodily Harm! You’re risking four years, maybe five if you fight the attempted murder. It’s a hell of a great bloody risk, my dear old thing.’
‘You mean I don’t have no chance?’ Oswald asked the question, and I answered it as well as I could. ‘As much chance as I have of leaving these marble halls and spending the evening of my days in a little villa in the South of France, being poured out long pink drinks by expensive secretaries. No chance. No.’
‘You got another case you want to do, you want to go work for some of them rich villains?’ Oswald looked at me, he seemed very angry. ‘What’s the matter with my case? Too much like hard work?’ I didn’t answer him and he sat down, suddenly deflated. ‘All right. I’ll plead guilty then! If that’s what you want, I’ll plead bloody guilty! My Mum – she wants me put away. All right. I’ll plead guilty to something what I never done!’ I lit a small cigar, and then I asked him, quietly. ‘Are you still telling me – you didn’t stab anyone?’
‘Look, dad. I never had the knife!’
‘Are you still telling me that?’
‘You don’t believe me?’ Oswald looked deeply hurt.
‘What I believe isn’t of the slightest importance. Is that what you’re still telling me?’
‘I’m still telling you that. Yeah.’
The most common question I’m asked by such non-legal characters as cross my path, or get talking to me over a glass in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, is how you can defend a customer when you know he’s guilty. Well, the answer is, of course, that you don’t. Once the old darling tells you that he did the deed, you’ve got to advise him to plead guilty, admit all and take the consequences. If he refuses to agree, then you must leave him to his own devices. This is not so much a code of morality as a reflex action, an admission of guilt in conference means the end of the road for Rumpole. But the converse is also true. If a client insists that he’s innocent, and maintains this attitude against all odds, you can’t finally lead him into Court and force him to plead guilty. I may have been, at this moment, just Mr Oswald Gladstone’s humble servant, but if My Master’s Voice still insisted that he was innocent there was no possible manner in which I could pretend to the Judge that he was ready to surrender. These were the simple rules I had to obey in the end, even if they put paid to luncheon with my son Nick.
‘If you still tell me you didn’t stab anyone,’ I told Oswald, ‘we’ve got to fight the case, and that’s all there is to it.’
It was then, of course, that Mr Winter began to get cold feet. ‘Listen, Ossie,’ he said, ‘perhaps it would be more sensible…’
‘If he goes on telling us he’s innocent we’ve got to fight,’ I repeated. ‘Just give me five minutes to ring up the Army and Navy Stores.’
‘Oh, is that Coats and Macintoshes? It’s about my son Nick. He’ll probably walk into your department at approximately midday. Well, I imagine you’re pretty empty, aren’t you, now we’ve lost the Empire?’
<
br /> I was standing in the telephone box outside No. i Court, chattering to the Army and Navy. Oswald’s instructions had meant a radical change in my plans. As I spoke, I happened to notice a worried-looking person in clerical garb loitering outside the window. However, I carried on my conversation with Coats and Macintoshes.
‘Nick? Well, he’s about twenty-three. Hair brown. Eyes blue. No visible distinguishing marks, that sort of thing. Please tell him, his father’s stuck down at the Old Bailey. Thank you.’
I didn’t have enormous hope in my message getting through, but there was nothing else I could do in the time available. As I emerged from the confined space, the cleric called my name.
‘Mr Rumpole!’
‘Yes.’
‘I did so want to meet you. I’m Ossie’s father.’ I looked at the undoubtedly white padre in some confusion. ‘His father in God you understand,’ the man of the cloth explained. ‘Eldred Pickersgill. I’m priest at St Barnabas Without. There’s good in that lad, Mr Rumpole, real good in him, deep down somewhere!’
‘Pity he doesn’t bring it up and give it an airing occasionally,’ I said on my way to the Court door.
‘He’s a hard worker. He works hard at his classes. No result as yet. Absolutely no result. But Oswald is not discouraged. He is, in my view, a natural optimist.’
‘That’s why we are fighting this case.’
I was about to go through the swing door and on to the battlefield when the vicar had an afterthought.
‘Oh, Mr Rumpole,’ he said. ‘If you do call me as a witness, I prefer not to swear on the Bible.’
‘What’s the matter, Vicar,’ I said severely. ‘Have you no religion?’ And I left him to attend to my secular affairs.
The Second Rumpole Omnibus Page 2
