The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘It’s a touch of death, if you want my opinion. There’s a lot of that about too.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’ll stay in the warm tomorrow.’

  ‘I can’t do that! Got to get down to the Bailey. The jury are coming back in my murder in the morning.’ I sneezed and continued bravely, ‘I’d better be in at the death.’

  ‘That’s what you will be in at. If you must go traipsing down to the Old Bailey, don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.’

  I was about to say, of course I never expected Hilda to feel sorry for me, when the telephone rang. She rushed to answer it (unlike me, she takes an unnatural delight in answering telephones), and announced that a Miss Rosemary Beasley was on the line and wished to communicate with her counsel as a matter of urgency. Cursing the fact that Miss Beasley, unlike my other clients, wasn’t tucked up in the remand wing of the nick, safe from the telephone, I took the instrument and breathed into it a rheumy, ‘Good evening.’

  Matron came back, loud and clear, ‘Mr Rumpole. I am sitting here at my planchette.’

  ‘At your what?’ Miss Beasley had me mystified.

  ‘Sometimes I use the board, or the wine glass or the cards. Sometimes I have Direct Communication.’

  ‘That must be nice for you. Miss Beasley, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Tonight I am at the planchette. I have just had such a nice chat with Colonel Ollard.’

  ‘With the late Colonel Ollard?’

  I was, I had to confess, somewhat taken aback. When Matron answered, she sounded a little touchy. ‘He wasn’t late at all. He came through bang on time! It was just nine o’clock when we started chatting. He says the weather over there’s absolutely beautiful! It’s just not fair, I told him, when we’re going through this dreary cold spell.’

  ‘Miss Beasley.’ I asked for clarification. ‘Did Colonel Ollard come over from the dead, simply to chatter to you about the weather?’

  ‘Oh no, Mr Rumpole. I shouldn’t be telephoning you if that were all. He said something far more important.’

  ‘Oh did he? And can you let me into the secret?’ My temperature was clearly rising during this conversation. I longed for bed with both my feet on a hot water bottle.

  ‘The Colonel said that Mr Pontefract had never looked in the tin box where he kept his dress uniform, in the loft at The Pines.’

  ‘Well. Suppose Mr Pontefract never has…’

  ‘If he looked there, the Colonel told me, Mr Pontefract would find, wrapped in tissue paper, between the sword and the… trousers, a later will, signed by himself in the proper manner.’

  I could see the way things were drifting and quite honestly I didn’t like it at all. The day might not be far distant when Miss Beasley might in fact find herself tucked safely up in the nick.

  ‘Is that what the Colonel said?’ I asked, warily.

  ‘His very words.’

  ‘You’re quite sure that’s what he said…’

  ‘How could I possibly be mistaken?’

  ‘Well, I suppose you’d better ring Pontefract and get him to take a look. I just hope…’

  ‘You hope what, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘I hope you’re not considering anything dangerous, Miss Beasley.’

  After all, what could all this planchette nonsense be but a rather obvious prelude to forgery?

  ‘Of course not! I’m perfectly safe, Mr Rumpole. I’ve just been sitting here chatting.’ Matron sounded her usual brisk self. I tried to remember if there’d ever been a woman forger, with a nursing qualification.

  ‘Yes. Well, if you ring Mr Pontefract,’ I suggested, but apparently all that had been taken care of.

  ‘I’ve done that, Mr Rumpole. I just thought I’d ring you too, to tell you the joyful tidings. Oh, and Mr Rumpole. The Colonel sent you his best wishes, and he hopes he’s been a help to you, giving you a leg to stand on. Cheerio for now! Oh, and he hopes your cold’s better.’

  As I put down the receiver, I felt, as I have said, a good deal worse.

  ‘Who on earth’s Miss Rosemary Beasley?’ Hilda asked when I had finished sneezing.

  ‘Oh her. She’s just someone who seems to be on particularly good terms with the dead.’

  The next day, still feeling in much the same condition as the late Colonel Ollard, but without the blue skies to cheer me up, I staggered off to the Old Bailey and heard my warehouse breaker get three years. When the formalities and the official goodbyes were over I walked back to Chambers and there, awaiting me in my room, was the lugubrious Pontefract. He came straight out with the news.

  ‘It was just as she told us, Mr Rumpole. There was a tin box under a pile of old blankets in the loft at The Pines, which we had overlooked. In it was the full dress uniform of a colonel of the Royal Dorsets.’

  ‘And between the sword and trousers?’

  ‘I found a will, apparently dated the first of March 1974. Over four years after the other will in favour of the Percival Ollards. It revokes all previous wills and leaves his entire estate to…’

  ‘Miss Rosemary Beasley?’ I hazarded a guess.

  ‘You’ve hit it, Mr Rumpole!’

  ‘It didn’t need great powers of divination.’

  I couldn’t help looking round nervously to see that we weren’t in the presence of the mysterious matron.

  ‘Mr Pontefract, as our client isn’t with us today…’

  ‘I’m quite thankful for it, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘You are? So am I. You know that the late Colonel apparently spoke from the other side of the grave, to tip our client off about this will?’

  ‘So I understand, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Mr Pontefract. I know you are accustomed to polite civil law and my mind turns as naturally to crime as a vicar’s daughter does to sex, but…’

  I didn’t know how to make the suggestion which might wound the old gentleman; but he was out with the word before me.

  ‘You suspect this will may be a forgery?’

  ‘That thought had crossed your mind?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Rumpole. There is no field of endeavour in which human nature sinks to a lower depth than in the matter of wills. Your average Old Bailey case, Mr Rumpole, must seem like a day out with the Church Brigade compared to the skul-duggery which surrounds the simplest last will and testament.’

  As he spoke I began to warm to this man, Pontefract. He was expressing my own opinions fairly eloquently, and I listened with an increased respect as he went on.

  ‘Naturally my first thought was that our client, Miss Beasley, had invented this supernatural conversation in order to direct our attention to a will which she had, shall we say, manufactured?’

  ‘A neutral term, Mr Pontefract.’ But well put, I thought. ‘That was my first thought, also.’

  ‘So I took the precaution of having this new-found will examined by a well-known handwriting expert.’

  ‘Alfred Geary?’

  There is only one handwriting expert Her Majesty’s judges pay any attention to. Geary is now an old man peering at blown-up letters through thick pebble glasses, but he is still an irrefutable witness.

  ‘I went, in this instance, and regardless of expense, to Mr Geary. You approve, sir?’

  ‘You couldn’t do better. The Courts listen in awe to this fellow’s comparison between the Ms and the tails on the Ps. What did Geary find?’

  ‘That the signature on the will we discovered…’

  ‘Between the dress sword and the trousers?’

  ‘Is undoubtedly the genuine signature of the late Colonel.

  It was the one piece of evidence I hadn’t expected. If the will was not a forgery, if it were a genuine document, could it possibly follow that the message which led us to its hiding-place was also genuine? The mind, as they say, boggled. I was scarcely listening as Mr Pontefract told me that the Percival Ollards would be attacking our new will on the grounds of the deceased’s insanity. It was my own sanity I began to fear for, as I wondered if the deceased Colonel wo
uld be giving us any more instructions from beyond the grave.

  When I got home I was feeling distinctly worse. I mentioned the matter to She Who Must Be Obeyed and she swiftly called my bluff by summoning in the local quack who was round, as he always is, like a shot, in the hope of a fee and a swig of my diminishing stock of sherry (a form of rot-gut I seem to keep entirely for the benefit of the medical profession).

  ‘He’s not looking in a particularly lively condition is he?’ Doctor MacClintock remarked to Hilda on arrival. ‘Well, we’ve got to remember, Rumpole’s no chicken.’

  I was unable to argue with the doctor’s diagnosis, as it was undoubtedly true, and what’s more, I had a clinical thermometer stuck between my jaws. I could only grunt a protest when Hilda, with quite unnecessary hospitality, said, ‘You will take a glass of sherry, won’t you, Doctor? So good of you to come.’

  I mean to say, when I do my job of work, the Judge doesn’t start proceedings with, ‘So nice of you to drop in Rumpole, do help yourself to my personal store of St Émilion.’ I was going to say something along these lines when the gloomy Scots medico removed the thermometer, but he interrupted me with, ‘His temperature’s up. I’m afraid it’s a day or two in bed for the old warrior.’

  ‘A day or two in bed? You’ll have to tell him, Doctor, he’s got to be sensible.’

  ‘Oh I doubt very much if he’ll feel like being anything else.’

  I began to wish they’d stop talking as if I’d already passed on, and so I intruded into the conversation.

  ‘Bed? I can’t possibly stay in bed…’

  ‘You’re no chicken, Rumpole. Doctor MacClintock warned you.’

  I noticed that the thirsty quack had downed one glass of Pommeroy’s pale Spanish-style and was getting a generous refill from the family.

  ‘You warned me? What did you warn me about?’

  ‘You’re not getting any younger, Rumpole.’

  ‘Well, it hardly needs five years’ ruthless training in the Edinburgh medical school and thirty years in general practice to diagnose that!’

  ‘He’s becoming crotchety.’ Hilda said, with satisfaction. ‘He’s always crotchety when he’s feeling ill.’

  ‘Yes, but what are you warning me about? Pneumonia, botulism, Parkinson’s disease?’

  ‘There is an even more serious condition, Rumpole,’ the doctor said. ‘I mean there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go on for a good few years, provided you take proper precautions.’

  ‘You’re trying to warn me about death!’

  ‘Well, death is rather a strong way of putting it.’

  The representative of the medical profession looked distressed, as though he realized that if Rumpole dropped off the twig there might be no more free sherry.

  ‘Odd thing about the dead, Doctor.’ I decided to let him into a secret. ‘You may not know this. They may not have lectured you on this at your teaching hospital, but I can tell you on the best possible authority, the dead are tremendously keen on litigation. Give me a drink, Hilda. No, not that jaundiced and medicated fluid. Give me a beaker full of the warm south, full of the true, the blushful Château Pommeroy’s ordinary claret! Dr MacClintock, you can’t scare me with death. I’ve got a far more gloomy experience ahead of me.’

  ‘I doubt that, Rumpole,’ said the Scot, sipping industriously. ‘But what exactly do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to appear in the Chancery Division.’

  The Chancery Division is not to be found, as I must make clear to those who have no particular legal experience, in any of my ordinary stamping grounds like the Old Bailey or Snaresbrook. It is light years away from the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court. The Chancery Division is considered by many, my learned Head of Chambers in particular, to be an extremely up-market Court. There cases are pleaded by lawyers who spring from old county families in a leisurely and courteous manner. It is a tribunal, in fact, which bears the same sort of relation to Inner London Sessions as the restaurant at Claridges does to your average transport café.

  The Chancery Division is in the Law Courts, and the Law Courts, which prefer to be known as the Royal Courts of Justice, occupy a stately position in the Strand, not a wig’s throw from my Chambers at Equity Court in the Temple. The Victorian building looks like the monstrous and overgrown result of a misalliance between a French château and a Gothic cathedral. The vast central hall is floored with a mosaic which is constantly under repair. There are many church-shaped windows and the ancient urinals have a distinctly ecclesiastical appearance. I passed into this muted splendour and found myself temporary accommodation in a robing room where there was, such is the luxurious nature of five-star litigation, an attendant in uniform to help me on with the fancy dress. Once suitably attired, I asked the way to the Chancery Division.

  I knew that Chancery was a rum sort of Division, full of dusty old men breaking trusts and elegant young men winding up companies. They speak a different language entirely from us Criminals, and their will cases are full of ‘dependent relative revocation’ and ‘testamentary capacity’, and the nice construction of the word ‘money’. As I rose to my hind legs in the Court of Chancery, I felt like some rustic reveller who has blundered into a convocation of bishops engaged in silent prayer. Nevertheless, I had a duty to perform which was to open the case of ‘In the Estate of Colonel Roderick Ollard, deceased. Beasley v. Ollard and ors’. The judge, I noticed, was a sort of pale and learned youth, probably twenty years my junior, who had looked middle-aged ever since he got his double first at Balliol, and who kept his lips tightly pursed when he wasn’t uttering some thinly veiled criticism of the Rumpole case. This chilly character was known, as I discovered from the usher, as Mr Justice Venables.

  ‘May it please you, my Lord,’ I fished up a voice from the murky depths of my influenza and put it on display, ‘in this case, I appear for the plaintiff, Miss Rosemary Beasley, who is putting forward the true last will of a fine old soldier, Colonel Roderick Ollard. The defendants, Mr and Mrs Percival Ollard and Master Peter Ollard, are represented by my learned friends, Mr Guthrie Featherstone, Q.C.…’

  It was true. The smooth-talking and diplomatic Head of our Chambers had collared the brief against Rumpole. Never at home in the rough and tumble of a nice murder, the Chancery Division, as I have said, was just the place for Guthrie Featherstone.

  ‘… and Mr…’ I made a whispered inquiry and said, ‘Mr Loxley-Parish.’

  Guthrie had got himself, as a Chancery Junior, an ancient who’d no doubt proved more wills than I’d had bottles of Pommeroy’s plonk. I turned, as usual, to the jury-box and got in the meat of my oration.

  ‘My client, Miss Beasley, is the matron and presiding angel of a small nursing home known as Sunnyside, on the Sussex coast. There she devotedly nursed this retired warrior, Colonel Ollard, and was the comfort and cheer of his declining years.’

  Mr Justice Venables was giving a chill stare over the top of his half glasses, and clearing his throat in an unpleasant manner. Here was a judge who appeared to be distinctly unmoved by the Rumpole oratory. I carried on, of course, regardless.

  ‘Declining years, during which his only brother, Percival, and Percival’s wife, Marcia, never troubled to cross the door of Sunnyside to give five minutes of cheer to the old gentleman, and Master Peter Ollard was far too busy cashing the postal orders the Colonel sent him to send a Christmas card to his elderly uncle.’

  It was time I thought that the Chancery Court heard a little Shakespeare.

  ‘Blow, blow thou winter wind

  Thou art not so unkind…

  As man’s ingratitude.’

  At which point the judicial throat-clearing took on the sound of words.

  ‘Mr Rumpole,’ the Judge said. ‘I think perhaps you need reminding. That jury-box is empty.’

  I looked at it. His Lordship was perfectly right. The twelve puzzled and honest citizens, picked off the street at random, were conspicuous by their absence. Juries are not
welcome in the Chancery Division. This was one of the occasions, strange to Rumpole, of a trial by Judge alone…

  ‘It is therefore, Mr Rumpole, not an occasion for emotional appeals.’ The Judge continued his lesson. ‘Perhaps it would be more useful if you gave me some relevant dates and a comparison of the two wills.’

  ‘Certainly, my Lord,’ I said, always anxious to oblige. ‘By his true last will of the first of March 1974 the late Colonel recognized the care of a devoted Matron…’

  ‘Just the facts, Mr Rumpole. Just give me the plain facts,’ snapped the old spoil-sport.

  ‘And the plain fact is, under the previous will of the fifteenth of February 1970 the Percival Ollards had managed to scoop the pool.’

  ‘Scoop the pool’ was, it seemed, not a phrase or saying in current use in the Chancery Division.

  ‘You mean, I suppose,’ the Judge corrected me, ‘that Mr Percival Ollard, together with his wife and son were the sole beneficiaries of the deceased’s residuary estate.’

  Somehow I managed to finish giving the Judge the brief facts of the case without open warfare breaking out. But the atmosphere was about as convivial as a gathering of teetotal undertakers.

  I then called Matron to give evidence. She filled the witness-box with authority, she was dressed in respectable and respectful black, she gave her answers in ringing and resonant tones, and yet I could tell that the Judge didn’t like her. As she gave her touching description of her devoted care of the late Colonel, and her harrowing account of the Percival Ollards’ neglect of their relative, Mr Justice Venables looked upon Matron as though she was a person who had come to his Court for one reason only, money. Well, it was a charge which might, with equal justice, be levelled against me, and Guthrie Featherstone and even, let it be said, the learned Judge.

  ‘Finally, Matron,’ I asked the last question with a solemnity which would have deeply moved the jury, if there had been a jury. ‘What did you think of the deceased?’

  ‘He had his little ways, of course, but he was always a perfect gentleman.’ She looked at the Judge; he averted his eye.