The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘That was before the Colonel started talking to the dead?’ the Judge asked in a way unfriendly to Rumpole.

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’ Percy looked gratefully at my Lord.

  ‘Before he became, shall we say, eccentric in the extreme?’ the Judge went on.

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’

  ‘Very well’. Venables, J., now seemed to have worn himself out. ‘Carry on, if you must, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Two weeks after he went into the nursing home, you took him for a drive on the Downs?’ Rumpole carried on.

  ‘I did, yes.’ Percy’s nervousness seemed to have returned, although I couldn’t imagine why the memory of tea on the Downs posed any sort of threat to him.

  ‘You were then on good terms?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You shared tea, scones and clotted cream at the Bide-A-Wee café?’ It was strange the effect on the witness of this innocent question. He took out a silk handkerchief, wiped his forehead and had to force himself to answer, ‘Yes, we did.’

  ‘And talked?’

  We talked, yes.’ Percy answered so quietly that the Judge was constrained to tell him to speak up.

  ‘And after that conversation you and your brother never met or spoke to each other again?’

  There was a long pause. Had I stumbled, guided by a Dead Hand, on some vital piece of evidence? I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘No. We never did.’

  ‘And he made a will cutting out your family, and leaving all his considerable property to my client, Miss Beasley?’

  ‘He made an alleged will, Mr Rumpole,’ the Judge was at pains to remind me.

  I bowed respectfully, and said, ‘If that’s what you call it in the Chancery Division, yes, my Lord. What I want to ask you, Mr Percival Ollard, is simply this – what did you and your brother say to each other at the Bide-A-Wee café?’

  Now the pause seemed endless. Percy looked at Featherstone and got no help. He looked at his wife and his ballet-dancing son. He looked vainly at the doors and the windows, and finally his desperate gaze fell on the learned Judge.

  ‘My Lord. Must I answer that question?’ he said.

  ‘Mr Rumpole, do you press the question?’ His Lordship asked me with distaste.

  ‘My Lord, I do.’ For some reason, I was on to a good thing, and I wasn’t letting it go.

  ‘Then it is relevant and you must answer it, Mr Ollard.’ At least the Judge knew his business.

  ‘My L-L-Lord,’ Percival Ollard stammered. He was clearly extremely distressed. So distressed that the Judge had time to look at the clock and relieve the witness’s agony for an hour. ‘I see the time,’ he said. ‘You may give us your answer after luncheon, Mr Percival Ollard. Shall we say, two o’clock…?’

  We all rose obediently to our hind legs, with Rumpole muttering, ‘Bloody Chancery Judge. He’s let old Percy off the hook.’

  Miss Beasley vanished somewhere at lunchtime, and when I had returned from a rather unhappy encounter with the plaice in the crypt, I found Guthrie Featherstone waiting for me outside the Court. He offered me a cigarette, which I refused, and he lit my small cigar with a gold lighter.

  ‘Horace,’ he said, ‘we’ve always got on pretty well at the Bar.’

  ‘Have we, Guthrie?’

  ‘My client has come to a rather agonizing decision.’

  ‘You mean he’s going to answer my question?’

  ‘It’s not that exactly. You see, Horace, we’re chucking in the sponge. Our hands are up. We surrender! Matron can have her precious will. We offer no further evidence.’

  You could have knocked me down with a Chancery brief, but I tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Oh really, Featherstone,’ I said, ‘that’s very satisfactory.’ It was also somewhat incredible. But Guthrie, it became clear, had other matters on his mind.

  ‘I say, Rumpole. A fellow must be certain of his fee. You’ll let me have my costs out of the estate, won’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I warned him, ‘I’d better just check.’

  ‘With your client?’

  ‘Not only with her,’ I said, ‘with the deceased. I mean it’s his money, isn’t it?’ And I left him thinking, no doubt, that old Horace Rumpole had completely lost his marbles.

  When Matron came into view I put the proposition to her; I told her that the Percival Ollards would give her all the boodle, only provided that Guthrie, and their other lawyers, got their costs out of the estate. She and the dear departed must have had a convivial lunch together, agreement was reached, and the deal was on. With about as much joy and enthusiasm as King John might have shown when signing Magna Carta, Mr Justice Venables pronounced, in the absence of further argument, for the will of the first of March 1974 benefiting Miss Beasley, and against the earlier will which favoured the Percival Ollards. All parties were allowed their costs out of the estate.

  When we came out of Court, Matron seized my hand in her muscular grasp.

  ‘Thanks most awfully, Mr Rumpole,’ she said. ‘The Colonel knew you’d pull it off and hit them for six.’

  ‘Miss Beasley. May I call you “Matey”?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘What’s the truth of it? What did the brothers say to each other over the scones and Darjeeling?’

  There was a pause, and then Miss Beasley said with a small, secret smile, ‘How would I know, Mr Rumpole? Only the Colonel and his brother know that.’

  However, I was not to be left in total ignorance of the truth of ‘In the Estate of Colonel Ollard, deceased’. After we had taken off our robes, Guthrie Featherstone did me the honour of inviting me to crack a bottle of claret at the Sheridan Club, and, as he had given me my first (and my last) Chancery will, I did him the honour of accepting. As we sat in a quiet room, under the portraits of old actors and even older judges, Featherstone said, ‘No reason why you shouldn’t know, Rumpole. Your client had been Percy’s mistress for years.’

  ‘Miss Beasley, Matey, the old dragon of the nursing home, his mistress!’ I was astonished, and I let my amazement show. ‘His what?’

  ‘Girlfriend.’ Featherstone made it sound even more inappropriate.

  ‘It seems odd, somehow, calling a stout, elderly woman a “girlfriend”. Are you trying to tell me, Guthrie, intimacy actually took place?’

  ‘Regularly, apparently. On a Wednesday. Matron’s afternoon off. But when Colonel Roderick Ollard went into Sunnyside she dived into bed with him, and deserted Percy. The meeting at the tea-room was when the Colonel told his brother all about it and said he meant to leave his money to Rosemary Beasley.’

  I was silent. I drank claret. I began to wonder where the planchette came in.

  ‘But why couldn’t your client have told us that?’ I asked my ex-opponent.

  ‘His wife, Rumpole! His wife Marcia! She’s a battle-axe and she was kept completely in the dark about Matey. It seems there would have been hell to pay if she’d found out. So we had to settle.’

  ‘Well, well, Featherstone. Matron, the femme fatale. I’d never have believed it.’

  What did I believe? That the Colonel spoke from the grave? Or that Matron invented all the séances to tell us a truth which would have caused her deep embarrassment to communicate in any other way? As it was, she had told me nothing.

  All I knew was that I didn’t fancy the idea of the ‘other side’. I knew I shouldn’t care for long chats with Colonel Ollard and the Emperor Napoleon even if Josef Stalin were to be of the party. Dying, as far as I was concerned, had been postponed indefinitely.

  Rumpole and the Rotten Apple

  Nothing shocks your Old Bailey Judge more than a bent copper. There the Judge is, his simple world proceeding nicely, with the villains committing enough crimes to keep his Honour in business, and the public-spirited Old Bill out catching them and lobbing them neatly into the dock, and then, horror of horrors, a copper gets on to the wrong side! The Old Bailey universe comes grinding to a halt, and the Judge tends to look on the twisted bobby with the amount of smiling
tolerance that Savonarola would have had for a pregnant nun; his only answer would be to kick her out of the convent and into the nick before she starts infecting other members of the Serious Crimes Squad. Of course, the truth is never quite so simple as it appears to an Old Bailey Judge. Coppers and villains spend so much time in each other’s company that they often begin to look alike (as dog owners grow to look like their pets). They have the same short-back-and-sides haircut and wear the same navy blue blazers and cavalry twill trousers. King Lear put it in a neat phrase, ‘Handy dandy, which is the Justice, which is the thief?’

  This was the point at issue in the case of dear old Inspector Dobbs of the Detective Force. I remember leaving Casa Rumpole, our flat in Froxbury Court, Gloucester Road, for a conference with the Inspector one soggy February morning, when I was submitted to a brief interrogation from She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  Now it is not, it is certainly not, that I am going deaf. It is just that everyone seems to talk more quietly nowadays, particularly my wife Hilda. I have no doubt that She said something to me on the stairs and the subsequent evidence went to show that her general drift was, ‘Will you come straight back this evening, Rumpole?’

  Now this may, indeed, be what she said. What I thought she said was rather different. From the blurred mumble that reached me over the roar of the traffic and the babble of other people’s radios, I thought she said, ‘Will you come late back this evening, Rumpole?’ To which I replied, with the utmost courtesy, ‘I bloody well hope not.’ You can imagine my dismay, therefore, when Hilda received my soft answer with a swift intake of breath and retreated back into our matrimonial home as though I had announced a previous engagement with a couple of ladies of the town in an opium den. In a shifting world I felt only one rule was certain, there was no accounting for She.

  When I got to my chambers in Equity Court, the clerk’s room presented the usual scene of frenzied activity. Henry, my clerk, was making telephone calls. Henry is the devoted servant who is the true master of our Chambers; if he says go, we go, even to the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court. Dianne, his helper, was training as usual for the slow typers’ competition, and Uncle Tom, our oldest and most briefless barrister, was practising mashie shots into the waste paper basket. Miss Trant, the Portia of our Chambers and our only lady barrister (now known to some, but not to me, as Phillida Erskine-Brown, having married one of our barristers, Claude Erskine-Brown) was eagerly undoing the tape on her brief in a lengthy ‘gang bang’ with scarlet finger-nails. Her husband, who now spends a good deal of his time at home drafting affidavits and looking after their baby, was thoughtfully stirring his coffee and Guthrie Featherstone, Q.C., M.P., our Head of Chambers, was picking over his letters in the hope of finding an invitation to play golf with the Lord Chief Justice.

  ‘Inspector Dobbs is in your room, Mr Rumpole, along with Mr Morse from the instructing solicitors.’ Henry put down the telephone momentarily to announce my engagements.

  ‘Rumpole! Are you under arrest? Have they caught up with you at last?’ Ever since Featherstone was asked to sit as a Commissioner of Assize, or type of part-time Judge, he has shown a regrettable tendency to attempt jokes. All the same I thought I detected, beneath the levity, a certain wishful thinking.

  ‘Not yet, Guthrie, my old darling,’ I told him. ‘The Inspector comes to me as a client. Like most of the rest of mankind, he’s got himself into some sort of trouble with the law.’

  ‘Your letters, Mr Rumpole.’ Dianne came up and pressed a number of unwelcome communications into my hand. I took a look at them and threw them into the waste paper basket.

  ‘Little brown envelopes,’ I said with horror. ‘Communications from Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Revenue!’

  ‘All the same, there’s no need to throw them away.’ Claude Erskine-Brown spoke with disapproval.

  ‘There certainly is, Erskine-Brown. Reading communications from the Revenue only produces palpitations of the heart and quite unnecessary anxiety.’

  ‘You don’t deal with the Revenue properly, Rumpole. Philly’ll tell you. I’ve just won a long battle with them on the subject of pin-striped trousers, which I say are absolutely necessary for our work at the Bar. Haven’t I, Philly?’

  His wife Phillida, appealed to, went on reading her brief. She looked as if she couldn’t care less about her husband’s pin-striped trousers. Erskine-Brown was our expert on revenue law, good on figures and absolutely hopeless on bloodstains.

  ‘I’m now deducting two pairs of pin-striped trousers a year. It’s a perfectly legitimate claim, which has been recognized as such by the Inland Revenue,’ the proud father and tax lawyer told me.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee up in your room, Mr Rumpole?’ Dianne was being remarkably attentive that morning. However, I declined her offer as I knew that Dianne’s idea of coffee was a tepid brew tasting faintly of meat extract.

  ‘You might as well have it, Mr Rumpole. You’re paying regularly into the coffee money,’ Dianne pointed out.

  ‘No time for luxurious living, Dianne. Inspector Dobbs awaits my attention.’

  When I went into my room I found dear old Dobbs, a grey-haired, slow-speaking officer sitting stolidly in my client’s chair. I had known the Inspector about the Courts for years and we had crossed swords on a number of occasions. I respected him as hard-working and, within his limits, an honest officer. The other man present was Mr Morse, an old solicitor’s clerk who had brought me criminal work for longer than I care to remember. He was re-lighting his pipe and my room was filled with the familiar reek of his quite revolting tobacco.

  ‘I never expected to see you in a defending barrister’s Chambers, Inspector,’ I greeted him. ‘Good of Mr Morse to trundle you along.’

  ‘Inspector Dobbs has long been aware, Mr Rumpole, of your talent for getting persons acquitted,’ Morse grinned through the smoke-screen.

  ‘I’ve found your talents frustrating,’ Dobbs grumbled. ‘Especially when you and I both know the lads are damn well guilty.’

  ‘Really, Inspector! Is it my talent for getting the guilty off you’d like me to exercise in your case?’ I couldn’t resist it.

  ‘I didn’t say that, Mr Rumpole.’ Dobbs looked gloomy and I did my best to cheer him up with some gentle reminiscences.

  ‘We met last year, didn’t we, after Charlie Pointer’s latest warehouse-breaking charge?’

  ‘You had a ridiculous win there, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Because you went into the witness-box and swore that he’d said, “It’s a fair cop, Mr Dobbs,” when you first got him into the nick. Charlie may break into warehouses but he never admits it to the police. He was so incensed at the insult to his intelligence that he was determined to fight.’ I’d always wanted to tell old Dobbsy why he lost R. v. Pointer.

  ‘And you won!’ The Inspector sounded unexpectedly bitter.

  ‘If you hadn’t put that little bit of gilt on the gingerbread, it might’ve been a guilty verdict.’

  ‘Well, I can see we’re never going to agree, Mr Rumpole. I told Mr Morse it was going to be hopeless. I’ll not waste any more of your time!’ He seemed about to struggle up from my easy chair, so I said, as soothingly as possible,

  ‘Agree? Of course we’re going to agree.’

  ‘We’ve never been on the same side in Court.’

  ‘We’re on the same side now,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Why? What’s changed?’ The Inspector still seemed to doubt it.

  ‘What’s changed, Inspector Dobbs,’ I told him, ‘is that now you’re the one in trouble. You’ve caught a nasty disease and just look at me as the doctor who’s here to cure you.’

  ‘What disease is that?’

  I found my papers and opened them. Dobbs waited patiently and then I said, ‘A little charge of bribery and corruption… five hundred pounds. Don’t worry, though. The most that can happen to you is a spell in an open prison, that’s where they send the bent coppers. Cheer up, Dobbs, my old darling. You can exercise your
natural talent for hedge clipping and spreading manure.’

  My natural high spirits had got the better of me, and I had gone too far at last. Dobbs got up then and grabbed his mac.

  ‘Come along, Mr Morse. I’m not going to sit here and have Mr Rumpole crow over me! He’s the chosen representative of the criminal fraternity.’ Dobbs made for the door and was out of it, leaving Mr Morse to make his apologies.

  ‘I’m sorry about this, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘That’s quite all right, Mr Morse. ’I told him. ‘Charlie, Pointer’s just the same. He’s always extremely difficult when we start working together. He’s been trained to be a model client by the time I get him into the witness-box.’

  I was sitting brooding on the departure of the Inspector in trouble, when I received a visit from my learned friend Claude Erskine-Brown. He had the grave face and suppressed excitement of a man who has just unearthed a serious scandal.

  ‘Rumpole, in this not undistinguished set of Chambers…’ He started as if opening a ten-week case to the jury.

  ‘You mean this stable of moderate legal hacks?’

  ‘… what do we stand for above all else?’ Erskine-Brown ignored the interruption.

  ‘What do we stand for? I would say we provide a place of refuge, for villains in distress.’

  ‘I would say we stand for justice and for honesty! Surely it’s up to us, Rumpole, to set an example.’

  An example? I wasn’t sure I agreed with him. God save us from a state where everyone goes around imitating lawyers.

  ‘That’s why it is so particularly distressing when lawlessness is to be found, even in these very Chambers!’ Something of grave importance seemed to be distressing poor old Claude. I set about to probe into the mystery.

  ‘What’ve you done, Erskine-Brown? Unburden yourself to me, Claude. You’ve been taking home the law reports for solitary reading, or did you indecently assault Mrs Justice Appleby after a long and sultry divorce case?’

  ‘Rumpole. I implore you to be serious for a moment.’ His voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘It’s Henry.’