The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘What?’ I was handicapped by the habit people have, nowadays, of speaking beyond the level of human audibility, like dog whistles.

  ‘Our clerk, Henry.’ Erskine-Brown raised his voice slightly.

  ‘Henry made an improper suggestion to Mrs Justice Appleby?’ I was puzzled. We were obviously entering deep waters, but Erskine-Brown brushed the suggestion aside and said, ‘Rumpole! Have you any idea what you pay for coffee money? Of course you haven’t. Because Henry deducts the coffee money with the rest of our Chambers’ expenses and gives us no particulars. But I happened to be in the clerk’s room and saw the petty cash book lying on Henry’s desk…’

  ‘You want to confess an indecent assault upon Henry’s petty cash book?’ I was still failing to follow the fellow’s drift.

  ‘He is charging us two pounds a week each for coffee money!’

  ‘You astonish me, Claude!’

  ‘I have made careful inquiries at my local supermarket. And a large tin of instant coffee…’

  ‘That is not instant coffee we drink, Erskine-Brown. Don’t flatter the stuff. It’s dishwater lightly flavoured with meat extract.’

  ‘Well, a large tin of whatever it is costs no more than £6.50 at the most. There are twenty members of Chambers. Henry is getting £40 a week coffee money and making a profit of £33.50. On our coffee!’

  ‘Unbelievable!’ I did my best to sound aghast. ‘There’s only one thing that disturbs me.’

  ‘What’s that, Rumpole?’

  ‘Will they have room for a waxwork of our clerk Henry, between Dr Crippen and Herr Hitler in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s?’

  I could see that, once again, I had said the wrong thing and given offence. Erskine-Brown got up and prepared to leave in some dudgeon. I seemed to be doing nothing but drive my visitors away that morning.

  ‘Oh really, Rumpole! It’s no use talking to you. I should have gone straight to the Head of Chambers.’

  As he reached the door, a thought occurred to me. I thought it just might be worth trying to stop Claude creating endless trouble in the clerk’s room. ‘Just before you go. That’s a very elegant new pair of pin-striped bags you’re wearing, Erskine-Brown.’

  ‘Nonsense, Rumpole!’ My learned friend looked puzzled. ‘I haven’t had a new pair of pin-striped trousers for years.’

  ‘Haven’t you really?’ I smiled at him in the friendliest fashion. ‘That’s what I rather thought!’

  I had to turn my thoughts from the vital matter of Erskine-Brown’s trousers when Inspector Dobbs, true to the form of Charlie Pointer, the celebrated warehouse breaker, returned in a more docile mood the next day. He was back in the depths of my clients’ chair, sitting where some of the most notable villains on his East London patch had sat before him, and I was studying the officer’s pained and honest expression through the smoke of Mr Morse’s pipe and my own small cigar.

  ‘I’m back here, Mr Rumpole, on the advice of my senior officer.’ Left to himself, it was clear, the Inspector would never have darkened the doors of my Chambers in Equity Court again.

  ‘That’s remarkably civil of your senior officer, Inspector. Who is he, by the way?’

  ‘Superintendent Glazier. He called at my home special.’

  ‘Inspector Dobbs has been suspended from duty. For over a year,’ Mr Morse explained.

  ‘Of course. You’ve been out of touch with police matters.’ I tried to put it as tactfully as I could.

  ‘The Super came to tell me that you were an outstanding brief, Mr Rumpole.’

  A ‘brief’ is just what Charlie Pointer calls me. Once again, I remembered that villains and the Old Bill speak the same language.

  ‘Superintendent Glazier agrees you are outstanding at getting customers off. That being your job of course.’

  I must say I was a little surprised. I knew Glazier as a remarkably efficient officer, proud of his conviction rate, and a cautious and unshakeable witness. I would never have guessed that he cherished a warm admiration for the Rumpole talents. However, I felt proper gratitude to the Super for his friendly action and for encouraging Inspector Dobbs to confide his troubles in me, as he was now doing in the measured monotone which he always used when giving evidence.

  ‘I was as surprised as anyone when Charlie Pointer asked to come and see me. He telephoned me at the station. Suggested we had a Chinese together.’

  ‘A Chinese what exactly?’ I asked, purely for clarification.

  ‘Meal, of course,’ Dobbs explained tolerantly.

  ‘What did you think about that?’ It seemed, on the face of it, a strange invitation from a con to a copper. Dobbs gave me a small, reassuring laugh and said, ‘I thought he was trying to Doggett a Chinese dinner.’

  ‘Did you say “Doggett”, Inspector?’ Mr Morse was puzzled. This time I was able to translate.

  ‘Of course he did, Morse. “Doggett’s coat and badge”. Means “cadge”. Thieves’ rhyming slang. The language used by Charlie Pointer and Detective Inspector Dobbs. In any event, you agreed to meet Charlie?’

  ‘At the Swinging Bamboo. In the High Street.’

  ‘Why did you meet him?’

  ‘I was curious. It was my night off and I was on the lonely side, not being a married man.’ I looked at Dobbs; of course, it was a solitary life being a copper, a man with few friends except among the criminals he pursues.

  ‘So the idea of picking over a chop suey with Charlie Pointer appealed to you. You went on your own?’

  ‘I did, yes. Soon it became, well, a regular date we had together.’

  ‘You weren’t suspicious?’

  ‘No. Charlie’s the old-fashioned type. Sticks to simple warehouse breaking. No violence, an honest sort of tea leaf, in his way.’

  ‘Just as you’re an honest sort of copper, in your way. Even though you invented a couple of verbals at Charlie’s trial.’ I couldn’t help myself and this time the Inspector looked only slightly pained. ‘Mr Rumpole,’ he said, ‘do we have to go into that again?’

  ‘I’m sorry. You’re quite right. Don’t let’s dig up old verbals. Go on.’

  ‘As I say, you could’ve knocked me down with a feather when Charlie offered to be a grass.’

  It amazed me too. Charlie Pointer was an old-fashioned type of villain, born before the age of the super-grass, with old-fashioned ideas of honour among thieves. I asked Dobbs if Charlie would have been any use as an informer. ‘He’s in touch with three or four big firms of shop and warehouse breakers. I thought he might be useful, yes.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I consulted my superior officer.’

  ‘Superintendent Glazier?’

  ‘That’s right. He told me to carry on at my discretion.’

  ‘Did Charlie give you anything useful?’ I wondered.

  ‘Little bits and pieces. Nothing enormous. But when we checked it over, we found it was reliable.’

  ‘And you were prepared to pay him for it?’

  ‘Yes. We owed him five hundred nicker at the time.’

  ‘At the time of the alleged bribery? So that’s what you were talking about!’ I began, with a feeling of elation, to sniff the faint odour of a defence. I rose from my seat and found and lit another small cigar.

  ‘Of course, Mr Rumpole.’ Dobbs sounded vaguely rebuking, as though it should have been obvious to a child.

  ‘That’s the defence! You didn’t want Charlie to pay you five hundred. You were going to pay him.’

  ‘Certainly I was. I’ll swear on the book on that. He’s a liar who says different.’

  Inspector Dobbs looked so solid and convincing when he protested his innocence that I rashly began to assume that we were on a winner. However, one witness was found to contradict the words of the inspector, and to do so, awkwardly enough, in his own words and even with his slow and reassuring voice.

  In the good old days when I did the Penge Bungalow Murders, and scored a remarkable success, although I say it myself, alone and
without a leader, witnesses were, by and large, human beings. And as human beings, they could be cross-examined, suggestions could be made to them and they were subject to merciful confusion and welcome failures of recollection. Things, I regret to have to say it, have not improved since those distant days, and many of the faults must be laid at the door of automation. Not only have witnesses changed. String quartets, which were once the pride of the tea room, have now been replaced by an abominable form of mechanical music. The toasting fork has given way to an alarming machine that fires singed bread at you like a minute gun. The comforting waitress in black bombazine has become a device that contrives to shoot a warmish and unidentifiable fluid into a plastic cup and over your trousers at the drop of a considerable sum of money. None of these engines is an improvement on the human factor, neither are trials made any easier by the replacement of the living witness with the electronic device. It is hard to cross-examine a machine or to try and shake its recollection.

  ‘Have you seen the additional evidence, Mr Rumpole, in the case of R. v. Dobson?’

  I confessed I hadn’t. Mr Morse and I had had a busy and unpleasant week with an unlawful handling before Judge Bullingham. I staggered away after a day of being chased round the Court by the demented Bull, barely able to raise the glass of Pommeroy’s plonk to my parched lips, or read anything more demanding than the Times crossword puzzle.

  ‘They’ve served us with the inspector’s little chat with Charlie Pointer in the Chinese restaurant. They’ve got it word for word.’

  ‘You mean…’ we were in my favourite wine bar at the time, and I paused to absorb the first glass of the evening, ‘… poor old Dobbsy was bugged?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Mr Rumpole. Not a lot we can do about it.’

  ‘We can listen to the beastly machine. I mean, don’t let’s take the word of any sort of transcript.’

  Listening to the machine meant a visit to New Scotland Yard where the mechanical witness was in the safe custody of Superintendent Glazier, the officer in charge of the case.

  Superintendent Glazier was a tall, rather pale officer with dark hair brushed straight back, wearing a blue suit and a police Rugby Club tie. He greeted Mr Morse and me politely and I took the opportunity of thanking him for recommending my services to the reluctant Inspector.

  ‘I know you’re good, Mr Rumpole,’ he said, ‘and I want Dobbs to have the best. I want him given every chance to put his defence, if he has one. But, if he’s crooked, I want him out of my manor and I want him in the nick. I can find a good word to say for all sorts of villains, Mr Rumpole, it’s my Christian duty to do so, but I can’t stand a bent copper.’

  There was a small badge on the officer’s lapel, the insignia of the Police Witness to God Society. ‘Clean living and high thinking’ was the style of Superintendent Glazier.

  ‘This little matter of the additional evidence?’

  ‘Sorry about that, Mr Rumpole. Must have come as a nasty shock to Dobbs that we had that.’

  ‘Tell me, why didn’t you put it in at the Magistrates’ Court? Was it a little threat you were saving up till the last moment?’

  ‘Let’s say, we wanted to spare your feelings, sir.’ The Superintendent gave a wintry smile. ‘We didn’t want to destroy your faith in your client.’

  ‘Oh, I think I can bear to hear the truth about dear old Inspector Dobbsy.’

  ‘A rotten apple, Mr Rumpole! One that could poison the whole barrel if he’s not thrown out.’ Glazier spoke and I could hear the voice of an officer in Cromwell’s army, determined to stamp on corruption and backsliding.

  ‘A rotten apple? He seems to me much more like a swede.’

  ‘A what, Mr Rumpole?’ The Superintendent frowned.

  ‘Isn’t that what you sophisticated officers call the poor old turnip-heads, the simple-minded ploddies who’d look far happier in cycle clips?’

  ‘Simple-minded?’ He gave another flicker of a smile. ‘I don’t think you’d call Dobbs simple-minded, Mr Rumpole. Not when you’ve heard this tape.’

  So the performance we had come to attend began as Superintendent Glazier switched on the little machine. Act One, Scene One. The set, I take it, was the Swinging Bamboo restaurant, the dramatis personae were Detective Inspector Dobbs and new super-grass Charlie Pointer. The background noises were the crunch of prawn crackers and the gentle simmering of sweet-and-sour pork on the table heaters. On this the curtain rose, or rather, the tape was turned on. Mr Morse and I listened, with growing depression, as Charlie Pointer spoke first.

  ‘You want another payment, Inspector?’

  There was a pause, and then the Inspector came through loud and clear. The dialogue went as follows:

  DOBBS : No one works for nothing, Charlie.

  CHARLIE : What’s going to happen if I can’t pay?

  DOBBS: I’ve got the whole Squad behind me. And I want to get my fingers on what you promised me. When are you coming through, Charlie?

  CHARLIE : How much do you want off me, Mr Dobbs?

  DOBBS: Five hundred nicker, Charlie.

  CHARLIE : Can I have a few more days to collect the money? I’ll sell my old banger.

  DOBBS : Next Thursday, Charlie. I want it by then. Next Thursday’s pay day.

  CHARLIE: Same time and place then, Mr Dobbs.

  Glazier clicked off the tape. The performance was over, but we had heard quite enough.

  ‘Still got a lot of faith in your client, have you, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Interesting recording that.’ I was thinking it over. ‘You can hear the clatter of plates and the crackle of crispy noodles throughout. It must have been made in the Chinese restaurant.’

  ‘Of course it was, Mr Rumpole.’ Glazier was clearly proud of his evidence. ‘Got the transcript of all that, have you?’

  I looked at the document Morse produced from the filing system of his overcoat pocket.

  ‘Yes. Dobbs’s answers were…’ I read them out. ‘ “No one works for nothing, Charlie.” “I’ve got the whole squad behind me. And I want to get my fingers on what you promised me. When are you coming through, Charlie?” “Five hundred nicker, Charlie.” And, “Next Thursday, Charlie. Next Thursday’s pay day.” ’

  ‘Those are only Dobbs’s answers! You forgot Charlie’s questions.’ Superintendent Glazier looked at me as though he were starting to lose his faith in my legal abilities.

  ‘Forgot dear old Charlie the grass’s questions, did I?’ I did my best to look innocent. ‘How particularly stupid of me! Oh well. Come on, Mr Morse. Perhaps it doesn’t matter after all.’

  When I came home worn out from another day with the Bull, topped up by that somewhat chilling visit to Scotland Yard, I was in a mood to unburden my soul to some sympathetic companion. Imagine my bewilderment when I discovered that She Who Must Be Obeyed had apparently taken a vow of silence and entered a Trappist order. All my attempts to keep up a jolly bubble of conversation fell on very stony ground indeed.

  ‘Had a nice day, have you, Hilda?’ was my opening gambit. It got no sort of response.

  ‘Did you buy plenty of Vim to go with the saucepan scourers? Did you treat yourself to a coffee and a couple of ginger nuts upstairs at Pontings and then take a long slow, luxurious turn round the hat department? What did you do this afternoon, Hilda? Put your feet up with the ladies’ pages of the Daily Telegraph?’ All this was greeted by a solemn silence. Perhaps I hadn’t made myself heard. I raised the voice a little.

  ‘I said, have a nice day, did you, Hilda?’

  ‘It’s all right, Rumpole. You needn’t shout. I’m not deaf.’ My wife spoke at last. ‘Yet.’

  ‘Good. That’s marvellous news! I thought I was sending out words like troops to some hopeless battle on the Somme. Knowing they’d never return.’

  The vast silence fell again.

  ‘Well, Hilda. Aren’t you going to ask me what sort of day I had?’ She clearly wasn’t, so I carried on with the monologue.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say,
“Had a good day, Rumpole?” Yes, thank you, dear. A very good day. Dear old Inspector Dobbs! Apart from a marked tendency to invent verbal admissions by the villains he felt sure were guilty anyway, I always thought he was rather an honest old copper. Just the sort to send bicycling round the village to clip little boys on the ear-hole when he detected a bad case of scrumping apples. But he’s been charged with all sorts of nasty practices. Accepting bribes. Corruption. Perverting the course of justice! And the interesting thing about it is, they’ve got it all on tape. They’ve recorded his very incriminating words. Question and Answer. What did you say, dear?’

  There was a seemingly endless pause, but at last She gave tongue. ‘If you have had such a fascinating day, Rumpole, I really don’t know why you bothered to come home at all!’

  All things happen if you wait for them long enough, and in due course Inspector Dobbs was called to give an account of himself in Number One Court at the Old Bailey. He stood to attention before Mr Justice Vosper, a cold-hearted Judge who was never particularly fond of rotten apples. Her Majesty, regardless of expense, had secured the service of Mr Martin Colefax, Q.C., to prosecute, and I sat containing myself as best I could whilst that aristocratic voice opened the case to the jury as though, if Dobbs were not convicted, there would be a total breakdown of law and order, rioting in the streets and human sacrifices in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral.

  ‘Members of the jury,’ Colefax spoke with deep disapproval, ‘it is fashionable nowadays to “knock” the police. Left-wingers, “do-gooders”, protectors of so-called civil liberties…’

  ‘Defending barristers such as my learned friend, old Rumpole of the Bailey,’ I thought Colefax wanted to add that to his list of villains.

  ‘… even some defending barristers.’ Martin Colefax said it at last. ‘All these people take every opportunity to suggest dishonesty in the police. But you may think, I’m sure you do think, members of the jury, that our police are quite the best in the world, and they are the sure protectors of our liberties.’ Here, I thought the old darling was overdoing it a bit; there might be some hostile reaction. The man with the handlebar moustache top left of the jury-box looked as though he’d just been done for speeding. ‘But when one policeman goes wrong. When one copper, as we say, “goes bent”…’ I wondered if Martin Colefax really did use that sort of language, when chattering to his pals round the Sheridan Club on a Saturday night ‘… that one single bent copper can bring the entire police force into ill-deserved disrepute. That one rotten apple, members of the jury, can infect the whole barrel. He must be weeded out.’