And then we were in the outskirts of a grey, stony town. The train gasped to a standstill and I heard a porter calling, ‘Tester! Change here for Deepside and Watching Junction.’
When I got outside the station, burdened, as usual on my travels, with my suitcase, briefcase and robe bag, I was hailed by the young man I had seen briefly in Jonathan Postern’s entourage, and who had been pointed out as the boyfriend of Miss Fiona Allways.
‘Horace Rumpole!’ he was calling as he tried to stuff an extremely large and melancholy-looking dog into the back seat of a battered sports car. ‘Do hop in. I’m Jeremy Jowling, instructing you. Don’t mind Agatha. She’s a soppy old date really. Here, let me take your luggage.’ As we put my travelling wardrobe into his boot, I fitted myself with some difficulty into the sports car. The front seat was covered with dog hairs and the Hound of the Baskervilles was breathing lugubriously down my neck.
‘Where’d you like to go first,’ young Jowling said as he forced himself into the driver’s seat and switched on the engine. ‘The Tester Arms or the prison?’
‘Which is the least uncomfortable?’ I asked him.
‘I’d say the prison. Run you there, shall I? I must say it’s all a G.M.B.U.…’
‘G.M.B.U.?’ I asked, puzzled, as we roared off through the heart of Tester.
‘Grand Military Balls-up,’ he explained. ‘Years since we had a murder in the Tester Hunt. Well, it’ll get those dotty blood sports protestors going. Agatha! For God’s sake don’t kiss Mr Rumpole!’
I had, in fact, felt the slap of a warm tongue on the back of the neck. I leant forward and lit a small cigar. As he squeaked past a bus and slipped by as the light went red, I wondered how useful Fiona’s swain would be in the coming trial.
‘You’re a partner?’ I asked him.
‘In Jowling and Leonard. My old man’s firm, quite honestly. But he doesn’t care for murder. So he handed this case on to me. “Well, my boy,” he said. “You may as well start at the bottom…” You knew Jonathan Postern at all?’
‘Only momentarily.’
‘People round here had a tremendous lot of time for Jonno.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I meant it.
‘What?’
‘It’s not what you need in a murder case, a well-liked corpse.’
‘Well, you’d know about that, wouldn’t you? Agatha. Don’t kiss! I shan’t tell you again. Only one trouble with Jonno Postern. He had a bad case of the M.T.F.s.’
‘The what?’ The young man seemed to need a simultaneous translation.
‘Must Touch Flesh! Particularly the flesh of Debbie Pavier. Well; that’s what the row was all about, wasn’t it? A Grand Military Shout-up. I mean, if it hadn’t been for that the constabulary might have taken Sprod’s story about an accident, and no questions asked.’
‘Debbie Pavier?’ I asked. ‘Was she the girl who was kissing him in the tent at the races?’
‘One of them, yes. All the girls were crazy about Jonno.’
Tester prison was a smallish Victorian castle, not far from the centre of town. Jennifer Postern had been brought up from Holloway and we sat in a small, dark interview room and I rummaged in my brief and asked her questions. She seemed remarkably calm and self-possessed. She had none of the prison pallor I was used to in my clients, but seemed to bring into the stuffy little room a fresh breeze from the countryside.
‘It was an accident,’ she told me, as she had told the old man Figgis.
‘Your housekeeper says you were quarrelling with your husband that afternoon.’
‘Bit of a hangover. After some serious drinking the night before.’
‘Do you remember saying something about “killing him”?’
‘Isn’t it the sort of thing one says?’ Jennifer asked with a smile.
‘Is it?’
‘Well, don’t you quarrel sometimes, with She Who…?’
‘Happily, neither of us owns a shotgun.’ I meant it. ‘After the quarrel your husband went out?’
‘Jonno wanted a walk, I suppose. To cool off.’
‘And so did you?’
‘Yes. I went out after he did.’
‘And you took your twenty-bore with you?’
‘You know something about guns?’ For the first time, I thought, she looked a little worried.
‘A little. Why did you take it?’
‘I thought it might calm my nerves if I shot something.’
‘Not the most tactful way of explaining your feelings to the jury.’ I ground out the end of a small cigar on the tin ashtray on the table.
‘I meant rough shooting. A rabbit, perhaps, or a pigeon or…’
‘The gun was loaded when you met your husband in the wood?’
‘Of course.’
‘And the safety catch?’
‘I put up a pheasant and I was about to have a shot, and then I remembered it was after February. Closed season for pheasants.’ But not for husbands, I thought, but didn’t say, as Jennifer went on, ‘I must have forgotten to put the safety catch on again. I walked on a little.’
‘Down the track in the wood?’ I had another bundle of photographs in my brief, not of the mortuary but of rural scenes.
‘Yes.’
‘And then?’
She paused, seemed to be in some difficulty, and looked to the young solicitor for help. ‘I’ve told Jeremy,’ she said.
‘Tell me.’
Her hesitation didn’t last long. She took in a deep breath and said, ‘I saw Jonno coming towards me.’
‘He was still angry?’
‘No, I don’t think so. He looked perfectly calm, actually.’
‘And you?’
‘Oh, I was calm enough. I walked towards him. The track was rough, you know. Brambles. It needed clearing. And I must have tripped and… Well, that’s how it happened.’
I looked at her in silence and then slapped my pockets. ‘You don’t have a small cigar about you?’
‘No.’ She was smiling and seemed relieved.
‘Stupid of me. I must have left them in the car.’ I turned to Jeremy Jowling. ‘Your dog’s probably guarding them with her fangs bared.’
‘I’ll whizz out and get them. Back in a jiff.’
Jeremy went obediently. I sat looking at Jennifer. ‘He’s one of your lot, isn’t he?’ I asked her when we were alone.
‘Jeremy? Well, we knew his father, of course,’ Jennifer answered vaguely.
‘One of your lot,’ I stood and spoke my mind to her. ‘But I’m not. I don’t wear green welly boots. I don’t travel with a firearm and a bloody great mastiff in the back of my car. I’m even unfamiliar with your language – which seems to me to have been designed for the express purpose of saying nothing at all. I have landed in your midst, Mrs Postern, like a creature from outer space. You can speak to me as to a perfect stranger.’
‘What do you want me to say?’ She was smiling up at me with maddening politeness.
‘Anything you think I ought to know.’
There was a pause. She continued to smile and then said, as she had always done, ‘It was an accident.’
The Postern house was a long, grey Georgian manor in a small park which was bounded by the woods. The rough track I had seen in the photograph started at the edge of the parkland and passed the hedge which surrounded a small, tumbledown cottage. That afternoon I stood on the track near to a fallen tree, holding a shotgun in my hands. The weapon was the property of my instructing solicitor and I held it as though I were about to shoot a startled and unwary pheasant. Then I stumbled on the rough and overgrown ground and brought the gun up to point to Jeremy Jowling’s chest, roughly the area in which Jonathan Postern had received the fatal charge of shot.
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I speculated. ‘More likely I’d’ve shot your feet off, though.’
Jeremy took the gun from me gently.
‘Never, never let your gun
Pointed be at anyone.
That it should unloaded be
Matters not the least to me.’
‘Come again?’
‘You don’t know that?’ He sounded incredulous.
‘No. We must have learnt different nursery rhymes.’ Then an uncomfortable thought struck me. ‘Jennifer Postern would’ve known it, though, wouldn’t she? She must have learnt gun training on her Nanny’s knee.’ I was looking moodily at the ground, the trees and the bushes, the track that runs through the wood.
‘Her father was a terrific shot. Runs in the family. What are you looking at?’
‘The scene of the crime,’ I told him. ‘The locus in quo.’
‘What do you do now?’ Jeremy was interested to know. ‘Crawl about on your hands and knees collecting bits of cigarette ash in an old envelope?’
‘Not exactly. The locus in quo looks just like any old bit of the English countryside to me.’
I moved a little way along the track to a sign on a post, which bore the direction TO BADGER’S WOOD, and a picture of the appropriate animal.
‘Where’s that lead to?’ I asked. ‘More Postern country?’
‘Fishbourne country, actually.’
‘Who?’
‘Maurice Fishbourne. Something of a weed with a good deal of money. Gets ragged a lot for trying to ride at point-to-points. Invariably hits the deck.’
‘Fishface!’ Yes, of course I remembered.
‘You know him?’
‘Hardly at all. He isn’t a friend of the Posterns?’
‘They can’t stand him. No one can, actually. He’s not P.L.U. exactly.’
‘People Like Us?’ I hazarded a guess.
‘Well, he puts up those poncy little signs on his land and gets all his cash from laxatives: “Fishbourne’s keep you regular.” ’
I was looking at the top windows of the cottage which were visible above the tangled hedge. ‘I rely on medicinal claret myself,’ I told him. And then I was startled by a raucous cry, coming from somewhere quite near us. It was a strangely sad sound, like the lament for some irreparable loss. ‘What the hell’s that?’ I asked Jeremy. ‘Someone in pain?’
‘Not at all. That is a yell of pure randiness. Look, I’ll show you.’ He led me to a gap in the hedge and a gate into the untended cottage garden. And there, on the grass, was a rough coop in which a plump brown bird with a beady eye was imprisoned and letting people know about it. ‘That’s a calling bird. A cock pheasant,’ Jeremy told me.
‘A calling pheasant in a cage,
Puts all Heaven in a rage,’
I suggested, and went on,
‘The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider’s enmity.’
‘Figgis, the old devil who lives here, keeps it to entice all the Postern pheasants into his front garden. Of course, when they get there he knocks them off from his front window with a shotgun. Cunning isn’t it?’
‘Did Jonathan Postern know he was being robbed?’
‘I suppose he just let it go on. He couldn’t get Figgis out of the cottage. Old Jonno was a bit of an innocent in spite of everything.’
I was looking at the cottage. A thin line of smoke was coming out of the chimney. ‘Did you say “Figgis”?’
‘I bet he’s in there. Want to talk to him?’
‘Talk to a prosecution witness?’ I looked at Jeremy with deep disapproval. ‘Not sporting, old fellow. Definitely not sporting.’
But as we moved away I saw a shape behind the blurred glass of a downstairs window. The prosecution witness was no doubt watching us with interest.
When I got to know the Tester Arms Hotel I realized how right Jeremy Jowling had been to take me straight to the prison. That evening I had what was known as the ‘set meal’: Pâté Maison in the form of liver ice-cream, a steak from the rump of some elderly animal lightly singed under the X-ray machine, a cheeseboard aptly named because the Cheddar tasted exactly like wood, and a bottle of chilled claret which made Pommeroy’s plonk seem like Château-Lafite.
I didn’t sleep well that night. It wasn’t just the firewood in the mattress, or the intense cold, or the noise in the water pipes like a giant’s indigestion. I had sat up until well after midnight reading the post mortem report of a certain Dr Overton, a local man no doubt and hitherto unknown to me, and looking again and again at the photographs of the wound. Thoughts about shotguns raced through my head all night, and in the dawn I ordered the cooked breakfast which was there in about an hour’s time, cold as charity but better than dinner. At exactly nine o’clock I put through a call to the Forensic Department at St Cuthbert’s Hospital in London and asked to speak to Professor Andrew Ackerman.
There are two people in England who know most of what there is to know about bloodstains: Horace Rumpole and Professor Andrew Ackerman. I have crossed swords with the good Prof across many a courtroom, one of the most recent occasions being in the case of a strange young man who fell in with an appalling religious sect. It was a case which turned on a nice point of blood, and I think I got one up on Ackerman on that occasion.* We are firm friends, however, and once a year Andrew Ackerman invites me to lunch at the Athenaeum, where we discuss various corpses of our acquaintance over a chop. My night thoughts on the Postern case had convinced me that what I now needed was a bit of help from the good Professor. By good fortune I got hold of him before he went down to the morgue, and the conversation we had about shotgun wounds was long and enthralling.
In due course young Jeremy Jowling came up to my room to fetch me for the corrida and, as I buttoned myself into the black jacket and waistcoat, I asked him if he’d read Dr Overton’s report.
‘I’ve glanced at it,’ Jeremy said.
I was tying up my brief. ‘Sure of himself, our Dr Overton. Perhaps a little too sure of himself for an experienced pathologist. Know anything about him?’
‘Never heard of him. Gravely usually does all the stiffs for the Home Office.’
‘How interesting!’ I was checking the robes, and fitting the thick bundle of papers into my briefcase.
‘What’re our chances?’ Jeremy Jowling asked with a small show of nerves.
‘Speaking as a sporting man – you’d like to know the odds?’
‘Any better than evens?’
‘It’s not exactly an easy defence,’ I admitted. ‘But she’s a woman. She was probably badly treated by her husband. All we need is a sympathetic judge.’
And then young Jeremy Jowling dropped his bombshell. ‘We’ve got a fellow called Mr Justice Twyburne,’ he said, as though he were referring to the state of the weather. I must confess that the Rumpole jaw dropped.
‘What do you think?’ He must have noticed my dismay.
‘I think – the odds have lengthened considerably.’
‘Why? What’s he like then?’
I sat down, recovered my breath, lit a small cigar to steady my nerves and asked young Jowling if he remembered Martin Muschamp.
‘No…’
‘One of the last death penalty cases. He went out with a gang, and was tried for shooting a copper. Twyburne summed up dead against him. Couple of years later another boy confessed and Marty Muschamp was cleared by a Home Office Inquiry.’
‘That was all right then,’ Jeremy suggested.
‘Oh, lovely for everyone. Except for Martin Muschamp. He’d already been hanged.’ I got up and went to the door. ‘Don’t worry too much. We don’t do that sort of thing any more.’
Mervyn Harmsway was a pleasant, middle-aged prosecutor, who, so I was told, had a pretty Queen Anne house in Tester, and an impressive collection of Crown Derby. He opened the case perfectly fairly in the chilly atmosphere of Twyburne’s Court, and the old Judge, more paper-coloured than ever, listened without expression.
The Court was full. I recognized a few faces, including the pretty girls who had kissed Jonno at the point-to-point. Fiona was in mufti on the bench behind me, and her sister smiled at her, apparently unworried, from the dock. The solid-looking county jury listened to Harmsway as t
hough they were determined not to let anyone know what they were thinking.
‘That is all I have to say in opening this sad case, members of the jury,’ Harmsway finished. ‘And now, with the assistance of my learned friend Mr Gavin Pinker, I hope to fairly put the evidence before you.’
‘You are causing me a great deal of pain, Mr Harmsway.’ A dry voice came from the Bench.
‘I’m sorry, my Lord?’ Harmsway looked puzzled.
‘Please. Don’t split them.’ The Judge was looking extremely pained.
‘Don’t split what, my Lord?’
‘Your infinitives!’ his Lordship cracked back. ‘This is a distressing case, in all conscience. Do we have to add to the disagreeable nature of the proceedings the sound of you tormenting the English language? You hope to put the evidence fairly.’
‘Yes, my Lord.’ Harmsway looked cowed.
‘Then why don’t you start to do it?’ Twyburne asked testily.
‘My learned friend, Mr Pinker, will call the first witness.’
Poor old Harmsway subsided, deflated, to his seat. His junior, Gavin Pinker, who seemed made of sterner stuff, rose and announced that he would now call Mrs Marian Hempe. As the Posterns’ dear old housekeeper waddled into the witness-box and took the oath, Harmsway whispered to me bitterly, ‘What a charming Judge!’
‘Don’t worry, old darling,’ I comforted him. ‘Twyburne’s quite impartial. He’ll be just as ghastly to me.’ And then I turned my attention to the dialogue between Mrs Hempe and Mr Gavin Pinker.
‘Mrs Hempe. How long have you worked for the Posterns?’ Pinker started quietly.
‘Ten years now, for Master Jonathan. And his father before him.’
‘You don’t live in?’
‘I comes on my bicycle. They drive me home if it’s a late dinner.’
‘On the afternoon that Jonathan Postern died… did you hear anything going on, between him and his wife?’
The Second Rumpole Omnibus Page 41
