The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘I like a spot of Wordsworth before dropping off. Nothing wrong with that, is there, Portia?’

  ‘Nothing at all. So The Oxford Book of English Verse is to be found on your bedside table. In the Gloucester Road?’

  ‘Of course.’ At which she pulled another mean Courtroom trick, rolled back the brief on my desk further and revealed my favourite anthology.

  ‘Then what’s it doing here? Rubbing shoulders with Bloodstains I Have Known by Professor Ackerman and an out-of-date Archbold on Crime?’

  ‘I brought it here… to prepare a final speech in a case.’ Quick thinking you’ll agree, but she was on to me like a terrier.

  ‘Which case?’

  ‘Which what?’

  ‘Case! Am I not speaking clearly?’

  ‘An attempted murder. My client’s an excellent gardener and a remarkably unsuccessful murderer. I have to address the Jury…’

  ‘No, you haven’t! That case doesn’t start until next week.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’m prosecuting. The game’s up, Rumpole!’

  ‘All right, guv.’ I was, I confess it, beaten. ‘You’ve got me bang to rights.’

  ‘Oh, Rumpole. You know perfectly well criminals don’t say that any more.’ At that, she sat down, exhausted by her forensic brilliance, in my client’s chair.

  ‘A fellow is entitled to his own anecdotes for God’s sake,’ I started to explain. ‘I mean, where would I be without my anecdotes?’

  ‘Hilda took exception to one of them?’ She guessed the terrible truth.

  ‘An excellent story. You remember I told it at the Scales of Justice dinner. Went down rather well, I thought.’

  ‘Did you? And what did Hilda have to say about it?’

  ‘I prefer not to remember. I believe the word “senile” featured in her address to the Court. I opened the cab door and found freedom.’

  ‘You’ll have to go back sometime.’ And she added thoughtfully, ‘Anyway, you can’t stay here. After the Jeffrey Mungo case, Ballard’ll have you evicted for breaking the terms of the lease!’

  ‘Mungo cooked Spaghetti Bolognese.’

  ‘And you import curry; I’d say the offence is a great deal worse. They’re on to you, Rumpole. Stay here another night and you’ll lose your tenancy.’ She looked at me with a sort of amused desperation. ‘What are we going to do about you?’ She sighed and made up her mind. ‘Oh well. I suppose there’s nothing else for it. Just till you find somewhere else, you understand…’

  So it came about that I took up residence in a spare bedroom in the Erskine-Browns’ agreeable house in Canonbury Square. I was, although I say it myself, no trouble at all to Claude and Phillida. For instance, I always did my own breakfast, manning the cooker to produce my own bacon, eggs and fried slice, whilst the family gloomily digested muesli (stuff which looked as though it were manufactured to line birdcages) and fat-free yoghurt. In the evenings I entertained my hosts with an anthology of my best anecdotes, together with a complete account of my cross examination of the pathologist in the Penge Bungalow Murders, a triumph of which I have almost total recall. I must say that the Erskine-Browns were kind and generous hosts; the same could not be said of their issue, children operatically named Tristan and Isolde. This couple of mere infants, no more than nine and seven years old respectively, were amazingly puritanical, and on the whole as censorious of Rumpole as Soapy Sam Ballard at his most disapproving.

  One morning I was at the cooker in a dressing-gown, smoking a small cigar, and blowing out a slight fire caused by some leaping bacon fat on the grill. Portia was deep in a brief and Erskine-Brown had just had Opera magazine hot from the press, and the children were dressed for school when Tristan said, ‘I can’t understand why people have to smoke.’

  ‘I can’t understand why people have to chew gob-stoppers!’ I was quick with my reply.

  ‘I never chew gob-stoppers. They’re bad for your teeth.’

  ‘For one so young, you seem remarkably careful of your health. Let me tell you, Tristan, and you too, Isolde, if you’d care to listen, there’s no pleasure on earth that’s worth sacrificing for the sake of an extra five years in the geriatric ward of the Sunset Old People’s Home, Weston-Super-Mare.’

  ‘My teacher says they’re going to make all smoking illegal,’ young Isolde announced. ‘They’re going to send you to prison for it.’ I wondered if Portia had given birth to a couple of prosecuting counsel when the child continued, ‘My teacher says you shouldn’t be allowed to smoke, even if you’re all by yourself, sitting in a field in the open air.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘You might set yourself on fire with the matches; they’d have to cure your burns on the National Health.’ Tristan supplied the answer with considerable satisfaction. Then Erskine-Brown rose to take his infants off to school. As they left the room, Isolde made a remark to her father which caused the fried slice to turn somewhat sour in my mouth and make me feel but a temporary visitor to Islington. ‘Daddy,’ I heard her piping up, ‘how long is that man going to live here?’

  In search of an answer to the same question, I heard much later, Phillida visited She Who Must Be Obeyed in Froxbury Court. She found Hilda with her feet up in an unusually tidy flat, listening to The Archers (a programme which used to cause some controversy between us) and tried to effect a reconciliation. It seems she told Hilda that I was missing her greatly, whereupon my wife said that she was hardly missing me at all, and thanked Phillida for her courage in putting up with me. So much for the gratitude of a woman to whom I had continually returned home at a more or less regular hour from Pommeroy’s Wine Bar for the last forty years. No wonder I had chosen freedom.

  A few nights before R. v. Lutterworth started, I came home late from Chambers and let myself in quietly, thinking Tristan and Isolde might have been mercifully asleep. The kitchen door was open a crack and I thought I heard the sound of voices. Phillida and Claude were no doubt sampling a rather cheeky little Bergerac he had got in a job-lot from an old school-friend in the wine trade. I paused by the door and heard Phillida say, ‘You’ve got to talk to him, Claude. She doesn’t want him back! He might be with us for ever.’

  ‘You invited him to stay. You ought to talk to him.’ Claude Erskine-Brown was showing his usual courage. ‘Go on, Philly. Be a man!’

  ‘I’m not a man,’ Phillida said, and there was clearly force in her argument. ‘You’re the man, remember?’

  A fellow can’t help feeling a bit of a pang, when he hears he’s not a welcome guest in the house of a lady to whom he’s taught all she ever knew of the subject of cross-examination, and I trod the cold stairway up to bed a little sadly.

  So I was still a wanderer, with a temporary billet à côté de chez Erskine-Brown, when our Portia rose to open the case of R. v. Lutterworth to the Jury.

  ‘It’s the old, old story,’ she told them. ‘A young and attractive wife, married to an elderly husband who had, perhaps, lost some of his charm for her over the years. So she allowed herself to drift into a love affair with her husband’s partner, that no doubt physically more attractive young man, Hugo Lutterworth, the defendant in this case. Lutterworth is here today because he was not content with mere sex! He wanted his partner, Captain Gleason, out of the way so that he could enjoy his business and his wife, without having to share them with anybody. Members of the Jury, it’s difficult for us, who no doubt have stable homes and contented marriages, to understand the lengths to which some unhappy people will go in inflicting pain and suffering on others.’

  Mrs Erskine-Brown, Q.C., was no doubt at her most eloquent, but I wasn’t listening to her. I was gazing in fascinated horror at the Bench above me. There, chosen to preside over the Court, was the Welsh wizard, Mr Justice Huw Gwent-Evans, the Chapel guru who had failed to laugh at my joke in the Savoy Hotel, and there beside him, equally unamused, sat She Who Must Be Obeyed, my wife, Hilda, staring down at me apparently prepared to judge Rumpole, come to an un-fa
vourable verdict and impose the severest penalty known to the law.

  Among Phillida Erskine-Brown’s early witnesses was a Garden Centre worker named Daphne Hapgood, a chunky, red-headed young daughter of the soil, whose nails were broken with much potting up. She testified to having seen Hugo Lutterworth bestowing a passionate kiss on Mrs Gleason in a greenhouse (people who live in glasshouses shouldn’t kiss their employers’ wives), evidence which shocked the Judge and She Who Must Be Obeyed equally. She also described seeing Lutterworth doing some work on the Volvo Estate, bending over it with the bonnet open, on the day before it crashed. She added that it was not unusual for Hugo to work on the cars, being apparently as handy with sparking plugs as he was with seedlings. Through all this evidence I noticed that Amanda Gleason couldn’t resist looking distressed and lovingly at Hugo in the dock, bestowing upon him long glances which he, unfortunately, returned in a way which was doing us no good at all with the Jury.

  ‘Did you ever hear Captain Gleason ask Hugo Lutterworth to look at his car for him?’ I asked Daphne when I rose to cross-examine.

  ‘I can’t remember. He may have done.’

  ‘May have on this particular occasion?’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is that all, Mr Rumpole?’ The Judge seemed surprised. ‘You’re not challenging the evidence about the intimate conduct between your client and his partner’s wife?’

  ‘Oh, no, my Lord. That’s admitted.’

  ‘So this man’ – the Welsh wizard was working himself up to a denunciation from the pulpit – ‘admits kissing Mrs Gleason in full view of the Garden Centre workforce. He seems to have had a very tenuous grasp on morality.’

  ‘This judge,’ I whispered to Mr Driscoll, ‘is suffering from a bad case of premature adjudication.’

  ‘Did you say something, Mr Rumpole?’ His Lordship was looking at me suspiciously, and I could see that my lady wife was not too pleased either. ‘In due course there will be a full explanation,’ I told him.

  I hoped there would, but at the minute I had no particular idea what it was going to be. Happily the moment for luncheon had arrived and the Judge, showing that he had remembered more of my well-known anecdote than he cared to admit, said, ‘Very well, Members of the Jury, we’ll leave it there until…’

  ‘Ten past two, my Lord?’ I suggested. At which Sir Huw Gwent-Evans rose without another word and, ignoring my signals, She Who Must Be Obeyed swept out after him.

  Later, after I had hung about for a while in the marble-paved hallway of the Worsfield Court, I saw Hilda advancing upon me in the company of Posnett, the Judge’s clerk.

  ‘Hilda!’ I found myself, for once in my life, almost at a loss for words. ‘What on earth…?’

  ‘The Judge invited me down to luncheon and to hear a bit of your case, Rumpole. You may remember how well I got on with Mr Justice Gwent-Evans at the Savoy.’

  Of course judges did ask distinguished visitors down to lunch in their lodgings, and they did ask such people – sheriffs, lords-lieutenant of the county and their good ladies, persons of that ilk – to sit beside them on the Bench during particularly fascinating cases. But persons of the ilk of She Who Must Be Obeyed? I suppose I found it hard to believe that the Judge had taken such a shine to her.

  ‘Well, you might have let me know. It came as something of a shock to me, seeing you in the seat of judgement.’

  ‘How could I let you know, Rumpole? I keep looking round the flat and you’re nowhere to be found.’

  ‘The Judge is just coming, Mrs Rumpole,’ the Clerk said and started to withdraw from the presence.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Posnett. I’ll be waiting here. That’s Posnett, the Judge’s clerk. Quite a sweetie,’ she explained to me, as though I were a child in matters concerning the legal profession. Then she said, ‘Oh, by the way. That case of yours. Have you noticed the way Mrs Gleason keeps looking at your client? Quite an exhibition, isn’t it? Don’t you think she’s really making it too obvious?’

  The scarlet judge appeared with his clerk, Posnett, in attendance, and She was spirited off with them into the municipal Daimler to lunch in his lodgings. But what had happened was something of a miracle, a bit of a turn up for the book. What She had said had given me an entirely new view of the case; in fact She had come up with some sort of a legal inspiration. I went off in search of Driscoll and asked to see the original partnership agreement which came into existence when Gleason and Lutterworth got together to buy the Woodland Folk Garden Centre.

  Hilda did not return to Court in the afternoon, and took no further part in the case. We heard evidence about the brakes on the Volvo Estate car having been cut, and when I suggested that it was a strange criminal who left such clear evidence of his crime, the Judge went so far as to suggest that the criminal clearly expected the runaway car to be mashed up by a passing lorry on the main road, so that the damage might have been obscured in the resulting mess. Whatever friends I had in the world, they clearly did not include Mr Justice Gwent-Evans. An officer then gave evidence that Hugo’s fingerprints had been found near the area of the braking system. I managed to slip in a request for further investigations to see if the prints of anyone else who was connected with the Garden Centre could be found, and counsel for the Prosecution agreed readily. No doubt she wanted to propitiate me so that I would move out of her matrimonial home.

  When I got back to Chambers I found a small handbill on my tray, which was the only message I had, and went to my room to bone up on the laws of partnership. Before I got down to work I read the handbill, which ran, as I remember, somewhat as follows:

  LAWYERS AS CHRISTIANS:

  THE SUFFRAGEN BISHOP OF SIDCUP

  WILL GIVE AN ADDRESS ON

  ‘THE CHRISTIAN APPROACH TO THE RENT ACTS’.

  EVERYONE INTERESTED CORDIALLY INVITED.

  SHERRY AND SANDWICHES WILL BE SERVED

  AFTER THE DISCUSSION.

  SAMUEL BALLARD, Q.C., PRESIDENT.

  Something about the connection between Soapy Sam Bollard and sherry had put a thought in my head, and then the door opened and Erskine-Brown was upon me.

  ‘I wanted to have a word with you’ – he perched uncomfortably on the arm of my client’s chair – ‘Philly’s idea really.’

  ‘A short word. I’m studying the law of partnership, in depth.’

  ‘Of course, it has been tremendous fun having you to stay with us, for a short while. Just till you get fixed up.’

  ‘Enjoyed some of the old stories, eh?’ I lit a small cigar. ‘Better than watching television. I’ve got plenty of them, for the long winter evenings.’

  ‘Good.’ Erskine-Brown sounded unenthusiastic. ‘Philly and I would love that.’

  ‘Well then. Does that solve your problem?’

  ‘Our problem, yes. . . But not Hilda’s.’

  ‘Hilda’s?’

  ‘Philly went to see her. She’s most terribly upset.’

  ‘Your wife’s upset?’ I was puzzled. ‘She seemed quite bobbish in Court.’

  ‘No. Hilda’s, well, terribly down and lonely. She wants you back desperately, Rumpole. We were both, well, rather sad about it.’

  I looked pityingly at Erskine-Brown. Then I got up and slapped him heartily on the back. ‘Claude. I have good news for you!’

  ‘You’re going back to Hilda?’ The man appeared to have some hope.

  ‘No. Set your mind at rest. Hilda’s bright as a button. Happy as the day is long. She’s chummed up with a peculiarly nauseating brand of Welsh judge and she’s having an exotic social life round the Worsfield Assizes. She wanted me to tell you that she’s enormously grateful to you and Portia for having me and long may the arrangement continue. Now, is that good news for you?’ Erskine-Brown didn’t answer. ‘It isn’t, is it?’ Erskine-Brown still didn’t answer. ‘In fact, it’s somewhat dashed your hopes? You really want to give me the order of the Imperial Elbow, don’t you? Say no more! I can take a hint, Er
skine-Brown. I can tell, when your children simulate terminal bronchitis every time I walk into a room, that it’s time I was moving on. Only one thing. You’ll have to help me to another billet.’

  ‘How am I expected to do that?’ the poor fellow asked weakly.

  ‘Let me tell you, old cock. It’s perfectly simple. All you have to do is to go to this shindig.’ I let him have the handbill for nothing. ‘The Bishop of Sidcup on “The Christian Approach to the Rent Acts”.’

  ‘But that night I’ve got tickets for Rigoletto,’ he protested.

  ‘Rigoletto will still be around in a hundred years’ time,’ I assured him. ‘This is your one opportunity to hear the Bishop of Sidcup on this fascinating subject. Roll up, Claude! Be among those present on the night! Join Soapy Sam Bollard, our slithery Head of Chambers, and partake liberally of the sherry and sandwiches. Particularly the sherry…’

  ‘Why on earth should I?’

  ‘Because if you do this properly, old darling, I can fold my tent, take the Golden Road back to Chambers and stay here undisturbed. Now, this is all I’m asking you to do…’ And I began to fill him in with the details of my plan.

  The next day Captain Gleason went into the witness-box, a bulky figure in a double-breasted blue suit and a regimental tie; he seemed such an unlikely consort for the beautiful red-head in the well of the Court that it came as no surprise when she hardly looked at him. Phillida was winding to the end of her examination-in-chief when she asked the Captain when he became doubtful about his wife’s relationship with Hugo Lutterworth.

  ‘I had been suspicious of my wife and Hugo for some time. About a year ago I came back from a regimental dinner in London and discovered them in a… compromising position.’ Gleason spoke quietly, sounding the most forbearing husband. ‘I decided to forgive them both. Of course, I had no idea that my partner would… try to get rid of me.’