‘Oh, really?’ Hilda was embarking on an anecdote, one of her few.
‘Anyway, Daddy got the fellow off! His first real success and he was pleased as Punch. And as he was leaving the old London Sessions, this pickpocket came up to him and said, ‘I’m so grateful to you, Mr Wystan. You’ve saved me from prison and I’ve got no money to pay you. But I can give you this.’ So what do you think the pickpocket did?’
‘I’ve no idea!’ Well, I can occasionally lie in a good cause.
‘Offered Daddy the watch!’ She laughed and then stopped laughing, and looked at me with deep suspicion. ‘You’ve heard it before?’
‘No, Hilda. I promise you, never!’
‘Do take that poor plant out to the kitchen and offer it some water. It looks exhausted.’
Of course, as ever, I obeyed her command.
Rumpole and the Official Secret
Lawyers and priests deal largely in secrets, being privy to matters which are not meant for the public ear. I don’t know how it is in the religious life, or whether, when two or three prelates are gathered together, they regale each other with snatches from the Confessional, but barristers are mostly indiscreet. Go into Pommeroy’s Wine Bar any evening when the Château Fleet Street is flowing and you may quickly discover who’s getting a divorce or being libelled, which judge has got which lady pupil in the club or which Member of Parliament relaxes in female apparel. I don’t join much in such conversations; my own clients’ activities are, in the main, simple and uncomplicated transactions, and ‘Who turned over Safeways?’ or ‘Which bloke supplies logbooks for stolen Cortinas?’ are rarely questions which get much airing in the Mr Chatterbox column in the Sunday Fortress.
Of course, often the most closely guarded secrets turn out to be matters of such stunning triviality that you wonder why anyone ever bothered to keep quiet about them. Such, it seemed, was the closely guarded matter of the Ministry of Defence Elevenses which formed the basis for the strange prosecution of Miss Rosemary Tuttle. This was a case which, although it began with a laugh, and laughter was, as always, a weapon for the defence, certainly ended in what I will always think of as a tragedy.
But let me begin at the beginning, which was roughly Sunday lunchtime at 25b Froxbury Court, our alleged ‘mansion’ flat off the Gloucester Road. I was relaxing with the Sunday Fortress propped up against the Pommeroy’s plonk bottle, and Hilda was removing what was left of the roast beef and two veg, when the following item met my eye under an alluring headline:
BISCUIT WAR IN THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE
Government extravagance has been highlighted by the astonishing sums spent subsidizing tea and biscuits consumed by civil servants at the Ministry of Defence. The cost of elevenses plus the money spent on entertaining a long list of foreign visitors would, it is calculated, have paid for the Crimean War three times over.
Such was the item of what passes for news nowadays, leading the Mr Chatterbox column. Although I usually have a keen eye for crime, I can’t say that I realized that this apparently harmless story was in itself, a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
And then Hilda was calling me from the kitchen to ask if I wanted ‘afters’. ‘Of course I want “afters”,’ I called back. ‘Didn’t I hear a rumour of baked jam-roll?’
‘We need a hatch, Rumpole,’ the voice from without called, and then She entered with the tray of pudding. ‘If we had a hatch I shouldn’t have to walk all the way round by the hall to get your “afters”.’
Hilda had touched and reopened an old and sometimes bitter controversy. Personally, I am against hatches. We had one when I was a boy in the vicarage, a horrible thing that came trundling up from the bowels of the earth and smelled of stale cabbage. Besides which, hatches aren’t things that are given away. The construction and the necessary excavation of the wall might run away with an alarming sum in legal aid fees. Hilda’s argument, delivered with increasing volume as she went out again for the custard, was that the hatch wouldn’t entail anything trundling up from anywhere, as it would go straight into the kitchen.
‘If we hadn’t spent all that money on biscuits at the Ministry of Defence, we might have had three Crimean Wars,’ I called out to her as I thought she might have cared to know. ‘Who do you imagine finds out these things?’
‘I can’t hear you, Rumpole,’ Hilda called back. ‘And that’s because we haven’t got a hatch.’
I should now go back to the start of the story of Miss Rosemary Tuttle and the great elevenses’ leak at the Ministry of Defence. Miss Tuttle herself was a spinster lady in her fifties of vaguely central European extraction, whose parents had settled in Swiss Cottage shortly before the war. She lived alone, took her lunch in all weathers on a bench in St James’s Park, being especially fond of fresh air and bright peasant-style knitted clothes, so that it was never difficult to spot Miss Tuttle in a crowd.
One night, a certain Thorogood, Private Secretary to the Minister of State, was working late and he heard the sound of a copying-machine from down the corridor. He went to investigate, but by the time he got there the room was empty, although he found one bright green, embroidered glove, later identified as the property of Miss Tuttle, by the still warm machine.
‘Mr Chatterbox’ masks the identity of a youngish, untidy, slightly dissolute old Etonian named Tim Warboys. At his office in the Sunday Fortress, Warboys received an anonymous typewritten message telling him that at 2 p.m. the next day he would, if he were to be in view of a certain bench in St James’s Park, see a fifty-year-old lady in bright clothing arise from her seat. She would leave behind her a copy of the Daily Telegraph into which would be folded certain documents. Having done as he was instructed, Warboys discovered the newspaper in the appointed place and so came into the possession of figures concerning certain entertaining expenses in the Ministry of Defence, including the amount spent on coffee and biscuits. The biscuits alone, it seems, would have gone some way to financing the Navy. He was able to include this story in his next Sunday’s column.
In due course Miss Tuttle was accused of the crime and a decision had to be taken as to her prosecution. Her immediate superior was the Assistant Under-Secretary, Oliver Bowling, an old Wykehamist, who, from time to time, went to the Opera with the Erskine-Browns. Bowling, when I came to meet him, appeared to be a thoroughly sensible sort of chap who was fond of Miss Tuttle and regarded her as a harmless eccentric. He took the reasonable view that to prosecute her for what was undoubtedly – so asinine can the law be on State Occasions – a breach of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act would merely serve to bring the Civil Service in general, and the Ministry of Defence in particular, into ridicule and contempt. This view was not shared by Basil Thorogood who thought that whether the Secrets concerned biscuits or bombs, the safety of our Kingdom depended on the rigid application of the law and the consequent hounding of Miss Tuttle. Higher authority in the shape of Sir Frank Fawcett, K.C.B., the Permanent Under-Secretary, sent the papers to the Attorney-General who, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, decided to prosecute.
When this decision was given to Oliver Bowling, he was apparently outraged at the crassness of our bureaucracy. Having prophesied that any prosecution would make the Ministry look absurd, he was secretly anxious to be proved right. He asked his old school-friend, Erskine-Brown, if he happened to know a barrister whose particular skill was getting cases laughed out of Court, and Claude, who felt he owed me a debt of gratitude for having returned to my matrimonial home, recommended the very one. The consequence was that I found myself briefed by the upmarket City firm of Farmilow, Pounsford & James for the defence of Miss Rosemary Tuttle on the sinister and mole-like activity of betraying our biscuits to the enemy.
The brief in this cause célèbre arrived in a peculiarly impressive manner. One day I entered our clerk’s room to see Henry, Dianne and Uncle Tom staring respectfully at a heavy green safe.
‘A present,’ Uncle Tom explained, ‘from Her Majesty the Queen.’
�
�No, Uncle Tom. A loan from the Ministry of Defence,’ Henry corrected him with some pride.
‘What’s it got in it?’ I asked. ‘The Crown Jewels?’
‘It’s your brief, Mr Rumpole, in the Secrets trial. Government-issue safes are supplied to defence counsel when the matter is highly confidential. So that the papers don’t fall into the wrong hands.’ Henry’s voice sank in awe.
‘All right. How do we open it?’
‘There’s a number, for the combination. But’ – Henry looked round nervously as the grey figure of Hoskins, the barrister, came into the room – ‘it doesn’t do, Mr Rumpole, to mention these things in public.’
‘Well, just whisper it into the lock, Henry. There’s a brief in there, a money brief with any sort of luck.’
‘Four… five… three, eight, one,’ Henry muttered, as he turned the dial on the safe. Then he pulled the handle, but it didn’t open. Dianne almost shouted, ‘Four, five, two, eight, two wasn’t it, Henry?’ Henry said, ‘Dianne, please,’ and tried again, but the safe still refused to divulge its contents.
‘Open Sesame!’ I thumped the green top with my fist. The door swung open and I collected a slender brief and went upstairs to meet the clientele.
‘The number of gingernuts consumed in the Ministry of Defence! The amount spent on cups of tea in the Department of Arms Procurement! The free holidays charged up as entertaining foreign visitors!’ I stood smoking a small cigar in Chambers in the company of Mr Jasper James, the instructing solicitor, a well-nourished fifty-year-old in an expensive city suiting; Miss Rosemary Tuttle, dressed apparently for the Hungarian gypsy encampment scene in Balalaika; and my faithful amanuensis, Liz Probert, who was trying hard to find the dread hand of the C.I.A. somewhere behind the biscuits.
‘Miss Tuttle is bound by Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act. And it’s alleged that she copied confidential documents and gave them to the Press. If that’s a true bill, then…’ Mr James, the solicitor, made a regretful clucking sound, apparently indicating that he wouldn’t put 5p on our chances.
‘Look, James, my dear old sweetheart’ – I tried to cheer up the eminent solicitor – ‘it’s a well-known fact that Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act is the raving of governmental paranoia.’
‘But if she’s broken the law…’
‘If Miss Tuttle’s broken the law, the Jury are entitled to acquit her! It’s their ancient and inalienable privilege, I shall tell them. It’s the light that shows the lamp of freedom burns.’ I gave them a foretaste of my speech to the Jury: ‘If you think it a sign of bureaucracy run mad, Members of the Jury, that this unfortunate lady, whom I represent, should be hounded through the Courts just because our masters in Whitehall can’t restrain their revolting greed for Bath Olivers and Dundee shortbread, then you are fully entitled to return a resounding verdict of not guilty. She did what she did so that the tax-payer, that is you and I, Members of the Jury, should not be stung with an escalating bill for Maryland cookies and chocolate-covered digestives, and, God save us all, macaroons. She has been the guardian of our democracy and saved the waistlines of Whitehall!’
‘Look, I’m awfully sorry to butt in…’ Miss Tuttle butted in, interrupting my flow. ‘You can say all that in Court, if you like.’
‘I do like, Miss Tuttle. I like very much indeed. Strong stuff, perhaps, but I feel entirely justified.’
‘But I didn’t do it, don’t you see? I didn’t do anything!’
‘Nothing?’ I was, I confess, a little dashed to hear it.
‘No. I never copied those figures, or sent them to the papers. I’m jolly well innocent, Mr Rumpole.’
‘Innocent…’ It was a disappointment, but then I saw a glimmer of hope. ‘But your glove was found that night by the copying-machine!’
‘I can’t understand how it got there at all. It must have walked!’ She smiled round at us, like a child who has just thought of a joke.
‘Miss Tuttle. You copied those documents from the Personnel and Logistics Section of the Ministry of Defence and you gave them to Mr Tim Warboys of the Sunday Fortress, so he could make his little joke about the Crimean War in his Chatterbox column.’ I was doing my best to convince her; if she were not guilty, there could be no hilarious speech.
‘Would I do such a thing, Mr Rumpole?’
‘It seems completely creditable to me. Why ever not?’
‘I was in a position of trust.’ Now she looked like a serious child, one who always keeps the school rules.
‘Consider this. If you admit this noble act, I can turn you into a heroine, a Joan of Arc, Miss Tuttle, in shining armour doing battle against the forces of bureaucracy.’ I made a last appeal to her.
‘And if I deny it?’
‘Then you’re just an ordinary criminal, trying to lie your way out of trouble. Do think, Miss Tuttle. Do please think carefully.’
We sat in a minute’s silence while Miss Tuttle thought it over. Then she said quietly, ‘I’ve got to tell the truth.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed sadly. ‘Oh, yes, Miss Tuttle. I suppose you have.’ I looked at Jasper James in a resigned manner. ‘We’d better check the evidence, Mr James. I suggest we do our own typewriter test…’
Whilst I was thus concerned with affairs of State, Claude Erskine-Brown was considering entering into secret negotiations of an entirely different nature. He plumped himself down next to Liz Probert, who was enjoying a solitary sandwich in the Taste-Ee-Bite café in Fleet Street, and told her that it was no picnic being married to a busy silk. Phillida was always away doing important cases in Manchester or Newport, or such far-flung outposts of the Empire, and he was left a great deal on his own. He then startled Mizz Probert by saying, as she told me much later, ‘To be quite honest with you, Sue, it’s a pretty ghastly situation. My wife has absolutely no time for it.’ Mizz Probert could think of no suitable reply to this, except to say that her name was Liz.’
‘Of course, I think I knew that. On the rare moments Phillida’s at home, she’s far too tired. I feel I’m missing a vital part of my life. Can you understand that at all?’
When Liz Probert said that she supposed she could, in a way, Claude carried on in a manner she found embarrassing, she told me at the time. ‘I mean,’ he said. ‘it’s not the sort of thing a fellow likes to do on his own.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘It’ll be eighteen months now. I’m having the most terrible withdrawal symptoms.’
At which Liz tried to gobble her sandwich, but Claude was relentless. ‘All she could manage,’ he told her, ‘was a little bit of Offenbach at Christmas. You must know how it feels.’
‘Well, not exactly.’
‘To be honest with you,’ Claude apparently told her then, ‘I can’t remember when my wife and I last sat down together to a decent Wagner opera.’
If this was an enigmatic conversation for Mizz Liz Probert, it was as nothing compared to the extraordinary encounter I had with Claude as I left Chambers after my work was done a few days later. Bear in mind the situation. I had no idea of the confidences my learned friend had bestowed on Mizz Probert, and he came popping out of his door and waylaid me in an urgent manner.
‘Rumpole! A word in confidence!’
‘Not another secret?’ Secrets, it seemed, were in season around Equity Court.
‘I’ve invited you to the Opera next month.’ Erskine-Brown might have been passing on the recipe for Star Wars.
‘Not Wagner?’
‘Well, it does happen to be Meistersinger.’
‘An entertainment about the length of a long firm fraud, tried through an interpreter. Who was it who said Wagner’s music isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds?’
‘Don’t worry, Rumpole. You won’t actually have to come to the Opera.’
‘You mean you’re not going to ask me?’ I wasn’t entirely disappointed.
‘Oh, I did ask you.’
‘And I refused?’
‘Oh no. You accepted. You’d like to get
to know a good deal more about music drama.’
‘White man speak in riddles.’ The fellow was confusing me.
‘It’s just that if my wife asks you where I was on the twenty-eighth of next month we went to the Opera together,’ Erskine-Brown explained as though to a slow-witted child.
‘But I won’t have been there!’
‘Ssh!’ – Erskine-Brown looked round nervously – ‘that’s the whole point!’
‘Will you have been there?’ I was doing my best to follow his drift.
‘That’s… something of a secret. I can count on you, can’t I, Rumpole?’ He began to move briskly away and out of Chambers, but I called out and came pounding after him. ‘Why on earth should I assist you in this sordid little conspiracy?’
‘Because I’ve done you an enormous favour, Rumpole. I recommended you to Batty Bowling.’
‘Your old school-friend,’ I remembered.
‘Exactly. I was instrumental in getting you the brief in the Official Secrets case.’
‘Civil of you. Claude’ – I was considerably mollified – ‘really remarkably civil. I suppose, if you can’t get a hold of anyone else, I might as well not go to the Opera with you.’
DO YOU WANT TO HEAR ABOUT TEA AND SCANDAL, THEIR ANCIENT CUSTOM, IN THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE? IT’S ALL HIGHLY SECRET AND MIGHT MAKE A GOOD STORY FOR YOUR COLUMN. COME INTO ST JAMES’S PARK THURSDAY LUNCHTIME, FROM THE MALL. I’LL BE ON THE FIRST BENCH TO THE RIGHT AFTER YOU’VE CROSSED THE BRIDGE. DON’T SPEAK TO ME. I’M FIFTY YEARS OLD, BROWNISH HAIR GOING GREY, AND I WEAR SPECTACLES AND RATHER BRIGHTLY COLOURED CLOTHES. I’LL GET UP AT 2 P.M. WHAT YOU WANT WILL BE LEFT ON THE SEAT FOLDED INSIDE A COPY OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH.
I was sitting by the gas-fire in the living-room of 25b Froxbury Court, with the brief R. v. Tuttle open on my knees. What I was reading was a photostat of the note, typed in capitals, that my client was alleged to have sent to Mr Chatterbox. One phrase stuck in my mind, ‘tea and scandal’. It seemed too literary for Miss Tuttle, and had a sort of period flavour. No doubt it was a point of no importance and I dismissed it from my mind as the telephone rang and Hilda leapt to her feet and went out into the hall to answer it. This was somewhat odd, as there is a perfectly good extension in the living-room.
The Second Rumpole Omnibus Page 56
