The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  The Jury assembled and Ballard opened his case. His first witness was Tim Warboys of the Sunday Fortress, and by the time I rose to cross-examine this star of journalism, Henry had come down from Chambers in a taxi, and I had my brief and Uncle Tom had his sandwiches.

  ‘Mr Warboys… or should I call you Mr Chatterbox?’ I began and Ballard rose to protest, ‘There’s no need for my learned friend to be offensive to the witness.’

  ‘Oh, keep still, Bollard!’ I growled at him. ‘It’s his name in the paper.’

  ‘It would probably be better if you simply used the witness’s name, Mr Rumpole.’ The Chief started his interruptions politely and Ballard sat down, smiling with gratification.

  ‘Oh, much obliged, my Lord. I’ll try to remember.’ I was also starting politely. ‘Mr Warboys. You make your living by divulging secrets, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ The investigative journalist clearly didn’t like being investigated; he sounded narked.

  ‘Who’s sleeping with whom is one of your subjects. You keep your eye perpetually to the keyhole?’

  ‘I write a gossip column, yes,’ Mr Chatterbox admitted.

  ‘And you know that some gossip is strictly protected by our Lords and Masters?’

  ‘Some information is classified, yes.’

  ‘Classified gossip. Exactly! And you are familiar with Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act?’

  ‘I know something about it.’ A very cautious chap, I thought, the dashing old Etonian, Warboys.

  ‘You know that it’s an offence to receive secret information?’

  ‘I believe it is.’

  ‘For which you can get two years in the nick.’

  ‘Two years’ imprisonment, Mr Rumpole,’ the Chief Justice corrected me, still with smiling courtesy.

  ‘Oh, I beg its pardon, my Lord. Imprisonment.’

  ‘For a story about biscuits?’ Warboys sounded incredulous.

  ‘Oh, they’re very protective of their biscuits in the Ministry of Defence.’ I scored my first hit with that; there was some laughter from the Jury. The Chief turned to them and showed intense disapproval.

  ‘Members of the Jury,’ he said. ‘You may hear a good deal from the Defence about biscuits in this case, and I suggest that, after Mr Rumpole has got his laugh, we take this matter seriously. This is a case about whether or not a servant of the Crown was loyal to the interests of the Government. Very well…’

  ‘Your Lordship doesn’t wish me to call a biscuit a biscuit?’ I asked politely. ‘Should we settle for une petite pièce de pâtisserie?’ I got a suppressed titter for that from the twelve good citizens, and a cold ‘What’s your next question, Mr Rumpole?’ from the Bench.

  ‘Ah. Yes. I was so fascinated by your Lordship’s address to the Jury that I have forgotten my next question. No! Now I remember it! Do you expect to be prosecuted for receiving secret information, Mr Warboys?’

  ‘No. Not really.’ Mr Chatterbox was hesitant.

  ‘The police have set your mind at rest?’

  ‘I’ve been told I have nothing to worry about.’ He smiled modestly.

  ‘In return for shopping Miss Tuttle?’ At which the Lord Chief uttered a warning ‘Mister Rumpole!’ ‘Oh, I do beg your Lordship’s pardon. In return for giving evidence against the middle-aged spinster lady whom I represent, you’re saving your own skin, Mr Warboys?’ I suggested.

  ‘I have agreed to cooperate with the police, yes.’

  ‘Thus upholding the finest traditions of British journalism.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’ The Lord Chief’s patience was in short supply. ‘Have you any relevant questions to ask this witness?’

  ‘Of course. About your alleged meeting with Miss Tuttle in St James’s Park. On that occasion you didn’t speak to her at all. In fact, by the time you reached her bench, she had gone?’

  ‘That’s what happened…’

  ‘From the moment you saw her get up and go until you reached the bench and collected the envelope…’ – I picked up the envelope containing the copied documents – ‘… was the newspaper folded round it always in your view?’

  ‘I can’t be sure,’ he had to admit.

  ‘There may have been other people passing in front of the bench!’

  ‘There may have been.’

  I gave the Jury one of my most meaningful looks. ‘So you never really met Miss Tuttle at all?’

  ‘Not if you put it like that. No.’

  ‘And you have no doubt that it was Miss Tuttle, the defendant, you saw.’

  ‘No doubt at all. She…’ He looked at the figure in the dock.

  ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘I was going to say that she wears rather distinctive clothing.’

  ‘So she could be easily identified?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rather a foolish thing to do, I suppose, if she was in the business of leaking secrets?’

  Ballard rose to protest, and the Judge smiled wearily at him, as though they were both reasonable adults watching the antics of an extremely tiresome child. ‘I know, Mr Ballard,’ he spoke soothingly, ‘but perhaps we should both possess our souls in patience. No doubt the truth will finally emerge in this case, despite Mr Rumpole’s suppositions.’

  ‘The truth! Yes. I’m so much obliged to your Lordship.’ I acted deep and humble gratitude. ‘Let’s see if we can discover the truth. Remember, Mr Warboys, you’re on your oath; you had never seen Miss Rosemary Tuttle before?’

  ‘No. I had had her letter, of course.’

  ‘You say her letter. It wasn’t signed by her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It didn’t even have her name on it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So when you say it was her letter, it is a pure guess.’

  ‘The letter said she would be sitting on the park bench, and would leave at two o’clock. And there she was!’

  ‘But to say that the note was written by her is a pure guess!’

  ‘I suppose Mr Ballard will say to the Jury that it’s a reasonable deduction, Mr Rumpole.’ The Lord Chief sounded the embodiment of common sense.

  ‘My Lord! I really can’t be held responsible for what my learned friend Mr Ballard may say to the Jury. Thank you, Mr Ch— Mr Warboys.’

  I sat down then, fairly well satisfied, although I still had no clear idea which way the case was going. I wondered idly what you have to do to become Lord Chief Justice of England, and wear a golden lavatory chain on State occasions. Play remarkable golf? Shoot with the Lord Chancellor? Manners can’t have anything to do with it. That means there might be a chance for Rumpole! Lord Rumpole of the Gloucester Road, Baron Rumpole of the Temple Station… I came down to earth to hear Warboys tell Lord Wantage, in answer to a flagrantly leading question, that he had no doubt at all that it was Miss Tuttle he had seen in St James’s Park.

  Before we had started to quarrel I had persuaded the Lord Chief to give Miss Tuttle bail during the lunch hour, and when I came out of Court there she was waiting patiently for instructions. I tried to cheer her up, told her that the case was going as well as possible and that, in any event, she had a good friend in old Batty Bowling.

  ‘Oh, he is the most super boss,’ she agreed, in her quaint English schoolgirl’s lingo. ‘Always listens to your problems, but never spares himself. Burns the midnight oil. Well, so do I. Often when I’m working late at the Ministry, he’s still there. Sometimes I hear him singing to himself. He seems very happy.’

  ‘Well…’ I began to move off to the robing room. ‘Care for a Guinness and a steak pie at the pub?’

  ‘Oh, no. I brought sandwiches and there’s a dear little churchyard across the road.’

  ‘I’m sure there is. Oh. There was one thing I did mean to ask you. About Congreve.’

  ‘Congreve?’ Miss Tuttle looked blank. ‘Is he at the Ministry?’ There was clearly a gap in her English schoolgirl education.

  ‘William Congreve, Miss Tuttle, an English
dramatist of genius, born in Good King Charles’s golden days, carried on rather shockingly with the Duchess of Marlborough. The name doesn’t ring any kind of bell?’

  ‘Sorry. I was an economist, actually.’ I absorbed the information, and then asked, ‘One other little matter. The bomb.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘More politely known as the nuclear deterrent. Have you got any affection for it?’

  ‘Oh golly yes!, Mr Rumpole.’ She smiled enthusiastically. ‘Like all the chaps at the Ministry. We’re a hundred per cent behind the bomb.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Tuttle. That was all I wanted to know.’ I moved away from her then, leaving her standing alone in the middle of the hall. I would do almost anything for a client, except share her sandwiches in the churchyard.

  There was one part of R. v. Tuttle which I was looking forward to keenly. I may be a child when it comes to partnership agreements, a dolt about Real Property, and I may even have some difficulty construing the more opaque provisions of the Obscene Publications Act. But I do know about bloodstains, gunfire wounds and typewriters. The analysis of typewriting is a fascinating subject and one I have discussed with great enjoyment across many a crowded Court with Peter Royce-Williams, the uncrowned King of the questioned documents. Royce-Williams is no longer young; did he not, when we were both Juveniles, give evidence about the questioned suicide note in the Penge Bungalow Murders? But he is unrivalled in his field. He is a short, stout man with the pale face and strong, tinted spectacles of a man who spends his life with microscopes and darkrooms, pursuing forgeries.

  That afternoon, Royce-Williams stood in the witness-box with his enlarged pictures of the two documents: the note sent to Mr Chatterbox and that typed by Miss Tuttle in New Scotland Yard. His conclusion was that both documents were typed on the sort of paper used in government departments on the Olivetti Lettera 22 portable, which, according to the evidence, belonged to my client, the defendant Tuttle.

  When I got up to cross-examine, I knew that there would be no point whatever in a head-on clash with the witness. Peter Royce-Williams must be led gently and with the greatest respect to the point where we might, with any luck, agree. And having thought the matter over carefully, with the aid of a pint of Guinness during the luncheon adjournment, I now felt clear about what that point might be.

  ‘Mr Royce-Williams,’ I began. ‘As an acknowledged expert, would you agree that a typewriter doesn’t work itself, a human being is involved in the operation…?’

  ‘Yes, of course, Mr Rumpole.’ It was delightful to chat to old friends.

  ‘And human operators have varying degrees of skill?’

  ‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘Bear with me if I have a very simple mind, Mr Royce-Williams.’ The old boy smiled at that, although the Judge didn’t. ‘A highly experienced typist will, on the whole, type smoothly, hitting all the keys with equal force. A person not so used to the machine may hit harder, perhaps after a hesitation, or more faintly because their fingers are less skilled?’

  ‘That’s certainly possible.’

  ‘Have you considered that, in relation to these documents?’

  ‘No. I must confess I haven’t.’ Like all good experts he was completely candid about the limits of his research.

  ‘Just look at the word “scandal” in the note to Mr Warboys, and in that typed by Miss Tuttle in Scotland Yard. In the one sent to the newspaper, aren’t the ‘s’ and ‘c’ heavier and the other letters lighter?’

  Royce-Williams held the documents very close and raised his dark glasses, the better to peer at them with his naked and watery eyes.

  ‘That would seem to be so,’ he agreed at last.

  ‘And in that typed in the Detective Inspector’s office they all have the same clarity?’

  ‘Yes. I think they have.’

  ‘Might that not lead you to the conclusion that they were typed by different people using the same machine and paper?’

  There was a pause that seemed to me to go on for ever, as Royce-Williams carefully put down his papers and polished his glasses. But he was too good at his job to exclude the possibility I had mentioned. ‘I suppose it might,’ he said.

  ‘You suppose it might,’ I repeated with suitable emphasis for the benefit to the Jury.

  ‘Mr Rumpole. Where is this evidence leading us?’ The Lord Chief clearly seemed to feel that the case was wandering out of his control.

  ‘Your Lordship asks me that?’ I would, if I’d been as honest as Royce-Williams, have gone on: ‘Believe me, old darling, I wish I knew.’ What I actually said was: ‘To the truth, my Lord. Or isn’t that what we want to discover?’

  Furiously making a note, Lord Wantage then broke the point of his pencil. He whispered to the wigged Court Clerk below him, and when the man stood up to get him another, I thought I could hear him whisper, ‘Is Rumpole always as outrageous as this?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, my Lord,’ I know the Clerk whispered back. ‘Absolutely always.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Rumpole. I enjoyed that.’ Oliver Bowling was waiting for me when I got out of Court that evening, having apparently taken an afternoon off from the defence of the Nation to sample some of the free entertainment the Old Bailey alone provides. Grateful for his support, I took him for a cup of tea in the unglamorous surroundings of the Old Bailey canteen, where the cheese rolls were just being stored away for the night.

  ‘You had another leak from your Ministry? Anything important?’ He smiled at me over his cup of strong Indian tea, made not, I imagined, how he really liked it.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder what is important.’ Bowling smiled at me. ‘Wouldn’t the world be a healthier, more peaceful place if we told everyone exactly what we’d got and stopped trying to frighten each other with a lot of spurious secrets? Mustn’t say that in the Department, of course.’

  ‘No. Of course not.’ I crunched a chocolate biscuit; it’s hungry work cross-examining experts in questioned documents. ‘I’ve got to have a go at your big cheese tomorrow. The Permanent Under-Secretary. What sort of chap is he?’

  ‘Comes from “a branch of one of your ante-diluvian families, fellows that the flood couldn’t wash away”. That sort of thing. He’ll be immensely fair,’ Bowling reassured me. ‘Give me a ring if there’s anything I can do.’

  ‘I might call you at home, when Court’s over.’

  ‘Oh, right. Here’s the number.’ He took a card from his wallet and gave it to me. ‘I’ll be leaving the Ministry fairly early. Chap at the Foreign Office’s got the use of the Royal Box at Covent Garden. You can dine there, you know. Rather fun.’

  ‘Is it really?’ I was prepared to take his word for it. When we parted I looked at the visiting card he had given me, then I turned it over and wrote, on the back, a sentence from our conversation. At home I paid another visit to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

  Sir Frank Fawcett, the Permanent Under-Secretary, walked solemnly into the witness-box the following afternoon in a Court from which the public had been excluded at Ballard’s request. Could all this pomp and circumstance possibly be about so many thousand mid-morning snacks, or was it entirely occasioned by the activities of Miss Rosemary Tuttle, who sat, a small and somewhat garish figure, in the dock? I asked Sir Frank about her when I climbed to my feet and started to cross-examine.

  ‘You know something about my client, Miss Tuttle?’

  ‘Yes. I have the reports on her.’

  ‘You have no reason to suppose that she would constitute any sort of danger to the State, have you?’

  ‘May I refresh my memory, my Lord?’ His Lordship gave permission and a file was handed up to the witness.

  ‘Rosemary Alice Tuttle,’ he read out. ‘Born of Austrian parents, Franz and Maria Toller, who emigrated to this country when she was two years old and changed their name. Educated at Hampstead High School for Girls and the London School of Economics.’

  ‘No mystery about that – except that they cho
se the name Tuttle.’

  The Jury smiled at that and the Lord Chief was displeased. ‘She was, of course, thoroughly vetted when she took up her post with us,’ Sir Frank told him.

  ‘Nothing else known against her?’

  ‘Do you really want all this evidence in?’ I had a whispered warning from Liz Probert, sitting beside me, who was rapidly turning into quite a conventional form of barrister. ‘Keep your head, Mizz Probert, when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.’ I whispered back, and challenged the witness to tell us the worst.

  ‘Unconfirmed reports that she was seen at Molesworth American Air Force Base in January 1986…’ Sir Frank sifted through the file.

  ‘Taking part in an entirely peaceful demonstration?’ I asked him.

  ‘She was questioned about the matter and denied it. She suggested it might have been someone else similarly dressed.’

  ‘Did that seem to you rather improbable?’ The Lord Chief smiled understandingly at the witness.

  ‘It did, my Lord, yes. After that she was not recommended for further promotion and kept under special surveillance.’

  ‘Surveillance which in this case seems to have been somewhat ineffective?’ His Lordship was telling Sir Frank that men of their stamp always had problems with incompetent underlings.

  ‘I’m afraid so, my Lord.’

  ‘She got at the biscuits…’ I understood the full horror of the position and the Chief uttered a warning ‘Mr Rumpole!’