The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  Trooper Boyne had, unusually for anyone in the Regiment, married a German girl, and he was noted for his quick temper and his deep hatred of Sergeant Wilson, who, so many witnesses had noticed, lost no opportunity of picking on Danny and putting him on charges for a number of offences, many trivial but some more serious. Witnesses had also been found who had heard Danny threaten to cut the Sergeant up. He was, undoubtedly, present at the disco on the night the Sergeant died; and when the shirt he wore on that occasion was examined, a bloodstain of Sergeant Wilson’s group was found on the cuff. For these cogent reasons, he was put under arrest and now had to face a general court martial with Horace Rumpole called to the colours to undertake his defence.

  When I came out into the glass and concrete concourse of Badweisheim airport, a crisp, cheerful and thoroughly English voice called out to me, ‘Horace Rumpole? Consider yourself under arrest, sir. The charge is smuggling an old wig through customs.’

  The jokester concerned turned out to be a youngish, fair-haired captain, with a sky-blue cockade of the Seraphim in his beret and a lurcher at his heels. ‘Very funny!’ I hadn’t smiled.

  ‘Oh, do you think so? I can do much better than that. Sandy Ransom. I think you know my old uncle Johnnie?’

  ‘Captain Ransom.’ I didn’t know if I should attempt a salute.

  ‘I’m the Defending Officer.’

  ‘Oh, really? I thought I was doing the defending.’

  ‘Of course, you are. You’re O/C Defence. I’m just your fag. Anything you want I’ll run and get it. I’m the prisoner’s friend. We are all the friends of any trooper in trouble. It’s a question of regimental honour.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t entirely, at the time.

  ‘You’ll need a porter, won’t you?’ He whistled to a man and said in what was, as far as I could tell, an impeccable German accent, ‘Träger! Bitte nehmen sie das Gepäck.’ He also whistled to his obedient lurcher and led me to the jeep in which he was to drive me to the barracks. ‘I told my Uncle Johnnie we were looking for an ordinary sort of barrister,’ he told me when we were en route.

  ‘Ordinary!’ Again it seemed a most inadequate description of Rumpole’s talents.

  ‘The court-martial officers will be from other regiments,’ Sandy Ransom explained. ‘Pay Corps. That sort of rubbish. Very downmarket. They’re all highly suspicious of the Cavalry. Think we’re all far too well-off, which is luckily quite true. Parade a flashy Q.C. and they’d convict Danny Boy before he got his hat off. Just to teach the Cavalry a lesson. Anyway, old Uncle Johnnie said you’d done loads of court martials.’

  ‘Oh, yes, loads.’ Well, we were far from home and no one, I hoped, would know any different.

  At last we drew in at a gate house manned by a sergeant who saluted Sandy and got a brief acknowledgement, and then we were in a huge square surrounded by brick buildings erected, I learned, for the Wehrmacht. In the square there was a large collection of military vehicles – cars, jeeps, lorries and even tanks – and we passed various groups of the Duke of Clarence’s Own, all of whom saluted us smartly. Some lines from the Ancient Mariner floated into my mind:

  This seraph-band, each waved his hand:

  It was a heavenly sight!

  They stood as signals to the land,

  Each one a lovely light.

  This seraph-band, each waved his hand,

  No voice did they impart –

  No voice; but oh! the silence sank

  Like music on my heart.

  And I felt my own hand rising, irresistibly, to the brim of my hat.

  ‘Steady on, sir,’ Sandy told me. ‘There’s no need for you to return their salutes.’

  That evening the candlelight gleamed on the silver and the paintings of long-gone generals and colonels wearing wigs and scarlet coats, three-cornered hats, swords and sashes, posed against gunmetal skies or on rearing horses. The few officers dining with us in the Mess that night wore elderly tweed suits as though they were guests in some rather grand country house, with the exception of a young lieutenant in uniform. Sandy Ransom introduced me to a shortish, quietly spoken, amused and intelligent-looking man – considerably younger than me – as the Colonel of the Regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Undershaft, a high-flier at Military College from whom even greater things were apparently expected. The Colonel performed the other introductions.

  ‘Sandy you know, of course. And this is Major Graham Sykes.’ A greying, rather sad-looking man who, I had been told, wouldn’t rise higher in the service, nodded a greeting. ‘And Lieutenants Tony Ross and Alan Hammick. Alan’s Duty Officer, which is why he’s all togged up. Is that all of us?’

  ‘All we could rustle up, sir,’ Sandy told him. The lurcher was also among those present, and was lapping up a bowl of water before going to sleep under the table.

  ‘Can’t lure many people into the Mess nowadays,’ the Colonel admitted. ‘They prefer to be at home with their wives or girlfriends. We felt we’d better turn out.’

  ‘Very decent of you, Colonel.’

  ‘I told Borrow to bring up some of the regimental Bollinger in honour of your visit. That suit you?’ The elderly white-coated Mess Attendant handed round the champagne, which suited me admirably. I raised my glass and said, ‘Well, here’s to crime!’

  ‘I think we’d prefer to drink to the Regiment…’ the Colonel said quietly and the other officers muttered ‘the Regiment’, as they raised their glasses. ‘The boy had to go to a court martial, of course. But we rely on you to get him off, Rumpole. It’s a question of the honour of the Regiment.’ It was not the first time I had been told this, and I looked at a gilded coat of arms and list of battle honours hanging on the wall: Malplaquet, Blenheim, Waterloo, Balaclava, Mons, El Alamein, I read and the Regiment’s motto ‘For the sake of honour’.

  ‘Well, we can’t have it said that we had a murderer in our ranks, can we?’ the Colonel asked.

  ‘Certainly not!’ I found the courage to say. ‘Not after you’ve killed so many people.’ There was an uncomfortable silence, and then Sandy laughed. ‘I say, you know. That was rather funny!’

  ‘Was it really?’ I asked him to reassure me.

  ‘Oh yes. Distinctly humorous. Bit of a joker aren’t you, sir, in your quiet way?’ The Colonel looked at me and emptied his glass. ‘Shall we start dinner,’ he said. ‘We heard you were a claret man, Rumpole.’

  There was absolutely nothing wrong with the 1971 Margaux, and when the Cockburn 1960 was circulating, I was able to tell the assembled officers that I had done the State some service under battle conditions in the R.A.F., Dungeness. ‘Ground staff merely,’ I admitted, ‘but that’s not to say that we didn’t have some pretty hairy nights.’

  ‘Don’t tell me’ – Sandy was laughing – ‘a bomb fell on the N.A.A.F.I.?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact it did.’ I was a little put out. ‘Not a very laughable experience.’

  ‘Of course not,’ the Colonel rebuked Sandy mildly. ‘The port seems to have stuck to the table…’

  ‘I don’t know exactly how many of you gentlemen served through the Second World War?’ I was still a little stung by Sandy’s joke.

  ‘Too young for it, I’m afraid,’ even Major Sykes admitted.

  ‘I wasn’t even a glint in my father’s eye,’ this from young Captain Sandy Ransom.

  ‘My father was in Burma,’ Lieutenant Ross boasted. ‘He’s inclined to be a terrible bore about it.’

  ‘I suppose I was about one when it ended. Hardly in a position to join the Regiment,’ the Colonel told me. ‘And somehow we never even got invited to the Falklands…’

  ‘Soldiers of the Queen,’ I discovered. ‘Born too late for a war.’

  ‘Do you honestly think it’s too late?’ The Colonel looked at me; he was smiling gently.

  ‘Too late for your sort of war, anyway,’ I told him. ‘Too late for Blenheim and Balaclava and the Thin Red Line, and hats off to you fuzzy-wuzzies ‘cos you broke a British square
. Even too late for Passchendaele and Tobruk… Next time some boffin will press a button, and good-night all. “Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars/That make ambition virtue!” ’ I was getting into my stride:

  ‘O, farewell!

  Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,

  The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,

  The royal banner, and all quality,

  Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!…

  Farewell! The Colonel’s occupation’s gone.’

  I looked round at their slightly puzzled faces and said, ‘Nowadays, let’s face it, you’re only playing at soldiers, aren’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ the Colonel admitted. ‘But while we’re here, we may as well play the game as well as possible; it would be exceedingly boring if we didn’t. And we have to do our best for the Regiment.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course.’ I raised my glass. ‘The Regiment!’

  ‘It’s not customary to drink to the Regiment after dinner,’ Major Sykes corrected me quietly. ‘Except on formal evenings in the Mess.’

  So I drank, but not to the Regiment, and the Colonel got up and went to a small grand piano in the corner of the Mess. He sat on the piano stool, gently massaging his fingers and, as this was more as I expected an evening among soldiers would be, I started to sing ‘Roll out the Barrel’ just as we had sung it during the late war:

  ‘Roll out the barrel,

  We’ll have a barrel of fun

  Drink to the barrel

  We’ve got the blues on the run…’

  And then I fell silent, feeling exceedingly foolish as Colonel Undershaft began to play what even I could recognize as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Over a soft passage he spoke to no one in particular: ‘Perhaps we are all practising idiotically for a war which would begin by obliterating us all. But we’re still responsible, aren’t we? Responsible for our soldiers. Boys like Danny Boy. We pick them out of a back-street in Glasgow and give them clean boots and a haircut. We feed them and water them and teach them to kill people in all sorts of ingenious ways, and then we can’t even offer them a proper soldier’s war to do it in. Can we expect them to turn into nice, quiet members of the Salvation Army? We’re responsible for Danny Boy’ – he stopped playing and looked at me – ‘which is why we’ve got to take all possible steps to see that he’s acquitted.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said in the ensuing silence.

  ‘Why?’ the Colonel asked.

  ‘Sorry about that “Roll out the Barrel” business. It seems that I got things rather wrong.’

  Later Sandy took me across the square to a comfortable guestroom with a bathroom attached. On the way I asked him to show me the married quarters. I saw the late sergeant’s flat up a short, iron staircase at the foot of which two or three large dustbins stood against a wall; and, on ground level, I saw Trooper Danny’s small accommodation. There were lights on up and below the outside staircase. Two wives, parted from their husbands, were, it seemed, unable to sleep. When we got to my room, Sandy said we would see Danny in the morning and asked if I had all the ‘paperwork’ I needed.

  ‘Oh yes. An interesting little brief, especially the post-mortem photographs. Quite a lot to be learned from them.’

  ‘What about?’ Captain Sandy Ransom didn’t sound particularly interested.

  ‘About the time of death. It’s the hypostasis, you see, the post-mortem staining of the body that shows the time when the blood settles down to the lowest level.’

  ‘Time of death? I shouldn’t have thought it was the time that mattered. It’s who dunnit.’

  ‘Or it’s when dunnit?’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps that’s what makes this case interesting.’

  The next morning I found myself alone at breakfast-time in the Mess with Major Sykes, who was now in uniform and methodically consuming eggs, bacon and sausages. ‘Sandy told us you were brilliant at murders,’ he said, an accusation to which I had to plead guilty.

  ‘Of course Sandy’s a great one for jokes, usually of the practical variety.’

  ‘I can imagine that.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ The Major gave me an instance: ‘We had some sort of man from the Ministry out here – Under-Secretary at Defence, something like that. And Sandy turned up in the Mess pretending to be a visiting German officer. He’d got hold of the uniform somewhere. God knows where. Of course Sandy speaks German. About the only one of us who does. Anyway, he started doing Nazi salutes and singing the “Horst Wessel”. Nearly scared the fellow from the Ministry out of his few remaining wits.’

  ‘Does your colonel allow that sort of thing?’ I wondered.

  ‘Oh, Hugh was away that night, somewhere at Brigade H.Q. But no one can really be angry with Sandy. He’s a sort of licensed jester. Puts on the panto, you know. Aladdin last year. I was the Dame.’ He turned and nodded to one of the many framed regimental photographs on the wall behind him. It showed Major Sykes with other members of the pantomime cast.

  ‘You have hidden talents, Major,’ I had to admit my surprise.

  ‘Oh, it’s Sandy brought it out in me. He’s such a wonderful “producer” – is that the word for it? He can get the best out of everyone. Tell me. How do you find the U.K.?’

  ‘Go out of that door, turn West and keep straight on.’ I shouldn’t have done it and the Major didn’t smile.

  ‘You’re a joker, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Like Sandy. I only asked because I’m retiring next year. Got to. Back to live with my sister in Surrey. I never married – not to anyone except the Regiment.’

  ‘Now you’ve got to divorce?’

  ‘It’ll be a bit of a wrench, although I wasn’t born into it. I’m not like Sandy; his father was a colonel, of course, and his grandfather a lieutenant-general. Sandy was born into the Cavalry.’

  ‘With a silver bit in his mouth?’

  ‘Oh, he’s got plenty of money. But generous with it. He’s paying for you, you know…’

  ‘For me? No. I didn’t know that.’ It came as a surprise, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to feel so much indebted to the young Defending Officer.

  ‘When anyone’s in trouble, like this young Trooper Boyne’ – the Major explained the situation – ‘Sandy’ll always come to their rescue. He’d do anything for the Regiment.’

  ‘Even making you a Dame?’ At which point Major Sykes folded his arms and did a surprising Dame’s North country accent.

  ‘Where’s that naughty boy Aladdin now?’ he crowed, and then added, in his own voice, ‘Yes. He’d even do that.’

  After breakfast Sandy Ransom, an officer so popular, I later discovered, that it seemed inevitable that Trooper Danny Boyne should choose him for his defence, and I sat in a small office set aside in the guard room and interviewed our client. He seemed shy, indeed nervous, of me, and directed many of his answers to Captain Sandy Ransom, who perched on a small upright chair beneath which slept his favourite lurcher.

  ‘You said Sergeant Jumbo Wilson picked on you,’ I started at the beginning. ‘Why do you think that was?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No idea?’

  ‘I don’t know, I told you.’ And then he turned to Sandy as if to explain, ‘I told him.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole’s here to help you. Trust him.’ It was, I supposed, an order from a superior officer, but it didn’t seem to have a great deal of effect. I picked up Danny’s statement and went on to one of the most damaging parts of the evidence.

  ‘Did you ever say you’d carve him up?’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘About three weeks, apparently, before he died.’

  ‘Jumbo Wilson came into the disco, throwing his weight about like he always did’ – the Trooper started to talk more easily – ‘shouting, so people’d notice him. I may have said that to some boys by the bar.’

  ‘Some boys who’re coming to give evidence!’ I reminded him.

  ‘Witnesses from another regiment,’
Sandy said as though that disposed of the matter. ‘Of course,’ I remembered, ‘seraphs wouldn’t give evidence against each other – but you admit you said it?’ I asked Danny.

  ‘Like you’d say about anyone that picked on you: “I’ll carve him up.” It’s like a common saying.’

  ‘Danny comes from Glasgow.’ Sandy supplied what must have seemed to him an obvious explanation. ‘Is that going to be our defence?’ Not if I had anything to do with it, I thought. I came on to the fatal occasion. ‘On that evening, Saturday November 22nd…’

  ‘We were practising for the panto Captain Ransom puts on at Christmas.’ Danny now seemed more confident.

  ‘I can confirm that.’ Sandy confirmed it.

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘It was about nine o’clock.’

  ‘Or 21.00 exactly.’ I wasn’t sure whether I was getting the answers from the client or the Defending Officer.

  ‘I went back to the married quarters block. I changed and went out again. I was meeting my mates in the square. Just in front of my quarters.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just on the square. In front of the quarters.’

  ‘And there you met…?’

  ‘Finchie and Goldie.’

  ‘Troopers Finch and Goldsmith,’ Sandy gave me the names and added, for good measure, ‘I can confirm that too. I happened to see them. I stayed on a little while after the rehearsal and then I saw the three men when I came out.’

  ‘Where did you three go to?’

  ‘The disco.’

  ‘The Rosenkavalier?’

  ‘Got there about 21.30, didn’t you?’ Sandy asked, and Danny Boy said, ‘About that. Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you see Sergeant Wilson?’ I asked.

  ‘He was there, yes. In a corner.’