The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

‘Dressed in a frock?’ the Colonel asked.

  ‘That was your joker’s contribution. Did he have a dress among the props for the pantomime, one large enough for the Dame? I think he dressed up a dead body.’

  ‘Why on earth should anyone do that?’ Sandy sounded incredulous.

  ‘Why? To make some sort of homosexual crime of passion more credible, or as a sign of disapproval? The Sergeant brought no credit on the Regiment by having himself murdered, did he?’

  There was a long silence then; the officers were looking at me, and I felt an intruder, never particularly welcome, in their private world. Then Sandy said, ‘Aren’t you forgetting Helmut?’

  ‘Oh, I never believed in Helmut, the mysterious German who came so conveniently and asked for the Sergeant by name. All the girl remembered was the spiky hair. What do you use in the pantomime, Sandy? Hair lacquer? Hair gel? Was that your own black leather jacket you found so conveniently?’ The port had returned to me and I refilled my glass. I felt tired after a long case, and I wanted to leave them, to go home and forget their problem. ‘I suppose, in a way, you were a first-rate Defending Officer. You wanted to get Danny Boy out of trouble and you thought he was guilty. I always believed he was innocent; he was a boy from Glasgow with the good sense to marry a German girl because they loved each other.’

  There was another long, thoughtful silence, and then the Colonel spoke to me, ‘So, may we ask, who, in your opinion, killed Sar’nt Wilson?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I could reassure him, ‘the joker never went so far as that. He could move his body, dress him in a frock, but not murder him.’

  ‘Then who…’

  ‘I always thought that it must’ve been bad enough to have been fancied by Sergeant Wilson. It must have been hell on earth to be married to him.’ As I said it, in the warm Mess, I shivered slightly. I was doing a job which wasn’t mine, making accusations and bringing home guilt.

  While I was talking to the officers of the Duke of Clarence’s Own Lancers, a Captain Betteridge of the Special Investigations Branch called at the flat up the iron staircase in the married quarters. He found it spotlessly clean and shining. He saw the polished furniture and the framed photographs of Sergeant and Mrs Wilson on their wedding day, and of Mrs Wilson’s father, a sergeant-major who had been killed at Arnhem. He opened a drawer in the sideboard and saw the gleaming, black-handled carving-knife, and he told Mrs Wilson that he wanted to question her further about the events around nine o’clock on the evening her husband died. It was not long before she told him everything, as she had been secretly longing to do since the day she killed Sergeant Wilson.

  Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars,

  That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!

  Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,

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

  The royal banner, and all the quality,

  Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!

  Farewell, anyway, to the barracks of the 37th and 39th Lancers at Badweisheim. Lieutenant Tony Ross drove me to the airport and Captain Ransom, for some reason, didn’t turn out to say goodbye. Danny Boy thanked me a little brusquely, as though I had, after all, let down the Regiment. Only his wife, Hanni, was genuinely and, I expect, everlastingly, grateful. I went back to Civvy Street and, in due course, I was ensconced with Hilda in the bar of the Old Gloucester.

  ‘Where’s ex-Major Johnnie?’ I asked her.

  ‘He got a job as secretary of a golf club in Devon. We had a farewell lunch. He bought me champagne.’

  ‘Decent of him.’

  ‘We had a really good chat. When you’re with us, he told me, you do all the chatting.’

  ‘Oh, do I?’

  ‘He got me wondering.’

  ‘Oh, really. What about?’

  ‘I suppose what my life would have been like if I hadn’t got you to marry me, Rumpole.’

  ‘Did you do that?’

  ‘Of course. You don’t decide things like that on your own.’

  She was right. I can make all sorts of decisions for my clients, but practically none for Rumpole.

  ‘I might have kept up my singing,’ Hilda told me, ‘if I hadn’t married you, Rumpole. I can’t help thinking about that.’

  ‘No future in that, Hilda. No future at all in thinking about the past, or what we might have done. Let me give you a toast.’ I raised my glass of indifferent claret. ‘To the Regiment! Coupled,’ I murmured under my breath, ‘with the name of She Who Must Be Obeyed.’

  Rumpole and the Winter Break

  ‘What you need, Rumpole, is a break.’

  My wife Hilda, known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed, was, of course, perfectly correct. I did need a break, a bit of luck, like not all my cases being listed before Judge Rogei Bullingham, the Mad Bull of the Old Bailey, and not being led by an ineffective Q.C. named Moreton Colefax, not being prosecuted by Soapy Sam Ballard, the Savonarola of our Chambers, and not having as a client in my current little murder a shortsighted Kilburn greengrocer who admitted placing his hands about his wife’s throat to reason with her. When this happened she dropped dead and he concealed her body, for some time, in a large freezer in the stock-room, that is, until he lost his nerve and called in the Old Bill.

  ‘Of course, I need a break, Hilda. Anyone would think the Bull’s the only judge left down the Bailey.’

  ‘Not that sort of break. I mean a winter break. Now, for £236 each, we could have seven nights on Spain’s Sunshine Coast, with sea-view, poolside barbecue, sports facilities and excursions, including cocktails aboard the hotel’s old-time Pirate Galleon! Dodo’s been to Marbella, Rumpole, and we never have a winter holiday.'

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I can see your old school-friend, Dodo Mackintosh, with a cutlass between her teeth shinning up the ratlines to board the Pirate Galleon for a complimentary cocktail.’

  ‘I’ll book up,’ Hilda said.

  ‘Not yet,’ I told her, and thought to avoid further argument with a perfectly safe bet. ‘We’ll go,’ I promised, ‘if I win R. v. Gimlett. We’ll go as a celebration.’ Hilda appeared, for the moment, to be satisfied and I knew that never, in the whole Rumpole career, had there been such a certain loser as the case of the gentle greengrocer from Kilburn.

  ‘It’s true, is it not?’ I asked Professor Ackerman, pathologist par excellence and uncrowned King of the Morgues, across a crowded Courtroom a few days later, ‘that a very slight pressure on the vagal nerve at the throat may stop the heart and death may follow speedily?’

  ‘That would be so,’ the Professor agreed. He and I had discussed many a deceased person together and so, over the years, although always opponents, we had achieved a great deal of rapport. ‘But of course, my Lord, as Mr Rumpole knows, the pressure would have to be just on the right spot.’

  ‘Of course Mr Rumpole knows that!’ The Bull lowered his head in my direction and pawed the ground a little. ‘Are you suggesting that your client sought out the right spot and pressed on it?’

  ‘Certainly not, my Lord. He pressed on it by the sort of accident your Lordship or any of us might have – pressing on a gold collar-stud, say, putting on a winged collar before the start of a day in Court.’

  ‘That sort of pressure?’ I could see the Bull pale beneath his high blood pressure, and a nervous but stubby finger went to the space between the purplish folds of his neck and his off-white starched stand-up size nineteen. ‘Do you mean by a collar-stud?’ he asked the Professor.

  ‘I think Mr Rumpole is exaggerating a little.’ Ackerman gave me the tolerant smile he might reserve for a favourite pupil who had gone, for once, a little too far. ‘But the pressure could be comparatively slight.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole is exaggerating!’ His Honour Judge Bullingham, senior Old Bailey judge, and as such, entitled to try murders, seemed to be remembering my previous convictions. ‘That doesn’t surprise me in the least.’ And he gave the Jury one of his well-known meaningful sm
iles; no doubt it frightened the wits out of them.

  ‘The sort of pressure which might arise if a man put his hand round his wife’s neck for the purpose of restraining her?’ I asked the witness.

  ‘Restraining her, Mr Rumpole?’ the Bull growled.

  ‘Oh yes, my Lord. Restraining her from attacking him in one of her frequent outbursts of fury. Restraining her from following him into the shop and abusing him in front of the clientele as he weighed out a couple of pounds of Golden Delicious.’

  I got a small titter from the Jury, a cry of ‘Silence!’ from the Usher, a glare from the Bull, and an absolutely charming answer from the fair-minded forensic expert.

  ‘If he restrained her with some force, the vagal nerve might be inhibited, particularly if she were pressing against his hand. I suppose that is possible. Yes.’

  ‘Thank you, Professor!’ And I sat down silently wishing the pale Ackerman a long life and happy dissecting.

  But why was I, Horace Rumpole, a junior barrister in status if not in years (I go back to the dawn of time when Lord Denning was a stripling judge in the Divorce Division), why was I, who had a none-too-learned leader in the shape of Moreton Colefax, Q.C., cross-examining the Pathologist called by the Crown?

  The short answer was that Colefax, after a long delay, had been called to higher things, that is, the Bench, and, as our timid client appeared to feel safe in the Rumpole hands, I was left in the firing-line, a target for the Bull’s blunderbuss and the sniping of my opponent and fellow member of Chambers, Sam Ballard, Q.C.

  ‘You say your married life was unhappy, Mr Gimlett?’ Ballard started his cross-examination when the prisoner at the Bar had given evidence.

  ‘She had a terrible temper when roused.’ Gimlett looked at the Jury in a woebegone sort of way. ‘Her chief delight seemed to be to show me up in front of my customers. Talk about screaming; they say you could hear it all the way down to Sainsbury’s.’

  ‘You have some experience of married life though, haven’t you? You have been married before?’

  ‘My Lord. What on earth can be the relevance…?’ I reared to my hind legs to protest and the Bull bared his teeth in some sort of grin. ‘I don’t know, Mr Rumpole. Unless Mr Ballard is trying to suggest that your client is something of a Casanova.’

  Ballard passed swiftly on to other matters and abandoned that line of cross-examination, but I sat in a sort of glow because the Bull had delivered himself into my hands. Nothing in the world could have looked less like Casanova than the meek and middle-aged Harold Gimlett, with his pinkish bald head and National Health specs, who looked out of place without a brown overall, a slightly runny nose and cold hands among the Jersey potatoes. I would make him, before I finished with the Jury, the very image and archetype of the hen-pecked husband.

  ‘Members of the Jury,’ I told them in my final speech. ‘My client has been presented to you as a Casanova, a Valentino, even (I had got the name from Mizz Liz Probert, the youngest member of our Chambers), a Jagger. Look at him! Can you imagine teenagers swooning over him at the airport? (Laughter, at which the Bull growled menacingly.) Is he a Lothario or a Bluebeard? Does he fill you with terror, Members of the Jury, or is he simply a put-on, timid and long-suffering human being who only wanted peace in his home and prosperity for his little grocery business? Of course, after this terrible accident, when he managed to make contact with his wife’s neck in a way that he never dreamt could be so dangerous, he lost his head. For a futile moment he tried to conceal the body in that freezing cabinet you have all seen in the photograph, but soon he was his honest, straightforward self again and walked, of his own free will, into Kilburn Police Station, anxious only to face you fairminded, sensible ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, and receive justice at your hands…’

  ‘You look tired, Mr Rumpole. You need a holiday.’

  We sat together, Harold Gimlett and my learned self in the cells under the Old Bailey, waiting for the Jury to come back with a verdict. Such times are always embarrassing. You don’t quite know what to say to a client. You could say, ‘Win a few, lose a few,’ or, ‘See you again, in about fifteen years,’ but such remarks would be scarcely welcome. On this occasion it was the greengrocer who kept up the small talk.

  ‘I’ve always enjoyed a holiday, speaking personally,’ he said. ‘Things happen sometimes, on a holiday.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Well, for instance. It was on holiday that I met the ladies who became my wives.’

  I left him then and paced up and down outside the Court, smoking a small cigar and nervously dropping ash down the front of the waistcoat. I don’t know why, after so many years of waiting for juries to return, it never gets any better. The sad face of Sam Ballard, my devout prosecutor, hoved into view.

  ‘Ballard,’ I said, ‘why did you embark on that line about the previous wife? I mean, she died quite naturally, didn’t she?’

  ‘Natural causes, yes,’ he agreed in a sepulchral tone. ‘With quite a hefty life insurance made out in your client’s favour. As was the case with the last Mrs Gimlett.’

  ‘The trouble with you members of the Lawyers As Christians Society,’ I told him, ‘is that you have the most morbidly suspicious minds.’ What he said had unsettled me a little, I confess. I felt a momentary sense of insecurity, but within ten minutes the Jury, to the Bull’s evident chagrin, returned to find Harold Gimlett ‘not guilty’. It was only then, and with a sickening heart, that I remembered the promise I had made to She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  Three weeks later we had checked in at Gatwick airport, en route to the Costa del Sol.

  ‘What you will find in the Hotel Escamillo, Mr and Mrs Rumpole, is never a dull moment. We lay on the usual wet-suit water-skiing on clear days – all that sort of activity. Hardly your line, Mr Rumpole, is it? Well, you’ll be well pleased with the miniature golf, the Bingo and the bowling-green. We offer a full day, taking in Gibraltar and a packed lunch. The caves, now that makes a very nice excursion. And the hotel offers the Carmen Coffee Shop, the Mercedes Gourmet French Restaurant, the Michaela for snacks and grills, and the usual solarium and gym equipment if you want to keep in trim, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Thank you. I have no desire whatever to keep in trim.’

  ‘And for Mrs Rumpole, the Beauty Parlour – not that you need that, Mrs Rumpole. I must say we all, in hospitality, take particular care of our more mature ladies. Tonight, just as a for instance, there’s a Senior Citizens’ Happy Hour in the Don José American Bar. Any problems at all, and you come straight to me. My name’s Derek and I’m happy to host your stay.’

  I could tell his name was Derek because he had it written in gold letters on a plastic label attached to his green blazer. He had soft brown eyes and a sort of Spanish-style gaucho moustache, although his accent was pure Ealing Broadway.

  ‘Now, have you any questions at all, Mrs Rumpole, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where can I get The Times?’

  ‘The Frasquita Drugstore on the mezzanine floor,’ Derek told me, ‘is continually at your service.’

  But when I got there, they had nothing left but the Mirror and the Sun. I found the crosswords in those periodicals extremely puzzling.

  ‘I don’t know about you, Rumpole,’ said She Who Must Be Obeyed, ‘but I intend to take full advantage of all the facilities provided.’

  ‘Pity I’ve got a touch of leg coming on.’ I limped elaborately a few steps behind Hilda on the way to the lift. ‘But of course, I want you to enjoy the full day in Gibraltar.’

  So our days fell into a sort of pattern. The sun rose palely behind the tower blocks of the hotels, which in their turn cast a dark shadow upon the strip of beach. Each morning we took the Continental in the bedroom, as the Escamillo version of the full British breakfast arrived very cold and greasy, as though it had been flown out, tourist class, from England. I usually woke tired; the bedroom walls seemed made of thinnish hardboard, and the young family in the next room app
arently enjoyed round games and pop music far into the night. Hilda was always in a hurry to get ready, to find her purse, her straw peasant-style shopping-basket, her hardly needed sun-hat and shaded specs, because the day’s tour, or expedition, was always assembling round dawn in the foyer, to be taken by Derek on a bus journey to some distant point of interest.

  I would skulk in bed until she had set out, and then get up slowly and wait for the hot water which apparently also arrived from a long way off. Once togged up in a pair of old flannels and a tweed jacket, I would leave the delights of the Escamillo Hotel. I would walk, my leg having rapidly recovered, into a sort of village where there were still dark and narrow streets, a dripping fountain and a square. On the square was a dark shop – a jumble of tinned food, sun-hats, paperback books, lilos and shrimping-nets – kept by an old woman in a black dress, with a gold tooth and a stubby moustache, who managed to save me copies of The Times. I would then go and sit in the comforting, incense-filled gloom of the church and do the crossword. Once it was finished, I transferred my patronage to a small, tiled bar which smelled of carbolic soap and wet dogs, where I ate shrimps, drank a red wine which bore about the same relationship to Pommeroy’s plonk as Château Thames Embankment does to Latour 1961, and read my way backwards from the obituaries to the front-page news.

  I was always back at the hotel in time to meet Hilda, who arrived home footsore and very weary with her basket full of fans, mantillas, bullfighting posters, sword-shaped paper-knives and other trophies of the chase. We had dinner together and after a terrible encounter with an antique hen lurking under a sweetish sauce, which called itself ‘Caneton à l’Orange’, in the Mercedes Gourmet Restaurant, we patronized the Michaela for snacks and grills. Every evening Hilda would recount the adventures of the day, repeat several of Derek’s jokes, and tell me of the friendliness shown to her by everyone, but particularly by a Mr Waterlow, a visitor from England.

  ‘Mr Waterlow’s quite obviously a seasoned traveller. He came into the shop with me and managed to beat them down quite marvellously over the mantilla I bought as a present for Dodo Mackintosh.’