The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Bloke in here cleared quarter of a million on the horses.’ And Dennis was good enough to show me his Punter’s Guide. ‘Well,’ I told him, ‘I’ve had handsome wins in my time, but nothing to equal…’

  ‘He’s seen boarding an aeroplane for the Seychelles.’ Dennis showed me the picture in his Punter’s.

  ‘The Seychelles, eh?’ I was thoughtful. ‘Far from Judge Bullingham and the Old Bailey.’

  ‘I could make more than that on a four-horse accumulator. If I had a ton,’ our client claimed.

  ‘A ton of what?’

  ‘A hundred pound stake.’

  ‘A hundred pounds?’ That very sum was swelling in my back pocket.

  ‘I reckon I could top three hundred grand in the next few days.’

  I pulled myself together and reluctantly came back to the matter in hand. ‘You know what’s going to happen when you and Cyril blame each other for carrying the shooter? The Mad Bull’s going to tell the Jury you agreed to go on an armed robbery together. He’ll say that it doesn’t really matter who was in charge of the equipment. You’re both guilty! Did you say… three hundred thousand pounds?’

  ‘From a four-horse accumulator.’ Dennis made the point again.

  ‘Four-horse what?’

  ‘Accumulator.’ He consulted his paper again. ‘I could get 9 to 1 about Pretty Balloon at Goodwood this afternoon.’

  ‘Do you want me to take this down?’ Mizz Probert was puzzled at the course the conference was taking. I told her to relax but I pulled out a pencil and made a few notes on the back of my brief. I am ashamed to have to tell you they were not about the case.

  ‘So there’d be a grand to go on Mother’s Ruin at Redcar. 5 to 1, I reckon. That’d give us six thou.’ Dennis went on as though it were peanuts. ‘And that’d be on Ever So Grateful… which should get you fours at Yarmouth. So that’s thirty grand!’

  ‘Ever So Grateful, sounds a polite little animal.’ I was taking a careful note.

  ‘Now we need 10 to 1 for a bit of a gamble.’ Dennis was studying the forecasts.

  ‘What’s it been up to now?’

  ‘A doddle,’ he told me calmly.

  ‘Easy as tunnelling into a bank vault?’ I couldn’t help it.

  ‘Do me a favour, Mr Rumpole, don’t bring that up again.’ His pained expression didn’t last long. ‘Kissogram at Newbury on Wednesday,’ he read out in triumph. ‘Ante-post price should bring you, let’s say three hundred and thirty grand! Give or take a fiver.’

  ‘In round figures?’

  ‘Oh, yes. In round figures.’

  I put away my pen and looked at Dennis. ‘Just tell me one thing.’

  ‘About the shooter?’ His cheerfulness was gone.

  ‘We’ll come back to the shooter in a minute; I was thinking that you’ve been in custody since that eventful night.’

  ‘Six months, Mr Rumpole,’ Bernard told me and Liz Probert added, ‘We should get that off the sentence.’

  ‘I suppose, being in Brixton and now here, it’s difficult to place a small bet or two? Not to mention a four-horse accumulator?’

  ‘Bless your heart, Mr Rumpole. There’s always screws that’ll do it for you, even down the Old Bailey cells.’

  ‘Screws that’ll put on bets?’ I was surprised to hear it.

  ‘You know Gerald, the fat one at the gate, the one that’s always got his face in a bacon sarny?’

  ‘Gerald.’ I was grateful for the information. And then I stood up; we seemed to have covered all the vital points. ‘Well, I think that’s about all on the legal aspect of the case. Just remember one thing, Dennis. The Timsons don’t carry weapons and they don’t grass on each other.’

  ‘That’s true, Mr Rumpole. That has always been our point of honour.’

  ‘So don’t you go jumping into that witness-box and blame it all on your cousin Cyril. Let the Prosecution try and prove which of you had the gun; don’t you two start cutting each other’s throats.’

  ‘Cyril goes in the first, don’t he?’ Dennis had a certain amount of legal knowledge gained in the hard school of experience.

  ‘If he goes in at all, yes. You’re second on the indictment.’

  ‘I’ll have to see what he says, won’t I?’

  ‘But you wouldn’t grass on him?’

  ‘Not unless I have to.’ Dennis didn’t sound so sure.

  ‘ “What is honour? A word. What is that word, honour? Air!” ’ Happily the allusion was lost on my client, so I went off to try a few passes at the Mad Bull after a word in confidence with the stout warder at the gate.

  ‘Gerald.’ I accosted him after I had told Liz and Mr Bernard to go on up and keep my place warm in Court. ‘Yes, Mr Rumpole. Got a busy day in Court ahead, have you?’ The man’s voice came muffled by a large wadge of sandwich.

  ‘I am a little hard-pressed; in fact I’m too busy to get to my usual bookmakers.’ ‘Want me to put something on for you?’ Gerald seemed to follow my drift at once.

  ‘A hundred pounds. Four-horse accumulator. Start this afternoon at Goodwood’ – I consulted the notes on my brief – ‘with Pretty Balloon. I reckon you can get 9 to i about it.’

  ‘Will do, Mr Rumpole. I’ll be slipping out soon, for a bit of dinner.’

  ‘And I’m sure you’ll need it…’ I looked at the man with something akin to awe and gave him the name of my four hopeful horses. Then I put my hand in my back pocket, lugged out the hundred pounds and handed it all to Gerald. As some old gambler put it:

  He either fears his fate too much,

  Or his deserts are small,

  That puts it not unto the touch,

  To win or lose it all.

  It was after I had placed the great wager with Gerald that I went upstairs. Outside Judge Bullingham’s Court, I found three large figures awaiting me. I recognized Fred Timson, a grey-haired man, his face bronzed by the suns of Marbella, wearing a discreet sports jacket, cavalry-twill trousers and an M.C.C. tie. He was the acknowledged head of the family, always called on for advice in times of trouble, and with him I had also a longstanding business relationship. Fred was flanked by two substantial ladies who had clearly both been for a recent tint and set at the hairdressers; they were brightly dressed as though for a wedding or some celebration other than their husbands’ day in Court. They, as I was reminded, were Den’s Doris and Cyril’s Maureen. Fred hastily told me of the family troubles. ‘We’re being made a laughing stock, Mr Rumpole. There’s Molloys making a joke of this all over South London.’ Of course, I knew the numerous clan Molloy, rival and perhaps more deft and successful villains, who were to the Timsons what the Montagues were to the Capulets, York to Lancaster or the Guelfs to the Ghibellines of old.

  ‘I’ve been called out to in the street by Molloy women,’ Den’s Doris complained. ‘Maureen’s been called out to in Tesco’s on several occasions.’

  ‘They’re laughing at our husbands’ – this, from Cyril’s Maureen – ‘grassing on each other.’

  ‘Is that what they’re laughing at?’ I wondered.

  ‘Oh, the Molloys is doing very nicely, that’s what we hear. They pulled off something spectacular.’ Fred had the latest information.

  ‘They got away with something terrific, they reckon,’ Maureen and Doris added. ‘And they calls out that all the Timsons can do is get nicked and then grass on each other.’

  ‘These Molloys aren’t ever going to let us hear the last of it.’ Fred was gloomy. ‘Young Peanuts Molloy, he called out that all the Timsons is good for is to use as ferrets.’

  ‘Ferrets?’ I looked at him with some interest. ‘Why on earth did he say that, I wonder?’

  ‘You know the way they talk.’ Fred was full of contempt for Molloy boasting. ‘We wants you to go in there, Mr Rumpole. And save our reputation.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I had to promise. After all, the Timson family had done more for the legal profession than a hundred Lord Chancellors.

  A standard opening gambit, when fa
ced with the difficulties of a cut-throat defence, is to apply to the Court, before the Jury is let in and sworn, for separate trials for the defendants. If they are tried on different occasions they cannot then give evidence which will be harmful to each other. Such applications are usually doomed, as the Judge is as keen as the Prosecution to see a couple of customers convicting each other without the need for outside assistance.

  ‘A separate trial,’ the Bull growled when I stood on my feet to make the application, ‘for Dennis Timson? Any reason for that, Mr Rumpole, apart from your natural desire to spin out these proceedings as long as possible? I assume your client’s on legal aid?’

  I am sorry to say that not only the handsome young Hearthstoke but Phillida laughed at Bullingham’s ‘joke’, and I thought that if I were to win the four-horse accumulator, I could tell his Lordship to shut up and not be so mercenary.

  ‘The reason, my Lord,’ I told him, ‘is my natural desire to see that justice is done to my client.’

  ‘Provided it’s paid for by the unfortunate rate-payers of the City of London.’ The Bull glared at me balefully. ‘Go on, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘I understand that my co-defendant, Mr Cyril Timson, may give evidence accusing my client of having the gun.’

  ‘And you, no doubt, intend to return the compliment?’

  ‘I’m not prepared to say at this stage what my defence will be,’ I said with what remained of my dignity.

  ‘But it may be a cut-throat?’ the Bull suggested artlessly.

  ‘That is possible, my Lord.’

  ‘These two…’ – he looked at the dock with undisguised contempt – ‘gentry! Are going to do their best to cut each other’s throats?’

  Gazing at his Lordship, I knew how the Emperor Nero looked when he settled down in the circus to watch a gladiator locked in hopeless combat with a sabre-toothed tiger. I glanced away and happened to catch sight of a pale, weaselly-faced young man with lank hair and a leather jacket leaning over the rail of the Public Gallery, listening to the proceedings with interest and amusement. I immediately recognized the face, well known in criminal circles, of Peanuts Molloy, who also appeared to enjoy the circus. I averted my eyes and once more addressed the learned judge, ‘Of course,’ I told him, ‘the statements the defendants made to the police wouldn’t be evidence against each other.’

  ‘But once they go into the witness-box in the same trial and repeat them on oath, then they become evidence on which the Jury could convict!’ Bullingham added with relish.

  ‘Your Lordship has my point.’

  ‘Of course I do. You don’t want your client sent down for armed robbery and grievous bodily harm, do you, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘I don’t want my client sent down on evidence which may well be quite unreliable!’ At that I sat down in as challenging a manner as possible and his Honour Judge Bullingham directed a sickly smile at Phillida. ‘Mrs Erskine-Brown. Do you support Mr Rumpole’s application?’ he asked her in a voice like Guinness and treacle.

  ‘My Lord. I do not!’ Phillida rose to put her small stiletto heel into Rumpole. ‘I’m sure that under your Lordship’s wise guidance justice will be done to both the defendants. Your Lordship will no doubt direct the Jury with your Lordship’s usual clarity.’ When it came to buttering up the Bull our Portia could lay it on with a trowel. ‘You may well warn them of the danger of convicting Mr Dennis Timson on the evidence of an accomplice. But, of course, they can do so if they think it right.’

  ‘Oh yes, Mrs Erskine-Brown.’ The Bull was purring like a kitten. ‘I shall certainly tell them that. The Court is grateful for your most valuable contribution.’

  So the two Timsons were ordered to be tried together and I thought that if only certain horses managed their races better than I was managing my case I might, in the not too distant future, be boarding an aeroplane for the Seychelles. In fact, that first day in Court was not an unmitigated disaster. As Hearthrug was drawing to the end of a distinctly unsporting address to the Jury, in the course of which he told them that the bankguard, Huggins, ‘a family man, a man of impeccable character, who has sat upon his local Church Council, was wounded by these two desperate robbers, albeit in the foot’, my client scribbled a note which was delivered to me by a helpful usher. I opened it and read the glad tidings: THE SCREWS TOLD ME, MR RUMPOLE. PRETTY BALLOON WON BY A SHORT HEAD AT GOODWOOD. One up, I thought as I crumpled the note and looked up at Bullingham like a man who might not be in his clutches for ever – one up and three to go.

  I have it on the good authority of Harry Shrimpton, the Court Clerk, that after he rose, Bullingham said to him, ‘A really most attractive advocate, Mrs Erskine-Brown. Do you think it would be entirely inappropriate if I sent her down a box of chocolates?’

  ‘Yes, Judge,’ Shrimpton felt it his duty to tell him.

  ‘You mean, “Yes”, I can?’

  ‘No. I mean “Yes”, it would be entirely inappropriate.’

  ‘Hm. She hasn’t a sweet tooth?’ The Bull was puzzled.

  ‘The Lord Chancellor wouldn’t like it.’ The Court Clerk was expert on such matters, but the Judge merely growled, ‘I wasn’t going to send chocolates to the Lord Chancellor.’

  Whilst the learned female Q.C. was being threatened by unsolicited chocolates from the Judge, she was sitting, at his express invitation, with Charlie Hearthstoke, in a quiet corner of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in the company of two glasses and a gold-paper-necked bottle in an ice bucket. The ruthless counsel for the Prosecution, she was able to tell me much later, had invited her there so that he could tell her that my client, Dennis, possessed a firearm without a licence, although it was unfortunately a shotgun and not a revolver, and that he had done malicious damage with an air rifle when he was fourteen. It was also thought that he had rung the hospital to inquire about Huggins’s health; an event which, as interpreted by Hearthrug, showed not natural sympathy, but a desire to discover if he were likely to be charged with murder. All these facts were put at Phillida’s disposal, so that she might be the better able to cut my client’s throat. Then Charlie Hearthstoke told Phillida what a superb ‘Courtroom technician’ she was. ‘The way you handled Bullingham was superb. He’s dotty about you, naturally. Well, I can’t blame him. I suppose everyone is.’

  There was more of such flattery, apparently, and Hearthstoke made it clear that he wished he’d got to know Phillida better when he was in our Chambers, but of course she was always doing such important cases, and was ‘very much married, naturally’.

  ‘Not all that married,’ Phillida now agrees she replied, and who knows what course the conversation might not have taken had I not hoved to with Liz Probert, seen the bottle in the bucket, and asked Jack Pommeroy’s girl, Barbara, to bring us another couple of glasses. ‘Champagne all round, eh, Hearthrug?’ I said, as we settled in our places. ‘And I know exactly what you’re celebrating.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what that could be.’ Phillida tried to sound innocent.

  ‘Come off it,’ I told her. ‘You’re celebrating the unholy alliance between Cyril Timson and the Prosecution, with a full exchange of information designed to send poor old Dennis away for at least fourteen years.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’

  ‘Of course it’s not fair, Portia. But it’s true. And as the quality of mercy doesn’t seem to be dropping like the gentle rain from heaven around here, we’ll have to make do with Pommeroy’s bubbly.’ I pulled the bottle out of the bucket and looked at it with dismay. ‘Méthode Champenoise. Oh, Hearthrug. You disappoint me.’

  ‘Actually, Charles, it’s quite delicious.’ I saw Phillida smile at the odious Prosecutor.

  ‘Grape juice and gas,’ I warned her. ‘Wait for the headache. You know Mizz Probert, of course?’ Of course she knew Liz only too well, but I wasn’t in a mood to make life easy for Cyril Timson’s silk.

  ‘Of course,’ Phillida spoke from the deep-freeze.

  ‘There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to ask you, Phillida.’ Li
z being extremely nervous, started to chatter. ‘Now you’re a Q.C. and all that. But when you started at the Bar, wasn’t it terribly difficult being a woman?’

  ‘Oh, no. Being a woman comes quite naturally, to some of us.’ She smiled at Hearthstoke who laughed encouragingly. ‘Not that I had much choice in the matter.’

  ‘But didn’t you come up against a load of fixed male attitudes?’ Liz stumbled on, doing herself no good at all. ‘That’s what made it all such tremendous fun,’ Phillida told her. ‘If you really want to know, I didn’t get a particularly brilliant law degree but I never had the slightest trouble getting on with men.’

  ‘Clearly not.’ Hearthrug was prepared to corroborate her story. ‘Oh, yes’ – Phillida smiled at Liz in a particularly lethal way – ‘and there’s one question I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘About the exploitation of women at the Bar?’ A simple-minded girl, Mizz Probert.

  ‘No. Just… seen any good operas lately?’ A deep old-fashioned blush spread across the face of that liberated lady Liz Probert, and I tried to help her by saying, ‘You could have learned a great lesson from Portia today, Mizz Probert. How to succeed at the Bar by reducing Judge Bullingham to a trembling blob of sexual excitement. I’ve never been able to manage it myself.’ Gazing idly about me, I saw Claude enter Pommeroy’s, and I happened to tell his wife that he looked as though he’d lost her, a remark not lost on the egregious Hearthrug.

  ‘Rumpole, lay off!’ Phillida’s aside was unusually angry. ‘Are you going to lay off Dennis?’ I was prepared to strike a bargain with her, but as she made no response, I invited Erskine-Brown to draw up a chair and sit next to Mizz Probert. He declined to do this, but squeezed himself, in a way welcomed by neither of the parties, between his wife and Hearthstoke. When we were all more or less uncomfortably settled, I asked Claude if I could borrow the copy of the Standard, which he was holding much as a drowning man clings to a raft.

  ‘I went back to Chambers, Philly,’ the unhappy man was saying. ‘They said you hadn’t been in.’

  ‘No. I came straight here. I was discussing the case with prosecuting counsel.’