John Mortimer - Rumpole A La Carte

by Rumpole A La Carte(lit)

  Jago said he had knelt beside her body and tried to raise her head, during which operation his cuff had become smeared with blood.

  Then there followed the events which might have made any family feel that they had good reason to suspect Christopher Jago. He said he panicked. There he was with a dead girl whose blood was on his clothing and he felt sure he would be accused of some sort of sex killing, one of the murders which had recently terrified the neighbourhood. He left the house, drove to the airport and went on his way to Spain. Two hours 207 later, the owner of the mews called to collect some of his possessions, found the body and called the police. Veronica Fabian had died from extensive wounds to her skull. The only real clue was the name she had written against her eight thirty appointment in her desk diary: Arthur Morrison. The police spent a great deal of time trying to find or identify the man Morrison but without success.

  As luck would have it, Jago had parked his car on a resident's parking place in the mews, and the irate resident had taken its number. When he got back to England, Jago was questioned as a possible witness. He immediately admitted that he had found the dead girl, panicked and run away. However, after several days when he was assisting the police with their inquiries (often a euphemism for getting himself stitched up) Jago was released to the surprise and fury of the surviving members of the Fabian family.

  'You'd've charged him at least, Mr Rumpole, wouldn't you?' Fabian pere sounded, as ever, reasonable.

  'Perhaps. But I've grown up with the awkward habit of believing everyone innocent until they're proved guilty.' 'But you'll take it on for us, won't you? At least let a jury decide?' 'I'll have to think about it.' I lit a small cigar and blew out smoke. If Fabian fils had come expecting ash down the waistcoat I might as well let him have it. It's a curious English system, in my view, which allows private citizens to prosecute each other for crimes with the aim of sending each other to chokey, and I wasn't at all sure that it ought to be encouraged.

  I mean, where would it end? I might be tempted to draft an indictment against Sam Ballard, the Head of our Chambers, on the grounds of public nuisance. I had caught this soapy customer ostentatiously pinning up no smoking notices in the passage outside my door.

  'But we've got to have justice, Mr Rumpole. Isn't that the point?' 'Have we? "Use every man after his desert," as a well known Dane put it, "and who should escape whipping?"' I puffed out another small cigar cloud, hoping it would eventu 208 ' ally waft its way in the general direction of our Head of Chambers who would, no doubt, go off like a fire alarm. I was thinking of the difficulty of having a client I could never meet in this world, whom I could never ask what happened when she went to the mews house to meet this mysterious and vanished Morrison or, indeed, whether she wanted such secrets as she may have had to be dragged out in a trial which could no longer have any interest for her.

  'The power of evil is everywhere, Rumpole. And I'm afraid everywhere includes our own Chambers at Equity Court. That is why I have sought you out, although one doesn't like to spend too much time in these places.' 'Does one not?' I consider any hour wasted which is not passed with a hand round a comforting glass of Chateau Thames Embankment in Pommeroy's haven of rest.

  'Passive alcoholism, Rumpole.' Sam Ballard, who, I imagine, gets his hair-shirts from the Army & Navy Stores and whose belligerent puritanism makes Praise-God-Barebones look like Giovanni Casanova, had crept up on me at the bar and abandoned himself to a slimline tonic. 'You've heard of passive smoking, of course?' 'I've heard of it. Although, I have to say, I prefer the active variety.' 'Passive alcoholism's the same thing. Abstainees can absorb the fumes from neighbouring drinkers and become alcoholics.

  Quite easily.' 'Is that one of Matey's medical theories?' Sam Ballard, of course, had fallen for the formidable Mrs Marguerite Plumstead, the Old Bailey matron, and made her his bride, an act which lends considerable support to the theory that love is blind.

  'Marguerite is, of course, extremely well informed on all health problems. So now, when we ask colleagues to dinner, we make it clear that our house is an alcohol-free zone.' This colleague thought, with some gratitude, that the Bollard house in Waltham Cross would also be Rumpole-free in the future. 'But that wasn't why I wanted a word in confidence, Rumpole. I need to enlist your help, as a senior, in years 209 anyway, a very senior member of Equity Court. A grave crime has been committed.' 'Oh my God!' I did my best to look stricken. 'Some bandit hasn't pinched the nail-brush again?' 'I'm afraid, Rumpole', Bollard looked as though he were about to announce the outbreak of the Black Death, or at least the Hundred Years War, 'this goes beyond pilfering in the downstairs toilet.' 'Not nail-brush nicking this time, eh?' 'No, Rumpole. This time it would appear to be forgery, false pretence and obtaining briefs by fraud.' I lit another small cigar which had the desired effect of making Bollard tell his story as rapidly as possible, like a man with a vital message to get out before the poison gas rises above his head. It seemed that Miss Tricia Benbow, a somewhat ornate lady solicitor in whom Henry finds, when she enters his clerk's room with the light behind her, a distinct resemblance to the late Princess Grace of Monaco, had sent a brief in some distant and unappetizing County Court (Snaresbrook, Luton or Land's End, for all I can remember) to young David Inchcape whose legal career was in its tyro stages. Someone, as this precious brief was lying in the clerk's room, scratched out Inchcape's name and substituted that of Claude Erskine-Brown, who duly turned up at the far-flung Court to the surprise of Miss Benbow who had expected a younger man. An inquiry was instituted and, within hours, Sherlock Ballard, Q.c. was on the case. Henry denied all knowledge of the alteration, which seemed to have occurred before he entered the brief in his ledger, young Inchcape looked hard-done-by, and Claude Erskine-Brown, whose performances in Court were marked by a painstaking attention to the letter of the law, emerged as public enemy number one. 'That quality of evil is all pervasive.' The slimline tonic seemed to have gone to Ballard's head. He spoke in an impressive whisper and his eyes glittered with all the enthusiasm of a Grand Inquisitor preparing for the auto-da-fe. 'In my view it has entered into the character of Erskine-Brown.' Not much can be said in criticism of that misguided, and 210 somewhat fatuous, old darling with whom I have shared Chambers at Equity Court for more years than we like to remember.

  Claude's taste for the headier works of Richard Wagner fills him with painful longings for young ladies connected with the legal profession, whom he no doubt sees as Rhine Maidens or miniValkyries in wig and gown. In Court his behaviour can vacillate between the ponderous and the panic-stricken, so those who think unkindly of him, among whom I do not number myself, might reasonably describe him as a pompous twit. All that having been said, the soul of Claude Erskine-Brown is about as remote from evil as Pommeroy's plonk is from Chateau Latour.

  'Claude would be flattered to hear you say he was evil,' I told our Head of Chambers. 'He might feel he'd got a touch of the Nibelungens or something.' 'I noticed it from the time we did that case about the dirty restaurant. He wanted to conceal the fact that he'd been dining there with his female instructing solicitor. From what I remember, he wanted to mislead the Court about it.'* 'Well, that's true,' I conceded. 'Old Claude, so far as I can see, conducts his love life with the minimum of sexual satisfaction and the maximum amount of embarrassment to all concerned. If you want to call that evil...' 'A man who wishes to deceive his wife is quite capable of deceiving his Head of Chambers.' For a moment I caught in Ballard's voice an echo of that moral certainty which characterizes the judgments of She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  'How do you know he'd deceive you? Have you asked him if he put his name on the brief?' 'I'm afraid Erskine-Brown has added perjury to his other offences.' 'You mean he denied it?' 'Hotly.' 'No one in the clerk's room did it?' 'Henry and Dianne say they didn't and I'm prepared to accept their evidence. Rumpole, when it comes to crime, you have considerably more experience than any of us.' * See ''.

  211 fxmpole a la Carte 'Thank you very much.' 'I want to u
ndertake a thorough investigation of this matter.

  Examine the witnesses. And if Erskine-Brown's found guilty...' 'What, then?' 'You know as well as I do, Rumpole. There is no place in Equity Court for fellows who pinch other fellows' briefs.' I gave Soapy Sam the chance of a little passive enjoyment of the heady fumes of Chateau Fleet Street and thought the natter over. Poor old Claude was probably guilty. The starring role played by his wife, Phillida, now luxuriously wrapped in tie silk gown of Q.C., in so many long-running cases must have made him despondent about his own practice, which varied between the second-rate and the mediocre. The sight of a brief delivered by a solicitor he fancied sufficiently to fill up vnth priceless delicacies at La Maison Jean-Pierre to a whitewig must have wounded him deeply.

  Moreover, it had to be remembered that he had admitted young Inchcape to our Chambers under the impression that he was thereby proving his tolerance to those of the gay persuasion, only to discover that Inchcape was in fact a closet heterosexual and his successful rival for the favours of Mizz Liz Probert.* All these were mitigating factors which would spring instantly to the mind of one who always acted for the Defence. They were already outweighing any horror I might have felt at the crime he had probably committed.

  'I'm sorry, Bollard.' Our leader was still alongside me, his nose pointedly aimed from the direction of the glass that contained my ever-diminishing double red. 'I can't help you.

  It's the second time today I've been asked; but prosecution isn't my line of country. Rumpole always defends.' Not long after that events occurred which persuaded me to change my mind, with results which may have an incalculable effect on whatever is left of my future.

  It was that grim season i of the year, which now begins around the end of August and 1 reaches its climax in the first week of December, known as tine 'build-up to Christmas'. I have often thought that if the Soon of Man had known what he was starting he would have c chosen to be born on a quiet summer's day when everyone waas off on holiday on what the Timson family always refers too as the Costa del Crime. As it was, crowds of desperate shooppers were elbowing their way to the bus stops in the drivinng rain. More crammed aboard as we crawled through the WVest End, where the ornamental lights had been switched on. 11 sat contemplating the tidings of great joy She Who Must Be CObeyed had brought to me a few weeks earlier. That very nigght her old school friend, Charmian Nichols, was to arrive to:o spend the festive season a cote de chez Rumpole in the Gloucester Road.

  Readers of these chnronicles will only have heard, up till now, of one of the old ggirls who sported with my wife, Hilda, on the fields of Bexhillll Ladies College when the world was somewhat younger than i it is today. You will recall the redoubtable Dodo Mackintosh,!, painter in watercolour and maker of 'cheesy bits' for our Chaambers parties, who regards Rumpole with a beady, not to sayy suspicious, eye, whenever she comes to call. Dodo's place, onn this particular Christmas, had been taken by Charmian Nidchols. Charlie Nichols, no doubt exhausted by the wear ancid tear of marriage to a star, who had been not only a monitonr and captain of hockey, but winner of the Leadership and Chharacter trophy for two years in succession, had dropped of"ff the twig quite early in the run up to Christmas and the widdowed Charmian wrote to Hilda indicating that she had nothhing pencilled in for the festive season and was inclined to grannt us the favour of her company in the Gloucester Road. She aodded, in a brief postscript, that if Hilda had made a prior comnmitment to that 'dowdy little Dodo Mackintosh' she would 1 quite understand. She Who Must Be Obeyed, in whose breaast Mrs Nichols was able to awaken feelings of awe and wonoder which had lain dormant during our married life, immediateely bought a new eiderdown for the spare bedroom and brobke the news to Dodo that there would 213 be no room at the inn owing to family commitments. You see it took the winner of the Leadership and Character trophy to lure Hilda to perjury.

  'Hilda, dear. Why ever can't you persuade Howard to buy a new Crock-a-Gleam? Absolutely no one plunges their hands into washing-up bowls any more. Of course, it is rather sweetly archaic of you both to still be doing it.' The late Dean Swift, in one of those masterpieces of English literature which I shall never get around to reading, spoke of a country, I believe, ruled by horses, and there was a definite air of equine superiority about La Nichols. She stood, for a start, several hands higher than Rumpole. Her nostrils flared contemptuously, her eyes were yellowish and her greying mane was carefully combed and braided. She was, I had noticed, elegantly shod and you could have seen your face in her polished little hooves. She would, I devoutly hoped, be off with a thoroughbred turn of speed as soon as Christmas was over.

  'You mean, get a dishwasher?' Hilda no longer trusted me to scour the plates to her satisfaction and Charmian had taken my place with the teacloth, dabbing a passable portrait of the Tower of London at our crockery and not knowing where to put it away. 'Oh, Rumpole and I are always talking about that, but we never seem to get around to buying one.' This was another example of the widow's fatal effect on She's regard for the truth; to the best of my recollection the word 'dishwasher' had never passed our lips.

  'Well, surely, Harold,' Charmian whinnied at me over the glass she was polishing mercilessly, 'you're going to buy Hilda something white for Christmas?' 'You mean handkerchiefs? I hadn't thought of that. And the name is Horace, but as you're here for Christmas with the family you can call me Rumpole.' 'No, white! A machine to wash plates and things like that?

  Charlie had far too much respect for my hands to let them get into a state like poor Hilda's.' At this, she looked at my wife with deep sympathy and rattled on, 'Charlie insisted that I could only keep my looks if I was fully automated. Of course I 214 just couldn't haveived the life I did without our Planahead "archive" freer, our jumbo-microwave and rotisserie.' Something snappecbeneath the teacloth at this point. 'Oh, Hilda. One of your;lasses gone for a Burton! Was it terribly precious?' 'Not really. It w, a Christmas present from Dodo. From what I can rememb'.' 'Oh, well then.'Charmian shot the shattered goblet, a reasonably satisfacry container for Pommeroy's Perfectly Ordinary, into the iy-bin. 'But surely Hammond can afford to mechanize you, Ilda? He's always in Court from what you said in your letters.

  'Legal aid defends,' Hilda told her gloomily, 'don't pay for much machiner' 'Legal aid!' Charian pronounced the words as though they constituted a sort ostanding joke, like kippers or mothers-inlaw.

  'Isn't that a so of National Health? Charlie was always really sorry for ouroor little doctor in Guildford who had to pig along on that!' I wanted to say tit I didn't suppose old Charlie had much use for legal aid in is stockbroking business, but I restrained myself. Nor did I e:?lain that our budget was well off balance since our cruise,* Inch had taken a good deal more than Hilda's late aunt's loney, that legal aid fees had been cut and were paid at the pacof a handicapped snail, and that whenever I succeeded in cashg a cheque at the Caring Bank I had to restrain myself fro; making a dash for the door before they remembered our ov-draft. Instead, I have to admit, something about the condesceding Charmian, as she looked with vague amusement aroundur primitive kitchen equipment, made me want to impress heon her own, unadmirable terms.

  'As a matter of let,' I said, casually filling one of Dodo's remaining glasses, [ don't only do legal aid defences. I get offered quite a few jivate prosecutions. They can be extremely lucrative.' 'Really, Rumpe. Just how lucrative?' Hilda stood * See 'Rumpole at &'.

  215 transfixed, her rubber gloves poised above the bubbling Fairy Liquid, waiting for the exact figures. The next morning, when I arrived at my Chambers in Equity Court, Henry told me.

  'Two thousand pounds, Mr Rumpole. And I've agreed refreshers at five hundred a day. They've promised to send a cheque down with the brief.' 'And it's a case likely to last a day or two?' I stood awestruck at the price put upon my prosecution of Christopher Jago.

  'We have got it down, Mr Rumpole, for two weeks.' I did some not so swift calculations, mental arithmetic never having been my strongest point, and then came to a firm decision.


  'Henry,' I said, 'your lady wife, the Mayor of Bexleyheath...' 'No longer, Mr Rumpole. Her year of office being over, she has returned to mere alderman.' 'So you. Henry', I congratulated the man warmly, 'are no longer Lady Mayoress?' 'Much to my relief, Mr Rumpole, I have handed in my chain.' 'Henry, you'll be able to tell me. Does the alderman ever plunge her ex-mayorial hands into the Fairy Liquid?' 'Hardly, Mr Rumpole. We have had a Crock-a-Gleam for years. You know, we're fully automated.' Well, of course, I might have said, on a clerk's fees you would be, wouldn't you? It's only penurious barristers who are still slaving away with the dishcloth. Instead I made an expansive gesture. 'Go out. Henry,' I bade him, 'into the highways and byways of Oxford Street. Order up the biggest, whitest, most melodiously purring Crock-a-Gleam that money can buy and have it despatched to Mrs Rumpole at Froxbury Mansions with the compliments of the season.' 'You're going to prosecute in Jago then, Mr Rumpole?' Henry looked as surprised as if I had announced I meant to spend Christmas in a temperance hotel.

  'Well, yes. Henry. I just thought I'd try my hand at it. For a change.' Finally, my clerk declined a trip up Oxford Street but Dianne, who was busily engaged in reading her horoscope in Woman's Own and decorating her finger-nails for Christmas, 216 undertook to ring John Lewis on my behalf. At which moment my learned friend Claude Erskine-Brown entered the clerk's room looking about as happy as a man who has paid through the nose for tickets for Die Meister'singer van Niirnberg and found himself at an evening of 'Come Dancing'. He noted, lugubriously, that there were no briefs in his tray, even those with other people's names on them, and then drew me out into the passage for a heart to heart. 'It's a good thing you were in the clerk's room just then, Rumpole.' 'Oh, is it? Why exactly?' 'Well. Ballard says he doesn't want me to go in there unless some other member of Chambers is present. What's he think I'm going to do? Forge my fee notes or ravish Dianne?' 'Probably both.' 'It's unbelievable.' 'Perhaps. We've got to remember that Ballard specializes in believing the unbelievable. He also thinks you're sunk in sin.