John Mortimer - Rumpole A La Carte

by Rumpole A La Carte(lit)

  He's probably afraid of getting passive sinning by standing too close to you.' 'Rumpole. About that wretched brief in the Rickmansworth County Court...' 'Oh, was it Rickmansworth? I thought it was Luton.' I was trying to avoid the moment that barristers dread, when your client looks at you in a trusting and confidential manner and seems about to tell you that he's guilty of the charge on which you've been paid to defend him.

  'Rumpole, I wanted to tell you...' 'Please, don't, old darling,' I spoke as soothingly as I knew to the deeply distressed Claude. 'We all know the feeling.

  Acute shortage of crime affecting one's balance of payments.

  Nothing in your tray, nothing in the diary. The bank manager and the taxman hammering on the door. The VAT man climbing in at the window. Then you wander into the clerk's room and all the briefs seem to be for other people. Well, heaven knows how many times I've been tempted.' 'But I didn't do it, Rumpole. I mean I'd've been mad to do "• It was bound to get found out in the end.' 217 Many crimes, in my experience, are committed by persons undergoing temporary fits of insanity, who are bound to be found out in the end but I didn't think it tactful to mention this. Instead I asked, 'What about the handwriting on the changed brief?' 'It's in block letters. Not like mine, or anyone else's either.

  All the same, Ballard seems to have appointed himself judge, jury and handwriting expert. Rumpole', Claude's voice sank in horror, 'I think he wants me out of Chambers.' 'I wouldn't be surprised.' 'What on earth's Philly going to say?' The man lived in growing awe of Phillida Erskine-Brown, Q.c., the embarrassingly successful Portia of our Chambers. 'I should think she'd be very glad to have you at home to do the washing up,' I comforted him. 'That is, unless you have a Crock-a-Gleam like the rest of us.' 'Rumpole, please. This is no joking matter.' 'Everything, in my humble opinion, is a joking matter.' 'I want you to defend me.' 'Do you? Ballard's asked me to fill an entirely different role.' 'You!' The unfortunate Claude gave me a look of horror.

  'But you don't ever prosecute, do you?' 'Well', 1 did my level best to cheer the man up, 'hardly ever.' I passed on up to my room, where I lit a small cigar and reopened the papers in the Jago case, which I read with a new interest since Henry had dealt with the little matter of my fee.

  I looked at the photograph of the big, plain victim and thought again how little she looked like her trim and elegant father and brother. I went through the account of Jago's statements, and decided that even the clumsiest cross-examiner could ridicule his unconvincing explanations. I turned the pages of a photostat of Veronica Fabian's diary and leamt, for the first time, that she had had six previous appointments with the man called Arthur Morrison, and I wondered why the name seemed to mean something to me. Then the door was flung open and an extremely wrathful Mizz Liz Probert came into my presence.

  Well,' she said, 'you've really deserted us for the enemy now, haven't you, Rumpole.' 218 'I haven't been listening to the news.' I tried to be gentle with her. 'Are we at war?' 'Don't pretend you don't know what I mean. Henry's told me all about it. In my opinion it's as contemptible as acting for a landlord who's trying to evict a one-parent family on supplementary benefit. You've gone over to the Prosecution.' 'Not gone over', I did my best to reassure the inflamed daughter of Red Ron Probert, once the firebrand leader of the South-East London Labour Council, 'just there on a visit.' 'Just visiting the establishment, the powers that be, the Old Bill. Just there on a friendly call? How comfortable, Rumpole.

  How cosy. You know what I always admired about you?' 'Not exactly. Do remind me.' 'Oh, yes. No wonder you've forgotten, now you've taken up prosecution. Well, I admired the fact that you were always on the side of the underdog. You stopped the Judges sending everyone to the nick. You showed up the police. You stood up for the underprivileged.' Liz Probert was using almost the same words as the Fabians, but now she said, 'And you, of all people, are being paid by some posh family of ritzy estate agents to cook up a case against a bit of a naff member of their profession. They're narked he's been let free just because there isn't any evidence against him.' 'Let me enlighten you.' My tone, as always, was sweetly reasonable. 'There is plenty of evidence against him.' 'Like the fact that he never went to a "decent public school"

  like the Fabians?' 'And like the fact that he scooted out of the country when he found the body instead of telephoning the police.' 'Oh, I'm sure you'll find lots of effective points to make against him!' Hell hath no fury like an outraged radical lawyer, and Mizz Probert's outrage did for her what a large Pommeroy's plonk did for me, it made her extremely eloquent.

  You'll be able to argue him into a life sentence with a twentyfive-year recommendation. Probably you'll get the thanks of the Jge, an invitation to the serious crimes squad dinner dance d a weekend's shooting at the Fabians' place in Hampshire. I don't know why you did it, or, rather, I know only too well.' 219 'Why, do you think?' 'Henry told me.' Then she took, as I sometimes do, to poetry: ' "Just for a handful of silver he left us." You're always quoting Wordsworth.' 'I do. Except that's by Browning. About Wordsworth.' 'About him, is it? "The Lost Leader"? Well. No wonder you like Wordsworth so much.' All this was hardly complimentary to Rumpole or, indeed, to the Old Sheep of the Lake District whose job in the stamp office had earned him the fury of the young Robert Browning.

  I wasn't thinking of this, however, as Liz Probert continued her flow of denunciation. I was thinking of the unfortunate Claude Erskine-Brown and the way he had spoken to me in the passage. He had seemed angry, puzzled, depressed, but not, strangely enough, guilty.

  It's rare for a criminal hack to be invited into his customer's home. We represent a part of their lives they would prefer to forget. Not only do they not ask us to dinner, but when catching sight of us at parties years after we have sprung them from detention they look studiously in the opposite direction and pretend we never met. No one, I suppose, wants the neighbours to spot the sturdy figure of Rumpole climbing their front steps. I may give rise to speculation as to whether it's murder, rape or merely a nice clean fraud that's going on in their family. The Fabians were different. Clearly they felt that they had, as representatives of law and order, nothing to be ashamed of, indeed much to be proud of in the way they were pursuing justice, in spite of the curious lassitude of the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions. Mrs Fabian, it seemed, suffered from arthritis and rarely left the house so my discreet and highly respected solicitor, Francis Pyecraft (of Pyecraft & Wensleydale), and my good self were invited there for drinks. The dead girl's mother wanted to look us over and grant us her good housekeeping seal of approval.

  'It's not knowing, that's the worst thing, Mr Rumpole,' Mrs Fabian told me. 'I feel I could learn to live with it, if I knew just how Veronica died.' 'You mean who killed her?' 'Yes, of course, that's what I mean.' I didn't like to tell her that a criminal trial, before a judge, who comes armed with his own prejudices, and a jury, whose attention frequently wanders, may be a pretty blunt instrument for prising out the truth. Instead, I looked at her and wondered if couples are attracted by physical likeness. Mrs Fabian was as small-boned, clear-featured and neat as her husband and son.

  And yet they had produced a big-boned and plain daughter, who had stumbled, no doubt, unwittingly, on death.

  'Perhaps you could tell me a little more about Veronica. I mean about her life. Boyfriends?' 'No.' Mrs Fabian shook her head. 'That was really the trouble. She didn't seem to be able to find one. At least, not one that cared about her.' We sat in the high living-room of a house overlooking the canal in Little Venice. Tall bookshelves stretched to the ceiling, a pair of loud-speakers tinkled with appropriate baroque music. The white walls were hung with grey drawings which looked discreetly expensive. Young Roger moved among us, replenishing our glasses. The curtains hadn't been drawn and Mrs Fabian sat on a sofa looking out into the winter darkness, almost as though she was still expecting her daughter to come home early on yet another evening without a date. Veronica's mother, father and brother, I imagined, never found it difficult
to find people who cared about them. Only their daughter had to get on without love.

  'She worked in your firm. What were her other interests?' 'Oh, she read enormously. She had an idea she wanted to be a writer and she did some things for her school magazine, which were rather good, I thought,' Gregory told me.

  'Very good.' Mrs Fabian gave the dead girl her full support.

  'She never got much further than that, I'm afraid. I suggested she came and worked for us, and then she could write in her spare time. If she seemed to be going to make a success of ", the writing, I mean, of course, I'd've supported her.' Just do a little estate agency, darling, until you publish a bestseller.' I could imagine the charm with which Gregory Fabian had said it, and his daughter, unsure of her talent, had agreed.

  A fatal arrangement; if she had stuck to literature, she would never have kept an appointment in a Netting Hill Gate mews.

  'What did she read?' 'Oh, all sorts of things. Mainly nineteenth-century authors.

  She used to talk about becoming a novelist.' 'Her favourites were the Brontes,' Mrs Fabian remembered.

  'Oh, yes. The Brontes. Charlotte, especially. She had a very romantic nature.' Veronica's father smiled, I thought, with understanding.

  'This man Morrison,' I said, 'whoever he may be, keeps turning up in the desk diary. No one in the office's ever heard of him. He's never been a client of yours?' 'Not so far as I've been able to discover. There's no correspondence with him.' 'You don't know a friend others by that name?' 'We've asked, of course. No one's ever heard of him.' I got up and crossed to the darkened window. Looking out, all I could see was myself reflected in the glass, a comfortably padded Old Bailey hack with a worried expression, engaged in the strange pursuit of prosecution.

  'But in her diary she seems to have had six previous appointments with him.' 'Of course', Mrs Fabian was smiling at me apologetically, as though she hardly liked to point out anything so obvious 'we don't know everything about her. You never do, do you?

  Even about your own daughter.' 'All right, then. What do you know about Christopher Jago?

  You must have come across him in the way of business.' 'Not really.' Gregory Fabian stopped smiling. 'He has, well, a different type of business.' 'And does it in a different sort of way,' his son added.

  'What does that mean?' 'Well, we've heard things. You do hear things...' 'What sort of things?' fc 'Undervaluing houses. Getting their owners to sell cheap to a chap who's really a friend of the agent. The friend sells on for the right price and he and the agent divide up the profits.' 'We've no evidence of that,' Gregory told me. 'It wouldn't 222 be right for you to assume that's what he was doing. Apparently he's rather a flashy type of operator, but that's really all we know about him.' 'He's a cowboy.' Roger was more positive. 'And he looks the part.' They were silent then, it seemed, for a moment, fearful of the mystery that had disturbed their gentle family life. Roger crossed the room behind me and drew the curtains, shutting out the dark.

  'She wasn't robbed. She hadn't been sexually assaulted. So far as we know she hadn't quarrelled with anyone and Jago didn't even know her. Why on earth should he want to kill her?' I asked the Fabians and they continued to sit in silence, puzzled and sad.

  'The police couldn't answer that question either,' I said.

  'Perhaps that's why they let him go.' I left the house on my own, as Pyecraft was staying to discuss the effect of the girl's death on certain family trusts.

  Gregory came down to the hall and, as he helped me on with my coat, he said quietly, 'I don't know if Francis Pyecraft explained to you about Veronica.' 'No. What about her?' 'As a matter of fact she's not our daughter.' 'Not?' 'No. After Roger was born, we so wanted a girl. Evelyn couldn't have any more children, so we adopted. Of course, we loved her just as much as Roger. But now, well, it seems to make it even more important that she should be treated justly.' Again, I thought, he was talking as though Veronica were still alive and eagerly awaiting the result of the trial. Then he said, 'There's always one child that you feel needs special protection.' Christmas came and we sat in the kitchen round the white coffin of the Crock-a-Gleam which flashed, sighed, belched a few times and delivered up our crockery. As I rescued the burning-hot plates from a cloud of steam, the widow Charmian said, 'At least I've made Howard cough up a dishwasher for you, Hilda. I've managed to do that.' 223 'It wasn't you', I had long given up trying to persuade our visitor to use my correct name, 'that made me buy it.' 'Oh?' Charmian was miffed. 'Who was it, then?' 'I suppose whoever killed Veronica Fabian.' I don't know why it was that Charmian gave me a distinct touch of the Scrooges. Later, when we opened our presents in the sittingroom, I bestowed on Hilda the gift of lavender water, which I think she now uses for laying-down purposes, and I discovered that the three pairs of darkish socks, wrapped in hollypatterned paper, were exactly what I wanted. Hilda opened a small glass jar, which contained some white cream which smelled faintly of hair oil and vaseline.

  'Oh, how lovely.' She Who Must Be Obeyed was doing her best not to sound underwhelmed. 'What is it, Charmian?' 'Special homoeopathic skin beautifier, Hilda dear.' Charmian was tearing open the wafer-thin china early-morning tea set on which we had, I was quite convinced, spent far too much. 'We've got to do something about those poor toil-worn hands of yours, haven't we? And is this really for me?' She looked at her present with more than faint amusement. 'What funny little cups and saucers. And how very sweet of you to go out and buy them. Or was it another old Christmas present from Dodo Mackintosh?' It says a great deal for the awe in which Hilda held her, and my own iron self-control, that neither of us got up and beaned the woman with our Christmas tree.

  After a festive season of this nature, it may not surprise you to know that I took an early opportunity to return to my place of business in Equity Court, where I found not much business going on. Such few barristers and clerks as were visible seemed to be in a state of somnambulism. I made for Pommeroy's Wine Bar, where even the holly seemed to be suffering from a hangover and my learned friend Claude Erskine-Brown was toying, in a melancholy and aloof fashion, with a half bottle of Pommeroy's more upmarket St-Emilion-type red.

  'You're wandering lonely as a Claude,' I told him. 'Did you come up to work?' 224 'I came,' he said dolefully, 'because I couldn't stay at home.' 'Because of Christmas visitors?' 'No. Because of the shrink.' I didn't catch the fellow's drift. Had his wits turned and did he imagine some strange diminution in size of his Islington home, so he could no longer crawl in at the front door?

  'The what?' 'The shrink. Phillida knows all about the case of the altered brief. Ballard told her.' 'Ah, yes.' I knew my Soapy Sam. 'I bet he enjoyed that.' 'She was very understanding.' 'You said you were innocent, and she believed you?' 'No. She didn't believe me. She was just very understanding.' 'Ah.' 'She said it was the mid-life crisis. It happens to people in middle age. Mainly women who pinch things in Sainsbury's.

  But Philly thinks quite a lot of men go mad as well. So she said it was a sort of cry for help and she'd stand by me, provided I went to a shrink.' 'So?' 'It seemed easier to agree somehow.' Poor old Claude, the fizz had quite gone out of him and he had volunteered to join the great army of the maladjusted. 'She fixed me up with a Dr Gertrude Hauser who lives in Belsize Park.' 'Oh, yes. And what did Dr Gertrude have to say?' 'Well, first of all, she had this rather disgusting old sofa with a bit of Kleenex on the pillow. She made me lie down on that, so I felt a bit of a fool. Then she asked me about my childhood, so I told her. Then she said the whole trouble was that I wanted to sleep with my mother.' • 'And did you?' 'What?' 'Want to sleep with your mother.' Of course not. Mummy would never have stood for it.' 'I suppose not.' Quite honestly, Rumpole. Mummy was an absolute sweetie "i many ways, but, well, no offence to you, of course, she s corpulent. I didn't fancy her in the least.' 225 'Did you tell Gertrude that?' 'Yes. I said quite honestly I wouldn't have slept with Mummy if we'd been alone on a desert island.' 'What did the shrink say?' 'She said, "I shall write down 'fantasizes about
being alone with his mother on a desert island'." Quite honestly, I can't go and see Dr Hauser again.' 'No. Probably not.' 'All that talk about Mummy. It's really too embarrassing.

  She'd have hated it so, if she'd been alive.' 'Yes, I do see. Excuse me a moment.' I tore myself away from the reluctant patient to a corner in which I had seen Mizz Liz Probert settling down to a glass of Pommeroy's newly advertised organic plonk (the old plonk, I strongly suspected, with a new bright-green label on the bottle). There was a certain matter about which I needed to ask her further and better particulars.

  'Look here, Liz.' I pulled up a chair. 'How did you know all that about Christopher Jago?' 'You can't sit there,' she said. 'I'm expecting Dave Inchcape.' 'Just until he comes. How did you know that Jago didn't go to a public school, for instance?' 'He told me.' 'You met him?' 'Oh, yes. Dave and I got our flat through him. And I have to tell you, Rumpole, that he was absolutely honest, reliable and trustworthy throughout the whole transaction.' I had forgotten that Liz and Dave were now co-mortgagees and living happily ever after somewhere off Ladbroke Grove.