Rumpole Misbehaves

by John Mortimer

  I suppose our Director of Marketing had a point there, but I found her next remark quite ridiculous. ‘Erskine-Brown is considering the possibility of getting an ASBO against you, Rumpole.’

  ‘An anti-social behaviour order?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Against me, did you say?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And what’s the nature of their complaint?’

  ‘Persistent smoking in Chambers, and bringing food and alcoholic refreshments into your room.’

  ‘That’s not anti-social behaviour. It’s entirely social. Sit down, my dear old Director of Marketing. Let me offer you an egg sandwich, prepared by the hand of She Who Must Be Obeyed. Bring a spare glass and I can offer you a cheap and cheery mouthful. Now what could be more social than that?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Rumpole.’

  ‘What’s ridiculous about it?’

  ‘If I accepted your hospitality…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Then I’d be as anti-social as you are.’

  At this our Director of Marketing left me feeling profoundly anti-social so far as Ballard and his devious sidekick, Claude Erskine-Brown, were concerned.

  There is a certain area of London, not far from Clapham Common, where the streets of the wealthier middle classes, such as Beechwood Grove, are perilously close to less respectable areas, such as Rampton Road, which have become inhabited by members of the ever-spreading Timson clan, among them Bertie Timson, his wife, Leonie, and their single child, the twelve-year-old Peter. Bertie Timson’s alleged trade as an ‘Electrical Consultant’ was in fact a cover story for more felonious transactions, but he was a polite enough client, and I remember him thanking me warmly after a successful defence on a charge of carrying house-breaking implements. He had done his time during Peter’s extreme youth and now, when his son got into trouble, he had remembered Rumpole.

  Peter and his friends frequently engaged in football games in Rampton Road which the neighbours apparently suffered without protest. However, on too many occasions the ball found its way into the quiet and respectable precincts of Beechwood Grove. After a number of complaints, the police were called. When Peter Timson pursued a flying ball into Beechwood Grove, he alone was apprehended, as the rest of the team scarpered. Apparently Peter was considered to be the ringleader and source of all the trouble.

  So I walked one Monday morning, with rain dribbling down from a grey sky, into the South London Magistrates’ Court to defend a serious case of wrongfully kicked football. Madam Chair, hawk-nosed and sharp-eyed, with a hair-do which looked as though it had been carved out of yellow soap, sat between two unremarkable bookends, a stout and pink-faced man with a Trade Union badge in his lapel and a lean and hungry-looking fellow who might have been a schoolmaster.

  ‘It’s unusual for the defendant to be represented at this stage of the ASBO proceedings, Mr Rumpole. We wonder that you can spare the time from your busy practice.’ Madam Chair sounded coldly amused.

  ‘Then wonder on,’ I told her, ‘till truth make all things plain. Busy as I am, and I am of course extremely busy, I can always spare time for a case in which the liberty of the subject is an issue.’

  ‘Your young client’s liberty won’t become an issue unless he breaks an anti-social behaviour order. We are all concerned with the liberty of the subject to enjoy peace from noisy footballers. Mr Parkes, I’m sure that you have a statement.’

  The person addressed as Parkes appeared to be some eager young dogsbody from the local council. He handed a document up to the bench and began to read the statement of a Mrs Harriet Englefield of 15 Beechwood Grove. She said she was a ‘healer’ by profession and had many clients whom she was able to treat for physical and nervous disorders in a peaceful and homely atmosphere. She also had an aged mother who had been ordered long periods of rest and tranquillity, which had become impossible owing to the noisy games of football played by ‘rough children who come pouring in from Rampton Road’.

  It was at this point that I rose to object. ‘No doubt this Mrs Harriet Englefield will be giving evidence on oath?’

  ‘The law has advanced a little since your call to the Bar, Mr Rumpole. We don’t need to trouble such witnesses as Mrs Englefield. We are entitled to proceed on her written statement,’ Madam Chair told me.

  ‘So you are prepared to decide a criminal matter on hearsay evidence?’

  ‘It’s not a criminal matter yet, Mr Rumpole. And it won’t be unless your client breaks the order we’ve been asked to make.’

  ‘And plays football again?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Very well. I take it that even if we have dispensed with the rule against hearsay evidence, I am still allowed to address the court?’

  This request was apparently so unusual that Madam Chair had to seek advice from the clerk of the court, who stood up from his seat below her throne to whisper. This advice she passed on in a brief mutter to her bookends. Then she spoke.

  ‘We are prepared to hear you, Mr Rumpole, but make it brief.’

  ‘I shall be brief. What is anti-social behaviour? If you ask me, I would say that the world has advanced towards civilization by reason of anti-social behaviour. The suffragettes behaved antisocially and achieved the vote. Nelson Mandela’s anti-social campaign brought justice to South Africa. Now this young person, this child I represent…’

  I turned to wave a hand towards the long-haired twelve-year-old with curiously thoughtful brown eyes. ‘This young Peter, or Pete, Timson.’

  ‘Who is neither a suffragette nor Nelson Mandela,’ Madam Chair thought it fit to remind me.

  ‘That is true,’ I had to admit. ‘But he is an innocent child. He has no criminal record. He has broken no law. If football is illegal, it should be forbidden by an act of Parliament. Don’t stain his blameless record by a verdict based on untested hearsay evidence.’

  ‘Is that all, Mr Rumpole?’ Madam Chair broke into my final dramatic pause.

  ‘All,’ I said. ‘And more than enough, in my submission, to let this child go back to playing.’ With this I sat down, in the vain hope that I might have touched, somewhere in Madam Chair, a mother’s heart.

  After further whispered conversations the Chair spoke. ‘Mr Rumpole’s speeches,’ she said, ‘may be thought amusing in the Central Criminal Court, but here we cannot let his so-called oratory distract us from our clear duty. Peter Timson.’ Here, prompted by an usher, my client rose to his diminutive height. ‘We make an order forbidding you to enter Beechwood Grove for any purpose whatsoever, including, of course, the playing of football.’

  When I went to say goodbye to my client, he was standing next to his father, Bertie.

  ‘Say thank you to Mr Rumpole. I suppose he did his best.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Rumpole.’ Peter seemed extraordinarily pleased with the result. ‘I got an ASBO! All them down Rampton Road are going to be so jealous.’

  I had never, in all my legal life, met so delighted a loser.

  Back in Chambers I poured out the last glass from a bottle of Château Thames Embankment and lit a small cigar. My spirits were at a low ebb. My practice seemed to have shrunk to Pete-sized proportions. Then, quite unexpectedly, the tide turned. The telephone rang and I picked it up to hear once again the voice of my favourite solicitor.

  ‘I’m sorry about the ASBO case,’ Bonny Bernard said. ‘But I think I might soon be in a position to offer you a murder.’

  4

  The case Bonny Bernard had sent me seemed in the best tradition of English murders since the far-off days of Jack the Ripper and the Camden Town affair. The tragedy of the unfortunate girls who go on the game is that they all too easily fall victim to manual strangulation.

  The difference between these classic cases and the brief I was eagerly noting was that, in my present case, a death in Flyte Street, a small turning off Sussex Gardens near to Paddington Station, the alleged culprit was arrested in the dead girl’s room and there seemed
to be no mystery about it.

  My client was Graham Wetherby, thirty-three, single, a clerk in a government department. He had an address in Morden, on the outskirts of London, and, according to his statement, he lived alone in a bed-sitting room, travelling up every day to Queen Anne’s Gate and the Home Office.

  The case against Wetherby was a simple one. On the date in question he telephoned the address in Flyte Street where Ludmilla Ravenskaya, a Russian immigrant, carried on her profession. His call was answered by Anna McKinnan, who acted as Miss Ravenskaya’s maid and was the main witness for the prosecution. My client left his work at lunchtime and just before one he was admitted to the house in Flyte Street for a brief, expensive and, as things turned out, totally disastrous tryst.

  The entry phone at the front door invited him up to a room on the second floor. Once there he dealt with Anna McKinnan, the maid, and paid over to her the £110 he had saved up for a brief moment of passion.

  From then on McKinnan’s evidence was clear. She told Graham Wetherby that he could go into the small sitting room and wait, and Ludmilla, the ‘young lady’, would come out to him. If she didn’t come in a reasonable time he could knock on the bedroom door to announce his presence, because her mistress was alone and had no one else in with her. Accordingly, he went into the sitting room. Some twenty minutes later, McKinnan heard her ‘young lady’ screaming. She hurried into the sitting room and described what she saw.

  The bedroom door was open and Wetherby was standing by the bed, on which the ‘young lady’ lay partially dressed. She could see red marks round her neck and she was lying across the bed in an attitude the maid called ‘unnaturally still’.

  Wetherby said nothing, but Anna McKinnan, according to her evidence, acted quickly. She went and locked the sitting-room door, making my client a prisoner. While he was shouting and hammering at the door, she telephoned the police from a phone in the kitchen.

  A detective inspector, a woman officer and a police doctor arrived at the flat surprisingly quickly, no more than an hour later. McKinnan was able to tell them that she had seen Ludmilla alive and laughing over a cup of tea after her previous customer had departed.

  She then let the officers into the sitting room, where a distracted Graham Wetherby told them he had found Ludmilla dead when, having knocked on the door and got no reply, he went into the bedroom.

  On the face of it this seemed an unanswerable case, but I hoped that, when I got the chance of talking to Wetherby, some sort of defence might emerge. My pessimism was increased, however, the following morning, when I rang Bonny Bernard to thank him for the brief.

  ‘I thought you’d like to know,’ the misguided solicitor told me, ‘that I’ve briefed a leader for you, your Head of Chambers, Mr Samuel Ballard, QC. It’s a terrible business, isn’t it?’

  ‘Absolutely ghastly,’ I agreed, deliberately misunderstanding his point, ‘getting Soapy Sam Ballard to lead me. After all we’ve gone through together. How could you do it?’

  ‘The client wanted a QC. He said in all the big murder trials they have QCs.’

  ‘So you suggested Soapy Sam?’

  ‘He’s your Head of Chambers.’

  ‘So you’re determined to lose this case?’

  ‘Is it–entirely hopeless?’

  ‘No case is entirely hopeless unless you bring Mr Ballard in to conduct it.’

  There was a silence, then Bernard said, ‘I’m sorry. The client insisted on Queen’s Counsel. You’re not Queen’s Counsel, are you, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I warned him. ‘But who knows what may happen in the fullness of time?’

  ‘Who knows? You’re right there, Mr Rumpole.’ My solicitor sounded encouraging. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll meet you and Mr Ballard in Brixton Prison. Looking forward to it.’

  But I was no longer looking forward to our first meeting with our client, an occasion on which I would occupy a secondary and subordinate position. If, by any chance, there was some sort of defence available to Graham Wetherby, my not particularly learned leader could be guaranteed to miss it.

  5

  Extract from the Memoirs of Hilda Rumpole

  Leonard has been helping me in the plan I have for learning the law. He has lent me a number of little books that he said he used for passing his exams, his ‘little crammers’ he calls them. There’s one called All You Need to Know about Contracts and another, which I found far more readable, called Murder and Offences against the Person in a Nutshell.

  Leonard Bullingham tells me I’ll soon get to know as much law as Rumpole. In fact, he doesn’t think that Rumpole knows much law at all and that the only thing he has going for him is his ‘gift of the gab’.

  He, Rumpole I mean, came home the other night in a high mood. I don’t know which is more irritating, when he’s in a high mood or down in the dumps. Anyway, he brought another bottle of wine home and announced that he’d be back in Court Number One at the Old Bailey. Mr Bernard had brought him some unsavoury case about a prostitute strangled in a flat near Paddington Station. It was while he was pouring out yet another glass of the wine from that dreadful little bar, and telling me more than I cared to know about the effects of manual strangulation, that I brought him up short by saying, ‘It’s a pity that someone has to die to really cheer you up, Rumpole.’

  I’d silenced him for a while, and then he said, ‘That’s a terrible thought. Ludmilla from Russia, yes, of course. She’s dead and no one can do anything about that. But there’s that young man in Brixton Prison, that Graham Wetherby, he’s not dead and is probably in need of a little help.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why help him? He killed her.’

  ‘We don’t know that. And we shan’t know it until twelve honest citizens come back into court and tell us so. Meanwhile,’ and here Rumpole gave me one of those secret smiles of his that can be so annoying, ‘there are one or two small points that might be of interest. We shall have to wait and see.’

  So Rumpole went to bed in a comparatively happy mood, but the next day he was down in the dumps again because he’d been given a leader and wouldn’t be able to do all of that unsavoury murder case he is engaged on at the moment. Speaking for myself, I have always found Samuel Ballard a most agreeable person who has given me a warm welcome at Chambers parties and who seems to understand some of the difficulties which arise from the fact of being married to Rumpole.

  ‘He’ll be able to take over the case and lose it,’ Rumpole said. ‘Losing cases is what he has a real talent for. And it’s just because he’s entitled to write QC after his name.’

  ‘It’s a pity you can’t write QC after your name, Rumpole,’ I told him. ‘Then you wouldn’t have to rely on Ballard.’

  ‘I don’t rely on Ballard.’ Rumpole was not taking this well. ‘I just have to make sure he relies on me.’

  ‘But you’re the number two, Rumpole. I really don’t know why you can’t get to write QC after your name. You’ve been there at the Bar long enough.’

  ‘My face doesn’t fit.’ Rumpole shook his head, I thought a little sadly.

  I took a long and critical look at his face. At least I could truthfully say, ‘Lots of people with worse faces than yours have been able to put QC after their names.’

  ‘I mean, judges tend not to like me. You have to get judges on your side to get made a Queer Customer. They don’t like the way I point out their mistakes. They don’t appreciate it when I get juries to notice their devious methods of trying to secure a conviction. They can tell that when I say, “In my humble submission to Your Lordship”, I can’t bring myself to feel humble at all.’

  ‘Perhaps you should stop doing those things, Rumpole,’ I suggested. ‘It’s so embarrassing to have to admit to our bridge club that you’re still a junior barrister. At your age too!’

  ‘I can’t stop being myself,’ he told me. ‘That’s too much to ask. All the same, I might try it. I might apply for a silk gown and a seat in the front row. Horace Rumpole, QC. It has an agreea
ble ring to it!’

  The next time I played bridge with Mr Justice Bullingham, I told him that Rumpole was seriously thinking of applying for silk.

  ‘Good for him,’ Sir Leonard said, I thought generously. ‘But I’m afraid he won’t get it.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘The trouble with Rumpole is, and this is the generally held opinion, his face doesn’t fit.’

  6

  ‘There was a notice in a telephone box near where I went for lunch. “Exotic young Russian lady gives a full personal service”.’

  ‘And what did you take that to mean?’ Soapy Sam, unfortunately my leader, asked the question in the Brixton interview room.

  ‘Well, it didn’t mean shoe cleaning,’ I might have told him, ‘or even an extra shampoo and scalp massage.’ But I tactfully held my tongue.

  Our client answered the question. ‘I thought it meant we could make love,’ he said. And I thought that word ‘love’ sounded strange, even shocking, in those surroundings.

  Graham Wetherby, who had uttered it, seemed an ordinary, polite, inoffensive young man. His face might have looked pleasant enough had it not been disfigured by a red birthmark which stretched from under his eye about halfway down his left cheek.

  ‘We don’t all have convenient and loving home lives, Mr Ballard. Some of us have to venture a bit further afield.’

  He had an oddly precise way of speaking, with his lips pouted. I remember a saying of my childhood: ‘Prunes and prisms, very good words for the lips.’ Graham Wetherby seemed to have learned to speak in the ‘prunes and prisms’ way.

  ‘The absence of a love life,’ Ballard now put on a look of severe displeasure, ‘doesn’t mean you have to visit premises such as 16 Flyte Street.’

  ‘No, sir. Of course not. I do realize that. In my saner moments.’

  ‘Are you telling us you are insane when you do these terrible things?’ Ballard asked the question with a small smile of satisfaction. It seemed that he was anxious to conduct a defence case by getting a quick confession of guilt.