The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  ‘They was l … looking for a barrister who’d be sure to lose.’

  ‘After this, I suppose, I may get back to better quality crime.’ The full force of what Peter had said struck me. I looked at him and checked carefully. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘They wanted me defended by someone they could c … count on for a guilty verdict. That’s why they p … p … picked you for it.’

  It was, appallingly, what I thought he’d said.

  ‘They wanted to fit me up with doing Tosher,’ Peter Delgardo went on remorselessly.

  ‘Let me get this clear. Your brothers selected me to nobble your defence?’

  ‘That’s it! You w … was to be the jockey, like.’ That pulled me back.

  ‘How did they light on me exactly? Me … Rumpole of the Bailey?’

  My entire life, Sherlock Holmes stories, law degree, knock-about apprenticeship at Bow Street and Hackney, days of triumph in murder and forgery, down to that day’s swayed jury and notable victory, seemed to be blown away like autumn leaves by what he said. Then, the words came quickly now, tumbling out of him, ‘They heard of an old bloke. Got p … past it. Down to little bits of cases … round the M … M … Magistrates’ Courts. Bit of a muddler, they heard. With a funny old broken-down hat on him.’

  ‘The hat! Again.’ At least I had bought a bowler.

  ‘So they r … reckoned. You was just the bloke to lose this murder, like.’

  ‘And dear old Nooks. “Shady” Nooks. Did he help them to choose me?’ I suspected it.

  ‘I d … don’t know. I’m n … n … not saying he didn’t.’

  ‘So that’s my reputation!’ I tried to take stock of the situation, and failed abysmally.

  ‘I shouldn’t’ve told you.’ He sounded genuinely apologetic.

  ‘Get Rumpole for the defence – and be sure of a conviction.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s all lies.’ Was he trying to cheer me up? He went on. ‘You hear lots of s … s … stories. In the cells under the Bailey.’

  ‘And in the Bar Mess too. They rubbish your reputation. Small cigar?’ I found a packet and offered him one.

  ‘All right.’

  We lit up. After all, one had to think of the future.

  ‘So where does this leave you, Peter?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’d say, Mr Rumpole, none too s … safe. What about you?’

  I blew out smoke, wondering exactly what I had left.

  ‘Perhaps not all that safe either.’

  I had brought my old dinner jacket up to Chambers and I changed into it there. I had a bottle of rum in the cupboard, and I gave myself a strong drink out of a dusty glass. As I shut the cupboard door, I noticed my old hat; it was on a shelf, gathering dust and seemed to have about it a look of mild reproach. I put it on, and noticed how comfortably it fitted. I dropped the new, hard bowler into the waste-paper basket and went on to the Savoy.

  ‘You look charming, my dear.’ Hilda, resplendent in a long dress, her shoulders dusted with powder, smiled delightedly at Mrs Marigold Featherstone, who was nibbling delicately at an after-dinner mint.

  ‘Really, Rumpole.’ Hilda looked at me, gently rebuking.

  ‘She!’

  ‘She?’ Marigold was mystified, but anxious to join in any joke that might be going.

  ‘Oh “She”,’ I said casually. ‘A woman of fabulous beauty. Written up by H. Rider Haggard.’ A waiter passed and I created a diversion by calling his attention to the fact that the tide had gone out in my glass. Around us prominent members of the legal profession pushed their bulky wives about the parquet like a number of fresh-faced gardeners executing elaborate manoeuvres with wheelbarrows. There were some young persons among them, and I noticed Erskine-Brown, jigging about in solitary rapture somewhere in the vicinity of Miss Phillida Trant. She saw me and gave a quick smile and then she was off circling Erskine-Brown like an obedient planet, which I didn’t consider a fitting occupation for any girl of Miss Trant’s undoubted abilities.

  ‘Your husband’s had a good win.’ Guthrie Featherstone was chatting to Hilda.

  ‘He hasn’t had a “good win”, Guthrie.’ She put the man right. ‘He’s had a triumph!’

  ‘Entirely thanks … to my old hat.’ I raised my glass. ‘Here’s to it!’

  ‘What?’ Little of what Rumpole said made much sense to Marigold.

  ‘My triumph, indeed, my great opportunity, is to be attributed solely to my hat!’ I explained to her, but She couldn’t agree.

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ She explained to our hosts. ‘He does, you know, from time to time. Rumpole won because he knows so much about blood.’

  ‘Really?’ Featherstone looked at the dancers, no doubt wondering how soon he could steer his beautiful wife off into the throng. But Hilda fixed him with her glittering eye, and went on, much like the ancient mariner.

  ‘You remember Daddy, of course. He used to be your Head of Chambers. Daddy told me. “Rumpole”, Daddy told me. In fact, he told me that on the occasion of the Inns of Court summer ball, which is practically the last dance we went to.’

  ‘Hilda!’ I tried, unsuccessfully, to stem the flow.

  ‘No. I’m going to say this, Horace. Don’t interrupt! “Horace Rumpole,” Daddy told me, “knows more about bloodstains than anyone we’ve got in Chambers.” ’

  I noticed that Marigold had gone a little pale.

  ‘Do stop it, Hilda. You’re putting Marigold off.’

  ‘Don’t you find it,’ Marigold turned to me, ‘well, sordid sometimes?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Crime. Don’t you find it terribly sordid?’

  There was a silence. The music had stopped, and the legal fraternity on the floor clapped sporadically. I saw Erskine-Brown take Miss Trant’s hand.

  ‘Oh, do be careful, Marigold!’ I said. ‘Don’t knock it.’

  ‘I think it must be sordid.’ Marigold patted her lips with her table napkin, removing the last possible trace of after-dinner mint.

  ‘Abolish crime,’ I warned her, ‘and you abolish the very basis of our existence!’

  ‘Oh, come now, Horace!’ Featherstone was smiling at me tolerantly.

  ‘He’s right,’ Hilda told him. ‘Rumpole knows about bloodstains.’

  ‘Abolish crime and we should all vanish.’ I felt a rush of words to the head. ‘All the barristers and solicitors and dock officers and the dear old matron down the Old Bailey who gives aspirins away with sentences of life imprisonment. There’d be no judges, no Lord Chancellor. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police would have to go out selling encyclopedias.’ I leant back, grabbed the wine from the bucket and started to refill all our glasses. ‘Why are we here? Why’ve we got prawn cocktail and duck à l’orange and selections from dear old Oklahoma? All because a few villains down the East End are kind enough to keep us in a regular supply of crime.’

  A slightly hurt waiter took the bottle from me and continued my work.

  ‘Don’t you help them?’ Marigold looked at me, doubtfully.

  ‘Don’t I what?’

  ‘Help them. Doing all these crimes. After all. You get them off.’

  ‘Today,’ I said, not without a certain pride. ‘Today, let me tell you, Marigold, I was no help to them at all. I showed them … no gratitude!’

  ‘You got him off!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You got Peter Delgardo off.’

  ‘Just for one reason.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘He happened to be innocent.’

  ‘Come on, Horace. How can you be sure of that?’ Featherstone was smiling tolerantly but I leant forward and gave him the truth of the matter.

  ‘You know, it’s a terrifying thing, my learned friend. We go through all that mumbo-jumbo. We put on our wigs and gowns and mutter the ritual prayers. “My Lord, I humbly submit.” “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have listened with admirable patience …” Abr
acadabra. Fee Fo Fi Bloody Fum. And just when everyone thinks you’re going to produce the most ludicrously faked bit of cheese-cloth ectoplasm, or a phoney rap on the table, it comes. Clear as a bell. Quite unexpected. The voice of truth!’

  I was vaguely aware of a worried figure in a dinner jacket coming towards us across the floor.

  ‘Have you ever found that, Featherstone? Bloody scaring sometimes. All the trouble we take to cloud the issues and divert the attention. Suddenly we’ve done it. There it is! Naked and embarrassing. The truth!’

  I looked up as the figure joined us. It was my late instructing solicitor.

  ‘Nooks. “Shady” Nooks!’ I greeted him, but he seemed in no mood to notice me. He pulled up a chair and sat down beside Featherstone.

  ‘Apparently it was on the nine o’clock news. They’ve just arrested Leslie Delgardo. Charged him with the murder of Tosher MacBride. I’ll want a con with you in the morning.’

  I was left out of this conversation, but I didn’t mind. Music started again, playing a tune which I found vaguely familiar. Nooks was muttering on; it seemed that the police now knew Tosher worked for Leslie, and that some member of the rival Watson family may have spotted him at the scene of the crime. An extraordinary sensation overcame me, something I hadn’t felt for a long time, which could only be described as happiness.

  ‘I don’t know whether you’ll want to brief me for Leslie, Nooks,’ I raised a glass to old ‘Shady’. ‘Or would that be rather over-egging the pudding?’

  And then an even more extraordinary sensation, a totally irrational impulse for which I can find no logical explanation, overcame me. I put out a hand and touched She Who Must Be Obeyed on the powdered shoulder.

  ‘Hilda.’

  ‘Oh yes, Rumpole?’ It seemed I was interrupting some confidential chat with Marigold. ‘What do you want now?’

  ‘I honestly think,’ I could find no coherent explanation, ‘I think I want to dance with you.’

  I suppose it was a waltz. As I steered Hilda out on to the great open spaces it seemed quite easy to go round and round, vaguely in time to the music. I heard a strange sound, as if from a long way off.

  ‘I’ll have the last waltz with you,/Two sleepy people together …’ Or words to that effect. I was in fact singing. Singing and dancing to celebrate a great victory in a case I was never meant to win.

  Rumpole and the Man of God

  As I take up my pen during a brief and unfortunate lull in crime (taking their cue from the car-workers, the villains of this city appear to have downed tools causing a regrettable series of lay-offs, redundancies and slow-time workings down the Old Bailey), I wonder which of my most recent Trials to chronicle. Sitting in Chambers on a quiet Sunday morning (I never write these memories at home for fear that She Who Must Be Obeyed, my wife Hilda, should glance over my shoulder and take exception to the manner in which I have felt it right, in the strict interests of truth and accuracy, to describe domestic life à coté de Chez Rumpole); seated, as I say, in my Chambers I thought of going to the archives and consulting the mementoes of some of my more notorious victories. However when I opened the cupboard it was bare, and I remembered that it was during my defence of a South London clergyman on a shoplifting rap that I had felt bound to expunge all traces of my past, and destroy my souvenirs. It is the curse, as well as the fascination of the law, that lawyers get to know more than is good for them about their fellow human beings, and this truth was driven home to me during the time that I was engaged in the affair that I have called ‘Rumpole and the Man of God’.

  When I was called to the Bar, too long ago now for me to remember with any degree of comfort, I may have had high-flown ideas of a general practice of a more or less lush variety, divorcing duchesses, defending stars of stage and screen from imputations of unchastity, getting shipping companies out of scrapes. But I soon found that it’s crime which not only pays moderately well, but which is also by far the greatest fun. Give me a murder on a spring morning with a decent run and a tolerably sympathetic jury, and Rumpole’s happiness is complete. Like most decent advocates, I have no great taste for the law; but I flatter myself I can cross-examine a copper on his notebook, or charm the Uxbridge Magistrates off their Bench, or have the old darling sitting number four in the jury-box sighing with pity for an embezzler with two wives and six starving children. I am also, and I say it with absolutely no desire to boast, about the best man in the Temple on the subject of bloodstains. There is really nothing you can tell Rumpole about blood, particularly when it’s out of the body and on to the clothing in the forensic laboratory.

  The old Head of my Chambers, C. H. Wystan, now deceased (also known reluctantly to me as ‘Daddy’, being the father of Hilda Wystan, whom I married after an absent-minded proposal at an Inns of Court ball. Hilda now rules the Rumpole household and rejoices in the dread title of ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’), old C. H. Wystan simply couldn’t stand bloodstains. He even felt queasy looking at the photographs, so I started by helping him out with his criminal work and soon won my spurs round the London Sessions, Bow Street and the Old Bailey.

  By the time I was called on to defend this particular cleric, I was so well known in the Ludgate Circus Palais de Justice that many people, to my certain knowledge, called Horace Rumpole an Old Bailey Hack. I am now famous for chain-smoking small cigars, and for the resulting avalanche of ash which falls down the waistcoat and smothers the watch-chain, for my habit of frequently quoting from the Oxford Book of English Verse, and for my fearlessness in front of the more savage type of Circuit Judge (I fix the old darlings with my glittering eye and whisper ‘Down Fido’ when they grow overexcited).

  Picture me then in my late sixties, well nourished on a diet consisting largely of pub lunches, steak-and-kidney pud and the cooking claret from Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street, which keeps me astonishingly regular. My reputation stands very high in the remand wing of Brixton Nick, where many of my regular clients, fraudsmen, safe-blowers, breakers-in and carriers of offensive weapons, smile with everlasting hope when their solicitors breathe the magic words, ‘We’re taking in Horace Rumpole.’

  I remember walking through the Temple Gardens to my Chambers one late September morning, with the pale sun on the roses and the first golden leaves floating down on the young solicitors’ clerks and their girlfriends, and I was in a moderately expansive mood. Morning was at seven, or rather around 9.45, the hillside was undoubtedly dew-pearled, God was in his heaven, and with a little luck there was a small crime or two going on somewhere in the world. As soon as I got into the clerk’s department of my Chambers at Number 3 Equity Court Erskine-Brown said, ‘Rumpole. I saw a priest going into your room.’

  Our clerk’s room was as busy as Paddington Station with our young and energetic clerk Henry sending barristers rushing off to distant destinations. Erskine-Brown, in striped shirt, double-breasted waistcoat and what I believe are known as ‘Chelsea Boots’, was propped up against the mantelpiece reading the particulars of some building claim Henry had just given him.

  ‘That’s your con, Mr Rumpole,’ said Henry, explaining the curious manifestation of a Holy Man.

  ‘Your conversion? Have you seen the light, Rumpole? Is Number 3 Equity Court your Road to Damascus?’

  I cannot care for Erskine-Brown, especially when he makes jokes. I chose to ignore this and go to the mantelpiece to collect my brief, where I found old Uncle Tom (T. C. Rowley), the oldest member of our Chambers, who looks in because almost anything is preferable to life with his married sister in Croydon.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Uncle Tom. ‘A vicar in trouble. I suppose it’s the choirboys again. I always think the Church runs a terrible risk having choirboys. They’d be far safer with a lot of middle-aged lady sopranos.’

  I had slid the pink tape off the brief and was getting the gist of the clerical slip-up when Miss Trant, the bright young Portia of Equity Court (if Portias now have rimmed specs and speak with a Roedean accent) said that she didn’t thi
nk vicars were exactly my line of country.

  ‘Of course they’re my line of country,’ I told her with delight. ‘Anyone accused of nicking half a dozen shirts is my line of country.’ I had gone through the brief instructions by this time. It seems that the cleric in question was called by the somewhat Arthurian name of the Reverend Mordred Skinner. He had gone to the summer sales in Oxford Street (a scene of carnage and rapine in which no amount of gold would have persuaded Rumpole to participate), been let off the leash in the gents’ haberdashery, and later apprehended in the Hall of Food with a pile of moderately garish shirtings for which he hadn’t paid.

  Having spent a tough ten minutes digesting the facts of this far from complex matter (well, it showed no signs of becoming a State trial or House of Lords material), I set off in the general direction of my room, but on the way I was met by my old friend George Frobisher exuding an almost audible smell of ‘bay rum’ or some similar unguent.

  I am not myself against a little Eau de Cologne on the handkerchief, but the idea of any sort of cosmetic on my friend George was like finding a Bishop ‘en travestie’, or saucy seaside postcards on sale in the vestry. George is an old friend and a dear good fellow, a gentle soul who stands up in Court with all the confidence of a sacrificial virgin waiting for the sunrise over Stonehenge, but a dab hand at The Times crossword and a companionable fellow for a drink after Court in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar off Fleet Street. I was surprised to see he appeared to have a new suit on, a silvery tie, and a silk bandana peeping from his top pocket.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten about tonight, have you?’ George asked anxiously.

  ‘We’re going off for a bottle of Château Fleet Street in Pommeroy’s?’

  ‘No … I’m bringing a friend to dinner. With you and Hilda.’

  I had to confess that this social engagement had slipped my mind. In any event it seemed unlikely that anyone would wish to spend an evening with She Who Must Be Obeyed unless they were tied to her by bonds of matrimony, but it seemed that George had invited himself some weeks before and that he was keenly looking forward to the occasion.