The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  My chance came the next day when Hilda said that she had a cold coming on, and I would have to take the morning walk alone. I sympathized with Hilda (although I supposed that the natural state of an inhabitant of Shenstone must be a streaming nose and a raised temperature) and left carefully in the direction of the cliffs, as a direct route towards licensed premises would have raised a questioning cry from the window of the residents’ lounge.

  I struggled up a path in a mist of rain and came, a little way out of town, upon the thin man with the balaclava helmet. He was staring through his powerful field glasses out to sea. I gave him a moderately depressed ‘good morning’, but he was too engrossed in watching something far out on the grey water to return my greeting. Then I took the next turn, down to the harbour and the Crab and Lobster, a large, old-fashioned pub with a welcoming appearance.

  It was clearly the warmest place in Shenstone and the place was crowded. In very little time the landlord had supplied me with a life-restoring bottle of St Émilion and a couple of ham rolls, and I sat among the boat people in a cheerful fug, away from the knife-edged wind and the whining children in life jackets, among the polished brass and dangling lobster pots, looking at the signed photographs of regatta winners, all dedicated to ‘Sam’, whom I took to be the landlord. In pride of place among these pictures was one of a windswept but resolutely smiling couple in oilskins, proudly clutching a silver trophy with ‘love from Jackie and Barney, to Sam and all the crowd at the Lobster’ scrawled across it. The man seemed considerably and cheerfully overweight, and the colour print showed his flaming red hair and bushy beard. Jackie, Hilda’s school friend, also looked extremely cheerful. She had clear blue eyes, short hair which must have been fair but was now going grey, and the sort of skin which showed its long exposure to force-nine gales. Such, I thought, were the women who flew round the world in primitive planes, crossed deserts or rode over No Man’s Land on a bicycle. I bought Sam, the landlord, a large whisky and water, and in no time at all we were talking about the Batemans, a conversation in which a number of the regulars at the Crab and Lobster, also supplied with their favourite tipples, seemed anxious to join.

  ‘One thing I could never understand about Jackie,’ Sam said. ‘I mean, she lost a wonderful personality like Barney Bateman, and they thought the world of each other. Never a cross word between the two of them!’

  ‘And Barney was a man who always had a drink and a story for everyone. Never fumbled or rang the wife when it came to his round.’ A red-faced man in an anorak whom the others called Buster told me. ‘As I say, I can’t understand why after being married to Barney, the winner of the Shenstone regatta five years running, she ended up with a four-letter man like Freddy Jason! Hope he’s not a friend of yours, is he?’

  ‘Jason.’ The name was entirely new to me.

  ‘Jackie married him just six months after Barney died. We couldn’t believe it.’ A voluminous blonde bulging out of a pair of jeans and a fisherman’s jersey shouted, ‘Of course, I’ve never actually met Mr Jason. He’s moved her up to Cricklewood.’

  ‘Dreadful house,’ said Buster. ‘Absolutely miles from the sea.’

  ‘Well, it is Cricklewood.’ The blonde lady seemed prepared to excuse the house.

  ‘Like I told you, Dora. I went there once when I was up in London. On business.’

  ‘What business, Buster? Dirty weekend?’ the seafaring woman addressed as Dora screamed, and after laughter from the boat people, Buster continued.

  ‘Never you mind, Dora! Anyway, I looked up Freddy Jason in the book and rang Cricklewood. Finally Jackie came on the phone. Well, you remember what Jackie used to be like? “Come on over, Buster; stew’s in the oven. We’ll have a couple of bottles of rum and a sing-up round the piano.” Not a bit of it. “Ever so sorry, dear. Freddy’s not been all that well. We’re not seeing visitors.” ’

  ‘Can you imagine that coming from Jackie Bateman? “We’re not seeing visitors!” ’ Dora bawled at me, as though I would be bound to know. She was clearly used to conversation far out to sea, during gale-force winds.

  ‘What you’re saying is, there was a bit of a contrast between the two husbands?’ I was beginning to get the sense of the meeting. ‘At least she didn’t repeat the same mistake; that’s what most people do.’

  ‘Barney wasn’t a mistake,’ Dora hailed me. ‘Barney was a terrific yachtsman. And a perfect gent.’

  I didn’t repeat all this information to She Who Must Be Obeyed. To do so would only have invited a searching and awkward cross-examination about where I had heard it. But when we were back in London and recovering from our seaside holiday, Hilda told me she had had an unexpected telephone call from Jackie Bateman, Hopkins as was, Jason, as she had now discovered she had become. Apparently the boat woman had got our note by some means, and she wanted to bring her new husband to tea on Sunday to get ‘a few legal tips’ from Rumpole of the Bailey.

  Hilda spent a great deal of Saturday with her baking tins in celebration of this unusual visit, and produced a good many rock cakes, jam tarts and a large chocolate sponge.

  ‘Not for you, Rumpole,’ she said in a threatening fashion. ‘Remember, you’re on a diet.’

  In due course, Jackie turned up looking exactly like her photograph, bringing with her a thin and rather dowdy middle-aged man introduced as Freddy, who could not have been a greater contrast to the previous yachtsman and gent. Jason was dark, mouse-coloured and not red-haired; his one contribution to the conversation was to tell us that going out in any sort of boat made him seasick, and we discovered that he was a retired chartered accountant, whose hobby was doing chess problems. When Hilda pressed rock cakes and chocolate sponge on him, he waved her confections aside.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him gloomily. ‘Not on a diet too, are you?’

  ‘Freddy never has to go on a diet,’ his wife said with some sort of mysterious pride. ‘He’s one of nature’s thin people.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Freddy Jason told us. ‘I simply never never put on weight.’ All the same, I noticed that he didn’t do any sort of justice to Hilda’s baking, and he took his tea neat, without milk or sugar.

  After some general chat we came on to the legal motive for the party.

  ‘It’s awfully boring, but naturally Barney was insured, and the insurance company paid out. That’s how we were able to get married and buy the house. But now it seems that Chad Bateman, that’s Barney’s brother in New Zealand, has raised some sort of question about the estate. Look, can I leave you the letters? You see, we really don’t know any lawyers we can trust.’

  I had to say that I had only done one will case (in which I had been instructed from beyond the grave by a deceased military man) and that my speciality was violent death and classification of blood. However, I was prepared to get the opinion of Claude Erskine-Brown, the civil lawyer in our Chambers (civil lawyers are concerned with money, criminal practitioners with questions of life and death) and I would give Mrs Jason, whose clear-eyed and sensible look of perfect trust I found appealing, the benefit of his deliberations in due course.

  Before I had time to keep my promise, however, something happened of a dramatic nature. Hilda’s old school-friend Jackie was arrested, as we heard the next week on the television news, on a charge of the wilful murder of her late husband, Barney Bateman.

  We heard no more of Jackie Jason, Bateman, Hopkins and her troubles for a considerable period. And then, one morning, as I was walking into my Chambers in a state of some depression brought about by having mislaid about a stone of Rumpole in the course of my prolonged fast, my clerk Henry uttered words which were music to my ears.

  ‘There’s a new case for you, Mr Rumpole. A murder, from a new firm of solicitors.’

  It was good news indeed. A new firm of solicitors meant a new source of work, claret and small cigars, and of all the dishes that figure on the Criminal Menu, murder is still the main course, or pièce de résistance.

  ‘It’s an int
eresting case, Mr Tonkin was telling me.’ Henry handed me the bulky set of papers.

  ‘Tonkin?’

  ‘Of Teleman, Tonkin and Bird. That’s the new firm from Norfolk. He says the odd thing about this murder is, they never found the body.’

  ‘No corpse?’ Without a corpse the thing should not, I thought, present much difficulty, although like all cases it would probably be easier without a client also. I looked down at the brief in my hands and saw the title on it ‘R. v. Jason’.

  In due course, I read the papers and issued out into Fleet Street to find a taxi prepared to take me to Holloway Prison for an interview with Jackie Jason and Mr Tonkin. Waiting on the kerb, I was accosted by a tall figure wearing a bowler hat and an overcoat with a velvet collar, none other than our learned Head of Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone QC, MP.

  ‘Hullo there, Horace!’

  ‘Sorry, Guthrie. I’m just off to Holloway. Got a rather jolly murder.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Henry told you, did he? Strange thing, when I married She Who Must Be Obeyed, I never thought she’d be much help in providing me with work. But she’s turned up trumps! She had the good luck to go to an excellent school where one of her form mates grew up to be charged with an extremely interesting …’

  ‘I know.’ Guthrie repeated himself. ‘Jackie Jason.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Was Featherstone, I wondered, a spare-time boat person? His reply quite wiped off my grin of triumph and added, I thought, new difficulties to our defence.

  ‘Because I’m leading you, of course. It’ll be a pleasure to have you sitting behind me again, Horace. Ah, there’s a cab. Holloway Prison, please.’

  Because I never took silk and was not rewarded by the Lord Chancellor with a long wig and a pair of ceremonial knee breeches I am compelled, in certain cases, to sit behind some Queen’s Counsel and, although I am old enough to be Featherstone’s father, I must be his ‘junior’, and sit behind the QC, MP and listen, with what patience I can muster, to him asking the wrong questions. In the Shenstone-on-Sea murder, it would hardly be a pleasure. No doubt with his talent for agreeing with the Judge, Guthrie Featherstone could manage to lose even a corpseless case, in the nicest possible way.

  ‘The evidence against us is pretty strong,’ Featherstone said, as we sat together in the taxi bound for the ladies’ nick. ‘Two heads are better than one in a matter like this, Horace.’

  ‘I didn’t find that,’ I told him, ‘when I won the Penge Bungalow Murders, entirely on my own.’

  ‘Penge Bungalow? Oh, I think you told me. That was one of your old cases, wasn’t it? Well, people couldn’t afford leading Counsel in those days. It was before legal aid.’

  So, QCs have become one of the advantages of our new affluence, I was about to say, like fish fingers and piped music in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. However, I thought better of it and we reached the castellated turreted entrance to Holloway Prison in silence.

  I may be, indeed I am, extremely old-fashioned. No doubt an army of feminists are prepared to march for women to have equal rights to long-term imprisonment, but I dislike the sight of ladies in the cooler. For a start, Holloway is a far less jovial place than Brixton. The lady screws look more masculine and malignant than gentleman screws, and female hands never seem made for slopping out.

  When we got to the Holloway interview room, my new solicitor Tonkin rose to greet us. He was an upright, military-looking man with a ginger moustache and an MCC tie.

  ‘Mr Featherstone. Mr Rumpole. Good of you to come, gentlemen. This is the client.’

  Jackie Jason was looking as tanned and healthy as if she’d just stepped off a boat on a sunny day into the Crab and Lobster. She smiled at me from a corner of the room and said, ‘I’m so glad I could find you a legal problem more in your line, Horace.’

  I looked at her with gratitude. No doubt it was Jackie who had had the wisdom to choose Rumpole for the defence, and her solicitor Tonkin who had been weak-minded enough to choose Featherstone as a leader.

  ‘I think it would help if you were just to tell us your story in your own way,’ Featherstone kicked off the conference. I was sure that it would help him; no doubt he’d been far too busy with his parliamentary duties to read the brief.

  ‘Well, Barney and I,’ Jackie started.

  ‘That was the late Mr Barney Bateman?’ Featherstone asked laboriously.

  ‘Yes. We used to live at Shenstone-on-Sea. Well, we were boat people.’

  ‘Mrs Jason doesn’t mean Far Eastern refugees,’ I explained to my leader. ‘She means those who take to the water in yellow oilskins and sailing dinghies, with toddlers in inflated life jackets, and usually call out the lifeboat to answer their cries of distress.’

  ‘Barney and I never had toddlers,’ Jackie said firmly.

  ‘Horace, if I could put the questions?’ Featherstone tried to assert his leadership.

  ‘And we were pretty experienced sailors.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘of course you were. And yet your husband died in a yachting accident.’

  ‘Just remind me …’ Featherstone continued to grope for the facts.

  ‘We went out very early that day. We wanted to sail the regatta course without anyone watching.’

  ‘You and your late … husband?’ Featherstone was examining the witness.

  ‘Barney and I.’

  ‘You were on good terms?’

  ‘Always. He was a marvellous man, Barney. Anyone’d tell you, anyone in the crowd in the Crab and Lobster at Shenstone. We were the best of pals.’

  Dear old pals, jolly old pals. Everyone in the Crab and Lobster agreed with that. And yet one pal fell out of the boat and his body was never recovered.

  ‘You say there was a sudden gust of wind?’ Featherstone was making a nodding acquaintance with his brief.

  ‘Yes,’ Jackie told him. ‘It came out of nowhere. Well, it will in that bit of sea. Barney was on his feet and the boom must have hit his head. It was all so unexpected. The boat went over and there I was in the drink.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘Stunned, I suppose. By the boom, you see. I looked for him for ten minutes, swimming, and then, well, I clung to the boat. I couldn’t get her righted, not on my own I couldn’t. I waited almost half an hour like that and then the harbour motorboat came out. They’d got a phone call. Someone must have seen us. I was lucky, really. There aren’t many people around in Shenstone at six o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘But if you and your husband were on perfectly good terms …’ Featherstone was frowning, puzzled, when Mr Tonkin gave him some unhelpful clarification.

  ‘That’s not really the point, is it, Mr Featherstone? It’s the policy with the Colossus Mercantile that made them bring this prosecution.’ He was referring to the subject of the correspondence that Jackie Jason had given me when she was still at liberty, so I knew a little about the Colossus policy. Featherstone looked blank. If he hadn’t been a politician he would have said, ‘All-night sitting last night. I never got round to reading the brief.’ As it was, he said,

  ‘Do just remind me …’

  ‘Mrs Jason insured her first husband’s life with the Colossus Mercantile just two weeks before the accident,’ Tonkin explained. ‘Before these inquiries got going she had remarried and collected the money.’

  ‘How much was it? Just remind me,’ Featherstone asked.

  Mr Tonkin gave us the motive which had undoubtedly led to the prosecution of the yachtswoman.

  ‘Just about two hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘You know I’m going to Norfolk today,’ I reminded Hilda at breakfast some weeks later. ‘It’s Jackie’s trial.’

  ‘You will get her off, won’t you, Rumpole? She’s relying on you, you know.’ Hilda said it as if the case presented no particular problem.

  ‘I might get her off. I don’t know about my friend.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were taking a friend with you.’ Hilda looked at
me with sudden suspicion.

  ‘Didn’t I? I’m taking Guthrie Featherstone. It’s a secret romance. We’ve been passionately in love for years, Guthrie and I.’

  ‘Rumpole, I don’t know why you deliberately say things you know will annoy me. Also, it’s not in the least degree funny!’

  ‘I thought it was a little funny.’

  ‘This is a letter from Lucy Loman.’ This time Hilda showed me a pale green envelope.

  ‘Is it really? I thought it was your pools.’

  ‘Do stop being silly, Rumpole! I was at school with “Lanky” Loman!’ As I wondered if there were anyone that Hilda hadn’t been at school with, she went on, ‘She tells me her daughter Tessa has just divorced a bankrupt garage proprietor with a foul temper and a taste for whisky.’

  ‘Sounds a reasonable thing to do.’

  ‘The problem is that Tessa has remarried.’

  ‘Has she indeed?’

  ‘Yes. A bankrupt ex-launderette owner with a much worse temper and a taste for gin.’

  ‘So there’s been no real change?’

  ‘No. People don’t change, do they?’

  I was beginning to find She Who Must Be Obeyed unusually depressing that morning, when she went on thoughtfully,

  ‘When they change partners, they always go for the same again, only slightly worse.’

  Was there some similar, but even more ferocious version of She waiting to entrap me the second time around? The thought was too terrible to contemplate. I prepared to take self and brief off to Liverpool Street. On my way out, I said,

  ‘Well, if you’re going to change husbands while I’m gone …’

  ‘Please don’t be silly, Rumpole. I’ve had to tell you that once already. I’m quite prepared to make do with you, provided you’re a good deal thinner.’

  Make do for the rest of our natural lives, I thought. Matrimony and murder both carry a mandatory life sentence.

  In the train from Liverpool Street Featherstone looked at me in a docile and trusting manner, as though he were depending on his learned junior to get him and his client out of trouble.

  ‘I suppose you’ve read the birdwatcher’s evidence?’ he started gloomily.