Rumpole and the Primrose Path Read online

  ‘Because you practised as a doctor in that part of London?’

  ‘I did, yes.’

  ‘And got to know quite a number of characters who lived on the windy side of the law?’

  ‘It was my job to treat them medically. I didn’t enquire into the way they lived their lives.’

  ‘Of course, Doctor. Didn’t some of your customers turn up having been stabbed, or with gunshot wounds?’

  ‘They did, yes.’ Once again the Doctor took a punt on the truth.

  ‘So you treated them?’

  ‘Yes. Just as you, Mr Rumpole, no doubt represented some of them in Court.’

  It was a veritable hit, the Jury smiled, the Gravestone looked as though it was the first day of spring, and I had to beware of any temptation to underestimate the intelligence of Doctor Wakefield.

  ‘Exactly so. And like me, you got to know some of them quite well. You got to know Luxford very well in those old days, didn’t you?’

  ‘He was a patient of mine.’

  ‘You treated his wounds and kept quiet about them.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Probably. So would it be right to say that you and the Silencer Luxford went back a long time, and he owed you a debt of gratitude?’

  ‘Exactly!’ The Doctor was pleased to agree. ‘Which is why he told me about your client’s plan to pay him to kill me.’

  ‘I’m just coming to that. When you’re not practising medicine, or patching up old gangsters, you spend a great deal of your time acting, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s my great passion.’ And here the Doctor’s voice was projected and enriched. ‘Acting can release us from ourselves. Call on us to create a new character.’

  ‘Which is why you encouraged acting in prisons.’

  ‘Exactly, Mr Rumpole! I’m glad you understand that, at least.’

  There was a moment of rapport between myself and the witness, but I had to launch an attack which seemed, now that I was standing up in a crowded courtroom, like taking a jump in the dark off a very high cliff.

  ‘I think you encouraged Len Luxford to act?’

  ‘In the old days, when I did some work with prisoners, yes.’

  ‘Oh, no, I mean quite recently. When you suggested he went for a chat with Commander Durden about police informers and came out acting the part of a contract killer.’

  The Doctor’s reaction was perfect: good-natured, half amused, completely unconcerned. ‘I really have no idea what you’re suggesting,’ he said.

  ‘Neither have I.’ The learned Gravestone was delighted to join the queue of the mystified. ‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain yourself, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Certainly, my Lord.’ I turned to the witness. ‘It was finding the letter that gave you the idea, wasn’t it? It could be used to support the idea that Commander Durden wanted you dead. You were going to get your revenge, not by killing him, nothing as brutally simple as that, but by getting him convicted of a conspiracy to murder you. By finishing his career, turning him into a criminal, landing him, the rotten apple in the barrel of decent coppers, in prison for a very long time indeed.’

  ‘That is absolute nonsense.’ The Doctor was as calm as ever, but I ploughed on, doing my best to sound more confident than I felt.

  ‘All you needed was an actor for your small-cast play. So you got Len Luxford, who owed you for a number of favours, to act for you. All he had to do was to lie about what Commander Durden had said to him when he arranged a meeting, and you thought that and the letter would be enough.’

  ‘It’s an interesting idea, Mr Rumpole. But of course it’s completely untrue.’

  ‘You’re an excellent actor, aren’t you, Doctor?’ I took it slowly now, looking at the Jury. ‘Didn’t you have a great success in the Shakespeare play you did with the local Mummers?’

  ‘I think we all did fairly well. What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Didn’t you play Iago? A man who ruins his Commander by producing false evidence?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole!’ Graves’ patience, fragile as it was, had clearly snapped at what he saw as my attempt to call a dead dramatist into the witness box. ‘Have you no other evidence for the very serious suggestions you’re making to this witness except for the fact that he played, who was it?’ He searched among his notes. ‘The man Iago?’

  ‘Oh yes, my Lord.’ I tried to answer with more confidence than I felt. ‘I’d like the Jury to have a couple of documents.’

  Mr Crozier had done his work well. Having surrendered Bob Durden’s bank statements to the young man from the Crown Prosecution Service, he seemed to take it for granted that we should get Doctor Wakefield’s in return. Now the Judge and the Jury had their copies, and I introduced the subject.

  ‘Let me just remind you. Luxford saw Commander Durden on March the fifteenth. On March the twenty-first you went to Detective Inspector Mynot with your complaint that my client had asked Luxford to kill you for a payment of five thousand pounds, two and a half thousand down and the balance when the deed was done.’

  ‘That’s the truth. It’s what I told the Inspector.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s the truth?’

  ‘I am on my oath.’

  ‘So you are.’ I looked at the Jury. ‘Perhaps you could look at your bank statement. Did you draw out two and a half thousand pounds in cash on March the twenty-first? Quite a large sum, wasn’t it? May I suggest what it was for?’

  For the first time the Doctor missed his cue, looked about the Court as though hoping for a prompt, and, not getting one, invented. ‘I think I had to pay ... I seem to remember ... Things were done to the house.’

  ‘It wasn’t anything to do with the house, was it? You were paying Len Luxford off in cash. Not for doing a murder, but for pretending to be part of a conspiracy to murder?’

  The Doctor looked to Marston Dawlish for help, but no help came from that quarter. I asked the next question.

  ‘When does he get the rest of the money? On the day Commander Durden’s convicted?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Is that your answer?’ I turned to the Judge. ‘My Lord, may I just remind you and the Jury, there are no large amounts of cash to be seen coming out of Commander Durden’s account during the relevant period.’

  With that I sat down, and counsel for the prosecution suggested that as I had taken such an unconscionable time with Doctor Wakefield, perhaps the Court would rise for the day, and he would be calling Mr Luxford in the morning.

  But he didn’t call the Silencer the next morning or any other morning. I don’t know whether it was the news of my cross-examination in the evening paper, or a message of warning from Knuckles, but in a fit of terminal stage fright Len failed to enter the Court. A visit by the police to the house from where he carried out his window-cleaning business only revealed a distraught wife, who had no idea where he had got to. I suppose he had enough experience of the law to understand that a charge of conspiracy to murder against the Commander might turn into a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice against Doctor Wakefield and Len Luxford. So he went, with his cash, perhaps back to his old friends and his accustomed haunts, his one unsuccessful stab at the acting profession over.

  When Marston Dawlish announced that without his vital witness the prosecution couldn’t continue, Mr Justice Graves gave a heavy sigh and advised the twelve honest citizens.

  ‘Members of the Jury, you have heard a lot of questions put by Mr Rumpole about the man - Iago. And other suggestions which may or may not have seemed to you to be relevant to this case. The simple fact of the matter is that the vital prosecution witness has gone missing - and Mr Marston Dawlish has asked me to direct you to return a verdict of “not guilty”. It’s an unfortunate situation, but there it is. So will your foreman please stand?’

  I paid a last visit to the conference room to say goodbye to my client and Mr Crozier. The place had been cleaned up, ready to receive other sandwiches, other paper cups of co
ffee and other people in trouble.

  ‘I suppose I should thank you.’ The Commander was looking as confident again as he had on the telly. Only now he was smiling.

  ‘I suppose you should thank me, the shifty old defence hack, and a couple of hard cases like Knuckles and Len Luxford. We doubtful characters saved your skin, Commander, and managed to tip the Scales of Justice in favour of the defence.’

  ‘I shall go on protesting about that, of course.’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘Not that I have any criticism of what you did in my case. I’m sure you acted perfectly properly. You believed in my innocence.’

  ‘No.’ I had to say it, but I’m afraid it startled him. He looked shocked. His full lips shrank in disapproval, his forehead furrowed.

  ‘You didn’t believe in my innocence?’

  ‘My belief is suspended. It’s been left hanging up in the robing room for years. It’s not my job to find you innocent or guilty. That’s up to the Jury. All I can do is put your case as well as you would if you had,’ and I said it in all modesty, ‘anything approaching my ability.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d ever have thought up your attack on the Doctor,’ he admitted.

  ‘No, I don’t believe you would.’

  ‘So I’m grateful to you.’

  It wasn’t an over-generous compliment, but I said thank you.

  ‘But you say you’re not convinced of my innocence?’ Clearly he could hardly believe it.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘You’re free now. You can go back to work.’

  ‘That’s true. I’ve been suspended for far too long.’ He looked at his watch as though he expected to start immediately. ‘It’s been an interesting experience.’ I was, I must say, surprised at the imperturbable Commander, who could fall passionately in love, wish an inconvenient husband off the face of the earth and call his own criminal trial merely ‘interesting’. ‘We live in different worlds, Mr Rumpole,’ he told me, ‘you and I.’

  ‘So we do. You believe everyone who turns up in Court is guilty. I suspect some of them may be innocent.’

  ‘You suspect, you say, but you never know, do you?’

  And so he went with Mr Crozier. I fully expect to see him again, in his impressive uniform, complaining from the television in the corner of our living-room about the Scales of Justice being constantly tipped in favour of the defence.

  ‘You had a bit of luck in R. v. Durden.’ Ballard caught me up in Ludgate Circus one afternoon when we were walking back from the Old Bailey. ‘I gather Luxford went missing.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I told him. ‘Are you calling that luck?’

  ‘Lucky for you, Rumpole. From what I read of your cross-examination, you were clearly irritating the Judge.’

  ‘I’m afraid I was. I do have a talent for irritating judges.’

  ‘Pity, that. Otherwise you are, in many ways, quite able.’

  ‘Thank you, Ballard.’

  ‘No, I should thank you for getting me out of that unpleasant case. Our clerk fixed me up with a rating appeal.’

  ‘Good old Henry.’

  ‘Yes, he has his uses. So you see I have a lot to thank you for, Rumpole.’

  ‘You’re entirely welcome, but will you promise me one thing?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Please don’t hug me, Ballard.’

  ‘I told you, Rumpole, I could tell at once that there was something fishy about that client of yours.’ Hilda’s verdict on the Commander was written in stone.

  ‘But he was acquitted.’

  ‘You know perfectly well, Rumpole, that doesn’t mean a thing. The next time he turns up on the telly I shall switch over to the other channel.’

  Forget Graves, I thought, leave out Bullingham; you’d search for a long time down the Old Bailey before you found a Judge as remorseless and tough as She Who Must Be Obeyed!

  Rumpole and the Right to Privacy

  ‘Is no one, Rumpole, to be allowed to lead a private life any more? As I told them at my bridge club, they won’t leave you alone. Everything has to get into the papers.’

  ‘You mean we’re to expect headlines in the tabloids: “Hilda Rumpole bids four hearts. Full story in the Sun”?’

  ‘I know you like to make a joke of everything, but things are getting serious when I’m actually rung up by a journalist. He wanted to know all about you, Rumpole.’

  ‘Really? What did he want to know?’

  ‘More about the life of a well-known criminal barrister. What you did in your spare time, for instance.’

  ‘Did you tell him I spent my evenings enjoying recreational drugs in the company of lap dancers?’

  ‘Certainly not! I said it was absolutely no business of his, and you didn’t want anything written about you in the papers. You don’t, do you, Rumpole?’

  Didn’t I? I had, I’m afraid, felt a little thrill of pleasure as She Who Must uttered the words ‘well-known criminal barrister’. It was not, of course, entirely unexpected. Since my resurrection and return to life and the law, and since my defence of Commander Durden, my fame had spread far beyond Equity Court and the Old Bailey, so I would not have objected forcefully to a well-written profile in some respectful broadsheet, headlined ‘The Great Defender’, no doubt with a photograph or mercifully drawn caricature. I could imagine the jealousy at the next Chambers meeting and Luci’s gratitude for what I’d done for the ‘image’ of the Old Bailey hack.

  ‘Well,’ I started off cautiously, ‘it might rather depend on how it was done.’

  ‘It wouldn’t depend on that at all, Rumpole. There are no circumstances in which I’d allow journalists into our mansion flat to notice our furniture and write about our knick-knacks. Privacy is sacred, Rumpole, I’m sure you’d agree.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ is what I might have said. But to save time, and for the avoidance of controversy, I kept it to ‘You’re quite right, Hilda.’

  ‘Of course I’m right. Aren’t there enough wars, I told him, and natural disasters, without you having to come worrying us for something to put in your paper?’

  So not being a war or natural disaster, I reconciled myself to the status of a member of the newspaper-buying public who never gets profiled or caricatured or mentioned unless he becomes involved in a salacious scandal or features as the victim of violent crime. A few quotations in the reports when I was doing a particularly noteworthy case was all I could look forward to. The prospect of becoming Personality of the Week, ‘Old Bailey Star Horace Rumpole’, was best forgotten. Perhaps it was all for the best, and private life is something that should be cherished in secret, like a furtive love affair, or a miser’s hoard of cash. No doubt Hilda was right and we didn’t want our knick-knacks photographed. But, just sometimes, wasn’t life like the law? It shouldn’t only be lived but be seen to be lived.

  These thoughts were uppermost in my mind at that moment, not only because of what Hilda told me, but because I had become involved in a case about the denial of human rights, and the protection of the privacy of a very rich man indeed. Sadly, I was not on the side of the big money brief in that case, nor was I the gallant defender of privacy. I was briefed by the Chivering Argus which had, in the circumstances set out in my instructions, played the unattractive and unsympathetic role of a Peeping Tom.

  Sir Michael Smedley was to many people the ideal businessman, who had been able to pull himself up by what are still, in some relentlessly market-oriented circles, known as his bootstraps. (This phrase ignores the fact that no one except mountaineers and footballers wears boots nowadays or has any idea where the straps are kept.) Born into a family of old-fashioned union officials and shop stewards in Coventry, he devoted his time out of school to begging or buying old bicycles, repairing them expertly and selling them on at a small profit. In his teens he was doing the same thing with motorbikes and cars. By the time he was twenty, he’d opened a secondhand car business, which surpassed secondhand car businesses all over the M
idlands. It was then, it seems, that he took a deep breath and surveyed the scene for a new field for his undoubted entrepreneurial skills.

  He came to the conclusion that while the car industry might be in decline, going to bed at night was a habit never likely to go out of style. Accordingly, he took over some bankrupt motorworks for the manufacture of the first Smedley Slumberwell beds, which, helped on by some vaguely erotic advertising, became bestsellers in a mass of what had already become known as ‘furniture outlets’. Mike Smedley was something of a celebrity, constantly in the news, calling on the government to do more to help business, and on schools to teach ‘entrepreneurial skills’ instead of such pointless subjects as the plays of Shakespeare or the causes of the Civil War. So he had, unlike Rumpole, appeared in the newspapers as Profile of the Week, done Desert Island Discs and various discussion programmes. He had, as he constantly told his listeners, no political affiliations; all he was anxious to do was to serve the public and make sure that as many ofus as possible were tucked up safely at night in a Smedley Slumberwell superspring, shaped-to-your-body bed. His business career reached a peak when the government, faced with a rapidly increasing demand for beds in a number of new National Health hospitals, awarded the contract to Slumberwell in the face of stiff competition from other bed-makers. And there was no suggestion that the politically immaculate Sir Mike had made the smallest contribution to party funds.

  None of the above, however, explains how I had come to be briefed by the Chivering Argus when the full force of the Smedley millions had been turned against it, following a writ alleging a breach of confidence and the invasion of Sir Mike’s privacy by publishing a photograph of him on holiday in the Caribbean.

  ‘Do you do human rights cases, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘All the time.’

  I had immediately recognized the voice on the telephone as that of Crozier, the solicitor who had instructed Ballard and me, and finally me alone, in the defence of the Police Commander.