The Collected Stories of Rumpole Page 20

  ‘Look here, old darling.’ I absorbed half my glass, relishing the gentle fruitiness and the slight tang of wood. ‘If you spent your whole life in that high-rise hellhole called Keir Hardie Court, if you had no fat prosecutions to occupy your attention and no prospect of any job at all, if you had no sort of occupation except war with the O’Dowds …’

  ‘My own flat isn’t particularly comfortable. I don’t know a great deal about your home life, Rumpole, but you don’t seem to be in a tearing hurry to experience it.’

  ‘Touché, Wrigglesworth, my old darling.’ I ordered us a couple of refills of Pommeroy’s port to further postpone the encounter with She Who Must Be Obeyed and her rissoles.

  ‘But we don’t have to fight to the death on the staircase,’ Wrigglesworth pointed out.

  ‘We don’t have to fight at all, Wrigglesworth.’

  ‘As your client did.’

  ‘As my client may have done. Remember the presumption of innocence.’

  ‘This is rather funny, this is.’ The prosecutor pulled back his lips to reveal strong, yellowish teeth and laughed appreciatively. ‘You know why your man Timson is called “Turpin”?’

  ‘No.’ I drank port uneasily, fearing an unwelcome revelation.

  ‘Because he’s always fighting with that sword of his. He’s called after Dick Turpin, you see, who’s always duelling on the television. Do you watch the television, Rumpole?’

  ‘Hardly at all.’

  ‘I watch a great deal of the television, as I’m alone rather a lot.’ Wrigglesworth referred to the box as though it were a sort of penance, like fasting or flagellation. ‘Detective Inspector Wainwright told me about your client. Rather amusing, I thought it was. He’s retiring this Christmas.’

  ‘My client?’

  ‘No. DI Wainwright. Do you think we should settle on this port for the Bishop? Or would you like to try a glass of something else?’

  ‘Christmas,’ I told Wrigglesworth severely as we sampled the Cockburn, ‘is not just a material, pagan celebration. It’s not just an occasion for absorbing superior vintages, old darling. It must be a time when you try to do good, spiritual good to our enemies.’

  ‘To your client, you mean?’

  ‘And to me.’

  ‘To you, Rumpole?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Wrigglesworth!’ I was conscious of the fact that my appeal was growing desperate. ‘I’ve had six losers in a row down the Old Bailey. Can’t I be included in any Christmas spirit that’s going around?’

  ‘You mean, at Christmas especially it is more blessed to give than to receive?’

  ‘I mean exactly that.’ I was glad that he seemed, at last, to be following my drift.

  ‘And you think I might give this case to someone, like a Christmas present?’

  ‘If you care to put it that way, yes.’

  ‘I do not care to put it in exactly that way.’ He turned his pale blue eyes on me with what I thought was genuine sympathy. ‘But I shall try and do the case of R. v. Timson in the way most appropriate to the greatest feast of the Christian year. It is a time, I quite agree, for the giving of presents.’

  When they finally threw us out of Pommeroy’s, and after we had considered the possibility of buying the Bishop brandy in the Cock Tavern, and even beer in the Devereux, I let my instinct, like an aged horse, carry me on to the Underground and home to Gloucester Road, and there discovered the rissoles, like some traces of a vanished civilization, fossilized in the oven. She Who Must Be Obeyed was already in bed, feigning sleep. When I climbed in beside her she opened a hostile eye.

  ‘You’re drunk, Rumpole!’ she said. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’

  ‘I’ve been having a legal discussion,’ I told her, ‘on the subject of the admissibility of certain evidence. Vital, from my client’s point of view. And, just for a change, Hilda, I think I’ve won.’

  ‘Well, you’d better try and get some sleep.’ And she added with a sort of satisfaction, ‘I’m sure you’ll be feeling quite terrible in the morning.’

  As with all the grimmer predictions of She Who Must Be Obeyed this one turned out to be true. I sat in Court the next day with the wig feeling like a lead weight on the brain, and the stiff collar sawing the neck like a blunt execution. My mouth tasted of matured birdcage and from a long way off I heard Wrigglesworth say to Bridget O’Dowd, who stood looking particularly saintly and virginal in the witness-box, ‘About a week before this did you see the defendant, Edward Timson, on your staircase flourishing any sort of weapon?’

  It is no exaggeration to say that I felt deeply shocked and considerably betrayed. After his promise to me, Wrigglesworth had turned his back on the spirit of the great Christmas festival. He came not to bring peace but a sword.

  I clambered with some difficulty to my feet. After my forensic efforts of the evening before, I was scarcely in the mood for a legal argument. Mr Justice Vosper looked up in surprise and greeted me in his usual chilly fashion.

  ‘Yes, Mr Rumpole. Do you object to this evidence?’

  Of course I object, I wanted to say. It’s inhuman, unnecessary, unmerciful and likely to lead to my losing another case. Also, it’s clearly contrary to a solemn and binding contract entered into after a number of glasses of the Bishop’s putative port. All I seemed to manage was a strangled, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suppose Mr Wrigglesworth would say,’ Vosper, J, was, as ever, anxious to supply any argument that might not yet have occurred to the prosecution, ‘that it is evidence of “system”.’

  ‘System?’ I heard my voice faintly and from a long way off. ‘It may be, I suppose. But the Court has a discretion to omit evidence which may be irrelevant and purely prejudicial.’

  ‘I feel sure Mr Wrigglesworth has considered the matter most carefully and that he would not lead this evidence unless he considered it entirely relevant.’

  I looked at the Mad Monk on the seat beside me. He was smiling at me with a mixture of hearty cheerfulness and supreme pity, as though I were sinking rapidly and he had come to administer supreme unction. I made a few ill-chosen remarks to the Court, but I was in no condition, that morning, to enter into a complicated legal argument on the admissibility of evidence.

  It wasn’t long before Bridget O’Dowd had told a deeply disapproving jury all about Eddie ‘Turpin’ Timson’s sword. ‘A man,’ the Judge said later in his summing up about young Edward, ‘clearly prepared to attack with cold steel whenever it suited him.’

  When the trial was over, I called in for refreshment at my favourite watering hole and there, to my surprise, was my opponent Wrigglesworth, sharing an expensive-looking bottle with Detective Inspector Wainwright, the Officer-in-Charge of the case. I stood at the bar, absorbing a consoling glass of Pommeroy’s ordinary, when the DI came up to the bar for cigarettes. He gave me a friendly and maddeningly sympathetic smile.

  ‘Sorry about that, sir. Still, win a few, lose a few. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘In my case lately, it’s been win a few, lose a lot!’

  ‘You couldn’t have this one, sir. You see, Mr Wrigglesworth had promised it to me.’

  ‘He had what?’

  ‘Well, I’m retiring, as you know. And Mr Wrigglesworth promised me faithfully that my last case would be a win. He promised me that, in a manner of speaking, as a Christmas present. Great man is our Mr Wrigglesworth, sir, for the spirit of Christmas.’

  I looked across at the Mad Monk and a terrible suspicion entered my head. What was all that about a present for the Bishop? I searched my memory and I could find no trace of our having, in fact, bought wine for any sort of cleric. And was Wrigglesworth as inexperienced as he would have had me believe in the art of selecting claret?

  As I watched him pour and sniff a glass from his superior bottle, and hold it critically to the light, a horrible suspicion crossed my mind. Had the whole evening’s events been nothing but a deception, a sinister attempt to nobble Rumpole, to present him with such a stupendous hangover that he would
stumble in his legal argument? Was it all in aid of DI Wainwright’s Christmas present?

  I looked at Wrigglesworth, and it would be no exaggeration to say the mind boggled. He was, of course, perfectly right about me. I just didn’t recognize evil when I saw it.

  Rumpole and the Boat People

  ‘You’ll have to do it, Rumpole. You’ll be a different man.’

  I considered the possibilities. I was far from satisfied, naturally, with the man I was, but I had grown, over the years, used to his ways. I knew his taste in claret, his rate of consumption of small cigars, and I had grown to have some respect for his mastery of the art of cross-examination. Difficult, almost impossible, as he was to live with on occasions, I thought we could manage to rub along together for our few remaining years.

  ‘A different man, did you say?’

  Dr MacClintock, the slow-speaking, Edinburgh-bred quack to whom my wife Hilda turns in times of sickness, took a generous gulp of the sherry she always pours him when he visits our mansion flat. (It’s lucky that all his NHS patients aren’t so generous or the sick of Gloucester Road would be tended by a reeling medico, yellow about the gills and sloshed on amontillado.) Then he said,

  ‘If you follow my simple instructions, Rumpole, you’ll become a different man entirely.’

  Being Horace Rumpole in his sixties, still slogging round the Old Bailey with sore feet, a modest daily hangover and an aching back was certainly no great shakes, but who else could I be? I considered the possibilities of becoming Guthrie Featherstone, QC, MP, our learned Head of Chambers, or Claude Erskine-Brown, or Uncle Tom, or even Dr MacClintock, and retreated rapidly into the familiar flesh.

  ‘All you have to do, old man, is lose two or three stone,’ the doctor told me.

  ‘ “Old man”?’ I looked closely at the sherry-swilling sawbones and saw no chicken.

  ‘Just two or three stone, Rumpole. That’s all you have to lose.’ Hilda was warming to her latest theme, that there was too much Rumpole.

  ‘It’s a very simple diet, perfectly simple. I’ve got it printed here.’ Dr MacClintock produced a card with the deftness of a conjurer. The trick was known as the vanishing Rumpole, and the rapid materialization of a thinner and more eager barrister.

  ‘No fat, of course.’ The doctor repeated the oath on the card. ‘Because it makes you fat. No meat, too rich in protein. No bread or potatoes, too many calories. No pastries, puddings, sweetmeats or sugar. No biscuits. No salt on the food. Steer clear of cheese. I don’t recommend fruit to my patients because of its acid qualities. Eggs are perfectly all right if hard-boiled. Not too many though, or you won’t do your business.’

  ‘My business in the Courts?’ I didn’t follow.

  ‘No. Your business in the lavatory.’

  ‘Didn’t you say,’ Hilda put in encouragingly, ‘that Rumpole could eat spinach?’

  ‘Oh yes. As much spinach as he likes. And brown rice for roughage. Now you could manage a diet like that, couldn’t you, Rumpole? Otherwise I can’t be responsible for your heart.’

  ‘I suppose I might manage it for a while.’ The Rumpole ticker, I knew, had come to resent the pressure put on it during a number of hard-fought battles in front of the mad Judge Bullingham down the Bailey. ‘Of course, it’d have to be washed down by a good deal of claret. Château-bottled. I could afford that with all this saving on pastries and puddings.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens!’ The quack held his sherry glass out for a refill. ‘No alcohol!’

  ‘You’re asking me to give up claret?’

  ‘No alcohol of any sort!’

  ‘Certainly not, Rumpole.’ Hilda was determined.

  ‘But you might as well ask me to give up breathing.’

  ‘It’ll come quite easily to you, after a couple of days.’

  ‘I suppose when you’ve been dead a couple of days you find it quite easy to give up breathing.’

  ‘It’s you that mentioned death, Rumpole.’ The doctor smiled at me tolerantly. ‘I haven’t said a word about it. Now why not get your wife to take you away for a holiday? You could spare a couple of weeks at the seaside, surely? It’s always easier to give things up when you’re on holiday.’

  Brown rice, spinach and a holiday were not an appetizing combination, but Hilda seemed delighted at the prospect.

  ‘We could go down to Shenstone, Doctor. I’ve always wanted to go to Shenstone-on-Sea. My old friend Jackie Bateman, you know I’ve told you, Rumpole, Jackie Hopkins as was, we were at school together, runs a little business at Shenstone with her husband. Jackie’s always writing begging me to come down to Shenstone. Apparently it’s a dear little place and extremely quiet.’

  ‘My partner, Dr Entwhistle, keeps his boat at Shenstone.’ Dr MacClintock seemed to think this fact might lend some glamour to the hole. ‘It’s quite a place for the boating community.’

  ‘I don’t boat,’ I said gloomily.

  ‘Better not, Rumpole,’ the doctor was actually laughing. ‘Better not take out a small dinghy. You might sink it! Shenstone sounds just the place for you to get a bit of rest. Pick a small hotel. A temperance hotel. That’s all you’ll be needing.’

  That night, Hilda booked us in to the Fairview Private Hotel in Shenstone-on-Sea, and wrote off to Mrs Bateman, the former Miss Jackie Hopkins, announcing the glad tidings. I viewed the approaching visit with some dismay, tempered by the knowledge that it did seem to be becoming a minor Everest expedition for me to mount the shortest staircase. My bones ached, my head seemed stuffed with cottonwool and buttons were flying off me like bullets at the smallest unexpected move. Perhaps desperate measures were called for and a holiday would do me good. We set out for Shenstone armed with umbrellas, mackintoshes, heavy pullovers and, in my case, the Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories, Marjoribanks’s Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall and The Oxford Book of English Verse (I make it a rule not to read anything I haven’t read before, except for The Times and briefs). We launched ourselves into the unknown as, up to the time of our departure, Mrs Jackie Bateman hadn’t been heard from.

  Shenstone-on-Sea, in the county of Norfolk, was to be seen, like most English pleasure resorts, through a fine haze of perpetual rain. However, the main feature of Shenstone-on-Sea was undoubtedly the wind. It blew straight at you from the Ural mountains, crossing some very icy steppes, parky portions of Poland, draughty country round Dortmund and the flats of Holland, on the way. In this cruel climate the inhabitants gathered, stowing spinnakers and splicing ropes with bluish fingers, the wind blowing out their oilskins tight as a trumpeter’s cheeks and almost doffing their bobble hats. For Shenstone-on-Sea was, as my Scottish medical man had said, quite the place for the boat community.

  Apart from watching the daily armada of small boats set out, there was little or nothing to do at Shenstone. Hilda and I sat in the residents’ lounge at the Fairview Hotel, and I read or did the crossword while she knitted or wrote postcards to other old school friends and we listened to the rain driven across the windows by the prevailing wind. On our arrival we telephoned Jackie Bateman and got no reply. Then we called on her at the address Hilda had, which turned out to be a shop on the harbour called Father Neptune’s Boutique, a place for the sale of bobble hats, seamen’s sweaters, yellow gumboots, tea mugs with the words ‘Galley Slave’ written on them and such-like nautical equipment. The Batemans, according to Hilda, owned this business and had a flat above the shop. We called, as I have said, but found the place silent and locked up, and got no answer when we rattled the door handle.

  Hilda wrote a note for her elusive school friend, and put it through the door. We were standing looking helplessly at the silent shop, when someone spoke to us.

  ‘She’s moved. Gone away.’

  A tallish, thin person clad in a balaclava helmet and a belted mackintosh, and sporting a large pair of field glasses, came by pushing a gaunt bicycle.

  ‘Mrs Bateman’s not here?’ Hilda seemed slow to absorb the information.

  ‘I tell you. She
moved away. After it happened. Well. They reckoned she couldn’t abide the place after that.’

  ‘After what?’ Hilda hadn’t heard from Jackie Bateman since, she now remembered, the previous Christmas, and seemed not have been kept au courant with the major developments in her friend’s life.

  ‘Why, after the accident. When her husband got drowned. Hadn’t you heard?’

  ‘No, we hadn’t. Oh dear.’ Hilda looked surprised and shocked. ‘What a terrible thing.’

  The tall man pushed his bicycle away from us and we were left staring through the rain at the harbour where the frail boats were again putting out full of those, it now seemed, in considerable peril on the sea.

  That night I was pecking away at a minute quantity of fish, almost entirely surrounded by spinach, in our private hotel, and moodily sipping water (an excellent fluid no doubt, most useful for filling radiators and washing socks, but of absolutely no value as a drink) when Hilda said,

  ‘She was devoted to him, you know.’

  ‘Devoted to whom?’

  ‘To Barney. To her husband Barney Bateman. Jackie was. She always said he was such a wonderful man, and a terrific sailor with a really good sense of humour. Of course, he had your problem, Rumpole.’

  ‘What’s that? Judge Bullingham?’

  ‘Don’t be silly! Of course, I never met Barney, but Jackie told me he was a big man.’

  ‘You mean fat?’

  ‘That’s what I think she meant. Jackie was always afraid he was going to get too heavy for dinghy racing. And he simply refused to go on a diet!’

  ‘Sensible fellow.’

  ‘How can you say he was sensible, Rumpole? Don’t you remember, poor Jackie’s husband’s dead.’

  Did Mr Bateman’s weight become so gross that he simply sank with all hands? As I gave the lining of my stomach the unusual shock of a cascade of cold water, I decided not to ask the question, but to try at the earliest opportunity to get a little free time from She Who Must Be Obeyed.