Rumpole and the Angel of Death Read online

‘But you know?’

  ‘No, really. I have no idea.’

  ‘Well’ – I breathed a sigh of relief – ‘that’s all right then.’

  ‘No, it’s not all right.’ She stood up, her cheeks flushed, her voice clear and determined. Mizz Crump might be no oil painting, but I thought I saw in her the makings of a fighter. ‘We’ve got to find out why all this is happening. And we’ve got to save him. Will you help me get him out of trouble? Whatever it is.’

  ‘Helping people in trouble,’ I assured her, ‘has been my job for almost half a century.’

  ‘So you’re with me, Rumpole?’ She was, I was glad to see, a determined young woman who might go far in the law.

  ‘Of course I am. We fat people should stick together.’ Naturally, I regretted it the moment I had said it.

  ‘The Governor says you’re a model prisoner.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s a kind of tribute.’

  ‘Not exactly what I wanted to be when I was at university. I’d just done my first Twelfth Night. I suppose I wanted to be a great director. I saw myself at the National or the R.S.C. If I couldn’t do that, I wanted to be an unforgettable teacher of English and open the eyes of generations to Shakespeare. I never thought I’d end up as a model prisoner.’

  ‘Life is full of surprises.’ That didn’t seem too much of a comfort to Matthew Gribble as we sat together, back in the prison interview room. Spring sunshine was fighting its way through windows that needed cleaning. I had sat in the train, trees with leaves just turning green, sunlight on the grass. A good time to think of freedom, starting a new life and forgetting the past. ‘If we can get you off this little bit of trouble, you should be out of here by the end of the month.’

  ‘Out. To do what?’ He was smiling gently, but I thought quite without amusement, as he stared into the future. ‘I shouldn’t think they’ll ever ask me to direct a play for the Cowshott amateurs. “You’d better watch out for this one, darling,” I can just hear them whispering at the read through. “He stabbed his wife to death with a kitchen knife.” ’

  ‘There may be other drama groups.’

  ‘Not for me. Do you think they’d have me back at the poly? Not a hope.’

  ‘Anyway’ – I tried to cheer him up – ‘you did a pretty good job with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

  ‘Shakespeare with violent criminals, deputy-governors’ wives and wardens’ daughters. Not the R.S.C. exactly, but I can put on a good show in Worsfield gaol. Wasn’t Bob Weaver marvellous?’

  ‘Extraordinary.’

  ‘And you know what I discovered? He responds to the sound of poetry. He’s got to know it by heart. Great chunks of it.’ From Battering Bob to Babbling Bob, I thought, treating his bewildered visitors to great chunks of John Keats. It was funny, of course, but in its way a huge achievement. Matthew Gribble appeared to agree. ‘I suppose I’m proud of that.’ He thought about it and seemed satisfied. I turned back to the business in hand.

  ‘Those other cast members in the carpenter’s helping make the scenery – Tony Timson, the young Molloy? Do you think either of them saw who threw the chisel?’

  ‘If they did, they’re not saying. Grassing’s a sin in prison.’

  ‘But your protégé Babbling Bob is prepared to grass on you?’

  ‘Seems like it.’ He was, I thought, resigned and strangely unconcerned.

  ‘Have you talked to him about it?’

  ‘Yes. Once.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him to always be truthful. That’s the secret of acting, to tell the truth about the character. I told him that.’

  ‘Forget about acting for a moment. Did you ask him why he said you attacked the screw?’

  There was a silence. Matthew Gribble seemed to be looking past me, at something far away. At last he said, ‘Yes, I asked him that.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said’ – my client gave a small, not particularly happy smile – ‘he said we’d always be friends, wouldn’t we?’

  The master-pupil relationship – the instructing of a younger, less experienced person in the mysteries of some art, theatrical or legal – seemed a situation fraught with danger. While Matthew Gribble’s devoted pupil was turning on his master with damaging allegations, Wendy Crump’s pupil master was in increasing trouble, being treated by the Sisterhood of Radical Lawyers as a male pariah. As yet, neither Erskine-Brown, nor his alleged victim, had been informed of the charges against him, although Mizz Probert and her supporters were about to raise the matter before the Bar Council as a serious piece of professional misconduct by the unfortunate Claude, who sat, brooding and unemployed in his room, wondering what it was that his best friend wouldn’t tell him which had led to him being shunned by female lawyers. I learnt about the proposed petitioning of the Bar Council when I visited the Soapy Head of our Chambers in order to scotch any plan to drive the unfortunate sinner from that paradise which is 4 Equity Court.

  ‘There is no doubt whatever’ – here Ballard put on his carefully modulated tone of sorrowful condemnation – ‘that Erskine-Brown has erred grievously.’

  ‘Which one of the Ten Commandments is it exactly, if I may be so bold as to ask, which forbids us to call our neighbour fat?’

  ‘There is such a thing, Rumpole’ – Ballard gave me the look with which a missionary might reprove a cannibal – ‘as gender awareness.’

  ‘Is there, really? And who told you about that then? I’ll lay you a hundred to one it was Mizz Liz Probert.’

  ‘Lady lawyers take it extremely seriously, Rumpole. Which is why we’re in danger of losing all our work from Damiens.’

  ‘The all-female solicitors? Not a man in the whole of the firm. Is that being gender aware?’

  ‘However the firm is composed, Rumpole, they provide a great deal of valuable work for all of us.’

  ‘Well, I’m aware of gender,’ I told Soapy Sam, ‘at least I think I am. You’re a man from what I can remember.’

  ‘That remark would be taken very much amiss, Rumpole. If made to a woman.’

  ‘But it’s not made to a woman, it’s made to you, Ballard. Are you going to stand for this religious persecution of the unfortunate Claude?’

  ‘What he said about Wendy Crump was extremely wounding.’

  ‘Nonsense! She wasn’t wounded in the least. None of these avenging angels has bothered to tell her what her pupil master said.’

  ‘Did you tell her?’

  ‘Well, no, I didn’t, actually.’

  ‘Did you tell Wendy Crump that Erskine-Brown had called her fat?’ For about the first time in his life Soapy Sam had asked a good question in cross-examination. I was reduced, for a moment at least, to silence. ‘Why didn’t you repeat those highly offensive words to her?’

  I knew the answer, but I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of hearing it from me.

  ‘It was because you didn’t want to hurt her feelings, did you, Rumpole? And you knew how much it would wound her.’ Ballard was triumphant. ‘You showed a rare flash of gender awareness and I congratulate you for it!’

  Although a potential outcast from the gender-aware society, Claude hadn’t been entirely deprived of his practice. New briefs were slow in arriving, but he still had some of his old cases to finish off. One of these was a complex and not particularly fascinating fraud on a bookmaker in which Claude and I were briefed for two of the alleged fraudsters. I needn’t go into the details of the case except to say that the Prosecution was in the hands of the dashing and handsome Nick Davenant who had a large and shapely nose, brown hair billowing from under his wig, and knowing and melting eyes. It was Nick’s slimline pupil, Jenny Attienzer, whom Claude had hopelessly coveted. This fragile beauty was not in Court on the day in question; whether she thought the place out of bounds because of the gender-unaware Claude, I’m unable to say. But Claude was being assisted by the able but comfortably furnished (slenderly challenged) Wendy Crump and I
was on my own.

  The case -was being tried by her Honour Judge Emma MacNaught, Q.C., sitting as an Old Bailey judge, who had treated Claude, from the start of the case, to a number of withering looks and, when addressing him in person became inevitable, to a tone of icy contempt. This circus judge turned out to have been the author of a slender handbook entitled ‘Sexual Harassment in the Legal Profession’. (Wendy Crump told me, some time later, that she would challenge anyone to know whether they had been sexually harassed or not unless they’d read the book.)

  Nick Davenant called the alleged victim of our clients’ fraud – a panting and sweating bookmaker whose physical attributes I am too gender aware to refer to – and his last question was,

  ‘Mr Aldworth, have you ever been in trouble with the police?’

  ‘No. Certainly not. Not with the police.’ On which note of honesty Nick sat down and Claude rose to cross-examine. Before he could open his mouth, however, Wendy was half standing, pulling at his gown and commanding, in a penetrating whisper, that he ask Aldworth if he’d ever been in trouble with anyone else.

  ‘Are you intending to ask any question, Mr Erskine-Brown?’ Judge MacNaught had closed her eyes to avoid the pain of looking at the learned chauvinist pig.

  ‘Have you been in trouble with anyone else?’ Claude plunged in, clay in the hands of the gown-tugger behind him.

  ‘Only with my wife. On Derby night.’ For this, Mr Aldworth was rewarded by a laugh from the Jury, and Claude by a look of contempt from the Judge.

  ‘Ask him if he’s ever been reported to Tattersall’s.’ The insistent pupil behind Claude gave another helping tug. Claude clearly didn’t think things could get any worse.

  ‘Have you ever been reported to Tattersall’s?’ he asked, adding ‘the racing authority’ by way of an unnecessary explanation.

  ‘Well, yes. As far as I can remember,’ Mr Aldworth admitted in a fluster, and the Jury stopped laughing.

  ‘Ask him how many times!’

  ‘How many times?’ Wendy Crump was now Claude’s pupil master.

  ‘I don’t know I can rightly remember.’

  ‘Do your best,’ Wendy suggested.

  ‘Well, do your best,’ Claude asked.

  ‘Ten or a dozen times . . . Perhaps twenty.’

  I sat back in gratitude. The chief prosecution witness had been holed below the waterline, without my speaking a word, and our co-defendants might well be home and dry.

  At the end of the cross-examination, the learned Judge subjected Claude to the sort of scrutiny she might have given a greenish slice of haddock on a slab, long past its sell-by date. ‘Mr Erskine-Brown!’

  ‘Yes, my Lady.’

  ‘You are indeed fortunate to have a pupil who is so skilled in the art of cross-examination.’

  ‘Indeed, I am, my Lady.’

  ‘Then you must be very grateful that she remains to help you. For the time being.’ The last words were uttered in the voice of a prison governor outlining the arrangements, temporary of course, for life in the condemned cell. Hearing them, even my blood, I have to confess, ran a little chill.

  When the lunch adjournment came Claude shot off about some private business and I strolled out of Court with the model pupil. I told her she’d done very well.

  ‘Thank you, Rumpole.’ Wendy took my praise as a matter of course. ‘I thought the Judge was absolutely outrageous to poor old Claude. Going at him like that simply because he’s a man. I can’t stand that sort of sexist behaviour!’ And then she was off in search of refreshment and I was left wondering at the rapidity with which her revered pupil master had become ‘poor old Claude’.

  And then I saw, at the end of the wide corridor and at the head of the staircase, Nick Davenant, the glamorous Prosecutor, in close and apparently friendly consultation with the leader of the militant sisterhood, Mizz Liz Probert of our Chambers. I made towards them but, as she noticed my approach, Mizz Liz melted away like snow in the sunshine and, being left alone with young Nick, I invited him to join me for a pint of Guinness and a plateful of steak and kidney pie in the pub across the road.

  ‘I saw you were talking to Liz Probert?’ I asked him when we were settled at the trough.

  ‘Great girl, Liz. In your Chambers, isn’t she?’

  ‘I brought her up, you might say. She was my pupil in her time. Did she question your gender awareness?’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ Nick Davenant laughed, giving me a ringside view of a set of impeccable teeth. ‘I think she knows that I’m tremendously gender aware the whole time. No. She’s just a marvellous girl. She does all sorts of little things for me.’

  ‘Does she indeed?’ The pie crust, as usual, tasted of cardboard, the beef was stringy and the kidneys as hard to find as beggars in the Ritz, but they couldn’t ruin the mustard or the Guinness. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t ask what sort of things.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t talking about that in particular.’ The learned Prosecutor gave the impression that he could talk about that if he wasn’t such a decent and discreet young Davenant. ‘But I mean little things like work.’

  ‘Mizz Liz works for you?’

  ‘Well, if I’ve got a difficult opinion to write, or a big case to note up, then Liz will volunteer.’

  ‘But you’ve got Miss Slenderlegs, the blonde barrister, as your pupil.’

  ‘Liz says she can’t trust Jenny to get things right, so she takes jobs on for me.’

  ‘And you pay her lavishly of course.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Still smiling in a blinding fashion, Nick Davenant shook his head. ‘I don’t pay her a thing. She does it for the sake of friendship.’

  ‘Friendship with you, of course?’

  ‘Friendship with me, yes. I think Liz is really a nice girl. And I don’t see anything wrong with her bum.’

  ‘Wrong with what?’

  ‘Her bum.’

  ‘That’s what I thought you said.’

  ‘Do you think there’s anything wrong with it, Rumpole?’ A dreamy look had come over young Davenant’s face.

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it very much. But I suppose not.’

  ‘I don’t know why she has to go through all that performance about it, really.’

  ‘Performance?’

  ‘At Monte’s beauty parlour, she told me. In Ken High Street. Takes hours, she told me. While she has to sit there and read Hello! magazine.’

  ‘You don’t mean that she reads this – whatever publication you mentioned – while changing the shape of her body for the sake of pleasing men?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Davenant had to admit reluctantly, ‘it’s in a good cause.’

  ‘Have the other half of this black Liffey water, why don’t you?’ I felt nothing but affection for Counsel for the Prosecution, for suddenly, at long last, I saw a chink of daylight at the end of poor old Claude’s long, black tunnel. ‘And tell me all you know about Monte’s beauty parlour.’

  The day’s work done, I was walking back from Ludgate Circus and the well-known Palais de Justice, when I saw, alone and palely loitering, the woman of the match, Wendy Crump. I hailed her gladly, caught her up and she turned to me a face on which gloom was written large. I couldn’t even swear that her spectacles hadn’t become misted with tears.

  ‘You don’t look particularly cheered up,’ I told her, ‘after your day of triumph.’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact I feel tremendously depressed.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About Claude. I’ve been thinking about it so much and it’s made me sad.’

  ‘Someone told you?’ I was sorry for her.

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘Well’ – I thought, of course, that the damage had been done by the sisterhood over the lunch adjournment – ‘what Claude had said about you that caused all the trouble.’

  ‘All what trouble?’

  ‘Being blackballed, blacklisted, outlawed, outcast, dismissed from the human race. Why Liz Probert and the gender-aware rad
ical lawyers have decided to hound him.’

  ‘Because of what he said about me?’

  ‘They haven’t told you?’

  ‘Not a word. But you know what it was?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ I was playing for time.

  ‘Then tell me, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Quite honestly, I’d rather not.’

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’

  ‘I’d really rather not say it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’d probably find it offensive.’

  ‘Rumpole, I’m going to be a barrister. I’ll have to sit through rape, indecent assault, sex and sodomy. Just spit it out.’

  ‘He was probably joking.’

  ‘He doesn’t joke much.’

  ‘Well, then. He called you, and I don’t suppose he meant it, fat.’

  She looked at me and, in a magical moment, the gloom lifted. I thought there was even the possibility of a laugh. And then it came, a light giggle, just as we passed Pommeroy’s.

  ‘Of course I’m fat. Fatty Crump, that set me apart from all the other anorexic little darlings at school. That and the fact that I usually got an A-plus. It was my trademark. Well, I never thought Claude looked at me long enough to notice.’

  When this had sunk in, I asked her why, if she hadn’t heard from Liz Probert and her Amazonians, she was so shaken and wan with care.

  ‘Because’ – and here the note of sadness returned – ‘I used to hero-worship Claude. I thought he was a marvellous barrister. And now I know he can’t really do it, can he?’

  She looked at me, hoping, perhaps, for some contradiction. I was afraid I couldn’t oblige. ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘you don’t want him cast into outer darkness and totally deprived of briefs, do you?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.’

  ‘Then, in the fullness of time,’ I told her, ‘I may have a little strategy to suggest.’

  ‘Hilda,’ I said, having managed to ingest most of a bottle of Château Fleet Street Ordinaire over our cutlets, and with it taken courage, ‘what would you do if I called you fat?’ I awaited the blast of thunder, or at least a drop in the temperature to freezing, to be followed by a week’s eerie silence.