Rumpole and the Primrose Path Read online

  It was still there when I stood leaning against the wall in Luci Gribble’s flat, trying to balance a glass of Carafino red on a plate of cold cuts and potato salad and doing my best to eat and drink. I was in a room from which most of the

  seating had been removed, to be replaced by as many of our Marketing and Administration Director’s close personal friends as might have filled up the Black Hole of Calcutta.

  ‘I was just looking for a seat,’ I appealed to Luci as she loomed up from the throng. She came resplendent in some sort of luminous jacket, and her surprisingly deep voice was cut across, as always, by the fresh breeze of a Yorkshire accent.

  ‘I don’t want people sitting down, Rumpole,’ she told me. ‘I want them standing up, so they can meet each other, form new relationships and network. I asked our Chair,’ she looked round at the sea of chattering, chomping and eagerly swilling faces, ‘but he hasn’t come.’ By ‘Chair’ I suspected she meant our Head of Chambers, Soapy Sam Ballard. ‘I don’t expect his wife wanted to let him out, even though it is New Year’s Eve.’

  Soapy Sam had married the matron at the Old Bailey, a determined woman who, after long years of handing out Elastoplasts to defendants who had bumped their heads against cell walls and Aspirin tablets to barristers with piercing headaches brought about by acute anxiety and too many bottles of Pommeroy’s plonk, had retired from the dispensary.

  ‘You brought your wife, didn’t you, Horace? I expect she’s more tolerant and broad-minded than Sam’s, isn’t she?’.

  I was still doing my best to apply the adjectives ‘tolerant’ and ‘broad-minded’ to She Who Must Be Obeyed when Luci gave me another culture shock.

  ‘No doubt Sam’s wife keeps him on a pretty short lead. After all, he is extremely attractive physically, isn’t he?’

  Luci might be, I thought, a wizard at Marketing and Administration, but her powers of observation seemed, in this instance, somewhat flawed. ‘You’re speaking, are you,’ I checked carefully, ‘of Samuel Ballard, QC, leading light of the Lawyers as Christians Society? The man who is seriously concerned at the number of teaspoons of instant coffee our junior clerk uses per cup?’

  ‘It’s that little-boy look, Horace. It makes you want to hug him, doesn’t it?’

  I was about to tell Luci that I had never, at any time, felt the slightest temptation to hug Soapy Sam Ballard, when a grey-haired man with a gentle voice didn’t so much approach us as was washed up against us by the moving tide of Luci’s guests.

  ‘I want you to meet Derek Ridgley, Director of UA. He so much wants to meet you, Horace,’ Luci introduced.

  ‘Luci’s told me you have a store of legal anecdotes, Mr Rumpole. Have you?’

  What was I expected to do, balance my supper and glass of wine while reciting golden oldies from the life of an Old Bailey hack? ‘I might have a few,’ I told the man cautiously.

  ‘I wondered if you’d speak to us at a fund-raising dinner for UA. Urchins Anonymous, Mr Rumpole. We’re concerned about homeless children in London.’ As he spoke, I seemed to see again the boy asleep in the doorway, hugging a dog for warmth. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many children are still sleeping on the streets. Ignorance and Want. You remember the children Dickens wrote about? It’s changed far less than you might think. Only last night we found a ten-year-old girl who’d been sleeping for a month on the steps of a church. Luci used to help us with our PR. She suggested you might speak at our dinner.’

  I’d left a child asleep on the street and all I could do about it was to tell jokes at a charity do. Speaking at a dinner seemed an inadequate reaction, but, I supposed, better than nothing. ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘Good man! It’s a great organization, UA. I’ve worked for it since I came out of the navy. We rely so much on voluntary helpers.’

  And then the chimes of midnight rang out from the telly in a comer of the room. I crossed my arms and my hands were grasped by Luci and the man from Urchins Anonymous and we swayed to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.

  It was New Year’s Day when Hilda and I emerged into the street. The boy and the dog had disappeared from the doorway to be replaced by a man in a bobble hat, wrapped in a grey blanket. He lit a cigarette as we passed and I saw his face. He was smiling at me as though he was unexpectedly happy or very drunk.

  New Year’s Day dawned bright and frosty over the Gloucester Road. Remembering Hilda’s icy disapproval when I turn up late for breakfast, I pulled on my warm dressing-gown, ran a comb through what was left of my hair, blew my nose and presented myself in the kitchen full of apologies.

  ‘Must have overslept,’ I told Hilda. ‘Don’t know how it could’ve happened.’

  To my amazement, what I was looking at was a sympathetic smile on the face of She Who Must Be Obeyed. Instead of the sharp wind of a rebuke from my life partner, she was purring, like a cat who has just been handed a saucer full of cream.

  ‘It’s good for you to sleep, Rumpole. You need the rest. You work so hard. I’m amazed at how you keep going.’

  Not half as amazed as I was by this extraordinary change of character, was what I didn’t say.

  ‘Now what would you like for breakfast?’

  ‘Just a cup of coffee. If you’ve got one made.’

  I should point out that Hilda, apparently anxious about the Rumpole girth (a fact of nature that has never troubled me in the least), had insisted lately that I take nothing but a plate of muesli (even though I dislike the taste of dried cardboard) and carrot juice for breakfast - a meal which caused me to rush off to the Tastee Bite, a greasy spoon in Fleet Street, for an emergency cholesterol replacement.

  Now she made a surprising offer. ‘What can I cook you? Bacon? A couple of sausages? Two eggs sunny side up on a fried slice? We might have some potatoes...’

  By now I was getting anxious. ‘Hilda, are you feeling quite well?’

  ‘Not altogether well, Rumpole. Hurt. Deeply hurt.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’ve had a letter from Dodo Mackintosh.’ The hand with which she lifted the sheet of notepaper from the table was, I thought, trembling. Dodo was one of her oldest friends, both having survived the tough experience of Saint Elfreda’s Boarding School for Girls. ‘You don’t think I’m bossy, do you, Rumpole?’

  For once in my long life at the Bar, I was stuck for a reply. I could only mutter, ‘Bossy? Of course not! Perish the thought!’

  ‘Dodo tells me I am.’

  I gave, I thought, a convincing imitation of a man who has just been told that the world is, contrary to all previously held beliefs, flat. ‘Why ever should your old friend Dodo Mackintosh say such a thing?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Hilda sighed. ‘I merely wrote and told her I thought her new living-room curtains were a horrible mistake, and that she should really find a more interesting subject for her watercolours than Lamorna Cove in the rain. Oh, and I probably reminded her that to go shopping in a T-shirt and jeans, topped with a baseball hat, at her age was simply to invite ridicule.’

  ‘Might you,’ I hazarded a guess, ‘have added something about mutton dressed as lamb?’

  ‘I possibly said something to that effect. But, Rumpole,’ she looked at me in what I took to be an appealing fashion, ‘I have made a New Year’s resolution.’ At this point, Hilda stood and spoke as though she were swearing an oath of allegiance to some great cause. ‘I shall never be bossy again. I shall do my very best,’ I couldn’t believe my ears, but she said this, ‘to respect the wishes of others. Including you.’

  She then cooked my fry-up and a great change seemed to have come over the world.

  Hilda’s resolution survived, and the change was decidedly marked, as the year stretched, yawned, staggered to its feet and began to set off on the same old search for briefs and moments of relaxation after Court in Pommeroy’s. Soapy Sam Ballard was full of his own importance, being widely reported in the tabloids for the prosecution of a stalker who had bombarded Jenny Turnbull, the famous television i
nterviewer and newsreader, with e-mails, telephone calls and other pathetically obscene communications. The stalker’s story was that Miss Turnbull had invited these attentions, a defence which even Soapy was having little difficulty in tearing apart.

  In view of the respect Hilda had shown for her New Year’s resolution, I did my best to stick to mine. I held open doors, rose from my seat in the Underground; I even, in a moment of temporary aberration, lifted my hat to an elderly male Judge, who looked at me as though I had gone harmlessly insane. In due course, I turned up at the charity dinner of Urchins Anonymous, a glittering occasion in a City Livery Hall (the Ancient Order of Button-makers), and as we sipped champagne under the chandeliers, and I saw many cheerful pink faces over so many stretched white shirt fronts, and so many female necks - some, I have no doubt, rejuvenated by tactful surgery - decorated with rows of pearls, and as I looked up at the portraits of so many well-fed Masters of the Button-makers, I thought of the ten-year-old girl whose bedroom was the church steps, and the sleeping boy with a dog for a hot-water bottle. I supposed, after all, that the money raised by lobster salad and rack of lamb, Château Talbot and Rumpole’s old jokes was of more use to children in flight from abusive stepfathers, missing mothers or even the police than no money at all.

  It was over the champagne and canapes that I saw her, a woman not to be outdone by any of them in the matter of pearls on the neck, her black dress revealing an expanse of white back. The contrast was emphasized by a white lock in her otherwise raven hair. She came up to me, smiling, and was introduced by the Director of UA.

  ‘Mr Rumpole, this is Marcia Endersley. One of our tireless voluntary workers. She organizes our urchin outings.’

  ‘Oh, but I recognize Mr Rumpole.’ The Endersley smile was charming, her voice low and vibrating with amusement. ‘He offered me his seat, when I was bringing the urchins back from the Harry Potter film.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t take it,’ I remembered.

  ‘I thought your need was probably greater than mine. I hear you’re going to give us some of your legal jokes. I’m sure they’ll go down terribly well.’

  She was smiling at me as she said it, but I had the distinct feeling that she was, in some obscure and subtle way, taking the piss.

  Fashions in crime are as changeable as the length of skirts, popular music or the food in so-called smart restaurants. Every year or so, the government picks a favourite crime, which, so it is said, is likely to rot the foundations of society and cause universal anarchy. It regularly promises to ‘crack down’ on the offence of the day, even to the extent of mandatory life sentences. When I was a young white-wig it was frauds on the Post Office and the stealing of stamps, then it was the trashing of telephone kiosks. Later, spraying graffiti on the walls of multi-storey car parks and high-rise flats was temporarily regarded as worse than manslaughter. At other moments of recent history it has been mugging, stealing mobile telephones and the theft of expensive cars.

  At that time, after I had emerged from the dreaded Primrose Path Home, the crime of the day was nicking articles from passengers on the Underground. The opportunities for theft were numerous down the Tube, and ever more rarely interrupted by the arrival of trains. In the crowds that packed every platform it was easy to deprive the waiting customers of their handbags, wallets and detachable jewellery. All this had led to many stern warnings from the Home Secretary and instructions to Judges to treat Underground theft as ranking somewhere between matricide and High Treason in the hit list of high crimes and misdemeanours.

  ‘Theft of a wallet in an Underground station, Mr Rumpole,’ our clerk Henry said when he handed me the brief. I received it with no high hopes of an easy victory or a lenient sentence. ‘Thank you, Henry,’ I said, ‘for nothing very much at all. By the way, you’re not looking particularly happy this morning.’

  ‘It’s that Miss Gribble, Mr Rumpole.’ Henry sat down despondently in my clients’ chair. ‘Just who does she think she is?’

  ‘I suppose she thinks she’s Miss Gribble, otherwise known as Luci with an “i”. Who else could she possibly be?’

  ‘Director of Marketing and Administration. She wants to see my diary. She wants to be kept informed about fees on a weekly basis. She says she wants me to self-assess.’

  ‘She wants you to what?’

  ‘Write an essay, like we did at school. About myself. My strengths and my weaknesses. Quite frankly, Mr Rumpole, I haven’t got the time for it. Do you think she’s after my job?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. Anyway you can leave Luci with her “i” to me. She was a great help in a case I won without even going to Court.’ I was referring, of course, to the Primrose Path affair. ‘I’ll have a word with her.’ I looked at the brief, which bore the familiar title R. v. Timson, and, as I read through the statements, my confidence began to ebb away. I might be able to smooth the troubled waters that ran between our clerk and the new Marketing Director, but yet another larceny at a Tube station might prove more than I could manage.

  My client in the case Henry had handed me was young Trevor Timson, a youth who had shown, by his previous convictions, little talent for the family business of ordinary, decent crime. His situation was not made more hopeful by my instructions from our solicitor, Bonny Bernard, who had come to the conclusion that the best we could do for the client was a plea in mitigation, if we could persuade him to put his hands up. And then, flipping through the papers, I saw something which gave us, if not hope, at least more than a glimmer of interest.

  The facts of the case were alarmingly simple. It happened around six o‘clock one weekday evening when the Tube station was crowded with released office workers. There had been numerous cases of dipped-into handbags, emptied hip pockets and pinched purses at that particular station, so the railway police were inconspicuously alert. Two of them were present in the lift when Mr Hornby, a company director who prided himself on his use of public transport, felt a fluttering disturbance in his breast pocket and found his wallet flown away. Being an old-fashioned sort of company director he called out ‘Stop, thief!’ and the railway policeman in the lift detained the passengers. Trevor Timson was unhesitantly denounced by a witness who said she saw him take the wallet, which was then found intact in his half-open shoulder bag. It contained three hundred pounds in crisp twenties.

  So Bernard and I sat in the Brixton Prison interview room with the young sprig of the Timson family, who had been denied bail because of the number of his previous convictions.

  ‘It’s no good, Trevor,’ Bonny Bernard said. ‘We’ve got to chuck in our hand. The prosecution’s got a cast-iron witness.’

  To me, the phrase ‘cast-iron witness’ represented a challenge - particularly when the name on that witness statement was Marcia Endersley.

  ‘This wonderful witness who says she saw you take the money,’ I asked Trevor. ‘Alone, was she? Or was someone with her?’

  ‘Lots of kids.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She had a party of kids with her. They were all excited and chattering. Like she was taking them out for a school treat.’

  I sat in the interview room and I saw it again. The smiling woman, hanging on to a strap, and the boy looking up at her, offering her a present in gratitude for being taken out. A bar of chocolate, was it? Or sweets? It didn’t look like sweets.

  ‘So it’s got to be a plea, Trevor.’ Bernard was prepared to throw in the towel as cheerfully as possible, but I ventured to disagree.

  ‘No, it’s not. Never plead guilty. Let that be your New Year’s resolution, Bonny Bernard.’

  As we walked away across the prison yard, Bernard seemed pained at my brisk dismissal of his order to run up the white flag of surrender.

  ‘I didn’t want to argue the case, Mr Rumpole, not in front of the client. You say fight it. But what the devil do you imagine we’re going to fight it with?’

  ‘The wallet,’ I said.

  ‘The wallet? We can hardly call a wallet to give evidence.
’

  ‘Oh yes we can. Talk to your friends in the Crown Prosecution Service. See if it’s been kept carefully, as an exhibit. Then persuade them to send it to forensic for a fingerprint test. We’ll need to know about all the prints, and whether they come from known offenders.’

  ‘Our client’s a known offender.’

  ‘So he is, Bonny Bernard, and that’s why we must be particularly careful to see he doesn’t get sent down for a crime he didn’t do.’

  ‘I still think we ought to plead guilty and throw ourselves on the mercy of the Court.’

  ‘Would you say that,’ I asked him, ‘if we had to throw ourselves on the mercy of Judge Bullingham?’

  And that seemed to shut the man up for the moment.

  I would very much like you to undress for me completely. I long to pour custard over you, and after the custard, tomato ketchup. I imagine this and lots of other things and I hope you don’t mind. I have no intention of forcing the custard on you. The whole incident would have to be entirely voluntary on your part. But if you feel as I do, I think we might have some really enjoyable times together.

  The document on which this extraordinary message was written was, as I understand it, the ‘print-out’ of an e-mail Luci with an ‘i’ had received. She had shown it to me unasked and uninvited, explaining that, as we had become ‘close’ since the Primrose Path case, she valued my advice and wanted to know how she should take the message. ‘Seeing who it comes from.’

  When she told me, the news was like a sudden revelation that Her Majesty the Queen was joining a travelling circus.

  ‘You don’t really mean that Soapy Sam Ballard sent you this?’

  ‘Chair sent it!’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

  ‘It was attached to an e-mail which said, “Perhaps you’d like to have a look at this and give me your reaction. S.B.” ’