A Rumpole Christmas Read online

  She had watched many rehearsals and knew every word, every gag, every nudge, wink and shrill complaint of the Dame’s part. She had played it to perfection to give her husband an alibi while he went back to his old job in Croydon. It all went perfectly, even though Uncle Abanazer, dancing with her, had felt an unexpected softness.

  I had known, instinctively, that something was very wrong. It had, however, taken some time for me to realize what I had really seen that night at the Tufnell Park Empire. It was nothing less than an outrage to a Great British Tradition. The Widow Twankey was a woman.

  DI Grimble made his arrest and the case against Denis Timson was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. As spring came to the Temple gardens, Hilda opened a letter in the other case which had turned on the recognition of old, familiar faces and read it out to me.

  “The repointing’s going well on the tower and we hope to have it finished by Easter,” Poppy Longstaff had written. “And I have to tell you, Hilda, the oil-fired heating has changed our lives. Eric says it’s like living in the tropics. Cooking supper last night I had to peel off one of my cardigans.” She Who Must Be Obeyed put down the letter from her old school friend and said, thoughtfully, “Noblesse oblige.”

  “What was that, Hilda?”

  “I could tell at once that Donald Compton was a true gentleman. The sort that does good by stealth. Of course, poor old Eric thought he’d never get the tower mended, but I somehow felt that Donald wouldn’t fail him. It was noblesse.”

  “Perhaps it was,” I conceded, “but in this case the noblesse was Rumpole’s.”

  “Rumpole! What on earth do you mean? You hardly paid to have the church tower repointed, did you?”

  “In one sense, yes.”

  “I can’t believe that. After all the years it took you to have the bathroom decorated. What on earth do you mean about your noblesse?”

  “It’d take too long to explain, old darling. Besides, I’ve got a conference in chambers. Tricky case of receiving stolen surgical appliances. I suppose,” I added doubtfully, “it may lead, at some time in the distant future, to an act of charity.”

  Easter came, the work on the tower was successfully completed and I was walking back to chambers after a gruelling day down at the Bailey when I saw, wafting through the Temple cloisters, the unlikely apparition of the Revd Eric Longstaff. He chirruped a greeting and said he’d come up to consult some legal brains on the proper investment of what remained of the Church Restoration Fund.

  “I’m so profoundly grateful,” he told me, “that I decided to invite you down to the rectory last Christmas.”

  “You decided?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “I thought your wife Poppy extended the invitation to She ...”

  “Oh, yes. But I thought of the idea. It was the result of a good deal of hard knee-work and guidance from above. I knew you were the right man for the job.”

  “What job?”

  “The Compton job.”

  What was this? The rector was speaking like an old con. The Coldsands caper? “What can you mean?”

  “I just mean that I knew you’d defended Donald Compton. In a previous existence.”

  “How on earth did you know that?”

  Eric drew himself up to his full, willowy height. “I’m not a prison visitor for nothing,” he said proudly. “I thought you were just the chap to put the fear of God into him. You were the very person to put the squeeze on the Lord of the Manor.”

  “Put the squeeze on him?” Words were beginning to fail me.

  “That was the idea. It came to me as a result of knee-work.”

  “So you brought us down to that freezing rectory just so I could blackmail the local benefactor?”

  “Didn’t it turn out well!”

  “May the Lord forgive you.”

  “He’s very forgiving.”

  “Next time,” I spoke to the Man of God severely, “the Church can do its blackmailing for itself.”

  “Oh, we’re quite used to that.” The rector smiled at me in what I thought was a lofty manner. “Particularly around Christmas.”

  Rumpole and the Christmas Break

  I

  “We must be constantly on guard. Night and day. Vigilance is essential. I’m sure you would agree, wouldn’t you, Luci?”

  Soapy Sam Ballard, our always-nervous Head of Chambers, addressed the meeting as though the forces of evil were already beating on the doors of 4 Equity Court, and weapons of mass destruction had laid waste to the dining hall, condemning us to a long winter of cold meat and sandwiches. As usual, he longed for confirmation and turned to our recently appointed Head of Marketing and Administration, who was now responsible for the chambers’ image.

  “Quite right, Chair.” Luci’s North Country voice sounded quietly amused, as though she didn’t take the alarming state of the world quite as seriously as Ballard did.

  “Thank you for your contribution, Luci.” Soapy Sam, it seemed, thought she might have gone a little further, such as recommending that Securicor mount a twenty-four-hour guard on the Head of Chambers. Then he added, in a voice of doom, “I have already asked our clerk to keep an extremely sharp eye on the sugar kept in the coffee cupboard.”

  “Why did you do that?” I ventured to ask our leader. “Has Claude been shovelling it in by the tablespoonful?”

  Claude Erskine-Brown was one of the few barristers I have ever met who combined a passionate affection for Wag ner’s operas with a remarkably sweet tooth, continuously sucking wine gums in court and loading his coffee with heaped spoonfuls of sugar.

  “It’s not that, Rumpole.” Soapy Sam was getting petulant. “It’s anthrax.”

  “What anthrax?”

  “The sugar might be. There are undoubtedly people out there who are out to get us, Rumpole. Haven’t you been l istening at all to government warnings?”

  “I seem to remember them telling us one day that if we went down the Tube we’d all be gassed, and the next day they said, ‘Sorry, we were only joking. Carry on going down the Tube.’ ”

  “Rumpole! Do you take nothing seriously?”

  “Some things,” I assured Soapy Sam. “But not the Govern ment.”

  “We are,” here Ballard ignored me as an apparently hopeless case, and addressed the meeting, “especially vulnerable.”

  “Why’s that?” I was curious enough to ask.

  “We represent the law, Rumpole. The centre of a civilized society. Naturally we’d be high on their hit list.”

  “You mean the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and Number 4 Equity Court? I wonder, you may be right.”

  “I propose to appoint a small chambers emergency committee consisting of myself, Claude Erskine-Brown and Archie Prosser. Please report to one of us if you notice anything unusual or out of the ordinary. I assume you have nothing to report, Rumpole?”

  “Nothing much. I did notice a chap on the Tube. A fellow of Middle Eastern appearance wearing a turban and a beard and muttering into a Dictaphone. He got out at South Kensington. I don’t suppose it’s important.”

  Just for a moment, I thought—indeed, I hoped—our Head of Chambers looked at me as though he believed what I had said, but then justifiable doubt overcame him.

  “Very funny,” Ballard told the meeting. “But then you can scarcely afford to be serious about the danger we’re all in, can you, Rumpole? Considering you’re defending one of these maniacs.”

  “Rumpole would defend anyone,” said Archie Prosser—the newest arrival in our chambers—who had an ill-deserved reputation as a wit.

  “If you mean anyone who’s put on trial and tells me they’re innocent, then the answer is yes.”

  Nothing alarming happened on the Tube on my way home that evening, except for the fact that, owing to a “work to rule” by the drivers, the train gave up work at Victoria and I had to walk the rest of the way home to Froxbury Mansions in the Gloucester Road. The shops and their windows were full of glitter, ar
tificial snow and wax models perched on sleighs wearing party dresses. Taped carols came tinkling out of Tesco’s. The chambers meeting had been the last of the term, and the Old Bailey had interrupted its business for the season of peace and goodwill.

  There was very little of either in the case which I had been doing in front of the aptly named Mr Justice Graves. Mind you, I would have had a fairly rough ride before the most reasonable of judges. Even some compassionate old darlings like Mr Justice “Pussy” Proudfoot might have regarded my client with something like horror and been tempted to dismiss my speech to the jury as a hopeless attempt to prevent a certain conviction and a probable sentence of not less than thirty years. The murder we had been considering, when we were interrupted by Christmas, had been cold-blooded and merciless, and there was clear evidence that it had been the work of a religious fanatic.

  The victim, Honoria Glossop, Professor of Comparative Religion at William Morris University in East London, had been the author of a number of books, including her latest, and last, publication Sanctified Killing—A History of Religious Warfare. She had been severely critical of all acts of violence and aggression—including the Inquisition and the Crusades—committed in the name of God. She had also included a chapter on Islam which spoke scathingly of some ayatollahs and the cruelties committed by Islamic fundamentalists.

  It was this chapter which had caused my client, a young student of computer technology at William Morris named Hussein Khan, to issue a private fatwa. He composed, on one of the university computers, a letter to Professor Glossop announcing that her blasphemous references to the religious leaders of his country deserved nothing less than death—which would inevitably catch up with her. Then he left the letter in her pigeonhole.

  It took very little time for the authorship of the letter to be discovered. Hussein Khan was sent down from William Morris and began spending his time helping his family in the Star of Persia restaurant they ran in Golders Green. A week later, Professor Glossop, who had been working late in her office at the university, was found slumped across her desk, having been shot at close quarters by a bullet from a revolver of Czech origins, the sort of weapon which is readily and cheaply available in certain South London pubs. Beside her on the desk, now stained with her blood, was the letter containing the sentence of death.

  Honoria and her husband Richard “Ricky” Glossop lived in what the estate agents would describe as “a three-million-pound town house in the Boltons.” The professor had, it seemed, inherited a great deal of money from a family business in the Midlands which allowed her to pursue her academic career, and Ricky to devote his life to country sports without the need for gainful employment. He was clearly, from his photographs in the papers, an outstandingly handsome figure, perhaps five or six years younger than his wife. After her murder, he received, and everyone felt deserved, huge public sympathy. He and Honoria had met when they were both guests on a yacht touring the Greek Islands, and she had chosen him and his good looks in preference to all the available professors and academic authors she knew. In spite of their differences in age and interests, they seemed to have lived happily together for ten years until, so the prosecution said, death overtook Honoria Glossop in the person of my now universally hated client.

  Such was the case I was engaged in at the Old Bailey in the run-up to Christmas. There were no tidings of great joy to report. The cards were stacked dead against me, and at every stage it looked like I was losing, trumped by a judge who regarded defence barristers as flies on the tasty dish of justice.

  Mr Justice Graves, known to me only as “The Old Gravestone,” had a deep, sepulchral voice and the general appearance of a man waking up with an upset stomach on a wet weekend. He had clearly come to the conclusion that the world was full of irredeemable sinners. The nearest thing to a smile I had seen on the face of The Old Gravestone was the look of grim delight he had displayed when, after a difficult case, the jury had come back with the guilty verdict he had clearly longed for.

  So, as you can imagine, the atmosphere in Court Number One at the Old Bailey during the trial of the Queen against Hussein Kahn was about as warm as the South Pole during a blizzard. The Queen may have adopted a fairly detached attitude towards my client, but the judge certainly hadn’t.

  The prosecution was in the not altogether capable hands of Soapy Sam Ballard, which was why he had practically named me as a founding member of Al Qaeda at our chambers meeting. His junior was the newcomer Archie Prosser.

  These two might not have been the most deadly optimists I had ever had to face during my long career at the Bar, but a first-year law student with a lowish IQ would, I thought, have had little difficulty in securing a conviction against the young student who had managed to become one of the most hated men in England.

  As he was brought up from the cells and placed in the dock between two prison officers, the jury took one brief, appalled look at him and then turned their eyes on what seemed to them to be the less offensive figure of Soapy Sam as he prepared to open his devastating case.

  So I sat at my end of counsel’s benches. The brief had been offered to several QCs (“Queer Customers” I always call them), but they had excused themselves as being too busy, or unwell, or going on holiday—any excuse to avoid being cast as leading counsel for the forces of evil. It was only, it seemed, Rumpole who stuck to the old-fashioned belief that the most outrageous sinner deserves to have his defence, if he had one, put fairly and squarely in front of a jury.

  Mr Justice Gravestone didn’t share my views. When Ballard rose he was greeted with something almost like a smile from the bench, and his most obvious comments were underlined by a judicious nod followed by a careful note underlined in the judicial notebook. Every time I rose to cross-examine a prosecution witness, however, Graves sighed heavily and laid down his pencil as though nothing of any significance was likely to emerge.

  This happened when I had a few pertinent questions to ask the pathologist, my old friend Professor Arthur Ackerman, forensic scientist and master of the morgues. After he had given his evidence about the cause of death (pretty obvious), I started off.

  “You say, Professor Ackerman, that the shot was fired at close quarters?”

  “Yes, Mr Rumpole. Indeed it was.” Ackerman and I had been through so many bloodstained cases together that we chatted across the court like old friends.

  “You told us,” I went on, “that the bullet entered the deceased’s neck—she was probably shot from behind—and that, among other things, the bullet severed an artery.”

  “That is so.”

  “So, as a result, blood spurted over the desk. We know it was on the letter. Would you have expected the person, whoever it was, who shot her at close quarters to have had some blood on his clothing?”

  “I think that may well have happened.”

  “Would you say it probably happened?”

  “Probably. Yes.”

  When I got this answer from the witness, I stood awhile in silence, looking at the motionless judge.

  “Is that all you have to ask, Mr Rumpole?”

  “No, My Lord. I’m waiting so Your Lordship has time to make note of the evidence. I see Your Lordship’s pencil is taking a rest!”

  “I’m sure the jury has heard your questions, Mr Rumpole. And the answers.”

  “I’m sure they have, and you will no doubt remind them of that during your summing up. So I’m sure Your Lordship will wish to make a note.”

  Gravestone, with an ill grace, picked up his pencil and made the shortest possible note. Then I asked Ackerman my last question.

  “And I take it you know that the clothes my client wore that evening were minutely examined and no traces of any bloodstains were found?”

  “My Lord, how can this witness know what was on Khan’s clothing?” Soapy Sam objected.

  “Quite right, Mr Ballard,” the judge was quick to agree. “That was an outrageous question, Mr Rumpole. The jury will disregard it.”

&nbs
p; It got no better. I rose, at the end of a long day in court, to cross-examine Superintendent Gregory, the perfectly decent officer in charge of the case.

  “My client, Mr Khan, made no secret of the fact that he had written this threatening letter, did he, Superintendent Gregory?”

  “He did not, My Lord,” Gregory answered with obvious satisfaction.

  “In fact,” said Mr Justice Graves, searching among his notes, “the witness Sadiq told us that your client boasted to him of the fact in the university canteen.”

  There, at last, The Gravestone had overstepped the mark.

  “He didn’t say ‘boasted.’ ”

  Soapy Sam Ballard QC, the alleged Head of our Chambers, got up with his notebook at the ready.

  “Sadiq said that Khan told him he had written the letter and, in answer to Your Lordship, that ‘he seemed to feel no sort of guilt about it.’ ”

  “There you are, Mr Rumpole.” Graves also seemed to feel no sort of guilt. “Doesn’t that come to exactly the same thing?”

  “Certainly not, My Lord. The word ‘boasted’ was never used.”

  “The jury may come to the conclusion that it amounted to boasting.”

  “They may indeed, My Lord. But that’s for them to decide, without directions from Your Lordship.”

  “Mr Rumpole,” here the judge adopted an expression of lofty pity, “I realize you have many difficulties in this case. But perhaps we may proceed without further argument. Have you any more questions for this officer?”

  “Just one, My Lord.” I turned to the superintendent. “This letter was traced to one of the university word processors.”

  “That is so, yes.”

  “You would agree that my client took no steps at all to cover up the fact that he was the author of this outrageous threat.”