Rumpole and the Angel of Death (3 page)

‘But isn't it' – I was prepared, as usual, to put forward the argument for the Defence – ‘a bit like saying the sky's blue?'

‘It's not at all like that. It's judging a woman by her appearance.'

‘And isn't the other judging the sky by its appearance?'

‘I suppose I should have known!' Mizz Probert stood up, all her sorrow turned to anger. ‘There's no crime so contemptible that you won't say a few ill-chosen words in its favour. And, don't you dare light that thing until I'm out of the room.'

‘I'm sure you're busy.'

‘I certainly am. We're having a special meeting tonight of the Sisterhood of Radical Lawyers. We aim to blacklist anyone who sends Claude briefs or appears in Court with him. We're going to petition the Judges not to listen to his arguments and Ballard's got to give him notice to quit.'

‘Mizz Liz,' I said, ‘how would you describe me?'

‘As a defender of hopeless causes.'

‘No, I mean my personal appearance.'

‘Well, you're fairly short.' The Prosecutor gave me the once over. ‘Your nose is slightly purple, and your hair – what's left of it – is curly and you're . . .'

‘Go on, say it.'

‘Well, Rumpole. Let's face it. You're fat.'

‘You said it.'

‘Yes.'

‘So should I get you blackballed in Court?'

‘Of course not.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because you're a man.'

‘I see.'

‘I shouldn't think you do. I shouldn't think you do for a moment.'

Mizz Probert left me then. Full of thought, I applied the match to the end of the small cigar.

It was some weeks later that Fred Timson, undisputed head of the Timson clan, was charged with receiving a stolen video recorder. The charge was, in itself, something of an insult to a person of Fred's standing and sensitivity. It was rather as if I had been offered a brief in a case of a non-renewed television licence, or, indeed, of receiving a stolen video recorder. I only took the case because Fred is a valued client and, in many respects, an old family friend. I never tire of telling Hilda that a portion of our family beef, bread, marmalade and washing-up liquid depends on the long life of Fred Timson and his talent for getting caught on the windy side of the law. I can't say that this home truth finds much favour with She Who Must Be Obeyed, who treats me, on these occasions, as though I were only a moderately successful petty thief working in Streatham and its immediate environs.

The Defence was elaborate, having to do with a repair job delivered to the wrong address, an alibi, and the fact that the chief prosecution witness was a distant relative of a member of the Molloy family – all bitter rivals and enemies of the Timsons. While Fred and I were drinking coffee in the Snaresbrook canteen, having left the Jury to sort out the complexities of this minor crime, I told him that I'd seen Tony Timson playing the King of the Fairies.

‘No, Mr Rumpole, you're mistaken about that, I can assure you, sir. Our Tony is not that way inclined.'

‘No, in
Midsummer Night's Dream.
An entirely heterosexual fairy. Married to the Fairy Queen.'

Fred Timson said nothing, but shook his head in anxious disbelief. I decided to change the subject. ‘I don't know if you've heard of one of Tony's fellow prisoners. Bob Weaver, a huge fellow. Started off as a boxer?'

‘Battering Bob Weaver!' Fred seemed to find the memory amusing. ‘That's how he was known. Used to do bare-knuckle fights on an old airfield near Colchester. And my cousin Percy Timson's young Mavis married Battering Bob's brother, Billy Weaver, as was wrongly fingered for the brains behind the Dagenham dairy-depot job. To be quite candid with you, Mr Rumpole, Billy Weaver is not equipped to be the brains behind anything. Pity about Battering Bob, though.'

‘You mean the way he went down for the Deptford minicab murder?'

‘Not that exactly. That's over and done with. No. The way he's deteriorated in the nick.'

‘Deteriorated?'

‘According as Mavis tells Percy, he has. Can't hold a decent conversation when they visits. It's all about books and that.'

‘I heard he's learnt to read.'

‘Mavis says the family's worried desperate. Bob spent all her visit telling her a poem about a nightingale. Well, what's the point of that? I mean, there can't be all that many nightingales round Worsfield Prison. Course, it's the other bloke they put it down to.'

‘Matthew Gribble?'

‘Is that the name? Anyway, seems Bob thinks the world of this chap. Says he's changed his life and that he worships him, Mr Rumpole. But Mavis reckons he's been a bad influence on Bob. I mean that Gribble's got terrible form. Didn't he kill his wife? No one in our family ever did that.'

‘Of course not. Although Tony Timson was rumoured to have attempted it.'

‘Between the attempt and the deed, as you well know, Mr Rumpole, there is a great gulf fixed. Isn't that true?'

‘Very true, Fred.'

‘And Mavis says Bob's been worse for the last three months. Nervous and depressed like as though he was dreading something.' What, I wondered, had been bugging Battering Bob? It couldn't have been the fact that his friend was in trouble for attacking a warden; that had only happened a month before. ‘I suppose,' I suggested, ‘it was stage-fright. They started rehearsing
Midsummer Night's Dream
around three months ago.'

‘You mean like he was scared of being in a play?'

‘He might have been.'

‘I hardly think a bloke what went single-handed against six Molloys during the minicab war would be scared of a bit of a play.'

It was then that the tireless Bernard came to tell me that the Jury were back with a verdict. Fred stood up, gave his jacket a tug, and strolled off as though he'd just been called in to dinner at the local Rotary Club. And I was left wondering again why Battering Bob Weaver should decide to be the sole witness against a man he had worshipped.

I got back to Chambers in a reasonably cheerful mood, the Jury having decided to give Uncle Fred the generous benefit of a rather small supply of doubt, and there waiting in my client's chair was another bundle of trouble. None other than Wendy Crump, Claude's pupil, clearly in considerable distress. ‘I had to talk to you,' she said, ‘because it's all so terribly unfair!'

Was unfair the right word, I wondered. Unkind, perhaps, but not unfair, unless she meant it as a general rebuke to the Almighty who handed out sylphlike beauty to the undiscerning few with absolutely no regard for academic attainment or moral worth. ‘Of course,' I said, ‘
I
think you look very attractive.'

‘What?' She looked at me surprised and, I thought, a little shocked.

‘In the days of Sir Peter Paul Rubens,' I assured her, ‘a girl with your dimensions would have been on page three of the
Sun,
if not on the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall.'

‘Please, Rumpole,' she said, ‘there are more important things to talk about.'

‘Well, exactly,' I assured her. ‘People have suggested that
I'm
a little overweight. They have- hinted that from time to time, but do I let it worry me? Do I decline the mashed spuds or the fried slice with my breakfast bacon? I do not. I let such remarks slide off me like water off a duck's back.'

‘Rumpole!' she said, a little sharply, I thought. ‘I don't think your physical appearance is anything to do with all this trouble.'

‘Is it not? I just thought that we're birds of a feather.'

‘I doubt it!' This Mizz Crump could be very positive at times. ‘I came to see you about Erskine-Brown.'

‘Of course, he shouldn't have said it.' I was prepared, as I have said, to accept the brief for the Defence. ‘It was just one of those unfortunate slips of the tongue.'

‘You mean he shouldn't have told me about Kate Inglefield?'

‘What's he told you about Mizz Inglefield? You mean that rather bright young solicitor from Damiens? She's quite skinny, as far as I can remember.'

‘Rumpole, why do you keep harping on people's personal appearances?'

‘Well, didn't Claude say . . .?'

‘Claude told me that Kate Inglefield had decided never to brief him again. And she's taken his VAT fraud away from him. And Christine Dewsbury, who's meant to be his junior in a long robbery, has said she'll never work with him again, and Mr Ballard . . .'

‘The whited sepulchre who is Head of our Chambers?'

‘Mr Ballard has been giving him some quite poisonous looks.'

‘Those aren't poisonous looks. That's Soapy Sam's usual happy expression.'

‘He's hinted that Erskine-Brown may have to look for other Chambers. He's such a wonderful advocate, Rumpole!'

‘Well now, let's say he's an advocate of sorts.'

‘And a fine man! A man with very high principles.' I listened in some surprise. Was this the Claude I had seen stumbling into trouble and lying his way out of it over the last twenty years? ‘And he has absolutely no idea why he is being victimized.'

‘Has he not?'

‘None whatever.'

‘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.