Rumpole and the Angel of Death (33 page)

‘Of course I remember Hilda. She was such a quiet, shy girl at school.' I looked at Dr Betty, sitting in my client's chair in Chambers, and came to the conclusion that here was a quite unreliable witness. The suggestion of a quiet and shy Hilda was not, on the face of it, one that would satisfy the burden of proof.

‘She told me that you don't think life should be needlessly prolonged in certain circumstances. Is that right?'

‘Oh, yes.' The doctor, I judged, was in her late sixties but her smile was that of an innocent; her eyes behind her spectacles were shining with as girlish an enthusiasm as when she led her mustard-keen team out on to the hockey field. ‘Death is such a lovely thing when you're feeling really poorly,' she said. ‘I don't know why we don't all give it a hearty welcome.'

‘“The grave's a fine and private place,”' I reminded her, ‘“But none, I think, do there embrace.”'

‘How do we know, Mr Rumpole? How can we possibly know? Are you really sure there won't be any cuddles beyond the grave?'

‘Cuddles? I hardly think so.'

‘We're so prejudiced against the dead!' Dr Betty was almost giggling and her glasses were glinting. ‘Rather like there used to be prejudice against women when I went in for medicine. There must be so many really nice dead people!'

‘You believe in the afterlife?'

‘Oh, I think so. But whatever sort of life goes on after death, I'd be out of a job there, wouldn't I? No one would need a doctor.'

‘Or a barrister?' Or might there be some celestial tribunal at which a crafty advocate could get a sinner off hell? Plenty of briefs, of course, but my heart sank at the thought of eternal work before a jury of prejudiced saints. I decided to return to the business in hand. ‘Do you think that sufferers from Alzheimer's disease are appropriate candidates for the Elysian Fields?'

‘Of course they are! I'd fully decided to send old Chippy off there as soon as I judged the time was ripe.'

My heart sank further. The danger of having a conference with customers accused of murder is that they may tell you they did the deed and then, of course, the fight is over and you have no alternative but to stagger into Court with your hands up. That's why, during such conferences, it's much wiser to discuss the Maastricht Treaty or Whither the Deutschmark? than to refer directly to the crude facts of the charge. It was my error to have done so and now I had to tell Dr Betty that she had as good as pleaded guilty.

‘No, I haven't,' she told me, still, it seemed, in a merry mood. ‘I'm not guilty of anything.'

‘You're not?'

‘Of course not! It's true I was prepared to release old Chippy from this unsatisfactory world, when the time came.'

‘And it had come the night he died?'

‘No, it certainly had not! He was still having lucid intervals. I would have done it eventually, but not then.' I meant to rob the bank, Guv, but not on that particular occasion: it didn't sound much of a defence, but I was determined to make the most of it.

‘So do you think' – I threw Dr Betty a lifeline – ‘Chippy might have got depressed during the night and committed suicide?'

‘Of course not!' I'd never had a client who was so cheerfully anxious to sink herself. ‘He was an old soldier. He always told me that he regarded suicide as cowardice in the face of the enemy. He'd have battled on against all odds, until I decided to sound the retreat.'

It hadn't been an easy day and to go straight home to Froxbury Mansions without a therapeutic visit to Pommeroy's Wine Bar would have been like facing an operation without an anaesthetic. So, because my alcohol content had sunk to a dangerous low, I pushed open the glass door and made for the bar. I saw, on top of a stool, a crumpled figure slumped in deepest gloom and attacking what I thought was far from his first gin-and-Dubonnet. Closer examination proved him to be our learned clerk.

‘Cheer up, Henry,' I said, when I had called upon Jack Pommeroy to pour a large Chateau Fleet Street and mark it up on the slate. ‘It may never happen!'

‘It
has
happened, Mr Rumpole. And I could manage another of the same if you're ordering. Our new legal administrator has happened.'

‘You mean the blighter Blewitt?'

‘Tell me honestly, Mr Rumpole, have you ever seriously considered taking your own life?'

‘No.' It was perfectly true. Even in the darkest days, even when I was put on trial for professional misconduct after a run-in with a hostile judge and when She Who Must Be Obeyed's disapproval of my way of life meant that there was not only an east wind blowing in Froxbury Mansions but a major hurricane, I could always find solace in a small cigar, a glass of Pommeroy's plonk, a stroll down to the Old Bailey in the autumn sunshine and the possibility of a new brief to test my forensic skills. ‘I have never felt the slightest temptation to place my head in the gas oven.'

‘Neither have I,' Henry told me and I congratulated him. ‘We're all electric at home. But, I have to say, I'm tempted by a handful of aspirins.'

‘Messy,' I told him. ‘And, in my experience, not entirely dependable. But why this desperate remedy?'

‘I have lost everything, Mr Rumpole.'

‘Everything?'

‘Everything I care about. Dot Clapton and I. Our relationship is over.'

‘Really? I didn't think it ever began.'

‘Too right, Mr Rumpole. Too very right!' Our clerk laughed bitterly. ‘And my job has gone. What's my future? Staying at home . . .'

‘In Bexleyheath?'

‘Exactly. Helping out with a bit of shopping. Decorating the bathroom. And my wife will lose all respect for me as a breadwinner.'

‘Your wife, the Alderperson?'

‘Chairman of Social Services. It gives her a lot of status.'

‘You'll have a good deal of time for your amateur dramatics.'

‘I have been offered the lead in
Laburnum Grove.
I turned it down.'

‘But why, Henry?'

‘Because I'm losing my job, and I've got no heart left for taking on a leading role!'

Further inquiry revealed what I should have known if I'd had more of a taste for Chambers' meetings. The skinflint Bollard had decided to get rid of a decent old-fashioned barrister's clerk who got a percentage of our takings and to appoint a legal administrator, at what I was to discover was a ludicrously high salary. ‘Vince takes over at the end of the month,' Henry told me.

‘Vince?'

‘He asked me to call him Vince. He said that for us two to be on first-name terms would “ease the process”. And what makes me so bitter, Mr Rumpole, is I think he's got his eye on our Dot.' Mizz Clapton is so casually beautiful that I thought she must have many eyes on her, but I didn't think it would cheer up our soon to be ex-clerk to tell him that. Instead I gave him my considered opinion on what I took to be the heart or nub of the matter.

‘This man, Blewitt,' I said, ‘appears to be a considerable blot on the landscape.'

‘You're not joking, Mr Rumpole.'

‘One that must be removed for the general health of Chambers.'

‘And of me in particular, Mr Rumpole, as your long-serving and faithful clerk.'

‘Then all I can tell you, Henry, is that a way must be found.'

‘Agreed, Mr Rumpole, but who is to find it?'

It seemed to me a somewhat dimwitted question, and one that Henry would never have asked had he been entirely sober. ‘Who else?' I asked, purely rhetorically, ‘but the learned Counsel who found a defence in the Penge Bungalow affair, which looked, at first sight, even blacker than the case of the blot Blewitt – or even the predicament of Dr Betty Ireton.'

‘Then I'll leave it to you, Mr Rumpole.'

‘Many doubtful characters have said those very words, Henry, and not been disappointed.'

‘And I could do with another gin-and-Dubonnet, sir. Seeing as you're in the chair.'

So Jack Pommeroy added to the figure on the slate and Henry seemed to cheer up considerably. ‘I just heard a really ripe one in here, Mr Rumpole, from old Jo Castor who clerks Mr Digby Tappit in Crown Office Row. Do you know, sir, the one about the sleeveless woman?'

‘I do not know it, Henry. But I suppose I very soon shall.'

As a matter of fact I never did. My much-threatened clerk began to tell me this ripe anecdote which had an extremely lengthy build-up. Long before the delayed climax I shut off, being lost in my own thoughts. Did old Chippy Chippenham die in the course of nature or was he pushed? If he had been, would he have felt as merciful to Dr Betty as he had to my rustic client who shot his sick wife?

Had one long, confused afternoon arrived when Chippy muttered to himself, ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death'? The sound of the words gave me a lift only otherwise to be had from Pommeroy's plonk and I intoned privately and without interrupting Henry's flow:

‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!'

Then Henry laughed loudly; his story had apparently reached its triumphant and no doubt obscene conclusion. I joined in for the sake of manners, but now I was thinking that I had to win the case of Blewitt as well as that of Dr Betty, and I had no idea how I was to emerge triumphant from either.

‘We don't call this a memorial service. We call it a joyful thanksgiving for the life of his Honour Judge Chippenham.' So said the Reverend Edgedale, the Temple's resident cleric. Sitting at the back of the congregation, I thought that old Chippy wasn't in a position to mind much what we called it, and wondered if some of the villains he'd felt it necessary to send away to chokey would call it a joyful thanksgiving for his death. Chippy was dead, a word we all shy away from nowadays when almost anything else goes. What would Mizz Liz Probert have said? Old Chippy had become a non-living person. And

then I thought how glowingly Dr Betty had talked about Chippy's present position, happily unaware of the length of the sermon – ‘Chippy was the name he rejoiced in since his first term at Charterhouse, but you and I can hardly think of anyone with less of a chip on his shoulder' – and the increasing hardness of the pews. I looked around at the assembled mourners, Mr Injustice Graves, and various circuit judges and practising hacks who were no doubt wondering how soon they might expect a joyful thanksgiving for their own lives. I peered up at the stained-glass windows in the old round church built for the Knights Templar, who had gone off to die in the Crusades without the benefit of a memorial service, and then I fell into a light doze.

I was woken up by a peal on the organ and old persons stumbling across my knees, anxious to get out of the place which gave rise to uncomfortable thoughts of mortality. And, when we joined in the general rush for the light of day, I heard a gentle voice, ‘Mr Rumpole, how delighted Uncle Chippy would have been that you could join us.'

I focused on a pleasant-looking, youngish woman, pushing back loose hair which strayed across her forehead. Beside her stood an equally pleasant, tall man in his forties. Both of them smiled as though their natural cheerfulness could survive even this sad occasion.

‘Dick and Ursula Chippenham,' the tall man bent down considerately to inform me. ‘Uncle Chippy was always talking about you. Said you could be a devilish tricky customer in Court but he always enjoyed having you in for a jar when the battle was over.'

‘Chippy was so fond of his jar. What he wanted was to ask all his real friends back to toast his memory,' Ursula told me. ‘Do say you'll come!'

‘I honestly don't think . . .' What I meant to say was that I already felt a little guilty for slipping in to the memorial service of a man when I was defending his possible murderer. Could I, in all conscience, accept even one jar from his bereaved family?

‘It's thirty-one Dettingen Road, Holland Park.' Dick Chippenham smiled down on me from a great height. ‘Chippy would have been so delighted if you were there to say goodbye.'

As I say, I felt guilty but I also had a strong desire to see what we old-fashioned hacks call the
locus in quo
– the scene of the crime.

It was an English spring, that is to say, dark clouds pressed down on London and produced a doleful weeping of rain. I splurged out on a taxi from the Temple to Dettingen Road and spent some time in it while the approach to number thirty-one was blocked by a huge, masticating rubbish lorry which gave out strangled cries such as ‘This vehicle is reversing!' as it tried to extricate itself from a jam of parked cars. Whistling dustmen were collecting bins from the front entrance of sedate, white- stuccoed houses, pouring their contents into the jaws of the curiously articulate lorry and then returning the empty bins, together with a small pile of black plastic bags, given, by courtesy of the council, to their owners. I paid the immobile taxi off and took a brisk walk in the sifting rain towards number thirty-one. As I did so, I saw a solemn boy come down the steps of the house and, in a sudden, furtive motion, collect the black plastic bags from the top of the dustbin, stuff them under his school blazer and disappear into a side entrance of the house. I climbed up the front steps, rang the bell and was admitted by a butler-like person who I thought must have been specially hired for Chippy's send-off. Sounds of the usual high cocktail-party chatter with no particular note of grief in it were emerging from the sitting-room. The wake seemed to be a great deal more cheerful than the weather.

Ursula Chippenham bore down on me with a welcome glass of champagne. ‘We're so glad you came.' She moved me into a corner and spoke confidentially, much more in sorrow than in anger. ‘Dr Betty got on so terribly well with Chippy. We never thought for a moment that she'd do anything like that.'