Rumpole and the Primrose Path (10 page)

‘You mean you
all
hug each other?’

‘If you look on the noticeboard, you’ll see that Soapy Sam Ballard has commended the idea to ‘Everyone at Number 4 Equity Court’. He’s very pro-Luci because I told him she fancied him.’

‘Rumpole! Has the whole world gone mad?’

‘Only on Thursdays. That’s when we’re meant to hug each other. On Fridays Luci has decided that we dress down.’

‘What does that mean, exactly?’

‘It means that Ballard comes in wearing jeans and a red sweater with black diamonds on it. Oh, and white gym shoes, of course.’

‘You mean trainers?’

‘Probably.’

‘Do you dress down, Rumpole?’

‘Certainly not. I can’t afford the wardrobe. I stick to my working clothes: black jacket and striped trousers.’

‘I thought I saw Claude sneak out of the house in jeans. He hasn’t told me.’

‘Your Claude has a nervous disposition. I expect he was afraid you’d laugh at him.’

‘I certainly would. And about the hugging. Do you hug, Rumpole?’

‘Embrace our clerk Henry? Snuggle up to Ballard? Certainly not! I told them hugging always brought me out in a rash. I have a special dispensation not to do it for health reasons. It’s like taking the vegetarian dish.’

‘What did Ballard say when you told him you wouldn’t hug?’

‘He said I could just say “Good Morning” in an extra cheerful manner. Have I set your mind at rest?’

‘I suppose so.’ Phillida seemed reluctant to abandon a genuine cause for complaint against the unfortunate Claude. ‘Provided he doesn’t embrace that woman too enthusiastically. She’s far too old for that haircut.’

‘It was pure coincidence you came in at that moment,’ I told her. ‘If you’d come in ten minutes later you’d have found him wrapped around Hoskins, a balding, middle-aged man with numerous daughters.’

‘You’re always counsel for the defence, aren’t you, Rumpole?’

‘I can only say that, in any situation which looks guilty, I can sometimes offer an innocent alternative to the Jury.’

‘Bob Durden would call that another trick of the defender’s trade. Did you see him on the television the other night?’

‘I certainly did. And I just wish I had the chance to wake the Commander up to the reality of life when you’re on trial at the Old Bailey.’

At this the learned and beautiful Judge looked at me with some amusement, but my chance came sooner than either of us expected.

 

The earth-shaking news was read out by Hilda from her tabloid newspaper one morning in Froxbury Mansions. She looked seriously upset.

‘Feet of clay, Rumpole! That sensible policeman we saw on
Up to the Minute
turns out to have feet of clay!’

I had been trying to catch up with some last-minute instructions in a fairly complicated long firm fraud when She Who Must handed me the paper, from which the face of Bob Durden loomed solemn and severe beneath his cap. The headline, however, suggested that not only were his feet clay but the rest of him was by no means perfect senior-police-officer material. The Commander had been arrested on no less a charge than taking part in a conspiracy to murder. It took a good half-minute before I was able to suppress an unworthy tendency to gloat.

Of course I read every detail of the extraordinary case, in which it was suggested that the scourge of defence lawyers had been prepared to pay a contract killer to do away with a local doctor; but I was sure that the last member of the Bar he would call upon to defend him was that devious Rumpole who spent his life helping guilty villains walk free from court-rooms laughing triumphantly at the police. So the Commander took his place at the back of my mind, but I was on the lookout for developments in the newspapers.

One memorable day, Ballard appeared in my room with a look of sublime satisfaction and the air of a born commander about to issue battle orders. I have to say that he had smartened up a good deal since I let him know that our Director of Marketing and Administration nursed tender feelings for him. He had invested in a new suit, his hair was more dashingly trimmed by a Unisex Stylist, and he arrived in a chemical haze of aftershave which happily evaporated during the course of the day.

‘This, Rumpole,’ he told me, ‘will probably be the most famous case of my career. The story, you’ll have to admit, is quite sensational.’

‘What’s happened, Ballard?’ I had no wish to fuel Soapy Sam’s glowing self-satisfaction. ‘What’ve you landed now? Another seven days before the rating tribunal?’

‘I have been offered, Rumpole,’ the man was blissfully unaware of any note of sarcasm; he was genuinely proud of his eventful days in Court with rateable values, ‘the leading brief for the defence in
R. v. Durden.
It is, of course, tragic that a fine police officer should fall so low.’

Of course, I realized that the case called for a Q C (Queer Customer is what I call them) and, as I have said, that the defendant policeman would never turn to Rumpole in a time of trouble. I couldn’t help, however, feeling a momentary stab of jealousy at the thought of Ballard landing such a front-page, sensational cause célèbre.

‘He hasn’t fallen low yet.’ I thought it right to remind our Head of Chambers of the elementary rules of our trade. ‘And he won’t until the Jury come back to Court and pronounce him guilty. It’s your job to make sure they never do that.’

‘I know, Rumpole.’ Soapy Sam looked enormously brave. ‘I realize I have taken on an almost superhuman task and a tremendous responsibility. But I’ve been able to do you a good turn.’

‘What sort of good turn, exactly?’ I was doubtful about Ballard’s gifts, but then he told me.

‘You see, the Commander went to a local solicitor, Henry Crozier - we were at university together - and Henry knew that Durden wouldn’t want any flashy sort of clever-dick, defence Q C. The sort he’s spoken out against so effectively on the television.’

‘You mean he picked you because you’re not a clever dick?’

‘Dependable, Rumpole. And, I flatter myself, trusted by the Courts. And as I believe your practice has slowed down a bit since ...’

‘You mean since I died?’

‘Since you came back to us, I persuaded Henry Crozier to give you the Junior brief. Naturally, in a case of this importance, I shall do most of it myself. If the chance arises you might be able to call some formal, undisputed evidence. And of course you’ll take a note of my cross-examination. You’ll be capable of that, won’t you?’

‘My near-death experience has left me more than capable of conducting the most difficult trial.’

‘Don’t worry, old fellow.’ Soapy Sam was smiling at me in a way I found quite unendurable. ‘You won’t be called on to do anything like that.’

As I have said, Commander Durden’s patch was an area not far from London, and certain important villains had moved into it when London’s East End was no longer the crime capital. They ran chains of minicab firms, clubs and wine bars, they were shadowy figures behind Thai restaurants and garden centres. They dealt in hard drugs and protection rackets in what may have seemed, to a casual observer, to be the heart of Middle England. And no one could have been more Middle English than Doctor Petrus Wakefield, who carried on his practice in Chivering. This had once been a small market town with a broad main street, and had now had its heart ripped out to make way for a pedestrian precinct with a multi-storey car park, identical shops and strict regulations against public meetings or yobbish behaviour.

Doctor Wakefield, I was to discover, was a pillar of this community, tall, good-looking, in his fifties. He was a leading light in the Amateur Dramatic Society, chairman of various charities and the doting husband of Judy, pretty, blonde and twenty years his junior. Their two children, Simon and Sarah, were high achievers at a local private school. Nothing could have been more quietly successful, some might even say boring, than the Wakefields’ lives up to the moment when, so it was alleged, Commander Bob Durden took out a contract on the doctor’s life.

The local police force, as local forces did, relied on a body of informers, many of whom came with long strings of previous convictions attached to them, to keep them abreast of the crimes and misdemeanours which took place in this apparently prosperous and law-abiding community. According to my instructions, the use of police informers hadn’t been entirely satisfactory. There was a suspicion that some officers had been using them to form relationships with local villains, to warn them of likely searches and arrests and to arrange, in the worst cases, for a share of the spoils.

Commander Bob Durden was commended in the local paper ‘for the firm line he was taking and the investigation he was carrying out into the rumours of police corruption’. One of the informers involved was a certain Len ‘the Silencer’ Luxford, so called because of his old connections with quietened firearms, but who had, it seemed, retired from serious crime and started a window-cleaning business in Chivering. He was still able occasionally to pass on information, heard in pubs and clubs from his old associates, to the police.

According to Detective Inspector Mynot, Bob Durden met Len the Silencer in connection with his enquiry into police informers. Unusually, he saw Len alone and without any other officer being present. According to Len’s statement, the Commander then offered him five thousand pounds to ‘silence’ Doctor Wakefield, half down and half on completion of the task, the choice of weapons being left to the Silencer. Instead of carrying out these fatal instructions, Len, who owed, he said, a debt of gratitude to the doctor for the way he’d treated Len’s mother, warned his prospective victim, who reported the whole matter to Detective Inspector Mynot. The case might have been thought slender if Doctor Wakefield hadn’t been able to produce a letter from the Commander he’d found in his wife’s possession, telling Judy how blissfully happy they might be together if Petrus Wakefield vanished from the face of the earth.

Such were the facts which led to Bob Durden, who thought all Old Bailey defence hacks nothing but spanners in the smooth works of justice, employing me, as Ballard had made painfully clear, as his
junior
counsel.

‘I’m afraid I have to ask you this. Did you write this letter to Doctor Wakefield’s wife?’

‘I wrote the letter, yes. She must have left it lying about somewhere.’

‘You said you’d both be happy if Doctor Wakefield vanished from the face of the earth. Why did you want that?’

We were assembled in Ballard’s room for a conference. The Commander, on bail and suspended from his duties on full pay, wearing a business suit, was looking smaller than in his full-dress appearance on the television screen. His solicitor, Mr Crozier, a local man and apparently Ballard’s old university friend, had a vaguely religious appearance to go with his name; that is to say he had a warm smile, a crumpled grey suit and an expression of sadness at the sins of the world. His client’s answer to my leader’s question did absolutely nothing to cheer him up.

‘You see, Mr Ballard, we were in love. You write silly things when you’re in love, don’t you?’ The bark of authority we had heard on television was gone. The Commander’s frown had been smoothed away. He spoke quietly, almost gently.

‘And send silly e-mails to people who fancy you,’ I hoped Soapy Sam might say, but of course he didn’t. Instead he said, in his best Lawyers as Christians tone of deep solemnity, ‘You, a married man, wrote like that to a married woman?’

‘I’m afraid things like that do happen, Mr Ballard. Judy Wakefield’s an extremely attractive woman.’

There had been a picture of her in the paper, a small, smiling mother of two who had, apparently, fallen in love with a policeman.

‘And you, a police commander, wrote in that way to a doctor’s wife?’

‘I’m not particularly proud of how we behaved. But as I told you, we were crazy about each other. We just wanted to be together, that was all.’