Rumpole and the Primrose Path (9 page)

‘It was very quick. A matter of seconds.’

‘I’m sure it was. And it must have been done by magic. He must have spirited the thing through the air without touching it.’

Now the Jury had stopped laughing and were looking at the witness with renewed interest.

‘I don’t know how he got it out.’ She did her best to look bored with my questions.

‘Let me tell you a little more about the fingerprints. The owner of the wallet had left his, of course. But there were some other prints, rather small, left by someone with a police record. A young boy, no more than twelve years old, who had a conviction for stealing. Was he one of your Anonymous Urchins? A boy called Chris Hemmings. Did you take him out on one of these trips?’

‘I’ve no idea. I can’t remember all their names.’

‘Can’t you really? But you remembered to wear gloves. Was that so you would leave no fingerprints on stolen wallets?’

‘Mr Rumpole!’ The horns were lowered and the Bull was pawing the ground. ‘In all my years on the Bench I have never heard such an outrageous suggestion. I think you should consider your own position very carefully unless you withdraw it. Are you seriously suggesting that this lady, of unblemished character, who devotes her spare time to taking out deprived inner-city children to such places as the Science Museum, actually stole this man’s wallet? On the Underground?’

‘She didn’t steal it, my Lord. One of the children she carefully trained, and no doubt rather inadequately paid, stole it. She received it, though. And when she saw that the railway police were going to make a search she got rid of it, in the nearest open bag she saw, which happened to be Trevor Timson’s. And then she denounced him as a thief.’ I thought I’d said quite enough to the Judge and turned to that selfless philanthropist, the Mrs Fagin of the Underground. ‘Is that the truth?’

‘That is absolute nonsense!’

She was looking only a little less composed, but her hand grabbed the rail of the witness box as though she had a sudden fear of falling. I paused as I remembered what I had seen when I offered her my seat. A young boy who was giving her something. Not sweets. Not a message. I remembered the colour. Was it - I felt sure now that it was - the faded brown of folding money. Before the Bull could roar again, I spoke to the witness.

‘Let’s examine it, shall we? And see whether it’s nonsense or not. You took these children out to museums and occasional cinemas. Perhaps gave them tea. Who paid?’

‘I’ve told you. I paid.’

‘So they had no occasion to give you money.’

‘None at all.’

‘You’re saying they didn’t have money with them?’

‘None at all.’

‘So if anyone was to say they’d seen a boy hand you what looked like a wad of tenners, that would be untrue?’

‘That would be quite untrue. Yes.’

‘That would be quite untrue.’ The Bull was making a careful note of the answer and I had a bad moment, thinking I would have to go into the witness box and tell the Jury what I had seen: a small, gap-toothed, grinning boy handing her bank notes, which she grasped quickly in a gloved hand.

It never came to that. Halfway through that morning, Archie Prosser, for the prosecution, asked for an adjournment. A couple of children had been caught in an attempted handbag-pinching on the Circle Line. They had told the whole story of Mrs Endersley’s tireless work for inner-city youth and a surprise visit to her flat in Primrose Hill revealed a large quantity of handbags, wallets, watches, and money. The trial of the confident woman, who kept her white lock because she was so sure she’d never have to be identified, is fixed for next month. I doubt very much whether she’ll want me to defend her.

 

What I find hard to forget is the sight of the boy asleep in a doorway with a dog. Was he, perhaps, one of Marcia Endersley’s failed pickpockets, sent back by her to the anonymity of the streets so that he couldn’t be questioned? I think of the grand dinner in the Ancient Order of Button-makers and the girl sleeping every night on the church steps, and wonder if the children of Ignorance and Want must always be with us. Or, worse still, always be used.

Briefed by Soapy Sam Ballard, I told Luci of his deep love for her and his resolve to abstain, for the sake of the image of Chambers, from thoughts of a deeper intimacy or anything connected with custard. She took the news bravely and could be caught staring at the Chair, during Chambers meetings, with love and understanding.

And, one morning, Hilda and I returned to a subject which seemed to have dominated recent events.

‘I really don’t know whether it’s worth making New Year’s resolutions,’ I told her at breakfast. ‘You know why Trevor Timson was on the Underground when he got arrested?’

‘No. Why?’

‘He’d made a New Year’s resolution to visit his Probation Officer, a duty he occasionally skipped. On the other hand -’

‘What’s the other hand?’

‘If you hadn’t kept me to a New Year’s resolution to offer my seat to ladies on trains, I’d never have seen those stolen tenners popped into Mrs Endersley’s welcoming gloves.’

‘And what about
my
New Year’s resolution?’ Hilda looked doubtful. ‘Now I come to think about it, I’m not sure it was necessary. Dodo Mackintosh sometimes talks an awful lot of nonsense.’

‘I quite agree.’

‘I’m not really bossy, am I?’

‘Perish the thought.’

‘Good. I’m glad you said that. And by the way, you’ve got to stop eating all that fried food at breakfast. You’re putting on far too much weight.’

So we were in another year when my fry-up, once again, would be taken at the Tastee Bite in Fleet Street. All new resolutions would fade into the past and normal life, for better or for worse, would be resumed.

‘The Scales of Justice have tipped in the wrong direction.

That’s all I’m saying, Jenny. Now it’s all in favour of the defence, and that makes our job so terribly hard. I mean, we catch the villains and, ten to one, they walk away from Court laughing.’

Bob Durden, resplendent in his Commander’s uniform, appeared in the living-room of Froxbury Mansions in the Gloucester Road. He was in conversation with Jenny Turnbull, the hard-hitting and astute interviewer on the
Up to the Minute
programme.

‘You’ve got to admit he’s right, Rumpole.’ She Who Must Be Obeyed could be as hard-hitting and astute as Jenny. ‘Things have gone too far. It’s all in favour of the defence.’

‘Why don’t you - and the Commander, of course - try defending some unfortunate innocent before the Mad Bull down the Old Bailey? You’d have a Judge who’s longing to pot your client, and is prepared to use every trick in the book to get the Jury on his side, and a prosecutor who can afford to make all the enquiries and is probably keeping quiet about evidence that’s slightly favourable to the defence, and a Jury out for revenge because someone stole their car radios. Then you’d find out how much things are slanted in favour of the defence.’

‘Oh, do be quiet.’ She Who Must didn’t have time for a legal argument. ‘I’m trying to listen to the Commander.’

Bob Durden ruled the forces of law and order in an area, half crowded countryside, half sprawling suburbs, to the north of London. When the old East End died, and its streets and squares became inhabited by upwardly mobile media persons, ethnic restaurants and the studios of conceptual artists, it was to Commander Durden’s patch that the forces of lawlessness moved. He was a large, broad-shouldered, loose-lipped man who spoke as though he were enjoying some secret joke.

‘But aren’t there cases when the police haven’t been exactly on the side of the law?’ said Jenny Turnbull.

Well done, Jenny, I thought. It’s about time someone asked that question.

Hilda, however, took a different view. ‘That girl,’ she said, ‘should learn to show respect to the people she’s interviewing. After all, the man is a Commander. She could at least be polite.’

‘She’s far too polite, in my opinion. If I were cross-examining I’d be a good deal less respectful.’ I addressed the television set directly. ‘When are your officers going to stop bribing witnesses by putting them up in luxurious, all-expenses-paid hotels, and improving on confession statements?’

‘Do be quiet, Rumpole! You’re worse than that Turnbull woman, interrupting that poor man.’

‘You know who I blame, Jenny? I blame the lawyers. The “learned friends” in wigs. Are they part of the Justice System? Part of the Injustice System, if you want my honest opinion.’ The Commander spoke from the television set, in a tone of amused contempt to which I took the greatest exception. ‘It’s all a game to them, isn’t it? Get your guilty client off and collect a nice fat-cat fee from Legal Aid for your trouble.’

‘Have you got any particular barrister in mind?’ Jenny Turnbull clearly scented a story.

‘Well, Jenny, I’m not naming names. But there are regular defenders down at the Old Bailey and they’ll know who I mean. There was a case some time ago. Theft in the Underground. The villain, with a string of previous convictions, had the stolen wallet in his backpack. Bang to rights, you might say. This old brief pulled a few defence tricks and the culprit walked free. We get to know them, “Counsel for the Devious Defence”, and quite frankly there’s very little we can do about them.’

‘Absolute rubbish!’ I shouted fruitlessly at the flickering image of the Commander. ‘Trevor Timson got off because he was entirely innocent. Are you saying that everyone with previous convictions should be found guilty regardless of the facts? Is
that
what you’re saying?’

‘It’s no good at all you shouting at him, Rumpole.’ Hilda was painfully patient. ‘He can’t hear a word you’re saying.’ As usual, She Who Must Be Obeyed was maddeningly correct.

 

A considerable amount of time passed, a great quantity of Château Thames Embankment flowed down parched legal throats in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, a large number of custodial sentences were handed out to customers down the Bailey, and relatively few of those detained there went off laughing. Gradually, as the small shoots of promise appear when spring follows winter, my practice began to show signs of an eventual bloom. I progressed from petty thievery (in the case of the New Year’s Resolutions) to more complicated fraud, from actual to grievous bodily harm, and from an affray outside a bingo hall to a hard-fought manslaughter in a sauna. It was in the months before I managed to play my part in the richly rewarding case - in satisfaction rather than money - that I am about to record. I was sitting in my Chambers room enjoying an illicit small cigar (Soapy Sam Ballard was still in the business of banning minor pleasures) and leafing through
The Oxford Book of English Verse
in search of a suitable quotation to use in my final speech in a case of alleged gross indecency in Snaresbrook, when a brisk knock at the door was followed by the entrance of none other that Dame Phillida Erskine-Brown, once the much-admired Portia of our Chambers, now the appealing occupant of Judicial Benches from the Strand and Ludgate Circus to Manchester and Exeter Crown Court.

‘You’ll never guess what I’ve seen, Rumpole! Never in a million years!’ Her Ladyship was in what can only be described as a state of outrage, and whatever she had seen had clearly not been a pretty sight. ‘I just dropped in to tell Claude he’ll have to look after the children tonight because I’ve got a dinner with the Lord Chancellor and the babysitter’s got evening classes.’

‘All part of the wear and tear of married life?’

‘It’s not that. It’s what I saw in the clerk’s room. In front of Henry and Denise. Claude, flagrantly in the arms of another woman!’

‘When you say in the arms of -’ I merely asked for clarification. ‘What were they doing, exactly? I take it they weren’t kissing each other?’

‘Not that. No. They were hugging.’

‘Well, that’s all right then.’ I breathed a sigh of relief. ‘If they were only hugging.’

‘What do you mean, “That’s all right then”? I said “Am I disturbing something?” and walked straight out of the clerk’s room and came to see you, Rumpole. I must say I expected you to take this extraordinary conduct of Claude’s rather more seriously.’

I couldn’t help remembering the time when Dame Phillida, once the nervous pupil whom I’d found in my room in tears, now a Judge of the Queen’s Bench, had herself tugged a little at the strict bonds of matrimony and conceived an inexplicable passion for a Doctor Tom Gurnley, a savagely punitive right-wing Tory MP who believed in mandatory prison sentences for the first whiff of cannabis, and whom I had had to defend in the case of the Camberwell Carrot. I suppose it wasn’t an exact parallel - the Learned Judge had not been discovered embracing the old hanger and flogger in our clerk’s room.

Now that the Erskine-Browns’ marriage seemed to have sailed into calmer waters, I was unwilling to rock the boat. I offered an acceptable solution.

‘Exactly whom was your husband hugging?’

‘I couldn’t see much of her. She seemed to have blonde hair. Not entirely convincing, I thought.’

‘A black trouser suit? Shiny boots?’

‘I think so, now you mention it.’

‘Then that would be our new Director of Marketing and Administration.’

‘I believe Claude told me you have one of them. So that makes it perfectly all right, does it?’ I could see that the Judge was not entirely satisfied. ‘Is part of her job description snogging my husband?’

‘Not snogging. Hugging.’

‘All right then, hugging. Is that her job—is that what you’re saying?’

‘Provided it’s Thursday.’

‘Rumpole! Are you feeling quite well?’

‘Her name is Luci. She spells it with an “i”.’

‘Does she do that to irritate people?’

‘That might well be part of it. And she had the idea that we should all hug each other at work on Thursday. She said it would improve our corporate spirit and lead to greater harmony in the workplace.’