Rumpole Misbehaves (3 page)

The case Bonny Bernard had sent me seemed in the best tradition of English murders since the far-off days of Jack the Ripper and the Camden Town affair. The tragedy of the unfortunate girls who go on the game is that they all too easily fall victim to manual strangulation.

The difference between these classic cases and the brief I was eagerly noting was that, in my present case, a death in Flyte Street, a small turning off Sussex Gardens near to Paddington Station, the alleged culprit was arrested in the dead girl's room and there seemed to be no mystery about it.

My client was Graham Wetherby, thirty-three, single, a clerk in a government department. He had an address in Morden, on the outskirts of London, and, according to his statement, he lived alone in a bed-sitting room, travelling up every day to Queen Anne's Gate and the Home Office.

The case against Wetherby was a simple one. On the date in question he telephoned the address in Flyte Street where Ludmilla Ravenskaya, a Russian immigrant, carried on her profession. His call was answered by Anna McKinnan, who acted as Miss Ravenskaya's maid and was the main witness for the prosecution. My client left his work at lunchtime and just before one he was admitted to the house in Flyte Street for a brief, expensive and, as things turned out, totally disastrous tryst.

The entry phone at the front door invited him up to a room on the second floor. Once there he dealt with Anna McKinnan, the maid, and paid over to her the £110 he had saved up for a brief moment of passion.

From then on McKinnan's evidence was clear. She told Graham Wetherby that he could go into the small sitting room and wait, and Ludmilla, the ‘young lady', would come out to him. If she didn't come in a reasonable time he could knock on the bedroom door to announce his presence, because her mistress was alone and had no one else in with her. Accordingly, he went into the sitting room. Some twenty minutes later, McKinnan heard her ‘young lady' screaming. She hurried into the sitting room and described what she saw.

The bedroom door was open and Wetherby was standing by the bed, on which the ‘young lady' lay partially dressed. She could see red marks round her neck and she was lying across the bed in an attitude the maid called ‘unnaturally still'.

Wetherby said nothing, but Anna McKinnan, according to her evidence, acted quickly. She went and locked the sitting-room door, making my client a prisoner. While he was shouting and hammering at the door, she telephoned the police from a phone in the kitchen.

A detective inspector, a woman officer and a police doctor arrived at the flat surprisingly quickly, no more than an hour later. McKinnan was able to tell them that she had seen Ludmilla alive and laughing over a cup of tea after her previous customer had departed.

She then let the officers into the sitting room, where a distracted Graham Wetherby told them he had found Ludmilla dead when, having knocked on the door and got no reply, he went into the bedroom.

On the face of it this seemed an unanswerable case, but I hoped that, when I got the chance of talking to Wetherby, some sort of defence might emerge. My pessimism was increased, however, the following morning, when I rang Bonny Bernard to thank him for the brief.

‘I thought you'd like to know,' the misguided solicitor told me, ‘that I've briefed a leader for you, your Head of Chambers, Mr Samuel Ballard, QC. It's a terrible business, isn't it?'

‘Absolutely ghastly,' I agreed, deliberately misunderstanding his point, ‘getting Soapy Sam Ballard to lead me. After all we've gone through together. How could you do it?'

‘The client wanted a QC. He said in all the big murder trials they have QCs.'

‘So you suggested Soapy Sam?'

‘He's your Head of Chambers.'

‘So you're determined to lose this case?'

‘Is it–entirely hopeless?'

‘No case is entirely hopeless unless you bring Mr Ballard in to conduct it.'

There was a silence, then Bernard said, ‘I'm sorry. The client insisted on Queen's Counsel. You're not Queen's Counsel, are you, Mr Rumpole?'

‘Not yet,' I warned him. ‘But who knows what may happen in the fullness of time?'

‘Who knows? You're right there, Mr Rumpole.' My solicitor sounded encouraging. ‘Meanwhile, I'll meet you and Mr Ballard in Brixton Prison. Looking forward to it.'

But I was no longer looking forward to our first meeting with our client, an occasion on which I would occupy a secondary and subordinate position. If, by any chance, there was some sort of defence available to Graham Wetherby, my not particularly learned leader could be guaranteed to miss it.

Leonard has been helping me in the plan I have for learning the law. He has lent me a number of little books that he said he used for passing his exams, his ‘little crammers' he calls them. There's one called
All You Need to Know about Contracts
and another, which I found far more readable, called
Murder and Offences against the Person in a Nutshell
.

Leonard Bullingham tells me I'll soon get to know as much law as Rumpole. In fact, he doesn't think that Rumpole knows much law at all and that the only thing he has going for him is his ‘gift of the gab'.

He, Rumpole I mean, came home the other night in a high mood. I don't know which is more irritating, when he's in a high mood or down in the dumps. Anyway, he brought another bottle of wine home and announced that he'd be back in Court Number One at the Old Bailey. Mr Bernard had brought him some unsavoury case about a prostitute strangled in a flat near Paddington Station. It was while he was pouring out yet another glass of the wine from that dreadful little bar, and telling me more than I cared to know about the effects of manual strangulation, that I brought him up short by saying, ‘It's a pity that someone has to die to really cheer you up, Rumpole.'

I'd silenced him for a while, and then he said, ‘That's a terrible thought. Ludmilla from Russia, yes, of course. She's dead and no one can do anything about that. But there's that young man in Brixton Prison, that Graham Wetherby, he's not dead and is probably in need of a little help.'

‘Why?' I asked. ‘Why help him? He killed her.'

‘We don't know that. And we shan't know it until twelve honest citizens come back into court and tell us so. Meanwhile,' and here Rumpole gave me one of those secret smiles of his that can be so annoying, ‘there are one or two small points that might be of interest. We shall have to wait and see.'

So Rumpole went to bed in a comparatively happy mood, but the next day he was down in the dumps again because he'd been given a leader and wouldn't be able to do all of that unsavoury murder case he is engaged on at the moment. Speaking for myself, I have always found Samuel Ballard a most agreeable person who has given me a warm welcome at Chambers parties and who seems to understand some of the difficulties which arise from the fact of being married to Rumpole.

‘He'll be able to take over the case and lose it,' Rumpole said. ‘Losing cases is what he has a real talent for. And it's just because he's entitled to write QC after his name.'

‘It's a pity you can't write QC after
your
name, Rumpole,' I told him. ‘Then you wouldn't have to rely on Ballard.'

‘I don't rely on Ballard.' Rumpole was not taking this well. ‘I just have to make sure he relies on me.'

‘But you're the number two, Rumpole. I really don't know why you can't get to write QC after
your
name. You've been there at the Bar long enough.'

‘My face doesn't fit.' Rumpole shook his head, I thought a little sadly.

I took a long and critical look at his face. At least I could truthfully say, ‘Lots of people with worse faces than yours have been able to put QC after their names.'

‘I mean, judges tend not to like me. You have to get judges on your side to get made a Queer Customer. They don't like the way I point out their mistakes. They don't appreciate it when I get juries to notice their devious methods of trying to secure a conviction. They can tell that when I say, “In my humble submission to Your Lordship”, I can't bring myself to feel humble at all.'

‘Perhaps you should stop doing those things, Rumpole,' I suggested. ‘It's so embarrassing to have to admit to our bridge club that you're still a
junior
barrister. At your age too!'

‘I can't stop being myself,' he told me. ‘That's too much to ask. All the same, I might try it. I might apply for a silk gown and a seat in the front row. Horace Rumpole, QC. It has an agreeable ring to it!'

The next time I played bridge with Mr Justice Bullingham, I told him that Rumpole was seriously thinking of applying for silk.

‘Good for him,' Sir Leonard said, I thought generously. ‘But I'm afraid he won't get it.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘The trouble with Rumpole is, and this is the generally held opinion, his face doesn't fit.'

‘There was a notice in a telephone box near where I went for lunch. “Exotic young Russian lady gives a full personal service”.'

‘And what did you take that to mean?' Soapy Sam, unfortunately my leader, asked the question in the Brixton interview room.

‘Well, it didn't mean shoe cleaning,' I might have told him, ‘or even an extra shampoo and scalp massage.' But I tactfully held my tongue.

Our client answered the question. ‘I thought it meant we could make love,' he said. And I thought that word ‘love' sounded strange, even shocking, in those surroundings.

Graham Wetherby, who had uttered it, seemed an ordinary, polite, inoffensive young man. His face might have looked pleasant enough had it not been disfigured by a red birthmark which stretched from under his eye about halfway down his left cheek.

‘We don't all have convenient and loving home lives, Mr Ballard. Some of us have to venture a bit further afield.'

He had an oddly precise way of speaking, with his lips pouted. I remember a saying of my childhood: ‘Prunes and prisms, very good words for the lips.' Graham Wetherby seemed to have learned to speak in the ‘prunes and prisms' way.

‘The absence of a love life,' Ballard now put on a look of severe displeasure, ‘doesn't mean you have to visit premises such as 16 Flyte Street.'

‘No, sir. Of course not. I do realize that. In my saner moments.'

‘Are you telling us you are insane when you do these terrible things?' Ballard asked the question with a small smile of satisfaction. It seemed that he was anxious to conduct a defence case by getting a quick confession of guilt.

‘Is it so terrible? I don't find girls who might wish to make love to me in the usual course of my everyday life. That's why I ring the telephone numbers. Not too often, though. It comes expensive.'

While Ballard was digesting this reply, I asked the question which, in my view, was the reason for our visit. ‘Did you kill Ludmilla Ravenskaya?'

‘Of course not! I'm sure she was a lovely girl. But when I saw her, she was dead.'

‘All right,' I carried on while my learned leader was shuffling his papers. ‘So you say the maid, this Miss McKinnan, told you to go into the sitting room and wait for a short while. Then if Ludmilla didn't come out to you, you were to knock on the bedroom door and go in to her.'

‘Yes, that's what she said. Well, I waited in the sitting room and read some magazines that she had lying about. Then, after ten minutes, I knocked at the bedroom door. There was no answer, so I pushed the door open. Then I saw her.' ‘Alive?'

‘No, Mr Rumpole. Dead.'

‘Did you know that then?'

‘I didn't know. But I saw the marks on her throat. The bed was untidy. There was a table knocked over, as though there'd been some sort of a struggle. So I called for the maid–'

‘McKinnan?'

‘She accused me straight away. She accused me of killing the girl.'

‘And then?'

‘She told me to stay there. She went out and locked the sitting-room door. So I was a prisoner. It was then she called the police.'

‘That's what she says. How long was it before the police arrived?'

‘Quite a while. I suppose an hour, maybe more.'

It was at this point that my not quite so learned leader, who had been looking increasingly depressed and disapproving as I asked a few penetrating questions, came in with, ‘Mr Rumpole has gone into the details, Wetherby, but I have to look at the big picture. The point remains that the woman Ravenskaya was seen alive before your visit and during your visit she was found dead. You were the only person with her at this time. You must realize that we can hold out very little hope in your case.'

I thought it was far too early to reach such a verdict, so I said, ‘Until I've cross-examined the prosecution witnesses, including the forensic expert, we can't say that there is
no
hope.'

‘You seem to have forgotten, Rumpole,' Soapy Sam reminded the meeting, ‘that the duty of cross-examining the prosecution witnesses will fall on me.'

‘Then perhaps there
is
no hope after all,' I thought, but I restrained myself from saying it.

 

‘I'm seriously worried about Wetherby,' Sam Ballard told me as we walked out of the prison gate.

‘Don't give up all hope,' I said, and advised him to have a careful look at the post-mortem photographs.

‘It's not that, Rumpole. But should a silk in my position at the Bar, with my reputation for complete moral probity, be concerned in this extremely squalid murder? Added to that, as Chair-elect of the Lawyers as Christians Society, should I be defending a client who has lost all sense of decency and become a frequenter of brothels?'

I would like to have said, ‘That's exactly why he needs defending', but I didn't. I remained silent, and I now saw some blessed hope arising from Sam Ballard's strong sense of moral repugnance.