Rumpole Rests His Case (4 page)

‘Back a good many years,' I told him, ‘to the Sweet-Home Building Society job at Carshalton. When Harry Sparksman blew a safe so quietly that even the dogs slept through it.'

‘You were in that case, weren't you, Mr Rumpole?' Inspector Grimble was pleased to remember. ‘Sparksman got five years.'

‘Not one of your great successes.' Skimpy was also delighted. ‘Perhaps you wasted the Court's time with unnecessary questions. Have you anything else to ask this officer?'

‘Not till the Old Bailey, Sir. I may have thought of a few more by then.'

With great satisfaction, Skimpy committed Denis Timson, a minor villain who would have had difficulty changing a fuse, let alone blowing a safe, for trial at the Central Criminal Court.

 

 

 

‘Funny you mentioned Harry Sparksman. Do you know, the same thought occurred to me. An expert like him could've done that job in the time.'

‘Great minds think alike,' I assured D. I. Grimble. We were washing away the memory of an hour or two before Skimpy with two pints of nourishing stout in the pub opposite the beak's Court. ‘You know Harry took up a new career?' I needn't have asked the question. D. I. Grimble had a groupie's encyclopaedic knowledge of the criminal stars.

‘Oh yes. Now a comic called Jim Diamond. Got up a concert party in the nick. Apparently gave him a taste for show business.'

‘I did hear,' I took Grimble into my confidence, ‘that he made a come-back for the Croydon job.' It had been a throwaway line from Uncle Fred Timson - ‘I heard talk they got Harry back out of retirement' - but it was a thought worth examining.

‘I heard the same. So we did a bit of checking. But Sparksman, known as Diamond, has got a cast-iron alibi.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘The time when the Croydon job was done, he was performing in a pantomime. On stage nearly all the evening, it seems, playing the Dame.'

‘Aladdin,'
I said, ‘at the Tufnell Park Empire. It might just be worth your while to go into that alibi a little more thoroughly. I'd suggest you have a private word with Mrs Molly Diamond. It's just possible she may have noticed his attraction to Aladdin's lamp.'

‘Now then, Mr Rumpole,' Grimble was wiping the froth from his lips with a neatly folded handkerchief, ‘you mustn't tell me how to do my job.'

‘I'm only trying to serve,' I managed to look pained, ‘the interests of justice!'

‘You mean, the interests of your client?'

‘Sometimes they're the same thing,' I told him, but I had to admit it wasn't often.

As it happened, the truth emerged without Detective Inspector Grimble having to do much of a job. Harry had, in fact, fallen victim to a tip-tilted nose and memorable thighs; he'd left home and moved into Aladdin's Kensal Rise flat. Molly, taking a terrible revenge, blew his alibi wide open. She had watched many rehearsals and knew every word, every gag, every nudge, wink and shrill complaint of the Dame's part. She had played it to perfection to give her husband an alibi while he went back to his old job in Croydon. It all went perfectly, even though Uncle Abanazer, dancing with her, had felt an unexpected softness.

I had known, instinctively, that something was very wrong. It had, however, taken some time for me to realize what I had really seen that night at the Tufnell Park Empire. It was nothing less than an outrage to a Great British Tradition. The Widow Twankey was a woman.

 

D. I. Grimble made his arrest and the case against Denis Timson was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. As spring came to the Temple gardens, Hilda opened a letter in the other case which turned on the recognition of old, familiar faces and read it out to me.

‘The repointing's going well on the tower and we hope to have it finished by Easter,' Poppy Longstaff had written. ‘And I have to tell you, Hilda, the oil-fired heating has changed our lives. Eric says it's like living in the tropics. Cooking supper last night, I had to peel off at least one of my cardigans.' She Who Must Be Obeyed put down the letter from her old school friend and said, thoughtfully, ‘Noblesse Oblige.'

‘What was that, Hilda?'

‘I could tell at once that Donald Compton was a true gentleman. The sort that does good by stealth. Of course, poor old Eric thought he'd never get the tower mended, but I somehow felt that Donald wouldn't fail him. It was noblesse.'

‘Perhaps it was,' I conceded, ‘but in this case the noblesse was Rumpole's.'

‘Rumpole! What on earth do you mean? You hardly paid to have the church tower repointed, did you?'

‘In one sense, yes.'

‘I can't believe that. After all the years it took you to have the bathroom decorated. What on earth do you mean about
your
noblesse?'

‘It'd take too long to explain, old darling. Besides, I've got a conference in Chambers. Tricky case of receiving stolen surgical appliances. I suppose,' I added doubtfully, ‘it may lead, at some time in the distant future, to an act of charity.'

 

 

Easter came, the work on the tower was successfully completed, and I was walking back to Chambers after a gruelling day down the Bailey when I saw, wafting through the Temple cloisters, the unlikely apparition of the Rev. Eric Longstaff. He chirruped a greeting and said he'd come up to consult some legal brains on the proper investment of what remained of the Church Restoration Fund. ‘I'm so profoundly grateful,' he told me, ‘that I decided to invite you down to the Rectory last Christmas.'

‘You
decided?'

‘Of course I did.'

‘I thought your wife Poppy extended the invitation to She...'

‘Oh yes. But I thought of the idea. It was the result of a good deal of hard knee-work and guidance from above. I knew you were the right man for the job.'

‘What job?'

‘The Compton job.'

What was this? The Rector was speaking like an old con. The Coldsands caper? ‘What
can
you mean?'

‘I just mean that I knew you'd defended Donald Compton. In a previous existence.'

‘How on earth did you know that?'

Eric drew himself up to his full, willowy height. ‘I'm not a prison visitor for nothing,' he said proudly, ‘so I thought you were just the chap to put the fear of God into him. You were the very person to put the squeeze on the Lord of the Manor.'

‘Put the squeeze on him?' Words were beginning to fail me.

‘That was the idea. It came to me as a result of knee-work.'

‘So you brought us down to that freezing Rectory just so I could blackmail the local benefactor?'

‘Didn't it turn out well!'

‘May the Lord forgive you.'

‘He's very forgiving.'

‘Next time,' I spoke to the Man of God severely, ‘the Church can do its blackmailing for itself.'

‘Oh, we're quite used to that.' The Rector smiled at me in what I thought was a lofty manner. ‘Particularly around Christmas.'

There are no sadder relics of the past than the rows of small, semi-detached houses that line one of the western approaches to London. Once they were lived in and alive. Minis were washed on Sunday mornings inside their lean-to garages, bright dahlias and tea roses grew in their front gardens, their doorbells chimed and, on winter evenings, lights glowed from the stained-glass portholes in their front doors.

Now their blind windows are stuffed with hardboard, their front doors nailed up, their gardens piled with rubble and their garages collapsed. They are derelict victims of a long-delayed scheme to widen the main road, and some of these houses have already been pulled out like rotten teeth. When it came to be the turn of 35 Primrose Drive, a digger, prising up the sitting-room floor, lifted, with apparent tenderness, the well-preserved and complete skeleton of a young woman. Reports were made to the police and the coroner's office. D. I. Winthrop, an enthusiastic young officer, started an inquiry which led, to his great satisfaction, to the arrest of William Twineham, the sole owner of the house since its birth in the sixties. ‘Twineham's wife Josephine had, the D. I. discovered, vanished unaccountably some thirty-three years previously.

I was standing outside my Chambers in Equity Court, wearing my hat to protect the thinning top of my head from the drizzle and thinking, as my old darling Wordsworth would say, of old, unhappy, far-off things and crimes so long ago.

Around me in the doorways, under the arches or leaning against a sheltered wall, were many poor souls like me, driven out of doors. Most of them were girls. Short-skirted, high-heeled, with cigarettes dangling from their lips, they would seem to any passer-by to be ladies of the street, and the same casual observer might have been forgiven for supposing that the Outer Temple, home of the legal profession, had become. a red-light district in the manner of downtown Amsterdam. The casual observer would have been wrong. Neither they nor I were out of doors to offer sexual services. We were temporary exiles from Chambers which had become smoke-free zones.

The Inn was all for it, as was Soapy Sam Ballard. Mizz Liz Probert, who has now taken to coming to work on a daunting motorbike which pumps more gas into the atmosphere than a lifetime's small cigars, went over to the Green Party. Claude Erskine-Brown blamed my cheroots for the fact that his aunt had been flooded out by a climate change in Surrey. In vain I argued for the democratic rights of minorities. The smoking ban was introduced by a tyrannical majority, so I basked in the warmth of a small cigar as the rain settled in the brim of my hat.

‘Loitering with intent, Rumpole?'

‘Still polluting the atmosphere... ?'

Two grey, almost ghost-like figures approached through the rain. They were the opera-loving, wine-tasting, inadequate advocate Claude Erskine-Brown and none other than Soapy Sam Ballard, the unworthy Head of my Chambers.

These were the two who had undertaken to save the planet earth from extinction by kicking Rumpole, and our junior secretary Dawn, out into a storm to have a puff, an act which, in my humble submission, bore a close resemblance to the way Goneril and Regan treated their old Dad.

‘I'm glad you're showing some respect for the rules, Rumpole. Respect for the rules is the vital ingredient of a happy ship.'

‘What do you mean, respect for the rules?' I found Ballard's description of me as a rules respecter particularly offensive. ‘I simply came out here to think.'

‘Oh, really?' Erskine-Brown was unconvinced. ‘What were you thinking about, exactly?'

‘Skeletons. And how many family homes in respectable areas may have skeletons under the floorboards. God knows what goes on behind the double locks and burglar alarms. Have you ever looked under your floorboards, Ballard?'

The question, I was glad to see, had Soapy Sam looking momentarily worried. Erskine-Brown, like a faithful hound, came to his master's rescue with a piece of irrelevant information. ‘You just put one of those disgusting whiffs into your mouth, Rumpole. You clearly came out here to smoke.'

‘I came out here to be alone,' I assured the man with what dignity I could muster. ‘Clearly I failed miserably.'

‘Just try and remember — smoke causes global warming
even out of doors.
Did you see the pictures of Godalming?'

‘No, I didn't. I don't go about searching for pictures of Godalming, Erskine-Brown.'

‘My aunt,' Claude's voice sank to the doom-laden level of a news reader announcing the end of the world, ‘had to be taken shopping in a collapsible canoe.'