Rumpole Rests His Case (6 page)

‘I'll send you one.' The rescuing Welshman had his arm round my shoulder. ‘You can buy me a drink next time we meet.'

‘I think I'm on a winner,' I told Bernard, after I'd given my saviour the Chambers address.

‘You mean with Twineham?' He was incredulous.

‘No. I mean with Ballard.' But I had earned my solicitor's look of disapproval. I had forgotten a young woman with flowers in her hair, dead and buried under a living-room floor. And all because I was engaged in a fight, with no holds barred, to stop having to smoke small cigars in the rain.

 

 

‘You've taken on his case, Rumpole?' My wife, Hilda, known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed, cross-examined me over the breakfast table.

‘He's taken on me.'

‘How could you? A man like that!'

‘I'm not sure I can manage it,' I confessed to Hilda. ‘Apart from quoting the Book of Revelations, he hasn't given me the slightest hint of a defence.'

‘I always knew you'd stoop to anything, Rumpole ... but I never dreamed you'd side with men who bury their wives under the floor!'

What did she think? That I approved in any way of such conduct? That I could ever, in a million years, become such a husband? For a nightmare moment, I pictured myself trying to inter Hilda somehow below the well-worn Axminster, and rejected the idea as a physical impossibility. Then I heard a heavy sigh on the other side of the toast and marmalade. Hilda's mood had swung from the usual brisk attack on Rumpole's conduct to a note of sadness and regret as she looked down at the letter in her hand.

‘I can't possibly go now. It would be too embarrassing.'

‘You can't go where, Hilda?'

‘The Old Saint Elfreda's dinner.'

‘But you always go.' It was a reunion Hilda never missed, a party at which her innumerable old schoolfriends relived their gymslip years and which I welcomed as an opportunity for a quietly convivial evening in Pommeroy's Wine Bar.

‘Not now. Look at this.' She handed me the embossed invitation as though it were the announcement of a death. ‘President of the OEs this year, Lady Shiplake, Chrissie Snelling as was. It's so not fair! She never came to OE reunions, but as she married this Labour Lord, they've made her President. Neither Dodo Mackintosh nor I will be able to go now!'

‘Why ever not?'

There was a long and solemn pause, and then Hilda uttered a word which I didn't know existed in her vocabulary.

‘Guilt.'

‘You mean this Chrissie has a criminal record?'

‘No. Dodo and I.'

‘Hilda.' The breath had been knocked out of me. ‘You're confessing to something?'

‘Dodo and I did it together.'

‘You were fellow conspirators?'

‘We called her Smelling, of course. “Here comes Chrissie Smelling.” And we held our noses. We pretended there was a rule that everyone had to run round the hockey field three times before breakfast, and Chrissie did it. We sent her fake Valentine cards, making dates with non-existent chaps from the boys' school. We pinched her knicker linings and punctured her hot-water bottle. Halfway through one term a car with a chauffeur came and took Chrissie away. It was all our fault, Rumpole.'

‘Any other offences to be taken into consideration?' I hope I looked suitably shocked.

‘I can't think of any more at the moment.'

‘It's a formidable charge sheet.'

‘I know. Dodo and I simply couldn't face her again. Neither of us could.'

‘That's exactly why you've got to go!' For once in my married life, I was occupying the moral high ground, where the air was fresh and intoxicating.

‘Oh, Rumpole!' Could it be that She Who Must Be Obeyed was capable of a cry for help? ‘Don't make me!'

Could I make her? Could I turn Judge Bullingham into a soft-hearted, do-gooding member of the Howard League for Penal Reform? Of course I couldn't. All the same, I meant to put up a fight for an evening with a few well-chosen solicitors and convivial crime reporters in Pommeroy's.

‘I just think,' I gave Hilda the Rumpole look of gentle but serious concern, ‘you have the honour of Saint Elfreda's to consider.'

‘Dodo and I have always been intensely loyal to the old school.'

‘Always in the past, perhaps. But not now. Or is it part of the Saint Elfreda's tradition to run away from your responsibilities?'

‘What do you want me to do, Rumpole?' Another record broken: such a question had never been asked before, in the long, windy history of our married life.

‘Face up to it, Hilda. Confess everything and throw yourselves on the mercy of the Court. I am convinced,' and now Rumpole was at his most judicial, ‘that you and Dodo Mackintosh will feel the better, the purer for it.'

For a long moment, the fate of my free evening hung in the balance. Then she said, ‘I'll ring Dodo and ask her what she thinks.'

‘You won't. You'll tell her what you think,' I said, but not out loud. By now, I was satisfied that ringing Dodo would end in a summons to face the music.

 

 

 

‘After he had told us that his wife had left home, Will Twineham lived alone. We never saw a sign of another woman or girlfriend staying the night. I must say, he kept the house spotless. There was always a big jug of flowers kept on the hearth of the fireplace in the front room. He bought flowers at the Tube station on his way home from work. Will never lit a fire. It seemed that he could endure any amount of cold. Indeed, he said he enjoyed it.'

I was reading, once again, the statements of the semi-detached neighbours. I thought about flowers in the hearth and couldn't help remembering the flower-sellers at the gates of the great London cemeteries, the dying chrysanthemums and fading daffodils on the granite chips, within the marble frame on the grave. Whilst I was having these disturbing thoughts, the door swung open and Soapy Sam Ballard glided in. ‘Rumpole,' he said, ‘a word with you.'

‘You've come to free us from political correctness? Small cheroots may be lit again in i Equity Court?' I asked with quiet confidence.

‘Will nothing make you, Rumpole, take some responsibility for the universe?'

‘I seem to remember floods in Noah's day, when very few people were smoking whiffs. Have you forgotten your Bible, old darling?'

‘Rumpole, please don't quote the Scriptures to excuse your filthy habit.'

‘I wouldn't dream of it. I'll only remind you that the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Light Up” appears nowhere, from Genesis to Revelations.'

‘If you can be serious for a moment ...“

‘I'll try. If you promise not to make me laugh.'

‘This is entirely serious. I heard in the clerks' room that you are defending Twineham.'

‘You heard right.'

‘A difficult case.'

‘One it would be all too easy to lose.'

‘Have you got a defence?'

‘Not yet. One may come to me if you'd be good enough to tiptoe away and close the door very quietly after you.' I couldn't have put it more plainly, but the man loitered on, like the last guest at a party who wants a bed for the night.

‘Two heads, Rumpole, are considerably better than one.'

‘Doesn't that rather depend on whose heads they are?'

‘I assume that you're not thinking of doing this case alone and without a leader?' Soapy Sam announced the purpose of his visit. He was a QC, a fact which confirmed my definition of the whole genus as ‘Queer Customers'. As such, he would be entitled to play the lead in the defence team, leaving Rumpole, one of the oldest and, if I may say it, most accomplished juniors, to carry a spear, in the way of making notes, calling the odd witness and bringing the learned leader's coffee to him. There was clearly no place for Ballard in the curious drama of 35 Primrose Drive.

‘I did the Penge Bungalow Murders without a leader when I was an upwardly mobile white-wig. I don't think that, over the years, I've lost any of my powers.'

‘I'll ask our clerk to speak to your solicitor. I'm sure he'll be delighted to brief me as your leader.'

‘I very much doubt it. Bernard likes to enjoy his cases down the Old Bailey.'

Soapy Sam had nothing more to say. He stood goggling at me for a moment, and then made, slowly and thoughtfully, for the exit.

‘Shut the door,' I said, ‘Bonzo.'

He froze. His hand poised over the door handle, he turned to me, satisfactorily anxious. ‘What did you say?'

‘Nothing very much,' I reassured him. It was not yet time to strike. ‘I'm sorry. Silly of me. I must have been calling some old dog. Forgot myself for a moment. I'll see you around.'

Soapy Sam gave me a quick stare and left. I had, I felt sure, unnerved the man and fired a warning shot across his brow.

 

The weighty matter of Hilda's guilt and the consequent acceptance or refusal of the Old Girls' Reunion Dinner invitation was of too earthshaking importance to be decided by one telephone call, however prolonged. An invitation was given, and accepted, from Dodo Mackintosh for a week's visit to Lamorna Cove, where the issue could be tried at length, no doubt over cups of Ovaltine far into the night, and a definite verdict arrived at.

‘Will you be all right, Rumpole?' Hilda asked with unusual solicitude, as though afraid I might disappear by chauffeur-driven car and never return to the so-called mansion flat in Froxbury Mansions.

‘Quite all right,' I reassured her. ‘Take your time, this is not the sort of decision that can be taken in a hurry. Much, including the honour of the old school, depends upon it.'

So, as well as the possibility of an evening off if the dinner was on, I had a whole week on my own. And this was convenient, because Bernard had met a solicitor named Tony Thrale who had revealed, over lunch at the Law Society, that when he was a young articled clerk working and living round Perivale, he had met, in various clubs and all-night parties, Jo Twineham, whose name was now splashed across the tabloids in preparation for the reporting of a sensational murder trial. He had invited us both to dinner, as he thought he might be able to help us, provided we undertook to keep him out of Court.

‘Dinner?' I was surprised at this offer of hospitality from a potential witness. ‘What's that going to be like?'

‘They live in Maida Vale now. It'll be dinner with a big company lawyer. Good food. Handsome wife in a black frock. Candles. After-dinner mints.'

But when we got to the Thrales‘, it wasn't like that at all.

The front door of the sedate Victorian house in Maida Vale opened on to a purple and highly scented darkness. You might have walked from bright sunlight into the shadows of the kasbah. Tony Thrale greeted us. A burly, grey-haired man in his late fifties, he was dressed for dinner in a pair of faded jeans, backless slippers and a shirt which seemed to have once been dyed in various colours that had run into each other.

‘Mr Rumpole.' He greeted me, not with the handshake he would no doubt have offered had we met in the course of business, but with a kind of bear-like hug which brought me into close contact with the tie-dyed shirt and some sort of medallion nestling among the grey hairs immediately below his neck. ‘I salute you, Mr Rumpole. The only truly free spirit at the Bar. Glenda can't wait to meet you. I told her I was sure you'd be one of us. Vegetarian.'

The heart, I have to confess, sank. Was this what I'd come out for? I remembered, longingly, the remains of a steak and kidney pie waiting for me in the fridge in Froxbury Mansions. Were not free spirits carnivores? I shot an appealing look at Bernard, who was walking, apparently untroubled, towards the pulses.

If Glenda Thrale was anxious to see me, she managed to keep her impatience well under control. Wearing a kaftan, adorned with beads, squatting on what, I believe, during the heyday of such articles was known as a bean bag, she turned on us a look of minimal interest. This was accompanied, certainly, by a faint smile, but then she smiled without interruption during most of our visit. This smile was in no way connected with anything in the smallest degree comic. Indeed, when after what they eccentrically described as ‘dinner' was over and I told some of my better courtroom anecdotes, the smile faded on every punch line.

We had been led by Tony Thrale into a kind of cavern, a huge and shadowy open-plan area. At one end of it, illuminated by spotlights, there was a large Aga cooker at which Tony was now boiling up some kind of vegetable matter. The rest of the cave was sporadically illuminated by lamps muffled with heavy shades or, in some cases, swathed in paisley shawls. The smell which had loitered in the hall now intensified and seemed to be compounded of ecclesiastical incense, smouldering carpets and simmering lentils. Music with a loud and insistent beat poured relentlessly out of a ‘music centre'.