Rumpole and the Angel of Death (23 page)

‘Oh? What dimension's that?'

‘Well, quite honestly, sir, her baby died.' He gave me his candid, boyish look, half amused, as though he had to confess that he planned to raid the tuck shop.

I did my best to suppress rage. ‘Do you call that a plus? There should have been a
Daily Trumpet
around in the days of Herod the King. You might have broken all circulation records.'

‘We want to do Thelma's story' – Jonathan Argent looked very serious and sincere, his eyes wide and his voice particularly quiet – ‘in a way which will be a hundred per cent fair and sympathetic. We all know how women get after childbirth. We've got stuff from a psychiatrist. It's jolly understandable, really.'

Thirty-five years after childbirth, I thought, She Who Must Be Obeyed could still spring some surprises; but I didn't encourage the upper-crust young Jonno by telling him that. ‘If Miss Ropner wants to tell you her story when the trial's over, that's entirely up to her.'

‘I don't think Miss Ropner's going to be in much of a position to speak to anyone when the trial is over.' Jonathan Argent was smiling.

‘Why? Do you assume she's going to be convicted?'

‘Surprise me, then. You've got some brilliant defence tucked away under that old hat of yours? Have you, quite honestly, sir?'

How many more people would have to remind me of the burden of proof? I took a generous gulp of the old monk's recipe and said, ‘Thelma Ropner is innocent and will be until the Jury down the Bailey comes back with a verdict.'

‘You're expecting the thumbs up?'

‘We shall see,' I said – champagne after plonk is no recipe for epigrams – ‘what we shall see.'

‘Quite honestly, Mr Rumpole, it's not so much Thelma we're after.'

‘Who are you after, then? You seemed to have squeezed the best out of the Constant family.'

‘We're after you.'

He was very young, probably quite silly and looked harmless enough. I don't know why but when he said this I felt, in some curious way, trapped; he spoke modestly, but as though he had an immense power behind him.

‘I'm an old taxi' – I embarked on the much-loved speech – ‘plying for hire. If the
Trumpet
wants to brief me in some lucrative action, provided it doesn't conflict with the interests of my client, well and good. I make it a rule to represent all riff-raff, underdogs and social outcasts.'

‘We don't want to employ you, sir. We want to tell your story.'

‘You mean the “Have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed against you?” And the chap in the dock says, “Bugger all, my Lord.” And the Judge says to his counsel, “What did your client say, Mr Smith?”' My stories, by now, have achieved a pretty wide circulation.

‘Not exactly that, sir.' Argent shook his wise young head sadly, unable to understand the wilful old. ‘Your story in Tom's case:
WHY I'M DEFENDING THELMA ROPNER, THE MOST HATED WOMAN IN ENGLAND.
Your taxi bit can come in there:
I PUT MY TALENT AT THE DISPOSAL OF THE RIFF-RAFF AND THE UNDERDOG.
And then:
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL. HOW I FOUND A DEFENCE IN A HOPELESS CASE.
'

‘What are you suggesting I do? Spill all the beans? I can't do it.'

‘Whyever not? I'd write it for you.'

‘It would be against all the best traditions of the Bar.'

‘You might find it extremely profitable.'

‘How profitable? I only ask out of idle curiosity.'

The young hack looked around conspiratorially, made sure no one was listening and then offered me a sum of money, expressed in Ks, which I took to be thousands. I saw myself retiring, moving from icy Froxbury Mansions to a place with a small pool and a microwave on the Malaga coast, sitting in the bar with a group of accountants who had taken voluntary redundancy, drinking sangria. I stifled a huge yawn.

‘No thanks,' I told him politely, ‘it's too late for all that sort of thing.'

‘That isn't the end of the story, sir. With syndication it might be much more.'

I drained my glass. ‘In the circumstances I think it best if I pay for the Dom Perignon.'

‘There's absolutely no need, sir, for that sort of gesture. It's been a pleasure and a privilege to talk to you.'

I saw the man's point. ‘Then I'll be getting back to work.' I rose from the table. He smiled at me as though I had agreed to all his ridiculous propositions. As I was walking towards the door I heard him call after me, ‘And we'll keep in very close touch indeed.'

I discovered later, a good deal later, that when I was being given the expensive sauce, and offered all the kingdoms of Southern Spain, by the schoolboy journalist, my learned but incautious friend Claude Erskine-Brown, Q.C., was engaged in his first romantic encounter with the statuesque Regen. The place chosen for this tryst was hardly discreet, no small spaghetti house in the purlieus of Victoria station but the glittering glass and brass 1930s Galaxy Hotel in the middle of Mayfair, where the nomadic diva was pigging it during her Covent Garden visit. By a chance which turned out to be less than happy, she arrived back from shopping just as Claude's taxi drew up and then enjoyed a notable encounter on the marble steps in front of the Galaxy's top-hatted commissionaire and revolving door.

Of course, I wasn't a spectator at this event which assumed an importance rather like Solomon's greeting to the Queen of Sheba, or King David's ‘Hallo, there' to Bathsheba. I imagine that Claude was effusive and pathetically grateful that his suggestion of lunch, made at the Outer Temple concert, had been accepted and that the singing star was a little confused and perhaps unable to remember who her visitor was. Claude, however, announced himself in clear and ringing tones and swooped at her with two kisses on both cheeks, which, he imagined, would be acceptable to a jet-setting soprano. I believe Katerina Regen made a brisk movement, whether of greeting or avoidance I'm not altogether sure, and Claude stumbled on a shallow, marble step, with the result that their mouths collided in a manner which looked a great deal friendlier than it was. This mischance didn't embarrass the singer, who didn't embarrass easily. She gave a resonant laugh down the scale of C, put her arm in Claude's and dragged him in through the revolving door as though she was hauling him up from a well. And there, for a moment, and for the purpose of this narrative, we must leave the happy couple.

I decided to visit the scene, or rather the scenes, of the crime – a stretch of South London which took the place of the lonely fen in which the little boy was lost in William Blake's strange poem. We went in Bonny Bernard's unwashed Fiesta which seems to contain, in a state of unexpected chaos, all the elements of his life. Files, bulging envelopes, cardboard boxes, were piled on the back seat, together with a squash racket and a zipped-up bag of some sort of sportswear which I had never seen moved.

Our first call was the Springtide General Hospital. At my direction Bernard parked his motor in a space clearly marked
RESERVED FOR HOSPITAL HEAD OF HUMAN RESOURCES
and joined the throng pouring in at the main entrance, a huge space which resembled a town centre during late-night shopping when all the traffic lights are out of order and the local constabulary have gone on holiday.

Visitors sat on benches eating takeaway meals, and patients, long ago forgotten, were slumped in wheelchairs. Hospital trolleys rattled past, some heavy with sheeted figures. Other trolleys stood parked with old persons, belly upwards, staring hopelessly at the ceiling. A doctor or two, a little posse of clattering nurses, hugging their cardigans about them, were somewhere glimpsed. Otherwise, the crowd was notably civilian. The predominant smell was of rubber, disinfectant and popcorn.

We passed a row of shops selling plastic toys, girlie magazines and best-selling paperbacks. In the concourse in front of the out-patients, there was a children's corner: a broken playpen, a huge pink teddy bear and the mechanical donkey on which a small child might enjoy a stationary trip for fifty pence. At that moment, a shaven-headed, earringed nineteen-year-old was sitting astride it, swigging mineral water from a kingsize bottle. As I took in the
locus in quo,
the wonder was not how a child could be stolen there but how a small and adventurous boy could ever be kept safe.

‘God protect me' – I shared my prayers with my instructing solicitor – ‘from having to die in a place like this.'

‘Is there anything you want me to do here?' Bernard was as anxious as I was to get out of this house of healing.

‘Find out what was wrong with little Tommy. I mean, why did they take him to the out-patients that morning?' I looked towards the newspaper and tobacconist shop where Steve had turned his back on his son to buy fags, and where great piles of the
Daily Trumpet
were on sale. ‘It wasn't an accident. We knew that. Sudden sickness. Sheena says that in her statement. What sort of sickness exactly? Find that out, Bonny Bernard, in the fullness of time.'

‘Where to next, Mr Rumpole?'

‘Up to Redwood Road, I think. Just for a glance at the matrimonial home.'

In the car park the Head of Human Resources was standing beside his unparked B.M.W. and swearing at us. I smiled sweetly and told him that we were official inspectors sent by Mrs Lavinia Lyndon, the glamorous and lethal Minister of Health, to report on his hospital's efficiency, and that shut him up effectively.

I had seen the semi-detached in Redwood Road before, faintly in that first picture in the
Trumpet.
Now it seemed bigger and brighter than I had expected. The front garden looked as though it had been recently trimmed and rhododendrons and bright azaleas, already in flower, had been brought in from a garden centre. Parked in front of the garage was a low-lined, bright-red and sporty model with a number Mr Bernard knew to be recent. If the Constants had come into a bit of money, I saw no reason, after their week of misery, why they shouldn't enjoy it. We didn't see little Tommy, or either of his parents, although we waited for about ten minutes on the other side of the road. Then a middle-aged women in a bright yellow dress came out of the house and started to snip a bunch of early, straight-stalked and military tulips in the front garden. She had reddish hair, a pale face and a sharp nose. I thought she condemned the flowers to death in the house without mercy or regret.

On the way to Swansdown Avenue, threading our way along streets of identical pink-and-white houses (they looked, I thought, like carefully packed and identical packets of streaky bacon), round crescents and across wider roads, we stopped at traffic lights beside a row of small shops that no doubt were struggling for existence against the mass attack of the supermarkets and the shopping malls. As I looked idly out of the window, I saw a shoe mender's, a dry cleaner's with a window display of wire coathangers and paper flowers, and a shop called Snappy Print:
COPIES MADE AND FAXES SENT.
In the window I saw a poster offering a course in computer and business studies:
ONE WEEK IN A COUNTRY HOUSE NEAR TUNBRIDGE WELLS CAN PUT YOU ON THE TOP EXECUTIVE LADDER OF SUCCESS. SALESMANSHIP AND COMPETITIVE MARKETING THOROUGHLY TAUGHT.
After the printer's came a peeling hut with blackened windows and a sign advertising
THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE AND SAUNA.
The door was padlocked. The next shop, so narrow it seemed to have been squashed in after the rest of the row was finished, had a surprising and half-broken neon sign,
PSYCHIC
it must have once said when all the letters were fully operational,
ASTROLOGICAL SIGNS CHARTED AND CONSIDERED, CLAIRVOYANT ADVICE GIVEN.
The shop window was empty except for a white vase which contained three wilting tulips and a photograph. It was a glimpse of that photograph that made me ask Bernard to park, and I got out and stood examining it and the window display. In the shadows of the small room behind it I was sure I saw something of importance to our case. I tried the door but it was locked and, when I got back to the car, Bernard said, ‘What did you want, Mr Rumpole? To know our future in
R.
v.
Thelma Ropner
?'

‘I'm afraid,' I told him, ‘that we don't need a chart to tell us that the omens are against us. The star sign of the Constants, however, is definitely in the ascendant.' As we drove off towards Thelma's pad, another sporty car turned from under a sparse clump of trees. The driver seemed a very young man and I made sure he was following us.

Swansdown Avenue produced no surprises. The tip in which young Tommy had been discovered lived up to its sordid reputation, and the front garden of number seventeen next door was not much tidier. The grass was uncut, the paths weedy, and there was a pram blocking the front door. The garage doors were open and I imagined that the head of communication studies had taken the car off to the University of South-West London. There was the thin, insistent cry of a baby and I saw an upstairs window from which Mrs Edmunds would have had a clear view of the front gate of number nineteen, which was opposite a street lamp. I imagined the academic's house, and the perpetual smell of milk, vegetable soup and soaking nappies. I decided that my legal team and I couldn't go on much longer without a drink.

We found the Old Pickwick at a crossroads about half a mile from Swansdown Avenue and Dickens's fat hero would have thought it considerably less warm and welcoming than the Fleet Prison. Bernard and I sat in a cavernous bar where banks of electronic games squeaked and flashed and muttered angrily around us. The barmaid, a ferocious girl with a spiky hairdo, was heavily engaged on the telephone and avoided a glance in our direction. At long last she finished her call, switched on her favourite tape, and allowed me to yell a request for two pints of Guinness to a musical accompaniment which sounded like the outbreak of World War III. I had barely put my lips to the froth when I heard a penetrating word in my ear.