Rumpole and the Angel of Death (30 page)

‘It was good of you to come, Horace. I'd do the same for you, of course.'

‘I hope you'll never have to.'

Billy was sitting in the company of a small espresso and a quartet of adolescents who were drinking rum and Coke and playing the fruit machine. Behind the bar a sleepy woman sat longing for us to go home. While Soapy Sam had gone desperately continental, Billy looked like the caricature of an English tourist, wearing a blazer with gold buttons, a Sheridan Club tie and hating being abroad.

‘I was entrapped, Horace. You do realize that, don't you? I've complained to the Press Council. I didn't know that little runt of a journalist had sneaked into the rugger club. So far as I know journalists don't play rugger. It was pure bad luck. Could have happened to anybody.'

‘Anybody wasn't a Judge who'd just sentenced a foreign student to life imprisonment.'

‘I was giving voice to my private opinions. As I'm entitled to do. I didn't say any of that in Court, did I?'

‘No, that's what I've really got against you.'

Billy Bloxham looked puzzled. Indeed, during our brief pretrial meeting he was either angry or puzzled, more often both at the same time.

‘You think that might have helped you? If I'd said what I thought about foreigners?'

‘I'm damn sure it would.'

‘Horace, the very next time you're before me I'll do my best to help you. I'll say exactly what I think.' And then his voice began to break and his hand, lifting the dregs in the tiny coffee cup to his pallid lips, trembled. ‘You think there may not be a next time?' he dared to ask.

‘It's possible.'

‘You mean they may sack me? The Lord Chancellor could do that, couldn't he? I'm not a High Court Judge.'

‘I suppose it's on the cards.'

‘Horace, you've got a wonderful reputation, down the Bailey, for being on the side of the underdog.'

‘And you've become one?'

‘In this particular instance, yes.'

‘I don't know where everyone got the idea I only act for underdogs.'

Billy was sitting hunched, staring up at me with watery eyes. He looked as though he was prepared to do anything, even bark in a servile fashion and lick my hand. ‘Horace, you won't put the case too strongly against me, will you, old boy?'

‘I'll do my best,' I said, leaving him in doubt as to whether I was going to do my best to draw it strong or mild.

‘You see' – Billy was putting every ounce of emotion into his final speech – ‘I have to go on being a Judge. I'm really unfit for anything else.'

‘I'm sure there are other things you could do.' I could not, however, imagine what they were.

‘No. I know you're only trying to be kind. You see, I couldn't go back to what you chaps do. Arguing with each other. Catching out witnesses. Trying hard to win. I mean, would people give me any work, even if I was allowed back? Would they honestly?'

‘I suppose they might.' It was an answer I wouldn't have given under oath.

‘I don't believe it. Besides which, I've got used to a certain amount of respect. I like it when you fellows stand up and bow to me. I find that quite delightful. And when I go into the bank, the assistant manager sometimes pops over and says, “How can we help you, Judge?” And they ask me to say a few words at the Rotary and the rugby club dinners. Do you imagine they'd ask a sacked judge to speak at the rugger club?'

‘Don't despair.' The sight of the man was beginning to pain me.

‘You mean you'll go easy on me?' Billy cheered up a fraction.

‘I mean, I may not win.'

‘Why? Who's on the other side?'

‘Samuel Ballard, Q.C.'

‘He doesn't often win.' The Judge was back in the Slough of Despond.

‘It's got to happen some time. Anyway, the Euro Judges may not want to upset the British Government.'

‘But the British Government's always upsetting them. Do you happen to know who the Judges are?'

‘I believe they come from a variety of countries.'

‘Foreigners?'

‘Bound to be. One's Irish.'

‘All foreigners, then.'

‘Oh, and one English. Because it's an English case.'

‘Who've they got?'

‘I think it's Thompson. Used to practise in the Chancery Division.'

‘Tradders Thompson?' Billy looked seriously worried now. ‘Didn't he marry an Indian?'

‘I know nothing,' I assured him, ‘about his domestic arrangements.'

‘I feel sure I spotted him at an Inner Temple garden party' – Billy was now up to his neck in the Slough – ‘with someone in a sari.'

‘I've got to get to bed.' I yawned realistically and drained my cognac.

‘Written your speech, have you? Couldn't you just water it down a bit, Horace? We Brits should stick together.'

‘I haven't written anything.' As I said this, some faint hope returned to the desolate Judge. ‘We drank rather a lot of wine at lunch and my eyes won't stay open.'

‘Please,' he begged me, ‘please have another drink.'

‘Not possible.' I stood up then. I was fighting to keep awake. ‘Goodnight, Billy. Remember, the trial isn't decided until it's over.' It was the poor crumb of comfort I always kept for my most hopeless of cases.

‘I shall wear my Sheridan Club tie.' Billy was down to his last hope. ‘Perhaps some of the Judges are members.'

‘Oh, I expect so. Get a lot of Slovenes and chaps from Liechtenstein in there, do you?'

So I left him, conscious that my visit to the cells hadn't done much to cheer up the man who might go down in legal history as Lord Bloxham of Bias. I staggered out into the street and started on my way back to the hotel like a sleepwalker.

I hadn't gone far along the rue des Juifs when two things startled me into full wakefulness. First of all I saw an all too familiar red anorak and blue baseball cap moving, not altogether steadily, in the road in front of me. Then I heard the sudden acceleration of an engine behind me and I moved further from the edge of the pavement. An anonymous, dark-blue car thundered past and appeared to be aiming, like a heavy artillery shell, for Ballard's back. Just before it reached him, he skipped with hare-like agility on to the pavement, which the driver mounted. Luckily for Sam, there was a deeply recessed doorway into which he dived and the car, which had braked suddenly, couldn't follow him although he was lit, for a vivid moment, by its headlights, cowering as though from a fatal and expected blow. The car then reversed with a snort of the engine and vanished down the street. I emerged from the shadows as a second shock to my shaken Head of Chambers. ‘My God, Rumpole!' he said. ‘These continentals are the most terrible drivers!'

‘I'm not sure about bad drivers, Bollard. It looked to me as if it might have been a deliberate mistake.'

I was ministering to the man, who was still in a state of shock, and I had shown my medical skill by activating the night porter to shuffle off in search of a bottle of eau de vie. I administered a dose of this to Ballard who was still complaining about Alsatian driving skills. ‘I shall have to be careful,' he complained, ‘now I'll be coming to Strasburg on a regular basis.'

‘A regular basis?'

‘I've been talking to Betsi.'

‘So I understand.'

‘And there's a need for Senior Counsel who understand the importance of human rights. She has told me that there will be a great deal of work for a skilled international lawyer who is prepared to stick up for liberty and so on.'

‘And that's what you're going to stick up for? Liberty and so on?'

‘That's what the work is. According to Betsi.'

‘And does Betsi know about your long record as a persecutor? I mean, you're here to protect a biased Judge.'

‘I think she knows as well as anyone, Rumpole, that I am an extremely fair man. With liberal opinions.'

‘You made that clear to Betsi?'

‘I think she knows that about me.'

‘I expect she does. And on your future visits to Strasburg, will you be bringing your wife with you?'

‘Marguerite is heavily engaged with her first aid classes to the Housewives' League in Waltham Cross.'

‘That's all right then.' I poured out a further medicinal glass. ‘Bollard, does it occur to you that what happened in the street wasn't an accident?'

‘The car was out of control.'

‘It seemed very much
in
control to me.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Someone may not like you.'

‘Who?' The possibility didn't seem to have occurred to the man.

‘A jealous husband, perhaps. Or a boyfriend. Someone who took exception to your amorous adventures.'

‘Rumpole! I have no idea what you're talking about.'

‘Wasn't Betsi in your room rather late last night?'

‘Of course she was.'

‘Well, then.'

‘We were discussing human rights.'

‘I suppose that's another way of describing it.' I looked at the man without pleasure and emptied my glass.

It was Monday morning, the day dedicated to the rights of Amin Hashimi who had brought me to Europe and who, except for that moment when I had seen a cheque drawn on Netherbank, I had almost forgotten in a series of expensive and eventful meals.

I wasn't, I have to confess, feeling at my best on the day of the hearing. I have never tasted the bottom of a budgerigar's cage but I imagine it to be as dry as I felt that morning; added to which my head was stuffed with cotton wool penetrated, from time to time, with stabs of pain. Anxious supporters, interested speculators and the representatives of Her Majesty's Government, gathered in the sunshine outside the hotel and a fleet of taxis set off for the Cour Européenne des Droits de L'Homme.

I sat next to Betsi in the back of one taxi and told her that I hoped our driver was more reliable than the madman who nearly ran Ballard over the night before. ‘There are some idiots in this town,' she said. ‘I heard about that. It was absolutely unnecessary.'

‘Unnecessary?'

‘To drive so fast. Through the streets of the old town. The idiot was French, I have no doubt. They drive like madmen.' The Court was a long, grey concrete erection beside a river, with two circular towers like gasworks sawn off crookedly. Inside, we had wandered, uncertain of the way, in what looked like the vast boiler-room of a ship, painted in nursery colours. We went up and down steel and wire staircases, and travelled in lifts whose glass sides let you see more of the journey than made you entirely comfortable. And then I was standing up at a desk in a huge courtroom. Across an expanse of blue carpet, so far away that I could hardly distinguish their features, sat the Judges in black gowns under a white ceiling perforated like a giant kitchen colander. Human rights, it seemed, like the scientific romances of H. G. Wells, had been set in the future and now the future had arrived with a rush and overtaken me before I was quite sure how to address it.

‘Mr Rumpole' – the voice of the presiding Judge, a Dutchman, boomed electronically over the vasty hall of death – ‘we have read the submission filed on behalf of your client. Would you now speak to your paper?'

‘Speak to my paper?' It didn't sound much of an audience. I had been used to speaking to my Jury, so close that I could lower my voice, at dramatic moments, almost to a whisper. Now I was in contact only by microphone with the remote, international platoon of seven Judges: the Austrian, the Finn, the Slovene, the Hungarian, the British, the Irish and the Portuguese. In some glass case halfway between us, lit up like tropical fish, the translators were noiselessly mouthing my words in various languages which some of the Judges put on headphones to catch, and others, either superb linguists or premature adjudicators, didn't bother to fit over their ears.

‘I haven't much to say to the paper, my Lords. But I have a point of the greatest importance to make to your Lordships.' I waited in silence for the maximum effect, and because I felt suddenly in need of a rest I leant on the desk in front of me for support. At long last the Irishman was good enough to say, ‘And what is your point, Mr Rumpole?'

‘My point is' – another stab of pain penetrated the cotton wool – ‘that the learned Judge in this case was not only biased but bluffing. Not only prejudiced but perfidious. In fact, he might stand, if your Lordships will allow the phrase, as the personification of Perfidious Albion.'

For some reason I was rather pleased with this opening paragraph. I looked around and there, in an otherwise empty row at the back of the Court, I saw his Honour Judge Bloxham looking at me with ill-concealed hatred.

‘Perfidious
what,
Mr Rumpole?' Some sort of panic had clearly affected the translator in the fish tank and the presiding Dutch Lordship asked for clarification.

‘Albion, my Lord. An expression once popular on the continent of Europe, in which you now sit. It described the hypocrisy and slyness of a certain class of Englishman.'

‘You are using this expression to describe the learned Judge in this case?' The Finn's English was almost too perfect but he looked extremely interested.

‘Indeed I am. We all know the Judge was prejudiced. He was as biased as a crooked roulette wheel. He'd picked up his so-called opinions in the back of a taxi. He hated all foreign students and he made that perfectly clear in his speech to the rugger buggers.' At this, I saw expressions of genuine despair in the fish tank and the presiding Hollander clearly couldn't believe his headphones.

‘To the
what?
'

‘To the rugby football players' annual dinner. You see, this is the point I wish to impress on your Lordships. We all have prejudices. You may have prejudices. So do I. I have always found, that is until I came here and sampled your excellent Tokay d'Alsace, that all discussions about the European Common Market were about ten points less interesting than watching paint dry. That was my prejudice and I freely and frankly admit it to your Lordships.' Here I looked down and saw the note Betsi Hoprecht had pushed on to my desk:
CALL THEM THE COURT. WE DON'T HAVE LORDSHIPS IN EUROPE.
‘But did the perfidious Judge admit his prejudices?' I boomed on. ‘Did he come into Court and kick off with: “Members of the Jury, I personally cannot stick foreign students. The idea of a foreigner, particularly of the slightly tinted Middle-Eastern variety, makes my gorge rise to a dangerous level. I want that clearly understood. Now let's get on with it, shall we?”'