Rumpole Rests His Case (15 page)

‘Where's she gone?'

‘Nowhere. They're having a trial separation. It's a terrible trial for Claude, so anything you can do ...'

‘He asked me to go to the opera with him.'

‘He asked me too.'

‘You didn't go?'

‘Pressure of work.' I now felt guilty and hoped that Mizz Liz would show the poor fish more generosity. ‘You'll enjoy that.'

‘Will I? Apparently it's one called
Twilight of the Gods.
It's not one of the long ones, is it?'

‘I believe it does take a certain amount of time for the sun to set.'

‘I just hope Claude doesn't start getting ideas. That's all.'

‘Having seen Claude conduct his cases over the years, I can assure you that he hardly ever gets ideas.' I did my best to encourage her.

 

 

‘He needs help, Rumpole. That's what I've always admired about you. Your heart goes out to people who need help.'

‘My heart's finding it a little difficult to go out to Doctor Gurnley.'

‘It's gone out to some pretty doubtful characters in the past.'

‘Perhaps.' I had to recognize the force of Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown's argument. ‘But not to anyone who wanted to abolish Juries or reintroduce death by judicial strangulation.'

‘The Judge wants to see you again as a matter of urgency, Mr Rumpole. She seems a bit keen on your company, Sir,' was what my clerk had said when he brought me the message. So I'd crossed the road again and threaded my way to Phillida's room in the Palais de Justice. She was out of her wig and gown now, a distraught woman asking me to do her an unlikely favour.

‘You're a taxicab, Rumpole! You're committed to giving a ride to anyone who hails you. You don't have to
like
them, Rumpole. You know as well as I do you can probably do their cases better if you
don't
like them particularly. Then you can see all the dangerous points against them. For God's sake, we've known each other for so long, have you ever turned down a client because you didn't agree with his politics?'

‘Well, no ... But...'

‘Don't give me “buts”, Rumpole. I remember that was one of the first things you said to me when I was a pupil. “You're an old taxicab, Miss Trant,” you said. I took it as something of an affront to my personal appearance.'

There was a pause and she looked at me. She was no longer the daring Judge who had flicked a lock of hair as she looked at herself in the mirror. Now the moment of the youthful pupil she spoke of seemed to be vanishing further into the past.

‘Look, Rumpole. I know you don't like anything about Dr Gurnley ...'

‘It's odd how retaining the title “Doctor” is a mark of some unlovable people. When you come to think of Dr Goebbels, Dr Fu Manchu, Dr Crippen, Dr Death ...' I could have gone further but decided to comfort her distressed ladyship. ‘He must make lots of money from all these articles. It'll be a headline case. He can brief an expensive silk.' Why didn't the spliff-smoking hard-liner employ a Queen's Counsel? ‘I suppose if I really wanted to do him down I could offer him Soapy Sam Ballard QC, the so-called Head of our Chambers.'

‘I've told Tom. The worst thing he could do is choose some high-profiled, high-priced and famous silk. He'll look as though he's buying his way out of trouble.'

‘And he won't look like that if he hires me?'

‘Well hardly, Rumpole.' She gave me a faint smile.

‘So he wants justice on the cheap?' I was, I have to confess, a little riled, a touch put out at the suggestion that I was, to put it as kindly as possible, the bargain basement of the legal profession.

‘It's not that either, Rumpole. He wants to win.'

‘And he thinks I can do that for him?'

‘I told him that if I were ever in trouble, I'd rather have you appearing for me than the most famous silk in the business.'

This was flattery, pure and unadulterated. Naturally I lapped it up.

‘You honestly told him that?'

‘Cross my heart.'

‘And you have all that faith in me?'

‘I've always had faith in you, Rumpole. As an advocate, I mean. I know little of your private life.'

‘My private life? There's really not much to know.' But then, more out of habit than anything else, I asked her, ‘Has he got a defence?'

‘Why don't you see him and find out?'

‘You mean put my toe in the water?'

‘Before taking the plunge.'

‘Just tell him one thing. Tell him to go for Trial by Jury.'

‘You think he needs a Jury?'

‘Yes. Explain to him, Juries are the things he wants to abolish. But now he needs one.'

As I left, something happened which I had never expected in all my years at the Bar. I was kissed firmly on the cheek by a High Court Judge.

 

 

‘It was a trap, Mr Rumpole! A ruthless, deceptive, bloody-minded trap by a gutter journalist. That's exactly what it was. And I want the Court to know.'

‘So you were caught in a trap?'

‘A trap was set for me.'

‘And you walked into it?'

‘What do you mean?' Dr Gurnley looked suddenly wary.

‘I mean you walked into this trap, and lit up a large, fat Camberwell Carrot.'

‘I never lit up anything of the sort!' And then he seemed to feel there was something missing from his answer. ‘What do you mean by a Camberwell Carrot, Mr Rumpole? Are we here discussing vegetables?'

‘I realize this is your first visit to the Criminal Courts, Doctor,' I told him. ‘But if you'd been round them for as long as I have, you'd know that a Camberwell Carrot is an extremely fat spliff, a king-sized cannabis cigarette, as costly as a large Havana cigar. I don't know whether they have particularly large carrots in Camberwell, but that's what it's called.'

‘Look here, Mr Rumpole.' The Doctor spoke as if he were using the name of whoever was interviewing him on the
Today
programme and he had started some particularly irrelevant, evasive non-answer with a desperately friendly, ‘Look here, Jim...' Anyway, it was ‘Look here, Mr Rumpole' this time and 'I have devoted my life to speaking my mind. Particularly about drugs. If a young person smokes a “bit of pot”, that leads on to a life of evil. A life of crime, madness, hard drugs, juvenile delinquency, mugging in the streets, probably — ‘ He seemed to be searching for the ultimate depravity, 'same-sex intercourse, disease and death. The way is open to everything that's illegal and immoral, and a million small businessmen have to support it through their taxes because it creates an intolerable burden on the National Health Service. So that's why, and I'll say this in print and in Parliament, we have to have prison for the first offence. We must have a real deterrent because that's the first step on the slippery slope...‘

‘There's nothing wrong,' I interrupted him like an interviewer who sees the time's running out, ‘with a bit of hypocrisy.'

‘What do you mean, hypocrisy?'

‘The world's full of Christians who fail to give all their worldly goods to the poor,' I told him, ‘Communists who deal on the stock exchange, Catholic priests who surrender to their housekeepers, and vegetarians who fall to the temptations of a rasher of bacon. It doesn't make their beliefs any less valid. It just means that humanity is weak.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.' The Doctor looked deeply insulted.

‘I'm just saying it's understandable. Very few people practise exactly what they preach.'

‘How many times have I got to tell you? I have always called for prison for a first offence of cannabis possession.' Like a very old gramophone record, my conference with Dr Gurnley seemed to have got stuck in a groove.

I had been sneaking recently, I felt, round the corridors of power. I'd gone up the back stairs of the Royal Courts of Justice to the private room of a distressed Judge. Now I and Bonny Bernard, whom I had appointed solicitor in the case, had penetrated through some sort of tropical forest planted under glass in the MP's new and luxurious accommodation. There Tom Gurnley had waved us to a seat and treated us, for the first ten minutes, to the story of his life. Born the fourth son of a South London plumber, he had made his way up in the world by way of boxing and evening classes. He was, he told us, in favour of boxing being made part of the national curriculum.

‘I had my nose broken before I was twenty. Every man should.'

We heard of his climb through an accountants' office to a successful business career, his chairmanship of the Croydon Wanderers football club and his emergence as a public figure.

‘I say what I mean, Mr Rumpole. I think people appreciate that. They don't get that feeling with the present leadership, to whom I am, by the way, completely loyal, never mind what the papers say.'

At last we got through the life story to the night in question. He gave a party at his house in Smith Square to celebrate a win by the Wanderers. Some star players were present, together with their model girlfriends, and members of the Shadow Cabinet, who were only too pleased to have their photographs taken with a striker who looked like an old-time pirate, ear-ringed and shaven headed, and his girlfriend, the entire back of whose dress had unexpectedly gone missing. Despite the glamour of the guests, the party seemed to have been about as eventful, and with less of an undercurrent of seething passion, than our Christmas office do in Equity Court. There was no evidence of any illicit substances making their appearance until all but one of the guests had left.

She was a girl who had come, she said, with one of the Wanderers and his girlfriend. She had been in the loo at the time of the general exodus and, whether by accident or design, found herself alone with Tom Gurnley. She turned out to be Angela Illsley, principal prosecution witness and star reporter of the
Daily Beacon.

‘She wasn't there long. She thanked me for the party and gave me a kiss.'

‘She kissed you?' I wondered what Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown would have said to that. ‘How long did she stay?'

‘Only about ten minutes, quarter of an hour.'

And when I asked him if he had happened to light up a Camberwell Carrot during that period, he gave me, once again, his speech on the misuse of drugs.

When our meeting reached this less than satisfactory conclusion, there was one further question I had to ask.

‘Dr Gurnley, what are you a Doctor of? Heart transplants? Hip replacements?'

‘I am a Doctor of Communication and Verbal Persuasion at the Rogers University of Manitoba,' he announced with pride.

‘Really. Did you enjoy Manitoba?'

‘I never went there. I took the course entirely by post.'

I should have known better — ask a silly question and you get a silly answer.

Time passed. Mizz Liz Probert allowed herself to be taken to the opera. She said it lasted a long time and she slept through most of it. Every time she woke up, the Gods were still at it and Claude was holding her hand. She released herself gently and went back to sleep.

The days lengthened and I walked down Fleet Street to the Bailey in bright sunshine. We sweated in Court and the wigs scratched our thinning skulls. The daffodils in the Temple gardens gave way to roses, and a date was fixed at London Sessions for the trial of a popular MP on a charge of possession of a class-B drug. He had taken my advice and opted for a Jury.

Neither the sunshine nor the flowers had done much to cheer up Claude Erskine-Brown. The under-employed QC still loitered palely about Chambers in search of someone to talk to, or take out to dinner, or at least for a drink at Pommeroy‘s, so that checking back into the Sheridan Club might be delayed as long as possible. There was, however, something more determined about the man. He had, it seemed, come to some decision, fuelled, I was to discover, by equal parts of optimism and despair.

‘I've made up my mind, Rumpole. I'm going for a divorce.'

Claude was sitting in my client's chair. Indeed, there seemed to be very few hours of the day when he wasn't sitting in my client's chair, hungry for company and consolation.

‘Isn't that a bit desperate? I mean, it was only a trial separation.'

‘Philly's had her chance.' Claude was doing his best to look ruthless. ‘It's about time I got a life.'

I remembered where I'd heard that expression before, and a terrible suspicion entered my mind.

‘The trouble is that Philly and I are about the same age, and, you must see this Rumpole, it's difficult for a man to be married to a Judge.'