Rumpole Rests His Case (8 page)

‘The old Pithead Stompers,' he was muttering. ‘How young we were then. How terribly young!'

Then he was gone, and I couldn't help feeling a moment's pity for the chap. I stifled the feeling. There is a tide in the affairs of men when you have to be completely ruthless.

 

The approach of a serious criminal trial has different effects on customers who are about to step into the dock, whose names appear in the title and who are to take on the starring role in the proceedings. Older pros, such as the senior members of the Timson clan, that famous family of South London villains, take such trials philosophically, as a necessary risk in the pursuit of a career. Younger suspects become cocky and show off, over-excited by their day in Court, and play the somewhat corny character study of a cheerful and, if possible, likeable cockney sparrow.

As his day in Court approached, Will Twineham seemed to withdraw into some inner life which had more significance for him than the prison interview room, the dock and the prospect of an unfriendly verdict. But he began to answer questions more sensibly, as though, in a detached sort of way, he was willing to help me through a difficult, if not impossible period of my life.

‘It's kind of you. It's very kind of you to visit me.'

‘Not kind at all. It's my job.'

‘Kind of you. To take an interest.'

‘I wanted to ask about your wife. Happy marriage, was it?'

‘I was happy. I've never been happy since she . . . left me.'

‘From her photograph . . . she must have been beautiful.'

‘The photograph doesn't tell the whole story.'

‘I just wonder. Did she go out much? I mean, was she at home in the evenings?'

‘Sometimes she was — we lived our own lives, of course. I had the church and she was studying.'

‘Studying what exactly?'

‘She'd left school early and she wanted a degree in English. She went to classes. Discussion groups. She had friends in the discussion groups. I never begrudged her that.'

‘Did you ever meet her friends?'

‘I told you,' he looked only slightly impatient with my curiosity, ‘she had her own life to lead. I never questioned her. She was as loving to me as ever she was. And we became closer, when she had her religious experience.'

‘Religious?'

‘She dreamed dreams and saw visions.'

‘Visions?'

‘She saw what I had only read about in our church. Visions that had never appeared to me. She saw the serpent and the four beasts full of eyes before and behind.'

I remembered the Age of Aquarius club and all that Tony Thrale had told me about the days of acid. Had a small tablet sent Jo off to join her husband in visions of strange phantoms and terrifying apparitions? They spoke of things I could never dream of, let alone understand . . . and I felt an intruder into the strange world inhabited by Will and Jo Twineham. But I had to go on looking for explanations.

‘The bones under the floor. Are you telling us you don't know who was buried there?'

‘Jo was.' He said it as casually as he had thanked me for visiting him.

‘How do you know?'

‘Because I buried her there.' I looked at Bernard, but he avoided my gaze. We had travelled through the world of the serpents and the beasts full of eyes to something as flat and final as a plea of guilty to murder. We had lost our case, but I had to plod on, in search of further and better particulars.

‘You'd better tell us about it.'

‘I saw her. I came out of Gales . . . builders' suppliers in the High Street. I saw her outside the picture house.' And then he said quietly, in a matter-of-fact sort of way, ‘A woman seated upon a scarlet-coloured beast, arrayed in purple, having a golden cup in her hand full of the abomination and filthiness of her fornication.'

I waited for the visions to fade, for my client to look hard at the cold interview room, the screw on the other side of the glass door, the dog handler in the prison yard under the window. Then I asked him the question he'd have to answer in Court. ‘Mr Twineham, did you kill your wife?'

‘Yes, I killed her.'

‘And buried her body under the floor?'

‘I buried her. Yes.'

‘Because you were afraid of being charged with murder?'

He shook his head then and gave me one of his charming and disarming smiles. ‘No. Because I didn't want to be parted from her.'

 

 

‘Insanity's out.'

‘You mean you've come to your senses, Rumpole, at last.'

Hilda made this critical observation in what was, for her, a relatively jovial manner, and I ignored it. I was getting outside a nourishing breakfast (egg, bacon and fried slice) before heading off to the Old Bailey for the case of Mr Twineham.

‘He must have been sane, that's what all the quacks say, because he hid his wife's body. He knew perfectly well he'd committed a crime and was trying to escape detection. Even Bernard couldn't find a doctor who'd disagree with that. But in my view, burying your wife under the sitting-room floor is a sure sign of madness.'

‘I should think so too.' She looked at me as though such an idea might never have entered my head. I changed the subject.

‘By the way, how was the Old Girls' Reunion?'

‘It went extremely well. In fact, it was a whole lot of fun. Dodo and I enjoyed it hugely.'

I tried to imagine what sort of fun the Old Saint Elfreda's Girls got up to, failed and said, ‘But I thought you were dreading it?'

‘Oh, we were.'

‘How was Chrissie what's her name?'

‘You mean Chrissie Snelling - Lady Shiplake now. She was in the chair.'

‘And cut you two dead, did she?'

‘Not at all. She was enormously pleased to see us. She kept saying what an entertaining pair we were at school. She said we were a laugh a minute.'

‘She said that?' I tried to picture She Who Must and her friend Dodo Mackintosh as two capering schoolgirls constantly telling jokes and irritating the science mistress, but failed. ‘But you said she left because of you and Dodo?'

‘Oh, she explained that. It was nothing to do with us.'

‘It wasn't?'

‘No. Chrissie's father . . .'

‘Snelling?'

‘Yes. Anyway, he was high up in the Foreign Office and he got posted to Washington, so they decided to send her to school over there. It was quite a sudden decision.'

‘And no one told you that . . . ?'

‘No one.'

‘So you've felt guilty. All these years?'

‘Up till last night. Yes. As I said to Dodo, it's quite a weight off my mind.'

‘It must be.' Did I see, I wondered, some faint glow of light at the end of Will Twineham's tunnel? A life spent in the mistaken assumption of guilt? Still chewing the last bit of breakfast, I set off to meet my client down the Bailey.

 

 

‘Professor Ackerman, you can learn a good deal from a skeleton, can't you?'

‘I can tell you that it was the skeleton of a fully grown woman approximately five foot four inches high. I would say the body had been buried carefully and the digger brought it up all in one piece.'

‘Been buried carefully, had it?' Judge Cameron Foulks was a ginger-moustached, wary-eyed Scot who behaved, throughout his trials, in a military fashion, having a tendency to bark out orders as though without them courtroom discipline couldn't be maintained and proceedings might, at any moment, slide into anarchy. ‘The Jury will remember that. A woman of average height, buried carefully.' So far the evidence was giving him great pleasure.

‘Could you form any view as to how long ago the body was buried?' I asked the Master of the Morgues.

‘A considerable time. More than twenty years.'

‘It was thirty-three years ago that your client's wife disappeared.' The Judge was sitting bolt upright, perky as a cock who has just exercised his
droit de seigneur
over all the surrounding hens.

‘I think the Jury can work that out without any assistance from your Lordship.' I thought the time had come to take the Judge down a peg or two. He considered flying at me in a whirl of ruffled feathers but, thinking better of it, relapsed into a sulky silence.

‘Professor Ackerman, you're familiar with a condition known as obstructive cardiac myopathy.' Here I smiled at the Judge in a pleasant sort of way. ‘May I spell that for your Lordship?' And before he could protest, I did so.

Then I turned from him to the witness.

‘Is that a hardening of a muscle of the heart?'

‘It is more or less that.'

‘Doesn't it cause breathlessness and, in an extreme attack, death?'

‘It could do, certainly.'

‘And could such an attack be brought on by extreme emotional stress — in a young woman, for example?'

‘I believe it might.'

‘And if this young woman were taking drugs in the shape of LSD tablets, might that worsen her condition?'

‘I don't think it would do her any good.'

‘Mr Rumpole. Are you suggesting that death in this case had something to do with a heart condition?'

Prof. Ackerman and I had built up a certain rapport across many courts and in many murder trials. We both looked at the Judge who had interrupted our dialogue with a sort of weary patience.

‘I congratulate your Lordship.' I smiled at him in a way he clearly found irritating. ‘Your Lordship has grasped the exact nature of the defence.'

Before his Lordship could find the breath to reply, I asked the expert witness the next question.

‘Was it possible to tell, from your examination of her bones, if this woman had any such heart condition?'

I knew, of course, what his answer was going to be, but Dr Paul of Acton was dead and his notes gone, God knows where. Asking my old friend and sparring partner, Professor Ackerman of the Morgues, the above question was the only way I had of getting the facts of this complaint in front of the Jury.

‘I'm afraid, Mr Rumpole, I couldn't tell that.'

‘He couldn't possibly tell that.' The Judge had his tail feathers up again. ‘You've got your answer, Mr Rumpole.'

‘Certainly I have, my Lord.' I continued to look as though it were just the answer I wanted. Then I changed the subject.

‘Professor Ackerman, I want to ask you about the cause of death. Can you help us?'

‘I'll do my best.'

‘I'm sure you will. The skull was completely intact, wasn't it?'

‘It was.'

‘So we can rule out a heavy blow to the head, let us say with a blunt instrument?'

‘Yes we can.'

‘There were no broken bones?'

‘There were not.'

‘So we can rule out a violent attack?'

‘I think so.'

‘You mean very possibly we can rule such an attack out?'

‘Yes.'

‘There were no bones broken in the neck?'

‘None.'

‘So you can rule out violent strangulation?'

‘There were no signs of violence on the skeleton. No.'

‘So, to sum up, Professor. There was no evidence to show that this young woman had been murdered?'

The Court was silent, the Jury attentive as he answered fairly, ‘No evidence from the bones I examined. No.'

 

 

‘You did wonders with the Professor.'

‘Thank you, Bernard. I made bricks without straw. What can we do with bones? They don't prove much. One way or the other.'

The prosecution had closed its case, and the steak and kidney and nourishing Guinness in the pub opposite the Old Bailey were to give me strength for what was likely to prove one of the trickiest afternoons in the Rumpole career. When our client admitted, calmly and as though it was the most natural thing in the world, that he killed his wife, Bernard was convinced there was no alternative to a guilty plea and told the Court as much. But things began to happen. Tony Thrale, perhaps ashamed of his determination to keep out of Court, remembered a couple of middle-aged ex-flower-power children who could speak of Jo's quest for adventure by way of acid tablets and the Age of Aquarius club. One of them even remembered an attack of breathlessness. I had talked to Will Twineham in the cells under the Old Bailey, and I believed he was in a fit state to enter the witness box.

 

 

 

It started well. Will stood, quiet, grey haired, good looking, in the dock. We went through his life as a young builder falling in love with the girl next door. We got through his promotion to management, his married life and Jo's frequent absences. He remained calm as he described the lengthy kiss he saw in front of the cinema.

‘I waited for her to come home. It seemed that I went on a journey.'

‘You mean you left the house?'

‘Not in the body. In the spirit.'

‘In the body you stayed waiting for her?'

‘Yes. But my spirit was upon the side of the sea.'

Poor old His Lordship looked thoroughly confused. ‘Is your client saying he went to the seaside, Mr Rumpole?'

‘His spirit went, my Lord.'

‘I'm not interested in where his spirit went to.'

‘He went to the seaside, only in his imagination, my Lord.'

‘Mr Rumpole. Whatever is in his imagination is not evidence. You should know better by now. Considering the length of time you've been at the Bar.'