The Anti-Social Behaviour of Horace Rumpole (2 page)

‘You're a hopeless case, Rumpole,' she said.

‘Am I really? I rather like hopeless cases. They're the ones I usually manage to win.'

‘Well, I don't think you're going to win this time.
Haven't you seen the notice put up by our Head of Chambers?'

‘I have, and I read it with interest.'

‘You seem to be breaking every one of the new rules in Chambers, eating, drinking and smoking a small cigar.'

‘Of course, Soapy Sam's notice clearly doesn't apply to me.'

‘Why not? You're a member of Chambers.'

‘But I didn't attend the Chambers meeting.'

‘You never attend the Chambers meetings.'

‘Exactly! So the decisions they come to are only binding on those who attend. They are
res inter alios acta
.'

‘What's that meant to mean?' It was clear that Luci had even less Latin than I had.

‘A thing decided among others. Leaving me free to do as I please.'

‘I don't think that's much of a defence.' Luci looked sceptical. ‘I mean, you weren't present when they passed the laws against murder, but that doesn't mean you can go about killing people.'

I suppose our Director of Marketing had a point there, but I found her next remark quite ridiculous. ‘Erskine-Brown is considering the possibility of getting an ASBO against you, Rumpole.'

‘An anti-social behaviour order?'

‘That's the one.'

‘Against me, did you say?'

‘Exactly.'

‘And what's the nature of their complaint?'

‘Persistent smoking in Chambers, and bringing food and alcoholic refreshments into your room.'

‘That's not anti-social behaviour. It's entirely social. Sit down, my dear old Director of Marketing. Let me offer you an egg sandwich, prepared by the hand of She Who Must Be Obeyed. Bring a spare glass and I can offer you a cheap and cheery mouthful. Now what could be more social than that?'

‘Don't be ridiculous, Rumpole.'

‘What's ridiculous about it?'

‘If I accepted your hospitality…'

‘Yes?'

‘Then I'd be as anti-social as you are.'

At this our Director of Marketing left me feeling profoundly anti-social so far as Ballard and his devious sidekick, Claude Erskine-Brown, were concerned.

There is a certain area of London, not far from Clapham Common, where the streets of the wealthier middle classes, such as Beechwood Grove,
are perilously close to less respectable areas, such as Rampton Road, which have become inhabited by members of the ever-spreading Timson clan, among them Bertie Timson, his wife, Leonie, and their single child, the twelve-year-old Peter. Bertie Timson's alleged trade as an ‘Electrical Consultant' was in fact a cover story for more felonious transactions, but he was a polite enough client, and I remember him thanking me warmly after a successful defence on a charge of carrying house-breaking implements. He had done his time during Peter's extreme youth and now, when his son got into trouble, he had remembered Rumpole.

Peter and his friends frequently engaged in football games in Rampton Road which the neighbours apparently suffered without protest. However, on too many occasions the ball found its way into the quiet and respectable precincts of Beechwood Grove. After a number of complaints, the police were called. When Peter Timson pursued a flying ball into Beechwood Grove, he alone was apprehended, as the rest of the team scarpered. Apparently Peter was considered to be the ringleader and source of all the trouble.

*

So I walked one Monday morning, with rain dribbling down from a grey sky, into the South London Magistrates' Court to defend a serious case of wrongfully kicked football. Madam Chair, hawk-nosed and sharp-eyed, with a hair-do which looked as though it had been carved out of yellow soap, sat between two unremarkable bookends, a stout and pink-faced man with a Trade Union badge in his lapel and a lean and hungry-looking fellow who might have been a schoolmaster.

‘It's unusual for the defendant to be represented at this stage of the ASBO proceedings, Mr Rumpole. We wonder that you can spare the time from your busy practice.' Madam Chair sounded coldly amused.

‘Then wonder on,' I told her, ‘till truth make all things plain. Busy as I am, and I am of course extremely busy, I can always spare time for a case in which the liberty of the subject is an issue.'

‘Your young client's liberty won't become an issue unless he breaks an anti-social behaviour order. We are all concerned with the liberty of the subject to enjoy peace from noisy footballers. Mr Parkes, I'm sure that you have a statement.'

The person addressed as Parkes appeared to be some eager young dogsbody from the local council.
He handed a document up to the bench and began to read the statement of a Mrs Harriet Englefield of 15 Beechwood Grove. She said she was a ‘healer' by profession and had many clients whom she was able to treat for physical and nervous disorders in a peaceful and homely atmosphere. She also had an aged mother who had been ordered long periods of rest and tranquillity, which had become impossible owing to the noisy games of football played by ‘rough children who come pouring in from Rampton Road'.

It was at this point that I rose to object. ‘No doubt this Mrs Harriet Englefield will be giving evidence on oath?'

‘The law has advanced a little since your call to the Bar, Mr Rumpole. We don't need to trouble such witnesses as Mrs Englefield. We are entitled to proceed on her written statement,' Madam Chair told me.

‘So you are prepared to decide a criminal matter on hearsay evidence?'

‘It's not a criminal matter yet, Mr Rumpole. And it won't be unless your client breaks the order we've been asked to make.'

‘And plays football again?'

‘Exactly!'

‘Very well. I take it that even if we have dispensed with the rule against hearsay evidence, I am still allowed to address the court?'

This request was apparently so unusual that Madam Chair had to seek advice from the clerk of the court, who stood up from his seat below her throne to whisper. This advice she passed on in a brief mutter to her bookends. Then she spoke.

‘We are prepared to hear you, Mr Rumpole, but make it brief.'

‘I shall be brief. What is anti-social behaviour? If you ask me, I would say that the world has advanced towards civilization by reason of antisocial behaviour. The suffragettes behaved anti-socially and achieved the vote. Nelson Mandela's anti-social campaign brought justice to South Africa. Now this young person, this child I represent…'

I turned to wave a hand towards the long-haired twelve-year-old with curiously thoughtful brown eyes. ‘This young Peter, or Pete, Timson.'

‘Who is neither a suffragette nor Nelson Mandela,' Madam Chair thought it fit to remind me.

‘That is true,' I had to admit. ‘But he is an
innocent child. He has no criminal record. He has broken no law. If football is illegal, it should be forbidden by an act of Parliament. Don't stain his blameless record by a verdict based on untested hearsay evidence.'

‘Is that all, Mr Rumpole?' Madam Chair broke into my final dramatic pause.

‘All,' I said. ‘And more than enough, in my submission, to let this child go back to playing.' With this I sat down, in the vain hope that I might have touched, somewhere in Madam Chair, a mother's heart.

After further whispered conversations the Chair spoke. ‘Mr Rumpole's speeches,' she said, ‘may be thought amusing in the Central Criminal Court, but here we cannot let his so-called oratory distract us from our clear duty. Peter Timson.' Here, prompted by an usher, my client rose to his diminutive height. ‘We make an order forbidding you to enter Beechwood Grove for any purpose whatsoever, including, of course, the playing of football.'

When I went to say goodbye to my client, he was standing next to his father, Bertie.

‘Say thank you to Mr Rumpole. I suppose he did his best.'

‘Thank you, Mr Rumpole.' Peter seemed extraordinarily pleased with the result. ‘I got an ASBO! All them down Rampton Road are going to be
so
jealous.'

I had never, in all my legal life, met so delighted a loser.

Back in Chambers I poured out the last glass from a bottle of Château Thames Embankment and lit a small cigar. My spirits were at a low ebb. My practice seemed to have shrunk to Pete-sized proportions. Then, quite unexpectedly, the tide turned. The telephone rang and I picked it up to hear once again the voice of my favourite solicitor.

‘I'm sorry about the ASBO case,' Bonny Bernard said. ‘But I think I might soon be in a position to offer you a murder.'

The case Bonny Bernard had sent me seemed in the best tradition of English murders since the faroff days of Jack the Ripper and the Camden Town affair. The tragedy of the unfortunate girls who go on the game is that they all too easily fall victim to manual strangulation.

The difference between these classic cases and the brief I was eagerly noting was that, in my present case, a death in Flyte Street, a small turning off Sussex Gardens near to Paddington Station, the alleged culprit was arrested in the dead girl's
room and there seemed to be no mystery about it.

My client was Graham Wetherby, thirty-three, single, a clerk in a government department. He had an address in Morden, on the outskirts of London, and, according to his statement, he lived alone in a bed-sitting room, travelling up every day to Queen Anne's Gate and the Home Office.

The case against Wetherby was a simple one. On the date in question he telephoned the address in Flyte Street where Ludmilla Ravenskaya, a Russian immigrant, carried on her profession. His call was answered by Anna McKinnan, who acted as Miss Ravenskaya's maid and was the main witness for the prosecution. My client left his work at lunchtime and just before one he was admitted to the house in Flyte Street for a brief, expensive and, as things turned out, totally disastrous tryst.

The entry phone at the front door invited him up to a room on the second floor. Once there he dealt with Anna McKinnan, the maid, and paid over to her the £110 he had saved up for a brief moment of passion.

From then on McKinnan's evidence was clear. She told Graham Wetherby that he could go into the small sitting room and wait, and Ludmilla, the ‘young lady', would come out to him. If she didn't
come in a reasonable time he could knock on the bedroom door to announce his presence, because her mistress was alone and had no one else in with her. Accordingly, he went into the sitting room. Some twenty minutes later, McKinnan heard her ‘young lady' screaming. She hurried into the sitting room and described what she saw.

The bedroom door was open and Wetherby was standing by the bed, on which the ‘young lady' lay partially dressed. She could see red marks round her neck and she was lying across the bed in an attitude the maid called ‘unnaturally still'.

Wetherby said nothing, but Anna McKinnan, according to her evidence, acted quickly. She went and locked the sitting-room door, making my client a prisoner. While he was shouting and hammering at the door, she telephoned the police from a phone in the kitchen.

A detective inspector, a woman officer and a police doctor arrived at the flat surprisingly quickly, no more than an hour later. McKinnan was able to tell them that she had seen Ludmilla alive and laughing over a cup of tea after her previous customer had departed.

She then let the officers into the sitting room, where a distracted Graham Wetherby told them he
had found Ludmilla dead when, having knocked on the door and got no reply, he went into the bedroom.

On the face of it this seemed an unanswerable case, but I hoped that, when I got the chance of talking to Wetherby, some sort of defence might emerge. My pessimism was increased, however, the following morning, when I rang Bonny Bernard to thank him for the brief.

‘I thought you'd like to know,' the misguided solicitor told me, ‘that I've briefed a leader for you, your Head of Chambers, Mr Samuel Ballard, QC. It's a terrible business, isn't it?'

‘Absolutely ghastly,' I agreed, deliberately misunderstanding his point, ‘getting Soapy Sam Ballard to lead me. After all we've gone through together. How could you do it?'

‘The client wanted a QC. He said in all the big murder trials they have QCs.'

‘So you suggested Soapy Sam?'

‘He's your Head of Chambers.'

‘So you're determined to lose this case?'

‘Is it – entirely hopeless?'

‘No case is entirely hopeless unless you bring Mr Ballard in to conduct it.'

There was a silence, then Bernard said, ‘I'm sorry.
The client insisted on Queen's Counsel. You're not Queen's Counsel, are you, Mr Rumpole?'

‘Not yet,' I warned him. ‘But who knows what may happen in the fullness of time?'

‘Who knows? You're right there, Mr Rumpole.' My solicitor sounded encouraging. ‘Meanwhile, I'll meet you and Mr Ballard in Brixton Prison. Looking forward to it.'

But I was no longer looking forward to our first meeting with our client, an occasion on which I would occupy a secondary and subordinate position. If, by any chance, there was some sort of defence available to Graham Wetherby, my not particularly learned leader could be guaranteed to miss it.

 

Extract from the Memoirs of Hilda Rumpole

Leonard has been helping me in the plan I have for learning the law. He has lent me a number of little books that he said he used for passing his exams, his ‘little crammers' he calls them. There's one called
All You Need to Know about Contracts
and another, which I found far more readable, called
Murder and Offences against the Person in a Nutshell
.

Leonard Bullingham tells me I'll soon get to know as much law as Rumpole. In fact, he doesn't
think that Rumpole knows much law at all and that the only thing he has going for him is his ‘gift of the gab'.