The Anti-Social Behaviour of Horace Rumpole (3 page)

He, Rumpole I mean, came home the other night in a high mood. I don't know which is more irritating, when he's in a high mood or down in the dumps. Anyway, he brought another bottle of wine home and announced that he'd be back in Court Number One at the Old Bailey. Mr Bernard had brought him some unsavoury case about a prostitute strangled in a flat near Paddington Station. It was while he was pouring out yet another glass of the wine from that dreadful little bar, and telling me more than I cared to know about the effects of manual strangulation, that I brought him up short by saying, ‘It's a pity that someone has to die to really cheer you up, Rumpole.'

I'd silenced him for a while, and then he said, ‘That's a terrible thought. Ludmilla from Russia, yes, of course. She's dead and no one can do anything about that. But there's that young man in Brixton Prison, that Graham Wetherby, he's not dead and is probably in need of a little help.'

‘Why?' I asked. ‘Why help him? He killed her.'

‘We don't know that. And we shan't know it until twelve honest citizens come back into court
and tell us so. Meanwhile,' and here Rumpole gave me one of those secret smiles of his that can be so annoying, ‘there are one or two small points that might be of interest. We shall have to wait and see.'

So Rumpole went to bed in a comparatively happy mood, but the next day he was down in the dumps again because he'd been given a leader and wouldn't be able to do all of that unsavoury murder case he is engaged on at the moment. Speaking for myself, I have always found Samuel Ballard a most agreeable person who has given me a warm welcome at Chambers parties and who seems to understand some of the difficulties which arise from the fact of being married to Rumpole.

‘He'll be able to take over the case and lose it,' Rumpole said. ‘Losing cases is what he has a real talent for. And it's just because he's entitled to write QC after his name.'

‘It's a pity you can't write QC after
your
name, Rumpole,' I told him. ‘Then you wouldn't have to rely on Ballard.'

‘I don't rely on Ballard.' Rumpole was not taking this well. ‘I just have to make sure he relies on me.'

‘But you're the number two, Rumpole. I really don't know why you can't get to write QC after
your
name. You've been there at the Bar long enough.'

‘My face doesn't fit.' Rumpole shook his head, I thought a little sadly.

I took a long and critical look at his face. At least I could truthfully say, ‘Lots of people with worse faces than yours have been able to put QC after their names.'

‘I mean, judges tend not to like me. You have to get judges on your side to get made a Queer Customer. They don't like the way I point out their mistakes. They don't appreciate it when I get juries to notice their devious methods of trying to secure a conviction. They can tell that when I say, “In my humble submission to Your Lordship”, I can't bring myself to feel humble at all.'

‘Perhaps you should stop doing those things, Rumpole,' I suggested. ‘It's so embarrassing to have to admit to our bridge club that you're still a
junior
barrister. At your age too!'

‘I can't stop being myself,' he told me. ‘That's too much to ask. All the same, I might try it. I might apply for a silk gown and a seat in the front row. Horace Rumpole, QC. It has an agreeable ring to it!'

The next time I played bridge with Mr Justice Bullingham, I told him that Rumpole was seriously thinking of applying for silk.

‘Good for him,' Sir Leonard said, I thought generously. ‘But I'm afraid he won't get it.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘The trouble with Rumpole is, and this is the generally held opinion, his face doesn't fit.'

 

‘There was a notice in a telephone box near where I went for lunch. “Exotic young Russian lady gives a full personal service”.'

‘And what did you take that to mean?' Soapy Sam, unfortunately my leader, asked the question in the Brixton interview room.

‘Well, it didn't mean shoe cleaning,' I might have told him, ‘or even an extra shampoo and scalp massage.' But I tactfully held my tongue.

Our client answered the question. ‘I thought it meant we could make love,' he said. And I thought
that word ‘love' sounded strange, even shocking, in those surroundings.

Graham Wetherby, who had uttered it, seemed an ordinary, polite, inoffensive young man. His face might have looked pleasant enough had it not been disfigured by a red birthmark which stretched from under his eye about halfway down his left cheek.

‘We don't all have convenient and loving home lives, Mr Ballard. Some of us have to venture a bit further afield.'

He had an oddly precise way of speaking, with his lips pouted. I remember a saying of my childhood: ‘Prunes and prisms, very good words for the lips.' Graham Wetherby seemed to have learned to speak in the ‘prunes and prisms' way.

‘The absence of a love life,' Ballard now put on a look of severe displeasure, ‘doesn't mean you have to visit premises such as 16 Flyte Street.'

‘No, sir. Of course not. I do realize that. In my saner moments.'

‘Are you telling us you are insane when you do these terrible things?' Ballard asked the question with a small smile of satisfaction. It seemed that he was anxious to conduct a defence case by getting a quick confession of guilt.

‘Is it so terrible? I don't find girls who might wish
to make love to me in the usual course of my everyday life. That's why I ring the telephone numbers. Not too often, though. It comes expensive.'

While Ballard was digesting this reply, I asked the question which, in my view, was the reason for our visit. ‘Did you kill Ludmilla Ravenskaya?'

‘Of course not! I'm sure she was a lovely girl. But when I saw her, she was dead.'

‘All right,' I carried on while my learned leader was shuffling his papers. ‘So you say the maid, this Miss McKinnan, told you to go into the sitting room and wait for a short while. Then if Ludmilla didn't come out to you, you were to knock on the bedroom door and go in to her.'

‘Yes, that's what she said. Well, I waited in the sitting room and read some magazines that she had lying about. Then, after ten minutes, I knocked at the bedroom door. There was no answer, so I pushed the door open. Then I saw her.'

‘Alive?'

‘No, Mr Rumpole. Dead.'

‘Did you know that then?'

‘I didn't know. But I saw the marks on her throat. The bed was untidy. There was a table knocked over, as though there'd been some sort of a struggle. So I called for the maid –'

‘McKinnan?'

‘She accused me straight away. She accused me of killing the girl.'

‘And then?'

‘She told me to stay there. She went out and locked the sitting-room door. So I was a prisoner. It was then she called the police.'

‘That's what she says. How long was it before the police arrived?'

‘Quite a while. I suppose an hour, maybe more.'

It was at this point that my not quite so learned leader, who had been looking increasingly depressed and disapproving as I asked a few penetrating questions, came in with, ‘Mr Rumpole has gone into the details, Wetherby, but I have to look at the big picture. The point remains that the woman Ravenskaya was seen alive before your visit and during your visit she was found dead. You were the only person with her at this time. You must realize that we can hold out very little hope in your case.'

I thought it was far too early to reach such a verdict, so I said, ‘Until I've cross-examined the prosecution witnesses, including the forensic expert, we can't say that there is
no
hope.'

‘You seem to have forgotten, Rumpole,' Soapy
Sam reminded the meeting, ‘that the duty of cross-examining the prosecution witnesses will fall on me.'

‘Then perhaps there
is
no hope after all,' I thought, but I restrained myself from saying it.

‘I'm seriously worried about Wetherby,' Sam Ballard told me as we walked out of the prison gate.

‘Don't give up all hope,' I said, and advised him to have a careful look at the post-mortem photographs.

‘It's not that, Rumpole. But should a silk in my position at the Bar, with my reputation for complete moral probity, be concerned in this extremely squalid murder? Added to that, as Chair-elect of the Lawyers as Christians Society, should I be defending a client who has lost all sense of decency and become a frequenter of brothels?'

I would like to have said, ‘That's exactly why he needs defending', but I didn't. I remained silent, and I now saw some blessed hope arising from Sam Ballard's strong sense of moral repugnance.

 

Rumpole, QC. As I say, Queer Customers is what I always call them, and no doubt they'd be calling me that; but there are so many queer customers who have attained the rewards of senior barristers, a silk gown and a seat in the front row, that one more shouldn't make much difference. I remembered what Bonny Bernard had said about this most unassuming of men accused of manual strangulation: he wanted a QC to defend him. Even Hilda had wondered why, after so many years at the Bar, I had not reached the front row. I tried
saying ‘Rumpole, QC' again and found that it had rather a distinguished ring to it.

In the good old days – well, there were
some
good things about them – a barrister with a longing for a silk gown had only to get a couple of judges to write up to the Lord Chancellor, who as head judge easily found out who got drunk in court, or ate peas with his knife, or would date a woman on the jury, and indeed anything else likely to let down the high standards of the front bench.

Times, of course, have changed and nowadays it seems there must be a committee for everything, including sorting out the list of applicants for the silk gown. There are still written reports to the Lord Chancellor, who has incidentally been removed from his time-honoured task of supervising the debates in the House of Lords from the Woolsack, appropriately dressed in a wig, knee breeches, a gown and silk stockings. Now the poor chap has been siphoned off to something called the Ministry of the Constitution or some such title, where, for all I know, he shows up in jeans, a T-shirt and an elderly anorak. He has, I suppose, to follow the whims of the committee in the choice of who to dress in silk.

Meanwhile, I had to call on a platoon of judges,
clients and solicitors to back the Rumpole application. I had no illusions about the difficulty of this task. So far as many people in the top echelon of the legal profession were concerned, my face still didn't fit, and even though I could think of many less fit faces peering out above silk gowns, this was, as I had to explain to Hilda, owing to my determination to get my clients a fair run.

It was a tricky situation, but God, or whatever means the good, came to my assistance. My run of luck started with an unpromising case of dangerous driving in Potters Bar. There was the usual argument about the accuracy of speed cameras and the inaccuracy of police evidence, but the important thing was the prosecutor, a certain Matthew Wick-stead, a tall, forbidding bird with a pronounced Adam's apple, a thin beak of a nose and the sort of voice better suited to a church service than the Potters Bar Magistrates' Court.

After my client had been convicted, this Wickstead approached me in a friendly fashion and said, ‘You're in Samuel Ballard, QC's chambers, aren't you?'

‘Yes.' I had to admit it.

‘He's possibly the next Chairman of the Lawyers
as Christians Society. He's on the committee of course. He gives of his time so generously. I shall certainly vote for him as Chair. Do you see much of him?'

‘Quite a lot. He's leading me in a case of murder at the moment.'

‘A worthy cause? Samuel Ballard's always fighting for worthy causes.'

‘Not all that worthy, I'm afraid.' I tried to sound disapproving. ‘He's defending a client who went to a brothel. He's alleged to have killed a prostitute. Manual strangulation.'

‘Oh dear!' This appeared to be Matthew Wickstead's equivalent of ‘What the hell!' ‘Samuel Ballard, QC's defending a man who resorts to fallen women?'

‘I'm afraid so.'

‘And a man who, far from trying to restart and reform, killed one of them?'

‘That's what's alleged.'

‘Oh, dear me!' Wickstead continued to lament. ‘I left the Church and came to the Bar to support worthy causes.'

Was prosecuting a fast driver on the M25 a worthy cause? I supposed so and didn't argue the point, because of what he next said. ‘I can scarcely
believe that Samuel Ballard, QC, would defend a man who resorts to fallen women.'

‘You mean,' I said, determined to clarify the situation, ‘the Lawyers as Christians would disapprove of anyone undertaking Graham Wetherby's case?'

‘I'm afraid,' Wickstead told me, ‘we at LAC would be deeply disappointed.'

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘That's all I wanted to know.' And so I left him.

It was a sharp, spring morning some weeks later, with a wind that sent our trouser legs flapping and into which we leaned forward like skaters, when Soapy Sam Ballard and I were on our way back from the Old Bailey, where a judge had fixed a date for Graham Wetherby's trial and we had agreed rather more of the facts than I should have liked with the prosecution.

As we walked, I chucked a few well-chosen words into the wind. ‘I was against a friend of yours a while back. Matthew Wickstead.'

‘Splendid fellow! We serve together on the board of LAC.'

‘He mentioned that. He has great respect for you. In fact, he said he'd vote for you as Chair.'

‘How was he? Keeping well?'

‘He seemed perfectly healthy. Only, I'm afraid, a little sad, a trifle distressed.'