Rumpole Rests His Case
by
John Mortimer


By the Same Author

Charade

Rumming Park

Answer Yes or No

Like Men Betrayed

Three Winters

The Narrowing Stream

Will Shakespeare (An Entertainment)

Paradise Postponed

Summer's Lease

Titmuss Regained

Dunster

Felix in the Underworld

The Sound of Trumpets

Rumpole of the Bailey

The Trials of Rumpole

Rumpole for the Defence

Rumpole's Return

Rumpole and the Golden Thread

Rumpole's Last Case

Rumpole and the Age of Miracles

Rumpole a la Carte

Rumpole on Trial

The Best of Rumpole

Rumpole and the Angel of Death

Under the Hammer

With Love and Lizards (with Penelope Mortimer)

Clinging to the Wreckage Murderers and Other Friends The Summer of a
Dormouse

In Character Character Parts

A Voyage Round My Father

The Dock Brief

What Shall We Tell Caroline?

The Wrong Side of the Park

Two Stars for Comfort

The Judge

Collaborators

Edwin, Bermondsey, Marble

Arch, Fear of Heaven The Prince of Darkness


John Mortimer

Rumpole Rests His Case

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First published 2001 I

Excerpt from "Leda and the Swan' by W. B. Yeats printed by kind
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library Hardback ISBN 0-670-91085-6

Askews


For Ann Mallalieu and Tim Cassel


Contents

Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces Rumpole and the Remembrance of
Things Past 26

Rumpole and the Asylum Seekers

Rumpole and the Camberwell Carrot

Rumpole and the Actor Laddie

Rumpole and the Teenage Werewolf

Rumpole Rests His Case


Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces

In the varied ups and downs, the thrills and spills in the life of an
Old Bailey hack, one thing stands as stone.  Your ex-customers will
never want to see you again.  Even if you've steered them through the
rocks of the prosecution case and brought them out to the calm waters
of a not-guilty verdict, they won't plan further meetings, host reunion
dinners or even send you a card on your birthday.  If they catch a
glimpse of you on the Underground, or across a crowded wine bar, they
will bury their faces in their newspapers or look studiously in the
opposite direction.

This is understandable.  Days in Court probably represent a period of
time they'd rather forget and, as a rule, I'm not especially keen to
renew an old acquaintance when a face I once saw in the Old Bailey Dock
reappears at a "Scales of Justice' dinner or the Inns of Court garden
party.  Reminiscences of the past are best avoided and what is required
is a quick look and a quiet turn away.  There have been times, however,
when recognizing a face seen in trouble has greatly assisted me in the
solution of some legal problem, and carried me to triumph in a
difficult case.  Such occasions have been rare, but like number
thirteen buses, two of them turned up in short order round a Christmas
which I remember as being


 one of the oddest, but certainly the most rewarding, I ever spent.

"A traditional British pantomime.  There's nothing to beat it!"

"You go to the pantomime, Rumpole?"  Claude Erskine-Brown asked with
unexpected interest.

"I did when I was a boy.  It made a lasting impression on me."

"Pantomime?"  The American Judge who was our fellow guest round the
Erskine-Brown dinner table was clearly a stranger to such delights. "Is
that some kind of mime show?  Lot of feeling imaginary walls and no one
saying anything?"

"Not at all.  You take some good old story, like Robin Hood."

"Robin Hood's the star?"

"Well, yes.  He's played by some strapping girl who slaps her thighs
and says lines like "Cheer up, Babes in the Wood, Robin's not far
away"."

"You mean there's cross-dressing?"  The American visitor was puzzled.

"Well, if you want to call it that.  And Robin's mother is played by a
red-nosed comic."

"A female comic?"

"No.  A male one."

"It sounds sexually interesting.  We have clubs for that sort of thing
in Pittsburgh."

"There's nothing sexual about it," I assured him.  "The dame's a comic
character who gets the audience singing."

"Singing?"

"The words come down on a sort of giant song-sheet," I explained.  "And
she, who is really a he, gets the audience to sing along."

Emboldened by Erskine-Brown's claret (smoother on the


 tongue but with less of a kick than Chateau Thames Embankment), I
broke into a stanza of the song I was introduced to by Robin Hood's
masculine mother.

"I may be just a nipper,

But I've always loved a kipper .. .

And so does my loving wife.

If you've got a girl just slip her

A loving golden kipper

And she'll be yours for life."

"Is that all?"  The transatlantic Judge still seemed puzzled.

"All I can remember."

"I think you're wrong, Mr.  Rumpole."

"What?"

"I think you're wrong and those lines do indeed have some sexual
significance."  And the Judge fell silent, contemplating the unusual
acts suggested.

"I see they're doing Aladdin at the Tufnell Park Empire.  Do you think
the twins might enjoy it, Rumpole?"

The speaker was Mrs.  Justice Erskine-Brown (Phillida Trant as she was
in happier days when I called her the Portia of our Chambers), still
possessed of a beauty that would break the hearts of the toughest
prosecutors and make old lags swoon with lust even as she passed a
stiff custodial sentence.  The twins she spoke of were Tristan and
Isolde, so named by her opera-loving husband Claude, who was now
bending Hilda's ear on the subject of Covent Garden's latest Ring
cycle.

"I think the twins would adore it.  Just the thing to cure the
Wagnerian death-wish and bring them into a world of sanity."

"Sanity?"  The visiting Judge sounded doubtful.  "With old guys dressed
up as mothers?"


 "I promise you, they'll love every minute of it."  And then I made
another promise that sounded rash even as I spoke the words.  "I know I
would.  I'll take them myself."

"Thank you, Rumpole."  Phillida spoke in her gentlest judicial voice,
but I knew my fate was sealed.  "We'll keep you to that."

"It'll have to be after Christmas," Hilda said.  "We've been invited up
to Norfolk for the holiday."

As she said the word "Norfolk', a cold, sneeping wind seemed to cut
through the central heating of the Erskine-Browns' Islington
dining-room and I felt a warning shiver.

I have no rooted objection to Christmas Day, but I must say it's an
occasion when time tends to hang particularly heavily on the hands.
From the early-morning alarm call of carols piping on Radio Four to the
closing headlines and a restless, liverish sleep, the day can seem as
long as a fraud on the Post Office tried before Mr.  Injustice
Graves.

It takes less than no time for me to unwrap the tie which I will seldom
wear, and for Hilda to receive the annual bottle of lavender water
which she lays down rather than puts to immediate use.  The highlights
after that are the Queen's speech, when I lay bets with myself as to
whether Hilda will stand to attention when the television plays the
National Anthem, and the thawed-out Safeway's bird followed by port (an
annual gift from my faithful solicitor, Bonny Bernard) and pudding.  I
suppose what I have against Christmas Day is that the Courts are all
shut and no one is being tried for anything.

That Christmas, Hilda had decided on a complete change of routine.  She
announced it in a circuitous fashion by saying, one late November
evening, "I was at school with Poppy Longstaff."


 "What's that got to do with it?"  I knew the answer to this question,
of course.  Hilda's old school has this in common with polar
expeditions, natural disasters and the last war: those who have lived
through it are bound together for life and can always call on each
other for mutual assistance.

"Poppy's Eric is Rector of Coldsands.  And for some reason or other he
seems to want to meet you, Rumpole."

"Meet me?"

"That's what she said."

"So does that mean I have to spend Christmas in the Arctic Circle and
miss our festivities?"

"It's not the Arctic Circle.  It's Norfolk, Rumpole.  And our
festivities aren't all that festive.  So, yes.  You have to go."  It
was a judgment from which there was no possible appeal.

My first impression of Coldsands was of a gaunt church tower,
presumably of great age, pointing an accusing finger to heaven from a
cluster of houses on the edge of a sullen, gun-metal sea.  My second
was one of intense cold.  As soon as we got out of the taxi, we were
slapped around the face by a wind which must have started in freezing
Siberia and gained nothing in the way of warmth on its journey across
the plains of Europe.

"In the bleak mid-winter Frosty winds made moan .. ."  wrote that sad
old darling, Christina Rossetti.  Frosty winds had made considerable
moan round the Rectory at Coldsands, owing to the doors that stopped
about an inch short of the stone floors and the windows which never
shut properly, causing the curtains to billow like the sails of a ship
at sea.

We were greeted cheerfully by Poppy.  Hilda's friend had one of those
round, childishly pretty faces often seen on


 seriously fat women, and she seemed to keep going on incessant cups
of hot, sweet tea and a number of cardigans.  If she moved like an
enormous tent, her husband Eric was a slender wraith of a man with a
high aquiline nose, two flapping wings of grey hair on the sides of his
face and a vague air of perpetual anxiety, broken now and then by high
and unexpected laughter.  He made cruciform gestures, as though
remembering the rubric "Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch' and
forgetting where these important articles were kept.

"Eric," his wife explained, 'is having terrible trouble with the church
tower."

"Oh dear."  Hilda shot me a look of stern disapproval, which I knew
meant that it would be more polite if I abandoned my overcoat while tea
was being served.  "How worrying for you, Eric."

The Rev.  Eric went into a long, excited and high-pitched speech.  The
gist of this was that the tower, although of rare beauty, had not been
much restored since the Saxons built it and the Normans added the
finishing touches.  Fifty thousand pounds was needed for essential
repairs, and the thermometer, erected for the appeal outside the
church, was stuck at a low hundred and twenty, the result of an
emergency jumble sale.

"You particularly wanted Horace to come this Christmas?"  Hilda asked
the Man of God with the air of someone anxious to solve a baffling
mystery.  "I wonder why that was."

"Yes.  I wonder!"  Eric looked startled.  "I wonder why on earth I
wanted to ask Horace.  I don't believe he's got fifty thousand smackers
in his back pocket!"  At this, he shook with laughter.

"There," I told him, 'your lack of faith is entirely justified."  I
wasn't exactly enjoying Coldsands Rectory, but I was a little


 miffed that the Reverend couldn't remember why he'd asked me there in
the first place.

"We had hoped that Donald Compton would help us out," Poppy told us. "I
mean, he wouldn't notice fifty thousand.  But he took exception to what
Eric said at the Remembrance Day service."

"Armistice Day in the village," Eric's grey wings of hair trembled as
he nodded in delighted affirmation, 'and I prayed for dead German
soldiers.  It seemed only fair."

"Fair perhaps, darling.  But hardly tactful," his wife told him.
"Donald Compton thought it was distinctly unpatriotic.  He's bought the
Old Manor House," she explained to Hilda.  From then on the
conversation turned exclusively to this Compton and was carried on in
the tones of awe and muted wonder in which people always talk about the
very rich.  Compton, it seemed, after a difficult start in England, had
gone to Canada where, during a ten-year stay, he laid the foundations
of his fortune.  His much younger wife was quite charming, probably
Canadian, and not in the least standoffish.  He had built the village
hall, the cricket pavilion and a tennis court for the school.  Only
Eric's unfortunate sympathy for the German dead had caused his bounty
to stop short at the church tower.

"I've done hours of hard knee work," the Rector told us, 'begging the
Lord to soften Mr.  Compton's heart towards our tower.  No result so
far, I fear."

Apart from this one lapse, the charming Donald Compton seemed to be the
perfect English squire and country gent.  I would see him in church on
Christmas morning, and we had also been invited for drinks before lunch
at the Manor.  The Reverend Eric and the smiling Poppy made it sound as
though the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury would be out


 with the carol singers and we'd been invited to drop in for high tea
at Windsor Castle.  I also prayed for a yule log blazing at the Manor
so that I could, in the true spirit of Christmas, thaw out gradually.

"Now, as a sign of Christmas fellowship, will you all stand and shake
hands with those in front and behind you?"  Eric, in full canonicals,
standing on the steps in front of the altar, made the suggestion as
though he had just thought of the idea.  I stood reluctantly.  I had
found myself a place in church near to a huge, friendly, gently
humming, occasionally belching radiator and I was clinging to it and
stroking it as though it were a new-found mistress (not that I have
much experience of new-, or even old-found mistresses).  The man who
turned to me from the front row seemed to be equally reluctant.  He
was, as Hilda had pointed out excitedly, the great Donald Compton in
person: a man of middle height with silver hair, dressed in a tweed
suit and with a tan which it must have been expensive to preserve at
Christmas.  He had soft brown eyes which looked, almost at once, away
from me as, with a touch of his dry fingers, he was gone and I was left
for the rest of the service with no more than a well-tailored back and
the sound of an uncertain tenor voice joining in the hymns.

I turned to the row behind to shake hands with an elderly woman who had
madness in her eyes and whispered conspiratorially to me, "You cold,
dear?  Like to borrow my gloves?  We're used to a bit of chill weather
round these parts."  I declined politely and went back to hugging the
radiator, and as I did so a sort of happiness stole over me.  To start
with, the church was beautiful, with a high timbered roof and walls of
weathered stone, peppered with marble tributes to dead


 inhabitants of the manor.  It was decorated with holly and mistletoe,
a tree glowed and there were candles over a crib.  I thought how many
generations of Coldsands villagers, their eyes bright and faces flushed
with the wind, had belted out the hymns.  I also thought how depressed
the great Donald Compton who had put on little gold half-glasses to
read the prophecy from Isaiah: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a
son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his
name shall be called "Wonderful" would feel if Jesus's instruction to
sell all and give it to the poor should ever be taken literally.

And then I wondered why it was that, as he touched my fingers and
turned away, I felt that I had lived through that precise moment
before.

There was, in fact, a huge log fire crackling and throwing a dancing
light on the marble floor of the circular entrance hall, with its great
staircase leading up into private shadows.  The cream of Coldsands was
being entertained to champagne and canapes by the new Lord of the
Manor.  The decibels rose as the champagne went down and the little
group began to sound like an army of tourists in the Sistine Chapel,
noisy, excited and wonder struck

"They must be all his ancestors."  Hilda was looking at the pictures
and, in particular, at a general in a scarlet coat on a horse prancing
in front of some distant battle.

My mouth was full of cream cheese enveloped in smoked salmon.  I
swallowed it and said, "Oh, I shouldn't think so.  After all, he only
bought the house recently."

"But I expect he brought his family portraits here from somewhere
else."

"You mean, he had them under the bed in his old bachelor


 flat in Wimbledon and now he's hung them round an acre or two of
walls?"

"Do try and be serious, Rumpole, you're not nearly as funny as you
think you are.  Just look at the family resemblance.  I'm absolutely
certain that all of these are old Comptons."

And it was when she said that that I remembered everything perfectly
clearly.

He was with his wife.  She was wearing a black velvet dress and had
long, golden hair that sparkled in the firelight.  They were talking to
a bald, pink-faced man and his short and dumpy wife, and they were all
laughing.  Compton's laughter stopped as he saw me coming towards him.
He said, "I don't think we've met."

"Yes," I replied.  "We shook hands briefly in church this morning.  My
name's Rumpole and I'm staying with the Long-staffs.  But didn't we
meet somewhere else?"

"Good old Eric!  We have our differences, of course, but he's a saintly
man.  This is my wife Lorelei, and Colonel and Maudy Jacobs.  I expect
you'd like to see the library, wouldn't you, Rumpole?  I'm sure you're
interested in ancient history.  Will you all excuse us?"

It was two words from Hilda that had done it: 'old' and "Compton'.  I
knew then what I should have remembered when we touched hands in the
pews, that Old Compton is a street in Soho, and that was perhaps why
Riccardo (known as Dicko) Perducci had adopted the name.  And I had
received that very same handshake, a slight touch and a quick turn away
when I said goodbye to him in the cells under the Old Bailey and left
him to start seven years for blackmail.  The trial had ended, I now
remembered, just before a long-distant Christmas.


 The Perducci territory had been, in those days, not rolling Norfolk
acres but a number of Soho strip clubs and clip joints.  Girls would
stand in front of these last-named resorts and beckon the lonely, the
desperate and the unwary in.  Sometimes they would escape after paying
twenty pounds for a watery cocktail.  Unlucky, affluent and important
customers might even get sex, carefully recorded by microphones and
cameras to produce material which was used for systematic and highly
profitable blackmail.  The victim in Dicko's case was an obscure and
not much loved Circus Judge; so it was regarded as particularly serious
by the prosecuting authority.

When I mitigated for Dicko, I stressed the lack of direct evidence
against him.  He was a shadowy figure who kept himself well in the
background and was known as a legend rather than a familiar face round
Soho.  "That only shows what a big wheel he was," Judge Bullingham, who
was unfortunately trying the case, bellowed unsympathetically.  In
desperation I tried the approach of Christmas on him.  "Crimes
forgiven, sins remitted, mercy triumphant, such was the message of the
story that began in Bethlehem," I told the Court, at which the Mad Bull
snorted that, as far as he could remember, that story ended in a
criminal trial and a stiff sentence on at least one thief.

"I suppose something like this was going to happen sooner or later." We
were standing in the library, in front of a comforting fire and among
leather-bound books, which I strongly suspected had been bought by the
yard.  The new, like the old, Dicko was soft-eyed, quietly spoken,
almost unnaturally calm; the perfect man behind the scenes of a
blackmailing operation or a country estate.

"Not necessarily," I told him.  "It's just that my wife has so ii


 many old school friends and Poppy Longstaff is one of them.  Well
now, you seem to have done pretty well for yourself.  Solid citizens
still mis conducting themselves round Old Compton Street, are they?"

"I wouldn't know.  I gave all that up and went into the property
business."

"Really?  Where did you do that?  Canada?"

"I never saw Canada."  He shook his head.  "Garwick Prison.
Up-and-coming area in the Home Counties.  The screws there were ready
and willing to do the deals on the outside.  I paid them embarrassingly
small commissions."

"How long were you there?"

"Four years.  By the time I came out I'd got my first million."

"Well, then I did you a good turn, losing your case.  A bit of luck His
Honour Judge Bullingham didn't believe in the remission of sins."

"You think I got what I deserved?"

I stretched my hands to the fire.  I could hear the cocktail chatter
from the marble hall of the eighteenth-century manor.  "Treat every man
according to his deserts and who shall escape whipping?"  I quoted
Hamlet at him.

"Then I can trust you, Rumpole?  The Lord Chancellor's going to put me
on the local Bench."

"The Lord Chancellor lives in a world of his own."

"You don't think I'd do well as a magistrate?"

"I suppose you'd speak from personal experience of crime.  And have
some respect for the quality of mercy."

"I've got no time for that, Rumpole."  His voice became quieter but
harder, the brown eyes lost their softness: that, I thought, was how he
must have looked when one of his clip-joint girls was caught with the
punters' cash stuffed in her tights.  "It's about time we cracked down
on crime.  Well


 now, can I trust you not to go out there and spread the word about
the last time we met?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"How well you have understood the Christmas message."

"Which is?"

"Perhaps, generosity."

"I see.  So you want your bung?"

"Oh, not me, Dicko.  I've been paid, inadequately, by Legal Aid.  But
there's an impoverished church tower in urgent need of
resuscitation."

"That Eric Longstaff, our Rector he's not a patriot!"

"And are you?"

"I do a good deal of work locally for the British Legion."

"And I'm sure, next Poppy Day, they'll appreciate what you've done for
the church tower."

He looked at me for a long minute in silence, and I thought that if
this scene had been taking place in a back room in Soho there might,
quite soon, have been the flash of a knife.  Instead, his hand went to
an inside pocket, but it produced nothing more lethal than a cheque
book.

"While you're in a giving mood," I said, 'the Rectory's in desperate
need of central heating."

"This is bloody blackmail!"  Dicko Perducci, now known as Donald
Compton, said.

"Well," I told him, 'you should know."

Christmas was over.  The year turned, stirred itself and opened its
eyes on a bleak January.  Crimes were committed, arrests were made and
the courtrooms were filled, once again, with the sound of argument.  I
went down to the Old Bailey on a trifling matter of fixing the date of
a trial before Mrs.  Justice


 Erskine-Brown.  As I was leaving, the usher came and told me that the
Judge wanted to see me in her private room on a matter of urgency.

Such summonses always fill me with apprehension and a vague feeling of
guilt.  What had I done?  Got the date of the trial hopelessly muddled?
Addressed the Court with my trousers carelessly unzipped?  I was
relieved when the learned Phillida greeted me warmly and even offered
me a glass of sherry, poured from her own personal decanter.  "It was
so kind of you to offer, Rumpole," she said unexpectedly.

"Offer what?"  I was puzzled.

"You told us how much you adored the traditional British pantomime."

"So I did."  For a happy moment I imagined Her Ladyship as Principal
Boy, her shapely legs encased in black tights, her neat little wig
slightly askew, slapping her thigh and calling out, in bell-like tones,
"Cheer up, Rumpole, Portia's not far away."

"The twins are looking forward to it enormously."

"Looking forward to what?"

"Aladdin at the Tufnell Park Empire.  I've got the tickets for the
nineteenth of Jan.  You do remember promising to take them, don't
you?"

"Well, of course."  What else might I have said after the fifth glass
of the Erskine-Brown St.  Emillion?  "I'd love to be of the party.  And
will old Claude be buying us a dinner afterwards?"

"I really don't think you should go round calling people "old",
Rumpole."  Phillida now looked miffed, and I downed the sherry before
she took it into her head to deprive me of it.  "Claude's got us
tickets for Pavarotti.  L'Elisir d'Amore.  You might buy the children a
burger after the show.  Oh, and it's


 not far from us on the Tube.  It really was sweet of you to invite
them."

At which she smiled at me and refilled my glass in a way which made it
clear she was not prepared to hear further argument.

It all turned out better than I could have hoped.  Tristan and Isolde,
unlike their Wagnerian namesakes, were cheerful, reasonably polite and
seemed only too anxious to dissociate themselves, as far as possible,
from the old fart who was escorting them.  At every available
opportunity they would touch me for cash and then scamper off to buy
ice cream, chocolates, sandwiches or Sprite.  I was left in reasonable
peace to enjoy the performance.

And enjoy it I did.  Aladdin was a personable young woman with an
upturned nose, a voice which could have been used to wake up patients
coming round from their anaesthetics, and memorable thighs.  Uncle
Abanazer was played, Isolde told me, by an actor known as a social
worker with domestic problems in a long-running television series.
Wishy and Washy did sing to electric guitars (deafeningly amplified)
but Widow Twankey, played by a certain Jim Diamond, was all a Dame
should be, a nimble little cockney, fitted up with a sizeable false
bosom, a flaming red wig, sweeping eyelashes and scarlet lips.  Never
have I heard the immortal line, "Where's that naughty boy Aladdin got
to?"  better delivered.  I joined in loudly (Tristan and Isolde sat
silent and embarrassed) when the Widow and Aladdin conducted us in the
singing of "Please Don't Pinch My Tomatoes'.  It was, in fact and in
fairness, all a traditional pantomime should be, and yet I had a vague
feeling that something was wrong, an element was missing.  But, as the
cast came down a white


 staircase in glittering costumes to enthusiastic applause, it seemed
the sort of pantomime I'd grown up with, and which Tristan and Isolde
should be content to inherit.

After so much excitement I felt in need of a stiff brandy and soda, but
the eatery the children had selected for their evening's entertainment
had apparently gone tee total and alcohol was not on the menu.  Once
they were confronted by their mammoth burgers and fries I made my
excuses, said I'd be back in a moment, and slipped into the nearby pub
which was, I noticed, opposite the stage door of the Empire.

As the life-giving draught was being poured I found myself standing
next to Washy and Uncle Abanazer, now out of costume, who were
discussing Jim the Dame.  "Very unfriendly tonight," Washy said.
"Locked himself in his dressing-room before the show and won't join us
for a drink."

"Perhaps he's had a bust-up with Molly?"

"Unlikely.  Molly and Jim never had a cross word."

"Lucky she's never found out he's been polishing Aladdin's wonderful
lamp," Abanazer said, and they both laughed.

And as I asked the girl behind the bar to refill my glass, in which the
tide had sunk to a dangerous low, I heard them laugh again about the
Widow Twankey's voluminous bosom.  "Strapped-on polystyrene," Abanazer
was saying.  "Almost bruises me when I dance with her.  Funny thing,
tonight it was quite soft."

"Perhaps she borrowed one from a blow-up woman?"  Washy was laughing as
I gulped my brandy and legged it back to the hamburgers.  In the dark
passage outside the stage door I saw a small, nimble figure in hurried
retreat: Jim Diamond, who for some reason hadn't wanted to join the
boys at the bar.

After I had restored the children to the Erskine-Browns' au


 pair, I sat in the Tube on my way back to Gloucester Road and read
the programme.  Jim Diamond, it seemed, had started his life in
industry before taking up show business.  He had a busy career in clubs
and turned down appearances on television.  '"I only enjoy the living
show," Jim says.  "I want to have the audience where I can see them."
His photograph, without the exaggerated female make-up, showed a pale,
thin-nosed, in some way disagreeable little man with a lip curled
either in scorn or triumph.  I wondered how such an unfriendly-looking
character could become an ebullient and warm-hearted widow.  Stripped
of his make-up, there was something about this comic's unsmiling face
which brought back memories of another meeting in totally different
circumstances.  It was the second time within a few weeks that I had
found an old familiar face cast in a new and unexpected part.

The idea, the memory I couldn't quite grasp, preyed on my mind until I
was tucked up in bed.  Then, as Hilda's latest historical romance
dropped from her weary fingers, when she turned her back on me and
switched out the light, I saw the face again quite clearly but in a
different setting.  Not Diamond, not Sparkler, but Sparksman, a logical
progression.  Widow Twankey had been played by Harry Sparksman, a man
who trained as a professional entertainer, if my memory was correct,
not in clubs, but in Her Majesty's prisons.  It was, it seemed, an
interesting career change, but I thought no more of it at the time and,
once satisfied with my identification, I fell asleep.

"The boy couldn't have done it, Mr.  Rumpole.  Not a complicated bloody
great job to that extent.  His only way of getting at a safe was to dig
it out of the wall and remove it bodily.  He did that in a Barkingside
boutique and what he found in it


 hardly covered the petrol.  Young Denis couldn't have got into the
Croydon supermarket peter.  No one in our family could."

Uncle Fred, the experienced and cautious head of the Timson clan, had
no regard for the safe-breaking talent of Denis, his nephew and, on the
whole, an unskilled recruit in the Timson enterprise.  The Croydon
supermarket job had been highly complicated and expertly carried out
and had yielded, to its perpetrators, thousands of pounds.  Peanuts
Molloy was arrested as one of the lookouts, after falling and twisting
an ankle when chased by a night watchman during the getaway.  He said
he didn't know any of the skilled operators who had engaged him, except
Denis Timson who, he alleged, was in general charge of the operation.
Denis alone silenced the burglar alarm and deftly penetrated the lock
on the safe with an oxyacetylene blowtorch.

It had to be remembered, though, that the clan Molloy had been sworn
enemies of the Timson family from time immemorial.  Peanuts' story
sounded implausible when I met Denis Timson in the Brixton Prison
interview room.  A puzzled twenty-five-year-old with a shaven head and
a poor attempt at a moustache, he seemed more upset by his Uncle Fred's
low opinion of him than the danger of a conviction and subsequent
prolonged absence from the family.

Denis's case was to come up for committal at the South London
Magistrates' Court before "Skimpy' Simpson, whose lack of success at
the Bar had driven him to a job as a stipendiary beak.  His nickname
had been earned by the fact that he had not, within living memory, been
known to splash out on a round of drinks in Pommeroy's Wine Bar.

In the usual course of events, there is no future in fighting
proceedings which are only there to commit the customer to trial.  I

had resolved to attend solely to pour a little well  deserved contempt
on the evidence of Peanuts Molloy.  As I started to prepare the case, I
made a note of the date of the Croydon supermarket break-in.  As soon
as I had done so, I consulted my diary.  I turned the virgin pages as
yet unstained by notes of trials, ideas for cross-examinations,
splodges of tea or spilled glasses of Pommeroy's Very Ordinary.  It was
as I had thought.  While some virtuoso was at work on the Croydon safe,
I was enjoying Aladdin in the company of Tristan and Isolde.

"Detective Inspector Grimble.  Would you agree that whoever blew the
safe in the Croydon supermarket did an extraordinarily skilful job?"

"Mr.  Rumpole, are we meant to congratulate your client on his
professional skill?"

God moves in a mysterious way, and it wasn't Skimpy Simpson's fault
that he was born with thin lips and a voice which sounded like the
rusty hinge of a rusty gate swinging in the wind.  I decided to ignore
him and concentrate on a friendly chat with D. I. Grimble, a large,
comfortable, ginger-haired officer.  We had lived together, over the
years, with the clan Timson and their misdoings.  He was known to them
as a decent and fair-minded cop, as disapproving of the younger,
Panda-racing, evidence-massaging intake to the Force as they were of
the lack of discretion and criminal skills which marked the younger
Timsons.

"I mean the thieves were well informed.  They knew that there would be
a week's money in the safe."

"They knew that, yes."

"And was there a complex burglar-alarm system?  You couldn't put it out
of action simply by cutting wires, could you?"

"Cutting the wires would have set it off."


 "So putting the burglar alarm out of action would have required
special skills?"

"It would have done."

"Putting it out of action also stopped a clock in the office.  So we
know that occurred at eight-forty-five?"

"We know that.  Yes."

"And at nine-twenty young Molloy was caught as he fell, running to a
getaway car."

"That is so."

"So this heavy safe was burnt open in a little over half an hour?"

"I fail to see the relevance of that, Mr.  Rumpole."  Skimpy was
getting restless.

"I'm sure the officer does.  That shows a very high degree of technical
skill, doesn't it, Detective Inspector?"

"I'd agree with that."

"Exercised by a highly experienced peter man

"Who is this Mr.  Peterman?"  Skimpy was puzzled.  "We haven't heard of
him before."

"Not Mr.  Peterman."  I marvelled at the ignorance of the basic facts
of life displayed by the magistrate.  "A man expert at blowing safes,
known to the trade as "peters"," I told him and turned back to D. I.
Grimble.  "So we're agreed that this was a highly expert piece of
work?"

"It must have been done by someone who knew his job pretty well.
Yes."

"Denis Timson's record shows convictions for shoplifting, bag-snatching
and stealing a radio from an unlocked car.  In all of these simple
enterprises, he managed to get caught."

"Your client's criminal record!"  Skimpy looked happy for the first
time.  "You're allowing that to go into evidence, are you, Mr.
Rumpole?"


 "Certainly, Sir."  I explained the obvious point.  "Because there's
absolutely no indication he was capable of blowing a safe in record
time, or silencing a complicated burglar-alarm, is there, Detective
Inspector?"

"No.  There's nothing to show anything like that in his record .. ."

"Mr.  Rumpole," Skimpy was looking at the clock; was he in danger of
missing his usual train back home to Haywards Heath?  "Where's all this
heading?"

"Back a good many years," I told him, 'to the Sweet-Home Building
Society job at Carshalton.  When Harry Sparks-man blew a safe so
quietly that even the dogs slept through it."

"You were in that case, weren't you, Mr.  Rumpole?"  Inspector Grimble
was pleased to remember.  "Sparksman got five years."

"Not one of your great successes."  Skimpy was also delighted. "Perhaps
you wasted the Court's time with unnecessary questions.  Have you
anything else to ask this officer?"

"Not till the Old Bailey, Sir.  I may have thought of a few more by
then."

With great satisfaction, Skimpy committed Denis Timson, a minor villain
who would have had difficulty changing a fuse, let alone blowing a
safe, for trial at the Central Criminal Court.

"Funny you mentioned Harry Sparksman.  Do you know, the same thought
occurred to me.  An expert like him could've done that job in the
time."

"Great minds think alike," I assured D. I. Grimble.  We were washing
away the memory of an hour or two before


 Skimpy with two pints of nourishing stout in the pub opposite the
beak's Court.  "You know Harry took up a new career?"  I needn't have
asked the question.  D. I. Grimble had a groupie's encyclopaedic
knowledge of the criminal stars.

"Oh yes.  Now a comic called Jim Diamond.  Got up a concert party in
the nick.  Apparently gave him a taste for show business."

"I did hear," I took Grimble into my confidence, 'that he made a
come-back for the Croydon job."  It had been a throwaway line from
Uncle Fred Timson - "I heard talk they got Harry back out of
retirement' but it was a thought worth examining.

"I heard the same.  So we did a bit of checking.  But Sparks-man, known
as Diamond, has got a cast-iron alibi."

"Are you sure?"

"The time when the Croydon job was done, he was performing in a
pantomime.  On stage nearly all the evening, it seems, playing the
Dame."

"Aladdin," I said, 'at the Tufnell Park Empire.  It might just be worth
your while to go into that alibi a little more thoroughly.  I'd suggest
you have a private word with Mrs.  Molly Diamond.  It's just possible
she may have noticed his attraction to Aladdin's lamp."

"Now then, Mr.  Rumpole," Grimble was wiping the froth from his lips
with a neatly folded handkerchief, 'you mustn't tell me how to do my
job."

"I'm only trying to serve," I managed to look pained, 'the interests of
justice!"

"You mean, the interests of your client?"

"Sometimes they're the same thing," I told him, but I had to admit it
wasn't often.


 As it happened, the truth emerged without Detective Inspector Grimble
having to do much of a job.  Harry had, in fact, fallen victim to a
tip-tilted nose and memorable thighs; he'd left home and moved into
Aladdin's Kensal Rise flat.  Molly, taking a terrible revenge, blew his
alibi wide open.  She had watched many rehearsals and knew every word,
every gag, every nudge, wink and shrill complaint of the Dame's part.
She had played it to perfection to give her husband an alibi while he
went back to his old job in Croydon.  It all went perfectly, even
though Uncle Abanazer, dancing with her, had felt an unexpected
softness.

I had known, instinctively, that something was very wrong.  It had,
however, taken some time for me to realize what I had really seen that
night at the Tufnell Park Empire.  It was nothing less than an outrage
to a Great British Tradition.  The Widow Twankey was a woman.

D. I. Grimble made his arrest and the case against Denis Timson was
dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service.  As spring came to the Temple
gardens, Hilda opened a letter in the other case which turned on the
recognition of old, familiar faces and read it out to me.

"The re pointing going well on the tower and we hope to have it
finished by Easter," Poppy Longstaffhad written.  "And I have to tell
you, Hilda, the oil-fired heating has changed our lives.  Eric says
it's like living in the tropics.  Cooking supper last night, I had to
peel off at least one of my cardigans."  She Who Must Be Obeyed put
down the letter from her old school friend and said, thoughtfully,
"Noblesse Oblige."

"What was that, Hilda?"

"I could tell at once that Donald Compton was a true gentleman.  The
sort that does good by stealth.  Of course,


 poor old Eric thought he'd never get the tower mended, but I somehow
felt that Donald wouldn't fail him.  It was noblesse."

"Perhaps it was," I conceded, 'but in this case the noblesse was
Rumpole's."

"Rumpole!  What on earth do you mean?  You hardly paid to have the
church tower re pointed did you?"

"In one sense, yes."

"I can't believe that.  After all the years it took you to have the
bathroom decorated.  What on earth do you mean about your noblesse?"

"It'd take too long to explain, old darling.  Besides, I've got a
conference in Chambers.  Tricky case of receiving stolen surgical
appliances.  I suppose," I added doubtfully, 'it may lead, at some time
in the distant future, to an act of charity."

Easter came, the work on the tower was successfully completed, and I
was walking back to Chambers after a gruelling day down the Bailey when
I saw, wafting through the Temple cloisters, the unlikely apparition of
the Rev.  Eric Longstaff.  He chirruped a greeting and said he'd come
up to consult some legal brains on the proper investment of what
remained of the Church Restoration Fund.  "I'm so profoundly grateful,"
he told me, 'that I decided to invite you down to the Rectory last
Christmas."

"You decided?"

"Of course I did."

"I thought your wife Poppy extended the invitation to She .. ."

"Oh yes.  But I thought of the idea.  It was the result of a good deal
of hard knee-work and guidance from above.  I knew you were the right
man for the job."


 "What job?"

"The Compton job."

What was this?  The Rector was speaking like an old con.  The Coldsands
caper?  "What can you mean?"

"I just mean that I knew you'd defended Donald Compton.  In a previous
existence."

"How on earth did you know that?"

Eric drew himself up to his full, willowy height.  "I'm not a prison
visitor for nothing," he said proudly, 'so I thought you were just the
chap to put the fear of God into him.  You were the very person to put
the squeeze on the Lord of the Manor."

"Put the squeeze on him?"  Words were beginning to fail me.

"That was the idea.  It came to me as a result of knee-work."

"So you brought us down to that freezing Rectory just so I could
blackmail the local benefactor?"

"Didn't it turn out well!"

"May the Lord forgive you."

"He's very forgiving."

"Next time," I spoke to the Man of God severely, 'the Church can do its
blackmailing for itself."

"Oh, we're quite used to that."  The Rector smiled at me in what I
thought was a lofty manner.  "Particularly around Christmas."


Rumpole and the Remembrance of Things Past

There are no sadder relics of the past than the rows of small,
semi-detached houses that line one of the western approaches to London.
Once they were lived in and alive.  Minis were washed on Sunday
mornings inside their lean-to garages, bright dahlias and tea roses
grew in their front gardens, their doorbells chimed and, on winter
evenings, lights glowed from the stained-glass portholes in their front
doors.

Now their blind windows are stuffed with hardboard, their front doors
nailed up, their gardens piled with rubble and their garages collapsed.
They are derelict victims of a long-delayed scheme to widen the main
road, and some of these houses have already been pulled out like rotten
teeth.  When it came to be the turn of 35 Primrose Drive, a digger, pr
ising up the sitting-room floor, lifted, with apparent tenderness, the
well-preserved and complete skeleton of a young woman.  Reports were
made to the police and the coroner's office.  D. I. Winthrop, an
enthusiastic young officer, started an inquiry which led, to his great
satisfaction, to the arrest of William Twineham, the sole owner of the
house since its birth in the sixties.  Twineham's wife Josephine had,
the D. I. discovered, vanished unaccountably some thirty-three years
previously.


 I was standing outside my Chambers in Equity Court, wearing my hat to
protect the thinning top of my head from the drizzle and thinking, as
my old darling Wordsworth would say, of old, unhappy, far-off things
and crimes so long ago.

Around me in the doorways, under the arches or leaning against a
sheltered wall, were many poor souls like me, driven out of doors. Most
of them were girls.  Short-skirted, high-heeled, with cigarettes
dangling from their lips, they would seem to any passer-by to be ladies
of the street, and the same casual observer might have been forgiven
for supposing that the Outer Temple, home of the legal profession, had
become a red-light district in the manner of downtown Amsterdam.  The
casual observer would have been wrong.  Neither they nor I were out of
doors to offer sexual services.  We were temporary exiles from Chambers
which had become smoke-free zones.

The Inn was all for it, as was Soapy Sam Ballard.  Mizz Liz Probert,
who has now taken to coming to work on a daunting motorbike which pumps
more gas into the atmosphere than a lifetime's small cigars, went over
to the Green Party.  Claude Erskine-Brown blamed my cheroots for the
fact that his aunt had been flooded out by a climate change in Surrey.
In vain I argued for the democratic rights of minorities.  The smoking
ban was introduced by a tyrannical majority, so I basked in the warmth
of a small cigar as the rain settled in the brim of my hat.

"Loitering with intent, Rumpole?"

"Still polluting the atmosphere .. . ?"

Two grey, almost ghost-like figures approached through the rain.  They
were the opera-loving, wine-tasting, inadequate advocate Claude
Erskine-Brown and none other than Soapy Sam Ballard, the unworthy Head
of my Chambers.

2?


 These were the two who had undertaken to save the planet earth from
extinction by kicking Rumpole, and our junior secretary Dawn, out into
a storm to have a puff, an act which, in my humble submission, bore a
close resemblance to the way Goneril and Regan treated their old Dad.

"I'm glad you're showing some respect for the rules, Rum-pole.  Respect
for the rules is the vital ingredient of a happy ship."

"What do you mean, respect for the rules?"  I found Ballard's
description of me as a rules respecter particularly offensive.  "I
simply came out here to think."

"Oh, really?"  Erskine-Brown was unconvinced.  "What were you thinking
about, exactly?"

"Skeletons.  And how many family homes in respectable areas may have
skeletons under the floorboards.  God knows what goes on behind the
double locks and burglar alarms.  Have you ever looked under your
floorboards, Ballard?"

The question, I was glad to see, had Soapy Sam looking momentarily
worried.  Erskine-Brown, like a faithful hound, came to his master's
rescue with a piece of irrelevant information.  "You just put one of
those disgusting whiffs into your mouth, Rumpole.  You clearly came out
here to smoke."

"I came out here to be alone," I assured the man with what dignity I
could muster.  "Clearly I failed miserably."

"Just try and remember smoke causes global warming even out of doors.
Did you see the pictures of Godalming?"

"No, I didn't.  I don't go about searching for pictures of Godalming,
Erskine-Brown."

"My aunt," Claude's voice sank to the doom-laden level of a news reader
announcing the end of the world, 'had to be taken shopping in a
collapsible canoe."


 "Here's your man, Mr.  Rumpole."

The screw on duty at the Brixton interview room was used to delivering
a succession of alleged murderers, rapists and receivers of stolen
laptops to me and my faithful instructing solicitor, "Bonny' Bernard,
where a chair awaited them by the Formica-covered table which bore my
brief, Bernard's packet of courtesy Marlboro Lights and the top of a
tin of Oxo cubes which served as an ashtray.

The captive now delivered was markedly different from the usual run of
Rumpole's clientele, in that he was neither angry, cocky, chippy nor
overly anxious to please his brief.  He didn't, as some customers do,
appear eager to pretend that his dire situation was a bit of a joke. To
begin with he was tall, well over six foot, causing me to look up at
him.  He was old, I should have said in his late sixties.  He was also
handsome, with clear-cut features, unblinking blue eyes and a head of
white hair, well brushed, as perhaps his only vanity.  He stood looking
at me and Bonny Bernard with the half-smile of an Old Testament prophet
who had arrived in Gomorrah and found it just as sad and disgusting as
he had been led to believe.

"Sit down, Mr.  Twineham."  I waved him to a chair.  "Do have one of
Mr.  Bernard's cigarettes."

"Thank you.  I do not care to pollute the lovely world the good Lord
has given us."  Another of them!  I accepted the fact, then I thought
that at least no one in prison had to go out into the street to
smoke.

"This is Mr.  Rumpole."  Mr.  Bernard made the introduction.  "He'll be
defending you at the trial."

"The Lord has sent you."  William Twineham looked at me as though he
had been given a warning of my arrival into his life and thought there
was, after all, nothing much he could


 do about it.  "It's not for me to question the inscrutable ways of
Providence."

"You and your wife moved into number 35 Primrose Drive, as I
understand, as soon as it was built."  It was time, I thought, to move
away from the concerns of God to such mundane details as might interest
an Old Bailey Jury.

"Certainly.  She was known as Jo in certain quarters."  And then the
alleged murderer gave us a sudden smile.  It was modest, unexpectedly
charming and seemed to illuminate the shadowy interview room.  "To me
she was always Josephine."  He said it tenderly; whether he meant it or
was treating us to an expert professional performance was not yet
clear.

"So there were no previous occupants of the house?"  No one else, was
what I meant, to have stowed an unwanted wife under the floorboards.

"We watched it being built after we'd put down our deposit.  It was to
be our house together for the next five years."

"And your home until the Council took over all the houses.  You lived
there alone?"

"I still felt Josephine was there.  The memories."

"In fact she left you in 1968.  I'm looking at the statement of Paul
and Louisa Arkwright, your semi-detached neighbours.  You told them you
didn't know where your wife had gone.  Or with whom?"

"I told them that.  Yes!"

"Was that true?"

"It seemed true.  She had left me!"

"What does that mean "seemed"?"

"How much can we ever truly know, Mr.  Rumpole, this side of the grave?
When we see through a glass darkly."

Looking at the next-door neighbours' statements, I felt I could see
through a glass altogether too clearly.


 "The Arkwrights say they heard sounds of a violent quarrel shortly
before your wife disappeared.  Is that true .. . ?"

William Twineham's smile died.  His eyes were closed, his body moved as
though in time to unheard music as he recited in a muted singsong, "And
to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly
into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time,
and times, and half a time from the face of the serpent."

"Who said that?"

"Saint John the Divine."

"What's it meant to mean?"

"We must wait, Mr.  Rumpole, you and I must wait, until all things are
made clear."

"We can't wait, I'm afraid."  Bonny Bernard seemed to have found the
Book of Revelations singularly unrevealing.  "Your trial's fixed for
Tuesday the seventeenth.  We've got just about three weeks."

But I was looking back over thirty-three years.  I had the prosecution
album of photographs.  The first was taken from one framed on William
Twineham's mantelpiece in the bed sit he had moved to when number 35
was taken over.  I saw a girl laughing, with long, curly hair, which
shone on some faraway summer afternoon, crowned with a daisy chain.  I
turned the page, and there on a mortuary table was the completely
reassembled skeleton, the empty ribcage, the skull with dark sockets,
all that was left of Josephine Twineham, known to everyone except her
husband as Jo.

I took a deep breath and tried again.  "Mr.  Twineham, I don't know
exactly what your religious beliefs might be .. ."  He regularly
attends his church in Pinner."  Bernard had a note in his file.


 "The True Church Apostolic.  I know nothing of your religious
beliefs, Mr.  Rumpole."

I wondered how much I knew myself.  My creed included a simple faith in
trial by Jury and the presumption of innocence.  The eleventh
commandment was, "Thou Shalt Not Plead Guilty'.  I had a faint hope
that the Day of Judgment, if there was ever to be a Day of Judgment,
would not entail a day in Court as ferocious and unjust as a bad time
before Judge Bullingham down the Old Bailey.  I decided to avoid the
issue.  "I don't think my beliefs are strictly relevant."

"Beliefs, Mr.  Rumpole," our client was smiling again now, 'are always
relevant.  My church has taught me to interpret Revelations and
understand the gift of prophecy."

"Then perhaps you will reveal this to us.  Did you kill your wife?"

Mr.  Twineham was looking at me steadily, his smile undimmed.
"Josephine's death was an act of God."

"And did you give God any sort of assistance at the time?"

Instead of a smile, I got another question.  "Does anyone say I did?"

"You quarrelled.  She disappeared.  She seems to have been found buried
under the hearth in your living-room.  They will ask the Jury to draw
the inference that you killed her."

"You mean, ask them to guess?"

"An informed guess.  Yes.  That's what they'll decide.  Unless you tell
them a different story."

"What sort of story would you suggest?"

This was blasphemy!  My religious beliefs, such as they are, had been
deeply insulted.  As an old black cab plying for hire, I had been
engaged by some pretty dubious customers, shysters, fraudsters and con
men to whom the truth was, like the Virgin Birth, a remote myth.  But I
had never met a


 customer who had asked me to invent a defence for him, nor would I
ever have consented to do so.  Fired by indignation, I asked an unusual
and risky question.  "How about telling me the truth?"

"About the night Josephine and I quarrelled?"

"All about it."

"What happened that night... is one of the mysteries."

"Juries don't like mysteries."

"How much should I tell?  I shall pray for guidance."

"Well, all I can say is do it soon.  Otherwise I'll give you a prophecy
to think about."

"What is your prophecy?"  For the first time, our client seemed
genuinely interested in what I had to say.

"I see," I told William Twineham, 'through a glass and not so darkly,
you spending most of your remaining life locked in a cell, probably
with some unstable psychopathic killer, in a sink prison with drug
dealing, unchecked violence and screws who may take an instant dislike
to you.  So get your guidance, return of post, and we'll be back."

"Oh yes," Bernard told him forcefully, gathering up his papers, 'we'll
be back."

"Have you finished, Mr.  Rumpole?"  A screw opened the glass door and
enquired politely.

"Not really.  In fact we've hardly begun."  And so we left William
Twineham to his prayers.

"Thirty-three years ago.  Just imagine what it'd be like to be tried
for something after all those years, perhaps when you were an entirely
different person."  What had that overworked, meticulous and
respectable solicitor Mr.  Bernard done some forty years ago that he
wouldn't have liked to admit to in Court?  It wasn't long after the
disappearance of Jo that we


 first met.  What was the first case he sent me?  One of the Timson
clan, now grey-haired and walking with the aid of a stick, sowing his
wild oats in the theft of lead off a church roof.

"I mean, Will Twineham must have thought the past was all over,"
Bernard went on.  "Dead and buried."

"To coin a phrase," I muttered, refilling our glasses from the bottle
of Chateau Thames Embankment which Jack Pommeroy had agreed to put on
my somewhat overcrowded slate.  "You're right, though.  If some remote
town-planner or some faceless committee hadn't decided to widen the
road into London, Jo Twineham would have slept under the floor
undisturbed and our client could remain a pillar of the Apostolic
Church."

"It's the shock of that all coming out that's turned his mind, wouldn't
you reckon?"

"Either that or he's decided to take cover behind the Book of
Revelations."

"The evidence of identification," Bernard tried to sound helpful, 'it's
not all that convincing."

"You mean some complete stranger might have broken into the house and
buried a woman we know absolutely nothing about in the front parlour? I
know you're trying to be helpful

"That line's no use to us?"

"Probably not.  What I'd like most is .. ."

"Is what, Mr.  Rumpole?"

"To get to know him.  To get to know both of them, in fact.  He's so
serious and she was so beautiful.  What did they quarrel about all
those years ago?"

Before Mr.  Bernard could offer any help, we were rudely interrupted by
a voice crying from the other end of the bar,


 in a penetrating Welsh accent, "It's Roly Poly Rumpole, by all that's
wonderful!"

I looked round to find myself being approached by a stranger with a
toothy grin, strong bifocals and a shock of blond hair going grey.  He
had, in spite of his age, the cheerful look of a schoolboy in some
long-gone comic, famous for his jolly japes and teasing of house
masters

"Owen Oswald!  Remember me, don't you?"

"I'm afraid I don't."

"Dangerous driving.  Swansea.  1981.  You defended me.  I chose you."

He had advanced and was very close to me, one hand gripping my lapel as
though to hold himself upright and breathing out the sweet smell of gin
and tonic.  "I chose you because my solicitor said you'd get the whole
bench of magistrates laughing my case out.  Said you were a dab hand
with the jokes, if you know what I mean."

"I know exactly what you mean.  So did I get them laughing?"

"You did, my dear old Roly Poly.  You most certainly did.  And when you
suggested to the other driver that he had his car painted in his racing
colours .. ."

"They laughed at that?"  It sounded improbable.

"Tickled pink, they were."

"So we won?"

"We didn't win.  They enjoyed a good laugh and banned me for two years.
Thousand-pound fine.  You were the most expensive entertainment I ever
went to."

By now I was anxious to be rid of the Welsh joker with his memories of
past failure and get on with Mr.  Bernard, the bottle of Chateau Thames
Embankment and the fatal relationship of Jo and Will Twineham.  But
what Owen


 Oswald said next grabbed my attention and eventually, I thought, put
me permanently in his debt.  ,

"Just up here for a conference on a business matter, and they told me
you were in old Bonzo Ballard's Chambers."

"I am in Chambers supposedly led by a person called Ballard.  But I
know nothing of "Bonzo"."

"No one calls him Bonzo any more?"

' "Soapy Sam", is that who you mean?"

"It's obvious you weren't at the University of Wales in Cardiff,
1966-69."

"I have a vague memory of Soapy Sam telling me that the Law Faculty in
Cardiff was miles ahead of anything Oxford or Edinburgh had to offer,
which is why he'd honoured it with his presence .. ."

"I can't remember him talking much about the law.  It was the band.
That was the great thing with Bonzo."

"The band?"  What was the fellow talking about some earnest group
dedicated to Christian fellowship?  "What sort of band?"

"Bonzo Ballard and the Pithead Stompers.  Enthusiastic but, in my
humble opinion, they couldn't hold a candle to The Swinging Blue Jeans,
let alone Frank Zappa."

"Are you telling me that Soapy Sam Ballard played in a band?"  I felt,
at this moment, some blessed hope of which I had long been unaware.

"All over the place.  Uni dances, working men's clubs, Saturday night
pubs, old people's homes, till the old people went on strike."

"Are you telling me that Soapy Sam played some instrument?"

"Slapped away at a guitar.  You know the sort of thing.  And sang-not
badly."


 "Sang?"  I couldn't believe my luck.  "Are there no recordings
available?  Perhaps an old '78?"

"I don't think they were ever let into a recording studio.  But I've
got a photograph."

"A photograph featuring Ballard?"

"A photograph starring Bonzo.  He had hair down to his shoulders at the
time."

"You keep it as some sort of memento?"

"I keep it because I was a member of the Pithead Stampers.  On
drums."

I looked at the man as a mountaineer clinging to the edge of a cliff
might greet the guide come to haul him to safety.  "I'm not a rich
man," I confessed to Oswald.  "I do Legal Aid crime and we only get
paid now and then.  But I'm prepared to spend good money on a copy of
this photograph."

"I'll send you one."  The rescuing Welshman had his arm round my
shoulder.  "You can buy me a drink next time we meet."

"I think I'm on a winner," I told Bernard, after I'd given my saviour
the Chambers address.

"You mean with Twineham?"  He was incredulous.

"No.  I mean with Ballard."  But I had earned my solicitor's look of
disapproval.  I had forgotten a young woman with flowers in her hair,
dead and buried under a living-room floor.  And all because I was
engaged in a fight, with no holds barred, to stop having to smoke small
cigars in the rain.

"You've taken on his case, Rumpole?"  My wife, Hilda, known to me only
as She Who Must Be Obeyed, cross-examined me over the breakfast
table.

"He's taken on me."

"How could you?  A man like that!"


 "I'm not sure I can manage it," I confessed to Hilda.  "Apart from
quoting the Book of Revelations, he hasn't given me the slightest hint
of a defence."

"I always knew you'd stoop to anything, Rumpole .. . but I never
dreamed you'd side with men who bury their wives under the floor!"

What did she think?  That I approved in any way of such conduct?  That
I could ever, in a million years, become such a husband?  For a
nightmare moment, I pictured myself trying to inter Hilda somehow below
the well-worn Axminster, and rejected the idea as a physical
impossibility.  Then I heard a heavy sigh on the other side of the
toast and marmalade.  Hilda's mood had swung from the usual brisk
attack on Rumpole's conduct to a note of sadness and regret as she
looked down at the letter in her hand.

"I can't possibly go now.  It would be too embarrassing."

"You can't go where, Hilda?"

"The Old Saint Elfreda's dinner."

"But you always go."  It was a reunion Hilda never missed, a party at
which her innumerable old school friends relived their gym slip years
and which I welcomed as an opportunity for a quietly convivial evening
in Pommeroy's Wine Bar.

"Not now.  Look at this."  She handed me the embossed invitation as
though it were the announcement of a death.  "President of the OEs this
year, Lady Shiplake, Chrissie Snel-ling as was.  It's so not fair!  She
never came to OE reunions, but as she married this Labour Lord, they've
made her President.  Neither Dodo Mackintosh nor I will be able to go
now!"

"Why ever not?"

There was a long and solemn pause, and then Hilda uttered a word which
I didn't know existed in her vocabulary.

"Guilt."


 "You mean this Chrissie has a criminal record?"

"No.  Dodo and I."

"Hilda."  The breath had been knocked out of me.  "You're confessing to
something?"

"Dodo and I did it together."

"You were fellow conspirators?"

"We called her Smelling, of course.  "Here conics Chrissie Smelling."
And we held our noses.  We pretended there was a rule that everyone had
to run round the hockey field three times before breakfast, and
Chrissie did it.  We sent her fake Valentine cards, making dates with
non-existent chaps from the boys' school.  We pinched her knicker
linings and punctured her hot-water bottle.  Halfway through one term a
car with a chauffeur came and took Chrissie away.  It was all our
fault, Rumpole."

"Any other of fences to be taken into consideration?"  I hope I looked
suitably shocked.

"I can't think of any more at the moment."

"It's a formidable charge sheet."

"I know.  Dodo and I simply couldn't face her again.  Neither of us
could."

"That's exactly why you've got to go!"  For once in my married life, I
was occupying the moral high ground, where the air was fresh and
intoxicating.

"Oh, Rumpole!"  Could it be that She Who Must Be Obeyed was capable of
a cry for help?  "Don't make me!"

Could I make her?  Could I turn Judge Bullingham into a soft-hearted,
do-goo ding member of the Howard League for Penal Reform?  Of course I
couldn't.  All the same, I meant to put up a fight for an evening with
a few well-chosen solicitors and convivial crime reporters in
Pommeroy's.

"I just think," I gave Hilda the Rumpole look of gentle but


 serious concern, 'you have the honour of Saint Elfreda's to
consider."

"Dodo and I have always been intensely loyal to the old school."

"Always in the past, perhaps.  But not now.  Or is it part of the Saint
Elfreda's tradition to run away from your responsibilities?"

"What do you want me to do, Rumpole?"  Another record broken: such a
question had never been asked before, in the long, windy history of our
married life.

"Face up to it, Hilda.  Confess everything and throw yourselves on the
mercy of the Court.  I am convinced," and now Rumpole was at his most
judicial, 'that you and Dodo Mackintosh will feel the better, the purer
for it."

For a long moment, the fate of my free evening hung in the balance.
Then she said, "I'll ring Dodo and ask her what she thinks."

"You won't.  You'll tell her what you think," I said, but not out loud.
By now, I was satisfied that ringing Dodo would end in a summons to
face the music.

"After he had told us that his wife had left home, Will Twineham lived
alone.  We never saw a sign of another woman or girlfriend staying the
night.  I must say, he kept the house spotless.  There was always a big
jug of flowers kept on the hearth of the fireplace in the front room.
He bought flowers at the Tube station on his way home from work.  Will
never lit a fire.  It seemed that he could endure any amount of cold.
Indeed, he said he enjoyed it."

I was reading, once again, the statements of the semidetached
neighbours.  I thought about flowers in the hearth and couldn't help
remembering the flower-sellers at the gates


 of the great London cemeteries, the dying chrysanthemums and fading
daffodils on the granite chips, within the marble frame on the grave.
Whilst I was having these disturbing thoughts, the door swung open and
Soapy Sam Ballard glided in.  "Rumpole," he said, 'a word with you."

"You've come to free us from political correctness?  Small cheroots may
be lit again in i Equity Court?"  I asked with quiet confidence.

"Will nothing make you, Rumpole, take some responsibility for the
universe?"

"I seem to remember floods in Noah's day, when very few people were
smoking whiffs.  Have you forgotten your Bible, old darling?"

"Rumpole, please don't quote the Scriptures to excuse your filthy
habit."

"I wouldn't dream of it.  I'll only remind you that the commandment
"Thou Shalt Not Light Up" appears nowhere, from Genesis to
Revelations."

"If you can be serious for a moment..  ."

"I'll try.  If you promise not to make me laugh."

"This is entirely serious.  I heard in the clerks' room that you are
defending Twineham."

"You heard right."

"A difficult case."

"One it would be all too easy to lose."

"Have you got a defence?"

"Not yet.  One may come to me if you'd be good enough to tiptoe away
and close the door very quietly after you."  I couldn't have put it
more plainly, but the man loitered on, like the last guest at a party
who wants a bed for the night.

"Two heads, Rumpole, are considerably better than one."

"Doesn't that rather depend on whose heads they are?"


 "I assume that you're not thinking of doing this case alone and
without a leader?"  Soapy Sam announced the purpose of his visit.  He
was a QC, a fact which confirmed my definition of the whole genus as
"Queer Customers'.  As such, he would be entitled to play the lead in
the defence team, leaving Rumpole, one of the oldest and, if I may say
it, most accomplished juniors, to carry a spear, in the way of making
notes, calling the odd witness and bringing the learned leader's coffee
to him.  There was clearly no place for Ballard in the curious drama of
35 Primrose Drive.

"I did the Penge Bungalow Murders without a leader when I was an
upwardly mobile white-wig.  I don't think that, over the years, I've
lost any of my powers."

"I'll ask our clerk to speak to your solicitor.  I'm sure he'll be
delighted to brief me as your leader."

"I very much doubt it.  Bernard likes to enjoy his cases down the Old
Bailey."

Soapy Sam had nothing more to say.  He stood goggling at me for a
moment, and then made, slowly and thoughtfully, for the exit.

"Shut the door," I said, "Bonzo."

He froze.  His hand poised over the door handle, he turned to me,
satisfactorily anxious.  "What did you say?"

"Nothing very much," I reassured him.  It was not yet time to strike.
"I'm sorry.  Silly of me.  I must have been calling some old dog.
Forgot myself for a moment.  I'll see you around."

Soapy Sam gave me a quick stare and left.  I had, I felt sure, unnerved
the man and fired a warning shot across his brow.

The weighty matter of Hilda's guilt and the consequent acceptance or
refusal of the Old Girls' Reunion Dinner


 invitation was of too earthshaking importance to be decided by one
telephone call, however prolonged.  An invitation was given, and
accepted, from Dodo Mackintosh for a week's visit to Lamorna Cove,
where the issue could be tried at length, no doubt over cups of
Ovaltine far into the night, and a definite verdict arrived at.

"Will you be all right, Rumpole?"  Hilda asked with unusual solicitude,
as though afraid I might disappear by chauffeur-driven car and never
return to the so-called mansion flat in Froxbury Mansions.

"Quite all right," I reassured her.  "Take your time, this is not the
sort of decision that can be taken in a hurry.  Much, including the
honour of the old school, depends upon it."

So, as well as the possibility of an evening off if the dinner was on,
I had a whole week on my own.  And this was convenient, because Bernard
had met a solicitor named Tony Thrale who had revealed, over lunch at
the Law Society, that when he was a young articled clerk working and
living round Perivale, he had met, in various clubs and all-night
parties, Jo Twineham, whose name was now splashed across the tabloids
in preparation for the reporting of a sensational murder trial.  He had
invited us both to dinner, as he thought he might be able to help us,
provided we undertook to keep him out of Court.

"Dinner?"  I was surprised at this offer of hospitality from a
potential witness.  "What's that going to be like?"

"They live in Maida Vale now.  It'll be dinner with a big company
lawyer.  Good food.  Handsome wife in a black frock.  Candles.
After-dinner mints."

But when we got to the Thrales', it wasn't like that at all.


 The front door of the sedate Victorian house in Maida Vale opened on
to a purple and highly scented darkness.  You might have walked from
bright sunlight into the shadows of the kasbah.  Tony Thrale greeted
us.  A burly, grey-haired man in his late fifties, he was dressed for
dinner in a pair of faded jeans, backless slippers and a shirt which
seemed to have once been dyed in various colours that had run into each
other.

"Mr.  Rumpole."  He greeted me, not with the handshake he would no
doubt have offered had we met in the course of business, but with a
kind of bear-like hug which brought me into close contact with the
tie-dyed shirt and some sort of medallion nestling among the grey hairs
immediately below his neck.  "I salute you, Mr.  Rumpole.  The only
truly free spirit at the Bar.  Glenda can't wait to meet you.  I told
her I was sure you'd be one of us.  Vegetarian."

The heart, I have to confess, sank.  Was this what I'd come out for?  I
remembered, longingly, the remains of a steak and kidney pie waiting
for me in the fridge in Froxbury Mansions.  Were not free spirits
carnivores?  I shot an appealing look at Bernard, who was walking,
apparently untroubled, towards the pulses.

If Glenda Thrale was anxious to see me, she managed to keep her
impatience well under control.  Wearing a kaftan, adorned with beads,
squatting on what, I believe, during the heyday of such articles was
known as a bean bag, she turned on us a look of minimal interest.  This
was accompanied, certainly, by a faint smile, but then she smiled
without interruption during most of our visit.  This smile was in no
way connected with anything in the smallest degree comic.  Indeed, when
after what they eccentrically described as 'dinner' was over and I told
some of my better courtroom anecdotes, the smile faded on every punch
line.


 We had been led by Tony Thrale into a kind of cavern, a huge and
shadowy open-plan area.  At one end of it, illuminated by spotlights,
there was a large Aga cooker at which Tony was now boiling up some kind
of vegetable matter.  The rest of the cave was sporadically illuminated
by lamps muffled with heavy shades or, in some cases, swathed in
paisley shawls.  The smell which had loitered in the hall now
intensified and seemed to be compounded of ecclesiastical incense,
smouldering carpets and simmering lentils.  Music with a loud and
insistent beat poured relentlessly out of a 'music centre'.

I had taken my seat next to a purple-fringed shawl and an un cased
guitar in the corner of the sofa, while Bernard was balanced, a little
unsteadily, on another bean bag.  Looking round the room, sniffing the
exotic odours, I thought we were in a museum, a careful reproduction of
the past, like the Victorian dining-rooms or eighteenth-century
boudoirs that might be constructed to educate the public on the way we
lived then.  Or did Tony Thrale, by all accounts a conventional
solicitor by day, come home each evening to life in a time warp?

"Mr.  Rumpole," Glenda Thrale was speaking to me in a voice that was
curiously high and seemed to come from a long way off, 'don't you adore
the Beach Boys?"

Was she casting serious doubt at my sexual orientation?  I must say I
bridled a little and answered, in an aloof sort of way, "I'm afraid I
don't spend much time on beaches."

At this Glenda fell into a prolonged silence, and my spirits sank to a
new low when Tony offered us, by way of a pre-dinner sharpener, a
temperance beverage, a curiously unattractive mixture of lime and mango
juices, said to be rich in vitamins but sadly deficient in alcohol.


 I had pushed the lentils round my plate, hidden some under the
untouched couscous, and, in describing the repast as 'delicious',
committed perjury.  Now we were about to get what we'd come for Tony
Thrale's reminiscences of swinging Perivale.  "Jo was very beautiful.
Clear blue eyes and a lot of blonde curls."

"With flowers in them?"  I remembered the photograph.

"Flowers in them quite often."

"And her husband?"

"He was a surprise.  I could never quite make out why she'd married
him.  He was very good looking, of course, and I think they'd been
childhood sweethearts.  She was the girl next door to his parents'
house in Perivale.  They went to school together, he carried her books,
all that sort of that sort of thing .. ."

"Did you get to know him?"

"Hardly at all."

"What was his job?"

"Something in the building trade I believe he did rather well.  Moved
off the sites and into the office.  She said he practically ran the
business."

I remembered the statements of the semi-detached neighbours.  At about
the time Jo vanished, her husband had got in building materials.  They
heard sounds at night and he explained he was dealing with a damp wall
in the kitchen.

"Did they go out together?"

"Never.  So far as I remember.  I think she said he was seriously
religious and spent a lot of his spare time doing things for a
particular church.  He wouldn't have enjoyed the Karma Club, or The Age
of Aquarius in Alperton.  That's where the cool people went."

"Was it cool for you," I wondered, 'being an articled clerk in a
solicitors' office?"


 "I wrote a column for an underground magazine.  It was called "Kill
All Lawyers".  I showed it round the Aquarius so I kept my
credibility."

"What did your law firm think about that?"

"It was printed in green ink on green paper, so it was more or less
illegible.  Anyway, I don't think the partners subscribed to Peeping
Tom."

"Did the Twinehams quarrel about her going out, do you remember?"

"I'm not sure she told him everything.  I mean, she always said she
loved him and it would have been hard for anyone not to love her.  I
don't think she told him about all the clubs and bars we went to she
had some story about evening classes and study groups.  Exams she had
to prepare for.  I got the feeling that he didn't ask too many
questions, and our life was something she didn't take home with her."

"Your life?"  I asked him the question direct.

Tony Thrale smiled, less with embarrassment than a sort of pride.  "You
know what we believed in then.  "Make love not war."

"Was war an available alternative?"

"Well, of course it wasn't.  So we just made love."

Glenda Thrale had been busy with a pouch and packet of cigarette
papers.  She had rolled a fairly fat cigarette which she now lit and
inhaled deeply.  Having got the thing alight, she handed it to her
husband.

"You mean," I thought this had to be asked, 'you and Josephine Twineham
made love?"

"It's hard to describe her."  Tony Thrale was now drawing heavily on
the joint, a habit which seemed to have a strong following among the
over-fifties.  "When she walked into the club, or even if you bumped
into her in the street, you'd


 feel somehow better, happier, more optimistic, as though the sun had
just come out from behind a cloud and was shining brightly.  She was
beautiful, yes, and kind and interested in everybody.  But it wasn't
just that.  She made people feel it was better to be alive."  He passed
the joint back to his wife.

"She was a little tart."  Glenda, after inhaling again, came out with
this verdict, a condemnation quite out of fashion in the sixties.

"She gave generously of herself."  Tony gently brought the language
into the Age of Aquarius.

"Do you think Will Twineham ever found out, about you and Jo, I
mean?"

"I don't think she ever told him.  She didn't tell him everything."

"Or very much.  Could he have found out?"

"There was one time ... I'd got an afternoon off.  I can't remember
why.  And we went to the cinema together..  . What was the film?  .. .
Blow up.  I'm sure I can remember.  Well, we'd done pretty much
everything you can do in the double seats at the back of the old Regal
and we came out still interested in each other and we ... well, we
kissed.  For a long time and pretty thoroughly.  In the street.  And
then she said, "Don't look now".  But I turned and saw her husband.
He'd just walked out of a shop across the road.  I'm not sure if he saw
us.  I don't think he did."

At this point, Glenda handed me the wet-ended stub.  Feeling that the
information might peter out if I rejected it, I put the object between
my lips, drew in a mouthful, choked slightly and blew two columns of
smoke out of my nose, producing a small, mirthless laugh from Glenda.
Tony took the dank object from me and handled it more expertly.


 "Did she tell you if he ever tackled her about having seen you?"

"No.  She'd left."

"Left?"

"Shortly after that we heard she'd left him.  No one ever knew where
she'd gone."

"Not with you?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Or anyone else from the Age of Aquarius?"

"We were all mystified.  There must have been someone else, we thought,
someone we didn't know anything about."

"Now you know what happened."

"Of course.  He killed her, didn't he?  Will murdered her."

"Is that what you think?"

"Don't you?  Who else did they dig up, if he didn't?"

"I don't know."

There was a silence then.  No one spoke and the tape on the sound
system was over.  All the trappings of the past, the incense and the
dope, the voices of Glenda's favourites, the Incredible String Band and
Van Morrison (she had announced the performers' names as the music
changed) had died away.  Tony gave a little shiver, as though shaking
off the past and doing his best to face the realities of the present.

"Of course," he said firmly, 'there's no way you'll get me to come to
Court to tell them any of this."

"We realize that, Tony."  Bonny Bernard was conciliatory.  "This is
mere background information.  That's all Mr.  Rum-pole wanted from
you."

"It doesn't help you anyway, does it?"  Tony was looking at me.  He was
a man making, in a determined fashion, for the way out.  "I mean, the
fact she had other lovers would only give him a motive for ... doing
what he did."


 "You think so?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

And isn't it obvious, I might have added, that you, Tony Thrale,
ex-swinger and survivor from the Age of Aquarius, might have been,
partly at least, the cause of her death.  Instead I thanked him.
"You've been a great help, telling us about Jo.  One more thing how was
her health?"

"She had enormous energy."

"Never ill?"

"She did acid, of course.  Acid was what we did then.  Gave her some
funny dreams at times, she told me."

"No other problems?"

"She got breathless sometimes.  She became quite faint, as though she
couldn't breathe.  I thought it was the way she lived.  Trying to cram
everything in while there was still time."

"Did she go to a doctor?  About the breathlessness, I mean?"

"I think she did once.  She told me something about an enlarged muscle
to her heart."  He smiled.  "I told her her heart was absolutely
perfect."

"Did she get any treatment?"

"I think she forgot about it.  That would have been her way."

Not long after that, Bernard and I were out in the street, breathing in
air free from incense and the smell of exotic cheroots.  I asked my
solicitor to find out who Jo Twineham's doctor was and see if any notes
survived.

"I'm afraid they weren't much help."  Bernard was apologetic.

"Well, at least we know a good deal more about the Twinehams."

"None of it's much help to the defence, is it?  You've got to admit
that.  All we know just explains why he did it."

"I wouldn't agree with that..  . entirely.  Oh, and if we have


 to meet Tony again, let's do it in Pommeroy's, shall we?  At least
somewhere he's living in the present."

On my way into Chambers a few days later, I stopped at Cameras R Us and
took delivery of several copies of the photograph Owen Oswald, the
helpful ex-drummer, had thoughtfully sent me.

"Who was that group, the Pithead Stompers?"  the girl who slid the
vital evidence into a large envelope asked me.  "I've never heard of
them."

"No," I told her, "I don't imagine many people have.  But they will
now."

I was at my desk in the smoke-free zone, idly turning the pages of
Ackerman's Forensic Medicine to check on what the Master of the Morgues
had to say on the information available from skeletons, when Soapy Sam
again intruded on my life.

"Rumpole," he said, "I've been thinking about that case of yours.  The
chap who buried his wife under the floorboards."

"Who is alleged to have buried her.  We haven't had the trial yet."

"I did offer to lead you in that case, Rumpole."

"I thought I said "Thanks, but no thanks"."

"Of course, I would have done my best for your client."

I didn't tell him what I thought of his best.  Instead I raised a more
immediate subject.  "Ballard, you and I have a vital matter to
discuss."

"But I have come to the conclusion not to take a brief in R. v.
Tzuineham," Ballard ploughed on.  "Your man has no possible defence."

"This is a formal request to you, Ballard, to return my room to its
status as a refuge for the peaceful enjoyment of a small cigar."


 "Rumpole, neither of us has anything to gain by taking up impossible
causes."

"I don't regard my cause as impossible.  I understand you may have
certain formalities to go through.  Chambers meetings, getting the
formal agreement of such puritanical spirits as Mizz Liz Probert, so
I'll give you well let's say three weeks.  But you can do it, Ballard.
You're entitled to do it as Head of Chambers.  And I have to give you
fair warning.  If I'm still smoking in the street by the end of the
month, the consequences to you may be dire."

"Rumpole, I have absolutely no idea what you mean."

It was the moment to produce Exhibit A, the prosecution's trump card. I
produced it, handing a copy to the accused.

There was a silence during which I took Soapy Sam to be slowly
appreciating the damning nature of the evidence.  When he spoke, it
was, I have to admit, with considerable self-control.

"That's me at Uni," is what he said.

"True," I told him.  "That central figure with its hair down to the
shoulders, holding a guitar in a horribly suggestive fashion, is indeed
you, Bonzo Ballard."

The man attempted a brave smile and merely said, "Fancy you having
that."

"A present from a well-wisher," I told him.  "Look at the drummer."

"Owen Oswald gave it to you?"

"Indeed he did."

Rising from his seat, Ballard said, "May I keep it?"

"Do what you like with it.  Burn it.  Tear it into small pieces and
flush it down the clerks' room facility.  I have copies.  And one goes
up on the Chambers notice-board if my reasonable request isn't granted
by the end of the month."


 Ballard was on his way out, looking at the photograph and smiling, as
I thought, bravely.

"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 couns
and in many murder trials.  We both looked at the Judge who had
interrupted our dialogue with a son 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."

I decided to ignore such rudeness and turned to the witness.  "Mr.
Twineham.  Tell the Court.  What did you do?"

"I saw a beast rising out of the sea," Will told the Judge in the most
matter-of-fact tone of voice, 'having seven heads and ten horns, and
upon his horns, ten crowns and upon his heads the name of blasphemy."

"Mr.  Rumpole."  The Judge was getting desperate.  "Has this beast,
whatever it is, anything at all to do with your case?"

"Not directly, my Lord," I had to admit.

"Then get the beast out of my Court.  Can't you persuade your client to
give evidence in the proper manner?"

"I'll try.  Mr.  Twineham, did your wife come home?"

"She came home later."

"What did you do?"

"I told her what I had seen.  Coming out of Gales, I had seen her with
a man, kissing, in the way of fornicators."

"Did she deny it?"


 "No.  She laughed.  It was one of the moods she had.  When she came
home.  Laughing.  But then she stopped laughing."

"What did you do?"

"I believe I killed her."

It was what we had all come there to decide, but suddenly,
unexpectedly, the decision seemed to have been made.  The Jury looked
away, as if embarrassed by the moment of truth, this stark admission. I
had to show them that it wasn't at all as simple as that.

"You say you believe you killed her?"

"I believe that, yes."

"Did you strike her over the head?"

"I never did that."

"Did you strangle her?"

"I didn't do that either."

"Did you have your hands round her throat?"

"Never."

"Did you touch her at all?"

"I never touched her."  Will Twineham seemed surprised by his own
answer.

"But you say you believed you killed her?"

"I shouted at her.  I called out in a loud voice."

"What did you call out?"

"I told her.  I told her what I could see when I looked at her."

"What was that?"

"A woman.  Arrayed in purple, having a cup in her hand full of
abominations and filthiness of fornications.  I believe I called her
the great mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth..  ."

"What happened then .. . ?"

"The words killed her."


 "The words?"

"She was upset.  I could see that.  As if she couldn't breathe.  She
was fighting for breath.  I saw that.  I saw her fall .. . She never
got up again."

"And you swear you never touched her?"

"Never!  It was the words.  The power of the words was too much for her
strength."

"And then?"

"Then I did touch her.  There was no heart.  No breath either.  I
watched by her all night.  All next day too.  And the next night, when
I was sure she was dead, I buried her."

"Where?"

"In front of the fireplace.  Under the big hearthstone.  I knew the
earth was soft there.  I laid her gently .. . And then I covered her
over."

The Jury were watching him now, puzzled by a scene they could hardly
imagine, let alone understand.

"Did you do that because you were afraid you'd be accused of murdering
her?"

"No."

"Why then?"

"I loved her."  He was looking at the Jury now.  "I wanted to keep her
with me."  It was what he had always told us.

Two days later, I was waiting for the Jury to come back with a verdict.
The trial had gone as smoothly as possible.  Old George Kilroy for the
prosecution had asked Will, over and over again, about his lies to the
neighbours and the story that Jo had left him.  To all of which Will
smiled and said that she had left him by dying, and he had wanted,
above all, to keep her close to him.  The Judge, who would never, so
long as he lived, be able to dream dreams and see visions, had told
the


 Jury that there was only one reason for Jo's burial in the house.
Will Twineham wanted to avoid the inevitable justice which had been so
long delayed.

"Will your foreman please stand?"

A grey-haired woman rose to her feet.  I had counted her as a friend in
the Jury.  She had listened intently and smiled at my occasional
jokes.

"Have you reached a verdict on which you are all agreed?"

"We have."

"Do you find the defendant, William Twineham, guilty or not guilty of
murder?"

She was looking straight at Will, neither apologetic nor embarrassed,
which is always meant to be a good sign.  My hopes soared until she
spoke.

"Guilty."

When I went down to the cells with Bernard, I had the sour taste of
failure in my mouth and he said nothing to console me except words as
trite as "You can't win them all, Mr.  Rumpole."  Of course I started
every case, however unpromising, hoping to win some small victory, and
no loss was ever welcome.  But now something worse seemed to have
happened: the old Bailey, dedicated to common sense and hard facts, had
failed in an act of the imagination.  The life of the Twinehams had
remained a mystery and Justice had not been done.  These were my
thoughts as we passed the carefully preserved door of the old Newgate
prison, blacked with age and scarred with initials of hopeless cases on
their way to the gallows.  We saw the bulky screws brewing up tea and
eating doorstep sandwiches and one of them called out, "He's waiting
for you, Mr.  Rumpole."

And there he was, out of his cell and in the cramped


 interview room, waiting patiently, as he would wait to see if he
could live out his life sentence, and, incredibly, smiling.

"I want to thank you, Mr.  Rumpole," he said.  "For all you've done.  I
honestly believe it's what I wanted."  "You wanted to spend your old
age in prison?"  "It's fair and right.  Seems to me.  I closed her up.
I did that to her.  I put earth and cement on her and shut her away.
It's right I should be shut away too.  Shut away from the world as she
was.  Like this, it seems to me now, we're still together.  You can't
understand that, can you?"

Will Twineham had been right.  I couldn't understand it.  There had
been, in a destroyed semi-detached near Hangar Lane, a clash between
two worlds, both alien to me.  The Book of Revelations had met the Age
of Aquarius, fallen in love and reached a conclusion which involved
death, the concealment of a young body until it became, over the years,
a collection of bones for a forensic expert to pick over.  As I walked
back to our Chambers, I knew the case, which had filled the last few
days, would never vanish from my mind.  It would remain a nagging
doubt, perhaps, a recollection of failure to return in black moments.
But its place would be taken by simpler, more ordinary cases and, above
all, by the great case in which I felt sure of success Rumpole v. Soapy
Sam Ballard.  Remembering this, a spring came into the Rum-pole step
and I bore down on Equity Court to taste the fruits of victory.

On my way to my room, I passed the Chambers notice-board the place
where I had threatened to pin up the cherished picture of the Pithead
Stompers.  And then I stopped dead in my tracks.  The photograph was
already there.  High above the government health warnings and the list
of


 services in Temple Church, there was the band and Bonzo Ballard
strutting his stuff, grinning inanely with long hair flopping to his
shoulders and an electric guitar, a monstrous instrument, apparently
erupting from his crotch.  The familiar voice of Mizz Liz Probert was
heard from behind me.

"Haven't you seen it before, Rumpole?  Isn't it cool?"

"Who put it there?"

"Ballard did.  He showed it to us at the last Chambers meeting.  When
you were busy with that poor buried woman.  We thought it was great."

"Great?  What do you mean, great?"

"Well, we always thought he was a bit stuffy.  You know, rather dull.
But now we know.  He had a life once.  Good on Ballard, that's what I
say.  We thought it right to go up on the notice-board."

She looked at me in a critical sort of way.  "You were never part of a
group, were you, Rumpole?"

"Never," I assured her.  "Never at any time.  I'm a one-off.  Entirely
on my own."  Which is exactly how I felt as I made my way to my room in
the smoke-free zone.

There was tentative sunlight in Equity Court, and the falling drops of
water from the fountain were coloured by it.  Snowdrops and early
daffodils were out in the Temple gardens.  The scent of spring was
nicely qualified by the smell of the small cheroot I was still obliged
to smoke alfresco.  I hadn't the heart to pursue Bonzo Ballard further
for the moment.  He had behaved, I have to admit, with totally
unexpected craftiness and some degree of courage.  He had outsmarted me
and I had to hand it to him.  The day of reckoning would come, but
perhaps not yet.  The sour taste of a guilty verdict had passed.  I had
been tempted, perhaps for a dark moment,


 to hang up my wig, refuse all further work and await death in some
dark corner of Pommeroy's Wine Bar, spinning out my half-bottle of
Chateau Fleet Street and failing to finish the crossword.  No longer.
Spring had brought me an affray at Snaresbrook and I had thought of an
ingenious defence.  Rumpole was himself again.


Rumpole and the Asylum Seekers

It was about dawn on a bitterly cold April morning, with snow flurries
and freezing fog, when a lorry, loaded with crates of imported mango
chutney, was stopped in Dover Harbour.  Men in bright-yellow jackets,
inspecting the cargo, became suspicious at what appeared to be
breathing holes in one of the crates.  There was also a curious
knocking as though some of the chutney was anxious to escape.  Further
investigation revealed the true nature of the cargo: not pickle but ten
refugees from Afghanistan, men, women and three children.  As they were
liberated and lined up beside the lorry, an enterprising newsman got a
picture of them which appeared, in blurred colour, on the front page of
Hilda's tabloid under the headline "BRITAIN REPELS MANGO CHUTNEY

INVADERS'.

"When will it end, Rumpole?"  Hilda gazed into an uneasy future.  "Soon
we won't be able to tell Gloucester Road from Suez High Street."

"These are Afghans," I tried to explain.  "I don't suppose they've been
anywhere near Suez High Street, wherever that may be.  What puzzles me
is why on earth they want to come here."

"Why on earth shouldn't they?  It's Britain."  Hilda turned to a page
headed "FAMOUS BOTTOMS.  FIT THESE TO THE


 FACES OF THE STARS', which she proceeded to study with great
interest.

"I mean spring has become indistinguishable from midwinter.  The Tube
broke down last night and we spent an hour trapped between the Temple
and Embankment.  All the animals have apparently got infectious
diseases and the countryside is lit with funeral pyres.  Get a bit ill
and you're sentenced to forty-eight hours on a trolley.  I'm surprised
that anyone would take the trouble of creeping into the country
disguised as some sort of exotic condiment."

"Rumpole!  You're just trying to be irritating!"

There was some truth in this accusation, but having found a theme I was
loath to abandon it.  "Anyway, why are they called "asylum seekers"?
They used to be called refugees, which meant they were looking for a
refuge from persecution.  "Asylum seekers" means they're looking for a
madhouse, which given the present state of the country might be an
accurate description."  I had worked myself into a state of gloom, and
I was quite enjoying it.

"What you want, Rumpole," Hilda had moved on to the "Home and Style'
pages of her paper, 'is a complete makeover."

"A what?"

"A re-think.  An adjustment to an entirely fresh concept.  Like this
flat."

"This flat?  What's wrong with this flat?"

I looked round our home, the mansion flat that is decidedly not a
mansion.  It has, however, the virtues of familiarity.  The
sitting-room carpet may have become a little worn, a little marked
round the fireplace by the stubs of inaccurately thrown small cigars
aimed for the grate, the chintz of the chair covers might have become a
little faded, the cream paint less


 creamy, the wallpaper, to some extent, losing contact with the
bathroom ceiling.  But I liked the creaky reception of the sofa, and
the shelves of read and re-read books.  Even Dodo Mackintosh's
water-colours depicting Lamorna Cove in doubtful weather had reached
the status of old friends.  As with my gown, which was ever in danger
of coming apart at the seams, and my wig, which has long since lost its
whiteness and achieved the respectably yellowish tinge of old
parchment, I had grown contented with the appearance of the mansion
flat which, when not blasted with the cold winds of Hilda's
displeasure, was a perfectly comfortable place to inhabit.

"Something is happening out there, Rumpole.  There's no reason why this
flat shouldn't be part of it."

"Something?  You mean some sort of demonstration?  You want our flat to
leave home and join in?"  I might have said that but, no doubt wisely,
I thought better of it.  "I've got to get to work," I told her.

"That's your answer to everything, isn't it, Rumpole?  Work.  It stops
you thinking about how we're going to keep up with the times."

As usual, I thought, as I embarked on the journey from Gloucester Road
Tube station, which had become about as complex and unpredictable as
the Road to Mandalay, Hilda was perfectly right.

Among the refugees from Afghanistan was Doctor Mohammed Nabi, trained
and qualified during happier moments in the history of his country.
When a new regime took over he had paid a large sum for his trip in the
chutney wagon.  Having sold all he possessed and borrowed a thousand
dollars from relatives and well-wishers, he found his


 country as easy to escape from as England was hard to get into.

After his emergence from the crate, the lengthy process began.  The
Doctor and his companions were sent to a vacant council house on the
outskirts of a town in Kent, where he was given vouchers to buy a
minimum amount of food.  There he was allowed ten days to fill in a
nineteen-page form in English.  The form was sent off to the Home
Office, who undertook to give no answer unless it was a rejection.  In
due course the rejection arrived.  This refusal led me into a hitherto
unknown field and to invest in a slim publication, designed for
students, called All You Need to Know about Immigration Law.

"Civil Rights.  Freedom of the Individual.  Defeat for the Forces of
Darkness.  That's what you stand for, don't you, Mr.  Rumpole?"

Mr.  Minter, "Call me Ted', was a large, untidy, perpetually smiling
man with the look of an astute rabbit.  His upper lip a little raised,
he spoke with a slight lisp.  He was, he told me, "Old Labour' so far
as his political beliefs went, which meant that he had an unfashionable
faith in such concepts as the Rights of Man.  He carried on a practice
outside Canterbury, and undertook Legal-Aid cases for those in flight
from foreign tyrannies.  He carried a bulging briefcase and had two
holes in the sweater he wore under a crumpled tweed suit.

"I'm a newcomer to this branch of the law," I told him.  "What on earth
made you choose me?"

"We knew you'd have the right attitude, Mr.  Rumpole.  Men like the
good Doctor come here and everyone's against them.  The government, the
opposition, most of the public and the newspapers.  You speak up for
them."

"Only to my wife," I had to tell him, and perhaps that


 was only for the entirely legitimate purpose of starting an argument.
"I have to confess I never did one of these difficult cases."

"But you've won enough difficult cases, Mr.  Rumpole, we know that."

"We?  Who's we?"

"Well, I know and the client does."

"You mean this Doctor Nabi?"

Ted made a quick search of his briefcase, as though unsure which of his
many customers we were concerned with, pulled out a sheet of paper and
looked at it with some relief.  "That's the one!  I have his notes
here.  He asked for you specifically.  Your fame has gone before you,
Mr.  Rumpole."

In my imagination I crossed the snows of high mountains to swoop down
on a crowded market square, loud with the squawk of chickens and the
braying of donkeys, filled with brown-eyed men in turbans whispering to
each other, "If you're ever in trouble, send for Rumpole!"

"My fame even in Afghanistan?"

"Apparently."

"Likeable fellow, this Doctor, is he?"  I had already formed a
favourable opinion of the man.

"I don't know."

"You don't?"

"The fact is," Ted the solicitor looked embarrassed, "I've never seen
him."

"What?"

"It seems he's afraid of something, or someone.  He says his life's
threatened I'm not sure who by exactly.  I get my instructions through
a friend."

"A friend of yours?"

"A friend of his.  Another Afghan called Jamil.  He seems to


 be a sort of social worker who gives advice to asylum seekers.  He
helps them fill in their forms.  He does all that for the Doctor."

"And the Doctor doesn't speak to you?"

"I'm not quite clear why.  Jamil says he's in a state of depression
since his application was turned down.  He needs all our help, Mr.
Rumpole .. ."

"I'll have to see him before the hearing."  I was now becoming
impatient with this arm's-length client, apparently determined to keep
his distance.

"Oh, you will see him.  You'll certainly see him.  Meanwhile .. ."  Ted
dug into his briefcase and brought up a great wodge of paper, flimsy
copies of forms filled in, formal rejections and tales of a political
regime that beggared belief.

"They all say you're a legend in your lifetime, Rumpole.  Your fame's
spread far and wide."

The man who paid me this apparent compliment was small, dressed in a
dapper suit, with shoes so brightly polished you might see your face in
them.  He had light-brown hair, which stood up on either side of a bald
patch, and the face of an immoderately self-satisfied Pekinese.  Did I
detect in his elaborate compliment a note of sarcasm?  If so, I ignored
it and gave him the facts.

"I am quite well known, it seems," I said, 'in Afghanistan."

"Isn't that where they make you grow beards, Rumpole?  I say, wouldn't
Rumpole look splendid with a bloody great beard down to his navel?
Don't you all think Rumpole would make a splendid Ayatollah?"

This man had been introduced to me as Archie Prosser, known,
Erskine-Brown told me, as the "Boy Wonder' at Winchester.  He had a
good mixed practice, Claude also said, and


 was looking for new Chambers.  As Archie spoke, he gave a little
wriggle of delight, deeply enjoying his own jokes.  In my opinion, they
weren't worth the wriggle, although they were greeted with loud
laughter by the assembled company in Pommeroy's Wine Bar.  Claude was
there, of course, and Mizz Liz Probert and Hoskins, who laughed so
immoderately at the idea of a bearded Rumpole that his usual anxiety
about the expense of rearing his daughters seemed forgotten.

Ballard, who since his revelation as the one-time Bonzo, lead singer of
the Pithead Stompers, had taken to joining the tenantry in Pommeroy's,
where he sat smiling and indulging himself in a potent mixture of
orange juice and lemonade, also laughed heartily.

"It's got nothing to do with beards."  I was, I confess, rather short
with them all.  "It's an Afghan doctor, who chose me to represent
him."

"What's he done?  Medical negligence or indecent assault?"

"Neither.  He just wants to live in England.  Eccentric of him, you may
say, but that's what he wants."

"They come here," Archie Prosser looked serious, 'because we're an easy
touch."

"Not all that easy.  He's had all his applications refused so far."

"Quite right."  Prosser's Pekinese face took on an expression of high
judicial authority.  "These people need cracking down on."

"Cracking down?"  I felt strongly on this subject.  "We always seem to
be cracking down on everyone one-parent families, lawyers, windscreen
washers, refugees and those who like an occasional small cheroot!" Here
I flattened Bonzo Ballard with a stare.  "Why don't we try cracking up
something for a


 change, such as the great British tradition of welcoming political
refugees?"

Unlike the Boy Wonder's jokes, this speech was greeted with an
embarrassed silence by the assembled members of i Equity Court.  They
appeared to cheer up slightly when the entertaining Archie said, "I
heard about your smoking habit, Rumpole.  I heard you rather enjoy
standing out of doors chatting up the secretaries in all sorts of
weather."

When the totally uncalled-for, and I thought somewhat forced, laughter
subsided, Ballard, proving that "Soapy Sam' was, indeed, an apt
description, said, "I'm so glad we brought you two together, Rumpole. I
knew you'd find Prosser a kindred spirit, and a great asset to
Chambers."  It was a statement which I thought called for a firm "No
comment."

"It'll be a joy to share with Rumpole, well known as the Chambers wit
and the joker in the pack.  Come to think of it," the Boy Wonder stared
at me and gave a little preparatory wriggle before what he clearly
considered would be a sure-fire hit, 'you haven't said anything funny
the whole evening."

When troubles come, they come not single spies, or even single asylum
seekers.  Finding that the company in Pommeroy seriously detracted from
the pleasure of the Chateau Thames Embankment, I arrived home early to
find the usually quiet and uneventful flat in Froxbury Mansions
positively buzzing with activity.  Hilda was not alone, but in the
company of a couple who looked, at first sight, inexplicable.  They
were not people she could possibly have been at school with, or even
met at bridge.  For a moment, I thought they must be refugees come to
consult me owing to my spreading fame in such cases.  Were they perhaps
young members of a resistance group subject to persecution, and perhaps
torture, in their


 native land?  They looked pale and deeply serious, with the manner of
fervent believers in some cause, and the young man, his head shaven to
premature baldness, wore the trousers of some military force with huge
pockets at the knees, perhaps for the storing of hand grenades.  Above
them, he wore a puffed-up waistcoat which might be useful for keeping
afloat after your plane ditched in the water.  The girl, who had long,
straight hair and small spectacles, clearly had some trouble securing
her jeans the top fly-buttons were undone, causing them to slip below
her hips exposing the dingy tops of a pair of knickers and an expanse
of pale stomach before the advent of a faded T-shirt which bore the
legend ACT IV8 YOURSELF.  The message seemed to have gone unattended
because she stood leaning against a wall, her glasses on the end of her
nose and her eyes closed in evident exhaustion, while her male
companion was busy with a metal tape, apparently measuring us up.  As I
stood looking at the couple with wild surmise, the young man asked me
if I'd mind shifting so he could measure the distance from the door to
the gas fire.

"There's plenty of room," he said with satisfaction, 'for the talk
pit."

"When we take away the gas fire and those absolutely ghastly tiles, and
the mantelpiece, of course, we're going to make this the "Relationship
Area"."  The girl unexpectedly spoke, and then refreshed herself from
the large, plastic bottle of mineral water she carried with her.

"Hilda!"  I heard in my voice bewilderment turning to desperation. "Who
are these people?"

"Mark and Sue," she started to explain.  "From the television."

"Surely we don't have to move the gas fire and the mantelpiece to
accommodate the television.  I mean, the television's


 there, on its stand, where it's always been.  It doesn't take up much
room."

"Rumpole.  Sue and Mark are from Make Over.  We've been chosen as a
London flat to be made over."

"A gone-to-seed, deeply worn-out London flat."  Mark spoke with
missionary enthusiasm.  "We're here to liberate it!  To give it new
life.  To let it breathe."  for once!"

"I'm not sure our flat is noticeably short of breath."

"Aren't you?  Well, just tell us how's your relationship?"  He looked
from one to the other of us.  The girl moved away from the wall, her
eyes open.  It was a question clearly of deep interest to both of them.
Neither of us answered it.

Instead Hilda said, "They're going to give us a talk pit."

"A what?

"It's a space you sit in.  A sort of hole.  Quite comfortable."

"Like a grave?"  I couldn't help myself.

"Sitting below floor level," Mark explained, 'you'll find yourselves
saying things to each other you never thought of saying before."

"I should think we might.  But you can't dig a hole in the middle of
our sitting-room.  You'd crash through Colonel Daventry's ceiling in
number 31A and he'd be extremely angry."

"No problems," Mark said.  "Pas de probs."  To which he added, "We're
simply going to raise your floor three feet.

"We'll knock through that door and include the passage."

"Get rid of all those horrible dangling lights and have lava lamps."

"And as this is the Relationship Zone, we'll have shelves behind the
talk pit to put the crystals on."

"Crystals?"  I was doing my best to keep up with the plans for our
matrimonial home.


 "We'll place a large crystal directly facing the talk pit," Sue
explained to me as though to a child, 'so it can really help with your
relationship."

The mind boggled at the idea of my long, sometimes stormy attachment to
She Who Must Be Obeyed being seriously affected by a lump of glittering
rock.

"We thought the walls dead white.  Just blank pages, really.  For your
thoughts."

"With lights so you can change wall colour according to your mood."

"We find most couples turn on yellow for happiness and accord."

"Scarlet for passion."

And black, I thought, for complete matrimonial incompatibility.  My
reverie was interrupted by Hilda's curt "Why don't you go into the
kitchen, Rumpole, and read your Evening Standard, so Sue and Mark can
get on with their job?"

As I left, I heard them discussing see-through storage drawers, so you
could always see your underclothes.

Much later, Hilda joined me in the kitchen.  "What the hell," I asked
her, 'are lava lamps?"

"Beautiful things, Rumpole.  Sort of tubes of light with bubbles
running up and down.  Like the stuff that comes out of volcanoes."

"Lava?"

"Exactly!"

"All this redecoration," I did my best to sound reasonable and keep the
panic out of my voice, 'is out of the question.  It'd cost us a
fortune!"

"That's where you're wrong, Rumpole.  It won't cost us a single
penny."


 "Who's going to pay for it, then?"

"The television."

"Hilda, please.  Face up to reality."

"I am.  Have you never seen the Make Over programme?  No?  You've
always been asleep, or reading about some dreadful crime or other.  The
real world is passing you by.  They take people's homes and make them
over."

"Make them over to what?  The bankruptcy court?"

"Make them over to modern, lovable, hugely desirable residences where
relationships can grow and flourish.  And the television company
pays."

"But why us, Hilda?  Why, out of the entire population, did they choose
us?"

"I wrote, Rumpole.  It was when I said that you needed a makeover that
I got the idea.  So I wrote to the programme and told them we had a
typically seedy sort of London flat, and Mark and Sue came to see us
and the answer was "Yes".  They'll do a programme about us."

"A programme?"  The voice was faint, the mind had grown tired of
boggling.

"Of course.  They'll show the whole rebuilding thing and us as we enjoy
our new lifestyle.  You'll be on the television.  You'll be famous,
Rumpole."

"You mean the whole country will see us?"

"Yes, of course."  Hilda sounded delighted.  "Nationwide."

"So Judge Bullingham and Soapy Sam Ballard and the Lord Chief Justice
and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police not to mention the
Timsons and my next Jury and the entire population of Wormwood Scrubs
can watch me sitting with you in a talk pit having our relationship
cemented by beams of light from crystal balls and volcanic


 eruptions?  Do you honestly think, Hilda, that's going to be a great
help to my practice at the criminal Bar?"

"Of course it will!  You need a bit of publicity, Rumpole.  No one's
ever heard of you.  Now you'll be quite famous.  Oh, and I've got
another piece of good news.  I got a call from Elsie Prosser.  Elsie
Inglefield as was."

"You mean," I could sense what was coming, 'you two were at school
together?"

"Of course we were.  Elsie Inglefield was a house monitor with me at
St.  Elfreda's.  That was before she married the Honourable Archie
Prosser."

"The Boy Wonder?  What's honourable about him?"

"He's Lord Binfield's son.  And Elsie tells me he's joined your
Chambers.  A bit of a feather in the cap of i Equity Court, isn't
it?"

"Hardly."

"Anyway, I've invited them here to dinner.  It's a long time ahead, but
make a note in your diary.  Of course we can tell them about it, but
I'm afraid the new talk pit won't be ready by then."

A pity, I thought.  I could have pushed the Hon.  Archie Prosser into
it and nailed down the lid.

The neglected council house somewhere in Kent was a place that had no
talk pit, no lava lamps and had never been subjected to any sort of
makeover.  The walls showed the damp, and hot water was a distant
memory since the boiler packed up.  The windows were frequently broken
by local inhabitants, resentful of strangers whom they suspected were
after their jobs or had come to sponge off their taxes.  The men played
cards or sometimes, in the evenings, sang national laments, or outdated
rock numbers they had heard secretly on banned


 radios.  The women, astonished at being allowed to uncover their
faces or wear trousers without fear of the lash, giggled and gossiped
in the kitchen.  The children whooped with delight as they chased each
other up and down the stairs, playing as they might have done in their
villages or in the back streets of Kabul, only knowing they were out on
an adventure and not caring where, or how, their future lives would be
led.  In one of the overcrowded bedrooms a man lay with his face to the
wall, sunk in a deep depression and hopeless gloom.  The others, as
though afraid that this condition might be contagious, as far as
possible avoided him.

When Ted Minter the solicitor called at this address, Doctor Mohammed
Nabi was no longer there.  He had stirred himself, gone out to buy a
little food with his vouchers and not returned.

"I told you he's afraid for his life, Mr.  Rumpole.  Maybe it's some of
the other refugees.  Perhaps it's part of the Mafia that smuggled him
over."

"Mafia?"  I asked Ted to explain.

"The Russian Mafia.  Aided by quite a few Afghans on the make.  The
mango chutney element has the stamp of Afghans on it."

"So which of their organizations is threatening the Doctor?"

"Jamil doesn't know.  He says the Doctor hasn't any idea, but it was a
Russian he paid originally."

"And the Doctor's vanished?"

"I told you, I only get instructions through Jamil."

"And have you met this Jamil?"

"He telephones me."

"So what organization does he belong to?"

"Well," Ted became vague, started a search in his over-stuffed
briefcase again and gave it up.  "As I said, he's some


 kind of social worker.  They've certainly heard of him at the Asylum
Seekers' Council.  He keeps them informed.  He speaks reasonable
English, so he can cope with the forms.  It's not entirely
satisfactory."

"If you want my honest legal opinion, it's bloody hopeless."

"It was before the adjudicator."  Ted smiled as if the general
hopelessness of the world he operated in caused him only vague
amusement.  "Neither of them turned up, not Jamil, not the Doctor.  My
instructions were to go on without them.  Read the statements, you know
the sort of thing.  Make the legal argument.  Of course they threw us
out.  The strange thing was .. ."

"What?"

"We got leave to appeal to the Tribunal."

"As a reward for not bothering to turn up?

"I had to undertake to get the Doctor to the Appeal."

"Sounds a pretty hopeless undertaking."

"Jamil says the Doctor realizes it's vitally important.  He'll be
there.  Another strange thing .. ."

"What?"

"They've made it a "Starred Appeal".  As though we were going to decide
some great point of legal principle."

"Tell the Doctor's messenger that the vital point of legal principle is
whether he bothers to turn up, not only to the hearing but to a
conference in these Chambers within the next two weeks.  And if he
can't force himself to do that, you can send him a message of goodbye
from Rumpole."

"Rumpole, do you know the one about marriage being like a hurricane?"

"Yes," I told the Boy Wonder, but it didn't deter him in the least.


 "It starts with all that sucking and blowing and you end up by losing
your house!"  Our addition to Equity Court then laughed immoderately.
Having heard this joke told somewhat better by Jack Pommeroy the week
before, I gave a weakish smile.

"You don't know many jokes, do you, Rumpole?"

"Only one," I had to confess, 'and that's not a true belly laugh."

"Tell us though."

The fact that you've been offered a seat in Chambers, was what I'd
intended to say, but I decided not to bring myself down to the Archie
Prosser level.  Instead I told him I had to get to the Temple station
before they privatized the Underground and caused total chaos on the
Circle Line.

To this he answered unexpectedly, "You know we have girls in the
Sheridan Club now?"

"No, I didn't know."

"A lot of the members were against it, but I like to see a girl round
the old place occasionally.  Cheers a fellow up."

"Does it really?"

"So what I meant to say was, could you stop in for a drink at the old
place?  There's a girl member there longing to meet you.  Bunty
Heygate.  You've heard of her, of course a real live wire of the Home
Office team."

A live wire at the Home Office sounded a bit of an oxymoron, like hot
ice.  That gloomy institution, dedicated to cracking down on Magna
Carta, the Presumption of Innocence, the right to cross-examine or any
other available aid to a fair trial, seemed to me to be shrouded in
perpetual darkness.  "But why ever," I asked Archie, 'does this Home
Office luminary want to see me?"


 "Afghanistan."

"Oh yes?"  For once the fellow was beginning to hold my attention.

"Aren't you defending some doctor who came in with a load of
pickles?"

"Something like that."

"Over here no doubt to sponge on our National Health Service."

"You mean there's a terrible danger he might help get a few patients
off their trolleys?"

"Come and meet Bunty anyway."  Archie was in no way put out.  "She's
heard such a lot about you.  Oh, and by the way, see if you can't think
of a few jokes."

"A drink in the Sheridan Club with the Honourable Archie Prosser and
the star of the Home Office, Rumpole?  Of course you've got to go.  And
remind him about coming here on the fourteenth of the month after next.
It seems Archie is tied up for dinner till then."

"Tied up for dinner."  I thought about it as Archie raised a glass of
champagne to his lips.  Was he frequently tied up, trussed, roasted to
a pleasant, light brown and served, perhaps with an orange in his
mouth, on a silver platter?  My dream was interrupted by a throaty
female voice calling, "Cheers, Mr.  Rumpole."  She drank and, without
hesitation, I followed her example.

I had come, at Hilda's express order, to the Sheridan Club, hidden in
the purlieus of Whitehall.  The room we sat in was large and gloomy,
lit by a single chandelier, with chocolate-brown walls and furnished
with armchairs flattened by long use in the seating department and
shiny, like jackets worn at the elbows.  The temperature in the room
was a good four


 degrees lower than the outside air, so chilling the champagne seemed
unnecessary.

This was the institution to which women had, after a long campaign
against a determined opposition, gained access, an event greeted by the
papers as though it were as great an historical moment as entry to the
House of Commons or the priesthood.  Some of these 'girls' were dotted
about the room.  Grey-haired, darkly clothed, bespectacled, they were
hard to distinguish from the elderly, pink-cheeked, high-voiced old men
they were entertaining or being entertained by.

Bunty Heygate was an exception.  She might well, with some
justification, still have been called a 'girl'.  Her blonde hair was
cut in a fashionable page-boy manner.  Her face was fresh and her eyes
appealing.  She wore a red coat and skirt with darker velvet at the
collar and cuffs, and heels just this side of a fetishist's delight.
Her voice had that note of command learned as part of the curriculum in
girls' boarding schools.

"We so admire the way you stand up in Court, Mr.  Rumpole, fighting for
human rights," Bunty told me.

"Do you really?"  This, from a member of the Government, was something
of a revelation.

"I want you to believe we're right behind you."

"So far behind that you're practically out of sight.  Judging from what
your Home Secretary said."

"Mr.  Rumpole," she interrupted me with a tolerant smile, 'we
politicians have to live in the real world.  I've got constituents in
the North of England, men who gather in pubs and discuss hanging and
flogging first-time offenders that's after they've castrated them, of
course.  Now, when we make statements about our policy, those are the
people we have to think about."


 "You mean the men in pubs?"

"Exactly!  But we do respect what you said in Court about Jury trials
.. ."

"Members of the Jury, you are the lamp that shows the light of freedom
burns."  I had said that in a case at Snaresbrook concerning sending
indecent magazines through the post.  It got reported in the Guardian
as a saying of the week, but the Jury convicted me.  I was grateful to
Bunty for remembering it.  Then I asked, "Why are you cutting down on
Jury trials?"

"Mr.  Rumpole," Bunty was smiling gently.  "Get real.  Have you ever
been north of Watford?"

"Very often.  Have you?"

"I do try to go.  But since I became a member here, it's so tempting to
stay in London."  There was a pause as she looked round the room with
apparent affection, at the dark walls, the wheezing chairs and the
members' guests who were looking with awe at the central table set out
with back numbers of The Field and Country Life and the portrait of
Richard Brinsley Sheridan.  He was looking down in some disapproval at
the club which bore his name and yet seemed singularly short of drunken
playwrights and loud-voiced, bosomy actresses.  Bunty Heygate MP was
examining her well-tended nails and she started almost shyly.  "You're
representing Doctor Nabi, Archie told me."

"I hope to be, when we can find him.  I was told you think it's an
important case.  A Starred Appeal they said.  That's very
flattering."

"The Foreign Office have taken a view, haven't they, Bunty?"  Archie
Prosser, who seemed to move in high political circles, was helping her
out.

"Well, to be honest with you," she smiled at me disarmingly,


 'we have a problem.  We do have to respect, well, other nations whose
ways may be different from ours.  We have to respect their
ethnicity."

"Ethnicity?"  It was a word to which I had not yet become accustomed.
"What does that mean, exactly?"

"Well, you see, we want an Afghan to be proud of his Afghanism, his
religion, his customs.  His traditional way of life.  It's not
politically correct, we feel, for us to impose white, Western values on
another civilization.  We would not want Afghans .. ."

"To become members of the Sheridan Club, for instance?"  I suggested.
This appeared to irritate Bunty, who became noticeably less friendly.

"It's not like that!  It's, well ... As you know, they have their own
ways of dealing with theft, which seem perfectly reasonable to them."

"You mean by chopping off people's hands?"

"It's all part of their Sharia law."

"Which would be extremely popular with those men in pubs up North you
keep talking about.  You know the Afghan police make their local
doctors attend to the hand-chopping?"  My cross-examiner's blood was
up.

"There's no direct evidence of that."  Archie Prosser seemed to know.

"There will be!  Once I get the good Doctor in front of the
Tribunal."

"All I'm trying to say, Mr.  Rumpole," Bunty leaned forward and spoke
now in a low, eager voice, almost as if she were making a declaration
of love, 'is that this country has to maintain reasonably friendly
relations with countries and people ... all over the world."  Here she
spread out her hands as though to embrace Mormons, Seventh Day
Adventists,

8?


 practitioners of Sharia law and worshippers of the Reverend Moon in
one cosy and politically correct embrace.

"So you're in favour of women.  being denied education and treatment in
hospital, or being whipped for wearing trousers?"

"Of course I'm not," she explained patiently, as though to a child.  "I
was brought up in a different cultural tradition."

And damned lucky for you, I thought, as I inspected her page-boy cut
and scarlet nails; you might have a bit of a tough time in Kabul.  "You
don't believe in a justice which transcends all cultural traditions?" I
asked them both in a voice so unexpectedly resonant that several of the
assembled old boys and their girlfriends turned to look at me in
alarm.

"Of course you'll say that in Court, and we'll all respect you for it."
Once again Bunty sounded as though she were soothing a difficult child.
"But we don't want the Tribunal used as a platform for politicians or,
worse still, political terrorists!  We don't want that, do we?"

It was a question, I thought, that didn't deserve an answer, and I gave
her none.  Bunty put her bright fingers against her mouth and,
apparently, thought profoundly.

"Ours is a government of barristers," she told me, 'but we're always
needing more."

"Are you?"  I thought I knew what was coming.

"So many tribunals, committees needing chairmen.  We're facing an
alarming shortage of stipendiary magistrates."

"That doesn't alarm me," I had to confess.

"The Lord Chancellor's always looking for someone to appoint."

The approach had been made, and I let it dangle in the air until Archie
came crashing in with, "At your age, Rumpole, don't you want a steady
job?  Get your feet under some reasonably well-paid desk?"


 "I don't think so.  I fully expect to die with my wig on.  Now I'd
better get back to the mansion flat, before it's made over."

"Great to meet you, Mr.  Rumpole."  Bunty was all smiles again.  "You
know we have a kind of connection.  I was at Saint Elfreda's.  Long
after your wife, of course, but we met briefly at the OE dinner."

So Bunty had received the same kick-start in life as She Who Must Be
Obeyed.  That piece of news, I have to confess, didn't surprise me in
the least.

"Mr.  Minter is here, Sir.  And he's got a doctor with him."  My clerk,
Henry, rang me in my room, where I was considering the possibility of
lighting an outlawed cheroot and getting away with it.

"Doctor Nabi?"  I asked him.

"I don't know, Sir.  I'll just check."  I slid the small cigar out of
its packet while listening to the ensuing silence.  Then Henry said,
"That seems to be his name, Sir."

I had scarcely lit up before my door opened.  The possibility of it
being Bonzo Ballard and the smoke police caused me to dispose of the
evidence.  As I did so, Ted Minter and his briefcase came shambling
eagerly in, accompanied by a tall, thin, brown-eyed stranger with a shy
smile.

"Found him at last.  This is the missing Doctor."  Ted was
understandably triumphant.

I waved the Doctor towards my client's chair and asked Ted, "How did
that happen?"

"I got a call from Jamil saying he was coming to my office.  That was
yesterday."

"We were worried about you, Doctor," I said.  "No one could find
you."


 "I also was worried, Mr.  Rumpole.  I was afraid all the time they
would kill me."  He spoke with a pleasant, rather breathless accent,
but seemed to have, I was relieved to discover, a reasonable command of
English.  I wouldn't have to examine him through an interpreter.

"We may not treat refugees particularly well," I advised him.  "Our
government seems anxious to get rid of them as quickly as possible. But
we don't actually cull them.  We save that honour for the sheep. Now
tell me, Doctor, what were you so afraid of ?"

"Excuse, Mr.  Rumpole."  The Doctor seemed obsessed with something even
more important.  "I think your waste-paper basket is on fire."

He exaggerated.  There was only a slight smouldering and a certain
amount of smoke.  A complete burn-out was prevented by Ted fetching a
glass of water from the clerks' room on the pretext of the Doctor
feeling faint.  This emergency having been satisfactorily dealt with,
our client went on with his story.

"They wanted twelve thousand dollars to bring me to England.  I scrape
for eleven in Kabul.  All my saving.  All I can sell or borrow.  So I
promise one thousand dollars from a friend.  A doctor in England.  But
when I telephone he is gone.  Gone to America.  I can no longer find
him.  So I know they will come to find me."

"Who will come?"

"Afghan or Russian.  We call them the Travel Agents, Jamil knows.  He
told me to move all the time.  So they don't find me easily."

"Do you always do what this fellow Jamil tells you?"

"Jamil is a good man.  He helps all those coming from my country.  And
he knows the Travel Agents, so he can warn us


 .  Also he told me I must come to see you.  You are the one chance I
have of staying in your country."

Well, I thought in all modesty, that was probably true, and I failed to
remind our client, or myself, that I had never, ever appeared in front
of an Appeals Tribunal before.

So I did what I do in every case, from Uxbridge Magistrates to the High
Court of Justice.  I went through my client's statement with him
slowly, carefully, underlining every essential fact and warning him of
all awkward questions.  It was the usual story of a government which
believes that having God on your side excuses all brutality.  The
Doctor had been warned, arrested, tortured and was about to be tortured
again.  His refusal to take part in the maiming of prisoners had led to
further warnings.  He went into hiding, and then, with the help of a
Russian representative of the "Travel Agents', escaped.  If he were
sent home, he would face further prison and more torture.  When we had
finished, the Doctor did something rather strange: he blew out his
cheeks, lay back in his chair and said, "I hope I can remember all
that."

"I should have thought," I told him, 'that you'd find it all too
difficult to forget."

Then I told Ted Minter to have the Doctor medically examined for the
signs of his various interrogations in police custody.  We told him the
date of his Appeal hearing and I asked if his friend Jamil would be
there to help him.

"Oh no," he said.  "Jamil is a shy man.  He doesn't want to come out
before the public at all."

There is a cupboard at the end of the passage in the mansion flat in
which Hilda stores old newspapers, sometimes for months on end, in case
she should suddenly need to remember a recipe, or a new way with a
cashmere scarf, or some juicy slice of gossip.  I spent that evening
turning over the


 copies of Hilda's tabloids until I found what I wanted the one with
the photograph of Afghan refugees being turned out of the chutney
wagon.  I took it into the sitting-room and studied it for a long time
under the light, then I crept in beside the sleeping Hilda in our as
yet unmade over bedroom.

The Appeals Tribunal was held in a gaunt concrete and glass building
off the Horseferry Road.  I found a room with a notice "Lawyers Only'
pinned to the door.  I went in and was preparing myself for the day
ahead when an eager young man wearing glasses, a blue suit and dark
hair brushed forward in a curious manner, so that he seemed to have a
villainously low forehead, came in and called loudly, "Hi, Rumpole. I'm
your Hopo."

I looked at him in a mild surmise.  Did this eccentric imagine he was
some strange tropical bird?  "I'm afraid I don't know what you're
talking about."

When he explained, I was not much wiser.  "I'm your Home Office
Presentation Officer."

"Does that mean you're on my side?"

"I'm afraid it means I'm against you."

"So you're counsel for the prosecution?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," he said modestly.  "I just present the facts
to the Court in a totally fair and balanced manner."

"Sounds fatal."

"I must say it usually is.  You chaps don't win many cases.  Is this
your first time?"

"In this particular jurisdiction," I admitted, 'yes.  I appear at the
special request of our guest from Afghanistan."

"He might be here for rather a short stay," my Hopo smirked.  "Of
course, I knew it was your first time because of the fancy dress.  No
one uses wigs and gowns down here."

Reluctantly, I removed the ancient props of my profession.


 Was this a Court of Law, I wondered, or another arm of the
bureaucracy?  I was a little reassured when we were called into the
hearing to see a proper Judge seated behind a table on a small
platform, even though the Judge in question was our one-time Head of
Chambers, that Conservative-Labour politician (I could never quite
remember which) Guthrie Feather-stone QC MP, now Mr.  Justice
Featherstone, whose judicial capacity was constantly frustrated by a
deep-seated reluctance to make up his mind.  Guthrie, wearing a
three-piece suit and an unusually cheerful tie, was seated between a
grey-haired woman, who looked as deeply concerned whether she was
listening to me or my Hopo, and a middle-aged solicitor, who smiled at
me throughout in a manner I found particularly dangerous.  Such smiles
from Judges often precede a particularly stiff sentence.

"Good morning, Mr.  Rumpole," Guthrie greeted me politely.  "Glad to
see you here at last."

"Thank you, my Lord," I answered him, ever courteous.

"Sir!"  Guthrie said firmly.

I looked at him in amazement.  Why was he calling me "Sir'?  Did he
think I'd been promoted, knighted perhaps?  Had I misheard the
fellow?

"I beg your Lordship's pardon?"

' "Sir".  You call me "Sir" here.  Even though you'd call me "my Lord"
in Court.  I'm sure it's difficult for you, doing one of these cases
for the first time."

I looked nervously at my client the Doctor.  Had he understood?  If so,
was it the end of my reputation in Afghanistan?  He was listening
attentively with one hand cupped behind his ear, and seemed to be
nodding in agreement.  Without further ado, I opened my case.


 Some people tell their stories in Court compellingly, clearly and
with the utmost conviction.  They make their listeners feel the wrongs
they have suffered, their fears, and well-founded outrage at any
possible injustice that might be done to them.  Such 'good witnesses'
are often accomplished liars.  Others stumble, hesitate, look fearfully
round the Court as though seeking ways of escape and convince nobody,
even though they may be, and sometimes are, telling nothing but the
truth.

The Doctor, as he told his story, was in a category of his own.  He was
reasonable, controlled, clear and concise.  He described moments of
torture with a restraint that made them sound even more horrible.  His
English was surprisingly good and his manner to the Tribunal was
respectful but not deferential.  I would have had no hesitation in
putting him into the 'good witness' class, except for one thing.  His
account sounded, to my ears, strangely impersonal, as though it had all
happened to someone else, a close friend perhaps, who had suffered
greatly but wasn't, somehow, exactly him.

Turning to Ted Minter behind me, to get another copy of another
completed form, I saw a familiar figure among the few spectators.  It
was the bulky presence of my old friend and sparring partner Detective
Inspector Grimble, who had been promoted out of his South London manor,
where the Timson family carried on its business, to some more powerful
position which was, apparently, shrouded in secrecy.  All he'd told me,
when I'd joined him for a farewell drink in the pub opposite his local
Magistrates' Court, was that he was 'going international', which he
hoped might entail trips abroad with lucrative expenses, in
collaboration with Interpol.  He was still young enough to go far.  He
was, I noticed, paying particular attention to the Doctor's evidence
when it came to deal with money owed to the Travel Agents.


 The Hopo had questions, many of which made considerable demands on my
patience.

"Doctor Nabi, you say you were tortured after your first arrest."

"Yes, I was."

"You have seen the medical report on your condition?"

"I have."

My heart sank a little.  The medical evidence was not entirely
helpful.

"It says the scars to your back were quite superficial and might have
been caused recently.  What was the date of your first arrest?"

"Two years ago."

"Did you inflict some sort of wounds on yourself in order to impress
this Tribunal?"

"No, of course not."  The Doctor was not outraged, only slightly amused
at the accusation.

"Even if you were tortured, as you say, two years ago, have you any
reason to suppose that you'd be tortured again if you returned to your
country?"

"My Lord," I rose in free-flowing outrage to object and was stopped by
Guthrie's smiling "You mean "Sir"."

"I mean "Sir".  Isn't it obvious that if he's been tortured before,
he's going to receive even worse treatment if he's sent back after
trying to escape abroad?  The regime hasn't changed.  The country
hasn't signed up to the Charter of Human Rights.  That wasn't a
question, it was simply a ludicrous assumption based on a wilful
refusal to face the facts."

"Mr.  Rumpole," Mr.  Justice Featherstone was clearly gathering his
wits for some sort of rebuke, 'as you see, we are sitting here without
a Jury.  No doubt a full Jury box at the Old Bailey might have been
impressed by one of your floods of


 indignation.  We, and I speak here for my two colleagues' (the
bookends on either side of him nodded sagely) 'have to decide this
matter without emotion strictly in the terms of Immigration Law on
which I'm sure the Prosecutor' here he looked at the Hopo with
untarnished approval, 'will give us the benefit of his knowledge and
experience.  Yes.  You may ask the questions again."

The Hopo accordingly did so and the good Doctor, having given the
matter some thought, replied, "No.  You're right.  I don't fear torture
if I return.  I fear death!"

As a piece of advocacy, I thought this was considerably more effective
than my objection.

"Just keeping an eye on your client, Mr.  Rumpole.  We're interested in
the Travel Agents, of course.  They're making their millions
transporting human misery.  That's about the size of it, if you want my
honest opinion."

D. I. Grimble often used this expression as though we might, from time
to time, quite enjoy his dishonest one.  Together with Ted Minter, we
had sought refuge in a Horseferry Road pub which promised reasonable
Guinness and beef sandwiches, a delicacy which I thought might, given
the present government's handling of animal disease, become as rare and
expensive as caviar.  At the other end of the bar my Hopo, apparently
satisfied with his performance, was laughing loudly with three
distinctly personable young Home Office secretaries.  Doctor Nabi had
remained in the Tribunal building and, after swallowing a handful of
vitamin pills and a glass of water, was refreshing his memory from his
notes.

"Our chap has a lot to say about the Travel Agents," I reminded
Grimble.  "Russian Mafia, some of them."


 "He's in fear for his life if he can't pay them."  Ted was looking
for help from a friendly officer.

"I think we may have got very close to one of the principal villains."
The Inspector sounded justifiably satisfied.  "That's why we want to
keep an eye on your client, now he's emerged from the shadows, Mr.
Rumpole.  Entirely for his own protection, of course."

He was looking at me steadily.  I had a curious feeling that the pieces
of what had seemed a haphazard jigsaw had locked together, and I
thought I knew what the Detective Inspector really meant.

The police observation, by WPC Mary Longcroft and DS Stewart, wearing
casual clothing and driving an unmarked Ford Fiesta, was tactful but
efficient.  After he left the Court at five-thirty p.m."  my client
took a taxi to a discreet address in Devonshire Place which was known
to house a massage parlour offering more exotic services to regular and
affluent clients.  He emerged and took another taxi to an Indian
restaurant in Kensington High Street, where he ate Tandoori chicken
with vegetable curry and drank mineral water and strong black tea.  He
walked to the Kensington Odeon, where he chose the screen presenting
Message in a Bottle starring Kevin Costner.  He left the cinema shortly
after ten, visibly moved.

From the Odeon, the object of scrutiny walked down towards Earls Court
Road and then, turning into Longridge Road, he stopped outside a door
next to, of all things, a travel agency.  He had a key to unlock the
door.  Seconds later, a light went on in the room over the shop.  The
subject was seen drawing the curtains, although chinks of light
revealed that the room was still occupied.


 Watch was kept by WPG Longcroft and DS Stewart for fifteen minutes,
and then they heard a sudden cry, perhaps a cry for help but in a
language they couldn't understand.  It echoed down the empty street and
then died in silence.  The watchers called for assistance and, when the
police car arrived, the door was broken down.  The subject was found
apparently alive in the upstairs room.

In the search that followed, a cupboard in the wall was found locked.
When the police forced the door, they saw a sight familiar, perhaps, in
the prisons and police stations of some cruelly intolerant regime.  A
tall man with light-brown skin and soft, pleading eyes was confined in
the darkness, bound to a chair, seated in the stench of his own
excrement, with his mouth shut and silenced by adhesive tape.

So the real Doctor Nabi was released from custody and later found to
have marks of torture on his body which could in no way have been
self-inflicted.  My Appeal before the Tribunal was adjourned, pending
the completion of police enquiries.

"Jamil was the Travel Agent, of course.  He made a fortune transporting
his fellow citizens, most of whom never got to stay here, in a
succession of chutney runs.  Grimble and his team were nearly on to
him.  He was desperately in need of a new personality."

"So he decided to become the Doctor."  Archie Prosser, the new Boy
Wonder of our Chambers, had got the point.

"Exactly."

"But if he was the Travel Agent, didn't the Doctor know him?"  Elsie
Prosser, the Boy Wonder's wife, was a large, motherly woman of what
used to be called a 'homely' appearance.  She had a sense of humour
and, apart from an


 inexplicable attachment to Archie, considerable common sense.

"Oh, he didn't know him as the Travel Agent, or one of them.  He knew
him as Jamil, the kindly refugee adviser and social worker who helped
him fill in all his forms and send them off."

"What happened to the answers?"

"Jamil got them.  But he told Nabi he'd heard nothing.  He was getting
ready to become the noble, persecuted Doctor."

"He never turned up before the adjudicator."  The Boy Wonder was quick
to spot our case's weakest link.

"Grimble doesn't think Jamil was ready then.  He'd just got the Doctor
out of the council house by telling him the Travel Agents were after
him and he was making him a prisoner in Longridge Road."

"He was lucky to get leave to appeal."

"Lucky all the way.  Until the end."

"When he deceived everyone.  Including you, Rumpole," Hilda was
delighted to say.

"I had my suspicions.  I looked at the picture in your paper.  I
couldn't see anyone who looked much like our client.  And then, there
was something about the way he gave his evidence .. ."

"Oh, nonsense, Rumpole!"  Hilda, as ever, was determined to make the
most of Rumpole's fallibility.  "You know perfectly well you were
completely taken in."

There was a silence then.  The Boy Wonder took in his surroundings,
cast an eye round the sitting-room, helped himself to an after-dinner
mint bought by Hilda for the occasion, and said words which were music
to my ears.  "You know, Hilda, you've got this flat of yours exactly
how I like it."


 "There's a real feeling of home here."  The admirable Elsie Prosser
backed him up.

"I can't bear the way some people do their places up nowadays," Boy
Wonder further improved the situation.  "Bubbling lights in coloured
tubes and plants all over the shop."

"See-through sock drawers," I suggested, turning the screw.

"A chap I was at school with, works in the City," Boy Wonder was
laughing in a way I found delightful.  "He's even got a hole in his
sitting-room floor, like a sort of grave, you're meant to sit in it and
chat!"

"What a ridiculous idea!"  I heard Hilda's voice of surrender, and
heard it with relief.

"What I like about this place," Mrs.  Prosser kept to the theme, 'is
that every dear old article of furniture looks thoroughly loved."

"They're all things that have seen us through our married lives, aren't
they, Rumpole?"

"For better or worse.  Yes."

"You know, in some ways this place reminds me of the good old Sheridan
Club."

Down at heel?  I felt like saying but resisted the temptation. Inviting
the Boy Wonder and his wife to dinner had proved to be a blessing in
excellent disguise.

"You know, Rumpole had some sort of an idea we needed a makeover."  I
was fascinated by the devious mind now revealed by She Who Must Be
Obeyed.

"Oh no, you can't!  Don't do it, Rumpole."  The Prossers spoke in
unison.

"Well, it was just an idea .. ."  I was only too pleased to cooperate
with Hilda.

"I really think," she said firmly, 'that we should tell those


 decorator people they're not needed.  Would you agree, Rumpole?"

"Oh yes, Hilda, I most certainly would."

It was a moment of thankfulness, and sanity returned.  I lit a small
cigar and Mrs.  Prosser accepted one also.

"I only wonder," Archie asked, apparently innocently, 'why this arch
crook and ruthless exploiter Jamil suggested you do the Appeal.  I
mean, he wasn't going to get a new life if you messed it up, was he?"

"I can only suppose," I said, 'that he had heard something about me
that convinced him I could win."  And at that moment I didn't know
whether to feel proud or ashamed.

"Finally, Sir, with respect to the Tribunal, may I say this.  There may
be people, perhaps people of power and influence, who say, or think, or
might wish you to find, that if an independent state inflicts horrible
cruelty on its citizens because of its sincerely held religious
beliefs, or because such cruelties are part of its traditions, or are
believed to be for the common good, we should close our eyes, fail to
condemn it, and send its refugees who come here expecting protection
back to face torture and probably death.  We would submit that there
are values higher than local customs or traditions, or even the demands
of various religious beliefs.  There is a justice which believes that
persecution is persecution, cruelty is cruelty, torture is torture,
murder is murder, in whatever country and for whatever motive it is
carried out.  With those thoughts, I leave the future of Doctor
Mohammed Nabi with confidence in the hands of this Tribunal."

It was some while later that I made this final speech in a new hearing.
I had spoken to Guthrie and the bookends exactly as if they were a
Jury.  And it worked.


 Shortly after that, the Boy Wonder left Chambers for a job in the
Home Office.  I had a spell of gout and extreme pain.  I called on the
real Doctor Nabi at his practice in the Clerken-well Road and the stuff
he gave me worked extremely well.


Rumpole and the Camberwell Carrot

"Absolutely right!  I quite agree.  That's the only way to treat
them."

It was breakfast time in the mansion flat and She Who Must Be Obeyed
was pleased to find herself in complete agreement with her Daily
Beacon.

The way to treat whom?  I wondered.  Husbands?  Plumbers who make you
wait at home all day on the off-chance that they might condescend to
call?  Supporters of the European common currency?  I wondered which of
Hilda's betes noires was in for it at the moment.

"First-time drug users!  Dope fiends in the making.  We're too
tolerant, Rumpole!  We're soft on cannabis."

"You, Hilda?  I didn't know you were soft on anything."

"We need more like him."

"Like who?"

By way of answer Hilda passed me her paper.  The centre pages were
dominated by the photograph of a burly, square-shouldered man with a
broken nose and bushy eyebrows.  He was staring at the camera in a
hostile and challenging manner and the article was headed "PUT
FIRST-TIME DRUGGIES INSIDE, by Doctor Tom Gurnley MP, the voice of
common sense!"

"He could have any job he wants for the asking, if he weren't


 so wonderfully loyall He prefers to speak his mind from the
back-benches."

Dr.  Gurnley's views on the death penalty (strongly in favour), the
European Union, erotic advertisements in the Underground, one-parent
families and asylum seekers (strongly against) were trumpeted from
every chat show on radio, television and most of the newspapers on a
daily basis.  If they weren't interviewing him or publishing his
articles, they were reporting that there was a strong movement to make
the Doctor leader of his Party after its forthcoming electoral
defeat.

"The thing about him is he's prepared to crack down on crime from the
outset.  He understands the nature of evil, which I sometimes think is
more than you do, Rumpole."

"You may be right."  Is evil a word used too frequently to explain the
apparently inexplicable?  Does it exist, not only in the dock but along
the corridors of power, among the lawgivers as well as the
cracked-down-on?  I could have discussed King Lear's pertinent
question: "Handy Dandy.  Which is justice, which the thief ?"  but
breakfast wasn't the right time for such debates, nor would Hilda have
enjoyed a closer exploration of this subject.

"And he's such a handsome chap, isn't he, Rumpole?  I mean, he looks a
real man.  Not like some of the variety we see around the House of
Commons nowadays.  He's got the look of a gladiator about him.  Someone
with a cause to fight for!  Don't you agree, Rumpole?"

"I suppose so."  As I say, I wasn't in a gladiatorial mood that
morning.  "Although quite honestly I couldn't fancy him myself."

"Do try to be serious, Rumpole.  I don't think you'd catch Tom Gurnley
not being serious."


 "No, I don't think you would."  I had to agree with her at last.

"Oh, what can all thee, Erskine-Brown," I asked Claude, not for the
first time, 'alone and palely loitering?"

The look he gave me was decidedly stricken.  He had the appearance of a
man who's just prosecuted a plea of guilty and lost the case.

"Would you like to come to the first night of the Ring cycle with me,
Rumpole?  It's only five hours with intervals."

"Would that be Wagner?"

"Of course."

"I'd do a lot for you, Claude.  I'd buy you a drink' (we had both
resorted, after the day's work done, to Pommeroy's Wine Bar).  "I see
you're drinking the wine of the country.  I'll take your children to
the pan to  I'd even get bail for you if you're thinking of committing
a criminal offence.  But I have to draw the line at five hours of
Wagner."

"I knew that when I asked.  I knew you wouldn't come with me.  Not even
for the sake of our old friendship."

"Not even for the sake of our old friendship," I agreed.  "Not even for
that."  And then I looked at the poor fish with real concern.  His
condition seemed unsatisfactory, verging on the dangerous.  Even the
Chateau Fleet Street wasn't having its usual calming effect.  "Do tell
me, what are you suffering from, Claude?"

"A trial separation."

"You mean an order for separate trials?"  I was at a loss.

"It's not a case in Court, you idiot!  It's life.  Real life!  Phillida
and I are having a trial separation."

"She's left you?"  It was surprising but not incomprehensible.  Life
with Claude might become something like a constantly


 repeated Ring cycle.  No doubt the Portia of our Chambers, now
elevated to a High Court Judgeship, would welcome an interval.

"What've you done, Claude?"  I looked at the chap, recognizing human
frailty, and, in particular, the frailty of Erskine-Brown.  "Was it the
au pair or Hoskins' new pupil?"  I doubted if Claude would have had the
enterprise to stray further afield.

"It's not me, Rumpole."  Claude seemed stung enough to put a certain
amount of energy in his denial.  "I've been a perfect husband for ...
oh well, for a considerable length of time.  It's Philly.  She's taken
it into her head we should live apart, at least for a trial period."

"So you've got to look after the twins, cook them burgers, et
cetera?"

"Oh no, Philly's at home.  She's made me move out."  Well of course, a
High Court Judge, like my own Hilda, I thought, is someone who has to
be obeyed.

"She's made me stay at the Sheridan Club."  Claude's voice rose in
misery.

My heart went out to him.  I searched for consolation.  "Well at least
they have girls in there now."

"I'm not interested in girls, Rumpole," Claude lied.  "Anyway they're
all Heads of Colleges and Governors of the BBC, those girls at the
Sheridan.  They're as old as my aunts and I can't keep up with their
conversation.  Quite honestly, I just miss Philly terribly.  What can I
do, Rumpole?"

"Wait and see, old chap.  Time cures everything.  She'll be back.  I'm
sure she's getting lonely."

"She's not, Rumpole!  Trevor Lowe from number five Equity Court went to
a birthday dinner at the Ivy and there she was, at a table in the
middle surrounded by what he


 called her 'groupies'.  They were all laughing and having a
thoroughly good time."

"Inside her," I tried to cheer him up, 'perhaps the heart was
breaking."

"I don't think so, Rumpole.  I hardly think so.  Oh, what can I do?  If
ever I heard a cry for help, Claude bleated one now, causing assorted
barristers in Pommeroy's to turn and stare at him as though he were a
nasty accident.

"Claude," I said, 'after a lifetime's knocking around some frequently
unsympathetic Courts I've learnt a little of the art of persuasion.
Would you like me to have a word with her?"

He looked at me then, his eyes bright with gratitude.  "Oh, Rumpole,"
he blurted, 'would you?"

"Rumpole!  This is a surprise.  I hope you haven't come to ask me to
give some axe murderer community service."

"I have come," I said, ignoring the slur on my reputation, 'to ask you
for an even greater act of clemency."

My clerk, Henry, had had words with Mrs.  Justice Erskine-Brown's clerk
on the telephone.  This led me into a discreet entrance of the Great
Chateau de Justice, the Victorian Gothic Law Courts in the Strand,
where I was escorted down passages and up stairs to Phillida's room.
"The Judge is just finishing in Court," I was told.  "She'll be here
directly."  But it was nearly half an hour before she appeared,
liberated as a young girl released from school, pulled off her wig,
flung it on the desk, struggled out of her black, civil case gown and,
crossing to the mirror, started to assess her face critically.  My line
about an act of clemency was carefully ignored.

"I don't look too bad, do I?  For someone in sight of fifty."

She looked, I thought, almost better than when she had


 appeared, all those years ago, a nervous pupil about to brighten up
Equity Court.

"You look," I said, 'of course, the most desirable member of the
judiciary.  Perhaps that's why he's missing you so much."

"Oh yes?"  She flicked at her hair with a finger, and sounded
unconvinced.

"I am here," I told her, 'on behalf of Claude Erskine-Brown QC.  A man
of good character with no previous convictions."

"No convictions?"  Phillida gave her reflection a small, mocking smile.
"It wasn't for want of trying."

"I understand that, in recent years anyway, his conduct has been beyond
reproach."

"Perhaps that's what's wrong with him."  Her voice seemed to indicate
that, for the present at least, clemency was off the menu.  "There's
not much fun to be had from someone who is beyond reproach."  From this
I gathered that, faithful or unfaithful, Claude was on a loser.

"He's missing you terribly.  The chap is merely a shadow of his former
self."

"He could do with losing weight."  The Judge was merciless.  "Anyway,
I've met someone."

What did that mean?  I'd met a lot of people, from safe-blowers to
Lords of Appeal in Ordinary.  So, in his quiet way, had Claude.  "I
suppose you mean you've met someone special."

"You wouldn't approve of him, Rumpole."

"Wouldn't I?"

"You wouldn't approve of his politics."

She moved away from the mirror and at last, in a more friendly mood now
we had got on to discussing her special person, poured me a glass of
sherry from the judicial decanter.

"Some young white wig who belongs to the Workers Revolutionary
Party?"


 "Hardly!  This one's more than a little to the right of Genghis Khan.
Capital punishment, corporal punishment, Britain's for the British you
name it, he's all for it."

"Sounds ghastly to me."

"It isn't really.  Underneath all that he's just a simple, rather
innocent boy at heart.  Anyway," she sat in one of her leathery,
masculine armchairs and nursed her sherry, 'you know there's something
rather exciting about someone you disagree with.  Claude and I never
really argued with each other.  I fell in love with my present chap
during a quarrel about whether or not President George W. Bush is a
total dickhead."

Would I ever have dreamt, when I did my first case before some
terrifying old monster at London Sessions, that I would ever sit
discussing the erotic effect of an argument about the American
President on a High Court Judge?

"Does your present chap enjoy the opera?"  I wondered.

"Not in the least.  He thought Rheingold was some sort of South African
currency."

"Do I know him?  He's not a member of the Criminal Bar?"

"Not at all."

"Or of the Commercial?  Tax?  Family Division?"  I asked, although I
thought the last was improbable.

"None of that.  He's a Member of Parliament."

"Anyone I've heard of ?"

"Probably.  He's called Tom Gurnley."  And then her phone rang.  Before
I could express my amazement she was smiling, one hand on her hip,
chirping happily into the instrument.  "Wonderful, darling.  The Ivy at
eight?  No worries.  I've got a babysitter.  Yes .. . Love you too!"

She put a hand over the mouthpiece and, in a penetrating whisper, said,
"Good to see you, Rumpole.  So glad you're going out with Claude.  Try
and keep him out of trouble,


 won't you?"  and then she turned away from me, back to the voice of
her improbable lover.  "See you there then, our usual table."  And she
blew a kiss at the mouthpiece.

"It's absolutely disgusting!"

Hilda, with an outburst of disapproval so violent that she actually
hurled her Daily Beacon, usually a much-cherished possession, to the
ground, said, "He's let us down terribly."

"Nothing I've done then, Hilda?"

"He was a man who seemed to have convictions, Rumpole!"

"Well, most of my clients have got them."

"Do be serious!  That was the point about him.  He genuinely believed
in good and evil.  You don't believe in things like that, do you,
Rumpole?"

"Good and evil?  Of course I do.  I just don't believe they often get
taken straight.  Sometimes they come mixed.  Like a sort of
cocktail."

"Cocktail?  Do you think of nothing but alcohol, Rumpole?  Well, this
doesn't come mixed at all.  This is pure evil.  And to think how we all
respected him!"

At which she scooped her newspaper off the floor and gave me a view of
the front page, which was decorated with the face of Mrs.  Justice
Erskine-Brown's favourite politician.  "ANTI-DRUG MP CHARGED WITH
POSSESSION' screamed the headline, followed, in only slightly smaller
type, by "Gurnley lights up a spliff ", by our reporter on the spot,
Angela Illsley."

I hoped my face, as I read the story, expressed serious concern at the
fact that Hilda's idol had, apparently, feet of cannabis resin.  I'm
afraid that all I could feel, at that particular moment, was quiet
amusement.

no


 "Serves him jolly well right," said merciless Mizz Liz Probert.
"Cracking down on cannabis!  The law's ridiculous.  What does that
ghastly, right-wing, out-of-date old dinosaur think he's talking about?
Just make it legal.  That would solve all our problems."

"Solve his problem too, apparently."

"Why can't we be like Amsterdam?"

I tried to think of an answer to this question.  Because we didn't have
little canals all over the place, and very few Dutch people.  I gave up
and asked, "So you don't disapprove of cannabis smokers?"

"Get a life, Rumpole.  Everyone does it."

"Not everyone.  I have yet to see She Who Must Be Obeyed with an
enormous spliff, or Mr.  Injustice Graves giggling helplessly.  I mean,
do you think it's really good for you?"

"You should talk!"  Mizz Probert began dismissively.

"Well, yes.  I usually do."

"You should talk about doing things that are bad for you.  When you're
wrecking your liver with Pommeroy's plonk and your lungs with small
cigars."

"Let's get this entirely clear!  You're against a law stopping people
smoking dope, but all for a law stopping me smoking small cigars?" This
was a twist in the ethics of political correctness which surprised even
me.

"We didn't actually make a law, Rumpole.  We didn't put it through
Parliament."

"But you enforced it all the same."  I breathed in the disappointingly
fresh air of my room in Chambers.  "You and the other members of the
smoke police.  Soapy Sam Ballard and Claude Erskine-Brown."

"Claude Erskine-Brown."  Liz Probert's manner changed.  No longer the
confident legislator of modern times, the girl in


 whose life had already been securely got, she sounded uncertain and
vaguely troubled.  "I'm worried about him."

"The fellow," I explained as best I could, 'is going through a bad
patch."

"He hangs round me," Liz complained.  "He comes into my room and sits
down.  Then he talks for a long time about nothing very much.  Is
something wrong with his home life?"

"Practically everything.  He's moved into a dusty old gentlemen's club
in Whitehall which has now admitted Claude and an assortment of
clubbable ladies.  He's suffering Phillida deprivation."

"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 Phil-lida'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
Tram," 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."

"5


 "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 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 pans 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."

I tried to listen to him sympathetically, and I didn't tell him that it
was a position I'd got used to over the years.

"I had the feeling that she was judging me all the time.  Well, no one
likes being judged, do they, Rumpole?"

"None of my clients are very keen on it."

"So I'm thinking of marriage to someone younger.  Someone more at the
start of her career."

"Have you asked her yet?"

"Asked who?"

"Liz Probert."

"I don't know why you should think it's Liz I have in mind."  Claude
looked flattered, however, as though I had recognized that he had a
reasonable chance of Mizz Probert.  "I haven't asked her yet. Naturally
I'm not free to do so.  But she has given me a certain amount of
encouragement."

"You mean she let you take her to the Twilight of the Gods?

"She leapt at the idea of coming to Govern Garden with me.  Wagner, a
half-bottle and sandwiches in the Floral Hall.  She loved every minute
of it!  That's the sort of life I can offer her, Rumpole."

"And you think she'll leap at that?"

"What girl wouldn't?"

"Oh, I suppose hardly any."  I didn't disillusion the poor old QC, who
felt happiness was within his grasp.  And then his voice became more
resolute and he frowned in a way he might have thought was merciless.

"I have a strong suspicion," he said, 'that Phillida's seeing someone
else.  I mean why else would she want a separation?"

"I can't imagine."

"I'm not hanging around for her agreement to a divorce,


 Rumpole.  I've instructed my solicitor and I'm going to have her
watched.  She won't get away with this.  I'm keeping her under close
observation."

"You weren't invited to Dr.  Gurnley's party?"

"Not actually invited.  No.  I told you.  My friend, Anthea, happens to
be the girlfriend of Keith Fawcett who plays for the Wanderers.  They
took me with them."

"Did you ask Anthea to do that?"

"I asked her.  Yes."

"Simply because you wanted to go to a party?"

"I was in a party mood.  Yes."

"It wasn't just that, was it?"

There was a moment's pause.  Angela Illsley, 'our reporter on the
Beacon', stood in the witness box at London Sessions and looked towards
the prosecution counsel as though for advice.  She was, I thought, in
her early thirties, her naturally pretty face marred, at that moment,
by a frown of irritation.  Her evidence in chief had been clear,
precise and given with every sign of conviction.  But she didn't like
to be contradicted.

"Why else would I want to go?"

"Let me tell you.  You were a fairly junior reporter at the Beacon,
weren't you?"

"I do my job well, Mr.  Rumpole, and I'm proud of it."

"Did you want to do your job even better and see if you could get a
story about a well-known politician?"

"I'm always on the look out for stories, Mr.  Rumpole."

"So you didn't just go because you were in a party mood.  You went
there in search of a story."

"If you put it that way, yes."

Seldom have I played to a larger audience.  The press benches were
stuffed and seasoned Court reporters were


 , squashed in with the public.  Lawyers waiting for their cases to
come on had dropped in to catch the highlights of our trial.  Seated in
the dock, wearing a dark suit and a Croydon Wanderers tie, my client
indulged in rather too much smiling at the Jury.  They looked a
reasonable lot, a selection of variously coloured faces.  There was a
large, motherly black woman whom I had seen reading the Guardian, two
young women who might have been schoolteachers, and a scholarly looking
young Indian who took copious notes.  They were men and women, I
thought, who lived in a world more real than that inhabited by the
Honourable Member.

"The sort of story you were after wouldn't be one about what a
thoroughly decent, kindly and upright citizen Dr.  Gurnley was and how
the canapes were delicious."

"How the what were delicious, Mr.  Rumpole?"  His Honour Stephen
Millichip was a soft-voiced, gentle Judge who seemed to be constantly
surprised by the rough and often brutal world to which his modest
practice in the law of landlord and tenant had brought him.  "Did you
say the cannabis?"  He named the drug as though the word might itself
cause some sort of dangerous intoxication in Court.

"No, Your Honour.  Canapes.  We'll get to the cannabis later."

There was a little breeze of laughter from the Jury, and Angela Illsley
got briskly back to business.  "I don't think my editor would have
wanted a story like that."

"What your editor wanted was a story that proved my client to be a
complete hypocrite."

"I don't know what you mean, Mr.  Rumpole."

"Do you not?  After three years working on the Daily Beacon, are you
really telling this Jury you don't know what a hypocrite is?"


 It was a mistake.  The black Guardian reader smiled broadly, but the
scholarly Indian frowned with disapproval.  Adrian Hoddinot, a
singularly fair-minded prosecutor, who looked owlish in thick pebble
glasses and always said he only kept on working to provide adequately
for his Great Dane, rose with a mild rebuke.

"Your Honour, I'm sure we all enjoy Mr.  Rumpole's sense of humour in
the robing room.  I just don't think he should make jokes at the
expense of the witness."

"Yes.  You mustn't think of this Court simply as a place of
entertainment, Mr.  Rumpole."  The Judge had, perhaps, put his finger
on a flaw in my character.  I stood looking suitably rebuked and he
went on, as though regretting some judicial severity, "I know you'll
want to rephrase the question."

"Certainly, I'll rephrase it."  I turned back to the Beacon reporter.
"You wanted a story that would show my client doesn't practise what he
preaches.  That all his high moral talk about family life and cracking
down on drugs was pure hogwash."

"Pure what, Mr.  Rumpole?"

"Hogwash, Your Honour."

I must have stopped being entertaining.  The Judge wrote the word down
carefully.

"When I went to the party

"When you gate-crashed the party."

"I told you, I went with my friend Anthea."

"Did my client know you were coming?"

"I don't know.  Perhaps not..  ."

"So when you turned up uninvited, that was the story you were after."

"I didn't know what sort of story there'd be, or if there'd be a story
at all."


 There was an obvious answer to this, but now was not the moment to
accuse her of invention.  I embarked on the slow approach, the line of
questions the witness agrees to, until, in the end, she is fixed with
one she doesn't want to agree to but may be left with no reasonable
alternative.

"You stayed on in the house after all the other guests had left?"

"I told you, I was in the toilet."

"You told us that.  Yes.  Let's get this clear.  Up to the time when
you emerged from the lavatory, there'd been no sign of anyone smoking
cannabis."

"No one was doing drugs.  No."

"Had you told your friend, Anthea, you wanted to stay on after she and
her friend had gone?"

"She knew I did."

"So it was a carefully arranged plan?"

"It was a plan.  Yes."

"Where did you go, after you were the only one left?"

"I went into the sitting-room.  Tom was sitting on the sofa.  I think
he was having a drink."

"Did you sit beside him, and tell him it was a lovely party?"

"Yes."

"Had you spoken to him before?"

"Not really.  Not actually spoken.  He'd smiled at me."

"Did you tell him your name?"

"He didn't ask me."

"Did you kiss him?"

"I gave him a nice kiss."  She looked at the Jury and gave them a
small, confidential smile and said, "I think he enjoyed it very much."
It was her first mistake.  The motherly Guardian reader looked
disapproving, the studious Indian mildly surprised.


 "A Judas kiss, was it?"

Adrian the prosecution rose, half-apologetic.  "I think my learned
friend should explain .. ."

"Certainly I'll explain.  A traitor's kiss.  You kissed him and made up
your mind to write a story which you knew would ruin his career."

"It's not my fault he's ruined his career."

"Isn't it?  What did you hope for when you kissed him?"

"I suppose I hoped we'd get friendly," again she gave an unreturned
smile to the Jury, 'and he'd give me a story."

"So was the kiss enough ... to unlock his secrets?"

"It didn't seem to be.  He looked happy, as I say, but he was quiet." A
rare moment, I thought, in the life of Tom Gurnley, MP.

"And after that?"

"After that nothing much happened and I asked him if he minded me
smoking."

"Did he mind?"

"Not at all.  So I got out cigarette papers and I had some .. ."  She
paused, and it was time to take a risk, to ask a question without
knowing the answer.

"You said in your statement to the police, and in your evidence in
chief, that you rolled a cigarette.  That wasn't the truth, was it?"

"It was a sort of cigarette."

"A spliff ?"

She looked at the prosecutor for help, but he sighed and looked away.

"Yes."

"Cannabis.  A class-B drug?"

"Well, yes.  But the police know.  They gave me a warning."


 "So not being a well-known Member of Parliament means you don't have
to face the inconvenience of a prosecution?"

"Mr.  Rumpole."  The Judge, unused to the ways of the world, asked me,
in the politest possible manner, for some basic education.  "Perhaps
there are some Members of the Jury who know nothing about the making of
"spliffs", as you have called them.  Can you help me?"

"Certainly, Your Honour.  Someone has a packet of papers and rolls a
cigarette packed with the dope, which may be of varying quality.  It's
lit and passed round among the participants, who are meant to breathe
the smoke in deeply.  This produces a feeling of satisfaction and
giggles, although by now the end of the joint may, perhaps, be
unpleasantly moist..  ."

I stopped there.  Some Members of the Jury were looking at me in wild
surmise.  Even the well-meaning Judge had raised his eyebrows and the
prosecutor said, in a penetrating whisper, "Are you an expert witness,
Rumpole?"  Had I drawn too deeply on my experience of dinner with
relics of the sixties during the case concerning Mrs.  Twineham's
skeleton?  To avoid further dangerous speculation, I passed quickly on
to the next question.

"Did you offer him the wet end of your spliff ?"

"Yes, I did."

She had the Jury's full attention.  Their disapproval was now reserved
entirely for the witness.

"Was that calculated to tempt him?"

"I thought it might be fun to see how he'd react."

"Fun?  Is this whole case fun to you?  Fun to see a public figure
humiliated and perhaps destroyed?"

"All right then.  I wanted to show him up."

"And you were determined to do that, weren't you?  You


 had given him the Judas kiss and you were going to sell him for
thirty pieces of silver."  Was I making an absurd comparison between
the Honourable Member and the founder of a great religion? Undoubtedly.
But the Jury, and in particular the Guardian reader, seemed to relish
my quoting scripture in the case of the Camberwell Carrot.

"I don't know about pieces of silver .. ."

"How much did the Beacon pay you?"

"I got ten thousand."

"Not bad, for a beginner.  And a job?"

"I was promoted.  Yes."

"And let off your own drug offence."

"I told you, I was warned.  And I told you, he said he'd got better
stuff of his own.  He went to a drawer in his desk and unlocked it.  He
made himself this huge .. ."

"Camberwell Carrot?"

"Yes."

"A name, Your Honour," I hastened to bring the learned Judge up to
date, 'for a particularly large marijuana cigarette."

"Smoked in Camberwell?"  The Judge was doing his best to keep up with
the evidence.

"Undoubtedly," but here I turned back to the witness, 'but never smoked
in front of you in my client's house.  Did he lecture you on the
dangers of using drugs?"

"No."

"How did it end?"

"Well, we chatted a bit and then he seemed sleepy.  So I left."

"Left to write a piece of rather poor fiction for ten thousand pounds.
Yes?  Thank you, Miss Illsley.  I have no further questions."


 "The defence is often at its best at the end of the prosecution case.
It is now.  The Jury don't like Angela at all.  They're perfectly
prepared to disbelieve her.  They don't like her kissing you, or
getting away with smoking pot.  They're not at all keen on traps set by
newspapers.  It's my belief that she sank the prosecution.  As I say,
they don't like her.  I'm afraid they might like you even less."

"Why shouldn't they like me?"  Tom Gurnley was genuinely puzzled.  "I'm
a straightforward, plain-speaking, very ordinary sort of chap."

"If you were very ordinary they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of
prosecuting you.  The point of this case is to show the world that the
Crown Prosecution Service can act without fear or favour."

"I'll just go into the witness box and let them know what I think about
drugs."

"I advise against it."

"You want to shut me up?"  He looked hurt.

"In a word, yes."

"I'm not doing it.  No one's ever been able to shut me up before."  He
began to shout, as though at a Party Conference.

"Perhaps they haven't really tried."

Decent restaurants round London Sessions are few and far between, and
instead of propping up some nearby saloon bar, like the other ordinary
chaps, the down-to-earth MP had booked a private room in a smart hotel.
So we sat before a sweeping view of the river on its way to the Thames
Barrier, past Greenwich Palace to Gravesend and the sea.  We toyed with
lobster mayonnaise, washed down with the sort of white Burgundy
unavailable in Pommeroy's Wine Bar, and discussed our tactics for the
afternoon.

"Have you taken a good look at the Jury?"  I asked him.


 "There are two or three serious young women who might well have
one-parent families.  There's a powerful black matriarch who reads the
Guardian.  There's a serious-minded Indian who might remember you
saying that most of London was becoming indistinguishable from the back
streets of Bangladesh.  I'm just afraid that you may not be a complete
hit with these honest citizens."

"I'm not afraid of them."  The MP cracked a claw as though it were the
entire judicial system.  "What do you think they'll ask me?"

"How you reacted when Miss Angela Illsley kissed you.  She's quite a
personable young woman."

"I returned her kiss, in a friendly way.  As though I were her
uncle."

"And when she rolled up a joint?"

"I warned her about the dangers of cannabis."

"She says you had better stuff of your own."

"I didn't say that.  I told her, I've spent a lot of my precious time
fighting a war against drugs."

"That's what you always say.  All I want to know is, did you or did you
not produce a Camberwell Carrot?"

As usual, the direct question seemed to silence him.  I looked out at
the river that had floated queens and politicians to the Tower for
beheading, received desperate young prostitutes driven to suicide, and
held pirates in chains waiting for the rising tide to drown them, and
here I was trying to save a public figure who didn't seem able to tell
me if he'd puffed at a king-sized spliff or not.

When he spoke at last he said, "I have a friend who's a Judge."

"Oh yes, I know you have."

"She said you could get me off."


 "Perhaps I can.  What I can't do is call you to give evidence if I
know you can't deny the charge against you."

"But you can tell them that bloody little Angela hasn't proved the
case."

"Oh yes, I can tell them that.  But if you want to give evidence,
you'll have to do it on your own."

Not for the first time, I wondered why the one-time Portia of our
Chambers could ever have fallen for my client's charm.  It was time for
me to say, "So, thank you for the lobster."  I rose to my feet.  "I
have better things to do, more serious crimes to discuss, than you and
the Camberwell Carrot."

"Rumpole."  He put a hand on my arm.  He was as near, I suppose, as he
ever would get to begging for help.  "My friend the Judge was right,
I'm sure.  I'll take your advice on this."

So it was still on.  I gave my best legal advice.  "Then keep your
mouth shut," I said.  "You can bore the House of Commons to your
heart's content.  Just don't start boring this Jury.  I'll do my best
for you."

Whether it was the white Burgundy or the stimulating effect on the
brain of a massive intake of cold fish, I was at my best with the Jury.
The Judas kiss and the thirty pieces of silver figured again in my
final speech.  "Is my client's whole career, his public life and his
reputation, to be at the mercy of a ruthless young journalist on the
make, a self-confessed drug-taker whose unreliable evidence was sold to
the highest bidder?  Some of you may disagree with Tom Gurnley's
politics, but as a tolerant, fair-minded Jury you will still give him
the benefit of the doubt in this dubious and tarnished prosecution."
And then I remembered a criminal defender who had been in his day
almost as good as Rumpole, and how he had ended his final speech on
behalf of a politician.  "My


 client," I told them, 'got twenty-five thousand votes at the last
election.  But now' (and I pointed at each Member of the Jury in turn)
'he wants YOUR VOTE and YOUR VOTE and YOUR VOTE .. ."  And so on until
I came to the last of the twelve.

Champagne glasses were being filled in the hotel room looking out over
the Thames.  All had gone according to plan.  Adrian the prosecutor,
with his cross-examination well prepared, had looked like a golfer
whose ball, teed up and ready to be sent flying towards the green, had
suddenly been snapped up by a passing eagle.  He was left flailing the
air when the Honourable Member remained modestly out of the witness
box.

The great matriarch, having emerged as foreman of the Jury, said "Not
guilty' in ringing tones whilst looking with distaste at the ambitious
young reporter from the Daily Beacon.

"I've just about had it with this country."  My successful client, with
a glass in his hand, joined me as I stood looking out across the
water.

Where was the aggressive Britishness, the refusal to be part of the
decadent and corrupt bureaucracy which he imagined started at Calais,
the determination to keep the streets of Croydon free from the exiled
snake charmers, the devious Chinese street traders, the foreign pimps
he feared were marching in their millions towards the white cliffs of
Dover?

"I've been thinking for a long time.  It's about time I got out."

I appeared to consider this, watching the grey river, now dimpled with
rain.  Then I gave my verdict.  "I think you might be wise."

"Do you really?"  He looked at me, as though in surprise.


 "Well, I must say, your advice has been pretty good up to now."

"Someone's out to get you," I told him.  "Someone doesn't want you in
line to lead your Party.  Someone with friends in the Crown Prosecution
Service.  It's a bit of a compliment, really.  Not many of the nameless
multitude of dabblers in class-B drugs would be paid the compliment of
a full-blown Jury trial for a few puffs of a Camberwell Carrot."

"That's what I was thinking.  They might try and cook up another
case."

Only, I couldn't help feeling, because there might be something left
around to cook.

"I've been offered," he lowered his voice so that Bonny Bernard and the
waiter might not overhear the story and tell the newspapers, 'the
chairmanship of a very large sports and leisure wear company in New
South Wales.  I know it's not the Party leadership.  It may not lead to
Downing Street.  But the pay's good, and I might get a look at the sun
occasionally."

"Take it," I told him without hesitation.  "If you want my advice,
you'll take it."

"Caroline!"  He called loudly to his secretary as he moved briskly away
from me.  "Get the Aussies on the mobile.  Wake them up if
necessary."

He left me staring at the river.  I thought of the hulks packed with
poachers, pickpockets, stealers of watches and handkerchiefs, who chose
deportation as an alternative to hanging, and who floated down the grey
river as their first stage on a journey to an unknown and almost empty
continent.  Then Tom Gurnley returned to me, smiling.

"You know," he said, 'from the way you described smoking a spliff to
that Judge, I'm sure you've had a bit of experience of the stuff too,
haven't you?"  And then he winked.  That did it.


 "I will eat with you, drink with you, defend you in Court.  But I
won't wink with you," I told him, and so I left.

"It's ridiculous, Rumpole!  Just look at it.  Isn't it absurd?"

Claude handed me a document, and a glance revealed that it was a
private detective's report.  I remembered that he had threatened to
have his wife kept under close observation.  I looked at the end and
saw that it was signed by no less a person than "Fig' Newton. Ferdinand
Ian Gilmour Newton had dug out golden nuggets of information in many of
my cases.  He is, I have always maintained, the best of the somewhat
unreliable band of private eyes.  His ancient mackintosh, collapsing
hat, lantern jaw, watchful eye and occasionally dripping nose, the
product of much open-air observation in all weathers, don't make him an
immediately attractive figure, but he is a bloodhound after a guilty
secret.  As I began to read his report, I was dreading the revelation
of some amorous encounter between the Phillida I had known and loved
and the Honourable Member due for deportation.

"I'm pleased to be able to report that I think we have struck gold at
last," Fig Newton began his account in a typically modest manner, 'due
to skilled observation maintained in difficult conditions."

"Have you ever met Fig Newton?"  I asked Claude.

"Never set eyes on the fellow.  Go on, Rumpole, read it."

It was a different Claude that had entered my room, no longer palely
loitering but purposeful, lively and suffering from a deep sense of
outrage.

I commenced observation on the house in Islington at 1900 hours.  At
19.15 the young girl I know as apart-time babysitter rang at the


 bell and was admitted by Hedwig, the au pair, whom I knew from past
enquiries to be due for her evening off.  At 19.30 a radio taxicab
arrived.  At 19.35 Dame Phillida Erskine-Brown (hereinafter referred to
as 'the Judge') emerged from the house and entered the said radio cab.
I followed in the vehicle in which I had kept observation (details of
petrol charges and mileage are included in the overall sum set out at
the foot of this report).  The taxi took the Judge to the Ivy
restaurant in West Street.  I was able to observe her enter the
restaurant and I should at this juncture make it clear that the Judge
was dressed, as I would phrase it, 'up to the nines'.  She was wearing
a well-cut black dress, with several pieces of jewellery.  I came to
the conclusion that she had come to meet 'someone special', and
subsequent events confirmed this view.

I was fortunate to secure a parking spot and I approached the Ivy
restaurant on foot.  A man of Irish extraction wearing a top hat tried
to prevent my entry but I told him I was booked in and walked past him.
The young lady in charge of the coats was similarly discouraging.
However, I got past the glass doors into the dining area and was met by
a further young woman in a black trouser suit.  I again claimed to have
a booking and, as she went to check at the desk, I was able to obtain a
view of the assembled diners.

I have to report that the Judge was there with another man.  They were
both smiling, and talking in an animated manner.  Her hand was on the
table and he was holding it.  During the minutes for which I kept
observation, the Judge made no attempt to withdraw her hand.  I would
describe the man in question as 'furtive', 'sly looking', 'talkative'
and not, I would have thought, 'attractive to women'.  He had
mouse-coloured, receding hair, a weak chin and wore spectacles and a
dark, pinstriped suit.  Before I could approach the table more closely,
the girl in the black trouser suit, by now accompanied by a small
Maitre d' with a determined look and a trace of a cockney accent, told
me in no uncertain terms that I


 had no booking for that night or indeed any other night, and he
invited me to leave immediately.  As I left the Ivy restaurant, the man
in the top hat suggested he call me a cab.  I declined, having my own
transport and not wishing to put the client to further expense.

At 2200  hours the Judge left the Ivy restaurant with the
'furtive-looking' man I have previously described.  He seemed to be
looking about him in some fear of observation, but he didn't notice me
in my vehicle parked up in the shadows of West Street.  The parties got
into another cab.  I noticed that the Judge gave money to the man in
the top hat, her date of the evening having clearly protested that he
had 'no change'.

At 22.75 the parties stopped outside a large building, in clear need of
a lick of paint, in one of the streets behind Whitehall.  I was able to
follow them into the hallway, where the 'furtive man' asked a sleepy
porter for "The key to my bedroom."  They both then took a lift to an
upper floor.  I was unable to follow as the sleepy porter asked me my
business, and when I said, "Just looking around.  What is this place?"
he said, "The Sheridan Club.  Members Only' and instructed me, again in
no uncertain terms, to leave.  Seated in my vehicle, I kept observation
on the entrance of the Sheridan Club until 03.00 hours on the
nineteenth.  Neither the Judge nor the 'furtive' companion had emerged
by that time, from which I deduced that intimacy had undoubtedly taken
place.

'"Furtive!  Sly looking!  Weak-chinned!  Not attractive to women."
Would you describe me like that, Rumpole?"

"Not in a million years."  I resisted the temptation to say 'yes'.

"So how could this ridiculous Fig person get me so wrong?  Hasn't he
got eyes in his head?"

"You can't mean' a wonderful prospect opened before


 me, 'that it was you having dinner with Phillida in the Ivy?"  "Of
course it was.  She rang me up last week.  Out of the blue.  She said
something had happened to change her mind.  So we made a date for
dinner.  It went amazingly well.  Quite like old times.  In fact.. ."

"Of course, the Sheridan Club!  I ought to have realized."  "This Fig
Newton, Rumpole what am I going to do?  He wants me to pay him two
hundred pounds for telling me that I had dinner and slept with my
wife!"

"Take my advice," I told him.  "Count it cheap at the price."  "Oh, all
right."  Claude looked temporarily depressed at the prospect, but soon
cheered up.  "I want to thank you, Rum-pole, for all you've done to
bring me and Philly together again.  I brought you a small gift."

He walked away with an unusual spring in his step; a man, I thought,
who had recovered, at last, a little of the snap in his celery.  He had
left me a packet of my favourite small cigars.  I lit one, and blew a
perfect smoke-ring at the ceiling of my room.


Rumpole and the Actor Laddie

"Mr.  Rumpole!  Your timing!  My dear, it's something to die for.  And
the hand gestures!  So telling.  That wonderful sniff of contempt, just
the way Larry used to do in The Merchant.  Of course, I've only had the
opportunity of seeing your perf from the gods at the Old Bailey.  And I
don't believe you saw the last thing I did.  My Adam the gardener in As
You with the Clitheroe Mummers.  A small part, of course, but I think I
made a little jewel of it.  That was in '84, or was it '85?  It's
difficult to get cast when you're not young, and definitely not
prepared to take your clothes off.  That's why I'm thrilled that we're
working together at last.  I've dreamed and dreamed, I promise you, my
dear, of playing opposite the great Rumpole of the Bailey!"

Was my timing so good?  Quite honestly, I had never thought about it.
And yet I was half-pleased to get a tribute from the client who had
told me at the outset that he was 'in the business', and when I asked
what business that might be, he had given a light laugh and said, "A
poor player, an honour I share with Garrick and Irving and the late
great Sir Donald Wolfit.  My crown is a little tarnished now, but some
old theatre-goers won't easily forget my Benvolio, my French Ambassador
above all my Rosencrantz in the Danish play.  I have, it's true, been
resting for, well to be honest with you, getting on for quite a while,
which is why I'm so looking


 forward to our forthcoming engagement.  I know I haven't lost the
trick of holding an audience.  I just hope I won't have trouble
remembering the lines.  I fear I'm no longer the "quick study" I
was."

The elderly man talking with the volubility of someone emerging from
years of silence had a pink face, a monkish fringe of grey hair and the
appearance of an elderly cherub run to fat.  He wore a light-grey suit,
strained at the buttons, suede shoes and a bright-pink tie.  A
voluminous silk handkerchief billowed from his breast pocket and he
smelt of some pungently seductive eau de toilette.  His name, inscribed
on my brief, was Percival Delabere, and the venue in which we were to
perform together was, I am sorry to say, the London Sessions, where
Percival was engaged to play the lead in a fairly ordinary charge of
theft.

When he was no longer, as he would say, 'in demand' as an actor, Percy
Delabere ("Call me Percy, dear boy.  Johnny G. and Dame Edith always
did') eked out his living on a small income left to him by an aunt and
occasional speech lessons to puzzled West Indians or Spanish waiters
who wanted to talk in the singsong tones of long-dead actor-managers.
He was able to afford a bed sitting room on the top floor of a
crumbling Victorian house in Talbot Square, near Paddington Station. 
This undesirable residence was the property of a Miss Hunter, a large,
untidy woman, a solitary gin drinker whose quarters and financial
affairs were in a perpetual muddle.  She fussed over her younger, more
attractive tenants and took only a perfunctory interest in the fading
career of the old actor on the top floor.

The circumstances which led to our meeting, and his complimentary
remarks about my perf, in the conference room at the London Sessions
were unfortunate.  During his long rests


 it was Percy's practice to wander about the house, going into other
people's rooms in order to bore them with reminiscences of Larry, John
G. and the great Sir Donald Wolfit.  On the afternoon in question, Miss
Hunter had pottered round to the off-licence and left her door open. It
was agreed that Percy had popped into her room to pay his rent and,
apparently for want of anything better to do, had examined some items
of the landlady's jewellery which she had left in a jumble of
possessions on a marble-topped table under a tarnished mirror.  A Mr.
Crookshank, a retired insurance salesman, had passed Miss Hunter's open
door and seen Percy slip her most valued possession, a diamond and
emerald ring, on to one podgy finger and stand admiring the effect of
it in the looking glass.  Later Miss Hunter announced that the ring was
missing, and Percy made a considerable investment in new pink shirts, a
silk dressing-gown and a purple, spotted bow tie from a posh shop in
Jermyn Street.

"How did you afford all that?"  I asked Percival.

"Poor as I am, Mr.  Rumpole, I had made savings.  And one must keep up
appearances.  That is very important.  You never get offered anything
if you don't keep up appearances."

I thought that producers would hardly be hurrying to Percival door at
the hot news that he had bought a new dressing-gown, but I didn't say
so.  Instead I came to the very heart, the nub of the matter.  "I
suppose you'd better tell me now.  Did you take the landlady's ring?"

"Mr.  Rumpole."  There followed a long pause, which, although no doubt
meant to be dramatic, soon became tedious.  And then, "Do you really
have such a low view of my profession?"

Ignoring the fact that he seemed to find no appreciable difference
between the Bar and the stage, I did my best to


 focus the man's attention.  "That's a question you'll have to answer
"Yes" or "No" to soon."

"Not now, Mr.  Rumpole."  He held up a warning hand.  "I shall tell the
full story when I enter the witness box."

"You'd better not enter it until I know what you're going to say."

"My dear!  Would you deny me the witness box?  Am I to be a mere extra,
a super, a spear-carrier with no lines?  My crown may be a little
tarnished now, but I think you can rely on me to play the lead.  I
promise I shall not disappoint."

"You'll go into the witness box over my dead body," was what I should
have said, but I weakly agreed to call him.  How could I deny the old
actor laddie the only leading role he was likely to get?

I did say, "I assume you'd deny keeping the ring?"

"Mr.  Rumpole.  It's for you to make assumptions.  It's for me to play
the lead.  To the best of my poor ability."  And that, of course, is
exactly what he did.

"Mr.  Rumpole, can't you control your client?"

"I'm afraid, Your Honour, that is quite impossible."  Why had I ever
allowed Percival to take centre stage?  We were a quarter of an hour
into his evidence, he was in full flow and his Honour Judge Archibald
"Artful Archie' to his many detractors, owing to his many ingenious
ways of persuading Juries to convict was clearly in the throes of
terminal irritation.

The trial had started quietly.  Miss Hunter, voluminous and somewhat
confused, told the story of the missing ring which Mr.  Crookshank had
last seen on Percy's finger.  And then Percy had gone into the witness
box and taken the oath in the hushed tones of the Prince of Denmark
addressing his father's


 ghost.  After a few routine questions, he ignored me and became Mark
Antony, orating to the Roman plebs.

"My friends and fellow countrymen on the Jury," his voice was low and
throbbing, 'may I take a moment of your time to speak of my humble self
?  I am a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage in
my case this witness box -and then, perhaps to your relief, will be
heard no more ... I have lived for my art.  I have done my poor best to
dedicate myself to that perpetual challenge which is the theatre.  I
have sung with Shakespeare and argued with Shaw and, yes, I am not
ashamed to confess it, on occasions lost my trousers with Ray Cooney."
Here he waited for a laugh which never came.  "Such a career teaches
passion.  It teaches love of the language.  What it cannot teach is
sensible behaviour and self-restraint .. ."

After a good deal more in the same vein, Artful Archie made his
irritated interjection, so I attempted to drag the wandering thespian
back to the point at issue, and I put the question to him bluntly. "Mr.
Delabere, do you agree that you put Miss Hunter's ring on your own
finger and surveyed the effect in the mirror?"

"Members of the Jury.  You will remember the line in the Moorish play
-I speak of Othello about the base Indian who threw a pearl away,
richer than all his tribe?"

"Mr.  Delabere!"  I have to confess that the Rumpole patience, never my
strongest asset, was wearing extremely thin.  "Let's forget the Moorish
play, the Danish play, or indeed the Scottish play for a moment and
concentrate on one simple fact.  Did you put Miss Hunter's ring upon
your finger?"

"I imagined, for a moment, that I was playing the Doge in the Venetian
play.  I remembered that they wore rich jewellery."


 "For the last time.  Did you put on the ring or not?"

"I did."

The relief at actually getting an answer gave me confidence to move on
to the next, most dangerous question.  "And did you take it away with
you, Mr.  Delabere?  Did you steal it?"

Percy treated us to one of his famous pauses, during which I held my
breath and Archie sat with his pencil poised to take a note.  When
Percy spoke again it was to treat us to yet another oration.

"Members of the Jury.  I have taken the liberty of calling myself a
poor player, and poor I am.  It has been a constant worry to keep
myself in those few necessities a good suit, a few decent shirts, an
attractive tie which are vital if you wish to keep in the swim, to be
seen and thought of as a character actor, now my juvenile days are
over, who is constantly "available".  Those who devote themselves to
their art do not expect to be richly rewarded.  We don't ask for
yachts, Members of the Jury, or Old Master paintings, or a Rolls-Royce
motor car.  What we, perhaps, have the right to expect is a decent
standard of living, which would leave us free to dream, to create, to
study and, when in work, do our job without the haunting fear of future
poverty.  So what am I saying?  Did I steal the ring?  Yes.  I stole
the ring.  I announce it publicly!  I announce it proudly.  Miss Hunter
has boxes of jewellery, most of which she never wears.  You have seen
her her fingers are glittering, her neck is loaded, with semi-precious
trinkets.  That ring, Members of the Jury, is the tribute the property
owner pays to the artist.  Judge me if you will.  Call me guilty if you
must.  But don't deny me your understanding or your mercy, which, like
the blessing of the Almighty, transcends all human laws!"

At which point, I promise you, Percy Delabere clung to the front of the
witness box and bowed as though acknowledging


 the wildest applause after the most exhausting performance.  The Jury
sat in stolid silence and the only voice heard was that of Artful
Archie, who sounded content that the old actor had convicted himself
without needing any assistance from the learned Judge.

"Mr.  Rumpole, I imagine you will now advise your client to change his
plea."

"I see it's nearly one o'clock."  I decided to play for time.  "Perhaps
I might take his instructions during the lunch-time adjournment?"

"Very well.  But in view of what he has now told us, I must cancel his
bail.  Delabere will be taken down to the cells.  Back here at two
o'clock, Members of the Jury."

Confronting the actor laddie in the cells before having a drink would
have been like having an operation without an anaesthetic and I decided
against it.  I ordered a pint of Guinness in the pub across the road
and was about to consume it with a slice of pork pie and pickle when
"Spider' Wilkinson, the counsel for the prosecution, so-called because
of his thin arms and legs which seemed to stretch out in all directions
and his solemn, bespectacled face, came in and greeted me with,
"Rumpole!  You lucky bastard!"

"Lucky?  To have a client who is so clean off his head that he makes a
totally unnecessary confession to the Jury in a performance of such
unutterable ham that I blushed to hear it?  Do you know, that idiotic
thespian complimented me on my timing!  His timing was perfectly judged
to get him a long rest in Wormwood Scrubs."

"Did you think you could get him off ?"

"We had a chance.  There was no evidence he actually sold the ring, or
even kept it."


 "He didn't."

"What do you mean?"

"Just that dear old Miss Hunter searched through her handbag,
apparently a lengthy undertaking, late this morning and found a receipt
from a jeweller.  She'd taken the ring in to be repaired long after
your client tried it on.  We rang the shop and it's still there.  When
we go back I'll have to tell Archie.  He's not going to like it."

Strangely enough, when I brought the good news to Percy, he also seemed
disappointed.  When I asked him why on earth he'd shopped himself to
the Jury, I could make no sense of his reply.

"It seemed right somehow, Mr.  Rumpole.  The perfect dramatic ending to
what I natter myself was a moving speech, powerfully performed.  I
stood before them, I thought, a heroic victim and not a foolish old
actor who tried rings on for fun.  I think it was my finest
performance."

I left Percy Delabere then, having resolved never, under any
circumstances, to work with him again.


Rumpole and the Teenage Werewolf

"We've tried, Mr.  Rumpole.  No one can say we haven't tried.  His own
telly, his own telephone number."

"He's on line, Mr.  Rumpole.  He can access the world from his own
bedroom."

"Trainers.  And Puffa jackets.  You can't imagine the amount he's cost
us in trainers."

"And we've always done our best to be fair to him.  Not judge mental

"Chris is always so fair-minded.  He tries to reason with him."

"It's very hard, Mr.  Rumpole, to reason with a slammed door."

"Chris understands young people.  He gives his time freely to a youth
club in Worsefield.  He helps them to become computer literate."

"It's the struggle, Mr.  Rumpole.  Every day's a struggle.  Will there
be a row?  Has he gone missing?  It's a nightmare for his mother. She's
losing weight over it."

The couple who sat in my clients' chairs were what She Who Must Be
Obeyed would have called 'thoroughly nice people'.  They might qualify
to represent the best of Middle England, modest and intelligent,
capable of serious concern but also able to make jokes at their own
expense.  They were,


 I thought, the type of people who supported the local Oxfam shop,
gave generously to hospices, read to the blind, whipped round for funds
to help the victims of floods and earthquakes in distant parts of the
world and organized free trips to the seaside for the poor and
elderly.

They had come with their local solicitor, an amiable old bird named
Beazely who looked as if he'd be more at home shooting pheasants than
fighting a prosecution for assault and of fences under the Prevention
of Harassment Act.  Notably absent was the sixteen-year-old they had
been talking about with such weary resignation.  Ben was Hermione
Swithin's son and her husband Christopher's stepson.  He was due to
make his criminal debut before Hartscombe Crown Court.

The family history was also typical of Middle England.  Hermione had
met Martin Cutler at University and given birth to Ben when she was
twenty-three.  Cutler, apparently a part-time journalist and full-time
drunk, had disappeared to America with Hermione's best friend and
little or nothing had been heard from him since.  Hermione's first job
was as Christopher Swithin's secretary and they were soon in love. "Ben
was four when Chris took him on, Mr.  Rumpole.  He's treated him just
as though he was his own son.  Our Caroline's different from him in
every way."

"We call Ben the teenage werewolf," Chris explained and they both
laughed gently, apparently comforted by this description.

"Not to his face, of course.  To his face we always try to build him up
give him confidence."

"Caroline's such a sweet character."  Hermione looked gratefully at
Chris, as though congratulating him on not having brought any of her
first husband's destructive genes to infect the character of their
daughter.  "She's always smiling.


 She's only ten but you can tell she's going to grow up as a
thoroughly adorable person."

"She just wants everyone to like her, that's our Caroline."

"The teenage werewolf doesn't care if no one likes him at all."

"When we moved into Merrivale and Chris could do all his work from home
we thought Ben'd be so happy.  All of us together in one place."

Was all the family being together in one place a perfect recipe for
happiness, I wondered?  Not, perhaps, for the Mac-be ths or the
Agamemnons in their houses of doom, but Merrivale sounded, from the
Swithins' account of it, a highly desirable residence.  It was an old
brick and flint farmhouse with magnificent barns from which the sheep
and cows had long gone, and the hay moved out to make way for
Christopher's computers and office equipment, installed so he could run
his particular dot.  com business from a part of what was left of rural
England.  Both the children went to state schools in Hartscombe, the
nearest town, some ten miles from Merrivale ("If people like us don't
support the state system it'll never get any better," Hermione had told
me).  At sixteen, Ben was facing his A-levels and had been booked into
Hartscombe College, where his attendance was sporadic and the lectures
were occasions when he found it convenient to catch up with his
sleep.

"That's par for the course with teenagers, Mr.  Rumpole."  Chris was at
his most tolerant.  "That's what we'd been told to expect.  We thought
he'd grow out of it.  We could see sometimes when he bought Hermione a
birthday present with his own money, for instance a light at the end of
the tunnel.  We could live through all that.  This is something quite
different.  We never thought he'd take to serious crime."


 "He says he didn't do it," Hermione reminded her husband.

"Of course he does.  And we've stood by him.  That's why we've come to
you, Mr.  Rumpole."

The Swithins were involved with the law because of a girl called
Prunella Haviland, just seventeen and also at Hartscombe College.
"Everyone says she's so attractive but Chris thinks she's nothing out
of the ordinary," Hermione told me.  "He used to pick her up on the
school run, until suddenly her father decided to take her.  That was
when the e-mails started coming to Prunella."  It was the e-mails that
constituted the harassment and supplied the evidence of guilt in the
case of the teenage werewolf.  In the earliest days they were amorous,
then openly obscene, lecherous and full of promises to perform
eccentric and sometimes dangerous acts of love.  At one stage, walking
through a lane in Hartscombe after dark, Prunella had felt she was
being followed and someone close behind her fastened his arms round
her.  It lasted only a few seconds, but she felt a kiss on the back of
her neck before she struggled free and ran.  After that she never
walked alone through the town, by day or by night.  She was not
molested again, but the e-mails continued thick and fast.  They clearly
emerged from the computer bought, at considerable expense, to
propitiate the werewolf one Christmas and installed, among other costly
technology, in his bedroom at Merrivale.

"We knew he was difficult, selfish, utterly incapable of caring about
how his mother or I felt.  We didn't know he was a criminal.  Do what
you can for him, Mr.  Rumpole."

"You see how it is."  Hermione gave her husband a small, sad smile.
"Chris loves Ben.  He's the only son he's never had."

And then, it seemed, the conversation dried.  Neither of the concerned
adults had any more to say about the accused


 werewolf except that he had been given the address, and the telephone
number, and even a map of the Outer Temple so that he could find Equity
Court and meet his defender.  He'd been to a party in London the night
before and had promised them he'd be at the conference in my Chambers
but, by now, it was time to give him up.  It had happened before and
would probably happen again, and yet again.  He was on bail and kept
away from school for the sake of Prunella.  Perhaps he'd gone home by
now, perhaps they'd find him there, perhaps not.  Hermione looked at
me, apologetic, confused, as though she had no reasonable explanation
to offer for the human being she had brought into the world.

In the silence that followed I was looking once again at the
printed-out e-mails.

"It's interesting," I said.  "They're outrageous, of course.  But some
of these messages are quite poetic."

Chris Swithin was looking at me with deep disapproval.  Clearly I had
said the wrong thing, and soon after this the couple left.

When were teenagers invented?  I tried to remember myself slightly
spotty, a great deal thinner, in a cold boarding school beside an
unfriendly sea, with a headmaster whose role model appeared to have
been Captain Bligh of the Bounty.  Despite all the discomforts, and the
occasional terrors of the place, I had no thought of leaving it.  I
tolerated my parents, and my father's often-repeated stories.  I
understood his reluctance to spend more time than was absolutely
essential with an adolescent whose favourite reading was Notable
British Trials.  I put up with my mother's resigning herself, with a
sigh, to the fact that my failure to keep my room tidy would make it
unlikely that I would ever marry.  I kept the other boys friendly


 by telling them stories and provided de fences for them when they
were faced with serious charges of giggling in chapel or introducing
white mice into the divinity class.  I sent no obscene communications
to girls, indeed I knew hardly any girls to send them to.  On the
whole, I would say I was a more conventional character, politer, more
easily imposed upon and with a respect for authority which had
dwindled, rather than increased, over the years.

"Were you a teenage werewolf ?"  I asked Mizz Liz Probert as we sat
together in the Tast-Ee-Bite in Fleet Street.  I was fortifying myself
with a bite of breakfast before making my way down to Ludgate Circus,
the Palais de Justice and my customers in the cells.

"I told my mother she was stupid," Mizz Liz admitted.  "I did that
quite a lot."

"Are you ashamed of that?"

"Not really.  It was perfectly true.  Someone had to say it.  My father
didn't dare."

"Then I suppose," I told her, 'teenagers 'were invented around the date
of your birth."

"Not all teenagers are terrible."  Mizz Liz sprang to their defence.
"Although I must say I've got one odd one now."

"You've got one?"  She seemed too young.  "Is he, or she perhaps,
giving you hell as a mother?"

"Don't be silly, Rumpole.  Not my child, my client!  At least I've been
told I'm going to get the case.  Nasty charges of harassment and
assault.  I got rung up by a firm of solicitors in Hartscombe."

"Is the boy called Ben Swithin?"

"You've got it, Rumpole!"

The teenage werewolf was Mizz Liz's client?  This was deeply disturbing

and I sought for the only possible explanation.  "You'll be my
junior?"  I asked her.  "I'm going to need all the help I can get."

"Oh, they didn't say anything about that.  I got the feeling they want
me to do it on my own."

With this Mizz Liz got up, leaving me puzzled.  As she left, she was
immediately replaced by Soapy Sam Ballard, carrying his meagre
breakfast of muesli, with hot water and lemon on the side, on a tray
which he held with as much care as if he was transporting caviar and
some rare wine in a cut-glass decanter.  As he put down his tray and
laid out his feast, he looked after Mizz Liz Probert's retreating
figure.

"Nice little bottom she's got to her, our Mizz Probert.  Wouldn't you
say so, Rumpole?"

I was profoundly shocked at what Mizz Liz and the sisterhood of young
women lawyers would have regarded as outrageously offensive.  If made
by our clerk, Henry, or one of the Timsons, or even my most regular
client and solicitor, Bonny Bernard, it would have seemed no more than
a background noise in" the meaningless chatter of everyday life.  None
of those people would have thought of making any sort of amorous
approach to Mizz Liz.  Had she turned to face them, they would have
been almost deferential in their approach.  But this was Soapy Sam,
leading light of the Lawyers as Christians, tied, you might say
cocooned, by his marriage to Matey, the formidable nursing sister who
manned the casualty room at the Old Bailey, ready with cough sweets or
Elasto-plasts and calming words for lawyers attacked by disappointed
clients or the victims of bungled attempts at suicide.  To hear
Ballard, who had adopted self-righteousness as a way of life and
regarded the lighting up of a small cheroot as a breakdown in public
morality, use such an expression about any member of the Bar was like
hearing a bishop break out into a couple


 of verses of "The Good Ship Venus' during evensong.  But now Liz was
gone, and Ballard was staring at the less potentially erotic subject of
his plate of muesli.

"I've been a little unsettled, Rumpole.  Since you found that old
photograph of the Pithead Stompers."

"Forget it," I advised him.  "We've all made mistakes in the past."

"I don't regard it as a mistake, Rumpole.  Perhaps ... as a matter of
regret.  I can't help feeling that I enjoyed life more then."

"You want to pick up the guitar again?  Assemble the old drum kit?"  I
couldn't believe that Matey would welcome sessions from ageing Stompers
in the Ballard home.

"Not that.  Of course I'm happily married now."

"Of course."  Why should I dispel his illusions?

"And I have my work.  And the Lawyers as Christians to look after.  But
when I look at that photograph you so kindly gave me, I can't help
remembering girls dancing the Shake.  Did you ever dance the Shake,
Rumpole?"

"Not within living memory."

"Happy days.  When we were young."

"Not always."

"No, I suppose not."

"I've got a client now known as a teenage werewolf.  Got himself
involved in serious crime because of a girl.  You're far safer living
quietly in Belsize Park with Matey.  Your days with the guitar are
over.  Are you going to eat that stuff, by the way?"  Ballard had been
toying with his muesli, putting a spoon in as tentatively as the toe of
a swimmer confronted by an icy pool.

"Of course I'm going to eat it, Rumpole."  And he crunched a mouthful
of what appeared to be wet, flavoured stubble.  "We all need
roughage."


 I had, I felt, quite enough roughage in my life without having
recourse to muesli.

As soon as I got back to Chambers, I rang the Swithins' solicitor.  We
had done various jobs together of an un sensational and rural nature
careless drivings, closed footpaths, stolen piglets, receiving stolen
diesel in all of which I had achieved a satisfactory level of
success.

"Oh, is it you, Mr.  Rumpole?"  The country lawyer sounded startled, as
though he'd been peacefully reading Trout and Stream and enjoying life
until he heard a voice which must have pricked his conscience.

"What do you imagine you're up to, Beazely?  Have you entirely
forgotten the rules of ethical behaviour which apply even to
solicitors?  Or was your head turned by the scrumpy or whatever it is
you drink in the countryside?"

"Mr.  Rumpole .. ."

I could tell the man was already somewhat shaken, so I twisted the
dagger in the wound.  "I have been practising at the Bar almost as long
as living memory and on no occasion you hear that?  on no other
occasion has a case in which I have been briefed been offered to a
junior white wig, a girl to whom the Penge Bungalow Murders may seem an
historical event as distant as the Battle of Waterloo.  I refer, as of
course you know, to Mizz Liz Probert and the case of the teenage
werewolf."

"The point was .. ."  Here Beazely attempted a stammering defence. "The
client thought..  ."

"What do you mean "The client thought"?  Have you met the client?  Has
he spoken to you?  Is he in some way related to Mizz Probert?"

"I've never met him.  No.  But the Swithins thought..  ."

"I know what they think.  I've had an opportunity of studying the
Swithins in depth."


 "They think the boy might react better to someone of his own age."

"The boy, as you call him, has had no opportunity of reacting to me."

"They can't persuade him to come to London for a conference."

"Then Mahomet must come to the mountain."

"Who did you say?"

"Don't concern yourself, Beazely, with Mahomet.  A figure of speech.
Just find out which evening this week it would be convenient for me to
come down to Hartscombe.  I can easily manage tonight.  You and I will
talk to the client together."

It wasn't until the end of the week that the Swithins could take time
off from their charity committees, their book-club gatherings, Chris's
prison visiting and Hermione's quiz in the village hall to support the
handicapped.  Ben was helping out in a Hartscombe restaurant the night
I visited Merrivale.

"If he wants a younger brief, I can understand that."  This was Rumpole
at his most reasonable.  "But I want to hear it from the client in
person.  Neither of you .. ."  I looked at the werewolf's mother and
stepfather, comfortable but no doubt deeply concerned people, 'neither
of you is in danger of youth custody."

"He promised he'd be here by ten."  Hermione's wail was muted and
polite, but it had its own brand of desperation.  "It's really too bad
of Ben."

"He sometimes stays in the restaurant talking," Christopher told me,
'even after it's closed."

"He talks to someone, that's encouraging," I told them.  "If he does
that there's no good reason why he shouldn't talk to me."


 "No consideration for others.  No manners.  Wherever young Ben came
from, he didn't arrive from heaven, trailing clouds of glory."  Chris's
knowledge of Wordsworth put him up a notch in my estimation.

We were waiting, this time, in Chris's study.  All his computer
technology was, he assured me, in the barn, and the room had an
old-fashioned comfort, with a crackling log fire, armchairs, an
impressive collection of books lining the walls, with the lights
shining on their golden titles.  We had been drinking brandy, listening
to Schubert on the CD player, enjoying all the delights of a
civilization which had not, apparently, rubbed off on Hermione's son.
As we waited for him, conversation seemed to run out with the brandy
until Chris, after prolonged and careful thought, said, "I don't think
he'll ever talk to you, Mr.  Rumpole."

"We'll have to see about that."  I decided the time had come to track
the werewolf to its lair.  "Oh, by the way, could I borrow your loo
before I go?"

"I'm so sorry."  Hermione, who apologized for most things, was also
sorry about her bathroom.  "It's up the stairs."

"First on the left when you get to the landing."  Chris was more
practical.

The bathroom, when I got to it, needed no apologies.  The air had been
freshened with a no doubt chemical but pleasant smell of fresh apples.
The porcelain gleamed, the loo seat was of dark mahogany.  The towels
looked soft and inviting.  Glass shelves on one side of the washbasin
supported Hermione's array of lotions and unguents, her shampoos,
perfumes, cottonwool buds, tweezers and electric toothbrush.  The
shelves on the other side were clearly Chris's, displaying his
silver-backed brushes, his electric razor, Floris soap and
anti-dandruff shampoo and a more masculine perfume clearly


 labelled "For Men'.  I suppose it was a small part of me that wanted,
like the Timsons, to get something for nothing that tempted me to
sprinkle a little of this on the Rumpole handkerchief.  The smell was
fresh, strong and reassuringly male.  Smelling like that, I felt,
entirely qualified me to meet and tame the werewolf.

II Paradiso in Hartscombe marketplace was closed, but the lights still
shone behind drawn blinds.  After Beazely had rattled the door, it was
opened by a woman in a black trouser suit.  Apparently she knew my
instructing solicitor as a regular customer and she was full of
apologies.

"Such a shame!  We've taken the last orders and the kitchen's closed.
We could perhaps do you and your friend a plate of antipasti."  She
sounded entirely English and had brought Tuscany to Hartscombe by way
of the Sunday supplements.

"That's very kind of you," I told her, 'but we've really come to meet
one of your waiters.  Ben Swithin."

"Ben?  Of course.  I think he's still here.  Come in, both of you."  My
heart warmed to this polite hostess when she led us to a corner table
and offered the apparently popular Beazely a bottle of Chianti on the
house.  I watched her as she went to a long table where teenage
waiters, making a few pounds after school hours, were laughing
together.  After some persuasion she detached one of them and brought
him to our table.  He approached in slow motion, frowning deeply.

"Who are you?"  he said.  "What do you want?"

"I want you to sit down.  And have a glass of wine."

"I don't drink.  Who are you?  Or what?"

"I'm a lawyer," I had to admit, 'but don't let that put you off."


 "Mum and Dad wanted me to see a lawyer.  It's like ... I can't be
bothered."

"Why can't you be bothered?"

"Because it's useless."

"Why is it useless?"

"Because you can't help me."

"Suppose I told you you're innocent."  The effect was surprising.  He
looked at me, a long, wondering look.  He was a boy, thin,
narrow-shouldered, a little short for his age.  His hair looked as
though it had been almost shaved and was growing back to an untidy
stubble.  He had the eyes of his mother, large and luminous with
sculptured eyelids.  He sat down then, the scowl faded and he looked
younger than his years and quite defenceless.

"What did you say?"

"I said you're innocent.  Until they prove you guilty."

"They won't have much trouble.  Right?"

"How do you know?"

"Dad told me."

"You call Christopher Swithin "Dad"?"

"Yes.  He asked me to."

"I see."  For a werewolf, he seemed to be singularly obliging.  "Tell
me about this girl, this Prunella.  She goes to your college."

"I don't go near her.  I'm not allowed.  I'm not allowed to go within
miles of her.  Like I'm a sort of fatal disease."  All these sentences
ended on a rising inflection, as though they were questions, but he
required no answer.  I knew about his bail conditions.

"Tell me more about Prunella."

He picked up a table knife and, quite ineffectually, tried to saw at
the edge of the table.  This occupied him seriously for


 a while and suddenly, unexpectedly, he smiled at me.  "Old Prune?
She's all right."

"You've known her a long time?"

"Forever.  Since primary school."  Again he made it sound like a
question.

"Did you fancy her at all?"

"Prune?  Like I've known her since we were young.  We were just
friends.  Mates.  Dad used to pick her up on the school run and I'd see
her every day.  Mates.  That's all we were.  Right?"

"They say you sent her messages."

"Why would I want to send her messages when I saw her all the time?
There wouldn't have been a whole lot of point in it."

"So you didn't send her e-mails?"

He was working again with his knife on the edge of the table.  "You
believe I did, don't you?"

"I never said that."

"Like everyone believes I did."

"Not everyone."

"Who doesn't then?"

"I told you.  I don't.  I'm in no hurry to believe anything.  Now, as I
told you, I assume you are innocent."

He stopped sawing then, having done the edge of the table little
visible damage.  He put the knife down and looked at me.  "No one's
said that to me before.  You going to speak up for me?  Like in
Court?"

"If you want me to."

"There's nothing much you could do."

"Oh yes there is.  I'd see if they could prove it."  He was silent then
and I felt I had to say, "Your parents think you might want someone
younger."


 He flicked the knife with a finger and spun it as it lay on the
table.  I remembered, at his age, spinning knives to make decisions or
answer questions, even to point out a guilty party.  It came to rest
pointing at me.

"All right then."  He was looking at me, as though accepting an
inevitable conclusion.  "You'll do, right?  You're cool."

"Thank you very much."  I looked at old Beazely and confirmed my
engagement.  "That's settled then."

"Is that all?"  Ben looked longingly back to the table where the other
student waiters and waitresses were laughing, or blowing across the top
of a bottle to produce a strange boom.  None of them, so far as I knew,
was on bail awaiting trial.  Ben wanted to get away to join them, I
thought, and not to go home.

"For the moment.  Come and see me in London, and don't vanish this
time.  You can send Mr.  Beazely an e-mail, just to confirm you'll be
there."

"All right then."  Ben couldn't wait to get up.  "Thank you very much."
It was an automatic thank you, his mother must have taught him to say
it when he went to his first party.  "Thank you very much for having
me."  He was not so very much older when it was a thank you for doing
his case of harassment and assault.

"Just one more question."  I looked up at the young man who seemed, in
many ways, still a child.  "Do you like poetry?"

"What do you mean?"  He looked puzzled and I had to explain.

"Stuff in short lines.  It rhymes quite often.  Do you read it ever?"

"Not really.  I'm not bothered with it."  He still looked longingly
towards his friends.

"But you read some at school?"


 "At school, yes.  Most of it's boring."

"Have you read Yeats, for instance?"

"Yeats?  Never heard of him.  Sorry, I've got to go now."  And he was
away, back in his own world, with the young people of the college who
found poetry boring and helped out at II Paradiso in the evenings.

"It's hopeless though, isn't it?  All the e-mails have got his name on
them, for God's sake," Beazely said, as we stood on the windy platform
of Hartscombe station waiting for the last train to London.  "They all
came from his machine."

"He called her "Prune"," I remembered.

"What's that got to do with it?"

"If you nursed a secret, powerful lust for a girl, so strong that you
bombarded her with passionate and sexually explicit e-mails, if you
were tormented with such urgent longings, do you think you'd call her
"Prune"?"

Beazely frowned, puzzled.  Clearly I had invited him to speculate on an
alien world, a territory far from his quiet, orderly life as a country
solicitor.  "I still think we're on a loser.  Is this Prune business
your only point?"

"No," I told him.  "Not quite the only one."

It was about two in the morning when I undressed in the bathroom,
climbed into my pyjamas and fitted myself into my side of the bed as
far as possible from the sleeping Hilda.

"Rumpole," her voice boomed out of the darkness, 'where do you think
you've been?"

"I'm not sure.  Probably dinner at the Ivy with a couple of starlets
and then to Stringfellow's for the lap dancing.  Oh, and I caught a bit
of a cold playing chemmy.  We'll have to take out a second mortgage."

"Absolute stuff and nonsense!  You tell as many lies as your clients.
It must be catching."


 The voice of She Who Must Be Obeyed died away into the night.  I had
a momentary vision of a young girl, gazing up to heaven in mixed terror
and joy, as a god, disguised as a swan, swooped down to ravish her. And
then I, too, fell asleep.

"Naturally we want to be with him when he sees you, Mr.  Rumpole."

"It's worried his mother almost to death."

"It's worried you too, darling.  I told you, Mr.  Rumpole, Chris treats
him exactly as though he was his own son."

Beazely the solicitor, looking unusually embarrassed, had brought the
Swithins to my room.

"I can understand exactly how worried you are."  I started to pour a
little oil on the troubled parents who appeared outraged.

"He's given us such an incredibly hard time for years.  And now this.
Have you no idea what we are going through?"

"I'm sure it's been horrible," I hastened to reassure Chris.  "So why
not take a little time off.  Drop into a cinema.  Have tea at a posh
hotel.  I just need to see my client alone.  Otherwise he might be
reluctant to say things you'd find hurtful."

"Believe me, Mr.  Rumpole," Chris gave me a sad little smile, 'he's
perfectly capable of saying things we find hurtful to our faces.  He's
quite prepared to tell his mother she's fat, or me that I'm drunk when
I just happen to open another bottle of wine at dinner."

"Then I ask you to leave to save yourselves further pain."

Hermione, with a sigh of resignation, moved towards the door.  Chris
followed her with displeasure.  "I suppose you'll allow us to attend
our son's trial?"  he said.  "That'll be far the most painful moment
for us."

"Of course I want you to be there.  I'm sure," I told Chris,


 'that you'll be ready and willing to give evidence of Ben's good
character."

As soon as they left me, the telephone rang.  A miracle had taken place
and the werewolf was downstairs.  I told Henry to bring him up as soon
as his mother and Chris were clear of the building.  Then I opened the
brief and read the last document, an e-mail from our client to Beazely.
It was headed 'chimes@fishnet.co.uk and the message, which I took a
minute to decode, read "HOPE 2CUB4 sPM 2MORROW.  It was signed with
nothing but a smiling face which appeared, together with the address at
the top of the document, on all the messages which were the subject of
the prosecution case.

Ben Swithin had dressed down for the occasion, wearing jeans with ink
writing on the knees, a baggy sweater with holes in it and trainers
that might have been used for a marathon run through mud.  He looked
even younger than usual, a face unmarked by the years, a contrast to
the carefully, perhaps expensively preserved good looks of his mother
and stepfather.

So I turned from the face of innocence to the pile of printed-out
e-mails which dealt with an encyclopedia of sexual fantasies, the
penetration of every orifice, the ritual humiliations to be inflicted
on the innocent Prune, a girl doing her A-levels at Hartscombe college.
The language was constantly obscene, frequently ugly but, from time to
time, as I had suggested to Chris, unexpectedly poetic.  The werewolf
read through them and appeared genuinely shocked.  "That," he said with
all the outrage of youth, 'is disgusting!  Whoever wrote that needs
locking up."

However, Ben admitted that the messages were headed by his e-mail
address and that he used the name "Chimes'.  "Dad suggested that when
he gave me the computer.  It was a sort


 of joke about the Chimes of Big Ben.  He thought it was like a clever
idea so I went along with it.  "Fishnet" is my provider."

"So they all seem to come from you.  Did you write them?"

"I never even heard," he was looking at me steadily, 'of doing half
these things to anybody."

So we went through the dates and times the messages were sent.  The
times were late at night and Ben tried to remember which dates he was
at home, or when he worked very late at the restaurant and stayed with
friends, sleeping on other people's floors in Hartscombe.  The task of
trying to get Ben and his friends to remember dates and places with any
accuracy whatever was one I was happy to leave to old Beazely, who had
read the e-mails with a certain detachment, even going so far as to say
after the werewolf had left us, "I never saw any point in bondage, but
there are one or two things in here I might suggest to my wife Avril.
She used to be a bit of a goer in her day."

Before we parted, I asked him to get hold of that persistent sleuth Fig
Newton, and get him to keep a discreet watch with a view to satisfying
my curiosity about certain aspects of our case.

Unlike Beazely, I found nothing in the documents I could possibly have
suggested to Hilda who, as far as I knew, would not care to be a
receptacle for honey.  When I told her that I was defending a boy
accused of bombarding a schoolgirl with obscene messages, she looked at
me as though she had always known I followed a sordid and debased
profession, and announced that she would be off to visit her old
schoolfriend Dodo Mackintosh in Cornwall.  "I don't want to be about,
Rumpole, while you're reading disgusting things, even to yourself. I'll
enjoy a breath of fresh air in Lamorna Cove."

Some nights later, I was discussing the wear and tear of


 married life with Claude Erskine-Brown in Pommeroy's when Soapy Sam
Ballard joined us in his new companionable ex-Bonzo mode.  I told them
both that my wife was fleeing to Land's End rather than be near me when
I was reading erotic material.

"Does that mean," Ballard looked hopeful, 'that your flat will be
empty?"

"Not altogether empty.  I'll be there."

"Oh, I don't mind about you," our Head of Chambers was kind enough to
say.  "I was planning a little gathering.  Just a few old friends.  And
we're looking for a venue."

"What about the desirable family home in Belsize Park?"

"Wouldn't do at all.  My wife wouldn't entertain the idea.  Can we
gather at yours?  Of course you'd be very welcome to join us."

"There's just one condition."  I was determined to sell the mansion
flat for a high price.  "Are small cigars permissible in my room in
Chambers from now on?"

"Oh, I suppose so."  The new, reconstituted, ex-Bonzo Ballard, the
character who pined for his youth and gazed longingly at girls'
bottoms, gave his permission and we had a deal.

There are certain cases undertaken by a criminal defender in which, on
entering Court, you feel you've stepped into a giant refrigerator into
which you're shut, freezing, for the rest of the trial.  The cold winds
of disapproval howl at you from all sides and every time you stand up
you feel as if you are clearly identified as a septic sore on the body
of the nation, closely related to the alleged sex offender in the dock.
Such was my feeling when I entered the Crown Court, His Honour Judge


 Denis Wintergreen presiding, sitting at Hartscombe in the Home
Counties.

The Swithins were, of course, there, sitting in front of me, holding
hands to support each other in what everyone realized was the final and
bitterest blow struck by the evil teenager in the dock.  The
prosecution was in the friendly hands of the owlish Adrian Hoddinot,
who at least had the decency not to look at me as though I were a
serial rapist who happened to have a wig on his head.

Adrian opened the case and read out some of the most horrific e-mails
to a stony-faced Judge who wouldn't have minded saying "Guilty' right
away.  I asked him to read one more, page thirty-two of the bundle.
Obligingly the prosecutor read, without emotion:

How can your terrified, vague fingers push my feathered glory from your
loosening thighs?  I will produce a shudder in your loins.  Ours will
be an historic moment when I, the great bird God, swoop down on you.

"Is there any particular reason why you want that one read, Mr.
Rumpole?"  Wintergreen was a hefty, square-jawed Judge who had played
rugby football for his country.  He clearly thought that any defence of
this werewolf in the dock would be nothing but an unnecessary waste of
time.

"The words don't suggest anything to you, Your Honour?"  I asked him.

"Nothing more than that whoever wrote them must have a peculiarly
filthy mind."

"That may not be fair to the particular author concerned."

"That will be a matter for the Jury to decide, Mr.  Rum-pole."


 "Exactly!  So wouldn't it be best if Your Honour would refrain from
comment until that time comes?"

"Continue with your opening, Mr.  Hoddinot."  Winter-green cut me dead
and looked only at the prosecution.  "Perhaps we may be spared any
further interruption from Mr.  Rumpole."  I'd have to face it,
relations between me and the learned judge during this trial were not
going to be friendly.

Prunella Haviland gave evidence.  She had received all the e-mails.  At
first she tried to ignore them, but finally she told her parents and,
when the messages kept on coming, they told the police.  She stood in
the witness box, a slim, sensible, pretty girl with clear features who
gave her evidence calmly, sensibly and without embarrassment.  You
could see her, when the bloom of her youth had faded a little, as a
loyal wife and, like Hermione, a frequenter of charity dinners and
coffee mornings in Hartscombe.

"What effect did receiving all these messages have on you -on your
state of mind?"  Adrian asked.

"Well, to start with I didn't take them too seriously.  But then I got
worried, of course.  I didn't want to go out on my own at night.
Particularly after what happened down the passage off the market square
.. ."

"Tell the Jury about that."

So she told them, clearly, calmly, without exaggeration.  She'd been to
American Pie, the club in Thames Street.  She left early because she
had an essay to finish, but it was dark when she walked through the
market square and even darker when she got to the narrow passage I'd
found with Mr.  Beazely on our way to the station.  She was walking
quickly, already nervous in the dark, when she felt strong arms
gripping her from behind and a quick, damp kiss on


 the back of her neck.  She struggled and freed herself.  Then she
ran, fast and without turning back, until she reached the main road.

"You never saw his face?"

"No."

"So you've no idea who he was?"

"I couldn't tell.  He was just someone strong.  He had a smell.  I
noticed that."

"What sort of smell?"

"An aftershave.  Machismo Three.  I know it because my dad uses it.
It's quite a nice smell, really."

"But it wasn't nice being attacked in the dark alley?"

"Please don't ask leading questions."  I rose wearily to my feet.

"Have you some objection, Mr.  Rumpole?"  Wintergreen could see me
standing there with my mouth open I don't know what His Honour thought
I was doing.

"My learned friend asked a question which suggests an answer to the
witness.  That's called a "leading question" and I object to it."  I
explained, to the best of my ability, the situation to the
rugger-playing Judge.

"I will allow the question."  And His Honour asked it again, from the
bench.  "Was it nice being attacked in that way, Miss Haviland?"

"No, Sir.  It certainly was not."

'"It certainly was not."  His Honour repeated the words loudly and
clearly, just in case we had the odd deaf juror, as he wrote them down.
And then he asked, as though expecting the answer "No', "Have you any
questions of this witness, Mr.  Rumpole?"

"Just a few, my Lord."  I turned to Prunella and became, I hope,
Rumpole at his most gentle, charming and polite.  "Miss


 Haviland, I realize how upsetting these dreadful messages must have
been to you.  I suppose, at first, all you knew was that they were from
someone called "Chimes"?"

"Yes.  That's right."

"Thank you.  When did you discover that "Chimes" was in fact Ben
Swithin?"

"When my dad told the police.  They found that out."

"Was that after the attack in the dark passage?"

"It was after that, yes."

"So when you were attacked, you didn't think it was Ben who was sending
you these obscene messages."

"I didn't know that.  No."

"So it might have been any man in the world who happened to use
Machismo aftershave?"

"Well," Prunella differed from the learned Judge in that she had a
completely fair attitude to her case, "I suppose that's right."

"But now you know what you know," the rugger player couldn't help
joining in this sc rum 'who do you think attacked you?"

"I think it was Ben Swithin."

' "I think it was Ben Swithin," His Honour repeated very loudly, for
the benefit of the deaf juror, as he wrote it down.  Then he turned on
me, careful to sound more in sorrow than in anger.

"Mr.  Rumpole.  Hasn't this young lady suffered enough?"

"She has certainly suffered.  I quite agree with that."

"Then why add to her suffering by making her go over all these painful
matters again?  Can't you leave it at that, Mr.  Rumpole?"

"Your Honour is telling me I shouldn't cross-examine?"

"Not to cause this young girl pain, Mr.  Rumpole."


 "Then how about the pain inflicted on the young boy in the dock if
he's convicted of a crime he didn't commit?"

"Naturally, when it comes to sentence I shall have regard to the amount
of embarrassment caused to Miss Haviland at the trial."

"You mean you intend to punish my client for the way I choose to
conduct his case?"

"Mr.  Rumpole, that was an outrageous remark!"

"Then it was very like Your Honour's intervention."

The learned Judge was staring at me, strongly tempted, I believe, to
hurl himself from the bench and tackle me low.  So I decided to take
preventive action.  As I was considering this, I saw Chris Swithin
writing a note which he turned and handed up to me.  Before reading it,
I assured the not-so-learned Judge, "If Your Honour stops my
cross-examination, I shall have to ask for an adjournment so I can go
straight to the Court of Appeal."  It was this threat that tackled the
Judge, perhaps temporarily stunned him.  The Appeal Court had spoken
unkindly of recent Wintergreen summings up.  "Slipshod," they had said.
"Misleading .. . Clearly not thought out."  As he picked himself up and
regained consciousness, I read the note from Chris.

"Don't ask any more questions!"  was what my client's stepfather said.
I squashed his note into a small ball and dropped it on the floor as
the Judge kicked the case into touch.  "You may cross-examine, Mr.
Rumpole.  Whether your questions help your case is quite another
matter."

"Miss Haviland, have you known Ben for a long time?"

"We were at primary school together."

"And at secondary school.  And then you were getting ready for A-levels
at Hartscombe College together."

"That's right."


 "At any time at all, when you were with Ben, has he done anything you
would complain of ?"

"Not that I remember."

"Did you like him, until you got these messages?"

"He was all right.  I mean, well, yes.  We were good friends."

"Did he ever try to kiss you?"

"I was not one of his girlfriends."

"So he never kissed you?"

"Not that I remember."

"Or try to?"

"I don't think so, no."

"So when you were told that he'd written these e-mails, did it come as
a complete surprise to you?  Were you amazed?"

"Yes."  She gave a sudden smile, which did more for the defence than
I'd managed to do all that day.  "To be honest, I was gob smacked

I invited the friendly prosecutor to lunch at II Paradiso, where we
enjoyed a quick cutlet Milanese and a glass or two of Chianti red.
"Terrible thing," the manageress told us as she poured the wine.  "I
can't imagine Ben doing a thing like that.  You never know, do you?"

"No," I agreed with her.  "You never know."

When she had gone, I raised a glass to Adrian Hoddinot.  "I've thought
of a scheme, old darling," I told him.  "It'll bring the case to a
fairly quick conclusion so you can spend more time with your Great
Dane."

"Good old Ophelia."  Adrian seemed attracted to the idea.  "She
deserves a day out in the country."

"Very well.  Here's what I plan to do.  And I do need your cooperation
.. ."  Then I told Adrian Hodinott all I knew.


 It was mid-afternoon before I got round to opening my case.  I
reminded the Jury about the presumption of innocence and the burden of
proof, giving such matters an importance which His Honour might seek to
minimize.  Then I announced that I would call young Ben's stepfather
first, as he was a busy man and anxious to get away.  To the Judge's
disappointment, prosecuting counsel raised no objection and Chris
Swithin made his way to the witness box.  I thought he walked a little
unsteadily, but there was only the slightest slur in his voice as he
took the oath.  I had noticed, when we sat in his study waiting for the
werewolf's non-arrival, that he had shown such slight lack of focus
after yet another large brandy, and came to the conclusion that he had
lunched not wisely but too well.  However that might have been, he
turned respectfully to the Judge and answered my questions in clear,
ringing tones.  I got through the essential preliminaries, then asked
him his view of Ben's character.

"Difficult, I have to say.  Extremely difficult.  At times quite
impossible."

It wasn't what you might expect from a character witness, but it
delighted the Judge, who repeated "At times impossible" in a loud voice
before he wrote it down.

"He's taken your name.  He agreed to that, at least?"

"His mother asked him.  He never thanked me for it.  Well, I've learned
not to expect thanks from Ben."

"And I think he adopted your suggestion of calling himself "Chimes" on
his e-mails.  As in the chimes of Big Ben."

"I thought he might enjoy the joke."

"And apparently he did?"

"He never said so."

'"He never said so."" The Judge gave utterance like a ventriloquist's
doll worked from the witness box.

"I want to ask you about his computer."


 "I bought it for his sixteenth birthday."

"I bought it, for his birthday' Big Sir Echo was the learned Judge.

"It is in his bedroom, which is, unusually, downstairs?"

"He was making such a noise coming up to bed at all hours, we moved him
down to what had been the farm office.  We had it decorated nicely for
him."

' "Decorated nicely."  The Judge again.

"Does that room have windows opening on the back of the house?  I mean,
it's possible to see into it by standing behind the building?"

"Yes, it is."

"Have you ever used Ben's computer yourself?"  I asked the question
lightly, in all innocence, but it got an angry reply.

"Never.  I told you.  I bought it for him.  I have all my own IT
equipment in the converted barn.  That's where I run my business.  To
keep the family going."

"Let me ask you this.  You know Prunella Haviland.  I think you used to
pick her up on the school run?"

"I did, yes, before Ben caused all this trouble.  I thought she was an
extremely nice girl."

"I'm sure the Jury thought so too.  Tell me, Mr.  Swithin, did you find
her attractive?"

"Mr.  Rumpole," the Judge looked like a referee who'd just been kicked
on the shins by a delinquent player, "I'm sure Mr.  Hoddinot will
object to that question."

"No objection, Your Honour."  I had briefed Adrian the prosecutor well,
and he earned the Judge's frown of displeasure.  Chris, however, spoke
up, full of confidence.  "I'm perfectly prepared to answer the
question.  I think any man would find her extremely attractive."


 "You say "any man", Mr.  Swithin."  The Judge leaned forward
graciously to the witness.  "Does that include any teenager?"

"It certainly does, Your Honour," was the right answer.  The Judge
noted it down gleefully.

"I want you to look at the e-mails."  The bundle of print-outs was
handed up to Chris Swithin.  "First of all, you have sworn that you
never used Ben's computer?"

"He knew how to handle it before we got it.  I never touched it, I've
told you that on my oath, Mr.  Rumpole."

"He's told you that, Mr.  Rumpole."  Judge Wintergreen was writing
aloud.

"Then let's look at them.  The first is one he sent to my Chambers
before a conference.  Do you see that?"

"Yes."

"Do you see that it's written in a sort of code?  The words 'see',
'to', 'you' and 'be' are indicated by capital letters or numbers."

"That's the way young people send e-mails."

"And yet in all the obscene e-mails to young Prunella no such code is
used.  All the words are written out properly in full."

"I believe that is so."

"You can take it from me it is so.  Is that the way middle-aged people
write e-mails?"

"Probably."

"Do you use any of these abbreviations when you send e-mails?"

"I don't personally, no."

"You spell and punctuate properly?"

"Hike to do so."

"You like to do so."  I glanced at the Jury box.  Did I notice


 a stirring of interest?  "Let me turn to another subject.  Were you
pleased at Ben's fondness for poetry?"

Chris gave a small, bitter smile.  "Ben has no time for poetry
whatever, I'm sorry to say."

"Doesn't he even know the names of the major poets?"

"I don't think he does."

"You yourself have a fine collection of books of poetry in your study.
All arranged in alphabetical order from Arnold to Yeats."

"I read English at Cambridge.  I'm greatly moved by fine poetry."

"And you admire the great poets of the last century, T. S. Eliot and W.
B. Yeats, of course?"

"Of course I do."

"Mr.  Rumpole," the Judge put his oar in, 'are you wasting the time of
my Court with this literary excursion?  I'm sure Mr.  Hoddinot would
think so."

"I have no objection at all, my Lord."  Adrian the prosecutor
disappointed His Honour again.

"So far as you know, the name Yeats would mean nothing to young Ben?"

"He's said that your client has no interest in poetry, Mr.  Rumpole,"
Wintergreen reminded us.

"I know he has.  Such a pity.  Ben missed that beautiful lyric, "Leda
and the Swan'.  I'm sure you have it well in mind, Mr.  Swithin."  The
witness, for once, was silent, and I thought I saw for the first time
on that handsome, lightly suntanned face, a hint of fear.

"Some of you may know the legend, Members of the Jury," I told them.
"The girl Leda was raped by the King of the Gods, who disguised himself
as a swan for the purpose.  This


 is how Yeats described it."  I opened a book which had nothing to do
with the law and read aloud,

"A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering
girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his
bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her
loosening thighs?  And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel
the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning
roof and tower And Agamemnon dead."

The words rang and resonated in the stuffy courtroom.  Then I asked the
witness to read out the relevant e-mail.  He seemed to have some
difficulty finding the page, and further difficulty in reading it out;
but, in the end, he had no choice but to do so.

"How can your terrified vague fingers push my feathered glory from your
loosening thighs?  I will produce a shudder in your loins.  Ours will
be an historic moment when I, the great bird God, swoop down on you."

"Did you send that e-mail to Prunella, Mr.  Swithin?  Were you Jupiter
hoping, one day, she might be your shuddering girl?"

The answer came back as a blustering question.  "What on earth are you
suggesting?"

"I don't know whether it was just because you enjoyed sending erotic
messages to a pretty young girl, or because you


 wanted revenge on a stepson you'd grown to hate.  Perhaps it was for
both reasons.  But you sent these e-mails, didn't you, Mr.  Swithin?"

"Mr.  Rumpole," The Judge was equally outraged at this suggestion,
'you've called this witness as to character.  You have no right to
cross-examine him.  I've been waiting for the prosecution to object."

"Perhaps my learned friend," I suggested as politely as possible,
'thinks the Jury are entitled to an answer.  Perhaps I should explain
this to Your Honour.  That last E-mail was sent only three weeks ago.
Just before this trial."

"Which I regard as an act of gross contempt."  The Judge clung to his
brief authority.

"That may be so.  It's dated midnight on the seventeenth, a Friday
night, when my client was enjoying a staff party in an Italian
restaurant.  I shall be calling a witness, a Mr.  Newton, an enquiry
agent who observed Mr.  Swithin in my client's bedroom, operating young
Ben's computer."

It was then Chris began to shout.  "Ben!  He's a pathological liar!  He
always has been!  Werewolf!  That's what we call him.  He's an animal!
No, worse than that!  Animals have some dignity.  He's evil!  He's
wrecked our marriage.  He's .. ."

"Mr.  Swithin."  The Judge, at least, was calm.  "I have to warn you
that you needn't answer any question that's likely to incriminate
you."

"Very well."  I saw what Chris was like then.  He was like a small
child, caught out in an act of pointless destruction.  "I won't
answer."

"Then perhaps you'll tell us this," I said.  "A simple question, about
the delightful aftershave I saw in your bathroom.  What's it called
some dashing masculine title, like, perhaps, Machismo Number Three For
Men?"


 It was then that it happened, too quickly and far too unexpectedly
for the Court usher dozing in his chair, or the officer in the dock, to
give chase.  Chris Swithin left the witness box with a turn of speed
that recalled the days when he had won the hundred yards for his
Cambridge college, and was out of the Town Hall and pushing his way
through the crowd at the Craft Fair in the market square.  No one
recognized him when he grabbed the rail of a moving bus, or knew what
happened when he got off at the next country stop.  Were his business
contacts clever enough to get him out of the country?  Would he, some
day, be extradited from southern Spain in a case of harassment? Perhaps
not.  All I know is that he was never seen again by his wife and family
in Hartscombe.

When, on the excellent Adrian Hoddinot's application, the teenage
werewolf was released from the dock and the prosecution dropped, I said
goodbye to him outside the Court.  Hermione, in tears, had her arms
around him, holding him tightly with a mother's love.  But he was the
one who was doing the comforting.

I had a pub dinner that night (at the Trout Tickler beside the river)
with Beazely and his wife Avril.  She was a gentle, grey-haired woman
with such a twinkle in her eyes that I wondered what, if any, new
experiences she had been introduced to.  It was late when I got home to
the flat and as I went up the stairs I heard a noise, a cacophony of
over-loud music.  Was some new arrival in the building giving a party,
a rare event in the tomb that was Froxbury Mansions?  When I opened the
front door, the noise enveloped me and rattled my brains.

It was in the sitting-room that it was going on.  I remembered whom I'd
lent a key to while Hilda was in


 Cornwall, far away from the corruption of the e-mails.  Owen Oswald
from Wales was on drums, other Pithead Stompers were blowing and
scraping hell out of a saxophone, a clarinet and a double bass.  In the
centre of it all, in his shirt sleeves and slapping a guitar, Bonzo
Ballard was calling loudly on some unknown baby to light his fire.

I went into the kitchen and opened a bottle of Chateau Thames
Embankment.  How long would it be, I wondered, before these middle-aged
men grew up and forgot the girls they might have known in the past?
Lacking Hilda's determination, I couldn't turn them out.  I poured
myself a large glass and hoped for sleep.


Rumpole Rests His Case

"Members of the Jury.  This case has occupied only ten days of your
lives.  In a week or two you will have forgotten every detail about the
dead budgerigar, the torn-up photograph of Scan Connery, the mouldering
poached egg on toast behind the sitting-room curtain and the mysterious
cry (was it a call for help, as the prosecution invite you to believe,
or the delighted shriek produced by a moment of sexual ecstasy?) which
could be heard issuing from 426 Mandela Buildings on that sultry and
fatal night of July the twenty-third.  All this has been but a part, a
fleeting moment perhaps, of your lives, but for the woman I represent,
the woman who has endured every scrap of innuendo, scandal and abuse
the almighty Crown Prosecution Service can dredge up, with the vast
resources of the State at their disposal, for her this case represents
the whole of her future life.  That and nothing less than that is at
stake in this trial.  And it is her life I now leave, Members of the
Jury, in your hands, confident that she will hear from your foreman, in
the fullness of time, the words that will give the remainder of her
life back to her: "Not Guilty!"  So I thank you for listening to me,
Members of the Jury.  I rest my case."

The sweetest moment of an advocate's life comes when he


 sits down after his final speech, legs tired of standing, shirt damp
with honest sweat, mouth dried up with words.  He sits back and a great
weight slides off his shoulders.  There's absolutely nothing more that
he can do.  All the decisions, the unanswered questions, the
responsibility for banging up a fellow human being, have now shifted to
the Judge and the Jury.  The defence has rested and the Old Bailey hack
can rest with it.

As I sat, relaxed, and placed my neck comfortably against the wooden
rail behind me, I removed the wig, scratched my head for comfort, and
put it on again.  As I rested, I looked for a moment at His Honour
Judge Bullingham, an Old Bailey Judge now promoted to trying murders.
To call them trials is perhaps to flatter the learned Judge, who
conducts the proceedings as though the Old Bailey were a somewhat
prejudiced and summary offshoot of the Spanish Inquisition.  One of my
first jobs as a defending counsel in the present case was to taunt and
tempt, by many daring passes of the cape and neat side-steps in the
sand, the bellowing and red-eyed bull to come out as such a tireless
fighter on behalf of the prosecution that the Jury began to see him as
I did.  They might, perhaps, acquit my client because an ill-tempered
Judge was making it so desperately clear that he wanted her
convicted.

But who had killed the budgerigar, a bird which, it seemed, had stood
equally high in the regard of both the husband and the wife?  It was as
I toyed with this question, in an increasingly detached sort of way,
that I closed my eyes and found not darkness but a sudden flood of
bright golden light into which the familiar furnishings of Court Number
One at the Old Bailey seemed to have melted away and vanished.  Then I
saw a small black dot which, rushing towards me like a shooting


 star, grew rapidly into the face of His Honour Judge Bullingham who
filled the landscape wearing the complacent expression of a man about
to pass a sentence of life imprisonment.  Then I heard a voice, deeper
and more alarming than that of any clerk of the Court I had ever heard
before, saying, "Have you reached a verdict on which you all agree?"
"We have," some faint voice answered.  "Do you find the defendant
Rumpole guilty or not guilty?"  But before the answer could be given,
the great light faded, and Bullingham's face melted away with it. There
was a stab of pain in my chest, night fell and I became, I suppose,
unconscious.

Undoubtedly, this was a dramatic way of ending a closing speech.  Mrs.
Ballard, known round the Bailey as Matey, was soon on the scene, as I
understand it loosening my collar and pulling off my wig.  The
prosecutor rose to ask His Honour what steps he wished to take in view
of the complete collapse of Mr.  Rumpole.

"He's not dead.  I'm sure of that."  Bullingham declined to accept the
evidence.  "He's tried that one on me before."  This was strictly true,
when, many years before, the stubborn old Bull dug his heels in and
refused an adjournment, so I had to feign death as the only legal
loophole left if I wanted to delay the proceedings.  I put on, as I
thought, a pretty good performance on that occasion.  But this was no
gesture of theatrical advocacy.  Matey made the appropriate telephone
call.  An ambulance, howling with delight, was enjoying its usual
dangerous driving round Ludgate Circus.  Strong men in uniform, impeded
by offers of incompetent help from the prosecution team no doubt
thankful to see the back of me,

See'Rumpole and the Last Resort'.


 rolled me out of my usual seat and on to a stretcher.  So I left
Court (was it for the last time?) feet first.

"I know what this is," I thought as I looked upon the vision of hell.
My chest was still crunching with pain.  There was a freezing draught
blowing scraps of torn-up and discarded paper across the lino, and a
strong smell composed of equal parts rubber and disinfectant.  I saw
some shadowy figures, a mother with a child on her lap, a white-faced
girl with staring eyes and a scarlet mouth, an old man, his tattered
coat tied with string, who seemed to have abandoned all hope and was
muttering to himself, a patient Chinese couple, the woman holding up a
hand swathed in a bloodstained bandage.  They all sat beneath a notice
which read: "Warning.  The average waiting time here is four and a half
hours."  It seemed a relatively short period measured against eternity.
If this place wasn't hell, I thought, it was, at least, some
purgatorial anteroom.

When I had opened my eyes I had found myself staring at the ceiling,
yellow plaster mysteriously stained, a globe surrounding a light in
which, it seemed, all the neighbourhood insects had come to die.  Then
I realized, with a sudden pang, that I was lying on some particularly
hard surface.  It felt like metal and plastic and I was more or less
covered with a blanket.  Then a vision appeared, a beautiful Indian
girl with a clipboard, wearing a white coat and a look of heavenly
confusion.  Perhaps this wasn't hell after all.

"Hello, Mr.  Robinson.  Are you quite comfortable?"

"No."  I still had, so it seemed, retained the gift of speech.

"No, you're not comfortable?"

"No, and I'm not Mr.  Robinson either."

"Oh.  So that's all right then."  She made a tick somewhere


 on her clipboard and vanished.  I missed her but could no longer
worry.  I stirred with discomfort and went back to sleep.

When I woke up again, it must have been much later.  The windows which
once let in faint daylight were now black.  The old man who had once
sat quietly was now wandering round the room, muttering complaints and,
from time to time, shouting "Vengeance is mine!"  or "Up the Arsenal!".
There was a clattering as of a milk cart parking, and a formidable
machine was wheeled up beside me, a thing of dials and trailing wires
steered by a young man this time, also in a white coat.  He had a large
chin, gingery hair and an expression of thinly disguised panic.  He
also had another clipboard which he consulted.

"Ted Robinson?"

"No."

"Collapsed in the workplace?"

"If you call the Old Bailey a workplace.  Which I certainly never
do."

"All the same, you collapsed, didn't you?"

He'd got me there.  "Yes," I had to admit.  "I collapsed completely."

"All right, Mr.  Robinson.  I'll just get you wired up."

"But I'm really not..  ."

"You'll make it much easier for both of us if you don't talk.  Just lie
still and relax."

I lay still as wires were fixed to me.  I watched a line on a
flickering screen which seemed to be on a perpetual downward curve. The
stranger in the white coat was also watching.  In the end the machine
handed him a scrap of paper.

"Rest.  A time in bed," he told me.  "That's the best we can do for
you."

"But I haven't got a bed."


 "Neither have we."  He began to laugh, holding on to my arm as though
he wanted me to join in the joke.  "Neither have we."  He repeated the
phrase, as though to squeeze the last drops of laughter out of it.  "I
expect someone, sometime, will do something about it.  In the meantime,
your job is to rest.  Have you got that, Mr.  Rumpole?"

"You know my name?"

"Of course I do.  We've got it written down.  I don't know why you kept
calling yourself Robinson all the time."

No doubt the man worked unsociable hours.  He wandered away from me in
a sort of daze.  Everything became terribly silent and, once again, I
fell asleep despite the crunching pain.

My sleep was not undisturbed.  Half awake and only a little conscious,
I felt that I was on the move.  I opened my eyes for a moment and saw
the ceiling of a long passage gliding past.  Then gates clanged.  Was I
at last going the way of too many of my customers?  Was I being banged
up?  It was a possibility I chose to ignore until I felt myself rolled
over again.  I caught a glimpse of a kindly black face, the brilliant
white teeth and hands pulling, in a determined way, at what was left of
my clothing.  Then I was alone again in the darkness, and I heard, like
the waves of a distant sea, the sounds of low incessant snores, and the
expulsion of breath was like the rattle of small stones on the beach as
the waves retreat.

"I didn't bring you grapes, Rumpole.  I thought you wouldn't want
grapes."

"No interest in grapes."  My voice, as I heard it, came out in a hoarse
whisper, a ghostly shadow of the rich courtroom baritone which had
charmed Juries and rattled the smoothest bent copper telling the
smoothest lies.  "I'm only interested


 in grapes when they've been trodden underfoot, carefully fermented
and bottled for use in Pommeroy's Wine Bar."

"Don't talk so much.  That's a lesson you'll have to learn from now on,
Rumpole."

I looked at Hilda.  She had smartened herself up for this hospital
visit, wearing her earrings, a new silk blouse and smelling a great
deal more strongly than usual of her Violetta Eau de Toilette.

"I thought you wouldn't want flowers, Rumpole."

"No.  You're right, Hilda, I wouldn't want flowers."  Plenty of time
for flowers, I thought, later.

"Flowers always look so sick in a hospital."

"That's right, of course.  Most of us do!"

Conversation between myself and She Who Must Be Obeyed was flowing like
cement.  It wasn't that we were embarrassed by the presence of other
men on the ward.  The snorer, the tooth-grinder, the serial urinator
had headphones glued to their ears, their heads nodding gently to the
beat of the easy listening.  The young man who had lost a kidney held
the hand of his visiting girlfriend; they only spoke occasionally and
in whispers.  The other youngish man, perhaps in his thirties,
brown-haired with soft, appealing eyes and a perpetually puzzled
expression, lay in the bed next to mine.  His was a face I recognized
from newspapers and the television, and I knew his name was David
Stoker and that he had been operated on as a result of gunshot
wounds.

"Let this be a lesson to you, Rumpole," Hilda went on remorselessly.
"You've got to give it all up."

This was how she spoke to me at home and she made no effort to moderate
her tone, although the much-bandaged Stoker was well within earshot.

"Give what up, Hilda?  I don't really mind giving up


 anything, so long as it's not small cigars or Pommeroy's very
ordinary or the Bar."

"That's the one!"

"Which one?"

"The Bar.  That's what you've got to give up.  Well, after this
business it's perfectly obvious you can't go on with it.  All these
criminals you're so fond of defending will just have to go off to
prison quietly, and about time too, if you want my opinion, Rumpole."

"Of course I want your opinion, Hilda.  But..  ."

"No "but" about it.  I've spoken to the doctor here."

"That was nice of you.  How is he?"

"He's perfectly well, Rumpole.  Which is more than can be said about
you.  It's your heart.  You've put too great a strain on it.  You do
understand that, don't you?"

"Is that what he said?"

"His very words."

"He called me Robinson."  I thought of the most likely explanation for
this ridiculous verdict.  "He's seriously overworked.  I don't think,
Hilda, you should attach the slightest importance to his evidence."

"That woman you were defending when you passed out.  Your last case,
Rumpole.  The woman who stabbed her husband.  You got her off."

"I know," I said.  "They let me read the Sunday papers.  The Jury found
she didn't mean to stab him.  She held the knife to keep him away and
he stumbled and fell on it.  That's what the Jury believed."

"What you persuaded them to believe."

"I have a certain skill, as an advocate."

"A skill that'll finish you off, Rumpole, if you don't give it up
entirely."


 "Anyway, he wasn't a particularly nice man.  He wrung her
budgerigar's neck."

"Oh, well, then I suppose he deserved it."  She was easily persuaded.
"But now you've given it all up, you'll be able to enjoy life."

"Enjoy life doing what?"

"Well, you can rest.  Help around the flat.  I've always thought we
ought to go in for window boxes.  If you make a good recovery you could
help me with the shopping."  I couldn't think of a weaker incentive for
a return to health.  But I didn't say so.  A silence fell between us
and then she said, "I bumped into Chappy Bowers the other day."

"Who?"  The name meant little to me at first.

"You must remember Chappy.  He was in Daddy's Chambers when you joined.
He didn't get much work.  It was rather sad.  He said he just couldn't
bear spinning improbable stories for ungrateful people."

"Then he clearly had absolutely no talent for the law."

"He went into the City and did a number of jobs.  Then he fell on his
feet.  They made him secretary of his local golf club.  Chappy Bowers
loves his golf."

"And where did you bump into him on the thirteenth green?"

"Don't be silly, Rumpole.  He rang me up when he read about your
collapse in the Evening Standard.  He agrees with me that you must have
a complete rest.  It's the only answer."

"Has he got any medical qualifications, this Chappy person?"

"Not that I know of, but he's truly understanding, and, what's more,
he's asked me out for dinner."

"Where to the Club House?"


 "Of course not.  He knows this little place in Soho.  Very intimate
and excellent cooking.  He's told me I'll adore Chez Achilla .. . Good
heavens!"

This last breathed, barely whispered exclamation arose from Hilda's
observation of the bed next to mine.  David Stoker had been called for
an X-ray.  He couldn't immediately get up and go.  A thin chain, about
eight foot long, was curled to his wrist and the wrist of an overweight
screw who, dressed informally in a sweater and tracksuit trousers, sat
at the end of David Stoker's bed, easy listening also fastened to his
ears.  The screw rose and this mini-chain gang left us.

"He's in chains, Rumpole!"  Hilda couldn't get over it.  "That patient
is in chains!"

"That's right."  I did my best to reassure her.  "He's not dangerous.
It's just that he had his operation while awaiting trial and the prison
hospital's full up.  He's got a bit of previous form, I know.  Apart
from that he's not a bad sort of young fellow."

"Good heavens!"  Hilda repeated her prayer.  "What's he waiting trial
for?"

"House-breaking by night, I think it is.  Armed with a pistol."

She looked at me then, and said, more in sorrow than in anger, "You
just can't keep away from them, can you, Rum-pole?  The criminal
classes.  You just can't keep away from them at all."

"Mr.  Rumpole."  The voice in the darkness came from the chained man in
the bed beside me.  "Was that your wife, Mr.  Rumpole?"

"What did you think?"

"Well, I hardly thought it was your girlfriend."  He laughed softly but
I didn't join in his laughter.  "She's a member of the


 public, isn't she?  All members of the public hate me for what they
think I've done."

"What have you done, exactly?"

"Only got shot up so badly I had to have two hours on the operating
table.  Only got pumped as full of lead as a fucking pencil.  And for
getting that done to me, I'll probably get four years.  That's what
they tell me my brief's thinking of, four to five he reckons.  That's
my youth gone, all that's left of it."

"Who's this brief you speak of?"

"It's a Mr.  Erskine-Brown QC.  He's a senior man."

"QC?  I've always thought those letters stand for "Queer Customer".  If
you've got Claude defending you, you might as well plead guilty.  He'll
probably do you a very nice plea in mitigation."  As soon as I'd said
that I regretted it.  It wasn't worthy of me.  The onset of death, I
thought, brings out the worst in you.

"I'm joking of course," I told him.  "Claude Erskine-Brown is a man of
considerable experience."  And I restrained myself from adding, "Of
opera."

There was silence then.  At last my neighbour spoke in a smaller voice.
"I always heard you were a fighter, Mr.  Rumpole."

"Where did you hear that?"

"Round the Scrubs.  When I was in there.  They were talking about
it."

"You've got a bit of previous, haven't you?"

"Quite a bit, to be honest.  I was a bad lad in my younger years.
Before I decided to straighten myself out."

"Why don't you two shut the fuck up."  It was the snorer, to whom I
owed quite a few sleepless nights, sending us a message from the other
side of the ward.


 I had read enough, when I was alive and kicking, in the newspaper
accounts of the shooting at Badgershide Wood to recall David Stoker's
past, both as instigator and victim of the affair, and to be able to
inform Hilda of my neighbour's problem.  The next day he opened his
locker and brought out a bundle of press cuttings, copies of the
indictment and statements of evidence, so I was able to sit up in bed
and read the details of the events which had led my neighbour to the
operating table and would take him to my familiar hunting ground at the
Old Bailey and, in all probability, to a long term of imprisonment.

Badgershide Wood, from what I found out about it, did its best to claim
that it was still a country village, an island in the suburban sprawl
that stretched from the north-west of London towards the Chiltern
Hills.  It had a small Norman church, a main street, two pubs, four
antiques shops, a hair-dressing salon called Snippers and a Thai
restaurant.  In the middle of the village, larger and more imposing
than the church, was a Georgian house which had been the home of the
Dunkerton family for generations.  The present heir, Major Ben
Dunkerton, was the hero who had peppered Stoker with shots and confined
him to bed in chains.

Major Ben Dunkerton, who succeeded in behaving like an eccentric but
amiable country squire in what had, in fact, become a suburb of London,
did a great deal to preserve Badgershide Wood's claim to be a rural
community.  He was old enough to have joined the army in the last years
of the War and had been honourably wounded after D-Day as a very young
officer.  He stayed on in the army until he took over the family
business and became the Chairman of a local firm of estate agents.
During his long retirement he was a favourite customer at the Badger's
Arms, had a kind word for


 everyone in the village street and penetrated more deeply into the
countryside to shoot with his old friends.  He fished in Scotland and,
although childless and a long-time widower, gave a lavish party for all
the Badgershide Wood children at Christmas.  He was spoken of with
great affection as a thoroughly good chap, one who enjoyed his malt
whisky and still, God bless him, had an eye for the girls.

Major Dunkerton's account of the night of the fifth of March was a
simple one.  He'd gone upstairs to get ready for bed when he heard
sounds of breaking glass and something knocked over in the kitchen.  He
kept a shotgun upstairs, since there had been a number of cases of
armed robbery in well-known country houses.  He loaded the shotgun and
went downstairs, calling first at the kitchen, where he saw a pane of
glass broken, a window forced open and crockery smashed.  Someone had
undoubtedly crawled in through the window.  The light had been left
on.

Then he crossed the hall to the library, which was also lit.  The door
was open and he could see someone standing by his desk, a man he had no
difficulty in identifying as Stoker.  As the intruder turned, the Major
saw he had what looked like an old army pistol in his hand.  Before
Stoker could shoot, the Major fired the shotgun and he fell, as the
Major thought at first, dead.  Before he could fully examine the fallen
body, there was a loud knocking at the front door.  It was Doctor
Jefferson who, on his way to his home next door, had heard the shot
and, when the Major opened the door to him, saw what at first sight he
also thought was a dead body.

The police and the ambulance were called.  When it was discovered that
the shots hadn't killed Stoker, the Major was, to quote Doctor
Jefferson, 'in a terrible state of anxiety as to


 whether the wretched robber was going to live or die'.  What was
clear from the newspaper cuttings, however, was that the great British
public couldn't care less about the fate of my neighbour in the ward,
and Major Ben Dunkerton was a national hero.  His right to defend his
house against an armed intruder was trumpeted.  "MAJOR'S HOUSE HIS

CASTLE'; "HE GOT HIS SHOT IN FIRST'; '76-YEAR-OLD MAJOR SHOOTS FOR
HIS

LIFE'; "ARMED THUGS BETTER NOT MESS WITH MAJOR BEN': such were the
headlines in all the papers.

The Major was charged with unlawful wounding, grievous bodily harm and
a firearms offence.  It was clear that the press regarded his trial as
a short preliminary before a triumphant acquittal and the receipt of a
George Medal for bravery.  Stoker, the armed robber, however, was sure
to be sent to prison for a sizeable chunk of the foreseeable future,
once he was well enough to leave hospital.

Stoker's statement told a very different story and one which, in
contrast to Major Ben's clear account, seemed hard to swallow.  His
childhood had been perfectly happy.  The only child of an insurance
salesman and a devoted mother, he had done well at school and seemed
set for a decent job, a first home on a mortgage and holidays on the
Costa Brava.  He was only seventeen, however, when, in the course of a
night's clubbing, he fell in with a group of boys a year or two older,
who had graduated from nicking car radios and snatching unattended
handbags to house-breaking.  "It's the excitement, Mr.  Rumpole,"
Stoker told me during one of our many conversations.  "There's no drug,
no drink you can take like it.  Standing in someone else's place when
you know anything you fancy is yours to pick up, and them snoring
upstairs.  All right, it's dangerous.  That's what's exciting about it.
Dangerous but so easy, sometimes I had a hard job not to laugh out
loud."


 By the time he was twenty-five, Stoker had half a dozen convictions
and got four years.

It was in prison that he began to write a wry, unselfpitying account of
life in the nick and the memories of a housebreaker, which led,
apparently, to his reform.  His book was serialized in a Sunday paper.
He became, in the public eye, the statutory reformed con, the hard man
gone soft, who appeared on television chat shows, took part in Any
Questions and was rung up to comment yet again on the latest Criminal
Justice Act introduced by the New Labour Party.  So, instead of coming
out of prison with a few pounds and an irresistible temptation to
return to crime, Stoker had a flat in now fashionable Hackney and a
steady income from his writing and as an adviser to a spate of British
gangster films.  He was held up as an example of how prison can work
and how a long dose of it produces a reformed citizen wanting to appear
on Newsnight.  Such hopes were dashed by the appearance of David
Stoker, not answering the questions of the day but armed and having
broken into an elderly stranger's house by night.

As I say, Stoker's explanation would have seemed way beyond the bounds
of probability, even in the gangster films on which he gave advice.
There was a girl named Dawn, once the girlfriend of one of his burgling
mates, whom he had always fancied.  They had met again by chance in a
club round Notting Hill Gate and she had told him that she had tired of
London and had a flat in a town near Badgershide Wood, where she had
satisfied a long-held ambition to open a hair-dressing salon.  Now she
had a thriving business offering up-to-the-minute hairdos to a large
catchment area.  So far so bad.  Stoker's knowledge of the village, and
the presence of a large and robbable house, was now explained.


 From there on his story got stranger.  He had, he said, met Major Ben
Dunkerton before.  Dawn was busy with a customer and he had gone for a
walk in the woods, where an elderly man with a tweed cap and a walking
stick came up to him and said he recognized him from the television.

"I've seen you around the village from time to time," the Major said.
"Attractive place, isn't it?"  And he added, with a particular
emphasis, "I'm sure it must have many attractions for you."

Then he went on to be extremely complimentary to Stoker on his reform
and his literary skills.  "Wouldn't your book make a tremendously
exciting film?"  the Major asked him, before mentioning a hugely
famous, although also elderly, film director whom he said he had known
'since our National Service days', who would love to meet David.  And
so a meeting was arranged for one of the few nights when the director
would be touching down in Badgershide Wood between Los Angeles and his
current location in Morocco.

"Have to be a bit late, I'm afraid.  Sam is having dinner with the
money people.  But he'll be back at my house around ten-thirty, if
you'd like to call in for a nightcap?"

Stoker said he took all this in, including the Major's improbable
demand for secrecy.

"Sam would hate there to be any sort of publicity about meeting you
before a deal's done.  So if you could keep quiet about all this, to
everyone?"

"Of course."

"Better not even tell your friend the hairdresser.  You know how
quickly these stories get about."

"All right, I won't tell her.  I'm going back to London tonight
anyway."


 "So why not drive straight to my house tomorrow evening?  You can
park round the back.  Not a word to anybody."

Not unnaturally, Stoker was surprised at the complexity of these
arrangements.  "Why are you doing all this for me?"

"Because I think, from what I've heard and read about you," the Major
told him, 'you're a decent lad that's doing his best to go straight,
and I want to encourage you."

Stoker put it down to being so used to obeying orders and having
everything arranged for him in prison that he obeyed the Major's
curious instructions.  He drove down the next evening, straight from
his flat in Hackney.  He got to the Major's house at ten-twenty-five,
parked behind it and walked round to ring at the front door.

Before he could touch the bell the door was opened by the smiling
Major, who showed him into the study, a book-lined room.  On the desk,
carefully laid out on the blotter between the paperweight and a
letter-opener, lay an old service revolver.

"Used to be mine in my army days.  I brought it home when I was de
mobbed  I know you're interested in guns."

"I never went tooled up," Stoker said he assured the Major.

"Just feel it.  Perfect balance, hasn't it?  For an outdated weapon."

Again obedient, Stoker picked up the pistol, felt its weight as
directed and put it down as quickly as possible.  "I know Sam will want
guns in his picture," the Major said.  "By the way he's just gone
upstairs for something.  I'll go and hurry him up."

The Major left then, but returned almost immediately.  What happened
next was, according to Stoker, quite inexplicable.  As he turned to
face the door, his host lifted a shotgun


 and fired.  Stoker remembered a blow like a kick from a horse, a
sudden and terrible pain, and then darkness until he came to, bumping
in the back of an ambulance in such agony that he wished he'd never
woken up.

One other fact emerged from the mass of papers he'd handed me.  Sam,
the famous film director, was nowhere near England on the date of the
shooting and, when asked, denied all knowledge of Badgershide or Major
Dunkerton.  All this proved was that either David Stoker or the Major
was lying prodigiously.  That was no help to either of them.

"Long time, Rumpole, such a very long time no see."

When I first put on the whitest of white wigs, having joined the
Chambers of C. H. Wystan, my wife Hilda's "Daddy', there was, if I
recollect, a rather chubby, smiling-for-no-reason young barrister,
reduced to inarticulate jelly by appearing in Court for something
really taxing, like fixing a date for a hearing.  His career in the law
had been short and unimpressive, but Chappy Bowers, as he rather liked
to be known, had, as the climax of an apparently harmless and
uneventful life, 'bumped into' Hilda after ringing her up because he'd
heard of my collapse in Court.  Unexpected and uninvited, he turned up
and sat himself down in my visitor's chair just when my mind was full
of strange and far more interesting business at Badgershide Wood.  He
still managed to look boyish in his grey-haired age.  His face was
round and chubby, his eyes blue and anxious to please and he had, over
the years, become no more articulate.

"When we were, erin Chambers together, I well, what I mean is we were
both of us, what's the word?  Umm .. . smitten by Hilda Wystan."


 "I suppose we were."  I didn't want to tell him that, from my point
of view, I sometimes felt that the smiting had gone on for a
lifetime.

"What I really came to, well... I mean, umm, what I came to ... well,
really, and in all honest truth, Rumpole, to say was that if anything
should happen to you.  And it's a bit "if"."

"No, it's not."  I couldn't help correcting him.  "It's not a big "if"
at all.  I collapsed in Court with a dicky ticker.  I'm confined in the
hospital block and have no idea when I'll get out of it.  Any day, to
be honest with you, I might lose my grasp of the twig."

"Well, if that .. . Well if... Which umm we profoundly .. . Well, not
profoundly.  What's the word?"

"Sincerely?"

"That's it, Rumpole!  Trust you, old fellow.  You always knew the right
word.  Sincerely."

"That's the word you use when you don't mean what you're saying."

"No?  Not really?  No!  I do mean this.  Of ... umm.  Of course I do.
If, again I say if, you should drop off the .. . What was it,
Rumpole?"

"Twig?"  I suggested.

"Yes, if you should drop off the twig, Hilda knows she'd always have
someone to look after her."

"You mean her friend Dodo Mackintosh?"

"No, Rumpole."  Now the words came out in a rush.  "I honestly mean
me."

"You'd look after Hilda, if I turned up my toes?"

"It would be an honour and a privilege."

"Then all I can say, Chappy, old darling, for the sake of


 your health and sanity, is I'd better make an astonishing
recovery."

Conversation dried up then, until Chappy leant towards me and said in a
penetrating whisper, "That fellow in the next bed looks, well..  . umm,
chained up."

"That's because he is chained up," I explained.  "It's what they do to
you nowadays if you get shot."

When Chappy had gone back to his golf club, apparently unshaken in his
desire to take care of She Who Must Be Obeyed, I asked Ted, the screw,
to put the headphones on again for another dose of Petula Clark and
asked the wounded suspect just a few more questions.

"You parked your car round the back of the house.  Did you notice a
kitchen window open?"

"It was quite dark."

"A window broken?"

"I didn't notice."

"Did you break a window?"

"I told you, I came in by the front door."

"You say the Major was there waiting.  He opened it for you."

"He must have seen my car arrive."

"You told me that."

After that I gave my full attention to the evidence of the Scene of
Crime Officer, with particular relation to fingerprints.

"Henry."  I was on the ward telephone to my clerk.

"Mr.  Rumpole!  We heard you were taken really bad, Sir.  It's good to
hear you're still with us, as you might say."

"As you might say, Henry, if you were in a particularly


 tactless mood.  Never mind.  It's wonderful to hear your voice.  Just
like old times."

"It's not about work, is it, Sir?  Mrs.  Rumpole rang to say we weren't
to worry you about work.  She said you'd be resting from now on.  It
made me feel envious.  Not much rest round Equity Court.  Not for a
clerk, there isn't."

"It's not about my work.  Actually, it's about someone else's work. Mr.
 Erskine-Brown's got an attempted robbery case called Stoker."

"The Badgershide Wood job?  I'm afraid it's going to clash with a civil
he's got.  Personal Injury with real money to it.  Claude's leading
Mizz Probert in the crime."

"Henry."

"Yes, Sir?"

"Remind me to order the drinks in Pommeroy's if you let them clash. And
go for the civil."

"That's what I had in mind.  But why exactly?"

"Who knows?  I might be leading Mizz Liz in the Badgers-hide shooting
business.  Stranger things have happened."

"You think Mrs.  Rumpole would allow it, Sir ... ?"

"We'll wait and see if we've got any sort of defence.  Oh, and get
Bonny Bernard to give me a ring here, will you?  The Princess Margaret
ward.  You have to sell your soul here to , make an outside call."

The system was that a telephone was wheeled to the side of your bed as
though it was a cardiogram machine or materials for a blanket bath.  If
there was a call for you, it came after a short interval.  If you
wanted to make a call you had to wait a considerable time for the
instrument, and also provide money to cover its cost.  I had to pay out
to call Henry, so I was


 relieved when Bonny Bernard's voice was wheeled towards me, with a
selection of pills as an after-breakfast treat.

"You had a brief in a sensational shoot-out in an old-age pensioner's
home and you sent it to Erskine-Brown?"  I accused the man.

"I was planning it for you.  But then we heard you'd left the Bar."

"The Bar?  I never left it.  Left life perhaps, but the Bar?  Never!
Now listen, my old darling.  It's very possible that Claude Queer
Customer may not be able to do this case owing to the pressures of
civil work in the Personal Injuries Department."

"So we'll have to look elsewhere, then."

"You may not have to look very far.  The future depends, to a certain
extent, on the evidence of the heart.  All I ask is that you don't rush
into any decisions.  And there's one thing you can do."  I gave Bonny
Bernard certain instructions and then I asked him if he'd like to speak
to his client.  "He happens to be here beside me."

"Mr.  Rumpole," Bernard's question came in a horrified whisper, 'you're
not in the nick, are you?"

"Don't worry, old darling.  He's in hospital."

I covered the mouthpiece and called to my neighbour, "Would you like to
speak to your solicitor?"

"No point, is there?  He came to see me before you got here.  Then he
sent me all these papers.  I could see it in his face.  He didn't
believe a word I said."

"We'll talk to you later," I told Bernard, 'when we've decided if
there's a possible defence."

"Can't you remember, Mr.  Rumpole, you're meant to rest..  ."  My old
friend started some form of protest and I put the phone down gently.


 It happened a few mornings later when Stoker needed some minor
surgery.  He was wheeled away chained to his trolley and accompanied by
his shadow, Ted, the ever-present screw.  I saw another visitor enter
the ward, a thin, hawk-like figure in a crumpled mackintosh carrying,
like an angel in a painting, a stiff, upright bunch of white lilies as
though to deck the top of a coffin.  He sat in my visitor's chair,
removed his hat, and Esmeralda, the cheerful Jamaican nurse we were
always glad to see, relieved him of his flowers, promising to put them
in water.

"Would you rather have had grapes, Mr.  Rumpole?"

"Grapes, lilies, it's all the same to me," I told him.  "It's you I
wanted to see, Fig.  You're going to provide the key to my present
problem."

"Your heart?"

Did Ferdinand Ian Gilmour (known to us as Fig) Newton believe that I
credited him with medical skills?

"Of course not.  My heart can look after itself.  It would, however, be
greatly encouraged by a solution to the mystery of the Badgershide Wood
shooting."

"Is it a mystery, Mr.  Rumpole?  In my paper it's just a decent citizen
defending himself and his property."

"Perhaps your paper doesn't know the half of it."

"No?  You may be right, Mr.  Rumpole.  What's the other half, then?"

"That's exactly what I want you to find out.  Hang around Badgershide
Wood with your ears open.  Find out all you can about the eccentric
Major.  Oh and there's a girl called Dawn something who works at
Snippers the hairdressers."

"You want her kept under twenty-four-hour observation?  I'm afraid
we're in for some inclement weather."  Fig sniffed


 gloomily, as though in anticipation of the cold he was likely to
catch.

"Don't just observe her.  Meet her.  Taker her off to the Thai
restaurant.  Make her like you.  Say that if she tells us all she
knows, it just might help her wounded lover escape a lengthy sentence.
Mention my name if you have to.  Say that Rumpole is relying on her.
No, better still, tell her that a hospital patient in chains thinks of
her constantly."

"I brought you a few grapes, Rumpole."

"That was very thoughtful of you, Hilda."

"Don't eat them all at once.  They looked nice in the shop."  She Who
Must pulled off a couple and chewed them thoughtfully.  "Not bad at
all.  Nice and juicy.  Well now, Rumpole."  She looked at me with an
eye born to command.  "I want you to make a complete recovery."

"Anything you say, Hilda."  I had no intention of arguing with her.
"Your fancy man was here."

"My what?"

"Your fellow.  Your little bit on the side," I might have said. Instead
I stuck to "Your friend Chappy Bowers.  The one who took you out to a
candlelit dinner.  I hope you enjoyed it."

"I did not enjoy it, Rumpole!"

"Veal escalope on the tough side, was it?  Nasty collapse of the
souffle at... What was it called?"

"Chez Achille in Soho.  The ladies' lavatory was down a long, damp
staircase and far too near the kitchen, and I didn't find the
tablecloth entirely clean."

"And no candles?"

"Oh yes.  There was a nasty guttering thing in an old wine bottle.  The
waiter was extremely familiar with Chappy and


 said, "Another of your girlfriends, Mr.  Bowers?"  before we even got
a glance at the menu."

"Wasn't that rather a compliment?"  The waiter, I thought, was laying
it on with a trowel by putting Hilda in the 'girlfriend' category.

"Not to be called a girlfriend of Chappy's.  I imagine they're a lot of
old trouts."

"Oh yes," I nodded.  "Of course that's what they probably are."

"I wouldn't want to be the "girlfriend", Rumpole, of any man who added
up his bill."

"Did Chappy do that?"

"Worse than that.  They gave us each, Rumpole, a "selection of
vegetables" on two small plates."

"That was bad news?"

"I wasn't greatly impressed.  We had a few bullet-hard potatoes, some
green beans that were also undercooked, and three undersized carrots.
Well, Chappy actually asked for a reduction because we hadn't eaten the
potatoes."

"On the tight side, as I remember.  Always fumbled for his money when
it was his turn at Pommeroy's."

"He is the sort of man, Rumpole, who would check up on a woman's
shopping list."

I knew a great deal of the Rumpoles' income was frittered away on such
luxuries as Ajax, kitchen rolls and saucepan scourers, but I would
never have intruded on the sanctity of Hilda's list.

"So I want you to recover, Rumpole," she went on.  "You may have your
faults, but you don't argue about the selection of vegetables.  So,
what I'm trying to tell you is, I simply couldn't put up with a person
like Chappy Bowers.  I want you back round the house."

That is very encouraging, Hilda."

"I hope you will agree to give up work entirely.  That's the only way
you're going to get well.  It's so good your being here, where you
can't spend your time worrying about crimes."

I glanced at the prisoner in the next bed.  He lowered the Daily Beacon
slightly and closed one eye in a discreet wink.

I took the opportunity to discuss the Major with the customers in the
Badger's Arms as well as the staff at the local garage and the owners
of at least two of the antiques shops.  On all sides he's spoken of as
a hero who was acting in self-defence and to protect his property.
There is no sympathy whatsoever for the client.

Fig Newton's reports never concealed the bad news, for which he has a
particular relish.  He went on:

The Major is admired as an amiable eccentric.  "His own man," the
landlord of the Badger's Arms told me.  "One of the old school.
Friendly with everyone, likes his drop of Scotch and always got an eye
for the ladies."  It's the landlord's opinion that the client, when he
entered the Major's house, got exactly what he deserved.  Several of
the regulars in the Badger's Arms and the landlord said they had seen
the client, whom they recognized from his photograph in the papers, on
his visits to Snippers the hairdressers.

I myself called at Snippers on the pretext of a hair wash and trim, as
the place is advertised as 'unisex'.  Dawn Maresfield was engaged with
another client and I was attended to by a 'trainee stylist'.  I did,
however, get the chance of a word with Miss Mares-field, and when I
told her we were acting in the interests of David Stoker, she agreed to
meet me after work.  We fixed a rendezvous in the Pizza Palace of the
Parallelogram Shopping Mall, about


 eight miles from Badgershide Wood.  Her reason for choosing this
venue was, she said, that 'people were talking'.

At my meeting with Miss Maresfield, I formed a favourable impression of
her and think that, if the time should ever come, she'd make a good
witness.  She said she was very disappointed with David, who she
thought had gone back to his old criminal ways and ruined his life. She
was, however, extremely worried about his condition and, when pressed,
said she would see him again, and I feel she retains her affection for
him.

Her attitude to the Major was in marked contrast to the view of him
held by all the other witnesses.  When I first mentioned him she sighed
heavily and said, "Don't talk about him."  When I told her that he was
what I wanted her to talk about, she said he'd been a pest, a nuisance,
a bit of a joke at times, and at times a menace.  I asked if that meant
he had taken a fancy to her, and she said she would have described it
as 'besotted'.  He'd sent her flowers, presents, bits of jewellery that
had belonged to his family which didn't suit her and she had no use
for.  She said she'd been out with him once or twice but she'd got
tired of moving his hand off her knee.  "He even tried to stick his
tongue down my throat in the car and would have if I hadn't clenched my
teeth on him.  At his age it is just ridiculous."  His letters to her
became 'just disgusting', so she stopped opening them.  Quite recently
he'd telephoned her at work and told her he knew she'd marry him if it
wasn't for that 'bloody little crook' he'd seen her with.  She thought
that when he said that he was probably drunk, because she'd never told
him about Stoker and, as far as she knew, they'd never met.  She never
told Stoker about the Major's advances as she was afraid he'd go up to
the big house and make a scene, which would do her no good: she relied
on the Major's many friends of both sexes to get their hair styled at
Snippers.

I don't know how much this helps and I am not clear at the


 moment what further steps I can take.  I therefore await further
instructions and I enclose my account, which includes travel expenses
and a reasonable sum for entertaining at the Badger's Arms and the
Pizza Palace in the Parallelogram Shopping Mall.

(signed) F. I. G. Newton.  Member of the National Institute of Enquiry
Agents.

I put down Fig's report and yes, I thought, we're ready for trial.  I
had a great deal to say and I could hardly wait for an opportunity to
say it.

It was late, almost midnight, when I began my final speech.  I made it
to a Jury which included the snorer, the tooth-grinder and the serial
urinator, who stayed in his bed during the greater part of it.  I was
sufficiently confident of my case to allow Ted the screw on duty to
remove his earphones and listen from the public gallery.  Quietly and,
I believe, with perfect fairness, I outlined the prosecution case, the
facts which had appeared in all the newspapers, the story of an
outraged householder who was merely upholding the sacred principle that
an Englishman's home is his castle.

"Now I come," I spoke even more quietly, causing the Jury to listen
attentively as I lured them into taking another and totally different
view of the facts, 'to the case for the defence of David Stoker.  The
defence is not made easier by the fact that it is well known that he
had committed of fences in the past, indeed he has written about them
and spoken about them on television.  We are not trying him for his
past of fences and you must be even more vigilant to see that he is not
now, because of his past, convicted of a crime he didn't commit.

"The first thing that puzzled me was the report of the Scene of Crime
Officer who was in charge of taking fingerprints.


 There were, of course there were, Mr.  Stoker's fingerprints on the
old army pistol on the library table, but, extraordinarily enough,
Members of the Jury, nowhere else.  In the light of that, let us
consider how he got into the house.

"You will remember the kitchen window, broken and forced, things
knocked over by the kitchen sink, clear signs that someone had climbed
in that way.  But none of Mr.  Stoker's fingerprints!  Many of the
Major's fingerprints, of course that was to be expected, in his
kitchen.  But what is suggested here?  That Mr.  Stoker wore gloves? No
gloves were found on him or anywhere near the scene of the crime. And
remember, he was taken straight from the library floor to hospital. Do
you think he climbed in through the kitchen window and then carefully
wiped all the surfaces on which he might have left his prints?  Can you
picture that happening, Members of the Jury?  Is it within the realms
of probability?  Let us take this matter a little further.  There were
none of Mr.  Stoker's prints by the front door, none on the bell push,
none at all.  Does that, or does it not, Members of the Jury, support
the suggestion that the Major heard Mr.  Stoker's car arrive and park
at the back of the house, so he opened the front door to him?  Was Mr. 
Stoker a visitor the Major was expecting?  Could it be, could it just
possibly be, he was a visitor the Major had invited?  The Major has
said he never saw Mr.  Stoker before in his life.  Can you really
believe that, if he opened the door before Mr. Stoker had even rung the
bell?  Let us see, shall we, if we can find the facts that might
account for this.

"Mr.  Stoker undoubtedly visited Badgershide Wood on a number of
occasions to see his girlfriend, Dawn Maresfield, who worked in the
hairdresser's shop.  He stayed with her in her flat which was in the
town a few miles away, but you've


 heard that he sometimes drove her to work and picked her up again in
his car.  Now I have to give you a rather different picture of the
lovable and eccentric Major.  He was seriously sexually obsessed with
Dawn, and you'll forgive me if I take up a little more of your time by
reading an account of a conversation Miss Maresfield had with a highly
reputable private detective, a Mr.  Ferdinand Ian Gilmour Newton."
(Here Fig Newton's evidence was read to the Jury.)

"What picture have you in your minds now, Members of the Jury, of Major
Ben Dunkerton?  Is it not of an old man sexually obsessed with a young
woman almost to the point of insanity?  So obsessed that he starts to
give her the family jewellery, which she doesn't want, and writes her
letters so embarrassingly obscene that she stops reading them.  But
does he get more and more deeply convinced that she might, at last, be
tempted by his house and his wealth and agree to be his mistress,
perhaps his wife?  Only one thing, he was deluded enough to think,
stood in his way.  She has a lover, much younger and considerably more
attractive than the elderly Major, and moreover a man with a criminal
past whom she feels she can keep on the straight and narrow path of
virtue.  Does it need a great effort of your imagination, Members of
the Jury, to understand how the Major managed to convince himself that,
if only her lover was removed, Miss Dawn Maresfield might become
available to him?

"How did he set about it?  He had, we all have, read cases in the
papers of householders shooting at intruders and earning public
approval.  Did this outrageous plan begin to form in the obsessed, in
the by now mentally unbalanced, old man's mind?  We all have to grow
old, Members of the Jury, but we may hope to come to terms with the
limitations of old age and not, in a vain effort to recover some of the
joys of youth,


 commit desperate and criminal acts.  So let us look again at the
evidence and see if we can see behind the carefully calculated pretence
and discover exactly what Major Ben Dunkerton did out of frustrated
love and irrational jealousy.

"First he met Mr.  Stoker when he was walking in the woods.  You may
think that he had Mr.  Stoker under observation for some time and his
plan to obliterate his rival had been carefully worked out.  You'll
remember he asked Mr.  Stoker about the attraction of Badgershide Wood,
a question which might well have had a reference to the charms of Dawn.
He then invented a story about a famous film director wanting to meet
Mr.  Stoker, a ploy which had no point except to lure my client to the
Major's house after ten-thirty on a particular night.  He risked this
pack of lies because he didn't expect David to live to tell the tale.

"What did the Major do on the night of the visit, Members of the Jury?
Consider this as a possibility with me.  Did he break his kitchen
window?  Did he, carefully and deliberately, create evidence of a
break-in?  Then, when he heard the car, did he open his front door and
welcome in the man he was prepared to kill?

"It all went quite easily.  He took Mr.  Stoker into the library, and
showed him the old army pistol he had brought home from the war and
never bothered to get a licence for.  He told Mr.  Stoker to handle the
weapon, so his fingerprints might be left on it.  And then, Members of
the Jury, he left the room to fetch his shotgun.

"None of us can know, not one of us should ever know, what it feels
like to commit a murder.  Was the Major afraid, or triumphant, or
filled with nervous excitement?  What it was that caused his shotgun to
go off too soon we shall never know.  Did his old finger press the
trigger before he'd taken


 aim?  Did he see Mr.  Stoker duck down behind the table and try to
follow him like a moving bird?  All we know is that he shot his rival
for Dawn's affection, but, happily, he didn't kill him.  His victim is
here, in the bed beside me, still alive to tell you his story.

"Did this happen, Members of the Jury?  Is that an account which fits
all the facts of this case?  If you think it's true you will, of
course, acquit.  But if you only think it might very well be true, if
as a thoughtful and fair-minded Jury you cannot reject the possibility,
then you must also acquit because the prosecution won't have satisfied
you beyond reasonable doubt.

"Members of the Jury, this case has only occupied a short part of your
lives.  Perhaps an hour of late-night entertainment to take the place
of the telly or the headphones.  You will soon forget all about
Badgershide Wood, and Snippers hairdresser's, and the conversation in
the Pizza Palace.  But for David Stoker, whom I represent, this case
represents the whole of his life.  Is he to go free, or is he to be
forced, by the devilish plot of a mad old man, back to his misspent
younger life of prison and crime?  It is his life I now leave, Members
of the Jury, in your hands, confident that he will hear from you, in
the fullness of time, those blessed words "Not guilty" which, more
effectively than any surgery, will give life back to David Stoker."

Then with a great flood of relief, I lay back on the pillows and closed
my eyes.  My final speech was over and I could do no more.  The
decision now had to be taken by other beds.  It was the best moment of
an anxious trial.  As I lay resting, I heard the sound of distant
voices.  Verdicts came from the snorer, the tooth-grinder and many
others.  "Not guilty," they said, and "Not guilty' they all voted. Even
Ted the screw

2IO


 at the end of the chain piped up with "I don't reckon David did it."
So the trial in the Princess Margaret ward was over.  Would I ever do
the case down the Bailey?  Would I ever repeat that closing speech to a
real Jury, up and dressed, in a real Jury box?  I felt sleep drifting
over me, dulling my senses and darkening my world.  Should I ever .. .
Who knows?  For the moment all I can say is, "The defence rests."



Sir John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist and former practising
barrister.  His novels include the Leslie Titmuss trilogy about the
rise of an ambitious Tory MP: Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained and
The Sound of Trumpets.  He has also written three volumes' of
autobiography, including most recently The Summer of a Dormouse, which
was published to great critical acclaim and became a bestseller in
2000.  All these books are available in Penguin.

Sir John lives in what was once his father's house in the Chilterns. He
received a knighthood for his services to the arts in the 1998 Queen's
birthday honours list.