Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

Table of Contents

 

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 à la Carte
Rumpole on Trial
The Best of Rumpole
Rumpole and the Angel of Death
Rumpole Rests His Case
Rumpole and the Primrose Path

Under the Hammer

 

With Love and Lizards
(with Penelope Mortimer)

 

Clinging to the Wreckage
Murderers and Other Friends
The Summer of a Dormouse
Where There's a Will

 

In Character
Character Parts

 

Plays
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
Naked Justice
Hock and Soda Water

Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 2004

All rights reserved

Publisher's Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

CIP data available.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67926-1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

For Penny

Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:

Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper'

1

‘Claude Erskine-Brown told my pupil she had extraordinarily nice legs.'

‘What're her legs like, then? Rather gnarled tree trunks, are they?'

‘Don't be ridiculous, Rumpole! Lala Ingolsby is a very good-looking girl.'

‘With a name like Lala Ingolsby I should have thought she wouldn't mind having her legs complimented.'

‘She wouldn't mind! That's what you all say, don't you, Rumpole? Just like a man! Anyway, I have reported Erskine-Brown's conduct to the Chair of the Society of Women Barristers.'

The speaker was Mizz Liz Probert, my one-time pupil and in many ways a helpful and hard-working barrister, when she was not determined to throw the book at Claude Erskine-Brown. He was being tried
in absentia
, having left early to catch about twenty-four hours of the Ring Cycle at Covent Garden.

‘Through the Chair!' Luci Gribble, our chambers Director of Marketing and Administration, spoke urgently to Soapy Sam Ballard, our Head of Chambers.

He looked both pained and startled, as though this ‘Through the Chair' form of address involved some kind of physical attack and penetration.

‘Through the Chair!' Luci (who spelled her name with an inexplicable ‘i') repeated. ‘It will be no good at all for our chambers' image if we get a reputation in the Society of Women Barristers for acts of sexual harassment.'

It's rare indeed that I am present at chambers meetings, held under the chairmanship of Soapy Sam Ballard and dealing often with such vital matters as the expenditure on instant coffee in the clerk's room or the importance of leaving a signed bit of paper on the library shelves when borrowing a book. But these were the dog days in the cold, wet and bleak start of the year, the criminals of England seemed to have all gone off for a winter break to Marbella or the Seychelles, and I had wandered into Ballard's room as an alternative to yet another struggle with the crossword puzzle.

‘I suppose I must have words with Erskine-Brown on the subject.' Soapy Sam sounded despondent, as though he were being asked to take immediate action about the condition of the downstairs lavatory in Equity Court.

‘You could tell Miss Ingolsby that if nothing worse happens to her, in her life in the law, she'll have been remarkably lucky. Come to think of it, at about her age I was doing the Penge Bungalow Murders, alone and without a leader.'

As I said this, the chambers meeting and all its concerns seemed to fade away. For a moment I was back long ago. I remembered myself sitting in an interview room under the Old Bailey, looking into the terrified eyes of a young man who had realized that the great engine of the criminal law was intent on driving him towards a grim execution shed and ceremoniously breaking his neck.

Then Luci Gribble startled me with an extraordinary question. ‘What on earth,' she asked, without a note of shame in her voice, ‘were the Penge Bungalow Murders?'

I was, I have to confess, shaken by such ignorance of one of the most remarkable trials of the post-war years; but in all fairness I had to concede that Luci Gribble was a lay person with no legal training. The story would take too long if I went into it myself and so I appointed Liz Probert to act for me.

‘You tell her, Liz.'

‘I'm not sure . . .' For the first time in the meeting, the politically correct Mizz Probert was caught off her guard. ‘I'm not sure I ever knew the facts,' she astounded me by admitting. ‘Before my time, of course.'

‘Ballard?' I appealed to our so-called Head of Chambers.

‘I'm not sure I ever knew what went on in the Penge bungalows either,' he said, as though one of my greatest legal triumphs were something that just slips the mind, like where you put the bus ticket. ‘I've heard you speak of it, Rumpole, of course, on many occasions.
You
clearly remember it.'

‘Old men forget,' I gave the meeting a well-deserved thought from
Henry V
, ‘and all shall be forgot. Yet I'll remember with advantages what feats I did that day.'

Of course, I altered the quotation a little to suit my purpose. But it was then that I realized it was high time I added the full story of the Penge Bungalow affair to my memoirs. So much of history is being lost. Young people nowadays are vague as to the identity of Hitler and Churchill, and although the murders at Penge were once headline material, the details of that remarkable case may have become lost in the mists of time.

 

We're looking back, down the long corridor of history, to the early 1950s. The war had been over for several years, but it still seemed part of our lives. Films featured life and death in the skies during the Battle of Britain, and heroes or heroines of the Resistance. It was a period when those who had enjoyed an unheroic war continued to feel pangs of guilt, and we all congratulated ourselves on having survived the Blitz, bread rationing, the Labour chancellor telling us all to ‘tighten our belts' and clothes on coupons.

It was, in many ways, an age of obedience when the government, the royal family and judges were treated with what was sometimes ill-deserved respect. It was also the time when the only sentence available for murder was death.

My own war had been unheroic. I had spent some years in the RAF ground staff (where I was well known as ‘Grounded Rumpole') and, when hostilities ended, I had taken a law degree at Keble College, Oxford. As learning law in those days entailed an intimate knowledge of the Roman rules for freeing a slave and the rights of ‘turfage' over common land (scraps of information which I have never found of the slightest use in the Uxbridge Magistrates' Court) and as I never at Keble experienced the excitement of rising on my then young hind legs to address a jury, I turned in a fairly honourable third-class degree. It has always been my view that knowing too much law is not only no help but also a considerable handicap to the courtroom advocate. Juries, on the whole, have little interest in freeing slaves or the Roman law governing the ownership of chariots.

My tutor at Keble had been Septimus Porter. I had loved his shy and nervous, but sometimes unexpectedly liberated, daughter dearly. In fact we were engaged to be married, but this engagement had to be broken off because of Ivy Porter's early death during the cold winter and fuel shortages after the war. Septimus Porter found me a place in the chambers of C. H. Wystan, QC, the father of that Hilda Wystan who was to become known to me, during a long life of argument and dispute both in and away from the courtroom, as She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Wystan's importance, therefore, both in the events surrounding the Penge Bungalow affair and in my future career and life, cannot be exaggerated.

2

The appearance of C. H. Wystan always made me think of some harmless crustacean, perhaps a lobster who had been snatched from a peaceful existence at the bottom of the sea and plunged into boiling water. His face and bald head were of a uniform pink, his mouth was turned down as though in sudden shock and his small beady eyes gave him a look of pained surprise. When he spoke he often moved his arms in the slow, disconnected way that lobsters have. But I have no wish to be overly critical of my future father-in-law. It was not after all his fault that he had, to my eye at least, the appearance of something that might be cooled down and served up with a hard-boiled egg and a dab of mayonnaise.