Rumpole and the Primrose Path (14 page)

These thoughts were uppermost in my mind at that moment, not only because of what Hilda told me, but because I had become involved in a case about the denial of human rights, and the protection of the privacy of a very rich man indeed. Sadly, I was not on the side of the big money brief in that case, nor was I the gallant defender of privacy. I was briefed by the
Chivering Argus
which had, in the circumstances set out in my instructions, played the unattractive and unsympathetic role of a Peeping Tom.

 

Sir Michael Smedley was to many people the ideal businessman, who had been able to pull himself up by what are still, in some relentlessly market-oriented circles, known as his bootstraps. (This phrase ignores the fact that no one except mountaineers and footballers wears boots nowadays or has any idea where the straps are kept.) Born into a family of old-fashioned union officials and shop stewards in Coventry, he devoted his time out of school to begging or buying old bicycles, repairing them expertly and selling them on at a small profit. In his teens he was doing the same thing with motorbikes and cars. By the time he was twenty, he’d opened a secondhand car business, which surpassed secondhand car businesses all over the Midlands. It was then, it seems, that he took a deep breath and surveyed the scene for a new field for his undoubted entrepreneurial skills.

He came to the conclusion that while the car industry might be in decline, going to bed at night was a habit never likely to go out of style. Accordingly, he took over some bankrupt motorworks for the manufacture of the first Smedley Slumberwell beds, which, helped on by some vaguely erotic advertising, became bestsellers in a mass of what had already become known as ‘furniture outlets’. Mike Smedley was something of a celebrity, constantly in the news, calling on the government to do more to help business, and on schools to teach ‘entrepreneurial skills’ instead of such pointless subjects as the plays of Shakespeare or the causes of the Civil War. So he had, unlike Rumpole, appeared in the newspapers as Profile of the Week, done
Desert Island Discs
and various discussion programmes. He had, as he constantly told his listeners, no political affiliations; all he was anxious to do was to serve the public and make sure that as many ofus as possible were tucked up safely at night in a Smedley Slumberwell superspring, shaped-to-your-body bed. His business career reached a peak when the government, faced with a rapidly increasing demand for beds in a number of new National Health hospitals, awarded the contract to Slumberwell in the face of stiff competition from other bed-makers. And there was no suggestion that the politically immaculate Sir Mike had made the smallest contribution to party funds.

None of the above, however, explains how I had come to be briefed by the
Chivering Argus
when the full force of the Smedley millions had been turned against it, following a writ alleging a breach of confidence and the invasion of Sir Mike’s privacy by publishing a photograph of him on holiday in the Caribbean.

 

‘Do you do human rights cases, Mr Rumpole?’

‘All the time.’

I had immediately recognized the voice on the telephone as that of Crozier, the solicitor who had instructed Ballard and me, and finally me alone, in the defence of the Police Commander.

‘I was deeply impressed by your handling of Bob Durden’s case. He’s very grateful, by the way. So when our local paper got a writ from Sir Michael’s solicitors, I thought of you at once.’

‘And you couldn’t have thought of anyone better.’ I was determined to give a passable imitation of someone who had the law of breach of confidence and the European Convention on Human Rights at their fingertips. ‘These privacy cases can be tricky if not handled by someone experienced in that particular branch of the law.’

It turned out that Sir Mike was a local power in Chivering, having bought a large house just where the suburban spread met an area of comfortable and well-cultivated countryside. There he grew hedges, reclaimed ponds, produced organic crops and was generally regarded as a model landlord. He also bought up a chain of local newspapers which dealt with local weddings, funerals and garden fêtes and advertised, in many brightly coloured supplements, the extraordinary comfort of Smedley Slumberwell beds.

His one failure in the neighbourhood had been to buy the
Chivering Argus,
a paper edited by a member of the family that had founded it in the 1920S.

‘I don’t like him, Mr Rumpole. If you put me into the witness box I’ll have to admit that I don’t like Sir Mike at all. He’s always either threatening to kill my paper with his competition or trying to bribe me to sell it to him. But we’ve got a loyal readership. Not a huge one, but loyal. So it’s no use him trying to throw his weight about.’

If it ever came to a physical encounter Mr Rankin, the editor, would have very little weight to throw. He was a small, bird-like man, with bright eyes and a head cocked to one side, who sat up very straight with his arms folded as though he had just fluttered down and alighted on the edge of my client’s chair. He had been brought to my room in Chambers by the ecclesiastical-looking Crozier, sniffed around the place in a mood of apparent excitement, asked for the history of the mementoes of old murder trials, and when I had satisfied his curiosity, started to talk about his case as though a hefty claim for damages was no more serious that a slight sniffle or an irritating draught.

‘That’s why we published the photograph. Just a bit of mischief. I’ll freely admit that. Our way of getting our own back, or what have you. Just so our readers could have a giggle at Sir High and Mighty Mike, the local celebrity who thinks everything’s for sale.’

‘You’re saying you published the photograph just to get a laugh?’ I was beginning to get the message. The editor was going to prove a highly unsatisfactory witness. Not only his sense of humour but his language seemed to have come out of some long-defunct boys’ comic. ‘Just a July jape, you see, Mr Rumpole. And then, ouch! We’re landed with this writ.’

‘You say your nephew took the photograph?’

‘Certainly. Young Jim. He’d gone to the Caribbean in his gap year, after school.’

‘And Sir Michael has a holiday home in St Lucia,’ Crozier reminded me.

‘Of course,’ I told him, ‘I‘d’ve expected nothing less.’

‘Jim was working in the Sugar and Spice Bar when the Great Big Cheese himself took the whole place over for a party with his chums.’

‘A
private
party, Mr Rumpole. And he made the management sign a contract - no photographs, no press, no divulging of the guest list ... They agreed to complete confidentiality.’ Crozier seemed to take some sort of gloomy delight in the difficulties of the case.

‘Of course, no one realized Jim knew all about Sir Mike, and that he had his camera with him.’

‘The young man was interested in taking pictures of wildlife on the island,’ Crozier filled in the details.

‘So he was all prepared to photograph wildlife in the Sugar and Spice Bar?’ I asked.

‘He thought it a great wheeze and managed very cleverly.’ Rankin seemed understandably proud of his nephew. ‘Of course, it was quite late and the party had been going on some time and they’d all had a skinful. And they’d fixed up a sort of swirling light over the dancers, so no one noticed the flash.’

‘And young Jim,’ I felt I had to ask the pertinent question, ‘apart from his talent for snapping local fauna, did he know that the management had signed a contract, no photographs allowed?’

‘Oh, he knew that.’ The editor was smiling happily. ‘But he did it as a prank. He knew how much his picture would delight his old uncle.’

‘And as a prank his old uncle published this picture in his paper?’

‘You’ve got it, Mr Rumpole.’ Rankin was delighted. ‘How could I resist the temptation?’

‘I really don’t know. But if you could have you might have saved yourself an action for breach of confidentiality, invasion of privacy and all the trimmings.’

I picked up the photograph and looked at it again, but it had got no better. Sir Michael Smedley, the great business tycoon, was a large, beefy-looking individual, with his hair brushed forward as though surrounding a monk’s tonsure. He was grinning happily and strutting in some sort of celebratory dance, clearly enjoying his private party. His dancing partner, whom I took to be a darkly beautiful local girl, was dancing with much finger-snapping and flashing of white teeth. She was naked from the waist up and her sizeable brassiere, in that golden moment immortalized by young Jim’s camera, was draped about Sir Michael Smedley’s ears.

 

‘Rumpole, I hear you’re doing an invasion of privacy case.’

‘Breach of confidence. Invasion of privacy. Outrageous infringement of human rights. Yes, Claude. That’s the sort of practice I carry on these days. I’ve left the petty larcenies and the public-bar affrays to Old Bailey hacks like you.’ I didn’t tell Erskine-Brown that I had been briefed by the
Chivering Argus
because the paper now faced bankruptcy as a result of Sir Mike’s charge and couldn’t afford a fashionable silk, or that, so far as I could see at the moment, there was little or no defence to the tycoon’s deadly writ.

‘I assume,’ Erskine-Brown had come into my room wearing what was, even for him, a peculiarly doleful expression, ‘that you know quite a bit by now of the law concerning the invasion of privacy?’

‘I have that at my fingertips,’ I assured him. ‘Is there anything wrong with your privacy, Claude?’

‘It has, I’m afraid, Rumpole, been seriously invaded.’ With which he sank into my client’s chair, no longer a reasonably confident QC, but a man like any other, in desperate need of reassuring legal advice. ‘I came to you as an expert in this class of case.’

‘Then you’ve come to the right man, Claude. So fire away. What’s the problem?’

‘The problem, Rumpole, is, I’m very much afraid, Mercy Grandison.’

I considered the matter for a while, and then I asked what seemed to me to be an essential question. ‘Who the hell is Mercy Grandison?’

‘Rumpole, I can’t believe it!’

‘You can’t believe what?’

‘That you don’t know who Mercy Grandison is.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You’ve never watched
Shopping Mall?
’

‘Never.’

‘She’s the one who runs the Boutique at the end of the Mall. You know, the one who broke up her marriage with Barry from the Sock Shop and had such a ghastly time with Bertrand from the Bistro des Voyageurs.’

‘Enormously interesting, Claude. But how does any of that threaten your privacy?’

‘Shopping Mall
doesn’t, but Mercy Grandison does.’

‘An actress?’

‘And author. That’s the terrible thing, Rumpole. She’s got a book coming out next month. It’s been advertised in the
Telegraph.’

‘A history of shopping?’

‘Unfortunately not. It’s her life story -
A Wandering Star.
“How Mercy Grandison, born Mary Grimes, sixth daughter of a Wisbech plumber, rose to become Queen of the Soaps. In this touching memoir, Mercy reveals the heartbreaks behind the glitter of show business.”’ Erskine-Brown had pulled a crumpled cutting from his wallet and put it, I thought reverently, on my desk. I had to confess I still didn’t see what the bothered QC was worrying about.

‘She reveals the heartbreaks, Rumpole.’

‘What’s that got to do with you?’

There was a pause, during which a certain amount of wrestling for the soul of Erskine-Brown seemed to be taking place. When the struggle was over he allowed himself to speak. ‘I’d better confess to you, Rumpole.’

‘You probably should, if you want my advice.’

‘It was years ago. I’d gone up to Grimsby to do a lengthy fraud.’

‘That’s forgivable.’

‘And one evening I went to the threatre. The local Rep. I went to see
Private Lives
by Noel Coward. A young girl in a white dress came out on a moonlit balcony.’

‘In Grimsby?’

‘No, the South of France! I was just totally knocked out, Rumpole. Stunned, I suppose ... I made a complete fool of myself. I waited for her at the stage door. We went out for supper every night for the rest of the week. In the end, I asked her back to the Trusthouse. I’m telling you all this because I need your help desperately. She told me she thought I was “rather sweet”.’

‘There’s no accounting for tastes’ is what I might have said, but I didn’t. Instead I asked, ‘So what happened exactly?’

‘It
happened.’

‘It?’

‘Yes, it. I have to tell you, Rumpole, it was one of the most important things in my life! The next morning we said goodbye on Grimsby Station. But I still think about it. When there’s nothing in Court, and Philly’s away on circuit, or when life seems completely uneventful, I think about her, Rumpole. I get a great deal of quiet pleasure from thinking about Mercy. And I’m very sure you’d do the same.’

‘I take it you met her from time to time, after your night in the Trusthouse?’

‘Never again, Rumpole. Not ever.’ The fellow had returned to his memories as though he had left me to take a bath. He was luxuriating in the warm water of his past, and I only got snatches of it, reminiscences through the bathroom door.

‘So it was a last goodbye?’

‘I’ll never forget it. On Grimsby Station. You see, I had just got married to Philly. It was a long time ago, of course, before we had the children ...’

‘And the learned Judge knows nothing about it?’

‘Nothing, Rumpole. But she’s going to find out when Mercy’s book is serialized in the
Daily Post,
which Philly demolishes at breakfast.’

‘And you don’t think she’ll be best pleased?’

‘So soon after we were married? She’ll bring it up every time we have an argument. She’ll tell me she can never trust me again. She’ll ...’ Here his small store of language seemed to have run out. ‘She’ll never let me forget it, Rumpole.’