Rumpole and the Primrose Path (19 page)

‘Possibly.’ At my age you steer clear of the quack in case he tells you you’ve got something you didn’t want to know about. Of course, I didn’t tell She Who Must Be Obeyed that. She is the fearless sort, who positively enjoys check-ups. ‘There’s been a considerable pressure of work lately. I may have this rather sensational murder case.’

‘Don’t worry about murders for the moment, Rumpole. You should concentrate on keeping yourself alive. Doctor McClintock asked me if you seemed to be short of breath after taking exercise.’

‘Well, you know the answer to that. I never take exercise.’

‘Exactly! Peter McClintock was deeply shocked. He wouldn’t believe it at first. But I swore it was true.’

‘And you were right, Hilda. Absolutely right.’

‘Peter insists that you should take some sort of exercise.’

‘Quite right! I’ll remember that. I do take a brisk stroll round to the tobacconist in Fleet Street to buy my small cigars.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish, Rumpole! What the Doctor recommends in your case is some light bicycling.’

‘Oh, I’m afraid that’s impossible.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! Of course it’s not impossible.’

‘I’m afraid it is. To go bicycling nowadays you have to wear a hat shaped like a peanut. That’s enforced by law, I believe. And rubber shorts. Black with a sort of white line down them. I mean I couldn’t possibly turn up in Chambers dressed like that. Besides which I might be run into by a bus and asphyxiated by petrol fumes. I gave up bicycling long before I did the Penge Bungalow Murders.’

‘You’re not going to bicycle out on the street, Rumpole. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that.’

‘Where do you want me to do it, then? On some sort of bicycle racetrack?’

‘Of course not. You will be on a stationary bicycle. It won’t be going anywhere.’

‘What on earth’s the point of that, then? Has his anxiety about my health caused the good Doctor McClintock to lose his marbles?’

‘The point of it, Rumpole, is to help you to train yourself up, to lose some of that unnecessary weight. To open up your tubes and help your breathing. To make you sweat a little and get to know your own body. I’ve taken up joint married membership at the Lysander Health Club in Iverna Gardens. They do special terms for married couples. Two for the price of one. They’ve got exercise bikes, of course, as well as all the other equipment.’

‘All the other equipment’ sounded, I thought, extremely sinister.

‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go,’ I told Hilda as I made for the door. ‘A conference in Brixton.’

At that moment prison sounded a far more attractive proposition than the Lysander Health Club.

 

‘If they could find ten Just Men in Sodom and Gomorrah, Mr Rumpole, the Lord promised not to send down fire.

They couldn’t be found, Mr Rumpole. So the cities of the plain were destroyed by fire and brimstone. You remember that?’

‘Not personally. I may be getting on a bit, but -’

‘They looked, but ten Just Men couldn’t be found.’

‘Are you saying that there are less than ten Just Men in Greater London? Please don’t tell the Jury that. There’ll be twelve of them and I’m sure they’ll like to think of themselves as Just Men. And Women, of course.’

Neville Skeate looked at me as though he couldn’t understand a word I was saying. He was tall, colourless, with a pale face, glasses, and large, bony hands kept folded on his lap. He looked what he was, a minor clerk in a government department, someone no one noticed or paid much attention to. He went home, I suspected, to a lonely bedsit, a meal to reheat bought from the supermarket on the way home. A man with few relatives, and a friend or two from the office, he was apparently nondescript and inoffensive. And yet when he spoke, a disturbingly rich and deep voice came out of him - a voice capable of issuing commands to the few dotty adherents of the Ninth Day Elamites. It was a voice, and this was the most alarming thing about him, of passionate conviction.

‘I shall tell the Jury that the slime pits of this city shall be destroyed utterly and sinners shall taste death.’

‘If that’s what you’re going to say,’ I looked at him with as much detachment as I could manage, ‘I’d better keep you out of the witness box.’

Bonny Bernard had brought me the Ninth Day Elamite like a birthday present which I would unwrap with eager anticipation. He thought I would be overjoyed by a brief in a sensational murder which was bound to hit the headlines.

‘Legal Aid said we could either have a QC or a Senior Junior,’ Bernard told me. ‘I said we would settle for you as the Senior Junior, Mr Rumpole. Well, it’ll save them a bit of money and I was sure you’d jump at the offer.’

‘That was good of you. Extremely good.’ I had read the papers and wasn’t sure that I ought not to be more wary of Bonny bearing gifts.

‘I knew you’d be grateful. A case like this, I told your clerk Henry, will bring the snap back into Mr Rumpole’s celery. It’ll do him more good than all the tonics and treatments in the world.’

Would it? Perhaps I
was
getting past it, but I couldn’t open the papers in
Skeate
without a feeling of almost unbearable sadness at the senselessness of the murdered beauty, the loneliness of the waiting child and the terrible obsession of the clerk whose mind had been turned to hatred disguised as religion. Civilization may not have come all that far, I thought, but at least we no longer use fire and brimstone as the answer to unconventional sex or tasteless entertainment. My first thought had been a plea of insanity, or at least diminished responsibility, but the doctors could find no recognized mental illness. No doubt Neville Skeate had an unfortunate tendency to take the Scriptures too literally, they said, but this was a view shared by creationists all over the world, and they couldn’t all be certified insane.

The most encouraging way of approaching Neville Skeate’s case was to consider the prosecution evidence. There were plenty of witnesses to the death threats directed particularly at Pamela outside the Candy Crocodile, but none of the act itself. He had been identified as having been often seen on Hampstead Heath, where it seems he went not to run for exercise but to denounce, whenever he could, the male homosexuals who met, and occasionally made love, in certain remote and wooded areas. He agreed that he had once or twice seen Pamela jogging, but denied he had ever accosted or threatened her on the heath. When the trainers and tracksuit trousers he wore on such rural visits were inspected, minute particles of sandy soil similar to that where Pamela was found were discovered clinging to the soles and sides of his shoes. So the case against Neville Skeate seemed to come down to his threats specifically directed at the dead woman and his possible presence at the scene of the crime.

‘You called her the Whore of Babylon?’ I asked him when we met in Brixton Prison.

‘On many occasions, when I was outside the house of slime pits.’

‘You promised her an early death?’

‘I did. And my promise was fulfilled.’

‘Because you killed her?’

Did I have a hope, contrary to all my principles as a defending hack, that he would admit it and have to plead guilty and we would soon be rid of him? But, for better or for worse, we remained in business as he said, ‘No, Mr Rumpole. I never killed her.’

‘Would you be prepared to say you greatly regret her death?’ I’d hoped for some reasonable words he might repeat to the Jury; but I hoped in vain.

‘Do I regret the death of weeds that are thrown on the bonfire? No, I don’t regret her death, Mr Rumpole. In fact, I rejoice in it.’

‘You think she deserved to die because she went, what do they call it, lap dancing?’

‘She behaved as I named her. The Whore of Babylon.’

‘How do you know? I’ve never seen anyone lap dancing. Have you?’

‘Of course I haven’t.’

‘So you would have condemned her to death for something you know absolutely nothing about. Is that what you’re really saying?’

‘I know very well what she did. She revelled in it. That’s what I know. She revelled in the sins of the city.’

‘So she had to die?’

‘Not my decision, Mr Rumpole. The decision of one greater than I.’

‘What the prosecution are saying is that you might have taken her life in your hands and strangled Pamela.’

‘I might have, Mr Rumpole. I might have done anything. But those above me had other plans for her. That is all I have to say.’

I looked at my client. What on earth was I to do about him? I had never, in all the long years I had spent round the criminal Courts, come across a customer for whom I felt more good, old-fashioned, honest loathing. So the answer to my question was, of course, that I must defend him to the very best of my ability.

 

There seemed to me to have been a time, in my boyhood, when bicycling was a source of pleasure. Not struggling up a hill, of course, not pedalling through rain with frozen fingers on a slithery road, but coasting down a gradual incline on a spring morning with a light breeze behind you and the three-speed Raleigh ticking happily. This was an experience to be ranked with the first gulp of Chateau Thames Embankment after a satisfactory verdict for a grateful client. But bicycling in the Lysander Club was a different story. There was no fresh breeze, no bright green leaves of spring, merely air conditioning, a pervading smell of massage oil and piped Caribbean music. What was worse was that after the most prolonged and industrious pedalling you found yourself going nowhere at all. It was a most frustrating experience, only to be compared to conducting a trial in an empty courtroom, with no Judge, no Jury, and absolutely no end in view.

There was a little clock on the handlebars of the bike, which I was instructed to keep flickering above a certain mark. It was, I’m afraid, dropping like my spirits, as my journey began to feel like a long path uphill to infinity, when a voice behind me called, ‘Well done, Rumpole! We’ll have you in the Tour de France yet.’

I turned to see Luci with an ‘i’, wearing thick leggings as though equipped for a hike through Outer Mongolia.

‘Luci! You’re not a fellow sufferer at the Lysander Club?’ It was a Saturday morning, and an odd way, I thought, for anyone, including me, to spend their day off work.

‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’ She had taken to repeating these three affirmations rapidly, like machine-gun fire. ‘I persuaded Hilda to join at the last Chambers party. We have such fun here together, whenever I can get time off.’

‘Fun?’ I was, I must confess, puzzled. ‘You have fun with Hilda?’

‘Of course. Don’t you?’

‘In a manner of speaking. She went off shopping. She said she’d feed me on nothing but organically grown rocket salad and vegetarian rissoles unless I promised to spend at least an hour in the gym. I suppose you might call that “fun”.’

‘It’s because she loves you, Rumpole. She wants you to keep fit, now that it seems you’re not going to die. Come on, I’ll buy you a coffee.’

I had dismounted, perhaps in the hope of some such invitation. The bike didn’t need parking, or pushing round to the sheds, and I left it standing, ready for the next traveller with nowhere to go.

I sat with Luci in a small bar where people in white dressing-gowns were whispering into their mobile phones and reading newspapers. I was trying to grapple with a new thought Luci had put in my mind. I had assumed (was it too rashly?) that Hilda wanted to send me bicycling because that would prevent me slinking off to Pommeroy’s under the pretence of having to pick up a brief in Chambers, or as an exercise in the power of her will to unfix my determination. Had I, for too long, totally misunderstood She Who Must Be Obeyed? I drank coffee that was so weak it needed a long go on the bicycle machine, and changed the subject. ‘All going well in the Marketing of Chambers, is it?’ It had to be one of the dullest questions I had ever asked.

‘All right. Henry still looks at me as though I was in there to pinch the cheques and insult the solicitors. Sam Ballard’s as charming as always ...’

I thought about that. Could someone who found Soapy Sam charming be trusted in her interpretation of Hilda’s motives?

‘Erskine-Brown’s started to hug me for longer than it takes to show corporate solidarity and wants to take me out to lunch. Oh, hello, Dermot. You’re looking good!’

The man she addressed as Dermot had a red face, against which his hair and moustache seemed as white as the driven snow. He was wearing scarlet shorts and a T-shirt which said, ‘My wife went to Eilat and all she bought me was this lousy T-shirt’. I couldn’t tell from a casual glance whether he was as good as Luci thought. He may have been a fraudster with an engaging appearance.

‘Hilda’s not here.’ Dermot stated an obvious fact.

‘Not today,’ Luci told him. ‘This is Hilda’s husband. Rumpole, this is Dermot. He does the sport on Thamesway Radio.’

‘Pity, that!’ He gave me a quick smile, a flash of pure white dentures. ‘We have a lot of fun when Hilda’s around, don’t we, Luci?’

‘A few laughs, yes.’

‘A few laughs?’ I was longing for further particulars, but Dermot, looking at me as though my grey flannels and striped shirt were in some way humorous, said, ‘Oh, you’re the legal beagle, aren’t you? The chap who defends all those crooks.’

‘He’s defending that man for the murder on Hampstead Heath,’ Luci told him.

‘That lovely girl!’ Dermot looked at me with stern disapproval. ‘And that creepy little bastard strangled her!’

‘I’m not sure doing that case does much good for the image of Chambers.’ Luci was equally disapproving.

‘Of course it does. It shows the world that even creepy little bastards need defending, just as much as beautiful girls, sports commentators or anyone else. And the creepier they are, the more they need help. They’re innocent until they’re proved guilty.’ I had said it all before, but I’d go on saying it to anyone who didn’t understand.