Rumpole and the Primrose Path (7 page)

In view of the respect Hilda had shown for her New Year’s resolution, I did my best to stick to mine. I held open doors, rose from my seat in the Underground; I even, in a moment of temporary aberration, lifted my hat to an elderly male Judge, who looked at me as though I had gone harmlessly insane. In due course, I turned up at the charity dinner of Urchins Anonymous, a glittering occasion in a City Livery Hall (the Ancient Order of Button-makers), and as we sipped champagne under the chandeliers, and I saw many cheerful pink faces over so many stretched white shirt fronts, and so many female necks - some, I have no doubt, rejuvenated by tactful surgery - decorated with rows of pearls, and as I looked up at the portraits of so many well-fed Masters of the Button-makers, I thought of the ten-year-old girl whose bedroom was the church steps, and the sleeping boy with a dog for a hot-water bottle. I supposed, after all, that the money raised by lobster salad and rack of lamb, Château Talbot and Rumpole’s old jokes was of more use to children in flight from abusive stepfathers, missing mothers or even the police than no money at all.

It was over the champagne and canapes that I saw her, a woman not to be outdone by any of them in the matter of pearls on the neck, her black dress revealing an expanse of white back. The contrast was emphasized by a white lock in her otherwise raven hair. She came up to me, smiling, and was introduced by the Director of UA.

‘Mr Rumpole, this is Marcia Endersley. One of our tireless voluntary workers. She organizes our urchin outings.’

‘Oh, but I recognize Mr Rumpole.’ The Endersley smile was charming, her voice low and vibrating with amusement. ‘He offered me his seat, when I was bringing the urchins back from the Harry Potter film.’

‘And you wouldn’t take it,’ I remembered.

‘I thought your need was probably greater than mine. I hear you’re going to give us some of your legal jokes. I’m sure they’ll go down terribly well.’

She was smiling at me as she said it, but I had the distinct feeling that she was, in some obscure and subtle way, taking the piss.

 

Fashions in crime are as changeable as the length of skirts, popular music or the food in so-called smart restaurants. Every year or so, the government picks a favourite crime, which, so it is said, is likely to rot the foundations of society and cause universal anarchy. It regularly promises to ‘crack down’ on the offence of the day, even to the extent of mandatory life sentences. When I was a young white-wig it was frauds on the Post Office and the stealing of stamps, then it was the trashing of telephone kiosks. Later, spraying graffiti on the walls of multi-storey car parks and high-rise flats was temporarily regarded as worse than manslaughter. At other moments of recent history it has been mugging, stealing mobile telephones and the theft of expensive cars.

At that time, after I had emerged from the dreaded Primrose Path Home, the crime of the day was nicking articles from passengers on the Underground. The opportunities for theft were numerous down the Tube, and ever more rarely interrupted by the arrival of trains. In the crowds that packed every platform it was easy to deprive the waiting customers of their handbags, wallets and detachable jewellery. All this had led to many stern warnings from the Home Secretary and instructions to Judges to treat Underground theft as ranking somewhere between matricide and High Treason in the hit list of high crimes and misdemeanours.

‘Theft of a wallet in an Underground station, Mr Rumpole,’ our clerk Henry said when he handed me the brief. I received it with no high hopes of an easy victory or a lenient sentence. ‘Thank you, Henry,’ I said, ‘for nothing very much at all. By the way, you’re not looking particularly happy this morning.’

‘It’s that Miss Gribble, Mr Rumpole.’ Henry sat down despondently in my clients’ chair. ‘Just who does she think she is?’

‘I suppose she thinks she’s Miss Gribble, otherwise known as Luci with an “i”. Who else could she possibly be?’

‘Director of Marketing and Administration. She wants to see my diary. She wants to be kept informed about fees on a weekly basis. She says she wants me to self-assess.’

‘She wants you to what?’

‘Write an essay, like we did at school. About myself. My strengths and my weaknesses. Quite frankly, Mr Rumpole, I haven’t got the time for it. Do you think she’s after my job?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. Anyway you can leave Luci with her “i” to me. She was a great help in a case I won without even going to Court.’ I was referring, of course, to the Primrose Path affair. ‘I’ll have a word with her.’ I looked at the brief, which bore the familiar title
R. v. Timson,
and, as I read through the statements, my confidence began to ebb away. I might be able to smooth the troubled waters that ran between our clerk and the new Marketing Director, but yet another larceny at a Tube station might prove more than I could manage.

 

My client in the case Henry had handed me was young Trevor Timson, a youth who had shown, by his previous convictions, little talent for the family business of ordinary, decent crime. His situation was not made more hopeful by my instructions from our solicitor, Bonny Bernard, who had come to the conclusion that the best we could do for the client was a plea in mitigation, if we could persuade him to put his hands up. And then, flipping through the papers, I saw something which gave us, if not hope, at least more than a glimmer of interest.

The facts of the case were alarmingly simple. It happened around six o‘clock one weekday evening when the Tube station was crowded with released office workers. There had been numerous cases of dipped-into handbags, emptied hip pockets and pinched purses at that particular station, so the railway police were inconspicuously alert. Two of them were present in the lift when Mr Hornby, a company director who prided himself on his use of public transport, felt a fluttering disturbance in his breast pocket and found his wallet flown away. Being an old-fashioned sort of company director he called out ‘Stop, thief!’ and the railway policeman in the lift detained the passengers. Trevor Timson was unhesitantly denounced by a witness who said she saw him take the wallet, which was then found intact in his half-open shoulder bag. It contained three hundred pounds in crisp twenties.

So Bernard and I sat in the Brixton Prison interview room with the young sprig of the Timson family, who had been denied bail because of the number of his previous convictions.

‘It’s no good, Trevor,’ Bonny Bernard said. ‘We’ve got to chuck in our hand. The prosecution’s got a cast-iron witness.’

To me, the phrase ‘cast-iron witness’ represented a challenge - particularly when the name on that witness statement was Marcia Endersley.

‘This wonderful witness who says she saw you take the money,’ I asked Trevor. ‘Alone, was she? Or was someone with her?’

‘Lots of kids.’

‘What?’

‘She had a party of kids with her. They were all excited and chattering. Like she was taking them out for a school treat.’

I sat in the interview room and I saw it again. The smiling woman, hanging on to a strap, and the boy looking up at her, offering her a present in gratitude for being taken out. A bar of chocolate, was it? Or sweets? It didn’t look like sweets.

‘So it’s got to be a plea, Trevor.’ Bernard was prepared to throw in the towel as cheerfully as possible, but I ventured to disagree.

‘No, it’s not. Never plead guilty. Let that be your New Year’s resolution, Bonny Bernard.’

As we walked away across the prison yard, Bernard seemed pained at my brisk dismissal of his order to run up the white flag of surrender.

‘I didn’t want to argue the case, Mr Rumpole, not in front of the client. You say fight it. But what the devil do you imagine we’re going to fight it with?’

‘The wallet,’ I said.

‘The wallet? We can hardly call a wallet to give evidence.’

‘Oh yes we can. Talk to your friends in the Crown Prosecution Service. See if it’s been kept carefully, as an exhibit. Then persuade them to send it to forensic for a fingerprint test. We’ll need to know about all the prints, and whether they come from known offenders.’

‘Our client’s a known offender.’

‘So he is, Bonny Bernard, and that’s why we must be particularly careful to see he doesn’t get sent down for a crime he didn’t do.’

‘I still think we ought to plead guilty and throw ourselves on the mercy of the Court.’

‘Would you say that,’ I asked him, ‘if we had to throw ourselves on the mercy of Judge Bullingham?’

And that seemed to shut the man up for the moment.

 

I would very much like you to undress for me completely. I long to pour custard over you, and after the custard, tomato ketchup. I imagine this and lots of other things and I hope you don’t mind. I have no intention of forcing the custard on you. The whole incident would have to be entirely voluntary on your part. But if you feel as I do, I think we might have some really enjoyable times together.

 

The document on which this extraordinary message was written was, as I understand it, the ‘print-out’ of an e-mail Luci with an ‘i’ had received. She had shown it to me unasked and uninvited, explaining that, as we had become ‘close’ since the Primrose Path case, she valued my advice and wanted to know how she should take the message. ‘Seeing who it comes from.’

When she told me, the news was like a sudden revelation that Her Majesty the Queen was joining a travelling circus.

‘You don’t really mean that Soapy Sam Ballard sent you this?’

‘Chair sent it!’

‘You’re absolutely sure?’

‘It was attached to an e-mail which said, “Perhaps you’d like to have a look at this and give me your reaction. S.B.” ’

‘And have you given him your reaction?’

‘That was what I wanted to ask your advice about. You’ve heard it all and done so many cases, and well, you’ve lived so long, Horace.’

‘I never thought I’d live so long as to read Soapy Sam Ballard on the subject of custard.’

‘Don’t you like it, Horace?’

‘Don’t I like custard? In the right place, which is on a nice portion of baked jam roll, yes, I do. But not what is suggested here!’

‘I think I told you, Horace,’ Luci sounded almost shy, ‘I do find our Chair hugely attractive.’

‘I know. You told me that at your party, much to my amazement.’

‘And of course he’s married.’

‘Then he ought to go home and pour custard over his wife.’ I was, in this conversation, taking the moral high ground. ‘I expect the ex-Old Bailey matron would send him away with a calming-down pill and a flea in his ear.’ I speculated on the scene in vain. ‘I can’t really imagine it.’

Our tough Director of Marketing and Administration, who struck terror into the heart of Henry, seemed at a loss. ‘The trouble is, I don’t really know how to take this sort of approach. I mean, it’s the sort of thing that might come up in the middle of a relationship. But I wouldn’t have expected our Chair to have suggested it when - well, we’ve hardly got to know each other. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I think I can guess.’ I was surprised, well, I might even say gobsmacked, by the turn this conversation was taking. ‘But surely this is something which should be discussed between the two of you. In some quiet place like, for instance, the corner table of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar.’

‘Horace, as I say, you’ve heard it all. Life, Love, Murder, Deception and -’

‘Custard?’

‘That too, probably. I just don’t feel I can talk to our Chair about this at the moment. If I only knew how he really felt about me. Is it genuine, do you think? Or is it just -’

‘Peculiar behaviour with the condiments?’

‘I mean, you’ve known each other over the years. Has our Chair ever said anything to you?’

‘About his feelings?’

‘Yes.’

I looked at her - the black trouser suit, the glistening boots worn by the mistress of the flip chart, the ace targeter and measurer of achievement—and it seemed to me that Luci was in desperate need of help. ‘Well, Soapy Sam hasn’t taken me into his confidence about his feelings as yet. But I could always bring them up casually, in the course of conversation.’

‘Oh, Horace, would you? Would you do that and let me know?’

‘I might,’ I said. ‘But, on another subject, I don’t think Henry’s entirely happy about writing an essay on his strengths and weaknesses. I think he’d find it extremely embarrassing. He’s used to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of barristers, but not to think about who he is.’

‘He can forget that.’ Luci was following my drift. ‘If only you could have a word or two with our Chair.’

‘I think I owe it to you,’ I told her, ‘for all the help you gave me in the Primrose Path affair. Meanwhile, what are you going to do about this e-mail he sent you?’

‘I shall keep it,’ she promised me. ‘Whatever happens, I shall keep it as a souvenir.’

 

‘Mr Rumpole, very good to see you back in your place in the Central Criminal Court. I trust you’re fully recovered.’

‘I was until I heard you welcoming me back,’ I might have said, ‘but now my breath has been entirely taken away by your Lordship’s good wishes.’ It was the second gob-smacking I had received in the course of a week. Soapy Sam’s interest in unusual sex had been rapidly followed by an appearance before Judge Bullingham, but our raging Bull was now translated into a gentle, soft-eyed old cow who lowed at me with warm and welcoming words from the bench. Had I gone mad, or had the whole world been turned upside-down?

‘I’m grateful to your Lordship,’ I managed to say. ‘I am, I suppose, as well as can be expected. Only, perhaps, a little surprised that your Lordship seems to have been missing me so much.’

‘Always a pleasure to have you before me.’ The old cow seemed to have taken to lying along with the personality change. ‘And now perhaps we should get on with the trial of Mr Timson. Yes, Mr Prosser?’