Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (7 page)

‘That's my business, isn't it, what I admits to?'

‘We're here to take the client's instructions, aren't we?' Daisy seemed to think I was being unnecessarily difficult.

‘The world is full,' I told her from the mountains, or at least the molehill, of my experience, ‘of stories about barristers who defend people they know are guilty. I absolutely refuse to be the first barrister who's pleaded guilty for a customer he knows is innocent. However attractive you find the idea of prison, Mr Timson.'

‘You reckon I ought to fight it?' Uncle Cyril seemed puzzled at my objecting to his retreat to a cell in Wandsworth.

‘I know you
have
to fight it,' I assured him.

‘Pity we couldn't get Teddy Singleton.' Daisy stared at me, whether in admiration or irritation I couldn't be sure. ‘He wouldn't have been quite so picky.'

‘I'm scared of the Molloys, Mr Rumpole. That's the truth of it.'

‘Perhaps you are. But pleading guilty's not the answer.'

‘It's the only answer I've got.'

‘No, it isn't,' I told him. Then I had an idea. ‘If you won't listen to me, perhaps I might have a word with your family. They looked a fairly sensible lot.'

 

They were all assembled in the canteen. Harry Timson, then the head of the clan, was there with his wife, Brenda, a spreading grandmother with bright, beady eyes. The much younger Fred, who was in line to succeed his father as the top Timson, was there with his warm-hearted wife, Vi, whom I was to defend on many a shoplifting charge in the future. There was Fred's brother Dennis, an expert on forged log books and ‘clocking cars', as I was to discover in the years to come, and Dennis's wife, Doris, with a glamorous and heavy-lidded expression, a tight sweater and enough perfume to drown a small furry animal. It was Doris who, much later, I had to defend in a difficult case concerning the receiving of a large quantity of frozen shellfish, luxury goods as befitted Doris: langoustines, scampi, crayfish and the like.

I was only a white wig, taking on a Timson brief at the last moment, but I have to say I have never been listened to with as much courteous attention by any of the judges who deal in crime as I received from the Timson family.

For a while the evidence called concerned the Molloys, their tyrannical behaviour and desire to impose a reign of terror on south Brixton. The evidence was clear, uncontested and all one way. After twenty minutes, and the consumption of another coffee, bun and butter, I decided it was time I made my final speech. Accordingly, I tapped my coffee cup with a teaspoon and went straight to what seemed to me to be the heart of the matter.

‘May it please you, members of the Timson family,' I began in a low, conversational tone, ‘what Cyril is asking for is an ignominious surrender to the forces of evil. I'm sure I don't need to remind you, it's only a few years since we emerged victorious from a war with a ruthless enemy with whom I'm sure the Molloys would have had much in common. Did we quietly surrender to the Wehrmacht and to the SS? Did we say politely, “It's all our fault, so please walk over us with your storm troopers and your jackboots?”' At this point I distinctly heard Doris ask her husband what jackboots were, as though they might be some sort of fashion accessory. ‘We did not! We fought back and told the truth and, in the end, we won! And if we hadn't, I ask you, what would have happened? The world would have been ruled by the Nazis.' As I was in a Churchillian mood I pronounced the word Narzeez, as he did. ‘So, if we turn tail and run from the Molloys now, they'll rule Brixton, doing what they like, bearing false witness and making accusations whenever it suits them.'

‘We don't want that.' Fred Timson gave me an encouraging mutter.

Then I embarked on a peroration, borrowed, I have to confess, from our wartime leader. ‘We must fight them in Coldharbour Lane, we must fight them on Streatham Hill and we must fight them in Clapham. We must never surrender!' And after a suitable pause I added, in what I hoped were quieter but even more persuasive tones, ‘And your Uncle Cyril must never give aid and comfort to the enemy by pleading guilty just because he's frightened of the Molloys. And if you want time to discuss this among yourselves, I will step over to the slot machine and buy myself a small bar of Cadbury's milk chocolate.'

I had hardly persuaded the machine to deliver up the goods before I was called back to the table by Fred Timson. It seemed they had a verdict; but first they had a question.

‘If Cyril does a “not guilty”, Mr Rumpole, will you be here to defend him?'

‘While I can stand on my hind legs,' I assured him, ‘and while I can still speak, I will defend Uncle Cyril to the death.'

‘Then he'll do a “not guilty”. That's what we've all decided and Uncle Cyril was never one to give any trouble to the family.'

 

The London Sessions judge, a small foxy-faced individual known as ‘Custodial Cookson' because of his lengthy sentences, was not best pleased at Uncle Cyril's apparent change of heart.

‘This case was listed as a plea of guilty, Mr Rumpole. Now another date will have to be fixed for the trial. Your client is causing a good deal of trouble with the lists.'

‘Any amount of trouble with the lists,' I felt entitled to say, ‘is less important than Mr Timson's right to a fair hearing.'

‘You are of quite recent call to the bar, I think, Mr Rumpole.' ‘Custodial Cookson' had a voice like dead twigs blown over a frosty window. ‘Perhaps in the future you will be able to control your clients' inconvenient changes of mind.'

‘I hope not, Your Honour.'

The custodial judge looked as though he would have liked to say a good deal more. Instead he told me we'd be informed of the new date and refused bail. So Uncle Cyril was remanded, for a while at least, within the safety of the prison walls.

As we crossed Blackfriars Bridge on the way back to Daisy's office and my chambers, she said, ‘You did well there, didn't you, Horace?'

‘You mean I upheld the finest traditions of the bar?'

‘No, I mean you won yourself another brief.'

8

Back at my desk, having committed my recollections of the first of many Timson defences to the pages of these memoirs, I was once again interrupted by the voices of the present day. Claude Erskine-Brown entered without knocking, flopped himself down in my client's chair and gave a heavy and, I thought, somewhat self-satisfied sigh.

‘It seems,' he said, ‘that I've done it again, Rumpole.'

‘I know you have. And got into deep trouble with the sisterhood of the bar.'

‘It's not them I'm worried about, Rumpole. They've got nothing to complain about. Not now.'

‘So what can ail thee, Erskine-Brown, alone and palely loitering?' I suppose I might have said that, but I kept quiet, hoping that the man would leave me sooner. He was, however, determined to tell me what ailed him.

‘Have you broken anyone's heart, Rumpole?'

‘No,' I had to confess, ‘I've had rather a poor record in the heart-breaking department.'

‘It happens to me all too often. People fall in love with me and of course, having regard to my present situation, it can never be.'

‘What can never be?'

‘What they all want.'

‘And what is that exactly?'

‘I suppose,' Erskine-Brown said in all modesty, ‘me.'

‘And you think you've broken a heart?'

Now Claude gave vent to a heavy sigh and tried to sound suitably regretful. ‘It's the effect I seem to have on people.'

‘Is it really? I don't think you've broken my heart yet, Erskine-Brown.'

‘Of course not, Rumpole. Your heart's probably reinforced concrete for all I know. I'm speaking now of younger women.'

‘Do you have one particular younger woman in mind?'

‘Haven't I told you? It's Lala Ingolsby. Probert's pupil.'

‘And what are the precise symptoms of her heart trouble?'

‘You won't spread this around chambers, will you, Rumpole? It's not the sort of story one wants to have repeated in the clerk's room.' Claude struck a cautionary note.

‘My lips will be sealed. In perpetuity.'

‘Well, then, of course she's fallen head over heels -'

‘A nasty accident?' I hadn't really misunderstood him.

‘No, in love. She wanted us to be together - for always.'

‘A long time,' I agreed.

‘What's more,
she
wanted to ring up Philly and tell her we wanted a divorce. I had to put a stop to it, Rumpole. You do see that, don't you?'

‘Embarrassment all round, I suppose.'

‘I'm glad you agree. I mean, you simply don't get a divorce from your wife if that wife is a High Court judge. Besides which, there are the children to consider.'

‘Tristan and Isolde?' I knew their operatically inspired names, having taken them to the pantomime.

‘One simply can't wreck their faith in family life.'

‘I suppose that's on your mind all the time?'

‘Of course it is. That's why I had to tell the poor girl -'

‘Lala?'

‘Probert's pupil. It can never be.'

‘And when she heard that she went, I suppose, into a decline, took a long holiday in Thailand, joined the French Foreign Legion?'

‘She's being incredibly brave about it, Rumpole. She turned up for work just as though nothing had happened.'

‘And you made no reference whatever to the shape of her legs?'

‘Never again, Rumpole, those days are over. Never again.'

To the accompaniment of another heavy sigh, I took up my pen again to attack these memoirs. When I next looked up, Erskine-Brown had palely loitered out of the room.

 

After the visit to London Sessions and my speech designed to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood of the Timson family in their fight against the tyranny of the Molloys, I felt a vague pang of regret that I hadn't ended the speech in question with a cry of ‘God for Rumpole! England and Saint George!' After all that excitement, time seemed to stand still.

So I was alone in Uncle Tom's room, long after he'd gone home. I was gazing once again at the photographs of the scene of the crime, what my old law tutor at Keble, Septimus Porter, had taught me to call the ‘
locus in quo
'. For what seemed to me like the hundredth time, I was staring at the dead pilot officer slumped in his armchair with a half-open door behind him. I was wondering whether to go for a chop in the Charing Cross Lyon's Corner House before returning to my lonely bedsit off Southampton Row when a question occurred to me which called, as I thought, for an immediate answer. Accordingly, I put a call through to the offices of our Penge solicitors.

‘I'm afraid Mr Barnsley Gough has had to leave. Can I help you at all, Mr Rumpole?' It was the voice of the eager young man, hardly more than a boy, who, I remembered, knew most about the case.

‘Is that Bernard?'

‘Yes, Mr Rumpole.'

‘Hail, Bonny Bernard.' I have no idea why I called him that, but it's a name which has stuck to him over the years during which, apart from a few moments of regrettable infidelity, he has been my perpetual support. ‘It has occurred to me that I would like to take a look at the
locus
.'

‘He's in it.'

‘What?'

‘Our client is in the lock - whatever you said.'

‘No, Bonny Bernard. The “
locus in quo
”. The scene of the crime. Can we see it?'

‘I don't know . . .'

‘It'll be perfectly simple. You'll just have to fix it with the officer in charge of the case. And tell the prosecution, they're entitled to be there.'

‘And your leader, Mr Rumpole?'

‘Oh, I'll tell Mr Wystan all about it, of course.'

‘All right, then. I'll let Albert know what I've fixed up. You got an idea, have you?'

‘An idea? I might just have a few more questions to ask.'

‘Tell me, Mr Rumpole.' Bonny Bernard still sounded keen.

‘Simon told us there was one man at the party who tried to stop them attacking him. Fellow named Harry . . .'

‘Harry Daniels?' Bernard remembered.

‘He's not on the list of prosecution witnesses. Get in touch with him, would you? He might give evidence for us.'

‘You think it's worth trying?'

‘I think everything's worth trying. In this particular case.'

 

It looked dusty and neglected, as though a feeling of guilt, the result of a violent death, still hung about it, and for which the room itself took some sort of blame. I had met Bonny Bernard at the bus stop and we had walked through the sifting rain to the row of identical bungalows in a dead-end street behind Penge Road. There was a police car parked outside number 3, the home of the Jerolds. We were met by Detective Superintendent Spalding, the officer in charge of the case. He was the sort of straight-backed, poker-up-the-backside, pursed-lipped policeman who clearly regarded our visit as a waste of his and everybody else's time. He was also not the kind of officer I could imagine collecting odd scraps of information from the Timsons in the Needle Arms.

So we stood in the room, which seemed small to have accommodated a party of half-drunk wartime heroes and a sudden tragedy. The bungalows were identical so ‘Tail-End' Charlie had precisely the same accommodation as his pilot officer. Jerry's front door opened on to a small hall, not much more than a short passage with another door opening into the sitting room, from where a door led to another passage with access to two bedrooms, a kitchen and the bathroom. There was a back door to an area where the dustbin stood in which the Luger pistol was eventually found.