The Anti-Social Behaviour of Horace Rumpole (7 page)

‘I don't know whether you really understand
this, Rumpole. Your wife has a formidable intellect.'

‘Of course I understand. Hilda's no fool.'

‘Certainly not! Did you know that girl of yours remembers every card played in a round of bridge? She's got a mind that would get her straight through the Bar exams. No trouble at all.'

‘Are you trying to tell me,' I was finding the conversation difficult to grasp, ‘that Hilda wants to go to the Bar?'

‘Of course.'

‘She wants to practise? Where?'

‘She would like to practise at the Criminal Bar, Rumpole. Living with you, she knows all about it anyway. Now she's going to be able to put it to good use.'

‘What sort of use is that?'

‘What's the name of that family you're always representing?'

‘The Timsons.'

‘The Timsons, yes! With their perpetual troubles – which aren't really serious enough for a silk to be employed. You would be rather relieved if all those cases could be passed on to Hilda. You'll be glad when you've done it.'

‘Done what?'

‘Taken silk, of course. Hilda will have to go through the Bar exams, but that will be no trouble to a mind like hers!'

‘So you received my letter?'

‘Rumpole, I have considered your letter long and hard.'

‘And are you prepared to recommend me? I need a judge.'

‘I know you do – and here I am. I think the name Bullingham will carry a bit of weight with the Department for Constitutional Affairs.'

I want to confess that I was stumped for words. It was as though I had been ready to meet an angry wolfhound, only to discover that my hand was being licked by an almost embarrassingly attentive Pomeranian.

‘It's enormously kind of you,' I said.

‘Of course it is. Without my name you don't have a cat in hell's chance. The title “High Court Judge” still carries a bit of clout in the corridors of power. And when you've got your silk, Hilda can start firing on all cylinders.'

‘Thank you for doing this for me.'

‘I'm not doing it for you, Rumpole, I'm doing it for her.'

Going home on the tube from Temple station I
fell into a sleep. In a moment of dreaming, I saw the huge figure of She Who Must Be Obeyed dressed in a wig and gown with her arms full of briefs in cases.

When I got back to Froxbury Mansions, and Hilda was reduced to the normal size, she said, ‘Leonard Bullingham tells me he's going to back your claim for silk.'

‘He told me that too.'

‘I think it's enormously kind of him, considering how rude you've been to him in court.'

‘Considering how rude he has been to me in court, it's very good of me to accept his help!'

‘Did Leonard tell you I'm thinking of reading for the Bar? He says I have exactly the right talents for it.'

‘If that means you can argue the hind legs off a donkey, I have to agree,' was what I didn't say. Hilda had made her decision and I would have to learn to live with it.

A few weeks after the events chronicled above I was seated alone in my favourite corner of Pommeroy's Wine Bar, sharing a bottle of Château Thames Embankment with myself.

At a distant table, presided over by Claude
Erskine-Brown, other members of 4 Equity Court Chambers were gathered. Hoskins, a barrister who had to maintain his many daughters, was there, and my ex-pupil Mizz Liz Probert, and Luci Gribble too, perhaps to look after our image. Even our clerk, Henry, was telling some anecdote, no doubt about Rumpole, which appeared to set the table on a roar. Ever since the attempt to serve an anti-social behaviour order upon me, I had been treated by my fellow members like some ancient and outdated piece of machinery, a wind-up gramophone perhaps.

Did I, in fact, represent some antique part of Chambers which needed clearing out in the war against global warming?

I was sitting alone with that thought when a sharp voice said, ‘Lars Bergman, new crime correspondent of the
Daily Fortress
. You're Mr Rumpole, aren't you?'

It was useless to deny it to the youngish man with slicked-down blond hair who immediately sat down at my lonely table uninvited.

‘The man at the bar pointed you out. I'm doing a piece on the Wetherby case. Isn't it a funny sort of case for you to be defending?'

‘I haven't got many laughs out of it up till now.'

‘But it's a hopeless defence, isn't it? I mean, the man is so obviously guilty.'

I refrained from offering Mr Bergman a drink. ‘Hopeless cases,' I told him, ‘are rather my speciality.'

‘That's what my editor objects to.'

‘I'm not really doing my work to please your editor.'

‘He thinks defending hopeless cases is a shocking waste of public money. This
is
a legal aid case, isn't it?'

‘And what does your editor intend to do about it?'

‘He thinks a single judge should look at the case, and if there's nothing that amounts to a defence, he could order a short trial.'

‘Your editor must be extremely old.'

‘A younger man than you are, Mr Rumpole.'

‘He's like our present government. All born before 1215, the date of Magna Carta. They haven't yet heard that no one is to be sent to prison without a trial by his equals.'

Bergman looked at me for a moment in a puzzled sort of way, and then he said something which seemed to switch on lights all around him and make him the sole object of interest for me in Pommeroy's Wine Bar.

‘I suppose I feel strongly about it,' he said, ‘because I met her.'

‘You met Ludmilla Ravenskaya?'

‘Yes. She told me her name. And it was the same address, off Sussex Gardens.'

‘You went there,' here I put it as delicately as I could, ‘as a client?'

‘Not really. My editor wanted me to write about the organization, whatever it was, which was importing these girls in the backs of lorries.'

‘Perhaps I judged your editor too harshly. That's a subject I should love to have investigated.'

‘I saw her name up in a telephone box. “Exotic Russian beauty will show you that the Cold War is over”. There was a telephone number.'

‘So you went to Flyte Street?'

‘And met Ludmilla, yes. She thought I'd come for sex, of course, but I told her I'd come for information which would be far better paid.'

‘So she told you what exactly?'

‘Nothing then. She said she was far too busy with clients, but she told me to call her in a week or two and she'd give me the story. She wanted half the money in advance.'

‘Did she get it?'

‘No, but I gave her £100 as a retainer. That was
on top of what I had to pay for the sex I didn't have.'

‘And did you phone her?'

‘I decided to wait, but then the story was all over the papers. Your client Wetherby had shut her mouth forever.'

‘Did you see her maid? A woman called Anna McKinnan.'

‘I suppose so. There was a woman who showed me in and said goodbye to me when I left.'

‘Did you tell her what you'd asked Ludmilla?'

‘No. I simply said we'd had a nice chat. It's no good you asking me these questions, Mr Rumpole. You're going to get a blast from the
Fortress
. “Barristers who get fat and rich on defending hopeless cases”, that kind of thing.'

‘I resent that,' I told him.

‘I'm sure you do. I'm just warning you what to expect.'

‘I may be fat, but I'm certainly not rich.'

So he left me, and I poured out the remainder of the bottle. I thought of Lars, and then of Lars Porsena of Clusium, who, in the old poem,

… bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array.

This Lars's ‘messenger' would go forth in every issue of the
Daily Fortress
to portray Rumpole as the man who throws public money away on nonexistent defences.

And then I remembered a possibly valuable piece of evidence that Lars had brought to me, so I raised a glass to him in spite of everything, an absent friend.

‘What time did you phone Flyte Street?'

‘About a quarter past twelve.'

‘You weren't in the phone box?'

‘No. I'd already copied down her number.

I made sure no one could hear me.'

‘So what time did you get to the flat?'

‘Just before one.'

‘And you've told us about your conversation with the maid, Anna McKinnan. Did she tell you anything else you can remember?'

‘She said they hadn't had many customers so I could go straight in.'

‘Nothing else?'

‘She said she hoped I wasn't a bloody journalist.'

I felt a small thrill of pleasure. The god who looks after defending barristers was giving me a little bit of his help.

‘What time was it when you went into the bedroom and found Ludmilla dead?'

‘About one thirty. I was getting worried about being late back to work. Then the maid locked me in.'

‘And then the police arrived at about two thirty with a police doctor?'

‘I suppose so. I was arrested and taken down to the car before they examined the body.' There was a silence and then my client looked at me and said quietly, ‘It's hopeless, isn't it?'

‘Not entirely.'

‘You think you're going to work some bloody miracle?'

‘It has been known!'

‘If you were a miracle worker they'd've given it to you before now, wouldn't they?'

‘Given me what?'

‘The QC. You haven't got it, have you?'

‘Not as yet.'

‘It's so humiliating. Everyone I meet at exercise. All those on serious charges like murder or rape or whatever. They've all got QCs to defend them.'

‘Have they ever been defended by me, these people?'

‘I don't believe so.'

‘I thought as much. If they had been they probably wouldn't be in a prison exercise yard. Anyway, a distinguished High Court judge, Leonard Bullingham, is backing my application.'

‘We live in hope then?'

‘Yes,' I told him. ‘That's the best way for us both to live.'

‘I don't know why you wanted to see him again, Mr Rumpole. Every time we go down there it seems clearer that he's got no defence. I'm afraid he's wasting our time.'

‘Not mine, certainly.' I had a disconsolate solicitor on my hands as we sought the comfort of Pommeroy's on our return to the Temple. “‘Never plead guilty,” that's my motto. You heard what Ackerman told us about the time of death?'

‘You think that's going to get him off?'

‘Not in itself perhaps, although it might be
enough before an intelligent jury. To be sure, we need to find out a lot more about Ludmilla. If our client didn't kill her, who did? And why?'

‘We haven't got an answer to the question.'

‘She was meant to report regularly to a police station in the Paddington area. Did she?'

‘I did ask. They've got no record of her reporting anywhere in Paddington.'

‘I thought not. So what would have happened if she hadn't been discovered at Dover?'

‘She'd have gone on to a garage in some office block in the Canary Wharf area. Didn't Scottie Thompson tell us that?'

‘Exactly. As I would expect, you have the facts of the case at your fingertips. But which garage, under precisely which office block?'

‘I have no idea.'

‘There may be stories going around. There can't be many office blocks where girls get out of boxes. We need a detective. You can put it down to further inquiries. Send for Fig Newton.'

Ferdinand Ian Gilmour Newton, clothed in the old mac he wore in all weathers, and with the cold that apparently afflicted him in all weathers, was just the man to pick up any rumours that might be going round about girls in boxes in the Canary Wharf area.

Shortly after these events I received an invitation from the corridors of power. Henry rang to say in a voice full of awe and wonder that the office of the Minister for Constitutional Affairs had rung. It seemed the Minister would like to share a drink with Mr Rumpole in his club.

It was not until then that I remembered who the Minister for Constitutional Affairs was. He was none other than the Peter Plaistow, QC, MP, who had dangled the offer of a Circuit (I call them Circus) Judgeship to me during the case in which
he was prosecuting the unfortunate Dr Khan, who was accused of terrorism, a case which I won, if you remember, satisfactorily alone and without a leader.

So there we were, under the soft lights of the Sheridan Club, where drinks were asked for quietly and members and their friends murmured together, so the occasional loud welcome or braying laugh seemed as out of place as it would in a chapel of rest.

Peter Plaistow looked aged by his time in government. His boyish charm had faded, to be replaced by what I could only call a look of grim determination. His eyes seemed tired and his eyelids swollen, but he nonetheless greeted me with enthusiasm and ordered champagne for both of us.

When we were seated with our drinks and he had told me how pleased he was to see me, he said, ‘I see Leonard Bullingham is backing your application for silk. I thought you two were sworn enemies. How did you manage that?'

‘I think my wife managed it.'

‘The remarkable Hilda? Well done her! Of course you have to go through a lot of tedious stuff before the new committee, but in the end the
decision will come to me as Minister for Constitutional Affairs.'

What was I meant to do precisely? Offer to buy the next round of drinks? Thank him profusely? I hadn't thought that the process of sliding into a silk gown could be managed so easily. But then I was to discover the real purpose of our meeting in the Sheridan Club.