The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Page 6

  Never imagining that it would suddenly be night.

  He returned to the French door, opened it and went out on the balcony. Once again he found himself observing the comings and goings of the cars and people in the piazza. People who confronted their everyday lives never imagining the heedlessness with which fate could shatter them. Children who would one day grow up and become men, something which his son had been denied.

  He stood there for a long time, reflecting on these and other thoughts.

  Then he left the sunny balcony and went back to the shadows, as every man does when he’s made his decision.

  Translation © 2009 by Anne Milano Appel

  Rumpole and the Christmas Break

  John Mortimer

  I

  “We must be constantly on guard. Night and day. Vigilance is essential. I’m sure you would agree, wouldn’t you, Luci?”

  Soapy Sam Ballard, our always-nervous Head of Chambers, addressed the meeting as though the forces of evil were already beating on the doors of 4 Equity Court, and weapons of mass destruction had laid waste to the dining hall, condemning us to a long winter of cold meat and sandwiches. As usual, he longed for confirmation and turned to our recently appointed Head of Marketing and Administration, who was now responsible for the Chambers’ image.

  “Quite right, Chair.” Luci’s north country voice sounded quietly amused, as though she didn’t take the alarming state of the world quite as seriously as Ballard did.

  “Thank you for your contribution, Luci.” Soapy Sam, it seemed, thought she might have gone a little further, such as recommending that Securicor mount a twenty-four hour guard on the Head of Chambers. Then he added, in a voice of doom, “I have already asked our clerk to keep an extremely sharp eye on the sugar kept in the coffee cupboard.”

  “Why did you do that?” I ventured to ask our leader. “Has Claude been shovelling it in by the tablespoonful?”

  Claude Erskine-Brown was one of the few barristers I have ever met who combined a passionate affection for Wagner’s operas with a remarkably sweet tooth, continuously sucking wine gums in court and loading his coffee with heaped spoonfuls of sugar.

  “It’s not that, Rumpole.” Soapy Sam was getting petulant. “It’s anthrax.”

  “What anthrax?”

  “The sugar might be. There are undoubtedly people out there who are out to get us, Rumpole. Haven’t you been listening at all to government warnings?”

  “I seem to remember them telling us one day that if we went down the tube we’d all be gassed, and the next day they said, ‘Sorry, we were only joking. Carry on going down the tube.’ ”

  “Rumpole! Do you take nothing seriously?”

  “Some things,” I assured Soapy Sam.“But not the government.”

  “We are,” here Ballard ignored me as an apparently hopeless case, and addressed the meeting, “especially vulnerable.”

  “Why’s that?” I was curious enough to ask.

  “We represent the Law, Rumpole. The centre of a civilized society. Naturally we’d be high on their hit list.”

  “You mean the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, and number 4 Equity Court? I wonder, you may be right.”

  “I propose to appoint a small Chambers emergency committee consisting of myself, Claude Erskine-Brown, and Archie Prosser. Please report to one of us if you notice anything unusual or out of the ordinary. I assume you have nothing to report, Rumpole?”

  “Nothing much. I did notice a chap on the tube, a fellow of Middle Eastern appearance wearing a turban and a beard and muttering into a Dictaphone. He got out at South Kensington. I don’t suppose it’s important.”

  Just for a moment I thought, indeed I hoped, our Head of Chambers looked at me as though he believed what I had said, but then justifiable doubt overcame him.

  “Very funny,” Ballard told the meeting. “But then you can scarcely afford to be serious about the danger we’re all in, can you Rumpole? Considering you’re defending one of these maniacs.”

  “Rumpole would defend anyone,” said Archie Prosser, the newest arrival in our chambers, who had an ill-deserved reputation as a wit.

  “If you mean anyone who’s put on trial and tells me they’re innocent, then the answer is yes.”

  Nothing alarming happened on the tube on my way home that evening, except for the fact that, owing to a “work to rule” by the drivers, the train gave up work at Victoria and I had to walk the rest of the way home to Froxbury Mansions in the Gloucester Road. The shops and their windows were full of glitter, artificial snow, and wax models perched on sleighs wearing party dresses. Taped carols came tinkling out of Tesco’s. The Chambers meeting had been the last of the term, and the Old Bailey had interrupted its business for the season of peace and goodwill.

  There was very little of either in the case which I had been doing in front of the aptly named Mr Justice Graves. Mind you, I would have had a fairly rough ride before the most reasonable of judges. Even some compassionate old darlings like Mr Justice “Pussy” Proudfoot might have regarded my client with something like horror and been tempted to dismiss my speech to the jury as a hopeless attempt to prevent a certain conviction and a probable sentence of not less than thirty years. The murder we had been considering, when we were interrupted by Christmas, had been cold-blooded and merciless, and there was clear evidence that it had been the work of a religious fanatic.

  The victim, Honoria Glossop, Professor of Comparative Religions at William Morris University in east London, had been the author of a number of books, including her latest, and last, publication Sanctified Killing – A History of Religious Warfare. She had been severely critical of all acts of violence and aggression – including the Inquisition and the Crusades – committed in the name of God. She had also included a chapter on Islam which spoke scathingly of some Ayatollahs and the cruelties committed by Islamic fundamentalists.

  It was this chapter which had caused my client, a young student of computer technology atWilliam Morris named Hussein Khan, to issue a private fatwa. He composed, on one of the university computers, a letter to Professor Glossop announcing that her blasphemous references to the religious leaders of his country deserved nothing less than death – which would inevitably catch up with her. Then he left the letter in her pigeonhole.

  It took very little time for the authorship of the letter to be discovered. Hussein Khan was sent down from William Morris and began spending time helping his family in the Star of Persia restaurant they ran in Golders Green. A week later, Professor Glossop, who had been working late in her office at the university, was found slumped across her desk, having been shot at close quarters by a bullet from a revolver of Czech origins, the sort of weapon which is readily and cheaply available in certain south London pubs. Beside her on the desk, now stained with her blood, was the letter containing the sentence of death.

  Honoria and her husband Richard “Ricky” Glossop lived in what the estate agents would describe as “a three-million-pound townhouse in Boltons”. The professor had, it seemed, inherited a great deal of money from a family business in the Midlands which allowed her to pursue her academic career, and Ricky to devote his life to country sports, without the need for gainful employment. He was clearly, from his photograph in the papers, an outstandingly handsome figure, perhaps five or six years younger than his wife. After her murder, he received, and everyone felt deserved, huge public sympathy. He and Honoria had met when they were both guests on a yacht touring the Greek Islands, and she had chosen him and his good looks in preference to all the available professors and academic authors she knew. In spite of their differences in age and interest, they seemed to have lived happily together for ten years until, so the prosecution said, death overtook Honoria Glossop in the person of my now universally hated client.

  Such was the case I was engaged in at the Old Bailey in the run-up to Christmas. There were no tidings of great joy to report. The cards were stacked dead against me, and at every stage it looked l
ike I was losing, trumped by a judge who regarded defence barristers as flies on the tasty dish of justice.

  Mr Justice Graves, known to me only as “The Old Gravestone”, had a deep, sepulchral voice and the general appearance of a man waking up with an upset stomach on a wet weekend. He had clearly come to the conclusion that the world was full of irredeemable sinners. The nearest thing to a smile I had seen on the face of The Old Gravestone was the look of grim delight he had displayed when, after a difficult case, the jury had come back with the guilty verdict he had clearly longed for.

  So, as you can imagine, the atmosphere in Court One at the Old Bailey during the trial of the Queen against Hussein Khan was about as warm as the South Pole during a blizzard. The Queen may have adopted a fairly detached attitude towards my client, but the judge certainly hadn’t.

  The prosecution was in the not altogether capable hands of Soapy Sam Ballard, which was why he had practically named me as a founding member of Al-Qaeda at our chambers meeting. His junior was the newcomer Archie Prosser.

  These two might not have been the most deadly optimists I had ever had to face during my long career at the bar, but a first-year law student with a lowish IQ would, I thought, have had little difficulty in securing a conviction against the young student who had managed to become one of the most hated men in England.

  As he was brought up from the cells and placed in the dock between two prison officers, the jury took one brief, appalled look at him and then turned their eyes on what seemed to them to be the less offensive figure of Soapy Sam as he prepared to open his devastating case.

  So I sat at my end of counsel’s benches. The brief had been offered to several QCs (Queer Customers I always call them), but they had excused themselves as being too busy, or unwell, or going on holiday – any excuse to avoid being cast as leading counsel for the forces of evil. It was only, it seemed, Rumpole who stuck to the old-fashioned belief that the most outrageous sinner deserves to have his defence, if he had one, put fairly and squarely in front of a jury.

  Mr Justice Gravestone didn’t share my views. When Ballard rose he was greeted with something almost like a smile from the bench, and his most obvious comments were underlined by a judicious nod followed by a careful note underlined in the judicial notebook. Every time I rose to cross-examine a prosecution witness, however, Graves sighed heavily and laid down his pencil as though nothing of any significance was likely to come.

  This happened when I had a few pertinent questions to ask the pathologist, my old friend Professor Arthur Ackerman, forensic scientist and master of the morgues. After he had given his evidence about the cause of death (pretty obvious), I started off.

  “You say, Professor Ackerman, that the shot was fired at close quarters?”

  “Yes, Mr Rumpole. Indeed it was.” Ackerman and I had been through so many bloodstained cases together that we chatted across the court like old friends.

  “You told us,” I went on, “that the bullet entered the deceased’s neck – she was probably shot from behind – and that, among other things, the bullet severed an artery.”

  “That is so.”

  “So, as a result, blood spurted over the desk. We know it was on the letter. Would you have expected the person, whoever it was, who shot her at close quarters to have had some blood on his clothing?”

  “I think that well may have happened.”

  “Would you say it probably happened?”

  “Probably. Yes.”

  When I got this answer from the witness, I stood awhile in silence, looking at the motionless judge.

  “Is that all you have to ask, Mr Rumpole?”

  “No, my Lord. I’m waiting so your Lordship has time to make note of the evidence. I see your Lordship’s pencil is taking a rest!”

  “I’m sure the jury has heard your questions, Mr Rumpole. And the answers.”

  “I’m sure they have and you will no doubt remind them of that during your summing up. So I’m sure your Lordship will wish to make a note.”

  Gravestone, with an ill grace, picked up his pencil and made the shortest possible note. Then I asked Ackerman my last question.

  “And I take it you know that the clothes my client wore that evening were minutely examined and no traces of any bloodstains were found?”

  “My Lord, how can this witness know what was on Khan’s clothing?” Soapy Sam objected.

  “Quite right, Mr Ballard,” the judge was quick to agree. “That was an outrageous question, Mr Rumpole. The jury will disregard it.”

  It got no better. I rose, at the end of a long day in court, to cross-examine Superintendent Gregory, the perfectly decent officer in charge of the case.

  “My client, Mr Khan, made no secret of the fact that he had written this threatening letter, did he, Superintendent Gregory?”

  “He did not, my Lord,” Gregory answered with obvious satisfaction.

  “In fact,” said Mr Justice Graves, searching among his notes, “the witness Sadiq told us that your client boasted to him of the fact in the university canteen?”

  There, at last, The Gravestone had overstepped the mark.

  “He didn’t say ‘boasted’.”

  Soapy Sam Ballard QC, the alleged Head of our Chambers, got up with his notebook at the ready.

  “Sadiq said that Khan told him he had written the letter and, in answer to your Lordship, that ‘he seemed to feel no sort of guilt about it’.”

  “There you are Mr Rumpole.” Graves also seemed to feel no sort of guilt. “Doesn’t that come to exactly the same thing?”

  “Certainly not, my Lord. The word ‘boasted’ was never used.”

  “The jury may come to the conclusion that it amounted to boasting.”

  “They may indeed, my Lord. But that’s for them to decide, without directions from your Lordship.”

  “Mr Rumpole,” here the judge adopted an expression of lofty pity, “I realize you have many difficulties in this case. But perhaps we may proceed without further argument. Have you any more questions for this officer?”

  “Just one, my Lord.” I turned to the superintendent. “This letter was traced to one of the university word processors.”

  “That is so, yes.”

  “You would agree that my client took no steps at all to cover up the fact that he was the author of this outrageous threat.”

  “He seems to have been quite open about it, yes.”

  “That’s hardly consistent with the behaviour of someone about to commit a brutal murder is it?”

  “I suppose it was a little surprising, yes,” Jack Gregory was fair enough to admit.

  “Very surprising, isn’t it? And of course by the time this murder took place, everyone knew he had written the letter. He’d been sent down for doing so.”

  “That’s right.”

  The Gravestone intervened. “Did it not occur to you, Superintendent Gregory, that being sent down might have provided an additional motive for the murder?”The judge clearly thought he was onto something, and was deeply gratified when the superintendent answered. “That might have been so, my Lord.”

  “That might have been so,” Graves dictated to himself as he wrote the answer down. Then he thought of another point that might be of use to the hardly struggling prosecution.

  “Of course, if a man thinks he’s justified, for religious or moral reasons, in killing someone, he might have no inhibitions about boasting of the fact?”

  I knew it. Soapy Sam must have known it, and the jury had better be told it. The judge had gone too far. I rose to my feet, as quickly as my weight and the passage of the years would allow, and uttered a sharp protest.

  “My Lord, the prosecution is in the able hands of Samuel Ballard QC. I’m sure he can manage to present the case against my client without your Lordship’s continued help and encouragement.”

  This was followed by a terrible silence, the sort of stillness that precedes a storm.

  “Mr Rumpole.” His Lordship’s words were as war
m as hailstones. “That was a most outrageous remark.”

  “It was a point I felt I should make,” I told him, “in fairness to my client.”

  “As I have said, I realize you have an extremely difficult case to argue, Mr Rumpole.” Once more Graves was reminding the jury that I was on a certain loser. “But I cannot overlook your inappropriate and disrespectful behaviour towards the court. I shall have to consider whether your conduct should be reported to the proper authority.”

  After these dire remarks and a few more unimportant questions to the superintendent, Graves turned to the jury and reminded them that this no doubt painful and shocking case would be resumed after the Christmas break. He said this in the solemn and sympathetic tones of someone announcing the death of a dear friend or relative, then he wished them a “Happy Christmas”.

  The tube train for home was packed and I stood, swaying uneasily, sandwiched between an eighteen-stone man in a donkey jacket with a heavy cold, and an elderly woman with a pair of the sharpest elbows I have encountered on the Circle line.

  No doubt all of the other passengers had hard, perhaps unrewarding lives, but they didn’t have to spend their days acting as a sort of buffer between a possibly fatal fanatic and a hostile judge who certainly wanted to end the career of the inconveniently argumentative Rumpole. The train, apparently as exhausted as I felt, ground to a halt between Charing Cross and the Embankment and as the lights went out I’d almost decided to give up the bar. Then the lights glowed again faintly and the train jerked on. I supposed I would have to go on as well, wouldn’t I, not being the sort of character who could retire to the country and plant strawberries.

  When I reached the so-called “Mansion Flat” in the Gloucester Road I was, I have to say, not a little surprised by the warmth of the reception I received. My formidable wife Hilda, known to me only as “She Who Must be Obeyed” said, “Sit down, Rumpole. You look tired out.” And she lit the gas fire. A few minutes later, she brought me a glass of my usual refreshment – the very ordinary claret available from Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street, a vintage known to me as “Château Thames Embankment”. I suspected that all this attention meant that she had some uncomfortable news to break and I was right.