The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Read online

  “This year,” she told me, with the firmness of Old Gravestone pronouncing judgement, “I’m not going to do Christmas. It’s getting too much for me.”

  Christmas was not usually much of a “do” in the Rumpole household. There is the usual exchange of presents; I get a tie and Hilda receives the statutory bottle of lavender water, which seems to be for laying down rather than immediate use. She cooks the turkey and I open the Château Thames Embankment, and so our Saviour’s birth is celebrated.

  “I have booked us this year,” Hilda announced, “into Cherry Picker’s Hall. You look in need of a rest, Rumpole.”

  What was this place she spoke of? A retirement home? Sheltered accommodation? “I’m in the middle of an important murder case, I can’t pack up and go into a home.”

  “It’s not a home, Rumpole. It’s a country house hotel. In the Cotswolds. They’re doing a special offer – four nights with full board. A children’s party. Christmas lunch with crackers and a dance on Christmas Eve. It’ll be something to look forward to.”

  “I don’t really think so. We haven’t got any children and I don’t want to dance at Christmas. So shall we say no to the Cherry Picker’s?”

  “Whether you dance or not is entirely up to you, Rumpole. But you can’t say no because I’ve already booked it and paid the deposit. And I’ve collected your old dinner jacket from the cleaners.”

  So I was unusually silent. Not for nothing is my wife entitled “She Who Must Be Obeyed”.

  I was unusually silent on the way to the Cotswolds too, but as we approached this country house hotel, I felt that perhaps, after all, She Who Must Be Obeyed had made a wise decision and that the considerable financial outlay on the “Budget Christmas Offer” might turn out, in spite of all my apprehension, to be justified. We took a taxi from the station. As we made our way down deep into the countryside, the sun was shining and the trees were throwing a dark pattern against a clear sky. We passed green fields where cows were munching and a stream trickling over the rocks. A stray dog crossed the road in front of us and a single kite (at least Hilda said it was a kite) wheeled across the sky. We had, it seemed, entered a better, more peaceful world far from the problem of terrorists, the bloodstained letter containing a sentence of death, the impossible client, and the no less difficult judge I struggled with down at the Old Bailey. In spite of all my troubles, I felt a kind of contentment stealing over me. Happily, the contentment only deepened as our taxi scrunched the gravel by the entrance of Cherry Picker’s Hall. The old grey stones of the one-time manor house were gilded by the last of the winter sun. We were greeted warmly by a friendly manageress and our things were taken up to a comfortable room overlooking a wintry garden. Then, in no time at all, I was sitting by a blazing log fire in the residents’ lounge, eating anchovy paste sandwiches with the prospect of a dark and alcoholic fruitcake to follow. Even my appalling client, Hussein Khan, might, I thought, if brought into such an environment, forget his calling as a messenger of terror and relax after dinner.

  “It’s wonderful to be away from the Old Bailey. I just had the most terrible quarrel with a particularly unlearned judge,” I told Hilda, who was reading a back number of Country Life.

  “You keep quarrelling with judges, don’t you? Why don’t you take up fishing, Rumpole? Lazy days by a trout stream might help you forget all those squalid cases you do.” She had clearly got to the country sports section of the magazine.

  “This quarrel went a bit further than usual. He threatened to report me for professional misconduct. I didn’t like the way he kept telling the jury my client was guilty.”

  “Well isn’t he guilty, Rumpole?” In all innocence, Hilda had asked the awkward question.

  “Well. Quite possibly. But that’s for the jury of twelve honest citizens to decide. Not Mr Justice Gravestone.”

  “Gravestone? Is that his name?”

  “No. His name’s Graves. I call him Gravestone.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you, Rumpole?”

  “He speaks like a voice from the tomb. It’s my personal belief that he urinates iced water!”

  “Really, Rumpole. Do try not to be vulgar. So what did you say to Mr Justice Graves? You might as well tell me the truth.”

  She was right, of course. The only way of appeasing She Who Must was to plead guilty and throw oneself on the mercy of the court. “I told him to come down off the bench and join Soapy Sam Ballard on the prosecution team.”

  “Rumpole, that was terribly rude of you.”

  “Yes,” I said, with considerable satisfaction. “It really was.”

  “So no wonder he’s cross with you.”

  “Very cross indeed.” Once again I couldn’t keep the note of triumph out of my voice.

  “I should think he probably hates you, Rumpole.”

  “I should think he probably does.”

  “Well, you’re safe here anyway. You can forget all about your precious Mr Justice Gravestone and just enjoy Christmas.”

  She was, as usual, right. I stretched my legs towards the fire and took a gulp of Earl Grey and a large bite of rich, dark cake.

  And then I heard a voice call out, a voice from the tomb.

  “Rumpole!” it said. “What an extraordinary coincidence. Are you here for Christmas? You and your good lady?”

  I turned my head. I had not, alas, been mistaken. There he was, in person – Mr Justice Gravestone. He was wearing a tweed suit and some type of regimental or old school tie. His usually lugubrious features wore the sort of smile only previously stimulated by a long succession of guilty verdicts. And the next thing he said came as such a surprise that I almost choked on my slice of fruitcake.

  “I say,” he said, and I promise you these were Gravestone’s exact words, “this is fun, isn’t it?”

  II

  “I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be married to Rumpole.”

  It was a lie, of course. I dare swear that The Honourable Gravestone never spent one minute of his time wondering what it would be like to be Mrs Rumpole. But there he was, having pulled up a chair, tucking in to our anchovy paste sandwiches and smiling at She Who Must Be Obeyed (my wife Hilda) with as much joy as if she had just returned twenty guilty verdicts – one of them being in the case of The Judge versus Rumpole.

  “He can be a bit difficult at times, of course,” Hilda weighed in for the prosecution.

  “A little difficult! That’s putting it mildly, Mrs Rumpole. You can’t imagine the trouble we have with him in court.”

  To my considerable irritation, my wife and the judge were smiling together as though they were discussing, with tolerant amusement, the irrational behaviour of a difficult child.

  “Of course we mustn’t discuss the case before me at the moment,” Graves said.

  “That ghastly terrorist.” Hilda had already reached a verdict.

  “Exactly! We won’t say a word about him.”

  “Just as well,” Hilda agreed. “We get far too much discussion of Rumpole’s cases.”

  “Really? Poor Mrs Rumpole.” The judge gave her a look of what I found to be quite sickening sympathy. “Brings his work home with him, does he?”

  “Oh, absolutely! He’ll do anything in the world for some ghastly murder or other, but can I get him to help me redecorate the bathroom?”

  “You redecorate bathrooms?” The judge looked at Hilda with admiration as though she had just admitted to sailing round the world in a hot air balloon. Then he turned to me.

  “You’re a lucky man, Rumpole!”

  “He won’t tell you that.” Hilda was clearly enjoying our Christmas break even more than she had expected. “By the way I hope he wasn’t too rude to you in court.”

  “I thought we weren’t meant to discuss the case.” I tried to make an objection, which was entirely disregarded by my wife and the unlearned judge.

  “Oh, that wasn’t only Rumpole being rude. It was Rumpole trying to impress his client by showing him how fearlessly
he can stand up to judges. We’re quite used to that.”

  “He says,” Hilda still seemed to find the situation amusing, “that you threatened to report him for professional misconduct. You really ought to be more careful, shouldn’t you Rumpole?”

  “Oh, I said that,” Graves had the audacity to admit, “just to give your husband a bit of a shock. He did go a little green, I thought, when I made the suggestion.”

  “I did not go green!” By now I was losing patience with the judge Hilda was treating like a long-lost friend. “I made a perfectly reasonable protest against a flagrant act of premature adjudication! You had obviously decided that my client is guilty and you were going to let the jury know it.”

  “But isn’t he guilty, Rumpole? Isn’t that obvious?”

  “Of course he’s not guilty. He’s completely innocent. And will remain so until the jury come back into court and convict him. And that is to be their decision. And what the judge wants will have absolutely nothing to do with it.”

  I may have gone too far, but I felt strongly on the subject. Judge Graves, however, seemed completely impervious to my attack. He stood, still smiling, warming his tweed-covered backside at the fire and repeated, “We really mustn’t discuss the case we’re involved in at the moment. Let’s remember, it is Christmas.”

  “Yes, Rumpole. It is Christmas.” Hilda had cast herself, it seemed as Little Lady Echo to his Lordship.

  “That’s settled then. Look, why don’t I book a table for three at dinner?” The judge was still smiling. “Wouldn’t that be tremendous fun?”

  “What a perfectly charming man Judge Graves is.”

  These were words I never expected to hear spoken, but they contained the considered verdict of She Who Must be Obeyed before we settled down for the first night of our Christmas holiday. The food at dinner had been simple but good. (The entrecôte steak had not been arranged in a little tower swamped by tomato coulis and there had been a complete absence of roquette and all the idiocy of smart restaurants.) The Gravestone was clearly on the most friendly of terms with “Lorraine”, the manageress, and he and Hilda enjoyed a lengthy conversation on the subject of fishing, which sport Graves practised and on which Hilda was expert after her study of the back number of Country Life in the residents’ lounge.

  Now and again I was asked why I didn’t go out on a day’s fishing with Hilda’s newfound friend the judge, a question I found as easy to answer as “Why don’t you take part in the London Marathon wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and a wig?” For a greater part of the dinner I had sat, unusually silent, listening to the ceaseless chatter of the newfound friends, feeling as superfluous as a maiden aunt at a lovers’ meeting. Soon after telling me how charming she had found The Gravestone, Hilda had sank into a deep and contented sleep. As the moonlight streamed in at the window and I heard the faraway hooting of an owl, I began to worry about the case we hadn’t discussed at dinner.

  I couldn’t forget my first meeting in Brixton Prison with my client, Hussein Khan. Although undoubtedly the author of the fatal letter, he didn’t seem, when I met him in the company of my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard, to be the sort who would strike terror into the heart of anyone. He was short and unsmiling with soft brown eyes, a quiet monotonous voice, and unusually small hands. He wasn’t only uncomplaining, he seemed to find it the most natural thing in the world that he should find himself locked up and facing the most serious of all charges. It was, he told us early in the interview, the will of Allah, and if Allah willed, who was he, a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate in computer studies, to ask questions? I was, throughout the case, amazed at the combination, in my inexplicable client, of the most complicated knowledge of modern technology and the most primitive and merciless religious beliefs.

  “I wrote the letter. Of course I did. It was not my decision that she should die. It was the will of God.”

  “The will of God that a harmless woman should be shot for writing something critical in a book?”

  “Die for blasphemy, yes.”

  “And they say you were her executioner, that you carried out the sentence.”

  “I didn’t do that.” He was looking at me patiently, as though I still had much to learn about the faith of Hussein Khan. “I knew that death would come to her in time. It came sooner than I had expected.”

  So, was I defending a man who had issued a death threat which had then been obediently carried out by some person or persons unknown in the peaceful precincts of a south London university? It seemed an unlikely story, and I was not looking forward to the murder trial which had started at the Old Bailey during the run-up to Christmas.

  At the heart of the case there was, I thought, a mystery. The letter, I knew, was clear evidence of Hussein’s guilt, and yet there was no forensic evidence – no bloodstains on his clothing, no traces of his having fired a pistol with a silencer (there must have been a silencer, because no one in the building had heard a shot). This was evidence in Hussein’s favour, but I had to remember that he had been in the university building when the murder had taken place, although he’d already been sent down for writing the letter.

  As the owl hooted, Hilda breathed deeply. Sleep eluded me. I went through Hussein Khan’s story again. He had gotten a phone call, he said, when he was at his parents’ restaurant. (He had answered the phone himself, so there was no one to confirm the call.) It had been, it seemed, from a girl who said she was the senior tutor’s secretary and that the tutor wanted to meet him in the university library at ten o’clock that evening to discuss his future.

  He had got to the William Morris building at nine forty-five and had told Mr Luttrell, the man at the main reception area, that he was there to meet the senior tutor at the library. He said that when he had arrived at the library, the tutor wasn’t there and that he had waited for over an hour and then went home, never going near Honoria Glossop’s office.

  Of course the senior tutor and his secretary denied that either had made such a telephone call. The implication was that Hussein was lying through his teeth and that he had gone to the university because he had known that Professor Glossop worked in her office until late at night and he had intended to kill her.

  At last I fell into a restless sleep. In my dreams I saw myself being prosecuted by Soapy Sam Ballard who was wearing a long beard and arguing for my conviction under Sharia law.

  I woke early to the first faint flush of daylight as a distant cock crowed. I got up, tiptoed across the room, and extracted from the bottom of my case the papers in R. v. Khan. I was looking for the answer to a problem as yet undefined, going through the prosecution statement again, and finding nothing very much.

  I reminded myself that Mr Luttrell, at his reception desk, had seen Honoria and her husband arrive together and go to her office. Ricky Glossop had left not more than fifteen minutes later, and later still he had telephoned and couldn’t get an answer from his wife. He had asked Luttrell to go to Honoria’s office because she wasn’t answering her phone. The receptionist had gone to her office and found her lying across her desk, her hand close to the bloodstained letter.

  Next I read the statement from Honoria’s secretary, Sue Blackmore, describing how she had found the letter in Honoria’s university pigeonhole and taken it to Honoria at her home. On Honoria’s reaction at receiving it, Ms Blackmore commented, “She didn’t take the note all that seriously and wouldn’t even tell the police.” Ricky Glossop had finally rung the anti-terrorist department in Scotland Yard and showed them the letter.

  None of this was new. There was only one piece of evidence which I might have overlooked.

  In the senior tutor’s statement he said he had spoken to Honoria on the morning of the day she had died. She had told him that she couldn’t be at a seminar that afternoon because she had an urgent appointment with Tony Hawkin. Hawkin, as the senior tutor knew, was a solicitor who acted for the university, and had also acted for Honoria Glossop in a private capacity. The senior tutor had no idea
why she had wanted to see her solicitor. He never saw his colleague alive again.

  I was giving that last document some thought when Hilda stirred, opened an eye, and instructed me to ring for breakfast.

  “You’ll have to look after yourself today, Rumpole,” she told me. “Gerald’s going to take me fishing for grayling.”

  “Gerald?” Was there some new man in Hilda’s life who had turned up in the Cotswolds?

  “You know. The charming judge you introduced me to last night.”

  “You can’t mean Gravestone?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I mean Gerald Graves.”

  “You’re going fishing with him?”

  “He’s very kindly going to take me to a bit of river he shares with a friend.”

  “How delightful.” I adopted the ironic tone. “If you catch anything, bring it back for supper.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to do any fishing. I’m simply going to watch Gerald from the bank. He’s going to show me how he ties his flies.”

  “How absolutely fascinating.”

  She didn’t seem to think she’d said anything at all amusing and she began to lever herself briskly out of bed.

  “Do ring up about that breakfast, Rumpole!” she said. “I’ve got to get ready for Gerald.”

  He may be Gerald to you, I thought, but he will always be the Old Gravestone to me.

  After Hilda had gone to meet her newfound friend, I finished the bacon and eggs with sausage and fried slice – which I had ordered as an organic, low calorie breakfast – and put a telephone call through to my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard. I found him at his home talking over a background of shrill and excited children eager for the next morning and the well-filled stockings.

  “Mr Rumpole!”The man sounded shocked by my call. “Don’t you ever take a day off? It’s Christmas Eve!”