Murder Most Merry (41 page)

“That’s enough,” he said. What with pictures and samples and the coroner’s boys, we’d been there maybe two hours. “Let’s get this to the station and ready for the lab.” He got to his feet, slow, wincing a little.

So here I was with a guy who I thought had done the murder we were investigating, a guy who was also maybe roping me in as his accomplice, and who might just put me out of my misery if he thought I’d figured that out. And all I could think was
, I wonder how he plans to keep anyone else from looking over the scene and reading it right.
And I never did find that out.

Funny how your mind works. I mean, I should’ve been thinking a lot of other stuff, about Smollett and Sughrue, and if my guesses were right—about both of them—and whether Sughrue thought I was going along with whatever his plans were, and what ideas he might have about my future. But what I remember most was worrying about how he was going to keep everyone else from seeing what I saw in the back room there at Smokey’s.

So this next part nobody believes. I must’ve told it a hundred times in the week after it happened and never got anything but funny looks, but it’s true just like I’m going to say: We were walking out the back of Smokey’s, to the car. And the snow hadn’t let up a bit, but it’d been packed down by the uniforms standing around holding the scene for us. So as I followed Sughrue out the back door, onto the little landing there, I stepped onto that smooth-packed snow and my foot slid out from under me, and I lurched up to keep from falling and bumped into Sughrue, and he went down. Hard. Into the snow.

And he yelped.

Like I say, most folks don’t think it happened that way. I could see on their faces when I got to that part, they all figured I pushed Sughrue on purpose. But it ain’t so; I was there, I seen it, and it was pure luck, good or bad.

Anyway, Sughrue hit the snow and he yelped and laid there. After a second, I reached down to help him up. but he kind of half swung at me so I pulled back.

He rolled over then and got to his feet, but it wasn’t like anything I ever saw before. You know how sometimes you get hurt and feel like you’re moving in slow motion? Well, now I saw just that. Sughrue moving in slow motion. It was almost like he floated onto his side, holding his coat shut real tight, then got to his knees, then his feet, and I swear I wouldn’t have been surprised if he drifted up into the falling snow and vanished in the gray clouds.

He might as well have.

We looked at each other again. We both knew now that he’d got shot last night, and I knew that the guy who’d done it just went to the morgue. And Sughrue knew I knew, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it but walk back to the car with me.

And I mean to tell you, that ride back was weird. We had this thing between us now, and we both knew what it was, and neither one of us said a word all the way back to the station. I wasn’t worried about Sughrue anymore, I wasn’t even thinking what I should do about this sorry mess. I just kept trying to remember a word I read in a book once about something the Greeks call it, when fear turns to pity.

I never did think of that word. I don’t think I had one other clear thought in my head all the time I fought the car through the snow-drifted streets. I parked and followed Sughrue across the parking lot to the station, seeing his steps get stiff and lurchy. And slow. I followed him up the stairs to the second floor even slower, hearing his breath get loud and raspy as he pulled himself up the steps one at a time, and I mean, One. At. A. Time.

I never saw his face again. Not while he was alive, anyway. I stood there at the top of the stairs and watched the back of him ooze down the hall to his office and get the door closed. Then I figured it was safe and I told Rosey to call the lieutenant.

Lieutenant Franklin retired a few years back, then died or something. So no one but me remembers pushing open the door to Sughrue’s office and seeing him sprawled back in his chair, white like Smollett was, white like the snow, with his coat hanging open and red blood spread all over his shirt and down on the floor. The same blood that was trailed from the front of Smollett’s desk into the bathroom where last night he’d gone to stop the bleeding and thought he had till he went down in the snow and opened up the wound again.

But all that was a long time ago. and nobody remembers Sughrue much anymore, and us who were there reported what we had to and covered up the rest and never talked about it after. In a few years it was like it never happened at all. Like I say. I’d even quit seeing Sughrue’s picture on the wall till the new kid made a point of it.

And even though I looked at it again on the way out that night, it didn’t mean much to me; just some guy I killed once, that’s all.

RUMPOLE AND THE CHAMBERS PARTY – John Mortimer

Christmas comes but once a year. Once a year I receive a gift of socks from She Who Must Be Obeyed; each year I add to her cellar of bottles of lavender water, which she now seems to use mainly for the purpose of “laying down” in the bedroom cupboard (I suspect she has only just started on the 1980 vintage).

Tinseled cards and sprigs of holly appear at the entrance to the cells under the Old Bailey and a constantly repeated tape of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” adds little zest to my two eggs, bacon, and sausage on a fried slice in the Taste-Ee-Bite, Fleet Street; and once a year the Great Debate takes place at our December meeting. Should we invite solicitors to our Chambers party?

“No doubt at the season of our Savior’s birth we should offer hospitality to all sorts and conditions of men,” “Soapy” Sam Ballard, q. c., our devout Head of Chambers, opened the proceedings in his usual manner, that of a somewhat backward bishop addressing Synod on the wisdom of offering the rites of baptism to non-practicing, gay Anglican converts of riper years.

“All conditions of men and
women
.” Phillida Erskine-Brown, q. c.. nee Trant, the Portia of our Chambers, was looking particularly fetching in a well fitting black jacket and an only slightly flippant version of a male collar and tie. As she looked doe-eyed at him, Ballard, who hides a ridiculously susceptible heart beneath his monkish exterior, conceded her point.

“The question before us is, does all sorts and conditions of men, and women, too, of course, include members of the junior branch of the legal profession?”

“I’m against it!” Claude Erskine-Brown had remained an aging junior whilst his wife Phillida fluttered into silk, and he was never in favor of radical change. “The party is very much a family thing for the chaps in Chambers, and the clerk’s room, of course. If we ask solicitors, it looks very much as though we’re touting for briefs.”

“I’m very much in favor of touting for briefs.” Up spake the somewhat grey barrister, Hoskins. “Speaking as a man with four daughters to educate. For heaven’s sake, let’s ask as many solicitors as we know, which, in my case, I’m afraid, is not many.”

“Do you have a view, Rumpole?” Ballard felt bound to ask me, just as a formality.

“Well, yes, nothing wrong with a bit of touting, I agree with Hoskins. But I’m in favor of asking the people who really provide us with work.”

“You mean solicitors?”

“I mean the criminals of England. Fine conservative fellows who should appeal to you, Ballard. Greatly in favor of free enterprise and against the closed shop. I propose we invite a few of the better-class crooks who have no previous engagements as guests of Her Majesty, and show our gratitude.”

A somewhat glazed look came over the assembly at this suggestion and then Mrs. Erskine-Brown broke the silence with: “Claude’s really being awfully stuffy and old-fashioned about this. I propose we invite a smattering of solicitors. from the better-class firms.”

Our Portia’s proposal was carried
nem con
, such was the disarming nature of her sudden smile on everyone, including her husband, who may have had some reason to fear it. Rumpole’s suggestion, to nobody’s surprise, received no support whatsoever.

Our clerk, Henry, invariably arranged the Chambers party for the night on which his wife put on the Nativity play in the Bexley Heath Comprehensive at which she was a teacher. This gave him more scope for kissing Dianne, our plucky but somewhat hit-and-miss typist, beneath the mistletoe which swung from the dim, religious light in the entrance hall of number three Equity Court.

Paper streamers dangled from the bookcase full of All England Law Reports in Ballard’s room and were hooked up to his views of the major English cathedrals. Barristers’ wives were invited, and Mrs. Hilda Rumpole, known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed, was downing sherry and telling Soapy Sam all about the golden days when her daddy, C. H. Wystan, ran Chambers. There were also six or seven solicitors among those present.

One. however, seemed superior to all the rest, a solicitor of the class we seldom see around Equity Court. He had come in with one hand outstretched to Ballard, saying. “Daintry Naismith. happy Christmas. Awfully kind of you fellows to invite one of the junior branch.” Now he stood propped up against the mantelpiece, warming his undoubtedly Savile Row trousers at Ballard’s gas fire and receiving the homage of barristers in urgent need of briefs.

He appeared to be in his well preserved fifties, with grey wings of hair above his ears and a clean-shaven, pink, and still single chin poised above what I took to be an old Etonian tie. Whatever he might have on offer, it wouldn’t, I was sure, be a charge of nicking a frozen chicken from Safeways. Even his murders, I thought, as he sized us up from over the top of his gold-rimmed half glasses, would take place among the landed gentry.

He accepted a measure of Pommeroy’s very ordinary white plonk from Portia and drank it bravely, as though he hadn’t been used to sipping Chassagne-Montrachet all his adult life.

“Mrs. Erskine-Brown,” he purred at her, “I’m looking for a hard-hitting silk to brief in the Family Division. I suppose you’re tremendously booked up.”

“The pressure of my work,” Phillida said modestly, “is enormous.”

“I’ve got the Geoffrey Twyford divorce coming. Pretty hairy bit of infighting over the estate and the custody of young Lord Shiplake. I thought you’d be just right for it.”

“Is that the Duke of Twyford?” Claude Erskine-Brown looked suitably awestruck. In spite of his other affectations. Erskine-Brown’s snobbery is completely genuine.

“Well, if you have a word with Henry, my clerk”—Mrs. Erskine-Brown gave the solicitor a look of cool availability—”he might find a few spare dates.”

“Well, that is good of you. And you, Mr. Erskine-Brown, mainly civil work now, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes. Mainly civil.” Erskine-Brown lied cheerfully; he’s not above taking on the odd indecent assault when tort gets a little thin on the ground. “I do find crime so sordid.”

“Oh, I agree. Look here. I’m stumped for a man to take on our insurance business, but I suppose you’d be far too busy.”

“Oh. no. I’ve got plenty of time.” Erskine-Brown lacked his wife’s laid-back approach to solicitors. “That is to say. I’m sure I could make time. One gets used to extremely long hours, you know.” I thought that the longest hours Erskine-Brown put in were when he sat, in grim earnest, through the Ring at Covent Garden, being a man who submits himself to Wagner rather as others enjoy walking from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

And then I saw Naismith staring at me and waited for him to announce that the Marquess of Something or Other had stabbed his butler in the library and could I possibly make myself available for the trial. Instead he muttered. “Frightfully good party,” and wandered off in the general direction of Soapy Sam Ballard.

“What’s the matter with you, Rumpole?” She Who Must Be Obeyed was at my elbow and not sounding best pleased. “Why didn’t you push yourself forward?” Erskine-Brown had also moved off by this time to join the throng.

“I don’t care for divorce,” I told her. “It’s too bloodthirsty for me. Now if he’d offered me a nice gentle murder—”

“Go after him, Rumpole,” she urged me, “and make yourself known. I’ll go and ask Phillida what her plans are for the Harrods sale.”

Perhaps it was the mention of the sale which spurred me toward that undoubted source of income. Mr. Daintry Naismith. I found him talking to Ballard in a way which showed, in my view, a gross overestimation of that old darling’s forensic powers. “Of course the client would have to understand that the golden tongue of Samuel Ballard, q. c.. can’t be hired on the cheap,” Naismith was saying. I thought that to refer to our Head of Chambers, whose voice in Court could best be compared to a rusty saw, as golden-tongued was a bit of an exaggeration.