Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (16 page)

It seemed from a far way off that I heard myself answering, probably unwisely, ‘No.'

‘Did you say no?' Wystan couldn't believe his ears.

‘No is what I said.'

‘May I ask why you said no?'

‘Because I've just had a long talk to Simon. Because he's got some hope at last. Because he seems to have come back to life and almost made a joke. I can't deprive him of all hope.'

‘Are you suggesting, then,' Wystan for once asked a question like a good cross-examiner, ‘that my presence in the case would deprive our client of hope?'

There was no answer to this, so I didn't give him one. He gave up persuading and passed to a judgement which, I suppose, I had made inevitable.

‘Rumpole! Young men who join chambers with no practice and no previous experience are necessarily marked “on approval”. We not only expect them to provide work for chambers but, perhaps more importantly, to live up to the finest traditions of the bar, by which our lives at Equity Court are, I am glad to say, governed. I have to admit that, at first, you showed promise. This was noticed by Albert Handyside, our clerk, and by my daughter, Hilda, who takes an interest in legal matters and who had some idea of pursuing a career at the bar, which proved to be impracticable.'

‘Because of the toilet accommodation?' I was unwise enough to interrupt.

‘For reasons of Chamber management which will no longer concern you, Rumpole! As I say, it was Hilda who persuaded me that you might be of some use as a very junior junior in
R
. v.
Jerold
. She is usually a sound judge of character and I took her advice. I very much regret I was unwise to do so. Disloyalty, Rumpole, is not in the finest traditions of the bar, and for a junior to turn the client against his leader is not conduct I can tolerate from a member of Equity Court. I advise you to start looking for alternative accommodation. You may have some difficulty finding it. Your reputation has already gone round the Temple, and Heads of Chambers have got little room for tenants who will seek to make fools of them in public.'

I can't say that this sentence was unexpected. There seemed to be little else to add, and there was no plea in mitigation which I could make without further wounding Wystan or betraying Simon. ‘So, that's that, then' was my final speech as I stood up to go.

‘Yes, Rumpole.' At last Hilda's daddy and I seemed to be in agreement. ‘That would appear to be that.'

‘There is one more thing.' That's the trouble with barristers, they always have something else to say. ‘You asked me the one important question.'

‘And what was that?'

‘If Simon didn't kill his father and Charlie, who on earth did?'

‘Oh, yes.' There appeared in C. H. Wystan's face something very like a sneer. ‘And I suppose you've found the answer to it?'

‘Not yet,' I told him, ‘but I certainly mean to try.' And then we parted company.

To cheer myself up, and banish all memories of sherry, I cooked myself bacon and eggs with a fried slice on my gas ring and washed it down with the bottle of Château Thames Embankment I had bought from Pommeroy's one optimistic evening when Albert gave me a Legal Aid cheque.

I went to bed with Wystan's question echoing in my head. Who on earth else? I had no idea of the answer then, but only a feeling that somewhere, perhaps in my long talk to Simon, there lay the first hint of an answer. I could get no further than that, and then the sight of Daisy Sampson floated across my mind and I remembered the lost case of Uncle Cyril Timson. For a moment his story seemed to have some connection with the mysterious happenings at the Penge bungalows. But not being able to work out exactly what it was, I fell asleep.

17

Looking back down the long corridor of the years, as I have had to do in the writing of these memoirs, I have come to the conclusion that life is a game of chance, like roulette or beggar my neighbour, and not a game of skill, like chess. There seems to be no sense or logic in the cards we are dealt. For instance, why on earth did my fiancée, Ivy Porter (daughter of my old law tutor at Keble), who was young, I thought beautiful, cheerful, happy, full of jokes and doing no harm to anyone, have to die so young? There was no sense at all in this, while those human beings we could quite honestly do without (here I might mention the names of Their Honours Judge ‘Custodial Cookson' and the mad Bullingham) soldier on until a ripe old age doing nothing but bring about injustice, frustration and irritation to those unfortunate enough to appear before them. By what ill chance was there a Luger pistol with a magazine full of bullets available in the Penge bungalow on the night when young Simon Jerold had a quarrel with his father?

But Simon's tragedy was, of course, my great opportunity, so whoever is dealing out the cards at random has no idea who will be the winners or losers. When I thought about this I felt ashamed, almost guilty. Did this young man have to risk his neck so that I could land a sensational case in the public eye? My shame at this thought had to be banished by a renewed determination to save Simon's life, if I could, if only I could! I thought of the chances that had brought me into this position, all of which I had accepted gratefully. If Daisy Sampson hadn't danced away from me I might not have, I told myself, so impressed Hilda by my walk around the floor that she recommended me for a junior brief in a case which her father had got, certainly more by luck than by good management. If he hadn't been called away to the Court of Appeal that morning, I wouldn't have been able to cross-examine the great forensic science oracle and inspire hope in Simon. And now here I was, landed with all this good fortune, with no real idea of what to do with it when we started work again on Monday morning.

I'd gone out to breakfast at a greasy spoon near Southampton Row and come back home with the hope of working out some sort of plan of attack, when the next card came fluttering down from the sky and it promised to be, if not an ace, at least a royalty. My landlady told me there'd been a phone call and she'd written down what was for me an unforgettable number. I put money into the pay telephone in the hall and was rewarded by the slightly breathless and ever welcome ‘Hello, darling' of Bobby O'Keefe.

‘You rang me! Are you going to leave that three-fingered husband and come down to join me for the weekend?'

‘He's right here with me in the bar, Rumpole.'

‘Is he jealous?'

‘Not in the least. He wants to know if you're still grounded.'

I couldn't help a feeling of resentment at ex-Pilot Officer Dougherty's complete lack of jealousy, but I pulled myself together. ‘Well, yes,' I said, ‘I am grounded. Doing a big case with not an idea in my head.'

‘Your ears would have been burning a couple of nights ago. There was a chap in here, taking a week's holiday in Coldsands with his new wife - very nice girl too. Anyway, he was interested in all the stuff we have over the bar and he told us he used to fly Bristols in the war, so naturally Sam and he got talking.'

‘Naturally.'

‘And we mentioned that case you're meant to be doing at the Old Bailey. We told him we knew you and he was interested in that too.'

‘Did he say anything else apart from being interested?'

‘He wanted to put you straight about a couple of things.'

‘He knew Jerry Jerold?'

‘He seems to have done.'

‘All right. Did he say what he wanted to put me straight about?'

‘Not really. He didn't say any more. Then he bought us a round of drinks and we got at the piano.'

‘I wish I'd been there.'

‘Well, you should stay down here. Not keep up in that London.'

‘Did he have a name, this well-wisher?'

‘He left us a card. He's a salesman in something. Home loans. Pensions. Patio paving. Something we don't want anyway.'

‘The card, Bobby! Have you got the card?'

‘I think Sam had it somewhere. Sam!' She called out across the bar, empty before opening time, and they started up a search. I waited in suspense until it was found, tucked in beside an upended bottle of Haig and Haig behind the bar. His name was Don Charleston and his card disclosed a telephone number.

It was as a result of this, and a subsequent call, that I found myself on Saturday lunchtime walking past the maze, the lake with flamingos and various significant buildings, towards the end of the Crystal Palace Park.

‘You'll find him,' Don Charleston's wife had told me on the telephone, ‘by the prehistoric animals.'

What was that about? Was he in the company of a coven of circus judges or hugely outdated Conservative politicians? I asked her what she meant exactly.

‘He's having access.' She pronounced the word as though it was an attack of an unfortunate illness like asthma or epilepsy. ‘
She
only gives it to him half a day a month. That's by order of the court. It hasn't made any difference since we got married. It's only half a day a month he can have Jimmy with him. And you know what's all that boy wants to do? Go to Crystal Palace Park and stare at the bloody dinosaurs, if you'll pardon my French. What did you say your name was, Mr . . .'

‘Rumpole. Horace Rumpole.'

‘Well, that's where you'll find them, Mr Rumpole, if you're all that interested.'

Crystal Palace Park, for those unfamiliar with the locality, was the place to which Joseph Paxton's great greenhouse, an enormous palace of glass, was moved from Hyde Park after the Great Exhibition of 1851. It burnt down before the Second World War, and what was left were fragments of buildings, lakes, a site for concerts, a motor-racing track and a football ground. And this strange collection of lakes and buildings exists, of course, around Penge.

I had my instructions from Mrs Charleston, who, I imagined, derived her strength and much of her energy from constant criticism of the cruel and unnatural ways of her husband's first wife. The park was full, at the weekend, of lovers, mothers pushing prams, children running away from their parents, getting lost and called for down the walkways, and street sleepers with nothing better to do, turning their faces to what was to be almost the last of the September sun. Somewhere on my way I passed a bust of the poet Dante. ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here,' was what I was repeating to myself, and yet I was full of hope now that I was about to meet another possible player in the Penge Bungalow tragedy.

When I reached the prehistoric animals I saw them almost at once, a tall man with curly greying hair and a small boy, perhaps seven years old. They were sitting together on a bench with what was left of a picnic lunch on a neat cloth between them. The boy was staring at an island on the lake where a variety of stone dinosaurs were assembled. To look at them seemed pleasure enough for him; he didn't want to hear them bellow or see them flop into the water and paddle their way to the footpath.

‘Mr Charleston?' I said.

‘Who the hell are you?' The man looked up suspiciously, but his voice was quiet, with a strong Scottish accent.

‘My name's Horace Rumpole. I'm a lawyer.'

‘I've got the boy till three o'clock. I've got the right to be with Jimmy till three provided I don't bring him into contact with my present wife, Marjorie Charleston. I don't know what sort of lawyer you are, but you'll see that down in black and white in the court order.'

‘No, no,' I did my best to reassure him. ‘I'm a friend of Bobby Dougherty, O'Keefe that was. She said you were staying down at Coldsands.'

‘Our only holiday. Working too hard all the summer to make what I have to pay to Jimmy's mother. Surely she doesn't begrudge us a week's holiday at the sea with a bit of rain attached to it.'

‘I don't know what your ex-wife begrudges,' I assured him, ‘I know absolutely nothing about her. As I told you, I'm a friend of Bobby and Sam Dougherty. Mind if I sit down?'

‘If you have to.'

I was not getting the warmest of welcomes from the ex-air force hero as I squatted on the bench beside him. On the other side was the check tablecloth, folded in four, and on it was the refuse of rejected crusts of spam sandwiches, prepared, I imagined reluctantly, by the present Mrs Charleston, the end of a chunk of fruit cake and empty bottles of Tizer. Jimmy never turned to look at me during our conversation, having eyes only for the prehistoric monsters.

‘I've got absolutely nothing to do with your divorce,' I assured Jimmy's father. ‘I'm the lawyer who's defending young Simon Jerold in the Penge Bungalow case.'

‘That's right!' Don Charleston seemed to be gently congratulating me on remembering at long last who I was. ‘That's right! They were talking about you up at Coldsands.'

‘With approval, I hope.'

‘They seemed to like you. Bobby likes you at least.'

‘She also said you were talking about the late Jerry Jerold.'

‘He was a brave man, that's all I know about him.'

‘Is it? One of his fellow officers, a chap called Harry Daniels, thought Jerry richly deserved what he got, which was shot through the heart. Do you agree?'

I waited for what seemed a long time for an answer. Don Charleston was occupied clearing up the remains of the picnic, putting the crusts of sandwiches and empty bottles into a carrier bag. He flapped the cloth in the air, scattering crumbs that were swooped on by the birds. When he sat down again he said, ‘The boy's just fascinated with the monsters. He can't get enough of them.'

‘They don't look particularly friendly.'

‘They used to roam the earth. You should remember that about them. It was nothing but a swamp with those monsters roaming about. Nothing changes, does it, Mr Rumpole?'