Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (3 page)

In the early 1950s, when peace and some degree of prosperity were celebrated by the Festival of Britain, the Dome of Discovery, the Guinness Clock and other tributes to our national way of life, including the Penge Bungalow Murders, I felt my existence enriched by a Miss Daisy Sampson. She was an outdoor clerk in the firm of Mickelthwaite and Nutwell, which was, by then, briefing me in small cases in the magistrates' courts. She was blonde, cheerful and uninhibited, a girl with a ready smile, slightly protruding front teeth outlined with bright red lipstick and a way with fairly basic jokes, such as ‘I'm always going to give you my briefs, Mr Rumpole,' which I found, in those far-off years, both provocative and witty.

So we shared morning coffee and pub lunches round the Uxbridge Magistrates', Old Street, Bow Street and the Horseferry Road. We spoke disrespectfully of our clients, the chairmen of the benches and the magistrates' clerks, and were able, more often than not, to pull off some sort of victory. Our relationship had so far advanced that, when I saw a dance for junior members of the bar and their guests announced in the Inner Temple Hall, I decided in a moment of reckless extravagance on the hire of a dinner jacket and tickets, supper included, for self and Daisy Sampson.

 

Although I was slowly gaining some experience as a barrister, I had far less experience as a dancer. Miss Daisy Sampson was so unfailingly cheerful and tolerant, however, that I was able to stroll round the dance floor, keeping my arm around her waist and my feet out of her way, and I imagined myself entirely happy in the early part of that evening.

And then, even as we danced, I heard a high commanding voice, the bray of an Eton accent, and turned to recognize Reginald ‘Reggie' Proudfoot, who had been the prosecutor in some of our cases.

‘Hey there, Rumpole! That girl's far too pretty for you to be dancing with.' At which the egregious Proudfoot advanced on us and, with an arm round Daisy, turned her into the dancing position, a process to which, I was sorry to notice, she offered little or no resistance.

‘That's as may be, Proudfoot -' I was anxious to keep the proceedings polite - ‘but Miss Sampson is
my
partner.'

‘Not now,' he assured me. ‘It's the “Gentlemen's Excuse Me” and we're fully entitled to carry off each other's partners. I suppose you don't go to many dances? You've got a lot to learn, Rumpole. A whole lot to learn.' At which the abominable prosecutor waltzed away with Daisy while the singer in the band repeated the verse I have quoted above.

I was walking moodily towards the bar when I heard another voice, clear as a bell but this time female, call, ‘Rumpole!' I turned to see a fresh-faced and determined-looking young woman of my own age finishing an ice cream. I was, as I was so rarely to be in the future, temporarily lost for words.

‘You
are
Rumpole, aren't you? I heard Reggie Proudfoot call you Rumpole.'

‘Well, yes,' I had to concede, ‘I am Rumpole.'

‘I thought so! And you're in Daddy's chambers.'

‘Daddy?' For a moment her description of our Head had me puzzled.

‘I'm Hilda Wystan.' She gave a final lick to her ice-cream spoon and put it down on the glass plate. Little guessing what the future held, I said I was pleased to meet her, or made some such neutral remark.

‘I like to keep my finger on the pulse of chambers,' she told me. ‘I often drop in to see how Daddy's managing you all. Albert tells me you're always before some Court of Petty Sessions. They must be keeping you pretty busy and you're not such a white wig after all. Although, come to think about it, you don't wear wigs in those inferior courts, do you? So your wig's probably as white as ever.'

I resolved to get hold of my wig and kick it around the dusty floor of the chambers' cellar until all its whiteness had gone for ever.

These thoughts were interrupted by Hilda Wystan. ‘So, Rumpole, if you're so good at asking for things in front of the magistrates, aren't you going to ask me to dance?'

It was less a question than a command and I found myself obeying it. Hilda didn't laugh so much as Daisy, but she uttered sharp orders such as ‘Left, left and left again' or ‘We're coming up to the corner now, so
chassé
, Rumpole. Please remember to
chassé
!'

I saw Daisy Sampson laughing with Reggie Proudfoot's friends at the far end of the hall as I was steered through several more dance numbers by Hilda Wystan, including ‘Jezebel' and ‘Jealousy'. As we danced, I caught sight of a couple grasping hands and apparently throwing each other apart before pulling themselves together again. ‘It's called “jiving”, Rumpole,' Hilda Wystan, who seemed surprisingly up in these things, told me, ‘but I wouldn't advise you to try it until you're better at the basic steps.'

As the band played ‘Goodnight Irene', my friend Daisy came over to tell me that Reggie had agreed to drive her back to Dagenham because it was ‘on his way home' - a statement which I didn't believe to be true.

Not much later Hilda Wystan told me that ‘Daddy' would be downstairs waiting to collect her, as he had been working late on a big brief in chambers. ‘Never mind, Rumpole,' she said as she departed, ‘we shall meet again. And it may be sooner than you expect.'

So I was left alone with a glass of dubious claret cup, in which leaves and slices of fruit floated, to wonder what Hilda Wystan had meant by her last doom-laden remark.

 

I didn't have long to wait for an answer. It was only a week or so later that C. H. Wystan came into the room where Uncle Tom was vainly trying to chip another golf ball into the wastepaper basket and I was making a note on yet another careless driving. He said, ‘Would you care to dine, Rumpole?'

I was about to tell him that I only did so occasionally, when the Legal Aid cheques were paid in, but he went on, before I could interrupt, ‘Just a family occasion. There'll be no need for you to dress.'

I had, I confess, a momentary temptation to ask, ‘A naked family occasion?' but again I resisted it.

So I found myself, far earlier than I expected, ringing the front door bell of a grey house on a street of similar grey houses in Kensington. The door was opened by a maid as colourless and tidy as the house, with its grey wallpaper, framed etchings of views of the Swiss Alps and central heating kept economically at a low level. Without any preliminary drinking time, I found myself facing the joint and two veg together with Wystan and his lady wife, a large anxious woman who seemed to be continually worried about the arrival and quality of the dinner.

‘Oh, do stop worrying and calm down, Mother!' exclaimed Hilda. She clearly had little tolerance for her female parent. To her father she was far more patient, although she was noticeably better informed about the business of chambers than he was.

‘It's true, isn't it, Daddy?' She seemed to be calling on his support as a mere formality. ‘Albert likes the cut of Rumpole's jib? It's so important to get on well with the clerk.'

‘Of course it's important.' C. H. Wystan was prepared to give a carefully balanced judgement on the subject. ‘That doesn't mean that you have to join the clerk in the saloon bar or anything of that nature! That would not be in the fine tradition of the bar. Rumpole understands that, I'm sure.'

‘Do you, Rumpole?' It was Hilda who asked the question.

‘Oh, yes,' I was craven enough to agree. ‘I understand it perfectly.' Youth is full of such small acts of betrayal. I promised myself to make it up to Albert the next time we met in Pommeroy's, a place of refuge from a harsh world.

When we had polished off the pudding (baked jam roll), C. H. Wystan gave a brief nod to his wife, who gathered up her daughter to depart. Before she left the room, Hilda said, ‘Daddy's got some good news for you, Rumpole,' and she went off with what I can only describe as a smirk. I was surprised that what always seemed to me the barbaric custom of leaving men to port and dirty jokes after the pud had then survived, even in the family circle, as one of the finest traditions of the bar.

Dirty jokes, of course, there were not. Port has always seemed to me a sickly sort of a wine, and I would have been happier with a glass of Pommeroy's Plonk with Albert than vintage Cockburn's with C. H. Wystan. ‘Perhaps we shouldn't have given you Uncle Tom as a pupil master.' He seemed in an apologetic mood. ‘He doesn't get much work.'

‘He certainly doesn't.'

‘All the same, he's a safe pair of hands.' It was then that I decided that, whatever became of me at the bar, I wouldn't be known simply for the safety of my hands.

‘We had a fellow once in chambers. I never liked him. Name of Denver. Well, Denver had a pupil from whom he extracted the usual £100 fee. And do you know, the very next day after he'd got it, Denver and our junior clerk legged it over to France! We never saw hide nor hair of either of them again. Horrible business, this Penge Bungalow affair, don't you think? Pure evil. A fellow shooting his father.' His small beady eyes peered out in horror as though amazed at such examples of the wickedness of the world in both cases. They were definitely not in the finest traditions of the bar.

However, there was one of these traditions that, although I was young, insecure and drinking his port wine, I felt I had to recall to C. H. Wystan's attention. ‘We don't
know
that your client in the Penge Bungalow affair shot his father, do we? I mean, we shan't know that until the jury comes back with a verdict of guilty.'

Hilda's daddy looked at me and his expression was pained. As though to cover his embarrassment, he said, ‘Things look very black against him. Very black indeed.'

‘That's before you've tested the evidence.'

‘I shall go through all the motions, Rumpole, in the best tradition of our great profession. But I can't hold out any high hopes for the wretched boy, I'm afraid. I can't hold out very much hope for him at all.'

‘I haven't read the evidence.'

‘No, Rumpole. Of course you haven't. Perhaps you will have that opportunity at some future time. At the moment all we can say is that public opinion - that is, the opinion of any jury - is likely to be dead against young Jerold.'

‘So he's a client who desperately needs defending brilliantly, ' was what I should have said. Being young and, as I say, craven, I only managed, ‘I'm sure you'll have difficulties. '

‘I won't have difficulties, Rumpole.' Here Wystan let a note of sadness in. ‘I will have impossibilities! Two war heroes murdered, men who saved our nation. A couple of “the few” who went on fearless bombing raids.'

I swallowed a sweet and sticky gulp of port and became bold enough to say, ‘Weren't “the few”
fighter
pilots?'

‘Men shot down over occupied France who managed to get back to England at the end of the war.' Wystan ignored my interruption. ‘Victims of an apparently completely senseless shooting by the boy Simon Jerold.'

‘Would you rather he'd shot a couple of conscientious objectors?' was what I felt I ought to have said. Once again, for reasons of youth, I didn't.

‘My daughter, Hilda, as you may have noticed,' C. H. Wystan seemed to have felt there was no more to be said on the subject of murder and our attention should be turned to more important matters, ‘takes a lively interest in all that is going on in chambers. She was appointed a school monitor at an unusually early age.'

I did my best to look suitably impressed.

Wystan continued, ‘Now, as you probably know, I've been offered the leading brief in
R
. v.
Jerold
by a perfectly decent firm of solicitors in Penge.'

‘Albert told me that.' I tried as hard as I could to keep the note of hopeless envy out of my voice.

‘I am telling you, Rumpole. It might be better if you waited for me to give you the news rather than pick up tittle-tattle from the clerk's room. The point is that in this case the solicitors have taken the rather unusual step of asking me to nominate a junior, from our chambers of course.'

‘Of course,' I repeated. I felt another twinge of envy at the luck of some other, older member of number 4 Equity Court.

‘It was Hilda who put your name forward. She said, “Why not give young Rumpole a chance to prove himself, Daddy?” She always calls me Daddy, you know.' He sounded more pleased than apologetic.

‘Yes,' I told him, ‘I know.' The pang of envy had become a rush of adrenalin. This drained away like used bathwater as C. H. Wystan made my terms of employment clear. ‘You'll be expected to take a full note of the evidence and look up any points of law that may arise. But you're not to worry, Rumpole. I shan't expect you to deal with witnesses, or indeed open your mouth at any point in the trial.'

5

For the first time in my legal career my brief contained photographs of a dead man. ‘Jerry' Jerold had been found by the police photographer, sitting in a chair in the bungalow's living room. Behind him was the door which opened on to a narrow hallway. You could see the corner of the mantelpiece and part of Jerry's collection of war memorabilia. The man in the chair looked still at his ease: his Brylcreemed hair was neatly brushed back, his glazed eyes seemed to express nothing but mild surprise. He wore a blazer with flannel trousers and an RAF tie. Only the dark stain on his shirt, spreading across his chest, indicated the cause of death.

‘Making a note for your learned leader in that Jerold case, are you?' Uncle Tom placed a golf ball carefully on the carpet and appeared to threaten it with his golf club.