Rumpole Rests His Case (2 page)

That Christmas, Hilda had decided on a complete change of routine. She announced it in a circuitous fashion by saying, one late November evening, ‘I was at school with Poppy Longstaff.'

‘What's that got to do with it?' I knew the answer to this question, of course. Hilda's old school has this in common with polar expeditions, natural disasters and the last war: those who have lived through it are bound together for life and can always call on each other for mutual assistance.

‘Poppy's Eric is Rector of Coldsands. And for some reason or other he seems to want to meet you, Rumpole.'

‘Meet me?'

‘That's what she said.'

‘So does that mean I have to spend Christmas in the Arctic Circle and miss our festivities?'

‘It's not the Arctic Circle. It's Norfolk, Rumpole. And our festivities aren't all that festive. So, yes. You have to go.' It was a judgment from which there was no possible appeal.

 

 

My first impression of Coldsands was of a gaunt church tower, presumably of great age, pointing an accusing finger to heaven from a cluster of houses on the edge of a sullen, gun-metal sea. My second was one of intense cold. As soon as we got out of the taxi, we were slapped around the face by a wind which must have started in freezing Siberia and gained nothing in the way of warmth on its journey across the plains of Europe.

‘In the bleak mid-winter/ Frosty winds made moan...' wrote that sad old darling, Christina Rossetti. Frosty winds had made considerable moan round the Rectory at Coldsands, owing to the doors that stopped about an inch short of the stone floors and the windows which never shut properly, causing the curtains to billow like the sails of a ship at sea.

We were greeted cheerfully by Poppy. Hilda's friend had one of those round, childishly pretty faces often seen on seriously fat women, and she seemed to keep going on incessant cups of hot, sweet tea and a number of cardigans. If she moved like an enormous tent, her husband Eric was a slender wraith of a man with a high aquiline nose, two flapping wings of grey hair on the sides of his face and a vague air of perpetual anxiety, broken now and then by high and unexpected laughter. He made cruciform gestures, as though remembering the rubric ‘Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch' and forgetting where these important articles were kept.

‘Eric,' his wife explained, ‘is having terrible trouble with the church tower.'

‘Oh dear.' Hilda shot me a look of stern disapproval, which I knew meant that it would be more polite if I abandoned my overcoat while tea was being served. ‘How worrying for you, Eric.'

The Rev. Eric went into a long, excited and high-pitched speech. The gist of this was that the tower, although of rare beauty, had not been much restored since the Saxons built it and the Normans added the finishing touches. Fifty thousand pounds was needed for essential repairs, and the thermometer, erected for the appeal outside the church, was stuck at a low hundred and twenty, the result of an emergency jumble sale.

‘You particularly wanted Horace to come this Christmas?' Hilda asked the Man of God with the air of someone anxious to solve a baffling mystery. ‘I wonder why that was.'

‘Yes. I wonder!' Eric looked startled. ‘I wonder why on earth I wanted to ask Horace. I don't believe he's got fifty thousand smackers in his back pocket!' At this, he shook with laughter.

‘There,' I told him, ‘your lack of faith is entirely justified.' I wasn't exactly enjoying Coldsands Rectory, but I was a little miffed that the Reverend couldn't remember why he'd asked me there in the first place.

‘We had hoped that Donald Compton would help us out,' Poppy told us. ‘I mean, he wouldn't notice fifty thousand. But he took exception to what Eric said at the Remembrance Day service.'

‘Armistice Day in the village,' Eric's grey wings of hair trembled as he nodded in delighted affirmation, ‘and I prayed for dead German soldiers. It seemed only fair.'

‘Fair perhaps, darling. But hardly tactful,' his wife told him. ‘Donald Compton thought it was distinctly unpatriotic. He's bought the Old Manor House,' she explained to Hilda. From then on the conversation turned exclusively to this Compton and was carried on in the tones of awe and muted wonder in which people always talk about the very rich. Compton, it seemed, after a difficult start in England, had gone to Canada where, during a ten-year stay, he laid the foundations of his fortune. His much younger wife was quite charming, probably Canadian, and not in the least stand-offish. He had built the village hall, the cricket pavilion and a tennis court for the school. Only Eric's unfortunate sympathy for the German dead had caused his bounty to stop short at the church tower.

‘I've done hours of hard knee work,' the Rector told us, ‘begging the Lord to soften Mr Compton's heart towards our tower. No result so far, I fear.'

Apart from this one lapse, the charming Donald Compton seemed to be the perfect English squire and country gent. I would see him in church on Christmas morning, and we had also been invited for drinks before lunch at the Manor. The Reverend Eric and the smiling Poppy made it sound as though the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury would be out with the carol singers and we'd been invited to drop in for high tea at Windsor Castle. I also prayed for a yule log blazing at the Manor so that I could, in the true spirit of Christmas, thaw out gradually.

 

 

‘Now, as a sign of Christmas fellowship, will you all stand and shake hands with those in front and behind you?' Eric, in full canonicals, standing on the steps in front of the altar, made the suggestion as though he had just thought of the idea. I stood reluctantly. I had found myself a place in church near to a huge, friendly, gently humming, occasionally belching radiator and I was clinging to it and stroking it as though it were a new-found mistress (not that I have much experience of new-, or even old-found mistresses). The man who turned to me from the front row seemed to be equally reluctant. He was, as Hilda had pointed out excitedly, the great Donald Compton in person: a man of middle height with silver hair, dressed in a tweed suit and with a tan which it must have been expensive to preserve at Christmas. He had soft brown eyes which looked, almost at once, away from me as, with a touch of his dry fingers, he was gone and I was left for the rest of the service with no more than a well-tailored back and the sound of an uncertain tenor voice joining in the hymns.

I turned to the row behind to shake hands with an elderly woman who had madness in her eyes and whispered conspir atorially to me, ‘You cold, dear? Like to borrow my gloves? We're used to a bit of chill weather round these parts.' I declined politely and went back to hugging the radiator, and as I did so a sort of happiness stole over me. To start with, the church was beautiful, with a high timbered roof and walls of weathered stone, peppered with marble tributes to dead inhabitants of the manor. It was decorated with holly and mistletoe, a tree glowed and there were candles over a crib. I thought how many generations of Coldsands villagers, their eyes bright and faces flushed with the wind, had belted out the hymns. I also thought how depressed the great Donald Compton — who had put on little gold half-glasses to read the prophecy from Isaiah: ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called “Wonderful” — would feel if Jesus's instruction to sell all and give it to the poor should ever be taken literally.

And then I wondered why it was that, as he touched my fingers and turned away, I felt that I had lived through that precise moment before.

 

 

There was, in fact, a huge log fire crackling and throwing a dancing light on the marble floor of the circular entrance hall, with its great staircase leading up into private shadows. The cream of Coldsands was being entertained to champagne and canapes by the new Lord of the Manor. The decibels rose as the champagne went down and the little group began to sound like an army of tourists in the Sistine Chapel, noisy, excited and wonderstruck.

‘They must be all his ancestors.' Hilda was looking at the pictures and, in particular, at a general in a scarlet coat on a horse prancing in front of some distant battle.

My mouth was full of cream cheese enveloped in smoked salmon. I swallowed it and said, ‘Oh, I shouldn't think so. After all, he only bought the house recently.'

‘But I expect he brought his family portraits here from somewhere else.'

‘You mean, he had them under the bed in his old bachelor flat in Wimbledon and now he's hung them round an acre or two of walls?'

‘Do try and be serious, Rumpole, you're not nearly as funny as you think you are. Just look at the family resemblance. I'm absolutely certain that all of these are old Comptons.'

And it was when she said that that I remembered everything perfectly clearly.

 

He was with his wife. She was wearing a black velvet dress and had long, golden hair that sparkled in the firelight. They were talking to a bald, pink-faced man and his short and dumpy wife, and they were all laughing. Compton's laughter stopped as he saw me coming towards him. He said, ‘I don't think we've met.'

‘Yes,' I replied. ‘We shook hands briefly in church this morning. My name's Rumpole and I'm staying with the Long-staffs. But didn't we meet somewhere else?'

‘Good old Eric! We have our differences, of course, but he's a saintly man. This is my wife Lorelei, and Colonel and Maudy Jacobs. I expect you'd like to see the library, wouldn't you, Rumpole? I'm sure you're interested in ancient history. Will you all excuse us?'

It was two words from Hilda that had done it: ‘old' and 'Compton‘. I knew then what I should have remembered when we touched hands in the pews, that Old Compton is a street in Soho, and that was perhaps why Riccardo (known as Dicko) Perducci had adopted the name. And I had received that very same handshake, a slight touch and a quick turn away when I said goodbye to him in the cells under the Old Bailey and left him to start seven years for blackmail. The trial had ended, I now remembered, just before a long-distant Christmas.

The Perducci territory had been, in those days, not rolling Norfolk acres but a number of Soho strip clubs and clip joints. Girls would stand in front of these last-named resorts and beckon the lonely, the desperate and the unwary in. Sometimes they would escape after paying twenty pounds for a watery cocktail. Unlucky, affluent and important customers might even get sex, carefully recorded by microphones and cameras to produce material which was used for systematic and highly profitable blackmail. The victim in Dicko's case was an obscure and not much loved Circus Judge; so it was regarded as particularly serious by the prosecuting authority.

When I mitigated for Dicko, I stressed the lack of direct evidence against him. He was a shadowy figure who kept himself well in the background and was known as a legend rather than a familiar face round Soho. ‘That only shows what a big wheel he was,' Judge Bullingham, who was unfortunately trying the case, bellowed unsympathetically. In desperation I tried the approach of Christmas on him. ‘Crimes forgiven, sins remitted, mercy triumphant, such was the message of the story that began in Bethlehem,' I told the Court, at which the Mad Bull snorted that, as far as he could remember, that story ended in a criminal trial and a stiff sentence on at least one thief.

‘I suppose something like this was going to happen sooner or later.' We were standing in the library, in front of a comforting fire and among leather-bound books, which I strongly suspected had been bought by the yard. The new, like the old, Dicko was soft-eyed, quietly spoken, almost unnaturally calm; the perfect man behind the scenes of a blackmailing operation or a country estate.

‘Not necessarily,' I told him. ‘It's just that my wife has so many old school friends and Poppy Longstaff is one of them. Well now, you seem to have done pretty well for yourself. Solid citizens still misconducting themselves round Old Compton Street, are they?'

‘I wouldn't know. I gave all that up and went into the property business.'

‘Really? Where did you do that? Canada?'

‘I never saw Canada.' He shook his head. ‘Garwick Prison. Up-and-coming area in the Home Counties. The screws there were ready and willing to do the deals on the outside. I paid them embarrassingly small commissions.'

‘How long were you there?'

‘Four years. By the time I came out I'd got my first million.'

‘Well, then I did you a good turn, losing your case. A bit of luck His Honour Judge Bullingham didn't believe in the remission of sins.'

‘You think I got what I deserved?'

I stretched my hands to the fire. I could hear the cocktail chatter from the marble hall of the eighteenth-century manor. ‘Treat every man according to his deserts and who shall escape whipping?' I quoted
Hamlet
at him.

‘Then I can trust you, Rumpole? The Lord Chancellor's going to put me on the local Bench.'

‘The Lord Chancellor lives in a world of his own.'

‘You don't think I'd do well as a magistrate?'

‘I suppose you'd speak from personal experience of crime. And have some respect for the quality of mercy.'

‘I've got no time for that, Rumpole.' His voice became quieter but harder, the brown eyes lost their softness: that, I thought, was how he must have looked when one of his clip-joint girls was caught with the punters' cash stuffed in her tights. ‘It's about time we cracked down on crime. Well now, can I trust you not to go out there and spread the word about the last time we met?'