John Mortimer - Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces

IN the varied ups and downs, the thrills and spills in the life of an Old Bailey hack, one thing stands as stone. Your ex-customers will never want to see you again.

Even if you've steered them through the rocks of the prosecution case and brought them out to the calm waters of a not guilty verdict, they won't plan further meetings, host reunion dinners, or even send you a card on your birthday. If they catch a glimpse of you on the Underground, or across a crowded wine bar, they will bury their faces in their newspapers or look studiously in the opposite direction. This is understandable. Days in Court prob-ably represent a period of time they'd rather forget and, as a rule, I'm not especially keen to renew an old acquaintance when a face I once saw in the Old Bailey dock reappears at a "Scales of Justice" dinner or at the Inns of Court garden party. Reminiscences of the past are best avoided, and what is required is a quick look and a quiet turn away. There have been times, however, when recogniz-ing a face seen in trouble has greatly assisted me in the solution of some legal problem and carried me to triumph in a difficult case. Such occasions have been rare but, like number thirteen buses, two of them turned up in short order round a Christmas which I remember as being one of the oddest, but certainly the most re-warding, I ever spent.

"A traditional British pantomime. There's nothing to beat it!"

"You go to the pantomime, Rumpole?" Claude asked with unexpected interest.

"I did when I was a boy. It made a lasting impression on me.

"Pantomime?" The American judge who was our fellow guest round the Erskine-Brown dinner table was dearly a stranger to such delights. "Is that some kind of mime show? Lots of feeling imaginary walls and no one saying anything?"

"Not at all. You take some good old story, likeRobin Hood..."

"Robin Hood's the star?"

"Well, yes. He's played by some strapping girl who slaps her thighs and says lines like `Cheer up, Babes in the Wood, Robin's not far away."'

"You mean there's cross-dressing?" The American visitor was puzzled.

"Well, if you want to call it that. And Robin's mother is played by a red-nosed comic."

"A female comic?"

"No. A male one.

"That sounds interesting," he said in a tone that suggested he had the wrong idea. "We have clubs for that sort of thing in Pittsburgh."

"It's not what you're thinking," I assured him. "The dame's a comic character who gets the audience singing. "

"Singing?"

"The words come down on a sort of giant song sheet," I explained, "and she, who is really a he, gets the audience to sing along."

Emboldened by Erskine-Brown's claret (smoother on the tongue but with less of a kick than Chƒteau Thames Embank-ment), I broke into a stanza of the song I was introduced to by Robin Hood's masculine mother.

"I may be just a nipper,

But I've always loved a kipper...

And so does my loving wife.

If you've got a girl just, slip her

A loving golden kipper

And she'll be yours for life."

"Is that all?" The transatlantic judge still seemed puzzled.

"All I can remember."

"I think you're wrong, Mr. Rumpole."

"What?"

"I think you're wrong and those lines do indeed have some significance along the lines I suggested." And the Judge fell silent, contemplating the unusual acts suggested.

"I see they're doingAladdin at the Tufnell Park Empire. Do you think the twins might enjoyit, Rumpole?"

The speaker was Mrs. Justice Erskine-Brown (PhillidaTrant as she was in happier days when I called her the Portia of our Chambers), still possessed of a beauty that would break the hearts of the toughest prosecutors and make old lags swoon with lust even as she passed a stiff custodial sentence. The twins she spoke of were Tristan and Isolde, so named by her opera-loving hus-band Claude, who was now bending Hilda's ear on the subject of Covent Garden's latest Ring cycle.

"I think the twins would adoreit. Just the thing to cure the Wagnerian death-wish and bring them into a world of sanity."

"Sanity?" The visiting judge sounded doubtful. "With old guys dressed up as mothers?"

"I promise you, they'll love every minute ofit." And then

I made another promise that sounded rash even as I spoke the words. "I know I would. I'll take them myself."

"Thank you, Rumpole." Phillida spoke in her gentlest judi-cial voice, but I knew my fate was sealed. "We'll keep you to that."

"It'll have to be after Christmas," Hilda said. "We've been invited up to Norfolk for the holiday."

As she said the word "Norfolk" a cold, sweeping wind seemed to cut through the central heating of the Erskne-Browns' Islington dining room and I felt a warning shiver.

I have no rooted objection to Christmas Day, but I must say it's an occasion when time tends to hang particularly heavily on the hands. From the early morning alarm call of carols piping on Radio Four to the closing headlines and a restless, liverish sleep, the day can seem as long as a fraud on the post office tried before Mr. Injustice Graves.

It takes less than no time for me to unwrap the tie which I will seldom wear, and for Hilda to receive the annual bottle of lavender water which she lays down rather than puts to immedi-ate use. The highlights after that are the Queen's speech, when I lay bets with myself as to whether Hilda will stand to attention when the television plays the National Anthem, and the thawed-out Safeway bird followed by port (an annual gift from my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard) and pudding. I suppose what I have against Christmas Day is that the Courts are all shut and no one is being tried for anything.

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

"What's that got to do withit?" 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 throughit 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 Arc-tic 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 judgement f6r which there was no possible appeal.

My first impression of Coldsands was 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, gunmetal 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-winterI Frosty winds made moan... wrote that sad old darling Christina Rossetti. Frosty winds 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. 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 each side 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 re-membering 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 thatit would be more polite if I abandoned my overcoat while tea was being served. "How worrying for you, Eric."

The Rev. Eric went into along, excited and high-pitched speech. The gist ofit was that the tower, although of rare beauty, had not been much restored since the Saxons builtit and the Normans added the finishing touches. Fifty thousand pounds was needed for essential repairs, and the thermometer, erected outside the church for the appeal, was stuck at one hundred and twenty pounds-the proceeds from 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 justi-fied." I wasn't exactly enjoying Coldsands Rectory, so 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 our," 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 thoughtit 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 with 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 had laid the founda-tions of his fortune. His much younger wife was quite charm-ing, probably Canadian, and not in the least standoffish. He had built the village hall, the cricket pavilion, and a tennis court for the school. Only Eric's unfortunate sympathy for the Ger-man dead had caused Compton's bounty to stop short at the church tower.

"I've done hours of hard knee-work," the rector told us, "beg-ging the Lord to soften Mr. Compton's heart towards our rower. No

result so far, I fear."

Apart from this one lapse, the charm-ing Donald Compton seemed to be the per-fect 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 madeit sound as though the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury would be our with the carol singers and we'd been invited to drop in for high tea at Windsor Castle. I prayed for a Yule log blazing at the manor so that I could, in the true spirit of Christmas, thaw our gradually.

"Now, as a sign of Christmas fellow-ship, will you all stand and shake hands with those in front of and behind you?" Eric, in full canonicals, standing on the steps in front of the altar, made this suggestion as though he had just thought of the idea. I stood re-luctantly. I had found myself a place in the church near a huge, friendly, gently hum-ming, occasionally belching radiator and I was clinging toit and strokingit as thoughit were a newfound mistress (nor 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 reluc-tant. He was, as Hilda had pointed our ex-citedly, the great Donald Compton in person-a man of middle height with silver hair, dressed in a tweed suit, and with a tan whichit must have been expensive to pre-serve during winter, He had soft brown eyes which looked almost at once away from me as, with a touch of 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 uncer-tain 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 conspirato-rially 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 genera-tions of Coldsands villagers, their eyes bright and faces flushed with the wind, had belted our these 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 Wonder-

ful"-would feel if Jesus' instruction to sell all and giveit to the poor should ever be taken literally.

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

There was, asit turned our, a huge log fire cracking at the manor, throwing a dancing light on the marble floor of the cir-cular entrance hall with its great staircase leading up into private shadows. The cream of Coldsands was being entertained with champagne andcanap‚s 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 all be his ancestors." Hilda was looking at the pictures on the walls and, in particular, at a general in a scarlet coat, on a horse prancing at the front of some distant battle.

My mouth was full of cream cheese enveloped in smoked

salmon. I swallowedit 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 nor nearly as funny as you think you are. Just look at the family resemblance. I'm absolutely certain that all of these are old Comprons." Andit was when she said this that I remembered everything perfectly clearly.

He was with his wife. She was wearing a black velvet dress and had long, golden hair that sparked 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 Longstaffs. 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 had touched hands in the pews, that Old Compton is a street in Soho, and that this was perhaps why Riccardo (known as Dicko) Perducci had adopted the name. I had received that very same handshake-a slight touch and a quick turn away-when I had said good-bye 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 lure 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 get even more, carefully recorded by microphones and cameras to produce ma-terial which was used for systematic and highly profitable black-mail. The victim in Dicko's case was an obscure and not much loved Circuit Judge, soit 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 him-self 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 is," Judge Bullingham, who was unfortunately trying the case, bellowed unsympatherically. In desperation I tried the Christmas approach 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 had ended in a criminal trial and a stiff sentence for 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, 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.

"Nor necessarily," I told him. "It's just that my wife has 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 our 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 re-mission 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. "Use every man after his desert, and who shall `scape whipping?" I quotedHamlet 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 qui-eter 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 punrers' cash stuffed in her tights. "It's about time we cracked down on crime. Well now, I can trust you not to go out there and spread the word about the last time we met?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"How well you have understood the Christmas message.

"Which is?"

"Perhaps, generosity."

"I see. So you want your bung?"

"Oh, not me, Dicko. I've been paid, inadequately, by Legal Aid. But there's an impoverished church tower in urgent need of resuscitation."

"That Eric Longstaff, our rector - he's nor a patriot!"

"And are you?"

"I do a good deal of work locally for the British Legion."

"And I'm sure, next Poppy Day, they'll appreciate what you've done for the church tower."

He looked at me for a long minute in silence, and I thought that if this scene had been raking place in a back room in Soho there might, quite soon, have been the flash of a knife. Instead, his hand went to an inside pocket and produced nothing more lethal than a chequebook.

"While you're in a giving mood," I said, "the rectory's in desperate need of central heating."

"This is bloody blackmail!" Dicko Perducci, now known as Donald Compton, said.

"Well," I told him, "you should know."

Christmas was over. The year turned, stirred itself and opened its eyes on a bleak January. Crimes were committed, arrests were made, and the courtrooms were filled, once again, with the sounds of argument. I went down to the Old Bailey on a trifling matter of fixing the date of a trial before Mrs. Justice Erskne-Brown. As I was leaving, the usher came and told me that the judge wanted to see me in her private room on a matter of urgency.

Such summonses always fill me with apprehension and a vague feeling of guilt. What had I done? Got the date of the trial hopelessly muddled? Addressed the Court with my trou-sers carelessly unzipped? I was relieved when the learned Phillida greeted me warmly and even offered me a glass of sherry, poured from her own personal decanter. "It was so knd of you to offer, Rumpole," she said unexpectedly.

"Offer what?" I was puzzled.

"You told us how much you adored the traditional British pantomime.

"So I did." For a happy moment I imagined Her Ladyship as Principal Boy, her shapely legs encased in black tights, her neat little wig slightly askew, slapping her thigh and calling out, in bell-like tones, `Cheer up, Rumpole, Portia's not far away.

"The twins are looking forward toit enormously."

"Looking forward to what?"

"Aladdinat the Tufinell Park Empire. I've got tickets for the nineteenth of January, You do remember promising to take them, don't you?"

"Well, of course." What else might I have said after the fifth glass of Erskine-Brown St. Emillion? "I'd love to be of the party. And will old Claude be buying us a dinner afterwards?"

"I really don't think you should go round calling people "old," Rumpole." Phillida now looked miffed, and I downed the sherry before she tookit into her head to deprive me ofit. "Claude's got us tickets for Pavarotti - L'Elisird'Amore. You might buy the children a burger after the show. Oh, and it's not far from us on the Tube. It really was sweet of you to invite them." At which she smiled at me and refilled my glass in a way which madeit clear she was not prepared to hear further argument.

It all turned out better than I could have hoped. Tristan and Isolde, unlike their Wagnerian namesakes, were cheerful, rea-sonably polite, and only seemed anxious to disassociate them-selves, as far as possible, from the old fart who was escorting them. At every available opportunity they would touch me for cash and then scamper off to buy ice cream, chocolates, sandwiches, or Sprite, I was left in reasonable peace to enjoy the performance.

And enjoyit I did. Aladdin was a personable young woman with an upturned nose, a voice which could have been used to wake up patients coming round from their anaesthesia, and memorable thighs. Uncle Abanazer was played, Isolde told me, by an actor who portrayed a social worker with domestic prob-lems in a long-running television series. Wishy and Washy did sing to electric guitars (deafeningly amplified) but Widow

Twankey, played by a certain Jim Diamond, was all a Dame should be-a nimble little cockney, fitted up with a sizeable false bosom, a flaming red wig, sweeping eyelashes, and scarlet lips. Never have I heard the immortal line, "Where's that naughty boy Aladdin got to?" better delivered. I joined in loudly (Tristan and Isolde sat silent and embarrassed) when the Widow and Aladdin conducted us in the singing of "Please Don't Pinch My Tomatoes." It was, in fact and in fairness, all a traditional panto-mime should be, and yet I had a vague feeling that something was wrong, that an element was missing. But, as the cast came down a white staircase in glittering costumes to enthusiastic ap-plause,it seemed the sort of pantomime I'd grown up with and which Tristan and Isolde should be content to inherit.

After so much excitement I felt in need of a stiff brandy and soda, but the eatery the children had selected for their evening's entertainment had apparently gone teetotal and alco-hol was not on the menu. Once they were confronted by their mammoth burgers and fries I made my excuses, said I'd be back in a moment, and slipped into a nearby pub which was, I no-ticed, opposite the stage door of the Empire.

As the life-giving draught was being poured I found my-self standing next to Washy and Uncle Abanazer, now out of costume, who were discussing Jim the Dame. "Very unfriendly tonight," Washy said. "Locked himself in his dressing room before the show and wouldn't join us for a drink."

"Perhaps he's had a bust-up with Molly?"

"Unlikely. Molly and Jim never have a cross word."

"Lucky she's never found out he's been polishing Aladdin's wonderful lamp," Abanazer said, and they both laughed.

As I asked the girl behind the bar to refill my glass, in which the tide had sunk to a dangerous low, I heard them laugh again about the Widow Twankey's voluminous bosom. "Strapped-on polystyrene," Abanazer was saying. "Almost bruises me when I dance with her. Funny thIng, tonightit was quitesoft."

"Perhaps she borrowed one from a blow-up woman?" Washy was laughing as I gulped my brandy and leggedit back to the hamburgers. In the dark passage outside the stage door I saw a small, nimble figure in hurried retreat-Jim Diamond, who for some reason hadn't wanted to join the boys at the bar.

After I had restored the children to the Erskine-Browns' au pair I sat in the Tube on my way back to Gloucester Road and read the programme. Jim Diamond,it seemed, had started his life in industry before taking up show business, He had a busy career in clubs and turned down appearances on television. "I only enjoy the living show," Jim says. "I want to have the audi-ence where I can see them." His photograph, without the exag-gerated female makeup, showed a pale, thin-nosed, in some way disagreeable little man with a lip curled either in scorn or tri-umph. I wondered how such an unfriendly-looking character could become a ebullient and warm-hearted widow. Stripped of his makeup, there was something about this comic's unsmiling face which brought back memories of another meeting in totally different circumstances. It was the second time within a few weeks that I had found an old familiar face cast in a new and unexpected part.

The memory I couldn't quite grasp preyed on my mind

until I was tucked up in bed. Then, as Hilda's latest historical romance dropped from her weary fingers and she turned her back on me and switched out the light, I saw the face again quite clearly but in a different setting. Not Diamond. Sparker? No, Sparksman. A logical progression. Widow Twankey had been played by Harry Sparkman, a man who had trained as a profes-sional entertainer, if my memory was correct, not in clubs, but in Her Majesty's prisons. It was,it seemed, an interesting career change, but I thought no more ofit at the time and once satis-fied with my identification I fell asleep.

"The boy couldn't have doneit, Mr. Rumpole. Not a com-plicated bloody great job to that extent. His only way of getting at a safe was to digit out of the wall and removeit bodily. He did that in a Barkngside boutique and what he found init hardly covered the petrol. Young Denis couldn't have got into the Croydon supermarket peter. No one in our family could have."

Uncle Fred, the experienced and cautious head of the Timson clan, had no regard for the safe-breaking talents of Denis, his nephew, and, on the whole, an unsklled recruit in the Timson enterprise. The Croydon supermarket job had been highly com-plicated and expertly carried out and had yielded, for its perpetra-tors, thousands of pounds. Peanuts Molloy was arrested as one of the lookouts after falling and twisting an anke when chased by a night watchman during the getaway. He said he didn't know any of the skilled operators who had engaged him except Denis Timson who, he alleged, was in general charge of the operation. Denis alone, he said, had silenced the burglar alarm and deftly pen-etrated the lock on the safe with an oxyacetylene blowtorch.

It has to be remembered though, that the clan Molloy had been sworn enemies of the Timson family from time immemorial. Peanuts' story sounded implausible when I met Denis Timson in the Brixton Prison interview room. A puzzled twenty-five-year-old with a shaven head and a poor attempt at a moustache, he seemed more upset by his Uncle Fred's low opinion of him than the danger of a conviction and subsequent prolonged absence from the family.

Denis' case was to come up for committal at the South London Magistrates' Court before "Skmpy" Simpson, whose lack of success at the Bar had driven him to a job as a stipendiary beak. His nickname had been earned by the fact that he had not, within living memory, been known to splash out on a round of drink at Pommeroy's Wine Bar.

In the usual course of events, there is no future in fight-ing proceedings which are only there to commit the customer to trial, I had resolved to attend solely to pour a little well-deserved contempt on the testimony of Peanuts Molloy. As I started to prepare the case, I made a note of the date of the Croydon supermarket break-in. As soon as I had done so, I consulted my diary. I turned the virgin pages, as yet unstained by notes of trials, ideas for cross-examinations, splodges of tea, or spilled glasses of Pommeroy's Very Ordinary, It was as I had thought. While some virtuoso had been at work on the Croydon safe, I had been enjoyingAladdin in the company of Tristan and Isolde.

"Detective Inspector Grimble, would you agree that who-.

ever blew the safe in the Croydon supermarket did an extraordi-narily skillful job?"

"Mr. Rumpole, are we meant to congratulate your client on his professional skil?"

God moves in mysterious ways, andit wasn't Skimpy Simpson's fault that he was born with thin lips and a voice which sounded like the rusty hinge of a rusty gate swinging in the wind. I decided to ignore him and concentrate on a friendly chat with D.I. Grimble, a large, comfortable, ginger-haired officer. We had lived together, over the years, with the clan Timson and their misdoings, He was known to them as a decent and fair-minded cop, as disapproving of the younger, Panda-racing, evidence-mas-saging intake to the Force as they were of the lack of discretion and criminal skils which marked the younger Timsons.

ú                                                         "I mean the thieves were well informed. They knew that there would be a week's money in the safe."

"They knew that, yes."

"And was there a complex burglar alarm system? You couldn't putit out of action simply by cutting wires, could you?"

"Cutting the wires would have setit off."

"So putting the burglar alarm out of action would have required special skills?"

"It would have done."

"Puttingit out of action also stopped a clock in the office. So we know that occurred at 8.45?"

"We know that. Yes."

"And at 9.20 young Molloy was caught as he fell while running to a getaway car.

"That is so."

"So this heavy safe was burnt open in a little over half an hour?"

"I fail to see the relevance of this, Mr. Rumpole." Skmpy was getting restless.

"I'm sure the officer does. That shows a very high degree of technical skill, doesn'tit, Detective Inspector?"

"I'd agree with that."

"Exercised by a highly experienced peterman?"

"Who is this Mr. Peterman?" Skimpy was puzzled. "We haven't heard of him before."

"NotMr. Peterman." I marvelled at the ignorance of the basic facts of life displayed by the magistrate. "A man expert at blowing safes, known to the trade as a `peter,"' I told him and turned back to D.I. Grimble. "So we're agreed that this was a highly expert piece of work?"

"It must have been done by someone who knew his job pretty well. Yes."

"Denis Timson's record shows convictions for shoplifting, bag-snatching, and stealing a radio from an unlocked car. In all of these simple enterprises, he managed to get caught."

"Your client's criminal record!" Skmpy looked happy for the first time. "You're allowing that to go into evidence, are you, Mr. Rumpole?"

"Certainly, Sir." I explained the obvious point. "Because there's absolutely no indication that he was capable of blowing a safe in record time, or silencing a complicated burglar alarm, is there, Detective Inspector?"

"No. There's nothing to show anything like that in his record... "

"Mr. Rumpole." Skimpy was looking at the clock; was he in danger of missing his usual train back home to Haywards Heath? "Where's all this heading?"

"Back a good many years," I told him, "to the Sweet-Home Building Society job at Carshalton, when Harty Sparkman blew a safe so quietly that even the dogs slept throughit."

"You were in on that case, weren't you, Mr. Rumpole?" Inspector Grimble was pleased to remember, "Sparksman got five years."

"Not one of your great successes." Skmpy was also de-lighted. "Perhaps you wasted the Court's time with unnecessary questions. Have you anything else to ask this officer?"

"Not till the Old Bailey, Sir. I may have thought of a few more by then." With great satisfaction, Skmpy committed Denis Timson, a minor villain who would have had difficulty chang-ing a fuse, let alone blowing a safe, for trial at the Central Crimi-nal Court.

"Funny you mentioned Harry Sparkman. Do you know, the same thought occurred to me. An expert like him could've done that job in the time."

"Great minds think alike," I assured D.I. Grimble. We were washing away the memoty of an hour or two before Skmpy with two pints of nourishing stout in the pub opposite the beak's Court. "You know Harry took up a new career?" I needn't have asked the question. D.I. Grimble had a groupie's encyclopaedic knowledge of the criminal stars.

"Oh yes. Now a comic called Jim Diamond. Got up a concert party in the nick. Apparently gave him a taste for show business."

"I did hear," I took Grimble into my confidence, "that he made a comeback for the Croydon job." It had been a throwaway line from Uncle Fred Timson - "I heard talk they got Harry back out of retirement"-butit was a thought worth examining.

"I heard the same. So we did a bit of checkng. But Sparkman, known as Diamond, has got a cast-iron alibi."

"Are you sure?"

"At the time when the Croydon job was done, he was performing in a pantomime. On stage nearly all the evening,it seems, playing the Dame."

"Aladdin,"I said, "at the Tufinell Park Empire. It might be just worth your while to go into that alibi a little more thoroughly. I'd suggest you have a private word with Mrs. Molly Diamond. It's just possible she may have noticed his attraction to Aladdin's lamp. "

"Now then, Mr. Rumpole." Grimble was wiping the froth from his lips with a neatly folded handkerchief. "You mustn't tell me how to do my job."

"I'm only trying to serve," I managed to look pained, "the interests of justice!"

"You mean, the interests of your client?"

"Sometimes they're the same thing," I told him, but I had to admitit wasn't often.

Asit happened, the truth emerged without Detective In-spector Grimble having to do much of a job. Harry had, in fact,

fallen victim to a tip-tilted nose and memorable thighs; he'd left home and moved into Aladdin's Kensal Rise flat. Molly, taking a terrible revenge, blew his alibi wide open.

She had watched many rehearsals and knew every word, every gag, every nudge, wink and shrill complaint of the Dame's part. She had playedit to perfection to give her husband an alibi while he went back to his old job in Croydon. It all went per-fectly, even though Uncle Abanazer, dancing with her, had felt an unexpected softness.

I had known, instinctively, that something was very wrong. It had, however, taken some time for me to realize what I had really seen that night at the Tufinell Park Empire. It was nothing less than an outrage to a Great British Tradition. The Widow Twankey was a woman.

D.I. Grimble made his arrest and the case against Denis Timson was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. As spring came to the Temple gardens, Hilda opened a letter in the other case which had turned on the recognition of old, familiar faces and readit out to me.

"The repointing's going well on the tower and we hope to haveit finished by Easter," Poppy Longstaff had written. "And I have to tell you, Hilda, the oil-fired heating has changed our lives. Eric says it's like living in the tropics. Cooking supper last night I had to peel off one of my cardigans." She Who Must Be Obeyed put down the letter from her old school friend and said, thoughtfully, "Noblesse oblige."

"What was that, Hilda?"

"I could tell at once that Donald Compton was a true gentleman. The sort that does good by stealth. Of course, poor old Eric thought he'd never get the tower mended, but I some-how felt that Donald wouldn't fail him. It was noblesse."

"Perhapsit was," I conceded, "but in this case the noblesse was Rumpole's. "

"Rumpole! What on earth do you mean? You hardly paid to have the church tower repointed, did you?"

"In one sense, yes.

"I can't believe that. After all the yearsit took you to have the bathroom decorated. What on earth do you mean about your noblesse?"

"It'd take too long to explain, old darling. Besides, I've got a conference in Chambers. Tricky case of receiving stolen surgi-cal appliances. I suppose," I added doubtfully,"it may lead, at some time in the distant future, to an act of charity."

Easter came, the work on the tower was successfully com-pleted, and I was walkng back to Chambers after a gruelling day down at the Bailey when I saw, wafting through the Temple cloisters, the unlikely apparition of the Rev. Eric Longstaff. He chirruped a greeting and said he'd come up to consult some legal brains on the proper investment of what remained of the Church Restoration Fund.

"I'm so profoundly grateful," he told me, "that I decided to invite you down to the rectory last Christmas. "

"Youdecided?"

"Of course I did."

"I thought your wife extended the invitation to She..."

"Oh yes. But I thought of the idea. It was the result of a good deal of hard knee-work and guidance from above. I knew you were the right man for the job."

"What job?"

"The Compton job."

What was this? The rector was speaking like an old con. The Coldsands caper? "Whatcan you mean?"

"I just mean that I knew you'd defended Donald Compton. In a previous existence."

"How on earth did you know that?"

Eric drew himself up to his full, willowy height. "I'm not a prison visitor for nothing," he said proudly. "I thought you were just the chap to put the fear of God into him. You were the very person to put the squeeze on the Lord of the Manor."

"Put the squeeze on him?" Words were beginning to fail me.

"That was the idea. It came to me as a result of knee-work."

"So you brought us down to that freezing rectory just so I could blackmail the local benefactor?"

"Didn'tit turn out well!"

"May the Lord forgive you."

"He's very forgiving."

"Next time," I spoke to the Man of God severely, "the Church can do its blackmailing for itself."

"Oh, we're quite used to that." The rector smiled at me in what I thought was a lofty manner. "Particularly around Christmas." ~

The End