Cynthia Manson (ed) (3 page)

“Yes, Mr. Rumpole. Do you object to
this evidence?”

Of course I object, I wanted to say.
It’s inhuman, unnecessary, unmerciful, and likely to lead to my losing another
case. Also, it’s clearly contrary to a solemn and binding contract entered into
after a number of glasses of the Bishop’s putative port. All I seemed to manage
was a strangled, “Yes.”

“I suppose Mr. Wrigglesworth would
say—” Vosper, J., was, as ever, anxious to supply any argument that might not
yet have occurred to the prosecution “—that it is evidence of ‘system.‘ “

“System?” I heard my voice faintly
and from a long way off. “It may be, I suppose. But the Court has a discretion
to omit evidence which may be irrelevant and purely prejudicial.”

“I feel sure Mr. Wrigglesworth has
considered the matter most carefully and that he would not lead this evidence
unless he considered it entirely relevant.”

I looked at the Mad Monk on the seat
beside me. He was smiling at me with a mixture of hearty cheerfulness and
supreme pity, as though I were sinking rapidly and he had come to administer
extreme unction. I made a few ill-chosen remarks to the Court, but I was in no
condition, that morning, to enter into a complicated legal argument on the
admissibility of evidence.

It wasn’t long before Bridget O’Dowd
had told a deeply disapproving jury all about Eddie “Turpin” Timson’s sword. “A
man.” the judge said later in his summing up about young Edward, “clearly
prepared to attack with cold steel whenever it suited him.”

When the trial was over, I called in
for refreshment at my favorite watering hole and there, to my surprise, was my
opponent Wrigglesworth, sharing an expensive-looking bottle with Detective
Inspector Wainwright. the officer in charge of the case. I stood at the bar,
absorbing a consoling glass of Pommeroy’s ordinary, when the D. I. came up to the
bar for cigarettes. He gave me a friendly and maddeningly sympathetic smile.

“Sorry about that, sir. Still, win a
few, lose a few. Isn’t that it?”

“In my case lately, it’s been win a
few, lose a lot!”

“You couldn’t have this one, sir.
You see, Mr. Wrigglesworth had promised it to me.”

“He had
what?
”

“Well, I’m retiring, as you know.
And Mr. Wrigglesworth promised me faithfully that my last case would be a win.
He promised me that, in a manner of speaking, as a Christmas present. Great man
is our Mr. Wrigglesworth, sir, for the spirit of Christmas.”

I looked across at the Mad Monk and
a terrible suspicion entered my head. What was all that about a present for the
Bishop? I searched my memory and I could find no trace of our having, in fact,
bought wine for any sort of cleric. And was Wrigglesworth as inexperienced as
he would have had me believe in the art of selecting claret?

As I watched him pour and sniff a
glass from his superior bottle and hold it critically to the light, a horrible
suspicion crossed my mind. Had the whole evening’s events been nothing but a
deception, a sinister attempt to nobble Rumpole, to present him with such a
stupendous hangover that he would stumble in his legal argument? Was it all in
aid of D. I. Wainwright’s Christmas present?

I looked at Wrigglesworth, and it
would be no exaggeration to say the mind boggled. He was, of course, perfectly
right about me. I just didn’t recognize evil when I saw it.

The door was stuck. Something inside
was stopping it from opening, and Fran was numb with cold. School had broken up
for Christmas that afternoon—”Lord dismiss us with Thy blessing”— and the
jubilant kids had given her a blinding headache. She’d wobbled on her bike
through the London traffic, two carriers filled with books suspended from the
handlebars. She’d endured exhaust fumes and maniac motorists, and now she
couldn’t get into her own flat. She cursed, let the bike rest against her hip,
and attacked the door with both hands.

“It was quite scary, actually.” she
told Jim when he got in later. “I mean, the door opened perfectly well when we
left this morning. We could have been burgled. Or it could have been a body
lying in the hall.”

Jim, who worked as a systems
analyst, didn’t have the kind of imagination that expected bodies behind doors.
“So what was it—the doormat?”

“Get knotted. It was a great bundle
of Christmas cards wedged under the door. Look at them. I blame you for this,
James Palmer.”

“Me?”

Now that she was over the headache
and warm again, she enjoyed poking gentle fun at Jim. “Putting our address book
on your computer and running the envelopes through the printer. This is the
result. We’re going to be up to our eyeballs in cards. I don’t know how many
you sent, but we’ve heard from the plumber, the dentist, the television
repairman, and the people who moved us in, apart from family and friends. You
must have gone straight through the address book. I won’t even ask how many
stamps you used.”

“What an idiot,” Jim admitted. “I
forgot to use the sorting function.”

“I left some for you to open.”

“I bet you’ve opened all the ones
with checks inside,” said Jim. “I’d rather eat first.”

“I’m slightly mystified by one,”
said Fran. “Do you remember sending to someone called Miss Shivers?”

“No. I’ll check if you like. Curious
name.”

“It means nothing to me. but she’s
invited us to a meal.”

Fran handed him the card—one of
those desolate, old-fashioned snow scenes of someone dragging home a log.
Inside, under the printed greetings, was the signature
E.
Shivers
(Miss)
followed by
Please make my Christmas
—
come for supper
seven next Sunday, 23rd.
In the corner was an address label.

“Never heard of her,” said Jim.
“Must be a mistake.”

“Maybe she sends her cards by
computer,” said Fran, and added, before he waded in. “I don’t think it’s a
mistake, Jim. She named us on the envelope. I’d like to go.”

“For crying out loud—Didmarsh is
miles away. Berkshire or somewhere. We’re far too busy.”

“Thanks to your computer, we’ve got
time in hand,” Fran told him with a smile.

The moment she’d seen the
invitation, she’d known she would accept. Three or four times in her life she’d
felt a similar impulse and each time she had been right. She didn’t think of
herself as psychic or telepathic, but sometimes she felt guided by some force
that couldn’t be explained scientifically. A good force, she was certain. It
had convinced her that she should marry no one else but Jim, and after three
years together she had no doubts. Their love was unshakable. And because he
loved her. he would take her to supper with Miss Shivers. He wouldn’t
understand
why
she was so keen to go, but he would see that she was in
earnest, and that would be enough...

“By the way, I checked the
computer,” he told her in front of the destinations board on Paddington Station
next Sunday. “We definitely didn’t send a card to anyone called Shivers.”

“Makes it all the more exciting,
doesn’t it?” Fran said, squeezing his arm.

Jim was the first man she had
trusted. Trust was her top requirement of the opposite sex. It didn’t matter
that he wasn’t particularly tall and that his nose came to a point. He was
loyal. And didn’t Clint Eastwood have a pointed nose?

She’d learned from her mother’s
three disastrous marriages to be ultra-wary of men. The first—Fran’s father.
Harry—had started the rot. He’d died in a train crash just a few days before
Fran was born. You’d think he couldn’t be blamed for that, but he could. Fran’s
mother had been admitted to hospital with complications in the eighth month,
and Harry, the rat, had found someone else within a week. On the night of the
crash he’d been in London with his mistress, buying her expensive clothes. He’d
even lied to his pregnant wife, stuck in hospital, about working overtime.

For years Fran’s mother had fended
off the questions any child asks about a father she has never seen, telling
Fran to forget him and love her step father instead. Stepfather the First had
turned into a violent alcoholic. The divorce had taken nine years to achieve.
Stepfather the Second—a Finn called Bengt (Fran called him Bent)—had treated
their Wimbledon terraced house as if it were a sauna, insisting on communal
baths and parading naked around the place. When Fran was reaching puberty,
there were terrible rows because she wanted privacy. Her mother had sided with
Bengt until one terrible night when he’d crept into Fran’s bedroom and groped
her. Bengt walked out of their lives the next day, but, incredibly to Fran, a
lot of the blame seemed to be heaped on her, and her relationship with her mother
had been damaged forever. At forty-three, her mother, deeply depressed, had
taken a fatal overdose.

The hurts and horrors of those years
had not disappeared, but marriage to Jim had provided a fresh start. Fran
nestled against him in the carriage and he fingered a strand of her dark hair.
It was supposed to be an Intercity train, but B. R. were using old
rolling-stock for some of the Christmas period and Fran and Jim had this
compartment to themselves.

“Did you let this Shivers woman know
we’re coming?”

She nodded. “I phoned. She’s over
the moon that I answered. She’s going to meet us at the station.”

“What’s it all about, then?”

“She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”

“You didn’t? Why not, for God’s
sake?”

“It’s a mystery trip—a Christmas
mystery. I’d rather keep it that way.”

“Sometimes, Fran, you leave me
speechless.”

“Kiss me instead, then.”

A whistle blew somewhere and the
line of taxis beside the platform appeared to be moving forward. Fran saw no
more of the illusion because Jim had put his lips to hers.

Somewhere beyond Westbourne Park
Station, they noticed how foggy the late afternoon had become. After days of
mild, damp weather, a proper December chill had set in. The heating in the
carriage was working only in fits and starts and Fran was beginning to wish
she’d worn trousers instead of opting decorously for her corduroy skirt and
boots.

“Do you think it’s warmer farther up
the train?”

“Want me to look?”

Jim slid aside the door. Before
starting along the corridor, he joked, “If I’m not back in half an hour, send
for Miss Marple.”

“No need,” said Fran. “I’ll find you
in the bar and mine’s a hot cuppa.”

She pressed herself into the warm
space Jim had left in the corner and rubbed a spy-hole in the condensation.
There wasn’t anything to spy. She shivered and wondered if she’d been right to
trust her hunch and come on this trip. It was more than a hunch, she told
herself. It was intuition.

It wasn’t long before she heard the
door pulled back. She expected to see Jim. or perhaps the man who checked the
tickets. Instead, there was a fellow about her own age. twenty-five, with a
pink carrier bag containing something about the size of a box file. “Do you
mind?” he asked. “The heating’s given up altogether next door.”

Fran gave a shrug. “I’ve got my
doubts about the whole carriage.”

He took the corner seat by the door
and placed the bag beside him. Fran took stock of him rapidly, hoping Jim would
soon return. She didn’t feel threatened. but she wasn’t used to these
old-fashioned compartments. She rarely used the trains these days except the
tube occasionally.

She decided the young man must have
kitted himself in an Oxfam shop. He had a dark-blue car coat, black trousers
with flares, and crepe-soled ankle boots. Around his neck was one of those
striped scarves that college students wore in the sixties, one end slung over
his left shoulder. And his thick, dark hair matched the image. Fran guessed he
was unemployed. She wondered if he was going to ask her for money.

But he said, “Been up to town for
the day?”

“I live there.” She added quickly.
“With my husband. He’ll be back presently.”

“I’m married, too.” he said, and
there was a chink of amusement in his eyes that Fran found reassuring. “I’m up
from the country, smelling the wellies and cowdung. Don’t care much for London.
It’s crazy in Bond Street this time of year.”

“Bond Street?” repeated Fran. She
hadn’t got him down as a big spender.

“This once.” he explained. “It’s
special, this Christmas. We’re expecting our first, my wife and I.”

“Congratulations.”

He smiled. A self-conscious smile.
“My wife. Pearlie—that’s my name for her—Pearlie made all her own maternity
clothes, but she’s really looking forward to being slim again. She calls
herself the frump with a lump. After the baby arrives. I want her to have
something glamorous, really special. She deserves it. I’ve been putting money
aside for months. Do you want to see what I got? I found it in Elaine
Ducharme.”

“I don’t know it.”

“It’s a very posh shop. I found the
advert in some fashion magazine.” He had already taken the box from the carrier
and was unwrapping the pink ribbon.