Rumpole Rests His Case (19 page)

I left Percy Delabere then, having resolved never, under any circumstances, to work with him again.

‘We've tried, Mr Rumpole. No one can say we haven't tried. His own telly, his own telephone number.'

‘He's on line, Mr Rumpole. He can access the world from his own bedroom.'

‘Trainers. And Puffa jackets. You can't imagine the amount he's cost us in trainers.'

‘And we've always done our best to be fair to him. Not judgemental.'

‘Chris is always so fair-minded. He tries to reason with him.'

‘It's very hard, Mr Rumpole, to reason with a slammed door.'

‘Chris understands young people. He gives his time freely to a youth club in Worsefield. He helps them to become computer literate.'

‘It's the struggle, Mr Rumpole. Every day's a struggle. Will there be a row? Has he gone missing? It's a nightmare for his mother. She's losing weight over it.'

The couple who sat in my clients' chairs were what She Who Must Be Obeyed would have called ‘thoroughly nice people'. They might qualify to represent the best of Middle England, modest and intelligent, capable of serious concern but also able to make jokes at their own expense. They were, I thought, the type of people who supported the local Oxfam shop, gave generously to hospices, read to the blind, whipped round for funds to help the victims of floods and earthquakes in distant parts of the world and organized free trips to the seaside for the poor and elderly.

They had come with their local solicitor, an amiable old bird named Beazely who looked as if he'd be more at home shooting pheasants than fighting a prosecution for assault and offences under the Prevention of Harassment Act. Notably absent was the sixteen-year-old they had been talking about with such weary resignation. Ben was Hermione Swithin's son and her husband Christopher's stepson. He was due to make his criminal debut before Hartscombe Crown Court.

The family history was also typical of Middle England. Hermione had met Martin Cutler at University and given birth to Ben when she was twenty-three. Cutler, apparently a part-time journalist and full-time drunk, had disappeared to America with Hermione's best friend and little or nothing had been heard from him since. Hermione's first job was as Christopher Swithin's secretary and they were soon in love. ‘Ben was four when Chris took him on, Mr Rumpole. He's treated him just as though he was his own son. Our Caroline's different from him in every way.'

‘We call Ben the teenage werewolf,' Chris explained and they both laughed gently, apparently comforted by this description.

‘Not to his face, of course. To his face we always try to build him up — give him confidence.'

‘Caroline's such a sweet character.' Hermione looked gratefully at Chris, as though congratulating him on not having brought any of her first husband's destructive genes to infect the character of their daughter. ‘She's always smiling. She's only ten but you can tell she's going to grow up as a thoroughly adorable person.'

‘She just wants everyone to like her, that's our Caroline.'

‘The teenage werewolf doesn't care if no one likes him at all.'

‘When we moved into Merrivale and Chris could do all his work from home we thought Ben'd be so happy. All of us together in one place.'

Was all the family being together in one place a perfect recipe for happiness, I wondered? Not, perhaps, for the Mac beths or the Agamemnons in their houses of doom, but Merrivale sounded, from the Swithins' account of it, a highly desirable residence. It was an old brick and flint farmhouse with magnificent barns from which the sheep and cows had long gone, and the hay moved out to make way for Christopher's computers and office equipment, installed so he could run his particular
dot.com
business from a part of what was left of rural England. Both the children went to state schools in Hartscombe, the nearest town, some ten miles from Merrivale (‘If people like us don't support the state system it'll never get any better,' Hermione had told me). At sixteen, Ben was facing his A-levels and had been booked into Hartscombe College, where his attendance was sporadic and the lectures were occasions when he found it convenient to catch up with his sleep.

‘That's par for the course with teenagers, Mr Rumpole.' Chris was at his most tolerant. ‘That's what we'd been told to expect. We thought he'd grow out of it. We could see sometimes — when he bought Hermione a birthday present with his own money, for instance - a light at the end of the tunnel. We could live through all that. This is something quite different. We never thought he'd take to serious crime.'

‘He says he didn't do it,' Hermione reminded her husband.

‘Of course he does. And we've stood by him. That's why we've come to you, Mr Rumpole.'

The Swithins were involved with the law because of a girl called Prunella Haviland, just seventeen and also at Hartscombe College. ‘Everyone says she's so attractive but Chris thinks she's nothing out of the ordinary,' Hermione told me. ‘He used to pick her up on the school run, until suddenly her father decided to take her. That was when the e-mails started coming to Prunella.' It was the e-mails that constituted the harassment and supplied the evidence of guilt in the case of the teenage werewolf. In the earliest days they were amorous, then openly obscene, lecherous and full of promises to perform eccentric and sometimes dangerous acts of love. At one stage, walking through a lane in Hartscombe after dark, Prunella had felt she was being followed and someone close behind her fastened his arms round her. It lasted only a few seconds, but she felt a kiss on the back of her neck before she struggled free and ran. After that she never walked alone through the town, by day or by night. She was not molested again, but the e-mails continued thick and fast. They clearly emerged from the computer bought, at considerable expense, to propitiate the werewolf one Christmas and installed, among other costly technology, in his bedroom at Merrivale.

‘We knew he was difficult, selfish, utterly incapable of caring about how his mother or I felt. We didn't know he was a criminal. Do what you can for him, Mr Rumpole.'

‘You see how it is.' Hermione gave her husband a small, sad smile. ‘Chris loves Ben. He's the only son he's never had.'

And then, it seemed, the conversation dried. Neither of the concerned adults had any more to say about the accused werewolf except that he had been given the address, and the telephone number, and even a map of the Outer Temple so that he could find Equity Court and meet his defender. He'd been to a party in London the night before and had promised them he'd be at the conference in my Chambers but, by now, it was time to give him up. It had happened before and would probably happen again, and yet again. He was on bail and kept away from school for the sake of Prunella. Perhaps he'd gone home by now, perhaps they'd find him there, perhaps not. Hermione looked at me, apologetic, confused, as though she had no reasonable explanation to offer for the human being she had brought into the world.

In the silence that followed I was looking once again at the printed-out e-mails.

‘It's interesting,' I said. ‘They're outrageous, of course. But some of these messages are quite poetic.'

Chris Swithin was looking at me with deep disapproval. Clearly I had said the wrong thing, and soon after this the couple left.

 

 

When were teenagers invented? I tried to remember myself slightly spotty, a great deal thinner, in a cold boarding school beside an unfriendly sea, with a headmaster whose role model appeared to have been Captain Bligh of the
Bounty.
Despite all the discomforts, and the occasional terrors of the place, I had no thought of leaving it. I tolerated my parents, and my father's often-repeated stories. I understood his reluctance to spend more time than was absolutely essential with an adolescent whose favourite reading was
Notable British Trials.
I put up with my mother's resigning herself, with a sigh, to the fact that my failure to keep my room tidy would make it unlikely that I would ever marry. I kept the other boys friendly by telling them stories and provided defences for them when they were faced with serious charges of giggling in chapel or introducing white mice into the divinity class. I sent no obscene communications to girls, indeed I knew hardly any girls to send them to. On the whole, I would say I was a more conventional character, politer, more easily imposed upon and with a respect for authority which had dwindled, rather than increased, over the years.

‘Were you a teenage werewolf?' I asked Mizz Liz Probert as we sat together in the Tast-Ee-Bite in Fleet Street. I was fortifying myself with a bite of breakfast before making my way down to Ludgate Circus, the Palais de Justice and my customers in the cells.

‘I told my mother she was stupid,' Mizz Liz admitted. ‘I did that quite a lot.'

‘Are you ashamed of that?'

‘Not really. It was perfectly true. Someone had to say it. My father didn't dare.'

‘Then I suppose,' I told her, ‘teenagers were invented around the date of your birth.'

‘Not all teenagers are terrible.' Mizz Liz sprang to their defence. ‘Although I must say I've got one odd one now.'

‘You've got one?' She seemed too young. ‘Is he, or she perhaps, giving you hell as a mother?'

‘Don't be silly, Rumpole. Not my child, my client! At least I've been told I'm going to get the case. Nasty charges of harassment and assault. I got rung up by a firm of solicitors in Hartscombe.'

‘Is the boy called Ben Swithin?'

‘You've got it, Rumpole!'

The teenage werewolf was Mizz Liz's client? This was deeply disturbing and I sought for the only possible explanation. ‘You'll be my junior?' I asked her. ‘I'm going to need all the help I can get.'

‘Oh, they didn't say anything about that. I got the feeling they want me to do it on my own.'

With this Mizz Liz got up, leaving me puzzled. As she left, she was immediately replaced by Soapy Sam Ballard, carrying his meagre breakfast of muesli, with hot water and lemon on the side, on a tray which he held with as much care as if he was transporting caviar and some rare wine in a cut-glass decanter. As he put down his tray and laid out his feast, he looked after Mizz Liz Probert's retreating figure.

‘Nice little bottom she's got to her, our Mizz Probert. Wouldn't you say so, Rumpole?'

I was profoundly shocked at what Mizz Liz and the sisterhood of young women lawyers would have regarded as outrageously offensive. If made by our clerk, Henry, or one of the Timsons, or even my most regular client and solicitor, Bonny Bernard, it would have seemed no more than a background noise in the meaningless chatter of everyday life. None of those people would have thought of making any sort of amorous approach to Mizz Liz. Had she turned to face them, they would have been almost deferential in their approach. But this was Soapy Sam, leading light of the Lawyers as Christians, tied, you might say cocooned, by his marriage to Matey, the formidable nursing sister who manned the casualty room at the Old Bailey, ready with cough sweets or Elastoplasts and calming words for lawyers attacked by disappointed clients or the victims of bungled attempts at suicide. To hear Ballard, who had adopted self-righteousness as a way of life and regarded the lighting up of a small cheroot as a breakdown in public morality, use such an expression about any member of the Bar was like hearing a bishop break out into a couple of verses of ‘The Good Ship Venus' during evensong. But now Liz was gone, and Ballard was staring at the less potentially erotic subject of his plate of muesli.

‘I've been a little unsettled, Rumpole. Since you found that old photograph of the Pithead Stompers.'

‘Forget it,' I advised him. ‘We've all made mistakes in the past.'

‘I don't regard it as a mistake, Rumpole. Perhaps ... as a matter of regret. I can't help feeling that I enjoyed life more then.'

‘You want to pick up the guitar again? Assemble the old drum kit?' I couldn't believe that Matey would welcome sessions from ageing Stompers in the Ballard home.

‘Not that. Of course I'm happily married now.'

‘Of course.' Why should I dispel his illusions?

‘And I have my work. And the Lawyers as Christians to look after. But when I look at that photograph you so kindly gave me, I can't help remembering girls dancing the Shake. Did you ever dance the Shake, Rumpole?'

‘Not within living memory.'

‘Happy days. When we were young.'

‘Not always.'

‘No, I suppose not.'

‘I've got a client now known as a teenage werewolf. Got himself involved in serious crime because of a girl. You're far safer living quietly in Belsize Park with Matey. Your days with the guitar are over. Are you going to eat that stuff, by the way?' Ballard had been toying with his muesli, putting a spoon in as tentatively as the toe of a swimmer confronted by an icy pool.

‘Of course I'm going to eat it, Rumpole.' And he crunched a mouthful of what appeared to be wet, flavoured stubble. ‘We all need roughage.'

I had, I felt, quite enough roughage in my life without having recourse to muesli.

As soon as I got back to Chambers, I rang the Swithins' solicitor. We had done various jobs together of an unsen sational and rural nature — careless drivings, closed footpaths, stolen piglets, receiving stolen diesel — in all of which I had achieved a satisfactory level of success.

‘Oh, is it you, Mr Rumpole?' The country lawyer sounded startled, as though he'd been peacefully reading
Trout and Stream
and enjoying life until he heard a voice which must have pricked his conscience.