Rumpole Rests His Case by John Mortimer

Author:John Mortimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

‘Rumpole! This is a surprise. I hope you haven’t come to ask me to give some axe murderer community service.’

‘I have come,’ I said, ignoring the slur on my reputation, ‘to ask you for an even greater act of clemency.’

My clerk, Henry, had had words with Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown’s clerk on the telephone. This led me into a discreet entrance of the Great Château de Justice, the Victorian Gothic Law Courts in the Strand, where I was escorted down passages and up stairs to Phillida’s room. ‘The Judge is just finishing in Court,’ I was told. ‘She’ll be here directly.’ But it was nearly half an hour before she appeared, liberated as a young girl released from school, pulled off her wig, flung it on the desk, struggled out of her black, civil case gown and, crossing to the mirror, started to assess her face critically. My line about an act of clemency was carefully ignored.

‘I don’t look too bad, do I? For someone in sight of fifty.’

She looked, I thought, almost better than when she had appeared, all those years ago, a nervous pupil about to brighten up Equity Court.

‘You look,’ I said, ‘of course, the most desirable member of the judiciary. Perhaps that’s why he’s missing you so much.’

‘Oh yes?’ She flicked at her hair with a finger, and sounded unconvinced.

‘I am here,’ I told her, ‘on behalf of Claude Erskine-Brown QC. A man of good character with no previous convictions.’

‘No convictions?’ Phillida gave her reflection a small, mocking smile. ‘It wasn’t for want of trying.’

‘I understand that, in recent years anyway, his conduct has been beyond reproach.’

‘Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with him.’ Her voice seemed to indicate that, for the present at least, clemency was off the menu. ‘There’s not much fun to be had from someone who is beyond reproach.’ From this I gathered that, faithful or unfaithful, Claude was on a loser.

‘He’s missing you terribly. The chap is merely a shadow of his former self.’

‘He could do with losing weight.’ The Judge was merciless. ‘Anyway, I’ve met someone.’

What did that mean? I’d met a lot of people, from safe-blowers to Lords of Appeal in Ordinary. So, in his quiet way, had Claude. ‘I suppose you mean you’ve met someone special.‘

‘You wouldn’t approve of him, Rumpole.’

‘Wouldn’t I?’

‘You wouldn’t approve of his politics.’

She moved away from the mirror and at last, in a more friendly mood now we had got on to discussing her special person, poured me a glass of sherry from the judicial decanter.

‘Some young white wig who belongs to the Workers Revolutionary Party?’

‘Hardly! This one’s more than a little to the right of Genghis Khan. Capital punishment, corporal punishment, Britain’s for the British — you name it, he’s all for it.’

‘Sounds ghastly to me.’

‘It isn’t really. Underneath all that he’s just a simple, rather innocent boy at heart. Anyway,’ she sat in one of her leathery, masculine armchairs and nursed her sherry, ‘you know there’s something rather exciting about someone you disagree with. Claude and I never really argued with each other.

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