Rumpole and the Angel of Death by John Mortimer

Author:John Mortimer [Mortimer, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471302329
Publisher: AudioGO

Rumpole and the Little Boy Lost

‘Whoever did that,’ Dot Clapton said, ‘deserves burning at the stake!’

‘I’m afraid they abolished that a few years ago.’ I took the Daily Trumpet Dot was offering me across her typewriter. ‘Although, given the reforming zeal of the appalling Ken Fry’ – I winced as I invariably do when I mention the name of the current Home Secretary – ‘we might get it back in the next Criminal Justice Act.’

What I saw was a big photograph, almost the whole tabloid front page. A young woman, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, was looking into the camera, trying to smile; a husband only a few years older, puzzled and frowning, had his arm protectively round her shoulder. Behind them was the blur of an ordinary semi-detached and a small, ordinary car, but they were the victims of an extraordinary crime. Their child had been snatched away from them, hidden among strangers and perhaps ... It was the awful perhaps which made Steve Constant put his arm round his wife and why her smile might turn so easily into a scream, SHEENA CONSTANT TALKS EXCLUSIVELY TO THE TRUMPET, the front page told the world, SEE CENTRE STORY.

‘If they catch the old witch who did it, you wouldn’t speak up for her in Court, would you? I mean you’d let her hang herself out of her own mouth, wouldn’t you, Mr Rumpole?’

I had turned over to the central spread, entirely devoted to the little boy lost. There was an enlarged picture of little Tommy in the strangely metallic washed-out colours in which photographs appear in newspapers: an ordinary, carrot-haired three-year-old with a wide grin, no doubt a singular miracle to the Constants whose first and only child he was. There were snaps of the family at the seaside, by a swing in the garden of the semi and a picture of the huge South London hospital, gaunt and unfriendly as a nuclear power station, from which Tommy Constant had unaccountably disappeared. As I glanced over these apparently harmless records of a tragedy, I was trying to remind Dot of an Old Bailey hack’s credo. ‘I’m a black taxi, Dot,’ I told her, ‘plying for hire. I’m bound to accept anyone, however repulsive, who waves me down and asks for a lift. I do my best to take them to their destination, although the choice of route, of course, is entirely mine.’

‘The destination of her who nicked that child’ – Dot was unshakeable in her demand for a conviction, she was not the sort you’d want called up for jury duty – ‘would be burning at the stake. If you want my honest opinion.’

I have to confess that I wasn’t giving Dot my full attention. There wasn’t a long story between the pictures, but what there was had been written in the simple, energetic style of the Daily Trumpet which, I thought, might be appreciated by a jury.

Twenty-four-year-old Sheena Constant spoke through her tears: ‘After he was seen by the doctor, I put him on the kiddies’ mechanical donkey in the out-patients assembly.

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