The First Rumpole Omnibus by John Mortimer

Author:John Mortimer [Mortimer, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Humour
ISBN: 9780141928005
Google: v-33M7X5JoQC
Amazon: B002XHNOEC
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1983-09-28T11:00:00+00:00

Rumpole and the Case of Identity

‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And did the stabbing in the Wandsworth Off-Licence?’

These lines passed through my mind as I sat working late in Chambers. My wife Mrs Hilda Rumpole, known to me as She Who Must Be Obeyed, had joined some dubious club called the Bar Choral Society and was out in the evenings at this time, indulging her fantasies in rehearsing Handel’s Messiah as Christmas was growing remorselessly near. On my desk was a police identikit photograph of a long-faced young man with bristling sideburns wearing, just in case no one noticed him, a loudly checked red-and-yellow tartan cap. This was the face, unreliably created from snatches of memory and a police artist’s pencil, of the man who entered an off-licence in Wandsworth and stabbed the licensee, a small Irishman named Tosher O’Neil, in the face and arm, making it necessary for repair work to be carried out to the tune of twenty-seven stitches. Also on my desk was a photograph of my client, a young man in his twenties named David Anstey, a driver in the well-known South London mini-cab firm ‘Allbright’s Cars’. Friends and fellow drivers had told the police that David’s sartorial taste ran to an unfortunate red-and-yellow tartan cap (I wondered how many thousand lunatics went to football matches each weekend in such headgear). If the prosecution could prove that this was the face Tosher remembered behind the descending knife, then David was due for a substantial visit to Her Majesty for Grievous Bodily Harm: which would be a pity as he had an excellent work record, was just married to a young wife, and his previous slips ran to driving off other people’s Ford Cortinas, so that knifing his fellow citizens would seem to be something of a new departure.

I was also wondering, as I read the papers in R. v. Anstey, how many seconds Tosher had really had to see his attacker’s face; and I was brooding on the horrible difficulty, and total unreliability, of trials decided on identification evidence. Do all the middle-aged ladies who write to ‘Any Answers’ calling for the return of hanging understand that the fallibility of human memory would ensure that we hanged at least a few of the wrong people, or is that a risk we are bound to take in the pursuit of their favourite sport? I was thinking of all these things, and of the greater difficulty in our case: Tosher O’Neil had picked David Anstey out at an identification parade when my unfortunate client wasn’t wearing a cap at all. As I turned back to compare the identikit picture with the undoubted face of the said Anstey there was a brisk knock at my door and the anxious face of Claude Erskine-Brown peered into my room.

‘Rumpole… you’re burning the midnight oil?’

‘Ah, Erskine-Brown, Claude.’ I decided to use him as a test for man’s power of identification. ‘How would you describe me, exactly?’

‘You? Why on earth…?’

‘Let’s say I’m getting unsure of my own identity.

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