"Mortimer, John - Rumpole and the Alternative Society" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mortimer John)

'Easy! Prop myself to my feet in Court and do my best.'

' But you know damn well she's guilty!'

It's the one great error everyone makes about my learned profession; they think we defend people who have told us they did the deed. This legend doesn't add to the esteem in which barristers are held, and I sighed a little as I exploded the myth for the thousandth time.

'Ah, there you're wrong. I don't know that at all.'

'Pull the other one!" Sam shared the usual public view of legal eagles.

'I don't know. And if she ever admitted it to me, I'd have to make her surrender and plead " Guilty". We've got a few rules, old sweetheart. We don't deceive Courts, not on purpose.'

'You mean, you think she's innocent?' Sam made it clear that no one who lived in a commune called 'Nirvana' could possibly be innocent of anything.

'He told you, Sam! He's got rules about it.' Bobby was polishing glasses and coming to the rescue of an old friend.

'At the moment I think she's the victim of a trick by the police. That's what I'll have to go on thinking, until she tells me otherwise.'

'That's ridiculous! The police don't trick people. Not in England.' Sam clearly felt he'd not delivered us from the Nazi hordes for nothing.

'Never had a plain clothes copper come in here and order a large Scotch after closing time?' I asked him.

' The bastards! But that's entirely different.'

'Yes, of course.'

'Anyway, who's paying you to defend Miss Slag-Heap? That's what I'd like to know.' Sam was triumphant. It hurt me, but I had to tell him.

'Fasten your seat belt, old darling. You are! Miss Kathy Trelawny is on legal aid. And I am here by courtesy of the ratepayers of Coldsands.' I lifted my rum in Sam's direction. 'Thank you, "Three-Fingers." Thank you for your hospitality.'

'Bloody hell.' Sam sounded more sorrowful than angry, and it gave him an excuse to turn the handle once more on the Teachers.

'We don't mind, do we, Sam?' As always Bobby's was the voice of tolerance. 'We don't mind buying Horace the odd drink occasionally.'

Later I sat in the residents' lounge, a small room which opened off the bar, and tried to shut out the considerable noise made by Sam's regular customers, middle-aged men mostly, in a sort of uniform of cavalry twill trousers and hacking jackets. I was working on my brief and already I had a plan of campaign. When the Detective Sergeant went to buy Miss Trelawny's cannabis he was disguised as a hippie and acting, I was quite prepared to argue, as an agent provocateur. If I could establish that my client would never have committed any sort of crime unless the police had invited her to I might, given a fair wind and a sympathetic judge, have the whole of the police evidence excluded which would lead to the collapse of the prosecution, a Zen service of thanksgiving at 'Nirvana', and Rumpole triumphant. I had brought a number of law reports on the question of agent provocateur and was interested to discover that it was the old hanging judges who regarded these beasts with particular disfavour; it's odd how gentler days have somehow dimmed our passion for liberty.

I had worked out an argument that might appeal to a judge who still had some of the old spark left in him when the door from the bar opened to admit Mr Friendly and my client.

I had, I felt, known Miss Kathy Trelawny for a long time. She had floated before my eyes from my early days with the old Oxford Book of English Verse, as Herrick's Julia, or Lovelace's Lucasta, or 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', or the 'Lady of Shallot'. As she smiled, she reminded me strongly of Rosalind in the forest of Arden, or Viola comforting the love-sick Duke. She had a long, slender neck, a mass of copper-coloured hair, friendly blue eyes and she was exceedingly clean. As soon as I saw her I decided that my one ambition in life was to keep her out of Holloway. I had to take a quick gulp from the glass beside me before I could steady my nerve to read out a passage from the depositions. Miss Trelawny was sitting quietly looking at me as if I was the one man in the world she had always wanted to meet, and she hoped we would soon be finished with the boring case so we could talk about something interesting, and deeply personal.

'"Real cool house, man,"' I was reading out the Detective Sergeant's evidence with disgust. '"You can't score nothing in this hick town. You don't get no trouble from the Fuzz"?' 'Just from the way the old darling talked, didn't you twig he was a Sergeant from the local Drug Squad?'

Miss Trelawny showed no particular reaction, and Friendly quickly filled the silence. 'My client has never come up against the police before.'

' We'll have a bit of fun with this case,' I told them.

'What sort of fun exactly?' Friendly sounded doubtful, as if he didn't exactly look on the coming trial as the annual dinner dance of the Coldsands Rotary.

'A preliminary point! In the absence of the jury we will ask the judge to rule the whole of Detective Sergeant Jack Smedley, alias Jack the Hippie's evidence inadmissable. On the sole ground...'