"Mortimer, John - Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mortimer John)

"Yes," I replied. "We shook hands briefly in church this morning. My name's Rumpole and I'm staying with the Longstaffs. But didn't we meet somewhere else?"

"Good old Eric! We have our differences, of course, but he's a saintly man. This is my wife Lorelei, and Colonel and Maudy Jacobs. I expect you'd like to see the library, wouldn't you, Rumpole? I'm sure you're interested in ancient history. Will you all excuse us?"

It was two words from Hilda that had done it - "old" and "Compton." I knew then what I should have remembered when we had touched hands in the pews, that Old Compton is a street in Soho, and that this was perhaps why Riccardo (known as Dicko) Perducci had adopted the name. I had received that very same handshake-a slight touch and a quick turn away-when I had said good-bye to him in the cells under the Old Bailey and left him to start seven years for blackmail. The trial had ended, I now remembered, just before a long-distant Christmas.

The Perducci territory had been, in those days, not rolling Norfolk acres but a number of Soho strip clubs and clip joints. Girls would stand in front of these last-named resorts and lure the lonely, the desperate, and the unwary in. Sometimes they would escape after paying twenty pounds for a watery cocktail. Unlucky, affluent, and important customers might get even more, carefully recorded by microphones and cameras to produce ma-terial which was used for systematic and highly profitable black-mail. The victim in Dicko's case was an obscure and not much loved Circuit Judge, soit was regarded as particularly serious by the prosecuting authority.

When I mitigated for Dicko, I stressed the lack of direct evidence against him. He was a shadowy figure who kept him-self well in the background and was known as a legend rather than a familiar face round Soho. "That only shows what a big wheel he is," Judge Bullingham, who was unfortunately trying the case, bellowed unsympatherically. In desperation I tried the Christmas approach on him. "Crimes forgiven, sins remitted, mercy triumphant, such was the message of the story that began in Bethlehem," I told the Court, at which the Mad Bull snorted that, as far as he could remember, that story had ended in a criminal trial and a stiff sentence for at least one thief.

"I suppose something like this was going to happen sooner or later." We were standing in the library in front of a comforting

fire, among leather-bound books which I strongly suspected had been bought by the yard. The new, like the old, Dicko was soft-eyed, quietly spoken, almost unnaturally calm-the perfect man behind the scenes of a blackmailing operation or a country estate.

"Nor necessarily," I told him. "It's just that my wife has many old school friends and Poppy Longstaff is one of them. Well now, you seem to have done pretty well for yourself. Solid citizens still misconducting themselves round Old Compton Street, are they?"

"I wouldn't know. I gave all that up and went into the property business. "

"Really? Where did you do that? Canada?"

"I never saw Canada." He shook his head. "Garwick Prison. Up-and-coming area in the Home Counties. The screws there were ready and willing to do the deals on the outside. I paid them embarrassingly small commissions.

"How long were you there?"

"Four years. By the time I came our I'd got my first million."

"Well, then I did you a good turn, losing your case. A bit of luck His Honour Judge Bullingham didn't believe in the re-mission of sins."

"You think I got what I deserved?"

I stretched my hands to the fire. I could hear the cocktail chatter from the marble hall of the eighteenth-century manor. "Use every man after his desert, and who shall `scape whipping?" I quotedHamlet at him.

"Then I can trust you, Rumpole? The Lord Chancellor's going to put me on the local Bench."

"The Lord Chancellor lives in a world of his own."

"You don't think I'd do well as a magistrate?"

"I suppose you'd speak from personal experience of crime. And have some respect for the quality of mercy."

"I've got no time for that, Rumpole." His voice became qui-eter but harder. The brown eyes lost their softness. That, I thought, was how he must have looked when one of his clip joint girls was caught with the punrers' cash stuffed in her tights. "It's about time we cracked down on crime. Well now, I can trust you not to go out there and spread the word about the last time we met?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"How well you have understood the Christmas message.

"Which is?"