"Mortimer, John - Rumpole on Trial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mortimer John)
Then I went to a lunchtime concert in Portland Place. I went to buy a dress. Oh, I had to have a drink with our agent at six.' 'Before that you popped back home and saw what your husband had written on the pad by the answering machine: TOM AT THE ROOM, SIX O'CLOCK?' 'No.' 'Mrs Casterini. It didn't take you from lunchtime to six o'clock to buy a dress. Were you carrying it all the afternoon, walking about London?' 'No. I did just call at the flat, to put the dress away.' 'And you didn't look at the message pad?' 'I never saw that.' I could tell by the way the Jury was looking at her that they found it hard to believe in a woman who would come home and not bother to look at the messages.
'Did you telephone Tom Randall from your car and arrange to meet him at the rehearsal room at five-thirty, before he spoke to your husband?' 'No. No, of course I didn't.' As she said that, I picked up another document and reminded her, 'Bills from car telephones have a nasty habit of showing the numbers called. You telephoned Tom Randall that day, didn't you?' 'No. No, I'm sure I didn't.' And then she changed it to 'I... I can't remember.' 'Didn't you go to the rehearsal room some time before six 74 -e* o'clock, taking your husband's gun in case Tom couldn't be dissuaded?' 'No! I had to meet the agent at six at the Warren Hotel. I told you that!' 'Plenty of time to do the deed, hide the gun somewhere the police could find it, then go up the stairs, out to the fireescape and down to the street. No doubt you arranged for the lift to be stuck at the top floor. How far from the rehearsal room to the Warren Hotel? Just around the corner?' 'Not very far away.' 'So,' I put it to her quietly, 'let's get back to the vital question. Who else had a motive for killing Tom Randall?
Might it be someone who wanted to stop paying him blackmail and also shut his mouth?' 'Not me... It wasn't...' She was stumbling, but Hilary Peek rose to her rescue. 'My Lord, Mr Rumpole is putting a whole string of suppositions to this witness. He's accusing her of the very crime for which his client is on trial. How can these questions be relevant?' 'Because, my Lord, if the Jury thinks someone else might be guilty, my client can't be convicted.' I supplied Oilie with, the answer. 'I'm fully entitled to put these suppositions to the witness. Or does your Lordship want me to argue the matter in the Court of Appeal?' At the mention of this dreaded court Oilie looked shaken and poured a great deal of North Country oil on our troubled water. 'Let's use our common sense about this, Mr Rumpole.
No need to bother the Court of Appeal, is there? They've got quite enough on their plates nowadays. You go on at your own risk. Accusing this lady may not exactly endear your client to the Jury. And remember I shall be watching you like a hawk, so "mind tha step, lad", as we say where I come from.' So I turned to Elizabeth and asked her the single most important question. 'Why did you come here as a witness, Mrs Casterini?' 'The police asked me.' 'You know you couldn't be compelled to give evidence 75 against your husband, they must have told you that. So you came here of your own free will. Why?' 'To tell you the truth as I know it.' 'Or to make sure your husband gets convicted for a crime you committed?' She didn't answer that but stood in silence for a moment.
She looked suddenly older, harder and when she spoke I knew she hated me. 'Is there anything else wicked I'm supposed to have done, Mr Rumpole?' 'Oh, yes,' I told her, 'you recommended your husband to brief a barrister you hoped wouldn't attack you. I'm sorry to have disappointed you, Mrs Casterini.' There is often a moment in a trial when you know for certain that the case is decided. R. v. Casterini was won when I had finished my cross-examination and my short, unreasonably happy and misguided friendship with Elizabeth. She left the witness-box and the court and I never saw her or spoke to her again. Three days later her husband also left the court, sad, confused but acquitted. I don't know when they met or what they said to each other. In any event their time together was short. Not long after the Jury's verdict D. I. Baker and D. S. Straw called at the Butterworth Buildings rehearsal room. There they found Elizabeth playing a violin solo and charged her with the murder of Thomas Randall. In spite of her high opinion of my brilliance she didn't call upon me to defend her.
After the Casterini trial my life returned to normal, which meant another Chambers meeting. This one was to reach a final verdict on the matter of the alleged harassment of Dot Clapton. Erskine-Brown, who was, as I thought, unwisely conducting his own defence, addressed us in a plaintive fashion. 'It's totally unfair,' he submitted. 'I never intended to harass Dot. That is, Miss Clapton. I heard Henry approaching her in the most outrageous manner and I asked her to tell me about it, so we could make a proper complaint. Well, she must have misunderstood me.' 'What outrageous manner was that?' I asked.
'Well, he was going on about the swishing sound made by 76."* her stockings and her modestly hidden breasts. Oh, and he said, "Just you and I, Annabelle. Two will become one when our bodies mingle."' 'Is that all?' 'Rumpole, just because you happen to have won in Casterini, don't feel you're entitled to take over this important inquiry.' Ballard objected to my stealing his thunder, but I was in possession of the facts.
'I have investigated the matter, Bollard,' I told him, 'as no one else seems to have bothered to do. May I just ask a simple question, with your Lordship's permission? I'm grateful to your Lordship. Erskine-Brown, is Miss Clapton's name Annabelle?' 'I... I don't think so,' Claude had to admit.
'It certainly isn't. Her name is Dot, short, all too short I'm afraid, for Dorothy. Have you forgotten that Henry is a thespian, a mummer, a star of the Bexleyheath Amateurs? Dot Clapton is also a native of Bexleyheath, with a taste for the stage. That ghastly dialogue was not Henry's but the product of the fevered brain of a Miss Mildred Hannay, a local author who has written a play especially for the group. What you had the misfortune to hear, Erskine-Brown, was a rehearsal. Any further questions?' There was a silence which Mizz Probert broke by asking, 'Yes. Why are we wasting our time with this meeting?' 'It's not all a waste of time, Probert,' Ballard spoke to her severely. 'There's the matter of your baby!' 'Her what?' Dave asked angrily.
'And your garage, Inchcape.' Ballard fired off the most serious allegation. 'With all that money you're earning, how could you refuse to maintain Probert's child? Are we to have a public scandal and a paternity suit in Chambers?' 'What have you got into your head about me and garages?' Dave Inchcape was running out of patience.
Liz Probert started to laugh. 'I know what it was!' 'What?' Soapy Sam Ballard sounded not a little put out.
'You came into the room during my telephone call about Singleton v. Singleton,' Liz told him. 'I wasn't talking about 77 me and Dave. We were talking about our clients. It's hilarious!' 'No, it isn't,' I corrected her. 'It's quite serious, really. You all think sex is the explanation for everything that happens, but quite often it's something else entirely.' 'Is there another chop, Hilda?' I was sitting at supper with She Who Must Be Obeyed and, having poured the remains of my bottle of Machismo for Men down the lavatory, I was reverting to my old ways.
'You've given up being a vegetarian, then?' she asked as she dropped one on my plate.
'Oh, yes. The last vegetarian I met was a murderer and a teetotaller.' 'What came over you, Rumpole, when you started to smell so exotic?' 'I met a lady in the meads (I explained) Full beautiful, a faery's child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild.' 'I suppose you're talking about that Mrs Casterini. When I think we sat and listened to her fiddling! If I'd've known what she was like I wouldn't have stayed.' 'Ah, but we didn't know, did we? La Belle Dame Sans Merci had us in her thrall..' 'There are actually two chops going begging, Rumpole.' And she rewarded me with the other.
'Thank you, Hilda. Thank you very much. You were never a faery's child, were you? That's one thing to be said in your favour, old darling.' 78 "
The most surprising thing about miscarriages of justice is that they should surprise everyone so much. If justice emerged as the result of an immaculate conception and miraculous birth, perfection might reasonably be expected.
If judicial decisions were arrived at by some puzzled girl playing the keys of a computer I suppose they might be more reliable, although computers appear to become hysterical and absent-minded at times. The machinery of the law has to be operated by fallible human beings, some of whom, such as Mr Injustice Graves, Mr Justice 'Oilie' Oliphant, Soapy Sam Ballard, Q.c., you will have met in these pages, and you can decide whether they might, on certain rare occasions, of course, fall into error. Juries, I believe, do their best, but have to contend with the soporific effects of many summings-up and the speeches of the learned friends.
The Old Bill, I am afraid, has been known to be only too anxious to achieve a quick result and hasn't always worried too much about injustice. And what of Rumpole? I suppose my job has been to prevent the huge, sometimes ill-directed legal machine totally flattening my client, so perhaps my concern has been less with legal principles than with ways of escape. For all these reasons it's dangerous to expect any trial to produce a result fit to be engraved on tablets of stone and stand unchallenged for all time. It is always as well to remember the conduct of that somewhat accidentprone old darling Mr Justice Guthrie Featherstone in the 'Pinhead' Morgan trial.
The Buttercup Meadows Estate (its rural title must have been bestowed on it as some sort of ironic joke by the 79 town planners) occupies a desolate area to the south-east of London. Its lifts are dangerous to enter, many of its windows are broken, its concrete walkways and balconies are cracked and its walls are smeared with graffiti and worse.
There is also little employment for the young men of the area, so they turn their hands to the exciting work of stealing cars, racing them at high speed round the estate and finally crashing them or setting them alight. These sporting events are usually accompanied by fights, knifings and the throwing of petrol bombs. Those elderly citizens of Buttercup Meadows who haven't resigned themselves to sleepless nights often telephone the police, who, with commendable courage, often arrive.
On one such night, when Buttercup Meadows was resounding with screaming tyres and lit with flaming Volvos and BMWs (the local youths only nicked vehicles in the upper range of the market), P. C. Yeomans, a courageous and undoubtedly straight young officer with a wife and two children, arrived on the scene to keep the peace. He left his car with a fellow copper but turned alone down a passage between two buildings, perhaps because he saw a fight or other incident taking place. There, in the shadows, he was stabbed in the throat and died almost immediately.
Tinhead' Morgan was so unkindly called by his contemporaries because, although past twenty, he had the mental age of a child. He seemed to have come to the car racing purely as a spectator. As other officers discovered P. C. Yeomans's fallen body, Pinhead was caught running some way from the scene of the crime. He was arrested and taken into custody. The officer in charge of the case was Detective Superintendent Gannon, an apparently dependable and avuncular man, who was nearing retirement age. He was assisted in his work by Detective Inspector Farraday and Detective Sergeant Chesney Lane. Pinhead was kept in custody for < three days, after applications to the magistrates. For the first two he was uncooperative and used, as an officer later testified, foul and abusive language to his interrogators. On the third day he told Detective Inspector Farraday that he was prepared to make a statement about his 'involvement'. This fact was reported to Detective Superintendent Gannon, who later wrote out a full confession, he said at Pinhead's dictation, which the young man signed.
So Pinhead was charged with murder. This clearly came as a most satisfactory outcome to the Detective Superintendent, who'd had the miserable task of waking Betty Yeomans up in the middle of the night and telling her that her husband had been murdered. All he could offer her were a few words of praise for the dead man and the promise that his killer would be convicted. With Pinhead's confession signed, it seemed that Detective Superintendent Gannon could keep his word.
The case came on before that master of indecision, Mr Justice Guthrie Featherstone. Guthrie, as regular readers of these chronicles will remember, had once been a middle-of-the-road M.P., a fairly middle-of-the-road Q.C. and the Head of our Chambers at 3 Equity Court before he was elevated (presumably they were on the lookout for middle-ofthe-road judges that season). On the Bench Guthrie found it hard not to open his mouth without putting his foot in it, but the words he used when sentencing Pinhead to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he serve at least twenty-five years, must have appeared perfectly safe at the time.
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