"Mortimer, John - Rumpole on Trial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mortimer John)

Doesn't it make you feel we've been in the Middle Ages?' 'Lucky for you, we're not.' 'It must have been so romantic.' 'Not that I'd ever have locked you up in the East Tower, Hilda. I'd never have dreamt of doing anything like that, not being a Lord.' 'Oh, really, Rumpole! I hope you weren't talking that sort of nonsense to Rosemary!' 'Not quite. We were talking about Richard's first wife. Not that it could have been her, of course, she's much too young.

Besides which, she's alive and wed and living in Pinner...' I was following a private train of thought and Hilda had stopped listening for we had arrived at the dog ring, where owners were assembling with their four-footed look-alikes. There was a fat woman with a Pekinese, a hatchet-faced man with a lurcher, and a man who had taken off his shirt and was holding his grey, long-haired Yorkshire terrier against the grey hairs on his chest. Richard stood proudly beside Monty, the Labrador, and old Plunger Plumstead was there with an ancient, watery-eyed and evil-looking bull-terrier to whom he might have been closely related. Hilda had wandered off to talk to the Yarrowbys, whom she had greeted as lifelong friends, and I stood alone, watching, as Pippa Bastion, the judge, announced that the first prize went to Plunger's dog.

The prize was presented by the coroner, who stood, in another suit of brilliant checks, at the judge's table. When he had been rewarded I went up to congratulate Plunger.

'Oh, Bo'sun and I win it every year. God knows what I'm going to do when the filthy dog snuffs it. Bottle of Cherry Bounce, presented by Dr Swabey. Revolting! Can't drink the stuff.' I told him I had spotted a beer tent where we might find something more acceptable. 'Oh, very good,' he said. 'Good idea of yours, Rumbold. You have these sort of do's in your part of Gloucester?' When we were in the tent, coping with large plastic I tumblers full of North Yorkshire bitter, I said, 'Perhaps dogs grow to look like their masters in the way that men grow up to be reproductions of their dads.' 'Reproductions? Oh, Richard certainly is. Spitting image of old Robert. Fine man, Robert. Had a bloody good war. Peace didn't treat him quite so kindly. Came back home. Found all sorts of things wrong. Lot of pheasant covers cut. Rooks out of control. Labour Government. Something seriously dicky about the roof. Things not so marvellous on the domestic front either, not too long afterward his wife bolted off.' 'Did you know Richard's mother?' 'Depends what you mean by know. Not in the biblical sense, old chap!' He laughed, gulped his beer and went on. 'So I was probably in a minority. But she always seemed a perfectly nice woman to me. A bit affected. I remember she always called Richard, Riccardo, with a sort of funny Italian accent.

Or was it Riccardino? Of course he hated it.' 'What was her name?' 'Margaret. Maggie was what we called her.' 'And what happened to her in the end?' 'In the end? Oh, in the end she died.' That evening we were only four at dinner but, with due formality, Hilda and Rosemary left us men to our port and I began to ask Richard about his childhood. It was then he told me something that had occurred at his prep school, a story I shall never forget. 'I suppose I was about nine,' he said. 'Just nine. And the message came: "The Headmaster wants to see you in his study after prayers." Well, you know what that meant. You got that awful sort of feeling in the pit of your stomach and sweaty hands. All the usual symptoms of terror, I suppose. Anyway, I knocked on the study door and there he was. Snowy Slocombe. A hard man. But just. Perfectly just.

I've got no complaints about that. Big tall fellow with snowwhite hair. And he told me to close the door and come up to the desk and then he said, "Sackbut, I know you're going to take this like a man." And then, of course, I thought I knew exactly what I was in for. But he said, "I've just had your father on the telephone, Sackbut. And he's asked me to let you know. I'm afraid your mother's dead." And do you know what I felt, Rumpole? I felt a kind of enormous relief, because he wasn't going to beat me.' We were silent for a little, then I asked, 'Did your father tell you how she died?' 'Not really. When I came home for the holidays he said, "I suppose Slocombe gave you the message." And I told him, "Yes." I don't think we discussed it much after that.' 'Do you know how? Or where?' 'I heard vaguely. I think she left home after I'd gone back to school. She must have died soon after that, I suppose.

Abroad somewhere. I've an idea it might have been Italy.

France or Italy...' 'But didn't you make... any sort of inquiries?' I found it hard to believe.

'No.' He sounded quite matter of fact.

'Why not?' 'I don't think my father would have wanted me to.' 'You believed your father?' 'Of course.' 'On so little evidence?' 'I wouldn't have doubted him.' 'Do you have any idea,' I asked, 'how old she'd be now? If she'd lived, I mean.' 'I suppose late sixties.' 'It never occurred to you that she might try to get in touch with you?' 'You mean, come back from the dead?' He was smiling.

'Yes. Something like that, I suppose.' Our new friends, the Sackbuts, invited us to the Opera, where the Bastions had taken a box. Not to be caught out a second time I arrived in a blazer and grey flannels to find the rest of the party in evening-dress. 'They're so secretive,' She complained to me in the interval. 'They never let you know what they're going to wear.' But Richard did give me some interesting information over the champagne and sandwiches. After telling me that the fellow on the stage looked a great deal too fat to be accepted into ", the Egyptian Army, he said, 'I say, Rumpole. I think I've got a young relative in your Chambers. David Luxter. His grandfather was Lord Chancellor and his father's my cousin.' 'You mean the present Lord Luxter?' Hilda has Debrett ever at her fingertips.

'No', I had to disappoint Hilda, 'I'm afraid we've got no Luxter in our stable.' 'Oh, he did an odd thing,' Richard told us. 'Didn't want to rely on his family name, can't think why. So the Luxter boy went into the law under an alias. He found a name in some poem or other, Harry Luxter told me, something about a bell and a rock: "The vessel strikes with a shivering shock," I told him. "Oh Christ! it is the Inchcape Rock!" Not a great poet, Southey, but I suppose young David found him useful.' 'That's the name! Inchcape!' 'Born the son of a Lord?' And I thought I knew the reason for Mizz Probert's sorrow. I wondered if she would ever forgive him.

When the Opera was over, Hilda woke me with a sharp nudge and we set off to walk down to the Savoy, where the Sackbuts were standing us dinner. We took a short cut down the narrow street behind the Strand Palace Hotel and there men and women, young and old, were settling down for the night as near as possible to the grilles where a certain amount of hot air came streaming up from the hotel's kitchen. As our rather grand procession swept by, a voice called my name from a doorway and I turned to see a small dosser, with a bobble hat pulled down over his eyes, holding out a tattered copy of the Evening Standard which had formed part of his bedding. 'Mr Rumpole! I recognize you, sir.' He handed up the snap of me blowing my nose. 'I see your picture in this old paper. As you was defending Walter The Wally in the big murder case. I have got some info for you on that one, sir.' As I loitered to speak further to the man, I heard Richard say, 'What's happened to your husband?' I 'I'm afraid he's met a friend,' Hilda told him, so they walked on, sure I suppose, that I'd catch them up. I didn't do so immediately as I wanted to hear the story old Arnie, as he'd introduced himself, had to tell. He would not speak of it, however, until I'd bought him a cup of tea and a couple of ham rolls in a rather affected caff, dressed up as a Parisian bar in the 189o's, in the Covent Garden Piazza. Those patrons sitting down wind of Arnie moved to other tables as he munched contentedly.

'I was with The Wally that night, Mr Rumpole,' he told me.

'We was all down under Hungerford Bridge. And he got into a bit of an argument, like, with Bronco Billington. Always a bit of a pain up the bum, Bronco, in a manner of speaking. Nick! Never seen anything like it. Well. He had Wally's drop of gin and his pie off him and a punch-up started. And a bit of manual strangulation.

Wally's strong, like, when he's roused up and he left Bronco flattened. So we went off sharpish round Centrepoint, where there was still spaces. And next day we read in the papers about the triple murder. But The Wally was with me, all that night.

Straight up, he was. Only thing, he reckoned he'd done in poor old Bronco, who was never in good health at the best of times.

Cough his bloody guts out soon as you touch him.' 'And had he done in Bronco?' 'Bless you, no. Bronco was in the Cut, Waterloo, Thursday midnight. Singing his head off on a bottle of meths. I'd've told The Wally, only I didn't know where they got him banged up. You'll be seeing him, will you?' 'Not just yet,' I told him. 'I'm defending a Lord.' 'Oh, wonderful, Mr Rumpole. Going up in the world, are we? You couldn't spare...' Of course I could. I handed him a couple of crisp tenners and told him not to waste it all on tea. Then I wondered if I could recover my outlay from the legal aid fund.

As the inquest drew near, I began to make my preparations.

Cursitor & Carlill of Welldyke were the family solicitors, and I saw the prim and elderly Mr Cursitor at my Chambers on one of his visits to London. I suggested that he must have been sure that Richard's mother had died, because if she were alive she might have had some claim against the estate on his father's death.

'Not really, Mr Rumpole.' Mr Cursitor actually put the tips of his fingers together when he spoke, something he must (' have seen family solicitors doing in old movies. 'Richard's father had started divorce proceedings before his wife left England. She never appeared again and the case went through undefended. She was no longer married to the late Lord Sackbut, so she would have had no claim.' "

'Did Richard know that?' I don't think we ever discussed it with him. I'm sure his father didn't.' 'And who was the man she ran off with?' 'An Italian prisoner-of-war. I believe she'd met him when he was working on one of the farms. I suppose she misconducted herself and joined him somewhere in Italy. She left no address.' Before I parted from Mr Cursitor, I gave him a number of jobs to do and asked him to put an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph personal column. It was a long shot, a very long shot indeed, but then I had very little ammunition.

For someone who has had, in the course of a long life, a great deal to do with sudden and violent death, I have only rarely appeared in Coroners Courts. The proceedings are directed by the coroner, who calls for witnesses and asks the questions. The legal hack is usually limited to putting a few supplementaries.

The Welldyke Court was a dark and stately Victorian affair, set in a crumbling municipal building. For the inquest on the unknown bag lady, the place was packed with friends of the Sackbuts and, I suppose, some enemies, interested members of the press and some who found an inquest a welcome addition to the pleasures of a holiday in North Yorkshire. There was a jury of local men and women, a shorthand writer and Mr Pringle, the coroner's officer, acting as the court usher. Dr Swabey sat, his face and glasses shining, thoroughly enjoying putting the grey-haired pathologist through his paces.

'Dr Malkin,' he said in his most patronizing manner, 'please use layman's language. Not all of us understand the complexities of forensic medicine.' 'Including you, old darling,' I whispered to no one in particular, but the coroner apparently heard me. 'May I remind everyone in court,' he pontificated, 'this is a solemn proceeding. Mine is the ancient office of custos placitorum, the Keeper of the Decisions. We have the solemn duty, you and I, Members of the Jury, to inquire into the mysteries of death. I hope we may do so without interruption.' 'Just as soon as you stop interrupting.' I tried another whisper which the coroner wisely ignored and asked Malkin to continue his evidence. 'She was a woman in her late sixties or early seventies, in poor general health. I came to the conclusion that death was probably caused by a blow to the head with some blunt instrument before the body entered the water.