"Mortimer, John Clifford - Rumpole 01 - Rumpole of the Bailey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mortimer John)

'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...' ' On what sole ground ?' 'That it was obtained contrary to natural justice, in that it constituted a trick. That it is the testimony of an agent provocateur.' ' We don't get many of those in conveyancing.' Friendly looked distinctly out of his depth.

'A nasty foreign expression, for a nasty foreign thing. Spies and infiltrators! Policemen in disguise who worm their way into an Englishman's home and trap him into crime!' 'Why should they do that, Mr Rumpole?' I stood up and directed my answer at my client. Her warm and all-embracing smile, and her total silence, were beginning to unnerve me. ' So they can clap innocent citizens into chokey and notch up another conviction on their collective braces! Bloody unBritish, like bidets and eating your pud after the cheese! Now, I mean your average circuit judge ... Circus judges ... we call them down the Bailey.' Friendly consulted a note. 'It's his Honour James Crispin-Rice tomorrow.' We were in luck. I knew old Rice Crispies well at the Bar. He was a thoroughly decent chap, who had once stood as a Liberal candidate. He was the product of the Navy and a minor public school. No doubt he'd had it firmly implanted in him in the fourth form, never trust a sneak. They had left the door slightly open, and through it I could hear the old familiar sound of Bobby thumping the piano.

' You think he might rule out the evidence ?' I got up and shut the door, blotting out some remarkable tuneless rendering of the Golden Oldies which had started up a cote de Chez Dogherty.

' If we can implant a strong dislike of Sergeant Smedley in the old darling,' I told them. 'Disgusting behaviour, your Honour. The police are there to detect crime, not manufacture it. What's the country coming to? Constables tricked out in beads and singing to a small guitar conning an innocent girl into making huge collections of cannabis resin from some Persian pushers she met at Bristol University. She'd never have done it if the policeman hadn't asked her!' 'Wouldn't you. Miss Trelawny?' Friendly gave her the cue to speak. She ignored it, so on I went showing her my quality.

'Withdraw the evidence from the jury, your Honour! It's un-English, unethical and clearly shows that this crime was deliberately created by the police. The whole business is a vile outrage to our age-old liberties.' Wordsworth crept into my mind and I didn't send him about his business. 'It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which to the open sea ...' I paused, insecure on the words and then, very quietly and for the first time, Miss Kathy Trelawny spoke, with words appropriattly supplied by the old sheep of the Lake District.

'Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters unwithstood," ... Should perish.' She looked at me, I took over.

' We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake ...' I decided I'd had enough of Wordsworth, and asked her, surprised, 'You know it?' 'Wordsworth? A little.' 'I thought no one did nowadays. Whenever I come out with him in the Bar Mess they look amazed. Unusual, for a client to know Wordsworth.' ' I teach kids English.' 'Oh yes. Of course you do.' I had learned from the brief that all the inhabitants of' Nirvana' were in work.

'There's one thing I wanted to ask you.' Now she had broken the ice, there seemed to be no holding her, but Friendly stood up, as if anxious to bring the conference to an end.

' Well, we shouldn't keep Mr Rumpole any longer.' 'Ask me, Miss Trelawny?' 'Yes.' Her smile was unwavering. 'What do you want me to say exactly?' 'Say? Say nothing! Look ... rely on me, with a little help from Wordsworth. And keep your mouth firmly closed.' I opened the door. Great gusts of singing blew in on us from the bar. Bobby's voice was leading, ' We'll meet again Don't know where Don't know when, But we're bound to meet again Some sunny day.' I remembered my craven cowardice in not speaking to Bobby on the occasion of the NAAFI hop, and I asked Miss Trelawny to join me for a drink. Fortunately, Friendly remembered that his wife would be waiting up for him, and I took my client alone into the bar.

As we sat at the counter, Sam came up to us swaying only slightly, like a captain on the deck of his well-loved ship. He looked at Kathy Trelawny with amazed approval.

' Where did you get this popsy, Rumpole ?' He leant across the bar to chat to my client intimately. 'You shouldn't be with the ground staff, my dear. You're definitely officer material. What's it to be?' ' I'll have a coke. I don't drink really." She was smiling at him, the smile I thought, uncomfortably, of universal love bestowed on everyone, regardless of age or sex.

'Oh,don'tyou? You don't drink!' Sam took offence. 'There's nothing else you don't do, is there?' ' Quite a lot of things.' Sam ignored this and recalled the Good Old Days as he passed me a rum.

'Remember, Rumpole? We used to divide the popsies into beer WAAFS and gin WAAFS.' He winked at Kathy Trelawny. ' In my opinion you're a large pink gin.' ' She told you, Sam. She doesn't drink,' I reminded Sam. He was getting impatient.