Murder Most Merry

RUMPOLE AND THE CHAMBERS PARTY – John Mortimer

Christmas comes but once a year. Once a year I receive a gift of socks from She Who Must Be Obeyed; each year I add to her cellar of bottles of lavender water, which she now seems to use mainly for the purpose of “laying down” in the bedroom cupboard (I suspect she has only just started on the 1980 vintage).

Tinseled cards and sprigs of holly appear at the entrance to the cells under the Old Bailey and a constantly repeated tape of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” adds little zest to my two eggs, bacon, and sausage on a fried slice in the Taste-Ee-Bite, Fleet Street; and once a year the Great Debate takes place at our December meeting. Should we invite solicitors to our Chambers party?

“No doubt at the season of our Savior’s birth we should offer hospitality to all sorts and conditions of men,” “Soapy” Sam Ballard, q. c., our devout Head of Chambers, opened the proceedings in his usual manner, that of a somewhat backward bishop addressing Synod on the wisdom of offering the rites of baptism to non-practicing, gay Anglican converts of riper years.

“All conditions of men and women.” Phillida Erskine-Brown, q. c.. nee Trant, the Portia of our Chambers, was looking particularly fetching in a well fitting black jacket and an only slightly flippant version of a male collar and tie. As she looked doe-eyed at him, Ballard, who hides a ridiculously susceptible heart beneath his monkish exterior, conceded her point.

“The question before us is, does all sorts and conditions of men, and women, too, of course, include members of the junior branch of the legal profession?”

“I’m against it!” Claude Erskine-Brown had remained an aging junior whilst his wife Phillida fluttered into silk, and he was never in favor of radical change. “The party is very much a family thing for the chaps in Chambers, and the clerk’s room, of course. If we ask solicitors, it looks very much as though we’re touting for briefs.”

“I’m very much in favor of touting for briefs.” Up spake the somewhat grey barrister, Hoskins. “Speaking as a man with four daughters to educate. For heaven’s sake, let’s ask as many solicitors as we know, which, in my case, I’m afraid, is not many.”

“Do you have a view, Rumpole?” Ballard felt bound to ask me, just as a formality.

“Well, yes, nothing wrong with a bit of touting, I agree with Hoskins. But I’m in favor of asking the people who really provide us with work.”

“You mean solicitors?”

“I mean the criminals of England. Fine conservative fellows who should appeal to you, Ballard. Greatly in favor of free enterprise and against the closed shop. I propose we invite a few of the better-class crooks who have no previous engagements as guests of Her Majesty, and show our gratitude.”

A somewhat glazed look came over the assembly at this suggestion and then Mrs. Erskine-Brown broke the silence with: “Claude’s really being awfully stuffy and old-fashioned about this. I propose we invite a smattering of solicitors. from the better-class firms.”

Our Portia’s proposal was carried nem con, such was the disarming nature of her sudden smile on everyone, including her husband, who may have had some reason to fear it. Rumpole’s suggestion, to nobody’s surprise, received no support whatsoever.

Our clerk, Henry, invariably arranged the Chambers party for the night on which his wife put on the Nativity play in the Bexley Heath Comprehensive at which she was a teacher. This gave him more scope for kissing Dianne, our plucky but somewhat hit-and-miss typist, beneath the mistletoe which swung from the dim, religious light in the entrance hall of number three Equity Court.

Paper streamers dangled from the bookcase full of All England Law Reports in Ballard’s room and were hooked up to his views of the major English cathedrals. Barristers’ wives were invited, and Mrs. Hilda Rumpole, known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed, was downing sherry and telling Soapy Sam all about the golden days when her daddy, C. H. Wystan, ran Chambers. There were also six or seven solicitors among those present.

One. however, seemed superior to all the rest, a solicitor of the class we seldom see around Equity Court. He had come in with one hand outstretched to Ballard, saying. “Daintry Naismith. happy Christmas. Awfully kind of you fellows to invite one of the junior branch.” Now he stood propped up against the mantelpiece, warming his undoubtedly Savile Row trousers at Ballard’s gas fire and receiving the homage of barristers in urgent need of briefs.

He appeared to be in his well preserved fifties, with grey wings of hair above his ears and a clean-shaven, pink, and still single chin poised above what I took to be an old Etonian tie. Whatever he might have on offer, it wouldn’t, I was sure, be a charge of nicking a frozen chicken from Safeways. Even his murders, I thought, as he sized us up from over the top of his gold-rimmed half glasses, would take place among the landed gentry.

He accepted a measure of Pommeroy’s very ordinary white plonk from Portia and drank it bravely, as though he hadn’t been used to sipping Chassagne-Montrachet all his adult life.

“Mrs. Erskine-Brown,” he purred at her, “I’m looking for a hard-hitting silk to brief in the Family Division. I suppose you’re tremendously booked up.”

“The pressure of my work,” Phillida said modestly, “is enormous.”

“I’ve got the Geoffrey Twyford divorce coming. Pretty hairy bit of infighting over the estate and the custody of young Lord Shiplake. I thought you’d be just right for it.”

“Is that the Duke of Twyford?” Claude Erskine-Brown looked suitably awestruck. In spite of his other affectations. Erskine-Brown’s snobbery is completely genuine.

“Well, if you have a word with Henry, my clerk”—Mrs. Erskine-Brown gave the solicitor a look of cool availability—”he might find a few spare dates.”

“Well, that is good of you. And you, Mr. Erskine-Brown, mainly civil work now, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes. Mainly civil.” Erskine-Brown lied cheerfully; he’s not above taking on the odd indecent assault when tort gets a little thin on the ground. “I do find crime so sordid.”

“Oh, I agree. Look here. I’m stumped for a man to take on our insurance business, but I suppose you’d be far too busy.”

“Oh. no. I’ve got plenty of time.” Erskine-Brown lacked his wife’s laid-back approach to solicitors. “That is to say. I’m sure I could make time. One gets used to extremely long hours, you know.” I thought that the longest hours Erskine-Brown put in were when he sat, in grim earnest, through the Ring at Covent Garden, being a man who submits himself to Wagner rather as others enjoy walking from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

And then I saw Naismith staring at me and waited for him to announce that the Marquess of Something or Other had stabbed his butler in the library and could I possibly make myself available for the trial. Instead he muttered. “Frightfully good party,” and wandered off in the general direction of Soapy Sam Ballard.

“What’s the matter with you, Rumpole?” She Who Must Be Obeyed was at my elbow and not sounding best pleased. “Why didn’t you push yourself forward?” Erskine-Brown had also moved off by this time to join the throng.

“I don’t care for divorce,” I told her. “It’s too bloodthirsty for me. Now if he’d offered me a nice gentle murder—”

“Go after him, Rumpole,” she urged me, “and make yourself known. I’ll go and ask Phillida what her plans are for the Harrods sale.”

Perhaps it was the mention of the sale which spurred me toward that undoubted source of income. Mr. Daintry Naismith. I found him talking to Ballard in a way which showed, in my view, a gross overestimation of that old darling’s forensic powers. “Of course the client would have to understand that the golden tongue of Samuel Ballard, q. c.. can’t be hired on the cheap,” Naismith was saying. I thought that to refer to our Head of Chambers, whose voice in Court could best be compared to a rusty saw, as golden-tongued was a bit of an exaggeration.

“I’ll have to think it over.” Ballard was flattered but cautious. “One does have certain principles about”—he gulped, rather in the manner of a fish struggling with its conscience—”encouraging the publication of explicitly sexual material.”

“Think it over, Mr. Ballard. I’ll be in touch with your clerk.” And then, as Naismith saw me approach, he said, “Perhaps I’ll have a word with him now.” So this legal Santa Claus moved away in the general direction of Henry and once more Rumpole was left with nothing in his stocking.

“By the way,” I asked Ballard, “did you invite that extremely smooth solicitor?”

“No. I think Henry did.” Our Head of Chambers spoke as a man whose thoughts are on knottier problems. “Charming chap, though, isn’t he?”

Later in the course of the party I found myself next to Henry. “Good work inviting Mr. Daintry Naismith,” I said to our clerk. “He seems set on providing briefs for everyone except me.”

“I don’t really know the gentleman,” Henry admitted. “I think he must be a friend of Mr. Ballard’s. Of course, we hope to see a lot of him in the future.”

Much later, in search of a small cigar, I remembered the box, still in its special Christmas reindeer-patterned wrapping, that I had left in my brief tray. I opened the door of the clerk’s room and found the lights off and Henry’s desk palely lit by the old gas lamp outside in Equity Court.

There was a dark-suited figure standing beside the desk who seemed to be trying the locked drawers rather in the casual way that suspicious-looking youths test car handles. I switched on the light and found myself staring at our star solicitor guest. And as I looked at him, the years rolled away and I was in Court defending a bent house agent. Beside him in the dock had been an equally curved solicitor’s clerk who had joined my client as a guest of Her Majesty.

“Derek Newton,” I said, “Inner London Sessions. Raising mortgages on deserted houses that you didn’t own. Two years.”

“I knew you’d recognize me. Mr. Rumpole. Sooner or later.”

“What the hell do you think you are doing?”

“I’m afraid—well, barristers’ chambers are about the only place where you can find a bit of petty cash lying about at Christmas.” The man seemed resolved to have no secrets from Rumpole.

“You admit it?”

“Things aren’t too easy when you’re knocking sixty, and the business world’s full of wide boys up to all the tricks. You can’t get far on one good suit and the Old Etonian tie nowadays. You always defend, don’t you, Rumpole? That’s what I’ve heard. Well, I can only appeal to you for leniency.”

“But coming to our party,” I said, staggered by this most confident of tricksters, “promising briefs to all the learned friends—”

“I always wanted to be admitted as a solicitor.” He smiled a little wistfully. “I usually walk through the Temple at Christmastime. Sometimes I drop in to the parties. And I always make a point of offering work. It’s a pleasure to see so many grateful faces. This is, after all, Mr. Rumpole, the season of giving.”

What could I do? All he had got out of us, after all, was a couple of glasses of Pommeroy’s Fleet Street white; that and the five-pound note he “borrowed” from me for his cab fare home. I went back to the party and explained to Ballard that Mr. Daintry Naismith had made a phone call and had to leave on urgent business.

“He’s offered me a highly remunerative brief, Rumpole, defending a publisher of dubious books. It’s against my principles, but even the greatest sinner has a right to have his case put before the Court.”

“And put by your golden tongue, old darling,” I flattered him. “If you take my advice, you’ll go for it.”

It was, after all, the season of goodwill, and I couldn’t find it in my heart to spoil Soapy Sam Ballard’s Christmas.