Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 114, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 697 & 698, September/October 1999

Rumpole and the Absence of Body by John Mortimer

©1999 by John Mortimer

Nearly everyone knows John Mortimer’s character Horace Rumpole. Many of the stories readers have read in EQMM first saw life as scripts for the TV series shown on BBC and PBS. As Crime and Mystery Writers says, “Mortimer paints a wicked picture of the British legal practitioners: the ambitious, indifferent prosecutor; the biased judge...” But it is Rumpole’s ironic take on ordinary life that makes him unforgettable to this reader.

“What’s better than the presence of mind in an accident? Absence of body.” So far as I recall, this was my old father’s only joke, if you can flatter it by calling it a joke. But when it comes to a trial for murder, the failure of the corpse to put in an appearance can be a considerable embarrassment to all concerned. So it was when the possibly late Charley Twineham failed to turn up, even in phantom form, at Number One Court in the Old Bailey, where his wife, Pauline, commonly known as “Poppy” Twineham, was on trial for his murder.

“Rumpole,” my wife Hilda, known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed, trumpeted like the recording angel uttering a hostile verdict on the Day of Judgement. “How can you possibly defend that appalling Poppy woman?”

“Perfectly easy,” I told her. “You put on the crumpled gown, perch the yellowing wig on your head, stand up, and try to make the prosecution witnesses look silly. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s the way it’s always worked for me in the past. And in her case the prosecution have completely failed to produce a corpse.”

“She did away with him, quite obviously. He’s undoubtedly at the bottom of the sea. I can’t think how she got you to defend her. Fluttered her eyelashes at you, I suppose. You’re such a fool, Rumpole. Where women are concerned.”

In fact she was wrong. Poppy’s eyelashes were not of the fluttering variety. She was a big, fair-haired, blue-eyed, you might say “beefy” woman who would have been naturally cheerful if she hadn’t suffered the handicap of marriage to a smaller, crinkly-haired, devious businessman with protruding teeth who looked, in the photographs we had of him, like one of the smaller and less attractive rodents. The Twinehams had a six-year-old daughter named Charlotte, whom her father always called “Charlie,” fondly believing that this child, to whom he gave all the love he denied her mother, was some perfected, far more attractive, and considerably more honest edition of himself.

Occasionally flush with money, often teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, the Twinehams kept a boat in the marina, handy for their cottage in Devon. This “twenty-six footer,” as it came to be known among the landlubbers in the Old Bailey, was christened — inappropriately, if it was indeed the setting for a violent marital murder — Love’s Young Dream. In it Poppy and her husband, unaccompanied by Charlotte, who was staying with a grandmother in Ealing, set sail, one winter morning, to practise for a local regatta. When Loves Young Dream returned to port, Poppy was the sole surviving member of the crew. Charley’s body was never found and was presumed to be drifting away towards America, feeding fishes in unplumbable depths. Subsequent enquiries led to the arrest of Poppy on the charge of murder and landed me, ten days before Christmas, in the Ludgate Circus Palais de Justice, listening to that opera enthusiast and indifferent advocate, Claude Erskine-Brown, as he opened the prosecution against Hilda’s least favourite woman. He presented a case which had every possible evidence of guilt about it except for that one essential — a dead person.

“I am distinctly worried,” Claude confided in me as we sat in the Old Bailey canteen, drinking the black and watery brew which came out of the machine that dispensed indistinguishable tea, coffee, or soup. “I can’t find enough Humpy Camels.” Christmas was coming and that year it wasn’t turtles or action men, Teletubbies or Barbie dolls, but a lugubrious family of ruminant quadrupeds who came inappropriately dressed as pop stars, space travellers, or members of famous football teams. Tristram and Isolde, the operatically named offspring of Claude and his wife Phillida, the Portia of our chambers, were then of an age to appreciate such toys. Sadly, Claude had searched some ten shops in vain; in that hectic week before Christmas, Humpies seemed to be all sold out, and Phillida was far too busy to join in the hunt.

“What can I do, Rumpole?” There was a note of desperation in my opponent’s voice.

“Forget Humpy for the moment,” I advised that stricken fellow. “Seek relief in some less taxing diversion. Such as the Twineham murder case.”

I suppose, in the circumstances, it was not surprising that Claude’s opening speech should have been a little distracted, at times incoherent, but the strength of the case against Poppy emerged strongly. Love had clearly died between her and Charley on the morning they took the boat out. When she returned alone, fellow members of the yacht club remembered shouting matches between the couple in which an irate Poppy had often wished her husband dead and had told him that she’d kill him if he got into another financial or amorous scrape, because Charley’s ratlike appearance didn’t stop him pursuing, and sometimes even catching, other women. She discussed, with various “friends,” cases in which wives who had done in their husbands escaped because of extreme provocation. Further police searches revealed Poppy’s diaries, to which she had confided her frequent temptations to enter a happy state of premature widowhood. Charley had left a sample of blood during the checkup at the doctor’s, and his group was found to correspond to bloodstains on a heavy winch handle on board the good ship Love’s Young Dream, and on the life jacket Poppy was wearing at the time of her husband’s disappearance. It was the prosecution case that Poppy, taller and beefier than her husband, had stunned him with the winch handle and pushed him overboard. The boat wasn’t far out when he vanished, and if he had fallen in by accident he might well have been able to swim ashore.

Poppy’s account was rather different. It was true that she had quarrelled with her husband on the high seas, some dispute about an alien pair of knickers found in the washing machine after Poppy had been away for a weekend in Ealing, but she had gone down to the galley to make herself a cup of tea to calm her fury. When she returned to the deck, Charley had vanished into the ocean mists. After calling for a long time, she had steered Love’s Young Dream back to harbour. She could think of no explanation for the blood on the winch handle and her life jacket.

“At the time he vanished from the deck of Love’s Young Dream, Inspector, was not Charley Twineham in serious trouble with the police?”

“Do you mean at the time of the murder, Mr. Rumpole?” The deep and melancholy voice of Mr. Injustice Graves seemed to come from the bottom of the seas, or from an area inhabited by the dead.

“No, my Lord. I do not mean ‘after the murder.’ The prosecution still has to prove that any murder took place. May I remind your Lordship that this is a case of notable absence of body.”

“The jury are no doubt aware,” the old Gravestone intoned, “that there have been convictions for murder of a corpus delicti.”

“Oh, I’m sure, my Lord, that in the particular area of Bermondsey from which this jury are drawn, they talk of little but ‘corpus delicti.’ What my Lord means,” I translated for the benefit of twelve honest citizens, “is absence of body. Now, Inspector.” I returned to the officer in charge of the case. “Wasn’t Charley Twineham in trouble for taking orders by post for a huge number of nonexistent shoes, as well as trying to sell a number of empty houses he didn’t own?”

“We were pursuing our enquiries, my Lord.”

“Which might end up in charges of fraud, false pretences, and possibly forgery?”

“They might have, Mr. Rumpole, had Mr. Twineham still been alive,” the inspector told me.

“Isn’t that the point the jury have to decide?”

“I suppose it is,” the officer conceded, and I gave a look of modest triumph at the jury, a pleasant moment interrupted by the rumble of the judge’s graveyard voice.

“Assume that the deceased Twineham was thoroughly dishonest as you suggest, Mr. Rumpole. Does that justify anyone stunning him with a winch handle and pushing him into the sea?” My heart sank as the friendly faces of the Bermondsey twelve seemed to turn to stone at the judge’s interruption.

Poppy’s trial, which seemed to be heading remorselessly towards a verdict of “Guilty, my Lord,” was interrupted by the great religious festival. The lights went on in Regent Street, the shops were crammed with the sort of presents you only buy as a final act of desperation, there were streamers in the Old Bailey canteen and limp holly decorated the screw’s office down in the cells. The universal demand for Humpy Camels was such that, Claude told me in despair, he could find none available, even for ready money. Poppy was sent on a brief holiday to Holloway Prison until the second week in January.

It was there I visited her two days before Christmas, and did my best to cheer her up without offering false hopes. It was then she gave me some rather curious news.

“I heard from Mother,” she said. “Little Charlotte — well, all right, we always call her Charlie — has been getting anonymous letters.”

“What sort of letters?”

Poppy showed me one that her mother had sent on to her. The message was simple, even conventional — “Hope you get your heart’s desire for Christmas.” What was odd was that this document was constructed along the lines of poison pen letters, when the writer wants to hide his or her identity. The words had been cut out of newspapers and gummed onto a sheet of bright red cardboard.

“Did you get the envelope?”

“I talked to Mummy on the telephone. She said she threw it away. It’s not important, is it?”

“I’m not sure. It might be.”

And then Poppy, a large blond woman who had once been pretty and was now watery-eyed and pale from prison, said, in a matter-of-fact sort of way, “He’s won now, hasn’t he? He’s got me locked up for life.”

“I’m not altogether sure. The case isn’t over until the fat foreman of the jury comes back with a verdict. It all depends on one person.”

“You or me?”

“Neither of us. At the moment I’m thinking of a rather shadowy private dick. A person with a crumpled mac and a hat that saw better days. His name’s Fig Newton.”

Ferdinand Isaac George Newton, always known in the trade as “Fig” Newton, ace private eye and sleuth extraordinaire, had a rotten Christmas. He spent it keeping watch on Poppy’s mother’s house in Ealing, not in seasonal snow but in relentless rain which saturated his macintosh and penetrated his hat. Standing on the edge of the dark garden at tea time, he was rewarded. He became conscious of another shadowy figure in the garden, a shortish man with a long upper lip and protruding teeth, who approached the French windows, walking delicately, and stood peering into a bright room. Under a glittering tree he saw his daughter Charlotte, also known as Charlie, open her presents. He was so engrossed in this spectacle and delighted with his daughter’s joy as she discovered a whole family of Humpy Camels, complete with spare costumes, that he didn’t hear Fig Newton mutter into his mobile. He was unpleasantly surprised when, on leaving the garden ten minutes later, he saw a car with a blue light coming rapidly towards him, containing one of Fig’s friends from the local force. In no time at all he was assisting the police with their enquiries.

“Charley Twineham was up to his neck in trouble and about to be arrested for fraud. He wanted to disappear, but to do it in a way which would be a revenge on his wife, whom he had grown to hate as passionately as he loved his small daughter. He knew his doctor had a specimen of his blood, and must have cut his finger to bleed a little more on the winch handle and his wife’s life jacket. On that misty morning it wasn’t hard to swim ashore. He must have had his line of retreat well planned.”

“But there was so much evidence against that wretched woman.” Hilda was still not sure, in spite of acquittal, that Poppy hadn’t got away with murder. Later, finding we were short of cream for the reheat of the Christmas pudding, she said, “I know I ordered it. He never listens. Sometimes I could kill that milkman.”

“Careful. Saying she could kill people was one of the strongest pieces of evidence against Poppy Twineham,” I reminded her.

“Don’t be silly, Rumpole. That woman obviously domineered over her unfortunate husband. You know I’m not like that, am I?”

I thought it was wiser not to answer. Instead I wondered how a man who could commit fraud and do his best to get his wife falsely convicted of murder still found it impossible not to watch his child open his presents at Christmas.