The Best British Mysteries III

I

‘We must be constantly on guard. Night and day. Vigilance is essential. I’m sure you would agree, wouldn’t you, Luci?’

Soapy Sam Ballard, our always-nervous Head of Chambers, addressed the meeting as though the forces of evil were already beating on the doors of 4 Equity Court, and weapons of mass destruction had laid waste to the dining hall, condemning us to a long winter of cold meat and sandwiches. As usual, he longed for confirmation and turned to our recently appointed Head of Marketing and Administration, who was now responsible for the Chambers’ image.

‘Quite right, Chair.’ Luci’s north country voice sounded quietly amused, as though she didn’t take the alarming state of the world quite as seriously as Ballard did.

‘Thank you for your contribution, Luci.’ Soapy Sam, it seemed, thought she might have gone a little further, such as recommending that Securicor mount a twenty-four hour guard on the Head of Chambers. Then he added, in a voice of doom, ‘I have already asked our clerk to keep an extremely sharp eye on the sugar kept in the coffee cupboard.’

‘Why did you do that?’ I ventured to ask our leader. ‘Has Claude been shovelling it in by the tablespoonful?’

Claude Erskine-Brown was one of the few barristers I have ever met who combined a passionate affection for Wagner’s operas with a remarkably sweet tooth, continuously sucking wine gums in court and loading his coffee with heaped spoonfuls of sugar.

‘It’s not that, Rumpole.’ Soapy Sam was getting petulant. ‘It’s anthrax.’

‘What anthrax?’

‘The sugar might be. There are undoubtedly people out there who are out to get us, Rumpole. Haven’t you been listening at all to government warnings?’

‘I seem to remember them telling us one day that if we went down the tube we’d all be gassed, and the next day they said, “Sorry, we were only joking. Carry on going down the tube.’“

‘Rumpole! Do you take nothing seriously?’

‘Some things,’ I assured Soapy Sam. ‘But not the government.’

‘We are,’ here Ballard ignored me as an apparently hopeless case, and addressed the meeting, ‘especially vulnerable.’

‘Why’s that?’ I was curious enough to ask.

‘We represent the Law, Rumpole. The centre of a civilised society. Naturally we’d be high on their hit list.’

‘You mean the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, and number 4 Equity Court? I wonder, you may be right.’

‘I propose to appoint a small Chambers emergency committee consisting of myself, Claude Erskine-Brown, and Archie Prosser. Please report to one of us if you notice anything unusual or out of the ordinary. I assume you have nothing to report, Rumpole?’

‘Nothing much. I did notice a chap on the tube. A fellow of Middle Eastern appearance wearing a turban and a beard and muttering into a Dictaphone. He got out at South Kensington. I don’t suppose it’s important.’

Just for a moment I thought, indeed I hoped, our Head of Chambers looked at me as though he believed what I had said, but then justifiable doubt overcame him.

‘Very funny,’ Ballard told the meeting. ‘But then you can scarcely afford to be serious about the danger we’re all in, can you Rumpole? Considering you’re defending one of these maniacs.’

‘Rumpole would defend anyone,’ said Archie Prosser, the newest arrival in our chambers, who had an ill-deserved reputation as a wit.

‘If you mean anyone who’s put on trial and tells me they’re innocent, then the answer is yes.’

Nothing alarming happened on the tube on my way home that evening, except for the fact that, owing to a ‘work to rule’ by the drivers, the train gave up work at Victoria and I had to walk the rest of the way home to Froxbury Mansions in the Gloucester Road. The shops and their windows were full of glitter, artificial snow, and wax models perched on sleighs wearing party dresses. Taped carols came tinkling out of Tesco’s. The Chambers meeting had been the last of the term, and the Old Bailey had interrupted its business for the season of peace and goodwill.

There was very little of either in the case which I had been doing in front of the aptly named Mr Justice Graves. Mind you, I would have had a fairly rough ride before the most reasonable of judges. Even some compassionate old darlings like Mr Justice ‘Pussy’ Proudfoot might have regarded my client with something like horror and been tempted to dismiss my speech to the jury as a hopeless attempt to prevent a certain conviction and a probable sentence of not less than thirty years. The murder we had been considering, when we were interrupted by Christmas, had been cold-blooded and merciless, and there was clear evidence that it had been the work of a religious fanatic.

The victim, Honoria Glossop, Professor of Comparative Religions at William Morris University in east London, had been the author of a number of books, including her latest, and last, publication Sanctified Killing – A History of Religious Warfare. She had been severely critical of all acts of violence and aggression – including the Inquisition and the Crusades – committed in the name of God. She had also included a chapter on Islam which spoke scathingly of some Ayatollahs and the cruelties committed by Islamic fundamentalists.

It was this chapter which had caused my client, a young student of computer technology at William Morris named Hussein Khan, to issue a private fatwa. He composed, on one of the university computers, a letter to Professor Glossop announcing that her blasphemous references to the religious leaders of his country deserved nothing less than death – which would inevitably catch up with her. Then he left the letter in her pigeonhole.

It took very little time for the authorship of the letter to be discovered. Hussein Khan was sent down from William Morris and began spending time helping his family in the Star of Persia restaurant they ran in Golders Green. A week later, Professor Glossop, who had been working late in her office at the university, was found slumped across her desk, having been shot at close quarters by a bullet from a revolver of Czech origins, the sort of weapon which is readily and cheaply available in certain south London pubs. Beside her on the desk, now stained with her blood, was the letter containing the sentence of death.

Honoria and her husband Richard ‘Ricky’ Glossop lived in what the estate agents would describe as ‘a three-million-pound townhouse in Boltons’. The professor had, it seemed, inherited a great deal of money from a family business in the Midlands which allowed her to pursue her academic career, and Ricky to devote his life to country sports, without the need for gainful employment. He was clearly, from his photograph in the papers, an outstandingly handsome figure, perhaps five or six years younger than his wife. After her murder, he received, and everyone felt deserved, huge public sympathy. He and Honoria had met when they were both guests on a yacht touring the Greek Islands, and she had chosen him and his good looks in preference to all the available professors and academic authors she knew. In spite of their differences in age and interest, they seemed to have lived happily together for ten years until, so the prosecution said, death overtook Honoria Glossop in the person of my now universally hated client.

Such was the case I was engaged in at the Old Bailey in the runup to Christmas. There were no tidings of great joy to report. The cards were stacked dead against me, and at every stage it looked like I was losing, trumped by a judge who regarded defence barristers as flies on the tasty dish of justice.

Mr Justice Graves, known to me only as ‘The Old Gravestone’, had a deep, sepulchral voice and the general appearance of a man waking up with an upset stomach on a wet weekend. He had clearly come to the conclusion that the world was full of irredeemable sinners. The nearest thing to a smile I had seen on the face of The Old Gravestone was the look of grim delight he had displayed when, after a difficult case, the jury had come back with the guilty verdict he had clearly longed for.

So, as you can imagine, the atmosphere in Court One at the Old Bailey during the trial of the Queen against Hussein Khan was about as warm as the South Pole during a blizzard. The Queen may have adopted a fairly detached attitude towards my client, but the judge certainly hadn’t.

The prosecution was in the not altogether capable hands of Soapy Sam Ballard, which was why he had practically named me as a founding member of Al-Qaeda at our chambers meeting. His junior was the newcomer Archie Prosser.

These two might not have been the most deadly optimists I had ever had to face during my long career at the bar, but a first-year law student with a lowish IQ would, I thought, have had little difficulty in securing a conviction against the young student who had managed to become one of the most hated men in England.

As he was brought up from the cells and placed in the dock between two prison officers, the jury took one brief, appalled look at him and then turned their eyes on what seemed to them to be the less offensive figure of Soapy Sam as he prepared to open his devastating case.

So I sat at my end of counsel’s benches. The brief had been offered to several QCs (Queer Customers I always call them), but they had excused themselves as being too busy, or unwell, or going on holiday – any excuse to avoid being cast as leading counsel for the forces of evil. It was only, it seemed, Rumpole who stuck to the old-fashioned belief that the most outrageous sinner deserves to have his defence, if he had one, put fairly and squarely in front of a jury.

Mr Justice Gravestone didn’t share my views. When Ballard rose he was greeted with something almost like a smile from the bench, and his most obvious comments were underlined by a judicious nod followed by a careful note underlined in the judicial notebook. Every time I rose to cross-examine a prosecution witness, however, Graves sighed heavily and laid down his pencil as though nothing of any significance was likely to come.

This happened when I had a few pertinent questions to ask the pathologist, my old friend Professor Arthur Ackerman, forensic scientist and master of the morgues. After he had given his evidence about the cause of death (pretty obvious), I started off.

‘You say, Professor Ackerman, that the shot was fired at close quarters?’

‘Yes, Mr Rumpole. Indeed it was.’ Ackerman and I had been through so many bloodstained cases together that we chatted across the court like old friends.

‘You told us,’ I went on, ‘that the bullet entered the deceased’s neck – she was probably shot from behind – and that, among other things, the bullet severed an artery’

‘That is so.’

‘So, as a result, blood spurted over the desk. We know it was on the letter. Would you have expected the person, whoever it was, who shot her at close quarters to have had some blood on his clothing?’

‘I think that well may have happened.’

‘Would you say it probably happened?’

‘Probably. Yes.’

When I got this answer from the witness, I stood awhile in silence, looking at the motionless judge.

‘Is that all you have to ask, Mr Rumpole?’

‘No, my Lord. I’m waiting so your Lordship has time to make note of the evidence. I see your Lordship’s pencil is taking a rest!’

‘I’m sure the jury has heard your questions, Mr Rumpole. And the answers.’

‘I’m sure they have and you will no doubt remind them of that during your summing up. So I’m sure your Lordship will wish to make a note.’

Gravestone, with an ill grace, picked up his pencil and made the shortest possible note. Then I asked Ackerman my last question.

‘And I take it you know that the clothes my client wore that evening were minutely examined and no traces of any bloodstains were found?’

‘My Lord, how can this witness know what was on Khan’s clothing?’ Soapy Sam objected.

‘Quite right, Mr Ballard,’ the judge was quick to agree. ‘That was an outrageous question, Mr Rumpole. The jury will disregard it.’

It got no better. I rose, at the end of a long day in court, to cross-examine Superintendent Gregory, the perfectly decent officer in charge of the case.

‘My client, Mr Khan, made no secret of the fact that he had written this threatening letter, did he, Superintendent Gregory?’

‘He did not, my Lord,’ Gregory answered with obvious satisfaction.

‘In fact,’ said Mr Justice Graves, searching among his notes, ‘the witness Sadiq told us that your client boasted to him of the fact in the university canteen?’

There, at last, The Gravestone had overstepped the mark.

‘He didn’t say “boasted”.’

Soapy Sam Ballard QC, the alleged Head of our Chambers, got up with his notebook at the ready.

‘Sadiq said that Khan told him he had written the letter and, in answer to your Lordship, that “he seemed to feel no sort of guilt about it”.’

‘There you are Mr Rumpole.’ Graves also seemed to feel no sort of guilt. ‘Doesn’t that come to exactly the same thing?’

‘Certainly not, my Lord. The word “boasted” was never used.’

‘The jury may come to the conclusion that it amounted to boasting.’

‘They may indeed, my Lord. But that’s for them to decide, without directions from your Lordship.’

‘Mr Rumpole,’ here the judge adopted an expression of lofty pity, ‘I realise you have many difficulties in this case. But perhaps we may proceed without further argument. Have you any more questions for this officer?’

‘Just one, my Lord.’ I turned to the superintendent. ‘This letter was traced to one of the university word processors.’

‘That is so, yes.’

‘You would agree that my client took no steps at all to cover up the fact that he was the author of this outrageous threat.’

‘He seems to have been quite open about it, yes.’

‘That’s hardly consistent with the behaviour of someone about to commit a brutal murder is it?’

‘I suppose it was a little surprising, yes,’ Jack Gregory was fair enough to admit.

‘Very surprising, isn’t it? And of course by the time this murder took place, everyone knew he had written the letter. He’d been sent down for doing so.’

‘That’s right.’

The Gravestone intervened. ‘Did it not occur to you, Superintendent Gregory, that being sent down might have provided an additional motive for the murder?’ The judge clearly thought he was onto something, and was deeply gratified when the superintendent answered. ‘That might have been so, my Lord.’

‘That might have been so,’ Graves dictated to himself as he wrote the answer down. Then he thought of another point that might be of use to the hardly struggling prosecution.

‘Of course, if a man thinks he’s justified, for religious or moral reasons, in killing someone, he might have no inhibitions about boasting of the fact?’

I knew it. Soapy Sam must have known it, and the jury had better be told it. The judge had gone too far. I rose to my feet, as quickly as my weight and the passage of the years would allow, and uttered a sharp protest.

‘My Lord, the prosecution is in the able hands of Samuel Ballard QC. I’m sure he can manage to present the case against my client without your Lordship’s continued help and encouragement.’

This was followed by a terrible silence, the sort of stillness that precedes a storm.

‘Mr Rumpole.’ His Lordship’s words were as warm as hailstones. ‘That was a most outrageous remark.’

‘It was a point I felt I should make,’ I told him, ‘in fairness to my client.’

‘As I have said, I realise you have an extremely difficult case to argue, Mr Rumpole.’ Once more Graves was reminding the jury that I was on a certain loser. ‘But I cannot overlook your inappropriate and disrespectful behaviour towards the court. I shall have to consider whether your conduct should be reported to the proper authority.’

After these dire remarks and a few more unimportant questions to the superintendent, Graves turned to the jury and reminded them that this no doubt painful and shocking case would be resumed after the Christmas break. He said this in the solemn and sympathetic tones of someone announcing the death of a dear friend or relative, then he wished them a ‘Happy Christmas’.

The tube train for home was packed and I stood, swaying uneasily, sandwiched between an eighteen-stone man in a donkey jacket with a heavy cold, and an elderly woman with a pair of the sharpest elbows I have encountered on the Circle line.

No doubt all of the other passengers had hard, perhaps unrewarding lives, but they didn’t have to spend their days acting as a sort of buffer between a possibly fatal fanatic and a hostile judge who certainly wanted to end the career of the inconveniently argumentative Rumpole. The train, apparently as exhausted as I felt, ground to a halt between Charing Cross and the Embankment and as the lights went out I’d almost decided to give up the bar. Then the lights glowed again faintly and the train jerked on. I supposed I would have to go on as well, wouldn’t I, not being the sort of character who could retire to the country and plant strawberries.

When I reached the so-called ‘Mansion Flat’ in the Gloucester Road I was, I have to say, not a little surprised by the warmth of the reception I received. My formidable wife Hilda, known to me only as ‘She Who Must be Obeyed’ said, ‘Sit down, Rumpole. You look tired out.’ And she lit the gas fire. A few minutes later, she brought me a glass of my usual refreshment – the very ordinary claret available from Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street, a vintage known to me as ‘Chateau Thames Embankment’. I suspected that all this attention meant that she had some uncomfortable news to break and I was right.

‘This year,’ she told me, with the firmness of Old Gravestone pronouncing judgement, ‘I’m not going to do Christmas. It’s getting too much for me.’

Christmas was not usually much of a ‘do’ in the Rumpole household. There is the usual exchange of presents; I get a tie and Hilda receives the statutory bottle of lavender water, which seems to be for laying down rather than immediate use. She cooks the turkey and I open the Chateau Thames Embankment, and so our Saviour’s birth is celebrated.

‘I have booked us this year,’ Hilda announced, ‘into Cherry Picker’s Hall. You look in need of a rest, Rumpole.’

What was this place she spoke of? A retirement home? Sheltered accommodation? ‘I’m in the middle of an important murder case, I can’t pack up and go into a home.’

‘It’s not a home, Rumpole. It’s a country house hotel. In the Cotswolds. They’re doing a special offer – four nights with full board. A children’s party. Christmas lunch with crackers and a dance on Christmas Eve. It’ll be something to look forward to.’

‘I don’t really think so. We haven’t got any children and I don’t want to dance at Christmas. So shall we say no to the Cherry Picker’s?’

‘Whether you dance or not is entirely up to you, Rumpole. But you can’t say no because I’ve already booked it and paid the deposit. And I’ve collected your old dinner jacket from the cleaners.’

So I was unusually silent. Not for nothing is my wife entitled ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’.

I was unusually silent on the way to the Cotswolds too, but as we approached this country house hotel, I felt that perhaps, after all, She Who Must Be Obeyed had made a wise decision and that the considerable financial outlay on the ‘Budget Christmas Offer’ might turn out, in spite of all my apprehension, to be justified. We took a taxi from the station. As we made our way down deep into the countryside, the sun was shining and the trees were throwing a dark pattern against a clear sky. We passed green fields where cows were munching and a stream trickling over the rocks. A stray dog crossed the road in front of us and a single kite (at least Hilda said it was a kite) wheeled across the sky. We had, it seemed, entered a better, more peaceful world far from the problem of terrorists, the bloodstained letter containing a sentence of death, the impossible client, and the no less difficult judge I struggled with down at the Old Bailey. In spite of all my troubles, I felt a kind of contentment stealing over me. Happily, the contentment only deepened as our taxi scrunched the gravel by the entrance of Cherry Picker’s Hall. The old grey stones of the one-time manor house were gilded by the last of the winter sun. We were greeted warmly by a friendly manageress and our things were taken up to a comfortable room overlooking a wintry garden. Then, in no time at all, I was sitting by a blazing log fire in the residents’ lounge, eating anchovy paste sandwiches with the prospect of a dark and alcoholic fruitcake to follow. Even my appalling client, Hussein Khan, might, I thought, if brought into such an environment, forget his calling as a messenger of terror and relax after dinner.

‘It’s wonderful to be away from the Old Bailey. I just had the most terrible quarrel with a particularly unlearned judge,’ I told Hilda, who was reading a back number of Country Life.

‘You keep quarrelling with judges, don’t you? Why don’t you take up fishing, Rumpole? Lazy days by a trout stream might help you forget all those squalid cases you do.’ She had clearly got to the country sports section of the magazine.

‘This quarrel went a bit further than usual. He threatened to report me for professional misconduct. I didn’t like the way he kept telling the jury my client was guilty.’

‘Well isn’t he guilty, Rumpole?’ In all innocence, Hilda had asked the awkward question.

‘Well. Quite possibly. But that’s for the jury of twelve honest citizens to decide. Not Mr Justice Gravestone.’

‘Gravestone? Is that his name?’

‘No. His name’s Graves. I call him Gravestone.’

‘You would, wouldn’t you, Rumpole?’

‘He speaks like a voice from the tomb. It’s my personal belief that he urinates iced water!’

‘Really, Rumpole. Do try not to be vulgar. So what did you say to Mr Justice Graves? You might as well tell me the truth.’

She was right, of course. The only way of appeasing She Who Must was to plead guilty and throw oneself on the mercy of the court. ‘I told him to come down off the bench and join Soapy Sam Ballard on the prosecution team.’

‘Rumpole, that was terribly rude of you.’

‘Yes,’ I said, with considerable satisfaction. ‘It really was.’

‘So no wonder he’s cross with you.’

‘Very cross indeed.’ Once again I couldn’t keep the note of triumph out of my voice.

‘I should think he probably hates you, Rumpole.’

‘I should think he probably does.’

‘Well, you’re safe here anyway. You can forget all about your precious Mr Justice Gravestone and just enjoy Christmas.’

She was, as usual, right. I stretched my legs towards the fire and took a gulp of Earl Grey and a large bite of rich, dark cake.

And then I heard a voice call out, a voice from the tomb.

‘Rumpole!’ it said. ‘What an extraordinary coincidence. Are you here for Christmas? You and your good lady?’

I turned my head. I had not, alas, been mistaken. There he was, in person – Mr Justice Gravestone. He was wearing a tweed suit and some type of regimental or old school tie. His usually lugubrious features wore the sort of smile only previously stimulated by a long succession of guilty verdicts. And the next thing he said came as such a surprise that I almost choked on my slice of fruitcake.

‘I say,’ he said, and I promise you these were Gravestone’s exact words, ‘this is fun, isn’t it?’

II

‘I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be married to Rumpole.’

It was a lie, of course. I dare swear that The Honourable Gravestone never spent one minute of his time wondering what it would be like to be Mrs Rumpole. But there he was, having pulled up a chair, tucking in to our anchovy paste sandwiches and smiling at She Who Must Be Obeyed (my wife Hilda) with as much joy as if she had just returned twenty guilty verdicts – one of them being in the case of The Judge versus Rumpole.

‘He can be a bit difficult at times, of course,’ Hilda weighed in for the prosecution.

‘A little difficult! That’s putting it mildly, Mrs Rumpole. You can’t imagine the trouble we have with him in court.’

To my considerable irritation, my wife and the judge were smiling together as though they were discussing, with tolerant amusement, the irrational behaviour of a difficult child.

‘Of course we mustn’t discuss the case before me at the moment,’ Graves said.

‘That ghastly terrorist.’ Hilda had already reached a verdict.

‘Exactly! We won’t say a word about him.’

‘Just as well,’ Hilda agreed. ‘We get far too much discussion of Rumpole’s cases.’

‘Really? Poor Mrs Rumpole.’ The judge gave her a look of what I found to be quite sickening sympathy. ‘Brings his work home with him, does he?’

‘Oh, absolutely! He’ll do anything in the world for some ghastly murder or other, but can I get him to help me redecorate the bathroom?’

‘You redecorate bathrooms?’ The judge looked at Hilda with admiration as though she had just admitted to sailing round the world in a hot air balloon. Then he turned to me.

‘You’re a lucky man, Rumpole!’

‘He won’t tell you that.’ Hilda was clearly enjoying our Christmas break even more than she had expected. ‘By the way I hope he wasn’t too rude to you in court.’

‘I thought we weren’t meant to discuss the case.’ I tried to make an objection, which was entirely disregarded by my wife and the unlearned judge.

‘Oh, that wasn’t only Rumpole being rude. It was Rumpole trying to impress his client by showing him how fearlessly he can stand up to judges. We’re quite used to that.’

‘He says,’ Hilda still seemed to find the situation amusing, ‘that you threatened to report him for professional misconduct. You really ought to be more careful, shouldn’t you Rumpole?’

‘Oh, I said that,’ Graves had the audacity to admit, ‘just to give your husband a bit of a shock. He did go a little green, I thought, when I made the suggestion.’

‘I did not go green!’ By now I was losing patience with the judge Hilda was treating like a long-lost friend. ‘I made a perfectly reasonable protest against a flagrant act of premature adjudication! You had obviously decided that my client is guilty and you were going to let the jury know it.’

‘But isn’t he guilty, Rumpole? Isn’t that obvious?’

‘Of course he’s not guilty. He’s completely innocent. And will remain so until the jury come back into court and convict him. And that is to be their decision. And what the judge wants will have absolutely nothing to do with it!’

I may have gone too far, but I felt strongly on the subject. Judge Graves, however, seemed completely impervious to my attack. He stood, still smiling, warming his tweed-covered backside at the fire and repeated, ‘We really mustn’t discuss the case we’re involved in at the moment. Let’s remember, it is Christmas.’

‘Yes, Rumpole. It is Christmas.’ Hilda had cast herself, it seemed as Little Lady Echo to his Lordship.

‘That’s settled then. Look, why don’t I book a table for three at dinner?’ The judge was still smiling. ‘Wouldn’t that be tremendous fun?’

‘What a perfectly charming man Judge Graves is.’

These were words I never expected to hear spoken, but they contained the considered verdict of She Who Must be Obeyed before we settled down for the first night of our Christmas holiday. The food at dinner had been simple but good. (The entrecôte steak had not been arranged in a little tower swamped by tomato coulis and there had been a complete absence of roquette and all the idiocy of smart restaurants.) The Gravestone was clearly on the most friendly of terms with ‘Lorraine’, the manageress, and he and Hilda enjoyed a lengthy conversation on the subject of fishing, which sport Graves practised and on which Hilda was expert after her study of the back number of Country Life in the residents’ lounge.

Now and again I was asked why I didn’t go out on a day’s fishing with Hilda’s newfound friend the judge, a question I found as easy to answer as ‘Why don’t you take part in the London Marathon wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and a wig?’ For a greater part of the dinner I had sat, unusually silent, listening to the ceaseless chatter of the newfound friends, feeling as superfluous as a maiden aunt at a lovers’ meeting. Soon after telling me how charming she had found The Gravestone, Hilda had sank into a deep and contented sleep. As the moonlight streamed in at the window and I heard the faraway hooting of an owl, I began to worry about the case we hadn’t discussed at dinner.

I couldn’t forget my first meeting in Brixton Prison with my client, Hussein Khan. Although undoubtedly the author of the fatal letter, he didn’t seem, when I met him in the company of my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard, to be the sort who would strike terror into the heart of anyone. He was short and unsmiling with soft brown eyes, a quiet monotonous voice, and unusually small hands. He wasn’t only uncomplaining, he seemed to find it the most natural thing in the world that he should find himself locked up and facing the most serious of all charges. It was, he told us early in the interview, the will of Allah, and if Allah willed, who was he, a 22-year-old undergraduate in computer studies, to ask questions? I was, throughout the case, amazed at the combination, in my inexplicable client, of the most complicated knowledge of modern technology and the most primitive and merciless religious beliefs.

‘I wrote the letter. Of course I did. It was not my decision that she should die. It was the will of God.’

‘The will of God that a harmless woman should be shot for writing something critical in a book?’

‘Die for blasphemy, yes.’

‘And they say you were her executioner, that you carried out the sentence.’

‘I didn’t do that.’ He was looking at me patiently, as though I still had much to learn about the faith of Hussein Khan. ‘I knew that death would come to her in time. It came sooner than I had expected.’

So, was I defending a man who had issued a death threat which had then been obediently carried out by some person or persons unknown in the peaceful precincts of a south London university? It seemed an unlikely story, and I was not looking forward to the murder trial which had started at the Old Bailey during the run-up to Christmas.

At the heart of the case there was, I thought, a mystery. The letter, I knew, was clear evidence of Hussein’s guilt, and yet there was no forensic evidence – no bloodstains on his clothing, no traces of his having fired a pistol with a silencer (there must have been a silencer, because no one in the building had heard a shot). This was evidence in Hussein’s favour, but I had to remember that he had been in the university building when the murder had taken place, although he’d already been sent down for writing the letter.

As the owl hooted, Hilda breathed deeply. Sleep eluded me. I went through Hussein Khan’s story again. He had gotten a phone call, he said, when he was at his parents’ restaurant. (He had answered the phone himself, so there was no one to confirm the call.) It had been, it seemed, from a girl who said she was the senior tutor’s secretary and that the tutor wanted to meet him in the university library at ten o’clock that evening to discuss his future.

He had got to the William Morris building at nine forty-five and had told Mr Luttrell, the man at the main reception area, that he was there to meet the senior tutor at the library. He said that when he had arrived at the library, the tutor wasn’t there and that he had waited for over an hour and then went home, never going near Honoria Glossop’s office.

Of course the senior tutor and his secretary denied that either had made such a telephone call. The implication was that Hussein was lying through his teeth and that he had gone to the university because he had known that Professor Glossop worked in her office until late at night and he had intended to kill her.

At last I fell into a restless sleep. In my dreams I saw myself being prosecuted by Soapy Sam Ballard who was wearing a long beard and arguing for my conviction under Sharia law.

I woke early to the first faint flush of daylight as a distant cock crowed. I got up, tiptoed across the room, and extracted from the bottom of my case the papers in R v Khan. I was looking for the answer to a problem as yet undefined, going through the prosecution statement again, and finding nothing very much.

I reminded myself that Mr Luttrell, at his reception desk, had seen Honoria and her husband arrive together and go to her office. Ricky Glossop had left not more than fifteen minutes later, and later still he had telephoned and couldn’t get an answer from his wife. He had asked Luttrell to go to Honoria’s office because she wasn’t answering her phone. The receptionist had gone to her office and found her lying across her desk, her hand close to the bloodstained letter.

Next I read the statement from Honoria’s secretary, Sue Blackmore, describing how she had found the letter in Honoria’s university pigeonhole and taken it to Honoria at her home. On Honoria’s reaction at receiving it, Ms Blackmore commented, ‘She didn’t take the note all that seriously and wouldn’t even tell the police.’ Ricky Glossop had finally rung the anti-terrorist department in Scotland Yard and showed them the letter.

None of this was new. There was only one piece of evidence which I might have overlooked.

In the senior tutor’s statement he said he had spoken to Honoria on the morning of the day she had died. She had told him that she couldn’t be at a seminar that afternoon because she had an urgent appointment with Tony Hawkin. Hawkin, as the senior tutor knew, was a solicitor who acted for the university, and had also acted for Honoria Glossop in a private capacity. The senior tutor had no idea why she had wanted to see her solicitor. He never saw his colleague alive again.

I was giving that last document some thought when Hilda stirred, opened an eye, and instructed me to ring for breakfast.

You’ll have to look after yourself today, Rumpole,’ she told me. ‘Gerald’s going to take me fishing for grayling.’

‘Gerald?’ Was there some new man in Hilda’s life who had turned up in the Cotswolds?

You know. The charming judge you introduced me to last night.’

‘You can’t mean Gravestone?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I mean Gerald Graves.’

‘You’re going fishing with him?’

‘He’s very kindly going to take me to a bit of river he shares with a friend.’

‘How delightful.’ I adopted the ironic tone. ‘If you catch anything, bring it back for supper.’

‘Oh, I’m not going to do any fishing. I’m simply going to watch Gerald from the bank. He’s going to show me how he ties his flies.’

‘How absolutely fascinating.’

She didn’t seem to think she’d said anything at all amusing and she began to lever herself briskly out of bed.

‘Do ring up about that breakfast, Rumpole!’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get ready for Gerald.’

He may be Gerald to you, I thought, but he will always be the Old Gravestone to me.

After Hilda had gone to meet her newfound friend, I finished the bacon and eggs with sausage and fried slice – which I had ordered as an organic, low calorie breakfast – and put a telephone call through to my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard. I found him at his home talking over a background of shrill and excited children eager for the next morning and the well-filled stockings.

‘Mr Rumpole!’ The man sounded shocked by my call. ‘Don’t you ever take a day off? It’s Christmas Eve!’

‘I know it’s Christmas Eve. I know that perfectly well,’ I told him. ‘And my wife has gone fishing with our sepulchral judge, whom she calls “Gerald”. Meanwhile, have you got any close friends or associates working at Hawkin’s, the solicitor?’

‘Barry Tuck used to be our legal executive – moved there about three years ago.’

‘A cooperative sort of character is he, Tuck?’

‘We got on very well. Yes.’

‘Then get him to find out why Honoria Glossop went to see Tony Hawkin the afternoon before she was shot. It must have been something fairly urgent. She missed a seminar in order to go.’

‘Is it important?’

‘Probably not, but it just might be something we ought to know.’

‘I hope you’re enjoying your Christmas break, Mr Rumpole.’

‘Quite enjoying it. I’d like it better without a certain member of the judiciary. Oh, and I’ve got a hard time ahead.’

‘Working?’

‘No,’ I told my patient solicitor gloomily. ‘Dancing,’

‘Quick, quick, slow, Rumpole. That’s better. Now chassé. Don’t you remember, Rumpole? This is where you chassé.’

The truth was that I remembered little about it. It had been so long ago. How many years could it have been since Hilda and I had trod across a dance floor? Yet here I was in a dinner jacket, which was now uncomfortably tight round the waist, doing my best to walk round this small area of polished parquet in time to the music with one arm round Hilda’s satin-covered waist and my other hand gripping one of hers. Although for much of the time she was walking backwards, she was undoubtedly the one in command of the enterprise. I heard a voice singing, seemingly from far off, above the music of the five-piece band laid on for the hotel’s dinner dance. It was a strange sound and one that I hadn’t heard for what seemed many years – She Who Must be Obeyed was singing. I looked towards my table, rather as someone lost at sea might look towards a distant shore, and I saw Mr Justice Gravestone smiling at us with approval.

‘Well done, Hilda! And you came through that quite creditably I thought, Rumpole. I mean, at least you managed to remain upright, although there were a few dodgy moments coming round that far corner.’

‘That was when I told him chassé. Rumpole couldn’t quite manage it.’

As they were both enjoying a laugh I realised that, during a long day by the river which had, it seemed, produced nothing more than two fish so small that they had had to be returned to their natural environment, Mrs Rumpole had become ‘Hilda’ to the judge, who had become ‘Gerald’.

‘You know, when you retire, Rumpole,’ the judge was sounding sympathetic in the most irritating kind of way, ‘you could take dancing lessons.’

‘There’s so much Rumpole could do if he retired. I keep telling him,’ was Hilda’s contribution. ‘He could have wonderful days like we had, Gerald. Outdoors, close to nature and fishing.’

‘Catching two small grayling you had to put back in the water?’ I was bold enough to ask. ‘It would’ve been easier to pay a quick visit to the fishmongers.’

‘Catching fish is not the point of fishing,’ Hilda told me. Before I could ask her what the point of it was, the judge came up with a suggestion.

‘When you retire, I could teach you fishing, Rumpole. We could have a few days out together.’

‘Now then. Isn’t that kind of Gerald, Rumpole?’ Hilda beamed and I had to mutter, ‘Very kind,’ although the judge’s offer had made me more determined than ever to die with my wig on.

It was at this point that Lorraine the manageress came to the judge with a message. He read it quickly and then said, ‘Poor old Leslie Mulliner. You know him, don’t you, Rumpole? He sits in the chancery division.’

I had to confess I didn’t know anyone who sat in the chancery division.

‘He was going to join us here tomorrow but his wife’s not well.’

‘He said on the phone that you’d do the job for him tomorrow.’ Lorraine seemed anxious.

‘Yes, of course,’ Graves hurried to reassure her. ‘I’ll stand in for him.’

Before I could get any further explanation of the ‘job’, the music had struck up a more contemporary note. Foxtrots were out, and with a cry of ‘Come along Hilda,’ Graves was strutting the dance floor, making curious rhythmic movements with his hands. And Hilda, walking free and unfastened from her partner, was also strutting and waving her arms, smiling with pleasure. It wasn’t, I’m sure, the most up-to-date form of dancing, but it was, I suppose, a gesture from two sedate citizens who were doing their best to become, for a wine-filled moment on Christmas Eve, a couple of teenagers.

Christmas Day at Cherry Picker’s Hall was uneventful. The judge suggested church, and I stood while he and Hilda bellowed out ‘Come, all ye Faithful’. Then we sat among the faithful under the Norman arches, beside the plaques and monuments to so many vanished rectors and country squires, looking out upon the holly round the pulpit and the flowers on the altar. I tried to understand, not for the first time, how a religious belief could become so perverted as to lead to death threats, terror, and a harmless professor shot through the head.

We had lunch in a pub and then the judge announced he had work to do and left us.

After a long and satisfactory sleep, Hilda and I woke around teatime and went to the residents’ lounge. Long before we got to the door, we could hear the excited cries of children, and when we went in we saw them crowded round the Christmas tree. And there, stooping among the presents, was the expected figure in a red dressing gown (trimmed with white fur), Wellington boots, a white beard, and a long red hat. As he picked up a present and turned towards us, I felt that fate had played the greatest practical joke it could have thought up to enliven the festive season.

Standing in for his friend Mulliner from the chancery division, the sepulchral, unforgiving, prosecution-minded Mr Justice Gravestone, my old enemy, had become Father Christmas.

On Boxing Day, I rang a persistent, dogged, ever useful private eye detective who, sickened by divorce, now specialised in the cleaner world of crime – Ferdinand Ian Gilmour Newton, known in legal circles as ‘Fig Newton’. I told him that, as was the truth, my wife Hilda was planning a long country walk and lunch in a distant village with a judge whom I had spent a lifetime trying to avoid. And I asked him, if he had no previous engagements, if he’d like to sample the table d’hôte at Cherry Picker’s Hall.

Fig Newton is a lugubrious character of indeterminate age, usually dressed in an old mackintosh and an even older hat, with a drip at the end of his nose caused by a seemingly perpetual cold -most likely caught while keeping observation in all weathers. But today he had shed his outer garments, his nose was dry, and he was tucking in to the lamb cutlets with something approaching enthusiasm. ‘Bit of a step up from your usual pub lunch, this, isn’t it Mr Rumpole?’

‘It certainly is, Fig. We’re splashing out this Christmas. Now this case I’m doing down the Bailey…’

‘The terrorist?’

‘Yes, the terrorist.’

‘You’re on to a loser with that one, Mr Rumpole.’ Fig was gloomily relishing the fact.

‘Most probably. All the same, there are a few stones I don’t want to leave unturned.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Find out what you can about the Glossops.’

‘The dead woman’s family?’

‘That’s right. See what’s known about their lives, hobbies, interests. That sort of thing, I need to get more of a picture of their lives together. Oh, and see if the senior tutor knows more about the Glossops. Pick up any gossip going round the university. I’ll let you know if Bonny Bernard has found out why Honoria had a date with her solicitor.’

‘So when do you want all this done by, Mr Rumpole?’ Fig picked up a cutlet bone and chewed gloomily. ‘Tomorrow morning, I suppose?’

‘Oh, sooner than that if possible,’ I told him.

It was not that I felt that the appalling Hussein Khan had a defence – in fact he might well turn out to have no defence at all. But something at the children’s Christmas party had suggested a possibility to my mind.

That something was the sight of Mr Justice Graves standing in for someone else.

III

Christmas was over, and I wondered if the season of goodwill was over with it. The Christmas cards had left the mantelpiece, the holly and the mistletoe had been tidied away, we had exchanged green fields for Gloucester Road, and Cherry Picker’s Hall was nothing but a memory. The judge was back on the bench to steer the case of R v Khan towards its inevitable guilty verdict.

The Christmas decorations were not all that had gone. Gerald the cheerful dinner guest, Gerald the energetic dancing partner of She Who Must be Obeyed, Gerald the fisherman, and, in particular, Gerald as Santa Claus had all gone as well, leaving behind only the old thin-lipped, unsmiling Mr Justice Gravestone with the voice of doom, determined to make a difficult case harder than ever.

All the same there was something of a spring in the Rumpole step. This was not only the result of the Christmas break but also due to a suspicion that the case R v Khan might not be quite as horrifyingly simple as it had appeared at first.

As I crossed the hall on my way to Court Number One, I saw Ricky Glossop – the dashingly handsome husband of the murdered professor – with a pretty blonde girl whom I took to be Sue Blackmore, Honoria’s secretary, who was due to give evidence about her employer’s reception of the fatal letter. She seemed, so far as I could tell from a passing examination, to be a girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She lit a cigarette with trembling fingers, then almost immediately stamped it out. She kept looking, with a kind of description, towards the door of the court, and then turning with a sob to Ricky Glossop and choking out what I took to be some sort of complaint. He had laid a consoling hand on hers and was talking in the sort of low, exaggeratedly calm tone that a dentist uses when he says, ‘This isn’t going to hurt’.

The medical and police evidence had been disposed of before Christmas and now, in the rather strange order adopted by Soapy Sam Ballard for the prosecution, the only witnesses left were Arthur Luttrell, who manned the reception desk, Ricky Glossop, and the nervous secretary.

Luttrell, the receptionist, was a smart, precise, self-important man with a sharp nose and a sandy moustache who clearly regarded his position as being at the centre of the university organisation. He remembered Hussein Khan coming at nine thirty that evening, saying he had an appointment with the senior tutor, and going up to the library. At quarter to ten the Glossops had arrived. Ricky had gone with his wife to her office, but had left about fifteen minutes later. ‘He stopped to speak to me on the way,’ Luttrell the receptionist told Soapy Sam, ‘which is why I remembered it well.’

After that, the evening at William Morris University followed its horrible course. Around eleven o’clock, Hussein Khan left, complaining that he had wasted well over an hour, no senior tutor had come to him, and that he was going back to his parents’ restaurant in Golders Green. After that Ricky telephoned the reception desk saying that he couldn’t get any reply from his wife’s office and would Mr Luttrell please go and make sure she was all right. As we all know, Mr Luttrell went to the office, knocked, opened the door, and was met by the ghastly spectacle which was to bring us all together in Court Number One at the Old Bailey.

‘Mr Rumpole.’ The judge’s tone in calling my name was as aloofly disapproving as though Christmas had never happened. ‘All this evidence is agreed, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you’ll find it necessary to trouble Mr Luttrell with any questions.’

‘Just one or two, my Lord.’

‘Oh very well.’ The judge sounded displeased. ‘Just remember, we’re under a public duty not to waste time.’

‘I hope your Lordship isn’t suggesting that an attempt to get to the truth is a waste of time.’ And before the old Gravestone could launch a counterattack, I asked Mr Luttrell the first question.

‘You say Mr Glossop spoke to you on the way out. Can you remember what he said?’

‘I remember perfectly.’ The receptionist looked personally insulted as though I doubted his word. ‘He asked me if Hussein Khan was in the building.’

‘He asked you that?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘I told him “yes”. I said Khan was in the library where he had an appointment with the senior tutor.’

I allowed a pause for this curious piece of evidence to sink into the minds of the jury. Graves, of course, filled in the gap by asking if that was my only question.

‘Just one more, my Lord.’

Here the judge sighed heavily, but I ignored that.

‘Are you telling this jury, Mr Luttrell, that Glossop discovered that the man who had threatened his wife with death was in the building, then left without speaking to her again?’

I looked at the jury as I asked this and saw, for the first time in the trial, a few faces looking puzzled.

Mr Luttrell, however, sounded unfazed.

‘I’ve told you what he said. I can’t tell you anything more.’

‘He can’t tell us any more,’ the judge repeated. ‘So that would seem to be the end of the matter, wouldn’t it, Mr Rumpole?’

‘Not quite the end,’ I told him. ‘I don’t think it’s quite the end of the matter yet.’

This remark did nothing to improve my relations with his Lordship, who gave me a look from which all traces of the Christmas spirit had been drained.

The jury may have had a moment of doubt during the receptionist’s evidence, but when Ricky Glossop was put in the witness box, their sympathy and concern for the good-looking, appealingly modest, and stricken husband was obvious. Graves supported him with enthusiasm.

‘This is clearly going to be a terrible ordeal for you, Mr Glossop,’ the judge said, looking at the witness with serious concern. ‘Wouldn’t you like to sit down?’

‘No, thank you, my Lord. I prefer to stand,’ Ricky said bravely. The judge gave him the sort of look a commanding officer might give to a young subaltern who’d volunteered to attack the enemy position single-handed. ‘Just let me know,’ Graves insisted, ‘if you feel exhausted or overcome by any part of your evidence, and you shall sit down immediately.’

‘Thank you very much, my Lord. That is very kind of your Lordship.’

So with formalities of mutual admiration over, Ricky Glossop began to tell his story.

He had met Honoria some ten years before when they were both cruising round the Greek Islands. ‘She knew all the classical legends and the history of every place. I thought she’d never be bothered with an undereducated slob like me.’ Here he smiled modestly, and the judge smiled back as a sign of disagreement. ‘But luckily she put up with me. And, of course, I fell in love with her.’

‘Of course?’ Soapy Sam seemed to feel that this sentence called for some further explanation.

‘She was extremely beautiful.’

‘And she found you attractive?’

‘She seemed to. God knows why.’ This answer earned him smiles for his modesty.

‘So you were married for ten years,’ Ballard said. ‘And you had no children.’

‘No. Honoria couldn’t have children. It was a great sadness to both of us.’

‘And how would you describe your marriage up to the time your wife got this terrible letter?’ Ballard was holding the letter out, at a distance, as though the paper itself might carry a fatal infection.

‘We were very happy.’

‘When she got the letter, how did she react to it?’

‘She was very brave, my Lord,’ Ricky told the judge. ‘She said it had obviously been written by some nutcase and that she intended to ignore it.’

‘She was extremely brave.’ The judge spoke the words with admiration as he wrote them down.

So Ricky Glossop told his story. And when I, the representative, so it appeared, of his wife’s murderer, rose to cross-examine, I felt a chill wind blowing through Number One Court.

‘Mr Glossop, you said your marriage to your wife Honoria was a happy one?’

‘As far as I was concerned it was very happy.’ Here he smiled at the jury and some of them nodded back approvingly.

‘Did you know that on the afternoon before she was murdered, your wife had consulted a solicitor, Mr Anthony Hawkin of Henshaw and Hawkin?’

‘I didn’t know that, no.’

‘Can you guess why?’

‘I’m afraid not. My wife had considerable financial interests under her father’s will. It might have been about that.’

‘You mean it might have been about the money?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you know that Anthony Hawkin is well known as an expert on divorce and family law?’

‘I didn’t know that either.’

‘And you didn’t know that your wife was considering proceedings for divorce?’

‘I certainly didn’t.’

I looked at the jury. They were now, I thought, at least interested. I remembered the frightened blonde girl I had seen outside the court and the hand he had put on her as he had tried to comfort her.

‘Was there any trouble between your wife and yourself because of her secretary, Sue Blackmore?’

‘So far as I know, none whatever.’

‘Mr Rumpole, I’m wondering, and I expect the jury may be wondering as well, what on earth these questions have to do with your client’s trial for murder.’

‘Then wonder on.’ I might have quoted Shakespeare to Graves: ‘Till truth makes all things plain.’ But I did not do that. I merely said, ‘I’m putting these questions to test the credibility of this witness, my Lord.’

‘And why, Mr Rumpole, are you attacking his credibility? Which part of this gentleman’s evidence are you disputing?’

‘If I may be allowed to cross-examine in the usual way, I hope it may become clear,’ I said, and then I’m afraid I also said, ‘even to your Lordship.’

At this, Gravestone gave me the look that meant ‘you just wait until we come to the summing up, and I’ll tell the jury what I think of your attack on this charming husband’, but for the moment he remained as silent as a block of ice, so I soldiered on.

‘Mr Glossop. Your wife’s secretary delivered this threatening letter to her.’

‘Yes. Honoria was working at home and Sue brought it over from her pigeonhole at the university.’

‘You’ve told us that she was very brave, of course. That she had said it was probably from some nutcase and that she intended to ignore it. But you insisted on taking the letter to the police.’

‘An extremely wise decision, if I may say so,’ Graves took it upon himself to note.

‘And I think you gave the story to the Press Association so that this death threat received wide publicity.’

‘I thought Honoria would be safer if it was all out in the open. People would be on their guard.’

‘Another wise decision, the members of the jury might think.’ Graves was making sure the jury thought it.

‘And when the letter was traced to my client, everyone knew that it was Hussein Khan who was the author of the letter?’

‘He was dismissed from the university, so I suppose a lot of people knew, yes.’

‘So if anything were to have happened to your wife after that, if she were to have been attacked or killed, Hussein Khan would have been the most likely suspect?’

‘I think that has been obvious throughout this trial.’ Graves couldn’t resist it.

‘My Lord, I’d really much rather get the answers to my questions from the witness than receive them from your Lordship.’ I went on quickly before the judge could get in his two pennies’ worth. ‘You took your wife to the university on that fatal night?’

‘I often did. If I was going somewhere and she had work to do in her office, I’d drop her off and then collect her later on my way home.’

‘But you didn’t just drop her off, did you? You went inside the building with her. You took her up to her office?’

‘Yes. We’d been talking about something in the car and we went on discussing it as I went up to her office with her.’

‘He escorted her, Mr Rumpole,’ the sepulchral voice boomed from the bench. ‘A very gentlemanly thing to do.’

‘Thank you, my Lord.’ Ricky’s smile was still full of charm. ‘And what were you discussing?’ I asked him. ‘Was it divorce?’

‘It certainly wasn’t divorce. I can’t remember what it was exactly.’

‘Then perhaps you can remember this. How long did you stay in the office with your wife?’

‘Perhaps five, maybe ten minutes. I can’t remember exactly.’

‘And when you left, was she still alive?’

There was a small silence.

The witness looked at me and seemed to catch his breath. Then he gave us the invariably charming smile.

‘Of course she was.’

‘You spoke to Mr Luttrell at the reception area on your way out?’

‘I did, yes.’

‘He says you asked him if Hussein Khan was in the building?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I suppose I’d heard from someone that he might have been there.’

‘And what did Mr Luttrell tell you?’

‘He said that Khan was in the building, yes.’

‘You knew that Hussein Khan’s presence in that building was a potential danger to your wife.’

‘I suppose I knew. Yes.’

‘I suppose you did. And yet you left and drove off in your car without warning her?’

There was a longer silence then and Ricky’s smile seemed to droop.

‘I didn’t go back to the office. No,’ was what the witness said.

‘Why not, Mr Glossop? Why not warn her? Why didn’t you see that Khan left before you went off?’

And then Ricky Glossop said something which changed the atmosphere in court in a moment, even silencing the judge.

‘I suppose I was in a hurry. I was on my way to a party.’

After a suitable pause I asked, ‘There was no lock on your wife’s office door, was there?’

‘There might have been. But she never locked it.’

‘So you left her unprotected, with the man who had threatened her life still in the building, because you were on your way to a party?’

The smile came again, but it had no effect now on the jury

‘I think I heard he was with the senior tutor in the library. I suppose I thought that was safe.’

‘Mr Glossop, were you not worried by the possibility that the senior tutor might leave first, leaving the man who threatened your wife still in the building with her?’

‘I suppose I didn’t think of that,’ was all he could say.

I let the answer sink in and then turned to more dangerous and uncharted territory.

‘I believe you’re interested in various country sports.’

‘That’s right, my Lord.’ The witness, seeming to feel the ground was now safer, smiled at the judge.

‘You used to go shooting, I believe.’

‘Well, I go shooting, Mr Rumpole.’ A ghastly twitch of the lips was, from the bench, Graves’ concession towards a smile. ‘And I hope you’re not accusing me of complicity in any sort of a crime?’

I let the jury have their sycophantic laugh, then went on to ask, ‘Did you ever belong to a pistol shooting club, Mr Glossop?’ Fig Newton, the private eye, had done his work well.

‘When such clubs were legal, yes.’

‘And do you still own a handgun?’

‘Certainly not.’ The witness seemed enraged. ‘I wouldn’t do anything that broke the law.’

I turned to look at the jury with my eyebrows raised, but for the moment the witness was saved by the bell as the judge announced that he could see by the clock that it was time we broke for lunch.

Before we parted, however, Soapy Sam got up to tell us that his next witness would be Mrs Glossop’s secretary, Sue Blackmore, who would merely give evidence about the receipt of the letter and the deceased’s reaction to it. Miss Blackmore was, apparently, likely to be a very nervous witness, and perhaps his learned friend Mr Rumpole would agree to her evidence being read.

Mr Rumpole did not agree. Mr Rumpole wanted Miss Sue Blackmore to be present in the flesh and he was ready to cross-examine her at length. And so we parted, expecting the trial of Hussein Khan for murder to start again at two o’clock.

But Khan’s trial for murder didn’t start again at two o’clock or at any other time. I was toying with a plate of steak and kidney pie and a pint of Guinness in the pub opposite the Old Bailey when I saw the furtive figure of Sam Ballard oozing through the crowd. He came to me obviously heavy with news.

‘Rumpole! You don’t drink at lunchtime, do you?’

‘Yes. But not too much at. Can I buy you a pint of stout?’

‘Certainly not, Rumpole. Mineral water, if you have to. And could we move to that little table in the corner? This is news for your ears alone.’

After I had transported my lunch to a more secluded spot and supplied our Head of Chambers with mineral water, he brought me up to date on that lunch hour’s developments.

‘It’s Sue the secretary, Rumpole. When we told her that she’d have to go into the witness box, she panicked and asked to see Superintendent Gregory. By this time, she was in tears and, he told me, almost incomprehensible. However, Gregory managed to calm her down and she said she knew you’d get it out of her in the witness box, so she might as well confess that she was the one who had made the telephone call.’

‘Which telephone call was that?’ Soapy Sam was demonstrating his usual talent for making a simple statement of fact utterly confusing.

‘The telephone call to your client. Telling him to go and meet the senior tutor.’

‘You mean…?’ The mists that had hung over the case of Khan the terrorist were beginning to clear. ‘She pretended to be…’

‘The senior tutor’s secretary. Yes. The idea was to get Khan into the building whilst Glossop…’

‘Murdered his wife?’ I spoke the words that Ballard seemed reluctant to use.

‘I think she’s prepared to give evidence against him,’ Soapy Sam said, looking thoughtfully towards future briefs. ‘Well, she’ll have to, unless she wants to go to prison as an accessory.’

‘Has handsome Ricky heard the news yet?’ I wondered.

‘Mr Glossop has been detained. He’s helping the police with their enquiries.’

So many people I know, who help the police with their enquiries, are in dire need of help themselves. ‘So you’ll agree to a verdict of not guilty of murder?’ I asked Ballard, as though it was a request to pass the mustard.

‘Perhaps. Eventually. And you’ll agree to guilty of making death threats in a letter?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I admitted. ‘We’ll have to plead guilty to that.’

But there was no hurry. I could finish my steak and kidney and order another Guinness in peace.

‘It started off,’ I was telling Hilda over a glass of Chateau Thames Embankment that evening, ‘as an act of terrorism, of mad, religious fanaticism, of what has become the new terror of our times. And it ends up as an old-fashioned murder by a man who wanted to dispose of his rich wife for her money and be free to marry a pretty young woman. It was a case, you might say, of Dr Crippen meeting Osama Bin Laden.’

‘It’s hard to say which is worse.’ She Who Must be Obeyed was thoughtful.

‘Both of them,’ I told her. ‘Both of them are worse. But I suppose we understand Dr Crippen better. Only one thing we can be grateful for.’

‘What’s that, Rumpole?’

‘The terrorist got a fair trial. And the whole truth came out in the end. The day when a suspected terrorist doesn’t get a fair trial will be the day they’ve won the battle.’

I refilled our glasses, having delivered my own particular verdict on the terrible events of that night at William Morris University.

‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘it was your friend Gerald Graves who put me onto the truth of the matter.’

‘Oh really.’ Hilda sounded unusually cool on the subject of the judge.

‘It was when he was playing Father Christmas. He was standing in for someone else. And I thought, what if the real murderer thought he’d stand in for someone else. Hussein Khan had uttered the death threat and was there to take the blame. All Ricky had to do was to go to work quickly. So that’s what he did – he committed murder in Hussein Khan’s name. That death threat was a gift from heaven for him.’

One of our usual silences fell between us, and then Hilda said, ‘I don’t know why you call Mr Justice Graves my friend.’

‘You got on so well at Christmas.’

‘Well, yes we did. And then he said we must keep in touch. So I telephoned his clerk and the message came back that the judge was busy for months ahead but he hoped we might meet again eventually. I have to tell you, Rumpole, that precious judge of yours does not treat women well.’

I did my best. I tried to think of The Old Gravestone as a heartbreaker, a sort of Don Juan who picked women up and dropped them without mercy, but I failed miserably.

‘I’m better off with you, Rumpole,’ Hilda told me. ‘I can always rely on you to be unreliable.’