Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer Read Free Book Online

chipping golf balls into the wastepaper basket, I miss the figures who have become so much a part of my life and seem inseparable from the building. Claude Erskine-Brown had not arrived to bore us about his nights at the opera and fall hopelessly in love at least once a month, nor had our Portia, Phillida Trant, who remarkably married him. Guthrie Featherstone, QC, MP, was still to take us over and Soapy Sam Ballard was organizing debates among his fellow law students on such subjects as ‘Is adultery a quasi-criminal offence?’ and ‘A Christian approach to smoking’.
    Most of the members of chambers at the time of the Penge Bungalow affair have died or become judges or, in other ways, put an end to their active lives. Their faces, plump and self-satisfied or sharp-nosed and inquisitive, have drifted into that great gallery of past learned friends I have been against and judges I have found irritating. Little labels which might have given me a clue as to their names and identities have got rubbed smooth and become illegible over the course of the years.
    A character who sticks in my mind, however, and had some influence on events surrounding the Penge Bungalow affair, was Teddy Singleton. He was by far the most elegant member of Equity Court. He lived in South Kensington with someone he always referred to as ‘Mumsie’ and rarely left chambers without putting on a fawn overcoat with a velvet collar and carrying a tightly rolled umbrella. He spoke in a voice which, having hit on an effective note of amused contempt, was disinclined to try any change of expression.
    Uncle Tom, defeated by the wastepaper basket, had drifted off home and the gas lights were being lit. I sat on in our room, turning the pages of the forensic science book, trying not to look at the photographs of battered babies and strangled women, but to concentrate on the information to be gained from bloodstains and the spattering of blood, making a note which I hoped C. H. Wystan would find useful. Teddy Singleton glided into the room and asked me what I was doing. I was good enough to tell him but he dismissed my efforts with a short, staccato burst of laughter.
    â€˜Don’t worry your pretty little head about that, Rumpole. You might think you’ve got an important job. Case in the public eye. Head of Chambers leading you. I tell you, I’ve been led by Wystan and he won’t even let his junior read out an agreed statement.’
    â€˜I’m just seeing if we can get anything from the blood.’
    â€˜Don’t worry your pretty little head.’ It was the sort of remark that would get Erskine-Brown in trouble with the sisterhood these days, and it seemed peculiarly inappropriate when applied to me, as he soon realized. Teddy gave me a more critical examination. ‘Your head’s not exactly pretty, is it? All the same, I’m going to offer you a speaking part. Dear old con, spent half his life in chokey, so it won’t come as much of a shock to him. I can’t do it. I’m in a fun divorce case across the road.’
    â€˜You mean he’s pleading guilty?’ My interest in Teddy’s brief was already shrinking. ‘Why’s he doing that?’
    â€˜You think you’ll find that rather dull? Never mind. It doesn’t much matter what you say. You could say this isn’t a case of juvenile crime. It’s elderly, non-violent and extremely unsuccessful crime. You could ask the court to take into consideration the fact that your client is one of the most unsuccessful burglars who ever failed to break and enter a fish and chip shop with the door left open. Anyway, I’m giving you the opportunity. Aren’t you going to thank me?’
    â€˜If I’m supposed to,’ I conceded.
    â€˜Of course you are! Life’s not all junior briefs in sensational murders, you know.’ At which Teddy Singleton went off, swinging his rolled umbrella, to his ‘fun divorce