Murderers and Other Friends Read Online Free Page B

can’t concentrate or think of anything else. Peter arrives smiling and asks if the case is all over. The woman behind the tea urns is shouting at a deaf man because he failed to send someone a birthday card. The clerk who spent most of his time asleep in court comes up to our table. ‘Your defence of that young man. Bloody top hole!’ he says. ‘If I were in charge I’d acquit immediately. And I say that from my extremely humble position.’ I decide I don’t like this work, and yet some inherited aptitude, or listening to ancestral voices, has kept me at it far too long.
    We drink coffee until it feels as though it’s running out of our ears and then we go to lunch in the pub. Doing nothing makes it the longest, the suspense makes it the most exhausting, day of the trial. At three o’clock in the afternoon the jury come back. ‘Will your foreman please stand.’ The clerk of the court is now wide awake and quietly excited. I hold my breath and stare at the ceiling, a gambler waiting for the roulette wheel to slow down and the ball to stop rattling. Jimmy, who has learnt chess from one of the screws during the long wait, seems entirely calm as the jury acquit him of murder and find him guilty of manslaughter by a majority of ten to two. I make the sort of mitigation speech, the appeal to mercy, which I have never been particularly good at and Jimmy stands, saying he’s sorry for the family of the deceased gentleman. Judge Aarvold, talking sadly about the dangers of drinking and carrying knives, gives him four years, which like so many things in life is probably worse than he’d hoped for but better than he’d feared. Of course I never see him again.
    And that, so far as I can recall, is how it was living through a murder trial. Years later I put some element of Jimmy O’Neill’s trial into a Rumpole story, so fact became fiction. On another strange occasion a fictional murder ended up as fact. I wanted Rumpole to appear at a court martial and, as I had never been engaged in such a proceeding, I went off to the British Army in Germany to see how it worked. I was shown great hospitality by the Judge Advocate’s office and taken to see the trial of a young guardsman accused of smoking a cannabis cigarette. An interesting point of law arose because the only evidence of what was in the cigarette was what he said at the time, and he might have been boasting or lying or just having everyone on. I learnt the procedure of a court martial and then I came home to write my Rumpole story.
    It was called ‘The Bright Seraphim’ and it concerned a court martial for murder in a guards regiment. I started the story with what I thought was a dramatic image: a British sergeant-major is lying, stabbed through the heart, outside a disco in a small German town. The bloodstains were not immediately visible as, instead of his uniform, the sergeant was wearing a long, bright-red evening-gown. The story was written and, in due course, televised.
    Years later I was invited to dinner with the Queen’s Guard in Germany. It was an extremely pleasant occasion organized by an assistant adjutant whose name was Delia. Before dinner she suggested I might like to have a drink in the Sergeants Mess. One of the sergeants looked over his pint and said, ‘Were you ever out with the army in Germany before?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I told them, ‘I came out to see a court martial. It was quite an interesting case, actually. A young guardsman was accused of smoking cannabis and the only evidence against him was that he said it was a joint.’ ‘That wasn’t the case!’ An older, no doubt more important, sergeant corrected me. ‘You came over here because of that murder we had. You know, the one where a sergeant-major was found stabbed outside a disco? And him wearing some tart’s red evening-dress.’

Chapter 3
    I’m giving a talk at lunch-time.