Rumpole and the Angel of Death Read Online Free Page A

that.’
    â€˜I heard he’s learnt to read.’
    â€˜Mavis says the family’s worried desperate. Bob spent all her visit telling her a poem about a nightingale. Well, what’s the point of that? I mean, there can’t be all that many nightingales round Worsfield Prison. Course, it’s the other bloke they put it down to.’
    â€˜Matthew Gribble?’
    â€˜Is that the name? Anyway, seems Bob thinks the world of this chap. Says he’s changed his life and that he worships him, Mr Rumpole. But Mavis reckons he’s been a bad influence on Bob. I mean that Gribble’s got terrible form. Didn’t he kill his wife? No one in our family ever did that.’
    â€˜Of course not. Although Tony Timson was rumoured to have attempted it.’
    â€˜Between the attempt and the deed, as you well know, Mr Rumpole, there is a great gulf fixed. Isn’t that true?’
    â€˜Very true, Fred.’
    â€˜And Mavis says Bob’s been worse for the last three months. Nervous and depressed like as though he was dreading something.’ What, I wondered, had been bugging Battering Bob? It couldn’t have been the fact that his friend was in trouble for attacking a warden; that had only happened a month before. ‘I suppose,’ I suggested, ‘it was stage-fright. They started rehearsing Midsummer Night’s Dream around three months ago.’
    â€˜You mean like he was scared of being in a play?’
    â€˜He might have been.’
    â€˜I hardly think a bloke what went single-handed against six Molloys during the minicab war would be scared of a bit of a play.’
    It was then that the tireless Bernard came to tell me that the Jury were back with a verdict. Fred stood up, gave his jacket a tug, and strolled off as though he’d just been called in to dinner at the local Rotary Club. And I was left wondering again why Battering Bob Weaver should decide to be the sole witness against a man he had worshipped.
    I got back to Chambers in a reasonably cheerful mood, the Jury having decided to give Uncle Fred the generous benefit of a rather small supply of doubt, and there waiting in my client’s chair was another bundle of trouble. None other than Wendy Crump, Claude’s pupil, clearly in considerable distress. ‘I had to talk to you,’ she said, ‘because it’s all so terribly unfair!’
    Was unfair the right word, I wondered. Unkind, perhaps, but not unfair, unless she meant it as a general rebuke to the Almighty who handed out sylphlike beauty to the undiscerning few with absolutely no regard for academic attainment or moral worth. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘ I think you look very attractive.’
    â€˜What?’ She looked at me surprised and, I thought, a little shocked.
    â€˜In the days of Sir Peter Paul Rubens,’ I assured her, ‘a girl with your dimensions would have been on page three of the Sun, if not on the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall.’
    â€˜Please, Rumpole,’ she said, ‘there are more important things to talk about.’
    â€˜Well, exactly,’ I assured her. ‘People have suggested that I’m a little overweight. They have- hinted that from time to time, but do I let it worry me? Do I decline the mashed spuds or the fried slice with my breakfast bacon? I do not. I let such remarks slide off me like water off a duck’s back.’
    â€˜Rumpole!’ she said, a little sharply, I thought. ‘I don’t think your physical appearance is anything to do with all this trouble.’
    â€˜Is it not? I just thought that we’re birds of a feather.’
    â€˜I doubt it!’ This Mizz Crump could be very positive at times. ‘I came to see you about Erskine-Brown.’
    â€˜Of course, he shouldn’t have said it.’ I was prepared, as I have said, to accept the brief for the Defence. ‘It was just one of those unfortunate slips of the