Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders Read Online Free Page B

Rumpole. It might be better if you waited for me to give you the news rather than pick up tittle-tattle from the clerk’s room. The point is that in this case the solicitors have taken the rather unusual step of asking me to nominate a junior, from our chambers of course.’
    â€˜Of course,’ I repeated. I felt another twinge of envy at the luck of some other, older member of number 4 Equity Court.
    â€˜It was Hilda who put your name forward. She said, “Why not give young Rumpole a chance to prove himself, Daddy?” She always calls me Daddy, you know.’ He sounded more pleased than apologetic.
    â€˜Yes,’ I told him, ‘I know.’ The pang of envy had become a rush of adrenalin. This drained away like used bathwater as C. H. Wystan made my terms of employment clear. ‘You’ll be expected to take a full note of the evidence and look up any points of law that may arise. But you’re not to worry, Rumpole. I shan’t expect you to deal with witnesses, or indeed open your mouth at any point in the trial.’

5
    For the first time in my legal career my brief contained photographs of a dead man. ‘Jerry’ Jerold had been found by the police photographer, sitting in a chair in the bungalow’s living room. Behind him was the door which opened on to a narrow hallway. You could see the corner of the mantelpiece and part of Jerry’s collection of war memorabilia. The man in the chair looked still at his ease: his Brylcreemed hair was neatly brushed back, his glazed eyes seemed to express nothing but mild surprise. He wore a blazer with flannel trousers and an RAF tie. Only the dark stain on his shirt, spreading across his chest, indicated the cause of death.
    â€˜Making a note for your learned leader in that Jerold case, are you?’ Uncle Tom placed a golf ball carefully on the carpet and appeared to threaten it with his golf club.
    â€˜Making a note for myself, as a matter of fact,’ was what I longed to tell him, but didn’t yet have the courage.
    In the last photograph Jerry was naked on a mortuary slab, his hair still neatly in place as though glued. I turned to the prosecution witness statements, the account of how he arrived, after missing death in the skies during the war, at this final humiliating end. The story was told in the greatest detail by Pilot Officer Peter Benson, who had been at the reunion party and gone back with Jerry to his bungalow at Penge.
    They had met, a dozen of them in all, including Peter and ‘Tail-End’ Charlie, in the bar of the Cafe Royal. By the time they got to the Palladium they were not entirely sober and ‘Tail-End’ insisted on joining Judy Garland in her songs. After the theatre they had a few more drinks at a bar near Victoria Station and they all arrived at Jerry’s bungalow just before midnight.
    Young Simon Jerold was in bed and asleep when they got there, but his father woke him up and set him to making tea and pouring more drinks for the old companions of the war in the air. Jerry, Peter Benson insisted, was ‘getting at’ his son, telling him to drink a couple of large whiskies like a man and letting the assembled company know that his son not only had no idea what a war was like but had funked his national service.
    â€˜The boy’s more scared of his sergeant on the parade ground than ever we were of German fighters,’ Jerry apparently said. It was then, it seemed, that the boy had lost his temper. Benson remembered him ‘shouting his mouth off’ and telling his father, ‘National service is ridiculous, there isn’t going to be another war anyway.’ Simon also said, ‘What’s the point of wasting your youth learning how to kill people?’ and announced he wasn’t going back to his army station anyway.
    At this point the war survivors were indignant, there was a cry of ‘go for his trousers’, which seemed to indicate that