Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders Read Free

survived for about half a century, and when old Vernon Pommeroy was succeeded by his son Jack the change caused no perceptible improvement in the wine. It was also at Pommeroy’s that Albert offered me one of his small cigars, introducing me to a source of comfort and relaxation when the insolence of office and the law’s delays had become almost too much to bear.
    So, by regular attendance at chambers and in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, I had managed to win a reasonable number of taking and driving aways, actual bodily harms and minor indecencies round a number of fairly unsympathetic courts. I could see myself, in the years to come, as the moderately successful, middle-of-the-road type of advocate of whom we had quite a few in our chambers.
    And then, as I say, the double murder in the Penge bungalows hit the headlines and changed my life.

3
    I had, for many years, been aware of Penge. My father, the Reverend Wilfred Rumpole, had charge of a church (St Botolph’s Without) in the neighbouring suburb of Croydon. My old father was not entirely happy in his work. He had serious doubts, he once told me, about most of the Thirty-Nine Articles; but his training had not equipped him for any other job, so he was compelled to soldier on at St Botolph’s.
    In my early years I seem to have spent more time in a bleak boarding school on the Norfolk coast or at Keble College than I did in the south London suburbs. When I got a place in C. H. Wystan’s chambers I made a determined bid for independence and took a room in the house of a Mrs Matilda Ruben, who not only let out bedsits but owned a small shop for the sale of trusses and other surgical appliances, including what, in those far-off days, we used to call ‘rubber johnnies’, in a street just off Southampton Row. This was in walking distance of the Temple. There were, I promise you, briefless days when I had to become a walker in order to save on bus fares.
    I had, however, a clear memory of Penge, a small suburb beside the island of parkland surrounding the old Crystal Palace, now burnt down, where I used to go on walks with my father and listen to his serious doubts on the subjects of God’s toleration of evil and original sin. I even remembered the street of bungalows which had sprung up in the 1930s to accommodate the growing population of the families of bank clerks, department store managers and commercial travellers who looked on Crystal Palace Park as their particular and privileged glimpse of the countryside.
    The facts of the double murder in the bungalows emerged from the newspapers which I read, rather as a young man hitchhiking through Somerset might read of a voyage of discovery in darkest Africa, never dreaming that I would come any nearer to the case than the full story in what we then called the ‘News of the Screws’.
    Denis, always known as ‘Jerry’, Jerold was a clerk at the National Provincial Bank when he got married to Yvonne and moved into their bungalow, number 3 Paxton Street. There they had their only child, Simon. When the war started, Jerry joined the RAF and soon became a bomber pilot. His life was less exciting when peace returned him to the bank, but his bungalow was filled with relics of the war: photographs of himself scrambling into his bomber, drinking and laughing with his fellow officers, together with his carefully preserved uniform, the silk scarf always tied at his throat when on a mission, fragments of destroyed enemy aircraft and a Luger pistol taken from the body of a dead enemy officer. Also prominent in the photographs was Charlie (‘Tail-End’ Charlie) Weston, who lived at number 7 Paxton Street. He joined up with Jerry and, by a series of lucky chances, was Jerry’s rear gunner. After the war, Charlie Weston returned to his bungalow and his job at the Happy Home Mortgage and Insurance Company.
    Both Jerry and Charlie survived the war, but Yvonne, Jerry’s wife and