Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders Read Free Page A

Simon’s mother, was killed by a buzz bomb when she was out shopping just north of Oxford Street in the closing stages of the war.
    After his wife’s death, according to the News of the World , Jerry moved in, from time to time, a series of girlfriends, but none of them lasted long and for considerable periods father and son were living alone in the bungalow.
    On the night of the murders Jerry and Charlie had been at a reunion dinner of members of the old squadron living in and around Croydon. Some they had known well, some were almost strangers. After the dinner and seeing Judy Garland at the London Palladium, singing and more than a little drunk, they came back to Jerry’s bungalow, where they woke up Simon and the party continued. During the course of it, according to the evidence given at a preliminary hearing before the Penge magistrates, a quarrel sprang up between father and son and young Simon was seen to pick up the German pistol and threaten his father and other members of the party. At that point he was quite easily disarmed by one of the RAF companions, after which he shut himself in his room.
    The party continued for a while, but in the morning young Simon rang the police to say that he had found his father dead, shot through the heart. ‘Tail-End’ Charlie was later found dead in his bungalow. Apparently he’d been shot when answering the door to some late-night caller. Both men were killed by German bullets. The pistol and magazine with two of its bullets fired were found in the dustbin outside the Jerolds’ back door.
    Jerry’s son was arrested and charged with a double murder. As though he weren’t in enough trouble already, he asked to see the only solicitor he’d ever heard of. This was a Penge local who had done a number of civil cases with my Head of Chambers, for whom the solicitor had a surprisingly high regard.
    So Simon Jerold, being just over twenty-one, was old enough for national service and old enough to be hanged. And it was on C. H. Wystan that his life depended.

4
    There is no point in writing your memoirs unless you’re prepared to tell the truth, and I have to confess to a number of occasions when I have felt stirred by an often hopeless passion and believed myself deeply in love. At Keble I had loved my fiancée, Ivy Porter, who was carried off in the cold snap after the war. When I was a member of the ground staff I was helplessly smitten by an alluring WAAF named Bobby O’Keefe, with whom I enjoyed a brief but ecstatic love affair until she was wooed from me by the then heroic charm of a certain pilot officer, Sam ‘Three Fingers’ Dougherty, who flew Spitfires and had apparently lost one of his fingers in action. I felt hidden longings, many years later, for a Kathy Trelawny, a beautiful if somewhat spaced-out member of the ‘alternative society’ who, ignoring my advice to stay silent at her trial, talked her way into Holloway Prison, where I had to say goodbye to her.
    In the early 1950s, when peace and some degree of prosperity were celebrated by the Festival of Britain, the Dome of Discovery, the Guinness Clock and other tributes to our national way of life, including the Penge Bungalow Murders, I felt my existence enriched by a Miss Daisy Sampson. She was an outdoor clerk in the firm of Mickelthwaite and Nutwell, which was, by then, briefing me in small cases in the magistrates’ courts. She was blonde, cheerful and uninhibited, a girl with a ready smile, slightly protruding front teeth outlined with bright red lipstick and a way with fairly basic jokes, such as ‘I’m always going to give you my briefs, Mr Rumpole,’ which I found, in those far-off years, both provocative and witty.
    So we shared morning coffee and pub lunches round the Uxbridge Magistrates’, Old Street, Bow Street and the Horseferry Road. We spoke disrespectfully of our clients, the chairmen of the benches and the