Rumpole Misbehaves Read Free Page A

again?’
    â€˜Exactly!’
    â€˜Very well. I take it that even if we have dispensed with the rule against hearsay evidence, I am still allowed to address the court?’
    This request was apparently so unusual that Madam Chair had to seek advice from the clerk of the court, who stood up from his seat below her throne to whisper. This advice she passed on in a brief mutter to her bookends. Then she spoke.
    â€˜We are prepared to hear you, Mr Rumpole, but make it brief.’
    â€˜I shall be brief. What is anti-social behaviour? If you ask me, I would say that the world has advanced towards civilization by reason of anti-social behaviour. The suffragettes behaved antisocially and achieved the vote. Nelson Mandela’s anti-social campaign brought justice to South Africa. Now this young person, this child I represent…’
    I turned to wave a hand towards the long-haired twelve-year-old with curiously thoughtful brown eyes. ‘This young Peter, or Pete, Timson.’
    â€˜Who is neither a suffragette nor Nelson Mandela,’ Madam Chair thought it fit to remind me.
    â€˜That is true,’ I had to admit. ‘But he is an innocent child. He has no criminal record. He has broken no law. If football is illegal, it should be forbidden by an act of Parliament. Don’t stain his blameless record by a verdict based on untested hearsay evidence.’
    â€˜Is that all, Mr Rumpole?’ Madam Chair broke into my final dramatic pause.
    â€˜All,’ I said. ‘And more than enough, in my submission, to let this child go back to playing.’ With this I sat down, in the vain hope that I might have touched, somewhere in Madam Chair, a mother’s heart.
    After further whispered conversations the Chair spoke. ‘Mr Rumpole’s speeches,’ she said, ‘may be thought amusing in the Central Criminal Court, but here we cannot let his so-called oratory distract us from our clear duty. Peter Timson.’ Here, prompted by an usher, my client rose to his diminutive height. ‘We make an order forbidding you to enter Beechwood Grove for any purpose whatsoever, including, of course, the playing of football.’
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    When I went to say goodbye to my client, he was standing next to his father, Bertie.
    â€˜Say thank you to Mr Rumpole. I suppose he did his best.’
    â€˜Thank you, Mr Rumpole.’ Peter seemed extraordinarily pleased with the result. ‘I got an ASBO! All them down Rampton Road are going to be so jealous.’
    I had never, in all my legal life, met so delighted a loser.
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    Back in Chambers I poured out the last glass from a bottle of Château Thames Embankment and lit a small cigar. My spirits were at a low ebb. My practice seemed to have shrunk to Pete-sized proportions. Then, quite unexpectedly, the tide turned. The telephone rang and I picked it up to hear once again the voice of my favourite solicitor.
    â€˜I’m sorry about the ASBO case,’ Bonny Bernard said. ‘But I think I might soon be in a position to offer you a murder.’

4
    The case Bonny Bernard had sent me seemed in the best tradition of English murders since the far-off days of Jack the Ripper and the Camden Town affair. The tragedy of the unfortunate girls who go on the game is that they all too easily fall victim to manual strangulation.
    The difference between these classic cases and the brief I was eagerly noting was that, in my present case, a death in Flyte Street, a small turning off Sussex Gardens near to Paddington Station, the alleged culprit was arrested in the dead girl’s room and there seemed to be no mystery about it.
    My client was Graham Wetherby, thirty-three, single, a clerk in a government department. He had an address in Morden, on the outskirts of London, and, according to his statement, he lived alone in a bed-sitting room, travelling up every day to Queen Anne’s Gate and the Home Office.
    The case against Wetherby was a simple one.