Rumpole Rests His Case

Rumpole Rests His Case Read Free

Book: Rumpole Rests His Case Read Free
Author: John Mortimer
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hugging the radiator, and as I did so a sort of happiness stole over me. To start with, the church was beautiful, with a high timbered roof and walls of weathered stone, peppered with marble tributes to dead inhabitants of the manor. It was decorated with holly and mistletoe, a tree glowed and there were candles over a crib. I thought how many generations of Coldsands villagers, their eyes bright and faces flushed with the wind, had belted out the hymns. I also thought how depressed the great Donald Compton — who had put on little gold half-glasses to read the prophecy from Isaiah: ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called “Wonderful” — would feel if Jesus’s instruction to sell all and give it to the poor should ever be taken literally.
    And then I wondered why it was that, as he touched my fingers and turned away, I felt that I had lived through that precise moment before.
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    There was, in fact, a huge log fire crackling and throwing a dancing light on the marble floor of the circular entrance hall, with its great staircase leading up into private shadows. The cream of Coldsands was being entertained to champagne and canapes by the new Lord of the Manor. The decibels rose as the champagne went down and the little group began to sound like an army of tourists in the Sistine Chapel, noisy, excited and wonderstruck.
    â€˜They must be all his ancestors.’ Hilda was looking at the pictures and, in particular, at a general in a scarlet coat on a horse prancing in front of some distant battle.
    My mouth was full of cream cheese enveloped in smoked salmon. I swallowed it and said, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so. After all, he only bought the house recently.’
    â€˜But I expect he brought his family portraits here from somewhere else.’
    â€˜You mean, he had them under the bed in his old bachelor flat in Wimbledon and now he’s hung them round an acre or two of walls?’
    â€˜Do try and be serious, Rumpole, you’re not nearly as funny as you think you are. Just look at the family resemblance. I’m absolutely certain that all of these are old Comptons.’
    And it was when she said that that I remembered everything perfectly clearly.
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    He was with his wife. She was wearing a black velvet dress and had long, golden hair that sparkled in the firelight. They were talking to a bald, pink-faced man and his short and dumpy wife, and they were all laughing. Compton’s laughter stopped as he saw me coming towards him. He said, ‘I don’t think we’ve met.’
    â€˜Yes,’ I replied. ‘We shook hands briefly in church this morning. My name’s Rumpole and I’m staying with the Long-staffs. But didn’t we meet somewhere else?’
    â€˜Good old Eric! We have our differences, of course, but he’s a saintly man. This is my wife Lorelei, and Colonel and Maudy Jacobs. I expect you’d like to see the library, wouldn’t you, Rumpole? I’m sure you’re interested in ancient history. Will you all excuse us?’
    It was two words from Hilda that had done it: ‘old’ and ’Compton‘. I knew then what I should have remembered when we touched hands in the pews, that Old Compton is a street in Soho, and that was perhaps why Riccardo (known as Dicko) Perducci had adopted the name. And I had received that very same handshake, a slight touch and a quick turn away when I said goodbye to him in the cells under the Old Bailey and left him to start seven years for blackmail. The trial had ended, I now remembered, just before a long-distant Christmas.
    The Perducci territory had been, in those days, not rolling Norfolk acres but a number of Soho strip clubs and clip joints. Girls would stand in front of these last-named resorts and beckon the lonely, the desperate and the unwary in. Sometimes they would escape after

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