‘So when do you want all this done by, Mr Rumpole?’ Fig picked up a cutlet bone and chewed gloomily. ‘Tomorrow morning, I suppose?’
‘Oh, sooner than that if possible,’ I told him.
It was not that I felt that the appalling Hussein Khan had a defence – in fact he might well turn out to have no defence at all. But something at the children’s Christmas party had suggested a possibility to my mind.
That something was the sight of Mr Justice Graves standing in for someone else.
III
Christmas was over, and I wondered if the season of goodwill was over with it. The Christmas cards had left the mantelpiece, the holly and the mistletoe had been tidied away, we had exchanged green fields for Gloucester Road, and Cherry Picker’s Hall was nothing but a memory. The judge was back on the bench to steer the case of R v Khan towards its inevitable guilty verdict.
The Christmas decorations were not all that had gone. Gerald the cheerful dinner guest, Gerald the energetic dancing partner of She Who Must be Obeyed, Gerald the fisherman, and, in particular, Gerald as Santa Claus had all gone as well, leaving behind only the old thin-lipped, unsmiling Mr Justice Gravestone with the voice of doom, determined to make a difficult case harder than ever.
All the same there was something of a spring in the Rumpole step. This was not only the result of the Christmas break but also due to a suspicion that the case R v Khan might not be quite as horrifyingly simple as it had appeared at first.
As I crossed the hall on my way to Court Number One, I saw Ricky Glossop – the dashingly handsome husband of the murdered professor – with a pretty blonde girl whom I took to be Sue Blackmore, Honoria’s secretary, who was due to give evidence about her employer’s reception of the fatal letter. She seemed, so far as I could tell from a passing examination, to be a girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She lit a cigarette with trembling fingers, then almost immediately stamped it out. She kept looking, with a kind of description, towards the door of the court, and then turning with a sob to Ricky Glossop and choking out what I took to be some sort of complaint. He had laid a consoling hand on hers and was talking in the sort of low, exaggeratedly calm tone that a dentist uses when he says, ‘This isn’t going to hurt’.
The medical and police evidence had been disposed of before Christmas and now, in the rather strange order adopted by Soapy Sam Ballard for the prosecution, the only witnesses left were Arthur Luttrell, who manned the reception desk, Ricky Glossop, and the nervous secretary.
Luttrell, the receptionist, was a smart, precise, self-important man with a sharp nose and a sandy moustache who clearly regarded his position as being at the centre of the university organisation. He remembered Hussein Khan coming at nine thirty that evening, saying he had an appointment with the senior tutor, and going up to the library. At quarter to ten the Glossops had arrived. Ricky had gone with his wife to her office, but had left about fifteen minutes later. ‘He stopped to speak to me on the way,’ Luttrell the receptionist told Soapy Sam, ‘which is why I remembered it well.’
After that, the evening at William Morris University followed its horrible course. Around eleven o’clock, Hussein Khan left, complaining that he had wasted well over an hour, no senior tutor had come to him, and that he was going back to his parents’ restaurant in Golders Green. After that Ricky telephoned the reception desk saying that he couldn’t get any reply from his wife’s office and would Mr Luttrell please go and make sure she was all right. As we all know, Mr Luttrell went to the office, knocked, opened the door, and was met by the ghastly spectacle which was to bring us all together in Court Number One at the Old Bailey.
‘Mr Rumpole.’ The judge’s tone in calling my name was as aloofly disapproving as though Christmas had never happened. ‘All this evidence is agreed, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you’ll find it necessary to trouble Mr Luttrell with any questions.’
‘Just one or two, my Lord.’
‘Oh very well.’ The judge sounded displeased. ‘Just remember, we’re under a public duty not to waste time.’
‘I hope your Lordship isn’t suggesting that an attempt to get to the truth is a waste of time.’ And before the old Gravestone could launch a counterattack, I asked Mr Luttrell the first question.
‘You say Mr Glossop spoke to you on the way out. Can you remember what he said?’
‘I remember perfectly.’ The receptionist looked personally insulted as though I doubted his word. ‘He asked me if Hussein Khan was in the building.’
‘He asked you that?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘I told him “yes”. I said Khan was in the library where he had an appointment with the senior tutor.’
I allowed a pause for this curious piece of evidence to sink into the minds of the jury. Graves, of course, filled in the gap by asking if that was my only question.
‘Just one more, my Lord.’
Here the judge sighed heavily, but I ignored that.
‘Are you telling this jury, Mr Luttrell, that Glossop discovered that the man who had threatened his wife with death was in the building, then left without speaking to her again?’
I looked at the jury as I asked this and saw, for the first time in the trial, a few faces looking puzzled.
Mr Luttrell, however, sounded unfazed.
‘I’ve told you what he said. I can’t tell you anything more.’
‘He can’t tell us any more,’ the judge repeated. ‘So that would seem to be the end of the matter, wouldn’t it, Mr Rumpole?’
‘Not quite the end,’ I told him. ‘I don’t think it’s quite the end of the matter yet.’
This remark did nothing to improve my relations with his Lordship, who gave me a look from which all traces of the Christmas spirit had been drained.
The jury may have had a moment of doubt during the receptionist’s evidence, but when Ricky Glossop was put in the witness box, their sympathy and concern for the good-looking, appealingly modest, and stricken husband was obvious. Graves supported him with enthusiasm.
‘This is clearly going to be a terrible ordeal for you, Mr Glossop,’ the judge said, looking at the witness with serious concern. ‘Wouldn’t you like to sit down?’
‘No, thank you, my Lord. I prefer to stand,’ Ricky said bravely. The judge gave him the sort of look a commanding officer might give to a young subaltern who’d volunteered to attack the enemy position single-handed. ‘Just let me know,’ Graves insisted, ‘if you feel exhausted or overcome by any part of your evidence, and you shall sit down immediately.’
‘Thank you very much, my Lord. That is very kind of your Lordship.’
So with formalities of mutual admiration over, Ricky Glossop began to tell his story.
He had met Honoria some ten years before when they were both cruising round the Greek Islands. ‘She knew all the classical legends and the history of every place. I thought she’d never be bothered with an undereducated slob like me.’ Here he smiled modestly, and the judge smiled back as a sign of disagreement. ‘But luckily she put up with me. And, of course, I fell in love with her.’
‘Of course?’ Soapy Sam seemed to feel that this sentence called for some further explanation.
‘She was extremely beautiful.’
‘And she found you attractive?’
‘She seemed to. God knows why.’ This answer earned him smiles for his modesty.
‘So you were married for ten years,’ Ballard said. ‘And you had no children.’