Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer Page A

the trial, and the great public interest in it, the Chief Justice, Lord Jessup, had consented to go slumming down the Old Bailey and try the case.
    â€˜It doesn’t matter a scrap what you do or have to say,’ Teddy Singleton of our chambers told me. ‘Theobald Jessup will see your boy hangs as sure as next week will have a Thursday. There’s a rumour he orders crumpets for tea at his club after he’s passed a death sentence.’
    I heard even more sinister rumours in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, suggesting that death sentences and sex produced the same results with the Lord Chief Justice. I also knew that Theo Jessup made jokes which I thought were in horribly bad taste. When a barrister wanted a short adjournment in a long murder trial to settle a will case, he said the prisoner should be removed from court as he probably didn’t want to hear about ‘due execution’. In an after-dinner speech, apparently intending to amuse the audience, he said that he had no trouble ending telephone calls because he was quite used to ‘hanging up’. Whatever fate was in store for Simon, I couldn’t bear the thought of him becoming a joke in an after-dinner speech.
    As part of my preparation for the case I decided to take a preliminary look at Theobald Jessup. I dropped in to the Court of Criminal Appeal at which he was presiding. What I saw, in the central position, between the two ‘bookends’ of lesser judges, was a small, thick-set man with bright beady eyes, a nose that looked as though it might have been flattened in some long-distant football game or boxing bout, and skin the colour of old vellum. From time to time he dipped, as some judges still did in those days, into the scarlet depths of his gown and retrieved a small silver box on which he tapped. He then sniffed a pinch of snuff from the back of his hand. After he had absorbed whatever pleasure this practice brought him, he wiped his nose gently on an ornate silk handkerchief.
    They were deciding an appeal against a conviction for murder, but it was the way the Lord Chief Justice began his judgement that I found, strangely enough, encouraging. ‘It’s a time-honoured precept of our criminal law,’ he had a surprisingly high-pitched voice for a man so greatly feared, ‘that it’s far more intolerable and unjust for an innocent man to be convicted than for a guilty man, or indeed woman, to be let off.’ After which hopeful start, there was a lengthy pause while the Lord Chief Justice took snuff. ‘Even giving full weight to this cherished precept, I cannot find anything unsafe or unsound in the learned judge’s summing up or the jury’s verdict in this case.’ After he had given his reasons, which appeared well argued, the two ‘bookends’ announced that they thoroughly agreed with ‘every word that had fallen from the learned Chief Justice’. The subject of this decision, a small colourless man wearing spectacles, was removed from the dock and taken down the steps to meet his death.
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    â€˜You never ask me out nowadays, Rumpole.’ Daisy Sampson positively purred at me and then uttered a small sigh of regret. We were sitting side by side on a bench in the hallway of the Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court, waiting to do a matrimonial dispute which, because of a long list of drunk drivers and soliciting prostitutes, gave no immediate prospect of being called on for trial. ‘And I’ve done all I can to give you my briefs in the most flagrant fashion.’
    â€˜Thank you.’ The old joke was still around and I ignored it.
    â€˜The Timsons think the sun shines out of your backside, Rumpole. They’re decent, hard-working minor criminals. And they should give you lots of jobs. So why don’t you ask me out?’
    â€˜Because the last time I did that, you waltzed away from me. With Reggie Proudfoot!’
    â€˜Reggie Proudfoot? Don’t