Rumpole and the Primrose Path by John Mortimer Page A

in London. A practice in the East End - Bethnal Green, that’s what he told us. Apparently a pretty rough area. Then he came out to Chivering.’
    ‘To get away from the East End?’
    ‘I don’t know. He always said he enjoyed working there.’
    ‘I’m sure he did. One other thing. He is a pillar of the Dramatic Society, isn’t he? What sort of parts does he play?’
    ‘Oh, leads.’ The solicitor seemed to brighten up considerably when he told me about it. ‘The Chivering Mummers are rather ambitious, you know. We did a quite creditable Othello when it was the A-level play.’
    ‘And the Doctor took the lead? You’re not suggesting he blacked up? That’s not allowed nowadays.’
    ‘Oh, no. The other great part.’
    ‘Of course.’ I made a mental note. ‘That’s most interesting.’
    A minute later, a flustered Ballard returned to the room and I moved politely out of his chair. He hadn’t been able to find Luci with an ‘i’ anywhere in Chambers, a fact which came as no surprise to me at all.
    When I got home to Froxbury Mansions, I happened to mention, over the shepherd’s pie and cabbage, that Commander Bob Durden had admitted to an affair with the Doctor’s attractive and much younger wife.
    ‘That comes as no surprise to me at all,’ Hilda told me. ‘As soon as he appeared on the television I was sure there was something fishy about that man.’
    I was glad to discover that, when it comes to telling lies, Hilda can do it as brazenly as any of my clients.
     
    In the weeks before the trial, I thought a good deal about Doctor Petrus Wakefield. Petrus was, you will have to admit, a most unusual Christian name, perhaps bestowed by a pedantic Latin master and his classically educated wife on a child they didn’t want to call anything as commonplace as Peter. What bothered me, when I first read the papers in R. v. Durden, was where and when I had heard it before. And then I remembered old cases, forgotten crimes and gang rivalry in a part of London to the east of Ludgate Circus in the days when I was making something of a name for myself as a defender at the Criminal Bar. These thoughts led me to remember Bill ‘Knuckles’ Huckersley, a heavyweight part-time boxer, full-time bouncer, and general factotum of a minicab organization in Bethnal Green. I had done him some service, such as getting his father off a charge of attempting to smuggle breaking-out instruments into Pentonville while Bill was detained there. This unlooked-for success moved him to send me a Christmas card every year and, as I kept his latest among my trophies, I had his address.
    I thought he would be more likely to confide in me than in some professional investigator such as the admirable Fig Newton. Accordingly, I forsook Pommeroy’s one evening after Court and made instead for the Black Spot pub in the Bethnal Green Road. There I sat staring moodily into a pint of Guinness as a bank of slot machines whirred and flashed and loud music filled a room, encrusted with faded gilt, which had become known, since a famous shooting had occurred there in its historic past, as the Luger and Lime Bar.
    Knuckles arrived dead on time, a large, broad-shouldered man who seemed to move as lightly as an inflated balloon across the bar to where I sat. He pulled up a stool beside me and said, ‘Mr Rumpole! This is an honour, sir. I told Dad you’d rang up for a meeting and he was over the moon about it. Eighty-nine now and still going. He sends his good wishes, of course.’
    ‘Send him mine.’ I bought Knuckles the Diet Coke and packet of curry-flavoured crisps he’d asked for and, as he crunched his way through them, the conversation turned to Doctor Petrus Wakefield. ‘Petrus,’ I reminded him. ‘Not a name you’d forget. It seemed to turn up in a number of cases I did in my earlier years.’
    ‘He treated friends of mine.’ Knuckles lifted a fistful of crisps to his mouth and a sound emerged like an army marching through a field of