Rumpole and the Angel of Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dream.’
    â€˜Shakespeare with violent criminals, deputy-governors’ wives and wardens’ daughters. Not the R.S.C. exactly, but I can put on a good show in Worsfield gaol. Wasn’t Bob Weaver marvellous?’
    â€˜Extraordinary.’
    â€˜And you know what I discovered? He responds to the sound of poetry. He’s got to know it by heart. Great chunks of it.’ From Battering Bob to Babbling Bob, I thought, treating his bewildered visitors to great chunks of John Keats. It was funny, of course, but in its way a huge achievement. Matthew Gribble appeared to agree. ‘I suppose I’m proud of that.’ He thought about it and seemed satisfied. I turned back to the business in hand.
    â€˜Those other cast members in the carpenter’s helping make the scenery – Tony Timson, the young Molloy? Do you think either of them saw who threw the chisel?’
    â€˜If they did, they’re not saying. Grassing’s a sin in prison.’
    â€˜But your protégé Babbling Bob is prepared to grass on you?’
    â€˜Seems like it.’ He was, I thought, resigned and strangely unconcerned.
    â€˜Have you talked to him about it?’
    â€˜Yes. Once.’
    â€˜What did you say?’
    â€˜I told him to always be truthful. That’s the secret of acting, to tell the truth about the character. I told him that.’
    â€˜Forget about acting for a moment. Did you ask him why he said you attacked the screw?’
    There was a silence. Matthew Gribble seemed to be looking past me, at something far away. At last he said, ‘Yes, I asked him that.’
    â€˜And what did he say?’
    â€˜He said’ – my client gave a small, not particularly happy smile – ‘he said we’d always be friends, wouldn’t we?’
    The master-pupil relationship – the instructing of a younger, less experienced person in the mysteries of some art, theatrical or legal – seemed a situation fraught with danger. While Matthew Gribble’s devoted pupil was turning on his master with damaging allegations, Wendy Crump’s pupil master was in increasing trouble, being treated by the Sisterhood of Radical Lawyers as a male pariah. As yet, neither Erskine-Brown, nor his alleged victim, had been informed of the charges against him, although Mizz Probert and her supporters were about to raise the matter before the Bar Council as a serious piece of professional misconduct by the unfortunate Claude, who sat, brooding and unemployed in his room, wondering what it was that his best friend wouldn’t tell him which had led to him being shunned by female lawyers. I learnt about the proposed petitioning of the Bar Council when I visited the Soapy Head of our Chambers in order to scotch any plan to drive the unfortunate sinner from that paradise which is 4 Equity Court.
    â€˜There is no doubt whatever’ – here Ballard put on his carefully modulated tone of sorrowful condemnation – ‘that Erskine-Brown has erred grievously.’
    â€˜Which one of the Ten Commandments is it exactly, if I may be so bold as to ask, which forbids us to call our neighbour fat?’
    â€˜There is such a thing, Rumpole’ – Ballard gave me the look with which a missionary might reprove a cannibal – ‘as gender awareness.’
    â€˜Is there, really? And who told you about that then? I’ll lay you a hundred to one it was Mizz Liz Probert.’
    â€˜Lady lawyers take it extremely seriously, Rumpole. Which is why we’re in danger of losing all our work from Damiens.’
    â€˜The all-female solicitors? Not a man in the whole of the firm. Is that being gender aware?’
    â€˜However the firm is composed, Rumpole, they provide a great deal of valuable work for all of us.’
    â€˜Well, I’m aware of gender,’ I told Soapy Sam, ‘at least I think I am. You’re a man from what I can remember.’
    â€˜That remark would