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

Tattersall’s?’ he asked, adding ‘the racing authority’ by way of an unnecessary explanation.
    â€˜Well, yes. As far as I can remember,’ Mr Aldworth admitted in a fluster, and the Jury stopped laughing.
    â€˜Ask him how many times!’
    â€˜How many times?’ Wendy Crump was now Claude’s pupil master.
    â€˜I don’t know I can rightly remember.’
    â€˜Do your best,’ Wendy suggested.
    â€˜Well, do your best,’ Claude asked.
    â€˜Ten or a dozen times . . . Perhaps twenty.’
    I sat back in gratitude. The chief prosecution witness had been holed below the waterline, without my speaking a word, and our co-defendants might well be home and dry.
    At the end of the cross-examination, the learned Judge subjected Claude to the sort of scrutiny she might have given a greenish slice of haddock on a slab, long past its sell-by date. ‘Mr Erskine-Brown!’
    â€˜Yes, my Lady.’
    â€˜You are indeed fortunate to have a pupil who is so skilled in the art of cross-examination.’
    â€˜Indeed, I am, my Lady.’
    â€˜Then you must be very grateful that she remains to help you. For the time being.’ The last words were uttered in the voice of a prison governor outlining the arrangements, temporary of course, for life in the condemned cell. Hearing them, even my blood, I have to confess, ran a little chill.
    When the lunch adjournment came Claude shot off about some private business and I strolled out of Court with the model pupil. I told her she’d done very well.
    â€˜Thank you, Rumpole.’ Wendy took my praise as a matter of course. ‘I thought the Judge was absolutely outrageous to poor old Claude. Going at him like that simply because he’s a man. I can’t stand that sort of sexist behaviour!’ And then she was off in search of refreshment and I was left wondering at the rapidity with which her revered pupil master had become ‘poor old Claude’.
    And then I saw, at the end of the wide corridor and at the head of the staircase, Nick Davenant, the glamorous Prosecutor, in close and apparently friendly consultation with the leader of the militant sisterhood, Mizz Liz Probert of our Chambers. I made towards them but, as she noticed my approach, Mizz Liz melted away like snow in the sunshine and, being left alone with young Nick, I invited him to join me for a pint of Guinness and a plateful of steak and kidney pie in the pub across the road.
    â€˜I saw you were talking to Liz Probert?’ I asked him when we were settled at the trough.
    â€˜Great girl, Liz. In your Chambers, isn’t she?’
    â€˜I brought her up, you might say. She was my pupil in her time. Did she question your gender awareness?’
    â€˜Good heavens, no!’ Nick Davenant laughed, giving me a ringside view of a set of impeccable teeth. ‘I think she knows that I’m tremendously gender aware the whole time. No. She’s just a marvellous girl. She does all sorts of little things for me.’
    â€˜Does she indeed?’ The pie crust, as usual, tasted of cardboard, the beef was stringy and the kidneys as hard to find as beggars in the Ritz, but they couldn’t ruin the mustard or the Guinness. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t ask what sort of things.’
    â€˜Well, I wasn’t talking about that in particular.’ The learned Prosecutor gave the impression that he could talk about that if he wasn’t such a decent and discreet young Davenant. ‘But I mean little things like work.’
    â€˜Mizz Liz works for you?’
    â€˜Well, if I’ve got a difficult opinion to write, or a big case to note up, then Liz will volunteer.’
    â€˜But you’ve got Miss Slenderlegs, the blonde barrister, as your pupil.’
    â€˜Liz says she can’t trust Jenny to get things right, so she takes jobs on for me.’
    â€˜And you pay her lavishly of course.’
    â€˜Not at all.’ Still