Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I suppose I’d heard from someone that he might have been there.’

‘And what did Mr Luttrell tell you?’

‘He said that Khan was in the building, yes.’

‘You knew that Hussein Khan’s presence in that building was a potential danger to your wife.’

‘I suppose I knew. Yes.’

‘I suppose you did. And yet you left and drove off in your car without warning her?’

There was a longer silence then and Ricky’s smile seemed to droop.

‘I didn’t go back to the office. No,’ was what the witness said.

‘Why not, Mr Glossop? Why not warn her? Why didn’t you see that Khan left before you went off?’

And then Ricky Glossop said something which changed the atmosphere in court in a moment, even silencing the judge.

‘I suppose I was in a hurry. I was on my way to a party.’

After a suitable pause I asked, ‘There was no lock on your wife’s office door, was there?’

‘There might have been. But she never locked it.’

‘So you left her unprotected, with the man who had threatened her life still in the building, because you were on your way to a party?’

The smile came again, but it had no effect now on the jury

‘I think I heard he was with the senior tutor in the library. I suppose I thought that was safe.’

‘Mr Glossop, were you not worried by the possibility that the senior tutor might leave first, leaving the man who threatened your wife still in the building with her?’

‘I suppose I didn’t think of that,’ was all he could say.

I let the answer sink in and then turned to more dangerous and uncharted territory.

‘I believe you’re interested in various country sports.’

‘That’s right, my Lord.’ The witness, seeming to feel the ground was now safer, smiled at the judge.

‘You used to go shooting, I believe.’

‘Well, I go shooting, Mr Rumpole.’ A ghastly twitch of the lips was, from the bench, Graves’ concession towards a smile. ‘And I hope you’re not accusing me of complicity in any sort of a crime?’

I let the jury have their sycophantic laugh, then went on to ask, ‘Did you ever belong to a pistol shooting club, Mr Glossop?’ Fig Newton, the private eye, had done his work well.

‘When such clubs were legal, yes.’

‘And do you still own a handgun?’

‘Certainly not.’ The witness seemed enraged. ‘I wouldn’t do anything that broke the law.’

I turned to look at the jury with my eyebrows raised, but for the moment the witness was saved by the bell as the judge announced that he could see by the clock that it was time we broke for lunch.

Before we parted, however, Soapy Sam got up to tell us that his next witness would be Mrs Glossop’s secretary, Sue Blackmore, who would merely give evidence about the receipt of the letter and the deceased’s reaction to it. Miss Blackmore was, apparently, likely to be a very nervous witness, and perhaps his learned friend Mr Rumpole would agree to her evidence being read.

Mr Rumpole did not agree. Mr Rumpole wanted Miss Sue Blackmore to be present in the flesh and he was ready to cross-examine her at length. And so we parted, expecting the trial of Hussein Khan for murder to start again at two o’clock.

But Khan’s trial for murder didn’t start again at two o’clock or at any other time. I was toying with a plate of steak and kidney pie and a pint of Guinness in the pub opposite the Old Bailey when I saw the furtive figure of Sam Ballard oozing through the crowd. He came to me obviously heavy with news.

‘Rumpole! You don’t drink at lunchtime, do you?’

‘Yes. But not too much at. Can I buy you a pint of stout?’

‘Certainly not, Rumpole. Mineral water, if you have to. And could we move to that little table in the corner? This is news for your ears alone.’

After I had transported my lunch to a more secluded spot and supplied our Head of Chambers with mineral water, he brought me up to date on that lunch hour’s developments.

‘It’s Sue the secretary, Rumpole. When we told her that she’d have to go into the witness box, she panicked and asked to see Superintendent Gregory. By this time, she was in tears and, he told me, almost incomprehensible. However, Gregory managed to calm her down and she said she knew you’d get it out of her in the witness box, so she might as well confess that she was the one who had made the telephone call.’

‘Which telephone call was that?’ Soapy Sam was demonstrating his usual talent for making a simple statement of fact utterly confusing.

‘The telephone call to your client. Telling him to go and meet the senior tutor.’

‘You mean…?’ The mists that had hung over the case of Khan the terrorist were beginning to clear. ‘She pretended to be…’

‘The senior tutor’s secretary. Yes. The idea was to get Khan into the building whilst Glossop…’

‘Murdered his wife?’ I spoke the words that Ballard seemed reluctant to use.

‘I think she’s prepared to give evidence against him,’ Soapy Sam said, looking thoughtfully towards future briefs. ‘Well, she’ll have to, unless she wants to go to prison as an accessory.’

‘Has handsome Ricky heard the news yet?’ I wondered.

‘Mr Glossop has been detained. He’s helping the police with their enquiries.’

So many people I know, who help the police with their enquiries, are in dire need of help themselves. ‘So you’ll agree to a verdict of not guilty of murder?’ I asked Ballard, as though it was a request to pass the mustard.

‘Perhaps. Eventually. And you’ll agree to guilty of making death threats in a letter?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I admitted. ‘We’ll have to plead guilty to that.’

But there was no hurry. I could finish my steak and kidney and order another Guinness in peace.

‘It started off,’ I was telling Hilda over a glass of Chateau Thames Embankment that evening, ‘as an act of terrorism, of mad, religious fanaticism, of what has become the new terror of our times. And it ends up as an old-fashioned murder by a man who wanted to dispose of his rich wife for her money and be free to marry a pretty young woman. It was a case, you might say, of Dr Crippen meeting Osama Bin Laden.’

‘It’s hard to say which is worse.’ She Who Must be Obeyed was thoughtful.

‘Both of them,’ I told her. ‘Both of them are worse. But I suppose we understand Dr Crippen better. Only one thing we can be grateful for.’

‘What’s that, Rumpole?’

‘The terrorist got a fair trial. And the whole truth came out in the end. The day when a suspected terrorist doesn’t get a fair trial will be the day they’ve won the battle.’

I refilled our glasses, having delivered my own particular verdict on the terrible events of that night at William Morris University.

‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘it was your friend Gerald Graves who put me onto the truth of the matter.’

‘Oh really.’ Hilda sounded unusually cool on the subject of the judge.

‘It was when he was playing Father Christmas. He was standing in for someone else. And I thought, what if the real murderer thought he’d stand in for someone else. Hussein Khan had uttered the death threat and was there to take the blame. All Ricky had to do was to go to work quickly. So that’s what he did – he committed murder in Hussein Khan’s name. That death threat was a gift from heaven for him.’

One of our usual silences fell between us, and then Hilda said, ‘I don’t know why you call Mr Justice Graves my friend.’

‘You got on so well at Christmas.’

‘Well, yes we did. And then he said we must keep in touch. So I telephoned his clerk and the message came back that the judge was busy for months ahead but he hoped we might meet again eventually. I have to tell you, Rumpole, that precious judge of yours does not treat women well.’