Abigail Browining - Murder Most Merry

“Happy Christmas, officer,” I said as cheerfully as possible. “Is Mr. Timson at home?”

“Well, I don’t believe he’s slipped down to his little place in the country.”

Such were the pleasantries that were exchanged between us legal hacks and discontented screws; jokes that no doubt have changed little since the turnkeys unlocked the door at Newgate to let in a pessimistic advocate, or the cells under the Coliseum were opened to admit the unwelcome news of the Imperial thumbs-down.

“My mum wants me home for Christmas.”

Which Christmas? It would have been an unreasonable remark and I refrained from it. Instead, I said, “All things are possible.”

As I sat in the interviewing room, an Old Bailey hack of some considerable experience, looking through my brief and inadvertently using my waistcoat as an ashtray, I hoped I wasn’t on another loser. I had had a run of bad luck during that autumn season, and young Edward Timson was part of that huge south London family whose criminal activities provided such welcome grist to the Rumpole mill. The charge in the seventeen-year-old Eddie’s case was nothing less than wilful murder.

“We’re in with a chance, though, Mr. Rumpole. ain’t we?”

Like all his family, young Timson was a confirmed optimist. And yet, of course, the merest outsider in the Grand National, the hundred-to-one shot, is in with a chance, and nothing is more like going round the course at Aintree than living through a murder trial. In this particular case, a fanatical prosecutor named Wrigglesworth, known to me as the Mad Monk, was to represent Beechers, and Mr. Justice Vosper. a bright but wintry-hearted judge who always felt it his duty to lead for the prosecution, was to play the part of a particularly menacing fence at the Canal Turn.

“A chance. Well, yes, of course you’ve got a chance, if they can’t establish common purpose, and no one knows which of you bright lads had the weapon.”

No doubt the time had come for a brief glance at the prosecution case, not an entirely cheering prospect. Eddie, also known as “Turpin” Timson, lived in a kind of decaying barracks, a sort of highrise Lubianka, known as Keir Hardie Court, somewhere in south London, together with his parents, his various brothers, and his thirteen-year-old sister, Noreen. This particular branch of the Timson family lived on the thirteenth floor. Below them, on the twelfth, lived the large clan of the O’Dowds. The war between the Timsons and the O’Dowds began, it seems, with the casting of the Nativity play at the local comprehensive school.

Christmas comes earlier each year and the school show was planned about September. When Bridget O’Dowd was chosen to play the lead in the face of strong competition from Noreen Timson. an incident occurred comparable in historical importance to the assassination of an obscure Austrian archduke at Sarejevo. Noreen Timson announced in the playground that Bridget O’Dowd was a spotty little tart unsuited to play any role of which the most notable characteristic was virginity.

Hearing this, Bridget O’Dowd kicked Noreen Timson behind the anthracite bunkers. Within a few days, war was declared between the Timson and O’Dowd children, and a present of lit fireworks was posted through the O’Dowd front door. On what is known as the “night in question,” reinforcements of O’Dowds and Timsons arrived in old bangers from a number of south London addresses and battle was joined on the stone staircase, a bleak terrain of peeling walls scrawled with graffiti, blowing empty Coca-cola tins and torn newspapers. The weapons seemed to have been articles in general domestic use, such as bread knives, carving knives, broom handles, and a heavy screwdriver. At the end of the day it appeared that the upstairs flat had repelled the invaders, and Kevin O’Dowd lay on the stairs. Having been stabbed with a slender and pointed blade, he was in a condition to become known as “the deceased” in the case of the Queen against Edward Timson. I made an application for bail for my client which was refused, but a speedy trial was ordered.

So even as Bridget O’Dowd was giving her Virgin Mary at the comprehensive, the rest of the family was waiting to give evidence against Eddie Timson in that home of British drama, Number One Court at the Old Bailey.

“I never had no cutter, Mr. Rumpole. Straight up, I never had one,” the defendant told me in the cells. He was an appealing-looking lad with soft brown eyes, who had already won the heart of the highly susceptible lady who wrote his social inquiry report. (“Although the charge is a serious one, this is a young man who might respond well to a period of probation.” I could imagine the steely contempt in Mr. Justice Vosper’s eye when he read that. )

“Well, tell me. Edward. Who had?”

“I never seen no cutters on no one. honest I didn’t. We wasn’t none of us tooled up, Mr. Rumpole.”

“Come on, Eddie. Someone must have been. They say even young Noreen was brandishing a potato peeler.”

“Not me, honest.”

“What about your sword?”

There was one part of the prosecution evidence that I found particularly distasteful. It was agreed that on the previous Sunday morning, Eddie “Turpin” Timson had appeared on the stairs of Keir Hardie Court and flourished what appeared to be an antique cavalry saber at the assembled O’Dowds, who were just popping out to Mass.

“Me sword I bought up the Portobello? I didn’t have that there, honest.”

“The prosecution can’t introduce evidence about the sword. It was an entirely different occasion.” Mr. Barnard, my instructing solicitor who fancied himself as an infallible lawyer, spoke with a confidence which I couldn’t feel. He, after all, wouldn’t have to stand up on his hind legs and argue the legal toss with Mr. Justice Vosper.

“It rather depends on who’s prosecuting us. I mean, if it’s some fairly reasonable fellow—”

“I think,” Mr. Barnard reminded me, shattering my faint optimism and ensuring that we were all in for a very rough Christmas indeed, “I think it’s Mr. Wrigglesworth. Will he try to introduce the sword?”

I looked at “Turpin” Timson with a kind of pity. “If it is the Mad Monk, he undoubtedly will.”

When I went into Court, Basil Wrigglesworth was standing with his shoulders hunched up round his large, red ears, his gown dropped to his elbows, his bony wrists protruding from the sleeves of his frayed jacket, his wig pushed back, and his huge hands joined on his lectern in what seemed to be an attitude of devoted prayer. A lump of cotton wool clung to his chin where he had cut himself shaving. Although well into his sixties, he preserved a look of boyish clumsiness. He appeared, as he always did when about to prosecute on a charge carrying a major punishment, radiantly happy.

“Ah, Rumpole,” he said, lifting his eyes from the police verbals as though they were his breviary. “Are you defending as usual?”

“Yes, Wrigglesworth. And you’re prosecuting as usual?” It wasn’t much of a riposte but it was all I could think of at the time.

“Of course, I don’t defend. One doesn’t like to call witnesses who may not be telling the truth.”

“You must have a few unhappy moments then, calling certain members of the Constabulary.”

“I can honestly tell you, Rumpole—” his curiously innocent blue eyes looked at me with a sort of pain, as though I had questioned the doctrine of the immaculate conception “—I have never called a dishonest policeman.”

“Yours must be a singularly simple faith. Wrigglesworth.”

“As for the Detective Inspector in this case,” counsel for the prosecution went on, “I’ve known Wainwright for years. In fact, this is his last trial before he retires. He could no more invent a verbal against a defendant than fly.”