"Mortimer, John Clifford - Rumpole 01f - Rumpole and the Heavy Brigade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mortimer John)

' Oh, do be careful, Marigold!' I said.' Don't knock it.' 'I think it must be sordid.' Marigold patted her lips with her table napkin, removing the last possible trace of after-dinner mint.

'Abolish crime,' I warned her, 'and you abolish the very basis of our existence!' 'Oh, come now, Horace!' Featherstone was smiling at me tolerantly.

'He's right,' Hilda told him. 'Rumpole knows about bloodstains.' 'Abolish crime and we should all vanish.' I felt a rush of words to the head. 'All the barristers and solicitors and dock officers and the dear old matron down the Old Bailey who gives aspirins away with sentences of life imprisonment. There'd be no judges, no Lord Chancellor. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police would have to go out selling encyclopaedias.' I leant back, grabbed the wine from the bucket, and started to refill all our glasses. 'Why are we here? Why've we got prawn cocktail and duck & I'orange and selections from dear old Oklahoma} All because a few villains down the East End are kind enough to keep us in a regular supply of crime.' A slightly hurt waiter took the bottle from me and continued my work.

' Don't you help them ?' Marigold looked at me, doubtfully.

'Don't I what?' 'Help them. Doing all these crimes. After all. You get them off.' 'Today,' I said, not without a certain pride. 'Today, let me tell you, Marigold, I was no help to them at all. I showed them ...no gratitude!' 'You got him off!' 'What?' ' You got Peter Delgardo off.' 'Just for one reason."

'What was that?' ' He happened to be innocent.' 'Come on, Horace. How can you be sure of that?' Feather-stone was smiling tolerantly but I leant forward and gave him the truth of the matter.

'You know, it's a terrifying thing, my learned friend. We go through all that mumbo jumbo. We put on our wigs and gowns and mutter the ritual prayers. "My Lord, I humbly submit." "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have listened with admirable patience ..." Abracadabra. Fee Fo Fi Bloody Fum. And just when everyone thinks you're going to produce the most ludicrously faked bit of cheese-cloth ectoplasm, or a phoney rap on the table, it comes. Clear as a bell. Quite unexpected. The voice of truth!' I was vaguely aware of a worried figure in a dinner jacket coming towards us across the floor.

'Have you ever found that, Featherstone? Bloody scaring sometimes. All the trouble we take to cloud the issues and divert the attention. Suddenly we've done it. There it is! Naked and embarrassing. The truth!' I looked up as the figure joined us. It was my late instructing solicitor.

' Nooks. "Shady " Nooks!' I greeted him, but he seemed in no mood to notice me. He pulled up a chair and sat down beside Featherstone.

'Apparently it was on the nine o'clock news. They've just arrested Leslie Delgardo. Charged him with the murder of Tosher MacBride. I'll want a con with you in the morning.' I was left out of this conversation, but I didn't mind. Music started again, playing a tune which I found vaguely familiar. Nooks was muttering on; it seemed that the police now knew Tosher worked for Leslie, and that some member of the rival Watson family may have spotted him at the scene of the crime. An extraordinary sensation overcame me, something I hadn't felt for a long time, which could only be described as happiness.

'I don't know whether you'll want to brief me for Leslie, Nooks,' I raised a glass to old 'Shady'. 'Or would that be rather over-egging the pudding?' And then an even more extraordinary sensation, a totally irrational impulse for which I can find no logical explanation, overcame me. I put out a hand and touched She Who Must Be Obeyed on the powdered shoulder.

'Hilda.' 'Oh yes, Rumpole?' It seemed I was interrupting some confidential chat with Marigold.' What do you want now?' 'I honestly think.' I could find no coherent explanation. 'I think I want to dance with you.' I suppose it was a waltz. As I steered Hilda out onto the great open spaces it seemed quite easy to go round and round, vaguely in time to the music. I heard a strange sound, as if from a long way off.

'I'll have the last waltz with you, Two sleepy people together ...' Or words to that effect. I was in fact singing. Singing and dancing to celebrate a great victory in a case I was never meant to win.