Free Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer Page B

I never aspired to the adventures of Casanova or the 1,003 conquests made by Don Giovanni in Italy alone. However, those I have named had, each of them, a deep effect on me and it was to one of their number my thoughts turned when I tried, in vain, to answer the searching and vital question posed me by my not particularly learned leader, C. H. Wystan. ‘If Simon Jerold didn’t shoot his father, then who the hell did?’
    I had read and re-read all the prosecution statements so that I knew them by heart when I got out of the train, one Saturday afternoon, at Coldsands-on-Sea. A wind swept this seaside resort on the Norfolk coast, home to the old RAF station where I had served, however unheroically, as ground staff during the recent conflict.
    The saloon bar of the Crooked Billet had this much in common with the living room at number 3 Paxton Street, Penge: it was a kind of museum of tributes to the war in the air. There was no gun, no bullets, but a captured Nazi helmet, a plaster image of Winston Churchill which could actually hold up two fingers in a ‘V’ sign and puff smoke out of a cigar, a signed photograph of Vera Lynn and a model of a Spitfire swinging from the ceiling. Even the pintable reminded me of an antique looted from the NAAFI of my old station. All of this was familiar enough, but my heart beat a little faster when the person who had been bent double, putting away bottles on the shelves behind the bar, straightened up and greeted me with her never-forgotten smile.
    She was no longer in the uniform of a WAAF. She was wearing a frilly shirt and dark blue trousers. And then, only seven years since her demob, the years had not added much to the generosity of her curves or dimmed the brightness of her hair. Bobby Dougherty looked much as she had when she was Bobby O’Keefe, before her heart was stolen away by Pilot Officer Sam ‘Three Fingers’ Dougherty, who was without doubt a wartime hero and so had attractions with which a mere member of the ground staff could never compete. But now we were alone together and she was smiling, surrounded by the fairy lights along the bar and the comforting smell of stale booze, getting ready for opening time.
    â€˜Hello, darling!’ Bobby gave me a breathless kiss which decorated my cheek with lipstick. ‘Long time no see. I’ve missed you.’ I was complacent enough to let myself believe she was telling the truth.
    That evening, after the bar closed, we three were at the pub piano. Bobby picked out the old tunes and vamped the accompaniments to ‘Somewhere in France with You’, ‘We’re Going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, ‘There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘You are My Sunshine’ and ‘Roll out the Barrel’.
    Ex-Pilot Officer Sam Dougherty had appeared early in the evening. My successful rival in love was, I have to admit, a tall good-looking man wearing an RAF scarf tucked into an open-necked shirt, a blazer and scuffed suede shoes. The years had not been so kind to him as they had to Bobby. His dark hair and moustache were peppered with grey and I noticed his three fingers had trembled a little as he filled and then refreshed his glass of whisky.
    Singing wartime songs, calling up wartime memories, running the bar and eating bacon and eggs around midnight left little time and I went to bed with my intended questions unanswered. I lay awake for a while, listening to the murmur of the sea and trying not to think of Bobby in bed with her three-fingered husband.
    It was not until Sunday morning that I suggested to Sam a ‘constitutional’. This meant a brisk walk by the grey, heaving sea in the teeth of a minor gale which might, for all I knew, have been blowing from the steppes of Russia across the flat north of Europe to send teeth chattering in Coldsands-on-Sea. It was in these adverse weather conditions that I broached my