With Rumpole Rests His Case , legions of fans welcomed back the curmudgeonly London barrister they had loved for years?and they are eager for more. The six new stories in Rumpole and the Primrose Path find Horace Rumpole?despite a heart attack that left him at death?s door in the previous volume?deftly parrying everything from the admonitions of his wife, Hilda, to the vagaries of his legal colleagues and their new director of marketing, Luci. With her cell phone, corporate jargon, glossy brochures, and plans to give their chambers a new image, Luci presumes Rumpole is soon to expire, and has been planning his memorial service. But the witty and irreverent Rumpole, sharp as ever, is far from hanging up his wig! RumpoleÆs wit has not deserted him... Mortimer is in high form here. ( The New Yorker ) For things most truly themselves, there should be a special place of honor... We should remember to be thankful for Rumpole. ( The Washington Post ) Mortimer is the master of a crisp, witty, eminently readable prose style. ( Los Angeles Times ) John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist, and former practicing barrister who has written many film scripts as well as stage, radio, and television plays, the Rumpole plays, for which he received the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited . He is the author of twelve collections of Rumpole stories and three acclaimed volumes of autobiography. Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph   Rumpole and the Primrose Path Rumpole and the New Year’s Resolutions Rumpole and the Scales of Justice Rumpole and the Right to Privacy Rumpole and the Vanishing Juror Rumpole Redeemed   FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE PENGUIN BOOKS RUMPOLE AND THE PRIMROSE PATH John Mortimer is the author of eleven other Rumpole books, many of which formed the basis for the PBS-TV series Rumpole of the Bailey. His work also includes many novels and plays and three volumes of autobiography. A former barrister at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, Mortimer, who was knighted in 1998, lives in Oxfordshire, England. PENGUIN BOOKS   Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa   Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England   First published in the Great Britain by Penguin Books Ltd 2002 First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2003 Published in Penguin Books 2004     Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 2002 All rights reserved   PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.   THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE Mortimer, John Clifford Rumpole and the primrose path / John Mortimer. p. cm. eISBN : 978-1-101-00692-4 1. Rumpole, Horace (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Detective and mystery stories, English. 3. London (England)—Fiction. 4. Legal stories, English. I. Title. PR6025.O7552R’.914—dc21 2003053527   Set in Plantin     The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. For Kathy Lette ‘Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads’   Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3       ‘I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.’   Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3 Rumpole and the Primrose Path The regular meeting of the barristers who inhabit my old Chambers in Equity Court took place, one afternoon, in an atmosphere of particular solemnity. Among those present was a character entirely new to them,