Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

“So I took the precaution of having this new-found will examined by a well-known handwriting expert.”

“Alfred Geary?”

There is only one handwriting expert Her Majesty’s judges pay any attention to. Geary is now an old man peering at blown-up letters through thick pebble glasses, but he is still an irrefutable witness.

“I went, in this instance, and regardless of expense, to Mr. Geary. You approve, sir?”

“You couldn’t do better. The courts listen in awe to this fellow’s comparison between the m’s and the tails on the p’s. What did Geary find?”

“That the signature on the will we discovered—”

“Between the dress sword and the trousers?”

“Is undoubtedly the genuine signature of the late colonel.”

It was the one piece of evidence I hadn’t expected. If the will was not a forgery, if it were a genuine document, could it possibly follow that the message which led us to its hiding place was also genuine? The mind, as they say, boggled. I was scarcely listening as Mr. Pontefract told me that the Percival Ollards would be attacking our new will on the grounds of the deceased’s insanity. It was my own sanity I began to fear for, as I wondered if the deceased colonel would be giving us any more instructions from beyond the grave.

When I got home I was feeling distinctly worse. I mentioned the matter to She Who Must Be Obeyed and she swiftly called my bluff by summoning in the local quack who was round, as he always is, like a shot, in the hope of a fee and a swig of my diminishing stock of sherry (a form of rotgut I seem to keep entirely for the benefit of the medical profession).

“He’s not looking in a particularly lively condition, is he?” Doctor MacClintock remarked to Hilda on arrival. “Well, we’ve got to remember, Rumpole’s no chicken.”

I was unable to argue with the doctor’s diagnosis, as it was undoubtedly true, and what’s more, I had a clinical thermometer stuck between my jaws. I could only grunt a protest when Hilda, with quite unnecessary hospitality, said, “You will take a glass of sherry, won’t you, Doctor? So good of you to come.”

I mean to say, when I do my job of work, the judge doesn’t start proceedings with, “So nice of you to drop in Rumpole, do help yourself to my personal store of St. Emilion.” I was going to say something along these lines when the gloomy Scots medico removed the thermometer, but he interrupted me with, “His temperature’s up. I’m afraid it’s a day or two in bed for the old warrior.”

“A day or two in bed? You’ll have to tell him, Doctor, he’s got to be sensible.”

“Oh, I doubt very much if he’ll feel like being anything else.”

I began to wish they’d stop talking as if I’d already passed on, and so I intruded into the conversation.

“Bed? I can’t possibly stay in bed—”

“You’re no chicken, Rumpole. Doctor MacClintock warned you.”

I noticed that the thirsty quack had downed one glass of Pommeroy’s pale Spanish-style and was getting a generous refill from the family.

“You warned me? What did you warn me about?”

“You’re not getting any younger, Rumpole.”

“Well, it hardly needs five years’ ruthless training in the Edinburgh medical school and thirty years in general practice to diagnose that!”

“He’s becoming crotchety,” Hilda said, with satisfaction. “He’s always crotchety when he’s feeling ill.”

“Yes, but what are you warning me about? Pneumonia, botulism, Parkinson’s disease?”

“There is an even more serious condition, Rumpole,” the doctor said. “I mean there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go on for a good few years, provided you take proper precautions.”

“You’re trying to warn me about death!”

“Well, death is rather a strong way of putting it.”

The representative of the medical profession looked distressed, as though he realized that if Rumpole dropped off the twig there might be no more free sherry.

“Odd thing about the dead, Doctor.” I decided to let him into a secret. “You may not know this. They may not have lectured you on this at your teaching hospital, but I can tell you on the best possible authority, the dead are tremendously keen on litigation. Give me a drink, Hilda. No, not that jaundiced and medicated fluid. Give me a beaker full of the warm south, full of the true, the blushful Château Pommeroy’s ordinary claret! Dr. MacClintock, you can’t scare me with death. I’ve got a far more gloomy experience ahead of me.”

“I doubt that, Rumpole,” said the Scot, sipping industriously. “But what exactly do you mean?”

“I mean,” I said, “I’ve got to appear in the Chancery Division.”