Rumpole had been a novice at Number 4 Equity Court, fresh from a quiet war in RAF groundstaff and a law degree at Oxford, when the murders at Penge first hit the headlines: two war heroes, bomber pilots who’d flown numerous sorties together over Europe, apparently shot dead after a reunion dinner by the son of one of them, young Simon Jerold. Young he might have been, but in those dark post–war days Jerold was facing the ultimate punishment. Yet, for Rumpole, there was something about the evidence which bothered him...