Horace Rumpole, you may recall, was very proud of his self-taught expertise in bloodstains, particularly insofar as it contributed to his single-handed triumph in the Penge Bungalow Murders. The meteorological equivalent, perhaps, is "The Rain Hat Murder Case".
The facts were these. The body of a young woman was found in a disused car park in Toronto on a dry, bright evening, lying, naturally enough, on ground which was completely dry.
However, an astute police officer noted that the inside of a rain hat, folded in her handbag, happened to be wet. From this it was inferred that the woman must have been killed shortly after a heavy shower of rain.
Enter a meteorologist. Given the approximate time of death, it was possible to use satellite pictures and rainfall records to identify those parts of the city where rain showers had occurred about that specific time. Few showers had occurred that day, so the police were able to focus their inquiries on one or two likely areas. Within hours, a successful arrest was made.
As happened in this case, the weather conditions at the time a crime may have been committed may be crucial to the subsequent investigation. This particular branch of meteorology is often referred to as forensic climatology; it depends for its effectiveness on the hundreds of thou sands of routine weather observations performed every year, and on the interpretative skill and expert knowledge of the practitioner.
Sometimes proceedings in which the meteorologist may find himself involved may be unusual and somewhat delicate.
In one instance, for example, an elderly gentleman man was charged with - how could one put it? - being visually indiscreet. The act complained of took place out of doors, but a meteorologist armed with local weather records for the hour in question was able to demonstrate that the temperature that night had been extremely low. Human physiology being what it is, the court decided that the act complained of was unlikely to have happened in the circumstances - and an acquittal followed.
In a somewhat similar case, the accused was alleged to have loitered in a convenience of the public kind, and his defence was that he was merely sheltering from heavy rain - which the police declared had not existed at the time.
The official weather observations for that day, however, showed that in fact it had been raining very heavily at the time of the alleged offence - and so, once again, a meteorological defence succeeded.