‘Your Honour will do,’ the magistrate said. ‘I take it you are representing Mr Grimes?’

‘Hundred percent! And my client opposes the application. Which I guess is obvious. That’s why we’re here.’ Dog shot Gordon a flamboyant wink.

Closing his eyes, Gordon slumped back into his seat. What the fuck was Dog doing here? He couldn’t ask. At this moment it was crucial to present a united front.

‘I know it’s obvious, Mr Gilsenan,’ the magistrate was saying. ‘What I’m asking is: what are your client’s grounds for objection? It seems the applicant has taken reasonable steps and conducted himself in a neighbourly way.’

‘My objection is also reasonable, Teeny.’

‘Mr Gilsenan,’ Tim Phelan said with an audible sigh. He’d always been asthmatic. The team used to call him Teeny-Weezy Timmy on account of his size, his sighs and his thighs. ‘The proper form of address, please.’

‘Come on, champion, just because you’re a beak you can’t—’

‘Your Honour will do.’

‘Certainly, Teeny.’ Dog coughed over the last word so that Gordon could not be sure what he had heard. What was the prick up to? ‘My client reasonably holds that it’s his path, his land, and if the respondent wants to knock down a house that you and I and many others have enjoyed all our lives, then he can reasonably use other access.’

‘Your client is the respondent,’ Tim corrected him. ‘You mean the applicant. Mr David.’

‘Should it please Your Honour,’ Dog said, shuffling his papers.

Tim sighed again, that whistle in his nose reverberating through the court microphone. ‘What other access?’

Dog leafed through the papers importantly.

‘I don’t fucking know, Your Honour.’

That woke Tim up. He turned red and spluttered at Dog to watch his language in a courthouse.

‘It’s the Capri local court, not the bloody Old Bailey,’ Dog said.

‘What other access?’ Tim thundered.

‘I don’t fucking know, Your Honour.’

‘This may “only” be the local court, Mr Gilsenan, but contempt can carry severe penalties. As you well know.’

Dog read from the paper in his hand. ‘I don’t fucking know, Your Honour. I am reading from the correspondence between my client and Mr Archer three weeks ago. My client wrote, and I am reading from his correspondence here, I don’t fucking know, you can shove your steel beams up your arse for all I care.’ Dog turned to Gordon and stage-whispered, ‘Language, champ!’

David Archer was enjoying this immensely. Gordon was not.

From there, Tim Phelan made short work of Dog’s argument. ‘Mr David’, as the magistrate kept calling him with suspicious fondness, as if Archer were his favourite children’s TV host, had taken reasonable steps, and if the respondent thought that his property rights were absolute, then he ought to reread the legislation. Gordon was losing track in the jargon of who was the applicant and who was the respondent. But he got the gist when Tim lined up his papers and tapped them on his bench and said, ‘The Access to Neighbouring Land Act was legislated for precisely these circumstances: where a neighbour is unreasonably preventing development. You can’t stop progress, Mr Gilsenan.’