It had taken the inquiry three tries before a suitable chairman could be found. The first ministerial appointee, a QC specialising in financial fraud, had backed out pleading personal connections to the inquiry (she had visited the islands as a child; she had once given legal advice to Harry Harcourt-Vane about an investment he had made overseas). The second, Judge Stephenson, a Northern Irishman, felt moved to resign the post after making a preliminary tour. Online reports that he was targeted by female activists upon arriving at Lerston Harbour are completely fabricated. The third, Judge Buxton, had built up a career in trust law, a branch of commercial law which suggested somebody pragmatic and sensible rather than an idealist. Of course, she immediately came under attack, pre-emptively, for being biased on various accounts, including but not limited to having been born (and continuing to live) as a woman. Her birthplace itself, in Slovenia, a country about which she had said nothing in public, except once joking to the Bar Council, during her delivery of the Annual Law Reform lecture, that it was so relaxing to have moved across Europe to make her home in a country ironic enough to have St George as a national icon, caused various male commentators to speculate that she probably had a cultural bias in favour of Eva on account of the latter’s written work. (Slovenia was the first part of the former Yugoslavia to claim independence.) Somebody anonymous even tried to prove that Judge Buxton and Eva Harcourt-Vane had met once. Mostly, however, the attacks focused on her femaleness, as might be expected.

It was this aspect of herself that the judge chose to address, head-on, in her opening remarks, and the corollary examples she gave, of bias in the other direction, men against women, a bias thoroughly proven by centuries of recent human history, and tempered only partially by her own work history – the cases she had worked on, the judgements she had given, resulting, when analysed by statisticians, in figures quite usual for the profession: where female defendants in magistrate courts are fined slightly more often than men (for mild crimes) and sentenced significantly less (for severe ones), with a similar pattern emerging in Crown courts; contributing factors being that men represent a far greater proportion of arrests, sentencing and incarceration, with female criminality hovering at around the quarter mark of the total. This line of debate provoked an interesting public discussion, without resulting in a winning personal attack; and indeed, the more everything the judge had ever done was trawled through, probed and tickled for proof of gender bias, conscious or unconscious, in either direction, the more biases pro and against were duly discovered by opposing camps according to their particular agenda, the more rapidly that line of questioning, the one about her being a woman, exhausted itself as efficiently as a gannet regurgitating oily fish into its baby’s mouth.