The evidence was pretty thin. And I never said it was him. But I had seen Lee at the clay pits, and I told them—reluctantly, under oath—of how the boy had boasted to me that he knew of a bloke in the Village who would pay for sex with sweets, marijuana, and alcohol. Lee had described Harry to me, as I described him to the court. And when Harry denied all knowledge of ever meeting Lee Bagshot, the people in the courtroom booed like at a pantomime.

Poodle tried to defend him, of course. But by then, no one believed him. The son of a politician; privileged and wealthy; and on top of that, a little queer—he just wasn’t the kind of person juries find appealing. He never spoke above a whisper, and often had to be asked to repeat himself. He never made eye contact. His tics and twitches had returned, making him tremble and stammer. With the help of his parents, who described him as a troubled young man; the Chaplain of St. Oswald’s, in whom I had once confided, and to whom Harry had already confessed his version of the story; the Head of St. Oswald’s, who came across, as always, as a bully; and all the staff of St. Oswald’s who came out en masse as character witnesses for the accused, Poodle ended up doing more harm than good as far as Harry was concerned.

Oh, I remember them, Mousey. All lined up like senators in their academic gowns and with their Oxbridge accents. There was Straitley, more like a toothless lion than ever, saying over and over again how Harry just couldn’t have done those things; then Mr. Bishop, the Head of Year, with his rugby-school physique; then the Head, like a Juggernaut, addressing the crowd the way he spoke to his boys in Assembly.

I noticed Mr. Scoones wasn’t there, even though he’d been Harry’s friend; nor was Dr. Devine, whose room was so close to Harry’s. But standing in front of a jury of ordinary folk from the area, who had always mistrusted the posh school, those witnesses all came across as shifty, smirking, and arrogant. You could tell that most of them weren’t taking the business seriously. Straitley, with rumpled suit and his Latin that the jury didn’t understand; trying to explain that you can’t hide secrets in a school, that if there’d been something going on, he would have known it, somehow; the Chaplain, looking confused; Mr. Fabricant, with his book on the Marquis de Sade, saying boys weren’t to be trusted and looking like a vampire.