Mike Roberts broke it. ‘Very well said, Meg.’ He picked up the thick bunch of trial documents and opened them at a page he had bookmarked. Then he looked at Mark Adams. ‘This lady you have described as a windbag, Primrose Brown, is an eminent criminal barrister. She will call more witnesses this afternoon. When she has finished with those, we will then have the closing speech from the prosecution, followed by the closing speech from defence. After that we will have the judge’s summing up, before we are sent out for our deliberations. It is highly unlikely you will get your wish of the trial ending this week, so as our foreperson has eloquently said, you’d better get over it.’

‘If I had one shred of doubt about the defendant’s guilt, then yes,’ Adams said, defensively. ‘But can you really, honestly, say you have, Meg?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I can. There are already plenty of arguments for reasonable doubt – and we still have more witnesses to come.’

‘I’m sorry, you just have to look at Terence Gready’s body language to see he is guilty,’ Toby DeWinter said.

‘Really?’ Meg quizzed. ‘You’re an expert on body language?’

‘Actually, yes. I’m an actor. Body language is part of what I do.’

Hari Singh chipped in. ‘There’s a saying we should all be aware of. Before you judge any man, first walk ten miles in his shoes.’

‘Isn’t that an old Groucho Marx joke?’ said Pink. ‘Before you judge a man, first walk ten miles in his shoes. Then you’ll be ten miles away and you’ll have his shoes.’

The tension in the room was broken by some laughter and smiles, except for Meg, who sat thinking.

‘I suggest,’ she said, tartly, ‘before we judge the defendant, we do what we are here to do, the thing we are sworn in to do, and that is to listen to all the evidence. The time to do our judging is after that.’

Rory O’Brien, the geek who had remained silent since they had entered the room, looked up from one of the stacks of spreadsheets in the bundle he had open in front of him and said, quietly, ‘I agree with our foreperson. We should hear all the evidence before we start coming to conclusions.’ He returned his focus to the spreadsheet.

Perhaps because O’Brien had barely spoken since the trial had begun, what he had to say had an oddly calming effect on the room.

89

Thursday 23 May

The first defence witness of the afternoon was a forensic financial analyst in her early fifties called Carolyn Herring. Primrose Brown began by coaxing her credentials out of her. Having worked for some years in a senior position in the fraud detection department of the Inland Revenue, she was now employed in a similar role in the private banking sector.