I stared at that prisoner’s dock, now empty, and considered all I had witnessed in the past several weeks, the testimonies, the facts I had already known and the startling facts I had learned. The faces. There was Freddie himself, of course, all calm demeanor and earnest eloquence. Lady Oakes, crushed by grief. Nancy de Marigny, resolute, pretty, courageously pale. Harold Christie, white knuckles gripping the rail, perspiring ferociously, though it was autumn and the courtroom was not especially hot. The two detectives from Miami, old associates of the duke, whom he had flown in specially to lead the investigation on the morning of the body’s discovery, because the Bahamas police (he claimed) were not up to the task. Slick, handsome, bumbling, all at once. In my head, though not my daily dispatches to the Associated Press, I called them the Keystone Kops.

Then you had the faces we didn’t see, because their owners had disappeared, or died, or—as in the case of Colonel Erskine-Lindop, the former Bahamas police superintendent, a man of known integrity—been transferred abruptly to Trinidad. Those absences were perhaps more interesting, as I pointed out to my readers. More telling, you might say. Among them, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It seemed the royal couple was called away to visit friends in the States just as proceedings got underway, so they could neither appear in court nor testify, although I understood that the duke arranged for detailed reports on the trial’s progress to be cabled to him daily from his good friend, Harold Christie, at no small trouble or expense. Which was good of him, don’t you think?

By now, I sat alone in the gallery. The other journalists had rushed to queue up at the telephones and send their dispatches to eager editors around the globe. Even in time of war, it seems, people still give a damn about a single dead man on a small island off the coast of Florida, because he was rich and because he was a friend of the Duke of Windsor. Before me, a clerk gathered papers on the prosecutor’s table. The courtroom had turned hot and stuffy with the heat of so many people and so many electric lights. A rising wind rattled the windows. I rose from the bench and made my way downstairs and across the street to the Central Police Station, where Nancy de Marigny awaited the verdict on the second floor.

I found her on a sofa, flushed and fluttery, smoking an anxious cigarette. Her mother was elsewhere, having taken exception to Nancy’s support for the accused, and I thought there was something rather moving about Nancy’s solitude.

“Oh, there you are,” she said to me. “What do you think?”