Dead Men's s Boots

Nobody challenged me. There was a single usher on duty, but he was talking with strained patience to a belligerent young guy in a hooded jacket outside the door leading to court number one, and he didn’t even look round as I passed. I followed the arrows to courtroom three, where a sign said that the Honourable Mister Montague Runcie was presiding, and slid in quietly at the back. It looked like I’d only missed the warm-up. The magistrate, a man in his late fifties with a pinched, acerbic face and three concentric rings of wrinkles across his cheeks as though his eyes were wells that someone had just dropped a pebble into, was still examining papers and holding a muttered conversation with the court clerk. Pen was sitting right at the front with her back to me, as tense as all hell if the set of her shoulders was anything to go by. But she hadn’t started shouting yet so that was good.

I sat down in an empty seat at the back of the room. There were a lot of empty seats: this was the sort of case that could easily make the local papers, but it didn’t look like any of them had caught onto it yet. In the digital age, cub reporters don’t bird-dog the courts and the cop shops any more: they print out the press releases that come in over the wire, clock off early and spend more time abusing substances.

Eventually the magistrate looked up. He cast his gaze around the room, as if someone at the back had just spoken and he was trying to work out who so he could hand out some lines.

‘Miss Bruckner?’ he said, in a querulous tone. Pen got to her feet, holding up her hand unnecessarily. Her fall of red-gold hair made her hard to miss even when she was sitting down. As always she looked much taller than her five foot and half a spare inch: that effect is even more pronounced whend „n you’re facing her, staring head-on at her scarily vivid green eyes, but it’s noticeable even from the back. Pen may be a small package, but what’s in there was tamped down with a lot of force and the lid stays just barely on most of the time.

‘And Professor Mulbridge?’

On the other side of the court, another woman who’d been scribbling notes in a ring-bound notebook looked up, flicked the book closed and stood. She was older than Pen, and she made a strong contrast to her in a lot of ways. Matt-grey hair – the same grey as Whistler’s mother’s, or a German helmet – in a well-sculpted bob; grey eyes flecked with the smallest hint of blue; an austere, thin-lipped face, but with a healthy blush to her cheeks that suggested a warm smile lurking there under the superficial solemnity. She was dressed in a formal, understated two-piece in shades of dark blue, looking like a probation officer or a Tory MP, whereas Pen was wearing flamboyant African silk. The older woman’s cool self-possession was clearly visible under the self-effacing smile and polite nod. Clearly visible to me, anyway: but then, I go back a long way with Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, and I know where most of the bodies are buried. Hell, in a few cases I even dug the graves. People who don’t know her so well are apt to take away from their first meeting a vague sense of heavy-handed maternal benevolence: and to be fair, if I were going to describe Jenna-Jane to someone who didn’t know her, ‘mother’ might well be the first couple of syllables I’d reach for.

‘Here, your honour,’ Jenna-Jane said mildly. Her voice said ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’: and she is, as far as that goes. Then again, so were Crippen and Mengele, and they both sold patent medicines in their time.

The magistrate tapped the stack of papers in front of him. ‘And I presume Doctor Smart and Mister Prentice are also in attendance?’ ‘Yes, your honour’ and ‘Here, your honour’ came from somewhere off to my far right. The magistrate acknowledged them with a curt nod.

‘Thank you,’ he said dryly. ‘You can all be seated again. Now, from what I understand, this is a question of the disposition of an involuntarily held mental patient. A Section 41 case, Mister . . . Rafael Ditko.’

Someone who looked like an extra in Judge John Deed, impossibly young and suave and dark-suited, stood as if on cue on Jenna-Jane’s side of the courtroom, and the magistrate flicked him a glance but went on without giving him a chance to open his mouth. ‘Has there been a tribunal hearing?’ he demanded, lingering on the word tribunal as though it was particularly tasty.

‘Your honour,’ the barrister said, holding up his own wodge of papers as if to prove that he was earning his salary here too, ‘Michael Fenster, representing Haringey health authority. Yes, the review tribunal met three weeks ago. If you look in the court papers, you’ll see the minutes of that meeting. It took place at the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill. In attendance were Doctor Smart, Mister Prentice, and your colleague Mister Justice Lyle.’

‘And the recommendation?’ The magistrate rummaged in the depths of the paperwork again, looking a little put out.