Murmuring The Judges [antikvár]

Brian Mackie's attention wandered as the advocate sorted through his papers, looking for a misplaced note. Court Eleven, in Edinburghi old Parliament House, was a small, unprepossessing room, with drab brown-panelled walls and varnished wooden benches which had not been designed with spectator comfort in mind. Austerity, rather than grandeur, was a Scottish characteristic, and it echoed through the buildings in which the nation's justice was dispensed. The policeman felt no sense of history as he looked around from the witness box, nor any sympathy for all the evil which, across the decades, had come face to face with retribution in its dock. He wondered how many men had stood there, where Nathan Bennett sat now, listening to a black-capped, red-coated judge make the pronouncement which would lead to sudden, brutal death at the end of a rope. A cough from across the room snapped him back to the present as abruptly as the noose had snapped the necks of the condemned. 'Are you seriously asking this Court to believe, Superintendent,5 said Her Majesty's Counsel, 'that the accused is so stupid that he would carry identifying material to the scene of a violent crime, far less leave it there?' The man's tone carried a sneer, for which Brian Mackie did not care at all: but fifteen years in the police service, and experience of far greater cross examination skills than those of the Honourable Richárd Kilmarnock, QC, had taught him that there was nothing to be gained by rising to such bait.