FEELING ONE’S AGE

Monday morning

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:

It wearies me; you say it wearies you;

But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,

What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,

I am to learn…

Like Antonio in Venice, I arrive at court in Bermondsey this morning in a rather subdued mood. It’s a beautiful spring day, and I have all my usual comforts – my latte from Jeanie and Elsie’s coffee and sandwich bar in the archway near London Bridge and my copy of The Times from George’s newspaper stand nearby. But neither the aroma of the latte nor the fresh, cool breeze blowing up off the river dispels the mist entirely. While I do hold the world as a stage where every man must play a part, I don’t often see my part as a sad one; and unlike Antonio, I’m pretty sure how I caught it, found it, or came by it. Every year at about this time, my good wife, the Reverend Mrs Walden, priest-in-charge of the church of St Aethelburgh and All Angels in the diocese of Southwark, declares a week to be ‘Remember the Elderly Week’. During Remember the Elderly Week everyone has to be nice to anyone older than they are: so we have all manner of events going on in and around the church for our senior citizens – Take your Nan to Church Day, coffee afternoons in the vicarage, bingo evenings in the church hall, slide shows with reminiscences of Bermondsey in the old days – all of them featuring parishioners full of years, escorted by relatives who would never ordinarily darken the door of a church, and who look bored and out of place. The Reverend Mrs Walden is wonderful with them: she can chat away for hours about the old days, and about their families, and about how things aren’t what they used to be, and about how the country’s going to the dogs, without sounding in any way patronising.

It’s a gift I haven’t been blessed with, I’m afraid. I’m not sure why. Obviously, I have nothing against the elderly: it’s a condition we all face in life barring a worse alternative, and I flatter myself that I can have a decent one-on-one conversation with any elderly person. But I just can’t relax when they descend on the vicarage in their hordes. Perhaps it’s the inevitable stark confrontation with impending decline – mine as well as theirs. Perhaps it’s because I’m only too well aware that some counsel who appear in my court consider me to have reached that stage of life already, my modest age in the mid-sixties notwithstanding, simply because I wear the judicial robe. But whatever the reason, sitting through two services for which the elderly turn out en masse with their minders isn’t my favourite way to spend my Sunday.

Yesterday too, I was aware of the trial I’m starting this morning, and it’s enough to depress even the most cheerful of souls. The Reverend Mrs Walden, rounding off the Week in her climactic Sunday evening sermon, was exhorting the parish to take better care of the elderly: to make sure they are kept safe, are enabled to attend church, and have enough human contact to prevent loneliness and isolation. But my mind was drifting to a different kind of human contact the elderly may encounter in church – and it’s one they need to be protected from rather than exposed to. In my case, the human contact is a woman called Laura Catesby, and her victim is a ninety-two-year-old widow by the name of Muriel Jones. Reflecting on Remember the Elderly Week, I can’t help thinking that my reaction to it has a lot to do with my fear that somewhere down the road, when the Reverend and I are in our dotage and have been put out to pasture, we may fall victim to something similar ourselves. Age and frailty, I reflect, can make a Muriel Jones of any of us. I suppose I’ve reached the point where I’m beginning to feel my age.

There’s another, even more immediate reason for this dampening of my spirits. This morning is one I hoped would never dawn; one I hoped I might be spared. This morning I truly expect to feel, not just older, but like a man becoming a dinosaur, a relic of the past: because today, after years of false starts and unfulfilled promises – or perhaps threats would be a better word – the Grey Smoothies are poised to introduce the ‘Paperless Court’. The Grey Smoothies are the civil servants responsible for the running of our courts. Their twin governing principles, and mantras, are ‘business case’ and ‘value for money for the taxpayer’. Intoning these mantras, they govern the courts using a form of magical thinking, according to which the courts would run just as efficiently, regardless of how much of our infrastructure and resources they degrade or take away, if only we would all just work harder and get on with it. In the universe of the Grey Smoothies, the quality of the courts and of the work we do lacks any quantifiable value. Like Wilde’s cynics, the Grey Smoothies know the price of everything and the value of nothing; and sadly, I fear, by the time they have finished with us, there may be little left of a court system that was once the envy of the world.

The Paperless Court is the Grey Smoothies’ current value-for-money project, and obsession. It is a system in which all court documents are filed, disseminated, and accessed electronically, so that no longer do we need the traditional court file with its huge piles of dog-eared papers stuffed into overworked cardboard folders. The Paperless Court is touted by the Grey Smoothies as a breakthrough akin to penicillin or the theory of relativity; and I must admit, its potential advantages are obvious even to me. You save on the cost of paper, you make documents available with far less delay, you reduce the risk of losing the documents, and best of all, no one has to carry all those heavy files around. All you need is your computer. But that’s where the other side of the equation comes into play.

The Grey Smoothies fondly imagine themselves as inhabiting the same plane as the bankers and commercial wizards of the world, and accordingly, think that the courts should be working with the same technology they use in Canary Wharf or on Wall Street. And unfortunately, someone has convinced them that this is the path to the Grey Smoothie Holy Grail – reducing the cost of running the courts to almost nothing in the interests of value for money for the taxpayer. Unfortunately, whoever told the Grey Smoothies that computerisation was the Holy Grail of cheap and efficient court administration omitted to add an important proviso: that it only works if you spend the money to buy computers and programmes adequate to the complex task of running a court. We’ve been threatened several times before with the advent of the Paperless Court – it’s been an ongoing saga ever since I took over as RJ – but the prototypes the Grey Smoothies have introduced in the past have had the unmistakeable whiff of underfunding about them. They haven’t worked very well, and have been abandoned shortly after being trumpeted as the salvation of the court system. None of these failures has been cheap, and after a while you have to question how much value for money the taxpayer is actually getting out of it all.

In addition to those technical concerns, the Grey Smoothies tend to overestimate the human aspects of making the system work – in other words, the talents of those of us on the bench when it comes to computers. Of the four judges at Bermondsey, only Marjorie Jenkins can claim any real expertise with computers. As a busy commercial silk before she became a judge, she mastered modern forms of communication in a way that most of us who spent our lives at the criminal bar did not. It’s expected in the world of banking and commerce, which has always seemed to me to revolve around three basic assumptions: that the continuance of human existence depends on the availability of twenty-four-hour phone and internet access; that the sum of all human knowledge can be expressed as a multi-coloured pie chart; and that all information must be capable of being transmitted instantaneously to any place on earth – how mankind survived until these conditions could be fulfilled being something of a mystery.

In the world of crime, that’s not exactly the tradition. We work at a slower pace, using such outdated, but time-honoured technology as pens and paper; and most of us think that we are not losing anything because of it. As barristers, many of us were members of chambers that didn’t even have a typist until we were getting quite senior in the profession; and even a few years ago, while most barristers had acquired personal computers, you were still looked on as a bit pretentious if you knew much more than how to turn it on. My colleague Hubert Drake, who is not too far from retirement – and, as far as computers are concerned, a confirmed Luddite – may not even know how to do that. Rory ‘Legless’ Dunblane and I are a little more advanced. We’ve mastered the art of emails and (at least in Legless’s case) texting, and we understand the basics of cutting and pasting and so on. But that’s about it. There is some mitigation, at least for those of us, like Hubert, old enough to have been on the bench for a good few years now. If you started your primary school education writing in chalk on a slate tablet, and were already of mature years when the original steam-powered personal computers were making their debut, I think you can be forgiven for not keeping up with every nuance of the computer revolution. Marjorie, by way of contrast, is up with most of them and so by comparison with most judges she is something of an expert. Typically, when my computer is doing something I don’t understand or can’t control, she’s the person I go to for advice, and usually whatever she tells me to do works.

I had hoped that the old paper system might last just long enough for me to retire and allow a new, more computer-savvy generation of judges to get to grips with the new technology. There are some such judges in place already, like Marjorie; and you can see judges-in-waiting, as counsel, with their laptops on the bench in front of them, their PowerPoint presentations in court, and so on. That’s what I mean when I say that I’m beginning to feel like a relic of the past, a dinosaur in a post-meteor world. But there’s to be no reprieve. We judges, products of another time as we may be, will have to cope with change as best we can. In fairness to the Grey Smoothies, they have done their best to educate us. We’ve received screed after screed of information – electronically, of course – and several seminars from visiting computer nerds; and we have learned something. But it’s a bit like learning a foreign language. If you grow up speaking a language, it’s effortless; if you try to learn as an adult, you may achieve a certain fluency, but it will never become second nature. Or perhaps, at the end of the day, it’s a cultural question: something to do with teaching an old dog new tricks – it’s not that the dog doesn’t understand them; it’s more that sometimes he just doesn’t feel inclined to play ball. I suspect that most of us, when faced with the relentless march of progress, have something of Mr Fezziwig about us.

But you can’t tell the Grey Smoothies any of that. As far as they’re concerned, they’re on the road to the Holy Grail, and now they think they’ve ironed out the teething troubles that held back Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain and the rest of them. So the Paperless Court is about to be rolled out, as the phrase is in Grey Smoothie-speak; and Stella, who’s done a whole day of training in Cardiff to prepare her for this new era of technological wonders, has been deputed to show all of us how it works this morning, so that we can take our computers into court for the first time. Her presentation ends just before ten thirty – the appointed hour at which the Paperless Court is to be switched on for us simultaneously, rather like the Blackpool Illuminations.

All four judges will be doing a test hearing with our computers in place on the bench. Mine is a plea and case management hearing in the case of a thirty-something defendant called Gerry Farmer. Gerry Farmer is charged with three counts of handling stolen goods, to which Emily Phipson, who’s prosecuting, tells me he is about to plead guilty. I’ve got Stella sitting up on the bench with me, just to make sure that I get off to a good start. Stella is our brilliant list officer, who almost single-handedly keeps the work of the court flowing: scheduling trials and pleas of guilty, and applications of every kind; making sure that each of the four judges has the right amount of work; arguing with solicitors, the CPS, and anyone else who tries to stand in her way. She’s also my confidante in sensitive matters, such as those affecting the other judges and the court staff. She is the one person in the building without whom the place would actually fall apart.

Stella has summoned up the file in Mr Farmer’s case for me on the screen. I’m feeling less than comfortable about having my computer with me on the bench. It’s invading my personal space, taking up room in front of me and to my left, room I’m used to having available for Archbold and my notebook. Once the file has come up, Stella whispers to me that if I want to take notes, there’s another file I can go to. Together we press a letter on my keyboard, and sure enough up it comes – a blank screen inviting the taking of a judicial note. But I’m not sure I could find my way back to the case file without Stella, and I’m aware of Emily and Piers Drayford, who’s defending, grinning up at me. They’ve been told what’s going on, and asked to be patient: but to them, switching between files is second nature and their patience isn’t going to last indefinitely. Besides which, I can’t spend all day on Gerry Farmer. I need to get on with the case of Muriel Jones before lunch if I’m to finish her evidence today and not have to drag her back to court tomorrow. So the habit of a lifetime prevails: I grab a pen and make my notes in my notebook. Now I need to go back to the Farmer file to look at the indictment, but when I try to return, the screen goes a bright blue colour and there’s a message saying, ‘Please sign in’. I glance at Stella, panicking slightly.

‘I have signed in,’ I protest quietly.

‘Enter your password again,’ she whispers.

Recently, I’ve taken a simple approach to passwords. Until someone told me that the Grey Smoothies insist on frequent changes of password, I opted for rather complicated ones designed to thwart even the most ingenious hacker – like Marjorie, who is working her way through the pantheon of Greek and Roman deities. But when I had to change them regularly, it all started to seem unduly complicated and since then I’ve resorted to CharlieWOne, CharlieWTwo, and so on. That seems to work well enough. But not today. When I type in ‘CharlieWFour’, the current version, I get the message, ‘Incorrect password: try again’.

‘No, it’s asking for your new “Paperless” password,’ Stella whispers; and belatedly, I remember that Paperless requires a second password, beginning with a capital letter and containing at least eight digits and including at least one numeral and one other symbol. I duly selected such a password this morning, and I confess that in frustration I went with ‘Sodthis!1’. I duly type this in the space provided, and the Farmer file pops back up. Stella smiles benevolently, and points to where it says ‘Indictment’. I tap again, and hey presto, there it is.

Perusing the indictment, I see that we have a problem we never seemed to have before draft indictments were sent electronically: namely, that no one ever seems to proofread them before sending them to the court. In the present case, Emily is in the embarrassing position of having to ask for leave to amend the statement of offence in count one, so that it reads: ‘Handling stolen goods, contrary to section 22(1) of the Theft Act 1968’ in place of the current text, ‘Ask counsel to insert appropriate details’. I allow the amendment with a deliberate show of ill grace; only to move to count two and find something that doesn’t feel quite right in the particulars of the offence. The particulars of offence in count two allege that Mr Farmer: ‘Dishonestly received a solar gorilla, knowing or believing the same to be stolen goods’. My court clerk, Carol, duly puts count two to Mr Farmer, who looks a bit bemused, but as Piers has advised, duly proffers a plea of guilty.

‘Are we sure that’s correct, Miss Phipson?’ I ask.

‘Your Honour?’

‘Has anyone been in touch with the London Zoo?’ Both counsel are staring at me. ‘To ask whether they have a record of such a creature going missing,’ I explain. ‘It sounds like the kind of thing they would notice, don’t you think?’

They both look at count two again, and Emily mutters something under her breath. Piers is also looking a bit embarrassed – as he should. Emily turns behind her to consult the CPS representative and the officer in the case, DC Martindale, and after some whispered discussion – and, ironically, some shuffling of old-fashioned paper – it emerges that the item dishonestly received by Mr Farmer was in fact a solar-powered grill. I allow the amendment, and ask Carol to arraign the defendant on count two again. He pleads guilty again, this time more confidently.

And so it goes on. By the time I’ve released Gerry Farmer on bail pending preparation of a pre-sentence report, I’ve just about mastered the art of accessing case files and individual documents, and to my delight, I find and open the Laura Catesby file without any assistance whatsoever from Stella. She leaves, assuring me that she is only a phone call away if I need her. For the first time, I find myself alone in the Paperless Court.

‘May it please your Honour, members of the jury, my name is Susan Worthington and I appear to prosecute in this case. The defendant Laura Catesby, the lady sitting in the dock at the back of the court, is represented by my learned friend Mr Roderick Lofthouse.’

Susan appears regularly at Bermondsey, both for the prosecution and the defence, but I’ve always felt that prosecution is her forte. She is naturally quite tall and imposing, and when on the prosecution side, has the habit of drawing herself up to her full height and giving the court, defence counsel and defendant alike a particularly menacing stare through her dark brown tortoiseshell glasses. Sometimes she gives the jury the same treatment if she thinks their attention may be wandering a bit; but thus far this morning she has reserved the stare for Roderick.

That’s not going to put Roderick off his game – during his long career he has been faced with many menacing stares, including a fair number from me. He will react as he always does, smiling blandly and giving every appearance of ignoring it: nothing new there. What’s more interesting about Roderick in this case is that he isn’t prosecuting. For some years now he has spent most of his time trying to get convictions rather than prevent them, and I’m curious. Glancing through the file, I see that my first instinct is correct: Mrs Catesby is not in receipt of legal aid. Roderick will have been retained privately, and I’m sure his clerk will have negotiated a very decent fee for her defence. Mrs Catesby comes from monied respectability – it’s one of the more puzzling aspects of the case – and I’m sure the prospect of a prison sentence had her solicitors scrambling to retain the most senior member of the Bermondsey Bar before the CPS could snatch him from them. No wonder Roderick is looking so pleased with himself. That’s the kind of attention to warm the cockles of any barrister’s heart.

‘Members of the jury, I’m going to ask the usher to hand out copies of the indictment, which you heard the clerk read to you a few minutes ago.’

Dawn, our usher, also the court’s first aid person and expert on home remedies and today wearing a bright orange dress under her gown, flits around the courtroom with truly astonishing speed. Despite her lack of height, she moves like a human dynamo; in a matter of a few seconds, she has furnished the jury with copies of the indictment, one between two, casually retrieving and restoring a pen one of them had dropped over the front of the jury box along the way.

‘If you look at the indictment with me, you will see that Laura Catesby is charged with five counts of theft and a sixth count alleging attempted theft. These counts represent what the prosecution say is a pattern of dishonest conduct over a long period of time. You will hear that over a period of about four years, Mrs Catesby stole money from a woman called Muriel Jones. Mrs Jones, members of the jury, is an elderly lady, a widow now almost ninety-three years of age. You will hear that Mrs Catesby met Mrs Jones at the church they both attend, the church of St Mortimer-in-the-Fields, here in Bermondsey.

‘Although Mrs Jones is in remarkably good health for her age, like anyone aged eighty-eight, as she was when they first met, she was glad to accept offers of help from friends, doing things like shopping and cleaning, which had become harder for her over the years. Mrs Jones’s own family live far from London; she has one son in Yorkshire, and the other living abroad, in South Africa. She didn’t see much of them, and her friends replaced them in her life to a large extent. She numbered Mrs Catesby among her friends. But the prosecution say that, far from being a true friend, Mrs Catesby made a pretence of befriending Mrs Jones, so that she could win her trust and pave the way for a campaign of theft which, over a four-year period, enabled her to steal a total of over ten thousand pounds. Mrs Jones was not a rich woman, members of the jury, but her husband, Henry, had left her reasonably well provided for after his death. Sadly, a large chunk of that provision is now gone, stolen by Mrs Catesby.

‘How, you may ask, was Mrs Catesby able to steal so much before what she had done came to light? Members of the jury, it was, as I said, a question of building trust. She started by insinuating herself into Mrs Jones’s life, volunteering to run errands for her, doing some shopping, picking up cleaning, washing up, making her a sandwich and a cup of soup at lunchtime, and so on. At first, you will hear, Mrs Catesby paid for any shopping out of her own money, presented Mrs Jones with the receipts, and was then reimbursed in cash. But as time went by she persuaded Mrs Jones that it would be easier if Mrs Jones trusted her with her debit card when she went out shopping. Seeing no reason to doubt this woman she knew from her church, Mrs Jones did as Mrs Catesby suggested.’

I see some members of the jury looking in the direction of the dock, and I follow their eyes. Laura Catesby is sitting next to the dock officer with a faraway expression that suggests that the proceedings are boring her. She is dressed in a frilly purple blouse with a black skirt, and she’s flaunting a string of pearls around her neck, not to mention a gold watch and two or three impressively sized rings. Now in my experience, regardless of what you’re charged with, it’s probably not a great idea to appear in front of a Bermondsey jury looking like that; but in a case where you’re charged with stealing more than ten thousand pounds from an elderly widow it seems almost reckless. I’m surprised that Roderick or her solicitor didn’t send her straight back home to change. Perhaps they tried. She doesn’t look like a woman who likes being told what to do. A middle-aged man in a grey suit and a red tie is trying not to look too conspicuous in the public gallery – the husband, I deduce, from the occasional furtive exchange of glances between public gallery and dock. Appearances can be deceptive, of course, but he strikes me as a man who spends more time following orders than giving them.

‘Count one,’ Susan continues, ‘is a count covering the whole four-year period. It deals with all the known occasions on which Mrs Catesby used Mrs Jones’s debit card improperly when she went shopping. There are many examples of Mrs Catesby taking more than the cost of the items she bought and gave to Mrs Jones. Her main method of stealing money was to ask for cash back in the amount of twenty-five or fifty pounds, which she then kept for herself. On other occasions she purchased items for herself and used Mrs Jones’s money to pay for them. The total amount she obtained in this way over that long period of time, the prosecution say, is in the region of eight thousand pounds.

‘Counts two to five relate to specific occasions on which Mrs Catesby stole money from Mrs Jones by inventing stories involving her two daughters. Members of the jury, in many ways this is the most distressing and puzzling aspect of the case. Mrs Catesby didn’t need the money she stole. She had a good job as a business manager in a large accountancy firm. Her husband is a fund manager in the City. She has two daughters, Sophie, now aged sixteen, and Emma, now aged thirteen. You will hear, members of the jury, that Mrs Catesby told Mrs Jones a number of blatant lies involving her two daughters. Count two deals with an occasion on which she told Mrs Jones that Emma was seriously ill and needed money for private surgery. She told Mrs Jones that it was just a loan, that it was necessary only because of a temporary financial difficulty, and that she would repay the money as soon as she could. Mrs Jones told Mrs Catesby to take what she needed out of her savings account, and gave her the authorisation to do so. On that occasion, Mrs Catesby took one thousand pounds. That sum was never repaid. Members of the jury, Emma has never needed surgery, and, as far as the prosecution is aware, has never been seriously ill.

‘Counts three, four and five deal with similar requests for money, also dressed up as loans, and also involving thefts from Mrs Jones’s savings account. In each of these cases, Mrs Catesby told Mrs Jones that because of temporary financial difficulties she was unable to pay school fees for Emma or Sophie at a well-known Christian school for girls in Surrey. She told Mrs Jones that she might have to take the girls out of that school and send them to an ordinary London comprehensive where, Mrs Catesby insisted, they were likely to encounter drugs and immorality. On hearing this, Mrs Jones gave Mrs Catesby the money she asked for: five hundred pounds on each of the occasions dealt with in these three counts. Members of the jury, neither Emma nor Sophie has ever been educated privately. Both girls attend a state comprehensive school in South London.

‘The thefts came to light because, when the so-called loans were not repaid, Mrs Jones started to worry, and became suspicious. She contacted Ronald, her son who lives in Yorkshire. Ronald will give evidence, members of the jury, and he will tell you that when his mother voiced these concerns, he came to see her, took charge of her bank statements, and immediately saw the scale of the money that was missing. Rather ingeniously, you may think, having a certain technical expertise as an engineer, he also installed a hidden camera and voice-operated recorder in Mrs Jones’s kitchen, where Mrs Jones and Mrs Catesby talked when Mrs Catesby visited. He then arranged for Mrs Catesby to visit Mrs Jones in the kitchen while he concealed himself in one of the bedrooms. As luck would have it, the camera caught Mrs Catesby rifling though Mrs Jones’s purse while she was at the stove making coffee, and on his monitor in the bedroom Ronald was able to watch her do it in real time. Ronald left the cover of the bedroom, confronted Mrs Catesby, and saw that she was holding fifty pounds in cash. Members of the jury, that is count six, the charge of attempted theft. Ronald immediately called the police, and detained Mrs Catesby until they arrived.’

Susan scans her notes for a few moments.

‘Members of the jury, I needn’t take up your time going through the police investigation now. You will hear all about it from the officers. To put it shortly, they carried out a thorough examination of Mrs Jones’s bank accounts. They would have liked to go through the receipts Mrs Catesby gave her when she returned from shopping, but the receipts were not in Mrs Jones’s flat. The police did find two or three receipts in Mrs Catesby’s house when they searched it, but that was all. The prosecution say that she made sure to remove them from Mrs Jones’s flat when she left, so as to cover her tracks. It was to be a paperless crime. But fortunately, DC Benson, the police forensic accountant, was able to reconstruct the amounts from the records of two stores where most of the shopping was done. The police also applied to a judge to order the disclosure of the Catesby family’s bank accounts. An examination of those accounts revealed no payments either for private surgery or for private school fees.

‘Mrs Catesby was arrested and interviewed under caution at the police station in the presence of her solicitor. She told the police that Mrs Jones had given her permission to take “a little something for herself” whenever she did the shopping. She also claimed that the payments in counts two to five were outright gifts from Mrs Jones to Emma and Sophie, gifts made for no better reason than that she liked the girls and wanted to help them. She denied any mention of loans for surgery or school fees. Members of the jury, the prosecution say that her explanation is patently false and dishonest.

‘With your Honour’s leave,’ Susan concludes, ‘I will call the evidence.’ She turns to me. ‘Your Honour, Mrs Jones is here at court. She’s been waiting with one of our volunteers from the victims and witnesses unit. She’s in good health, but she has told us that she can’t sit in one place for too long. I’ve promised her that we will give her frequent breaks. Would your Honour rise for a few moments, so that we can bring her into court and make her comfortable?’

With any elderly or vulnerable witness, trials move rather more slowly than in other cases and of course, I’ve had Gerry Farmer and the Solar Gorilla to deal with this morning before I became free to start the trial. But it’s something you can’t avoid – you have to work on the witness’s schedule until her evidence is concluded.

‘Certainly, Miss Worthington,’ I reply. ‘Coffee break, members of the jury. Fifteen minutes.’

The jurors give me a cheerful nod, but one or two cast rather dark glances in the direction of the dock on the way out of court. I’m finding it hard to resist the temptation to do the same.

Muriel Jones looks small and frail, not quite invisible but hard to see clearly in the witness box. But she has no difficulty in making herself heard. She takes the oath in a strong, clear voice.

‘Mrs Jones,’ Susan begins, having elicited her name and age, ‘do you know the defendant, Laura Catesby?’

Mrs Jones directs a sad look towards the dock. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Would you tell the jury how you first met Ms Catesby?’

‘It was at church.’

‘Is that St Mortimer’s church in Bermondsey?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘How long have you been a member of the congregation at St Mortimer’s?’

Mrs Jones smiles thinly. ‘Oh, goodness, now you’re asking, aren’t you?’

Susan returns the smile. ‘I don’t mean exactly. Roughly how long?’

‘Well, I’ve been going to St Mortimer’s all my life. My parents started taking me there when I was just a little girl; I went to Sunday school, I had my first communion, and I was confirmed there, and I’ve been going ever since.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Jones. Do you remember when you first met Mrs Catesby?’

At which point, for the first time, Mrs Jones seems hesitant. Susan knows that some patience will probably be required this morning. She gives her a moment, and doesn’t press her immediately.

She shakes her head. ‘I couldn’t tell you exactly.’

‘All right, just tell us as far as you remember. We don’t need an exact date.’ Still, the witness hesitates. Susan glances up at me. ‘Would it help you to see your witness statement?’

‘Yes. I think it would.’

Witnesses are always allowed to read their witness statements before giving evidence – after all, evidence is supposed to be a test of accuracy, not memory. But if a witness is having trouble remembering the court may permit her to refresh her memory even while giving evidence, and today judges almost always allow it if asked. Roderick could make a bit of a song and dance about it, but we’re dealing with a witness in her nineties, and he knows that I’m not about to keep her statement from her if she needs it. Wisely, he decides to keep his powder dry. In any case, an early hint of memory problems does his case no harm.

‘No objection, your Honour,’ he replies. Dawn quickly takes the statement from Susan and gives it to the witness. Mrs Jones takes her time reading through it.

‘She and her husband and her two girls used to come to church most Sundays,’ she replies eventually, ‘so I can’t give you an exact date, but it must have been at least four or five years ago. Her husband was one of the churchwardens for a while.’

‘And how did you come to talk to Mrs Catesby?

Another look down at the statement. ‘It was when the vicar gave a sermon one Sunday about helping one another.’ She pauses, and glances up at me. ‘That was the former vicar,’ she adds cautiously, ‘Mr Canning. He had to leave because of a… well… a scandal, so he’s not with us any more. We’ve got a lady vicar now, who’s very nice.’

The jury snigger, and I’m sure they’re curious about the details, as we all are when a minister is involved in a scandal. The Reverend Mr Canning had developed the habit of visiting a dominatrix called Madam Rosita and paying her fees from church funds, in respect of which he was convicted of theft in my court, resulting in a premature end to his clerical career. But that’s not on the agenda today.

‘It was Mr Canning who gave the sermon. And I remember I was standing outside church after the service, and Mrs Catesby was standing there with her husband and the girls, and she asked if she could give me a lift home. So I said yes, that would be very kind, and so they gave me a lift home; and from then on they started taking me to and from church almost every Sunday.’

‘Yes. Did Mrs Catesby offer to help you in any other ways?’

Mrs Jones nods. ‘Yes, after they’d been giving me a lift for some time, she asked if she could do some shopping for me. She told me she worked for a company that had an office not far from my block of flats, so she could run some errands for me during her lunch hour or after work. She said it was no problem.’

‘Did you accept that offer?’

‘Yes, I did. Well, I’m not as strong as I was, you know. I’ve got my shopping cart on wheels and Tesco is only a few minutes’ walk. I’ve been going there for years, but as you get older, you know…’ her voice trails away.

‘Yes, of course,’ Susan says. ‘Sadly, Mrs Jones, you’re a widow, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. My Henry’s been dead ten years and more now. I’ve got the two boys, of course, but they’re too far away.’

‘Your sons?’

‘Yes. Ronnie lives up in Yorkshire, near Scarborough, so he does come down to see me now and then. But Jamie’s in Durban – he works for a big international engineering company – so I’m lucky if I see him once a year. He’s got his own family out there in South Africa.’

‘So they can’t help on a regular basis?’

‘No.’

Susan pauses. ‘Mrs Jones, tell the jury how it worked, Mrs Catesby doing the shopping for you. How did you arrange the money and so on?’

She consults her witness statement again.

‘Well, I would make a list of what I wanted. I would give her the list, whenever she came, at lunchtime or after work, or whenever, and she would go and get it for me. She would bring me the receipt, and I would give her the money in cash. I still had to go out myself sometimes, of course. She wasn’t getting everything for me. I would still go to Tesco and the bank, and so on, at least once a week. But she was a big help. I must admit that. She was very helpful.’

‘Yes, I’m sure. Did there come a time when Mrs Catesby suggested a simpler method of dealing with the money?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was that? Explain to the jury what she suggested, please.’

Back to the witness statement for some seconds.

‘She said it would be easier if I just gave her my debit card when she went out shopping for me. I must admit, there were times when I didn’t have enough cash to pay her for the shopping, if I hadn’t got out to the bank, and then I would have to ask her to wait until the next time. It was only a couple of times, but of course I felt bad about it because she was doing me a favour, so at the time, what she suggested seemed like a good idea.’

‘And did you agree to that arrangement?’

‘Yes. I would give her the debit card. I’d told her the code, you know, the four numbers, so she could use it.’

‘Did she still bring the receipts back for you?’

‘Yes, always.’

‘Did you look at them at the time?’

Mrs Jones shakes her head sadly. ‘At first, I did, you know, when I was giving her the cash. But as time went by, when we’d been doing it all regularly for a while, I suppose I didn’t think I needed to. It all seemed to be going well, and I’d met her at church, you know, and I never thought…’ again, her voice trails away.

‘No, of course. Do you know what happened to the receipts she gave you?’

‘Not really. When the police asked about them I didn’t have them, so I expect she walked off with them.’

Roderick is rising to his feet. Susan holds up a hand.

‘But you don’t know? You didn’t actually see her taking receipts from your flat?’

‘I didn’t see her doing it.’

‘All right. Were you checking your bank accounts regularly?’

‘No,’ the witness replies quietly, embarrassed. ‘Not like I should. I have, what d’you call it, that electronic banking. They don’t send me the bank statements any more, do they? I have to go on the computer, or use that little plastic thing. I don’t… I mean, the manager explained to me how to do it, but I’m not really comfortable with it, and when I try to do it, I seem to make mistakes and it doesn’t seem to work properly.’

Paperless, I think to myself, without Stella to help her.

‘I understand,’ Susan says, but I doubt she does. Susan is one of the new generation of computer-savvy judges-in-waiting, who’s been using such technology all her life and probably can’t imagine the world without it. ‘Did Mrs Catesby ever help you in other ways, in addition to doing some shopping for you?’

‘She would collect my cleaning once in a while, and to be fair to her, she was always ready to tidy up a bit for me when she came round, and she would sometimes make me a sandwich and some soup for lunch. As I say, she was very helpful.’

‘Let me turn to something different,’ Susan says. ‘As well as getting to know Mrs Catesby herself, did you come to know her family at all?’

‘I never really got to know her husband, Larry,’ Mrs Jones replies after some thought. ‘He never came round to the flat. But Laura sometimes brought the girls if they weren’t at school, so I did talk to them from time to time. Very nice girls they are, too. They were always very polite and they seemed very well brought up.’

‘Did Mrs Catesby ever mention money in connection specifically with the girls?’

‘Several times,’ Mrs Jones replies.

‘When was the first time, do you remember?’

She thinks for some time, turning over one or two pages of her statement. ‘It must be about three years ago now, at least. She came to do some shopping one lunchtime, and she seemed very upset, teary and so forth.’

‘Did she tell you why?’

‘Yes. She told me that the younger girl, Emma, had some serious medical condition.’

‘Did she tell you what that condition was?’

‘Not as far as I remember. I assumed it was probably cancer.’

‘Why did you assume that? Did she say anything like that?’

‘No, but that’s always the way, isn’t it? No one wants to say the word “cancer”, do they? I mean, if someone has a heart attack or a stroke, they will tell you. But it’s like bad luck if you actually say “cancer”. So they just say that someone’s seriously ill. I suppose I just assumed it.’

‘And how did the subject of money come up?’

She thinks for some time. ‘As far as I remember, Laura said they couldn’t get Emma in for surgery on the NHS because of the waiting times. They thought it was dangerous to delay it, so they wanted to go private, but they didn’t have the money to hand.’

‘But, as I understand it,’ Susan interjects, ‘both Mr and Mrs Catesby had well-paying jobs, didn’t they?’

‘As far as I knew, yes.’

‘So, why was Mrs Catesby talking to you about money?’

‘It was something to do with their investments. If she told me, I can’t remember the details. But it was something to do with, they’d made some expensive investments and they had to rebuild their savings. She said it would only be a couple of months because they were due to get dividends from their investments, but they were a bit strapped for cash until then, and could I loan them some money to tide them over and make sure that Emma could have her operation?’

‘And did you?’

‘Yes, I loaned her a thousand pounds, which is what she said she needed.’

‘How did you arrange to make that money available to her?’

‘I arranged with the bank to take it out of my savings account, and I gave Laura an authorisation to collect it from the bank.’

‘Has Mrs Catesby ever repaid that loan?’

A look towards the dock. ‘No. She has not.’ Following her eyes, I note that Laura Catesby is still looking faintly bored.

‘Is there any question in your mind that it was a loan? Might it have been that you were making a gift of that thousand pounds to Mrs Catesby?’

‘What, a thousand pounds? No. It was a loan. I’m not made of money.’

‘Did Mrs Catesby ever follow up with you, tell you whether Emma had the surgery, how it went, and so on?’

‘She did thank me, and she told me it had been a success, and Emma was fine. But the odd thing was, I didn’t see Emma at church for a long time, and she never thanked me personally, which I thought was very strange, because she was always such a nice, polite girl.’

‘Before you made that loan to Mrs Catesby, how much money did you have in your savings account?’

‘It was something like twenty thousand pounds that my Henry had left me. That was what I had – in addition to my pension, of course. And I do own my flat that I still live in, where I used to live with Henry before he died. But I didn’t have any other money.’

‘Was that the only occasion when Mrs Catesby raised the subject of money in connection with her daughters?’

‘No.’ She’s turning over pages in her statement again.

‘What other occasions were there?’

‘There were times when she told me she couldn’t afford to pay their school fees.’

‘Did she tell you where they were at school?’

‘She said it was a Christian school for girls, St Somebody’s in Surrey…’

‘St Cecilia’s?’ Susan asks.

‘Something like that.’ She looks down at her statement. ‘Yes: St Cecilia’s, in Surrey. She said it was quite an expensive school, but she and Larry were keen on it because they didn’t want the girls going to the comprehensive, because there was a drug problem and the discipline wasn’t what it should be. She was afraid they would be exposed to bad influences: that’s what she said.’

‘Over what period of time was she complaining about not being able to afford the fees?’

‘Over the last two, two and a half years or thereabouts.’

‘And again, did Mrs Catesby explain why she and her husband couldn’t afford the fees?’

‘It was due to their investments, and the dividends hadn’t been as much as they’d hoped. And then Laura’s mother had been very ill, she said, and she’d had to take care of her. So they still didn’t have the money. But she was still insisting that it was just a temporary loan, and she would be able to repay me before long.’ She looks very sad. ‘But she didn’t.’

‘How much did you loan to Mrs Catesby for school fees?’

‘Five hundred each time. She asked me three times.’

‘So, fifteen hundred pounds in total?’

‘Yes.’

‘Plus one thousand for the surgery?’

‘Yes.’

‘That makes two thousand five hundred pounds, doesn’t it? And after looking at your bank accounts and discussing them with your son and with DC Benson, are you now aware that another eight thousand or so…’

‘I’m sorry, your Honour,’ Roderick intervenes, rising ponderously to his feet, as is his way. His rather-too-light single-breasted jacket has been too tight for him for some time now, but as the acknowledged doyen of the Bermondsey Bar, he is allowed some leeway. ‘I must object to that. This witness has no personal knowledge of that amount, or indeed of what happened to it.’

Roderick is right, technically. I’m not sure there’s much point in his objection in the long run. Susan shouldn’t have any trouble proving it through her police witness and the son, Ronald; but if Roderick really insists, that’s what she’ll have to do. But I don’t think that’s Roderick’s real agenda. I’m pretty sure he’s more interested in taking another early pot shot at Mrs Jones’s memory and her credibility as a witness about what happened to her money. Either way, he’s made a good point. I glance at Susan and she nods.

‘I’ll deal with that later in another way,’ she replies. ‘So far, then, Mrs Jones, we have a total of two thousand five hundred pounds, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any of it repaid?’

‘Not a penny.’

Susan pauses for some time. ‘Mrs Jones, the jury may want to know why you parted with so much money to someone you didn’t know all that well, why you trusted Mrs Catesby enough to loan her so much money? What do you say about that?’

I know how Muriel Jones is going to answer that before she opens her mouth, and it’s what’s made me into such an Antonio today.

‘I feel so stupid,’ she replies quietly. ‘I feel like a complete fool. I can imagine what Henry would have to say about it all.’ She bows her head for some seconds before continuing. ‘All I can say is that I met the family in my church, they seemed very respectable, they both had good jobs, they had two well brought up children. They were very nice to me, or so I thought, and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I’m sure they’ve been laughing at me, thinking I’m a real mug. It just breaks my heart.’

‘I think there came a time,’ Susan continues after a suitable pause, ‘when you contacted your son Ronald and told him that you were worried about Mrs Catesby. How did that come about?’

‘It was after I’d loaned her so much money, and she hadn’t repaid a penny,’ Mrs Jones replies. ‘I just started to get this feeling that something was wrong. It was always, she needed more time, not long, just a few weeks, and everything would be all right. But it never was. So I went to my vicar and I told her in confidence what was going on, and she advised me to ask someone I knew I could trust to look into it. So I asked Ronnie to come down and tell me what he thought. He has a good head on his shoulders. I just needed to know what was going on.’

‘And did Ronnie come down to London to see you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He made an appointment to see my bank manager, and got copies of my bank statements going back a few years, my savings account and my ordinary account, and we sat down together and went through them, and he told me…’

Roderick is halfway to his feet to object to the looming hearsay, but Susan raises a hand and deals with it herself.

‘I’m not allowed to ask you what Ronnie told you, Mrs Jones,’ she explains. ‘It’s to do with the rules of evidence. But as a result of what Ronnie found when he looked at your bank accounts, what did he do?’

‘He went out and bought one of those, what d’you call them, miniature cameras, and a recorder, and he installed them in my kitchen.’

‘Why in the kitchen?’

‘That’s where I always talked with Laura when she came to the flat.’

‘Did he do anything else?’

‘Yes. He told me to invite Laura to come round to the flat the next day, which I did. I told her I needed some help putting up some curtains.’

‘Did Mrs Catesby come the next day?’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Well, Ronnie told me to behave normally, and I did have some curtains I wanted put up, so I was talking with Laura in the kitchen and I made her a cup of coffee, and Ronnie was in my bedroom, watching and listening to us.’

‘He’d set it up so that he could watch and listen from a distance?’

‘Yes. He’s always been clever with his hands. He’s an engineer, you know. Both my sons are engineers, like their father before them.’

‘Yes. And what happened next?’

‘All of a sudden I see Ronnie running into the kitchen. I was a bit taken aback because it all happened very suddenly and I was turned with my back to Laura. But I see Ronnie run straight over to Laura and grab her arm. She tells him to let go of her, and she’s asking him who he is. But then I see that she’s got hold of my handbag, which I’d left on the kitchen table, and she has some money in her hand. She’d got it out of my purse. She’d taken fifty pounds, two twenties and a tenner: right under our noses. The cheek of it…’

Glancing towards the dock, I see Mrs Catesby smile briefly before resuming her look of boredom.

‘Mrs Jones, did you give Mrs Catesby permission to take any money from your purse on that day?’

‘No. I did not.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Ronnie called the police. Laura tried to leave, but Ronnie wouldn’t let her. He told her she had to wait for the police to come.’

‘And did the police come, and did they arrest Mrs Catesby?’

‘Yes, they did.’

‘Mrs Jones, did you ever give Mrs Catesby permission to take money over and above what she needed to pay for the shopping she did for you?’

‘No. I did not.’

‘Did you ever invite her to take “a bit for herself”, or “a little something for herself”, or anything like that?’

‘No. I did not.’

‘Or to take cash back using your debit card?’

‘No. I did not.’

‘Or to buy things for herself or her family at your expense without telling you?’

‘No. I did not.’

‘Did you ever make a gift of money, as opposed to a loan, to Mrs Catesby or to either of her daughters?’

‘No. I did not.’ She pauses for a few moments. ‘I didn’t mind helping her out because I believed her when she told me why she needed the money. Having met her at church, and with her husband being a churchwarden, and with her girls being so nice and polite, and…’

‘Yes,’ Susan replies. ‘Thank you, Mrs Jones, that’s all I have. Your Honour, I see the time. It’s a bit early to break for lunch, but …’

‘I’m sure Mrs Jones would welcome a break,’ Roderick agrees immediately. ‘May I cross-examine at two o’clock?’

And so to lunch, an oasis of calm in a desert of chaos.

I’ve brought my own lunch today, as three out of the four Bermondsey judges, myself included, do a good deal of the time, to lessen the risk from exposure to the canteen food. When I take my place at the huge table in the judicial mess, Marjorie is playing unenthusiastically with a mackerel salad. Rory Dunblane, known to us all as ‘Legless’ because of a now dimly remembered episode after a chambers dinner in his days at the Bar, has brought in some kind of posh-looking soup in a heavy-duty plastic container, and a couple of bread rolls. Only Hubert Drake consistently risks the dreaded dish of the day, which today seems to be some kind of Chinese concoction with noodles and vegetables. Hubert, whose age is somewhat in dispute, is the oldest of us and (according to my calculations, though not his) within sight of retirement; but his constitution seems to cope with the food in the mess remarkably well, and he often claims that he needs his ‘proper’ lunch to tide him over until his nightly ritual of dinner at the Garrick Club.

‘That’s a nasty little case you’ve got, Charlie, that Catesby woman,’ Legless observes. ‘I did her plea and case management hearing. She turned up dressed to the nines and gave the impression that she couldn’t care less about being in court.’

I nod. ‘She’s giving the same impression now.’

‘Is Roderick still defending her?’

‘Yes. He’s due to cross-examine the widow Jones after lunch.’

‘Well, at least you can trust Roderick to be nice to the widow Jones,’ Legless says. ‘He’s not going to beat her up the way some younger members of our bar would.’

‘What are you going to give her if she goes down?’ Hubert asks. ‘I’d give her five years straight inside, and that would be for starters. Taking advantage of the elderly like that: far too much of it going on; absolutely disgraceful.’

‘I’m not sure you can get to five years under the sentencing guidelines, Hubert,’ Legless replies, with a grin towards me. Over the years, we’ve had many lunchtime debates over Hubert’s views on sentencing, which in general date from the Raj era, but we’ve long since given up trying to convert him to contemporary practice. The Court of Appeal has also made several attempts without success, and if they can’t persuade him, what chance do we have?

‘That’s what’s wrong with the bloody courts these days,’ Hubert protests. ‘You can’t pass a decent sentence without someone telling you it’s not allowed under the guidelines. Stuff and nonsense. When you have a case like yours you have to be firm. Otherwise, all the older people are going to go the same way as Harry Buller.’

Hubert returns to his dish of the day without elaborating.

‘Who is Harry Buller?’ Legless asks after a few seconds.

‘What? Oh, Harry’s a member of the Garrick. Known him for years. He was telling me about it the other night at dinner. He got one of those, whatsits, emails, apparently from a friend of his, saying the poor blighter was in Tanzania or somewhere on a safari trip, and he’d been kidnapped by these bandits, who were demanding fifty thousand pounds in ransom, and so on; and he’d got two other friends to help him, but he still needed fifteen thousand, and would Harry please transfer it to a numbered account in some bank in the Cayman Islands.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Marjorie says, looking up from her salad.

‘But it turned out the email wasn’t from his friend at all; it was from some fellow in Nigeria. Complete bloody fraud from start to finish.’

‘Imagine that,’ Legless murmurs.

‘Don’t tell me he fell for a story like that, Hubert,’ I add.

Hubert shrugs. ‘Harry’s getting on a bit, Charlie,’ he explains. ‘He’s not as quick as he used to be. It wasn’t about the money. Harry’s made of money, so he wasn’t too bothered about losing the fifteen thousand, but he was asking me what we judges were going to do about it. He was saying that when you catch people like that, you should send them inside for a good long stretch, so they can’t defraud people who are less well off; and I agree with him, guidelines or no guidelines. And that’s exactly what you should do with the Catesby woman.’

He returns briefly to the dish of the day, but then suddenly looks up. ‘It’s easy enough to laugh at Harry, but it comes to us all eventually, you know, Charlie,’ he adds.

I nod. I’m only too well aware of that today. It’s time to change the subject. ‘How did you all get on with the Paperless Court?’

‘Fine,’ Marjorie replies immediately.

‘I think I’ve just about got the idea,’ Legless replies. ‘But it’s taking me forever to find a particular document when I need it; and sometimes it shuts down if it’s a big file, and I have to put my password in again. Bloody nuisance.’

Marjorie looks up. ‘Oh, not that again’, she says. ‘That’s what happened with the last version. How did you get on, Charlie?’

‘Oh, fine,’ I reply quickly, and obviously, not entirely truthfully. ‘Hubert, were you all right?’

‘Right as rain,’ Hubert replies with a smile.

‘Really?’ Marjorie asks. ‘Are you sure, Hubert, because if you like, I can always show you…’

‘No, thank you,’ Hubert replies at once. ‘Absolutely fine. No problem.’

The three of us exchange glances.

‘How did you manage?’ I begin tentatively. ‘I only ask because…’

Hubert looks up from the dish of the day. ‘Perfectly simple, Charlie,’ he replies. ‘I got my clerk to print the files out for me.’

* * *

Monday afternoon

‘Would it be fair, Mrs Jones,’ Roderick begins quietly, almost diffidently, ‘to say that your memory isn’t quite what it used to be?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my memory,’ Mrs Jones protests.

‘It’s just that I couldn’t help noticing that you were reading your witness statement quite a lot when you were answering questions from my learned friend. Is that because some of the detail escapes you when it comes to events a long time ago?’

‘Everybody has trouble remembering things from a long time ago,’ she insists.

‘Of course,’ Roderick agrees reassuringly. ‘I wasn’t being critical, Mrs Jones. But as you know, I’m representing Mrs Catesby and I have to try to make sure that the jury know how well you remember what happened between you and Mrs Catesby. I’m sure you understand.’

‘If you say so’, she replies grudgingly.

‘Would it be fair to say that when you first met the Catesby family, you were rather lonely?’

She thinks for some time. ‘I suppose so, in a way,’ she replies eventually. ‘I think most people feel they’re on their own by the time they get to my age.’

‘Of course,’ Roderick concedes. ‘Sadly, you’d lost your husband, and your two sons were rather far away, weren’t they?’

‘Yes. That’s true.’

‘So when you met people in church who spoke to you and took an interest in you, it must have made a big difference to you, mustn’t it, brightened your day a bit?’

‘I talk to a lot of people in church, including the vicar. St Mortimer’s is a very friendly church, always has been.’

‘But the Catesbys went out of their way to take an interest in you, didn’t they? They offered you a lift to and from church, offered to do shopping for you, and so on?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you responded to them; you welcomed the attention?’

‘I was grateful to them for offering to help me, yes.’

‘Do you have any grandchildren, Mrs Jones?’

‘Jamie, my son who lives in South Africa, has two children, a boy and a girl. They’re almost grown up now, seventeen and fourteen. I don’t see them very often.’ Once again, she looks sad.

‘But you saw quite a lot of Mrs Catesby’s two daughters, Sophie and Emma, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. I saw them at church, and once in a while Laura would have them with her when she came to see me.’

‘And you told the jury earlier that you found them to be very polite, well brought up?’

‘Yes, they were: always.’

‘Did you come to see them, in a way, as the granddaughters you didn’t have – at least, you didn’t have close to you, here in London?’

Mrs Jones has to think about that one. ‘I suppose I did get quite fond of them,’ she admits. ‘Yes. But I didn’t see them often enough to think of them as my grandchildren.’

‘But if Mrs Catesby had told you that Sophie or Emma needed something, something that cost money, you would have helped, wouldn’t you – to the extent you could?’

She looks down for just a moment. ‘I did help them,’ she points out.

‘That’s my point, Mrs Jones…’ Roderick begins.

‘The only trouble was, she wasn’t telling me the truth.’

‘Well, Mrs Catesby told you, didn’t she, that she and her husband were having some problems because of investments they’d made – they were strapped for cash, I think you told the jury?’

‘Yes. That’s what she told me.’

‘Do you have any reason to doubt that?’

‘I wouldn’t have any way to know, would I?’ she replies after some time.

‘So you believed her?’

‘At first I did, yes.’

‘Yes, and you agreed to help out, didn’t you?’

‘Not just because they were short of cash. I helped out because she told me they had to pay for an operation or school fees.’

‘Are you sure about that, Mrs Jones?’ No reply at first. ‘If you need to refer to your statement again, please do.’

‘I said about that in my statement. It’s right here, on page three.’

‘You did indeed, Mrs Jones, that’s quite right. But if you would turn over to page four with me for a moment…’

‘What was that? Page four?’

‘Yes, please.’

She’s turning over the page slowly.

‘Got it? Five lines down from the top, do you say, “I liked Sophie and Emma, and I wanted to make sure they didn’t suffer just because their parents had made a bad investment.” Is that what you told the police?’

‘Yes.’

‘Weren’t you saying there that you would have helped them anyway? It wasn’t tied to operations or school fees, was it? You were just helping to make sure they were all right for money?’

‘Yes, but it was because of the operation and the school fees. That’s why they needed the money.’

‘You told the jury earlier that at some point Mrs Catesby had said something about her mother being ill?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it possible that you got a bit confused – that it was her mother who was ill, not Emma?’

‘No… I don’t think so… no, I’m sure it was Emma…’ but there’s some hesitation.

‘When the girls came to see you, was it after they’d left school for the day?’

‘They sometimes came in the afternoon: yes.’

‘When they came in the afternoons, would they be wearing school uniform?’

She searches her witness statement: in vain; it’s not there. I know this because I’m following it on my screen, and feeling rather pleased with myself.

‘They may have done. I can’t remember.’

‘Do you know Wood Lane Comprehensive School?’

‘I know where it is, yes.’

‘It’s quite close to your flat, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you see children walking or cycling to and from Wood Lane sometimes? Would you recognise their school uniform?’

She thinks. ‘I’m not sure. I think it’s a black blazer with a shield on the pocket, a red shield, I think.’

‘Something like this?’ Roderick asks, holding up a blazer matching that description.

‘It could be,’ Mrs Jones replies. ‘I can’t be sure. I see them at a distance, mostly, from my window.’

‘Fair enough,’ Roderick replies.

‘Is my learned friend offering it as an exhibit?’ Susan asks, probably for the sole purpose of interrupting Roderick’s flow a bit.

‘I’d prefer not to,’ Roderick says with a smile. ‘I don’t want Sophie to catch a chill going home.’

The jury chuckle. Susan shoots Roderick one of her looks.

‘Mrs Jones, you also told the jury that Emma never said thank you for the money for her operation, is that right? And that surprised you because she’s a polite, well brought-up girl?’

‘Yes, it did surprise me.’

‘But if she never needed an operation in the first place, that would explain the fact that she never thanked you for paying for an operation, wouldn’t it?’

No reply.

‘Mrs Jones,’ Roderick continues, ‘what I’m suggesting to you is this: you were understandably lonely; the Catesbys befriended you after you met at St Mortimer’s; Laura was very helpful to you, shopping, tidying up, making lunch, and so on; naturally, you were grateful; you came to like Sophie and Emma; and you gave them money – as a gift, out of friendship and gratitude. It’s all perfectly natural, perfectly understandable. There was no mention of operations or school fees, was there?’

She stares at him for some time.

‘Did you understand my question, Mrs Jones?’

‘Yes… no… it was a loan… it wasn’t a gift… she kept saying she needed more time to pay me back…’

‘And didn’t you say to Mrs Catesby, when she went shopping for you, that she should take “a little something” for herself, just for helping you. That, again, would be quite natural, wouldn’t it? After all, she was giving up her lunchtime or her early evening to help you, wasn’t she? She was giving you her time, her family’s time?’

‘I suppose she was, yes… but that doesn’t mean I gave her permission to take money out of my bank account, or go shopping for herself using my card.’

‘She always brought you the receipts when she came back with the shopping, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘Did you ever, in that four-year period, challenge her about the receipts?’

‘Challenge her? What do you mean?’

‘Well, for instance, did you ever say to her, “What do you think you’re doing? You can’t just help yourself to cash from my bank account.” Did you ever say anything like that to her?’

Mrs Jones shakes her head.

Roderick looks up at me. ‘Your Honour, technically, I’m supposed to put my case to the witness. One interpretation of that is that I should take Mrs Jones through all the various transactions we will be hearing about from DC Benson.’ He shifts his glance to Susan. ‘If I do that, it will take me the rest of the afternoon, and perhaps into tomorrow morning, because it would only be fair to Mrs Jones to give her at least one break. I would much prefer not to have to keep her for so long. I’m satisfied that I’ve done enough to indicate the nature of my case to your Honour and the jury, and if my learned friend agrees, I would propose to stop now.’

I nod, and so does Susan. It’s a huge advantage of having experienced advocates, that they are not afraid to bend the technical rules in the interests of compassion when the chance offers itself. Roderick has been scrupulously fair in ensuring that Muriel Jones understands his case and has her chance to respond to it, and no purpose would be served by dragging her through each and every receipt and bank account entry. But there are many counsel, on both sides, who would have insisted on it. I tell both counsel that I appreciate what they’ve just agreed to, which I do, and I tell Mrs Jones that she is free either to remain in court, or make her way home, as she wishes. She says she would like to go home, and thanks everybody for listening to her.

The afternoon concludes with Ronald Jones, the son from Yorkshire. He doesn’t have much to say, really. The prosecution is going to get the financial evidence from the forensic accountant, DC Benson, tomorrow: so Susan contents herself with letting Ronald describe finding his mother distressed and worried; going to the bank to get copies of her accounts; going through the accounts and realising that something was wrong, and, in effect luring Laura Catesby into a trap. He also boasts to the jury, with a triumphant flourish, about catching her bang to rights in the act of having fifty pounds away from his mother’s purse; though when challenged about it by Roderick, he concedes that she had not made any move towards transferring the money to her own purse. Nonetheless, when Susan plays the video and recording generated by Ronald’s covert equipment in the kitchen, the whole episode does look rather squalid and underhand, and it’s fairly clear that Mrs Catesby hasn’t asked Mrs Jones’s permission to be rummaging through her handbag, much less take money from it. All in all, it’s a good end to the day for Susan.

I have a few administrative matters to deal with before going home, and Carol has brought me a nice cup of tea to celebrate a successful end to what started as a challenging day. Carol has been in a good mood today: Millwall ended something of a losing streak by winning on Saturday, and as fervent supporters, she and husband Ray had a good weekend on the back of the victory. Carol’s other claim to fame is that she trained as a hairdresser before joining the court service, and she has made use of her skills at court once or twice in urgent situations. But no sooner have I settled down to enjoy the tea than there is a knock on the door. Marjorie opens it and pokes her head inside.

‘Got a minute, Charlie?’ she asks. She sounds rather breathless.

‘Yes, of course, Marjorie. Come in. Do you want some tea?’

She waves the offer away and strides briskly over to take a seat in front of my desk. I’m bracing for bad news about the twins again. Simon and Samantha are away at boarding school, and the school tends to summon Marjorie whenever there’s a suspicion of illness. Husband Nigel does something frightfully important for an international bank, and spends a good chunk of his time abroad, currently in Geneva, I gather. So whenever the school calls, someone has to cover for Marjorie for a day or two, and it sometimes calls for all my diplomatic skills – and Marjorie’s – to pour oil on the troubled waters around whoever has to cover for her. But today, as it turns out, the twins are not the problem.

‘I can’t get into my computer,’ she complains.

‘What do you mean, you can’t get into it? Has it packed up?’

‘Possibly. I’ve tried all the usual things, including restarting it several times, but it keeps coming back to the same message.’

I’m assuming that Marjorie has run into yet another underfunded technology glitch beyond even her experience, and I’m a bit puzzled as to why she’s consulting me about it. The chances of my being equipped to help are remote, to say the least. But since she’s come to me…

‘What are the symptoms?’ I ask.

‘It’s locked me out, Charlie. The damn thing’s frozen solid. There’s a message on the screen that says: “Error 32B. Consult system administrator”.’

‘Who’s the system administrator?’

‘Stella. But I’ve already spoken to her, and she has no idea what it means. It’s not in the manual, apparently.’

‘I thought there was a helpline for this kind of thing,’ I suggest tentatively.

‘There is. Stella and I called them from her office. They sounded very evasive, and all they would say was that someone would call us back.’

I nod. ‘Well, I’m sure they will sort it,’ I reply reassuringly. ‘Perhaps “Error 32B” is one of the new features of the system and not everyone knows how to deal with it yet.’

‘That’s what’s worrying me, Charlie,’ she says. ‘Those people know everything there is to know. Usually when you call the helpline, they take over your computer for a minute or two, fiddle around with the settings or whatever, and Bob’s your uncle.’

‘Well, let’s see what they say when they call back. I’m not sure what else we can do.’

She shakes her head. ‘It wouldn’t matter so much except that I have a judgment to write from when I was sitting in the Family Division as a deputy High Court judge a couple of weeks ago, you remember? I promised the parties I would have it ready by tomorrow. I’ve done most of it, but I need to finish it and I can’t without my computer.’

‘Well, if you don’t hear from them by tomorrow morning, let me know, and I’ll contact them myself and tell them to pull their fingers out.’

Carol has knocked and put her head around the door to tell me she’s leaving for the day.

‘All right, Charlie, thanks,’ Marjorie says. She leaves quickly, and I have the impression that there’s something wrong that I can’t quite put my finger on.

* * *

Monday evening

‘Clara, do you have paperless banking at the church?’ I ask the Reverend Mrs Walden over a glass of Chianti as she is chopping up some green onions for tonight’s pasta sauce. The vicarage feels cold tonight, even though she’s got the heater working in the kitchen. It’s a huge old building with high ceilings and leaky windows, and can stay cool even in the middle of an August heat wave – just before it suddenly traps the heat and turns the place into an oven for days after the sun has disappeared.

‘Yes, of course. We have for years. There’s nowhere to store vast quantities of bank statements at church, and I don’t want them cluttering up my study here. Why do you ask?’

‘I was feeling sorry for Muriel Jones – you know, the elderly lady in this case I’m trying – having to work out how to do all that at her age. She was giving evidence today and she sounded completely bewildered by it all; and I must say, I have every sympathy with her.’

She nods. ‘It must be difficult for her. Of course, Charlie, you know, I’m hearing all about her from Amy Lock.’

‘The new vicar at St Mortimer’s?’

‘Relatively new. It’s been eighteen months since we lost Joshua Canning, hasn’t it?’ She pauses, as if reflecting on how sad it was to lose the Reverend Mr Canning, even in such embarrassing circumstances. Of course, he was her colleague, and inevitably it was a blow to discover the truth about him. It always is, I suppose, when a colleague has a serious problem. ‘We had coffee this morning, and she was telling me how shocked she was when Mrs Catesby was arrested.’

‘She’d be even more shocked if she heard the evidence,’ I reply. I refill both our glasses as the Reverend lights up the stove and starts to fry the onions and garlic.

‘Is it that bad?’

‘Well, of course, we haven’t heard Laura Catesby’s side of it yet, so it’s early days; but if Mrs Jones is right, it’s pretty bad.’

‘I’ll have a word with Amy,’ she suggests. ‘Perhaps she can find someone to help Muriel with her banking. I’m sure she’s got someone in her congregation who wouldn’t mind making a house call.’ She is stirring the sizzling spices gently, getting ready to add the tomatoes. She suddenly smiles. ‘You do realise, Charlie, that we do paperless banking ourselves, too?’

‘Do we?’ I ask. She has done our banking for most of our life together. This dates back to my time at the Bar, when I was self-employed and frantically busy, both conditions that can make dealing with a bank something of a nightmare. I’ve always been grateful that she shielded me from it: I’m doubly grateful now. ‘Did it take you a long time to get the hang of it?’ I ask.

‘Not really,’ she replies. ‘Once you’ve done it once or twice it’s easy enough. I’m sure it’s the same for you at court, with your new paperless system.’

‘Oh, of course,’ I reply as nonchalantly as I can.

* * *

Tuesday morning

Apparently, yesterday was a quiet news day. In the evening, Laura Catesby made the front page of the Standard, and when I stop to pick up my latte and ham and cheese bap – my favourite way of avoiding the hazards of the court cuisine – Elsie and Jeanie, avid readers, are incensed.

‘Just imagine, sir,’ Elsie says, ‘taking advantage of an old lady like that, and her with all that money and a husband with a good job. I don’t know what the world’s coming to. Of course, you’re used to it in your line of work, I’m sure, but I think it’s dreadful.’

‘I’d like to have seen her try that on with my auntie Nell,’ Jeanie adds. ‘She’d have given her what for, and no mistake. She would have shown her the door in no time, believe you me. My auntie Nell could get rid of anyone that came to the door, whether it was the Gypsies or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or anyone else. If she’d caught anyone going through her purse, she’d have taken the frying pan to them.’

‘A formidable lady, by the sound of it,’ I say, handing over my money and making doubly sure it’s enough.

‘My Nan would have done the same,’ Elsie adds. ‘Of course, my Nan wouldn’t have let anyone shop for her anyway. She always did everything herself. She didn’t trust anybody. She would walk all over town looking for the lowest prices – well, you could, in those days, couldn’t you?’

‘She wouldn’t have let anyone rob her blind, would she?’ Jeanie asks.

‘I should say not. She’d have taken the frying pan to the butcher or the baker, my Nan, never mind anyone going through her purse. She almost gave the greengrocer a black eye once, just for overcharging her by a halfpenny…’

Another customer is hovering, trying to push his way through to the counter in the very tight space of the archway coffee bar. I use him as cover to mouth my thanks and make a diplomatic exit.

‘Can you give the son a commendation, guv?’ George asks, handing me my copy of The Times.

‘A commendation?’

‘Yeah. I mean, for putting in all that recording equipment and what have you, and getting her bang to rights with her hand in the old lady’s purse. We need more people like that, don’t we, guv, people who’ll have a go? I mean, with all the cuts and that, the police won’t even come out for something like that, will they? Unless someone gets shot or a bank gets robbed, they don’t want to know, do they? If you ask me, that’s the first thing the Labour Party should do once they get back in, but they’re not even talking about it, are they…?’

Muttering my thanks, I slip quietly away into the bustle of the morning commute.

DC Benson is a very serious-looking young man wearing a dark suit and red tie, and at Susan’s invitation, he has taken his laptop with him into the witness box.

‘Officer,’ Susan begins, once he’s taken the oath, ‘in addition to being a police officer, and indeed a detective, have you received training as a forensic accountant, and are you made available as needed to assist with investigations into fraud cases, and other cases involving financial transactions?’

‘Yes, Miss, that’s correct.’

‘And were you asked to assist DS Gordon, the officer in charge of this case, with the investigation into Mrs Catesby’s activities?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please tell His Honour and the jury what steps you took to find out what had been going on.’

The officer nods and taps a key or two on his computer. ‘At an early stage, once I’d been advised of the nature of the allegations against Mrs Catesby, I advised DS Gordon to apply to the court for access to Mrs Catesby’s bank accounts for the relevant period, and indeed, her husband’s accounts also. I’d already been provided with Mrs Jones’s accounts by her son, Ronald.’

‘What other paperwork did you feel you needed?’

‘I was told that there should have been a large number of receipts for items from some shops where Mrs Catesby had gone shopping for Mrs Jones – two shops mainly, Garner’s and the Cooperative store, both in Bermondsey. But DS Gordon hadn’t been able to find them, except for three receipts dating from about two years ago, which officers found while searching Mrs Catesby’s home pursuant to a search warrant.’

‘What did you do about that?’

DC Benson smiles. ‘To be honest, I thought we were out of luck. I assumed that either Mrs Jones or Mrs Catesby must have thrown them away. But I made inquiries with Garner’s and the Coop, and they both told me they could recreate them from their computerised till roll archives, as long as it wasn’t a cash transaction, as long as a card was used.’

‘A paperless record,’ I observe.

‘Indeed, your Honour, yes.’

‘The point being,’ Susan adds, ‘that with a card there was something to identify the person paying for whatever had been purchased.’

‘Exactly, Miss.’

Susan smiles. ‘It sounds like a laborious process, reconstructing records like that.’

‘It was extremely laborious, Miss,’ DC Benson agrees with a rueful smile, ‘to go back over such a long period, and I couldn’t have done it without the cooperation of the two shops, both of which placed a member of their staff at my disposal. Fortunately, it turned out that they had a computer search engine, and when we fed in details of Mrs Jones’s bank account, we found the relevant entries – the receipts – more than two hundred of them. We then made them up into a schedule.’

‘Your Honour, may this schedule be Exhibit one, please?’ Roderick nods to indicate that he has no objection. I assent. ‘I’m much obliged. Your Honour, there are going to be four schedules in all. My learned friend and I have them on our computers, as does your Honour, but I’m afraid we haven’t been able to install screens for the jury or the defendant, so they will have them in hard copy, if the usher will assist.’

The diminutive Dawn is almost hidden by the thick files she has to lug over to the jury box, and although they are given only one between two, once in place they take away almost all the available writing space, so that the jurors have to juggle pens and notebooks with the exhibit. I experience a rare moment of moral superiority.

‘Paper, Miss Worthington?’ I say. ‘How very passé.’ Roderick, who is of my generation, gives me a grin.

‘I’m sorry, your Honour. We do have it electronically, of course, but the CPS budget wouldn’t stretch to the screens.’

‘Perhaps you should take that up with someone on high,’ I suggest.

‘Yes, your Honour, thank you. Officer, do you also produce a schedule of the relevant Jones bank accounts, and a schedule of the Catesby accounts?’

‘Yes, that’s correct, Miss.’

‘And those are also in the files the jury have. Exhibits two and three, please, your Honour. Officer, did you examine and analyse the information contained in all three schedules?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And do you also produce a master schedule – Exhibit four, please, your Honour, also in the files – which provides a summary of your findings?’

‘Yes.’

‘Using that schedule as a guide for the jury, can you explain your findings for the jury?’

DC Benson taps some more keys. I do the same, but in response my screen suddenly goes blank. My first instinct is to panic and call for Stella. But with an effort, I control my feelings and remember how to leave and re-enter the Paperless programme. To my relief, and surprise, I succeed in calling up the page inviting me to enter my password. I type in ‘Sodthis!1’ and a few seconds later I’m opening Exhibit four. I’m so proud of myself that I have to suppress an urge to interrupt DC Benson to draw attention to my technical prowess.

‘Yes,’ the officer is saying. ‘If the jury would open schedule four – page eighty-two in the file – they will see that in column one we have a list of the receipts, in chronological order.’

‘Does that list include the receipts found in Mrs Catesby’s house?’ Susan asks.

‘Yes, Miss, it does.’

‘Thank you, Officer. Please continue.’

‘In column two we have the total for the value of the goods purchased on each occasion. In column three we have the amount actually paid; and in column four we have the difference between the amounts in columns two and three.’

‘On each occasion where there is a difference, which amount is greater?’

‘Wherever there is a discrepancy, the amount paid is greater than the value of the goods purchased.’

‘Do we know why?’

‘Yes. In most cases the difference is attributable to the user of the card asking for cash back, in the amount either of twenty-five or fifty pounds.’

‘Are there some other discrepancies also? What is shown in column five?’

‘Yes. In column five I have drawn attention to the purchase of items for which Mrs Jones would have no obvious need, and the value of those items.’

‘Could you give the jury some examples of these?’

‘Yes. On page eighty-five, two pairs of white trainers; on page ninety-one, an item described as a gym bag; on page one hundred and two, a geometry set and a French dictionary. There are a number of others, as the jury will see if they flick through the pages – items of clothing and school supplies and the like, which seem to be inappropriate to Mrs Jones’s condition in life.’

‘What conclusion, if any, did you draw from column five?’

I see Roderick twitching. If he objects, I might have to stop DC Benson from saying it quite so directly. But Roderick knows that if he makes Susan drag Muriel Jones back to court, just to confirm that she had no reason to buy white trainers or geometry sets, the jury aren’t going to like it. Wisely, he contents himself with twitching.

‘I drew the conclusion that these were items that Mrs Catesby had purchased for her children, or in some cases, herself.’

‘Officer, did you then add up the figures to produce a total of the cash backs, and a total value of the inappropriate items, and do those totals appear on the final page of the schedule?’

‘Yes, that’s correct, Miss.’

‘And is there a grand total of both cash backs and inappropriate items, for the entire period of about four years, slightly in excess of eight thousand pounds?’

‘Yes, that’s correct.’

‘Thank you, Officer. Turning now to Exhibits two and three, I want to ask you about one or two specific matters. First, have you marked certain withdrawals from Mrs Jones’s savings account, one in the amount of one thousand pounds, and three in the amount of five hundred pounds each?’

‘Yes.’

‘In Mrs Catesby’s account, have you marked entries that appear to correspond to withdrawals from Mrs Jones’s account?’

‘Yes. In the case of each withdrawal from Mrs Jones’s account there is a corresponding payment into Mrs Catesby’s account, for exactly the same amount, on the same day or the day after the withdrawal.’

‘Officer, did you find anywhere in Mrs Catesby’s account, or her husband’s account, any evidence of a payment for a privately funded medical treatment or surgical operation?’

‘No. I did not.’

‘Did you find any evidence of a payment of school fees to a school called St Cecilia’s, in Surrey?’

‘No.’

‘Or, for that matter, any private school?’

‘No, Miss.’

Susan nods. ‘Thank you, Officer. Please wait there. I’m sure there will be some further questions.’

‘Very few, I’m sure you will be glad to hear, Officer,’ Roderick says, rising slowly to his feet. ‘You were never in Mrs Jones’s kitchen when she gave Mrs Catesby instructions for the shopping, were you?’

‘No, sir, I was not.’

‘So you don’t know what instructions Mrs Jones may have given?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘If Mrs Jones, out of appreciation for Mrs Catesby’s kindness to her, ever invited Mrs Catesby to take a “little something” for herself when she went shopping, you wouldn’t know about that, would you?’

‘Again, sir, I would not.’

‘If she authorised Mrs Catesby to buy something for her daughters, Emma and Sophie, you wouldn’t know?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘If she decided to make a gift of money to Mrs Catesby or her daughters, you would have no idea of that, would you?’

‘No, sir. I would not.’

‘And finally, Officer, you got Mrs Jones’s bank accounts from her son, Ronald, didn’t you? Not from Mrs Jones herself?’

‘That’s correct, sir.’

‘Did Mr Jones tell you that his mother kept no bank records at home, and that he had to go to the bank himself to get them?’

‘As I recall, sir, yes.’

‘Mrs Jones had electronic banking set up, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But like many elderly people, she was having some trouble coping with it?’

‘That’s what her son indicated to me, yes, sir.’

‘Thank you, Officer,’ Roderick concludes, resuming his seat.

The remainder of the prosecution case takes us up to lunchtime, and is remarkably concise. Susan and Roderick have helpfully agreed a number of facts, which are placed before the jury in writing. These include the facts that Emma Catesby has never had a surgical operation, if you discount a slightly difficult birth; and the fact that both she and her sister Sophie have always been educated in the state system, latterly at the Wood Lane Comprehensive School in Bermondsey, and have never attended St Cecilia’s, or any other private school.

DS Gordon, the officer in the case, gives evidence about the investigation in general, including Laura Catesby’s interview under caution at the police station following her arrest. As foreshadowed in Susan’s opening speech, Mrs Catesby told the police exactly what one would expect, namely: that Mrs Jones had given her permission to take ‘a little something for herself’ whenever she did the shopping; that the payments in counts two to five were outright gifts from Mrs Jones to Emma and Sophie, gifts made for no better reason than she liked the girls and wanted to help them; and that there was never any mention of loans for surgery or school fees.

And so to lunch, but not today to an oasis of calm. As I’m entering my chambers to take off my wig and robe, I encounter Stella almost running along the judicial corridor. She’s obviously in a hurry, her short straw-coloured hair bobbing up and down, and for Stella, who’s usually a model of stoic calm, she seems almost frantic.

‘Oh, Judge,’ she says breathlessly, ‘I’m so glad I’ve found you. Can you come with me, please?’

‘Yes, of course, Stella. What on earth is the matter?’

‘There’s some kind of disturbance going on in Judge Jenkins’s chambers?’

‘Disturbance? What do you mean?’ We set out together to walk the short distance to Marjorie’s chambers. ‘Judge Drake called, and said he heard raised voices. He didn’t want to intrude, so I went myself, and I heard some shouting, and then I put my head around the door and thought I should come and find you.’

‘Why didn’t you call security?’ I ask. ‘Judge Jenkins may be in trouble.’

Stella looks at me and shakes her head. ‘It’s the Grey Smoothies,’ she says.

‘The Grey Smoothies?’

We are now outside Marjorie’s chambers, and I can hear the raised voices for myself. I look at Stella and she looks at me, and we barge in together. Marjorie is standing behind her desk in a defensive posture. Standing in front of her desk is Meredith, our cluster manager – so-called in Grey Smoothie-speak because she manages more than one Crown Court – sporting the usual armful of coloured bracelets over her right grey suit jacket sleeve, and a streak or two of green in her hair. With Meredith is a young man I haven’t seen before, wearing thick black glasses, and contrastingly dressed in worn blue jeans and a white T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Don’t Mess with Mr Megabyte’. Our entry produces a temporary lull in hostilities.

‘Can I help at all?’ I ask, with what I hope is a calming smile.

‘These fascists won’t give me my computer back,’ Marjorie growls. ‘They want to keep me locked out.’

Meredith shakes her head. ‘I have instructions from Sir Jeremy, Judge,’ she says. ‘It’s required in this kind of case.’

Sir Jeremy Bagnall is a senior member of the Grey Smoothie High Command, on intimate terms with both the Minister and the Lord Chief Justice. He was knighted in a recent New Year’s honours list for services to the court system: and no, that’s not an attempt at humour on my part – it’s one of those things you couldn’t write for television and which make satire redundant. To any Grey Smoothie, any instructions given by Sir Jeremy are to be taken seriously and followed. But they’re obviously not going down well with Marjorie. I need to find out what’s going on.

‘What do you mean, “this kind of case”?’ I ask.

‘You should ask Shaun, Judge,’ Meredith replies, indicating Mr Megabyte. ‘He’s one of our computer security gurus. It’s his case. I haven’t seen the evidence.’

‘The evidence…?’ I ask.

‘It’s a 32B,’ Shaun replies, as if to suggest that the mere mention of 32B makes everything obvious, and requires no further elaboration.

‘Well, yes,’ I say. ‘Judge Jenkins told me she’d got an error message. But we were expecting you to come and sort it, if you couldn’t do it over the phone. Haven’t you been able to find the problem?’

‘It’s a 32B,’ Shaun insists again, in that irritating tone computer nerds use to express their contempt for anyone to whom their technical ramblings don’t immediately make perfect sense.

‘Well, for the benefit of those of us unfamiliar with the technical terminology,’ I ask, probably with a bit of an edge, ‘would you mind explaining in layman’s terms what a 32B is?’

There is a silence.

Shaun looks at Meredith. ‘Do you want to tell him, or shall I?’

Meredith looks down and exhales heavily. ‘An Error 32B message indicates the presence of pornography on a computer,’ she explains. ‘It’s a code our security staff use to avoid being specific about it, for obvious reasons.’

I see Stella’s eyes open wide, as I’m sure do mine.

‘What…?’ I manage to stammer, eventually.

‘As I say,’ Meredith continues, ‘I haven’t seen the evidence. I’m not cleared for it. Only Shaun and his supervisor, Paul, have actually seen it. What has to happen next is for them to show the evidence to Sir Jeremy, so that he can assess it and decide what to do. But Sir Jeremy is in urgent meetings with the Minister today and most of tomorrow, so after court Thursday would be the earliest he could look at it. It has to stay locked down until then.’

Marjorie has sunk into the chair behind her desk.

‘What do you mean, decide what to do?’ I protest.

‘The procedure we follow in these cases,’ Meredith continues with some show of reluctance, ‘is that if Sir Jeremy concludes that there is pornographic material on the computer, there will have to be an investigation. The judge in question is asked not to sit pending the investigation, and the police are informed.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ I say, almost to myself, after some time.

‘Sir Jeremy has no intention of calling the police until he sees the evidence for himself, but he has asked Judge Jenkins not to sit until it’s been resolved.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I exclaim. Now I’m just as worked up as everybody else. ‘I’ve known Judge Jenkins for years, and this is complete nonsense. Besides which, she’s in the middle of a trial.’

‘I’m sorry, Judge,’ Meredith replies, and I sense that she means it.

Marjorie looks up for a moment. ‘It’s all total bollocks, Charlie,’ she says. ‘But you won’t budge them. They won’t show me what they’re talking about, and I’m not saying a word until they do. I want to see the so-called evidence, and I want to make quite sure that no one can fiddle with my computer – including Mr Megabyte here.’

‘That is bang out of order…’ Mr Megabyte protests, but to her great credit, Meredith immediately puts him in his place, pointing a stern finger.

‘That’s enough, Shaun,’ she insists. ‘You will not talk to a judge like that, ever, whatever the situation. Understood? Now, answer me this: is there any way for anyone other than you and Paul to get into the computer?’

Shaun shakes his head sullenly. ‘It’s locked down tight,’ he replies, equally sullenly.

‘In that case, it can stay where it is for now. We will come back with Sir Jeremy on Thursday after court.’ She turns, not unkindly, towards Marjorie. ‘I’m really sorry, Judge Jenkins. Let’s hope we can sort this out quickly, and that it’s just a misunderstanding.’

‘Thank you, Meredith,’ I say.

After they have departed, I turn to Marjorie, but she briefly holds up both hands, then springs to her feet, quickly seizing her handbag from the bottom drawer of her desk. She’s still angry, and there are tears in her eyes.

‘I can’t do this any more now, Charlie. I have to go home and call Nigel. He will want to rush back from Geneva, I imagine. I suppose I should call a solicitor as well.’

‘Try not to worry about it too much, Judge,’ Stella says. ‘I’m sure it’s just some kind of mistake – isn’t it, Judge Walden?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I agree. ‘It’s all nonsense. I’m sure we will get it sorted tomorrow.’

After Marjorie has left, Stella and I linger for some time, gazing at the locked computer.

‘I suppose I’ll have to contact the parties in Judge Jenkins’s case and tell them she can’t sit for a day or two,’ Stella says.

‘Yes, but for God’s sake, no hint about what’s going on. Tell them she’s not feeling well, or something.’

‘I’m not worried about that,’ she replies. ‘But if Sir Jeremy thinks there may be pornography on her computer, then what are we going to do?’

‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,’ I suggest. ‘I’m not prepared for that yet. I just don’t believe it. It’s not possible.’

‘I agree, Judge,’ Stella says at once. She hesitates. ‘On the other hand, Judge Jenkins did make a good point. I wouldn’t trust Mr Megabyte further than I can throw him.’

I nod silently for some time. ‘I wouldn’t mind a quick preview of whatever is in there,’ I muse aloud.

Stella gives me a look. ‘Well, you do have that sentence in Greene tomorrow afternoon, Judge,’ she replies. ‘Just a thought.’

‘So I do,’ I reply.

I make my way to the judicial mess to snatch a quick, belated lunch. I tell Legless and Hubert that Marjorie isn’t feeling well and has gone home for the rest of the day.

* * *

Tuesday afternoon

Roderick has asked me to sit without the jury so that he can address me about something. Usually, when counsel asks to address the judge in the absence of the jury at the close of the prosecution’s case, it can only mean one thing: he’s about to make a submission of no case to answer. In other words, he’s about to argue: either that the prosecution hasn’t adduced enough evidence to sustain the charge; or that the case is so weak that it would be dangerous to leave it to the jury. Either way, he would then invite me to withdraw the case from the jury and direct them to return a verdict of not guilty. But we’re not even close to that scenario here. Susan has produced more than enough evidence to sustain a conviction, and Laura Catesby undoubtedly has a case to answer. I’m intrigued. But Roderick isn’t terribly enlightening.

‘Your Honour,’ he begins, ‘it’s not my practice to waste time, as I hope your Honour knows. But Mrs Catesby has asked if she might have this afternoon to reflect on the evidence, and decide whether or not she wishes to give evidence and call witnesses. We have made good progress with the prosecution case, and if we resume tomorrow morning, we will finish the case without undue delay. I would be most grateful.’

I glance at Susan. She doesn’t seem inclined to intervene. It seems odd. Roderick certainly isn’t a time waster. There’s obviously something going on behind the scenes. The husband isn’t here today, I note. It may be that Mrs Catesby is giving Roderick a hard time and proving impervious to advice. If her appearance is anything to go by, that is quite plausible: she’s turned out in much the same way she was yesterday, and I’m sure the jury are taking note of it. If she’s not listening to Roderick about her appearance, she’s probably not listening at all and knowing Roderick as I do, that’s likely to lead to an uncomfortable relationship. He’s worried, and he needs some time. I wish he’d told me earlier, but trials don’t always work like that. Roderick has good judgment, and I am happy to trust him. I agree to his request, and ask Dawn to tell the jury they’re free for the rest of the day.

* * *

Wednesday morning

Roderick calls Laura Catesby to give evidence. She’s still wearing the smart, well-to-do suburban professional woman’s suit, with the pristine blouse, the pearls, the rings and the watch, and as she makes her way to the witness box, I note for the first time the expensive-looking shiny black shoes with just a hint of a heel, their colour and tone exactly matching her handbag. I notice something else, too. The husband is back, now sitting in plain view in the front row of the public gallery. Sitting next to him for the first time are two girls, who must be the daughters and whose school uniform identifies them as pupils of Wood Lane Comprehensive. Sitting next to the daughters, in black clerical garb, sits a woman minister – presumably the Reverend Mrs Amy Lock, successor in unfortunate circumstances to the Reverend Mr Joshua Canning as vicar of the church of St Mortimer-in-the-Fields in the Diocese of Southwark. They all seem to be staring intently at the defendant as she puts her handbag down and raises the New Testament in her right hand to take the oath.

‘Are you Laura Catesby?’ Roderick begins. ‘Are you the defendant in this case? And are your husband, Larry, and your two daughters, Sophie and Emma, with you in court today?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mrs Catesby, what do you do for a living?’

‘I’m the business manager for a firm of accountants. Our offices are in Tower Bridge Road.’

‘Not far from this court, and indeed, not far from where Mrs Jones has her flat?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I think your husband, Larry, is a fund manager in the City of London?’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘And would it be fair to say that, while you may not be rich, you are a fairly well-off family?’

‘Yes, that would be fair.’

‘Do your two daughters attend Wood Lane Comprehensive School here in Bermondsey?’

‘Yes, they do.’

‘How old are they now?’

‘Sophie is sixteen, and Emma is thirteen, almost fourteen.’

‘Has either of your daughters ever attended a private fee-paying school?’

‘No. They’ve both always been to state schools.’

‘Mrs Catesby, how and when did you meet Mrs Muriel Jones?’

For the first time, the air of boredom recedes a little, and there is a slight air of concern. She thinks about her answer.

‘It was at St Mortimer’s church, at least four years ago, closer to five, I would think.’

‘Did you and your family get to know Mrs Jones?’

‘Yes. We felt a bit sorry for her. She was on her own, you know, and we noticed that she wasn’t as solid on her feet as she had been. So we approached her and got talking to her. We started giving her lifts to and from church; and from there one thing led to another and I offered to do some shopping for her if she didn’t want to go out. It wasn’t a problem for me. She lives not far from my office, so I could go round to see her during my lunch hour, or more often, after work before I went home. I often went shopping myself on the way home at Garner’s or the Coop, so it was no trouble to pick up a few things for her at the same time.’

‘Mrs Jones told the jury that at first you would show her the receipts for what you bought for her, and she would give you the amount in cash: is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘But after some time, she entrusted you with her debit card?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did that come about?’

‘It was Muriel’s idea. There were a couple of times when she hadn’t got out to the bank and she didn’t have enough cash to pay me back. I wasn’t going to take her last pound, obviously, so I would tell her I would wait until I next saw her. It didn’t bother me at all, but I think she was a bit embarrassed about it, so she just gave me her debit card and told me the passcode.’

Roderick pauses. ‘Mrs Catesby, you’ve been in court to hear the evidence of DC Benson, and you’ve seen the schedules he’s produced, have you not?’

‘Yes. I have.’

‘We know that there are instances where you took cash back when paying for the items you bought, usually twenty-five or fifty pounds. Is that also correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was the purpose of the cash backs?’

She hesitates. She looks as though she’s finding it a difficult question.

‘What I mean,’ Roderick continues, ‘is: would you keep the cash back, or would you give it to Mrs Jones?’

‘I usually gave it to her,’ the witness replies. ‘She would ask me to get cash for her if she didn’t think she would be going out to the bank for a few days. But there were times when I got some cash back for myself.’

I look up. Susan is tight-lipped and is shaking her head. She stands.

‘Your Honour, I’m sorry to interrupt, but this was never put to Mrs Jones. I am grateful to my learned friend for not putting all the detailed instances to her during his cross-examination, but she should have been given the opportunity to deal with this. It’s not a trivial point. It goes to the heart of the case.’

I have to agree. If Roderick was expecting his client’s last answer, it was naughty of him not to cross-examine Muriel about it while he had the chance, so that she had the chance to respond to it. It could be the key to the jury’s verdict on count one: if Muriel was the recipient of the cash back, how can she complain that it was stolen? But both Susan and I suspect that he wasn’t expecting the answer he got: the implication of which, of course, is that the smartly turned-out Laura is going off-piste, making it up as she goes along. So now, Roderick has to deal with the possibility that his client is spinning the jury a yarn; and although she knows there’s nothing I can do about it at the moment, Susan quite rightly wants to make sure the jury get the message that there’s something amiss.

‘My learned friend will be free to make that point during her cross-examination of the defendant,’ Roderick replies stiffly, his manner confirming our suspicions.

‘Very well,’ I say. ‘Let’s continue.’

‘I’ll take you through the instances in the schedule a little later,’ Roderick promises. ‘But if I understood you correctly, you said a moment ago that there were times when you took the cash back yourself. Why would you do that?’

The witness hesitates again.

‘Muriel always told me to take a little something for myself,’ she replies eventually.

‘Why would she tell you that?’ Roderick asks cautiously.

Laura shrugs. ‘She was grateful to me for helping her,’ she suggests. ‘She wanted me to have a little something, to say thank you. It was for the girls, really. I never took anything for myself. It was always for the girls. Muriel was very fond of the girls. She was always telling me how nice and polite they are. I think she saw them as her grandchildren, because the only grandchildren she has live abroad.’

I get the sense that something is going on. The two girls are exchanging glances, and look rather disturbed. Also, I think I’m seeing the prosecutor in Roderick imagining the cross-examination he would be planning if he were on that side of the case – the cross-examination Susan is undoubtedly planning as she sits listening, and taking copious notes. And he is anticipating, as am I, that her first question will have something to do with why an elderly pensioner would give this fairly well-off business manager twenty-five or fifty pounds a time for her daughters in recognition of her charitable services as a shopper. Abruptly, Roderick changes the subject.

‘Mrs Catesby, was there a time when Mrs Jones provided you with a thousand pounds out of her savings account?’

‘Yes,’ she replies, almost inaudibly.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Catesby, please keep your voice up.’

‘Yes.’

‘Under what circumstances…?’

But before Roderick can even complete the question, the witness has collapsed in tears in the witness box, and is sobbing uncontrollably. Two or three times, she says she’s sorry. Her family and her vicar are again staring at her. The jury are exchanging glances. Roderick puts down his notebook, and turns to me.

‘May Mrs Catesby have a few moments, your Honour?’

‘Of course,’ I reply immediately. ‘Let me know when you’re ready to resume.’

I take advantage of the break to call Marjorie at home and check on her. Needless to say, she’s not in the mood for much conversation. Nigel is quietly returning from Geneva today and she has a solicitor on call, ready to come to court tomorrow in case of need. I encourage her as far as I can with assurances that it’s all going to be all right, but I know it doesn’t offer her much comfort.

When I’m invited to return to court after about half an hour, I see that Laura Catesby has left the witness box and is sitting in the dock. Her family and vicar are still occupying the front row of the public gallery, and sitting beside them is none other than Mrs Muriel Jones, widow of this parish. Roderick remains standing when Carol invites those in court to sit.

‘Your Honour,’ he begins, ‘we are grateful for the time. It has been put to good use. I would ask your Honour to have the jury brought back into court. Mrs Catesby does not propose to continue her evidence. Once the jury are back, I will ask your Honour if the indictment may be put to her again.’

I must admit that I’m fairly taken aback at first, but thinking back to Laura Catesby’s evidence it occurs to me that perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised; at least I was right in thinking that something was going on. I call for the jury to be brought into court. Once they are in place, Carol puts all six counts of the indictment to Laura Catesby in turn, and asks how she pleads. She pleads guilty to each count. I explain to the jury that, as they have been put in charge of the case they must return a verdict on each count; but as they have heard the defendant freely change her pleas and admit her guilt, after receiving legal advice, the only proper verdict would be one of guilty, and they are to answer the clerk accordingly when she asks for their verdicts. This seems to come as no surprise to the jury. They have already, it turns out, elected a foreman, a woman in her thirties, who without hesitation returns verdicts of guilty on each count as prompted by Carol. It seems pretty clear that the case was travelling in that direction at a speed of knots, regardless of the defendant’s change of heart.

‘Your Honour,’ Roderick says, once the verdicts have been returned and Susan has confirmed that Laura Catesby is a woman of previous exemplary character, ‘this is a serious case, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But it’s also, as your Honour will appreciate shortly, a rather unusual one. I’m sure that in the normal course of events, your Honour would adjourn the case now for a pre-sentence report. But I’m going to ask your Honour not to make that decision yet. What I would like to do is to call a small number of witnesses, very briefly, and when your Honour has heard from them, I may well invite your Honour to pass sentence today. If your Honour still feels that he needs a pre-sentence report, then, of course, that option is still open.’

A pre-sentence report is a prerequisite in almost all cases today, certainly in any case of this kind, and I wouldn’t accede to the suggestion Roderick has just made if it were made by just any counsel. But I’ve known Roderick for years, and I know that he can be trusted not to take up the court’s time with frivolous suggestions. Besides, I am really curious to hear what’s coming.

‘Yes, very well, Mr Lofthouse,’ I reply.

The first witness is the husband, Larry, fund manager in the City, who tells me that his wife has been going through an extended ‘bad patch’ for the last five or six years. She’s been ignored and generally treated with a lack of respect at work; she’s had a difficult menopause and has been treated for depression (I’m told that some medical reports have been sent to me – electronically, naturally – via Carol); the whole family has been worried about her. It’s the depression that makes her appear bored with whatever is going on around her. She had been behaving strangely for a long time, Larry adds, but the family had no idea what was really going on until she was arrested. They knew, of course, that she was shopping for Muriel Jones and generally assisting her, but they were pleased about that, thinking that it was taking Laura out of herself to some extent. The couple have separate bank accounts, so he wasn’t aware of any unexpected monetary credits. He had never seen any receipts from the shops: it was, as Susan observed, a paperless crime.

Last, but of course not least, Larry has come to court bearing a cheque in the amount of fifteen thousand pounds in favour of Muriel Jones, which he is prepared to hand over to the court for onward transmission to Mrs Jones, and which is intended to cover her losses, plus interest, plus some slight compensation for what she has suffered. If Laura is sent to prison, he pleads, it will drastically affect the two girls, who are both at very sensitive stages of their development, as well as Larry himself. She will, of course, lose her job in any case, but if she serves a prison term she may become permanently unemployable, not to mention suffer even more terrible bouts of depression.

Both daughters then give evidence, also pleading with me not to send their mother to prison. Both deeply regret that Muriel Jones was given the impression that they needed money for private school fees; they can’t believe that their mother would do such a thing; and Emma, in particular, is mortified that Muriel Jones was led to believe that she needed an operation when she has enjoyed excellent health throughout her life. She actually apologises to Muriel from the witness box, even though what her mother did is in no conceivable way her fault.

The daughters are followed into the witness box by the Reverend Mrs Amy Lock, whom I suspect, without any hard evidence, of playing the ‘I know your wife; we work together’ card. It’s not what she says; it’s more the way she says it. I can almost see the two of them together talking about the case over a cup of tea at one vicarage or the other. But I don’t dwell on it – I can’t blame her even if she is invoking the spirit of the Reverend Mrs Walden – because what she is saying would be interesting enough even if it came from a wandering Russian Orthodox priest who’d never met either of us. The pleas of guilty that have just been tendered, she reveals, are not a bolt from the blue; on the contrary, they have been under discussion within the family, and with her as the family’s religious advisor, for some time now. Everyone was urging Laura Catesby to admit what she’d done, and it was only fear, the vicar confides, that stood in her way – fear and the difficulty of admitting to herself that she had taken advantage of Muriel Jones so shamelessly. Once she reached a place where she could admit to herself what she had done, admitting it to others finally became possible.

For some time, she tried to persuade herself that what she had done, she had done not for herself but for her daughters; but when Sophie and Emma told her in no uncertain terms that they were horrified by it and wanted no part in it, she began to see the light. The family, in particular her daughters, had urged her to plead guilty on Monday morning, and they have continued to urge her ever since. This morning, as the prospect of giving evidence grew ever closer, she began to respond. She tried to give evidence, but the task proved too much for her, and as I saw for myself, she collapsed under the weight. She has been punished – she has punished herself – enough, the Reverend Mrs Lock suggests; and now is the time for forgiveness, in the spirit of the church of which they are all members.

In that same spirit, Muriel Jones has also agreed to give evidence on her behalf.

‘She’s not a bad person, sir,’ Mrs Jones tells me. ‘She’s made mistakes; but then, we all do, don’t we, sir? I know I have, and so did my Henry during his time. But she’s obviously had problems I didn’t know about, and she’s admitted what she’s done, so, as the vicar says, perhaps it’s time to forgive and forget. She did try to be helpful to me, and as you get older, that’s something you really appreciate, sir, isn’t it? So I think she ought to be given a second chance, sir, if you’re willing.’

So now what do I do? She’s admitted to a long-running and serious breach of trust; and surely she could have reached the place where she could admit what she’d done before she put Muriel Jones through the additional anguish of having to give evidence and submit to cross-examination about her memory. But, judging from Muriel’s demeanour this afternoon, the experience doesn’t seem to have done her any harm, and she’s going to get her money back, with a generous bonus for her trouble. After a minute or so of reflection, I tell Roderick he needn’t say any more, and that I don’t think I would learn anything from a pre-sentence report that I haven’t learned this afternoon.

I ask the court probation officer to join us, and with her input I give Laura Catesby a sentence of twelve months imprisonment suspended for two years, concurrently on all six counts. I attach conditions: she is to continue under the supervision of a probation officer throughout the two years; seek treatment for her depression under the guidance of her vicar; perform one hundred and fifty hours of unpaid work for the benefit of the community – not to include shopping for the elderly; and pay compensation to Mrs Jones in the sum of fifteen thousand pounds. The details of the sentence will be transmitted paperlessly to whoever needs them.

* * *

Wednesday afternoon

Stella has found me a couple of applications to lend a pretence of industry to my afternoon, but the main business after lunch is to read and digest the voluminous file in the case I have coming up later. At the unusual time of five o’clock this afternoon, I am due to sentence a young man calling himself Brian Greene, and it’s going to take some time. Not that you would know this from reading the list, because you will find no mention of the case of Brian Greene there, and the timing of five o’clock is designed to ensure that the building will be as quiet as possible. Moreover, I will have no court staff with me except for Stella, who will be doubling as both clerk and usher, and one or two security persons from an outside agency.

Brian Greene has pleaded guilty to six offences – the tip, I’m told, of a rather large iceberg – of what is politely termed computer misuse. But in the context of this case, the term ‘computer misuse’ is a massive understatement, which doesn’t even begin to address the scope of young Mr Greene’s offending. The Grey Smoothies –not Sir Jeremy Bagnall and his crowd this time, but some people from the same agency as the security personnel – have left Stella and myself in no doubt about the sensitivity of the case. The only reason we’ve got the case at Bermondsey, they confided to Stella last week, is the hope of avoiding the publicity it would get at the Old Bailey or Southwark. So this afternoon, yours truly, rather than a High Court or Old Bailey judge, will be dealing, in closed court, with a case whose existence isn’t officially acknowledged.

The reason for this subterfuge is that it’s the government’s only chance of avoiding loud demands for Greene’s extradition to any one of the several politically important countries his offences have damaged. The government doesn’t want that because Brian Greene is generally judged to be, if not the most gifted, certainly one of the most gifted computer hackers in the world; and regardless of the sentence I pass on him today, he will be starting a new job within the week with the government agency I mentioned a moment or two ago, for which he has agreed to deploy his talents in a better cause. And I’m sure it won’t surprise you to know that Brian Greene isn’t his real name. It’s all a bit nerve-racking, but I am gratified that we have our uses at Bermondsey and are occasionally attracting a better class of work.

Brian Greene is an unprepossessing young man aged nineteen, but is described by prosecuting counsel, Derek Mapleleaf QC, as a genius – off the charts in terms of the autistic spectrum, but able to function fairly normally in society and possessed of once-in-a-century talents when it comes to computers, and specifically, to hacking. He is, technically speaking, of previous good character, but is known to have been the architect of some of the most damaging hacking attacks on record, in the course of which he has shut down a number of well-protected government and commercial operations both in this country and abroad. When eventually run to ground by the security services as the result of an anonymous tip, Greene could give no coherent account of why he behaved as he did, except that he didn’t know what else he would do all day if he wasn’t at his computer.

After obtaining extensive psychological reports, the security services concluded that he could be trusted to work in the government service, which – after they had explained to him the likely consequences of being extradited to certain of the countries he’d offended – Greene began to see as an acceptable idea. Abigail Sinclair QC, like Derek Mapleleaf a member of the small cadre of counsel having a high-level security clearance, is representing Greene; and, no doubt aware of its irrelevance, confines herself to a short, boilerplate speech in mitigation, which does little to shed any further light on the defendant. Since it doesn’t matter, I give him a concurrent suspended prison term on all six counts – a hopelessly inadequate sentence, but one that at least offers some recourse if his new employment isn’t working out a year from now.

To my mind, the hearing’s most interesting revelations come from a man introduced to the court as ‘Agent A’, a member of the security services, whom Derek calls to give evidence about Brian Greene’s talents and activities. By way of assuring us of his credentials to give evidence about these matters, Agent A tells us that he was recruited in much the same way about seven years ago, having himself been something of a prodigy in the computer field. But when he speaks about Brian Greene, there is a definite touch of John the Baptist about him: good as he was in his day, Agent A tells us, he is with us today only to proclaim the coming of a man whose computer he is not worthy to switch on. He stands in awe of Brian’s achievements, which have involved playing havoc with military, diplomatic and commercial activities seemingly at will, while leaving no real clue about his identity. If, as expected, Brian achieves the same kind of results on behalf of his new masters, Agent A concludes almost reverentially, Great Britain can look forward to a quantum leap forward in its ability to protect its cyber security, and to interfere with that of hostile powers. The Americans, he ventures to add, may even start to take us seriously again.

Remembering Stella’s enigmatic hint yesterday, after I’ve passed sentence I invite Derek and Abigail into chambers for coffee. I have a good excuse: they were both at Bermondsey in the famous Foggin Island case, whose implications for international law saved the court from closure, and is the subject of a plaque installed by the government of France in the court foyer. I invite Agent A to join us also. After some stilted conversation during which we are all doing our best to avoid any mention of the case we have just dealt with, I ask Derek as delicately as I can whether there might be any chance of borrowing Agent A for a few minutes – with his agreement, of course – to see if he can shed some light on a disturbing circumstance involving the suspected hacking of a judicial computer. Derek has no objection and Agent A, clearly intrigued, agrees at once. It’s well after seven o’clock by now. Derek and Abigail are understandably anxious to get away, and once they have gone, I give Agent A a confidential briefing, which he absorbs effortlessly. Like a couple of characters from a John le Carré novel we make our way furtively and, thankfully, unobserved along the now dark and deserted corridor to Marjorie’s chambers.

Seating himself in Marjorie’s chair, Agent A begins to tap the keys. I’ve warned him that the computer is securely locked down, to which he reacts with an impish grin. It takes him a little under two minutes, not only to unlock the computer, but also to bypass Marjorie’s password.

‘We don’t want to be too long,’ he says, once he’s in. ‘We don’t want to leave fingerprints, do we?’

He stares at the screen for some seconds and smiles. ‘I do like your colleague, Judge,’ he adds.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘She’s incredibly organised, isn’t she? Look at this: everything in files, clearly marked, nothing loose at all. A place for everything and everything in its place. I bet the trains run on time in her house.’

‘That would be Marjorie,’ I confirm.

‘This shouldn’t take long at all,’ he predicts cheerfully. He taps on some more keys, the screen flashes and flickers for a few moments; and suddenly he sits back contentedly. ‘Bingo. Got it. There we are, Judge. There’s your pornography.’ He laughs. ‘That doesn’t count as pornography in my book, but each to his own, or her own, I suppose. See for yourself.’

I stand behind Agent A and see for myself. I daresay we all have our own opinions about what constitutes pornography, but I must say that I’m inclined to agree with him. If this is pornography, Error 32B must have a rather sensitive trigger threshold. But I’m also noticing something else, something Agent A would probably have no reason to notice, and what I notice cheers me up even more than the unconvincing state of the ‘evidence’.

‘Are we sure this is all?’ I ask. ‘Could there be anything else?’

He shakes his head. ‘I did a very thorough search, using the language they’re using in their programmes, and she doesn’t have any hard-to-find files. No, I’ve got it all; so now, if you’re happy, let’s lock it back up before anyone knows we’ve been here.’ He pauses. ‘Unless, of course, you’d like me to… I could do it without leaving my fingerprints…’

‘No,’ I reply at once. ‘I have other plans for it. But thank you for offering.’

‘No problem,’ Agent A says cheerfully. Tap, tap, and the Error 32B message returns to an otherwise blank screen.

‘You’d better show me out the back way, Judge,’ he suggests, ‘just in case your security people are tempted to ask me any awkward questions.’

‘Thank you again,’ I say.

He grins cheerfully. ‘My pleasure. All part of the service.’

We shake hands. I walk him to the door at the end of the judicial corridor, from where he can disappear clandestinely into the Bermondsey night.

I shouldn’t have done it, of course, but like the newly converted Brian Greene, I’ve long been persuaded that sometimes you have to cross a line in a good cause; and I feel sure now that it is in a good cause. I would love to call Marjorie and tell her, but it wouldn’t be wise. Sadly, she will have another unquiet night, but things should improve considerably tomorrow.

* * *

Thursday lunchtime

The case of Laura Catesby having collapsed, as the court management terminology for yesterday’s events has it, Stella has started me on a short trial, a two-day non-residential burglary. While decidedly the worse for wear, Chummy broke into a store dealing in computer games and helped himself to a good selection from their stock. He’s claiming to have been so drunk at the time as not to know what he was doing. But the evidence suggests that, although he’d certainly imbibed enough to reduce his inhibitions when it came to breaking in, he wasn’t even close to being inebriated enough to plead temporary insanity. The defence isn’t going to fly, as his counsel, Emily Phipson, knows perfectly well. We’re going through the motions very efficiently, and we’re making good progress. We will get the jury out tomorrow before lunch, with any luck.

And so to lunch, an oasis of calm in a desert of chaos. On my way to the mess I look into Marjorie’s chambers, just to make sure that Mr Megabyte hasn’t been trying to interfere with her computer. To my surprise, I see her seated at her desk, apparently engrossed in some papers.

‘Marjorie, what on earth are you doing here?’ I ask. ‘I thought you weren’t coming in until it’s time to meet the Grey Smoothies.’

‘This is my bloody court, Charlie, and these are my bloody chambers, and if the bloody Grey Smoothies don’t like that, they know where they can bloody well stuff it.’ She smiles thinly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she adds. ‘I didn’t mean to get carried away.’

‘No,’ I reply. ‘Actually, that sums it up perfectly.’

‘I’m not coming into lunch, if you don’t mind.’

‘I wasn’t expecting you to.’

She pauses. ‘Charlie, do you think I need my solicitor with me this afternoon?’

‘No,’ I reply firmly. ‘It’s not going to come to that.’

She looks at me curiously. ‘Really?’ she asks, a trifle sceptically, I think. But then she examines me closely for some time.

‘What?’ I ask. She gets to her feet and walks across the room to stand in front of me.

‘I know that look, Charlie – you’re up to something. What is it?’

‘Up to something – moi?’

‘Charlie…’

‘I can’t tell you any more, Marjorie. Let’s just say, I don’t think you’ll need your solicitor.’

‘Oh, come on, Charlie…”

‘I can’t, Marjorie,’ I say with all the finality I can muster. ‘Really. Look, I have to go. I’ll see you later, after court.’

‘I hope I did the right thing, Charlie,’ Hubert says, tucking into his escalope Milanese and garlic mashed potatoes, the dish of the day, ‘calling Stella on Tuesday afternoon. I was a bit worried about all the shouting and what have you in Marjorie’s chambers.’ He’s obviously dying to ask what was going on. I’m not sure I’ve completely sold the story about Marjorie not feeling well.

‘It was nothing,’ I reply quickly, ‘storm in a teacup. Stella found me and we dealt with it. Bloody Grey Smoothies again.’

‘So, nothing to worry about then?’ Hubert asks.

‘Nothing at all,’ I reply, with as much emphasis as I can muster. ‘Marjorie wasn’t feeling too well, so I suggested she take the day off, but I’m sure she’ll be back with us soon.’ Hubert and Legless look at me questioningly. I give them what I hope looks like a reassuring nod.

‘What did you have going on yesterday afternoon then, Charlie?’ Hubert asks.

I am alarmed for a moment. ‘What?’

‘There seemed to be something going on in your court when I was leaving for the Garrick around five. Bit of an odd time for a hearing, or was it something to do with the Grey Smoothies?’

‘There was something I had to do,’ I reply evasively. Time to change the subject. ‘What’s this I’m hearing about the Garrick, Hubert,’ I retort, ‘reconsidering the question of women members? Wasn’t there something in The Times about it a day or so ago? What’s that all about?’ Mercifully he takes the bait.

‘That’s been blown up out of all proportion,’ he protests. ‘All that’s happened is that…’

And mercifully, the rest of the lunch hour passes harmlessly as we catch up on the latest gripping instalment of political goings-on at the Garrick Club.

* * *

Thursday afternoon

By the time we break for the day, we have dealt with the evidence and are ready for closing speeches tomorrow morning. Having claimed to be so comprehensively intoxicated, Chummy didn’t have much to say when he reluctantly went into the witness box, and Piers Drayford pretty much nailed him in cross-examination by exploring his admirable lucidity at the police station after his arrest, when he asked, perfectly rationally, to see his solicitor and for a message to be sent to his girlfriend. And now it’s time to go and meet the Grey Smoothies, and hopefully solve another paperless crime.

As promised, Sir Jeremy Bagnall is leading the Grey Smoothie delegation. With him are Meredith and Shaun, who, no doubt in deference to Sir Jeremy’s presence, has abandoned his Mr Megabyte persona in favour of a rumpled suit and tie. It’s all a bit fraught. Both Jeremy and Meredith know all four Bermondsey judges well.

‘Would anyone like to say anything before we begin?’ Jeremy asks. ‘Marjorie? Charles?’

Marjorie is sitting behind her desk, her arms wrapped tightly around her. I’m standing close to her on her left. She shakes her head.

‘I think we should just get on with it, Jeremy,’ I reply.

‘Yes, of course.’ He gives a majestic sweep of his arm, ushering Shaun forward. ‘Right then, Shaun, if you’re ready, please.’

The computer has been turned away from Marjorie and myself, and is perched near the front edge of her desk. Shaun strides forward and seats himself in front of it. He hasn’t said a word, but there is the suspicion of a self-satisfied grin on his face. He taps a few keys, and turns towards Jeremy and Meredith.

‘There you go, Sir Jeremy,’ he says proudly. ‘It’s all there. All you have to do is scroll down.’

Jeremy approaches the computer, but does not sit down. ‘Would you like to come and watch this?’ he asks us. I nod to Marjorie, and we walk slowly over to stand slightly behind him, one on each side. Meredith is keeping her distance – she has never liked any of this, I reflect – and she’s taken refuge in an armchair across the room. She’s holding a notebook, and I’m guessing that, in accordance with standard Grey Smoothie practice, she’s the designated note-taker for the meeting.

As soon as Marjorie sees the screen, she positively gasps. I smile. It’s a moment I’ve been looking forward to, seeing her face as she suddenly realises what she’s looking at. She has seen what I saw when Agent A gave me my preview. She turns to me excitedly. ‘Charlie, it’s…’ But I shake my head and hold a finger up to my lips. I want Sir Jeremy to discover this for himself – with a little help from me, naturally. She understands immediately, and nods.

‘So…’ Jeremy begins slowly, ‘what we have here are some documents with some extremely bad language in them, which you’ve kindly highlighted for us, Shaun, thank you. Everyone see?’

‘Yes, we can see, Jeremy,’ I answer.

‘The language would have triggered the 32B, even without the more graphic stuff we’ve got, that’s coming up next,’ Shaun observes with satisfaction.

‘Yes, I see.’

I’m sure you can imagine what the language consists of. It’s the usual Anglo-Saxon terminology for the act of sexual intercourse and related parts of the male and female anatomy. It’s nothing you don’t hear in the pub on any given Saturday night, but in the Grey Smoothie universe, apparently, it’s enough to trigger a 32B. Jeremy has his finger over the mouse, about to scroll down in search of the more graphic stuff. But I intervene.

‘Just before you scroll down, Jeremy, may I draw your attention to the header at top right of the pages you’ve been looking at?’

Shaun frowns and steps forward, as if puzzled, to see for himself. Surely, Mr Megabyte hasn’t missed this, I muse to myself? If he has, this could be even better than I’d anticipated.

‘It says, “Schedule one”, Jeremy reports.

‘Indeed, it does,’ I reply. ‘Now, Marjorie knows much more about all this kind of stuff than I do, Jeremy, but in my limited understanding of such matters, the usual context of a schedule is that it’s attached to a parent document, providing additional information that the author didn’t want to include in the main document. Let’s see what happens when you scroll down.’

By now Marjorie has fully recovered. The colour is back in her cheeks, her arms have disentangled themselves from her waist, and she has an ominous smile on her face. Shaun, on the other hand, is wearing an expression that conveys, for the first time, just a smidgeon of doubt.

‘Well, this is different,’ Jeremy observes with some distaste, as the results of his scroll present themselves on the screen. He’s right. This is very different, and one might well agree with Shaun that it’s pretty graphic. What we have is several pages of pictures of a man and a woman, both naked, engaging in various sexual acts. They don’t look as though they’re aware of the camera: they don’t look self-conscious at all, and there’s absolutely no effort to draw attention to themselves. Nonetheless, Shaun thinks of it as pornography, and he doesn’t need to tell us that it would have triggered a 32B even if the language hadn’t.

‘Mm…’ Jeremy muses, almost to himself, ‘so do we think of this as pornography?’

Shaun shrugs. ‘Definitely,’ he replies, though oddly he doesn’t sound absolutely definite.

Agent A and I, of course, have a different view. ‘I don’t think you can classify something as pornography just because there are images of naked people,’ I venture.

‘Even when they’re… doing what these people are doing?’ Jeremy asks. He reflects for some time. ‘Didn’t somebody once say that it’s all in the mind of the beholder, that it depends on one’s own reaction to what one sees?’

‘It was Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court,’ Marjorie replies quietly, breaking her silence for the first time, ‘and what he said was that he would probably never succeed in defining hard-core pornography intelligibly: but he knew it when he saw it.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Jeremy says. ‘Well, there we are. I suppose that’s what I have to decide.’

‘Well, just before you do,’ I say, ‘may I once again direct your attention to the header at top right of the page?’

Jeremy looks closely at the screen. ‘It says, “Schedule two”,’ he observes.

‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘I’m no expert, so perhaps it would be best to ask Shaun to help us. But wouldn’t it be sensible to see if we can find the parent document of these two schedules?’

Jeremy nods. ‘By all means, yes.’ He gives another imperious wave of the hand, and Shaun returns to the computer, rather more slowly this time. He taps twice, as did Agent A before him, and up it comes. Even Meredith is curious now, and she joins us as we huddle in a group in front of Marjorie’s computer.

CONFIDENTIAL

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE

FAMILY DIVISION Case number ___

BETWEEN WILLIAM JAMES JOLLY AND ANGELA JANE JOLLY

Hearing on issues relating to the children of the family following dissolution of marriage

Before Her Honour Judge Jenkins QC, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge

JUDGMENT

After which the document begins, in Marjorie’s crisp, precise prose, to analyse the issues between William James Jolly and Angela Jane Jolly relating to the children of their family.

‘This is my draft judgment,’ she explains to the silent room, ‘in the case I tried in the High Court two or three weeks ago. It’s almost finished. I just had one or two things to add.’

No one else seems capable of speech, so I ask her myself.

‘Marjorie, I’m sure everyone would be interested to know how these two schedules came to be attached to your judgment.’

‘They’re evidence in the case,’ she explains. She sounds just a tad frustrated, and I can’t say I blame her. ‘The wife was saying that the husband was an unfit father to his two young daughters, because he wrote those explicit letters to his secretary, and because the wife had those pictures of him in bed with said secretary.’ She pauses. ‘They’re obviously pretty graphic, but just for the record, I don’t think of them as pornographic, and I don’t think Potter Stewart would have thought of them as pornographic. If you read my judgment, you’ll see the view I’ve formed about it all – though I would prefer you didn’t: judgments are supposed to be confidential in the Family Division.’

‘As your judgment clearly states at the very beginning,’ I observe. ‘And that prompts me to ask how you received this evidence on your computer?’

The wife’s solicitors sent it to me, in preparation for the hearing,’ she replies, ‘obviously.’

‘Electronically?’ I ask. ‘A paperless case, is it, using the approved electronic filing system?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘So,’ I say, doing my best to look suitably judicial, ‘are you saying that these two schedules were sent to you electronically, using the system put in place by the ministry to create the Paperless Court, and to ensure that the taxpayer is getting value for money?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And that while using this system as a judge, in the course of trying to prepare a judgment – a confidential judgment, I may add –’ I say with a pointed glance in Shaun’s direction, ‘you find that not only is your judgment not treated confidentially, but in addition, you have been suspended because of an Error 32B?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sure you must find that rather disturbing.’

‘“Disturbing” doesn’t begin to describe it. I don’t feel safe. I don’t think I am safe. In fact, I think one might even say that it’s become unsafe for judges to deal with sexual cases at all.’

I shake my head. I’m not in a charitable mood, and I decide to approach the nuclear option without any preamble.

‘I don’t know about you, Jeremy,’ I say after a suitable pause, ‘but this strikes me as quite a serious matter. It’s not very creditable to whoever designed the system, is it? Confidential judgments being read by junior civil servants? Judges being smeared and suspended for doing their job? I shudder to think what the taxpayer might have to say if this finds its way into the newspapers. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if Marjorie’s MP were to ask the Minister one or two questions about it in the House.’

‘It’s still pornographic,’ Shaun whines almost inaudibly, without conviction.

Jeremy gives him a withering look. ‘You may leave us,’ he replies, turning his head away. Eventually, with Shaun safely out of the room, he turns to Marjorie.

‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Marjorie,’ he says. ‘I promise you that I will personally look into this, and take urgent steps to remedy the system, and to warn all judges about this… glitch. We will set up a helpline with immediate effect for any judge who encounters an Error 32B message before we have time to fix it.’ He looks across at Meredith, who nods and makes a note.

‘I hope we can also take it,’ I reply, ‘that Marjorie is now free to resume her trial. We’ve lost two days of work already – in a case funded by the taxpayer.’

‘That goes without saying,’ Jeremy adds, at once.

‘I’d prefer that it should go into Meredith’s note,’ I say, ‘just to avoid any doubt about the matter.’ Glancing at Meredith, I see that she is already making a thorough record.

Jeremy stands. ‘Well, it’s been a trying afternoon. I’m sure you have a lot to do. Unless there’s anything else, we’ll leave you in peace.’

‘Well, there is one more thing, Jeremy,’ I venture. ‘In the light of the distress caused to Judge Jenkins by this whole affair, I would have thought that you might make a suitable gesture of apology – and indeed, of recognition for the sterling work she’s doing on the bench.’

‘What kind of gesture?’ he asks cautiously.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘Perhaps an undertaking that she might spend a bit more time in the High Court, or perhaps a week or two at the Old Bailey, or even the Court of Appeal once in a while.’

‘Well…’ he begins, but Meredith cuts him off.

‘I’m on it,’ she replies.

After they’ve gone, I ask Marjorie if she has plans for the evening.

‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘Nigel and I are taking you and Clara to Gino’s for dinner. And we’re not taking no for an answer.’

* * *

Thursday evening

Gino’s is one of the hot new restaurants that keep springing up in Bermondsey these days. It’s the kind of place the Reverend Mrs Walden and I might go to once a year for some special celebration; and the kind of place Marjorie and Nigel frequent regularly. The food is Tuscan, and wonderful, and the wines are a far cry from the Lidl’s Founder’s Reserve the Reverend and I would typically be imbibing with dinner on a Thursday evening. It’s flowing quite freely, too. Both Marjorie and Nigel are a bit light-headed with relief, and are committed to celebrating without restraint – which I understand completely. The Reverend and I keep off the pace a bit, so that we can make sure they find a safe taxi home when the celebration winds down.

‘You have to tell me, Charlie,’ Marjorie says as we are savouring a wonderful Chardonnay grappa to round off our feast. ‘You knew exactly what they were going to find before Mr Megabyte opened my computer up, didn’t you?’

‘Did I?’ I ask innocently.

‘Yes, you did. How on earth did you do it?’

I hold my hands up modestly. ‘Oh, all right’ I reply, ‘I suppose I may as well tell you. GCHQ have been consulting me about cyber security for years. It’s one of my many areas of expertise. To a man with my talents in the field, cracking a Grey Smoothie security code was nothing – child’s play.’

She makes a face at me. ‘No, Charlie. Seriously.’

‘Seriously?’ I reply. ‘Marjorie, if I were to answer your question seriously, being suspended would be the least of my problems. I’m sorry, and I’m glad it’s over, but there are certain things that have to remain locked down, shall we say. Let’s invent a name for it. Let’s call it a 32C, shall we?’

As we stroll home, having poured Marjorie and Nigel into a black cab, the Reverend and I hold hands. It’s a pleasantly cool evening, and there are even a few stars on display.

‘Amy Lock called me while I was getting ready for dinner,’ she says. ‘She wanted to say how grateful she was to you for giving Laura Catesby a suspended sentence.’

‘I’m not at all sure I should have done,’ I reply. ‘It was a dreadful breach of trust. I’m surprised you would have any sympathy for her so soon after Remember the Elderly Week. There’s far too much of it going on, you know, bilking the elderly just because they can’t pay attention as well as they used to. Today it may be Muriel Jones and Harry Buller; but tomorrow it may be you and me, or even Marjorie and Nigel. We’re all feeling our age, you know.’

She turns to look at me. ‘Who’s Harry Buller?’

‘Oh… no one,’ I reply. ‘Not important.’

‘I don’t have any sympathy with what she did, Charlie,’ she says. ‘But I have a limited sympathy for the condition that allowed her to do it. And as Marjorie’s case proves, none of us knows the perils that lie in store for us. All we can do is keep going and hope for the best.’

I look up to the stars, reflecting on Bermondsey Crown Court in general. ‘Very true,’ I concede.