A Dead Liberty Read Online Free Page B

then?” demanded Leeyes.
    â€œThere isn’t one as far as I know,” said Sloan, hanging on to the shreds of his patience with an effort.
    â€œExcept that she won’t talk.”
    â€œThat’s not our problem,” said Sloan. “That’s someone else’s.”
    The someone else whose problem in due course the silence of Lucy Durmast became was Judge Eddington.
    His Honour sat in the Crown Court in the county town of Calleford. The scenario there had some of the same components as those of the Magistrates’ Court at Berebury but there were some important differences too. There was a certain amount of ceremonial rising and bowing for one thing. The judge was robed and the barristers were gowned for another.
    The prisoner was dressed exactly as she had been before.
    The judges and counsel were wigged.
    The prisoner’s hair gleamed like burnished copper.
    The skin of the judge was like old, creased parchment. The prisoner had the sort of skin that looked—given sunshine—as if it would freckle easily. There was no sunshine in prison. Confinement there had done nothing to bring freckles out and her complexion looked instead only rather pale under that striking hair.
    The judge listened to the formalities with which the trial began with the impassivity of long practice, settling himself into a state of mind in which he could listen to all the evidence with total impartiality. He watched in silence while the Clerk of the Court endeavoured to get Lucy Durmast to plead. Judge Eddington had met mutism before.
    He gave no sign of this—nor of whether or not he had taken note of the fact that the Attorney General had apparently waived his traditional right of prosecution in cases of alleged murder by poisoning. He let the Clerk work his way through the proper procedures without interference and when this, too, resulted only in total silence on the part of the prisoner the judge then—and only then—drew breath to speak.
    He proceeded to do what many another professional man would also have dearly liked to have been able to do when confronted with a difficult woman. And in so doing he followed a well-worn track.
    â€œRemanded for psychiatric report,” he said briskly. “Next case, please.”

THREE
    Haustus — Draughts
    Lucy Durmast kept on telling herself to try to think of the encounter as a game. If only she could do that she would be able to keep her mind clear. And she certainly needed to keep her mind clear if she were going to outwit the psychiatrist seated opposite her. She clasped her hands tightly together in her lap and fixed her eyes unwaveringly on his face.
    The psychiatrist automatically registered the clenched hands and much else besides. He purposely hadn’t allowed the need for speech to arise as Lucy Durmast had been brought into the consulting room, busying himself instead with the formalities of divesting her of her coat, getting her seated and reading through her file.
    â€œLet me see now,” he began in the manner of an ordinary doctor at an ordinary consultation, “you’ve been having some trouble lately, haven’t you?”
    Even in a prison setting, noted Lucy Durmast drily to herself, the habit of meiosis didn’t desert the medical profession. Her grandfather had been a doctor and he, too, had always preferred understatement. A patient’s being “not too well,” had, in his canon, meant a death knell.
    â€œTrouble does sometimes affect the capacity for speech,” the man opposite continued easily. “To put it very simply the brain pulls down a shutter on the past to protect itself from unpleasant memories.”
    She stared at him, trying not to scream that it hadn’t done any such thing: that she remembered with searing clarity everything that had happened the day that Kenneth Carline had died.
    â€œEspecially,” the psychiatrist went on, “when the past has got something in