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start a polite, low-key cross-examination. ‘When you say Wistey was sexually immature, does that mean he was at the homosexual stage?’ I ask a question which is politically incorrect but might be forensically effective. The doctor will have none of this and embarks on a long lecture about the nature of homosexuality which is distinctly unhelpful to our case. Hoping to stop his flow I sit down, to be fixed with a glare from Paul, who looks at me as though I were the first sign of blight on the potato crop. ‘Why didn’t you suggest that Master Charlie wouldn’t have admitted to being gay to his upper-crust friends?’ he hissed at me. I smile in a way which I hope indicates I had thought of that question and, after careful consideration, rejected it.
    By lunch-time Paul has forgiven me. We go to an Italian restaurant and, among the breadsticks and beside the plates of spaghetti carbonara, he gives me notes he has made about the blood in which Jimmy wrote his letter to the devil. I absorb a glass or two of Chianti and a crash course in haemotology. I realize with intense gratitude that I have a solicitor who may help win the case.
    The forensic expert looks like an anonymous housewife with glasses and a high, monotonous voice with whistling s sounds. She has formidable qualifications and handles all the exhibits with elaborate care, putting the dagger back into its sheath as though it were a valuable antique. It is to her that I have to put the body of instant learning I have got from Paul in the restaurant not half an hour before. I embark on the subject of the classification of blood: ‘All our red corpuscles are the same. What varies are the agglutinogens which must fit in with the appropriate agglutinin as a lock fits its own key, and causes the red cells to clump together like bunches of grapes. These varying types of lock can divide human blood into four groups, which have been named A, B, O and AB. An advocate must be able to take an instant lesson in any subject and at least sound knowledgeable when cross-examining an expert who has studied it for years. So far, the witness agrees. Then I put Paul’s great thesis. The deceased’s blood was of the common O variety. Jimmy’s is of the slightly more rare A. Now, when the blood on the letter was tested it was classified as O and it was assumed that it had been written after the murder because it was in the victim’s blood. But if, in fact, Jimmy had written it months before in his own blood, the passage of time could have caused the antigens to fade and the blood would have become very hard to classify. So the letter might not have been the devilish work of a murderer performing black magic with his victim’s blood, but the act of a schoolboyish young man who pricked his own finger to do something he had read about in the works of Dennis Wheatley. The judge is wide awake and looming forward as though in the Centre Court at Wimbledon. The expert, for whom I now feel a surge of love and admiration, admits the possibility of what I am suggesting. What may turn out to be a match point has been won by Paul Laity.
    The prosecution case is over and I’m opening the defence to the jury. I want them to perform an act of imagination. What would it be like to be an eighteen-year-old Irish boy who’d had a few drinks and was cornered by a bigger, taller, more athletic, better-nourished and sexually ravenous young man late on a wet night in the Earls Court area? The prosecutor has always called my client O’Neill. I call him Jimmy. I can tell his story for him but the moment comes, all too soon, when he has to tell it for himself. He leaves the safety of the dock for the dangerous witness-box. I take him through his evidence and then sit down. He’s alone now, beyond my help, facing a prosecutor who’s no longer smiling or winking at me but attacking Jimmy in a well-judged simulation of controlled outrage. It’s all