The Crime of Huey Dunstan Read Online Free Page B

caravan.”
    “Yes. The alleged incident. ‘Brutal and sadistic’, you said.”
    “‘Brutal and evidently sadistic’, I believe I said.”
    “‘Brutal and evidently sadistic’, yes. Thank you for correcting me. Why did you use that word, professor?”
    “I was trying—You mean the word evidently?”
    “No, I mean the word sadistic. But carry on, please.”
    “I was trying to help the jury see it through the eyes of a seven-year-old child, the anguish etched in a child’s memory. With trauma of this kind the victim doesn’t just run to the nearest person and unburden himself. Somehow he has to carry on living and learn to cope with the world around him. On the outside of the brain he learns to cope and so appears to behave normally but the memory—the trauma—is shut down inside. It’s frozen. Yesterday—a simple example I think we can all understand—yesterday we heard the mother describe what happened when a jug of boiling water fell on the defendant when he was a baby. He was kept in isolation for two months, I think she said, until the burns healed. But in his evidence Mr Dunstan exaggerated. He said it was longer. He said he was put inside a glass case for ‘two years ’, not two months. But that doesn’t lessen the trauma of what he remembers, everything is exaggerated. The exaggeration has become the reality. Similarly with his memory of the incident in the caravan. Whatever punishment he endured was evidently severe. And it was recurring.”
    “But you said sadistic , professor.”
    The voice was gloating.
    “Do you have any evidence, professor, that the perpetrator, if indeed there was a perpetrator, was a sadist?”
    No, of course not, you twerp. If I knew that, the trial would be over and you’d be redundant. Either the man was being deliberately obtuse or was himself a closet sadist. Such men make good prosecutors.
    “None,” I said. “ But the assumption seems obvious to me.”
    “Still, without independent confirmation, it’s a pretty big assumption, isn’t it?”
    So it went on.
     
    At one o’clock the judge adjourned for lunch. As I was stepping down for the Intermission, as Lawrence termed it, he said to me, “Did you notice what the judge called him?”
    “Who?”
    “The prosecutor. He made a mistake and called him Starling.”
    “Isn’t that his name?”
    “No. His name is Sparrow. The judge got confused.
    You know who Starling was? Lord Mayor of London in the 1600s, famous judge, notorious. Starling was the chap who presided at the trial of those two Quakers, William Penn and I forget the name of the other one, and when the jury refused to convict after being shut up for two nightswithout food and drink, Starling screamed at the foreman and threatened to cut off his nose.”
    I think Lawrence told me that to cheer me up. I was feeling a little bruised. I didn’t take kindly to being presented as callow and inexperienced by a finagling Sparrow little more than half my age. Beneath Lawrence’s sanguine demeanour I was beginning to detect a whiff of resignation, as if he already knew what the verdict would be. I didn’t know then about an incident that had occurred on the first day. Shortly after the trial began, police photographs showing what remained of the victim’s head were handed up. One of the jurors fainted and was taken to hospital.
    When I got back from lunch the prosecutor buttonholed me, saying, “Have you got your clinical notes?”
    I was defensive. “Not on me,” I said. The notes he was referring to were in a file among the papers on Lawrence’s table, I assumed, but couldn’t be certain. I had a moment of panic thinking I might have left them at the hotel.
    “No, I didn’t mean that, professor. I merely wondered if you had your notes to hand.”
    “It’s an old trick,” Lawrence said to me afterwards. “He does it to intimidate people.”
    I was simmering. The prosecutor was out of order. He had broken the convention of not speaking to a