A Certain Justice Read Online Free PDF Page A

would have gone hard with her client if it had.
    There was nothing more that she could do for him now. The jury were given their charge and filed out. The judge rose, the court bowed and waited, standing, until he had left. Venetia heard above her the murmuring and shuffling as the public gallery emptied. She had nothing to do now but to await the verdict.
     
Chapter 2
     
    I n Pawlet Court, on the western boundary of the Middle Temple, the gas lamps were glowing into light. Hubert St John Langton, Head of Chambers, watched from his window as he had on every evening when he had been working in Chambers, for the last forty years. It was the time of the year, the time of day, that he loved best. Now the small court, one of the loveliest in the Middle Temple, took on the soft refulgent glow of an early-autumn evening, the boughs of the great horse chestnut seeming to solidify as he watched, the rectangles of light in the Georgian windows enhancing the atmosphere of ordered, almost domestic, eighteenth-century calm. Beneath him the cobbles between the pavements of York stone glistened as if they had been polished. Drysdale Laud moved up beside him. For a moment they stood in silence, then Langton turned away.
    He said: “That’s what I’m going to miss most, the lighting of the lamps. But it’s not quite the same now they’re automatic. I used to like watching for the lamplighter to come into the court. When that stopped, it seemed as if a whole era had gone for ever.”
    So he was going, he’d actually made up his mind at last. Laud carefully kept from his voice either surprise or regret. He said: “This place is going to miss you.”
    There could hardly, he thought, have been a more banal exchange over a decision he had been awaiting with increasing impatience for over a year. It was time for the old man to go. He wasn’t very old, not yet seventy-three, but in the last year Laud’s critical anticipatory eyes had seen the gradual but inexorable draining of powers physical and mental. Now he watched as Langton seated himself heavily at his desk, the desk that had been his grandfather’s and which he had hoped one day might be his son’s. That hope, like so many others, had been swept away in that avalanche above Klosters.
    He said: “I suppose the tree will have to go eventually. People complain that it shuts out too much light in summer. I’ll be glad not to be here when they take the axe to it.”
    Laud felt a small surge of irritation. Sentimentality was something new for Langton. He said: “It won’t be an axe, it will be a heavy-duty chainsaw, and I don’t suppose they’ll do it. The tree is protected.” He waited for a moment, then asked with studied unconcern: “When were you thinking of leaving?”
    “At the end of the year. Once these decisions are made there’s no point in dragging things out. I’m telling you now because we need to give thought to my successor. There’s the Chambers meeting coming up in October. I thought we might discuss it then.”
    Discuss? What was there to discuss? He and Langton had run Chambers between them for the last ten years. The two archbishops — wasn’t that how Chambers spoke of them? Colleagues might use the words with an undertone of slight resentment, even of derision, but they expressed a reality. He decided to be frank. Langton had become increasingly vague and indecisive, but surely not about this. He had to know where he stood. If there was going to be a fight it was better to be prepared.
    He said: “I’d rather thought that you wanted me to succeed you. We work together well. I thought that Chambers had come to take it for granted.”
    “That you were crown prince? I expect they have. But it might not be as straightforward as I expected. Venetia is interested.”
    “Venetia? This is the first I’ve heard of it. She’s never shown the slightest interest in becoming Head of Chambers.”
    “Not until now. But I’ve heard a rumour that she’s