‘Stop,’ I shouted.
But White Coat took no notice as he cut off Wolf’s sleeve and twisted a tourniquet around his upper arm. Wolf stirred and moaned. The soldiers tightened his bindings and White Coat sliced into Wolf’s forearm, opening a gash three inches long and deep to the bone. A soldier staunched the flow of blood with a rolled-up length of torn bed sheet. White Coat reached around the soldier to get something from a trolley. It was a thin but strong-looking length of plaited leather, like a lead.
Gledhill’s face hovered beneath mine as he dripped more water into my eyes.
White Coat threaded the leather strap under the bone and tied it there. He tugged on it and Wolf’s screams became shriller. Happy, White Coat pressed the two sides of the forearm together, his ungloved thumbs slipping on the raw flesh and bloody skin, and with a needle handed to him he stitched up the incision.
He turned and looked at me. Gledhill watered my eyes. The leather strap dangled out of Wolf’s arm, a steel ring glinting in the loop at its end.
One of the soldiers snapped his fingers and the doors were pushed open again. A dog handler entered, pulled along the tiled floor by a dark brown pit bull, snarling and spitting. Behind me the children and little creatures started up their howling, yelping chorus again. The soldier unclasped the pit bull’s lead from his chain and fastened it to the lead that emerged from the wound in Wolf’s arm.
The dog strained at the new lead. It tore open two of White Coat’s stitches before the soldiers were able to undo all of the hoops and straps holding the all-but-broken man. Once Wolf was free, the dog pulled him to the floor. He managed to stand up but the dog raced down the ward and the blind man fell headlong, hitting his head against the end of a bed. Two soldiers picked him up and let his guide dog drag him screaming from the ward. His screams echoed down the corridor as the pit bull led him away into the night.
The goons released me and marched me off past White Coat, who watched with bloody-sleeved arms folded across his chest, and past the soldiers holding Giff and the Professor, who stared through me at the prospect of their own fate.
‘Don’t worry, fellas. None of this is real,’ I said to them. ‘This is not happening.’
‘You tell yourself that,’ said White Coat.
Before we left the ward, one of the soldiers pulled my hands behind my back and secured them with a plastic grip that dug into my wrists. My legs were cracked repeatedly with a baton as I was pushed along in the middle of the group. A black van stood waiting in a floodlit courtyard. I was bundled in and we left the hospital grounds by the main gate. I had to sit on the floor in the back of the van and when we went around corners I rolled over, banging my head. One of the goons leaned across and poked me with his baton.
‘Keep still, King killer,’ he spat.
I said nothing and was sick in the corner. I wondered about what I’d said to Giff and the Professor. I asked myself where the impulse to say that had come from.
The van jerked and the engine was killed. The guards jumped out and I heard their boots scrunch on grit as they came around to unlock the back doors.
‘I guess you’ll have a jeering crowd ready out there,’ I said to them. ‘A braying mob.’
They dragged me out of the van and missiles and abuse rained down on me from all sides.
‘What did I tell you?’ I said.
The guards frogmarched me into the back of some building. I was expecting a gaol cell but it soon became apparent that it was to the law courts that they had brought me. Within three minutes I was standing in the dock, my hands still bound behind my back and my ankles fastened together by a chain. A chorus rang out from the public gallery — ‘King killer, King killer, King killer!’ Things were moving much faster than I had anticipated.
Chapter Thirteen
The charge was regicide.
Specifically that I had planned and executed the assassination of the King by a single shot from a rifle while he was being driven through the City in his car on official duties.
There was a row of people sitting in a box marked Prosecution Witnesses. I’d never seen any of them before. There was no box of defence witnesses, no defence lawyer as far as I could see, just a barrage of prosecution lawyers and the judge, all of whom had spiral scars scratched on their foreheads.
The clerk of the court was already reading out special clauses that meant nothing to me. The prosecution counsel stood up and declaimed from his little podium. I had killed the King. These witnesses had seen me do it. The penalty was death. I should be taken from this court…
The proceedings seemed to be running away from me at an implausible speed. If I failed to intervene, the whole thing would be over without my having spoken a word.
‘Stop!’ I ordered. The courtroom fell quiet and everyone stared at me. Rows and rows of blank faces that seemed to extend beyond the natural confines of the room. In the public gallery I caught sight of Stella sitting just in front of Maxi. White Coat, cleaned up, and Gledhill were standing to one side by the exit doors, behind a cordon of policemen armed with batons. Everyone held their breath waiting for me to speak again.
I looked at the judge. He was dressed like his street-corner peers in a tight-fitting shiny black suit. The scar on his forehead caught a slanting ray of light from the windows high up in the courtroom wall.
‘What’s he doing?’ I asked, pointing at a burly man wearing headphones and bending over a cutting lathe. There was an acetate disc in position on his turntable.
‘Recording the proceedings,’ said the clerk of the court.
‘I’m speaking to the judge,’ I thundered, finding confidence from somewhere.
The judge himself spoke: ‘As the clerk said, the case is being recorded.’
I knew what would be on the disc when the verdict had been delivered and the condemned man taken away: forty-five minutes of silence. Ticks, hisses, booms and clicks but no witness testimonies, no impassioned plea of defence.
So, I had to win the case first time around. There could be no appeal.
‘Continue,’ said the judge with a vague hand gesture in the direction of the prosecution counsel.
The arrogant young lawyer picked up a book from the table in front of him.
‘This book,’ he said, brandishing what appeared to be my copy of Un Régicide at the court, ‘was found in the possession of the accused. As evidence linking him to the crime for which he stands accused it is damning.’
‘Stop,’ I cried again. ‘I want to speak.’
This seemed to take everyone by surprise. There was a collective rustle as all the figures in the courtroom turned towards me again. Row upon row of blank faces.
‘I don’t have a defence counsel so I’m going to defend myself.’ I looked around the court. No one spoke or moved. In the public gallery I glimpsed my mother’s face and my stomach turned over, but when I looked back she wasn’t there. It was just some anonymous bloodless face like a rolled-out lump of pastry. Could have been anybody. ‘I didn’t shoot the King…’ I began again before being interrupted.
‘Objection, Your Honour,’ said the prosecutor. ‘The accused did commit the offence. That is established fact.’
‘Objection sustained,’ the judge muttered.
I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘Objection,’ I shouted. ‘It is not fact. You will hear the facts now.’ Suddenly, despite my weak position and my physical restraints I felt I was in a position of power. Despite a ruling from the judge the prosecutor had fallen silent — his head was bowed over his desk — and the assembly was turned my way again.