The Baker Street Jurors (3 page)

Nigel shrugged and went back to his desk. Lois followed, still annoyed.

“Serving on a jury is a civic duty, Mr. Heath, and I for one would be proud to do it!”

“You're absolutely right,” said Nigel. “Unfortunately, they don't assemble juries by taking volunteers. In my experience, the more you want to be on a jury, the less likely they are to seat you—and the more you don't want to be on one, the more certain they are to force you to be. When I was in law school, I desperately wanted to get on a jury to see how the jurors thought. And so the court never accepted me. But now that I've been in practice long enough to have had my fill of juries, I'm sure they'd rope me in without question if they got the chance.”

“Well, I expect you'll be safe this time. I'm sure they only send one notice per address.”

“Not so. Laura got a summons once for her cat, presumably because of a veterinarian's list. Once an address gets in the database, anyone whose name is associated with it in any way could…”

Nigel stopped suddenly. He looked at Lois, she at him, and then they both looked at the unopened stack of incoming mail on Nigel's own desk.

Nigel peeked gingerly through the stack. And there he saw it—on the top edge of one unopened envelope was the emblem of Her Majesty's Courts Service. A jury summons.

And this one was addressed to Nigel Heath.

“Bloody hell,” said Nigel.

“There! You see?” said Lois. “Be careful what you don't wish for!”

Outside, at Bob's Newsstand on Baker Street, Bob stood behind the counter and watched a paper airplane drift down and settle lightly just in front of his display of daily tabloids.

For a brief moment Bob considered picking up the aerodynamic document—but from the bright official colors on it, he was pretty sure he knew what it was. He had been on jury duty a couple of times before, himself. Of course, this summons wasn't for him—but even so, he feared somehow that just by touching it he might acquire some responsibility that he just did not need right now.

So he hesitated, and did not immediately rush out from behind his newsstand to rescue it.

And then a breeze picked the summons off the ground and sent it kiting on down Baker Street.

 

2

It was Monday morning on the day that Nigel was to report to jury service.

Nigel was up early. He wanted to get to the Old Bailey before the full crowd of potential jurors arrived, so he could get a seat in the main waiting room. Late arrivals would have to wait on the benches in the corridors, which had no cushions and no backs.

He had shaved. He'd put on a relatively clean shirt. There was no need to dress up, but no point in making a show of being unusually slovenly, either. He had seen prospective jurors try that gambit before, and it never worked.

Besides, he knew he already had an out. After all, he was a lawyer.

Nigel exited Dorset House and went immediately to Bob's Newsstand for his coffee. With luck, being so early would mean the coffee was fresh. Lois always seemed to manage it.

He watched Bob pour the coffee, saw the thickness of it, and realized that he would never be that lucky.

And Bob seemed upset. Perhaps that was why he was serving up coffee that looked as though it were left over from the day before. Even though the day before was Sunday.

“Have you seen the McSweeney headlines?” said Bob. “It's an outrage, ain't it?”

“What is?” said Nigel.

“Why, just like it says here in the papers—that anyone could even think McSweeney did it!”

Nigel nodded patiently. There had to be a time when Bob made the coffee fresh. But he would probably never discover it if he was rude to the man.

“At least it's a change,” said Nigel. “To see the media in a frenzy to acquit rather than convict. They haven't been so much on the defense side of things since that young English au pair got convicted in Boston. And then when the American judge finally agreed with them and threw the conviction out, they didn't like that, either. The usual clamor is to convict. Like the Maxwell case. Or that American woman who was subjected to a jury-less trial in Italy.”

“If you say so. But what I say is, it's an outrage.”

“It always is. The tabloids are like the street mob in an American Western, coming with ropes and rifles to grab the legal system and string it up. And there's no sheriff guarding the door. Except the jury. And who protects the jury?”

Bob rubbed his forehead. “Philosophy is not my cup of tea, Heath. I just wanted to talk about sports. Innocent until proven guilty is all I know about the law. Like this—see, what it says right here…”

Bob held the paper out, and Nigel had no choice. He had to look.

It was an editorial:

“If the three-time England cricket team international champion is convicted of murder, then of course he should not play. If he is found guilty of some lesser charge, then that can be considered according to the weight it deserves. But at this moment, Liam McSweeney has not been convicted of anything at all. And along with England's recently established tradition of finally winning at international cricket, there is an even more important tradition, of much longer standing: innocent until proven guilty. Surely Liam McSweeney is entitled to this as much as any man, and surely the Cricket Council will not deny Mr. McSweeney—or England itself—the privilege of attempting to win a fourth international championship unless and until he is actually convicted.”

Nigel read it and nodded politely. “Quite right, and well put,” he said. “Oh, and Bob—I'll be doing early hours for a while, so if you don't mind—when do you make your first batch in the morning?”

“Ten minutes ago, just like yours,” said Bob.

Nigel absorbed the discouraging implications of that and hurried on his way, hoping to still get to the courthouse before everyone else.

But no. There was construction on one of the underground lines, and his train was delayed. When he finally ran up to the courthouse, the narrow jurors' entrance already had a queue that snaked outside, into the cold wind, and halfway down the side alley.

Nigel took his position at the end of that line as more stragglers hurried up from both ends of the alley.

A tall, fiftyish man, clean-shaven, with a thin, aquiline nose stepped into line behind Nigel. “Bloody hell,” he said. “Is this really the jurors' queue?”

“I'm afraid so,” said Nigel. “It's enough to make you want to commit a crime of your own, just to get inside and be warm.”

“At least it isn't raining,” chirped a woman nearby, and then the whole line groaned aloud in unison, because the moment it was said, the first spots began to appear on the ground.

One hundred umbrellas went up all at once.

“Ow,” said a woman somewhere ahead in the line, followed by a “sorry, miss,” from the reckless gentleman who had done it.

And now that rain was added to the cold and wind, the queue seemed to jostle forward a foot or so—and then it immediately stopped.

Nigel estimated this process would repeat itself for another twenty minutes or so before he reached the front of the queue.

But he was wrong. It took twice that.

Finally he reached the entrance.

“Jury summons, please?” said the uniformed woman at the check-in.

Nigel presented his jury summons. She checked it against a list.

“I have my ID here somewhere,” said Nigel. “I think. If I forgot it, do I get to go home and come back next year?”

“Nice try, but a summons and a heartbeat is sufficient,” said the woman. “You are now jury candidate two-oh-five.”

She gave Nigel his number stub, waved him in, and called for the next in line.

“Oh, that's an interesting name,” Nigel heard her say to the tall man, who was next. “When you combine it with that initial.”

“I get that a lot,” was the response from the tall man. “And as an officer of the court, you might be interested to know that it is the same surname as a former United States Supreme Court justice.”

“Carries no weight here,” said the clerk. “But thank you for calling me an officer of the court. You are now jury candidate two-oh-six.”

Nigel followed the juror candidates in front of him up an interior flight of stairs. They came to a halt. The Old Bailey corridor was packed. The jury assembly room itself, which Nigel knew had at least a hundred relatively comfortable cloth-covered chairs, was completely full and had overflowed its supply of potential jurors.

All the horizontal space on the hard corridor benches was taken as well. So was all the vertical space where you might lean casually back against the wall, or carefully against the glass-encased three-hundred-year-old portraits of bewigged legal scholars. It was worse than standing room only. There was enough room in the corridor, perhaps, for one-hundred-plus pairs of feet, but not for one-hundred-plus shoulders and Guinness-fed bellies.

A voice somewhere at the far end of the corridor said, “Don't everyone exhale at the same time, or we'll all either die or get pregnant.” Two or three people laughed.

Nigel didn't. Claustrophobia was beginning to set in.

Deep breath. Count the portraits of the famous lords on the walls. Deep breath again.

Wasn't working. He looked around for something else that could hold his focus.

Then he saw it.

It appeared to be either a rose or a heart or a butterfly. He couldn't see enough of it yet to be sure. But whether flora or fauna, it was located just below the belt line on the right hip of the slender woman standing directly in front of him.

And it would come into view, just for a glimpse, whenever she shifted her weight impatiently from one foot to the other.

Nigel wanted to know more. A rose, or heart, or especially a butterfly—any of those would be fine. He peered.

So long as it was not a black widow. Or a scorpion. Or a dragon.

And perhaps there was another small tattoo—on her left breast, just for symmetry?

“What are you looking at?”

She had turned. Nigel looked away too late; he was caught, and he knew it.

In for a penny, in for a pound. He tried an obvious lie with a smile.

“I wasn't.”

“Wasn't what?”

“Wasn't looking at … whatever you think I was looking at.”

She was a woman in her midthirties. Or perhaps as much as forty, it was difficult to tell—she was rather slender, hair cut short with half a nod toward style and half toward convenience, and she wore large, round spectacles, through which she had fixed Nigel in a glare.

Altogether, she gave the impression of Lisbeth Salander growing up to become Annie Hall. She wore a youngish woman's top, and when she turned to face him, Nigel thought he did indeed catch a glimpse of another tattoo, though he couldn't see what this one was, either.

But Nigel knew he had not only been caught looking, but also shot down in flames for trying to follow up. If he could have backed up and blended into the crowd, he would have—but he couldn't. There was no room to move.

“Were you trying to see if I have a tattoo there?”

“Tattoo where?” said Nigel, almost immediately realizing that wasn't his best possible response.

And then he was saved by a loud announcement from a court steward. “All jurors in group 1B, please proceed to court number thirteen at the end of the corridor.”

There was a general murmur as everyone looked at their summons notices. Nigel, still pinned by the woman's wary stare, held his breath—and then, at last, she looked away from him to check the numbers on her own summons.

The steward read the announcement again, this time more loudly and with gestures to point the direction, and a throng of jurors—the woman with the tattoo among them—began to move in that direction.

Nigel checked his own summons. No, he was not in group 1B. He was in 2C.

That was certainly lucky. Saved from some prolonged embarrassment there. Nigel sighed as the woman disappeared into the courtroom at the far end of the hallway.

There was some breathing room now in the corridor, but only a little, with group 2C jurors moving back and forth between the corridor, the loo, and the public canteen—from which the tall man who had spoken to Nigel earlier emerged now with a cellophane-packaged sandwich.

As Nigel surveyed all this, it occurred to him that perhaps there was actually a juror surplus. Perhaps his own group would be sent home.

Directly behind Nigel was a midtwenties man wearing old, ragged, and very dirty clothes. He was muttering to himself, or pretending to.

Nigel looked over his shoulder at him.

“It won't work,” said Nigel.

“Why not?” said the man, with perfectly lucid enunciation, but in a low voice so that no one else could hear.

“You can't pretend to be a homeless schizophrenic. For one, that won't actually disqualify you. But aside from that, the judge will immediately notice your fingernails. And if the judge is too nearsighted to see you've kept them clipped, the bailiff will notice instead, and will point it out. Either way, it won't work. You can't fake it, and if you try, the court can hold you in contempt, just as if you had deliberately come in pissed with beer.”

“All my mates said they found a way out of it.”

“Good luck with that,” said Nigel.

And now Nigel felt just a little guilty about wanting to get out of jury duty himself. But then the steward came out to the corridor to make another announcement. Nigel's guilt quickly gave way to hope once more that his group would be sent home.

“Attention, all jurors in group 2C. Attention, all jurors in group 2C.”

There was a long pause. Then …

“All jurors in group 2C, kindly proceed to court number thirteen.”

Bloody hell, thought Nigel.

 

3

The Court 13 jury steward, a pleasant, fortyish woman of Indian extraction, opened the door to let Nigel's group into the courtroom. She pointed the jury pool toward their seating gallery—a set of fifty seats, immediately to their left, at the near wall of the courtroom.