Murmuring the Judges

Начало книги

Brian Mackie’s attention wandered as the advocate sorted through his papers, looking for a misplaced note. Court Eleven, in Edinburgh’s old Parliament House, was a small, unprepossessing room, with drab brown-panelled walls and varnished wooden benches which had not been designed with spectator comfort in mind. Austerity, rather than grandeur, was a Scottish characteristic, and it echoed through the buildings in which the nation’s justice was dispensed.

The policeman felt no sense of history as he looked around from the witness box, nor any sympathy for all the evil which, across the decades, had come face to face with retribution in its dock. He wondered how many men had stood there, where Nathan Bennett sat now, listening to a black-capped, red-coated judge make the pronouncement which would lead to sudden, brutal death at the end of a rope.

A cough from across the room snapped him back to the present as abruptly as the noose had snapped the necks of the condemned.

Читать дальше →