Ana with one n seemed unconvinced. People usually did. “But then shouldn’t the defence be that ‘she had a good reason,’ not ‘she happened to eat the food before she decided not to pay for it’？”
“Maybe.” Oliver gave a little shrug. “But then we’d live in a world where the law says you’re allowed to commit crimes if you think you’ve got a good reason. And who decides what a good reason is?
It’s like the it’s-only-tea defence. If the law said that stealing only counted as stealing if you took something of significant monetary value, that would mean the law saw stealing a cup of tea from a poor person as a less serious crime than stealing a bottle of expensive wine from a rich person, and that doesn’t seem very just.” He sighed.
“I’m under no illusions about our legal system, I assure you. It has vast structural flaws, and miscarriages of justice absolutely do happen, in both directions. But it’s the best system we’ve got, and its problems generally aren’t what people think they are.”
“And”—I reached out and touched him on the shoulder, partly out of affection and partly out of a need for reassurance—“we’re okay, aren’t we? We’re not going to become, like, the Cup of Tea Seven or something?”
Oliver shook his head. “Fortunately for us, one of the vast structural flaws in our legal system is that being a group of white middle-class people on the way to an exclusive society wedding at which I suspect at least one guest will be an actual high court judge, the establishment is very much working in our favour.”
Well, that was a relief. In a checking-your-privilege kind of way.
Of course they didn’t have to charge us with anything to hold us for long enough to make us unfashionably late for Alex and Miffy’s wedding, although given that it was going to be this massive posh bonanza full of aristos and arseholes, maybe that would be a blessing.
For a while we sat quietly, contemplating our fate. Then Rhys said, “You know what I don’t get?”
“What don’t you get?” asked Ana with one n so that I didn’t have to.
The perplexed look on Rhys’s face would have been comical if it wasn’t so sincere. “I don’t get why Charlie gave us directions to somebody else’s house.”
THEY COULD HOLD US, OLIVER said, for twenty-four hours pretty much no questions asked. And I was beginning to think they were going to use all of it when I heard a titanic commotion coming from elsewhere in the police station.
“Completely unacceptable,” one voice was saying—not a voice I recognised.
“What do you expect in this part of the country,” another voice was saying, and this one I thought I recognised but couldn’t tell from where. “Bloody Welsh and Irish everywhere.”
“I say, steady on, Randy.” And that was a voice I recognised.
That was Alex Twaddle. “There’s a Welsh chappy I work with and he’s fearfully pleasant.”
Shit. The randomly insulting guy in the middle was Justice Mayhew. We’d had a run-in at Alex’s club a couple of years ago and he’d always struck me as exactly the kind of incompetent, bigoted bully you really hoped didn’t wield vast judicial power. Still, I suppose if there was ever a time to meet a friendly—well, not friendly, but inclined to be on your side in this situation—judge with a habit of browbeating people, it was when you were in a police station with pending charges of criminal trespass and Grand Theft Darjeeling.
The three men made their way through to our little holding area, where Alex beamed an oblivious hello while Justice Mayhew bore down at once on the officer on duty and began yelling.
“Well, hello, chaps and girl chaps,” Alex said, while in the background an irate jurist well past retirement age spat a stream of invective at a hapless public servant. “Heard you had a spot of bother with the local constabulary. Beastly thing, but we’ll soon have it sorted.”
“And if this country hasn’t completely gone to the dogs,” Justice Mayhew was saying, “neither you nor anybody like you will work in law enforcement again—”
“Incidentally,” Alex continued as if nothing loud and distracting was going on, “have you met my—”
“Never seen such a sorry excuse for a uniformed officer in all my born—”
“Daddy-in-law-to-be?” He looked around and, when nobody said Yes, we hang out all the time over foie gras and cribbage, went on.
“Everybody, this is Miffy’s father, Douglas Lettice, the Earl of Coombecamden. Daddy-in-law-to-be, this is everybody.”