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to spend the waiting time alone.
    As a junior she had walked the corridors of the Bailey, moving from the Edwardian baroque of the old building to the simplicity of the new, then down to the marbled splendour of the Great Hall to pace under the dome between its lunettes and blue mosaics and contemplate once again the familiar monuments while she emptied her mind of the things she might have done better, those she could have done worse, and prepared herself for the verdict.
    Now this perambulation had become for her too obvious a defence against anxiety. She preferred to sit in the library, and her insistence on solitude ensured that she was almost always alone. She took a volume from the shelf without noticing its title and carried it over to a table with no intention of reading.
    “Garry, did you love your aunt?” The question brought to mind a similar question asked — when? — eighty-four years earlier, in March 1912, when Frederick Henry Seddon had been found guilty of the murder of his lodger, Miss Eliza Barrow. “Seddon, did you like Miss Barrow?” And how could he convincingly answer that, of the woman he had cheated out of her fortune and had buried in a pauper’s grave? The Frog had been fascinated by the case. He had used that question to demonstrate the devastating effect which one question could have on the result of the trial. The Frog had come up with other instances too: the expert witness for the defence in the Rouse burning-car case whose evidence had been discredited because he couldn’t give the coefficient of expansion of brass; the judge, Mr. Justice Darling, leaning forward to intervene in the trial of Major Armstrong to ask why the defendant, who claimed that the arsenic he had bought was for the destruction of dandelions, had parcelled it up into small portions. And she, a fifteen-year-old, sitting in that small, under-furnished bed-sitting-room, had said: “Because a witness forgets a scientific fact or the judge decides to intervene? Is that justice?”
    The Frog had for a moment looked pained, because he needed to believe in justice, he needed to believe in the law. The Frog. Edmund Albert Froggett. Improbably a bachelor of arts, obtained by external study at some unspecified university. Edmund Froggett, who had made her a lawyer. She acknowledged this truth with gratitude to that odd, mysterious, pathetic little man, but he seldom came into her mind as an invited guest. The memory of the day when their relationship ended was so painful that gratitude was subsumed in embarrassment, fear and shame. If she thought of him it was because, as now in this moment, some trick of memory intruded on the present and she was fifteen again, sitting in the Frog’s bed-sitting-room listening to his stories, learning about the criminal law.
    They would be seated one each side of his small hissing gas fire with only one section burning because the Frog had to put coins into the meter and the Frog was poor. But there was a gas ring beside the fire, and he would make cocoa for them both, strong and not too sweet, just as she liked it. She must have been there with him in summer surely, in spring and in autumn, but in memory it was always winter, the unlined curtains drawn, the noise of the school muted now that the boys were in bed. Her parents, in their sitting-room in the main part of the house, were unworried about her, because she was supposed to be in her bedroom finishing her homework. At nine o’clock she would break off their talk and go downstairs to say good-night, to answer the predictable questions about how her work had gone, the timetable for the next day. But she would return always to the only room in the house in which she had ever been happy, to the hiss of the fire, the armchair with the broken springs which was made comfortable because the Frog would take a pillow from his bed and put it at her back, to the Frog sitting opposite her in the upright chair with his six volumes of
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