Twelve leather-padded, leather-backed chairs had been arranged at a round table, as if we were King Arthur and his knights, but people seemed to prefer to stand, talking to each other in the vicinity of the stainless steel hives containing that brown nectar which men like me preferred to honey. And we were all men. I have written people but there were no women. It was an all-male jury.‘Guilty as hell,’ said the chubby man in the large check suit. I wanted to tell him that if he wanted to look slimmer, he should try a narrow stripe pattern. Or even plain. ‘Can’t be anything else.’ He took a long sip of his coffee and obviously burnt his tongue, because he made a face and stuck the tip of that organ through his teeth.The chap he was speaking to was not much leaner but he was a more sensible dresser, in a blue sweater and jeans.‘I don’t know,’ he replied in a cultured voice, the kind of accent which one heard at county fairs. ‘I thought that’s what we were here to discuss.
