Chapter Two

CHAPTER 2

As soon as I saw the judge, my miserable night turned into an even more miserable morning.

‘Oh terrific!’ I muttered, when I realised he was the very same man who’d sent me to reform school.

‘You again!’ he scowled.
I could say the same, I thought.
It wasn’t a good start and it only got worse when he told the

warden to bring in the jury. ‘Jury?’ I blurted, my nerves jangling madly. ‘That sounds a bit serious!’

‘It’s more than a bit serious,’ said the judge, as I watched the twelve men of the jury being led in. ‘You are accused of a repeat offence, so this time you will face the full force of the law. The jury will hear all the evidence and decide whether or not you are guilty. If they find you guilty the penalty will be severe.’

By now, I had a nasty feeling disaster was looming. What’s more, it was looming in front of a gallery packed with people who had come for a morning’s entertainment. The only good thing about it was that Aunt Sadie was there. When she gave me a little smile and the thumbs up, I knew she believed in me after all, and I felt a tiny bit happier.

Then it started.

‘Are you Edith Timms?’ asked the judge, though he knew perfectly well who I was.

‘Yes,’ I answered, thinking it was not the time to point out that I preferred to be called ‘Cat’.

‘Edith Timms, you are charged with breaking in to The In and Out Club and stealing six sterling silver serving salvers. How do you plead?’ ‘Not guilty!’ I said firmly, chin up, refusing to let him see how

nervous I was.
‘Very well,’ said the judge. ‘We will hear from your accusers.’
Mr Burke stood up first, tugging his lapels and clearing his throat.

‘Your Honour, on the night in question, Miss Timms was seen climbing backwards through the same window she used when she robbed the club eight months ago,’ he said.

‘Who saw her?’ asked the judge.

‘Miss Candice Floss, Your Honour,’ Mr Burke answered. He pointed to a young woman who was sour-faced and as lumpy as a sack of coal – the exact opposite of what her name suggested. It soon became clear she was dishonest too.

‘I was returning home from the music hall when I saw someone climbing backwards out of a small window at the back of the club,’ she said, her voice thin and whiny.

For all I knew that part was true, but then the lies began.

‘It was definitely her!’ she said pointing to me, which I thought was rude. ‘I saw her clearly by the light of the gas lamp.’

‘Why did you not try to stop her?’ asked the judge.

‘I was afraid to, in case she was dangerous and attacked me with the plates!’ replied Miss Floss.

I was speechless, but not for long. ‘Oh come on!’ I cried. ‘She’s at least three times as big as me. She’d probably kill me if she sat on me; how could I be dangerous to her?’

The judge was not pleased with my observation, even if it was accurate.

‘I advise you to hold your tongue, Miss Timms, or I shall charge you with contempt of court,’ he scowled.

Things were not going well. The jury were lapping up Candice Floss’s lies as happily as a cat laps cream. I needed a miracle, and though I didn’t know it, one was coming, but not just yet. First I had to endure the testimony of my next accuser.

A grey-haired man with a walrus moustache and the plummiest voice I’d ever heard got to his feet. He stood ramrod straight and looked around with mean, watery eyes. ‘I am Brigadier Sir George Bradley-Bing, retired,’ he told the court. ‘I served in Her Majesty’s Dragoon Guards and in the Crimean War I survived the Charge of the Light Brigade.’

What that had to do with me being falsely accused I didn’t know. What I did know was that as soon as the brigadier mentioned the heroic Charge of the Light Brigade the jury stared at him in adoration. He soon had them all nodding in agreement.

‘I know a thief when I see one, and this robbery has the whiff of her about it,’ he said, pointing rudely, just as Candice Floss had done. ‘She used the same modus operandi as last time she robbed the club!’

Miss Kandinsky had taught me some Latin and I knew that modus operandi means a way of doing things. For a moment I thought I had found a way out of my predicament. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘When I actually did rob the club, I climbed out forwards, not backwards, as Miss Floss claims! That’s not the same modus operandi is it?’

‘We only have your word on it – the word of a convicted burglar!’ snorted the Brigadier.

‘You could ask the constable who arrested me the first time. He’d back me up,’ I retorted.

‘I dare say we could, Miss Timms,’ the judge interrupted. ‘But there is more to a modus operandi than the way a window is exited!’

The jury was nodding so hard by now that I feared they would injure their necks and try to blame me for that as well.

Finally, it was my turn, and believing the truth to be enough, that’s what I gave them. I denied everything. I told the jury I’d gone straight for the last eight months and said that if I was going to rob anywhere I wasn’t silly enough to rob the same place twice.

I’d done what I could to defend myself, and the jury left to consider their verdict. I had to hope they could see through my accusers’ lies.

They weren’t gone long. When they came back, the chief juror stood up and the judge asked him if they had reached a verdict. He said they had.

‘In the matter of the theft of six sterling silver serving salvers from The In and Out Club, do you find the defendant guilty, or not guilty?’ asked the judge.

‘Guilty, Your Honour.’

Even though I was half expecting it, the verdict was a gut- wrenching shock. I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach by a bare-knuckle fighter. My head spun. Aunt Sadie sat, white-faced, with a hand covering her mouth, and for some reason I thought of Mum. It occurred to me that she would be looking down on all this. She would see that justice was not being done. Had she been in the room she would have had something to say about that!

Suddenly, I knew I couldn’t go down without a fight. A little voice in my head told me I was about to make things worse, but I ignored it. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better, don’t they?

Before anyone could stop me, I scrambled up onto the edge of the dock. The crowd gasped and the judge looked as if the world had gone mad.

‘Tempus fugit! Seize the day!’ I yelled. 14

The judge looked baffled. ‘Don’t you mean carpe diem?’ he said, before he could stop himself.

‘Of course I do!’ I cried. I had mixed up my Latin in the excitement. But there was no time for a discussion. I needed to draw attention to this injustice, and the drama of the moment was disappearing fast. In order to try and carpe diem again, I began to wave my fists in the air and shout, ‘I didn’t do it! I wasn’t there! I’m innocent!’

For the tiniest, strangest moment, the universe seemed to stop, while everyone stared at me. And then the courtroom policeman leapt at me, shouting, ‘Oy!’, and suddenly the universe leapt back to full speed.

I did a nifty sidestep along the edge of the dock and the policeman missed me. Instead he knocked a portly gentleman’s top hat clean off his head. The hat flew across the room where it struck an elegant lady, wearing a maroon velvet dress, smack between the eyes. She promptly fainted and fell over, revealing pink petticoats to the world.

Well, that was it, wasn’t it? The petticoats seemed to set something off. The place went mad. People suddenly began shouting and waving newspapers and umbrellas in the air and somewhere in the room a baby started bawling. Even Aunt Sadie joined in the mayhem, indignantly shouting, ‘That’s my niece! She’s innocent! Release her! Release her!’

By then the judge had had enough. He began banging his gavel wildly on his bench. But the madness simply got louder and no one except me seemed to notice as something began to happen to the judge. His eyes narrowed and he sucked an enormous breath in through quivering lips, until he looked like a ripe redcurrant about to burst. I have never seen anyone turn such an unhealthy colour. And then he bellowed, letting it all out. ‘Silence I say, or you will all be held in contempt of court and I will jail every single one of you!’

The crowd hushed instantly; except for the baby, whose mother hastily stuck her thumb in its mouth.

In the silence, I suddenly felt a bit foolish standing on the edge of the dock, so I jumped down. All I could hear then was the ticking clock and the judge’s furious breathing.

‘Edith Timms,’ he hissed, when he had recovered enough to speak. ‘The jury has decided that you did do it, you were there, and you are not innocent. For your contempt I am giving you the maximum sentence – five years in prison!’

The sharp intake of breath from the crowd drowned out my own gasp, while the judge’s words rang in my ears again and again like some dreadful echo. All I could do was watch in horror as he raised his gavel and prepared to send me to jail.