Take My Life by Winston Graham

Author:Winston Graham [Graham, Winston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

The day of the trial broke warm and sunny. It was the first Thursday in May, and as Philippa looked out of the window of the flat she could hear the sparrows chirping and chattering. It was a day for going out and seeking the first green fields, to walk by a river or to wander in a wood. Middlesex were playing their first match of the season at Lord’s.

In the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey spring existed on hearsay evidence. Only the brightness of the light falling in through the glass dome suggested that an outer, freer, sunnier air existed somewhere and that all men might not be bent on the grim faded processes of human law.

To Philippa, after a sleepless night of foreboding, the court came as an anticlimax. As at Bow Street, she had expected something bigger and more imposing. This might have been a small county court, drab and yellow and unimpressive and built for the consideration of trespass and petty thefts. Little wonder the policeman said that the long patient queue stretching round the building outside had no hopes of getting in. She was glad of that. The fewer to peer and whisper the better.

Joan and John Newcombe were both there to greet her, and they sat together on one of the front benches. Philippa knew she would have to go into one of the outer rooms as soon as the trial started, since she was an important witness for the defence, but she wanted first to see Nick and to feel the general atmosphere into which she would suddenly be called either late today or early tomorrow.

Presently leading counsel drifted in, and Philippa glanced anxiously at Sir Alfred Well, KC, who was leading for the Crown. He was a taller, older, more imposing man than Tyler, with a beak of a nose and a habit of pursing his lips suddenly as if about to say ‘shush’. As the benches filled up round her, Philippa’s heart began to beat and the old sick, feeling returned. She realized that somehow the court was not unimpressive after all. She realized that she was frightened, and getting more frightened, for Nick.

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