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Justice Watlow arrived in his chauffeur driven Bentley at The Manor country house in Sussex around eleven pm, complaining about the damp weather. Renfield, the housekeeper, took his overcoat and ushered him into the cosy parlour. Grumbling, Watlow settled in his familiar armchair, but eyed appreciably the cognac on the silver platter and the inviting coal fire crackling in front of the ring of armchairs. By the time the others arrived, Watlow gulped his third cognac and puffed his second cigar. The three men exchanged opinions over current legal cases. “This one, a poor excuse for stealing,” said Watlow, his face the brick red of an undisciplined self-indulger. “Hungry indeed! Plenty of work about. Guilty pile?” “I second that,” murmured a wiry-looking Barnes indifferently. The stern-faced, pin-nosed Poncenby-Hithe haughtily blinked agreement. The mantelpiece clock ticked like a metronome, casting a soporific spell over the old men whose combined aged was two hundred and fifty. Watlow, avuncular great grandfather of eight, slumped down in the deep armchair. The cushions soaked up the discomfort of a gruelling day at the courthouse. Within minutes he was snoring loudly. This left rat-faced Barnes and Ponceby-Hithe (who resembled a whippet) to go through the remainder of the legal cases. They’d been doing so half-heartedly since Renfield dutifully brought another pile of white manuscripts into the room over an hour ago. “Too many to tackle,” complained Barnes. “I feel pressed for time.” “Hark at that storm,” Poncenby-Hither remarked, peering over his pince-nez and indicating the rain lashing the windows. “I wish I was home tucked up in bed.” “I second that,” murmured Barnes indifferently. Sleepily Poncenby-Hithe skimmed the case in his hand and allowed the paper to whisper from his grasp to the floor as he too fell asleep in front of the warm log fire. Justice Barnes picked it up a minute later and hovered over two piles, one marked Guilty the other Innocent. Judging by the bitter expression on Poncenby-Hithe’s sleeping face he dropped it in the Guilty bin. After skim reading a few more cases, his eyes blurred and he couldn’t go on. Rubbing his eyes, he dumped the remaining files in the Innocent bin. “Better,” he murmured to himself, “to err on the side of caution,” and wished one of the others was awake to second that before he too fell asleep. Renfield woke them an hour later. They shuffled out in single file, crooked, and wearing doleful expressions like a troop of pensioners sent back to bed from the common room in an old people’s home. Their drivers took them home. In the morning the cleaner Mrs Dix accidentally knocked the case papers off the table in the Dragonfly Chamber, scattering them across the recently vacuumed carpet. She stacked them back hastily, mindless of their order. Not long after, Renfield collected the cases from the boxes marked Guilty and Innocent and carried them to the office at the end of the hall for processing in the Courts of Justice in the morning.
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