Dead Men's Boots (6 page)

Someone who looked like an extra on
Judge John Deed,
impossibly young and suave and dark-suited, stood as if on cue on Jenna-Jane’s side of the courtroom. The magistrate flicked
him a glance but went on without giving him a chance to open his mouth. “Has there been a tribunal hearing?” he demanded,
lingering on the word “tribunal” as though it were particularly tasty.

“Your Honor,” the barrister said, holding up his own wodge of papers as if to prove that he was earning his salary here, too.
“Michael Trevelyan, representing Haringey Health Authority. Yes, the review tribunal met three weeks ago. If you look in the
court papers, you’ll see the minutes of that meeting. It took place at the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill. In attendance
were Dr. Smart, Mr. Prentice, and your colleague Mr. Justice Lyle.”

“And the recommendation?” The magistrate rummaged in the depths of the paperwork again, looking a little put out.

“The issue, Your Honor, is the transferral of Mr. Ditko from the Stanger Home to a separate, secure facility under the management
of Professor Mulbridge—the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Saint Mary’s in Paddington.”

“I’m aware of the issue, Mr. Fenster. I asked about the recommendation.”

“Of course, Your Honor. But as you’ll also note from that document, the tribunal did not in fact manage to complete its deliberations.
Miss Bruckner, who represents herself here today”—he glanced across at Pen—“was also in attendance and claimed—somewhat forcefully—that
the tribunal was not properly convened.”

The honorable Mr. Runcie had found his place now. He scanned the pages in front of him, tight-lipped. “Yes,” he said. And
then, a little later, “Oh yes.” After reading on for a good half-minute longer while the rest of us examined our fingernails
and the paint on the walls, he put down the paper and stared at Pen. “You disrupted the hearing, Miss Bruckner,” he said with
a slightly pained emphasis. “You’re facing criminal charges as a result.”

Pen stood up again. “I had to, Your Honor,” she said levelly. “They were going to break the law. I needed to stop them.”

I listened carefully to her words, or rather, to the tone of them, trying to assess how tightly wound she was. I estimated
about three to four hundred pounds of torque: not terrible, for this stage of the proceedings. If anything, she managed to
get an apologetic note into her voice, and she bowed her head slightly as she spoke in an understated pantomime of guilt.
She knew she’d blown it at the Stanger hearing, and she was trying to undo that damage.

“You needed to stop them,” Mr. Runcie repeated. “Indeed. Well, I’ve no doubt you feel very strongly about this. But still—the
transcript suggests that you shouted and scattered documents, and you’ve been accused of actually threatening Dr. Webb, the
director of the Stanger Home.”

“I’m really sorry about that,” Pen said meekly. “The threat, I mean. I did say all those things. But I didn’t mean half of
them.”

For a moment I could see the proceedings being derailed by an itemized discussion of which threats Pen did mean: the one about
breaking Webb’s arms and legs, or the more elaborate ones involving objects and orifices? But the barrister interposed smoothly
to keep things moving along.

“That case is pending, Your Honor, and it will be decided elsewhere. The crux of the matter here is that Miss Bruckner was
asserting a power of attorney over Mr. Rafael Ditko’s affairs and estate, and therefore a fortiori over the legal disposition
of his person.”

“On what grounds?” the magistrate asked, still looking at Pen. He was obviously trying to square the butter-wouldn’t-melt
picture of penitence in front of him with the written account of her exciting adventures at the Stanger. It didn’t compute.

Pen answered for herself, again with really impressive restraint and civility. “On the grounds that I’m the one who signed
the forms committing Rafi to the Stanger in the first place, Your Honor,” she said. “And I pay his bills there, along with
a Mr. Felix Castor. Dr. Webb has dragged me in every other week for two years, whenever he needed a signature on something.
The only reason he doesn’t want me to have a power of attorney anymore is because it’s not convenient. Because now he wants
to sign Rafi over to that woman, and he doesn’t want anyone to be able to say no.”

On “that woman,” she flicked a glance across the court at Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, the demure mask slipping for a moment as her
eyes narrowed into a glare. Jenna-Jane inclined her head in acknowledgment, the ironic glint in her eye barely perceptible.

“I see,” said the magistrate. He turned to the barrister. “Well, if this
is
a section forty-one case, the safety of the public is the overriding consideration. Consent isn’t necessarily going to come
into the equation. Is that the only substantive issue, Mr. Fenster?”

“Your Honor, no,” the barrister said, waving his wodge again. “Miss Bruckner further alleges improper collusion between Dr.
Webb, Professor Mulbridge, and Dr. Smart, who, as the medical member of the tribunal, would have been making the initial recommendation
as to its decision. That is where I come in, since the authority—which convened the panel—feels compelled to rebut these charges.”

“Charges of collusion?”

“Just so, Your Honor.”

The magistrate looked back at Pen with a frown. “Miss Bruckner,” he said with very careful emphasis, “may I ask on what basis
you are questioning the credentials and integrity of”—he scanned the paper that was still in his hand—“of a judge, a doctor,
and a trained psychologist?”

It was time for me to take some of the pressure off Pen before she could get any closer to blowing. I stood up and gave the
bench a friendly wave. “Can I answer that one, Your Honor?” I asked.

He gave me a slightly nonplussed look. Jenna-Jane looked around, too, and I took an unworthy pleasure in the way her thin
lips thinned a little more at the sight of me. “And you are—?” the magistrate asked.

“Felix Castor. Like Miss Bruckner said, I’m the other side of the coin when it comes to paying for Rafi’s fees at the Stanger
and signing off on his monthly reviews.”

“I see. And what is it that you do, Mr. Castor?”

Anything honest, I thought. Which rules out most of what you do. “I’m an exorcist, Your Honor.”

“An…”

“Exorcist. Ghostbreaker. Provider of”—I ran my tongue around the white-bread phrase with a slight reluctance—“spiritual services.”

The magistrate gave me an owl-eyed stare, the ripples seeming to spread away almost as far as his neckline. “I see. And you
agree with Miss Bruckner’s assertion that the tribunal’s members are not fully impartial?”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I do. Dr. Smart worked at the MOU under Jenna-Jane—Professor Mulbridge—for five years. He still
does all his consultancy work at Praed Street. And that guy Prentice who’s on the panel as the lay member—well, he’s ‘lay’
in the sense of laying low. He’s in my profession, and Professor Mulbridge is more or less his regular employer. She can’t
have exorcists on staff, so she hires them as security and puts their paychecks through a different budget. Prentice is as
much of a fixture at Saint Mary’s as the scum behind the toilet.” Prentice, who’d been giving me a hostile glare ever since
I mentioned his name, surged to his feet and opened his mouth to speak. “If you’ll pardon the expression,” I added punctiliously.
“I wasn’t comparing him to toilet scum in any personal or moral sense.”

“Your Honor—” Prentice spluttered.

Runcie cut over him, giving me a severe frown. “Mr. Castor, if I hear any repetition of that pugnacious tone, I’ll take it
as a contempt of court. Are you seeing proof of association as proof of collusion?”

“No,” I admitted. “Not automatically. But Professor Mulbridge is desperate to get her hands on Rafi because”—better pick my
words with care here—“his condition is so rare and it chimes so well with her own interests. And you’d have to admit, Your
Honor, it smells a little off if the institution that’s trying to swipe Rafael Ditko, to take possession of him against his
own wishes and the wishes of those close to him, is able to pad out the tribunal panel with its own staff. It looks like ballot-stuffing.”

Jenna-Jane put her hand up, and the magistrate turned his eyes on her. “Your Honor,” she said, sounding a little reproachful,
“could I make an observation? Not to rebut Miss Bruckner’s and Mr. Castor’s allegations but to indicate the problem that the
tribunal was faced with?”

Mr. Runcie indicated with a gesture that she could. Jenna-Jane nodded her thanks. “The facility I run at Saint Mary’s,” she
said, sounding like a grandmother reminiscing about the queen’s coronation, “is for the study, treatment, and understanding
of a very specific range of conditions. Many of my patients believe themselves to be possessed by the dead, or to be themselves
dead souls inhabiting animal bodies. As you know, the body of scientific evidence on such matters is small. In trying to enlarge
it, I’ve had to call on the skills of a great many people whose knowledge is of an empirical rather than an academic nature.”

Knowing the Jenna-Jane juggernaut and how it rolled along, I was listening to all this with a detached interest. I had to
give her a 5.9 for artistic effect, but only 5.6 for technical merit. She’d gotten the respectful tone right, but she’d overdone
the beating around the bush. “Your point, Professor Mulbridge,” the magistrate chided her.

“My apologies, Your Honor. My point is that Rafael Ditko claims to be demonically possessed. Dr. Webb’s initial diagnosis
was paranoid schizophrenia, but he admits that there’s some anomalous evidence that brings the diagnosis into question. He
wants Ditko transferred both because he represents a danger to the staff at the Stanger Home and because they don’t have the
proper facilities there to treat him.

“So a decision on Mr. Ditko’s case requires an awareness of the paranormal as well as of the psychiatric factors presenting
in his case. And it would be hard to find anywhere in the United Kingdom any practitioner in those areas—specifically, any
exorcist—who hasn’t worked with me or for me at some point in the last ten years. Why, Mr. Castor himself”—she turned to indicate
me with a tolerant smile, our eyes locking for the second time—“was a very valued colleague of mine at the Metamorphic Ontology
Unit until comparatively recently.”

The magistrate looked at me with a certain mild surprise. “Is this true, Mr. Castor?”

Damn. Sometimes when you’re not knife-fighting with Jenna-Jane on a day-to-day basis, you forget how strong her instinct for
the jugular really is.

There was no point dodging the bullet. “As far as it goes, yeah,” I admitted. “And it’s also true that a lot of exorcists
are going to have had associations with the MOU in the past. That’s different from being still on staff there, though. And
you could easily find a psychiatrist who isn’t in Jenna-Jane’s pocket.”

“A psychiatrist with a background in the behavioral and psychological matrices of bodily resurrection?” Jenna-Jane inquired,
tapping her thumbnail against her notebook.

“You don’t have a monopoly on—” Pen broke in.

“Please,” said Mr. Runcie with more of an edge to his voice. “I must insist that you address all comments to me and restrict
yourself to answering my direct questions. Sit down. All of you, please sit down. I haven’t asked anybody to stand.”

We all complied, but the magistrate’s feathers were thoroughly ruffled, and he didn’t look any happier. “Thank you. It appears
that there are two separate issues here—the one concerning Miss Bruckner’s assertion of power of attorney, and the other relating
to the legal constitution of the tribunal’s panel. Mr. Fenster, are there any other heads under this case of which you’ve
failed to apprise me?”

“None, Your Honor,” the barrister said, taking the implied criticism on the chin. “Those are the two substantive issues.”

The magistrate glanced at Pen. “And do you agree with that summary, Miss Bruckner? I mean, insofar as it states the matter
at issue—the substance of your case?”

Pen hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, Your Honor.”

There was a silence. The Honorable Mr. Runcie looked far from happy. “And the tribunal has no brief to review the terms of
Rafael Ditko’s detention—only his transferral from one facility to another?”

“Your Honor,” said the barrister, looking profoundly sorrowful, “Mr. Ditko has been involved in incidents of damage or assault
at the Stanger Home on five separate occasions within the last year. There are currently no plans—outside of the usual periodic
authorization process—to review his sectioning and detention. Nobody is claiming that he can safely be released back into
society.”

Runcie gave Jenna-Jane a look that was fairly long and fairly hard. “Professor Mulbridge, I take it you were not yourself
involved in the selection of the tribunal’s members?”

Jenna-Jane spread her arms expansively. “Your Honor, these things are the province of the local authority—in this case, Haringey.
As far as their internal workings go, I don’t ask, and I’m not told.”

The magistrate nodded agreement. “Yes. Just so. Still, I have the option of asking and presumably
will
be told. On the face of it, it does seem possible that there could be a conflict of interests. I’m keeping an open mind,
but I’m going to order a three-day suspension of these proceedings while I look into the selection arrangements and make sure
that all proper regulations were followed.” He pondered. “On the question of power of attorney, that’s an issue that goes
far beyond these current events. I can’t rule on the a priori assumption. Even if Dr. Webb has been dealing with Miss Bruckner
and Mr. Castor as though they had such a power, that does not necessarily make it so in the eyes of the law. I believe you
should take legal advice, Miss Bruckner, and perhaps give further thought to whether representing yourself is the wisest course
of action here.” He stroked the bridge of his nose self-consciously. “Given that Mr. Ditko can’t legally give you his informed
consent while he’s sectioned on mental health grounds,” he mused, “you’ll almost certainly have to make an application through
a higher court…”