Madame Juror.

Chapter 8

There was a silence, as everyone read what I had just written down. Chatt was the first to finish. He gave a low whistle, and came to pat me on the back.

"You are a smart young lady, Miss Winter, you've got that to your credit" he commented admiringly. Brenkley too, nodded his approval, and I wondered if perhaps it was possible that I might be able to call him to my side within a little while.

But firstly, it appeared, Mr. Samuels was going through a couple of processes in his head. (You could see the basic principles of them on his face)

Eventually, he stood up and came to sit on my side of the room. To my surprise, the next person to move was Hamish Rider. I had seen him as being one of the stubborn ones.

"I can't see any of those questions being answered" he said honestly. "Which rather begs the question, did she even do it at all?"

"I can answer that number six for you" Adelaide grunted. "The house is a stone house. Sound doesn't travel in a stone house."

"Good start, sir" I smiled, crossing it off the list. Now there was one less problem for me to think about.

Rider and Samuels looked uneasy, and I had a feeling I might be about to lose them again.

"Five to go" I reported, trying to keep the men's heads in the game.

"Well if the other questions are answered with such simple logic as that, then I'm sure this won't take long" Abernarthy scoffed. I smiled, but had to force it on as Rider walked back across the room again.

"I'm waiting" I said cheerily, as the group of eight men dissolved into thought.

"One's obvious" Rider himself said, after a minute. "To make sure."

I nodded, weighing this up.

"I'd agree with that" I decided, crossing it off the list. Samuels was now looking decidedly unsettled. I winked at him slyly.

"You can go" I mouthed. "I don't care."

That seemed to make up his mind. He sat down with a bit of a creak on a rather ornate oak chair on my side of the room, and stayed put.

"Two and Three can be put down to panic, surely" Mr. Abernarthy pointed out, a minute or two later. I stuck out my bottom lip.

"Perhaps. But then how did she remember to take the beating weapon with her? The weapon that did the damage was the knife, why not take that?" I asked.

"Panic can do strange things to a person" Mr. Price argued. I shrugged.

"But this murder, the way you described it, has to be premeditated" I said levelly. "There's no way in hell she was just walking by the study door with a big hefty stick or something in her hand and decided to go and batter her husband's head in."

"What if it was something he told her?" Mr. Patience said suddenly, in his Glaswegian tones. "Say...he told her something she didn't like, in the study, and she turned around and took a swing."

"Where's the weapon?" I shot back. "The police would have mentioned anything missing from the study and put it down as the beating weapon. And there's no fire, as the house plan shows, so no nice sticks on standby."

"She left the study and came back with the weapon, obviously!" Mr. Price sighed, like he was explaining it to a five-year-old child.

"Which would make it premeditated, wouldn't it?" I retorted, in precisely the same tone of voice. "She would have had no reason to panic, as she would have known exactly what she was about to do!"