Anselm left Mr Roderick Kemble QC prostrate in a cab at Waterloo and hurried through the Eurostar terminal, finding his seat a matter of minutes before the train lurched forward.
He gloomily skimmed a cutting on The Round Table Wilf had given to him. He’d shown the text to Roddy who’d glanced over it while he ate, raising an aimless question as to why Jacques was interrogated in the June when the ring was not broken until the July With affection, Anselm had filled the Master’s glass. As expected Roddy appeared not to have read the cutting. The June arrest had had nothing to do with the events of the following month. Only a Silk of Roddy’s standing could get away with that sort of blunder – and he did, frequently with breathtaking aplomb.
Once in Paris, Anselm took a room in a cheap hotel near Sacre Coeur. The next morning he set off for the Boulevard de Courcelles, near Parc Monceau, to the Fougeres home, wondering how he was going to phrase the application of the law to the death of their son.
All the witnesses were agreed on the basic facts: the pensioner, Mr Ogden, had grabbed the man with the white beard (Milby never named him. Instead he used a rather coarse term of art). The man with the beard had told him to let go, but Mr Ogden had then drawn back his fist. So the other had struck out. At that point Pascal Fougeres had slipped and fallen, banging his head. The terms of the conversation prior to the altercation had also been agreed. But, as the investigating officer repeatedly pointed out to the outraged witnesses, nothing said by the man with the beard constituted a criminal offence. Milby told Anselm that the police would have liked to nail him, ideally with a manslaughter charge under the doctrine of transferred malice – on the understanding that the backhand slap directed at Mr Ogden technically ‘shifted’ to Pascal. But that ignored the only compelling legal analysis: Mr Ogden was the aggressor and the response of his victim was not an unlawful act. The brute fact was that the terms of every other potential charge could not be stretched to accommodate the offensiveness of the victim.
After it became known that Pascal had died, the man with the white beard informed the police that he would not insist on charges being laid against Mr Ogden.