Chapter 51: Trial By Jury

On the first day of the trial, witness after witness attested to seeing David Tennant cut off my husband’s head. I cross-examined none of them. There was a sense of anti-climax the first time, but since David Tennant had pleaded not guilty, the anti-climax quickly translated itself into tension as to what trickery we must have up our sleeve. The prosecution lawyers were clearly disconcerted. They started pontificating, ‘Of course, the defence will try to say your eyewitness testimony doesn’t matter,’ or, ‘Some clever expert will appear to explain how this was a group delusion, simply because we can’t find the weapon.’ Everyone had expected a duel, but they were getting a phony war. That first evening, various legal pundits on the telly blustered to imagine what rabbit we would pull out of what hat.

Rabbit-and-hat is appropriate, actually. On day two, the prosecution introduced a couple of stage magicians to explain how they could have given the impression of holding a sword and then, five minutes later, ta-da!, no sword. Thus, they hoped, any defence which rested on such trickery would be doomed.

I knew, as did the demons on the prosecution team, that David Tennant’s sword had disappeared because it was literally magic (or born of powers beyond our technology’s ability to comprehend, powers lost by the demons and angels aeons ago, and so the difference between these powers and magic, as far as present purposes were concerned, was semantic). You couldn’t tell the jury that, of course.
***

‘So, Mr Tennant,’ I asked, ‘the so-called sword. Would you say it was impossible for it to have disappeared?’

‘Objection!’ said the dutiful prosecution counsel. ‘We have clearly established several methods by which the sword could have appeared to disappear.’

‘My question, your honour, is as to whether the sword could ACTUALLY have disappeared. It is central to the defence case.’

‘Carry on, Miss Park,’ said the judge. Like all judges unless television is lying, he was a very dignified black man.

‘So, Mr Tennant, could that sword have literally disappeared?’

‘Yes.’

‘Objection!’

‘Dismissed. Carry on, Miss Park.’

‘How would that be possible, Mr Tennant? Would you explain to the court, please? It flies in the face of our understanding of science.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said David Tennant, ‘you must rethink some of your fundamental beliefs about science.’

‘Objection!’ said my opposite number, panic and disbelief mingling in his voice. He understood now. ‘This is completely outside the remit of the courtroom.’

‘Your honour,’ I said, ‘I must be allowed to defend my client.’

‘Well, Miss Park,’ said the judge gravely, ‘I don’t know where this going, but you may continue for now.’

I thanked him, and asked David Tennant what he meant. He delivered his answer straight to the jury. ‘I’m sorry to be doing this. It’s only because I have been forced to. The world is full of crackpots pretending that evolution didn’t happen, or that dried camel’s brain and honey will cure epilepsy. They are deluded, of course. There are other crackpots who see conspiracies everywhere. Most of these conspiracists are lunatics screaming into the void, hungry to blame shadowy forces for their own inadequacies, but some of them, a tiny few, have been right all along. Humans are not the only intelligent life on this planet. Another race of humanoids have existed alongside you for millennia. I am one of them. We once possessed science of extraordinary power, but we warred and were exiled from our own planet. We are not more powerful than you – one thing about our exile was that we resemble you in every measurable way – and our former power and knowledge survives only as fragment and prophecy.’ The room was stunned into silence by this obvious speech, which they all knew was insane. But it was thrilling to be listening to David Tennant say it in a courtroom, like being in a story, and they had all heard things very like it from David Tennant’s lips when he was playing the Doctor. The unreality of his speech combined with his fictional persona to give him, while his momentum was unbroken, a fragile credibility. It would fall apart as soon as he stopped, surely, except he now said, ‘One of the few artefacts that remains to us is this! ‘And suddenly he was holding the sword, three-feet long and glittering in the courtroom sun. The policeman behind him seized him round the waist and grabbed for his arm, very bravely I thought, but the sword was gone.

The room erupted. Courtroom artists were feverishly trying to sketch what they were sure they had seen, the prosecution was objecting to anything it could think of, and the judge fixed me with a steely glare. ‘I very much hope you can explain this trickery, Miss Park, because I do not like trickery in my courtroom.’

‘Mr Tennant,’ I said. ‘Was that a trick?’

David Tennant smiled. ‘According to Sherlock Holmes,’ he began, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, has to be true. That is fair enough, so far as it goes, but it is unimaginative. Very, very often in their history, humans have been wrong about what is or isn’t possible, so their initial assumptions can make them believe things which they know for a fact are incredibly improbable. In those cases, the probability of them being wrong about what is impossible is much higher than the probability of the thing they are trying to persuade themselves to believe is the only possibility. For instance, in this case, it is much more probable that I have an artefact so advanced as to seem like magic than that you have all had the same collective delusion about me holding a sword – the same collective delusion that took hold of all yesterday’s witnesses.’

‘Miss Park,’ interrupted the judge, ‘Is the root of your case going to be that your client is not human?’ I nodded. ‘In which case, I am going to order a recess until tomorrow to prepare myself for the implications. I will not have this room turned into a circus. Good afternoon.’