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‘How old were you?’
‘Old enough to know better.’
‘How old?’ she demanded.
‘Seventeen.’
‘And the other guy?’
‘Twenty-five, though I didn’t know that at the time. I saw them in court.’
Her stomach lifted and dropped.
‘Them?’
‘There was another lad.’ Kaspar lifted his shoulders. ‘But he was almost too drunk to walk. He’d just been swinging a piece of wood around.’
‘A piece of wood in a bar? And no one did anything?’
‘We were outside by then, in a back alley.’
‘And all because they looked at you the wrong way? I don’t understand.’
Kaspar gritted his teeth, obviously hating every moment of the story but determined to tell her, to make her understand why he was so damaged.
‘We were in a bar, a bit of a dive. As they passed me, one of them tripped over my bar stool. He pushed me off it and told me to apologise. I refused and they suggested taking it outside and I didn’t have the sense to say no.’
‘So there were two of them and one of them was wielding a plank of wood. My God, Kaspar, you could have been killed. Surely you were just defending yourself?’
‘No, I wasn’t drunk. They were. I could have walked away. I should have.’
‘You were seventeen,’ she cried. ‘It was a mistake.’
‘I hospitalised the guy. They were both swinging at me and I saw red. I made a kick—one kick, Archie—and I broke his jaw. He needed reconstructive surgery.’
‘God, Kaspar.’ Her fingers were pressed to her mouth.
‘In one stupid, drunken, angry moment I’d changed some stranger’s life.’
‘It...it was one kick, Kaspar.’
‘Exactly. What if I’d really lost control and not been able to stop even there?’
For a moment she couldn’t respond and then, suddenly, it was easy.
‘But you didn’t lose control. You stopped. One kick, unfortunately well placed but hardly premeditated or unprovoked. What did the judge say?’
‘It doesn’t matter what he said. It’s what I know that counts.’
‘So he said it was self-defence?’ she guessed.
‘The guy was wasted, he probably couldn’t have hurt me, but still the judge dismissed the case,’ Kaspar said contemptuously.
‘Because even a drunken guy could get lucky if he’d, say, picked up a bar stool, or a glass ashtray, or who knows what else,’ she argued. ‘What did the judge say?’
He eyed her reluctantly.
‘That there were too many witnesses who had told him how those men were acting up all night, were always in there, acting that way. He said I was the innocent party and he let me walk away scot-free.’
