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r and make her more conscious of the fact that he had once loved her so deeply? He was here now as a friend, and as a lawyer who wanted to trust her on the case so she would not be caught out on the stand when the defence would do everything they could to discredit her.
‘Hester, no one is dead,’ he said gravely. ‘The charge is kidnap. If the defence can make it appear that you went willingly, then the case against Rand depends on the testimony of three small children, who are very young, and who can probably neither read nor write. We can’t call them to the stand. The judge wouldn’t believe them and the defence would tie them in knots! It rests on you, and on Monk and whoever else was with him when they found you. They are all Monk’s men and the defence will most certainly point that out.’
Hester frowned, the first shadows of real anxiety in her eyes.
Rathbone leaned forward a little. ‘Hester, they’ll say that Monk stormed the place, and they had no idea who he was. Very naturally they fought back! Who wouldn’t? If they can make it look as if you were a willing part of the experiment, then we have no case. Adrienne Radnor will very probably lie and say that you went as willingly as she did. If you did not tell your husband where you were, that is a domestic issue, and not their fault.’
She looked stunned, a little dizzy, as if he had slapped her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently, putting his hand over hers and feeling her fingers cool and stiff, as if she were afraid of him.
‘Rand would have killed me if Radnor had died,’ she said. ‘And worse than that, he would have bled those children to death, too, if it would have saved Radnor. He actually told me, when I argued for taking better care of them, that he didn’t need all of them alive.’
‘I’m not talking about the reality,’ Rathbone said. ‘I need what we can prove. And that has to be not what is believable, but what is beyond reasonable doubt. Any doubt at all that offers another explanation, and the jury will have to acquit both of them.’
She blinked back sudden tears. ‘How can I prove that I stayed because I couldn’t leave the children alone there? Maybe there’ll be a juror who would have? They’ll all be men, won’t they!’ Jurors were always men.
‘Many will be married, and with children,’ he replied, hating himself for doing this, although with every evasion he would feel the greater and greater need. It was almost something he could taste, like the sharpness of the lemons in the drink. ‘They’ll know that their wives would never leave children to be bled to death like that, frightened, alone and unloved or comforted. We may have to rely quite heavily on character witnesses.’
‘For me?’ she said, forcing a slight smile of self-mockery. ‘I run a clinic for prostitutes,’ she reminded him. ‘You might be better off not raising that one.’
‘An army nurse now looking after the fallen in a different war,’ he said drily.
Her smile widened in spite of herself. ‘What about the children? That can’t be acceptable. You only have to see them to know how small and vulnerable they are. And Maggie could testify. She’d fight anyone if they threatened her brothers. No lawyer will look good if he bullies a six-year-old little girl who’s been bled half to death for an experiment!’
‘We can’t prove that,’ Rathbone said grimly. ‘But it doesn’t matter, because the judge won’t allow the testimony of a child that age. The defence will fight tooth and nail to keep all of them off the stand.’
‘But they were there!’ she protested. ‘That’s a fact.’
‘Rand will simply say he paid the family for their participation in a medical experiment. Even if it didn’t work, could Rand have been close to success? Is it possible that he believed it could? Please . . . be very careful how you answer.’
Hester sat still for so long he thought she was not going to speak. Then she straightened up and faced him. ‘Yes, I think he was very close indeed. And if I am asked on the stand what I thought of his medicine, I would have to say that if he succeeded, it would be one of the greatest steps forward in saving lives that I have ever heard of. It wouldn’t just be people with white blood disease, it would be women bleeding to death in childbirth, anyone injured and dying from the shock of blood loss, soldiers, sailors, people in accidents of any sort – in the street, industrial – anything! It would stretch into the future beyond imagination. Think of having an operation, and not fearing the bleeding, knowing that what you lost would be replaced! There is no counting the people who would not die . . . if that could be made to work.’
He looked at her, searching her face, and he saw the wonder in her eyes.
‘Will you say that on the stand?’ he asked, realising that their case was vanishing in front of him.
‘If I’m asked, I have to. Do we need to punish him more than we need to save all those people in the future? Anyway, it’s the truth. If he succeeds, or anyone does, it would be like a miracle.’
‘And whose children do we bleed?’ he asked.
The colour bleached out of her face, leaving her haggard. ‘We don’t,’ she said hoarsely. ‘We find another way. That’s the problem he didn’t solve. Why was those children’s blood all right, while other people’s works sometimes and other times it doesn’t? And if the blood is wrong, it’s a hard and miserable way to die.’
‘So his success is partial?’
‘Yes. It’s a step along the path, that’s all. But I think it’s the best step anyone has made so far. We can’t say if it would have worked if he’d been able to continue.’ A sudden, dark shadow filled her eyes. ‘And of course if he is found not guilty, then who can even guess how many other people will try something similar?’
Rathbone had not even thought of that. He felt as if the air had suddenly turned ten degrees colder.
‘Then we must be a great deal more certain of success if we prosecute,’ he said quietly. ‘A victory would also be validation.’ He hesitated a moment, hating to ask her, afraid of the answer. ‘If you are asked on the stand what you think of his work, what will you say?’
She bit her lip. ‘That he was wrong to kidnap me, and deeply wrong to take the children and bleed them. But he could be on the brink of solving the problem of using willingly given human blood from one person to save the life of another. Especially if one could take a little from each of several people, adults, and given voluntarily.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Oliver, but that is the truth. I can’t lie about it. He’s a loathsome man, but that has nothing to do with the lives that his work could save.’
‘I understand. I put the law before individual people I care about, if they are wrong. I expect you to put medicine before them as well, in the same way. We must. And if we don’t, then everything else is also lost, sooner or later.’
She nodded, too full of emotion to look for words that were unnecessary anyway.
Rathbone drank the last of his lemonade and stood up to leave. His mind too was crowded with conflicting thoughts and emotions. He had told Ardal Juster that he would accept the case and work beside him on it. Now he was beginning to see that the complexity of it was deeper and far more tangled than he had imagined.
