Free Next of Kin by John Boyne

duty each night. They had simply forced the lock and overpowered two of the guards before filling their bags with millions of pounds’ worth of jewellery and beginning their escape.
    Everything had gone according to plan until they turned to leave the warehouse when they were surprised to see a group of policemen enter, shouting at them to drop the bags. When a chase ensued and he had found himself cornered by two of them, he had felt no hesitation in shooting the first and only regretted that his gun had stalled or he would almost certainly have made a clean escape.
    When he first met his barrister, Mr Justice McAlpine, and the instructing solicitor they had looked at him contemptuously and informed him that this was something of an open-and-shut case and the best he could hope for was to admit the offence, throw himself on the mercy of the judge and pray for a custodial sentence. More and more murderers, they told him, were seeing their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment if they appealed for clemency but the murder of a police officer, well that was different. There was really very little hope.
    â€˜It’s encouraging to see that you throw in the towel so easily,’ Domson said to McAlpine with a sarcastic laugh. ‘Do you have much of a record of winning your cases or are you generally too frightened to fight them?’
    â€˜I can fight a case if there are merits on which to fight it,’ said McAlpine in a gravelly tone, for he was far too old and experienced to allow himself to be spoken down to by a young man who had thought nothing of taking a life in cold blood. ‘But it’s very difficult in a case like this to make out grounds for leniency.’
    â€˜Perhaps I should tell you a little bit about my background then,’ said Domson with a smile. ‘Maybe I can help you out.’
    And so the business of Domson’s birth and genealogy was brought to the surface. At first neither Mr Justice McAlpine nor his solicitor believed what Domson was saying—that his great-great-grandmother had been the youngest child of a middle daughter of King George IV. They made a few notes on a piece of paper and tried to calculate what the relationship would be.
    â€˜What does that mean then?’ asked McAlpine. ‘That would make you a first cousin once removed to the king, would it?’
    â€˜A second cousin, actually,’ said Domson, referring to George V, who was enjoying the dying months of his reign. ‘Queen Victoria was my great-grandmother.’
    â€˜Then you would claim a position within the succession,’ asked McAlpine dubiously.
    â€˜Very distantly,’ said Domson. ‘I believe I’m number twenty-seven at the moment. Although some years ago I reached as high as eighteen. Until they started breeding,’ he added with disdain.
    McAlpine smiled and nodded his head; he was accustomed to prisoners making up the most outrageous stories in order to help their case but he generally offered them very little credence. This, however, was the most audacious suggestion he had heard in a long time.
    â€˜Well I’ll have to investigate this,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in to see you tomorrow morning and we’ll talk again then.’
    Later that day McAlpine set one of his pupils the task of investigating the ancestry of young Mr Domson and, to his surprise, he was informed that everything he had been told was in fact true.
    â€˜This puts the case into an entirely new light,’ he told his client the following morning. ‘I think it’s safe to say that we will be able to avoid the death penalty.’
    â€˜I thought as much,’ said Domson dismissively.
    â€˜But it will be important for you to show remorse and ask for mercy,’ said the barrister. ‘You do understand that, don’t you?’
    â€˜I’m not pleading guilty,’ he replied.
    â€˜I’m sorry?’
    â€˜I said I’m not