Free Next of Kin by John Boyne Page A

pleading guilty,’ said Domson with as nonchalant an air as if he was simply deciding between the soup or the melon starter. ‘If I plead guilty I’ll automatically be sentenced. They won’t hear my case.’
    â€˜Well … yes,’ said McAlpine.
    â€˜Then I want to plead not guilty,’ explained Domson.
    â€˜If you do that, young man, the chances of the judge showing you any mercy in the event of your conviction diminish tenfold.’
    â€˜In the event of my conviction perhaps,’ said Domson. ‘But that won’t happen. I am an old Etonian, Mr McAlpine. I am twenty-seventh in line to the throne of England and a second cousin to the king. Do you really think that a dozen fishmongers and schoolteachers and cobblers are going to take it on to their own consciences to send me to the gallows? There’s enough of a mystique about my extended family among the plebs and the riff-raff to ensure that I’ll be let off. Just give them enough reasons to be unsure about the safety of a conviction and I guarantee they’ll jump at the chance.’
    â€˜I’m not so sure about that,’ said McAlpine, who had been practising at the Bar for almost thirty years and had never come across a client so convinced of his own ability to persuade the jurors while yet being so obviously guilty.
    â€˜Trust me,’ said Domson. ‘In any event, those are my instructions.’
    And so Henry Domson had pleaded not guilty to the capital crime and over the course of the previous six months the evidence had mounted up against him. George V had died, to be replaced by Edward VIII, and suddenly he was twenty-sixth in line to the throne, albeit reverting from a second cousin of the monarch to a third. Throughout it all, as McAlpine tried to convince him to change his plea mid-trial, he had refused, continuing to maintain that his social standing would, at the end of the day, save his neck.
    Then, on the Thursday of the previous week, the foreman of the jury had stood up in the dock and announced that after only twenty-three minutes of deliberations they had voted, twelve to zero, to find Henry Domson guilty as accused.
    â€˜And that wiped the smile off the bugger’s face,’ McAlpine told his wife when he returned home that evening.
    He had spoken to his client only once in the time between the reading of the verdict and this morning, when the sentence was to be passed, and his self-confidence had certainly taken a beating in the intervening days; however, his arrogance was still such that he refused to believe that the judge would give him anything other than the most lenient of sentences.
    â€˜He seems like a decent old fellow,’ said Domson, who had observed him throughout the trial, noting the expression on his face when the more unsavoury aspects of the night in question were brought up in court. ‘Where did he go to school anyway?’
    â€˜Where he went to school is of no more concern to this case than how he likes his eggs cooked in the morning,’ said Mr Justice McAlpine abruptly. ‘Really, Henry, at some point you are going to have to start taking these proceedings seriously. Your life is at stake here.’
    But Domson didn’t care. No judge at a British court, he insisted, would ever sentence a man of his standing to such an extreme punishment. He would be given a few years at an easy prison and, following an appeal, would be quietly released after six months and allowed to return to his former life with a slap on the wrist and a promise to go forth and sin no more.
    â€˜I have every faith in the victory of British snobbery over British justice,’ he said as he adjusted his tie in the mirror.
    However, as he was not entirely stupid, he tried to appear remorseful as he stood in the dock while Mr Justice Roderick Bentley KC entered the courtroom and took his seat on the bench, rearranging a few books and papers around him and pouring a