Next of Kin by John Boyne Page A

inclined her head a little at the compliment. ‘I don’t suppose you can tell me in advance what he’s going to say, can you?’
    â€˜I don’t think so, sorry,’ said Jane.
    â€˜But he’ll be announcing it in a few minutes. There’s no one I can tell.’
    â€˜I’m sorry, no. There are certain secrets between a husband and a wife that must stay secret,’ she said, despite the fact that she too had no idea whether her husband would be sentencing the boy to a lifetime in Brixton prison or a trip to the scaffold. ‘And what kind of a wife would I be if I divulged them?’
    The case of Rex vs Henry Domson had begun six months earlier when police had foiled a warehouse robbery near a jewel factory beside London Bridge. Domson had been the brains of the operation and had they been successful they would have succeeded in stealing almost two hundred thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds and other precious stones. However, one of the gang had been too loose with his tongue and the police had received a tip-off on the night of the incident. They arrested his three accomplices but Domson himself escaped and was chased along the docks until he was cornered by two policemen near a container lorry. When they moved in to arrest him, Domson pulled a gun from his jacket pocket and then shot the first officer—PC Peter Milburn, aged fifty-two—in cold blood. He would have shot the second too had his gun not stalled and he’d been overpowered in the ensuing struggle.
    The newspapers had not made too much of the incident at first—crimes like this were two a penny after all—until it was discovered that Domson was a second cousin of King GeorgeV, and a third cousin to the Prince of Wales who, just after the trial began, had succeeded to the throne. Buckingham Palace had been conspicuously silent on the topic, refusing to comment except to say that no members of the royal family were either acquainted with Mr Domson or had ever even met him but the connection was enough for the case to constitute a scandal.
    Throughout the trial several of the daily participants had become celebrated figures; the chief prosecutor, Mr Justice Harkman, his learned colleague for the defence, Mr Justice McAlpine, and of course the trial judge, His Honour Sir Roderick Bentley KC, in whose hands the case now lay.
    Although it seemed like something of an open-and-shut case, Domson had pleaded not guilty and the trial had dragged on until the beginning of June when the jury had finally delivered a guilty verdict on the Thursday of the previous week. Domson had looked stricken in the dock when the announcement was made and there were those close to him who imagined he would disgrace his noble lineage even further by breaking down in tears but somehow he managed to keep control of his emotions, merely gripping the handrail in front of him for support.
    The newspapers had been debating the matter back and forth ever since. Murder was a capital crime, often punishable by death. The murder of a policeman, killed in the line of duty, was even more heinous and there had never been a conviction in such a case leading to anything other than the death penalty. However, there had also never been a trial quite like this one before either. The majority of the newspapers believed that Judge Bentley would suspend the death penalty and sentence Domson to a life of hard labour on account of his royal connections. Indeed, such a given was it that editorials had started to be written about the injustice of such a sentence and how the class structure was as relevant to crime as it was to normal, everyday life. Unbeknown to anyone in the courtroom The Times had already prepared a leader for the following day’s edition attacking Roderick and calling for his removal from the bench, questioning whether the sentence would have been as lenient had the murderer been a poor, unemployed lad from Walthamstow rather than