The One-Star Husband

Chapter Four: The Night Judge

For the first time in her career, Ottoline Abernethy had come to a courtroom without a microphone.

She sat in the press seats with her hands folded over her bag, where Raff's recorder lay wrapped in a scarf. She had watched Davey Kemble die on it again at four in the morning, and she still didn't know what she was going to do with it. Around her, her colleagues murmured into their phones. Three cameras stood along the side wall with their red lights glowing, and the courtroom was full to the doors.

Her father sat in the front row in a charcoal suit, and Raff sat beside him, freshly shaved, resting his right wrist carefully in his lap. Neither of them had looked at her when she came in.

Lucia stood in the witness box in her school blazer, the crest sewn slightly crooked on the pocket. She was holding the rail with both hands.

Benedict's lawyers had called three experts, one after another, each in a better suit than the last. Each swore under oath that the video had been built by a machine. The light was wrong, one said. The shadows didn't match the floodlights, said another, and the boy's injuries had been added afterward, frame by frame. Judge Corvin listened with his fingers laced over his stomach and nodded along, like a man hearing a story he already knew the end of.

"Miss Moretti," the senior lawyer said, turning to the box. "Who helped you make it?"

"Nobody," Lucia said. "I held my phone. That's all."

Ottoline turned in her seat. Enzo sat alone at the end of the back row, still in his driver's jacket, the collar Raff had torn folded down and held with a safety pin. He was watching his sister, and nothing else in the room seemed to exist for him.

Then the doors at the back opened, and the whole room rose.

Ottoline knew the woman at once, though she had only ever seen her on a raised bench. Chief Justice Abena Quaye hadn't set foot in a lower court in years. She was small and straight-backed in her black robe, her grey hair cropped close, a pair of reading glasses hanging from a chain at her chest. Behind his bench, Judge Corvin half-stood and seemed to forget how to sit back down.

The Chief Justice walked down the centre aisle and passed the Commissioner without a glance. Then she turned back, stopped at the end of the last row, and bowed her head to the one-star driver.

Not a whisper moved through the room. Somewhere behind Ottoline, a camera shutter clicked, then another.

Abena Quaye straightened and faced the courtroom.

"Ten years ago, I was the night judge at the Star Bureau," she said. Her voice was quiet, and it carried to every corner. "A boy of seventeen gave away the finest rating I had ever seen, to keep his mother and his little sister in this city. He asked me to hurry, because his sister was cold." She let the words settle. "I have bowed to nobody since I took this chair. I bow to him."

She sat down on the bench beside Enzo and folded her hands in her lap. The cameras along the wall caught every second of it.

In the witness box, Lucia had pressed a hand over her mouth. In the front row, Benedict was staring at the back of the room as if trying to place a face he had once looked straight through. And Enzo sat with his eyes on the floor, his shoulders set, as if the bow were a weight he had never asked to carry.

Judge Corvin had bent a great many hearings in his time, but he couldn't bend this one with the Chief Justice sitting in his back row. He cleared his throat and ordered the court's own examiners to test the original file from Lucia's phone. The room emptied for lunch and filled again faster than it had in the morning. By mid-afternoon, the examiners returned with their report. There was no machine anywhere in the video. Every frame was genuine.

Corvin read the ruling in a flat voice and never once looked at the front row. The video would stand. Davey Kemble's death would go to trial, and Rafferty Abernethy was summoned to answer for it. A court officer walked down the aisle and laid the summons on Raff's knee. Raff stared at it as if it might bite him, and their father didn't turn his head.

The courtroom broke into noise. Reporters crowded the aisle, shouting questions. Ottoline watched her husband rise, put an arm around his sister as she stepped down from the box, and walk her out past the cameras. People were calling his name now, Enzo Moretti, the boy who gave away five stars. He didn't answer any of them. He held the door for Lucia, and then he was gone.

Four years married, and it had never occurred to Ottoline to ask why he had one star.

She had seen the number on the first day and let it tell her everything. She had said her vows to him under studio lights, then spent four years giving him addresses from the back seat. She had never rated him, because she had never thought about him long enough to decide. Last night, he had told her that one-stars kept count of each other. Somebody had been keeping count of Enzo Moretti all along. It just hadn't been his wife.

That night, her father called her into his study. He didn't offer her a seat. He slid three typed pages across the desk.

"Tomorrow's Star Report," he said. "You'll open with it."

She read the first page, then the second. The Moretti family had forged evidence. They had deceived the Chief Justice with a sentimental story nobody could verify, and the Bureau must open a full investigation into all of them, starting with the man who had married into this house under false pretences. Her husband.

"None of this is true," she said.

"It doesn't need to be true. It needs to be read by the most trusted face in the city." Benedict capped his pen. "The Chief Justice made a fool of me today in front of every camera in Asterholm. Your brother is going to trial. Somebody pays for that, and it will not be this family."

"He's my husband."

"He's a prop I bought for an election." Benedict looked at her across the desk, and his voice didn't rise at all. "You'll read it, or you're no daughter of mine."