Second opinion
I HAVE long observed that the only modern public buildings on which expense has not been spared, and which consequently rise above the level of the barely functional, are law courts. And this is precisely as it should be, when one considers the criminality of the English population. Going to court is the only time it emerges from the primeval swamp of its own popular culture.
Alas, mere expenditure of money, while no doubt necessary, is not suffi- cient to bring a beautiful building into being; and the faculty of taste and dis- crimination has been so long absent from these islands that an ocean of money could be spent and nothing worthwhile would be built. So it is with our law courts: they all look as though they were designed by architects whose previous commissions were for underground tor- ture chambers in African despotisms.
It was to one of these new palaces of justice that I repaired last week, to give evidence in a murder trial. It was swiftly decided by counsel, before the proceed- ings began that day, that I should be of more use to the opposing side than to the one by which I had been retained, and I was free to go my way (and collect my fee). Fortunately, however, I did not do so before I had had a chat with anoth- er expert witness appearing in the case.
You can always tell an expert witness: dark blue suit, slightly grubby; grey cardi- gan underneath; unpolished shoes with thick rubber soles. Smartness does not come naturally to expert witnesses, and generally they make a hash of it.
This expert was an entomologist, though he felt uneasy with so grand a title, and preferred to call himself more modestly a 'fly man'. The outcome of the case depended on the age of the maggots in the deceased's body, and our fly man had found serious deficiencies, not to say outright inaccuracies, in their fly man's testimony.
He had misidentified the species of fly for a start, but that was not the most egregious of his errors. He had drawn conclusions about the length, and hence the age, of the maggots from frozen spec- imens; and everyone knows that defrost- ed maggots lose their shape, as frozen strawberries do. You can conclude noth- ing from frozen maggots, and here the fly man gave me a tip: in an emergency, he said, preserve your maggots in gin.
`Specifically in gin?' I asked. 'Or will any spirit do?'
`Any will do,' he replied, 'but best without colouring.'
He took out graphs to prove to me that the maggots in the body could not have been more than ten days old, and not five weeks old as the opposition fly man had alleged. Upon the age of the maggots turned the fate of a man: life imprisonment or what prisoners call a `walk-out'.
`I'll try to let him down lightly,' said our fly man of their fly man. 'But I'll probably make an enemy of him all the same.'
I had every confidence in our fly man. His graphs looked rock-solid to me. If ever I need a fly man to testify for me, he's the fly man I'll want.
As it happens, I've been in the compa- ny of insect men a few times in my life. They are uniformly splendid people, far more interesting company than, say, politicians. I could have been an insect man myself, if I hadn't been waylaid en route by that two-legged insect, Man.
Theodore Dalrymple
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