feeling its stickiness.
Emile looked in horror at the chunk of bloody meat I offered him. He stepped back and seemed to be reconsidering the whole idea.
‘What’s that?’
‘Madame Faure’s cat. I took a piece for . . . experimentation.’ I didn’t share the fact I’d fried that piece and still had slivers of cat and onion trapped in my back teeth. ‘This is the rest of it. It should be enough. Although we’ll need a quick trial. A decisive judgement.’
His eyes widened at my attempt to sound grown up and I almost smiled but caught myself in time. Serious. For this to work we had to be serious. Was he always so thin? I wondered. Had he always looked so weak? His eyes were watery, his lips bitten with anxiety. In my head he was bigger than me, this boy who punched me that first day and demanded my conkers. Now I realised I was looking down on him.
‘You killed her cat?’
‘It was fat and ugly.’
‘This judgement . . .’ Emile sounded anxious.
‘Execution. Death by hanging. To be carried out immediately.’
He mouthed the words, trying to make them his. Then it was time to meet the others in the lesser attic. Being caught out of bed would see us all whipped and I hurried Emile up the stairs, his steps slow and his face tight from his earlier beating. A broken harp loomed over us, leather cases rotted to spill their contents, a pair of ruined rapiers, their snapped blades rendering them exactly the right length for boys our age. Marcus grabbed one and tossed the other to a friend. Their clatter of enthusiastic battle was stilled by my outraged hiss.
‘Leave the blades here,’ Emile whispered. ‘Take them on the way back.’ Ordinarily Marcus would never take orders, but the fact Emile was judge in what came next was enough. Marcus put down the broken foil and his friend did the same.
At the far end of the attic was a door to the roof. Most of us had come this way for bets or to cut lead from the flashings to be melted to make silver rivers or dropped into water to make strange shapes. That was the way we went, up one side of a gully where two roofs met and down the other side, to a parapet overlooking the courtyard where Dr Faure kept his dog. It was late summer and the air was rich with the stink of recently manured fields. The countryside was a dark sea around us. The peasantry were like their animals, early to rise and early to sleep, driven by the seasons and the length of the day.
‘God’s farted,’ Marcus said. Someone sniggered and someone else muttered about blasphemy. I ignored them, already reaching into my bag.
‘May I go ahead?’ I asked Emile.
He stared at me, his hollow eyes half lit by moonshine the yellow of a cheap rush light. He was rocking slightly on his feet.
‘You’re the judge. May I go ahead to quieten the dog?’
‘Go,’ he said. So I opened my bag and pulled out a sliver of bleeding meat and lobbed it underarm along the edge of the parapet so it just cleared the top and splattered down onto the courtyard bricks. An eruption of barking greeted its landing, and I heard Marcus swear and Emile groan, and then the barking became snuffling. No lights showed in Dr Faure’s house, no windows were thrown open. The snuffling became a whine for more.
‘Here.’ I gestured the others closer.
They huddled around me and I had to burrow through them to reach where Emile stood on the edge. His face was white.
‘Do this,’ I whispered.
He raised his chin and his face changed as if his body were a house inhabited by different owners. He moved confidently through the small crowd and stared down at the foul-faced dog. ‘Feed it again,’ he ordered. The dog took its bloody mouthful and looked up to hear the charges. ‘You are charged,’ Emile said, ‘with being owned by Dr Faure. You are charged with being a vile four-legged monster no better than your master. You are charged with being ugly, noisy and foul-tempered. How do you plead?’ The animal whined for another sliver of meat and Emile nodded. ‘The plaintiff pleads not guilty.’
I tossed the plaintiff another chunk of Madame Faure’s cat and wondered if I had enough to last the trial. Emile must have wondered the same, because he turned to the defence and ordered him to keep his speech short and from the point. He then ordered the official witness to watch carefully. It was important that justice was seen to be done. This was an Emile none of us had seen before. Very different from the snivelling wretch who had sidled into our classroom that morning on a sea of his own tears.
‘Begin,’ Emile ordered.
‘To sentence a dog for its owner’s sins is no fairer than punishing a servant for obeying his master. The dog is not at fault. If it were my dog or your dog instead of Dr Faure’s dog it would still be the same dog. Would you judge it then?’
A couple of the boys clapped softly and I agreed. It was a good speech – to the point and clear about the potential for injustice. I wondered how Emile would answer.
‘The charges are in two parts. Both are serious. It is Dr Faure’s dog, and it is an ugly brute no better than its master. Where those points overlap is where the seriousness of this offence lies. When two men gather together for the committal of crime this is conspiracy. In this case we have a conspiracy of ugliness. This court requires you to prove two things to establish innocence. That the dog is not ugly, and that it is not owned by Dr Faure . . . Jean-Marie, more meat.’
I threw it down as the lawyer for the defence began his hasty summary. He could not prove either point, but repeated that the dog was of previously good character and threw himself on the mercy of the court. It was a poor dog, a dog that knew no better, that had fallen in with bad company and was being judged for the sins of others.
Emile, however, was not swayed. ‘There can be no mercy for crimes of this nature.’ He looked to the boy acting as witness. ‘You accept the trial is fair and carried out in accordance with the law. You hold witness to this fact?’
The boy nodded seriously.
‘Then all that remains is for me to pass sentence.’ Emile leant out over the parapet so he could see the dog clearly. Staring back, the dog wagged its tail and whined for treats. ‘Pleading now will not help you. You have been found guilty of crimes so serious that there can only be one sentence . . .’ Emile let the pause stretch. ‘And that sentence is death.’ A couple of our classmates looked at each other and he raised his eyebrows as if wondering what they thought we were doing out here on a rotting roof.
‘You may carry on,’ he told me flatly.
I reached for a rope coiled under my jacket, its noose already prepared, and hesitated. ‘The condemned deserves to finish his last meal . . .’ The remaining pieces of meat splattered onto the brick below and the dog wolfed them down, thrashing its tail with delight and licking its chops. I felt sick at the thought of what I was to do next and furious with myself for suggesting it. The last chunk of meat vanished down the dog’s gullet with barely a chew of those fearsome teeth. And as the hound looked up and whined expectantly, my noose dropped over its head and I yanked furiously, desperation putting steel in my muscles. One handful of rope followed another. The dog rose rapidly until my grip slipped, it plummeted a few feet and came to an abrupt halt. The drop broke its neck. The whole thing was over in seconds.
‘Help me,’ I said
