A Voss and Pike Casefile: The First Case
Section 51: Reasonable Doubt
Pryor walked out of the Grand Lantern that night with his solicitor's hand steering him gently towards the door, and Rook didn't stop him, because there was nothing solid left to stop him with. A declared consultancy. An access log that proved presence, not poison. A memo about methodology that half the department could probably have written about the other half, on any given week.
"We were right," said Jonah, on the walk back across a campus that suddenly felt considerably larger than it had nine days ago.
"Being right and being able to prove it," you said, "are apparently never going to be the same problem. I have a feeling I'm about to spend a great deal of my future finding that out properly."
Candour's contract quietly renewed. Hume's manuscript was filed and mostly forgotten. You resigned anyway, within the month, for reasons you found increasingly difficult to explain to colleagues who still believed the facts, left alone long enough, would eventually speak for themselves.
Sociological note: a pattern - a contract, a log, a disagreement - is not the same as proof. It would take several more cases, several more rooms like this one, before Ada Voss fully learned the difference between being certain and being right.