A Voss and Pike Casefile: The Early Days
Section 56: Reasonable Doubt
Keast walked out of the hall that night with the council's solicitor steering him gently to the door, and Rook didn't stop him, because there was nothing solid left to stop him with. A licence that was declared. A door log that proved attendance, not intent. An old man's account that the system had already filed as confusion.
"We were right," said Jonah, on the walk back to Bell Street, rain finding the same gap in the guttering it always found.
"Being right and being able to prove it are different problems," you said. "Three weeks in this job, and I already have a favourite sentence."
Saltmarsh Together was adopted. The quay got a railing in the spring, and nobody could say exactly why. Marian's audit lay in a drawer in the annexe until Joss took it home.
Sociological note: a pattern is not proof. The sociological problem, how this city comes to define its problems, was answered in full; the criminal question, who put a woman in the dock, needed evidence the system had made very easy to dismiss.