Some hot, harsh and constant. Others driven at her like snow against a stove-pipe, melting soon as touching. A shallow platform, one step up. She takes it, pauses, sways, hears the pause and the sway in the watcher's breath. She thinks: So it must have felt for Mick, that first step on to the scaffold. A hand steadies her. No executioner's hand, but her saviour's. Jay's, cousin Jay Waggs, though she cannot yet think of him as saviour. She clutches her old leather-bound Bible to her skinny breast. He smiles at her, a warm smile in a young face, and a memory is touched of faraway times, faraway places. He urges her forward. There is a chair. She sits. To her left, a pitcher of water with a glass. To her right, a small vase out of which a spray of freesia raises its hand of glory. Before her, a posy of microphones offering some protection from the flashing bulbs and probing gazes but none from the TV cameras covering her every move, like guns on a prison watch- tower. Mr Jacklin is speaking. Her solicitor. A small grey man who looks so dry that a very little pressure might crumble him to dust. But it is a dryness which kindles to fire at the spark of injustice. He says, 'Let me rehearse the situation in case anyone has strayed in from another planet. My client. Miss Cecily Kohler, was tried for the murder of her employer, Mrs Pamela Westropp, in nineteen sixty-three. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Almost from the start, doubts were expressed in some quarters about the safeness of the verdict, but circumstances conspired to make a reexamination of the case virtually impossible until, two years ago, Miss Kohler's kinsman, Jay Waggs, began to interest himself in the fate of his distant kinswoman, Cissy Kohler.

The new evidence he uncovered was first presented to the public in the Ebor television programme Doubt last spring.