The Thrill of the Case – Part Seven

Read Part Six of The Thrill of the Case, or go back to Part One.

"Based on the foregoing, your honour, I believe I have successfully proved that I, that is to say, Everarck Fanger, am not guilty of intellectual vanity."

And then because he'd always wanted to say it in a court.

"I rest my case."

And then he sat down, feeling immensely pleased with himself. This was the case that he'd painstakingly prepared with Gerellia, who'd turned out to be a vigorous advocate of his right to prove himself innocent of the ugly sin. He'd enjoyed working with her over the ten days or so of preparation, grown warm towards her, and privately in the comfort of his own mind, he was prepared to admit he'd even bonded with her more than a man in a long-term relationship ought to have.

He'd begun - and this had been his own idea - with a dictionary definition.

"Intellectual vanity can be defined - according to Cox and Moodie - as an excessive pride in one's own intellect or knowledge, often leading to a sense of superiority over others. Those who commit the sin of intellectual vanity often feel their own intellectual achievements or opinions are superior to those of others."

Gerellia had agreed that that provided a tidy opening to the subject. All he had to do now was go through the definition, bit by bit, and explain how no part of it described him, or his evident attitudes to others. She had even reminded him, "It doesn't matter if a defendant is actually guilty of a crime. It only matters if the defendant's conduct evinces criminal behaviour."

He had squirmed as she'd used words like 'crime' and 'criminal'. The other words: 'argument', 'demonstration', 'trial', 'judgement', with these he was comfortable, but 'punishment', 'prisoner' and 'sentence' made him shudder. Gerellia realised, watching him, that he saw the process as a high-minded exploration of whether certain qualities manifested in his behaviour. He had not, however, really grasped that he was in a literal court, which he had paid upwards of three thousand pounds to prosecute him and to which he had granted the power of finding him guilty of this form of behaviour, a social ugliness, which he himself had declared to be undesirable.

Intellectual vanity was not a crime, and the court had no power to imprison, but it was at the very least the architect of a public event whose proceedings had the power to stain a person's reputation, to humiliate them even as they attempted to wriggle free from the shadows in their own mind. Gerellia was not a lawyer. Everarck had simply assumed that. In fact, Gerellia was a psychologist, and what she saw in Everarck fascinated her. Never before had a person so obviously guilty of a social ill provided themselves to a process with such a powerful means of measuring it in them. That Everarck's motivation was to prove himself free of such vanity only plated the event with, to her, a profoundly satisfying irony.

She'd watched as Everarck had described his parents, his childhood, his dreams as a young person, his education and intellectual dreams. It had been a beautiful start to a strong argument. However, as the ten days progressed, shadows had swept over the self-examination, his gleaming autobiography. He had described his dreams of becoming a doctor which had seemed to wither even as he had pushed himself towards them. His daydreams of receiving that scroll of achievement had acquired, on one hand, the glow of utopian fantasy. On the other, parallel visions had showed the process as yellow and tawdry: the giving of a meaningless piece of paper in a dirty city hall surrounded by clowns in ridiculous gowns. Becoming tormented latterly that he would not be accepted by any university he'd want to join, he had pulled back from his exam preparation, and the results had been consequently mediocre.

"It was them!" he'd told Gerellia in strict confidence, "They were the intellectually vain!"

It was the gatekeepers of academic achievement who had been guilty of the sin. Gerellia had nodded encouragingly. From her own studies and the literature, she knew that accusing others of a sin is a behaviour repeated often amongst those most culpable of it. Then, taking pity, she had explained the phenomenon of projection to him, and got up and walked out of the room to allow him some time to himself. Clouds had occluded the sun that Tuesday afternoon, and the previously cheerful plant in the corner of the room had grown sullen.

He was guilty, he realised at last: guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, and all that remained for him was to become a new man from this moment onward, to stand up in court and show that the events of the past no longer stuck to him. The best way to do that, the plant explained to him, was to plead guilty. Cleanse yourself, accept punishment, move forward, enjoy honesty.

"You smug bastard of a plant," he hissed, raising a pair of office scissors at it and stabbing the air, "I'll get out of this shit on my own if you won't help me!"

And then he had constructed his tale of Everarck the Innocent, knowing full well that it was a work of fiction, promising himself that he would not let himself off the hook in the court of his mind, if only he could evade the public humiliation now facing him.

The Thrill of the Case – Part Six

Read part one, part two, part three, part four or part five of The Thrill of the Case.

Everarck walked through cold, deserted town streets at 8.30 am on a Saturday morning with the signed contract in the brown A4 envelope clutched in one hand. The shiny paper had already slipped out of his hand as he'd negotiated his garden gate and landed on a dried-up dog leaving, but he thought he'd got any marks off the paper and the point of contact didn't seem to smell too bad.

The court was located in the town's commercial centre, and Everarck found it uncomfortable to be in a place he'd gone in times of leisure on hot summer afternoons but which was now grey and quiet on this day of tense purpose. As he approached the place where he expected to find the court, he saw its clean white pebble-dashed exterior with a brand new sign on smoked glass. 

Reaching the court from an oblique angle, the glass appeared dark, and he wondered with elation if it might be unexpectedly closed, meaning he could return home and drink tea or go and browse the bookshelves of one of the town's charity shops. As he got close enough to see inside, he found - alas - that it was lit inside and furnished with a light wooden reception desk, a carpet in institutional green and a ticking analogue clock with a simple painting of an English village green between its numbers. There was the impression of movement within, but mercifully whoever was in there could not see him as he read and re-read the opening hours to verify that he could indeed push open the door without being reproached.

He stood there waiting for his hand to push open one of the double metal doors and was appalled to find that he would have to put it there himself. Nevertheless, he did so. The door opened about two inches and jammed on the untrodden carpet. He gave it a further shove, and it swung open and banged against a low table inside. He walked in with stooping posture only to be met by the startled looks of two women in suits: one behind the reception desk and one apparently in conversation with the receptionist on the way back to her office.

"Good morning," said the receptionist, a kind-seeming upper-middle-aged woman.

"My name's -- good morning -- my name's Fanger."

"Hello, Fanger. What might your surname be?"

"Fa-fanger. Fanger's my surname," he stuttered.

"Mr Fanger Fanger?"

"No-no, no. Everarck Fanger. My first name's Fang- I mean Eh-everarck, and m-my la-last name's F-fanger."

"Okay, let me check the diary."

There was a moment as pages were turned in which Everarck could fully fantasise about his name not being found and his being able to leave and go outside and walk along the kerbstones without putting his feet on the cracks. The woman coughed and, in his daydream, his foot slipped into the gutter.

"I have an appointment at 8.45 am for you, Mr Fanger."

"With Ms Noghan?" he enquired, but his hope of even this small element of familiarity was dashed when she shook her head.

"I'm sorry. Gerellia is indisposed this morning. No, I beg your pardon. She's not indisposed, but she isn't working today. I'll just call through and see if Gollion can begin working with you this morning. I'll just dial her extension."

"Gollion, sorry, it's Mr Fanger. Would you be able to take him this morning?"

Everarck started to notice the slight flushing in the woman's jowls, the sinister paleness of the wallpaper, the incessant chopping up of time as the clock ticked ever more harshly. Gollion had to be apologised to and begged to work with him this morning. He squirmed in his cheap office clothes. The door with its circular window on the far side of the reception room opened stiffly, and the woman he'd seen earlier appeared.

"Mr Fanger," she said striding towards him with her right hand held out.

Everarck suddenly worried about seeming rude by turning away from the receptionist, with whom he had not finished talking, and ended up taking the woman's hand across his body and shaking it quite awkwardly.

"Why don't you come through to my office? You can pay on the way out."

Her voice was smooth but the way she stared at him made him think he'd committed a faux pas. She went to the door, violently pushing it open and standing there. Everarck looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her chest, then panicked and wrenched his eyes back to her face.

"The door's a bit stiff. Why don't you go past me, and I'll follow you down the corridor?" 

Everarck did not want to be followed down a corridor, but he did as he was asked. As he went forward, he was aware of some kind of mouthed communication between Gollion and the receptionist, which he didn't want to think about. Nevertheless, the thought came to him that they were probably agreeing that he was a pervert and clarifying emergency procedures should he do anything disgusting.

He attempted to walk down the corridor whilst also somehow keeping Gollion in his peripheral vision. There were two doors on the right and one at the end of the corridor, all identical. He stopped and looked at the little red box with 'Emergency Break Glass' printed on its tiny window. The escape button looked back at him from behind the thin pane of glass.

"That's just the fire alarm button," said Gollion, suddenly behind him, "We're ISO 9000 compliant. That's the only reason that's there."

He was buffeted forwards by her unexpected closeness, and then she unlocked the door of a small room and ushered him in. He went in and sat on the swivelling office chair jammed behind a round table and put the brown envelope on the table, which Gollion ignored and retrieved a dossier from one of several box files in a bookcase.

He wiggled the chair from side to side in its tiny amount of free room, while she sat opposite him and skimmed through several stapled pages of handwritten notes, her lipstick framing a gritted pair of teeth. Then she skimmed the document again as if there were something missing, seemed to shrug and began to read from the beginning. He carefully pushed the table away from himself in order to create more room to wiggle the office chair. She glanced at him, adjusted her chair and the notes and went on reading.

Everarck looked at the potted plant. He tried to smile. He shivered. Gollion ignored him and went on reading.

Read part 7 of The Thrill of the Case.

The Thrill of the Case – Part Five

Read part one, part two, part three or part four of The Thrill of the Case.

‘Forlorn’, thought Zagonella as she took another piece of shortbread from the packet and dunked it into the warm brown liquid in her cup, was easily the saddest word in the English language. First, it was the way it captured the exact moment when hope dissolved like a biscuit in a hot drink. ‘Crestfallen’, of course, attempted much the same trick but rather evoked the comic image of a cockerel’s crown flopping sideways. And then there was the sound of it, two falling notes, the second one longer and deeper and sadder even than the first as the devastation of a once shining dream was realised.

And forlorn had indeed been the expression on poor Everarck’s face after he’d told her in a state of great triumph and agitation about this dodgy-sounding start-up so-called Court, which she imagined being run out of a van with the engine constantly running, and then she’d told him what she thought of it.

‘A silly game for silly boys,’ is what she’d said in the face of his glistening hopefulness, which was in fact Everarck’s own face, ‘I told you already that you do all these things just because you care so much about what other people think of you, all because you have no idea what to think of yourself. You’re a clever man, Everarck, but you waste it. You waste it on stupid things like this.’

And then Everarck had looked forlorn, and she’d regretted every word just as much as she’d been convinced that each one was necessary before she’d said it.

What was it about ‘forlorn’ that made her so sad? As she wondered, another face came to her, one from long ago that she could remember looking up at, from a distance, on an old man, instead of a young one. There had been a man who had rushed to greet his wife and give her a hug out of the sheer pleasure of seeing her again, for the 16,000^th time in their long marriage, but who had forgotten – again – that she no longer took pleasure in these embraces.

With the benefit of years and studies in psychology, Zagonella understood that her grandmother felt betrayed by her grandfather’s forgetfulness, that she was always angry with him, and that even the odd moments when he recognised her without assistance were, to her, just as symptomatic of his disease as the moments when he didn’t. Even so, the memory of her grandmother standing bolt upright as her grandfather hugged her, and just that same transformation of happy anticipation to confusion to realisation to sadness like a snowflake melting in the palm of your hand; that memory, every time it came to her, was a bullet through the heart.

And here she was, working in this hospital which specialised in mental illnesses, trying to cure that bullet wound every day of her life. And there she was with this man, this half-man, half-boy, sweet and innocent, unworldly and talented, rudderless and impulsive. She loved him, and she could not wish she didn’t, but what was she supposed to think; what was she supposed to do when he presented her with this contract, its incomprehensible black on glaring white, and she’d snatched it from his hand and flicked back page after page until she got to the last and found his strange squiggly signature sitting at the bottom on its hard horizontal line? Just what, in the name of God, was she supposed to do?

Read part 6 of The Thrill of the Case.

The Thrill of the Case – Part Four

Read part one, part two or part three of The Thrill of the Case.

Listen to this part of the story read by AI voice Mimic 3.

Everarck distributed the remainder of the e-mails without further incident. More than once he opened his mouth to ask about the Court of one of the array of thoughtful lonely officials abandoned in overlarge dusty offices around the building but, as HR Manager Octomus Dicks had somehow gotten loose from his office and was now snorting and evil-eyeing his way around the building, he decided to complete the task as efficiently as possible and then found a quiet place near the reception area to catch up on tasks he’d been avoiding for several days. As these did not elevate his impression of his own intellect, he contented himself by entering the records in rigorously pedantic detail in the most beautiful script he was capable of producing.

When Everarck got home, the hall telephone awaited him. A black triangular prism with round shiny buttons, its design was wholly predictable and yet Everarck could not help thinking it resembled the key to some deep space alien portal. He took off his jacket and baseball cap and put them on wall hooks that had always been there. He went to see if there was any mail propped next to the toaster. There was: a slender brown envelope, most likely a bill, and a stuffed-looking white packet that was undoubtedly junk mail. He didn’t touch either of them. The main news was that Zagonella had been here at some point. He hoped she’d slept.

Finally, there was nothing left to do except switch on the TV, access the world wide web with their dial-up service, read a newspaper, go for a walk, or check the answering machine. In short, give up, give up, give up, give up or let the consequences of his rash actions wash over him. He checked the answering machine. There were three messages, two of which were a couple of seconds of silence followed by a beep and then suddenly a voice was speaking in a slightly nasal voice that lingered over vowels, making it obvious the speaker was choosing her words with care.

‘Hello, this is Gerellia Noghan calling from the Court of Public Opinion. We received your message, Mr… Fanger. Thank you very much for getting in touch. I understand you’d like to apply for a law regarding… intellectual vanity of some kind, so that you can enter into a case with one of our professional advisors and work towards being acquitted of the charge. If I’ve understood correctly, call me back. My name’s Gerellia Noghan. You can call me on 01867 665 328. I’ll be here until about… 6 pm, maybe a little bit after that.’

‘Oh, God,’ he thought, ‘It’s only 5.37. I’ll have to do it.’

He sat down on the hall chair, an uncomfortable thing with a hard back. His knees jutted into the arc of the living room door, which he didn’t like, even though it was closed. He’d have to listen to the message again as he’d forgotten the number. The corner shop would close soon, and he needed cheese and bread, but that was no excuse either because the nearby Sunny’s didn’t close until 7. Sort out the road tax for Zagonella’s car? Fish the wedding invitation out from behind the fridge? No, it was no good. He’d have to call. He’d have to call. He looked at the phone and imagined picking up the receiver. Yep. There was no doubt about it. He’d have to call.

Read part 5 of The Thrill of the Case.

The Thrill of the Case – Part Three

Read part one and part two of The Thrill of the Case.

'Any success with the upgrade?' he further enquired.

'Mmm. Tricky one that, but old Nik knocked it out the park with a juicy new data set. While she was devouring all that lovely new info, she didn't seem to mind having her brain slightly reorganised,’ said the silver mop, bouncing with enthusiasm.

'Ah, foxy old Nik!' approved Everarck.

'Foxy old Nik with the hilarious face, you mean?'

'Oh, forget that! I was just upset about dropping these stupid e-mails on the floor.'

'I'll take that as an apology. Anything else I can help you with, young man?'

'Not really.'

'Hmmm? Yes or no?'

'No, I mean yes. I mean – have you seen that ad in the paper, “Are you so sexy, it should be illegal?”’

‘Goodness me, no. What kind of newspaper is this? It sounds a bit … top shelfian.’

‘No, the free thing on the bus.’

‘Ah, the illustrious Free Gazette!’

‘That’s the one! There was an ad in it yesterday. I thought it was interesting.’

‘Mmhmm.’

‘The Court of Public Opinion. You can… you just have to ring them up and apply for a law and then they, I think they arrest you and you have to, you have to prove you’re innocent.’

Nik’s face had slowly appeared from behind the sickly coloured screens. Two green eyes scorched Everarck from within a mass of wrinkled liver pink.

‘What are you blithering about?’

Everarck’s free hand patted his shirt pocket pointlessly.

‘I haven’t got it with me,’ he complained.

‘You are referring to your sanity, I take it,’ said Nik, looking over his shoulder before swiftly disappearing behind his machinery.

‘Oh, I checked my sanity in with HR when I started this job.’

Nik coughed. Everarck turned to find the short but undeniable image of Surd Fleeting examining something on the far wall.

‘As a general point of interest, the lawyer is in the reception area and seems to be waiting to be served,’ said the director in soft but resonant tones.

‘Oh, right, okay!’ exclaimed Everarck, simultaneously trying to bustle through the door while also attempting to permit Surd passage through the narrow space at the doorway, one carefully contrived to keep visitors to a minimum.

‘A lawyer!’ thought Everarck toing and froing dancingly around Surd as the short, stout man strode through his choreography, ‘I’ll ask him about the Court of Public Opinion! He’s probably very busy, but he might be able to tell me something about it!’ and the unsummoned image of a slim, severe and infinitely patient man blossomed in his mind.

He breathed with relief as the unheard computer fans were cut off as the door shut. He looked up and saw a young woman in an unembellished black jacket and red lipstick. He saw her as a rose in a vase and, as one does not speak to roses, he was not immediately able to speak. She watched him with curiosity as he entered the reception area with as much of an air of diffidence as he could muster.

‘Would I be able to assist you, madam?’ he asked, noting with discomfort that the question was several levels more polite than the one he’d asked the woman with the curly mop of hair and the pink cardigan twenty minutes previously.

‘I hope that you would,’ she said with a smile, ‘Is Ms. Lemender present?’

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘This is it,’ he thought, ‘This is my moment to ask her. No lead-in required. She’s standing right there, and she’s smiling at me! All I have to do is say, “By the way” or “Incidentally” and I’m in! Committed!’

But at that moment he looked to his right and saw the monolithic form of Chariot Lemender descending the stairs with purpose.

‘She’s on her way,’ sighed Everarck and sat down at the desk.

Pushing both of the narrow double doors open, Chariot entered the reception area and the glow of her gaze fell upon the lawyer. The sound of the double doors slamming shut seemed to take place in another world.

The chief executive was indeed a towering woman in a severe grey skirt, thick framed glasses and a pearl necklace. Her look was intelligent, humorous leaning towards ironic, hungry. To Everarck, she was a lighthouse, the grey skirt the very rocks of which her beam-like gaze warned. But in this lighthouse were not merely a spiral staircase and bare brick walls, but a whole glistening library, organised in teak shelving. And so she summoned and warned off at once, stoked curiosity and dread.

‘Sobian! Thank you for coming!’ she declared as though speaking to a roomful of people, ‘How long have you been waiting?’

‘A minute,’ she said.

‘I’m so sorry. Mr., em, Fanger must have been busy. You have a lot of plates to spin, don’t you, Mr. Fanger?’

‘One or two,’ shrugged Everarck, immediately cursing himself for the implied dissent.

‘Don’t worry about signing in. Mr. Fanger will deal with that,’ said Chariot, standing to one side so that the lawyer was denied all moves but that of progressing into the field.

And then the event of the morning was walking away from him through the double doors and up the stairs, and Everarck was left wondering whether the initiative had been snatched from his fingers or whether he had allowed it to fall.

Read part 4 of The Thrill of the Case.

The Thrill of the Case – Part Two

Read part one of The Thrill of the Case.

At work the following day, Everarck sat in the horseshoe of the reception desk, doing such a marvellous impression of someone who was not the receptionist, perhaps a technician surveying the receptionist's equipment in their absence: phone, switchboard, computer, guestbook, pen, cash drawer, corporate agenda, complaint forms; that not one of the visitors found themselves able to approach him for help for eight and a half unbroken minutes.

However, even the white golf club baseball cap, incompetently Windsor-knotted tie and oblique, uncomfortable posture could not indefinitely suppress the idea that this small-framed man with squashed facial features might be able to perform the most basic tasks of a receptionist - with effort. And perhaps a little support.

To his credit, Everarck maintained the impression of not really being the receptionist but graciously prepared to stand in for them, fumbling with systems he knew intimately and lathering his instructions with mights and maybes, until the last of the visitors had disappeared into the labyrinth of the back offices or gone home.

At this point, Everarck wrote, 'Back in 5 mins. Pls wait or leave a msg' with a marker on a sheet of scrap paper, which he placed next to the guestbook, and left with a pile of emails which he had printed out according to corporate policy.

In truth, his pretence of not being the receptionist had some basis in fact. The company did not have a receptionist, and Everarck's job description specified little more than that he competently assist the director and put to rest a minimum of 40 hours per week on the premises. However, that the flexibility of Everarck's role and the official vacuum of services in the reception area provided him a permanent mooring point in the organisation had been so powerfully implied by the director, the stone-faced and permanently sleep-deprived Surd Fleeting, that Everarck had not had the will to resist. Few would have.

He took the meticulously compiled sheaf of papers towards the IT room and attempted to open the door with his two unoccupied fingers but succeeded only in opening the stiff door and spilling the papers directly from his guts in one great floe across the IT room's becabled floor.

'Well done, young man,' rumbled the only person there, a man whose thick hair in several shades of shining grey was the only part of him visible behind a variety of box-shaped machines the colour of rancid cream, 'That is by far the funniest thing to happen today.'

'Apart from looking at yourself in the mirror, Nik,' replied Everarck to Nichomachus, stooping to pick up the papers and slather them into a single jumbled pile.

'Don't be rude. You'll upset MARIA.'

Everarck knew that MARIA was how Nik identified the seemingly alert core of the interlocking databases that defined his professional sandbox.

'How is she today?'

'Temperamental,' replied Nik with a hollow laugh, 'She still hasn't forgiven me for my little holiday to Lake Solemn without her.'

Everarck was briefly caught up in the dream of a woman who would miss him when he was gone. But he was holding Zagonella to an impossible standard. He never went anywhere.

Read part 3 of The Thrill of the Case.

The Thrill of the Case – Part One

It had all begun, thought Everarck, with an advert in one of those newspapers circulated by bus seat. The advert had been entitled Court of Public Opinion and its text had read as follows.

Are you so sexy it should be illegal? Do others call you a criminal snob? Now you can take them to the Court of Public Opinion and prove them wrong – or right! Call us now on 0800-ARREST-ME to register the law you could be guilty of breaking.

It was as though someone had been following Everarck’s thoughts for the previous 24 hours and known that he would plant his eyes on that particular corner of the free paper. Only last night had Everarck been accused by Zagonella, his girlfriend of 12 years, of intellectual vanity.

‘You only read that book because you want people to think you’re clever,’ she’d said, referring to the copy of Writing and Difference at which he’d been staring, glassy eyed, for ten minutes.

‘I am clever,’ he’d snapped and turned a crisp page.

‘That’s not the point.’

And it was as she’d said the word ‘point’ that he’d felt he was falling all the way to the plosive ‘t’. He’d been silent for a moment, quietly turned the page back again and then rallied.

‘So you think I am clever?’

She’d rolled her eyes then and gone back to her book, which was pink. He detested pink and couldn’t believe she read it in public. It was even worse that she should find it more interesting than him. Nevertheless, he’d gone to sleep, and when he woke up, she was gone, and the bedroom was cold, and there was streaky condensation on the bedroom window, which was framed by nasty, cheap curtains that he hated.

If he’d had any sense, he thought, he’d have become a lawyer and be living in the Barbados for half the year by now. He imagined gazing down at the Pacific Ocean from the purple mountains of the Barbados, sighed, and went and ate some Flax Puffs with brown sugar.

And then he’d seen that advert on the bus, and it was like everything had come together. He’d thought about it all day, at least when he wasn’t wondering why Zagonella hadn’t texted him. In the evening, Zagonella still wasn’t home.

‘Double shifts at the hospital,’ he’d tutted, eaten some microwaveable macaroni cheese, carefully cut out the advert, sat on the toilet reading it several times, put his pyjamas on, sat on the bed, stared at the receiver of the phone as though it were a portal to pandemonium, read the blurb on the Derrida book and then, at thirteen minutes past six, called the number on the advert, rocking backwards and forwards with the book clamped between his knees until it clicked and the tone changed.

‘The Court of Public Opinion is waiting for your call between 8 AM and 6 PM, Monday to Saturday. Alternatively, leave a message and we’ll call you back.’

‘Hello, my name’s Everarck, Mister Everarck Fanger BSc (Hons). I’m calling because everyone says I think I’m smart, I mean my girlfriend says I want people to think I’m smart, but I’m not, I mean I don’t. I mean obviously it’s nice if someone recognises my efforts to be intelligent, but I don’t need that. I don’t know if you can help me. If not, don’t worry about it. But if you can, here’s my number.’

He'd given his number twice and hung up, put the advert in the Derrida book, watched some TV and gone to bed, waking briefly when Zagonella slipped into bed beside him at some unnameable hour of the night.

Read part 2 of The Thrill of the Case.