The musicologist entered the courtroom carrying neither papers nor a tablet, but a small leather-bound manuscript that smelled of old libraries and careful preservation. Dr. Eleanor Vance was in her late sixties, her silver hair coiled in a precise chignon, wearing a tweed suit that seemed transplanted from an Oxford seminar room. She moved with the quiet authority of someone who has spent a lifetime listening to the spaces between notes.
Sir James rose. “Dr. Vance, you are professor emeritus of musicology at King’s College London, specializing in twentieth-century compositional theory.”
“I am.”
“And you have reviewed the defendant’s materials—the lists, the annotations, the candidate gallery, and her own prison compositions?”
“I have spent three hundred and twenty-seven hours with the
