Page 70 of Husband Material
Oliver had finished talking to whoever he was talking to, but from the look of very mild frustration on his face—he’d gone into professional mode, so very mild frustration was the worst he was going to show—he hadn’t got anywhere. “They’re being stubborn,” he explained.
“Are we going to prison?” I asked. “Are we going to prison for breaking and entering? Did we break and enter on the way to a wedding?”
Oliver pulled up a blue plastic chair and sat down next to me. “How much detail do you want on this?”
Damn, he was sexy when he was doing the lawyer bit. “All the detail.”
“If you insist.” He smiled, and everybody else—mistaking my request for interrogation rather than flirtation—gathered round. Well, everybody except for Professor Fairclough, who was looking at a spider, even though, as I was embarrassingly proud to remember, it wasn’t technically an insect.
“For a start,” Oliver continued, somewhat surprised to suddenly have an audience. “We’re not going to prison for breaking and entering because that’s not a distinct crime under UK law. Burglary is a crime, and trespassing is a civil infraction. Wedidtrespass, but it only becomes burglary if the Crown can show that we trespassed with the intent to either steal or commit grievous bodily harm or unlawful damage.”
“We stole tea,” Barbara Clench pointed out, with the pedantic attention to detail that made her frustratingly good at her job.
“Technically we didn’t,” said Oliver. “We drank tea that didn’t belong to us, but stealing is when you dishonestly appropriateproperty belonging to another person with the intent to permanently deprive them of it. Of those five elements—”
“How do you get five elements out of one sentence?” I asked, partly because I liked playing my part in the law-is-cool-and-you’re-cool-for-knowing-it game we sometimes played and partly because I was genuinely confused.
“Dishonesty”—Oliver counted on his fingers—“property, appropriation, belonging to another person, and intent to permanently deprive.” He held up his open hand. “Five.”
“Also,” added Rhys, who was lounging across two chairs on the other side of the circle with his head in Ana with onen’s lap, “it’s only tea.”
Oliver gave him an I-wish-it-was-that-simple kind of look. “Sadly, the it’s-only-tea defence isn’t recognised in court. Our defence is specifically dishonesty.”
“Because,” I tried, “we thought we had the tea owner’s permission to drink the tea?”
Turning back to me—Oliver had been Wimbledoning between us—he gave a sort of half nod. “Interestingly, consent by itself wouldn’t be enough either.”
“What?” Ana with onensat forward, displacing Rhys’s head. “I could get done for theft even if somebody has given me permission to take something?”
“If you came by that permission dishonestly.” Oliver had gone into a law rhapsody. I liked law-rhapsody Oliver even at two in the morning at a random police station on the Welsh borders. “The law specifically says ‘appropriates,’ not ‘misappropriates,’ and the precedent was set in 1971 when a taxi driver who took money from a tourist’s wallet was found guilty of theft because while the tourist had permitted them to take the money, the amount of money taken had been far in excess of any reasonable fare.”
Ana with onen’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you know so much about theft?”
Feeling a sudden swell of pride, I gave Oliver a possessive hug. “Because he’s a lawyer.”
“Barrister,” Oliver gently corrected me. I knew the difference, I just thought lawyer sounded cooler and less like he made flat whites for a living. “And more specifically I’m the veryunsexykind of criminal barrister who deals with exactly this kind of law. I’m afraid I spend a lot less of my time saying, ‘My client couldn’t possibly have been guilty of this murder because the pings from this cell-phone tower prove he was ten miles away’ and a lot more of it saying, ‘My client is not technically guilty of theft because although she did leave the restaurant without paying, she formed the intent to do so only after she had already eaten the meal, and therefore at the time the dishonest appropriation took place, the food in question was not in the restaurant’s possession.’”
She blinked. “Do you say that a lot?”
“Quite a lot, yes. As I say, I’m not the glamourous sort of barrister. Young people who have skipped out on a bill are quite a large part of my client base, and ‘it’s only stealing if you decided not to pay before you ate’ is a well-known technicality.”
Rhys gave the kind of broad grin that suggested he thought he’d had the most brilliant idea. It was a grin he got far more often than he should. “That’s not a technicality,” he said, “that’s a bloody life hack. We never have to pay to go to a restaurant again.”
“Bit unethical?” I pointed out.
“True, but think of all the free chips you could eat.” Rhys’s expression told me that he was thinking of exactly that. One day, I wanted somebody to look at me the way Rhys looked at hypothetical free chips. Although to be fair, Oliver sometimes did.
“I mean,” said Oliver in the tones of a man who was determined to at leasttryto put the genie back in the bottle, “you’d probablystill have to go to court, and even if you won, the time, effort, and lawyer’s fees would cost far more than the chips in the long run.”
Rhys, genie that he was, remained unperturbed. “You say that, but I can eat a hell of a lot of chips.”
“If you ate enough chips to cover the costs of a legal battle,” Oliver observed, “that might just count as evidence you formed the intent to withhold payment before consuming the meal.”
“It still seems like a weird loophole to me.” Ana with onenslipped off a trainer and wiggled her toes distractedly. “Have you ever actually got somebody off with that argument?”
“A couple of times.”
She winced. “Isn’t that a bit…dodgy?”
