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Alva never said what happened to her husband in my office, or indeed any of her involvement in anything. She remained tight-lipped through the entire affair, no doubt on the advice of her council. She refused to answer questions from the police and, later on in court, from lawyers, citing the Goblin equivalent of what some humans would call the Fifth Amendment. It didn't make any difference in the end. I was called as a witness, for the prosecution, one day a very long time after almost everybody had forgotten about the events at the Starfield Club. Perhaps that was the idea of the delay: the detail of the events had sunk into the background of everyone's minds, and so clarity and precision now took a back seat. I'd like to think my recollections were better than most: I am a trained detective after all, and I made copious notes in the days immediately afterwards, as always, sat comfortably in my office with a strong cup of coffee - or a stronger glass of whiskey - in my hand. The trial was held in Number Seven Court in the Central Court Buildings, part of a large collection of imposing masonry erections separated by several spacious plazas close to the centre of Number One cavern. This is the cave which holds the core of our society - at least according to the pundits in the newspapers - the seat of government, commerce, education and law; the cave which - by old-fashioned word-of-mouth reputation, rather than documented history - was the first to be populated by our forefathers many millennia ago. The Court Building itself was a soaring edifice of elegant stone arches, cool stone-flagged corridors and enclosed courtyards, which echoed to the sound of expensive shoe leather mixed with the soft susurrations of confidential conversations. It was altogether a rather more impressive setting than Judge Kirkton's chambers, which felt modest and homely by comparison; indeed, very little expense had been spared to give the impression that no expense had been spared. The Judge was a wizened old gnome, small and wiry - even by Goblin standards - whose name I missed the general racket of "be upstanding for...". He seemed to spend his entire existence sneering at lawyers and witnesses with equal distain. He made no attempt to disguise his disgust at the shenanigans that Alva - not to mention the rest of the cast - had got up to, allegedly, and was equally disparaging at the antics performed by the legal representatives for both prosecution and defence. I would have supported his viewpoint if it were not for the strong suggestion that there was nothing in the caverns - and certainly not the surface world - that would actually meet with his approval. As for the jury, well, I guess the best way to describe them was to ask you to imagine a dozen of the most nondescript, average-looking Goblins you might see on a cavern street. None of them had any clear distinguishing features and even my trained observational skills found it difficult to separate old from young, male from female, prosperous citizen from street bum. I guess this is a side-effect of the process used to select jurors. Anybody displaying even the most cursory hint of having a genuine personality or an opinion of their own is regarded as a threat and therefore rejected out of hand by either prosecution or defence. It is in the nature of juries when the lawyers have a chance to influence those who are selected, that those so selected are on average fairly dumb, characterless and unlikely to read any newspaper beyond page three and the sports headlines. After the usual amount of hanging around, I was ushered into the witness box and swore the usual oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. My hand was placed, not on a Bible, but on a contained glamour which made it much harder to tell an undetectable conscious untruth. Of course, there are ways of circumventing such magics - beyond the obvious one of being oblivious to the truth - but I would not have to attempt any such deviousness today. I had previously referred to my notes - notes which eventually became the basis for these memoirs, by the way - and I was able to answer the prosecution's questions with a clarity and directness which earned a degree of grudging approval from the beak. I suffered the minimum amount of offensive cross-examination, the defence legal team quickly realizing that it would further irritate the already irascible judge, who seemed quite capable of directing the jury to whatever verdict he saw fit. I guess the jury eventually managed to work out exactly what happened, despite the wilful obfuscation by lawyers for the defence - and the prosecution, for that matter. In a secret deal with Hosh, long before, Merton Vale bought the Starfield Club; having dealt with the accounts, he must have had a good idea of what the Club was earning - not very much, mainly because of poor financial management - and what it could earn if managed properly. Until Merton Vale could extricate himself from the remains of his accountancy partnership and devote his entire attention to the money-making machine that the Club could become, he retained Hosh as the day-to-day manager. I doubted Hosh was entirely happy about being told where he had been going wrong by an over-privileged toff. Alva must have got wind of this - how, I will never know - and struck on the imaginative ploy of blackmailing her own husband in an attempt to discover more about the asset Merton had acquired. This must have been about this time that she took up with Monzie Hosh. This was almost certainly a calculated move; her sophistication and up-town manners would have appealed to a low-life brute - a true categorisation, despite the expensive suits and ties - like Hosh. In some hothouse amalgam of passion and ambition, Alva and Hosh must have plotted to kill Merton, having understood that - as is the convention for wills in Goblin society - all of his goods and chattels would revert to her in the event of his death, as hers would to him in the event of her own untimely demise. Hosh must have been persuaded by Alva, by one means or another - I'm sure I don't need to spell it out for you - that the Club would be better under her control, giving the two of them free rein, a move which Hosh not doubt regarded as the return of his rightful property. When they discovering that Merton had engaged my services, the lovebirds' schemeing threw up another doozie to obscure their plans. Hosh approached Merton and made it clear he knew about the blackmail, and that wasn't particularly worried about it. Rather, he stressed it was Merton's problem - he was the owner, after all - but pointed out that there were aspects of the Starfield Club's operations which could not withstand an investigation by a half-way competent private detective. Merton must have been convinced. The two Goblins traveled together to my office, to buy me off, at a time Alva knew I would not be there. Cool as a cucumber, Hosh suggested that they help themselves to my scotch - my own very fine bottle, or at least as fine as I could usually afford. Unbeknownst to Merton, Alva had previously visited my offices - never locked and barely noticed and added poison to my bottle of whiskey and left poor Merton a stiff in my own office for me to discover. Throughout the trial, according to my own observations and the newspaper reports, Alva sat silent, stony-faced, refusing to acknowledge anyone or anything beyond those which would have earned her a spell in the joint for contempt of court. It didn't work, in the end: the jury found her guilty on all counts, unanimously.
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Part 101