The K Word

Daniel sat in a bright cubic cell. He perched on the edge of a ledge, slightly too small to be a bed, that herniated out of the smooth clean wall. A black lens was set into the ceiling and looked down on him like a shark’s eye. 

The door swung open and a man wearing a grey suit and a blue veil of fag smoke stepped into the cold cell. The man turned to watch the door close behind him and then leant against it, scratching audibly at dandruff with a hooked yellow finger.

“Good morning,” said the man.

“Are you my solicitor?” said Daniel.

“If you are Mr Daniel Kopie, then I am your legal adviser.”

“What do I call you?”  

“You have paid for our Bronze level of service. I’m afraid you only get a named fee earner at Silver and above.”

“What else do I get if I pay for the Silver service?”

“A named Fee Earner who has between two and five years of experience. The level of experience your Fee Earner has is important, especially if the charges are serious.”

“What are the charges against me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well how do I know what level of package I need?”

“Personally, I wouldn’t go for anything less than Gold. You get a named Fee Earner with five to ten years under their belt. Between you and me, I was doing Platinum packages until recently, but I’ve just started with this firm and I’m only allowed to do Bronze jobs for the duration of my probation period.”

“That’s good, you’ve got lots of experience then? That’s good, I’ve never been arrested before. Never been in any trouble at all, actually. I have no idea what’s going on, two blokes just came and arrested me at the bank. They were plain clothes officers; they said I had to go with them. This whole thing is a mistake.”

 “Right, yeah, I’ve got loads of experience but I can only advise you to the Bronze level today, which doesn’t include assessing the legality of the arrest. You could upgrade if you like? You just need to make the additional payment.”

“But they have my wallet, my phone, everything.”

“Bronze it is then.” The man shrugged, peeled himself from the door and began to pace back and forth across the small room. He trotted like a half-mad zoo animal and spoke to his own scuffed brogues. “Tell me something you’ve done wrong.”

“What? I’m not a criminal,” said Daniel, straightening on his perch.

“Yeah, right, of course, but give me something. Trust me, this is a good tactic for Bronzers. Nothing too serious, but not nothing. Has there been a time when you’ve forgotten to scan absolutely everything in your basket at the self-checkout in the supermarket? Have you ever parked illegally? Maybe a bit of speeding on the motorway?” The trivial criminality of every suggestion was shrugged away as the man paced, hands lazily swatting away any concern Daniel may have about admitting to such minor indiscretions.  

“Something illegal but common?” said Daniel.

“Yeah, you know the type of thing, everyone’s done it, but nothing too serious.”

Daniel folded his arms and shifted on the hard ledge. “I mean… I might have slightly overestimated the value of some of my possessions when I insured the contents of my house.”

“Christ! Not that.” The man stopped and turned on his heel. “That’s a crime of dishonesty, insurance fraud, they’ll throw the book at you and it’ll undermine any evidence that you give. Bloody hell. I’ll pretend that I didn’t hear that.” The man patted all of his pockets in turn, chasing the ghost of absent cigarettes around his battered suit.

“It’s not that bad,” said Daniel. “The value of taxidermy squirrels fluctuates. You could argue that I’ve actually undervalued my collection.” 

“I will not be making that argument,” said the man, giving up his reflexive search for cigarettes that he knew he had been forbidden to bring into the cell.

“We could get an expert to value them.”

“A stuffed squirrel expert?” said the man, folding his arms and looking coldly at Daniel with glass eyes.

“Yes. They’re out there, there’s a whole collecting community. I’m a bit of an expert myself, actually. I don’t suppose we can use me though, can we?”

“We can’t use anyone, we’re not instructing experts on a Bronze fee. Look, shut up and give me something else to work with. We need a sacrifice; we need to have something ready that you would be plausibly apologising for.”

“Why? Why would I be apologising at all? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“First of all, you have, everyone’s done something. Secondly, because we’re going to make an apology before anything else happens. Contrition now will go a long way later on. We need to get in there early and show that you’re remorseful. It could reduce any future sentence.”

“Sentence! But I haven’t been found guilty of anything. I don’t even know what the charge is. If I apologise now, it will look like I’m guilty of an unknown crime.”

“It might, but if the charge turns out to be something awful that you don’t want to cop to, we can say that the apology was made for the minor thing, not bloody insurance fraud, but something they can deal with quickly, give you a fine or a really short sentence.”

“Short sentence! There you go again.” Daniel was on his feet now. “I haven’t done anything wrong. Let’s just find out what the charge is and take it from there, shall we?”

“No,” said the man, looking Daniel up and down from his shoeless feet to the open neck of his untucked, crumpled shirt. “Get the apology in now. Look,” the man placed a hand on Daniel’s shoulder, “since the reforms the conviction rate has gone through the roof. Your chances of acquittal today are about 8%.” The man applied a smoothly increasing pressure and Daniel folded back down onto the hard ledge.

“What about innocent until proven guilty?” said Daniel with a shake of his head.

“Oh yeah, well, you still are, of course. It’s just that there’s a 92% chance that you will be found guilty and when you are there’s a 100% chance that you’ll be sentenced, and the sentencing guidelines say that they can take remorse and early acceptance of guilt into account. The earlier the better.”

“So, your legal advice is to just apologise for something I haven’t even done, without knowing what the alleged offence even is?”

“Yes. But with a sacrificial minor crime up our sleeve, just in case the charge turns out to be something really grim. Something bad enough to make it worth gambling when the odds are 1/11. Are you a gambler? Going for the Bronze package suggests that maybe you are, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Daniel let his head fall back and looked up at the camera in the middle of the ceiling. “I can’t believe it, it’s…”

“Don’t say it,” said the man, a thick finger raised in paternal warning.  

“It’s Kafkaesque,” said Daniel staring into the shark’s eye.  

“Great, nice one, cheers for that,” said the man turning away and slapping both palms against the cell wall.

“What are you talking about?”

“The new reforms have made it clear that section 4 of the Public Order Act 1986 can be applied where the alleged victim is the state, or any emanation of the state, for example, a court, and the guidance lists the word Kafkaesque as an example of abusive or insulting language,” said the man to the wall, head hanging between his spread arms. “So, you’ve just committed the offence of intentionally causing harassment, alarm or distress.”  

“They’ve made it illegal to say that the court system is Kafkaesque?”

“Yes. And as an officer of the court, I have to report it.” To emphasise the point and make it clear that he had no choice in the matter, the man took one hand from the wall and pointed up at the black camera lens.  

“But earlier you said, I’ll pretend that I didn’t hear that, about the squirrel thing.”

“There’s no guidance about squirrel-based insurance fraud.” The man turned and slumped with his back against the wall.” He frowned and looked down into the corner of the room, searching an unseen text. “Yet.” He looked up at Daniel and smiled, showing a sliver of magnolia dentistry. “It’s a grey area. A grey squirrel area.”

“So, I’ve committed an offence by saying that something is Kafkaesque, even though it is Kafkaesque and my own lawyer has to report me for it?”

“You’ve now committed the offence four times and I have to fill in a separate form for each one, so please don’t say it again.”

“But that’s…”

“Yes, it is,” said the man stepping forward and clamping his hand over Daniel’s mouth. Daniel could taste salt on the hard palm and smell the acrid tang of the man’s nicotine habit on his worn grey cuff. “But we must uphold the rule of law,” he said, staring hard into Daniel’s eyes. “Can’t have people throwing the K word around.” A grin split his face into a delta of crow’s feet. “Or the public will lose faith.”

The two men stared at each other over the hairy ridge of the man’s hand. After a few long seconds the man took his hand from Daniel’s mouth and straightened, returning to his repetitive three-pace measuring of the small cell. 

“This is unbelievable,” said Daniel, watching the man’s bluebottle patrol. “How can that possibly be a crime?”

“Wait! That’s it,” said the man, stopping and stooping to clap his hands to Daniel’s upper arms, pulling him to his feet. “That’s your crime. I’ll make my report, then you make your apology and then when we get the charges we decide whether you were apologising for the crime we know about, your repeated use of the K word, or the mystery crime. If the mystery crime is something really grim then we tie the apology to the K word incidents and you can then decide if you want to do another apology for the big one, or take your 1/11 shot at acquittal.” His grin buckled under the weight of a sudden frown and he pushed Daniel back down onto the ledge. “Of course, in your case the odds will be much worse than that.”

“Why?” sighed Daniel, his tiredness complete, the word interrogating not just the matter of his worsening odds, but everything that had happened to him since he had looked up from his spam sandwich to see two unfamiliar men standing by his desk in the bank. Laura from HR had handed him his coat before he even stood up. He’d looked at her dumbly, crumbs on his tie. He wished he’s taken one more bite before they took the sandwich off him and put him in the van.  

“Well, all of the public order offences you’ve just committed will be taken into account.”

The man’s words brought Daniel back into the cell. “I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what to do,” he said, raising a hand to his chest, where his crumby tie had hung before they confiscated it, along with his shoes and belt and wallet and phone, all of the personal furniture of a normal day.

The man and the shark’s eye lens stared down at Daniel. “Just say you’re sorry. It’s your best bet.”

Daniel nodded and turned to the wall, lowering himself into a foetal coil on the hard ledge. “I’m sorry,” he said, before the cell door slammed shut and the light blinked out.