Husband Material (London Calling #2)(65)

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 one n sat 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 one n’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 very unsexy kind 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 least try to put the genie back in the bottle, “you’d probably still 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 one n slipped 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?”

Oliver was used to this—so used to it that he’d brought it up unprompted on our first fake date. These days it made me get slightly prickly-defensive on his behalf, but I knew he could field it perfectly well himself.

“I appreciate it might seem that way,” he said, “but…well…to take a recent example, a little while ago I ‘got somebody off’ for exactly this reason. I can’t go into details, but the case I made was that my client and her boyfriend only formed the intent to leave without paying because they grew frustrated at the staff consistently misgendering her. She admitted it wasn’t the right thing to do, but she was very upset at the time and she found the whole process of going through a court case deeply traumatic. I don’t think that being convicted of theft would have made her a better person. I don’t think locking her up or fining her would have protected anybody. So, no, I don’t think it was dodgy at all.”

Ana with one n seemed unconvinced. People usually did. “But then shouldn’t the defence be that ‘she had a good reason,’ not ‘she happened to eat the food before she decided not to pay for it’?”

“Maybe.” Oliver gave a little shrug. “But then we’d live in a world where the law says you’re allowed to commit crimes if you think you’ve got a good reason. And who decides what a good reason is?

It’s like the it’s-only-tea defence. If the law said that stealing only counted as stealing if you took something of significant monetary value, that would mean the law saw stealing a cup of tea from a poor person as a less serious crime than stealing a bottle of expensive wine from a rich person, and that doesn’t seem very just.” He sighed.