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You will remember, that one witness was asked whether
he thought Leung Ki had any power to enforce that threat and he said "No, I don't know how he was going to do it." The accused man himself had not told us that he regarded that threat as anything beyond mere youthful boasting and so, if the prosecution witnesses are correct, the only thing that
happened up to that time, and by that time the accused man had got up from his seat, was this tap with an open hand on the
you shoulder. "Three days to pay and if/don't you will be
warned off."
Then, we are told, the accused man, without a word,
turned round and walked over to Ng Kui's stall.
Here I think we might quite usefully remember what
we know about conditions that night.
Mr. Chen has made a lot of the fact that by 7.30 at
night on the 28th September it is dark. That is a proposition that Mr. Prentis is not going to question, but we don't know
that it was dark at Ng Kui's stall. Ng Kui earns his liveli-
hood by selling coffee there. You have seen photographs of
the stall a little difficult to imagine that Ng Kui thinks
he can best advertise his wares by keeping them in darkness,
but all we do know is that the accused man sat for some time
on one of the canvas seats just at Ng Kui's stall. What we
do know, however, is that one of the dishes served is bread
and that in order to cut the bread he used this sharp chopper;
and that he cut the bread on top of three wooden boxes on
which normally the chopper lay. We know also that the
accused man had been an intermittent -- more than an occasional,
customer, at Ng Kui's. There is no evidence that conditions
there were so dark as to make it difficult for anyone to see.
In fact, such evidence as there is seems to be rather the
other way, because you have your noodle manufacturer busy
making his pastry in a corner behind his stall and doing it