A long-running court case involving an alleged child-molester and an 11-year-old victim was yesterday adjourned until next Friday.

It's the third adjournment in the on-again, off-again trial; proceedings were halted twice Wednesday -- once when a lawyer went missing and again when a witness failed to appear.

The accused, a 39-year-old Sandys Parish man, has pleaded not guilty to the sexual exploitation by someone in a position of trust and the alternate charge of touching a young person.

A defence witness yesterday testified that the 11-year-old victim was being neglected during the time of the alleged incident.

According to the witness -- a relative of the girl and the girlfriend of the accused, during the summer of 1996 the girl slept at the houses of more than seven different relatives.

And the witness told Magistrates' Court that the girl sometimes stayed with her family at her mother's boyfriend's house.

"During September and October of 1996, (the girl and her siblings) were here, there, and everywhere,'' she said.

Earlier in the case, an assistant Wednesday had to seek an adjournment while defence counsel Victoria Pearman was hurriedly retrieved from Supreme Court.

But the numerous delays and slow pace of the trial appeared to be getting to Magistrate Edward King: "This is a sexual assault trial, this is serious business ... Everyone knows the difficulty we've had in getting this trial finished,'' he said before reluctantly granting the adjournment.

Fifteen minutes later however, Mr. King had to adjourn again when the next defence witness, the defendant's girlfriend, could not be found.

The court heard earlier this week that the accused denied ever being left alone with the girl.

He claimed the girl's relative was present every time the alleged victim visited the house during October and December, 1996, when the offence is alleged to have occurred.

Under cross examination by Crown counsel Lesley Basden, the man said he did not have a good relationship with the child.

"We just used to speak, and that was it,'' the man said.

He denied that he helped the girl with her homework or played with her after school, but said he had known her all her life.

The man said he had frequent unprotected sex with the girl's relative, who he claimed was his only sexual partner. And he claimed test results indicating he had at least two of the three sexually transmitted diseases were unreliable.

He stressed that if he had herpes or gonorrhoea, his regular partner would have contracted the diseases.

According to earlier testimony, the victim contracted three sexually transmitted diseases from him.

Ms Basden accused the man of sexually molesting the girl, offering her money, and telling her to pull down her pants so he could rub his genitals against her -- to which the man repeatedly responded: "Not true''.

The trial, which began two weeks ago, has been squeezed into the Magistrate's Court schedule for one hour every morning.

But the trial has been consistently interrupted by other legal matters, adjournments, and lawyers' tardiness.