Quite early into a session of the trial at Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Meerabux said three words he had not said in the many months during which the BF&M case has run.

The words were: "Yes, Mr. Moore?'' Mr. Martin Moore was making his first appearance in the case, instructed by Appleby, Spurling & Kempe, for the individual defendants.

"Yes, my Lord,'' said Mr. Moore. "I break my silence after 70 days.'' His Lordship, welcoming the latest combatant to the field of battle -- Mr.

Moore joins about two dozen lawyers from Bermuda and elsewhere -- was initially felicitous. "I hope you did not regard (this court building) as a monastery,'' his Lordship enquired.

"My Lord, no,'' replied Mr. Moore. "I am not a Capuchin.'' Instead, Mr. Moore explained, he was appearing for the estate of the late Charles Collis, Mr. Donald Lines, Mr. William Cox, Mr. Gregory Haycock and Mr.

Michael Collier, referred to collectively as the "individual defendants''.

Mr. Moore set to cross-examining insurance manager Michael Owner, but the lawyer faltered when his second question raised his Lordship's eyebrows. In the question, Mr. Moore had given the word `travelling' its standard connotation in the insurance industry, which is "travelling in anticipation of attracting or developing existing business.'' His Lordship queried Mr. Moore's meaning and was duly satisfied. The Court moved on. Another brief side-step almost immediately occurred when Mr. Moore omitted one of Mr. Owner's former employments and had to apologise.

Things go in threes, and, sure enough, Mr. Moore went the distance. Knowing that Mr. Owner had retired on medical grounds some years before joining the company referred to in court as "BFMIC'', Mr. Moore made an all-too-human assumption: that Mr. Owner had recovered from his medical condition.

Mr. Moore to Mr. Owner: "Then, in 1986, your health presumably having improved ...

His Lordship interrupted the testimony to ask Mr. Moore where it had been substantiated that Mr. Owner had indeed recovered from his health problems.

Mr. Justice Meerabux to Mr. Moore: "Would you please find out whether or not his health improved?'' Mr. Moore to Mr. Owner: "Did your health improve following (your) early retirement for health reasons?'' "Yes, indeed it did,'' said Mr. Owner.

Mr. Moore, having triple-faulted, then proceeded without any further problems to adjust his delivery to the mood and the speed of the court and spent some hours pursuing the who-knew-what-when and the what-does-it-all-mean of any number of documents.

This is not the Law as practised by Perry Mason or Ally McBeal, with intuitive leaps of insight from sympathetic attorneys as they weasel the truth out of the witnesses. Nor does anyone offer up the tired English cliche: `I put it to you', so beloved of comedians and barrrack room lawyers.

The case proceeds at a stately pace. Some tiny details are explored, almost obsessively, by the learned ladies and gentlemen of the local and overseas Bars who have made Bermuda their home in what history may record as the early days of what is already a lengthy legal process.

The evidence, such as it is, is documentary in the main. Articles, memoranda, minutes: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of sheets of paper bear silent witness on either wall of the courtroom until summoned forth, usually a few pages at a time, by the wizards in the wigs and gowns.

Stacked almost to the ceiling in the fiercely air-conditioned room, the bookcases and boxes full of files and documents suggest that each team has a set of its own and a set of everyone else's, and probably a separate set of its own. The judge has his own, in the far corner of the Court. They are retrieved as necessary by his staff.

The barristers and their associates sit in serried ranks, six or seven across, several rows of eminence deep.

Matters proceed at a fantastically laborious pace, to be frank. Again unlike TV legal melodramas, there are no neat breaks every eight or ten minutes. Two and a half hours in the morning and as many again the afternoon, four days a week, each split into two intense sessions by an intermission barely long enough to smoke a cigarette out on Court Street and shake the cobwebs out of the system.

At stake is a great deal of money, a good slice of which will be leaving Bermuda for London, no matter who, if anyone, wins this marathon.

The visiting counsel are among the most eminent the motherland has to offer.

Among their ranks are great legal minds and, in one or two cases, a degree of snootiness with which Bermudians are not enormously comfortable.

"My Lord,'' said one leading counsel some weeks ago, referring to a precedent he held in his hand. "There is something called the Supreme Court of Mitchigan ...'' There is no `t' in Michigan, but its insertion -- probably not recorded in the court's notes -- produced in the orator a faint air of distaste well worth the price of the day's admission. Supreme Court, of course, is free to interested citizens.

Not too many are interested on any given day. The public gallery has perhaps 60 seats. At no time are more than two or three taken.

Such seats as are taken contain the occasional reporter or visiting lawyer; one afternoon, a mother and her daughters keen to see justice at first hand, who stayed all of ten minutes; and two female lawyers who spent a lunch hour checking out the visiting advocates, attempting not to burst into fits of giggles, which would have been unseemly behaviour entirely out of place in the arid atmosphere of jurisprudence.

It should be stressed that, no matter how crusty matters may become in this complicated and seemingly endless law suit, what is being done on Court Street with great care and professional magnificence, is justice, open justice of the kind which is a basic building block of a free society.

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