Michael Baigent's tiny notebook is almost full, Richard Leigh is getting through a packet of throat lozenges a morning (there may be some connection with the pocket of Marlboro sported in the breast pocket of his cowboy leather jacket) and Dan Brown, who spent his last hour on the witness stand despairingly twisting documents at arm's length, sighing that the case has destroyed his eyesight, has now vanished from court.

After what seems no more than a century or so spent on the tenth floor of the High Courts - the case is not in the Hogwartian splendour of the main building, but high in a dismal modern tower around the back - The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail v The Da Vinci Code is finally drawing to a close.

In his closing statement John Baldwin, QC for Random House, insisted that the accusation of plagiarism against The Vinci Code was a travesty, and said the HBHG case was in tatters.

He described Richard Leigh as a witness whose evidence "must be approached with considerable caution", but reserved his full ferocity for Michael Baigent. "We do not know whether he was deliberately trying to mislead the court, or was simply deluded. Either he is extremely dishonest, or he is a complete fool."

Baigent and Leigh get the chance to have the last word, through their lawyers, on Monday. But the very last word to a witness went, of course, to Mr Justice Peter Smith.

Steve Rubin, president of Doubleday in the States, the outpost of the Random House empire which published the original American edition of the Da Vinci Code, was just about to step down when the judge murmured softly through his moustache: "What you said in paragraph 78 - did you really mean that?" Mr Rubin blinked in astonishment, and said yes, he had, absolutely.

We mere mortals had to wait to get out of court and get our hands on paragraph 78 of Mr Rubin's witness statement to find out what he meant.

The statement read, simply: "I have been publishing books for 21 years. In that time I must have read thousands of manuscripts, proposals and book synopses. Although I have obviously not read every work of fiction, at the time when I first read The Da Vinci Code, I had certainly never read anything like Mr Brown's work. I believe then, and still believe now, that this type of book had never been written before."