Court in the Act
Britain’s number one criminal court—the Central Criminal Court, otherwise known as the Old Bailey is a court unlike any court in which I have ever conducted a trial. The building, at every turn, is designed to throw you, whether as defendant or advocate, into abject terror. It starts with an air-lock as you enter the building. It encloses you in a glass tube and traps you momentarily before releasing you, like something out of a movie. And it ends with the daunting panelled courtroom itself, and the inevitably terrifying judge presiding over it. In one of the courtrooms is even a sword, that hangs menacingly behind the throne of the senior judge. I’ve never been exactly sure of the purpose of it but something about a 16th Century sword in a court room has the effect of putting the willies up you.
It was exactly for the deep sense of foreboding at the Old Bailey that I set the opening scene of my novel there. As a practising barrister (a be-wigged trial attorney for those of my cousins across the pond), I see the plotting crime of novels the same way that I see a new case when it arrives on my desk, tied up in pink ribbon. A case just like a book, kicks off with a crime. And then as you read on, the story of the crime emerges in layers. The witnesses on the one hand tell you what they saw, then the defendant on the other, through his interview with the police tells you his side. And in between there is the forensic evidence and the telephone evidence and the CCTV. Slowly but surely, every detail is revealed until the picture is complete.
There is nothing tighter than the plot contained in a set of criminal papers. No sentence is wasted. No piece of evidence unturned. No mystery left unexamined. In this there is a straight line between my job as a barrister and my job as a novelist.
When I was starting out as a trainee (or pupil as they’re called), my supervisor (or pupil master—yes I know—very feudal!) taught me a lesson that I carried with me throughout my career. ‘It’s no good,’ he said after delivering a particularly spell-binding speech, ‘just reciting a load of facts to a jury. If you do that you’re likely to send them to sleep and when they deliberate later on they won’t remember anything you told them.’ I asked him then what the solution was. ‘You tell them a story,’ he said, ‘because a story does everything. It’s memorable, it tells the key facts and more than that it keeps a jury hooked.’ I thought about that advice for a long time. Everyone loves a good story. And the best stories engaged the emotional as well as the logical brains. And very often it’s the emotion that stays long after the facts of the story ebb away.
There is however a difference between a novel and a criminal case. In a case, once I have given my closing speech to the jury I’m redundant. From that moment on, like every other actor in the court room, I just have to wait until the jury has reached its verdict. Sometimes that can take days and for the whole of that time, I roll around the robing room, waiting, waiting, waiting. I can’t stay up late to find out the verdict early or skip to the end, I just have to be patient—there are lives and freedoms at stake. But that’s not the difference I’m talking about. It’s the next part. The verdict. Often the verdict in real cases is unsurprising and just as often it is a shock. Frequently verdicts don’t come smoothly along like endings in a book, but arrive bumpily, dragging themselves along on their bellies. Guilty of two counts, not guilty of three, hung on one. Sometimes I walk away baffled and wishing I could know what really happened – whether there was some poetic motive or some sinister explanation for what we had all witnessed. But there never is. There is just the cramped Tube journey home (via Chambers) and another brief in my bag waiting to be untied.
But when you’re in the case, there is no feeling like it. In my court room scenes in Finding Sophie I do everything I can to recreate the tension of a real cross-examination. For an advocate that is the moment of truth. You spend hours crafting questions designed to elicit only helpful answers. You lay meticulously prepared traps. You agonise over a phrase or even a word just so that when you’re in court, the cross-examination hits its target. The preparation, however never fully prepares you for the reality of what actually happens. The surprise information, the sudden emergence of defences nobody could have anticipated. I wanted to bring home the high stakes of a murder trial. There is nothing quite like it for drama in the real world but also on the page. The only difference is that when I write novels, I can at least choose the ending I want!
About the Author
Imran Mahmood is a practicing criminal barrister in England and Wales with over thirty years’ experience fighting cases. His debut novel, You Don’t Know Me, was chosen by Simon Mayo as a BBC Radio 2 Book Club Choice for 2017, longlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year and the CWA Gold Dagger Award, and shortlisted for the Glass Bell Award. Its hugely successful television adaptation reached number three in the world on Netflix charts and received a BAFTA nomination for best actor. Mahmood was born and raised in Liverpool and now lives in London with his wife and two daughters.
For the last seventeen years, Harry and Zara King’s lives have revolved around their only daughter, Sophie. One day, Sophie leaves the house and doesn’t come home. Six weeks later, the police are no closer to finding her than when they started. Harry and Zara have questioned everyone who has ever had any connection to Sophie, to no avail. Except there’s one house on their block–number 210, across the street–whose occupant refuses to break his silence.
Someone knows what happened.
As the question mark over number 210 devolves into obsession, Harry and Zara are forced to examine their own lives. They realize they have grown apart, suffering in separate spheres of grief. And as they try to find their way back to each other, they must face the truth about their daughter: who she was, how she changed, and why she disappeared.
Someone will pay.
Told in the alternating perspectives of Harry and Zara, and in a dual timeline between the weeks after Sophie’s disappearance and a year later in the middle of a murder trial, Imran Mahmood’s taut yet profoundly moving novel explores how differently grief can be experienced even when shared by parents–and how hope triumphs when it springs from the kind of love that knows no bounds.
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