Imran Mahmoud On Grief, Justice, and the Long Path Towards Resolution

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My latest novel Finding Sophie is a crime novel about a teenager (Sophie) who goes missing one seemingly uneventful day. That simple but monumental event rips open the lives of her parents, Harry and Zara and sends them spiraling in opposite directions. Where one lives in hope, the other clings to despair. When one finds strength to commit to a search, the other seeks answers internally—in a search of the soul. They each want to find truth but to do that they have to learn to understand and navigate a path between hope and grief.

Missing persons stories are usually told from the lens of the police or a private detective—a dispassionate investigator who can leave emotions behind in order to get to answers. But I chose to tell the story from the perspectives of the missing girl’s parents because I wanted to get closer to their emotions and their internal worlds. I wanted to feel as well as to discover. There are many ways to tell the missing person story but this, to me is by far the most dramatic and heart-engaging one. The stakes are personal and for that reason, I think, all the more thrilling.

In my job as a criminal barrister I have dealt with missing persons cases, in the context of murder cases. Judges and juries try cases together, the one dealing with the law and the other with the facts. But together they try the case as impartial actors. They don’t have any personal skin in the game beyond doing what is right and just. However, these kinds of trials are usually highly emotional. There are families and whose futures and whose need for resolution are at stake. A missing person case is a special kind of case precisely because so much hangs in the balance. It is literally a case of life and death. Is the missing person alive and well carefully holding the dreams of those who love her and await her return or have those dreams withered and been buried with her?

Parents seem to have a conjoined identity in dramas and novels involving their children. They act as a unit. They feel the same things. They often have the same thoughts. But I wanted tell this story in the separated voices of Sophie’s parents, Harry and Zara. I felt it important to give equal weight to their stories because they react to Sophie’s disappearance in such different ways. To understand them as individuals and to appreciate the depth and variety of their feelings it’s necessary to unstitch them from one another. To see how they deal with their challenges and their obstacles as individuals. To examine how particularly they meet with and absorb their grief.

Grief. That is the beating heart of a missing person case.

It is often said that the depth of a person’s grief, is in direct proportion to the depth of the love they have lost. Grief is the testimony of love, its twin and its mirror. We know grief just as surely as we know love. But in the same way that love might be unrequited, so too can loss be inchoate. There is a liminal state, I think, that is produced by incomplete grief. When the person for whom you grieve isn’t definitely dead, but is missing, how do you process that? What do you do when, in Schrodinger-speak, you have a cat that is both alive and dead at the same time? How do you rationalize and then deal with a possible loss, in a way that is authentic to both outcomes? To feel grief feels disloyal to hope. And feeling hope feels like a treason to loss.

For me this conflict was the natural place to begin. But then as I drew further into the novel, I found I had to tackle something more practical. Justice. In criminal cases, the absence of a body isn’t a bar to trying a defendant for murder. In some ways, a trial is more crucial in these cases than anywhere else because people need something to stand in place of the sickening labile uncertainty of a missing loved one.

A trial in a kind of miraculous way can give you that something. You take the evidence and feed it through a court and wait for the dark magic to unfold. Because a verdict once it is given creates a truth out of thin air.

Every criminal case is tried by a jury that didn’t witness the events in question. Nobody on that jury can know for sure whether X was acting in self-defence in the heat of the moment or if Y mistakenly identified X as the suspect. We only have the word of a witness or witnesses. A word based, even if honestly believed, on a memory that is dwindling as fast as time is moving on. But once the verdict is in, X is guilty. He is a murderer. Whether in reality he is or not. And so a verdict delivers certainty out of uncertainty, give closure where once there were only open wounds. Even if that verdict is nothing more than a fiction, in which twelve jurors have conspired.

And that strange creation of truth was one of the reasons I wanted to splice a murder trial in between Harry and Zara’s alternating accounts. The drama in court is where we unearth the ‘truth’. I keep the courtroom scenes tense and unpredictable to replicate in some small way the feeling that Harry and Zara perhaps have of holding onto a hope that is liable to turn on them any second. And also court is tense. There are moments in every trial where it feels as though the world can just come tumbling down. We all, as courtroom advocates, hold our breaths for the answers to questions we are not sure we should have asked.

But when all is said and done, a verdict is not a true substitute for truth. And no family was ever fully healed by a trial unless their loved one was found (dead or alive). We need to find answers as readers of crime fiction that leave us whatever the answer, in a state where we better understand the world. Because the world out there is a chaotic and dangerous place and the least we can do as writers is to restore some order. So I promise that at the end of Finding Sophie you will find out what happened to Sophie. And what became of Harry and Zara. And what this murder trial tells us about hope and grief. Because to leave you without that resolution would be to leave you with your own inchoate loss and liminal spaces. And frankly I never liked the idea of a cat that could be both dead and alive at the same time.

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