Bleakly, thinking hard, she followed her colleagues back into the jury room and took her place at the head of the table. As she sat, she decided her best chance was to be assertive and take immediate control. She also needed to buy herself more thinking time.

‘As it is now lunchtime,’ she announced, ‘may I suggest we take a short break? Some sandwiches and drinks have been provided for us. Let’s resume with clear heads in half an hour’s time.’

Her suggestion was greeted by universal assent and to her relief everyone found their own space around the room. She got straight on with her plan, scanning through all of her notes and numbering them in a sequence she felt might work best for her – just her hunch. Her tiredness was long forgotten. She felt alert and increasingly optimistic the further she read through her notes.

She could do this, she realized, it was no longer an impossible task – she actually could pull this off.

99

Tuesday 28 May

It was half an hour later, after everyone was ready in the jury room, had made themselves drinks and sat back at the table, when Meg put the first part of her plan into place.

‘Right, I’d like each of you to write down on a piece of paper your initial verdict on each or all of the counts. It would be useful to see where everyone stands before we begin our discussions. Do please write down, also, if you are undecided.’

They all dutifully complied, passing the various-sized folded scraps of paper into the middle of the table, which were then pushed up to her. They arrived in too much of a jumble for Meg to figure out who had written which.

The handwriting gave her few further clues, although she knew for sure that Harold Trout would have been a ‘guilty’, and one of those ‘guilty’ votes had shaky, old-person handwriting. His?

Nine of her ten fellow jurors were looking at her, expectantly. One, the geeky Rory O’Brien at the far end of the table, was poring through a stack of spreadsheets in front of him and scribbling notes.

‘OK,’ Meg said. ‘We have five “guilty”, three “undecided” and two “not guilty”.’

‘Meg,’ Toby said in his pained voice, ‘are you going to tell us what you think?’

She decided on a tactical bluff. ‘Well, from all I’ve heard, I think he’s guilty.’

‘But can you really say that for sure, Meg?’ asked Hugo Pink, coming to her rescue.

She sat, pretending to weigh this up for some moments, thinking hard. Maybe the way she could win this would be by appearing to lose, she thought. ‘Fair point, Hugo. I understand why you say that, and I’m struggling to process it all myself. To be sure is the essence, the most important factor. Are we satisfied on the evidence to be sure of the defendant’s guilt?’