And today he was here to begin the murder trial of Simon Kash.

The entrance to the court building was unusually secure. Heavy, metal-framed doors led from the street to a security foyer. Lawyers, police officers, defendants and witnesses could pass through. For everyone else, that foyer was as far as they would get.

After all these years the security process was familiar. Knowing what was ahead, Michael could pass through the isolation tubes at the end of the foyer and then the magnetic gate that followed in a matter of seconds, delayed only by the speed of the conveyor belt on the X-ray machine through which he had to pass any bags and belongings.

This morning was no exception. Michael was through the process in under a minute and making his way down the three steps that led to the building’s basement-level elevator bank.

The basement elevator bank was almost identical to the banks on every other floor. Six elevators. Three a side. Ornate but ageing. The only difference was the large wooden door that sat at the far right-hand corner of the bank.

It led to the court’s cell area.

The cells where Michael would today meet Simon Kash for only the second time.

Michael boarded the elevator nearest to the cell-area door and pressed ‘four’. The outdated lift mechanism kicked in and his stomach lurched with the sudden upward movement.

When the doors opened at ‘four’ Michael stepped out and turned left. At the end of the bank – left again – were the antique oak and glass doors that led to the Old Bailey’s robing areas, where barristers changed from their twenty-first-century clothing into the eighteenth-century outfits unique to Britain’s courts.

The doors led to three rooms. The largest by far was the male robing room, directly behind the doors. The others were much smaller. One was the female robing area. It sat on the right, immediately after the main entrance. A recent addition. Or, more accurately, an after-thought. The size of the room practically an insult.

The remaining room was the QC’s robing space, which sat behind an antique oak door at the far end of the male area. It was as small as the female robing room, but in this case the size was justified. QCs were massively outnumbered by junior barristers.

Michael still felt strange going into that last room. He had been coming to the Old Bailey for seventeen years. In all of that time he had used the main robing room. It seemed unnatural to do otherwise, but rules were rules. Especially here.

He took less than five minutes to change clothes, transforming him from modern lawyer to traditionally dressed Queen’s Counsel. The wig was the same as always. The same horsehair he had bought in Ede and Ravenscroft when he was just twenty-one. His wing collar and court bands were also unchanged. But the rest of the outfit was new. In place of his suit jacket was a QC’s court coat; a cross between a waistcoat and a jacket, the three buttons at the end of each upturned sleeve was one of the clearest ways for a QC to be identified on sight. Finishing the costume was a thick, silk QC’s robe instead of the more flowing cotton robe Michael had worn for almost two decades.