Imran Mahmood
* * *
YOU DON’T KNOW ME
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
To Shahida who gave me life
To Sadia who changed my life
To Zoha who made my life
To all my brothers and sisters at the Criminal Bar, who make the real speeches and fight the hard cases every day, for such little recognition or reward
IN THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT T2017229
Before: HIS HONOUR JUDGE SALMON QC
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Closing Speeches:
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Trial: Day 29
Tuesday 4th July 2017
APPEARANCES
For the Prosecution: Mr C. Salfred QC
For the Defendant: In person
Transcribed from a digital audio recording by
T. J. Nazarene Limited
Official Court Reporters and Tape Transcribers
1
10:05
DEFENDANT:
“In 1850, Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston, made a speech to Parliament that lasted five hours. A Portuguese Jew called Don Pacifico who was living in Greece but who was born in Gibraltar had been attacked by a racist mob. He had been beaten. His home had been vandalized. His possessions had been stolen. The Greek police had watched all of this happen but had done nothing. Don Pacifico asked for compensation from the Greek government. The Greek government refused to give him anything. So he appealed to the British.
“What did Palmerston do? Palmerston considered this Gibraltan Jew to be a British subject. So he sent a whole squadron of Royal Navy ships to Athens to block its port. After eight weeks the Greek government paid up. It was when he was challenged by a hostile crowd in Parliament that Palmerston made his five-hour speech. In it he said, ‘A British subject ought everywhere to be protected by the strong arm of the British government against injustice and wrong.’
“That is what it meant to be British then. In them days. Sorry, in those days, I’m a bit nervous. In those days if you were a British citizen, it did not matter if you were a Jew or Portuguese or a Gibraltan or whatever else. It was enough that you were a British subject. It was enough that wherever you were in the world, if harm came to you, you could count on the full might of all of England to come to your aid. This Palmerston, he sent a fleet of ships for one man!
“That is what England would do for just one of its men – even if he was a nobody Jew like Don Pacifico – the whole of England for one man. One hundred and sixty years later and this black Englishman can count on none of England. None of it. I can count on none of it except this tiny bit of it here in this room. For me, this is all of England right here. You are all of England and I need you now. I need the strong arm of your protection against injustice and wrong. I need you. I need you. I need you. And you need me. You need me so that you can be all of England.”
Basically that is as far as I got up to. Then I thought to myself, ‘What is the point?’ I ain’t no Lord Palmerston and no five-hour speech from me is going to start you cheering my corner. I ain’t stupid. I know that no speech is going to get me out of this. But you know what? It was worth reading that bit out just to see your faces. I don’t mean it as joke ting, but like as a thing to shake you up. You never knew that I could speak like a professor is it? But I just wanted you to know that there’s more than just that one side to me that you lot saw when I was giving evidence. I wanted to maybe, I don’t know, surprise you. And let me tell you there’s some surprises coming your way.
So maybe this is the first surprise. Why am I standing here doing this speech instead of my barrister? Why did I decide to stand before you all and tell it in my words? Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t upset with him or nothing like that. It was more that we had a difference of opinions on certain subjects and I’ve got certain like extra information that he don’t know.
Like I’ll give you an example. You remember when I gave my evidence a couple of days back? Well that was one of them things we had opinions about. He wanted me to tell you what he called a ‘plausible story’. ‘Give them what they need to hear,’ he goes to me. So I go to him, ‘Nah bruv, I want to give them what they don’t want to hear from me, the truth.’ But he didn’t like that too much. ‘It’s too rich for them,’ he was saying, ‘it’s too rich for their blood.’
He was good, my QC, don’t get me wrong. But I thought, he’s not me. He don’t know what I know. The problem for me was that although I know what I know, I don’t know what he knows. Do I let him speak to you in your language but telling only half the story, or do I do it myself and tell the full story with the risk that you won’t understand none of it? Can I even tell you the whole story? Would you believe it? I don’t know man. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I ain’t going to be risking my life for this murder and not tell you what is true. Even if my barrister don’t want me to do that.
So here’s my confession. I gave you evidence on oath before. On the Holy Bible. But God knows what I told you in the witness box wasn’t exactly the whole truth. It had some truths, don’t get me wrong, a lot of truths, but it also had some maybe not truths. But that is the way he wanted it, my brief. ‘It’s not about the truth,’ he says to me, ‘it’s about what they can believe.’
This upset me, I mean how can I swear to you to say the truth and then like tell you lies? So last night when I was trying to sleep I thought about it. A lot. And when I woke up I weren’t happy, trust me. So this morning I said to him, ‘Bruv, I need to start telling it like it is. This speech, my closing speech, it’s my last chance.’ And he goes, ‘Well that’s it.’ He can’t act for me no more for ethical reasons. Ethical reasons? I thought ethical was about truth, but apparently, it ain’t. It’s all about impressions. ‘What impression do you think you are giving if you go into court now and tell them a different story? What do you think it’s going to look like if you tell them this new piece of information?’ ‘Well maybe,’ I says to him, ‘I don’t need to tell them that thing’ – and truth be told I ain’t even sure if I can tell you that thing. Coz if I do tell you that thing I’m not sure I would even survive it, you get me?
Don’t get me wrong, I want to tell you but I’m just not sure if I can right now. I don’t know what you’d think about me if you heard that. Maybe you need to get to know me a bit first. The real me.
Right now you think, looking at me, that I’m just some foolish kid who go
around shooting up people for no reason. I know you think that because I ain’t stupid and you ain’t stupid. I know my evidence, what I said to you from the witness box, weren’t all that good. I know that. I know it was shady. So I know what you think is that I just shoot up that kid but that ain’t it. That’s just what they want you to believe. They want you to think that I’m a no-brain lazy kid who go into some random street and shoot a next man up for nothing. Don’t be fooled though. They are good at that – fooling you. That’s what this guy, Mr Prosecutor, does for a living. He does this day in, day out, and by the time he’s finished with you, you’re seeing white as black and black as white. I take my hat off to him. He is good. He’s sneaky, but he is good. But you have to see past all this smoke he’s been creating here and see what’s behind it. Trust me you’ll be surprised. You don’t have to do it for me. Just do it as one of them things, just as an experiment. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and you do what you have to do. But if I’m right …
Start with the evidences. Okay the evidences don’t look good for me but there aren’t that many of them really. But before I go into all of that I just want to say this. Ignore what all I said or didn’t say in my statement when I got up there in the box the other day. That don’t matter really, does it, if there’s no real evidence to tie me to this murder? If the evidence is shit, what does it matter what I did or didn’t tell you?
Okay so here it is. This is how I wrote them down:
A boy got shot who is from the same area I live in.
Three months before he got shot someone saw me apparently walking past him and saying to him, ‘You’re waste man.’
A couple of months before he was shot a witness saw Jamil, the dead boy, having an argument with a black boy about my age wearing a black hoodie with white Chinese-style writing on the back.
Cell-site evidence. The phone expert said that my phone was in the same cell-site as the deceased at the exact moment of the shooting. My phone was also in the same cell-site as his on the day that I was supposed to be arguing with the boy. And it was also in the same cell-site as his phone on the day that I was supposed to be saying, ‘You’re waste man.’ All within one cell-site area. What did that expert say? Fifty or sixty metres?
The search of my flat. The police arrested me because they heard a rumour that I was involved in the shooting. They searched my flat and found a Baikal handgun. They found a black hoodie with white Chinese-style writing on the back. They found my phone, which matched the cell-site evidences. They found my passport. They found an e-ticket for a flight to Spain. They found cash, thirty thousand pounds in my rucksack. They found the firearms discharge residue that the prosecution has been going on about, in my car and on the hoodie. They found me.
The police say that the bullet which killed the boy, Jamil, must have come from my gun. Ballistics. You remember the guy who came with all his charts and whatever. That bullet came from that gun he says.
They found a tiny particle of the dead boy’s blood under my nails.
They found a few of my hairs in his car.
Open and shut innit? Enough said. You can go home now thank you very much for your attention. And if you did convict me on that you would probably go home and sleep all nice at night. I know that. But you have been sitting here for four weeks doing this case. What I was hoping was that you wanted to make them weeks count for something. But then I thought, I ain’t so sure.
Maybe to you lot, this is just a thing to do innit? A nice break from your lives. You can get up every day and put on a clean shirt and come into this place and look at papers or whatever and nod or shake your heads. You can listen to him, the prosecution. You can listen to this Judge here and feel like you are doing something. You can be all respectable. And when you leave here, after this case is done, you can go back to your lives to do whatever it is you do. But I don’t disappear, you know, when you lot go home. I’m still here. I’m still a person innit? When your little boy who is maybe four or five years old right now and just starting school grows up, I’ll still be in a prison cell. When he gets to like ten and starts his first day at big school, I’ll still be doing my time. When he leaves and gets a job or goes to uni: I will still be here. Doing my life sentence. Because you didn’t look hard enough. Because you didn’t do your job. That’s all I’m asking. Just listen to my story – I am innocent. I promise you, if you look hard enough you’ll see it for yourself.
Just look at the evidence. That will tell you all you need to know. And trust me there is enough there to make you see what I am saying is real.
Break: 11:15
2
11.28
Before I was arrested for this murder I had a job. Well not a real job with pay as you earn and all that, but I had something that I did to bring in the dollars. I weren’t no gangster either – what my thing was, was selling wheels. Cars. I love them. There’s nothing you or anyone else can teach me about cars. I like the old ones. I like the new ones. I like the V8s, I like the naturally aspirated ones, I like the turbo-charged ones.
Anyway, what I realized was that most people don’t always know what they got when they selling their cars. This one girl was selling what she thought was an old Vauxhall Carlton that used to belong to her boyfriend. But what she didn’t know was that it wasn’t just any old Carlton that was maybe worth about three hundred quid. This was a Lotus Carlton. A three point six litre twin-turbo three hundred and seventy-seven horsepower Carlton. Nought to sixty in five seconds. Top end, one hundred and seventy-six miles per hour. Twenty grand of anybody’s money even though it’s twenty years old. See I check my shit before I buy. And I tell you what else, most of the people when they buy from me, they check their shit too. You can’t be selling no bangers to the people round where I live. They want to go over the thing with a magnifying glass. Every dent’s a discount. Every bit of optional extra is extra, you get me?
So this has to be the same thing here innit? Are you just going to take what the prosecution say on their say-so or are you going to look at it carefully and check under the bonnet? Is it proper quality what the prosecution is selling you? Or is it just some made in Taiwan rubbish?
So look at the first piece of evidence. The dead boy was shot in the same area I live in. What I say about that is, so what? He was shot in the same area that all the people who live in that area live in. This is just a nothing argument and it’s a nothing evidence. Do I even need to go on about this any more?
If he was shot in your areas would that mean that you shot him? No man. That is just stupidness. But Mr Prosecutor thinks it does and makes a big thing out of it. But that’s just a thing he’s got over me innit. He can say anything and it sounds proper bad. But when you look at it, it’s just bollocks. Sorry Your Honour, it just slipped out. What I mean is if I could say it like the way he can say it, the prosecution, you would be saying ‘this is just a rubbish evidence’. What, I was living there and so was the dead boy? Is that an actual evidence that means something? That don’t mean shit. Come on, yeah?
Then look at the second evidence. I was seen walking past the victim and that I said to him, ‘You’re waste man’. To the prosecution, and to everyone else that’s been watching too many movies, that is supposed to be evidence. That is supposed to be me saying that the victim is a dead man. Like I’m some Mafia guy in an American film. Ha! Sorry, jury. Sorry if you knew what I knew and you grew up where I grew up you’d be laughing too. On the streets in London that means something else. Mr Prosecutor wouldn’t know that because he’s not from the streets. Not the real streets, the kind of streets I know, the kind of streets where people shoot each other. Actually maybe that’s a bad example but you know what I mean. He’s on a different level. I’m not saying that as a bad thing. It’s just the truth. If I was going to one of his shooting parties or whatever, I wouldn’t know what their words mean. When I hear the word ‘estate’ I think of a car with a long boot or maybe a council block. He probably thinks of a house in the country, you get
me? We are from different worlds, me and him. I don’t wish I lived in his world but I wish he spent a day in mine. Waste man!
Let me tell you about waste man. When I was about eleven I went to a new school. It wasn’t the local state school, it was some next school a mile away because they didn’t have room in my nearest one. It was one of them old seventies boxes that they must have thought looked cool at one time but by the time I got there it just looked like a falling-down block of flats. It had green panels, I remember that, with big square windows in between them. There was a yard that went all the way around where all us kids used to play at break time, with a railing round the outside to stop the kids spilling out into the road. That was it. Basically, it was like the most space they could make with the least money and wide open like a desert so there was nowhere anyone could hide.
There was this one place though. It was this fire escape kind of thing which ran down the side of the building in square spirals and under the last run of steps there was a like a well, you could call it. If you followed it all the way down it led to a locked metal door into some basement thing where the caretaker probably wanked himself off or whatever. That place, that was what we called ‘the Spit’. It was one place you did not ever want to be.
Anyway you move ends and it’s like moving into a different country. I moved and it was like I was in some war zone. In my first school it was maybe fifty per cent black. This place though, rah, it was like I had moved into BNP central. There was only like eight or nine non-whites in the whole school. It was like my eyes had suddenly gone from colour to black and white. And the kids, man! There was some proper racist shit going down there, trust me. Sorry Judge, I know what you said before about the swearing but it was, ‘Nigger this, coon that, black bastard that.’ Whatever though. That was just what it was. Some shit you got to just live with.
You Don't Know Me: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Choice Page 1