The Clerk of No Record

For twenty-two years, Maura Loftus has trusted the record. Then one old murder file gives her a reason not to.Ardenshaw Crown Court, 1998. Maura knows the building better than almost anyone: its courtrooms and corridors, its temperamental heating, its basement archives, and the thousands of files that have passed through her hands.When a request from the Criminal Cases Review Commission brings the file of Dean Sharrock back into view, Maura encounters something that should not be there: a sealed envelope whose presence does not fit what she remembers of the case.Maura remembers because she was there.She had been the judge's clerk during Sharrock's 1994 murder trial. And years later, when she saw evidence that something had appeared on the file that had not been there before, she recognised the irregularity and said nothing.Now the past has returned in paper, ink, signatures and dates.As Maura begins to examine what the official record can and cannot establish, small discrepancies open into larger questions. A hearing held behind a closed door has left almost no trace. Documents exist without explaining themselves. Memory conflicts with procedure. And somewhere between what happened, what was recorded and what can now be proved lies the fate of a man convicted of murder.But following the record also means confronting Maura's own place within it. Her loyalty to the institution in which she has spent her working life collides with a more difficult obligation: to pursue the truth even when doing so may expose her own silence.The Clerk of No Record is a quietly gripping literary legal novel about institutional memory, evidence, conscience, complicity and the dangerous distance between an event and its official record.When the record cannot tell the whole truth, who is responsible for what it leaves out?