Award-winning author and master storyteller Anna Sharpe (pseudonym of Anna Mazzola) delves into the creation of Notes on a Drowning in this exclusive Crime Collective piece, complete with insights and a chapter sampler.
Intro From Anna Sharpe
The initial idea for Notes on a Drowning came from listening to the survivors of Epstein talk about what they’d been through, and learning about the powerful people who’d not only concealed what was going on, but merrily joined in. All that glitz, power and money, with something desperately seedy beneath. Why did so many people go along with it? What other machinations have remained under wraps? It was also inspired by reading about the lives of the uber rich, and discovering how their London exists on an entirely different level to ours.
The novel is set mainly in London, partly in Tokyo. It begins in the world of Alex, a jaded but smart legal aid solicitor who, as a favour to a colleague, takes on an inquest into the death of a Moldovan girl, Natalia, found drowned in the Thames. Natalia’s sister doesn’t believe Natalia’s death was an accident. Alex comes to believe it too. Meanwhile, north of the Thames, Kat has secured her dream job: special adviser to the charismatic new Home Secretary, introducing her to a seductive new world of power, elitism and influence. But she also comes across Natalia’s case, and she too begins to question the official narrative.
There are good reasons for the two women not to want to work together, but they but must overcome their differences to get to the heart of a political scandal involving misogyny, international corruption and abuse of power. In the background, is the fact that Alex’s sister went missing twelve years before and has never been found. All this makes the book sound very serious, but in fact quite a lot of it is funny to even out the darkness. I think we’re all in need of some humour at the moment.
They say ‘write what you know’, which I generally haven’t, but I work with survivors in my role as a consultant solicitor, so it was no great surprise that I’d want to explore abuse of power in my fiction. I was also a solicitor in legal aid practices for many years and, before that, a government lawyer, so, in writing Alex and Kat, I’ve used bits of my own experiences (not cases, but the funny office stuff) and mixed them with the made-up.
Notes on a Drowning is my first legal/political thriller. I’ve previously written gothic and historical crime, so this is quite a departure for me. I’ve had to embrace modern technology, for example fax machines. People keep asking me if Kat and Alex will ride again. I hope so. However, my next Anna Sharpe novel is about a barrister from a criminal family who is made to prosecute the wrong man. It’s called Lie for Your Life and I’m supposed to send it to my editor in March 2025. Which means I’d better go write it...
Chapter Sampler from Notes on a Drowning
CHAPTER 5
ALEX
A week that needed to be washed off and she was only halfway through it.
Alex secured her goggles and plunged into the cool water, the sound of voices echoing off the pool walls receding as her head went below the water, and she began to swim, gaining her usual pace, fast, but not too fast, up and down the pool. She tried to clear her mind, to think only of the movement of her body, the rush of water, the sunlight on the glazed blue floor. It was her time away from the office, the cases, the complexity of her home life, the endless demands of the day-to-day. Still, though, other thoughts seeped into her dappled blue calm. The case that Ari had claimed was just a favour, just a simple one-day inquest, was proving to be something quite different. Something increasingly worrying and ever more similar to her own experience.As she moved from front crawl to backstroke, Alex remembered her conversations with the police over the past few days, the attitude of the Official Investigating Officer moving from disinterest to vague hostility.
‘We’ve carried out a thorough investigation, Miss Moreno. I realise your client doesn’t accept that her sister could have been involved with drugs or alcohol given the family history. She’s told us that many times. But, unfortunately, that’s what we found.’ Alex recognised his tone: it was that of a man who believed himself to be right – to always be right – and who suffered with little sympathy those who sought to question him. ‘You’ve seen the pathologist’s report and our report. There’s nothing to indicate this was anything other than a drunken fall from a boat, and I’m sure you appreciate we’re dealing with high caseloads and other more pressing investigations. This girl’s case is sad, but it’s no longer a criminal matter.’
The girl. That’s all she was to him. A girl dragged from the Thames. Another young immigrant come to seek her fortune in the big city, without knowing what she was getting into. Another young woman who’d made herself vulnerable through drink and drugs and who had only herself to blame. It was all so horribly familiar; only the setting was different. And the fact, of course, of the body.
‘Can I ask whether you checked all the possible CCTV and video footage that might have captured what happened on the river, including people’s private surveillance cameras?’
‘Yes, Miss Moreno, as we do in all such cases.’ His voice was patronising, bored. ‘I’ve been doing this job for over ten years – I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to tell me how to do it.’
Alex paused for a moment at the side of the pool, catching her breath. It had been a hell of a week. A week of numerous deadlines and distressed clients and, behind it all, the threat of closure, of the whole firm going under because they couldn’t meet their overheads. ‘We’re gonna have to rethink things round here,’ Paul, her boss, had said yesterday. ‘Streamline this shithole. Clean it up.’ Alex feared she knew what that meant: restructuring, reducing the amount of legal aid work, focusing on private clients with money to wave around. Oligarchs, not trailer parks. It would also mean further scrutiny of what each caseworker was doing, and if Paul realised how little she’d been charging those clients who struggled, if he knew how much time she’d spent on an unpaid inquest, he would be skinning her hide and making it into a pair of gloves. He’d already given her a dressing-down about her billing. (‘Targets, Alex. Targets. They’re not there for fucking target practice.You have to actu- ally hit them.’) Still, though, she couldn’t just abandon Rosa and her little sister. She’d committed to helping, even if only to a limited extent. Also, there was something that nagged her about the case, about ‘the girl’, as the police termed her. Her life in London seemed such a skimpy, opaque thing. Alex had spoken to the friend who’d been on the boat with her – a Romanian woman,Tanya, also aged eighteen – and it turned out she hadn’t been a good friend at all. She had, in fact, only met Natalia a few times before that night when they decided to go together to a boat party to which they weren’t properly invited. Tanya could tell Alex little of who Natalia’s friends were or who she associated with, and when Alex had asked her about the drugs Natalia had taken that night, the girl had retreated, becoming frosty and increasingly vague. No, she didn’t know about Natalia taking drugs. No, she hadn’t realised she had taken anything, hadn’t noticed if she seemed inebriated. Tanya was frightened, of course. She didn’t want the police to suspect her of drug-taking, but it left Alex without any clear understanding of what had happened that night: how Natalia had ended up in the water. How the girl who’d sworn off alcohol and drugs had been riddled with them at the time of her death.
Alex pushed herself off from the edge of the pool with her feet and glided across the surface of the water, beginning to stretch forward with her arms. As she did so, she imagined Natalia struggling to swim, calling out into the dark. Or had the post-mortem been wrong, and she’d been unconscious when she hit the water? Had she not cried out at all? Is that why no one had heard her? Alex couldn’t quite believe that no one had seen anything. Had the police really studied all the CCTV? It was one of the many things she’d got wrong after her own sister’s disappearance: not insisting they seized all of the video footage before it was written over; not insisting they preserve all the phone messages so that Elisa’s voice, at least, remained. Her sister’s voice still came to her sometimes, though, as echoes of long-ago conversations or comments on her own life now – things she was likely to say. ‘Maybe he really means it, Alex. You do tend to lock people out.’
