Title: The Ten prompted by Michael Poole

Genre: Legal Thriller / Psychological Mystery
Setting: Birmingham, Jersey, and London – 1990s to present day

Premise

Thirty years after a terrifying police interview in a small Birmingham station, a weary man begins to suspect that what happened in that locked room with ten officers wasn’t just intimidation—it was a secret operation that never officially existed. Now, as he battles a web of estate fraud, cyberattacks, and old faces resurfacing in the Channel Islands courts, he starts to realize that his past interrogation may have marked him for life.

Plot Summary

Act I – The Interview
In 1994, Simon Harlow is dragged into Rose Road Police Station in Birmingham. Ten officers sit in a circle around him, the air thick with smoke and threat. He’s accused of “associating with known offenders,” though he’s done nothing wrong. They question him for hours. No lawyer. No rights read. No escape. Years later, he still dreams of that room—the smell, the faces, the voices—and wakes gasping. The event never left an official trace.

Act II – Ghosts in the System
Decades later, Simon is a quiet web designer running small business sites from a flat in St. Helier, Jersey. His mother has died, leaving behind an estate tangled in shell companies and private banks. When his website gets hacked—just the hit counter, just the numbers—he laughs it off. Until it happens again. And again. Then the police show up, seizing books from his shelves “for review.”

When he confides in BH414, an online lawyer who seems oddly invested in his case, Simon starts piecing together something chilling: the people who hacked him are connected to the same institutions managing his mother’s estate—and some of them once wore badges.

Act III – The Estate
Viberts, a prestigious Jersey law firm, sends a letter with a ticking clock: seven days to approve an executrix, his sister, who works with Rawlinson & Hunter—a trust company that also happens to own a London flat under a shell entity. Simon suspects money laundering disguised as inheritance management. But if he refuses, he could lose everything. If he signs, he might be complicit in something darker.

As he debates his options, he encounters Bailiff Le Cocq, the island’s most powerful judge, on the street. The Bailiff refuses to speak. The silence is deafening.

Act IV – Court of Shadows
Simon goes to the Assize Court to observe a trial. Five ushers chat near the cells, their words sounding like code. He asks for a Hebrew translator, partly to test them, partly to see who reacts. They deny him. He realizes: they already know exactly what he understands.

Soon after, he’s followed home. His email fills with strange “confirmation” messages from accounts that don’t exist. He turns to a McKenzie friend—a quiet, eccentric researcher who believes Simon’s entire life may have been an off-the-books surveillance experiment from the start.

Act V – The Ten Return
The deeper Simon digs, the more the threads connect: the 1990s interview, the hacked counters, the banks, even the lawyers. It all leads back to Operation Ten, a secret internal unit formed in the 1990s to profile dissidents using psychological pressure and data manipulation—then buried by the police themselves.

Simon finally discovers the truth: his interrogation wasn’t about him at all. It was a pilot program testing how long an innocent man could be held and questioned before breaking. His digital life, his mother’s estate, even the hack—all were methods of control, still echoing from that day in Rose Road Station.

The final scene mirrors the first: Simon sits in another small room, now in the Royal Court, as ten jurats stare down at him. Only this time, he knows exactly who they are—and what they’ve done.

Themes

Abuse of power under the guise of law

Psychological trauma and memory distortion

The blurred lines between legality and morality

Legacy, inheritance, and institutional secrecy

Truth as the ultimate act of rebellion

Tone & Style

Taut, slow-burn paranoia in the early chapters, gradually giving way to fast-paced legal intrigue.

Told in first person, allowing readers to question whether Simon’s perception of reality is breaking.