Backstory Page 10

  Broaching a plot like this to men who’ve been at the sharp end sounds, on the face of it, a tricky call. Asking a survivor about his long-ago war is one thing. Asking him to speculate about the activities of a predatory psychopath is quite another. I needn’t have worried.

  We’ll call him Alex. He’d sailed south aboard Coventry. The moment I began to broach the thrust of the plot he nodded. Coughlin, he said, would be a Killick Cook. He’d be big, nasty, in-your-face…in other words a total control freak. He’d have access to limitless quantities of booze, especially rum, disguising his drinking habits by mixing the stuff with Coke. With drink inside him, said Alex, Coughlin would be a monster. Most people would give him a wide berth and no one would ever grass him up to the Joss for fear of the consequences.

  “Joss?”

  “The Master-at-Arms.”

  “Ah…” I made a note. The sheriff.

  By now Alex was at full throttle. In terms of on-board entertainment, he said, Coughlin’s favourite would be a game called Freckles. He didn’t go into details but – as the name suggests – this apparently involved a whole bunch of guys around a table splatting quantities of human excrement. One of them, inevitably the loser, would be Bunny Warren.

  Bunny himself, said Alex, would be a steward in the Two Delta mess. This would bring him physically within Coughlin’s reach. Given his age and seniority, Coughlin would probably be President of the Mess, a role that would feed his hunger for power over others. Including, of course, young Bunny.

  “What about runs ashore?”

  “With Coughlin, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Total nightmare. This guy’s a real shag-nasty. He has a problem working out where piss-ups end and torture begins. He’s a bully. He drinks too much. He wants to hurt people, especially people who aren’t about to answer back. That’s where Bunny comes in. Coughlin will take a whole bunch of skates to some scabby bar. He’ll have a whip round and pay the girl round the back to get Bunny’s kit off. He wants the kid humiliated in front of everyone. He thinks it’s funny. He’s giving the kid the opportunity for a free shag. If he can’t get it up, so much the better. That’s the kind of animal Coughlin is.”

  “This kind of stuff happens?”

  “I never said that.”

  “You’re making it up?”

  “I never said that, either.”

  This, as you might imagine, was gold dust to the working novelist, proof that my plotting was far from fanciful. Now I wanted to know more about the on-board sheriff. I still have my notes, the key quotations underlined in green Pentel.

  The Joss, said Alex, would be the kind of guy who commanded respect. His job was to keep good order amongst a bunch of testosterone-fuelled matelots. He’d be even-tempered. He’d have an acute sense of anticipation, sensing trouble without being shown it, and he’d be more than happy to live with the consequences – however physical – of his own decisions. Acquiring shipboard enemies would be a fact of his professional life, something that went with the turf. In fact a Joss without enemies, said Alex, wasn’t worth the rank.

  I made a note. A name popped into my head. Dave. Dave Beattie.

  “What about the night Warren disappears? Is Dave Beattie the guy who co-ordinates the search?”

  “Yeah. Probably. You’d better get advice on that one. Talk to the Naval Provost’s Office.”

  Next day I made another call. The Naval Provost, basically the RN’s police force, operated from premises on Whale Island, a naval establishment nestling in the muddy armpit beside the Commercial Ferry Port. The go-to guy was a Lieutenant-Commander called Tony West. He invited me along.

  Once again I explained the plot. Tony, known as “Banjo”, loved it. By this time I was beginning to suspect that a wild imagination is somehow wired into every serving seaman whether an officer or otherwise. Charles Wylie had it. Alex had it. And now Banjo.

  The first clue to Warren’s disappearance, he said, would have been an empty bunk. A search of the heads (aka lavatories) would have drawn a blank. The Officer of the Watch would then order a search of the entire ship, known as Operation Thimblehunt. Once again, no joy. At this point, said Banjo, the supposition has to be that the lad’s gone overboard. The Captain would put the ship into a specialised search pattern, depending on tide and wind. Given the time of year – winter – and the fact that no life jackets were missing, Warren was probably already a gonner. After six hours or so, the search would be called-off, leaving the Joss to auction his possessions and gather as much evidence as possible from Warren’s shipmates.

  Was the lad depressed? Was he missing his mum? His girlfriend? Had he just had a Dear John? Were there any half-finished blueys (letters home) around? Something that might shed light on what he’d done? Was he frightened by the prospect of going to war? Had he picked up too many dits (stories) from the officers in the Wardroom? Was he scared shitless about getting killed by an Argie Exocet? The heat-seeking missile that always made a beeline for the galley and the mess?

  These were all valid questions but if the Joss was that sharp, that alert to every nuance of shipboard life, why wouldn’t he be thinking hard about Coughlin?

  “Good question,” Banjo was looking hard at my notebook. “This ship’s going to war, right?”

  “Right.”

  “A week or so later, it’s sunk…yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Loads of blokes dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Burned? Maimed.? Wounded?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And now you’re asking about an 18 year old who doesn’t even make it down there?” He shrugged. “End of.”

  In the days that followed, I slowly filled up the gaps in my research. Phone calls to Type 21 veterans up and down the country identified the Air Filtration Unit and the Air Treatment Unit as two more possible locations for shipboard trysts. Both were unlocked. Ditto the tiller flat which was bloody noisy but totally accessible. Charles Wylie, bless him, explained the rescue search patterns ordered by the Captain and the mysteries of something called the Williamson Turn. I paid a visit to the Naval Home Club down by the Victory Gate and talked through the kind of annual get-together the survivors of Accolade’s sinking would attend. This event was to play an important part in the developing narrative and I needed menus, seating plans, plus a map showing the locations of all internal and external CCTV cameras.

  By now, the Joss had become the key to the entire plot. Alex had planted the seeds from which Dave Beattie had grown, and what I loved about this man was the way he’d fit so comfortably with Joe Faraday. This was another loner who – once out of the Navy – would find somewhere private and solitary to spend the rest of his working life.

  Lin and I had good friends, Alastair and Alison, who had a cottage deep in Devon’s Tamar Valley. We’d been down there with them on a couple of occasions and the more I thought about my Joss, the more I knew that Ezentide Cottage offered him the perfect location. The Tamar Valley lies within striking distance of Plymouth. Dave would have discovered it in his service days. The cottage itself overlooked the muddy swirl of the river. It was surrounded by trees. Plus there were birds everywhere – exactly the kind of busy silence that Faraday would adore.

  The cottage came as a surprise, appearing suddenly as the path veered to the left: slate roof, newly whitewashed elevations, tiny recessed windows. The garden in front of the cottage stretched down to the water’s edge, a patchwork of carefully-cropped lawn, shrub-filled borders and – beyond a timber summerhouse – a sizeable veggie patch.

  Faraday shook his head, overwhelmed by the isolation, the peace, that this man had created for himself. The cottage was overhung on three sides by trees, yet facing south the front of the property was flooded with sunshine. Beyond the slow, green drift of the river, more trees. Could life get better than this?

  It could.


  On the far side of the cottage, Faraday found half a dozen chickens in a coop, counted four fresh eggs tucked carefully into a bucket lined with straw, caught the scent of freshly-sawn timber from a pile of newly-stacked logs beside the back door, knelt to tickle the chin of a pink-nosed tabby, sprawled in the sunshine. In another life, unshackled from the Pompey underworld, Faraday would kill for a place like this.

  After three books of unremitting urban gloom I had the feeling that readers might appreciate an interlude like this but I drove down there myself for one last look before making the final decision. If Dave Beattie was to have made his home here, I also needed to find something plausible for the guy to do for a living. By now Alastair had sold the cottage. The approach road grew steadily more narrow until there was barely room for a single vehicle. At the gate to the property I found a battered old Land-Rover. Hand-stencilled on the door was a clue to the new owner. Tony Weedon, it read. Tree-Surgeon. Tree-Surgeon? Perfect.

  Back in Pompey, I had one more research box to tick. HMS Phoenix houses the RN’s fire-fighting school. I phoned them up and asked if I could come over. I explained about the book. The voice at the other end asked me what, specifically, I was after and I said that I needed to understand exactly what it felt like to be bombed.

  “No problem,” the voice said. “Tomorrow? Nine o’clock?”

  The following day, I found myself watching a bunch of new recruits on a damage limitation exercise. Alarms were wailing and the emergency lighting threw surreal shadows over the rising water while the guys in the fire-fighting suits did their best to wedge timber into a gaping hole. That morning I learned about ruptures in the fire main and the kind of lateral whip that ripples through a ship after a direct hit from a bomb. I made notes about blast routes and the killer potential of the thickly toxic smoke that comes from burning cable runs. Above all, from guys who themselves had survived something similar, I managed to script the book’s opening pages.

  SAN CARLOS WATER, 21 MAY, 1982

  All the training, all the waiting, all the unvoiced speculation: what it might feel like, how you might cope. And now, all too suddenly, this.

  The first bomb fell aft. His face an inch from the mess deck plates, he could feel the ship lift, shudder, and then settle again. Helo deck, he thought. He’d been out there only hours ago, marshalling Lynx ops in the bright, cold winter sunshine. Now, in the neo-lit harshness of the Delta Two mess, he raised his head a little, adjusting his anti-flash hood, trying to picture the scene above.

  “Second aircraft. Red two zero.” The PWO’s voice on the main broadcast Tannoy.

  The Argie Skyhawks normally came in pairs. Concentrating on a single ship was favourite because it narrowed the odds on a sinking. Nice one.

  “Brace! Brace! Brace!”

  The ship heeled savagely as the Captain tried to throw the Argie pilot’s aim. Then came the fairground boom-boom-boom of the 20mm Oerliken and a sudden whoosh as a Seacat engaged. Even with target lock at three miles, Seacats were famously crap. Loosing one at six hundred metres, you’d give its little electronic brain a seizure. Even the PWO admitted it.

  The sudden roar of the Skyhawk overhead ground his face into the deck. He shut his eyes and began to count but he hadn’t got past one before the mess erupted around him. Thrown upwards by the blast, he had a moment of absolute clarity before the world closed in around him. Small things. The long-overdue bluey he’d started this morning, finished except for a couple of lines at the end. The bet he’d taken a couple of days back with the XO, the date they’d all be home again. And the boy Warren, adrift in the South Atlantic, so much gash.

  Smoke everywhere. And the roar of water blasting out of a ruptured main. Voices yelling and the clang of metal on metal as men took a Samson Bar to the heavy secured doors. All that plus a licking flame from the yawning gap below.

  For a second or two, pure instinct, he checked himself over. His ears were still ringing from the explosion and when his hand came down from his face it was sticky with blood but he could get up, no problem, and his mind was clear enough to latch itself onto the emergency drills.

  According to the book, he was to return to the flight deck to assess the situation. His instincts, though, told him that the ship was finished. Already, she’d taken a heavy list. Port? Starboard? He couldn’t work it out but the smoke was getting thicker by the second and judging by the thunder below the fire was spreading towards the Seacat magazine. A situation like this, any sailor with half a brain would be binning the Damage Control Manual and thinking about an orderly evacuation.

  On his hands and knees, hunting for clean air, he began to move. Already the deck plates were uncomfortably hot and the upward blast of the fire below drove him to the edges of what remained of the Two Delta mess. Seconds earlier, he dimly remembered three other guys with him in this cramped little space. Where were they now?

  He found one of them sprawled beside a yawning locker. Surrounded by packets of crisps, bits and pieces of civvy kit, plus assorted copies of “Mayfair”, the man was rigid with shock but still alive. He slapped his face hard, hauled him into a half-crouch, and pushed him towards the jagged hole where the door had once been. A final shove took the man through.

  “Out!” he shouted. “Get out!”

  Back inside the mess, the smoke coiled into his lungs. It had a foul, greasy, chemical taste. He could feel his throat burning, his airways beginning to tighten. This is how you die, he thought. This is what the Fire School instructors at Matapan Road meant by suffocation.

  He found the next body beside the fridge. Jones. Definitely. He tried for a pulse, spared a breath or two for mouth-to-mouth, all he could muster, then gave up. Taff was very dead.

  Two down. One to go.

  There was a movement in the half-darkness. Someone staggering uncertainly to his feet, shocked but still mobile. He moved towards the man, meaning to help him out, then stopped. Away to his left, beyond a gaping hole in the forward bulkhead, he could just make out the shape of another body.

  He ducked low again, sucking in the last of the good air, picking his way through the debris. The casualty was face up. His anti-flash gloves were charred where he’d tried to protect himself, and one of his legs was bent outwards at a strange angle, but his eyes were open and he blinked in response to an upraised thumb. Yes, I’m still alive. And yes, for Christ’s sake get me out of here.

  The body weighed a ton. Every time he tried to heave the deadweight towards the mess, towards the passageway and the ladder beyond, the man screamed in agony. Getting him through the tangle of debris would be a joke unless he could find another pair of hands.

  The guy he’d glimpsed earlier was still in the mess. He could see his bulk, pressed back against the surviving partition. He had his hands out, trying desperately to follow the billowing smoke, up towards the chill sweetness of the open air.

  “Hey you!” he managed. “Come here! Give us a hand!”

  The man turned and stared at him. From the main broadcast, faint along the passageway, came a shouted order, repeated twice. The Captain’s voice. Abandon ship.

  The figure beside the partition was on the move again, faster this time, lunging towards the passageway. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he spun round. The eyes were wide, letter-boxed in the anti-flash hood, staring at this sudden apparition.

  “There’s a guy back there. Give us a hand.” It wasn’t a polite request. It was an order.

  The man stared at him for a moment, then shaped to take a swing.

  “You’re fucking joking,” he snarled. “Piss off, will you?”

  I now realise that this single scene contained all the clues that any reader would need to successfully weather the next 338 pages. It contains the two key characters, and the violence unleashed by the Argie bomb puts them both to the test. The plot that follows does something similar but at far gr
eater length, and by the time I’d got to the final page I sensed that I might have touched an important nerve in the collective memory that badges a city like Pompey. This was a community that hugged its past. A succession of foreign wars had culled generation after generation of young men and although Bunny Warren’s story was only twenty years old, there was something ageless in the emptiness he left behind.

  I sent the completed first draft to Simon, my editor. We both knew that Angels Passing had set the series bar significantly higher. The reviews for the so-called break-out book had been fabulous. Susanna Yagar, at the Sunday Telegraph, had become a big fan, and Margaret Cannon, from the Toronto Globe and Mail, talked of “a brilliantly layered and nuanced story”. But the best review of all came from crime-czar Maxim Jakubowski at the Guardian. This is what he wrote.

  “An ambitious police procedural epic set in the author’s home town of Portsmouth, this could well be the book that drags Graham Hurley into the rarified atmosphere of crime bestsellerdom in the wake of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. The often sordid life of a large British city is caught with pinpoint accuracy, together with a host of realistic characters on both sides of the law. The picture of a society in freefall, littered with wrecked families, drugs and corruption feels painfully true to life and the conflicts facing the investigating policemen betray true emotion and pathos. Hurley was previously a TV documentary maker and his touch stays assured and analytical throughout. A splendid achievement.”

  On a reading like this, Angels Passing was going to be a very hard act to follow but Simon, thank God, had no reservations about Book Four. His line notes were minimal. Overall, he loved the sharpness of the focus and the tightness of the plot. The only challenge we hadn’t fully met was the title. I quite fancied Adrift. He wasn’t convinced. We traded ideas for a day or so, then came the moment when he was browsing a book called Jackspeak, a guide to naval slang. He’d found a word that described the hinged metal flap that can be lowered and clamped over a scuttle in order to darken ship. Darkening ship, burying evidence, drawing a discreet veil over a long-ago death was exactly what the book was about. So what was the word?