Backstory Page 12

  Within a week, I’d designed the outlines of Operation Tumbril. Faraday joins the investigation late, replacing D/I Nick Hayden, who’s been run over by a bunch of lairy Scouse drug dealers. A call to Tony West, aka Banjo, had won me a tour of RN premises on Whale Island, which turned out to be perfect for Tumbril. And thus Faraday finds himself leading a covert operation, involving a mere handful of specialist officers, about which no one else in the force has a clue.

  With the broad thrust of the story now established I needed to thicken the plot, inventing sub-plot after sub-plot to give the book texture and richness. You might think of this process as adding a kind of gravy, a mix of character and incident that will bring out the essence of the story, and the obvious place to start was at the consumer end of the drugs chain.

  All writers, in my experience, are squirrels. No memory, no event, no set of circumstances, no conversation ever goes to waste. They’re all stored on hopelessly overloaded shelves in your brain and may – one day – pop up in a book.

  In the early seventies, as I briefly mentioned earlier, I’d made a documentary about a bunch of young heroin addicts in the city. I and some friends had raised enough money to pay for the film stock but little else. Two days’ filming had given us some startling footage and the addicts themselves had been a revelation. The film was to have no commentary, no list of do’s and don’ts, just candid first-person accounts from the guys (and women) who’d got into serious trouble with smack.

  It worked a treat. The cut version, titled Better Dead?, included a post-mortem, graphically shot, and some fixing sequences which were truly horrible. With the budget nearly exhausted we had just enough money to hire a London venue for the press preview. Half way through the film a guy made a bolt for the exit door but fainted in the aisle. Ian Dillow, an ex-journalist who was part of our team, had the house lights turned on. This was a stroke of genius because next day’s national papers were brimming with news of the movie that had felled a hard-boiled journalist. This, said a leader in the Daily Mail, was footage no child should ever see. Within weeks, we were selling 16mm film copies (at £90 each) to schools nationwide. The orders multiplied and our little charity – Project Icarus – went on to make a dozen more movies.

  Somehow, I was determined to weave elements of this story into the ever-growing tapestry that would become Book Five. The drug involved, heroin, was very different to cocaine but if I was nimble I might be able to turn this contrast to the book’s advantage. Another important theme I had to address was Faraday’s love life and instinctively I sensed the possibility of somehow using one element – the making of a drugs movie – into sharpening the developing drama around Faraday’s choice of partners.

  From the moment I’d started thinking in earnest about Joe Faraday, I’d figured that his love life would become central to the series. This, remember, is a guy who’s devoted most of his spare time to bringing up his deaf-mute son. By the opening of Turnstone, J-J has decamped to France leaving Faraday to at last invest a little time in his private life. After the long-ago death of his wife, Janna, he’s had very little to do with women. As a direct result, the choices he now makes are far from wise.

  Ruth Potterne, in Turnstone, is mid forties, slender-legged, large-breasted, and has beautiful hands. She favours Arab and Indian silver jewelry and long cotton dresses, and runs her late husband’s art gallery in Southsea’s Marmion Road. Self-aware and slightly opaque, she slips easily into Faraday’s bed but leaves him profoundly perplexed.

  Once, in an unguarded moment, Faraday had described Ruth as every detective’s wet dream. Far from taking offence, she’d asked him to explain and as he fumbled his way towards some kind of rationale he’d realised exactly what it was that fuelled this strange compulsion of his to keep chasing her. Everyone, he said, was a series of dots. Connect the dots in the right order and the person was revealed. It happened time and again in his professional life - with colleagues, with witnesses, with suspects. It had happened, over the course of a single rain-lashed afternoon in Seattle, with Janna. It had happened, over twenty long years, with his son, J-J. But never with Ruth. She was every detective’s wet dream because her case was so obviously worth cracking. Yet the harder he tried, the more aware he became of his own inadequacies. She was, in her own phrase, beyond reach.

  After Ruth came Marta. Faraday met her at the weekly French conversation classes he attended. Marta had a high-powered job at IBM. She drove a new Alfa-Romeo. She was stylish and lightly flirtatious. She taught him how to laugh, how to relax, and she bedded him with immense panache. Faraday, besotted, neglected to find out about her personal circumstances. Later, much to Paul Winter’s amusement, he discovered that she was married.

  Winter had long had Faraday down as a loser when it came to women. Twenty years bringing up a deaf son had obviously cramped his social style and office gossip suggested that a brief affair with the widow of a local art dealer had quickly hit the buffers, but with the boy at last off his hands, Faraday seemed to be making up for lost time.

  In one sense, Winter wished him nothing but good luck. In his own experience, affairs with married women offered the perfect fusion of theft plus brilliant sex. Once you’d blagged it off a women who was dying for the odd variation or two, you knew there was nothing better. But the thought of Faraday doing it with someone else’s wife sat oddly with everything else he knew about the man. When it came to the job, Faraday could be a nightmare. Winter had never met anyone else who was so straight.

  The relationship with Marta finally came to nothing but by the time I was thinking hard about Book Five, another woman had found herself a perch in Faraday’s heart. This was Eadie Sykes, a leggy Australian divorcee with a background in video production. Fit, game, blunt and totally fearless, she stepped into Faraday’s life in Deadlight after hiring J-J to shoot black and white stills on a Dunkirk anniversary TV docco. J-J, blessed with his mother’s eye for a picture, did exceptionally well but for Faraday the rapport he struck up with his new employer was even more important.

  Recently, watching Eadie with J-J, Faraday had concluded that she’d become the mother his son had never had. She’d built a real kinship with the boy. She’d become his mentor, his pathfinder, his guide. She was teaching him all she knew. She stuck by him in difficult situations. And all of that, in Faraday’s view, probably added up to motherhood. Janna had died when J-J was barely a couple of months old. Only now, 23 years later, had he discovered a woman he could rely on.

  As a late spring tumbled into summer, the possibilities of the plot for what was to become Cut to Black were deepening by the day. What if Bazza, with typical chutzpah, took his first step onto the public stage by funding a video version of Better Dead? Something to make the kids at last sit up and take notice? What if that money went to one of Pompey’s leading video makers, the force of nature that is Eadie Sykes? What if the making of this video, co-organised by J-J, were to put Faraday’s son in the lens of a drugs squad surveillance team? And what if the video’s key junkie, a pale-faced rich kid called Daniel Kelly, were to die of an overdose after Eadie’s camera departs?

  Each of these questions triggered a number of intriguing possibilities but what brought the plot to life was the fact that J-J brings his dad and Eadie together in circumstances that can’t fail to stretch Faraday to the limit. Already handcuffed to Operation Tumbril, about which he’s sworn to silence, he will find himself signing on behalf of his son in a CID interview suite while attending detectives – whom he knows – try and nail J-J on a charge of conspiracy to manslaughter. Rich pickings, indeed.

  At this stage in the writing cycle comes the gathering-up of research threads. A uniformed sergeant, Dave Hunter, talked me through the custody centre booking-in procedure that would greet J-J after his arrest. Tim Robinson, at the QA hospital’s Department of Critical Care, explained the twelve painful weeks that lay in wait for D/I Nick Hayder after being run over by a bunch of S
couse drug dealers, while an undercover officer – one of John Ashworth’s mates - shared a secret or two about u/c deployments, vital to a proper understanding of the workings of Operation Tumbril.

  Help also arrived from other corners of the city. David Horsley, the Pompey Coroner, took me through the Inquest that would follow the death of Daniel Kelly, while Michelle Jackolow, the owner of Spit Bank Fort, was only too happy to have Lin and I pay a visit. All these separate conversations generated more possibilities to strengthen what already felt like a promising narrative but as the time approached to launch myself into the first draft, my eye fell once again on Bazza Mackenzie.

  I’d now spent an entire summer with my idea of this guy. I’d caught his tone of voice. I could visualise the way he walked, I knew what he drank. I could make a pretty informed guess about the million and one things that drove him nuts. And the more he shaped himself in my imagination, the more I realised just how much he shared with Paul Winter. As the series developed this was to have profound consequences for both men but for now I could only anticipate the mid-book scene that I knew awaited them both. Winter is paying Mackenzie a visit at his Craneswater mansion.

  Winter unbuttoned his coat and sank into one of the two armchairs. The last time he’d seen Bazza Mackenzie was a couple of years back at a CID boxing do on South Parade pier. They’d shared a bottle of champagne while two young prospects from Leigh Park belted each other senseless

  “Lost a bit of weight, Baz. Working out?”

  “Stress, mate, and too many bloody salads. Marie started going to a health farm last year. Worst three grand I ever spent. You know why she wanted to move here?”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s at least a mile to the nearest decent chippy. She measured it in the Merc and then phoned me up and told me to put the deposit down. You think it would be the views, wouldn’t you? And the beach? And all these posh neighbours? Forget it. We live in a chip-free zone, mush. Welcome to paradise.”

  Winter laughed. Unlike many other detectives he’d always had a sneaking regard for Bazza Mackenzie. The man had a lightness of touch, a wit, an alertness that went some way to explaining his astonishing commercial success. You could see it in his face, in his eyes. He watched you, watched everything, ready with a quip or an offer or a put-down, restless, voracious, easily bored.

  In the wrong mood, as dozens could testify, this man could be genuinely terrifying. Nothing daunted him, least of all the prospect of serious injury, and Winter had seen photographic evidence of the damage he could do to men twice his size. But catch him in the right mood and you couldn’t have a nicer conversation. Bazza, as Winter had recently told Suttle, had a heart the size of a planet. Whatever he did, for whatever reason, he was in there one thousand per cent, total commitment.

  “What’s this, then? New chums?”

  Winter was inspecting a gaudy collection of colour snaps pinned to a cork wallboard, one image overlapping with the next, briefly-caught moments in the cheerful chaos of Mackenzie’s social life. One of the latest photos featured four middle-aged men posing on a putting green. They all looked pleased with themselves but it was Mackenzie who was holding the flag.

  “Austen Bridger, isn’t it?” Winter was peering at a bulky, scarlet-faced figure in slacks and a Pringle sweater.

  “That’s right. Plays off seven. Unbeatable on his day. Look at this though. Here…” Mackenzie dug around in a drawer then produced a scorecard and insisted Winter take a look. “Three birdies and an eagle. Cost him a dinner at Mon Plaisir, that did. Foie Gras, turbot, Chablis, the works. Marie gave me serious grief for weeks after.”

  He retrieved the scorecard and gazed at it while Winter’s eyes returned to the corkboard. Austen Bridger was a solicitor with a booming out-of-town practise in a new suite of offices in Port Solent. He specialised in property and development deals, high end stuff, and had the executive toys to prove it. Away from the golf course, he sailed a £350,000 racing yacht which regularly featured in the columns of the News. Another winner.

  Mackenzie was on his feet now, ash-grey track suit and newish-looking Reeboks. He began to poke through the photos on the cork board, hunting for a particular shot.

  “Here, mush.” He unpinned it. “Dubai at Christmas. Can’t do too much for you out there. Marie loved it. See that ramp thing in the background?”

  Winter was looking at a beach shot. Mackenzie and his wife were posed against the brilliant blue of the sea. Marie was an inch or two taller than her husband and for a middle aged woman, bikini-clad, she was in remarkable nick.

  “What ramp thing?”

  “There. Look.” Mackenzie tapped the photograph. “It’s for water skiing. Day one you get to stand up. Day two you go tearing round the bay. Day three they tell you about jumping and ramps and stuff and day four you get to cack yourself. You ever done it?”

  “Never.”

  “Brilliant. Some blokes do it backwards. Can you believe that? Can’t wait, mate. Still on the Scotch, are you?”

  Without waiting for an answer he went across to a filing cabinet and produced a bottle of Glenfiddich from the top drawer. A glass came from a table in the corner. It was up to Winter to pour.

  “And you?” Winter was looking at the single glass.

  “Not for me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Given up, mush.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yeah, just for now. I’m nosey, if you want the truth. I’ve spent so much time pissed, all this is a bit of a novelty.” He waved a hand around, a gesture that seemed to have no geographical limit, then he settled back behind the desk, a man with important news to impart. “You know something about this city? Something really weird? It’s about the way you look at it. As a nipper you just do your own thing, head down, get on with it. A little bit older, you follow your dick. A bit older still, you get married, all that stuff. But you know your place, right? Because everything’s bigger than you are. Then, if you’re lucky, you wake up one morning and there it is, there for the taking.”

  “What?”

  “The city. Pompey. And you know why? Because this place is tiny. Get to know maybe a coupla dozen guys, the right coupla dozen, and there’s nothing you can’t do. We’re not talking bent. We’re just talking deals, one bloke to another. And you know something else? It’s easy, easier than you can ever believe. Suss how it’s done, make the right friends, and you start wondering why every other bastard isn’t doing it too.”

  “So what does that make you?”

  “Lucky, mush.” He reached for a paperclip and began to unbend it as he elaborated on this new world of limitless opportunities. How one deal led to another. How business could breed some genuine friendships. How wrong he’d been about some of the middle-class blokes he’d always had down as wankers. Fact was, a lot of them were hard bastards, knew how to live with risk, knew how to party. Collars and ties, in the end, were nothing but camouflage.

  “Know what I mean?”

  Winter nodded, his eyes returning to the corkboard. Then he took a long swallow of Glenfiddich, the drift of this sudden outburst of Mackenzie’s slowly slipping into focus. The city, he was saying, had become his plaything, the train set of his dreams. He could alter the layout, mess with the signalling, change the points, play God.

  A smile warmed Winter’s face. Bazza Mackenzie, he thought. The Bent Controller.

  Seven

  Books come from strange places. It was March, 2004. Cut to Black had been edited and was ready for the printers. I was at home in Southsea, killing a wet afternoon with an overdue trawl through the weekend papers. An article about Sarajevo caught my eye, an account of the long years of siege when Serb gunners in the surrounding mountains did their best to bring the city to its knees. This was a world of plastic sheeting for blown-out windows, of old men taking axes to wooden pallets for winter fuel, of veggie patc
hes growing everywhere, of sagging electricity lines, of women risking their lives for half a loaf of stale bread, and of the incessant boom of heavy artillery as shell after shell chased them across the ruined city.

  Towards the end of the article, a woman recalled the morning her sister died. Hours after her remains had been tidied into a body bag and taken away, a truck full of UN troops arrived. “There were ten of them,” she said. “They wore those blue helmets, like always, and they got down off the truck and started measuring the shell hole. I went across to them. I was still in shock. Where were they when it mattered? Where were they when Jasna died?”

  That scene was all too easy to imagine. This was a woman who was tired of history, sick of the countless feuding tribes that so often turned the Balkans into a blood bath. She probably expected very little of life – somewhere safe to live, somewhere to bring up a family – yet here she was, watching a bunch of so-called peacekeepers turning her sister’s death into a hastily scribbled description of the scene of crime.

  The anger and incomprehension sparked by the article sent me to Pompey’s Central Library. Within a week I’d read a couple of books giving me the political background I needed. Then came a handful of personal accounts from Bosnians, from Western journalists, and from a serving UK army officer who’d done his best to make life just a little more tolerable for the tide of displaced refugees who’d tried to flee the fighting.

  The story, in essence, was simpler than I’d thought. During the Cold War, the US had monitored every square inch of the old Yugoslavia in the belief that World War Three might one day start there or thereabouts. Then, after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, nobody cared. Tito’s federation fell apart and the Serbs, always the self-proclaimed victims of history, set about killing as many Bosnians as they could lay hands on. The polite word for this was genocide.