Backstory Page 15

  “One thing I don’t understand.” Faraday frowned. “How come she wants to go back to this place? To this village? After all she’s been through?”

  “She doesn’t. Not to her home village. We’ve got somewhere else in mind. The Jablanica Valley. Village called Celebici. Nice little smallholding near the lake, bit of ground, couple of goats, chickens, spare room for German tourists, maybe a spot of freelance mine clearance if things get tight. Yeah…” he nodded. “…I can cope with that.”

  Pelly lapsed into silence. Faraday was clearer now about what drove Pelly, about those months in the mountains that had changed his life. Any man who’d been through an experience like that would carry the images in his head forever. But what about Lajla? Gang-raped week after week? A woman who’d never know who’d fathered her child? How would you ever lay so many ghosts?

  He put the question to Pelly. It drew an immediate shake of the head.

  “She won’t talk about it.”

  “Not to anyone?”

  “No. Not to me. Not to you. Not to fucking anyone.” He touched his head, then his heart. “It’s locked away. You’d be a brave man to even try and get at stuff like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Pelly threw back his head and laughed. “Because she’d fucking kill you.”

  I quote this passage partly in disbelief that bits of my hammered brain were still fully functional, but mostly because it sheds light on the way all that reading in the early research stages of Blood and Honey finally shaped a key scene that – in essence – explains where the book came from. The monologues I wrote were a key step in that process, a way of turning reportage into character, and in books to come I was to use this technique again and again.

  Eight

  It was at this point, 2004, that we decided to leave Pompey. Both our dads had passed away some time ago, and Lin’s mum had also died. My own mother was very frail and the time had come to put her into a nursing home. Since the late Eighties, we’d had a third floor flat overlooking the coast in a lovely old Regency house in Exmouth and when the chance came to buy the flat above, thus turning the top half of the property into a proper home, we knew we had to go for it. To pay for what needed to be done we needed to sell our Southsea house so we put it on the market, packed our bags, and headed west.

  Turning our backs on Pompey was a real moment for both of us. Lin had been born in Southsea and grew up amongst the bomb sites and buddleia of the post-war city. For my part, I’d settled very happily in the late Seventies, and owed the Old Bruiser a huge professional debt. A couple of stand-alone thrillers had been rooted in Portsmouth, before the current Faraday series was even a gleam in the eye. I’d been lucky enough to write and co-produce the city’s Millenium pageant (a cathedral-based entertainment called Willoughby and Son), plus a number of dramatic monologues to mark important episodes in the city’s history. For the last six years I’d also been writing my regular Monday column for the Pompey News. This is how I said goodbye.

  Leaving Portsmouth is the oddest experience. My wife is a Pompey gal. I’ve lived in the city for nearly thirty years and have the scars on my liver to prove it. Between us we’ve watched change after change wash over this tiny, crowded island. Some of these changes, like the physical look of the place, have been an immeasurable improvement. Others, too numerous to list, less so.

  When I first came to Portsmouth I was overwhelmed by the gruffness of its charm. Here was a working city that never bothered to doff its cap to either reputation or status. You sank or swam by how you rode life’s punches. In this respect, and in many others, playing inside right for Armada in the Pompey Dockyard League – and surviving to tell the tale – was an invaluable lesson.

  Since then, I’ve met some of the nicest and most genuine people in the world and made friendships I know will see me out. The currency of mateship in this city is measured in wry half-conversations, in pub banter, in the tacit acknowledgement that the world is well and truly barmy and that life is all the better for the fact that Pompey has always turned its back on the rest of the UK.

  What will I miss? The list is endless. It includes Southsea neighbours, the view from Hot Walls, the swim out to the deep-water buoy off Clarence Pier, and the long conversations afterwards with an amazing mix of people in the shadow of Spur Redoubt. John Molyneux and his cadre of colleagues from Respect have been an inspiration, as has the sadly-missed Sarah Quail.

  The Central Library, for which Sarah has been responsible, remains a shining light in the gathering cultural darkness and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the small army of assorted locals who have helped me put Pompey on the page, either in this newspaper or in the on-going series of Joe Faraday crime thrillers.

  But the other Pompey that will always stay with me is that unique fusion of the familiar and the truly historical with which this city is so richly blessed. The cold April morning when the Falklands Task Force put to sea. The summer afternoon, months later, when HMS Glamorgan ghosted back through the habour narrows, her starboard quarter torn open by an enemy Exocet. Two centuries earlier, similar crowds would have been cheering HMS Victory on her return from the Battle of Trafalgar.

  This, in short, is a city in which history shapes us all. Remember the chant at the Fratton End? Pompey ‘Till I Die…

  We settled cheerfully in Exmouth, surrounded by builders. It rained a great deal which was a problem because we didn’t have a roof but a collective effort finally secured the huge blue tarpaulin that sheltered us from the elements. Our Southsea house took a while to sell, which stretched our finances to the limit, but a buyer paid up just days before we had to settle the bill for the Exmouth refurb. My mum was content in a nursing home round the corner and my son, Tom, was living with his partner Kate in the flat below us. The cat was slowly coming to terms with life on the third floor and we organised a rota to keep mum well supplied with red Martini. The only box left unticked belonged to Farrars. Where next for Pompey’s finest?

  This would be Book Seven and the yeast for the fictional mix appeared in the residue of a dream. I’d woken early. For once it wasn’t raining. I lay in bed, listening to the birds, trying to tease out the knot of images that still lay deep in my brain. I’d been having some kind of nightmare. It featured a naked body chained to a railway track. The body was in a tunnel. It belonged to a man. It wasn’t me but he had to do something sharpish because – in the dream - I could hear the distant rumble of a train.

  This setting, as it happened, had already featured in a previous book, Deadlight, in which a washed-up drunk – key to the developing plot – walks into the darkness of the tunnel and dies beneath the wheels of a London-bound express. The tunnel takes the Pompey main line under the South Downs and emerges beside the village of Buriton. I knew it well because I’d paid it a quiet visit to make sure I got the details right. Nothing is scarier than ducking into the shelter of one of those trackside refuges as the Waterloo Flyer thunders past.

  I suspected a naked body chained to a railway line would make for a powerful opening scene but before I got down to more research I had to work out why he was there, and what would happen next. I pondered this challenge for a day or two, knowing deep down that the answer lay with the guy I’d name-checked in my farewell column.

  John Molyneux was a huge, burly academic from the College of Art and Design with no dress sense and a full beard. He had a couple of academic books to his name, and knew a great deal about Rembrandt, but his other passion was politics. John was a lifelong leftie. He’d pitched his tent amongst fellow travellers from Respect, The Socialist Workers Party and the ever more vocal Stop-the-War Movement, and emerged as their intellectual leader.

  John himself was a gifted speaker. He had a fine voice and knew how to think on his feet. He was prepared to take on difficult audiences in pretty much any context – indoors or out – and was undaunted in the face of widespread apathy. On Saturd
ays, you’d see him outside Tescos in Southsea’s Albert Road, a big man in a scruffy leather jacket thrusting agitprop at passing shoppers. I admired his resilience and his sheer dedication. This wasn’t a guy who wrote the odd letter to the paper and called it a day. He really got stuck in.

  By now, according to George Bush, the Iraq War was over. A year earlier, stung once again by something I’d picked up from the media, I’d penned a column about the aftermath of the invasion.

  So short is our collective memory span these days that it came as a bit of a shock to catch news coverage of last week’s Athens EU summit and see enraged Greeks battling with riot police to protest against the coalition warmongers in Iraq.

  But the war is over, surely? We and the Americans won, Saddam is history, and millions of Iraqis are tasting the sweet fruits of democracy. Bush’s approval ratings are topping 120 per cent and our own sainted leader – after Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa – is in line for the Congressional Gold Medal.

  Al Qaeda? Gone to ground. North Korea? Frightened witless. The Middle East? Sorted.

  So why all the fuss in Athens? Don’t these people realise the world moves on?

  The truth, of course, is that nothing is sorted – and deep down we all know it. Hence, perhaps, the extraordinary media attention devoted to 12 year old Ali Abbas, who lost both arms plus ten members of his family when a US Air Force “smart” missile got itself in a tizzie and levelled his house.

  The pictures I’ve seen of Ali show a bewildered boy who can’t quite work out what’s happened to the rest of his life. With the exception of his missing limbs and charred torso he looks alarmingly like my nephew Harry. Harry lives in North London and should be relatively safe from American missiles but the way the Project for the New American Century is going, you can never be really sure. Harry, in some future spasm of ultra violence, might well find himself paying the going rate for a stiff dose of democracy.

  Ali Abbas has become the conscience of the nation and people are eager to do whatever they can for him but there isn’t a big enough cheque in the world to restore that child to the life to which he had every entitlement. Ask Ali, or the thousands of other Iraqis maimed by Allied bombing, whether Bush-style liberation was a fair trade for crippling injury and you might – at last – have some notion of the price of freedom inflicted by our leaders.

  All this is sobering stuff but behind Ali Abbas lurks another truth, equally uncomfortable. The sad tally of events since Christmas offers incontrovertible proof that we, like poor limbless Ali, are effectively helpless when it comes to the big decisions.

  We can protest all day, we can march all week, we can write countless letters, we can petition hundreds of MPs, and absolutely nothing happens.

  Blair explains – and may well even believe – that he took us to war in the name of democracy. Shame, then, that he didn’t listen when millions of us turned up on his doorstep and voted with our feet.

  Shortly after this piece was published, John acquired a list of the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by coalition forces and contacted friends across the city. His plan was to hold a marathon reading of the names in Pompey’s Guildhall Square. Each of us were to spend ten minutes at the microphone. Just the names. Nothing else.

  My turn came at dusk. It was a freezing night yet little knots of people had gathered as a mark of respect, or perhaps protest. A bunch of drunken kids were going their best to disrupt proceedings but the grown-ups ignored them. An occasion like this, with the war so recently and so decisively won, was by no means popular across the city as a whole. It was to take another year of collateral damage, of savage sectarian warfare, and of the slow disintegration of Iraq before the penny dropped. The two million of us who had bothered to march in London had been right. The war had turned a functioning sophisticated society, with which we were only happy to trade, into a basket case. Nice one, guys. Iran, anybody?

  Viewed from my new perch in the West Country, this kind of political turf – occupied by committed lefties – offered all kinds of prospects. I’d met a number of these people and in a society gorging itself on consumer choice and crap TV they represented something very different. They read a lot. They understood the subtler hypocrisies of the system we called democracy. And they were prepared to take a stand.

  And so I invented a 29 year old political activist called Mark Duley, a guy who divides his time between writing novels, falling in love, and changing the world. In none of these three respects has he met with any great success but that’s not the point. Duley isn’t a man to ever stop trying.

  Faraday meets him early on in the book that will become One Under. At this point, he has a shrewd suspicion that Duley, what’s left of him, is the guy in the tunnel.

  Faraday reached for his keyboard and typed in his access code. Moments later, he was into the site, transcribing Duley’s name and date of birth. Up came the details. Over the past ten years, Duley had collected fines, plus a suspended prison sentence, for a number of offences, mainly riot, affray and criminal damage. Faraday sped through the list, recognising a pattern in the arrest locations. Trafalgar Square. Edinburgh. Sellafield. Aldermaston. Newhaven Docks. In certain political circles, this lot would read like a war record. Young Duley, it seemed, was a serial activist, never far from the action when a big demo turned violent and the ninja squads waded in.

  He sat back a moment, gazing at the screen. Faraday had never been the slightest bit interested in politics, especially the wilder extremes, happy to leave Special Branch to keep tabs on the hairies and assorted no-hopers that took their protests onto the streets. But even he knew enough about the lunatic fringe to have trouble coaxing a pattern from Duley’s half dozen court appearances. Here was a guy who plainly had strong feelings about more or less everything: Globalisation, the Iraq War, Animal Rights, Nuclear Waste, Asylum Seekers, Anti-Personnel Mines, and the Trident Missile Programme. Was there any cause this man hadn’t supported?

  There was a custody photograph attached to the file. Duley was 5’11”, male, white, weighed 64 kilos, had brown eyes, blond hair cropped short, and – at the time of his last arrest – no identifying birthmarks or tattoos. The face in the photo seemed to have treated the arrest process as a kind of audition. The head was tilted back slightly, the eyes half-closed, the stubbled chin thrust out. It was a shot, thought Faraday, that any actor would have been proud of, and something told him that Duley might even have asked the Custody Sergeant for copies. This guy had no fear of the law. On the contrary, he probably papered his bedroom with photocopies of his various indictments.

  Duley was to die in the opening pages of One Under but already I sensed that even posthumously he had the kind of energy that would power the book forward. Some women of my acquaintance find this kind of raw political commitment a real turn-on and it wasn’t long before I’d come up with Jenny Mitchell, a young, attractive mother of two. Jenny will live in Old Portsmouth. She’ll be partnered to a social entrepreneur, one of the new super-cool breed of businessmen currently cutting a swath through Pompey café-bars. She’ll meet Duley at a Respect get-together. And he’ll help her recognise the emptiness of a life that has ceased to nourish her. I’d yet to work out what would lie beyond that first meeting but before I got down to writing in earnest I needed to find out a great deal more about running people over in railway tunnels.

  In these circumstances, you lift the phone. My first call went to the British Transport Police HQ in London. I explained I was writing a book in a crime series and I needed the driver’s eye view of an incident with a body on a railway line. The voice on the other end hadn’t got much time for authors. Why didn’t I talk to their regional branch in Southampton?

  Good idea. I phoned Southampton. It was a woman this time. She said she’d contact their office in Portsmouth and have them call me. I waited a couple of days before the phone rang. I already knew a couple of guys from BTP in Pompey but this was a voi
ce I didn’t recognise. I went through my little storyline again and asked him for an hour of his time. He was grumpy. If I wanted to talk the thing through then it had to be tomorrow. Half eight. Not a second later. At that time in the morning, Pompey is three and a half hours from where we live. A five am start? No problem.

  Next day I was at Pompey’s town station for half eight. The BTP office is accessed via a secured door on the left of the station premises. I rang the entry phone and introduced myself. A secretary came down to let me in. The guy I was due to meet, Mr Grumpy, was evidently upstairs waiting. And she warned me that he was in a very bad mood.

  I climbed the stairs behind her. I hadn’t had time for breakfast and I was starving hungry. The squad room lay at the end of a corridor. The secretary stepped aside to let me in. As I pushed the door open I became aware of a handful of blokes waiting inside. These were the guys I knew already. A table in the middle of the room was piled high with copies of my books, all readied for the authorial signature. They’d already been out for sticky buns and had the kettle on the go. All the grumpy stuff was a wind-up.

  We settled in for a chat. I briefly explained the set-up: I wanted to set the book in high summer. I wanted to know when the last of the previous day’s trains would have cleared the tunnel. I wanted to open the book with the first London-bound train to leave Pompey the following morning. I needed the reader to be in the cab, alongside the driver, and to share his view as the mouth of the tunnel approached. The body would be chained to the rails at the far end of the tunnel. By that time the driver’s eyes would have adjusted to the sudden darkness. The throw of the train’s headlights would pick up something bulky, something white, on the line ahead. How would he react? How long do these trains take to stop under emergency braking? What would he do once the train had come to a halt? How would he feel?