Backstory Page 27

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,

  He watches from his mountain walls,

  And like a thunderbolt he falls.”

  Suttle looked up. J-J’s performance had got wildly out of sync and he was already sprawled at Suttle’s feet, the fallen thunderbolt, but it didn’t seem to matter. The soft applause came from Ulyana. The vicar picked up the cue, joining in. Then everyone else did the same, uncertainly at first, then louder and louder before Suttle helped J-J to his feet and silence returned.

  Back in his pew, Suttle closed his eyes. Lizzie reached up and kissed him. There were more prayers, a reading or two, and then an address from the Vicar about the welcome awaiting Faraday on the other side of the grave. Over the last week Suttle hadn’t managed to find anyone who had a clue whether Faraday was a believer or not. It was yet another side of the man that would remain a mystery. Yet just here, in this small moment of time, Suttle sensed that there’d be someone, something, some presence that would take care of him. Not because he’d been to Sunday School or collected for Oxfam or found some other way to stack his credits up. But because he’d been a good man. The vicar appeared to agree.

  “Like all of us, Joe Faraday is a child of God.” He said. “May the Lord be with him.”

  The service came to an end minutes later. The curtains closed on the coffin and Suttle found himself listening to another Schubert impromptu, sunnier this time. J-J was standing at the end of the pew, closest to the aisle. His task now was to lead the mourners out of the chapel but he couldn’t take his eyes off the curtains. Suttle was trying to get inside his head, trying to imagine what this must feel like. Did he view this as some grotesque conjuring trick? Would he expect to meet his dad again in the Garden of Rememberance? Or had he managed to make some kind of peace with Faraday’s going?

  Suttle didn’t know and seconds later it didn’t matter because Ulyana had taken J-J firmly by the elbow and was steering him down the aisle towards the door. Out in the sunshine, people knotted together, seemingly lost for words. Several of the woman gave each other a hug. Then a D/I, Cathy Lamb, appeared from nowhere and took Suttle to one side. As a D/S, years ago, Suttle knew she’d been a favourite of Faraday’s. He’d served under her himself as a rookie detective on division and understood why. She was solid, and warm-hearted, and had turned out to be a brilliant skipper.

  Looking at her now, Suttle realised she’d been crying. Her eyes were puffy and her mascara had streaked. He fumbled for a handkerchief and then mumbled something about not having brought one.

  She waved the apology away.

  “That poem was unbelievable”, she said. “Joe would have been really proud of you.”

  This sequence, oddly enough, sparked as many e-mails as the final pages of Borrowed Light. This may be fanciful on my part but there was almost an element of forgiveness in these messages. Readers found Joe’s funeral deeply moving, relieved that the man’s sheer humanity had won a quiet round of applause from people who’d mattered in his life. Those people, for the record, included me. And, yes, I still miss him.

  Without Faraday, I’d been a little nervous of pushing Happy Days forward but I needn’t have worried. Books without tension seldom work but there was more than enough unfinished business between Winter, Suttle and Bazza Mackenzie to bring the series to a storming end. In the dead months following the completion of Borrowed Light, I knew that somehow I had to find a way of revving Bazza up until he self-combusted, an exploding ball of fiery gases against the darkness that is Pompey. Quite how I was going to this remained a mystery until I began to tune into all the pre-election chatter in the media. It was February, 2010. New Labour’s grip on power was visibly weakening. The Tories and the Lib Dems were scenting blood. Quite suddenly, picking up on all this stuff, the solution was obvious. When the inevitable election was finally called, Bazza Mackenzie was going to stand for parliament.

  This is a guy, remember, who’d been determined to step onto the public stage and recent books had charted the steps he’d taken to distance himself from his colourful past. The bid to organise a huge Jet-Ski Grand Prix event for his dead brother. The creation of the Tide Turn Trust to sort out the city’s wayward youth. Dreams and schemes for putting himself forward as Mr Pompey, should Portsmouth become one of the UK cities to elect a Lord Mayor. Each of these little adventures had taken Bazza a little closer to where he’d always wanted to be: at the very top of the pile of movers and shakers who held the city’s future in their hands. With a general election in the offing, I told myself, he’d become increasingly obsessed with a single word: Westminster.

  But this manic bid for serious political authority had to work on the page. There are two parliamentary constituencies in Pompey: Portsmouth North and Portsmouth South. Born in Copnor, Bazza would naturally regard himself as the northern constituency’s favourite son. The seat was currently held by Sarah McCarthy-Fry, whom I happened to know. Sarah had thrived under New Labour, ending up with a ministerial role in the Treasury. All the sources I talked to in the city suggested she’d have a fight to retain the seat, and when I made contact with a view to shadowing her through a busy and probably fraught election campaign, she regretfully declined. Very wise.

  By now it was early spring. The hot money was on a May election and the party machines were cranking up, readying themselves for the hustings. I began to research the technical and legal steps Bazza would have to take before his candidacy was accepted. The electoral process was far more complex than I’d imagined, and the paperwork was daunting, but there was nothing I could find to rule out a Bazza bid for a seat in parliament, and in the shape of strict limits imposed on electoral expenses, there appeared to be scope for all kinds of mischief. Money, to Bazza Mackenzie, was the key that could unlock any door and he’d never been the kind of guy to pay much attention to the rules.

  As the start of the campaign approached, the notion of letting Bazza loose on the Pompey electorate felt more and more promising. Given the nature of the man – his vanity, his ambition, his sheer determination to win whatever ruck life put in his way – I could already anticipate countless fictional opportunities. Bazza would be in the fight to give the other candidates a severe kicking but the man was also canny enough to know that his campagn had to be truly mould-breaking to attract the kind of attention – both local and national – that he felt he needed. To make this credible on the page I had to design this campaign with an eye to every detail way before Gordon Brown went to the Palace and fired the starting gun for the four weeks of political mayhem that would inevitably follow.

  My ally and chief consultant in this wonderful game was my son Jack. Like me, Jack is a political junkie. He loves the small print of politics, and the kind of grotesques it seems to attract. He reads widely and is totally fluent in the kind of bollock-speak that passes for communication in Westminster and Whitehall. His weekly blog, a post-mortem on BBC 1’s Question Time, is a delight to read and has rightly attracted a big following (check it out on questionabletime.com).

  I put the proposition in a long e-mail. Jack had read some of the books and was familiar with the cast list. Bazza, I said, was close to going broke. His commercial empire was in meltdown, and Winter – at last – had decided that the time had come to deliver his boss to the Men in Blue in return for the guarantee of a new identity and the promise of a fresh start abroad. This would deliver him from the looming threat of a European Arrest Warrant being prepared by the Spanish after in-depth enquries into the killing of Brett West and his German girlfriend.

  With some reluctance, Det Chief Supt Willard had agreed. The masterplan – Operation Gehenna - called for Mackenzie to be pushed to the brink by a brand new call on what little was left of his war chest. This had to be something he couldn’t do without, something that had really taken his fancy, and in the shape of the coming battle for Portsmouth North, we were looking at the perfect opportunity. In a situation like this, I told Jack, Bazza couldn’
t help himself. He was in there to win. He was in there to screw all the other numpties. It would cost whatever it cost. Given his mounting financial troubles, this was a guy in serious denial.

  Jack was intrigued. Hoy hoy, he wrote. I really like this storyline. It has legs and you could have some real fun with it. All good in my book. As for Bazza cultivating an on-line following, well that’s pretty much standard procedure these days. Here’s how these things work….

  There followed a witty analysis of the e-arrows Bazza would be readying for his electoral bow. How he’d set up a sockpuppet account on Facebook. The ways he’d squeeze Twitter for maximum poilitical advantage. How important it would be to keep his own website a bit rough, littered with typos, in order to maximise his prime asset which – in Jack’s view – was his authenticity. This guy’s homegrown Pompey, he wrote. And the look has to match.

  More suggestions followed. Maybe a flirtation with the big aggregators like Digg or Reddit. Definitely the launch of various internet forums, bespoke stuff carefully designed for specific voter-groups. One might be white, male, and playfully rascist, appealing to the Squaddie Vote. Another, maybe accompanied by YouTube mini vids, would target students. These were guys, Jack pointed out, who’d probably never seen a voting booth in their lives and Pompey was full of them. Potentially, you’d be looking at thousands of their crosses against Bazza’s name on the ballot papers come polling day. Nice one.

  Much of this stuff was way outside my comfort zone (aggregators? sockpuppet accounts?), and more to the point, it would be way outside Bazza’s, too. Under no circumstances is Bazza allowed in front of an internet connection without supervision, Jack wrote. Very wise. He needed, at an early stage, a little helper. So who was that to be?

  In the event I came up with not one but two characters. The first was a guy called Leo Kinder, a political consultant who’d already made a brief appearance in Borrowed Light. Winter arrives at Bazza’s house to find this stranger sitting at the dinner table. The subject of the conversation? Bazza’s ambitions to become Lord Mayor.

  Mackenzie was deep in conversation with a sleek thirty-something across the table. Designer jeans, crisp white collarless shirt, winter tan, a hint of stubble. Leo Kinder.

  Winter found himself a chair and sat down. Mackenzie pushed the bottle of Remy Martin in his direction.

  “Leo here thinks we’re sitting on a gold mine. And he thinks we’re about to cash in big-time. Isn’t that right, Leo?”

  “Politically…” Kinder nodded. “Yes.”

  Kinder favoured Winter with his soft brown smile. Winter hadn’t trusted him from the off. Too smooth. Almost feline.

  “How does that work, then?” He heard himself say.

  “Politics is all about catching the tide, Paul. Just now I get the sense that tide’s running in our favour. You know something’s happening when papers like the Guardian come knocking on your door. This stuff’s viral. If they take us seriously then word spreads.”

  Winter loved the way he said “us”. A couple of months ago, no one in this house had ever heard of Leo Kinder.

  “GQ, mush.” Mackenzie was grinning fit to bust. “Leo says they’re up for a big piece for some spring special they’re planning. And it doesn’t stop there, eh Leo?”

  “By no means…” the smile again. “Since the Guardian, the phone’s been ringing non-stop. Everyone wants a piece of what Baz has to say. I’m telling them to form an orderly queue at the door. This stuff’s free. It doesn’t cost us a cent. Plus editorial is the best kicker of all. You can’t buy this kind of coverage, no way. It’s the old story, Paul. The right time and the right place. Like I say, all we have to do is ride the tide.”

  Kinder would be the natural choice to be part of Bazza’s larger political ambitions, and Jack agreed. But what we still needed, he said, was someone maybe a bit younger, a bit geekier, someone who knew every inch of the internet and had the skills to do the heavy lifting at the tekkie end. This someone turned out to be Andy Makins. Here he is in Bazza’s campaign War Room, arriving for interview. Jack, I hasten to say, was responsible for his wardrobe.

  Andy Makins appeared at the door within seconds. He was small, thin, pale, intense, with thick-lensed glasses and a scary side parting, a greasy lick of hair falling over one eye. He wore a Ramones T-shirt under an ill-fitting tweed jacket he must have picked up in a charity shop and had wound a Palestinian scarf around his scrawny neck. The black jeans had definitely seen better days but the lime green Nike Hi-tops looked brand new. He stepped into the room, unpeeled the scarf, and then blinked at the faces around the table. Kinder, Winter sensed, couldn’t believe his eyes. His brand of political consultancy had little room for a fashion statement this muddled.

  This was beginning to feel real. More to the point, it was fun. Way back in the Nineties, I wrote a stand-alone thriller called Heaven’s Light, another fictional bid to push politics to the limit in Portsmouth. The plot called for a new grassroots party. I called it Pompey First. It did well at the hustings, pushing the case for the city to declare UDI, and I saw no problem in resurrecting it. Maybe Bazza had read my stand-alone. Maybe he’d happened on the phrase in his own good time. Either way, Pompey First became the vehicle that would – Bazza was convinced – take him to Westminster.

  Now my tyro politician needed to wade into the swamp of local issues that was Portsmouth North. These included the on-going issue of the Navy’s two planned super-carriers (would they ever happen?), a controversy over the hiring of specialist advisers for New Labour’s Building Schools for the Future scheme (who needs all this consultant bollocks?), a closure threat to Hilsea Lido (ripping the fucking heart out of Pompey), and the incontestable fact that Pompey South had scored 1000% more Lottery funding than Pompey North (why are we always sucking the hint tit?).

  This was strong stuff, tinder for the bonfire of Bazza’s political dreams, and my next challenge was to draw up an official manifesto. All the other political parties had one. Why not Pompey First?

  Bazza hands the task to Leo Kinder. After consultations with Andy Makins, he agrees that your average punter is bored witless with pages of promises that will never be kept and comes up with four snappy bullet points.

  Pompey Pride: oddles of dosh to spruce the place up, full resus for Pompey Football Club, bid to stage boxing events for the 2012 Olympics.

  Pompey Passion: opening the doors to Chinese and Indian investment, thereby turning the city into an international growth-hub.

  Pompey Fast: sorting out the transport chaos, EU-funded tram system, water buses everywhere, tunnel to Gosport under the harbour.

  Pompey Plus: new discount card accepted by outlets city-wide distributed free to paid-up members of Pompey First.

  Along with the manifesto, Kinder develops a set of display posters which will, come the election, be plastered all over the city. Each of these features The Candidate in a variety of his favourite settings: Fratton Park, the naval dockyard, Spinnaker Tower, Gunwharf, plus the much-loved Hilsea Lido.

  The ten strap lines go as follows:

  Pompey First…because the last lot screwed up.

  Pompey First…time to get real.

  Pompey First…because enough is enough.

  Pompey First…before it’s too late.

  Pompey First…because the rest of them are rubbish.

  Pompey First…because we’re worth it.

  Pompey First…because we deserve better.

  Pompey First…getting the state out of your face.

  Pompey First…unpicking the stitch-up.

  Pompey First…last, and always.

  Jack thought this was a laugh, and so did I. But as the election campaign crept nearer it began to dawn on me that we could bed this madness down in real life, making it both funny and weirdly credible on the page, carrying the reader along on a building wave of enthusiasm for Pompey’s madcap candidate.


  Pompey First, aka Bazza Mackenzie, was where you’d put your cross if you’d pretty much given up on everyone else and wanted – with the minimum of inconvience – to simply make a point. For how many people would that be an irresistible option? And why hadn’t it happened in Pompey before? In truth, it had. A while back, a character called Docker Hughes had stood for parliament but his candidacy had imploded under the strain of the campaign trail, and he’d finally limped in with a handful of votes. That wasn’t going to be Bazza’s fate. No way.

  Bazza, though, will be fighting demons. Not simply his fellow candidates, not only the army of media scribblers waiting for his first gaffe, but Paul Winter and the Men in Blue, quietly plotting his downfall.

  Here’s an early indication of where Happy Days will be headed. If you listen very hard, you can hear the jaws of Operation Gehenna beginning to close.

  Gordon Brown called the general election on Tuesday 6th April. He drove to Buckingham Palace, asked the Queen to dissolve parliament, and returned to Downing Street to launch the New Labour campaign. That same morning, oddly enough, Bazza Mackenzie got some very bad news.

  He was in the War Room with Kinder, Makins and Winter when his mobile rang. All eyes were glued to the live BBC news feed on the big plasma TV Kinder had installed. Gordon Brown was emerging from Downing Street to address a mob of reporters.

  Mackenzie bent to his phone. Already visibly irritated, his frown deepened. He brought the conversation to an end and sat back to watch Gordon Brown at the microphone. The election was to take place on 6th May. The future, he said, is ours to grasp, a future fair for all. So let’s get to it.

  “Too right, mush.” Mackenzie got to his feet. He caught Winter’s eye and jerked his head towards the door. They needed to talk. Now.

  Upstairs in his office, Mackenzie siezed the phone and punched in a number. When he was especially tense he had a habit of perching on the very edge of his seat. Just now he hadn’t even sat down.