Backstory Page 3

  Cops, after all, are the world’s prime witnesses when it comes to all the symptoms that badge the disintegrating bits of our society. Whether it’s family breakdown, or alcohol abuse, or Class “A” drugs, or poverty, or simple ignorence, crime is often the consequence. And where there’s crime, you’ll find coppers. My guy, like so many detectives I’d begun to meet, would be wearied by the sheer volume of human debris that washed up at his office door, by the broken lives and hopeless prospects, by the pissed young mothers and their absent partners, by the unthinking cruelties we so often inflict upon each other in the name of getting even. And so, as often as practically possible, he’d need to turn his back on all this mayhem and get away. And what better solace than to find himself a perch on the foreshore at Keyhaven, or at the Farlington RSPB site, or on a cliff top on the Isle of Wight, and spend a couple of hours peering into another of nature’s hierarchies, untainted by stolen welfare cheques or a bellyful of Stella?

  One afternoon, on yet another birding expedition, I put this notion to Roly. At last I had a name for my cop. He was to be called Faraday, partly after the discoverer of electricity (the bringer of light, ho-ho), but mainly because the name sits so well on the tongue. I broke this news to Roly. Faraday, I said, was going to be a birder.

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s his way of staying sane.”

  I tried to explain about dipping out of one world and into another. Birding, I said, would offer a gentler take on the difficult business of trying to trying to conjure order from chaos, of trying to stay sane in the face of increasingly impossible odds.

  Roly shot me a look, not a good sign.

  “Have you ever seen a kittiwake pushing other bird’s young out of a cliff top nest?” he inquired. “Do you know what a peregrine falcon can do to a pigeon?”

  I said I didn’t. And that, in any case, it didn’t matter. I really liked the contrast. Really, really, liked it.

  He shook his head, reached for another bacon sandwich.

  “Pure fantasy”, he said. “I thought you were better than this.”

  I wasn’t. The next piece of Faraday came from another friend, a poet called George Marsh. I’d decided by now that I was going to give Faraday a deaf-mute son, a lad he’d been bringing up as a single parent for the last twenty years. A back-story like that struck me as both distinctive and potentially interesting. The problem was I knew nothing about deaf kids.

  George occupied an interestingly cavernous house in Southsea, cooked like an angel, and penned great haiku. He also had a grown-up son called Jessie who’d been severely deaf since birth. George had been a single parent for most ofJessie’s life and – early on – had faced the challenge of establishing some kind of contact. He’d achieved this immense task in a variety of ways, including a robust insistence – against the prevailing wisdom – of the importance of sign and gesture. For George, the key to communication was getting through and if a raised glass successfully signalled are you thirsty?, then so be it.

  George had also kept a kind of diary through the long years of Jessie’s youth, and he was generous enough to let me see it. Entry by entry I tracked his battle to bring fatherhood into the near-silence of Jessie’s world. This enterprise became a shared journey, and as the relationship between them deepened it I knew that Faraday would have been through something like this. Maybe birding might have provided the bridge into his young son’s life. Maybe they started with books, with images, with wild life movies on TV, then stepped into the real thing, planning expeditions together, consulting maps, dreaming up picnics, building a shared fortress against the bafflements of the world outside. By now, Faraday had a Christian name: Joe. His boy, Joe Junior, became J-J.

  Stepping away from detailed background research and trying to people this new landscape with characters of your own invention is the strangest process. To date, writing one-off thrillers, I’d welcomed the annual challenge to turn months of reading and dozens of conversations into fictional flesh and blood. The plot itself, that web of circumstance which would put my guys to the test, dictated various combinations of vice and virtue. Molly Jordan, the mother in The Perfect Soldier, determined to find out what really happened to her son in the Angolan minefields, must have a rock-like determination to nail the truth. While Todd Llewellyn, the ageing poster boy of a top-rating TV current affairs show, must be equally determined to sprinkle a little stardust on his flagging reputation. The tension between these two characters, with the addition of a carefully chosen supporting cast, had to power the novel from page to page but if I got these people wrong then the damage would be limited to a single book. Now, with a three-book contract on my desk, that escape lane was well and truly closed. I was going to be living with these people for at least three years. I had to get them right.

  So Faraday became ever more important, the key to a door that might unlock Pompey and shed light on untold fictional goodies. What was the rest of his back-story? Where did he live? What did he eat? What kind of car did he drive? How come had to bring J-J up single-handed? And – most important of all – what was he like as a bloke?

  A fellow scribe once told me that the working novelist can – literally – play God. He was, of course, right but all that creative freedom comes with a big fat health warning. Your hero has to work on the page. He (or she) has to be credible. And they have to carry a sizeable readership to the very end of the book (or, in this case, series). So what was I going to do about Joe Faraday?

  I went for lots of walks. I tried to picture this man, tried to put him in one of the countless offices I’d visited over the last couple of months, tried to imagine him in management meetings, in the interview suite, in bed. With J-J grown up and gone, how would he resume a private life he’d neglected for the past two decades? Where might that lead him? Who would he invite into this suddenly solitary life of his?

  As the questions piled up, I became less and less certain of the answer. Then, one lunchtime, as I was leaving Kingston Crescent police station, I held the door open for a middle-aged man in a grey suit who was stepping in off the street. I think he was a detective but I can’t be sure. I don’t have a name and I’ve never seen him since but I knew at once that he was Faraday.

  He was maybe a stone overweight. He was about my height, 5’11”. He had greying hair and a full beard. He moved with that hint of caution that suggested a lower back problem. His grey suit badly needed a press. He looked a little bruised by life. But when he spared me a glance and a nod of thanks for holding the door open there was something in his eyes that spoke of gentleness and a sense of amused detachment. This was someone who’d been around a bit, someone who’d found a perch on the very edges of life, someone who knew how to watch, and listen, and draw the appropriate conclusions. In some respects, this guy was very CID. In others, he was anything but. But, from where I was standing, this was very definitely my man.

  Next I had to find somewhere for him to live. The guarantee of a decent selection of birds took me to the city’s eastern shore, where Pompey peters out into the tufty semi-drained marshland that fringes Langstone Harbour. A footpath skirts the mudflats the whole length of the island on which the city is built and at the southern end I found the perfect house.

  It looked Victorian. It was a two-storey construction, red brick with white clapboard. It had a usefully-sized garden and – from the big upstairs windows – an upper circle view of the gleaming silver-gray spaces of the harbour. At once, I could see Joe Faraday up there, seated behind his telescope, tallying the birdlife as it came and went. This would be his refuge, his sanity. This was where he and his son would have turned deafness into something briefly magical before the stroppiness of adolescence began to put the boy beyond reach. This was where Faraday turned his back on the city and the Job, closed the door, and became a human being again.

  In real life, the house is called Beach Lodge. A couple of hundred metres south a
re a pair of lock gates that once offered access to the canal that linked Langstone Harbour on one side of Portsea island to Portsmouth Harbour on the other. This masterpiece of Victorian strategic thinking, linking to more canals inland that would take shipping north to London, was designed to protect precious military cargoes from the marauding French out in the English Channel. Within a decade it had been overtaken by the coming of the railways but the lock gates and traces of the canal itself still survive. Sensing already that I’d be wanting to tell bits of Pompey’s story, as well as Faraday’s, I seized on this tiny fragment of history. Thus Beach Lodge became The Bargemaster’s House.

  But books like these – indeed, any books – have to be credible. The Bargemaster’s House wouldn’t be cheap. At the time I needed Faraday to move in – a year or so after J-J’s birth – he’d still be in his early twenties. So how on earth would he afford a place like this? And, equally important, what had happened to J-J’s mum?

  This turned out to be the perfect example of one plot problem solving another. Already I knew that I wanted Faraday to have been a bit of a rebel and a bit of a romantic. In the sixth form at his Bournemouth comprehensive he scores good “A” levels in English, History and Economics. A place at university is his for the asking but instead he blows most of his savings on a cheapie air ticket to New York, works his way from illegal job to illegal job, and ends up in Seattle on the west coast. There, he celebrates his nineteenth birthday by meeting a woman called Janna in a downtown bookshop. Janna, at 27, is feisty, big-boned, strong-minded, full of appetite, and already making her name as an art photographer.

  A passionately reckless love affair results in almost instant pregnancy. Janna and Faraday return to UK, at first camping out with Joe’s parents who have sold up in Bournemouth and moved to Freshwater on the Isle of Wight where Faraday’s mum is now running a modest B&B. Faraday gets himself a seasonal driving job delivering fancy goods and other knick-knacks to seaside outlets. This income, plus a £350 parental loan, secures Janna and Faraday the rental deposit on a damp, draughty, mice-ridden rented bungalow in Freshwater Bay. They guard their new privacy with fierce delight.

  Four months later, Joe junior is born. Within weeks, Janna is diagnosed with an advanced tumour in her left breast. This turns out to be her second tussle with cancer, a medical detail she’d never shared with her lover. By the year’s end, she’s dead.

  Faraday, as a single parent, now needs a proper job, plus regular help with the infant J-J. His mum offers to do whatever she can but – independent to the last – Faraday is keen to find some other solution. He makes inquiries about a career in the police with the Hampshire Constabulary. He does well at the interviews. But his two-year induction as a probationer will have to take him back to mainland. At this point, fate intervenes in the shape of Janna’s parents. They like what they’ve seen of their son-in-law and they adore J-J. They also have serious money and insist on Faraday accepting a sizeable cheque plus a regular allowance. This pays for both the Bargemaster’s House and a daily nanny for J-J.

  Serendipity? Well, yes. But the plot needs this kind of bend in Faraday’s road and it sets him up nicely for the kind of guy he’s got to become. How many other fictional cops have spent the last twenty years bringing up a child who turns out to be deaf? And how many of these guys have devoted the best parts of themselves to a shared passion for birds?

  At this point in the development of the series, I was beginning to get excited by the prospects. In the shape of my hero-protagonist, I seemed to have come up with someone genuinely distinctive. Twenty years on from J-J’s birth, this is a man who knows how to cook a decent meal, who drives a clapped out Mondeo, who has a commendable indifference to material goods (apart from his precious Leica Red Dot binoculars), who grows a fine row of tomatoes, who knows a thing or two about Brent Geese, and who can do serious damage to a bottle of Cotes du Rhone.

  My months of research, thanks to an ever-expanding circle of police contacts, had also given me a feel for the realities of police work. This, to no one’s surprise, wasn’t the world of serial killers and endless car chases. On the contrary, most of the guys I’d got to know spent a great deal of time chasing feral kids, stoned single mums, and a small army of walking wounded who simply couldn’t cope with daily life. Back at the office, knackered and probably empty-handed, they could expect a four-hour stack of paperwork before clocking off.

  This was emphatically crime in the minor key, hopelessly real, but once again the challenge lay in trying to turn a problem on its head. I was aware by now that I faced serious competition out in the commercial market place. Half of the UK, it seemed to me, were penning crime fiction. A lot of it was taken straight off the telly – serial killers, car chases – so if I was to fence off a bit of this precious turf I had to do something radically different. And what bolder move than to try and turn the minor key into major sales figures? To try and write crime fiction so real, so procedurally accurate, so in keeping with what the Job had become, that any working cop would read the stuff and shudder at its accuracy?

  As a mission statement I was aware at once that this might not win me many friends amongst my fellow scribes, or even in Orion sales conferences. The marketing honchos in mainstream publishing love what Hollywood call “high concept”. Bring on the barbecue killer and the paedo who feasts on babies’ heads. Use any colour on the fictional palette as long as it’s black. Make the stuff darker and darker until you’ve out-yukked everything else in the marketplace. There’s an undeniable commercial logic behind all this. No author ever lost money by making people lock their doors at night.

  So what would the likes of Malcolm Edwards make of a mission statement like mine? An invitation to share the world of a bunch of deeply paranoid coppers trying to cope with an impossible job? To be frank, I’d no idea but I also knew that I had little choice. Luck had brought me Joe Faraday and the realities of his working world. All I had to do now was write a book.

  Two

  It’s August, 1999, and Lin and I have taken the ferry over to the Isle of Wight to catch the start of the Fastnet Race. My notes recall that it’s the opening day of the football season and that the Fast Cat is full of Brummies on holiday.

  At Cowes, the marina is bannered by Mumm Champagne and Skandia Life Insurance. Perfectly tanned young women are selling carry-out bespoke noodles at silly prices, and race crews are wandering through the crowds of gawkers, identically badged by their sponsors. Demon Internet. Crew Clothing Company. Out on the pontoon, amongst the fleet of contending yachts, big-faced men with sun-bleached hair have mischief in their eyes. They gather in little knots aboard their respective boats, eyeing the talent, discussing the start. Their accents come from every corner of the globe. The Italians, as you might expect, are by far the sleekest.

  The start itself happens hours later. A sizeable crowd has gathered on the foreshore as the yachts stitch back and forth behind the starting line, jockeying for position. A loud-voiced man behind us seems to know a lot about ocean racing and attaches a price to each of these monster yachts. If two of them collide, which seems more than possible, he thinks the damage will be in five figures. Easily.

  Warning guns go off. Navigators check watches. Skippers trim sails. The dance, if anything, is even more frenzied: the boats turning, the water churning, the view from the beach a blur of sails, rich daubs of blue and crimson and sunshine yellow against the billowing cumulus over the mainland. Then comes a final gun and as if by magic the fleet shakes itself out, crosses the start line, and surges west towards the Needles. I like to think that this sudden conjuring of order out of chaos is some kind of metaphor for what awaits me at the PC once I start to write in earnest. Lin thinks that’s sweet.

  A week earlier, in the interests of research, I’d been aboard a smaller version of one of these yachts. It was a 28 footer called Pipkin. It lay in the RNSA marina in Gosport, across the water from Pompey, and it belonged to a
n retired RN Commander, Charles Wylie. I’d met Charles at one of the Southern Writers’ Conferences at Winchester. Charles had penned a number of short stories and needed to find out whether they were any good. He’d attended a session of mine in the morning. At lunch, we found ourselves at the same table. He’d quite liked what I’d had to say about writing and wanted to propose a deal. Did I, by any chance, like sailing?

  I told him I did. I’d been sailing dinghies for years.

  “You’re married?”

  “I am.”

  “The wife?

  “Loves the water.”

  “Excellent.”

  The deal was simple. If I read his stories and delivered an honest opinion, he and his wife would take us to sea for the day. He passed me a thickish A4 envelope and we shook hands.

  I read the stories that night. They weren’t very good. I asked Lin what she’d do.

  “Tell him,” she said. “The guy’s probably been to war. He can certainly handle a phone call.”

  Sound advice. I phoned Charles next day. When I told him he was wasting his time he first laughed, then thanked me for my candour. The tides looked promising next week. How were we placed next Tuesday?

  Thus began another of the friendships that litter this story. Our voyage to Buckler’s Hard – way down the Solent – was undiluted pleasure. The picnic Jean had prepared was delicious. We sank a couple of bottles of decent Sancerre and stormed back on a stiffening westerly breeze. Charles even let me helm most of the way. He’d spent his final years in the Navy checking out young Captains in boat-handling and navigation and was totally nerveless in the presence of someone as callow as yours truly. That in itself was a lesson worth learning. Grace under extreme pressure.