Backstory Page 4

  Charles gave up on the short stories (becoming a much-read poet in the process) but our relationship survived intact and when I badly needed technical advice for the first of the Faraday books he was the obvious go-to guy. The plot, lifted wholesale from the never-finished Fastnet, revolved around the disposal of a body carried aboard a yacht similar in size to Charles’ Pipkin. The twist? The yacht was taking part in the Fastnet Race.

  Charles, like many men with a naval background, believes in clarity. He thought the proposition that underpinned the plot was absurd and said so. My yacht, the fictitious Marenka, would be carrying a crew of five. A couple of these guys knew about the body. The rest didn’t. A yacht that size is extremely intimate. Adult cadavers aren’t small. They also smell. Was I seriously proposing to convert this tiny below-deck space into some kind of hearse and hope that no one noticed? I said I was. And that somehow, between us, we had to make it happen.

  On the phone, he had the grace to laugh.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be on Pipkin for ten. Do join me.”

  I crossed to Gosport again on the ferry. Charles was waiting with a flask of tea and a blindfold. The tea was welcome. I was worried about the blindfold.

  “I want to recreate a storm,” he said. “So we’ll start with this.”

  He wound the blindfold around my eyes. I could see nothing. We went below.

  “It’s night time,” he said. “The batteries have shorted out, it’s blowing a gale, and you’ve got to use the radio. OK? You’re happy with that?”

  I said I was. I still hadn’t finished the tea. He guided me to the radio, explained how it worked, which buttons to press, then spun me round a couple of times and told me to send a message. I did my best and failed completely. Charles loosened the blindfold. Daylight flooded in.

  “Not simple, eh?”

  “No,” I could only agree.

  “But that’s what you need. Total familiarity. You’ve got to touch perfect. You need to know every inch of this space. Listen. Watch me.”

  He blindfolded himself, told me to spin him round, then groped his way to the VHR radio and went through the motions of sending a message. I’d like to think he was cheating but he wasn’t.

  Once he was sighted again, I asked him what this had to do with my body, the corpse awaiting disposal at sea.

  “Nothing,” he said cheerfully “I just thought I’d get you in the mood.”

  Hiding the body, as it turned out, was less of a problem than he’d thought. Ahead of the main cabin lay the forepeak, complete with two bunks. Under race conditions this would be unoccupied. Charles, typically, had brought a tape measure. Detail, again. The need to get the thing exactly right. Together we measured the deck hatch that opened directly into this space. Room enough to slide a corpse through? Secured in a body bag? Easy.

  By now, Charles was warming to the plot. Had I thought about the weather? About the tides? About the kind of conditions that my unfolding story required? To be honest, I hadn’t devoted much time to this but I knew it was important. This stuff mattered. If I got it wrong, readers in the know would smell a rat. Worse still, they’d probably bin the book and tell their mates it was rubbish. Bad news travels fast in my line of work. Not good.

  I took the ferry home and listed the exact sequence of events that would take the racing fleet to the Fastnet Rock. I needed winds of a certain strength for the first day or so, a certain pattern of tides to justify a big dog-leg out to sea where the body would be dumped, after which I’d require the arrival of a full-scale storm as the story built to its climax. Charles took notes on the phone. He had a chum in Scotland, William Bowman, who specialised in designing weather systems tailor-made for plots like these. He’d ring again once he had something useful to pass on.

  As good as his word, he was back within a couple of days. A series of barometric charts were en route to our address from Scotland. These would track the kind of deepening low depression I’d be needing. Charles, meanwhile, was preparing an hour-by-hour breakdown of exactly the course Marenka would require to take to make the book credible. He still thought the actual disposal of the corpse offered a challenge or two but he wished me well. I put the phone down. A remarkable man.

  That year, the real Fastnet Race ended on August 12th. I have a black and white photo, scissored from a newspaper, that shows Catherine Chabaud crossing the line at Plymouth. There hadn’t been a storm and no one, to my knowledge, had got rid of a body. The following morning, curious rather than nervous, I switched on the PC and settled down. Page one of Turnstone lay before me.

  The only time she’d ever been inside a police station was the day someone had stolen her bike. Luckily it had turned up several weeks later, recovered from a second hand shop near her home, and afterwards she’d realised how worthwhile that trip to Kingston Crescent had been. The police were there to chase the bad people. They knew how to get things back. So who was to say it wouldn’t happen again?

  By lunchtime I’d got to the end of the first section. I’d introduced D/I Joe Faraday and I’d sown the seeds of the coming plot. A middle class child reports her missing dad at the police station. Behind this shy faltering dialogue lie broken families and lives in chaos. This, the default Pompey setting, was more than satisfactory but I’d already made another discovery, a tad more troubling. Joe Faraday was an interesting enough bloke but I sensed already he’d never be able to carry entire books by himself. Why not? Because he was just too decent.

  I went for a walk and had a think. These stories needed grit in the Pompey oyster and I knew instinctively that Faraday, unaided, simply couldn’t supply it. There had to be someone else alongside him, someone at the coal-face, a D/C, someone who’d started his CID career in very different circumstances, someone prepared – indeed eager – to take a risk or two.

  I jumped down to the beach and skipped a few pebbles across the flatness of the falling tide. By now I’d met dozens of D/Cs and their faces swam back to me. Pughie. J-R. Countless other names. Some of them were definite contenders. A combination of two or three of them, with a helping of authorial licence, might just do it. Then I stopped dead. Another idea. My rogue centre forward. Dave Hopkins.

  As far as I could remember, Dave used to wear a suede car coat. He was over-weight. His hair was thinning. He favoured a particular brand of after-shave. He was always on his toes, ducking and weaving into conversations. He read other people like a book. Perfect.

  I returned to the PC. Gazed at the screen. Reached for the keyboard.

  Heading into his late forties, Paul Winter was still an old-style D/C, wholly unreconstructed, a man for whom the difference between criminality and innocence was never less than subjective. As such, he was the perfect specimen of the old Portsmouth Mafia, a brotherhood of like-minded detectives who’d thrived on alcohol, patronage and favouritism in more or less equal measure. Unlike his ex-colleagues, though, Winter had survived the wholesale CID culture changes of the eighties and some of the newer intake still viewed him with awe. Winter, they said, had a rare talent for getting inside the heads of the bad guys, for winning their trust and opening their mouths, for tying them into schemes so complex, so Byzantine, they defied description. This interpretation of Winter’s MO was both colorful and compelling but to Faraday the truth was altogether simpler. On a good day, just, Winter stayed legit. The rest of the time he was as bent as the low life he gloried in putting away.

  Thanks to Winter, the book powered forward. The guy was a dream to write. He came fully-formed, stepped onto the page in a cloud of after-shave, sowed artful chaos wherever the plot took him. He was cheeky, ruthless, and totally effective. I knew at once that readers would love him and I was right. Twelve books on, I still get e-mails from a fan in Northern Queensland. He heads a bunch of readers who have formed themselves into the Preserve Paul Winter Fellowship. If that guy ever falls under a bus, he writes, we know where to find yo
u. Bless.

  I finished the first draft of Turnstone a couple of weeks before the Millennium celebrations. On the whole I was pretty pleased with it. I was still clueless about mainstream crime fiction but as a book, a yarn, I thought it worked OK. What also seemed to work was Faraday’s take on the city itself. As book followed book Pompey was to become a major character, a role that – to me at least – it richly deserved. Here’s Faraday pausing for a moment while he searches a house in Paulsgrove, a post-war council estate to the north of the city.

  The bedroom window faced south. The sun was strong through the glass and from here, on the slopes of Portsdown Hill, Faraday could see the hazy sprawl of the city stretching away towards the gleam of the Solent and the low swell of the Isle of Wight. There were a 190,000 people down there, jig-sawed together in street after street of terraced housing. The parking was non-existent. The traffic was impossible. The schools were falling apart. The kids were out of control. And if you found yourself a job, the pay rates were often pitiful. Yet folk still hung on, glued to the island city by something deeper than habit.

  More and more, Faraday found himself asking what it was about the place that made it so particular, so infuriatingly special, but none of the sensible answers did it proper justice. He’d lived here for over twenty years and he’d grown to love the seafront, with its busy views, and the quiet, shadowed cobblestones of Old Portsmouth, still haunted by the tramp of the press gang, but this was the tourists’ Pompey, Flagship Portsmouth, the image that the council loved to peddle on posters nationwide. What it didn’t capture or explain were the subtler glimpses of a very different city.

  Even at the distance of two generations, poverty and war still seemed to shape the people he dealt with. They expected, and got, very little. A certain stoic resignation seemed to go with the turf. Yet still they managed a smile and a joke with people they trusted. Islanders were like that, Faraday thought. Given any kind of choice, they always looked inward.

  These little moments of reflection , scattered throughout the book, were a delight to write, not least because they echoed something that I’d been trying to voice for some time. Turnstone’s take on the police, too, felt authentic. These were guys who seemed to spend most of their time battling the system and their frustration showed, as did the forest of acronyms which made working conversations extremely hard to follow. This latter point featured in my editor’s notes. Thin out the technical stuff, Simon wrote. This is a novel not an essay.

  He was right, of course. In retrospect I was still far too close to all the research I’d done. It had crowded in on the book and occasionally made the plot hard to follow. I needed to background all that stuff and become a story-teller again. A second draft rapidly followed. I hacked away at the acronyms until the reader could see a gleam or two of daylight. This improved the book no end but I still felt it was important to let Faraday occasionally reflect on the career that had decided the shape of his waking life.

  Faraday had been a D/I for four years now, winning the promotion after a ten year stint as a D/S in various outlying CID offices. The move back to Portsea Island had brought him much closer to home and he’d treasured the freedom of being his own boss in a division as busy and varied as Portsmouth North, but he’d never anticipated the distance he’d have to keep between himself and the rest of the squad.

  In part, he’d learned to recognize this gulf as inevitable. It was true what his old guvnors had told him - that the investigative buck well and truly stopped with the D/I - but there was something else, too, and the older he got the more difficult it was to define. It had to do with laughter and a degree of irresponsibility. It had to do with the knowledge that each working day was finite and that a limit existed to what one man could reasonably achieve. Get yourself promoted to Detective Inspector, and those comforts disappeared.

  Faraday’s responsibility was no longer one part of the jigsaw, or even two, but the whole bloody puzzle. It was his job to piece it together, his job to conjure administrative order out of chaos, and the longer he did it, the harder it was to resist the conclusion that the job was impossible. Being a successful D/I meant learning how to survive under a state of constant siege - not just from the criminal fraternity but from his own bosses as well. And in war, as Faraday was beginning to understand, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

  Turnstone published towards the end of 2000. In a crowded marketplace, it attracted little attention but a couple of the reviews were nice. Guys who knew the genre far better than I seemed to detect something new in the writing. The Pompey setting undoubtedly helped, as did the whiff of genuine sharp-end coppering. Here, maybe, was someone who’d taken the trouble to find out what these guys were really like. “The best British procedural that I’ve read since John Harvey’s Resnick series,” wrote Mark Timlin in The Independent of Sunday. “And that’s a real compliment.” John Harvey? I made a note and headed for Waterstones.

  After every publication day comes a down-moment when you wonder whether anyone out there really cares but in this case it didn’t happen. On the contrary I began to get a thin trickle of response from the blokes in the Job I’d been pestering for all those months and by and large they seemed to like what I’d done. This was a huge relief but more to the point it seemed to make all the difference when it came to adding more names to my contacts book.

  At first I didn’t quite understand why they’d suddenly relaxed and lowered their guard but then it dawned on me that they’d sensibly been waiting to see what I’d make of them. I knew by now that most working detectives have nothing but contempt for the kind of crime drama they see on telly. Most of this stuff bears absolutely no resemblance to the job they do and they don’t understand why the makers of this drivel don’t bother to get it right. Here, on the other hand, was a recognisably accurate account of life at the sharp end, warts and all. Turnstone didn’t make them out to be supermen, far from it, but most of the stuff that gets in their face was there, and for that they were, in a strange way, both surprised and sort-of impressed.

  These guys, of course, were working at street level, run ragged by the drum-beat of volume crime, and as the weeks went by I began to wonder what the senior officers at force headquarters might make of the book. Naturally I’d done my best to reflect the smallest print of CID culture, much of which concerns itself with slagging off the bosses. They’re remote. They haven’t got a clue what really happens at the coal face. They think you can sort out a city like Pompey with sheaf after sheaf of carefully prepared statistics. Not true.

  I was, by now, actively planning Book Two. Thanks to Mark Timlin, I was beginning to believe that my take on crime fiction might not be quite as doomed as I’d once suspected. I’d also become fascinated by the company of Paul Winter. I’d never devoted the kind of careful biographical attention I’d lavished on Joe Faraday but now I was beginning to wonder where he’d come from, what his private life was like, why he and his wife had never had kids, a tiny chorus of questions in my head that made his character ever more real.

  Guys I’d met in the Job felt the same. Some of them had limited patience for Faraday. One, a hugely experienced (and very funny) D/S on the Major Crime Team, thought he’d last ten minutes, tops, on a real job. Faraday, he said, thought too hard about the wrong things. He was too thin-skinned, too vulnerable. All the stuff about J-J and the Bargemaster’s House was, to be frank, a bit of a wank. The guy was away with the fucking birds. End of.

  Winter, on the other hand, plainly came from an honourable line of thoroughly devious blokes fluent in the darker arts of crime detection. These were the guys who knew how to draw the straightest line between all the investigative dots. Number one, they delivered. Number two, you wouldn’t trust a word they said. And number three, they made you laugh.

  I couldn’t have agreed more. I liked Faraday a lot. More and more he offered the perfect prism for a view of Pompey – informed, stoical, slightly mela
ncholic – which I happened to share, and the catastrophic misjudgements he was prone to make in his private life offered rich prospects for the books to come. Winter, on the other hand, sauntered guilefully from page to page, totally on top of things, completely in command, with barely a backward glance. Here was someone who wrote himself. To date, I’d simply enjoyed his company.

  By this time, Lin and I had been living in Pompey for more than fifteen years. Towards the end of the Nineties, I’d been offered a regular column by the city’s daily paper and gathering material for my weekly 700 words had deepened my appreciation for this extraordinary city. It seemed to me the place was changing by the month. The naval dockyard was winding down. Commercial developers were beginning to eye some of the prime harbour side sites for which the Ministry of Defence no longer had a use. HMS Vernon, once the Navy’s diving and minesweeping establishment, was now a forest of cranes. In less than a year, this building site would become Gunwharf, a bold mix of retail, leisure and residential opportunities, the boast of the tourist board and a magnate for visitors. A city traditionally uncursed by money was at last on the move.

  Should my books reflect a little of this transition? I thought they should. Was everyone happy with the way things were going? With the glossy lifestyle promises on the placards surrounding the Gunwharf site? With the coming of London brands and London prices? Emphatically not. Here’s Faraday again, pausing for another moment of reflection.