Backstory Page 8

  At the point when the book starts, Doodie is shoplifting to order for 50p a hit. Some way down the road, when he’s scored enough moolah, he plans to buy himself a convertible BMW, a big yacht, and one of them Royal Navy destroyers he’s sometimes seen on Pompey Harbour. He especially likes the idea of the destroyer. Something to do with the name.

  Doodie turned out to be the starting point for Book Three. I called it Angels Passing, after a French phrase I’d come across. When conversation suddenly dries up for no reason at all, people in France look at each other and say “un ange passe” or “an angel just flew by”. This sudden moment of silence beyond comprehension seemed to me the perfect expression of what the book might set out to try and explore. Has it come to this? Is it this bad?

  I have a very good friend in Pompey called Dave Cook. Dave is a gifted film-maker and was teaching media studies at one of the city’s FE colleges. Portsmouth born and bred, he was in daily touch with Pompey youth and loved the idea of Doodie nearly as much as I did. Between us, we pondered where he might be kipping just now. I’d picked up rumours that kids like Doodie, effectively off the radar, had moved into the shell of the old ABC cinema, now boarded-up and awaiting demolition. Between us, we agreed it was worth a visit. Dave laid hands on a torch. We both wore heavy boots. Dave drove me down to the cinema and parked up.

  Months later, as the first draft of Angels Passing gathered speed and headed for the final pages, my series D/I finds himself doing something remarkably similar.

  Faraday laced on a pair of the boots he used for birding and tested the big torch he’d borrowed from one of the uniformed sergeants at Highland Road. According to Imber, there was an unsecured window round the side, the favoured entry for local kids. He crossed the road and skirted the front of the building. The window Imber had mentioned was masked by a line of bushes. Someone had been at the security boards with a crowbar and the splintered remains lay in the deep concrete gully that separated the path from the window.

  Feeling slightly ridiculous, Faraday checked behind him before straddling the gully. With one leg on the sill, he was committed. There were still tiny shards of glass in the window frame and he briefly regretted leaving his gloves in the car before taking the weight of his body on his arms and swinging his other leg across the gully. Seconds later, out of breath, he was catching his balance on the line of concrete steps inside.

  The stairs led downwards into darkness. Underfoot, in the light from the window, he could see more broken glass. Dimly, where the light gave out, a radiator had been ripped from the wall and now hung drunkenly outwards, secured by pipe work alone. He flicked on the torch, tracking the beam to the right until it settled on some kind of door. The place smelled of damp and neglect. Stand absolutely still, ignore the low rumble of traffic from the road outside, and for a moment he thought he heard movement.

  Faraday stepped carefully downwards, the crunch-crunch of glass echoing back from the stairwell. He pushed at the door and it began to open. Inside he felt a sudden chill, and the soft clunk of the door as it closed behind him brought the torch beam whirling round. Take it easy, he thought. Ten metres away from the pavement and already this place has got you spooked.

  He edged towards the wall and swept the torch beam across the yawning space ahead. This had once been one of the smaller cinemas, Screen Two or Three. He could remember sitting here in this same darkness, J-J beside him, settling into a Steve Martin comedy or one of the Oliver Stone movies. “Platoon” had been a favourite of J-J’s. The dialogue had been beyond him but he could sit and watch the action sequences for hours on end. Faraday’s torch at last found the long curve of the back wall which had once served as the screen. This was where Charlie Sheen had confronted the realities of Vietnam. And this was where J-J had upset an entire bucket of popcorn when the Viet Cong sprang their major ambush.

  The noise again. Footsteps this time. Definitely. Faraday felt his pulse begin to quicken as he followed the strip of carpet up the ramp towards the back of the cinema. The carpet was wet underfoot and twice he detoured to avoid little curls of turd. Another door him into some kind of vestibule. He paused, listening for movement, then called out, mapping the wreckage around him with the torch. There was more glass, abandoned bottles, crushed cans of Castlemaine and Special Brew, and a pile of charred wood that must once have been a door frame. There was a smell too, more distinctive this time. It was a bitter, acrid stench that tugged at his throat, and he tried to visualize living amongst this chaos. Would people really try and make a home for themselves here? Was life that bad that you’d trade sunshine and fresh air for this sour darkness?

  He stood absolutely still for minutes on end, listening. Faintly, he could hear the wail of a car alarm. It went on for thirty seconds or so, then stopped. When nothing else happened – no footsteps, no sign of movement – he picked his way across the vestibule and down a shallow flight of steps at the end. It was lighter here, and as he rounded the corner he could hear traffic again. Then he stopped. Before him lay the cinema’s foyer. The ticket booths and popcorn bar were in ruins, everything smashed. A false wall had been wrenched away and kicked to pieces. Tiles, broken glass and lengths of splintered wood spiked with rusting nails littered the floor, and the area near the boarded-up doors was ankle deep in more empty cans, Stella this time.

  Faraday was trying to remember the layout of the old cinema. He’d been right about Screens Two and Three, he was sure, but the biggest screen was upstairs. Maybe that was where the kids hung out. Waiting, as ever, for the main attraction.

  Not bothering to hide his presence, he pulled a length of timber aside and cleared a path for himself up the stairs. At the top, through the sagging remains of the big double doors, he found himself in another vestibule. The floor was covered with cladding ripped away from cable runs and there were bare wires hanging from the ceiling. Off to the right, exactly where his memory suggested, was another door and another flight of steps. It was dark again, pitch black, and he took the stairs one at a time, only too aware of Anghared’s warning. The place is structurally unsound, she’d said, closing their last conversation with a sigh.

  At the top of the stairs, he knew he’d found Screen One. The long black curve of the ramp stretched away into the darkness. Stripped of seats, it seemed to go on forever. He edged slowly forward down the long emptiness of the ramp, the light from the torch pooling at his feet. Then, without warning, the light from the torch abruptly diffused, dropping into nowhere. Faraday stopped, chilled to the bone, rocking back on his heels. Before him was a void, a chasm so sudden and so deep that the torch beam couldn’t locate the floor below. Anghared had been right. This place was a death trap.

  Faraday closed his eyes, trying to still his racing pulse, telling himself that he was OK, that he’d got away with it, then he began to step sideways, easing back from the void. He tracked the torch to the left, looking for the door that would take him back to the vestibule, and as he did so he spotted a shape in the darkness. The torch was shaking in his hand. He couldn’t hold it steady. He was looking at a tent. It was a ridge tent, green, sagging, not big, and it was about a dozen paces away. He swallowed hard. Who in his right mind would camp out in a place like this?

  Much later, after a great deal of reader reaction to Angels Passing, it became clear that this scene lay at the very heart of the book. People talked about it all the time. Because Dave and I had been in there, doing exactly what Faraday did, I managed to get all the details, all the spookiness, right. That was a lesson in itself – research really does pay off - but on reflection I began to sense that this handful of pages also caught something bigger. Readers seemed to recognise that there was something deeply shocking about this grotesque ruin, this palace of shattered dreams, something that mirrored the society these kids had so emphatically rejected. The picture house had become a camp site for the dispossessed. We’d uprooted these kids. We’d turned them into ghosts and left them in t
he dark.

  The rest of the research schedule wrote itself. I met a couple of older lads who screwed a living from housebreaking and thefts from vehicles. A beleaguered teacher from one of the inner city comps gave me a combat report from the front line. The guy who headed the force Child Protection Unit shared the policing challenges of dealing with kids like Doodie. A uniformed beat officer gave me a conducted tour of an area called Foxes’ Forest on Hilsea Lines where I planned a particularly gruesome murder. Jason Goodwin, a Senior Technician at the city’s mortuary, talked me through the full post-mortem process, while Bob Lamburne, one of Hantspol’s top forensic officers, explained exactly what he’d be looking for back at the Crime Scene amongst the trees on Hilsea Lines.

  By now the plot had virtually shaped itself. I needed more information on bare-knuckle fighting behind some of the city’s closed doors, and I also needed to find out about the pecking order amongst the clergy at the Anglican cathedral. Both were easier to come by than you might imagine and I wound up in one of the lifts at Ladywood House, a towering block of inner city flats.

  As ever, the people in charge of this particular fictional opportunity couldn’t have been more helpful. I ascended to the 23rd floor where I was planning to kick off the scene that would end the book. Two flights of concrete stairs led up to a door that accessed the roof. There was a drying area, and a kind of parapet. If you scrambled on top of the parapet, like Doodie would, you could stand up, brace yourself against the wind, and then look clear across the city and the Solent to the Isle of Wight. It was a moment I knew I’d never forget, partly because I was terrified of looking down, and partly because I sensed already that this book was going to be special.

  The first draft of Angels Passing arrived on my editor’s desk a week or two before Christmas. Simon liked it a lot. Word spread in-house in the way that writers - always the outsiders – never fully understand. A decision appeared to have been taken to make Angels Passing the break-out book. Break-out meant big time. Stay tuned.

  The first hint of the promotional firestorm to come arrived two months into the New Year. Publicity executives arrived from London for a pre-campaign meet with Portsmouth News editor Mike Gilson. The warmth of the Orion commitment, expressed in plans for large space advertorial, reader offers and publication day competitions, did wonders for my reputation on the city’s daily paper. I was no longer the scruffy guy who filed 700 words of left-wing copy every week but – to quote a top Orion honcho – I’d become “the latest addition to the ranks of crime fiction’s grandmasters”.

  This was deeply flattering, but there was lots more. The following month, the cover shot that would badge the hardback of Angels Passing, a shot I’d taken myself in a bid to root the novel squarely in Pompey, featured on the front of the Orion New Titles catalogue, a six monthly publication that went to thousands of trade outlets nationwide. Inside, amongst 200 other titles, Angels Passing had won itself a full page. The Take had recently been picked by the Independent on Sunday as one of the five best crime novels of 2001, and this announcement anchored the copy. The promotional master plan, I was glad to see, included large space colour advertising in both national and regional newspapers, a full point-of-sale package, plus the promise of “author events and signings”.

  The Doodie bandwagon gathered speed. In April, a press day in Portsmouth attracted a number of journos including Ralph Baxter from Publishing News. His diary piece appeared a week later. I was a bit clueless about why all this stuff mattered but Simon assured me that the trade press would be the key to the planned break-out. I had to get noticed by the top buyers. My name had to be out there in lights. The fact that Orion were putting a great deal of promotional money behind me was enough to get a lot of people talking but to get to where Orion really wanted me to be I had to become a brand. A brand? Christ.

  It was at this point that Orion decided to make a film about me and my book. The in-house sales conference was the hinge on the marketing door, a two-day opportunity to gather all the reps and the key execs together and fire them up for the coming round of sell-ins. The next sales conference was to be held at Eastbourne’s Grand Hotel in May. It would kick off with a big dinner and a band afterwards. The following morning, these people needed to be wised up about the current crop of major titles. Angels Passing was very definitely one of them.

  Starring in my own movie after twenty years in television production was a bit of a novelty. I reproduce the script in full because this experience marked the moment when I really did think I’d cracked it. With a forty grand promotional budget, national ads, and all sorts of other goodies, there was no way I wasn’t about to step into scribe heaven.

  Scene One: Portsdown Hill

  SLOW REVEAL TO GH FROM CITY BELOW

  “This is Portsmouth, Joe Faraday’s Pompey, one of the world’s great naval cities. It was built for war, and the business of war, and even now daily life is splintered by a preoccupation with violence.

  190,000 people live down there, banged up together in one of the most densely-populated pockets of land in Europe.

  Where better to set a series of crime thrillers?”

  Scene Two: Langstone Shore

  TRACK BACK WITH GH ALONG TOWPATH PAST THE BARGEMASTER’S HOUSE

  “This is where Faraday lives – and this is as quiet as Pompey gets.

  Joe Faraday is in his forties. He’s a Detective Inspector. And he’s been living in that house for the last 22 years.

  Back in the late Seventies, he had a son, J-J, who was born deaf. Faraday’s wife, Janna, died soon afterwards and so Faraday brought the child up virtually single-handed. Not just a child but a deaf child.

  How do you penetrate that silence? How do you build a bridge to somebody you love who speaks only the language of gesture? You look for a common interest. And Faraday chose birds.”

  CUT TO BIRDS ON THE HARBOUR

  “The world of nature, here on Faraday’s doorstep, is what keeps him sane. Like most cops, he’s become an expert on what we’re collectively doing to each other. Detectives are the guy who clear up the mess – the thefts, the stabbings, the rapes, the murders – and as society begins to disintegrate, it’s cops like Faraday who find themselves with a ringside seat.”

  GH TO CAM

  “Which brings us to an attractive 14 year-old called Helen Bassam.”

  Scene Three: ext Ladywood Flats

  TILT UP FROM CHALKED BODY OUTLINE ON THE PAVEMENT TO GH TO CAM

  “It’s February. It’s dawn. And at the foot of these inner city flats, a milkman has found the body of a teenage girl. As the senior detective on call, Faraday attends. Scenes of Crime are already at work. The body has been screened off. Uniforms keep passers-by moving on. And Faraday? He heads for the roof.”

  Scene Four: roof, Ladywood Flats

  PAN ACROSS ROOF DISCOVERS GH TO CAM

  “But one look up here is enough to confirm that going off this roof wouldn’t have been a simple proposition. What on earth would have possessed a 14 year-old to clamber up onto that parapet? Was she drunk? Was she depressed? Was she doing it for a laugh? Or – far more to the point – was there someone else involved?”

  Scene Five: interior lift going down

  DESCENDING LIGHTS ON PANEL. THEN GH TO CAM

  “Already, like any detective, Faraday is covering the usual bases. Door to door enquiries in these flats. ID and background on the girl. Interviews with her parents and her mates. And a good look at last night’s pictures from that little device up there….CCTV. This lift is interesting, by the way. This little bench at the back folds down and comes out – and you know why? To bring undertakers’ coffins down from the upstairs flats. Helen Bassam, of course, saved them the trouble. As Faraday himself reflects.”

  Scene Six: int. CID office, Southsea Police station.

  WIDE SHOT: CID OFFICE

  “This is Southsea police stati
on – and this is where Faraday works. His office is out there at the end of the corridor but it’s in here, in the CID office, that his squad will try and piece together the sequence of events that led to Helen Bassam’s death.

  In a perfect world, of course, there’d be no distractions. But Faraday’s world is far from perfect and for him and his squad of detectives Pompey never ceases to be a fast-moving target.”

  Scene Seven: Foxes’ Forest, Hilsea lines

  PULL BACK FROM TREES TO DISCOVER GH TO CAM

  “Within twenty four hours, another phone call and another body. This time it’s a man in his twenties found here, on top of Hilsea Lines, one of the countless fortifications thrown up around Pompey to keep the French at bay.

  The body is naked except for a pair of woman’s knickers and it’s dangling on the end of rope. Suicide or murder? Once again, Faraday must rally his troops, gather his evidence and try and tease some sense – some pattern – into the violence and chaos that increasingly passes for real life in a city like this.

  No wonder he finds solace in the birds…”

  Scene Eight: the Round Tower overlooking the mouth of Portsmouth Harbour

  START WITH GULLS. REVEAL GH TO CAM

  “Angels Passing is the third Joe Faraday novel.

  Emotionally, because of the years he’s devoted to his deaf son, Faraday suffers from a kind of arrested development. Women he knows are quietly surprised at his naivety, at his determination – rare in a cop – to believe the best about people. Every book puts that optimism, that faith, to the test – and Angels Passing is the biggest test of all.