Backstory Page 9

  Does he make it? Does he get to the bottom of either death? No clues. No conferring. But I can tell you this. There’s a lot more of Joe Faraday – and a lot more of Pompey – to come.”

  The sales conference came and went. I got pissed, like everyone else, and, like everyone else, wondered about nicking the crested toweling robe from the en suite bathroom in my room. I don’t know what kind of deal Orion got on the room rates but there was clearly more money in publishing than I’d thought.

  Double page ads went into the trade press ahead of the reps’ sell-in, as promised, and 300 advance reading copies were dispatched to key bookshop managers world wide. This was accompanied by a personal letter from Orion founder and CEO, Anthony Cheetham. I especially liked the bit about my 130,000 words offering readers “a breathtaking and harrowing ride”. Doodie again. His fault.

  In June, five months ahead of publication, 800 copies of a classy 4-page presenter was mailed to the sales force for distribution to bookshops. Headed Operation Bestseller, this faux CID briefing outlined the promotional campaign already underway. It was a clever piece of design, beautifully produced, and would doubtless convince every bookseller in the country to make shelf-space for my little tome.

  By September, Orion were beating the Angels Passing promotional drum louder than ever. A special lunch in London to meet the key crime reviewers. Local and national media interviews. A blitz on specialist crime magazines and internet sites.

  Then, with a blast of promotional trumpets, came the October publication day. As teams of girlies distributed chapter samplers and 2000 postcards featuring The Take to rush hour commuters at Waterloo Station, nearly 200 specially invited guests gathered at Portsmouth Cathedral to lift a glass to Doodie and the book that was going to make his (and my) name. The Canon of the cathedral, a fictional liberty on my part, features importantly towards the end of Angels Passing and the diocesan authorities had been only too happy to offer the cathedral for our launch party.

  I’d invited every cop who’d lent a hand over the past three books to come along for the launch and I watched them checking out the display boards that lined the nave. I’d taken a series of moody photos of various Pompey locations, matching them with reproduced quotes from the book, and there was part of me, ever-curious, that wondered what they made of all this carefully orchestrated hoopla. They, like me, had always been slightly sceptical about the real impact any work of fiction can make, yet here was the living proof that all those interviews, and all that note-taking, hadn’t been in vain. Here’s one of the reproduced quotes. Rather fittingly, it centered on Nigel Phillimore, my fictional Canon with whom Faraday has a number of key exchanges about Doodie.

  At first, the priest had been guarded about the boy. It really wasn’t his business to do Faraday’s work for him and there were consequences that he, Phillimore, was obliged to respect. Nonetheless, it was incontestable that Doodie had severed the mooring rope that ties the individual to society. His father had become a stranger. His mother had given up. His teachers had begged for his exclusion. And so there was no one – no agency, no individual, not even the saintly Anghared – whom Doodie regarded as anything but a traitor. The child was on the run behind enemy lines. He trusted nobody. Five years earlier, in Phillimore’s opinion, he might have been diagnosed autistic. In five years time he would, in all probability, be behind bars. But for now he was one of those rare creatures who didn’t know the meaning of either restraint or fear.

  The evening was a big success. We drank a lot of wine that night, during and after the launch. Loads of guests came back to our place to start partying in earnest and I remember telling Lin as we finally staggered up to bed that it probably wouldn’t get better than this. Enjoy, I said, as my head hit the pillow.

  As it turned out, this drunken apercu was absolutely on the money. Orion couldn’t have done more to give Angels Passing the biggest of promotional launches. After publication day came the promised media interviews, library and reader group events, plus umpteen stock signings at bookshops up and down the country. To justify a spend like this – not just money but time and effort – the book had to make it into the Top Ten. It didn’t. It sold OK, gathered fabulous reviews, attracted a lot of attention on the festival circuit, and began to appear in translation abroad. But it didn’t scale the required retail heights.

  Within months, with a new three-book contract in my pocket, I was beginning to wonder what to write next. My brief glimpse of best-sellerdom had done my confidence the world of good, and I knew I could at least hold my own in the punchy world of crime fiction, but I knew something else as well. That when it comes to the magic break-out, when you tip-toe into publishing’s Garden of Eden, you only get one bite of the apple.

  Five

  Every new book comes from a different place in that hall of mirrors that passes for my brain. A book called Sabbathman, for instance, came from the title itself. It sparked a stand-alone thriller about the settling of political blood debts but the moment the word “Sabbathman” popped into my head, much of the structural work was done. Other books have seeded themselves after a conversation overheard in a pub or on a bus. Yet more force themselves on me after the glimpse of a face crossing the road, or the reading of a particular article. This setting fire to the dry kindling of the imagination has always fascinated me and the book which maybe throws most light on the process turned out to Deadlight, number four in the Faraday series.

  It’s Saturday 3rd April, 1982. Twenty four hours earlier, the Argentineans have invaded the Falkland Islands and now, on a grey weekend afternoon, a mate and I are in a dinghy, bobbing around on Portsmouth Harbour, watching a succession of Harrier jets landing onto HMS Hermes. The noise is deafening. Beyond the carrier, on the quayside, we can see a human chain of matelots passing box after box of supplies aboard. Down below, though we don’t know it yet, engineers are desperately trying to sort out problems in the engine room. The Royal Navy, like the nation itself, has been caught on the hop by a bunch of gauchos grabbing what they think is rightfully theirs. In ways that happen all too rarely, this is the stuff of history.

  Two days later, a modest Task Force slips out through the harbour narrows and disappears into the greyness of the mist that shrouds the Solent. Families have gathered on the Round Tower that overlooks the harbour mouth, yet another of the tearful farewells that have marked the start of countless wars. Kids wave Union Jacks, available from the pavement below for a quid each. Wives and mums try to be brave. The atmosphere on this chilly late spring day is sombre. This is not a parade or a carnival or some kind of peacetime exercise. These men, to everyone’s intense surprise, are going to war. For real.

  As a documentary maker with one foot in the Current Affairs camp, I made a film about that weekend which went around the world. Over the coming weeks and months, as the war began in earnest, reports of the casualties, the dead and the maimed, anchored our nightly news magazine. Many of these men came from Portsmouth. Family and neighbours held candlelit vigils. Special services were held at churches across the city. Then, with equal abruptness, the war was over and won.

  In high summer, elements of the Task Force returned to the UK. I was sitting on the wall of the Portsmouth Sailing Club compound when HMS Glamorgan, a County-class missile destroyer, limped back into the harbour. She’d taken an Exocet strike off East Falkland towards the end of the war and for an unforgettable moment the sight of this badly wounded warship stilled the flag-waving and the cheers. The patched-up hole in her hull was clearly visible. Men had died in the flame and chaos that followed the missile hit. In this, the most martial of cities, grown men were moved to tears.

  A decade later, I was commissioned to make a series of films to mark the anniversary of that war. I devoted a couple of months to talking to men and women who’d fought in the campaign, then flew to the Falklands and spent three weeks meeting the Islanders, walking the battlefields, and trying to imagine for myse
lf what it must have been like for both sides. There was a bareness about that landscape that was, to me, the perfect setting for an experience that had taught so many people so much about themselves. The wind blew incessantly. There were no trees. It seemed always boggy under foot. And it was possible to walk all day and never set eyes on another human being. If you were prone to introspection, and you didn’t much fancy the prospect of getting killed, the Falklands in the depths of winter would have been a very bad place to be.

  Later, I returned with a film crew. By now, I’d decided to devote each film to the study of a particular moment during the war. The soundtrack, indeed the films themselves, would belong to the guys who took part. This, in a way, was the novelist’s bid to get inside their heads and their hearts, to explore their memories, to find out how the war had changed them. There would be no commentary.

  The series was called In Time of War. Of the six films that were transmitted, the one that made the most impact – both on me and the viewing public – was about the loss of HMS Coventry. This was a Type 42 destroyer that found itself in the line of fire on 25th May 1982. Deployed as a decoy for marauding Argentinean aircraft in the waters off Falkland Sound, she took three direct hits and sank within twenty minutes. Nineteen men died and many others were badly burned. The survivors, it quickly became apparent, hadn’t just lost their shipmates. The place they called home had also gone.

  Ten years later, the memories of that chill midwinter day in the South Atlantic were still raw. Many of these men lived in Pompey. I devoted a great deal of time trying to win their confidence and when I finally stitched together a composite account of their separate journeys through the conflict I was struck by just how tightly-knit a shipboard community like Coventry’s could be.

  Steaming south, said one of them, was an experience that truly concentrated your mind. Over the preceding months and years you might have taken part in countless exercises but nothing prepared you for the real thing. The day you sat in the mess and watched TV news pictures of HMS Sheffield on fire, was the day you began to wonder what it might be like to die.

  This Type 42, a sister ship to Coventry, was supposed to be immortal. Yet it had taken a single Exocet, launched from 25 miles away, to kill twenty of her crew and knock the ship itself out of the war. Under tow, six days later, she sank. If “Shiny Sheff” was already a gonna, went the buzz, what were the odds on Coventry surviving intact? “The pressures on the guys just grew and grew,” one Chief Petty Officer told me. “The loud ones went quiet. The quiet ones became jokers. None of us had fought a war before. None of us knew what to expect. Stuff like that finds you out. It tells you who you really are.”

  The possibility that research like this might find its way into a Pompey-based crime series didn’t occur to me until the tide of reviews for Angels Passing, generated by the Orion promotional push, began to recede. John Ashworth and I were having a catch-up pint or two. He’d been impressed by the modest splash the latest book had made and was curious to know what I planned next. I said I wasn’t sure. In the end I’d kept Faraday on division for Angels Passing, and I sensed that the time had come for my fictional D/I to transfer to the Major Crime Team. This would suggest his involvement in a murder investigation but beyond that I was looking at a blank canvas.

  We had a couple more beers while John talked about a long-running job that had swallowed months and months of investigative time. At least two men had died at the hands of a psychopath who’d already been tried and found guilty This guy was now banged up on a life sentence but there were suspicions that he’d killed others. The link between the killer and his victims was the Royal Navy, and as the story developed my mind kept tracking back to all the conversations I’d had in the aftermath of the loss of HMS Coventry.

  This was a world quite unlike any other I’d ever encountered, a world of nutty, of blueys, of Chuffs and Puffs and Jack Dusties, of ukkers and buzzes and shite hawks and the Oggie Song. This tight little fraternity of matelots (or “skates” as they were known in Pompey) lived together for months on end. They became very close, especially in wartime, and several of the blokes I’d talked to cheerfully admitted that they probably shared more secrets with some of their shipmates than they did with their own families. This kind of kinship can last a lifetime, and often does, but with it goes an awareness of the kind of bloke who doesn’t fit, the nutter who can make life afloat a misery, or – in John’s case – the psychopath who can target someone young, someone vulnerable, cast a line baited with all kinds of goodies, and slowly reel him in.

  I lived with this germ of an idea for a week or two. For a couple of decades I’d been aware of the lengthening shadow of the Falklands conflict. Wars change people in all kinds of ways and in a city as martial as Portsmouth that matters. Pompey families have long memories, yet another element in the mix that was slowly becoming a book.

  What if I were to invent a Type 21 destroyer called HMS Accolade and send her south to the Falklands with other elements of the Task Force? What if the ship’s crew were to include a scary middle-aged matelot with a fierce temper and few friends? What if this guy openly boasted of getting his way with younger, prettier, more vulnerable members of various ship’s companies? What if the rawness of his appetites, coupled with his incandescent temper, terrified someone younger into compliance? And what if that on-going situation, for the victim, became impossible to live with? This, surely, would turn out to be a war within a war, potentially no less violent, and with consequences potentially no less terminal?

  From the scribe’s point of view I sensed at once that there were real possibilities in this plot. The story that was slowly beginning to emerge belonged body and soul to the city that was already established as a major player in the series as a whole. Pompey was built on blood and treasure. For centuries, generations of young and not-so-young men had been shipping out in search of death or glory. In this sense, the Falklands War campaign was simply the latest episode in a long chain of adventures that had begun with the Mary Rose, straddled Trafalgar and Jutland, and ended – for HMS Accolade – on a cold May morning within sight of Falkland Sound.

  At this stage you need names. The older guy I called Sean Arthur Coughlin. He’d served aboard Accolade during the Falklands War and later joined the Prison Service, bringing exactly the same MO to another community of banged-up males, many of them young and vulnerable. The reader, I’d already decided, would never meet this man alive. The discovery of his dead body anchors the first chapter. This is what he looked like.

  Coughlin was lying on his side on the carpet, his knees drawn up towards his chest, his hands knotted protectively across his groin. He was a big, flabby man, a couple of stones overweight, and there were curls of black body hair across the spread of his belly. The bruising to his rib cage purpled the white flesh and there were more bruises around his thighs and buttocks. A day’s growth of beard darkened his lower face and a thin dribble of vomit had caked across his swollen chin. His eyes were open, gazing sightlessly across the soiled carpet. Even in life, he wouldn’t have been a handsome man.

  Coughlin’s onboard fancy I pictured as 18 year old Matthew Warren. He’s blond, good-looking, and not that bright. His mates will know him as “Bunny”. Coughlin, with different motives, will call him “Fluff”. En route south, Warren will disappear overboard, presumed drowned.

  I now have the bones of the story. En route to the Falklands, twenty years ago, a young matelot disappears overboard. For the Ministry of Defence, this is just another death, regrettable perhaps but quickly overtaken by all the bloodshed yet to come. His family and friends mourn him as one of the fallen. Few real questions are asked and none of those receive a proper answer. Two decades later, will the truth about Bunny Warren finally surface?

  What I need to do next is fill in the background detail that must be rich enough to be credible. What roles will Coughlin and Warren play on board? What will give Coughlin the kind of access
he needs to this callow young sailor? Where would they go when Coughlin fancies a shag? Who else would know – or at least sense – what might be going on? What happens at sea when someone goes missing? And just who plays sheriff aboard a ship like Accolade?

  These are questions, it occurred to me, that will be equally as important to D/I Faraday. Hence my need to get the answers absolutely right.

  At this stage, a major stroke of luck. Browsing the Sunday papers, my eye was caught by a brief review for a book called Through Fire and Water. The author, Mark Higgitt, was a journalist and – like me – he’d been fascinated by the Falklands War. HMS Ardent was a Type 21 that went down in Falkland Sound towards the end of the conflict. Through Fire and Water’s 402 pages must surely offer a comprehensive account of life aboard.

  I got hold of a copy of Mark’s book. It was an excellent read in all kinds of ways and gave me a thorough grip of the geography of a Type 21. This is more important than you might think. If I was plotting a murder, or a chain of events set in – say – a hotel or a country house, then I’d need to be able to visualise all the elements of the building that have a bearing on the plot. Ditto HMS Accolade. I knew already that life aboard any warship is cramped and intimate to the point of claustrophobia. For the back-story to work, there had to be places where Coughlin could have his wicked way. Sadly, Through Fire and Water didn’t extend to a guide to favoured on-board bogging spots but there were references in the text that offered a clue or two. The tiller flat, aft. Some of the on-deck storage areas after dark. Maybe even the tiny helo hanger. I scribbled a few notes but I needed more information. Time to talk to the guys who’d really know.

  From my Coventry documentary, I already had contact details for men who’d served aboard in the Falklands campaign. Coventry, of course, was a Type 42 but these were guys who’d either done time in Type 21s, or who had mates who might be able to help. Some of the Coventry survivors lived in the Pompey area. I started making calls.