“Yes, that’s her signature.”
“Sorry,” Gemma said. “But there’s some paperwork I need to complete, Mr Todd. Can you confirm how you were related to Julie Todd?”
Barry looked at the note in front of him and its explanation of a person he never knew. “They try and focus your attention on someone who’s not important or only very peripheral, so that you’re not looking at the people who seem unimportant but are actually central to the whole thing. It’s how deception works.” It appeared that PC Worrall was right.
“How are we related?” Barry had to ask himself the question because the answer no longer seemed obvious. Eventually, it came to him.
“By marriage,” he said. And suddenly something his father had said didn’t seem like a joke after all. “Only by marriage.”
Author’s Note
Acts & Monuments is a work of fiction. There is no Monument Housing Association; there is no Barry Todd. The events and characters portrayed are wholly fictional. Any similarity to actual events and/or actual people is purely coincidental and unintended.
However, the legal framework outlined in the novel is based on the actual legal framework in place in England at the time in which the novel is set. The financial and other processes described are a reasonable portrayal of practices that were (or could reasonably be) employed by real organisations at that time. The figures and reporting procedures for fraud are taken from the latest publicly available information at the time of writing.
Buildings described as being owned by Monument Housing Association are fictional composites based on a variety of real buildings. Other buildings mentioned in the text are actual buildings and their descriptions are intended to be historically and architecturally accurate. Similarly, all works of art described herein are real works of art and any historical information related to them is intended to be true. Works of art described as being on display in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery were on display there at the time ascribed to them.
For the avoidance of doubt, at the time of writing, The Edwardian Tea Rooms did indeed contain “examples of great cake”.
@AlanKaneFraser
#ActsAndMonuments
Acknowledgements
There is a myth that persists in the popular imagination, which is that the construction of a book is an essentially solitary process; that a hermitical genius locks themselves in a garret, or similar, and only engages with the world once their meisterwerk is completed. In this conception, all everyone else has to do is wait for the writer to produce their novel and then gasp in astonishment at its brilliance. The writer then retires to their boudoir, whilst teams of people disseminate it uncritically to the reading public.
If this was ever true (which I doubt), it is certainly not true now. Today, the production of a book is a team process in which the writer is supported, steered, cajoled and sometimes simply bossed about by a great many other people whose job it is to see that the novel that the writer has written is the very best that it can be. These people do not get their name on the front cover and so the reader might suppose that they are unimportant. They are not.
And so the last task of the novelist, once the final draft of their novel is completed, is to publicly acknowledge the contribution of others toward the finished work and to thank them for helping to make it better than it would otherwise have been. In my case, this first involves acknowledging the contribution of Paul Harris at Real Success in making sure that there was a finished work at all. Without his encouragement, I wouldn’t even have got to the end of draft one.
But, equally, the task of getting from the virtually unreadable 192,000-word first draft of Acts & Monuments to the somewhat more streamlined final draft has been aided by a number of people who have provided helpful, firm and occasionally downright brutal editorial advice. Firstly, this came from Alison Williams, but there was subsequent substantial input from Haydn Middleton and Doug Johnstone. This wasn’t always easy to hear, but it all helped to tame the unwieldy beast that I started with.
If they did the editorial heavy lifting, the finishing and polishing was provided by an army of volunteer readers without whom any aspiring novelist’s job would be immeasurably harder. So I also want to thank Cerys Howell, Malcolm Clifford, Fiona Bullock, Kay Dashti, Lewis Fraser and particularly Rowena Wilding and Jenny Warbrick, who all provided invaluable feedback at various stages of the book’s development. Some of it I even listened to.
Of course, the plausibility of a book such as this is dependent in large part on getting crucial details right. As someone who has worked in and around the field of social housing for many years, I am well versed in the world that Acts & Monuments inhabits. But the world of police procedures is largely unknown to me, so it was hugely helpful to be able to call on the services of Mark Watkins at crucial points to advise on such issues. Malcolm Clifford also cast a helpfully beady eye over the process by which the fraud is perpetrated.
All of these people have contributed in some way toward improving Acts & Monuments as a novel. Responsibility for its shortcomings, however, remains firmly with me.
Finally, I also want to thank Sharon Fraser, who has stood by my side throughout the whole process and who kept me going at all the points when I thought of giving up – and got me restarted on the couple of occasions when I actually did give up. Living with a writer is a thankless task, which she has borne with good grace, for which I am ever in her debt.
A.K.F.
The Feast of the Annunciation, 2018
Notes
* * *
1Why does it take so long? Just get the bloody details!
2What do you think I’m trying to do? There are rules you know – he won’t just give them to me!
Acts & Monuments Page 30
