I fetched more coffees while Rosie had a think. By the time I got back, she had a smile on her face.
“We often attend conferences, either in our own right or on behalf of our managers,” she explained. “These get-togethers are normally held in London so you spend a day or a couple of days listening to the all the experts telling you about current best practice and then you get on the train and come home again.”
While she was talking, I tried to work out how much it must cost to put on something like this. According to Rosie, each delegate would be paying around £400. Add the bill for travel, plus the cost of delegates’ time, and you’d surely be looking at a sizeable sum. Multiply that sum by – say – 300 delegates, add the organising company’s profit, and you’re probably talking a quarter of a million quid. That’s public money. Some of which must come out of the council tax.
Rosie nodded. Mo Sturrock, we agreed, would feel mightily pissed-off watching all this resource – cash that might have funded foster placements for kids in trouble – being devoted to something that felt infinitely less pressing.
So what if he was standing in for his boss? And what if his boss had been scheduled to give a speech at the conference? Mo would arrive at the rostrum with his boss’s speech. He’d put it carefully aside and go totally off-piste, letting rip at what he really felt. Gross waste of time. Criminal use of public money. Standing ovation. End of career.
It was the perfect solution to my plot quandary but what followed was, in a sense, even better. In real life, said Rosie, Mo would quickly find himself on gardening leave. That could very easily last a year. There’d be murmurings about gross misconduct, and maybe dark rumours about inappropriate contacts with kids. He might be named and shamed in the local rag. Everyone on the island would know about his disgrace. Friends in the check-out queue at Tesco would start turning their backs. Nightmare.
Excellent. I rode back to the mainland with a song in my heart. This book would work. I knew it would.
All that remained before I started writing in earnest was a series of conversations with Terry Lowe at Scientific Services about the mystery of familial DNA. This was a technology I’d picked up through reading an article in one of the Sunday broadsheets and I fancied it might offer a key to the plot’s resolution but try as I might I couldn’t map the exact sequence of events I needed to make this thing work. Terry, bless him, did it for me. He clearly regarded me as special needs when it came to anything remotely scientific and his many e-mails came complete with capital letters, multiple exclamation marks, helpful references to other texts, and instructions for me to sit in the Naughty Corner for not paying proper attention. Years later, I’m still stumped if anyone asks me about familial DNA but thanks to Terry for one tiny moment I think I understood. And that was time enough to write the scene.
By Christmas, the book was done. I sent it off to Simon, who had doubts about the title but little else. “A cracking read”, he wrote. “The focus on the families works amazingly well to the book’s benefit and the central conundrum is a profoundly unsettling one. Indeed, this is a book that asks some questions to which there are no easy answers.”
I was pleased with it, too, but there were a handful of procedural issues about which I was less than certain. At the very beginning of this adventure, way back in 1999, the first policeman I talked to in real depth was a young D/S called Scott Chiltern. We met in an empty pub in Fratton called the Froddington Arms and he wised me up about the steepness of the path ahead. A decade later, on one of my trips to Pompey, I’d bumped into him again. By now he was a Detective Superintendent on the Major Crimes Team, dealing with proper jobs. We talked about an unsolved killed in Otterbourne, a village south of Winchester, about a body in a suitcase, recovered from another village near Basingstoke, about a marital bloodletting (29 stab wounds!) in a kitchen in Petersfield, and finally about a crop of one-punch homicides that had recently plagued Pompey. Before I left we promised to stay in touch.
A couple of months later, I e-mailed him with my queries for what had now become Beyond Reach. I needed to know about the protocols surrounding the interviewing of someone with dementia, about what would happen in real life if a Family Liaison Officer was held hostage by a pack of feral kids, and what would happen if the owner of a Chinese restaurant in Paulsgrove took a hatchet to other kids trying to extort money and killed one of them. In every case, Scott’s response was prompt and detailed. But that wasn’t the point. The guy, I’d realised belatedly, was in Kabul on a training attachment to the Afghani police. This was a world of black-outs, car bombs, and deafening rooftop passes by American attack helicopters. Yet still he found time to ponder my queries, reach for his lap top, and add his own thoughts to the fictional mix. Truly amazing.
Before the book was put to bed, there was one last check. Readers, for some reason, appear to know an awful lot about post-mortem procedures. Maybe it’s the popularity of shows like CSI. I’m not sure. In any event, it pays to cover your authorial arse with details like this and – thanks to John Ashworth – I’d made contact with a pathologist called Debbie Cook.
Debbie is slight, attractive, measured, and has a passion – as any pathologist should – with getting the small print exactly right. She lives in some seclusion with her husband and small daughter on Exmoor and was happy, for our first meeting, to come to our place for lunch. The meal extended through the afternoon. The book that needed Debbie’s expertise on this occasion was No Lovelier Death and she devoted a busy couple of hours imagining herself into Bazza’s garden while she decided exactly what to do with the two bodies beside his pool.
We were having a light fish salad that day, with lashing of white wine, and the quaffing was punctuated with phrases I was only too happy to write down. Debbie lived in a world of digital probes, of vulval swabs, of intradermal bruising and patterned stamping. She described the post-mortem process in detail: how a high-Y incision might make the subsequent dressing of the body difficult; how a removed brain would be left suspended in formalin in a bucket for three weeks in order to firm it up; how important it was to make a layered dissection, looking for deep injuries otherwise easy to miss; how wet drowning filled the lungs with fluid, sending a plume of froth up the windpipe and out through the mouth. Lin was as fascinated as I was and by the end of the meal I like to think we’d all become friends.
Now, aware that I might have cocked one or two things up, I sent her the relevant bits from Beyond Reach. A guy gets run over at around 40mph. He suffers, amongst other injuries, multiple scalp lacerations. The accident itself is never described in real time but inferred in the post-mortem scene that follows.
Debbie’s reply arrived the next day. She had a number of things to say about the injuries, all of them immensely helpful, but her real concern was sartorial. She was worried about the pathologist, a guy I’d invented called Dodman. I’d written that he was “tucking the bottoms of his scrubs into the tops of his wellies” while having a conversation with Steph Callan, the uniformed sergeant on the Road Deaths Investigation Team. This, Debbie pointed out, could never have happened because Dodman would have robed himself in the male changing room. I was right, however, to infer that post-mortem scrubs are always a lousy fit and that I might find room for the fact that the smallest wellie available in most mortuaries is Size 9. Debbie, it turned out, was Size 4.
Details like this, to me at least, are fascinating – not simply because they spice a narrative and make it real but because they tell you a great deal about people like Debbie who have built an entire career on getting it right.
It was at this point that I got a call from Angela McMahon, my publicist at Orion. She’d had an inquiry from John Wilson, one of the anchors on BBC Radio 4’s excellent nightly arts magazine, Front Row. John, it seemed, was a bit of a fan of the books and wanted to do an interview. He happened to be down in Pompey next week for another feature and wondered whether I could spare an hour.
> We met at the offices of the Mary Rose conservation team in Pompey’s Historical Dockyard, where thousands of artifacts from the 16th century shipwreck were stored. While John interviewed one of the project team for another Front Row feature, I browsed shelves of wooden arrows, crude hypodermics, and bone-handled meat knives. Afterwards, hunting for a location that fitted the Pompey I’d tried to put on the page, John settled for the top of the Spinnaker Tower, the big-bellied signature spike that dominates the harbour.
It was an inspired choice. With the machine in record, we moved from window to window while John pushed me to describe Faraday’s Pompey, Winter’s Pompey, and the sprawling empire that Bad Bazza had made his own. I’d never been up here before, and from three hundred feet above the city it was fascinating – to me at least – how tightly these separate fictional worlds interlinked. I talked about the city’s origins in the tiny Camber dock, about the ring of distant fortifications thrown up against successive threats of invasion, about the way Pompey people and Pompey pressures never left me short of material, and when John finished by suggesting that a setting like this was probably unique to Portsmouth, I could only agree. “I owe everything to this city,” I told him. “And you know why? Because it has a spirit like no other place I’ve ever known.”
The interview, as it turned out, did me to end of good. To date I’d been blessed with generous reviews and committed reviewers, but the move into broadcast national radio, and the kind of audience targetted by a show like Front Row, opened the door to a whole new readership. Friends I hadn’t heard from years made an effort to get in touch. I’d been on Front Row. Things must be looking up.
The second draft of Beyond Reach was complete by the middle of January. By now it was 2009. Melissa had been pinging me the occasional update on Tiger Aspect’s progress with the TV adaptations and I was keen to see the results. Melissa sent me both scripts the following week. Looking back, I’m not sure quite what I was expecting. I’d worked in TV for twenty years, long enough to know that adaptation is an imperfect process and that any scribe would be foolish to expect his precious characters to survive exactly the way he’d written them. None the less, it was a shock to get to Scene Seven in the first script and find Joe Faraday screwing his best friend’s wife at her house while that same D/I – Nick Haydon – is in Critical Care fighting for his life after being run over by a bunch of Scouse drug dealers.
I think something in me died at that moment. I’d had lunch with these people. We’d agreed about the importance of character, about what truly drove this series. Hadn’t they read these books? Hadn’t they realised the kind of guy Faraday was? Didn’t they understand what was important in his life? Women, certainly. But his best friend’s wife? When the guy was half-dead?
I read on with little appetite for the rest. The procedural stuff was less than accurate and I began to wonder whether they’d ever put in the right kind of face time with the contacts I’d supplied. By the end, I felt as if my guys – my characters, the men and women who peopled my books and my imagination – had been kidnapped. The scripts left a taste I can only describe as sour.
It probably wasn’t Melissa’s fault. British TV is predatory. It feats on last month’s successes and simply demands more. So Tiger Aspect had taken my plots and my characters, minced them up, fashioned them into tellyburgers, and fed them into the gaping maw of the prime-time machine. Stories that had started out by running counter to the raging tidal stream that was TV crime fiction ended up as flotsam on that same stretch of water. So when the news arrived that Sky had finally said no after a long weeks of deliberation, I muttered a silent prayer of thanks and asked Conrad whether that was the end of it. Regretfully, yes, he pinged back. But never give up.
I didn’t. And here’s why. This is the real Joe Faraday, as Beyond Reach gathers speed. And the real Winter, too.
The moment Faraday opened the front door, Winter knew he was in with a shout. Something on the stove was laced with garlic. Classical music played in the background. Either Faraday was expecting other company or the pair of them would be settling in for a cosy evening.
Winter stepped into the hall, shaking the rain from his jacket. He’d stopped at the offie up the road for a bottle of something decent.
Faraday glanced at the wine. He didn’t seem the least surprised by Winter’s sudden arrival. He had a bottle already open.
‘Côtes-du-Rhône OK?’
‘Love it.’
Faraday led him through to the big lounge and poured a glass of red.
‘Cheers, boss.’ Winter raised the glass in salute. ‘Where’s your lady?’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yep.’
‘Bad?’
‘Yep.’
In the grey evening light from the window, Faraday looked exhausted, thinner, almost ill. Now Winter knew why. Years ago, when he discovered his wife was dying from cancer, he’d come to this very house on some mad pretext. That night, over the best part of a bottle of Scotch, Faraday had done his best to ease the pain. Maybe now was the time to return the favour.
‘You want to talk about it?’
‘Not really.’
‘Might help.’
‘Yeah? You think so?’ Faraday sank onto the sofa, reaching for the remote to lower the volume on the audio stack. Music like this, thought Winter, would turn anyone into a depressive.
‘Mahler.’ Faraday seemed to read his mind. ‘Not to everyone’s taste.’
‘Each to his own, boss. Neil Diamond does it for me.’
‘I bet.’
Winter caught an edge in Faraday’s voice but the expression on his face seemed benign enough. His glass was already empty. Winter wondered whether this was the first bottle.
‘So how’s it going then, boss?’
Faraday eyed him for a moment or two, said nothing. Winter put the question again. These days his only connection with the Job was Jimmy Suttle, though even at the level of gossip the young D/S was reluctant to risk a conversation.
‘It’s crap,’ Faraday said at last. ‘If you really want to know.’
‘Crap how?’
‘Crap everywhere. We live in a swamp of our own making. We’re going backwards. We’re sinking. Maybe this happens with every civilisation. Maybe the Romans got there first. God knows.’
It dawned on Winter that this wasn’t about the Job at all. For reasons he didn’t understand, Faraday appeared to have thrown in the towel.
‘I’m not with you, boss.’ Winter was still on his feet. ‘You’re telling me we’re doomed?’
‘I’m telling you it’s crap.’ Faraday gestured vaguely towards the window. ‘All of it.’
From the kitchen came the smell of burning. Winter got there in time to rescue a pan of onions. The air was blue with smoke. He opened a window and flapped around with a tea towel to get rid of the smell. Then he spotted the open bottle of wine and returned to the lounge. Faraday hadn’t moved. He watched Winter splashing wine into both their glasses.
‘You miss it?’
‘What, boss?
‘The Job?’
‘Never.’
‘I don’t believe you. It was in your bones. I watched you. You could be bloody good when you made the effort. Difficult but bloody effective.’
‘Difficult as in bent?’
‘Difficult as in –’ Faraday frowned ‘– stroppy. Difficult as in devious. You any good with onions? Only we need to start again.’
Winter went back to the kitchen. Faraday had told him where to find the veggie basket. Half a dozen onions nestled amongst a collection of other produce. The new potatoes were still caked with soil. Maybe he grew this stuff himself, Winter thought. Maybe he had an allotment or a veggie patch out in the garden. Another solace. Another refuge.
Winter peeled a couple of onions and then looked for a chop
ping board, unaware that Faraday had joined him. He was standing in the open doorway, leaning against the jamb, staring glassily in. Winter knew he’d been right. Pissed as a rat.
‘Any garlic, boss?’ Winter was looking round the kitchen.
‘Cupboard above the stove.’
Winter reached up. On the back of the cupboard door was a photo of Faraday sharing a hammock with a slender woman in a red bikini. She had a cap of black hair and a generous mouth. She must have taken the photo herself because Winter could see her thin arm stretching towards the camera lens.
‘That’s her?’ Winter stood aside.
‘Yeah.’
‘Name?’
‘Gabrielle.’
‘Lovely.’
‘You’re right. Too lovely.’
‘Impossible, boss. You know something about life? You can never get too much of it. Never. And you’re looking at someone who knows. If it feels good, enjoy it. The rest is bollocks.’
Faraday was still gazing at the photo. He appeared to agree. Winter shut the cupboard door and scraped the wreckage in the saucepan into the waste bin. He hadn’t come here to cook a meal but under the circumstances he was happy to oblige. He’d never seen any man this lost, this vulnerable.
In the absence of further instructions, he sliced the garlic, raided the fridge for a tube of tomato paste, primed the saucepan with a generous splash of olive oil, and started again. There were herbs in a rack beside the cooker. Salt too. A glance into the lounge told him that Faraday had returned to the sofa. The music, thank Christ, had come to an end.
On the window sill behind the sink was an ancient radio. Winter helped himself, retuning to BBC Radio Two. Friday Night Is Music Night. Perfect.
He found a packet of pasta, a tin of tuna, half a dozen eggs. He filled another saucepan with water and turned the gas up high. Then he had second thoughts, adjusting the flame to a low simmer. Food might return Faraday to sobriety. He didn’t want that. Not yet.
Backstory Page 23
