Backstory

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘I can’t vouch for this, boss, but the woman in the offie swore by it.’

  Winter had appeared at Faraday’s elbow with the Rioja. The other bottle in the kitchen was empty. Faraday was stretched full length on the sofa, his eyes closed.

  ‘You awake, boss?’ Winter gave him a nudge.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fancy a drop more?’

  ‘Silly question.’

  His hand strayed to the carpet, fumbled for the glass. Winter did the honours.

  ‘There’s a DCI called Perry Madison,’ he said. ‘Used to be on Major Crime.’

  ‘Complete arsehole.’

  ‘You’re right. Horrible man.’

  ‘Gets up everyone’s nose. Ego the size of a planet.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’ Faraday’s eyes were open now.

  Winter perched himself on the arm of the sofa. He wanted to keep this casual, matey, matter-of-fact. He also needed Faraday’s total attention.

  ‘He’s shagging Bazza’s daughter,’ he said. ‘Big time.’

  This turned out to be one of a handful of moments across the series when my two protagonists, so different in so many ways, paused for long enough to take stock of each other. In a curious way, this scene enabled me to understand just how much a decade in the Job was changing them both. Winter, to his own alarm, was heading up a cul-de-sac which could only end in disaster while Faraday, with even less room for manoeuvre, was fast becoming a clinical depressive. At this stage in the series, with two books to go, I’d no idea what lay in wait for either character. Which, on reflection, was probably just as well.

  Twelve

  In December 2008, with the first draft of Beyond Reach complete, Lin and I decided to go somewhere different for Christmas. A couple of years earlier, we’d tried out something similar, packing a couple of rucksacks and taking a series of trains across Europe until we fetched up in Istanbul.

  City hopping like this in the depths of winter calls for a savvy choice of pullover but that first journey was unforgettable. Gluwein in the snow beside the towering spires of Cologne Cathedral. Four brilliant days in Vienna, equally snowbound. A wet forty eight hours in Budapest, trying to crack the queues for an onward booking for the next stage in our journey. A bright, freezing morning on Bucharest station where we arrived to find every other child carrying a tiny pre-Xmas lamb. And the final clattering descent through forests of snow-laden Yuletide pine trees to the Golden City on the Bosphorus.

  We got off the train at a deserted Istanbul Central station on Christmas Day, found a caff for a breakfast of lentil soup, sorted a cheap hotel, and then took a ferry in the vague direction of the Black Sea until we found a waterside eatery. In the thin sunshine, we ate fresh sardines and chips, washed down with lashing of Efes beer, while we played backgammon. Best Christmas dinner ever.

  Now, two years later, we wanted to do something similar but this time use Istanbul as a point of departure. We knew that the city’s other main railway station lay on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. From there you could take a train to Iran or Syria. We decided on the Middle East, bought the appropriate visas, and booked a flight to Istanbul.

  The first train into Asia took us to Ankara. We were starving. With three hours before the next train that would take us east again, we tramped into the city and bought bread, tinned fish, cheese, tomatoes, beer and wine. With a compartment to ourselves on the near-empty train, we feasted through the night and woke up on the very edge of Turkey. No one spoke a word of English but we managed a bus, and then found ourselves in a taxi full of cigarette smugglers heading for the Syrian city of Aleppo. By now it was snowing again and Lin was starting to ask the hard questions about my forward research. We’d packed very little extra clothing because I’d believed the Lonely Planet’s fantasy predictions about the weather we could expect. 13 degrees Celsius? Bags of sunshine? Fat chance.

  It was days later, recovering from flu in Damascus, that I noticed the gathering crowds in the street. Lin was much taken by the men in masks and the forest of green flags. There were hundreds of riot police around and I thought I caught the sour whiff of tear gas as the crowd began to chant but in the spirit of Christmas I wasn’t much bothered. Syrian street theatre, I told Lin. Lucky old us.

  That afternoon, with the crowds on the street bigger than ever, the penny began to drop. Something deeply unpleasant had kicked off in the Gaza strip and the locals weren’t at all happy. That evening, we wandered into the huge covered souk in the middle of the city. Street artists had been busy painting various versions of the star of Israel on the paving slabs and most of the locals went out of their way to trample all over them.

  Over the next week, with the Israelis shelling and bombing defenceless civilians in Gaza, it got worse. We were in Jordan by now. Jordan has a huge population of displaced Palestinian refugees from Gaza and the West Bank, and tempers were running high. Aqaba on New Year’s Eve was a very bad place to find yourself if you happened to be white and Anglo-Saxon, and we spent most of the time – with various degrees of success – pretending to be French. Aqaba itself, which I’d somehow imagined to be an irresistible mix of history and palm-fringed beaches, was anything but and in the end we fled south on a ferry which took us down the Red Sea to a scruffy Egyptian port called Nuweiba Beach.

  Nuweiba Beach is on the edge of the Sinai peninsula. The weather, at last, had begun to behave itself. The nights were cold but the temperature was up around 70C by midday. This part of Sinai, which extends north to the border with Israel, is normally full of partying Israelis at this time of year but no Jew with half a brain would risk visiting an Arab country with Gaza reduced to rubble and so we had the place to ourselves.

  We took a cab north from the ferry port and found a waterside hotel about half an hour away. The hotel, like everywhere else, was empty. It was a big development, rather grand, seven stories, umpteen rooms, tennis courts, swimming pools, well-kept gardens. Without guests it looked shut for the winter but the imposing plate glass door opened to my touch and there was a suited member of staff behind the reception desk. When I inquired about a double room he didn’t think there’d be a problem. When I asked the price he said US$350 a night. Lin had noticed grass huts on the beach. How much were they? US$49 dollars.

  “A night?”

  “No,” he was eyeing our rucksacks. “A week.”

  We stayed for six days, sharing the grass hut with a small army of lizards. The beaches in both directions were empty except for a local who exercised his camels every morning in the low slant of sunlight that appeared over the mountains of Saudi Arabia across the water. The swimming was brilliant – warmer than Devon in July – and we found a dusty township a couple of hours along the coast that felt like the perfect film set for a spaghetti western. Dogs sprawled in the dirt. Tatty palm trees stirred in the wind off the sea. An old man dozed in the shade. There was absolutely no one else around.

  We’d buddied up with a Swedish couple, footloose travellers like ourselves, and we found a Korean restaurant within walking distance for nightly helpings of Szechuan curry and Egyptian beer. After the last couple of weeks, it was a kind of idyll, a stolen moment, timeless and unpeopled, but there was a TV in the restaurant and nights when the owners were watching Al Jezeera you couldn’t avoid the latest horror pix coming out of Gaza. The relentless Israeli bombardments. The evident use of white phosphorous. Kids hideously burned by this evil stuff carried shoulder high through the wailing crowds to waiting ambulances. These ambulances, it turned out, drove west to the Egyptian border. The nearest hospital which had the facilities to cope with them was in a city called El Arish. El Arish was just up the road.

  To be this close to a developing war crime was a very sobering experience. As a student I’d spent three long summers in a kibbutz in Northern Israel, not because I was Jewish but because Israeli kibbutzim offered board and lodging in return
for eight hours work a day and was by far the cheapest way of putting a decent distance between you and the UK.

  The kibbutz I happened across was called Shamir. In 1966, when I first arrived, it was three hundred metres from the Syrian border. The following year saw the surrounding Arab nations massing to crush Israel, only to suffer an astonishing reversal in the Six Days War. I was one of tens of thousands of Western kids who volunteered for that war in the belief that it somehow mirrored the cause of Republican Spain in the thirties. The fighting, of course, was over by the time that my mate and I arrived and we spent a very frustrating summer working off our martial fantasies in the apple orchards of the Hula Valley.

  We were, nonetheless, on the very edge of history. The border with Syria had moved dozens of miles east over the brief course of the war and during the long hot afternoons, once our work on the valley floor had finished, Steve and would climb up the rocky heights behind the kibbutz and prowl amongst the shell-blasted barracks and trench works once occupied by the Syrian army. There were minefields everywhere, and it paid to keep to the taped pathways that had been swept by the Israeli engineers. There were rabid dogs up there, too, and an Israeli friend at the kibbutz, freshly returned from service in Sinai, lent us his Uzi submachine gun and a spare magazine in case the dogs had a go at us.

  All this was deeply satisfying. The storm had passed on but there were still faint whiffs of sulphur in the air. Later, the kibbutz was to lend us a truck and a driver and we spent a weekend in Jerusalem, touring parts of the city only recently off-limits to Israelis. The long, increasingly bitter residue of that war was to poison the neighbourhood for decades to come, turning Israel into the pariah of the Middle East. This slow, remorseless drift to the right had created an Israeli that was unrecognisable to the likes of Steve and I, and forty years later it felt odd to be sitting on an empty beach in Sinai, trying to imagine the mind set that could lob shell after shell into the teeming chaos of the Gaza Strip. It was impossible to watch the TV images that were coming out of that undeclared war and not feel the kind of helpless anger that sparks a book.

  I took that anger home. We nailed the ferry back to Aqaba and next morning flew up to Amman. The flight took forty minutes. From 27,000 ft, sitting on the left of the aircraft, you could see the drift of smoke pluming out over the Mediterranean. Beneath that smoke was the Gaza Strip and it was then, or shortly afterwards, that a sentence drifted into my mind on which I was to hang an entire novel. My notebook was tucked into the back of the seat in front of me. Lin lent me her pen. Faraday was asleep… I wrote, …when he went through the windscreen.

  This was one of those rare break-through moments that trigger everything that follows. We had a two-hour wait at Amman for the flight back to Heathrow. By the time we joined the queue for boarding, I had the entire book mapped out. Faraday and Gabrielle would be taking a one-week birding break in Sinai. One night, on the ride back to the hotel, the local driver would lose control on a bend. Faraday, asleep without a safety belt, would be badly injured in the crash that followed. Still unconscious, he’d be rushed to the nearest hospital.

  The hospital would be at El Arish. Over the days that followed, waiting for her partner to regain consciousness, Gabrielle would prowl the neighbouring wards, doing her best to comfort the wounded kids shipped in from nearby Gaza. One girl in particular – I eventually called her Leila – would catch her eye. Leila appeared to have no one left in the world after an Israeli shell killed the rest of her family. As the enormity of this crime became clear, it would fall to Gabrielle to make good at least a little of the damage. By the time Faraday finds himself in convalescence, she’s determined to bring Leila back to the UK for specialist medical attention. And then adopt her.

  Back in Devon, I worked on the rest of the plot. Still on sick leave, Faraday is all too aware that something has changed.

  At the Bargemaster’s House, perched on the edge of the greyness that was Langstone Harbour, Faraday was becoming aware that his life was slowly slipping out of focus. He was beginning to develop an obsession with doors. He needed to close them quietly, deftly, measuring the exact effort that went into the push, savouring the soft kiss as the door seated into the frame. He tip-toed from room to room, longing for the coming of dusk, embracing the gathering darkness like a long-lost friend. On wet nights he cherished the whisper of rain against the French windows, and lay for hours on the sofa, listening to the wind, his mind a total blank.

  One morning, with a jolt of surprise, he realised that he was knotting and unknotting his hands in the most unlikely places (the bathroom, for instance, while he stared uncomprehendingly at the tiny array of waiting toothbrushes). He also started to talk to himself, recognising the low mumble that dogged him from room to room as his own voice. In his more rational moments, he put most of this down to the accident, inevitable aftershocks from Sinai, but what was more unexpected was a growing sense of helplessness, of his mind playing tricks beyond his comprehension.

  As the days and nights went by, he didn’t seem to be able to rid himself of the same thought, the same memory. It came back time and time again: a man on a horse he’d glimpsed briefly, in the middle of the night, from the window of the hotel where he and Gabrielle had been staying in Aqaba, days before the accident. The horse had appeared from nowhere, the clatter of hooves waking him up. He’d gone to the window and watched the man on the horse galloping back and forth across the dusty parking lot, tugging hard on the reins. The man had looked angry. He’d carried a stick, slashing left and right at the empty night air. And then he’d disappeared. The breeze from the Gulf on Faraday’s face had been warm, a kind of balm. But what remained was the sense of bewilderment: why the horse? At that time of night? And what was this man doing there, riding from nowhere to nowhere? So violent? So manic?

  This was bizarre enough, a tug on his wrist from which he couldn’t shake himself free. But then, towards the end of this brief convalescence, he came across notes to himself that he must have left around the house, all of them recent. He couldn’t remember why he’d written them in the first place, nor what function they served, but the fact that they were there, that they existed at all, was frankly weird. They read like the jottings of a stranger passing by, a voice he couldn’t recognise, and as his grip on reality slackened he sensed that he was becoming a spectator at the feast of his own undoing. Stuff was happening – puzzling stuff, troubling stuff – and he hadn’t a clue what to do about it. Should he go back to the doctor and ask for medication, some magic pill that would bring his world back into focus? Or should he drive over to Major Crime, knock on DCI Parsons’ door and plead insanity? He simply didn’t know.

  Then came the morning when he awoke to find blood all over the pillow, Hanif’s blood, still warm from the accident. Propped on one elbow, aghast, he tried to reach for Gabrielle to tell her what had happened but Gabrielle wasn’t there. Worse still, when his gaze returned to the pillow, the blood had gone.

  “Mad”, he whispered to himself, slipping deeper under the duvet.

  The dreams, if dreams they were, got worse. He was back in the hospital in El Arish, trying to explain to an old man with no head that everything would be OK. Then, inexplicably, he was crouched in a hide beside the Dead Sea, his binos steadied on the body of a child. A pair of crows stalked nearby, occasionally pecking at the child’s eyes. Images like these awaited him night after night. And the best part of a bottle of Cotes-du-Rhone simply made them worse.

  Finally, the morning he was due to return to work, his mobile began to ring. He was groggy, exhausted, wiped out by another night with his demons. Gabrielle, he thought at once.

  “Boss? Is that you?” It was D/S Jimmy Suttle. Something horrible had kicked off on the Isle of Wight.

  That something horrible turns out to be a fire that has destroyed an old farmhouse. The farmhouse belongs to a mate of Bazza Mackenzie’s, a hopeless drunk called Johnny Holman. This was the name
of the successful bidder in an auction after a Lord Mayor’s dinner inn Exeter I’d attended some months back. The prize was to be a star role in my next book, though whether the real Johnny Holman knew what he was letting himself in for I rather doubt. In any event, firemen combing through the smouldering remains of Monkswell Farm find four bodies. Thus the call from D/S Jimmy Suttle.

  Sending Faraday to the Isle of Wight was, in the end, to prove a kind of death sentence though at this point in time I didn’t know it. More importantly, I needed to bind one theme – the gathering threat to Faraday’s sanity – to the other – the equally gathering threat to the remains of Bazza Mackenzie’s business empire. The latter mattered greatly, not least because Winter’s very survival was also at stake.

  I made some phone calls. One of them went to Andy Harrington. He confirmed that Pompey street prices for the laughing powder were plunging. Eight quid would now buy you a wrap, enough for four lines. The purity was shit (less than 40%), yet another sign that the bottom was falling out of the cocaine market. A second call to an accountant friend suggested that Bazza could be in even deeper trouble. Property prices were continuing to implode across Europe and the consumer bubble, inflated by years of easy credit, had well and truly burst as the banking system went belly up. So if you’d put your eagerly-washed moolah into bricks and mortar, or anything on the High Street, then you were probably staring disaster in the face.

  This was bad news for Bazza, but good news for me. What if Pompey’s canny businessman had salted away a stash of 95% Peruvian flake against exactly this kind of train crash? What if he’d physically lodged the taped-up blocks of cocaine with his old mate Johnny Holman, paying him to babysit the toot at his farm on the Isle of Wight? And what if that self-same stash had disappeared in the aftermath of the fire? Two million quid’s worth? Gone?