Sleepers

AFTERWORD

It’s a standard question when I tell people that I make my living as an author: where do you get your ideas? I’ve never had a problem with finding something interesting for my characters to do. It’s often just a case of opening the newspaper or going to the cinema. The genesis of this book has been a little different, though. More immediate. Closer to home, and, once I started investigating and writing, much more difficult to stop.

I live and work in Salisbury. I had made good progress with my new novel when Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found on a bench in the Maltings, a shopping precinct in the centre of town. It’s a two minute walk from my office to that bench, and, as the story changed from a suspected drug overdose to an attempted assassination that then became an international story, it was something that I simply couldn’t ignore. More recent developments, in which Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were also poisoned (with Sturgess tragically passing away) have added another, more frightening, dimension.

Life has imitated art. I was writing about a defecting spy who comes to the attention of his previous employer, and local events added relevance that would have been hard to credit if they were not true. My research has unfolded around me. I’ve watched the media helicopters hovering over the spire of the beautiful cathedral. I’ve seen forensics tents erected around suspected crime scenes. I’ve observed soldiers in Hazmat suits shutting down a homeless shelter. I’ve spoken to the police officers who have been guarding the cordons. I know the restaurant and pub that the Skripals visited before they became unwell. My daughter was playing in the park that was closed after the two subsequent victims were poisoned. And I live close to the hospital where all the victims were treated. As the story developed, so too did my compulsion to write about it.

If you ask around on the streets you will find plenty of people who don’t believe the official narrative. That’s not surprising. The authorities have revealed very little, for good reason. An official narrative that is so full of holes offers licence for conspiracy theories, and you’ll find no shortage of them if you ask around. It also makes it possible for an author to take the lines of a story that has been sketched out and then to colour in the blanks. Why was Skripal targeted? Who targeted him? Why was an exotic nerve agent used, rather than a more prosaic – but more effective – method? How did Sturgess and Rowley find the poison? Why – if reports are true – did the would be assassins ditch the bottle rather than dispose of it more carefully?

It’s been a challenge to take these starting points and turn them into a work of fiction while also remembering that this is an on-going story, with a human cost to those who have been unfortunate enough to have been affected by it. It has also been an interesting and exciting project, and one that I hope you’ve enjoyed.