The Pact by Sharon Bolton - Reviewed by Gwent Moffat

  

THE PACT, Sharon Bolton

Trapeze.  Hbk £14.99. Publ. May 27, 2021

Waiting for exam results which will secure them places at favoured universities six friends while away the long summer nights beside the pool of Talitha’s indulgent parents. All six are ensured success, and in more than exam results; five are from privileged backgrounds, and if Megan is a scholarship girl she balances the scales with brains and drive, even status. She is head of their elite Oxford school.

So where are the challenges when suddenly there is nothing to do and the future is guaranteed: gilded but – dull? On the cusp of ennui they have invented a game which five have played already. They emerged unscathed but shocked and frightened and gloriously exhilarated. It’s a dare: to drive the wrong way down the M40. It’s Russian roulette – and now Dan, the quiet one, is cajoled and bullied into taking his turn.

Of course it goes wrong. Again the friends escape physically undamaged but they have forced another car to take avoiding action and crash and while they argue whether they should try to rescue the screaming occupants it catches fire and explodes and they flee, leaving two children and their mother to die. 

An image of their car’s registration plate is caught on camera. They panic and while they wait for the police to find them they concoct crazy alibis against a rolling background of exam results – which are as they’d anticipated except  that Megan has failed across the board. But the immediate concern is their dread of murder charges and they are close to hysteria when Megan comes up with a solution. She will confess to driving the car even in the face of life imprisonment. In return the others must sign a document committing each to grant her some unspecified service when she has served her term.

Eventually the others agree to sign; they have all their lives ahead of them, but Megan is only a scholarship girl and she fluffed her finals. Besides, she volunteered. They assure her they will keep in touch. 

Twenty years later those on the outside have, individually and predictably, achieved success. Amber is a junior minister in the cabinet, Xavier a banker, Felix a millionaire industrialist, Talitha a lawyer. Only Dan (who had been driving the car) is unmarried. He has joined a religious order but he too has climbed the ladder and is master of their old school. And now, having served extra time for bad behaviour, Megan is released and comes back to remind them of the pact.

The book proper begins. So far, in the first few pages, there was a group of careless adolescents who played a silly game to produce horror that has haunted them ever since.  Reactions have run the gamut as they tried to repress guilt by means of new lives with intense professional involvement bolstered by easy living and comfortable domesticity. Whereas in prison Megan has had to contend with violence, failing health and isolation. No one visited. No one wrote. But she has the whip hand; she holds the signed document and photographs dating from the night of the fatal crash, evidence that proves all six people were responsible, not one: the ultimate blackmail weapon. She has nothing to lose, she has served her time.

The situation has been artfully contrived. With every participant possessing hostages to fortune, there are heart-breaking dilemmas to be resolved, lines to be crossed. If murder was done on the motorway nothing short of murder can balance the books. But who and whom and how? All six were guilty: five passengers in the car were accessories even if only one was at the wheel, but how is it going to work out?

A remarkable novel: part puzzle, part morality play. Despite the bizarre premise of that outrageous dare, perhaps because of it, this one is a page-turner.

Sharon Bolton (previously S. J. Bolton) is the critically acclaimed author of some of the most bone-chilling crime books ever written. She has been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Crime Novel of the Year and the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. In 2014 she won the CWA Dagger in the Library for her whole body of work. 

Gwen Moffat is a British mountaineer and writer, whose novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. 

Creating Character: Clementine Starke

I always wanted Clementine Starke to be rather unconventional as a character but it took me a number of drafts of the book before I finally figured her out. From the start, I’d had the idea of a reclusive young woman, damaged by an incident in her past that still haunted her, but trying to make her way back into the real world through connecting with people on social media who shared her interest in true crime. The tricky part was getting the balance right.

When the book begins, due to the incident in her past, Clementine doesn’t feel emotion. She’s not a sociopath or psychopath in the traditional sense – she was able to feel emotion as a child – but trauma from an incident left her with a prevailing feeling of ‘nothingness’. In the first draft of the book I didn’t know what exactly had caused this. I’m not a writer who plots the story out in advance – preferring to ‘pants’ it, writing by the ‘seat of my pants’. This made writing Clementine tough. The storyline of her teaming up with the true crime addicts who she met online in the forum of website True Crime London flowed easy enough, but her inner thoughts and deepest motivations evaded me. It was a frustrating time.

In my mind she was a determined female lead, a strong woman, refusing to be kept down by her traumatic past. But I couldn’t write her like a typical action heroine, because although she was the driving force of the story she was also reclusive and doubting. Her behaviour was less predictable, her decisions more erratic. Yet, she wasn’t like Amy, the psychopathic lead character in Gillian Flynn’s amazing thriller Gone Girl. Clementine wasn’t born without empathy; she was made that way by the incident. It always came back to the incident. And yet even at the end of the first draft I still didn’t know what had happened.

I got feedback on the book, and set about improving it in the second draft. I rewrote my detective, Dominic Bell’s, side of the story relatively quickly. I felt it was taking shape. But Clementine’s voice, and her inner world, still eluded me. I wanted her to be strong but vulnerable, make bad choices that put others in danger but somehow still likable, and I wanted her to feel emotionful, even when she couldn’t feel and understand the emotions herself. I needed to know what happened in her backstory. I had to know more about the incident.

In the end, the key to Clementine’s character – the motivation that drives everything in her life – and her own voice, came to me in the middle of the night. It woke me up. But it wasn’t divine intervention or ‘the muse’ or anything mystical that helped me, it was Gillian Flynn. Not actual Gillian Flynn in person, obviously, but something she’d said in an interview. Earlier that day I’d been watching a youtube video of her The National Writers Series appearance, speaking about her writing process and creating characters. It’s a great talk – I recommend you check it out – and I’m pretty sure that’s what kicked my subconscious into overdrive to figure out what the hell I was going to do with the Clementine.

I woke up with the opening paragraph to Clementine’s chapter in my head, and a sudden realisation of what the incident was, so I groped for my notebook (always on the floor by my bed) and scribbled down the lines that are still the opening lines in chapter one:

They say I was dead for three thousand and six seconds. They say that when I woke I was different, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that my world became a different place once every one of those precious seconds had expired.

Then I got up, took my notebook with me, made myself a mug of coffee and sat down at my desk. I spent the rest of the night writing Clementine Starke.

My Little Eye by Stephanie Marland published by Trapeze Books

Can a group of true crime addicts take on the police to catch a serial killer?

KISS THE GIRLS… A young woman is found dead in her bedroom surrounded by rose petals - the latest victim of 'The Lover'. Struggling under the weight of an internal investigation, DI Dominic Bell is no closer to discovering the identity of the killer and time is running out.  AND MAKE THEM DIE...  As the murders escalate, Clementine Starke joins an online true crime group determined to take justice in their own hands - to catch the killer before the police. Hiding a dark secret, she takes greater risks to find new evidence and infiltrate the group.  As Starke and Bell get closer to cracking the case neither of them realise they're being watched. The killer is closer to them than they think, and he has his next victim - Clementine - firmly in his sights.