William Shaw on the Cost of Borders

Since Donald Trump, have you noticed how we’re all suddenly anxious as we queue up to pass through immigration the US? We’re looking at the guy behind the counter, the one with the Tom Selleck moustache and the lack of smiles, and thinking about the power he holds over us right now.

And if you’re a white European male like me you’re feeling pretty stupid about that, because you know that you’re the one who passes through borders easily.

As we enter another age of massive population shifts, borders harden.

Any prohibition brings crime. We know that. Ever since the Americans brought in the 18th Amendment in 1920, creating a sound business model for organised crime by banning the legal sale of alcoholic beverages, we’ve known that. Without the 18th Amendment we wouldn’t have had American hardboiled crime fiction of the 1920s, which thrived in a world full of guns and moonshine.

So these, again, are glory days for the crime writer. Organised crime and the misery it causes are back in the saddle. Salt Lane is by no means the only book that tackles migration – crime writers better than me have been picking into the dark morality of the subject for years because that’s what the genre does so well. But I hope that Salt Lane, which is the first in a new series set in Dungeness and Romney Marsh featuring DC Alex Cupidi, is a book about the real cost of those borders.

I’m not saying that everybody who voted to harden our borders is wrong. If you have borders, you have to make decisions about what sort of people we want to allow through them. But Salt Lane is, I hope, a story that makes us look at the consequences of the decisions we’ve made.

Because strengthening the legal restrictions around our borders doesn’t necessarily stop the flow of people coming illegally. It just turns the people that do into non-people. And non-people are on the one hand, easy to exploit, and on the other, desperate. And they exist in a miserable world.

Just one tiny sad example among thousands that are out there: When I was researching Salt Lane, a woman from a charity that supports legal migrant workers, who themselves can have a pretty raw deal, told me the story of a woman she’d been trying to help.

The woman was from a poor rural area of Poland, probably not that bright. She had come here to work on farms. Her life was tough. The wages were low. Because she wasn’t bright, didn’t speak English, she was young and did as she was told. An easy mark.

A fixer had set her up with a date. A young man, probably North African. She had fallen for him; they slept together, she became pregnant.

What she didn’t know was that effectively she had been sold to this man by the fixer. All the man was interested in was her having his baby; his name on the birth certificate. The moment the baby was born, he vanished, leaving the mother alone and terrified in a country where she didn’t even speak the language.

He had what he wanted. For a few thousand pounds he had paid for a woman to have sex with him, plus a piece of paper that would make it almost impossible for the Border Agency to be able to remove him to whichever country he wished to escape from.

It’s not the main story in Salt Lane, but you’ll find it tucked away there. Because these days there’s no shortage of material.

Salt Lane
by William Shaw
published 3rd May 2018  Hbk £16.99 Riverrun

No-one knew their names, the bodies found in the water. There are people here, in plain sight, that no-one ever notices at all.  DS Alexandra Cupidi has done it again. She should have learnt to keep her big mouth shut, after the scandal that sent her packing - resentful teenager in tow - from the London Met to the lonely Kent coastline. Even murder looks different in this landscape of fens, ditches and stark beaches, shadowed by the towers of Dungeness power station. Murder looks a lot less pretty. The man drowned in the slurry pit had been herded there like an animal. He was North African, like many of the fruit pickers that work the fields. The more Cupidi discovers, the more she wants to ask - but these people are suspicious of questions.  It will take an understanding of this strange place - its old ways and new crimes - to uncover the dark conspiracy behind the murder. Cupidi is not afraid to travel that road. But she should be. She should, by now, have learnt.

       
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Syd Moore - Keeping it Real - Why I Write About Real Events

The historical mystery in my latest book, Strange Fascination, had been fluttering on the edges of my imagination, attracting my glances periodically, since I was first alerted to it by a friend. He’s a photographer and seven years ago was commissioned to document a cute little Essex pub. When he had arrived he noticed a lump of rock situated rather strangely at the entrance to the carpark. It was in such an odd position that when he finished his work he commented on it to the owner. To his surprise the landlord informed him that, yes it was a pain but unfortunately it couldn’t be moved. When asked why, my friend was told rather casually, it was the ‘Witches Stone’ and had been there for centuries to stop the witch underneath rising from her grave. That’s right – this was just seven years ago. As you can imagine, my curiosity was well and truly piqued and, when I had cleared my desk of other tales, I began to research.  As my studies got underway I uncovered a true story of murder, mayhem and magic.  Gradually I peeled back layers of legend and lore to 1621 where I learned of the sad tale of Anne Hewghes. She, like the majority of accused witches in Essex, was a poor woman and a widow who lived in the village of Great Leighs. In 1621 she was accused of ‘bewitching to death’ a pied cow, the ‘goods and chattels’ of Richard Edwardes and murdering John Archer through sorcery. Her neighbours threw in a couple of other grumbles for good measure, so that over time Anne’s story became a legend that told of a powerful and evil old witch who brazenly slayed a fine upright citizen and who was consequently burnt at the stake on the crossroads of Scrapfaggot Green. Not only that, the villagers decided once her body had been obliterated her ashes should be buried under the site of her execution and a great boulder moved over the top to ensure she could not take revenge. Hence the reason why the carpark rock could never be moved.

It was a fascinating story, which took a further twist when I discovered that it had been the source of much concern to none other than the US military as late as 1944. Commandeering the pub for their use during the Second World War, the army found that they could not get their military vehicles into the carpark: they were big and the entrance was small. In their way, you see, was a large stone boulder with a ridiculous local legend attached to it. Having no truck with the concerns raised by the locals they commissioned a bulldozer to remove it. The desecration however soon began to wreak havoc: church bells rang of their own accord; livestock keeled over and died; geese disappeared, and a dark and lonely phantom was seen walking the village at night.

And, it wouldn’t stop.

The haunting became so notorious that it was featured in several national newspapers, alongside news about the war. The publicity, however, did nothing to halt the slew of strange phenomena engulfing the village. In their desperation the military called in well-known ghost hunter, Harry Price, of Borley Rectory fame. His conclusions were utterly compelling, and I could not resist exploring them in Strange Fascination. So in my latest book, I’ve located the boulder in the carpark of a pub in Adder’s Fork, home to the Witch Museum. Instead of the military driving into town the story, set today, sees greedy developers arrive in the village. They intend to build a brace of new executive homes, but guess what? There’s a large boulder in their way. Obviously, they decide to move it – I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

The history that lies under every inch of our country, its real people and real crimes, also keep me focussed on structure, especially beginnings and ends. But more than that this aspect enables me to reclaim the stories of some of those lonely unheard voices, the owners of which have long since slipped through the fingers of history. One thing that’s for certain is that Essex, with the highest number of indictments for witchcraft than any other English county, will be keeping the Witch Museum stocked with stories for many years to come.   

STRANGE FASCINATION by Syd Moore is out now from Point Blank, an imprint of Oneworld, paperback £8.99.

 It's summer in Adders Fork. The sun is out, the sky is blue and things are going swimmingly for Rosie Strange, thank you very much. The Essex Witch Museum has been relaunched with a new Ursula Cadence wing and picnic grounds.  Then developers roll into the sleepy village to widen the road. When the centuries-old Blackly Be boulder, said to mark the grave of a notorious witch but now in the car park of the Seven Stars, is moved, all hell breaks out. Within hours a slew of peculiar phenomena descends and, when a severed head is discovered atop the boulder, the locals can take no more and storm the Museum to demand someone take action.  Can Rosie and Sam unravel the mystery? And what of the ancient treasure that could drastically change someone's fortunes and offer a motive for murder?

Escape and Evasion by Chris Wakling

I used to work for a city law firm.  Our clients included investment banks.  One of the cases

I worked on required me, as the most junior lawyer on the team, to go through a room full of documents in search of a smoking gun we hoped we’d never find, and didn’t. 

So far so dull. 

But the documents included the work diaries of the bankers who had negotiated the sour deal at the centre of the case, and one of those bankers had unfathomably decided to combine his working record of meetings and phone calls with details of his, er, more personal life. 

Not just dental appointments and holiday plans: this chap carefully made a note of any motivational aphorism that struck him as meaningful (‘success means success on all levels!’), alongside two faintly pencilled strings of numbers.  One string, recorded on the first day of each month, ran something like 6.2, 6.3, 5.9.  The other, recorded every Sunday, was a lower number, mostly zeros in fact: 1, 0, 2!, 0, 0, 1, 0.

What did these gnomic numbers signify?

Millions, siphoned into offshore accounts?  Thousands paid to buy off potential witnesses?

I had to ask the guy.  As in I had to: if I didn’t, the other side surely would.  It was my job.

It turned out that the bigger numbers referred to his cholesterol level.  He held my eye as he told me this.  When I asked him about the Sunday numbers he looked out of the window at a pigeon pecking on the flat roof and his neck flushed.  ‘That’s how many times my wife and I, you know, that week.’

I also focussed on the pigeon before making a note of his response.

How did this inspire the book?

It didn’t, not on it’s own at least.  It just cemented something I already knew, because it’s obvious: bankers, for all the masters-of-the-universe nonsense, are comically flawed humans, like the rest of us. 

When the financial crisis blew up ten years ago, the idea of bankers as greedy materialists fleecing the country at once underlined their fallibility – they got everything wrong – and made them, as cartoon villains, more remote.  At first I thought I’d bring a comically flawed, evil banker to life.  But although a deserving target, it seemed an easy one.  Perhaps because of that, I found myself wondering what might prompt a desperate financier to have a change of heart?

Then I read Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household.  It’s a great adventure story about a big game hunter who wants to bag the biggest game of all: a dictator (unnamed, but basically Hitler).  He’s caught while trying, gets away, and ends up on the run, chased by both the British authorities (who cannot sanction an assassination attempt) and the unnamed dictator’s secret police. 

The novel is full of wonderful nature writing, plus Ray-Mears-style survival tactics, deployed by its super-skilled hero.  What if my running banker also attempted to go to ground in the countryside, but more realistically, for which read a whole lot less competently. 

As seems to happen for me with ideas for novels, these questions, together with other notebook preoccupations, collided in slow motion over a number of months, years even, until I found myself pulling the trigger, or writing the first sentence.  And of course the book I eventually ended up with veered off in its own directions as I wrote it.   But it did start out with a pigeon pecking on a banker’s rooftop, and an incompetent outdoorsman making do in a hole in the woods.

Escape and Evasion by Chris Wakling
Published May 3rd 2018 Faber & Faber. Pbk £7.99

City banker Joseph Ashcroft has stolen GBP1.34 billion from his own bank. He has given it - untraceably - to impoverished strangers worldwide, and has fled. Why has he done this? And will he get away with it? Joseph knows that if he leaves the country, he will easily be tracked down. So he opts for hiding close by - first in the city, then in the woods near the home of his estranged family. An ex-soldier, he's adept at the art of camouflage. On Joseph's trail is Ben Lancaster, the bank's head of security and, as it happens, a former army friend with whom he shares a violent, guilt-ridden past. The hunt is on. Escape and Evasion is a tragicomic tale of buried secrets, the lengths a man will go to win back those he loves, and the fallout from a monumental change of heart.