Afterword
This book is a fiction, of course, but one which rests on some firmly factual footings.
The life of the undercover police officer is often as remarkable – and as dangerous – as I’ve portrayed it. It’s true, for example, that the undercover training course is the hardest offered by any British police service. True too that the vast majority of applicants fail. Also true that undercover officers receive no huge overtime payments, no vast bonuses to make up for the fact that their old life disappears, that their family ties are severed, almost completely. It’s also not my invention that a legend is for ever: the bad guys don’t go away just because you happen to have completed an assignment. The fear lives on.
As for the technology in this book – all that audio and video bugging, the transmitters and the RF scanners – they’re all real too, and not just real, but very cheap. If you want to buy a voice-activated bugging device that looks like (and is) an ordinary power socket, it’ll set you back about fifty pounds, about eighty bucks. Pens that record, little magnetic gizmos that track cars, RF scanners that find them – you’ll find all these things sold by the bigger online stores, and at prices that are scarily affordable. In this new dawn of surveillance, no one ever knows if they’re safe.
Furthermore, many of the specific incidents in the book were informed by my conversations with former undercover officers or those that managed them. When, for example, Brattenbury decides to ‘arrest’ Fiona as a way of removing her from the enquiry, he was simply doing what countless other police officers have done in real life. When Anna Quintrell makes a long and detailed confession to her cellmate, her mistake is one that countless other criminals have made in the past. Even that final journey to the farmhouse: the way that Henderson eliminated aerial pursuit came straight from an account given to me by a recently serving police officer. If it seems ungenerous of me not to name those people who have helped me – well, they would prefer to remain in the shadows. My thanks to them anyway. This book owes them, big time.
Two last things.
First, the British press has been rightly critical of certain recent undercover operations, which were poorly targeted and slackly managed. But those operations were not typical. Most undercover enquiries are aimed at infiltrating and breaking some deeply unpleasant organizations: criminal gangs who use intimidation and violence as a routine part of their trade. Those gangs need to be destroyed and their senior officers arrested and convicted. The burden of achieving that – and achieving that by lawful means – falls, to a disproportionate extent, on a small group of astonishingly brave officers whose exploits will never, and can never, gain public recognition. We all owe them, however. Our streets are safer because of their commitment and courage.
And second: thank you. Thank you for reading this book to the end. Thank you for sharing Fiona’s journey. Thank you for making it possible for me to do this job that I love. And if you would like to continue watching Fiona’s progress, she and I would both be delighted if you did. You can sign up to my mailing list here, and I’ll ping you an email to let you know when I’ve got a new book coming out. I’ll treat your email address with as much respect as I would my own: I won’t give it to anyone else; I won’t send you a ton of junk; and I’ll make it incredibly easy to unsubscribe should you wish to.
Finally, if you’re curious to know a little about This Thing of Darkness – Fiona’s fourth excursion – well, I won’t say much, but I will say that she has a very tough time at one point, her toughest test so far. And if you happen to have a boat you’re fond of, then may I strongly advise that you keep Miss Griffiths well away from it? She’s a dangerous lady and not to be trusted.
Harry
Oxfordshire, England