And smells. By God. The stench of the abattoir. It takes all of my powers to stop myself gagging and vomiting, choking to death on my own sick.
And there are noises. Slight and rustling and occasional. Rats. Nesting. Within the corpses.
My imagination only, I think. My fears surfacing. The light allows me to see, to keep watch, to calm my rising panic.
I do not know what the morning will bring. Josie and the child may have simply gone and left me here. She could disappear, at least for a while, with £10,000 in cash. If so, I am doomed. I cannot free myself. If, over time, the tape and ropes loosened slightly, I would by then be too weak and sickly to break free. Even if I could loosen the tape at my mouth, what could I do?
Call out?
The neighbours coming here?
The police called?
It is possible that, having seen what is in the shelter, and having regained her composure overnight, Josie might simply call the police in the morning. Show them the diary left in my room. Tell them where I was. It would save my life. But I would spend the rest of it locked up in a cell. Would that be better than this? I do not know. It would be a life, of sorts.
But would Josie call the police?
Questions and investigations?
Leon and the missing £10,000 in cash?
Josie and the child could just stay there in the bungalow. They would be safe from Leon. With the bungalow paid for, and bills that could be settled as they went along, £10,000 would go a long way. Josie knows Mrs Todd won’t be coming back to make a claim. Neither will Mr Rennie. Or Adrian. No one will ever come knocking on the door. I think Josie and the child might just do that. Yes, that is what I believe.
So I will remain trussed up in the air-raid shelter.
In the heat and the rain.
With the corpses.
Waiting for the rats to arrive and discover me.
One way or the other, I will die here.
This is the end.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
My first novel, Sweet William, from Contraband, an imprint of Saraband, was published in November 2017. A man, Raymond Orrey, escapes from a psychiatric unit to snatch his son, William, from foster parents and to go on the run to start a new life together in the south of France.
In some ways, this was a simple book to write – its linear narrative going from ‘A’, the psychiatric unit, to, or at least towards, Z’, the south of France. In essence, it’s a manhunt – the age-old story of an innocent man on the run, although I subverted it a little bit by having a flawed and damaged lead character. I told most of the story from inside Orrey’s head – a mix of anger, love and madness – and then aimed to crank up the tension by having him running away with an increasingly sick child with Type 1 diabetes.
With this second book, Mr Todd’s Reckoning, I wanted to write something more ambitious and complex, layered, back and forth, while still retaining the same characteristics as Sweet William – mainly, the story unfolding from inside the mind of the lead character. I also wanted to set the story in one main location, over a short period of time, and with a growing sense of claustrophobia and tension. Most important of all, I wanted to try to present a character who was exactly the same at the start as he was at the end but to change the reader’s perception of him over the course of the book.
The initial idea, of the father and son in a bungalow story, came to me two to three years before I started work on the book. I wrote the first, ‘snip, snip’ scene in the middle of 2015 and then put it aside until I had a plot to go with it.
It’s well-documented that my eldest son, Michael, suffered from depression and anorexia and spent time in hospital and The Priory because of it. I wrote a memoir, Dear Michael, Love Dad, published by Hodder in 2016 and 2017 followed by another memoir, co-authored with Michael, called Out of the Madhouse for Jessica Kingsley Publishers in 2018. Michael’s fit and well and happy now – his turnaround has been remarkable and I am very proud of him – but when he came back to live in the family home in May 2015, things were bleak and it was touch and go for a while.
That first scene – ‘snip, snip, snip’ – was based on Michael preparing his evening meal and me sitting close by. Michael was just minding his own business, getting his tea ready and was oblivious to the fact that I was there, feeling hot and bothered, listening as he snip… snip… snipped… long pause… snip, snip snip… snip… snip, snipped his way through his vegetables.
So I wrote that first scene and thought there was a potential story here – a father and son forced to live together, the son appearing to have some serious issues but supported by a kind and decent father; although things were perhaps not quite as they seemed.
I began thinking about this book after finishing Out of the Madhouse. The idea I had was that the son would drive the father mad with his constant, twitching presence. The father would then kill the son in a sudden rage and spend the rest of the book trying to deal with that on various levels: emotionally, practically etc. That’s how I planned to start and where I intended to go with it.
I always feel slightly deflated when I read about well-known writers plotting a book from start to finish, knowing exactly what will happen when and doing several drafts before they get it all just so. It’s not how I do it. I write the first scene, agonise and tweak it, sit with my head in my hands thinking I can’t do this, write the next scene, agonise and fiddle a bit more and so on. What this means is that my book sort of evolves as it goes along and what seemed like a good idea when thinking about things seems less so when I have begun writing.
I also used to read about successful writers who said their characters kind of ‘took over’ when they wrote and they had to go where the characters went. I always thought that was a load of twaddle. I was wrong. When I started writing creatively, I found that, by getting inside the character’s mind and imagining myself in that setting, the book does sort of write itself in that you think ‘yes, he’d do that’, ‘no, he’d not do that’, ‘that’s how he’d react’ and so on. When I got stuck into this book, everything pretty much fell into place and went where it wanted to go.
As I started writing, the father began as a sort of skewed version of me and the son was a twisted version of Michael. As it progressed, and I got more into it, the characters became completely fictionalised, but lived as real people in my mind and ended up bearing little or no comparison to Michael or me.
I like to see the setting in my head when I write. The bungalow – shabby, rundown etc. – is based on my late mother’s and stepfather’s bungalow in Windmill Lane in Rustington, West Sussex. I should state that it was a nice and clean and well-presented bungalow, but it always seemed so small to me. They moved from a biggish house on the outskirts of London and downsized to the south coast as many do. I was always struck by how cramped the place was whenever we visited. As there were two of them and five of us – Iain, Tracey, Michael, Sophie and Adam – I guess that wasn’t so surprising. But that squashed-in feeling stuck with me.
I moved the bungalow in my mind near to where I live in Suffolk. I wanted it to be anonymous, out of the way, overlooked, neither in Ipswich nor in Felixstowe, where I live. It’s sort of in-between. If you live this way and drive into Ipswich from Felixstowe, I imagined it up by Sainsbury’s at Warren Heath, on the left, as you approach St Augustine’s Church. If anyone working for HMRC lives thereabouts, apologies – it’s just a coincidence. We used to have friends, Wendy and Nick, who lived opposite and, whenever we visited, the road always seemed noisy and it was hard to get your car in and out. So that sort of fitted in well.
The other locations mentioned in the book – the railway line behind the bungalow, the Co-op, the park in Ipswich, the theatre in Felixstowe – they are all real enough but have been slightly re-imagined in my head. The Spa Pavilion is there on Felixstowe seafront, and very nice it is too, but the wooded area where Rennie parked his car would be harder to find nearby; I saw it in my head as being up near the Grove wood
s a mile or two away.
The heatwave! I set the story during a heatwave as it helped to add to that ever-increasing sense of suffocation and tension in the bungalow. Many readers will assume, naturally enough, that I wrote the book in the summer of 2018 when it was blisteringly hot, day after day, week after week. It was, in fact, a coincidence. I actually finished writing at the end of May 2018. I then had a bit of a read and an edit through June and sent it to Saraband on 2 July 2018.
Finally, the names of the characters and the last thing to fall into place – the title of the book. The father was always going to be Malcolm and his son Adrian. The names just suited the characters I saw in my mind so well. As for the title, it started off as Mr Somebody’s Secret – the ‘Somebody’ surname being that of a tax inspector who carried out a random tax investigation on me many years ago. He was a nice guy and it all went well enough but his unusual, and really rather lovely, surname stuck in my head. His surname would have been just perfect but, not unreasonably, it might have been an issue further down the line; especially when doing local publicity.
I then ran through a list of names that occurred to me for various reasons as being potentially suitable – Simkins, Stenning, Halliday, Hyde, Vine, Hunt, Laight, Hurst, Hulton, Joyce and more – before settling on ‘Todd’, an anonymous, short and blunt English name. I then changed Secret to Reckoning because of its dual meaning – the book kind of started with one meaning and then sort of ended, rather neatly, with the other.
Iain
Iain Maitland
www.iainmaitland.net
twitter.com/iainmaitland
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank …
Saraband, for publishing Mr Todd’s Reckoning. You have been wonderful from start to finish.
Sara, I always wanted you to publish this and I’m so glad you did.
Ken, great cover!
Ali, for copy-editing the book so brilliantly. You made it a better book.
Craig – love the blurb.
Barbara and Paul for your quotes and all you lovely bloggers for your reviews.
Tom, an excellent proof-read.
My fab agent Clare, for the literary stuff and for staying calm as I bounced off the walls.
Will at Stillwater Books – and Charlotte, Linda, Alison and Dennis - for the book launches.
Tracey, Michael, Sophie, Adam – my family. No-one will recognise you in Mr Todd’s Reckoning. But you’re all in here - as you are, one way or another, in everything I do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Iain Maitland is the author of Dear Michael, Love Dad (Hodder, 2016), a moving book of letters written to his son, who suffered from depression and anorexia, and co-author (with his son) of Out of the Madhouse: An Insider’s Guide to Managing Depression and Anxiety. Iain is an ambassador for Stem4, the teenage mental health charity, and talks regularly about mental health issues. A writer since 1987, he is a journalist and has written more than 50 books, mainly on business, which have been published around the world. His first novel, Sweet William, a thriller, was published by Saraband, in the Contraband imprint, in 2017.
Also by Iain Maitland:
Sweet William
Out of the Madhouse (with Michael Maitland)
Dear Michael, Love Dad
COPYRIGHT
Contraband is an imprint of Saraband
Published by Saraband
Digital World Centre
1 Lowry Plaza, The Quays
Salford, M50 3UB
www.saraband.net
Copyright © Iain Maitland 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN: 9781912235452
ebook: 9781912235469
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
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This is a work of fiction.
All characters are a product of the author’s imagination.
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