I’m lucky enough to know a retired detective, a really good guy who, over the past 10 years, has been incredibly generous with his time and knowledge. He’s the source of basically every accurate detail about police procedure in my books (and none of the inaccurate ones – those are all mine).
I rang him a few years ago to ask him how he would interview a suspect in a specific set of circumstances, and he gave me a quick demonstration, just off the top of his head, using me as the theoretical suspect. It was a revelation. Just like that, like flicking a switch, he transformed from the easy-going, cheerful, friendly guy I’d known for years into the absolute controller of the situation: this concentrated, full-on, unstoppable force, locked on to me like a pit bull. It’s not that he was being aggressive, exactly; just that he was going to get what he was after, and nothing in the world was going to get in his way. Even though he was doing it specifically as a favour to me, it was intimidating as hell. I was only on the phone to him, and I was leaning back in my chair under the sheer momentum of that drive. It was like having a train bearing down on you.
I’d been writing about detectives for years, but I think it was only in that moment that it hit home just how much of their job is about power. It’s a job where one of your most important currencies is your ability to make people do what you want them to, against their will and against their own best interests: make reluctant witnesses talk, make suspects confess, force the story towards the ending you want. That focus is necessary in order for the squad to get the job done, but it’s also dangerous. If you’ve got the wrong detectives setting the tone, it would be very easy for that to turn sour, turn into an environment that’s all about who can impose their chosen roles and narratives on whom.
When I was getting towards the end of The Secret Place – in which the second lead character, Antoinette Conway, wasn’t playing well with the rest of the Murder squad – and I started thinking about a next book, that feeling came back to me. I started thinking about what it would be like to work in a squad of detectives who all had that skill, that other mode instantly accessible – and what would happen if the rest of them started using it against you. What it would be like to have that freight-train force turned on you every day, all day, from all directions, in the place where you were meant to be strongest and most at home; how it might skew your sense of reality and where you stood within it. I started wondering what would happen if Conway pulled a case that looked like a bog-standard lovers’ tiff, right up until that pressure from within her own squad started to escalate – or she believed it did – and she needed to figure out why…
The Trespasser by Tana French is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99
