December 6, 09.28am
Every so often I get to witness a small scene that instantly strikes me as the sort of incident that would provide excellent ballast and background for a crime novel. it might be a snippet of conversation on a bus, the occasional flat out slanging match between partners or lovers or perhaps a lunatic driving manoeuvre on the motorway. By and large, I think, if you keep your eyes open people are doing more than enough fascinating things to keep you interested.
Last night, however, a delicious, intriguing vignette played itself out in front of me in a pub in Shepherd's Market in Mayfair that felt as if it might be the basis for an entire book, never mind an incidental episode.
I met a contact for a couple of beers, a corporate comms guy at a big company, and he spent the first 20 minutes on the phone sorting out some sort of problem, leaving me to find a temporary distraction.
It came in the form of a couple canoodling at a corner table a few yards away from where we stood. There a be-suited man of about 40 was fawning over a woman roughly 10 years his junior who was wearing a very short skirt. Couples snogging in public inside is a relative rarity so they attracted immediate attention, but what really piqued interest among onlookers was the fact that at first the woman did not seem nearly as interested as the man, who had very clearly had a few sherbets. Even my friend on the phone was distracted enough to see.
This may sound somewhat voyeuristic, and I guess it probably was. Everybody in our half of the pub was watching them - even my friend on the phone - as the scene had that same compelling quality that causes people to rubber-neck on the motorway. But what really interested me was that, I suspect, married couples rarely indulge in that sort of behaviour publicly, and so I got to looking for wedding rings, and sure enough my suspicions were confirmed in that the bloke was wearing one and the woman wasn't.
And from there, as my friend concluded his call, I began to construct the scenario of the crime story:
The pub was busy, full of Mayfair suits relaxing after a tough day running their hedge funds and Range Rover blondes preparing for a tough evening at Annabelle's. it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an ideal space for conducting a furtive affair, but the man's drunkenness overcame his natural caution while the woman needed to get past little more than her own embarrassment at such public and provocative displays of affection.
And across the other side of the bar, a young man arrived to order a round of drinks for a vocal group of friends who had just announced their entry into the pub with a burst of laughter and liud braying voices. The man, ordering his drinks, noticed the couple tucked away in the corner of the pub and viewed them with the same interest as everyone else. But because the necking couple's faces were joined at the lips and the back of the woman's head obscured the face of the man, he saw an anonymous couple going at in a pub. Unusual and interssting but no more.
Only when he was loudly told that he had come back from the bar with one pint of Adnam's too few did he see the couple more clearly. And this time he very plainly recognised the man as his bosses' husband...
But that is where the novel ends. It starts with a London detective called to the Chelsea home of a wealthy but anonymous London financier and his less wealthy but somewhat more prominent lawyer wife, where the body of said financier lays dead at the threshold to his townhouse, apparently stabbed to death by an armed robber trying to gain forced access to the riches he believes lie within.
At first sight it appears the man is the latest in a long line of wealthy people attacked on their own doorsteps by opportunist armed burglars attempting to force entry, and Inspector Knacker of the Yard, under pressure from an angry press scaring the life out of its well-heeled readers, begins his investigation working on that assumption...
Not brilliant perhaps. Not even moderate, probably, but perhaps it does show that for all us budding crime writers, there is inspiration everywhere, if only we get the time to look and find it.