Think of the Children (36 page)

I pulled into the lay-by and could feel my heart beating. It’s one of those clichés that everything happens in slow motion but that’s what it felt like. I knew the bank
dropped steeply, before opening out onto a tight row of trees, so anything could have happened if the vehicle had hit those.

As I got out of my car, the first thing I noticed was a woman in a black cocktail dress and short coat walking up the embankment with her heels in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.
Miraculously, the car had spun so perfectly that it was resting parallel to the road in between two trees, having hit neither of them.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked in what was perhaps one of the most obviously stupid questions ever. Her car had just spun off the road at speed and slid down a grass bank. She was hardly
going to be jumping around in delight.

Her eyes were blank and she was blinking really quickly, not entirely aware of what had happened. She told me she had been listening to ‘Robbie’ a bit too loudly and got carried
away. I assumed she meant ‘Williams’, though never clarified it. Perhaps she was really into an audio book being read by Robbie Coltrane? I asked if she was cold (she wasn’t),
then phoned the police while she waited. After I hung up, she turned to me and said she should call her husband.

I remember the conversation exactly:

Her (sounding shaky and slightly panicked): ‘Hi, it’s me. I’ve had an accident in the car …’

Her: ‘No, the car’s fine …’

I was a little shaken myself, more by her than anything else, so it was only later that I realised her husband had asked about the car’s welfare before he had checked hers.

That scene and the way I still see it in slow motion has stayed with me ever since and one morning I woke up with a really clear vision of a car crash which Jessica and Dave witness. The
driver’s identity was always unknown, although, in my first notes, the person in the boot was alive. Much of the rest of the story moved around in my head and through my notes but that first
chapter is almost exactly as I wrote it.

This was an incident where nobody was hurt and no one else stopped. Instead, it was ten minutes of my life while I waited with a bare-footed stranger as the sun started to go down on a
summer’s evening. But that’s where a lot of the purer scenes and ideas I have come from – a few seconds here and a few minutes there: people and life.

As for the book itself, there are a few people who have collectively helped get this into your hands. Firstly, Claire, who helped me with the initial drafts of the first Jessica book,
Locked
In
, what seems like an age ago. Without her, that would have been a lot worse and the rest of the series would likely not exist. Secondly, Imogen who gave me a hand with the ebook exclusive
As If By Magic
(yes, that’s a cheap plug).

The team at Pan Macmillan have been terrific in welcoming me into their family – and not just as that annoying cousin who turns up on Christmas Day getting on everyone’s nerves.
Thanks to Natasha, Jodie and Susan, plus Trisha in particular, for their help, guidance and good humour. I’ve spent years learning the hard way that sarcasm in emails rarely comes across but
somehow none of them have taken anything I’ve written too literally. Well, yet.

Then there are the two women in my life.

My wife, Louise, and I have been together for ten years. We lived in a small flat with noisy neighbours and no money. We scrimped, we saved and we moaned about our jobs and neighbours
(obviously) – but it is our relationship which enabled me to write these books. They have very little in common but, simply put, without Louise, there would be no Jessica.

The ‘other woman’ is my agent, Nicola. She read
Locked In
and approached me at a point where the rest of the publishing industry didn’t know whether to poke me with a
stick, or ignore me completely. Her help, faith, humour, and ability to ignore my complaining has been invaluable. She probably could have just emailed me though, as opposed to literally poking me
with a stick.

Finally, I will thank my mum for forcing me to read as a kid. It’s easy to plonk your annoyingly loud hyperactive son in front of a television to shut him up but it isn’t so simple
to invest time in him. I may have learned to read through Terrance Dicks’s
Doctor Who
books and Stan Lee’s comics but you still need someone to give you them in the first place
– and then plonk you in front of the television and tell you to shut up.

Kerry Wilkinson

Readers’ Questions & Answers

All of the questions below have been submitted by readers either on Jessica Daniel’s Facebook page (http://facebook.com/JessicaDanielBooks) or through my mailing list
(drop me a line at [email protected]). Please be aware there are spoilers for the previous books included below, so read on with caution. I had lots of questions and unfortunately could not
use them all.

Do you agree with everything your characters say and do or is it just for fictional purposes?

It is mainly for fictional purposes although some of the things that really annoy Jessica are things that get on my nerves too. Sometimes characters say or think things utterly
opposite to my views. It’s good trying to think about other people’s opinions, even if you disagree with them.

What is your favourite part of the series?

This is really harsh. It is when Jessica first breaks up so brutally with Adam in the pub in
Vigilante
, telling him to test the swab for her, even though he said it was
that or their relationship. In my first notes, Jessica and Adam started going out but they were never meant to be the couple they became. As I wrote their scenes together – especially the one
in Adam’s kitchen when he told her about how his parents died – they seemed so right for each other. But then I knew I had to break them up. I was devastated writing that but it really
worked for the story and her text message to him gave me my ending too. So much of that grew organically the more I wrote.

Has your style of writing been modelled on anyone else’s?

I read a lot of
Doctor Who
books growing up that were only 100–150 pages and skipped along pretty quickly from set piece to set piece without too much in the way
of description, etc. That said, I don’t really read enough to model myself on anyone. I don’t get time! When I was writing the first two books, I was watching the complete
Lost
set and I was definitely thinking about long- and short-term plotting when planning the books. There are odds and ends littered throughout them that I’ve left myself to come back to if I want
to and I always like writing towards cliff-hangers.

When you start writing a book, do you write a synopsis of the plot and characters, or do you just have a sudden brainstorm of an idea and start writing?

In the early days, it was literally Post-it notes. I had them everywhere. Now, most of my initial notes are handwritten in a notebook. Then I type the book in short form. It is
usually around 5,000 words and very bullet-pointy. Once that is done, I will start writing properly. Things always change because I have better ideas, or the plot evolves as I write. Because I have
that skeleton to work towards, I can usually work pretty quickly.

What gave you the idea to create a character like Jessica Daniel? Her manners, her style, her way of thinking … she is quite peculiar but she is really close to
reality.

Jessica is supposed to be ‘normal’ as I see it. Most people aren’t super-confident and they aren’t brilliant in social situations – but they have a
public face. Jessica is confident to the point of being abrasive at times – but the truth is that she’s filled with self-doubt. I try to show both sides because that’s what we are
all like. It’s too easy to create caricatures, who are either unlucky in everything they do, or ultra-confident – good with the opposite sex, perfect at their jobs, and so on. People
often create either the ideal person they’d like to be, or they pile all of the worst features they can think of into someone. Jessica has good and bad times, she’s liked and disliked.
That doesn’t mean she always does ‘normal’ things – because sometimes she ends up in abnormal situations and she doesn’t always make the sensible decision.

You managed to create a woman who is not just the typical fantasy image. How did you manage to conjure up such a character?

I think a lot of the differences between the sexes are things talked up by media and movies – men are from Mars, women from Venus, etc. But most people care about the same
things. What do my friends and family think of me? Does my boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife love me as much as I love them? People don’t want to be alone – they want a job, a career,
or something that stimulates them and pays them reasonably well. They want to feel safe. They want time off. They want enough money to go out and entertain themselves once in a while. And so on. At
our core, most of us share the same concerns about life. These things aren’t exclusive to either gender but there is a lot of generalisation throughout society that men like X and women like
Y.

Do you always know the end of the story when you start a book?

More or less. Sometimes I don’t know the exact beats of a final showdown. For instance, with
The Woman in Black
, I knew the ‘trick’ and I knew I
wanted to write something to prove Jessica had learned her lesson from
Locked In
. The swimming-pool scene became an idea as I moved further through writing it.
Think of the
Children
was completely different because I had a very vivid picture of the shed in my mind and knew it was going to end there. A lot of it depends on how minutely I have plotted things.
Sometimes I have the final chapter before the first chapter.

How do you come up with the different characters in your books? Are they based upon people in your life?

Not really. There will always be bits and pieces which you absorb through everyday life and end up in the stories. People think Garry is based upon me or someone I know because
he’s a journalist, but he’s really not. That said, I used the double-R spelling because someone I know spells it that way. It was entirely so I could have Jessica make that one joke
around a third of the way through
Locked In
where she says she doesn’t trust anyone who can’t spell his own name properly. Of course, now I’m stuck with it being spelled
that way!

Who was your favourite or most memorable author growing up and why?

As above, I used to collect and read
Doctor Who
paperbacks – so Terrance Dicks. He wrote about eighty to ninety per cent of the books I read as a kid. But I read
plenty of
Marvel
comics too, so Stan Lee has to be in there somewhere. The things they have in common are very strong central characters.

Are there ever any points in the writing process when you decide on a certain point but then later go back and change it thinking it would fit better?

Sometimes this happens during the plotting but I rarely change major things in the course of the actual writing. Often it will be lots of little changes, rather than anything
big.

Is there anything you wish you could have changed about the characters or storylines before they became so popular?

Not really because I thought about this quite a lot before I started. I tried to leave things as open as possible. So there is very little information about Jessica being at
school and in her home town – and not much about earlier boyfriends. I have written hardly anything about what Jessica and Caroline did in south-east Asia. I tried to set up a lot of things I
can come back to if and when I want.

Why are your books based in Manchester and why do you choose the specific locations?

Manchester is a fun place to play. It’s huge and there is so much difference between the affluent areas to the south and west compared to some of the poorest areas in
Western Europe. You just need a lot of ways to describe the rain.

Where do you get the ideas for the stories from for your books?

Often throwaway lines here and there. Much of the premise of
Vigilante
was based on the final line in a newspaper article about people who didn’t have national
insurance numbers. Someone left a review saying it was unrealistic when it was the only true part!

Do you create Jessica first and then build up the story and the plot around her and her colleagues?

Jessica’s story is now plotted a long way ahead, although it wasn’t at first. I could tell you more or less where she will be in book eight. The individual plots of
the books fit around that – but in a natural way. My best idea for a novel is still sitting on my pad because it doesn’t yet suit the direction Jessica’s life is going in. One day
…