“You write very well, you know. You just need to get out of the Middle East. It's doing you no favours. We really, really don't care about it.”

Thus did a prominent (even eminent!) London literary agent advise me. The words hit home hard: I had thought being the only person writing spy thrillers set in this most colourful and conflicted area since Eric Ambler gave us The Levanter would be a good thing, but apparently not.

The 'we' he referred to was the Great British Public - the people UK publishers want to sell books to. I didn't have a firm 'next project' lined up after Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and I was toying with the idea of making a book out of my 'Uncle Pat' joke (Sarah’s Uncle Pat was an inoffensive chap with a smallholding in South Tipperary and I used to tease her about how he was an ex-IRA man sitting on a huge arms cache - and then I thought one day, ‘What if he WAS?’ and so was born A Decent Bomber).

I set about abandoning the Middle East with as much distress and compunction as the average psychopath has for their victims. How was I to know that, in terms of attracting British publishing, the next worst place on earth to set a book after the Middle East was Northern Ireland?

By Birdkill, I'd given up trying to please anyone but myself, and yet the book was to be set in the UK. It is explicitly not located anywhere in particular. I started out with my original short story - probably the first ‘thing’ I ever wrote, which I sent to Sarah back in the late ‘80s when we used to write letters to each to each other (yes, people used to do that). It was, as so much of what I’ve done, based on a dream.

I began to construct a narrative around it. That narrative exploded, pages filling with great rapidity as the dreams that had formed the beginning and end of the book raced to meet each other. Soon enough, Mariam Shadid came calling and simply refused to leave. Great, so now I've got a Lebanese journalist with frizzy hair and a taste for combat trousers and a click-hungry Middle Eastern scandal/gossip website.

The Arab world/Middle East just wouldn’t let me go. The Edgware Road poked its damn oud, shisha and cardamom coffee-scented nose in. The pull continued: Robyn's past was drawn inexorably to Zahlé with its restaurants alongside the rushing little torrent of the Berdawni River and its tiled rooftops scattered across the rolling Beqaa.

And then, if that wasn't all bad enough, the Château Ksara came calling with its beguiling wiles and brilliant wines.

Mary was chatting with Félicie at reception when the Englishman stalked in, an overgrown beanpole of a man, grey-haired with an aristocratic English nose and points of piercing blue under bushy brows. He looked dry and papery, but powerful. The Lebanese have a nose for power, she surmised. Some are attracted to it, seek it; moths to a candle. Others flee it, fearing the trouble and disruption it brings to our precarious lives. She sighed.

‘I would like to speak with Monsieur Delormes as a matter of urgency, please.’ He announced to Félicie who was, and this was her way if you but knew her, unimpressed.

She flicked her hair back and glanced over at Mary with a hint of a roll to her eyes. ‘Would you? Who will I say is calling?’

‘Lawrence Hamilton. It is in regard to his new patient.’

Mary tried not to betray her interest. ‘I can take him there.’ She tried to mask her quickening with a shrug. ‘If you like.’

And quite where Sister Mary, the fag-smoking Lebanese nun, came from I could not even begin to tell you, even if you put the thumb screws on me.

There's not much Lebanon in there, to be honest, but there's a scattering. Enough to let you know that the Middle East ain't giving me up that easily. Which, oddly enough, I found something of a comfort...

So. Here’s the original short story that started it all. I haven’t edited it, so this is raw 1980s me, not the sophisticated gentleman in a smoking jacket pairing a purple Sobranie with his white negroni we find today…

Martin

Ashridge was a welcome contrast from the grey oppression of the city. After only a week living by the forest I had recovered my interest in life and work. The only source of worry in my delight with these freshened circumstances was that Mariam hadn't been able to get away from the city to come up and see me yet.

The city! A memorable misery; three years of making do and being alone amongst millions. Spending my working days in an antiseptic environment, preferable to the dirt, smoke and rush of the morning and evening commute. Even the small bedsit I had managed to find was little comfort as a haven, depressing every sensibility with its Victorian plumbing and Edwardian wallpaper. The ageing shabbiness came with a very modern price tag. London evenings were just a gap to fill between work, food and bed. Even then, late at night, the city intruded. I had grown used to traffic rumbling through my short time of clear reflection before sleep, too used to faces that had no time, no concern for anything other than their own secret miseries.

Now, here, I found light, laughter, sharp air and the heady scents of wet leaves and fresh grass. At night I sat by my own handiwork, a wood fire that filled the living room of the little house with warmth and the hint of pine in its smoke. Before I went to work at the Institute each day, the cold morning light would find me padding with a little thrill across the rough flagstones of the hall with the makings of the fire to prepare for my homecoming.

Scrunched paper, criss-crossed twigs, then a couple of larger cuts laid down ready to take to flame on my return in the chill night. A lifetime away from igniting the Bakelite gas fire that brought warmth to that dingy London flat.

Of course the dog took to his new life immediately, not a moment’s hesitation there as he pounded down the woodland path each day. Even buying a dog had been a trial in London, the pet shop filled with animal screeches and the sight of puppies scrabbling for space in tiny cages forming a background to the spectacle of the owner in her shabby pink dress and painted face.

Her voice rasped with fags and an awful confiding leer in every vowel. ‘You can't keep a big dog like this in a flat, you know.’ She coughed at me. ‘They grow up hellish fast.’

But I wasn’t buying year-old Bill for a flat. I was buying him to move into the great outdoors and now the patter of his claws on the flagstones peppered the silences, barking as he rushed to meet me every evening, Bill The Happy Labrador.

I delighted in the contrast: cold screens and air conditioned clean rooms by day, a red glow and glass of scotch at night. After five days in the country, the hammering in my head receded and my new employer had commented on the brilliance of his find.

This was my first weekend at Ashridge, and I wasted no time in pulling the collar off the coat hook (with the usual attendant barking and skittering) and sallying forth on a long Saturday walk. Bill pulled and my feet scrunched on the wet gravel path, clouds of breath in the bright morning air. Soon we were away from the road, and I let Bill off and stooped as he bounded away chasing ghosts in the undergrowth. The woods took us both in, the dog and I, and we meandered for over an hour together through the pathways, Bill racing in great, curving arcs through the heather, returning to tease me with his big, brown laughing eyes.

I heard the children laughing a long time before I saw the green light of open field through the woodland. Bill was off nosing through the undergrowth again, muddling through the heather and snuffling excitedly at the day-old scent of pheasant. Labradors, I have found, are the world's greatest optimists, becoming so ecstatic at the prospect of game that they rush off making the most awful racket, never seeming to mind that every animal for a mile around has instantly gone to ground.

Making enough noise for six humans, poor old Bill would never catch even the most stupid pheasant. And believe me, pheasants are off the dial stupid. Nevertheless, he was delighted to be pushing through the bracken, and I was happy enough walking the dark leaf mould and listening to the far-off tinkle of children’s laughter.

It must have come a good ten minutes after I had first heard them, the red flash of a tiny figure running past the opening into a field. Bill re-joined me on the path, soil on his muzzle, and leaves on his back. I dropped my cigarette, careful to heel a hole and bury the smoking mottled orange stub in a shallow grave of wet leaves.

I will never know why I didn't just walk straight onto the common. It was the first time I had walked that path, although I had strolled in the vast woodland several times during my short stay in the area. I’d normally have carried on through onto the common, and into the next patch of trees visible past the gentle rise of the otherwise flat grassland. But I stood just inside the shaded boundary of the wood and watched the source of the laughter, six children playing by the other edge of the common, some two hundred yards distant.

Four were boys, about eleven years of age. The two girls were distinguishable only because they had longer hair, all six dressed in jumpers and jeans. They were capering around one of the boys, the smallest, who was standing stock still, and looking towards the top of the trees bordering the third side of the grassland. The girl in the red jumper seemed to be leading the whooping dance around the small, expectant figure in the centre. The boy in the centre, still fixing his gaze on the treetops, reached down, and touched the tip of a small brown pile with his index figure. As he straightened, Bill pushed against my leg and, in my annoyance at the dog for breaking the spell of my voyeurism, I almost missed the boy reach out his arm to the sky. Red jumper faltered, and fell to the grass, screaming. As the dancers stopped, and the girl on the ground kicked, a bird flew to the small boy, perching on his beckoning index finger. Quick as lighting, he grasped the bird with his other hand, and twisted its neck. I heard the faint, high pitched crack. Again he reached upwards, and again a sparrow alighted, only to drop to the pile of dead birds. Red jumper screamed again as a third bird came to its caller and fell to the pile. A fourth. A fifth. The dancers had come close now, and were holding hands as a sixth bird died. Red jumper was silent as the pile grew, she staggered to her feet and joined the dancers but I could see her pallor, even from that distance.

My senses returned and I blundered through the undergrowth towards the group of children to stop this wrongness. Something clamped onto my mind and I slammed against the trunk of a tree, grasping it like a long lost friend. The boy had turned, and stood with his hand stretched out to me.

Doubt and foreboding filled me as his beckoning filled my vision, I looked down to avoid that intense stare. Bile rose in my throat and green stains slashed across my chest from the tree-trunk. My impelled legs were heavy, not mine to command. I fought, my arms clutching at the tree, my body compulsively jerking forward. An age of battling the urge to run to him and be consumed before a girl's scream breaks it all. ‘Martin!’

It sheds like the lifting of stone weights pressing the life from me and the urge to dash to my death, I was certain at that point I was being invited to be another sparrow, evaporated as the boy turned and fled with the others into the far woodland. I slid down the trunk, spent, its roughness scraping my back. I sat in the wet leaves, tears running down my cheeks and bewildered Bill licking at my face.