Until my investigation into David Kelly I was a novelist,
a writer of crime noir, to be specific. And as a novelist, the worst you could
be was rubbish. To my horror, I realised non-fiction offered a further pitfall:
you could be wrong, and if you were wrong you could hurt people, sometimes
quite badly. Of course sometimes when you were right you could hurt people too,
but the truth will always out eventually, or at least it should.
It was one of the differences that kept me up at night. So
too did the sort of stuff I was uncovering. I remember receiving, through a
tortuous inter-library loan, a rare government document on anthrax. Flipping
through its pages I was amazed at what it contained. Not just proof of
Britain’s links with eighties Iraq’s biological weapons programme, but
incredibly detailed information about anthrax itself. I knew that the
government had made deliberate efforts to wipe this data off the internet, but
it still exists, in the nooks and crannies of academia. I have absolutely no
doubt that if I’d been a Muslim, I would have been picked up by Special Branch
not long after, for possessing information useful to terrorists. As it was, the
knock never came.
In other aspects, writing Dark Actors felt like living in
a crime noir novel. I spent a lot of time bashing phones and chasing leads. There
were rendezvous in hotels and parks. Some people refused to speak to me, some
would only speak to me anonymously, some wouldn’t speak to me at all. Others
would tell me something incredible, hesitate, and then break off contact
permanently. Then there were those who just couldn’t be found in the first
place; they had disappeared, repatriated to unknown countries under new
identities. And not everyone I spoke to told me the truth. Mysteries begat mysteries.
The plot thickened.
As I neared on my subject, glimpsed the person who he was
and the life that he had led, I saw that Kelly too was perhaps a character not
far removed from the pages of crime noir. A dogged loner, noble but flawed,
morally compromised but struggling to do good, used and then ruined by the
sinister forces that would undo him. Life imitating art, as Oscar Wilde once
put it.
Another thing I found was that non-fiction puts you on
the front-line in a way that novels never do. There is too much at stake.
Columnists got political, journalists got turfish, conspiracy theorists accused
me of being an intelligence plant, and my computer got hacked. There is more to
come, I am sure. When all this subsides I will return for another foray into
the world of fiction, I think. I could
put all this hard-won knowledge about WMD and the world of intelligence to good
use there. And to be honest, after all this it would feel like a holiday.
Robert Lewis is the
author of the Robin Llywelyn trilogy of novels: The Last Llanelli Train,
Swansea Terminal and Bank of the Black Sheep.
