Hunting for the Truth - Robert Lewis

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.