Killing State

Travel Guide

The O’Reilly Guide to London and the North-East

Victoria Park, East End of London

The book opens in Majesty Park, which is based on Victoria Park in Mile End. Honor Jones is running. It’s early and deserted. We’re worried for her, because we know someone has her in his sights and he’s carrying a knife. I used to live in Mile End, London before we moved up to the North-East. The run into the park – under the railway bridge, by the canal, past the graffittied lock – is all based on the path I used to take with my eldest son to get him to nursery and before that when he was a baby, pushing him in his pram and then his buggy.

And when Honor runs into and through the park – the lake, the woodland, the trees and the wooden benches – all come from memories of that time. I’d often sit in the little café by the water, and drink coffee on my own apart from a sleeping baby, and watch the water and the world go by. I’m a catastrophist. I’ve always felt those spaces hold potential dangers for the unwary.

Westminster

Honor is an MP. There’s a scene where she’s thinking about an earlier encounter with a mysterious stranger. She’s wondering whether he was indeed planning to kill her or whether she got it wrong. For this particular scene in Portcullis House, which is where many MPs have their offices, I asked a favour of a Labour MP called Grahame Morris, who represents Easington in County Durham. Portcullis House was built since I worked in the lobby as a political correspondent, so although I’ve been in it a few times, I don’t know it as well as the Palace of Westminster. Grahame was kind enough to take me to its café and when he had to go, his colleague came down to sit with me for a while so that I could drink in the atmosphere as well as the coffee. It’s a simple thing, but it meant I knew the shape of the tables and how they are set out. That there’s a bank of fig trees which reminded me of a Paris park and an “arching glass and ironwork dome.” Honor feels safe as she sits there. Obviously, she isn’t.

Holy Island. Northumberland

When North and Honor go on the run, they drive out of London, up the A1. Honor is looking for her best mate Peggy who works in Newcastle. But North has realised Peggy has a cottage on ‘Hermitage Island’– which is based on Holy Island.  (The reason I change the names is because I want to be able to tweak details. Otherwise, you risk distracting readers who know the actual locations.) In this instance, North and Honor attempt to drive across the causeway from the mainland on to the island, despite the fact the tide has turned and there’s a storm raging. They don’t make it. In reality, the lifeboat regularly has call-outs, because fool-hardy tourists attempt to make it across the causeway and have to take refuge in a small wooden box while they watch the sea wash over their car. It’s flat and the water there not all that deep. I wanted a sense of much greater depth and danger. That the storm seas swallow their car and wash it away to Norway. That they risk drowning and death. If I call it Hermitage Island, I can get all that.

Seahouses

We live in Durham now, but used to live just outside Seahouses in North Northumberland. Michael North and Honor make it off Hermitage Island in a small fishing boat and hide out among the Farne islands where they see “a colony of Atlantic grey seals …fat and comfortable against the foaming water’s edge. Small dark pups nuzzling their parents while braver souls flopped into the shifting, churning water.” Boat trips round the Farnes are part and parcel of life in Northumberland and I’ve done a few in my time. So too, when the boat comes into Seamouth (based on Seahouses) the fictional harbour is based on the real thing. The harbour wall, the huge rusting ring set in the lichened brickwork, the harbour master’s office and the lifeboat. I’ve also written about Seahouses in my two non-fiction books. It’s an inspirational place, set right on the coast with a very strong sense of identity, community and history.

Newcastle Quayside

A big chunk of the book is set in Newcastle – Chinatown, the University, Jesmond-like suburbs. It’s also impossible to write a thriller and not have a seedy bar as a location. North gets lured into a dive complete with pole-dancer, ladies of the night and one of my favourite characters, bar-owner and tough broad, Stella Boland. I wanted a sense of North being enticed through the streets towards the river and Stella’s bar. The riverside features a couple of times in the book – “the shifting River Tyne pockmarked by the reflected lights of the city spread out behind her.” And again, the “slanting view of the arcing Tyne Bridge, the silvering river it crossed, and the steady falling-down rain.” You can’t really write about Newcastle and not mention the Tyne Bridge and with bridges comes the idea of crossing from one state to another, of leaving and of coming home, of leaving and never coming back, the potential of change from good to bad and from bad to good.

Northumberland Moors

North is still looking for Peggy when he sets out across the moorland to find an army camp. There is a hat tip here to Otterburn army camp, though this is Otterton New Army Training Camp and full of bad guys. Scrubby moorland, signs warning of danger and to keep out, yellow-blooming gorse, curlews and the occasional bleat of scattered sheep. I wanted a sense of Northumberland isolation – a bleak and beautiful wilderness where no one can hear you scream.