‘A dark under-current of intrigue… I was drawn in relentlessly. Simms is at the forefront of new British crime fiction.’
RJ Ellory
DI Jon Spicer’s investigation into the vicious slaying of a Russian asylum-seeker grinds to a halt when the man’s identity turns out to be false. It seems the only truth to his story was the fact he was found drifting off the British coast in a small boat.
Before the man’s true identity can be discovered, more asylum-seekers start to die – each murdered in the same horrific way. By the time Spicer realises what links the men, he knows there’s a trained assassin at large who’s desperate to guard a secret of enormous magnitude. And when he ignores MI5’s warnings to back-off, he also becomes the target of a man whose sole purpose is to kill.
And all the while, a series of heartbreaking and enigmatic messages are being found drifting in from the sea – slowly revealing the appalling plight of a group of refugees trapped on a raft.
Who’d have thought a freight ship losing its cargo of rubber ducks during a storm out in the Atlantic would result in this novel? But that’s the truth – reading about how the flotilla of bath toys was slowly carried by ocean currents to be eventually deposited on the British coast got me thinking.
What if, contained within the ducks, there was a series of notes written by a refugee who’d also been washed from the ship? What if the notes were pieced together and the person’s plight gradually revealed?
So there I had the basis of my story. Other questions quickly followed on. Who was the refugee? Where had the person come from? What was the intended destination?
As the plot took shape, it led me into the controversial area of immigrants and asylum seekers. As luck would have it, Liverpool (an hour’s train journey from Manchester) is home to one of the UK’s two screening centres – Border Agency facilities where every person entering the UK to claim asylum has to report.
The story started taking on a momentum of its own. I certainly had no idea that, in time, I would be writing about MI5 surveillance operations, CIA agents and a fearsome ex-member of Russia’s special forces who is very handy with a garrotte.
And all because those grinning ducks slowly bobbed their way to Britain across thousands of miles of open sea.