Writing

Who polices the powerful?

Twisting Fates is out now. It's a Glasgow crime novel about a murder investigation that goes quietly wrong - not through a conspiracy, just through a lot of reasonable people finding reasons not to push.

While I was writing, the bit I got interested in was a different problem: what happens when the suspect is somebody important.

Not necessarily a politician. Just somebody with lawyers, an institution behind them, and people whose careers quietly depend on the thing going away.

The answer turned out to be far stranger than anything I'd invented.

There are units for these sorts of enquiries. The Met runs a Special Enquiry Team for public office and Parliament - over 170 offences since 2013. The Serious Fraud Office handles the City. Various squads have handled the press and the entertainment industry.

And the record, once you start reading it, is all over the place.

Politics first, briefly, because it's the bit everyone knows. In 2006 the Met investigated whether seats in the House of Lords had been sold for party funding. Blair's chief fundraiser was arrested twice, Blair became the first sitting Prime Minister interviewed in a criminal inquiry since Lloyd George, and sixteen months later nobody was charged with anything.

The expenses scandal went the other way - six parliamentarians jailed, Labour MPs and Tory peers both, one of them over about £14,000.

And Partygate ended with 126 fines issued over gatherings in Downing Street, including one to the Prime Minister, and no explanation of how the police decided who got one.

The press is a more interesting example, partly because it went on so long. The phone hacking investigation began with the discovery that a newspaper had been listening to the voicemails of murder victims, and grew to take in celebrities, politicians, sports figures and ordinary people who'd had the bad luck to end up in the news.

It killed a 168-year-old paper. Dozens of journalists were arrested. Actors Sienna Miller and Jude Law gave evidence. The main trial ran nearly eight months, one of the longest and most expensive in British legal history, and ended with the editor convicted of conspiring to intercept communications while his co-defendant - by then the considerably more senior figure - was acquitted on every charge.

Same trial. Same evidence.

A Prime Minister had to apologise for having employed the man who went to prison.

Then the City. The Serious Fraud Office spent years on interest rate rigging after the financial crisis and convicted nine bankers. Tom Hayes, a former UBS and Citigroup trader, was the first person in the world jailed for it - fourteen years, cut to eleven on appeal, five and a half actually served. He lost three appeals.

Then last July the Supreme Court quashed his conviction and another trader's, unanimously, because the juries had been misdirected and the trials weren't fair. The SFO declined to seek a retrial. This January five more traders had their convictions sent back to the courts. Hayes has said it destroyed his family and cost him most of his son's childhood.

And then there's the version where nobody is ever charged and the damage happens anyway. Cliff Richard was never arrested and never charged, but in 2014 the BBC put a helicopter over his house to film South Yorkshire Police searching it. Prosecutors confirmed two years later there would be no charges. He sued, won, and the judge ruled that a suspect has a reasonable expectation of privacy during an investigation - the force paid him £400,000 and apologised, the BBC £210,000.

Paul Gambaccini spent a year on police bail before the case against him was dropped.

And Operation Midland ran for eighteen months on the word of a single man, with a senior detective publicly calling his account credible and true, before collapsing without a single arrest at a cost of £2.5m. The accuser is now serving eighteen years for lying. One of the men whose home was searched died before he was cleared. Another lost his house and his job.

Look at it all together and it isn't a system tilted towards powerful people, or against them. It's a system that gives wildly different answers to similar questions and often can't tell you why.

Sometimes somebody walks. Sometimes somebody serves five and a half years for something a court decides, a decade on, was never properly tried.

Sometimes nobody is charged with anything and a life gets taken apart regardless.

Which is roughly where the novel lives.

Twisting Fates is fiction.

But fiction gets to ask the thing the paperwork can't, which is what it actually feels like to be the one detective in the room who thinks the agreed answer is wrong.

Why "Twisting Fates"?

People have asked where the title comes from, and the honest answer is that it started as a piece of jargon.

Before I wrote fiction I worked in biology, and "fate" there is a technical term. A cell's fate is what it is destined to become - a liver cell, a neuron, a length of muscle. For most of the twentieth century that destiny was understood to be one-way. Once a cell had committed, that was that.

Then, in 2006, Shinya Yamanaka showed it wasn't. An ordinary skin cell could be wound back to a state where it could become almost anything else. Fate, it turned out, could be rewritten. The work won a Nobel Prize six years later and it underpins a great deal of what stem cell laboratories do now, including the work that gets Professor Robert Arnold killed in the first chapter of this book.

That was the starting point. But it isn't really what the book is about.

What interested me was the second meaning.

Institutions redirect fates too, and they do it with much less fanfare.

A case can be steered.

A verdict can be arranged.

A career can be quietly finished by someone who never raises their voice and never appears in the paperwork.

Nobody in Twisting Fates announces themselves as a villain. They just make reasonable-sounding suggestions to people who are already tired, already compromised, already halfway to agreeing.

DS Don Maciver arrives in Glasgow from Oban with a case that looks solved and an answer that will not sit right. Working out what happened is the easy part. Getting anyone to say it out loud is what the book is actually about.

The difference between a cell and a person is that a cell doesn't get a say. That is the whole argument of the novel, and I'll leave it there.