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  Q&A

  Edward Richie, script-writer

  Born in Nottingham, Richie is an award-winning TV and radio scriptwriter. Over the past twenty-five years he has written more than a hundred scripts for shows such as the children’s comedy CrazyMadLoopy, the crime drama Beat Up, and the BAFTA nominated series set in a psychiatric institute, All In A Day. His one-off radio play The Ten Sleepers won the Radio Critics’ award in 2005. He currently writes the BBC hit soap opera, Morgan’s Café. He lives in North Yorkshire.

  When were you happiest?

  Crete, June 2008.

  What is your greatest fear?

  Terminal illness.

  What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

  Apathy.

  What is the trait you most deplore in others?

  Greed.

  Which living person do you most admire, and why?

  My friend the scriptwriter Digby Lincoln: he doesn’t let the bastards grind him down.

  What was your most embarrassing moment?

  Stumbling over my acceptance speech for the 2005 Radio Critics’ award.

  Property and cars aside, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought?

  A computer.

  What is your most treasured possession?

  A photograph.

  What makes you unhappy?

  The greed and short-termism of politicians.

  What would your superpower be?

  The ability to heal and cure.

  What is your most unappealing habit?

  Talking with my mouth full.

  What do you most dislike about your appearance?

  My constant five o’clock shadow.

  What is your favourite word?

  Replenish.

  What did you want to be when you were growing up?

  A footballer, then a writer.

  Which book changed your life?

  I never read a novel until I was fifteen, when my father gave me Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and instantly I understood the power of fiction.

  What or who is the greatest love of your life?

  Annabelle.

  What is the worst thing anyone’s said to you?

  An old girl-friend, who was also my editor at the time, told me that my work lacked psychological insight.

  What is your favourite smell?

  Curry.

  What does love feel like?

  A kind of pain.

  Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

  Digby Lincoln, Germaine Greer, Noam Chomsky, Doris Lessing, and Jonathan Miller.

  What is the worst job you’ve done?

  Working as a kitchen porter while I was a student.

  If you could edit your past, what would you change?

  Pass.

  When did you last cry, and why?

  A month or so ago, thinking about Annabelle.

  To whom would you most like to say sorry?

  To Annabelle.

  How do you relax?

  Watching football.

  How would you like to be remembered?

  As an honest writer and loyal friend.

  What do you consider your greatest achievement?

  Two or three of my best plays.

  What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

  To keep on.

  Where would you most like to be right now?

  I’m fine here, sitting in the Black Bull with a pint, completing this questionnaire.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  January, 2030

  ELLA STARED DOWN at the Northumberland countryside far below. The land was covered with snow, the black lines of dry-stone walls dividing fields into separate squares on a vast, undulating grid. It looked as if the countryside was being prepared for a great game of noughts and crosses. She smiled at the notion, and wondered if she could use it in her book about Ed Richie: the country as a board-game, divided by competing national interests over the last decade into autonomous states, with Scotland and Wales seceding, and Northern Ireland yet again torn apart by sectarian imbecility.

  The sun was high, and the plane’s dark shadow rippled over the snow, arrowing south.

  She had taken the eleven-thirty flight from Edinburgh to Leeds-Bradford airport, where she would pick up a hire car and drive towards the border with Lancashire. On the way to Digby Lincoln’s place she would stop off at Harrowby Bridge, where Ed Richie had lived for twenty-three years until his disappearance in 2025.

  She returned to her book, Interesting Times, Richie’s first novel, published when he was fifty-eight. It was a semi-autobiographical account of the life of a screenwriter, his increasing dissatisfaction with the trade, and his midlife-crisis as he searched for a fulfilling means of artistic expression. It was also an astute analysis of the prevailing political climate in the mid-teens of the century, and a bleak forecast of what was to come. It had sold reasonably well, but it was his second novel, Statecraft,a near-future dystopia about a world-wide fascist state controlled by multinational companies, which had become an international hit, selling twenty million copies in English alone and being translated into more than thirty languages. Richie had written a further six novels combining penetrating psychological insight with astute political foreboding. And then, one morning in July 2025, he’d left his house and never been seen since.

  She turned to his photograph on the inside flap. It showed a long-faced, dark-haired man in his mid-fifties, with a drooping moustache, five o’clock shadow, and dark, intense eyes. She could have characterised the face as being haunted, but wondered if she were reading too much into subsequent events. She recalled meeting Richie once or twice when she was twelve: a darkly handsome, driven young man in his early twenties, forever either ranting about the political situation or tapping away at a play on his portable typewriter. He had lived with Ella’s sister, Annabelle, in a poky Hackney flat, which Ella dimly recalled from family visits.

  She shut out those memories and lost herself in the novel, smiling at a scene in a pub and the banter that passed between the brilliantly drawn characters.

  The plane landed just after twelve; she passed through passport control, ignored the touts hawking cheap rooms and hire cars, and picked up a battered Nissan from the Hertz office.

  The bored girl behind the counter, whose name badge identified her as Rizwana, her face heavily made-up with purple eye-shadow, passed Ella the keys and said, “Where you going, luv? Only the York road’s closed and so’s the M62.”

  “I’m heading west, but not by the M62.”

  “Be careful on the smaller roads, then. The councils don’t do owt these days to clear the roads.”

  “Thank you, I’ll take care.”

  Her wrist-com told her that it was two below zero and the Nissan, standing out in the open, started on the fifth attempt. Ella inched her way out of the airport precincts and headed west on winding country roads, passing through pretty stone-built villages and out into beautiful countryside. There was no satnav in the car, and the program on her wrist-com was experiencing limited connectivity. Fortunately she’d memorised the route to Harrowby Bridge.

  Compared with the well-maintained roads north of the border, even the main roads of West Yorkshire were pot-holed and crumbling. The towns she passed through were silent and depressed, with rows of shop-fronts boarded up and covered with posters advertising Romanian circuses and UK Front rallies.

  England had suffered a gradual economic melt-down, starting with the lean years of the ’20s, with the ever-increasingly draconian austerity measures of the Conservative-UK Front alliance. Ella had watched with mounting incredulity as the ultra-right-wing UK Front came to prominence on a wave of popular support. With the rise of the right had come the invidious influence of Christian fundamentalist churches from the US, the ban on abortion in ’22 and the repeal of same-sex marriage. Ella wondered how long it would be before England followed the lead of the US government and declared homosexuality illegal.

&
nbsp; Her wrist-com pinged and she pulled into the side of the lane and took the call. Kit waved from thetinyscreen. “How’s England, El?”

  “A delight. And cold and bleak. How did it go with Douglas?”

  “Very well, but he’s a miserable prick, isn’t he?”

  “It’s a front,” Ella said. “He’s really a pussycat.”

  “I’ll believe you. Anyway, I signed up for a year and I’m due to deliver a daily diary, five hundred words a slot, from tomorrow. He also wants longer, in-depth political pieces every week. It’ll keep the wolf from the door. Thank you, El.”

  “I’m glad I could help.”

  “Oh, and Aimee’s found a job. Short-order cook in a Cantonese place on the Royal Mile. It’ll do till she finds something better.”

  “Great.”

  “I’m amazed at all the tourists in the city, El. The place is packed. And most of them seem to be Chinese.”

  “That’s where the money is these days. They’ve opened a chain of authentic restaurants in Edinburgh and Glasgow, not happy with the standard of Chinese food the locals were doling out. And they’ve just moved their car manufacturing plant from Middlesbrough to Aberdeen. That did nothing for Anglo-Scottish relations.”

  “But everything for Scottish-Chinese accord.” That was the direction Europe was looking, these days, as it turned its back on the US.

  “I’d better be going,” Kit said. “I’m treating Aimee to a steak, in celebration.”

  “Catch you in a couple of days.”

  She cut the connection, restarted the car and pulled out onto the icy lane. Rizwana of Hertz was right: the councils had done nothing to make any of the roads less of a death-trap, and in many places Ella was forced to inch along at ten miles an hour.

  She tuned her wrist-com into the ScotFreeMedia newsfeed for the next hour and listened to the news pinging in from around the world. The civil war in Nigeria was entering its fifth year with no end in sight, and each side accusing the other of atrocities. The Australian government was brokering an aid deal with India to supply Malaysia with food and agricultural infrastructure following the ceasefire between government troops and Islamic rebels. In the US, President O’Ryan, as the third Operation Rainbow Airlift plane touched down in Edinburgh, announced a state visit to England to discuss trade deals between ‘our great countries.’

  Swearing to herself, Ella killed her ’com and concentrated on the road.

  One hour later she edged the Nissan over the brow of the hill and braked.

  Down below, nestled in a snow-clad valley, was the village of Harrowby Bridge, a cluster of honey-coloured stone houses with grey slate roofs, smoke drifting vertically into the windless winter sky. Nothing moved, not even traffic, and the river threading its way through the village was frozen, the ice shattered and whitened along fracture lines.

  Ella scanned the hillside to the west of the valley, looking for the converted barn that had belonged to Ed Richie. There were perhaps half a dozen likely candidates; she’d ask directions at Richie’s local, as the satnav on her wrist-com was still down. She wanted a photograph of the house, and to get a feel for the place where he’d lived for twenty-three years.

  She eased the car down the lane that descended steeply into the village, located the Black Bull, and parked behind the pub.

  A blazing coal fire warmed a traditional bar-room decorated with horse brasses, paintings of the area, and a couple of mock-antique globes. Three or four locals sat at tables, drinking by themselves, and an old man in a Burberry jacket and flat cap stood at the bar. Ella noticed that he was reading the Breitbart daily bulletin on a softscreen rolled out before him.

  A smiling, auburn-haired barmaid in her late thirties, welcomed Ella with, “Freezing out there, luv. What can I get you?”

  “A coffee, and do you do food?”

  The woman pointed to a specials board. It was mainly meat, with a lone vegetarian option. Ella ordered the cheese and onion pie with veg.

  “That’ll be fifteen minutes. And here’s your coffee.”

  Ella remained at the bar, warming her hands on the cup. When the woman returned from the kitchen, she asked Ella, “Come far?”

  She refrained from saying she was down from Scotland, for fear of arousing hostility. “From Leeds.”

  Along the bar, the old man looked up. “Staying in the area?”

  “Just passing through,” Ella said. “I’m trying to locate where the writer Ed Richie lived.”

  The barmaid stopped polishing a glass. “Are you a detective?”

  “A writer. I’m planning a book about Richie.”

  “Who’d’ve thought it!” the old man laughed. “Fame at last, if belatedly.”

  The barmaid bridled at this. “Ed was famous in his lifetime, Nigel. You should have read his novels.”

  “Novels?” Nigel snorted. “Don’t read claptrap, Cindy. ’Specially not the tripe Ed trotted out. Stick to the truth.” He tapped the screen before him.

  Ella had wondered why the old man seemed familiar, then smiled to herself. He resembled the long-forgotten Nigel Farage, President Trump’s gurning gimp.

  “Ed lived in the converted barn on Old Smithy Lane,” Nigel said. “Head west out of the village and it’s the first turning on the left. Ed’s old house is the second you come to, on the crest of the hill.”

  Ella looked from Nigel to the barmaid. “Did you know him personally?”

  Cindy said, “Ed was a regular here for years, when my mum and dad ran the place. Came in with Shakespeare – well, that’s what I called him because he looked like Shakespeare, only fatter. He was called Digby. Ed called him Diggers.”

  “Digby Lincoln,” Nigel said, not looking up from his softscreen. “Another bloody champagne socialist, just like Ed.”

  “You didn’t see eye to eyewith Ed Richie?” Ella asked.

  “Oh, we rubbed along well enough. He always bought his round. But he was like all the rest of his kind, artists and writers. Heads up their bloody arses when it came to politics. I put him right a few times. Christ, he’d be spinning in his grave if he could see what’s become of his beloved Labour party, eh? Not that old Ed’s in his grave… But Cindy knows what I think on that score.”

  The barmaid rolled her eyes. “Nigel has a pet theory. Thinks Ed did a runner.”

  “A runner?”

  “Saw the writing on the wall, the fall of the left, so he got out,” Nigel said. “Probably sunning himself in Bali as we speak.”

  “I think we’d have heard about it, if that were so,” Ella said.

  Cindy nodded. “That’s just what I said.”

  Nigel drained his lager, rolled his softscreen, and saluted with it to Cindy and Ella. “See you around. Good luck with the book. And remember, try Bali.”

  “Don’t take any notice of that old fascist,” Cindy said when Nigel had departed.

  “You must have known Ed Richie quite well,” Ella said.

  “I’d never met a writer before I started working here,” Cindy said. “And Ed wrote some of my favourite TV shows. He came in here three or four times a week, and always on Tuesday and Friday nights for the lock-ins. Ed and Shakespeare liked their ale. There was quite a crowd of them at one point, a few local artists and potters, and Nigel hanging around on the fringes ready to stir things.”

  “What did you make of Ed?”

  “I liked him. He was a real gentleman, and very quiet. I mean, sort of quiet in a sad way. Melancholy, that’s the word. I often wondered if he suffered from depression, not that he ever let it show in how he treated people, though he did get a bit irate with Nigel once or twice.”

  “I suppose the political situation would have depressed anyone of the left,” Ella said. “You must have known him a long time.”

  “Years, apart from when I was away at uni. I came back and ran this place when my dad retired. Ed came in every week, without fail, him and his many women.”

  Ella smiled. “I hope to interview some of them, if I can tra
ce them after so long.”

  “Strange thing is,” Cindy said reflectively, “they were all very much the same. Blonde, pretty, slim as you like. I never had a chance, did I?”

  “Were you attracted to…?”

  “Ed was one of those men who made you want to take care of him. I suppose that’s what all his women thought, to begin with.”

  “And then? Why do you think all his relationships came to nothing?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Ed only loved one thing – his writing. I mean, he worked long hours up there on the hill. I’d see him at his study window, tapping away, when I was out walking the dogs. And he’d often come in here with his laptop. Maybe that didn’t leave him enough time for his relationships?”

  “Maybe,” Ella said. Her food arrived and she ate at the bar, chatting with Cindy in between customers.

  In a lull, she said, “Were you around when Ed disappeared?”

  Cindy had been wiping the bar, and she slowed down, her eyes taking on a faraway look. “Do you know something? I served Ed the day before he vanished. That’s why I know he didn’t do a runner, despite what Nigel says. He was just the same old Ed as always. I remember we chatted about my dog. He’d just had an operation on his spine, and Ed was asking after him.” She shrugged. “Ed was the same as usual, in for his lunchtime pint. Just one, and then home to rewrite what he’d written that morning. Same old routine. You’d have thought, if he was thinking of doing a runner, that he’d say something to me: not exactly goodbye, but…” She shrugged again.