The Shadow Friend

by Alex North

It took me a second to realize that my mother was leaning on the car horn. The blaring volume of the sound seemed jarring and profane in the setting – a scream at a funeral – but when I looked at her I saw my mother’s jaw was clenched and her gaze directed furiously at the police car ahead. She kept her hand pressed down, and the sound continued, echoing around the village.

Books come together in strange ways, and often not in the order the reader ends up experiencing them in. So: this prologue was actually one of the last scenes I wrote in an earlier draft. It was intended to be fairly perfunctory – Paul’s mother driving him to the police station – and it’s fair to say that what she does here, with this aggressive act of defending her son, took me by surprise as much as it does Paul in the story. I hadn’t known she was going to do this until she did. It was a revelation of a kind. It was as though a character I’d considered relatively minor up to that point stepped forward, knocked angrily on the computer screen, and said “you do realise this book is about me too, don’t you?” I hadn’t before. But suddenly now, yes, I did. That meant changing a great deal of what I’d written to follow on from it. The last scene I wrote of that earlier draft became the first scene of the very different one you’re reading now. Which was, in some ways, extremely irritating in terms of being handed a huge amount of work to do. But what can I say? Books come together in strange ways. And you should always listen to your mother.