A loosely-knotted clear sack lay on top of the body in the cooler. It contained black shoes, a red sweater, a pair of trousers, and whatever else the man had been wearing when he died, along with his meagre possessions. The clothes were cheap, constructed from man-made fibres, and manmade fibres do not rot like natural fibres. Polyester, like a diamond, is (almost) forever. It was just possible to make out the lineaments of his form beneath the tough plastic of the body bag, but the tokens of his essential humanity - the little personal items (driver's licence, photos, donor cards, video club membership) that defined him as an individual, that identified him as he was to the state, to the government, maybe even to his wife and children and friends - were contained in the sack that lay upon his shins. Take them away, remove the tag from his toes, extract him from the cooler, and he would quickly begin to decay. But even then he would not be anonymous. The shape of his skull and pelvis would reveal his sex; the areas of fusion in the ossification centres, or perhaps patterns in the head of the humerus and femur, would testify to his age; his teeth would hold clues to his racial origins. There would be dental charts to identify him; long-healed breaks in his bones that could be checked against medical records; DNA tests; facial reconstruction; and photo-superimposition, the placing of photographs of suspected victims against the skull in the hope that the structures will match. And if, in the end, all of these proved useless, then something of this individual would be retained in the basement of the Maine Medical Examiner's Office in Augusta, in the hope that at some point in the future, a last, small service could be done for him by providing the once unidentified man with the final dignity of a grave with a name above it. Here, in this place, anonymity is failure. Until comparatively recently, almost everything I knew about the science of forensic anthropology was contained in the 12th and 13th words of this sentence: I knew that it existed, and I had a very vague notion of what it entailed, but that was about it. Now, having researched the subject, I know more, and I have drawn on the extensive knowledge of others to fill in the many remaining gaps. I apply the same principle to every area of research. The Maine Medical Examiner's Office, arachnologists, local historians, theatre managers, boat-makers, hunters, guides, policemen, all have contributed their knowledge to me and the results are contained in The Killing Kind. Anything can be researched; if you don't know about something, you ask. That is why the hoary adage "write what you know" is such a fatal imposition on new writers, frequently subject to the narrowest of interpretations. You choose what you know. If you want to write about 18th-century France, visit a library. Visit France. If you want to write about the dead, visit a morgue.
I try, as far as possible, to base as much of my books on reality as I can.
The Killing Kind concerns the disappearance of a religious community in the north of Maine during the early 1960s, but when I was planning the book I was worried the plot was too fantastic, that nobody would accept that, Waco and Jim Jones notwithstanding, a group of sane individuals would follow a preacher to the point of death; or at least, if they did so, they wouldn't do it in Maine. But Maine is a far stranger place than most outsiders realise. Until the middle of this century, parts of it were still regarded as frontier territory, and frontiers attract missionaries, both good and bad. In the 1860s, the Reverend George Adams persuaded his followers in Maine to sell their possessions and join him in establishing a colony in Palestine, which they duly did. Within the first weeks, 16 of them died. Within a year, the Reverend Adams had abandoned them to their fate, departing for California where he was eventually discovered perpetrating bank frauds. Instead of adopting a "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" policy, Mainers were to become the victims of a more ambitious preacher than Adams. At the beginning of the last century, Frank Sandford, an evangelist, built a small town called Shiloh with his followers' money, a project so ambitious its main building had 520 rooms and was a quarter of a mile in circumference.
Convinced he was Elijah, and unperturbed by the deaths from smallpox and starvation of Shiloh's women and children, Sandford bought two ships and, with 100 members of his flock, set about converting the peoples of Africa and South America by sailing quite close to their respective coasts and praying really, really hard. This ill-fated project came to an end when one of the ships sank off the west coast of Africa and the survivors mutinied in the face of Sandford's insistence they sail to Greenland. Sandford was eventually jailed for manslaughter, although Shiloh still remains a religious community to this day. So, much of the background to The Killing Kind is factual. The tales of religious obsession, the exploration by federal law enforcement of the links between extreme anti-abortionists and violent militias, even the fetishists who get their sexual thrills from watching semi-naked women stamping on bugs, all have a basis in reality. There are wolf-dog hybrids in northern Maine, the town of Eagle Lake exists, and the methodology used in the recovery of bodies from such an area is based on real procedures, even down to the use of orange aluminium arrows to mark out a grid at the crime scene, since orange stands out clearly against snow and trees. (In fact, Maine state police and the ME's office had recovered a body, the remains of a suspected mob victim, from that very area not long before I began my research, so the procedures were uncomfortably fresh in their minds.) Recluse spiders exist, and you really don't want to get bitten by one. The rest of it I made up. That's the easy part. The trick is to hide the join . . .
The Killing Kind is published this week by Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99 in UK.