Inside the Whispers – The Low-down!

When I lived in Brixton, south London, in the 1990s, the shop below the flat, where I was fast asleep, was fire-bombed during the night and we had to get out pronto! Even though the fire didn’t cause any real damage for us, I remember how swiftly the smoke filled the bedroom and how long the smell lasted in our carpets and clothes, afterwards. The scare left a lasting impact and many years later, it became a spark (pardon the pun!) for a book. I liked the plot idea of people reporting they’d been involved in some kind of incident, in this case a fire on the London Underground, but bit by bit, it becomes clear that their stories don’t add up. After terrible disasters, there really are people who go to extreme lengths to pretend they were involved. It happened after 9/11. As a former psychotherapist, I’m intrigued by this. I’m interested in the different degrees involved in lying: white lies, withholding information, exaggerating the truth, pretence, denial, self-delusion – all the ways we deceive others (and ourselves). In Inside the Whispers, everything is not as it first appears – there’s a complex and devious conspiracy behind the choking smokescreen…

The plot centres around a mysterious series of events, starting with a fire on the Tube and a handful of survivors who present for trauma therapy at a London hospital. My starting point was to draw on my own experiences working with traumatised and suicidal individuals to build a story involving my favourite subjects: secrets, deception and hidden motives! In fact, for most of the main characters in Inside the Whispers, things are not all they seem. Most of them are hiding or running away from something.

A number of questions arise for Dr Samantha Willerby, the diligent and compassionate therapist, when she starts to see that her patients’ accounts of the fire are very similar, but don’t ring true. Are they faking it? Why are they lying? When one of them commits suicide, Sam feels personally responsible. She should have seen the warning signs, shouldn’t she? But before long, it dawns on her that she’s caught up in a horrific web of manipulation and foul-play.

A big twist at the end is pretty much de rigueur in psych thrillers, although my book is also a ‘why’ and ‘how’-dun-it, as much as a ‘who-dun-it’. There are twists and turns along the way, blindsiding the reader with revelations, shocks and red-herrings, as Sam gradually peels away the layers to get to the truth. I love to knock my readers sideways and there’s one final bombshell – right on the last page!

When I worked as a psychotherapist, a number of clients came to see me with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and I wanted to give readers a ‘behind the scenes’ insight into that kind of work. Therapy is confidential and confessional with a ‘cloak-and-dagger’ aura of secrecy – I think a lot of people are curious about what actually happens!

 
One aspect that people are perhaps unaware of is ‘secondary trauma’ – when patients’ accounts are so distressing that it has a knock-on effect on the therapist, who can then internalise the details and, in turn, experience similar symptoms themselves, such as nightmares and anxiety. On one occasion, I worked with a city fire officer who suffered PTSD after his involvement in a fatal, horrific blaze and the images he described have always stayed with me. Some of these impressions have filtered through into the story (modified for fiction) which is one creative and therapeutic way of dealing with them.