In this piece author of Vigilante Martin M McShane relates his personal experiences with his latest book played out in scarily similar circumstances.
Martin M McShane's Vigilante
It’s almost midnight. I should’ve been in bed hours ago but I got hooked watching a movie. Despite I know exactly how it’s going to turn out I have to see it to the end, the bitter end. I must be crazy being up at this hour because I’ve a flight to catch at 0745. I debate whether I should drop a couple of Blue Tylenol’s, I know shouldn’t because I’ll wake woolly headed in the morning, but at this hour I won’t get any sleep at all if I don’t. My laptop beeps. It’s an email from my daughter. It has no title. This means she wants something or I’ve ‘done something’. Should I open it or leave it until morning? I open it. It reads: Hi Dad, nothing to worry about but I’m in hospital. I got robbed of my mobile. They knocked me down with their scooter and I cracked my head open. They’re keeping me in overnight for observations so don’t panicking! My blood turned to ice and I felt frozen to the spot.
Reads like the opening of an appallingly bad crime novel, doesn’t it? But it’s no such thing, it happened. Getting news like this is every parent’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at A&E I saw my daughter lying in a bed with her head wrapped in a bandage and an intravenous drip in her arm. A female Police Officer was taking her statement. . We got talking and she told me the Police knew who had carried out the attack but an arrest was unlikely because: no witnesses, no evidence, they have alibis, ‘no grassing’ culture etc. She went on to explain that Scooter Muggers are at the centre of other crimes, such as drugs, vehicle thefts and burglaries and prey on their own communities and that the level of violence and intimidation is so great that no one will bear witness against them. It’s not surprising, therefore, that with almost eighty thousand of these crimes committed in the past twelve months, less than one percent resulted in arrest.
Things could’ve gone a lot worse for my daughter but the Scooter Muggers didn’t care that they’d knocked a young woman to the ground, cracking her head open, and all for a lousy mobile phone. They drove off leaving her lying bleeding on the ground. The robbery impacted the lives of dozens of people and, it being just one of at least six robberies the Scooter Muggers committed that night, this translates to hundreds, possibly thousands, of ordinary people being impacted every week.
The Scooter Muggers who attacked my daughter were never caught, not for that crime at least. I’d been powerless to protect her and I began feeling like if I couldn’t get justice I’d settle for revenge. My partner warned me not to get involved. “Leave everything to the Police,” she said, “or you’ll end up in prison, not them.” I’m sure many parents would feel the way I did but, statistically, we don’t do anything about it.
I began writing Vigilante the year after my daughter’s attack. It started out as a self-indulgent-semi-non-fiction account of the incident to but ultimately I went with my favourite genre of protags who are ordinary people that find themselves in extraordinary situations and, hey presto, Danny Deacon leapt into my head. Danny’s just an ordinary dad, but one with a dark and deadly past, which is bad news for Scooter Muggers because they picked the wrong one the night they mugged his daughter Lucy for her phone. Go Danny!
Vigilante by Martin M McShane is released 28/10/2024 ISBN: 9781835740583 Price: £9.99