Simon Kernick delves into his experience of abduction to help his writing process (Image: Supplied by author)
Simon Kernick has a theory about how people will react to sudden and violent situations. It’s something he knows about full well – and not because his occupation is a bestselling crime writer. It’s because aged 16 he was abducted by three men while hitchhiking home one night, an ordeal that 42 years later remains etched on his mind.
“When you are put on the spot, I believe there is a mixture of panic, fear and shock that is pretty universal,” says Simon, 58, today. “There is almost a resignation, too.”
Though he leaves the next part unsaid, he means a resignation to death. A horrible certainty that your time is up and there isn’t a thing you can do about it.
Having survived his horrendous ordeal, you might expect Simon would do everything possible in his power to never relive it again. Yet, it’s quite the opposite. From time to time, he taps into the dark folds of the memory to channel fear or despair into a character he is writing. And none more so than for his new novel, You All Die Tonight, in which seven people wake up in a mansion with no means of escape and only hours left to live.
“I draw on my experience particularly with one of the seven characters, Colton,” explains Kernick. “When you’ve been put into that situation where you’re certain that you are about to die within a space of minutes then you never forget that feeling so it’s much easier for me to put that fear onto the page.”
He describes his upbringing in South Oxfordshire in the early 1980s as safe. “I had a fairly normal life and I was relatively happy aside from the odd tussle in school.”
This was until the fateful Sunday evening which started with Simon hanging out at his girlfriend’s house with two friends, chatting and listening to music.
They decided to leave around 10.30pm, opting to hitchhike the four-mile journey home. “Back then everything was shut,” explains Simon by way of explanation. Besides, they had thumbed lifts from strangers before and never had any problems.
After a short wait, a small two-door Ford Escort driven by “three much older guys” pulled up to offer the teenagers lift. Simon perched on his friend’s lap in the middle, his other friend on the left and one of the three men on his right.
At first, everything seemed fine. The men chatted freely and before long they were approaching the river demarcating the picturesque town of Henley-on-Thames. Then, suddenly, the car stopped at the side of the road. And the violence erupted almost immediately.
Simon Kernick aged 16 (Image: Simon Kernick)
“The driver turned around and punched me in the face very hard,” remembers Simon. “My nose sort of exploded and there was blood everywhere. It was like, ‘Woah’. They started pummeling us from the front and side. Unfortunately because of my position I was the easiest target and I got quite a few of the blows.”
In shock and under attack, Simon and his friends cowered in fright and simply took the punches. “They said, ‘We’re not going to f*** around. Give us all your money’,” remembers Simon of what happened next. “We were 16, we virtually had nothing. The men took over and tipped everything out of our pockets and said, ‘That’s not enough’.”
The assailants pulled the car back onto the road and drove back into the pitch-black countryside, throwing the odd punch to keep the boys in their dazed state.
Then, things took an even darker turn. Simon says: “They told us to take our clothes off and when we said “no”, they began punching us again.”
With the car still moving, all three boys were forced to strip naked and watch helplessly as their clothes were hurled out of the window.
Terrified of the possibility of rape or sexual violence, Simon sat “almost paralysed with fear”.
Finally, the attackers stopped along an isolated country track in a pine woodland.
“I was bleeding quite a bit from my nose and face,” says Simon. “They got us out of the car and lined us up along one side. The front seat passenger said to the driver, ‘Get the shotgun out’. The driver began rummaging under the front seat.”
He didn’t think of resisting or fighting back. “I was convinced that it was the end. I remember that I was completely resigned [to my fate]. You’re beyond scared, you’re just shocked,” he explains. That resignation has haunted his darker moments ever since.
“I thought I was going to die and I was trying to work out in my head if I had had a good life, and did it matter?” he says. “I thought, Look at the stars in the sky, it’s a very clear night. All these things go round in your head. You hope it will be quick. It was a maelstrom.”
Suddenly, one of his friends bolted into the darkness. Then men gave chase but couldn’t catch him. “He was so fast and had so much adrenaline that he escaped,” says Simon.
And then as suddenly as the attack had started, it was over.
“They must have thought there wasn’t any point carrying on as he would raise the alarm. So they told me and my friend to ‘f*** off’, gave us a couple of punches and kicks, and drove off in their car leaving us in the middle of the woods,” says Simon.
The two friends ran back to Simon’s girlfriend’s house in the town of Marlow. It took them around two hours to cover the seven miles. Once there, they hid in her garage unsure what to do. “We wrapped ourselves up in rugs, we didn’t want to say anything,” says Simon. He and his friend vowed never to mention it again. Above anything else, he hated the idea of being thought a coward.
“Eventually we were so cold, we knocked on the door and my girlfriend’s mother opened it. She said the police had been looking for our bodies for the last few hours because the last thing my friend who had escaped had heard was, ‘Get the shotgun out’. He thought we might be dead and had raised the alarm.”
The boys met with Thames Valley CID to give their statement and shortly after, their relieved parents brought their clothes. But counselling was not mentioned. Simon is not even sure if it existed at the time but, in his mind, a collective thought hung in the air: “Everyone wanted to brush it under the carpet.”
His parents, in fairness, tried on several occasions afterwards to talk to him about it but he refused. Then when the kidnapping hit the newspapers, the boys were mercilessly teased by their male friends at school for weeks.
“That’s how kids were, we were teenagers,” he says. “I was embarrassed about it so I didn’t talk about it and I just tried to forget about it and get on with life.”
Only later did Simon learn through the police that the men had stolen the car to attempt a burglary in a country house that had gone wrong. “We were picked up as we just happened to be there and they wanted to enjoy themselves,” he says.
The police had a strong suspicion of who the assailants were and arrested them. None of them admitted to a thing so they weren’t charged. Crucially, the car they were driving was never found or reported as stolen. Weeks later, the police visited with photos of the suspects but the boys couldn’t pick out their assailants. There was no identity parade and no case to answer for in the end. “We just had to get on with it,” says Simon.
The experience massively impacted him and he split up with his girlfriend soon after.
For two or three years afterwards, he feared visiting new places and being in large crowds.
“If I went to a different town, even in the middle of the day I would be very paranoid about who was around,” he says. “I’d be more nervous at night, always thinking that someone might attack me. I was hyper-vigilant for a long time without admitting it to myself. I’ve carried it with me for a long time and I’ve suppressed as much of it as I can.”
He has learned to “compartmentalise” the fear over the years, and says he’s largely unaffected by it today, but it’s easy to find in the recesses of his mind.
“I always know where everyone is in the street,” he adds. “I’m still hyper-vigilant in that respect. I have a camera on my house, a burglar alarm and good locks. I wouldn’t want to make the same mistake twice. I’d always be very careful if someone approaches me and tries to talk to me.”
You All Die Tonight is Simon Kernick’s 24th book (Image: Headline Publishing)
He also finds himself being overprotective of his two daughters, although he tries not to be.
Was it difficult to process that his perpetrators weren’t ever brought to justice?
“Ironically, no, it was almost better that they weren’t because I wanted to forget about it so badly,” he admits. “If there had been a court case months later it would have drenched things up. It’s not the right attitude but at that age I just wanted to forget about it. I never wanted to find out who they were.”
He lost touch with one of the friends, the other he’s still Facebook friends with. They last saw one another 15 years ago. Neither mentioned the events of that night. Simon doesn’t believe he became a crime writer because of what happened to him, but it acknowledges it may in part have been a small, subconscious factor.
You All Die Tonight is his 24th book and relies heavily on twists and turns to keep the reader guessing right until the end. “I was tearing my hair out quite a few times,” he admits. “It’s the hardest book I’ve written for a number of years precisely because you’ve got to keep a fast-paced story going and you’re constrained by the setting and by the timespan of only a few hours. It feels to me like it works well but I’ll leave it to the readers to decide that.”
Considering he once believed he had mere minutes to live, rather than hours, the fear should feel very real indeed.
You All Die Tonight by Simon Kernick (Headline, £20) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25