Donna McLean’s haunting memoir sets out to solve a mystery: who was Carlo, the man who duped her into falling in love, only to vanish after two years together, turning her steady life into a scattered jigsaw puzzle, as she puts it in Small Town Girl.
“Carlo Neri does not exist. Carlo Neri does not exist. Carlo Neri does not exist. I was in love with a fiction, a character straight out of a book,” she writes.
A bull of a man, Carlo had seemed real enough when McLean met him on a protest march in London in September 2002 against the impending invasion of Iraq. “The day I first met Carlo was bathed in acid colours, a Lichtenstein painting. He was in a yellow hi-vis vest over a sky-blue T-shirt with a nondescript logo, polarised sunglasses masking his eyes. They looked expensive.”
Three months later, on Hogmanay, they were engaged, although a ring, like the wedding, never materialised. That’s because Carlo turned out to be a married undercover police officer with London’s Met’s Special Demonstration Squad, interested in Donna only for the links to her friends, who were trade union and anti-racism activists.
It would take McLean until 2015 to begin unravelling something close to the truth about Carlo, one of more than 20 officers who deliberately targeted women to infiltrate their friendship circles. A message from an old friend confirmed suspicions that grew after she read Undercover, the 2013 book by Guardian reporters Paul Lewis and Rob Evans.
“He was an undercover cop, working for special branch. He was sent by the state to spy on my friends,” Donna tells her bemused mum, who used to bring Carlo back snow globe souvenirs for his collection. The narrative unfolds in staccato bursts that spiral between memories about McLean’s relationship with Carlo and the meat of the memoir: how she joins the public inquiry into undercover policing and reinvents her own life in the process.
Getting the inside track on a scandal at the heart of British policing is gripping stuff, but the nature of a memoir means McLean’s story is too one-dimensional to satisfy if you want chapter and verse on the “spy cops” outrage.
Where McLean excels is in resolving a mystery bigger even than her fake lover’s identity: who she is and how she can survive such a devastating shock. For this and more, this is one not to miss.
