A Line to Kill

Kathryn Harris was found not guilty. I can’t say I followed the entire case, but I understand it turned on a single issue. In the end, the prosecution was unable to prove that Anne Cleary had informed her daughter that she actually intended to kill Charles and Helen le Mesurier. Kathryn insisted that she had thought her mother had planned only to confront Charles le Mesurier for his part in her brother’s death, but at the last minute (after Kathryn had left the Snuggery) she must have lost control and taken her bloody revenge. Kathryn broke down in court. She said she had been shocked to hear what her mother had done and that she was ashamed to have been a part of it.

I know it sounds improbable as I write it here, but then the law is often hard to fathom. The jury was sympathetic and, most significantly, the main witnesses were dead so in the end they believed her. I thought Hawthorne might have been called to give evidence. Deputy Chief Torode certainly turned up, although by then he was plain Mr Torode. He had been quietly sacked for incompetence.

Kathryn might have been charged with various lesser offences, such as lying to the police or obstructing the course of justice. But there was no real appetite to go after her. The press and the public were also on her side (‘GP’S WIFE TRAPPED BY A MOTHER’S MADNESS’), and anyway, thanks to Hawthorne, she had voluntarily turned herself in just two days after she had left Alderney. The authorities must have decided that pursuing her would only have been seen as vindictive.

Did she get away with murder?

I’m fairly sure that Kathryn was there when Charles le Mesurier died. Maybe she was laughing as the knife went in. Maybe she was the one holding it. And I still don’t fully believe Anne’s account of the murder of Helen le Mesurier. Helen was on her way to an important meeting. She believed that Derek Abbott had been involved in her husband’s death. Would she really have taken a diversion down a disused railway to show Anne the entrance to the cave? It was much more likely that, once again, mother and daughter were working in tandem. Anne could have told Helen that her daughter was inside the cave, that she had taken a fall and was lying there, injured. They could have waylaid her and led her in at knifepoint. They could even have knocked her out and carried her between them.

I think Anne lied to us because she was aware of the difference between the two crimes. The murder of Charles le Mesurier was wicked enough, but the death of his wife was somehow worse. Hawthorne had got it exactly right. Helen was an actress playing a part. Her only crime was that she had never considered the consequences.

But all of this is irrelevant. The point is that Hawthorne had no choice as to whether Kathryn should face trial or not. It was not his decision to make and in the end he achieved exactly the outcome he might have wanted without having to compromise himself. Kathryn was acquitted. Hawthorne was far from straightforward, but he was always honest and I was glad that things worked out the way they did.

I was particularly busy when I got back from Alderney. It was always the same. If I took a few days off, I would need a whole week to catch up, and to make matters worse, I now knew that I would have to write a third book about Hawthorne, which only added to the pressure to finish the second. I had decided to call it The Sentence is Death, although I was already beginning to worry that quite soon I would run out of titles with grammatical allusions.

I was working in my office one morning when my wife popped in with the mail – the usual bills, bank statements and circulars. (I used to look forward to the mail when I was young, but nowadays it’s nearly all dreary.)

Rifling through them, I noticed a postcard with a picture of Fort Clonque on the western tip of Alderney. I thought at first it might be fan mail and reached for it straight away. I turned it over and even before I read the brief message, I recognised Derek Abbott’s handwriting. He had sent the card to my publishers at Penguin Random House and someone had forwarded it to me. There were just four words. It read:

Ask Hawthorne about Reeth.

Sitting at my desk, I felt a chill in the pit of my stomach. I remembered the postcards that had been sitting on the desk in Derek Abbott’s living room. He had written his suicide note on the back of one of them, but then he must have decided to write a second card to me. He knew I was planning several books about Hawthorne. Even as he had left this world, he had wanted to leave some small measure of pain behind.

Reeth.