A Line to Kill

24 A Postcard from Alderney

I have to make a confession. All along I’d thought that the real killer of Charles and Helen le Mesurier was Terry, our taxi driver. It was a thought that I’d never articulated – it lurked somewhere in the back of my mind – but he did actually have a motive: he’d mentioned that Charles le Mesurier had been planning to start a new taxi service that would have been enough to put him out of business. And it seemed more than coincidental that he had been present at the times of both murders. He had been outside The Lookout when Charles was killed and, by his own admission, he had driven past when Helen left the next day. I was just glad that I had never mentioned any of this to Hawthorne. I would have looked ridiculous.

In the days that followed our visit to Summertown, I found myself thinking about Anne Cleary a great deal. I’ve often wondered why people become murderers and I was shocked that I had met her years before, when she had been as ordinary as me, before she had allowed her son’s death to destroy her own life. I couldn’t get her out of my head: the ticking clock, the porcelain figures, the candles. She was gentler – and more genteel – than anyone I’d ever met. And yet, in Alderney, she had let loose a torrent of blood.

Was Hawthorne right to make the decision he had made?

He could have remained silent. Charles and Helen le Mesurier, two not very pleasant people, were dead and nothing was going to bring them back to life again. They were responsible for the suicide of Anne’s son and had probably harmed the lives of countless others – not that I’d thought twice before accepting an invitation to a literary festival sponsored by Spin-the-wheel.com. They had conspired to compromise Colin Matheson. A husband selling his wife, a wife cheerfully prostituting herself for her husband. They had blackmailed Colin and probably destroyed his marriage. They would have been happy to see war graves desecrated and an island torn apart – figuratively and literally – by a power line if it made money for them.

As far as the police were concerned, the case was closed. Derek Abbott, another unpleasant man, had been wrongly identified as the killer and he wasn’t going to complain about it any time soon. Anne Cleary was terminally ill. What exactly was there to be gained by dragging her daughter through the courts and putting her in jail?

Hawthorne had chosen to take the moral high ground, which was all very well, but I couldn’t forget the part he had played in all this. Although I hadn’t challenged him, I was almost certain that he had visited Derek Abbott and told him that the police had all the evidence they needed to make an arrest. Abbott had already spent six months in jail and he had told us that he would never go back. I remembered what he had said. He had used almost exactly the same words as he had written on his suicide note. I will never go back to prison. I don’t care what happens to me in my life, but I will never let that happen again. Had Hawthorne actually encouraged him to throw himself off the cliff at Gannet Rock? Whatever had passed between them, he had been complicit in the other man’s death and he was surely in no position to pass judgement on either Anne Cleary or her daughter.

And yet perhaps he was vindicated by what happened next.

I’m writing this a whole year after the events I have described and I can tell you that Anne Cleary did indeed go to the police and made a full confession to both the murders. As a result, both she and her daughter were arrested.

Anne did not stand trial. She suffered a massive heart attack while she was still in remand and died just a month after we had visited her at her Summertown home. That left Kathryn Harris to face justice alone and she duly went on trial, charged with being an accessory to murder. I saw photographs of her outside the courthouse with her husband, Dr Michael Harris. They looked like any other young couple, very much in love, clutching each other as they faced the press pack.

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.

I have already mentioned the evening at the Station Inn in the Yorkshire village of Ribblehead, when Hawthorne and I were investigating the murder of Richard Pryce. We had travelled there to find out more about a potholing accident that had taken place a few years before and we were having dinner together when a man had come up to us and introduced himself as Mike Carlyle. He had addressed Hawthorne as ‘Billy’ – which wasn’t his name, but was, now I thought about it, the name of his son. And what had the man said? I opened the notebook that I always kept on my desk and found the page.

‘You weren’t in Reeth?’

‘No,’ Hawthorne had replied. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just up from London. I’ve never been to anywhere called Reeth.’

At the time, I’d assumed that Mike Carlyle had mistaken Hawthorne for someone else and had put the whole thing out of my mind.

But now this.

Ask Hawthorne about Reeth.

It was clear to me that Hawthorne hadn’t pushed Derek Abbott down a flight of stairs because he disliked what he represented. The two men had known each other before. I remembered what had happened in Abbott’s house just before we left. Abbott had recognised him. I had seen it for myself, the moment when he had realised that he and Hawthorne had a shared history that went all the way back to Reeth. How extraordinary that in the last moments of his life, just before he left to throw himself off Gannet Rock, he should have decided to take this one, final shot at revenge.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know any more, but I couldn’t stop myself. I clicked on my laptop and went to yorkshirevillages.org.

Tucked away in the corner of Arkengarthdale and Swaledale, the village of Reeth is an attractive tourist centre with a popular market every Friday. It has been described as a heaven for cyclists … The description went on like that for about half a page, with a couple of pictures: a handsome church, a high street, the surrounding Dales. Other websites talked about hiking trails, campsites, the Black Bull pub. I widened my search on Google but nothing of any interest seemed to have happened there. It was not mentioned in any newspaper stories. Nobody famous had lived or died there. It seemed to be a village completely at peace with itself.

What could I do? I had no way of finding Mike Carlyle and I obviously wasn’t going to ask Hawthorne. I thought for a moment, turning the postcard over in my hands.

Then I slid it into my notebook, closed it and went back to work.