murder
Domestic psychological thrillers
Although I’ve read a large number of thrillers in an effort to understand the secrets and techniques that make for success, I’ve come across surprisingly few that fit more precisely into the family-based variety I’ve been trying to create myself; ‘domestic’, so-called ‘real-life’ fiction. So when I saw Until You’re Mine by Samantha Hayes in a supermarket second-hand charity corner at the weekend, I snapped it up. And I read it in two days.
I love the cover (her trademark style apparently), and the strap-line spoke to me: To create her family she will destroy yours. My kind of territory, huh?
And it got better and better the more I read about the book and its author. She’s dipped a toe in being a barmaid, a fruit picker, a private detective, a factory worker; she’s lived on a kibbutz, holidayed on Cornwall (my home county)… – a colourful life even before she took up crime writing. And in her novels she focuses on current issues, designed to challenge the reader to think, What if this happened to me or my family? Exactly what I try to do.
And indeed, Until You’re Mine bears some striking similarities to my own new novel, Killing me Gently, which becomes available for purchase this coming weekend*. Both are based around a young career woman, trying to adapt to being a mother; things clearly not being what they seem to be; threats hanging over families; marriages and relationships in peril.
In the case of Until You’re Mine, there are three principal women involved. Claudia Morgan-Brown has a history of numerous previous pregnancies all ending in miscarriages or still births – leaving her feeling ‘ an unworthy shell of a woman‘ and ‘a freak‘. Around perfect families with perfect babies ‘jealousy stuck in my craw like a bowlful of mud shoved down my throat.’ And yet her job – a job she loves – revolves around parents and children. As a social worker heading up a child protection team, she’s constantly dealing with dysfunctional, violent, abusive, disadvantaged families. Nor is she a stranger to the painful experience of removing children from their inadequate or unfit parents.
And it’s in the course of her work that she goes to check out the welfare of 2-month-old twin baby boys, Oscar and Noah Morgan, whose mother has just died of pancreatic cancer. They are being well cared for, but Claudia falls in love with their so-recently bereaved father, James, who reciprocates the emotion. ‘He was hurting. I was hurting. Together, we were mended.’ And now she’s heavily pregnant with James’ baby, but determined to keep working up till her due date and take the minimum of time off after the birth.
Husband, James, is a naval officer, a submariner, away for long stretches of time. And in reality Claudia knows very little of his past life. She does know, however, that he has inherited wealth from his first wife, enabling them to live in a huge and beautiful house, and that he has secrets about which she knows nothing. They decide to hire a live-in nanny to enable Claudia to keep doing what she’s good at.
Enter Zoe Harper, who comes with impeccable credentials, and is clearly really good with children. The twins adore her. We, however, know from the outset that Zoe isn’t what she appears to be. She lives in the ‘centre of an ever-changing lie’. We know she is preoccupied with pregnancy and babies. We know she’s recently left an intense relationship but still longs to make contact with her past. We also know she has her own agenda and is on a mission which somehow relates to counting down to the birth of Claudia’s child.
The third woman is Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher. She’s dealing with domestic crises at home – an errant husband and a rebellious teenage daughter determined to abandon her education and career prospects, leave home and marry her boyfriend. And on the work front Lorraine is dealing with two cases of pregnant women being sliced open and left for dead. Both the victims had troubled pasts and had been in the care of social services. Both had been wanting to terminate their pregnancies early on but for some reason had not gone through with it. Both babies and the first mother have died, but the second mother has survived, and somehow the survivor is the link between the social worker, nanny and detective.
Through the eyes of all three women we inch forward towards the critical date – the birth of Claudia’s baby girl. It’s tense, gripping stuff. But the three stories simply don’t hang together. Who is to be believed? Three women desperate to become mothers. Three women juggling competing demands. Three murders already. We’re counting down the days to deadlines with huge trepidation. The suspense keeps us glued to the pages. The killer twist in the tale, when it comes, is brilliantly executed. And the last sentence is perfection.
Phew! A serendipitous find but highly recommended. And I’ll certainly be hunting down more of Samantha Hayes’ books.
* Yep, at last! We’ve had a few glitches in the publishing process this time, hopefully now ironed out. More on this next week.
To act or not to act
Remember last week I mentioned the cases of child abuse or mistreatment that go to court? That got me thinking.
I’ve been creeping uncomfortably close to this area in my current novel, Killing me Gently – the delicate relationship being built up in the early weeks and months following the birth of a new baby and mysterious things happening which perplex the professionals responsible for ensuring everyone’s safety. We know that some children can be very difficult to love; some appear to reject overtures of maternal affection; some parents struggle to bond with their child for assorted reasons; some parents actually harm and even kill their children. Cruelty and rejection can come in many guises (as I’ve had brought home to me recently in the experiences foster carer Cathy Glass recounts), but so sensitive and nuanced is this whole topic that primary care teams and social services can be unsure of how best to support such families, when to intervene, when indeed to remove the child from the biological family.
Perhaps it was this preoccupation in my writing life that reminded me of a recent news report that I filed away for reference purposes. At the beginning of August a serious case review found that professionals had missed a series of opportunities to save the life of a little girl, Elsie Scully-Hicks, in Cardiff. Pause for a moment and just look at that gorgeous little smiling face … And then take in the fact that this precious life was snuffed out before she even saw her second birthday.
Elsie had been placed with fitness instructor, Matthew Scully-Hicks, and his husband, Craig, at the age of 10 months, and following due process, formally adopted by them just two weeks before her death aged 18 months. The couple were described as well educated and articulate, and highly regarded by each of the involved agencies as good positive parents. They’d already successfully adopted an older child. Indeed, such was their standing that a catalogue of significant bruises and fractures were dismissed as normal childhood accidents (as Elsie’s adopted father alleged). There was indeed a conspicuous lack of professional curiosity about each of her many injuries.
In reality the stay-at-home dad was struggling with her care – he described her as ‘Satan in a babygro’. And when she was just 18 months old, he shook her so violently before throwing her to the floor, that he killed her. Last year he was jailed for life after being convicted of murder at Cardiff Crown Court.
The agencies concerned have promised to learn lessons from this review, but of course, nothing can bring little Elsie back. No one involved in this case will ever forget her. I rather suspect some professionals will never forgive themselves. I shudder to think what it’s like to live with these weighty responsibilities; just getting inside the skin of health visitors and social workers grappling with such judgements in my fictional world is more than enough for me – and I know the outcome! Pause for a moment and think of all those courageous people engaged in making these momentous decisions every day. And living with the consequences. I salute them.
A Place of Execution
Every once in while a book comes into my orbit that’s so well crafted that it leaves me buzzing. Sacred and Profane, Fingersmith and Past Caring spring to mind.
This week I’ve been awed by the skill of crime writer Val McDermid in A Place of Execution. Written in 1999 it’s not new but it’s only just come to my attention, recommended unreservedly by a friend – thanks, Barbara.
The main story is set in the early 60s in Derbyshire around the time when the Moors murderers were perpetrating their deadly attacks on children in the Manchester area. The historical context, together with the unembellished matter-of-fact account of the investigation seen through the eyes and mind of a young detective in charge of his first major case, gives a sense of real-life happening to this fiction which got me off to a promising start.
When thirteen-year-old Alison Carter goes missing from the tiny hamlet of Scardale there are those who believe the events are linked. Law graduate, fast-tracked-for-promotion, Inspector George Bennett is not among them. His every instinct tells him the squire’s step-daughter has been abducted and murdered by a local person. But gathering evidence in a close-knit in-bred community, hostile to anyone from outside its ranks, is an uphill struggle. Each fragment of evidence comes at a price.
PARTIAL SPOILER ALERT. If you plan to read this book you might want to skip the rest of this post. It doesn’t reveal the most important facts but it does indicate the progress of the investigation, trial, outcome and subsequent findings.
A compelling case builds as George is guided towards his goal:
– two people swear to seeing a man walking the fields when he claims he was elsewhere;
– a fragment of wool, a smear of blood, a duffle toggle, and trampled vegetation suggest a struggle in nearby woodland;
– a disdainful old woman points them in the direction of a disused mine-working long forgotten by the locals but recorded in a book in the squire’s library;
– torn woollen tights and semen-stained gym knickers found in that mine indicate rape;
– the squire’s wife finds a gun wrapped in a bloodied made-to-measure shirt hidden in a dark room, damning evidence of a terrible crime;
– photographs hidden in an underground safe give incontrovertible evidence of foul goings on in Alison’s bedroom.
George and his colleagues are so appalled by what they find, so convinced of the man’s guilt, that they pursue the criminal with all the resources at their disposal and at the expense of their own private lives. The fact that George is about to become a father for the first time adds zeal to his crusade. A compelling case is built for the murder of Alison Carter even in the absence of a body. But the rapist has powerful lawyers with formidable reputations on his defence team. George’s own motivation and integrity are dragged through the mire in the courts.
The evidence of the photographs, though, is powerful stuff; the jury are appalled by what they see and unanimous in their verdict. The first part of the book ends with a stroke-by-stroke account of the hanging of the perpetrator of this terrible violation and murder. As the man falls through the trapdoor and his neck is dislocated, George’s firstborn son enters the world. One life begins as another one ends.
But the reader is left with a sense of unease. Everything points to this man’s guilt but something isn’t right. The rest of the novel (146 of 549 pages) is devoted to events thirty-five years later. A journalist who grew up not far from Scardale and who was contemporaneous with Alison Carter, has finally persuaded George Bennett, now retired, to talk for the first time about his experience of the Carter case, for a book. He finds it unexpectedly cathartic. The manuscript is almost ready for submission to the publisher when George is persuaded to revisit Scardale. What he finds there so shocks him that he feels forced, without explanation, to withdraw permission for publication. So powerful is his reaction that he ends up in Intensive Care fighting for his life after a severe heart attack.
But the journalist is too close to the scoop of the century to back down so easily. She too visits Scardale. She too sees what George sees. What should she do? What will she do? If she agrees to withhold the book she will lose the opportunity of a lifetime; is she publishes she will ruin many other lives.
The truth about what actually happened in Scardale in 1963 is immensely more complex and unexpected and horrific than George ever dreamed of. Far more people suffered than he knew. But the fact that a man was hanged for a murder he did not commit because of his own actions will haunt him for the rest of his days.
This is a beautifully executed tour de force of a book with a subtlety and intricacy that mark McDermid out as a brilliant writer. I found it compelling reading and wanted to start all over again to seek out the cues I missed first time around. And it’s very rare for me to say that about any book.
Locked in to a fate worse than death
Tony Nicklinson is 58. He’s paralysed from the neck down, can’t speak, and his only means of communication is by moving his eyes on a screen linked to a special computer. And yet his brain is so alive and intelligent that he can hold his own in arguments with twitters and QCs alike.
Prior to the stroke, Mr Nicklinson was a handsome, successful, fun-loving man, keen on extreme sports. He was in Greece on a business trip, when he suffered a catastrophic stroke in 2005. Now he is in a locked-in state, dependent on carers for his every need, with no hope of recovery. He considers his life as ‘miserable, demeaning and undignified‘. He ‘has no privacy or dignity left‘, and he rates it a state worse than death. He’s held that view since 2007; it’s no passing whim. It’s what’s described as a ‘voluntary, clear, settled and informed wish’ in legal parlance. Watching him on The Channel 4 documentary, Let Our Dad Die, surely no one could help but sympathise with his viewpoint. Even the Greek doctor who saved his life is appalled by the consequences of his actions, although no blame attaches to him.
In March Mr Nicklinson won the right to have his case heard by the High Court. The hearing took place last week (starting 19 June). There was considerable media interest in the run up to it. Lord Falconer visited the family at home. BBC’s Fergus Walsh went to see for himself what kind of a life a locked-in patient has. Channel 4 aired its documentary. Though he could communicate with these people in his own home, Mr Nicklinson was unable to attend the hearing in person, so he stated his arguments through emails and lawyers.
His case? Simply put, he is incapable of taking his own life, so he wants the judges to rule that, when he decides he wants to die, a doctor will be immune from prosecution if he/she helps him. Mr Nicklinson fully realises that the law as it stands prohibits anyone else taking his life; that would be murder. His defence rests on the view that he is being discriminated against, because of his disability. He is looking for assistance to do what he would do for himself were he able. Furthermore he adds poignantly, why should other people be allowed to condemn him to a life of increasing misery?
His barrister described it in more ponderous legal terms: ‘a serious interference of his common law and Convention rights of autonomy and dignity’.
It’s important to note that Mr Nicklinson is not seeking a change in the law. He is seeking two declarations from the court.
1. That in the circumstances of his case – and where an order has been sought from the court in advance – ‘the common law defence of necessity would be available to a doctor who, acting out of his professional and human duty, assisted him to die‘.
2. That the current law of assisted suicide and euthanasia is incompatible with his Article 8 rights of autonomy and dignity .
The QC acting for this family argues that a prior sanction by a court ‘would provide the strongest possible safeguard against abuse’. And furthermore ‘it would also provide a safeguard against the concern, often expressed by disabled opponents of legalisation, that a change in the law would lead to a change in people’s attitudes to disabled people, who they predict would come under subtle pressure to seek an assisted death through fear of being a “burden”.’
But any loosening of the limits frightens the legal fraternity. Speaking directly to Mr Nicklinson, Lord Falconer made it perfectly clear that in his judgement, modifying the law to accommodate such an act would be ‘crossing the Rubicon’. He was himself sympathetic to assisted suicide in cases of terrible disability with no prospect of improvement, where the patient expressed a sustained wish to put an end to their misery, but ending someone else’s life is murder and that must always be unacceptable.
Pause here for a moment and ask yourself: What answer would I give to Tony Nicklinson?
Watching the documentary I wanted to weep with this man. His chagrin, his pain, were palpable. But there again, as Christina Petterson put it in The Independent,
‘… the law isn’t about how we feel. The law isn’t about how you feel if you were once healthy and fit and happy, and now aren’t. The law, as Lord Falconer said on that Dispatches, is the same for everybody. “If people want to kill themselves,” he said, it’s an “entirely private matter”, but “they can’t kill somebody else”. The law, as the disability rights campaigner Kevin Fitzpatrick also said on the programme, is meant to offer protection. “When you develop a society where some people judge that other people’s lives are not worth living,” he said, “that’s the Rubicon.”‘
There can be no happy ending for the Nicklinsons, neither Tony, nor his wife, nor his daughters. But each time a tragic case like this comes to court, and I watch the family being forced to parade their lives in front of others, to expend dwindling energy on fighting their cause, I feel there has to be an alternative.
I can, of course, see the dangers inherent in a change to the law against taking life. The consequences could be inconceivably horrible. I accept too that these extreme cases make bad laws. But the fact remains, that these exceptional circumstances do present from time to time. And they seem to cry out for special judgements.
Would it be so terrible to openly acknowledge this fact, and to relieve these families of the necessity of taking their cases to the courts? Why not constitute a sort of Ombudscommittee – a gathering of carefully selected, experienced and wise folk, representing law, medicine, religion, ethics, patients – who could quietly, rationally, compassionately, debate the very few cases which fall into this terrible legal limbo, taking guidance from others as and when they need it? Not in such a way as to drive the debate underground, not to sweep the anomalies under the carpet, but to take individual cases away from the heat and distortion of media coverage, protecting and supporting those for whom this dilemma is a lived reality not a theoretical argument.
I haven’t ever seen this idea promoted, and it’s the first time I’ve aired my own view on this. So what do you think? Would you be in favour? Or can you see some glaring reason why this would not be an acceptable way forward?
What would your solution be?
Eyes closed but wide awake
Life chez nous is becoming very scrambled this spring. Three weddings and a couple of conferences all involving long car journeys (of the several-hundred-miles-in-one-hop variety) … looming literary appointments … elderly folk needing tlc … family commitments … amongst the usual hmdrum responsibilities. Which is a long-winded way of saying, not much time to sit writing novels.
As far as the current story (about a family whose lives are devastated by a car crash) goes, I know I need to lift the mood somewhat. And I’ve identified the way forward: another secondary narrative thread. But it requires a lot of concentration to hang on to which of my characters is doing what, where and in what time frame; to place enough cues strategically without losing pace or flow. So, with everything else going on, it’s left to the deep recesses of the night-time brain to develop this new storyline.
Which reminds me of the narrator in the fictional Diary of an Ex-Detective (1959): ‘When I am deeply perplexed it is my practice to go to bed, and lie there till I have solved my doubts and perplexities. With my eyes closed, but wide awake, and nothing to disturb me, I can work out my problems.’ quoted in the The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. I’m doing a fair bit of problem-solving with my eyes closed these days, not just during the long watches of the night, but also on those aforementioned long journeys – not, I hasten to add, when I’m in the driving seat.
But for those of you who haven’t made the acquaintance of late great Mr Whicher, here’s a summary. One summer night in 1860 the well-to-do Kent family went to sleep in an elegant Georgian house in Wiltshire. Mr and the second Mrs Samuel Kent, their children, their domestic staff. Next morning their world is blown apart by the discovery of the gruesome murder of one of the children. What’s more it seems that the perpetrator of the crime must be someone within the household.
The celebrated detective Jack Whicher from Scotland Yard is brought in to investigate but his conclusions fly in the face of the verdicts of the local police and others. He believes the daughter of Samuel Kent’s first marriage is to blame, but almost everyone else comes into the frame at some stage. And so powerful are the voices raised in opposition that Mr Whicher’s mighty reputation crumbles and he fades into obscurity. The true story only evolves gradually over many years.
The book is a reconstruction of a real case but begins like a novel. Whatever its later shortcomings, hats off to Kate Summerscale for her meticulously detailed research. She weaves in the work of authors of the time, historical landmarks, other notorious cases, alongside her account of who said what, who did what, and when. Rather too many deviations, in my view, detracting from the pace of the main storyline. Probably why she needs to repeat points so often to remind the reader of the salient facts of this case. But in the process she brings into stark relief the harsh and capricious nature of the legal system of the day, with all its limitations. There’s no DNA evidence, no CCTV documentation, no sophisticated pathology result, to substantiate the circumstantial suspicions. The death penalty is meted out after short brutal trials. Public hangings are still a spectator sport.
And the class structure still divides. Whicher himself is seen by some as a greedy and inept working class fellow, meddling in middle class affairs. But by others as a fearless pursuer of the truth irrespective of class distinctions. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.
His investigation certainly shines a light into a closed-up house, into the secretive world beneath the veneer of well-to-do respectability, into the divided loyalties above and below stairs, into the complex emotions of step-relations. Police procedure involves measuring breasts, examining night attire for bodily fluids, asking indelicate questions of nice young ladies – all in a context of Victorian prudery and secrecy. Sensational stuff for its age. It attracts huge media attention. And the echoes and repercussions go on for decades.
I enjoyed the clever piecing together of the fragments of a story from many sources. And the unravelling of a family’s life during that era. A clever idea adroitly executed. I wasn’t so keen on the time it took to tell the story and the repetitive elements. But it made me appreciate the fact that at least any false trails I might lay won’t lead to the gallows.
Hmmm, clutching at straws comes to mind!