miscarriage of justice
Nothing Ventured
I’m currently grappling with some very deep and challenging topics, so needed a little light relief and an escape from brain overload and emotional tension. Jeffrey Archer ticked all the boxes and Nothing Ventured – the first of his William Warwick series – has proved both undemanding and distracting. Oh, and with a nice line in humour. Just what the doctor ordered.
It’s billed as ‘not a detective story, but a story about a detective’. DC William Warwick is the product of an expensive private education, with a degree in Art History, and a lifelong yearning and determination to be a police detective. His father is an eminent judge and his sister a successful barrister, but William does his best to hide these facts from his fellow officers; he wants to advance on his own merits alone. What he’s less able to hide are his privileged ‘choirboy’ credentials.
Having been very successfully mentored by an excellent near-retirement sergeant on the beat and given invaluable practical advice, William is devastated when Fred is killed in the line of duty while they are out on the streets, and he is himself wounded in the same incident. But by this time his own innate abilities are all too obvious and he is fast tracked to Scotland Yard into the Art and Antiques Squad.
With his background in Art History he’s uniquely qualified to join a team investigating the theft of priceless masterpieces by the great artists, and the clever replication of certain special pieces. When he falls in love with Beth Rainsford, a girl from the Fitzmolean Museum from where one great work was stolen seven years earlier, he also gets embroiled in her personal campaign to free her father, Arthur, from prison where he is serving time for murder. William becomes a key player in both cases, and both his father, Sir Julian Warwick, and his sister, Grace, are instrumental in defending Arthur’s innocence.
When the mastermind behind the theft of paintings is apprehended, both his case and the review of Arthur Rainsford’s case come to court at the same time. Archer skilfully has us dipping back and forth into Court 22 and Court 14, following the arguments in each case, eyes flicking from the immobile faces of the experienced judges, to the reactions of counsel as they score or lose points, to the concentration of the jury, to the sneer on the face of the man in the dock.
Fred Yates’ advice to a rookie PC Warwick at the outset of his career is: ABC – Accept nothing. Believe no one. Challenge everything. And that’s what we need to do with this book. Archer is brilliant at weaving a clever plot and keeping us guessing till the end which way the courts will swing. Nothing Ventured filled this brief very satisfactorily.
How to Kill Your Family
Ahah, if you read my post last week, I guess you’ll have been wondering when this topic might appear – How to Kill Your Family. 
This debut novel by Bella Mackie was written during the pandemic and published last year, quickly becoming a Sunday Times bestseller. Given the reaction of the lovely waitress at Shugborough Manor, I felt somewhat compelled to get on and read the book, to assure her/readers that it was indeed part of my writerly research, not signifying any evil intent on my part!
It’s a tale that takes us inside the mind of an unusual psychopath, one who is possessed and intoxicated by her need/desire to wipe out a complete family. The young killer in this case believes that there’s a certain art to a good murder. She’s not into bloodshed and savage violence; rather she’s fascinated by the motives and habits of her potential victims, and wants their own extravagant lifestyles to be the cause of their undoing. To that end her research is meticulous. She studies the minutiae of the lives and appetites of each of her victims to find a way of killing that happens while they are going about their ordinary everyday activities doing something perfectly normal for them. And, of course, that way credibility is given to a verdict of ‘accidental death’.
Grace Barnard was born of a short unbalanced relationship between an impecunious but effortlessly-beautiful French girl, Marie, and a wealthy entitled already-married man, Simon Artemis, 22 years her senior, one of the richest men in the world, who rejected Marie and her baby both at the pregnancy stage and when Marie appealed to him just before her own untimely premature death.
From the age of 13 Grace has planned a way to avenge her mother: she would rid the world of this morally rotten family, the embodiment of toxic capitalism, a vacuum of morality, a totem of greed. And she had absolutely no qualms about doing so. After all, it wouldn’t be taking anything decent away, would it? Indeed it would be for the public good.
By the time we meet her, she has calmly and methodically killed six members of the Artemis family and then carried on with the rest of her life without a single regret. But having evaded justice for these murders, she is now in Limehouse prison for a crime she did not commit – the death of her foster-brother’s fiancee. To relieve the relentless boredom inside while she awaits her expensive lawyer arranging to get her off her life sentence, she decides to secretly write an accurate account of her life and actions. Re-living the murders, observing her own cleverness, and remembering how she contrived to right a great wrong, helps, though she’s only too conscious that her scribblings are nowhere near the level of Oscar Wilde‘s musings from his prison cell.
Killing her biological grandparents seemed like the least problematic task.
‘… it didn’t matter as much. Old people who do nothing but drain their pensions and stultify in their favourite armchairs isn’t a brilliant advertisement for humanity.’ They’ll only ‘become useless bed blockers who get more and more mean-spirited until they are nothing more than bigoted beasts of burden living in the room you wanted to make a study … old and disposable, and they live staggeringly useless lives.’
Oh, and from the outset her own grandparents wanted nothing to do with their illegitimate granddaughter, Grace, so they don’t deserve to go on living. A ‘natural’, ‘accidental’ death in a car crash attracts no unwarranted attention.
Her cousin Andrew poses a bigger problem. She hasn’t bargained for him being likeable. But, unknown to her, he had already turned his back on wealth and privilege, and now spends his days trying to save the world and mankind through conservation and natural remedies, currently centring on amphibians and hallucinogens. He has put his toxic family out of his life and Grace finds it far harder to carry out her plan with a truly blithe spirit. Finding a way to kill him without arousing suspicion takes a long time in the planning, but his end is suitably gentle and amongst his beloved frogs.
Uncle Lee is a chancer steeped in privilege and greed … a heartless sociopath with nothing at all to recommend him to Grace. It’s a pleasure to carry out her plan with him. His seedy proclivities become his undoing and she watches him die with great satisfaction. But his wife Lara is a different kettle of fish and Grace simply can’t bring herself to harm someone so guileless and decent and wronged.
Her father’s wife Janine, however, is a mean, selfish, indulged woman who spends her whole days doing precisely as she wishes and bullying those whom she considers beneath her. Grace is increasingly drawn to the idea of letting her obscenely luxurious home in Monaco turn on her, and she employs the skill of a needy 17-year-old computer nerd and Janine’s put-upon maid to enable her plan. It’s a calculated risk involving others but she builds in protection for herself to minimise the possibility of a backlash. And again the murder passes as a tragic accident.
Totally spoilt and pampered Bryony, Simon’s 27-year-old legitimate daughter, is the one whose death is most likely (if any) to affect Simon, so Grace leaves her till the penultimate kill. Only when he has suffered this acute loss will she reveal herself and her final intention to him. Bryony has one specific natural weakness which Grace decides to exploit: she is allergic to peaches. The premature death of a young heiress attracts media attention but no suspicion and Grace finally gets a glimpse into the pain she is inflicting on her father.
Only one target left: Daddy dearest himself, the principal victim from the outset. But she hasn’t bargained on him being paranoid for his own safety after losing so many relatives, rendering him virtually unreachable. And it’s an enormous anticlimax when Simon disappears at sea piloting his speedboat while drunk during a visit to his villa in St Tropez. Frustrated and bewildered, Grace weeps for days. Now he would never get to know what she had done and why – the whole point of the plan.
Explanation comes in an unexpected email which she receives the day she is released from prison; an email that will vanish once it’s read. Someone else had a vested interest in the Artemis family; someone else shared a remarkably similar status; someone else was born to a young silly woman dazzled by a larger-than-life Simon Artemis, and then cast aside when he became bored with her; someone else feels entitled to the Artemis’ wealth; someone else was involved in the end of a dynasty. It comes as a complete shock. Especially when that someone knows so much about Grace and her actions. When that someone has effectively scuppered her entire operation.
Journalist and columnist Bella Mackie has created a brilliant plot, based on clever insights into the mind of an emotionally detached but somewhat naive psychopath, and an understanding of human psychology and behaviour. The book is at once gripping, compulsive and chillingly dark. It’s not a comfortable feeling getting inside the head of someone who can kill without scruple, but Mackie manages to keep a lightness of touch and humour by tailoring the deaths – not the usual messy slaughtering, but clean, almost natural ends to pampered lives; and by fleshing out the impact of social injustices and inequalities that fuel Grace’s slow-burning anger, using caustic commentary to give us a degree of sympathy with her single-minded crusade to clean up the world.
The book served as a small diversion from some serious study into much more edifying subjects the waitress at Shugborough would be pleased to know – about virtue and ethics and integrity in real life. The other end of the spectrum from murder.
Interestingly this week the BBC aired a four part programme called The Sixth Commandment based on the true story of a young man who befriended lonely elderly people and conned them out of their money and self respect. He too could take life without scruple. Sobering reality.
Innocent until proven guilty
Imagine you are sitting in court … a stern faced judge is condemning the young man in the dock to life imprisonment, to serve a minimum of 30 years. He’s only in his 30s. He’ll be almost 70 when – if – he is ever released. Horrendous. And that young man is … your son. Already the hate mail is arriving, your own private life is becoming public, you are personally reviled and shunned … for giving birth to a monster.
Now imagine that you are totally, utterly convinced that your boy is innocent of the alleged crime. You know him, his nature, his attitudes. He’s chosen nursing as his career; he’s spent his life caring for people; he’s incapable of hurting anyone. And yet … the evidence is spelled out by the lawyers and police: what he said; what he did; the links between him and so many deaths in mysterious circumstances. The prosecution describe him as a ‘thoroughly evil and dangerous man … arrogant and manipulative’ – a fiend who deliberately and maliciously injected insulin into elderly patients in his care. The press liken him to Harold Shipman, but in this case he’s been stopped in his tracks after just four murders, possibly five. The jury with no vested interest either way, listen carefully, objectively, to the evidence, and they conclude that he is guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
You watch your boy being taken away to serve this terrible sentence, your precious son locked away with criminals, his life and future in tatters.
Small wonder that you don’t accept this verdict … that you seek an alternative explanation. There must be one. Years pass. Eventually there’s a new investigation. The enquiry reveals that there is no direct forensic evidence connecting your son to any of those deaths; that there was no trace of insulin in any of the patients allegedly murdered; that tests used in evidence were invalid; that mathematical calculations reveal it is unfeasible and unrealistic that the level of insulin needed to effect these deaths could have been injected; that naturally-occurring hypoglycaemia happens more often than was thought in the frail elderly non-diabetic sick patient; that eminent experts do not believe there were any murders committed at all. Indeed, new data suggest that these four women died from a condition called insulin auto immune syndrome.
It looks as if your boy has spent six years waiting for his case to come to court, a further six years in prison, for a crime he did not commit. That he has lost his career, his good name, his freedom, and yet he has done nothing wrong. That he only came to attention because he predicted the death of an old lady (something nurses often do), and he just happened to be on duty when these four people died.
A novel I’ve dreamed up? No – although I’d have been jolly pleased with the plotting if I had made it up! No, it was a case discussed on BBC 1 on Monday evening: The Innocent Serial Killer? At once fascinating, frightening and disturbing. Scottish nurse Colin Norris was arrested in 2002. His case came to court in 2008. He is still in prison. His mother has actually lived through this nightmare scenario I’ve just described. She’s living it still.
The results of the BBC investigation were mesmerizing. I found myself identifying with everyone concerned – as a patient, as a grieving relative, as a nurse, as a mother, as a juror, as a writer. And I was appalled. I wanted to march into Durham prison and demand his instant release at least until his case is reheard. OK, I don’t know him; I can’t vouch for him personally; and this programme was presenting a certain line in evidence; but there does seem to be more than enough doubt over this conviction to suggest a possible – maybe even probable – miscarriage of justice, and don’t we Brits pride ourselves on our scrupulously fair innocent-until-proven-guilty system? Besides, there but for the grace of God go I. I’ve predicted deaths. I’ve been on duty when a spate of deaths has occurred. I’ve joked about jinxing the ward. It’s what nurses do. It’s how they survive in a workplace where the grim reaper stalks the corridors.
Stranger than fiction indeed and much much more tense and terrifying.