I will never forget the pause that followed. It seemed to stitch itself into the very air.
‘Gambling addicts, for example.’
That was when Anne Cleary knew it was all over.
‘Internet gambling is a horrible thing,’ Hawthorne went on, and for once he sounded genuinely sympathetic. ‘Your son was one of around three hundred thousand addicts in the country. There are about five hundred deaths a year and most of them are young men, university students, kids living alone. And the big online gambling companies … they know what they’re doing with those bright lights and flashing colours, the personalised texts and emails, the free bets. You must have been sickened when you got an invitation to a literary festival sponsored by Spin-the-wheel.com. I assume they were the same people who killed William.’
Everything in the room had changed. It was like an image on a computer screen that had suddenly frozen. It all looked the same, but I was aware that something had gone terribly wrong.
‘He never told me,’ Anne said. ‘William had always been such a happy boy and of course I knew something was wrong. He’d changed. But I thought it was down to the pressure of starting at university. He’d never lived away from home before. And of course he’d had to borrow the money to pay the tuition fees and that was preying on his mind. It was only after he died that the police found all the evidence on his computer. He’d gone through his savings and he’d maxed out all his credit cards. And he’d sold things.’ Until now, Anne had been strangely dispassionate, explaining her past history as if it was unconnected to her. But for the first time her voice cracked. ‘He’d sold the watch we’d given him for his eighteenth birthday and the laptop when he’d started university. He’d sold his clothes. All the time, he was getting more and more desperate, but he kept on playing, spinning the wheel in the hope that he would make everything right. And when it got to be too much, he took an overdose of paracetamol. That was the drug that killed him.’
Hawthorne was accusing Anne Cleary of murder, and I had been witness to two shocking deaths. But I felt only pity for her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
She stared at me. ‘I don’t want your pity. I made the decision to commit a crime. It was a dreadful thing to do and I always expected to pay the full price.’ Anne turned back to Hawthorne.
‘Two crimes,’ Hawthorne said. ‘You also killed Helen le Mesurier.’
‘Yes.’
Anne Cleary hadn’t even tried to deny it. She was sitting very still. I was aware of the hollow ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. I wanted to get up and silence the wretched thing.
‘When I heard about Derek Abbott, I thought that might be the end of it as far as I was concerned,’ she said. ‘But if you’ve come here to judge me, you’re too late. My judgement has already been made.’
‘It’s not just you, Anne. You weren’t alone.’
That jolted her. ‘Yes, I was.’
‘Do you really think you can lie to me? Even now? You couldn’t have tied Charles le Mesurier to that chair without help, even if you had whacked him with a rock first. You also needed someone to persuade Helen le Mesurier to walk into that cave where you were waiting for her. All of this was carefully planned. And not just by you.’
‘I killed both those people. I will pay for it.’ She looked at him with a growing desperation. ‘What more do you want, Mr Hawthorne?’
‘Colin Matheson asked me that when I was doing my talk in Alderney,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘I told him I wanted the truth, and I suppose that’s close enough. But actually, it’s more than that. I want you to face up to what you did because here you are sitting in this nice house, surrounded by nice things, but you’re not nice, are you? You’re a killer.’
‘You don’t think he deserved it? Charles le Mesurier destroyed my son and made money out of his pain – and the pain of hundreds like him! Go on the website. Look at it.’
‘I’ve been on their website. I’ve seen what you saw and I’m sorry about your boy. I really am. But nobody deserves to die, Anne. You know that, even if you’ve persuaded yourself otherwise. That was the mistake you made.’
Silence. The clock ticking. Then …
‘Why don’t you ask your daughter to come down?’
Anne stiffened. ‘She’s not here.’
‘Her car’s parked outside. I’ve had a friend of mine watching the house since you got back. I thought you would have got that by now. You can’t lie to me.’
The door opened and a young woman came in. ‘Mum,’ she said.
‘Don’t—’ Anne began.
‘It’s all right, Mum. He knows.’
Kathryn Harris was wearing jeans and a shirt knotted at the waist. She had taken off the overlarge spectacles that she had used to disguise her face and as she sat down I thought how similar the two women were. But then, from the very start I had said that Anne Cleary reminded me of someone’s mother. I just hadn’t realised whose.
‘How did you know?’ Kathryn asked Hawthorne.
‘That you were related? Well, we could start with your mum’s books. I really did love those books, by the way. Me and my son couldn’t get enough of them. Bill and Kitty Flashbang.’ He glanced at Anne. ‘You told Tony that you’d named the two characters after your own kids. Bill was William, obviously. And Kitty …’
‘… Kathryn,’ I said.
‘Harris is your married name, is that right?’
‘Yes.’ Kathryn nodded, suddenly fearful. I guessed that her husband knew nothing of all this.
‘There were plenty of clues. You look like each other. You’ve got the same-coloured eyes. You’ve obviously lived together for a long time, so you talk in the same way. It’s going to be a hot one. That’s how Kathryn described the summer weather when we met her at breakfast. And Anne, you used exactly the same phrase when you asked if you could leave the hotel. They say it’s going to be a hot one, so I might go for a walk.
‘There were other things, too.’ Hawthorne was still addressing Anne. ‘Marc Bellamy told me that you’d lent Kathryn your pen. That struck me as strange, if it was so precious to you. Right now you were pretending you couldn’t even remember her name. And finally, you’re both vegetarians.’
Anne had told us she was a vegetarian when we interviewed her at the hotel, but I was sure that Kathryn hadn’t provided us with the same information. I thought back. At Southampton Airport she had ordered a cheese salad. At The Divers Inn she had been nibbling a stick of celery. Her breakfast at the hotel had been muesli and yoghurt. Even at The Lookout, after serving steak and kidney puddings, she had helped herself only to a cheese pastry. Never once had I seen her eat any meat or fish.
‘Kathryn never did anything!’ Anne insisted.
‘Let me tell you what you both did,’ Hawthorne cut in. His voice was cold. ‘My guess is that this all started with you, Anne. You were invited to a literary festival in Alderney, probably at the end of last year, and you noticed that it was being sponsored by Spin-the-wheel.com. I can imagine how angry you must have felt, though probably your first instinct was to forget the whole thing. But then you started thinking. Maybe you could use it to your advantage. Maybe it was a chance to get close to the people who were responsible for the death of your son.
‘At about the same time, Kathryn moved in on Marc Bellamy. She happened to be sharing a room with his assistant, who’d just been offered a job on another cookery show. It was a perfect opportunity. Kathryn was a vegetarian; she didn’t like meat. But she persuaded Bellamy to take her on and he was delighted because she was asking for so little money. As soon as she was in there, she contacted Judith Matheson and got Marc invited.’ He looked at Kathryn for the first time. ‘Is that right?’