Not at all my cup of tea really, far too Gothic, but I kept going out of sheer curiosity because of promises of a ‘fascinatingly rich & complex mystery’ & ’a workout for the grey cells’ which would keep me ‘guessing until the last page.’
Well, not guessing about whodunit, but what is it for? Until very near the end I thought its main value might be as an awful warning, to girls in particular, of the reasons for not going to Oxford, for not submitting oneself to that intense, enclosed, possessive place, with teachers who see it as their job to mould you in their own image, a place which, even without the mayhem, can crush & destroy those who need a less rarefied atmosphere with more space in which to breathe.
Or at least a place which could do that as recently as the early 1990s when there was still such a thing as an all female college with bitchy girls & scary, snobbish, disapproving but scholarly spinster dons.
I was however struck by the unusually explicit way in which ‘the moral of this story’ was expressed, in particular:
There’s a price we pay for being part of society. You don’t get to make rules that apply only to you … The law isn’t always fair … But it’s the best we’ve got
That seems only too apt a point for her readers to ponder & ruminate upon at a time when there is an unusual amount of discussion & doubt about our law, or at least around the workings of our legal system.
This week’s outrage has been over the cross-examination of Milly Dowler’s parents at the Old Bailey trial of Levi Bellfield, a man who was already serving life for two other murders & one attempt & has now been found guilty of killing Milly.
It is not at all hard to regard the parent’s ordeal with horror, to think that it should not have happened, or at least not in open court in the full glare of publicity. Until you start thinking about the alternatives.
Milly was a thirteen year old girl who disappeared suddenly nine years ago on her way home from school one sunny afternoon. Despite the fact that this happened on a busy street, minutes after she had left her friends in a station café, there was very little for anyone to go on, no witness to an abduction, no cctv, no body. One obvious line of enquiry, though by no means the only one, was whether Milly could have run away of her own volition, which involved police questioning the family closely. One really could expect nothing less.
There is also the point that, statistically speaking, the father/husband/boyfriend is a main initial suspect in the death of a family member.
I remember hearing another father speak of the long term effects of his daughter’s murder on the family – another notorious case in the leafy suburbs south of London, the girl had been murdered in her own bedroom while the family slept. The father fully accepted the reasons why the police had to go through the process of eliminating him as a suspect, rather than just assuming that of course he didn’t do it, & the case was ultimately solved with the real murderer convicted, but the scars were still there.
The problem in the Dowler case lay in the fact that the police uncovered evidence of the father’s sexual predilection which Milly had also found out about, & other written evidence of Milly’s teenage angst. In these days of careful record keeping & full disclosure, the defence also knew about this.
We have full disclosure because there have been too many past cases of miscarriage of justice where police & prosecution kept to themselves important evidence considered irrelevant to the case they eventually brought to court against the accused.
Milly’s body was finally found six months after she disappeared, but sadly in a condition which provided little in the way of evidence about how she died.
The case which was finally put before the jury was entirely circumstantial, consisting of little more than the fact that Bellfield lived close to the point at which she disappeared & had behaved oddly in the days immediately following her murder.
So his defence, which in part consisted of arguing that Milly must have run away & come to harm somewhere else, not at his hands, is a reasonable line to take in a system where the prosecution must prove its case.
There remain questions of whether the evidence about personal sexual peccadilloes should have been heard in open court & whether counsel for the defence were over-aggressive in their questioning.
Sexual privacy – the right to a private life - is another much debated issue which some say is bringing the law - & judges – into disrepute. Some have claimed that it is ridiculous to humiliate a grieving father in this way when the system grants a privacy injunction to a footballer anxious to keep his infidelities confidential. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, is weighing this against another privacy argument still wending its way through the European judicial system, in which the press is claiming the right to publish details of a man’s sexual proclivities merely because of who he is & who his father was. In other words the press seem close to saying that they have the sole right to decide who gets the pointing, wagging finger of ridicule & blame & who gets left alone as an ‘ordinary person’
The argument seems further to be that if Levi Bellfield refused to do the decent thing & keep quiet about this, his lawyers should have – well what? Told him he could not invite the jury to consider evidence which had been considered by the police? Confined themselves to asking a mealy-mouthed question about whether his daughter had been upset by an unspecified discovery?
Of course you would never be in the dockbut if you were, knowing yourself to be innocent, what would you want your barister to do?
There is also, if we are honest, a way in which we simply do not want to know, to be told, all this. It doesn’t fit the story we want to tell ourselves about good, decent families living uncomplicated, decent, hard working lives, raising happy children who never suffer secret agonies, dark thoughts or struggles coming to terms with growing up & the meaning of life.
A happy story which can be disrupted only by evil people, who will be dealt with by the law.
As indeed has, finally happened in this case. Levi Bellfield is guilty, a jury has said so, & we are entitled to judge the conduct of his lawyers in the light of that finding.
There is an even more nasty possibility lurking in the background of this story.
It is being suggested that Levi Bellfield may have committed more murders, before he murdered Milly. Should these be investigated with renewed vigour, should he face yet more trials?
In particular, should he, possibly, if evidence becomes available, be tried for a crime of which another man has twice been found guilty?
Another story of a family whose idyll was brutally shattered, two even younger girls attacked alongside their mother in the English countryside. Another father who had, at least briefly, to endure coming under suspicion until his alibi could be checked, then making a life for himself & a daughter who miraculously survived.
The evidence against the man who was found guilty was also circumstantial; he was in the vicinity, he had more than his share of untreatable psychiatric problems; to say the least he was a scary nuisance.
But he had a sister who loved him & made the case that he was not capable of that particular evil, to no avail.
Suppose he is, after all, innocent. Where does justice lie here?
I started this by calling Val McDermid’s tale too gothic for my taste. Her book does at least end with closure of a kind, but what sort of reception would be given to a new book which reinterprets all the evidence, shows us that the Oxford-trained expert psychiatric profiler & her high flying policeman friend got it all wrong?
Added 28 June: There is a very useful & balanced summary of the legal underpinnings to the Dowler trial at Justice: RIP?
