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 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?