18

Moxham Hall

Like Hawthorne, I had managed to download Harriet’s book on Kindle and I skimmed through it on the train to Chippenham. What was I to make of Harriet Throsby’s writing style? It was a mishmash of treacly sentimentalism and sheer venom, worth every penny of the £0.00 that Kindle had attached to it. I had to agree with what Martin Longhurst had said. There was something deeply offensive about turning a tiny incident, a tragedy in an English village, into some sort of Mills & Boon morality tale, and reading it, I felt less bad about her review of Mindgame. It was one thing to trash a play at the theatre, but with Bad Boys she had done the same to people’s lives and almost every sentence demonstrated to me what a thoroughly unpleasant woman she had been. Why should I care what she thought of me? It’s an interesting paradox. The more humane the critics, the more hurtful their opinions.

For a crime reporter, she had an extraordinary knack of muddling up the facts, so that it was almost impossible to work out where her sympathies lay – although by and large she seemed to have a bad opinion of almost everyone involved. So Stephen was the younger boy who had been seduced, led astray by Wayne. He had been abandoned by his unloving parents. But he was still Little Lord Fauntleroy, the rich kid who deserved everything he got. Wayne Howard was his worst enemy, a bad influence, the instigator of all their crimes. And yet he was a victim himself … damaged by his upbringing and social status. Major Alden was a patriot and a war hero, but he was also a stick-in-the-mud, a martinet who should never have been allowed anywhere near a modern primary school. Rosemary Alden, his wife, fussed over the children but never took their side against her husband. And so on.

Hawthorne had brought his iPad with him, but he didn’t read any of the book on the way down. Perhaps he had guessed that he would find nothing of value inside. It was nice, just for once, to be one step ahead of him, but even as I swiped the screen from page to wearisome page, I knew that Bad Boys wasn’t going to help me very much either. Harriet distorted everything. It was a sort of ownership. She made the entire world her own – just as she had done with my play, her marriage to Arthur, the production of Saint Joan, all those first-night parties she had insisted on gatecrashing. I was finally getting the measure of the woman. It was just the identity of her killer that defeated me.

I only hoped that this trip wasn’t going to be a complete waste of time. With the experts still battling away at the Police Forensic Science Laboratory, time was something of which I had very little left.