Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Sussex, a summer’s day, and in Ashdown Forest a woman walking her dog is raped and viciously assaulted. As she fights for life in hospital three people are stricken with guilt at their own perceived involvement for, as teen-agers, they had witnessed an even worse atrocity when a young mother died with her child and they had told lies that were to send a man to prison for eighteen years. Yet the crimes didn’t stop; women continued to be raped in that locality and with every incident there came the suspicion that the wrong person had been jailed, that a killer was walking free.
The story alternates between past and present, told by the three children, as teens and adults, but concentrating on present time when Shawn Weston is coming up for Release, not only with a judicial Hearing but one bolstered by a powerful campaign fighting for his reinstatement, even exoneration. A bad man admittedly, the argument goes: violent, an abusive father, but not a murderer. However, guilty as originally charged or innocent, Weston is now a vengeful man and it’s assumed that, if freed, he will come looking for those he holds responsible for his incarceration.
It’s not only the original trio that know themselves to be targets but their families: partners, lovers, children: hostages to fortune. Lives are in balance. Rachel (who coached the malleable Alex in the original lie) is paranoid and alcoholic, fighting her husband for the custody of her children; Alex is being blackmailed by a spiteful lover, Jonathan had his own reasons for lying and as much to lose as anyone. The reader feels for these three people: as children, traumatised by horror, who had acted instinctively, with cunning, out of love, and told one lie - that led to more – to find themselves enmeshed in a web between the police and media, the Press epitomized by one reporter who smelled a rat and for whom all ends justified the means.
There were a lot of bastards involved, a scatter of good men and too many vulnerable women. Tearful, yet despite its girly style and an obligatory swipe at misogyny it’s a scorching indictment of the judiciary system from the top down, and what might have been taken for padding served as a ratcheting up of fury on the part of author and reader. We didn’t need it. We got the message.
