Unforgotten 3
An outline for a six part serial by Chris Lang
Series three of ‘Unforgotten’ will once again explore the fallout from, and the investigation into, an historic murder. It will continue to mine some of the themes of series one and two, but the primary theme of this series, will be the increasingly public nature of serious criminal investigation.
So this is a story about public opprobrium and shaming, about trial by twitter, facebook and blog. It is about societal rage and self righteousness, and about why we are now so eager to accuse and scream ‘guilty’, ever less concerned with such inconveniences as evidence and due process.
Reflecting events like the murder of Jo Cox, the trial-less but very public excoriation of Greville Janner and Leon Brittan, and the media frenzy surrounding anyone connected to high profile murder cases, ‘Unforgotten 3’ asks uncomfortable questions about the threat to justice that comes with the increasingly transparent system we now demand.
On a human level, it will delve deeper into the notion of what sins are forgivable – not so much by others, but by ourselves. We’re all fallible, we’ve all done things of which we may be ashamed, but which of those should we forgive ourselves for, which should we not, and how do we make the distinction?
So although the story will once again spin off from the discovery of an historical murder victim, there are some key differences in series three.
Firstly, all of our key suspects are close friends. Four men who met as bright young 11 year olds, at a south London grammar in 1968. (By using this fixed starting point, our story will reference documentaries like ‘7 Up’, and examine how the sixties experiment of social mobility played out over the decades).
So whatever bonds were forged in those first few febrile years of early adolescence, as each tried to define their place in the world with the help of friendship, girls, and alcohol, they were extraordinary enough to have survived till today. Survived moving away, failed marriages, career successes and numerous kids, this self styled ‘gang of four’ have been mates through thick and thin, and indeed as we join them in episode one, it is at the first sixtieth birthday party (Tim’s) and is a big moment for them all.
But storm clouds are gathering, and as the investigation starts to peel back the layers of each of our antagonists’ lives, after initially offering the support they have always given to each other, they will then start to re-evaluate, retreat, and finally turn on one another, as everything they thought they knew about their old friends, is thrown into doubt.
Secondly, we will chart the journey of four characters who are clearly not suspects.
The older sister of the victim (now a 34 year old woman) who (understandably) has profound issues associated with the tragedy seventeen years ago.
A suspect in the original investigation, who was arrested but ultimately not charged, and whose life was ruined as a result of the attention (we will be referencing characters like Colin Stagg and Robert Murat in this strand).
A woman not connected to the murder in any other way but through her public engagement with the case through social media. The original investigating officer.
And thirdly Cassie will face the greatest test of her career when, as a direct result of information she inadvertently allows to be made public, one of the suspects is murdered by a member of the public, in the ultimate articulation of righteous societal anger.
This murder will threaten the successful investigation of the case (made to look like a guilt induced suicide, it pulls focus away from the other suspects) and will also have a profound impact on Cassie. The deep sense of personal responsibility she feels for the murder, will come at a time of great emotional instability for her, following the departure of her father to live with his new wife, and her sons both doing a year in America for their degrees. On top of these events, the nature of the investigation also dramatically escalates, as new information is discovered at the end of episode five, which takes the case into uncharted and very dark waters in the final episode.
The combined toll these factors take on Cassie will lead her to consider her position and her future. In the end this is a dilemma that tragically she will never have to resolve, as she is stabbed trying to arrest the member of the public who murdered the suspect. Her life hangs in the balance as the story draws to a close, and it is very possible that she will die.
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On Jan 3rd 2000 in the picturesque village of Wisborough in the New Forest, 15 year Hayley Reid disappeared somewhere between the pub she had just finished her evening shift as a waitress in, and her family home, half a mile down a dark country road.
The original investigation failed to find her, her body, or who might have been responsible for her disappearance, but did manage to cause immense pain to her family and community in the course of a profoundly troubled few months. Hayley was a fairly normal fifteen year old, but perhaps more sexually experienced than most (she had had at least three partners, one of whom was 25) and the police struggled to know quite what they were dealing with or how to interpret the possible narrative, resulting in a serious mistake, when they initially suggested she had probably run off to London with a man she had met in the summer.
Three years after she went missing, the twenty strong investigation team was scaled down to a core team of three officers. Five years later this core team was also stood down.
And then, on a cold November morning nearly seventeen years later, during routine maintenance works to a section of the M1 in Finchley, remains that are fairly quickly identified as Hayley’s (she had an unusual metal plate in her tibia from a horse riding accident) are found buried on the central grass reservation between the two carriage ways. Given her experience in similar cases, the investigation is assigned to Cassie Stuart.
The body is found with no clothes and no evidence linking it to anything, but it is clearly significant that it was found in London, and after a number of false starts (the idea that Hayley ran away is re- examined for a while) it is Cassie who first posits the theory that she was brought to London already dead. Which suggests the murderer possibly lived in London.
So this in turn leads them to look at second homes and holiday lets in and around Wisborough, and then when this theory is examined in conjunction with certain evidence from the original investigation, focus will turn to one particular house. ‘The Spinney’, a seven bedroom former rectory, four miles from Wisborough, which it now transpires was rented for one week from December 29th 1999, to 5th Jan 2000, by a group of old friends and their families (at that time, all in their early forties) to celebrate the Millennium. Seventeen years later, Cassie Stuart and her team start to explore the possibility that one of them was responsible for the death of Hayley Reid.
So who are our antagonists?
Tim Wells (59) is a GP in the small West Sussex market town of Petworth, and is about to turn 60 (indeed the first time we meet him and the other three, will be at a special dinner to celebrate his birthday). After leaving school in 1975, seven years of med school saw him qualify as a doctor in the early eighties. A patient and deeply caring man, with a laconic wit, he has been married for twelve years to his second wife, Daisy (56) who runs a local antique shop, and both are involved and much loved members of the local community. He has two grown up children (a son and daughter, both now in their late twenties) with his first wife, Jennifer, who he divorced in 2004, and who he and (to a lesser degree) his kids, are estranged from. The true cause of this estrangement (in the kids’ minds their mum simply absented herself) will be painfully revealed over the course of the series, with many claim and counter claim, as his children struggle to know who to believe.
Jennifer, his wife at the time of the millennium break, and now living a reclusive life in the wilds of Wales, is indisputably a volatile and irrational woman, but she claims it was her ex that caused her to become that person. A man who demeaned, controlled, and physically abused her for years. The kids, who were both at boarding school, never saw anything of the sort, nor did any of his friends have any sense of him being a violent man, but they do acknowledge he can be controlling, and a man who possibly subtly controls Daisy even now. And when conclusive proof is found of his historic domestic violence, even as a hitherto unknown connection is made all those years ago to Hayley Reid (he is identified as the man seen talking to her on New Year’s day on a local beach) questions are asked about what might have transpired between this girl and the youthful looking Timothy Wells over the course of that week away.
And when in interview, Jennifer reveals she left (by train) a day early, to get the kids back to school on time, meaning Tim had the car to himself, alarm bells start seriously ringing, and the question his loving wife, his kids and the police must ask, is could his unpleasant but not extraordinary character flaws, make him a murderer.
Dave Carr (60) Runs a small financial services company in Hunstanton, Norfolk. Joined the grammar school a couple of years later than the others after returning from overseas with his military parents. With no competition for entry at 13, this less academically gifted lad struggled to keep up. Happily, what he lacked in brains, he made up for in personality. The joker in the pack (who was also a handsome bastard) he was charming, affable, and indisputably the glue of the group, the one who would always be arranging for them all to meet up over the years. With two scrappy A levels, he was never going to go to university, and instead went abroad and worked in property in the Balearics. He partied and worked hard for slightly longer than he should have, till he met Maria (cabin crew) in the mid nineties, and returned to the UK to finally marry in1997, at the age of 39. So he had kids ten years later than the others (they are now late teens) and had settled in the UK and found professional equilibrium (his own mortgage brokerage) at about the same time.
Or so everyone thought, because a tangential strand of the main investigation (the theft of some quite valuable silverware from the 14c Wisborough village church on Jan 2nd ) throws up a fingerprint which now matches David’s (whose prints have been taken after he assaults a uniform officer trying to question him). And now a whole raft of problems start to arise for Dave Carr. He denies being involved in the theft, nor encountering Hayley in the church (she had a part time cleaning job there) but investigation reveals that in 1999, contrary to what everyone thought, his company was in dire financial straits. This leads to the discovery of a history of fraud in Spain, two bankruptcies of shell companies (designed by him solely to make money through bankruptcy) and worst of all, a three month sentence in a Spanish jail in 1994, for defrauding a children’s charity of 50k (the loss caused it to close down).
The revelation of these appalling acts leaves Maria and their kids understandably devastated – it is horrible to consider a man you believed to be basically moral, could do such immoral things, and despite his apparent contrition, it is not made any easier by Dave’s inability to offer any sense of how he could have behaved in this way. But all of this pales into insignificance, when it is revealed that two days after the holiday ended, Dave travelled back down to Hampshire, on his own, to pick up a lap top he said he had left at the house. Coincidence, or something more sinister.
James Hollis (60) is a journalist and has just returned to London, after nearly 30 years working in America. So James was exactly the sort of kid grammar schools were designed for. Super bright, his education afforded him opportunities his working class parents could never have dreamed of. Eschewing university (on the advice of his dad, a postman) he got an apprenticeship at the local newspaper and was soon earning a salary, whilst most of his contemporaries were drinking and fucking their way through uni. Within five years he was on Fleet St, working for the Guardian, and then in 1989, he moved to the States to work for the New York Times, moving into TV in the early noughties. More American than Brit now, he nevertheless returned permanently to the UK last year and bought a house in Islington.
Also on his second marriage (married New York yoga teacher Anna in 2012) his first wife (Mel Hollis - she kept the name, think Sarah Vine) is a well known columnist for the Mail, and as the investigation hits the headlines, she has no problem gaining a few column inches with some frank articles about his infidelity during their marriage. So Anna knew of one affair, but now dozens come out of the woodwork, prompted by his ex’s article, all with a different spin on ‘Jimmy’s’ voracious and sometimes unusual sexual appetites. Anna is rocked by this (who would not be, this was not who she thought she had married) and then by Mel’s further revelation that when they returned to London from the Millenium holiday, Jimmy insisted on packing the luggage trailer himself . No connection is made by the investigation to Hayley, and James denies any wrong doing, or having ever met Hayley, but we will sense he is lying.
And then into this already heady cocktail of lies and uncertainty, the investigation now adds James and Mel’s son. So Eliot – who was 15 in 2000 - was at that time a troubled young man with drink and drug issues. But much more pertinently, evidence emerges now that suggests he may well have taken his parents’ car, whilst drunk, on the moonless rainy night of the 3rd.. When it then emerges that James Hollis’s car had bodywork damage repaired in London in the second week of January 2000, it prompts a number of questions from the police and his wife. Might Eliot have knocked Hayley down and killed her as she walked home? How much might his father have known of this? And most importantly, just how far would a loving father go to protect his vulnerable child? These are the questions the papers, the BBC, and indeed half the news channels in the world are soon asking, as James Hollis’s hitherto gilded life, starts to implode. The investigation will take Cassie and Sunny to New York, to the brownstone James still owns in Manhattan, and to the offices of the NYPD.
Julian Lowe (60) lives in a camper van in Bristol. So Julian is the ex head of London advertising agency BBO Limbus. Also from humble beginnings, he ended up at Durham Uni (leaving with a first) and immediately joined JWT as a copywriter in 1978, rising quickly up the management ladder, to become CEO of BBO in 1998 when it was second only to Saatchi’s in size and he was only 41. On a stupid salary, with a chauffeur, a large house in Richmond, a wife (Katie, a marketing exec) and two kids, to this day it remains astonishing to his friends and family, how only four years later he was living on his own in a one bedroom flat in Hornsey. So the consensus was that he had succumbed to undiagnosed bi-polar, exacerbated by pressure induced alcoholism, but the investigation into the death of Hayley, will slowly start to challenge that narrative. Julian’s life has been very difficult since he was sacked in 2002. His wife divorced him and mountains of hidden gambling debt saw him walk away penniless. His children have attempted to maintain a relationship with him, but his chaotic life in the last fifteen years, with long periods of mental illness, have made that hard. Julian has him spent long periods variously living on the streets, and as we join him, in a VW camper van (given to him by one of the gang) parked up in various car parks in Bristol. A gentle, frail, but seemingly decent man, he is volunteering in a local refugee crisis centre, teaching young kids English, and has a tender two year relationship with one of the other volunteers, which promises stability and a brighter, simpler future.
But the investigation threatens to precipitate him off a cliff (both literally and metaphorically) and Cassie has to ask herself some tough questions about the morality of questioning this very vulnerable, maybe completely innocent, man. And then the investigation reveals that in 2001 Julian had been arrested as part of the operation Ore team, for buying online child porn (the discovery of this by a work colleague, the real reason for his dismissal). Julian claimed then and claims now, that his card had been cloned (and indeed no charges were pressed, and his lawyers, after a three year fight, were able to have the arrest removed from the PNC) but can his new partner, his children (one of whom now has grandchildren) and his friends completely believe his story. And if it turns out he was actually guilty of the charge, what else might he have been capable of? The questions Cassie must now consider are; Could he have sexually attacked Hayley and then killed her? What is the significance of learning that Hayley had an ambition to move to London and work in advertising? Could Julian be an entirely innocent man, who’s life has just been derailed by bad luck, pure and simple, the random hand of cruel fate.
So these are our primary antagonists, but we are also telling the stories of four further key figures.
Jessica Reid (34) Jess is Hayley’s sister, and has had to overcome many difficulties in the seventeen years since her sister disappeared. Not just the obvious - the grief and pain of not knowing for so long what happened to a sister she adored, but also, what it did to her family and the community around her. So she has had to live with a father who effectively drank himself to death from grief and with a mother who could never move on, but who has devoted the rest of her life not to the living daughter, but to the memory of Hayley. And lastly she has had to deal with a community who have lost a livelihood from the terrible legacy Hayley’s disappearance left. Wisborough, a holiday village in the prettiest part of Hampshire, became a Soham, a Praia de Luz, a place name forever associated with horror, which no-one wants to visit any more. And the truth is, the community slightly blame Jess and her family for that.
Sandra Raworth (24) Sandra is a freelance ‘new media journalist’, who clearly styles herself as a pound shop Katie Hopkins. Having failed her English degree, she has now directed her ire at a world she sees as going to the dogs. She would say ‘she calls it as she sees it’, unaware that in her case (in most cases) this is not a virtue. Rather in fact, that her honesty simply reveals a terrifyingly naive and un-examining mind set that says more about her need for approval and attention, than it does about the state of the world she bigotedly comments on. She would be dangerous if she wasn’t more or less invisible. And then Hayley’s body is found, and ‘The Spinney’s’ link is made and by good luck she is one of the first to blog about it (and the tv presenter James Hollis’s connection) and overnight she gains tens then hundreds of thousands of twitter followers. And suddenly she is not invisible any more, and people are listening to her opinions on the justice system and crime and punishment and the death penalty. And overnight she has become very, very, dangerous. John Bentley (51) was the original lead detective, and is a man fairly racked with guilt at the mistakes he knows he made, losing all momentum in the first few weeks by wrongly suggesting Hayley was most probably living in London. Now based in Guilford, John’s uncomplicated admission of inadequacy to Cassie, is refreshing, as is his unconditional offer of support and help - he is nearing retirement and would love to help rectify the mistakes he still punishes himself for. Over the course of the weeks of the investigation, John and Cassie will become close (he is a divorcee) and they will start a tentative relationship, which is rather lovely, and will, we sense, work. Which Sunny could not be more pleased about.
Steve Lewis (44) Seventeen years ago, at the age of 24, Steve Lewis had (consensual) sex with 15 year old Hayley Reid in a storeroom at the beach cafe they both worked at. He saw her a few times more, before she dumped him for a boy in her class, but he was to pay a heavy price for this illegal act when it is revealed during the original investigation. Labelled a paedophile by the tabloids, and hounded by their reporters, he was also a prime suspect for several months. Then, after no proof linking him to her death could be found, and the tabloids moved on to someone else, he nevertheless found he was now both unemployable and a social pariah. He left Hampshire in 2001 and moved to London, and finally several years later, he got his life back on track. And now it is all about to be dragged up again, and his life re-examined, by police, by the papers, by people that do not know him. Except this time, post Leveson, this very fucking angry man, is ready to fight back.
So these are the stories and lives Cassie will engage with, as she slowly tries to divine what happened that night. The investigation will take her down several cul de sacs, and offer up a number of false starts, as she and Sunny consider theories many and varied - that this was a ‘consensual’ sexual liason that went wrong (Tim) that it was sexual grooming, rape and murder (Julian) that she was knocked down by a car (James’s son, Eliot) or that she unwittingly interrupted another crime (Dave) .....but ultimately, the truth will be revealed as something far more wide reaching and depraved than either of them could ever have imagined.
Welcome to Unforgotten 3.