Page 138 of Murder in the Family

BILL SERAFINI

True.

HUGO FRASER

In my experience, swindlers who actually marrythe women they’re conning do it preciselybecauseof ‘the legals’. I.e., to put themselves in line to inherit their property, including any life insurance. Which they’ve often taken out without the wife’s knowledge. I prosecuted a case exactly like that only last year.

JJ NORTON

You’re talking about a different sort of conman there, though, are you? A conman who wants to inherit is a conman who intends to kill. Like the man who murdered that novelist – Helen something—

MITCHELL CLARKE

Helen Bailey. Now hewasa nasty piece of work—

LAILA FURNESS

Just to interject – psychologically speaking, a conman of that kind would be a very different personality type.

And like Mitch just said, we don’tknow‘Luke’ didn’t marry other women. In fact, how do we know he didn’t murder them?

I mean, he could have, right? He could even have been planning to kill Caroline, for all we know.

HUGO FRASER

(looks round the table)

Do we know if Caroline – or indeed Luke – took out any new life insurance policies after the marriage?

NICK VINCENT (Producer) – off

I’ve already asked Guy that and he says not.

HUGO FRASER

In that case I think it’s unlikely he was planning to murder her. They’d been married more than a year. He’d have had plenty of time to get thefinancial side of things in place, if he really did intend to kill her.

MITCHELL CLARKE

Perhaps he had a change of heart. He may have conned women in the past but this time it was The Real Thing. He married her because he actually loved her.

LAILA FURNESS

(smiling at him)

You old romantic, you.

BILL SERAFINI

(shaking his head)

Nice try, Mitch, but I don’t buy it.

HUGO FRASER

There is one other possibility: maybe he realized he stood to gain more by playing a long game? I mean, all he had to do was sit on his hands and wait for Florence Ryder to die and he’d be quids in.

MITCHELL CLARKE

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