Page 48 of Murder in the Family

(opening his file)

Caroline was born Caroline Farrow in a suburb of Hull in 1963, the only child of Alan and Jane Farrow.

CUT TO: MONTAGE of photos of Caroline as a child, with her parents, on the beach, in school uniform, in a ballet class, with a group of friends at her birthday tea, wearing a party hat. She’s a very pretty child, with brown hair and a bright confident smile. All her clothes are very girly.

The family was comfortably off and Caroline was sent to private school, but judging by her ‘O’ levels she wasn’t an especially diligent student. And by the time she was 16 she’d started seeing an older man her parents didn’t approve of, so they packed her off to spend the summer with her uncle in Edgbaston to get it out of her system.

She came back in September, refused to return to school, and enrolled on a course to train as a children’s nanny. By the time she was 20 she was living and working in the Kensington area of London. This is the early ’80s of course, and given the lapse of time we’ve struggled to track down anyone who knew her back then, apart from one woman she worked for briefly in 1984.

CUT TO: Ruth Cameron, sub-captioned ‘Former Employer of Caroline Howard’. An elderly lady in a chintzy sitting room. Knick-knacks, potted plants, a brown Burmese cat blinking on the sofa. She has a slight American accent.

RUTH CAMERON

We always got on very well. Not the best nanny we ever had – she was too easily distracted, which is a problematic quality in a childminder. But I liked her. She was good company. Quite the talker.

We didn’t keep in touch after she left but I remember the wedding being announced in the papers. I wasn’t at all surprised she was getting married. I always assumed the nannying was just a stopgap until she found someone who’d provide for her.

CUT TO: Studio. JJ is at the whiteboard in front of an array of images.

JJ NORTON

It was when Caroline left the Camerons that she took the job at Dorney Place, working for Andrew Howard and his wife. This was 1985 and Rupert had just turned five.

CAMERA PANS over the pictures on the board: Dorney Place in the ’80s: Andrew and Amanda with friends in the garden; Rupert as a toddler sitting on his mother’s lap, and being carried on his father’s shoulders, smiling and waving. Then police photos of the wreckage of Amanda Howard’s Golf GTi, upside down on the hard shoulder of the A3, and finally several of Andrew with Caroline on the steps of Chelsea Town Hall on the day of their wedding. She’s blonde now, in a pale blue two-piece with a Jackie O feel to it, he’s rather dapper in a grey suit and silver tie. Rupert is in one shot, holding tight to his father’s leg, as far away from Caroline as he can get. He’s not smiling.

As we discussed before, it was only a few months after Caroline started working at Dorney Place that Amanda Howard died, and less than a year later Caroline and Andrew got married in a relatively low-key ceremony at their local registryoffice. If you can call Chelsea Old Town Hall ‘low key’.

They always denied they’d been having an affair before Amanda’s death, and clearly there’s no way of proving it either way now.

LAILA FURNESS

What about Amanda’s car crash – was there really any reason to think it was suspicious, or was that just more malicious gossip?

ALAN CANNING

I went through the accident report and there was nothing wrong with the car.

MITCHELL CLARKE

(looking through his papers)

Wasn’t it put down to icy roads?

JJ NORTON

Yes it was, but according to the PM Amanda had a blood alcohol level only just below the legal limit.

Which surprised a lot of people, as it was only eleven o’clock in the morning. And the police never did establish what she was doing on that road in the first place. The A3 goes from London to Surrey and Hampshire and she didn’t have any friends or family in that part of the country.

LAILA FURNESS

Did Amanda have a problem with alcohol?

JJ NORTON

No, she didn’t. In fact, she rarely drank at all, which was another thing that fuelled the rumours.

LAILA FURNESS

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