Jonathan Morrison
A Plot to Kill by David Wilson review — a real-life Midsomer Murder
The psychopathic machinations of ‘a less talented Mr Ripley’ are explored in this true story of crime. Review by Jonathan Morrison
“Poison suspected after retired teachers die in village” — that was The Times. “Elderly woman believed mirror messages left by young lover were from God” — that’s from The Independent. “Church warden guilty of murdering university lecturer over will” — The Guardian. “Ben Field thought he would get away with it” — the BBC.
With its lurid details of “gaslighting”, terrifying hallucinations, physical and mental torture, homosexual and heterosexual affairs, and a psychopath at loose in a sleepy market town, it was perhaps unsurprising that the murder of Peter Farquhar, a 69-year-old retired teacher, novelist and part-time lecturer at the University of Buckingham, made headlines around the world.
Incredible twist followed salacious revelation, but by the time the jury at Oxford crown court announced a guilty verdict in August 2019, it was clear that Farquhar had been seduced, drugged, defrauded and finally murdered in 2015 by his live-in lover, Benjamin Field, an aspiring Church of England vicar.
Field would almost certainly have escaped justice had he not tried to repeat the grooming process with Farquhar’s neighbour, Ann Moore-Martin, who lived just three doors down in Maids Moreton and who had also been persuaded to change her will in his favour. Field was 25 when he began a sexual relationship with the former headmistress; she was 81. She died in May 2017 and her niece raised the alarm. Field was accused of plotting to kill her, but was found not guilty.
Given the public interest in this real-life Midsomer Murder, it was inevitable that the case would be turned into a documentary or drama. Channel 4 led the way with Catching a Killer last year and the BBC has since commissioned a “true crime” show called The Sixth Commandment. But David Wilson’s A Plot to Kill is the first book to attempt to shed light on the events that led to the murder, and on the man at the centre of them: Field, a Baptist minister’s son who was eventually sentenced to life with a minimum term of 36 years. It may be the first book, but it is unlikely to be the definitive one, although there is much to recommend it.
Wilson has impeccable credentials: a former prison governor and professor of criminology at Birmingham, he has also lived in Maids Moreton, a suburb of Buckingham, for over thirty years. He can quote everyone from Trish on the supermarket till to Farquhar’s former pupils and colleagues, plus a couple of friends from the local rugby club with whom he chews the facts and the meaning of life at length. There are certainly too many digressions: into the philosophy of Kant or the career of John Bercow, the former MP, for example.
It is literature that frames much of the book, given how important it was to Farquhar and possibly Field, who met Farquhar through a course on Romanticism he taught at the university. Wilson is accurate in his analysis of Farquhar’s three novels, one of which, A Bitter Heart, bears a disconcerting resemblance to real-life events. His conclusion that the tragedy of Farquhar’s life, and the contradictions that made him vulnerable — namely that he was torn between his homosexuality, having grown up in a less tolerant Britain, and his deep Christian faith — is shown through his writing is most certainly correct.
I can say that because I have read Farquhar’s work, mostly out of a sense of duty, and because I was fortunate to be taught English by him for five years at Stowe, the public school a few miles from Buckingham. I don’t think anyone who knew Farquhar would have been surprised to discover he was gay and that probably explains why friends and neighbours didn’t feel it was their place to question or intervene in his private life, something Wilson labels collusion.
I also grew up in Buckingham, so I don’t quite agree with Wilson’s depiction of it as a bastion of middle-England decency either. Like most market towns, there was an undercurrent of criminality: shoplifting in Tesco, nocturnal drug deals behind Budgens, and quite a few unpleasant characters.
But where the book falls down most is when it veers into flights of speculation. His theory of why the police decided to name their investigation “Operation Naseby” (The Battle of Naseby was a famous Parliamentarian victory; Thames Valley Police saw themselves as Roundheads in opposition to the crown court in Oxford, which had been a Cavalier stronghold) is ludicrous.
His hamfisted dissections of some of the books that Field might have read — Frankenstein and Brighton Rock — and conjecture that Field modelled himself on fictional characters is unconvincing. If anything Field seems to be the polar opposite of Pinkie Brown, Graham Greene’s antagonist — he is calculating, rather than impulsively violent; plausible rather than antisocial. So Wilson’s assertions that the church and university were negligent in not identifying the psychopath in their midst seem harsh. That was the problem with Field: he fitted in.
Wilson is at his best when he applies a forensic gaze to Field, drawing on his experience and a tool of the trade — a “P-Scan” — to identify him as a “process-focused killer” who enjoys tormenting his victims. Somewhat annoyingly, he won’t give us the exact result of his P-Scan, although Field is clearly identified as a psychopath, “a less talented Mr Ripley”, but he concludes ominously that “Field was not just capable of one murder, but would continue [to murder] whenever the opportunity arose; once the genie was out of the bottle, he would be unable to put it back in again”.
Given that the coroner, whom Wilson rightly lambasts, initially concluded that Farquhar had died of alcohol poisoning (Field placed a whisky bottle by his corpse and had spread rumours that he had become an alcoholic); given that Field was found to have a list of 100 other targets, including his parents; and given that Field was days away from attending a bishop’s advisory panel, the first step towards ordination, he speculates that Field could have become a serial killer to rival Harold Shipman. It’s a chilling passage, but his explanation of how a psychopath thinks — “they have no genuine core to what they are, and so find it easy to live only in the moment” — is masterly and may show why Field kept the notes and photos that helped to prove him guilty.
Wilson also has a chatty, engaging style, and the book ticks along, punctuated by flashes of humour. Those moments of levity are welcome because there is so much to dismay: how Farquhar was drugged and manipulated; his baffled letters to an ineffectual GP describing his visions of black insects and brilliantly coloured lights, the result of Field poisoning his food and drink; the playing of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, beloved of Hannibal Lecter and Tom Ripley, at their civil union in May 2014, where they exchanged knives. The entry in Farquhar’s diary, when he wrote: “God is good to me, far better than I deserve . . . gone are the fears of dying alone.” The musings on how the retired are pushed into invisibility and isolation, where they can be seen as “collateral damage” in a pandemic or as easy pickings by a predator.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking passage, at least for those who remember Farquhar’s brilliant and uncompromising intellect, is the poem that he gave to Field in 2012 that showed how clearly he saw through his young lover: “Deceptive and disloyal as a friend / Ben uses people for unworthy ends . . . / Hurting others is his special pleasure / Cruel disregard is a happy leisure.”
How right he was. But by then it was already too late.
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