The sudden and tragic death of the young lad, Harry Jennings, is one of the many mysteries that remain unsolved till the very end of Dept. Q. Back in the day, when Merritt Lingard was still a teenager living on the deserted island of Mhor, she was dating Harry, the eldest son of the Jennings family. I don’t know if the duo really loved each other or if it was just a casual teenage romance, but these two people did have one thing in common: they’d both suffered their fair share of family trauma. This was why they wanted to escape the shadows of their parents to start a new life somewhere else. But surprise, surprise, the teenagers didn’t have the money to rent a room in Edinburgh. Well, Merritt’s mother, Lila Graham, who supposedly came from a wealthy background, had left some money for her and William, which the children would have inherited once they turned 18. Merritt just needed to get her hands on some money for a year or two, so she proposed a plan to her lover, Harry, to break into her house and steal one of her mother’s diamond rings, which would make both of their lives easy. I suppose at this point in time, Harry and Lyle’s mother, Ailsa, had been sectioned after their father’s allegedly accidental death. Maybe Harry believed that this was the perfect time to run away from their clinically insane mother, who used to lock the young boys in a hyperbaric chamber as a punishment.
While locked inside the decompression chamber, Harry could notice that his younger brother, Lyle, was slowly losing his mind. He was slowly turning into their mother, raising the alarm for Harry that he needed to do something quick or he would lose his brother too. This was the reason why Harry jumped at Merritt’s stupid scheme to rob her house when the family wasn’t around. And color me surprised; things didn’t go as planned. William arrived at the house early that day, while Harry was still inside. William accidentally hit Harry with a baseball bat, soon after which Lyle came out of hiding and smashed William’s head in like an egg. It seemed like Lyle had been following his brother and somehow believed that he was going to run away with Merritt, leaving him behind with their monstrous mother. Lyle, not even in his wildest imagination, could picture a life without Harry, as he was his only support system, the only thread that was keeping him sane. I think Lyle hated Merritt from the very beginning for stealing his brother, because he’d started spending time with her and not him. The young lad, struggling with abandonment issues, had bottled up a lot of anger inside him, and unleashed it on William the moment he saw blood spilling out of Harry’s head. Harry knew that his brother would have killed the young lad, which was why he knocked his brother out to protect him from himself.
Now the robbery had gone wrong, and Harry wasn’t left with much of an option. He took the diamond rings and dragged Lyle out of the house, possibly trying to run away from the island. While he was leaving the house in his truck, he saw Merritt returning home. And as soon as she saw blood on Harry’s head, she knew something was amiss. At this point, we don’t know where Lyle is. We never saw him after the attack. But I am assuming he wouldn’t have left Lyle behind, because he knew what was coming for him. Additionally, their mother wasn’t around, and Lyle wouldn’t have been able to survive without family. So I guess he took Lyle to the ferry to leave the island. However, as per the police report (likely made by Constable Cunningham), Harry jumped out of the boat after the captain got suspicious of his actions. Cunningham called the captain, informing him about the robbery, and as soon as he approached Harry, he jumped overboard, which according to DCI Carl Morch, wasn’t a high enough fall to kill somebody, so it could be possible that Cunningham was lying. The old officer of the law had lied to everyone investigating Merritt’s disappearance. He’d said Harry was a local offender who was drunk to the gills on the day of the robbery, which wasn’t true. This makes me believe that Cunningham was hiding something, but the old block is dead, so no one would ever be able to find out what he was really hiding.
Maybe Lyle regained consciousness while they were still on the ferry and possibly entered into yet another argument. I am not sure of this one, but yes, I am suggesting here that maybe it was Lyle who accidentally pushed his brother off the boat, and the people around assumed it was an accident? The thing is, Harry’s death was one of those things that was never investigated in the whole show. Soon after Harry’s death, Merritt left the island for Edinburgh. But hold on, she didn’t have the money to pay for rent, right? Then how did her financial condition change all of a sudden? Did she steal her mother’s diamond ring, or did she meet Harry after he ran from the house? Well, the kind of reaction Merritt had when she found out at the end of the show that she was being punished for Harry’s death—she didn’t have an ounce of remorse—suggests that, until the very end, she held Harry responsible for William’s condition. Well, it did come as a shock to her that it wasn’t Harry who beat William like a pulp, but his brother Lyle, who showed signs of psychotic behavior from an early age.
So, with all that said, we are left with two possibilities. Harry either jumped out of the boat to evade arrest, or he was accidentally pushed off the boat by someone; well, it could be anyone. It could be Lyle, the boat’s captain, or Constable Cunningham himself who, while trying to catch Harry, pushed him to his death. I am not sure if the police ever recovered Harry’s body or if they even tried looking for him. The case was shut, and everyone on the island went back to their mundane lives, except for Ailsa and Lyle, who were burning with a desire for vengeance.
I suppose Merritt, who now knows the truth that Harry wasn’t the main culprit in her story, would try to investigate his murder in the next season. Obviously she could enlist the help of the newly formed Department Q, and together they could solve the mystery centered around Harry’s death. I mean, if anyone’s bothered about the lad and would still be asking the question we have in mind.
