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T he following morning, Emily woke up already wanting to go back to sleep. She felt heavy and headachy, and her back hurt from a second night spent on the thin, hard mattress of the sofa-bed. She’d slept fitfully, dreaming about the weirdest things – being trapped, at home, in the office-wardrobe that Mark had fashioned for himself while someone hammered on a typewriter right outside; following Kate Smyth around the shopping centre near her parents’ house in Cork; Jack breaking through the connecting doors like Jack Torrance in The Shining .

She hadn’t responded to him last night, when he’d tried to speak to her through them, and if he brought it up today she was going to act dumb and say she’d been watching something with her headphones on and hadn’t heard. It had creeped her out and she didn’t want to encourage it, didn’t want to acknowledge the thinness of the walls between their spaces.

If he needed to speak to her, he could call her phone or come to the front door, thanks very much.

While her first cup of coffee brewed noisily, Emily lifted the blinds and saw that the weather was a perfect match for her mood. Overnight, a thick blanket of gunmetal-grey cloud had settled itself over the Gulf, changing the landscape completely, and a strong wind was churning up the surf. She watched for a few minutes as waves crashed furiously up onto the shore, sending spray flying, and saw a new, dark line of seaweed drawn across the sand.

It looked like a different country.

This morning, it felt like one she didn’t want to be in.

It was still only a little after eight, so Emily climbed back into bed with the coffee and picked up her phone. She’d had it on silent while she slept, seeing as everyone in her life was in a different time zone and therefore at risk of waking her up in the middle of the night. She saw now that she’d missed a call from an Irish number, a Dublin area code, and the message telling her about the voicemail that presumably went with it.

She only got as far as ‘ Ah, hi. This is Neil Wallace. I got —’ before she cut the message off and called him back.

‘Emily, hello.’ He sounded older and very RTé news anchor: smooth tone, good enunciation and no detectable regional accent.

‘Neil, hi. Thanks for calling me.’

‘Thanks for your intriguing message.’

‘Ah, yeah. I can’t really say too much.’

‘Is this about Jack Smyth?’

She hesitated. ‘They made me sign something. But if you’re wrong, I’ll tell you.’

‘Well, I’ve only ever had two ghostwriting clients, and I know Anthony Baume isn’t away anywhere because he was on with Oliver Callan about three hours ago, live and in studio, so … Hang on one second, I’m going to go somewhere a little quieter.’ There were a lot of buzzy voices in the background of wherever Neil was – it sounded like some kind of open-plan office – and then, after a rustling sound, the firm closing of a door and no noise at all. ‘Now. That’s better. So, yes. Jack Smyth. Gosh.’

Emily didn’t think she’d ever heard anyone use the word gosh in real life.

‘I understand,’ she said, ‘if you can’t tell me anything. But I’m just wondering what happened before I came on the scene.’

‘Not at all. I’m happy to chat. It’s more that it was all such a long time ago. Must be, what? Two years ago now, at least?’

Two years?

‘What was?’ she asked, confused.

‘My meeting with him. About doing a book.’

Kate wasn’t even dead a year, so that book couldn’t be this one.

‘Sorry,’ Emily said. ‘I thought you’d been hired for this job, that I’m doing now. And that you’d had it up until very recently. I thought I might be your replacement, and I was wondering why you’d dropped out. But it sounds like I’m wrong.’ She paused. ‘The, ah, the thing I’m helping him write about hadn’t happened two years ago.’

There was a long beat of silence before Neil said, ‘Bloody hell. Why on earth is he doing that ?’

‘I don’t know,’ Emily said. ‘I didn’t know when I came out here and I feel like I know even less now. But he gave me the impression that you’d had this job first. He didn’t actually say your full name, but he did mention you in another conversation, about Anthony Baume’s book.’

‘I met with him about doing a business thing,’ Neil said. ‘One of those, you know, ten life lessons I learned in the saddle or some such. Something for unimaginative people to buy their equally unimaginative fathers and brothers and husbands for Christmas, and then pile high in the airport bookshops afterwards.’

She must have the wrong Neil, then. But this was the Neil that had written Anthony Baume’s book, that Jack had mentioned specifically in his reasoning for doing this book, and he had met with Jack about another publishing project.

How many ghostwriting, cycling-adjacent Neils could there be?

‘Why didn’t it happen? If you don’t mind me asking.’

‘Oh, it was nothing dramatic,’ Neil said. ‘They just never got their act together. That happens a lot – you have a meeting, everyone appears to be chomping at the bit, and then you never hear a word about it again. So I really can’t help you there, but …’ A pause. ‘I do spend three days a week in a newsroom, if that’s any use to you? Just on, you know, deep background.’

It took Emily a beat to join the dots.

‘What have you heard?’ she asked.

‘We can’t report any of it, you know. You can’t.’

‘I can’t even have this conversation. And this is his story. I won’t be adding to it. This is … This is just out of personal curiosity, really.’

‘I see,’ Neil said. ‘Well, for starters, they found her blood upstairs. A handprint, on the wall. Her hand. Which would mean that she was injured before she fell down the stairs. There must have been an altercation or some kind of attack, before the fall.’

Or push , Emily said silently.

‘What about, like, forensics? Physical evidence? Do they have any?’

‘I do know that there was an issue with his clothing. Jack was injured, of course, and treated at the scene. I don’t know if his clothes were damaged, contaminated or lost. Whatever happened, they didn’t have anything to test. And, you see, he held her. For a considerable time and tightly, to his chest. Outside the house. Wouldn’t let her go. The paramedics had to physically break his grip. Now, you could say that’s the desperate act of a devastated husband – or a very clever move from a forensics point of view. He was covered in her blood, but it was meaningless from an evidentiary standpoint.’

Emily swallowed back the sudden taste of bitter coffee.

‘How much blood was there?’ she asked.

Whenever she’d pictured the scene inside the house, she’d imagined Kate’s unconscious body or blackened debris, but never blood.

‘Tell me,’ Neil said. ‘Are you squeamish?’

Yes, very , she answered silently. ‘Not particularly, no.’

‘All that’s been made officially public is the cause of death: skull fracture. It sounds clean, doesn’t it? Neat. Bloodless, even. But, you see, for Kate, it wasn’t like that at all. She also had a broken collarbone, a broken leg and a shattered pelvis – and there were multiple skull fractures, concentrated on the front of the head.’

‘You mean on her …?’

‘The poor woman’s face was destroyed,’ Neil said quietly. ‘One eye was out of its socket’ – Emily winced at this – ‘and there was a sort of, ah … A caving-in effect, for want of a better phrase. When I was a child, there was a terrible accident on the grounds of my school. It had snowed, and one of the older boys was dared to go down the steepest hill in the grounds on a dustbin lid they’d been using as a sled. Straight into a tree, he went. Doing some speed. My father was a GP and one of the first on the scene, and I heard him later telling my mother that the boy’s face was in the back of his head.’ He paused. ‘The guards had to persuade her parents not to view the body.’

‘Jesus,’ Emily breathed.

‘Kate’s injuries simply don’t add up. You don’t get that from a fall down the stairs. And something like 56 per cent of women murdered in Ireland last year were killed by their partners or former partners so, if we go by the odds … Are you still there?’

‘Yeah. Yes.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ Emily said, unsure if that were true. ‘It’s just that, you know, I’m here with him. I have to go into a room with him this morning and talk to him about this, one-on-one. And it just …’ She didn’t want to say, It just doesn’t seem like he did it , because that was, officially, the absolute dumbest shit she could utter, even if it felt true. ‘In a weird way, those details make me move towards him not doing it. Like, a push down the stairs could be a split-second thing, a blown fuse, a moment in time. But to inflict those kinds of injuries, and on someone you supposedly love … Wouldn’t you have to be, I don’t know, some kind of monster?’

‘How old are you?’ Neil asked.

‘Thirty-two,’ she answered, confused as to why he needed to know.

‘Probably too young for Jagged Edge, then, am I right?’

‘I must be, because I don’t know what it is.’

‘Glenn Close? Jeff Bridges? The typewriter with the tell-tale “T”?’

‘It’s not ringing any bells.’

Where the hell was this conversation going?

‘Bridges stands accused of killing his wife,’ Neil says. ‘She’s been brutally murdered. Really bloody, violent stuff. “Bitch” in blood on the wall and all that. Her blood, needless to say. Later, the prosecutors are sitting around, discussing her injuries, and one of them goes, “But do you really think a guy could do that to his own wife?” And another says, “Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s what he wanted. For us to look at the photos and go, geez, do you really think a guy could do that to his own wife ?”’ Neil paused. ‘You should watch it. Great film.’

‘Yeah,’ Emily said, feeling like she might throw up.

‘And then, of course, there’s the issue of the burns. Or lack thereof. Jack’s story is that he went in the front door, saw her, grabbed her and dragged her out. But Kate’s body didn’t have a single burn on it. Which makes sense. She got downstairs before the fire did. It never did, actually. Smoke yes, flames no. The damage to the ground floor was mostly from water, from the hoses. So where and how and why did she get—’ On Neil’s end, there was a knocking sound and then a new voice saying something about a meeting. ‘Ah, sorry, I have to go here.’

‘Just before you do – did he do it?’

‘Who, Jack?’

‘The guy in the movie.’

Neil snorted. ‘What do you think? And before you go – are you the same Emily Joyce who wrote The Witness ?’

‘Ah … Yeah. That’s me.’

Neil was interrupted again by the other voice on his end, so if there was a reason he’d wanted to know that, he didn’t get to tell her.

He apologized for having to go. She thanked him again and ended the call.

Emily fell back against the pillows and wished she’d never contacted Neil Wallace at all.