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A warrant has been issued for your arrest.

The words seemed to suck all the air out of the room.

Blood rushed in Emily’s ears. Jack half-walked, half-staggered to the nearest chair and collapsed into it. Joe asked the women if they’d mind if he spoke to Jack alone in a way that suggested he wasn’t asking, and the three of them murmured their consent and duly filed out into the hall.

Ruth muttered something about needing a smoke before taking off towards the courtyard. Grace turned back to slide the living-room doors shut behind them. Just as they closed, Emily glimpsed Jack, pale and shellshocked, staring straight at her. She only had time to panic about what her face should be doing in this moment – communicating disdain, mouthing it’ll be all right , nothing at all because she should be neutral? – before the doors shut and Jack was gone, and she was alone with Grace in the hallway.

‘I can’t believe this,’ Grace whispered. ‘It’s been ten months. We’re here three days and they decide to arrest him?’

Emily doubted it was a coincidence.

‘Has he left Ireland before now?’ she asked. ‘Maybe the guards thought he was, I don’t know, fleeing the jurisdiction or whatever they call it.’

‘ Fleeing? ’ Grace spat. ‘Fleeing what?’

Blood everywhere … Eye out of its socket … Face caved in …

‘I need to get my phone,’ Emily said. ‘I left it upstairs.’

It was perhaps a sign of how distracted Grace was by the news of Jack’s arrest that she didn’t react to this egregious breach of regulations.

Or maybe her lack of reaction was because she knew it didn’t matter now.

Jack getting arrested didn’t necessarily mean he was going to be charged, but it was what had to happen before he could be. It changed nothing and everything. The book would surely be cancelled. Emily presumed that, legally, it would have to be. If he continued with it, he’d risk harming his own defence and profiting from the proceeds of crime, which was a crime in itself.

She wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that this madness was almost certainly over. On one hand, the sick, acidic dread of owing a huge sum of money was working its way back into her chest. But on the other, was having to sit alone in a room with Jack, after this development, the more attractive prospect? It had been one thing when he was a man the general public had convinced themselves had killed his wife. Now that the authorities had formally announced that they felt the same way, things were different. After all, the Gardaí were the ones with all the facts, the evidence, the expertise.

They would know .

Upstairs, back in the interview room, she retrieved her phone from the drawer. Out the window on the courtyard side, she could see Ruth pacing up and down parallel to the long edge of the pool, smoking. Emily turned away and sat on the couch, consciously choosing the end of it Jack never sat in.

She tensed as she unlocked her phone’s screen, but relaxed when she saw that there were no new emails.

Mark had sent a text fifteen minutes ago. Did you by any chance take my Olympus? Can’t find it.

She glared at the words, acutely annoyed and mentally formulating a response that would adequately explain to him how long down her list of priorities the location of his digital voice-recorder was right now.

But she had taken it, actually. It was in her backpack, over in Bookmark. She’d thought she’d need it; it hadn’t occurred to her that everything would be provided. She hadn’t bothered to ask and then she’d forgotten to tell him.

I have it, sorry , she typed in response and hit S END .

Then she remembered that Alice was going to call around, so she sent a follow-up. Alice is going to drop in later to collect something. She’ll probably text first.

Next, Emily opened her banking app and stared at the balance of her current account. The digits were purple, indicating that she was overdrawn. Her salary was due in on Friday and then the same dance could begin again.

It hadn’t really bothered her before now, this living month to month. She had a roof over her head, the things she needed and, occasionally, a few of the things she wanted. Every now and then she’d be gripped by the fear that something terrible was about to happen and there’d be a panicked spurt of applying for better jobs – jobs that would pay more, that offered career progression, the kind that people with mortgages and private health insurance and pensions had – but she rarely got as far as an interview and never beyond it.

If she mentioned The Witness , they’d start asking questions about writing and publishing that she knew translated to concerns that she only cared about having a proper job temporarily, or that she’d never really care about it at all. If she didn’t mention it, it was hard to explain why she’d only ever worked entry-level jobs for little money and why there were so many gaps in her employment.

She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what she should do. But regardless of what happened with Jack, she knew that, when she got back home, she was going to have do something .

She closed the banking app and saw—

One new email.

And knew with a sickening certainty who it was going to be from.

TELL HIM OR I WILL.

Emily tried to swallow back the stale taste that had suddenly filled her mouth.

I know who you are. I know what you did. Tell him or I will.

Three messages, now. And this last one hadn’t come in while she was sleeping, or getting ready to leave Bookmark this morning, or sitting in this room interviewing Jack. It hadn’t been on her phone a couple of minutes ago, when she’d first sat down on the couch and unlocked the device. It had just come in now, while she was sitting here alone, holding it in her hand.

Was the sender here , in Sanctuary?

Were they watching her right now?

She tapped on her own name and stared at the email address that appeared in its place, willing it to reveal some information. [email protected] . Something about those numbers …

Emily had a strange feeling she’d seen them somewhere before.

But where? No phone number she’d be dialling would start with 978. It was too many digits to be a bank account and too few for a credit card, but what was it? She copied and pasted it into the search box on her browser. When she hit G O , the screen filled with links to places where you could buy a used hardback copy of The Witness online.

978-0099282914 was her ISBN.

Every book published was assigned a unique numerical identifier, an International Standard Book Number. Whoever was sending these emails had taken the ISBN for the hardcover edition of The Witness and stuck a ‘W’ at the start to make their email address. If her own name as the sender wasn’t, in itself, evidence enough that this was indeed about her and not some random spam shot, then this left no doubt about it at all.

Who the hell was sending these messages?

And why ?

She typed a search-friendly version of that question – how can I identify the sender of an anonymous email? – into the search box and hit G O .

The top suggestion was to contact the host of the email address and ask them for the information, which was about as useful to her as a chocolate teapot when the host in question was Hotmail. The next tip she found was to type the email address into Facebook’s search box; if someone had used it to sign up for an account, their profile should appear. But none did, so no one had, unsurprisingly. Clearly, this email had been set up for one purpose and one purpose only. She kept scrolling until she found advice to use the ‘show original’ option in Gmail’s menu to find the sender’s IP address, which would give her the sender’s general location.

That would at least be something .

But when she did it, the email transformed into a huge mass of messy, incomprehensible code. Despite scouring it three times, she couldn’t see anything that looked to her like it might be an IP address, or identified itself as one. If it was in there, it was well buried, or as good as hidden from someone who had no idea what they were looking at. And she thought that you probably had to pay to look up IP addresses, anyway.

Tell him or I will .

Who was ‘him’? Jack? That would rule out Alice’s theory about this being someone who wanted to expose the existence of this book. And how much time was this phantom giving the real Emily to complete the task? And how did they know that she’d even seen these messages? They could be going straight to her spam folder.

Which gave her an idea: she could just ignore them. Pretend she hadn’t seen them. Set up a filter so all further messages from that address ended up in Junk, where they belonged, so from now on she wouldn’t have to pretend. But while that sounded like the easiest option, it made her feel itchy and hot – because they wouldn’t know that she wasn’t reading them and might consider her disobedience a choice.

Unless she played dumb. Like, really dumb.

She hit R EPLY and typed, Just FYI I think you may have the wrong person/email address. You’ve sent this to a person with the same name as you and the message doesn’t make any sense to me . Sorry! She went to press Send , then thought about her own IP address. She was on Beach Read’s wifi. If the sender was more tech savvy than she was, they might be able to find her location from this message. And if the ‘him’ they were referring to was Jack and they knew that she was with him …

Replying might just lead this person straight here.

‘Does that fucking noise go on all day?’

Emily startled at the voice.

Ruth, Jack’s sister, was standing in front of her. She hadn’t heard anyone come up the stairs.

‘They, ah, they stop early in the afternoon,’ Emily said, putting her phone face-down on the couch beside her. ‘Or at least, they did yesterday.’

‘It’s such a racket. It’s going to give me a fucking migraine.’ Ruth surveyed the room before choosing Emily’s usual seat behind the desk. ‘So. You’re the ghost.’

Emily nodded even though it hadn’t been a question.

‘Since when?’

‘You mean, when did I get the job? Monday.’

‘ Monday? As in, Monday just gone?’

‘I met with Beth and Carolyn that morning and—’

‘Who are they?’

‘They’re with Morningstar, the publisher,’ Emily said. ‘Beth is the editor and Carolyn is the publishing director. I met them on Monday morning and by Tuesday evening I was here.’

‘And they told you up front what the project was?’

The question felt soaked in judgement, which was interesting considering that it was Ruth’s own brother who was writing this book.

‘Well, yeah.’

‘No offence, but why you?’

Emily shifted in her seat. ‘Well, I’d worked with them before.’

‘As a ghostwriter?’

‘No. This is my first time doing that.’

‘But you’d written about cycling?’

‘No …’

‘Sport?’

‘I wrote a novel.’

‘A novel? Would I have heard of it?’

The world’s most ridiculous question. It was like asking another person ‘Am I hungry?’ How the hell were they supposed to know the answer to that ?

She wanted to say as much to Ruth, but this was both the sister of her high-profile client and a woman who’d recently found out that her brother was being arrested in connection with a murder – and the victim was her sister-in-law – so Emily elected to give her a pass.

‘Probably not,’ she said. ‘It was a few years back.’

Ruth was peering at her like she was an exhibit in a museum. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m not trying to be rude. I’m just trying to figure this out. You see, my brother never leaves anything to chance. Every decision, big or small, is considered and researched and weighed up and planned. Whenever he’s getting a new phone, I actually tell him: please don’t talk to me about it. Because he will drive you mad reading reviews, making comparisons, talking to the guys in the shop, talking to us about ours – and that’s his choice of phone . You’re the person who was going to help him write the most important story he’ll ever tell. So I’m wondering, why you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But there must be something .’

‘I’m not sure if he got to pick me.’ Emily tried to think back to exactly what Beth and Carolyn had said. Wasn’t it something like we’re all in agreement ? ‘My guess would be that the publishers suggested me and then he had a yay or nay. I think it would always be the publisher who finds the ghostwriter, as far as I know. Unless there’s an existing relationship, which there wasn’t.’

Ruth made a hmm noise.

‘I think they were having trouble finding someone,’ Emily added.

An eye-roll. ‘Oh, I bet.’

‘I guess it’s all moot now, anyway.’

‘Yeah,’ Ruth said with a sigh. ‘I tried to tell him it was a bad idea. We all did. But he went and did it anyway. Secretly. We thought he was in New York, taking business meetings. Grace thought that too. Then when they land, he springs this on her.’

So Grace must be the other part of the we who had flown with Jack from Dublin Airport.

‘How did you find out he was here?’ Emily asked.

‘Grace called me, freaking out.’

‘She doesn’t want him to do this?’

Ruth met her eye. ‘No one who cares about Jack even a little bit would let him do this, let alone encourage it.’ She stood up. ‘Look, the silver lining to the arrest is that this can’t happen now. Although I honestly don’t know how he ever thought it could. Or why the publisher agreed to it. I mean, seriously. A confession, but not really? How it happened if he did it but he definitely didn’t, because he’s innocent, but if he wasn’t, here’s how it went down? How the hell was that ever going to work?’

It took Emily a beat to grasp what Ruth was saying.

Then she thought, Wait, what?

Her face must have been saying the same thing, because Ruth said, ‘Shit. You don’t know, do you? Didn’t they tell you? Didn’t he tell you? God, trust my brother …’ She shook her head. ‘This book – it was going to be Jack’s confession. That’s what he promised the publisher. That’s the only reason they offered him a contract. He was going to tell you how and why he killed Kate, and you were going to help him tell the world.’