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J ack had initially wanted to do a straightforward book, Ruth explained while Emily tried to ignore the insistent buzzing in her ears. The one he had described to her, his side of the story. But no publisher was interested. No one wants to read that , they told him. No one cares . So he came up with a different pitch. A fictional confession. A hypothetical one, because it had to be, because Jack was innocent. He didn’t kill Kate or start the fire in their home, but if he had, this was how he would’ve done it. But he didn’t.

The doublethink made Emily’s head hurt.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Join the club.’ Ruth rolled her eyes. ‘The way he explained it to me was that he was going to tell his story, his true story, the one he’d wanted to share, up until the night of the fire. But then, in the penultimate chapter, he’d confess ’ – she made air quotes there – ‘to the murder and arson. Explain what led him to do it, the blow-by-blow of what happened inside the house, and his efforts to cover it up afterwards. Written as if he had done what everyone suspected he had, as if they’d been right about him all along. And then the start of the next chapter would be, not ! As if. Ha, ha, joke’s on you, none of that was true and you’re an idiot for even thinking it was. He’d say he made it all up, because he had to, because he wasn’t there, and the book would end with him reasserting his innocence.’ She paused for another eye-roll. ‘The way he justified it was that it would be the book he wanted to write, with the exception of that one chapter, and that one chapter was the only way he was going to get the book he wanted to write. And he’d make it clear that that part was fiction.’

‘But—’ Emily started, before faltering, because she didn’t even know where to begin. But everything . Everything about this was insane. And stupid. Dangerously so, for Jack. ‘But something is either true or it isn’t. You can’t make something up in the middle of a book you’re otherwise selling as being the whole truth. And this is his memoir. It’s in the first person. So, what? He’s going to say “And that’s when I killed Kate”? “When I hit her”? “When I set a fire to cover up what I’d done”? He’s going to put that in print ?’

Ruth threw up her hands as if to say, What can you do? ‘Maybe you can talk some sense into him,’ she said. ‘Although I suppose then you’d also be talking yourself out of a job …’

Emily couldn’t believe it. What Jack was planning was a monumentally stupid idea. Only a guilty man would confess, in any capacity, and no reader would care about what came after the bit where he said he did kill Kate, actually. They’d pay no attention to the denial. They probably wouldn’t even bother to read it.

Not to mention the headlines its publication would generate, and far more people would read them .

‘And Morningstar knew all this? They knew he was planning to confess?’

‘They were counting on it,’ Ruth said. ‘That’s the only reason he got the book deal. You know, I can’t think of another time in his life when my brother made a genuinely bad decision. But there was just no talking him out of it. Maybe it’s the grief, I don’t know. I mean, Kate isn’t even dead a year. Should he even be making big decisions now?’ She exhaled. ‘I don’t want my brother to get arrested for something he didn’t do, but maybe, in this instance, it’s a good thing. It might shock some bloody sense into him.’

‘I think I need to call Morningstar,’ Emily said.

‘I think you probably do.’

They both went back downstairs. There was a low murmur of voices coming from behind the closed living-room door. Ruth stopped in the courtyard to light another cigarette. Emily headed up to Bookmark and found Grace, hopping from foot to foot outside its open door, gesturing furiously for her to hurry up.

‘I have Beth and Carolyn for you,’ she whispered. ‘They’ve been waiting for you for the last five minutes.’

‘Waiting for me? But I didn’t even know—’

‘Just go in ,’ Grace hissed.

There was no time to ask why Grace hadn’t come to get her, or tried her phone, or what the hell she thought she was doing letting herself into Bookmark yet again . Before Emily was even all the way inside, she saw that Beth and Carolyn were already on screen, specifically the one on the pink laptop set up on the breakfast bar that must belong to Grace.

The two women were sitting side by side at the same desk with a wall of framed book covers behind them.

Beth waved at her.

‘Hi Emily,’ she said, her smile and her tone both artificially bright. ‘How have you been? How has it been going over there?’

‘Not great,’ she answered. ‘To be honest.’

Behind her, Emily heard Bookmark’s front door close.

A half-second later, Grace passed by the front windows, crossing the deck to descend the stairs back to the courtyard.

‘Obviously,’ Carolyn said. ‘The arrest changes things.’

‘But maybe not as much as you’d think,’ Beth added.

‘I know about the confession,’ Emily said.

The two women exchanged glances.

‘How?’ Beth asked. ‘Did Jack—?’

‘His sister just told me.’

‘Well, needless to say, we would’ve preferred if you hadn’t found out that way.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Carolyn leaned forward, closer to the camera. ‘That was the most top-secret element of an already top-secret project. Information was shared on a strictly need-to-know basis.’

‘I’m his ghostwriter. Didn’t I need to know?’

‘Look,’ Beth said. ‘Jack was going to tell you his story and that was what his story was going to be. You’ve already spent hours with him. Did you know everything that was going to come out of his mouth in advance? Of course not. So whether or not you knew going in about this particular element …’ She pressed her lips together. ‘What difference, really, would it have made?’

Emily opened her mouth to say, All the difference! I wouldn’t have done it!

But was that really true? With or without this crazy confession chapter, it would still have been the only way out of her Morningstar debt. She might have been more reluctant to say yes, but she probably still would’ve said it.

As much as she didn’t want to admit it, she doubted knowing about this from the get-go would have changed anything much at all.

Except everything would have made a bit more sense.

Emily had bought Jack’s motivation. Back in the Fitzwilliam, when Carolyn and Beth had talked about his being trapped in a hellish limbo and not being able to prove his innocence and wanting the speculation and suspicion to end, she’d accepted the logic. Sure, she thought it was risky and foolish and she very much doubted Jack was going to get the result he wanted, but she could see why he was doing it.

Why were Morningstar buying it, though?

Yes, there was a ravenous public appetite for details of this case, but how interested were the reading public going to be in a suspected wife-killer’s protestations of innocence? Enough for a publisher to risk this much? To wade into a murky sea not only of moral ramifications, but legal ones too, if the case ever went to court? That, for Emily, had been harder to reconcile, but she’d assumed Carolyn and Beth knew what they were doing.

And now she knew they did.

With a confession inside, even one signposted as hypothetical, this book’s flight off the shelves would’ve been guaranteed to go supersonic. Observers could purse their lips, critics could stand on their morals and readers could pretend to be disgusted, but if everyone was so above it, if no one was interested in true crime, who was it all for? The podcasts. The long reads. The eight-part limited series based on a long read, streaming now along with its after-show podcast companion. If they weren’t being listened to, read and watched, they wouldn’t be getting made.

Now this one couldn’t be.

‘Is, ah, Grace there?’ Beth asked lightly.

‘No, I’m alone, but …’

Emily looked up, at the connecting doors. Was there someone standing on the other side of them, listening in?

‘This is very sensitive,’ Carolyn said.

‘Hang on one second …’ Emily picked up the laptop and relocated it to the countertop next to the kitchen sink, the furthest point she could get from the connecting doors while still being inside. She turned down the laptop’s volume a little. ‘Go ahead.’

‘We always knew there was a risk of an arrest,’ Carolyn said. ‘Or, let’s say, a change in Jack’s legal status. And he knew it too. So there had to be a contingency plan. We didn’t want to end up in a situation like HarperCollins did with OJ Simpson. So we only agreed to go ahead with this book if we could add a clause to the contract that would, in such an event, protect us. Offset our risk.’

‘What does that mean?’ Emily asked.

Carolyn looked at Beth and nodded encouragingly.

‘Until such time as Jack is charged,’ Beth began, ‘ if that ever happens, we can proceed as planned. So long as Jack agrees. In the absence of a charge or a conviction, it’s ultimately up to him whether or not he wants to publish this book. But if there is one, putting us in a situation where we can’t legally go ahead, then we go to Plan B, which is to take all the materials collected and use them as the basis of a non-fiction account of the crime, which we are free to write and publish without his cooperation, using the writer of our choosing, without any editorial input from any other parties and without having to compensate him, which sidesteps any legal issues on his profiting from it.’ She paused to take a breath. ‘But we can only publish such a book after there’s a verdict.’

Emily frowned, confused.

‘We either publish Jack’s story in his own words,’ Carolyn clarified, ‘or the definitive book on the case, using his own account, that we’ll have ready to go to print the day the verdict comes in.’

His hypothetical account , Emily corrected silently. Allegedly.

‘And Jack agreed to that?’ she said.

‘He had to. The deal was contingent on it.’

‘And he maintains his innocence,’ Beth said. ‘So …’

So he was agreeing to something he never thought would actually come to pass.

Emily had to admit, it was clever. Either Morningstar got to publish Innocent Jack’s yes-but-no confession now, or they got hours and hours of Guilty Jack talking in detail about the crime which they could use exclusively as the basis for a book about the case at a later date. A book that could say anything, because Jack would have no editorial control over it. A far more attractive publishing prospect, really, than this book—

It was then that it hit her.

This really was just a transcription job.

‘I was never actually writing this book,’ Emily said. ‘Was I?’

That was why her lack of experience didn’t matter. She hadn’t been hired to ghostwrite Jack’s story. She was here to get the raw material out of him for the book Morningstar actually wanted to publish, the one about a convicted killer.

The two women on screen shifted in their seats.

‘You have a very important job,’ Carolyn said. ‘And it’s even more important now that it looks increasingly likely we’ll be going with Plan B.’ She pressed her lips together again. ‘Emily, it’s absolutely crucial that we get the confession. You understand why, right?’

‘Get the confession ?’ Emily spluttered. ‘You want to keep going ?’

‘Jack wants to,’ Beth corrected. ‘And we have time. Grace tells us he can’t go anywhere until first thing Saturday anyway. That’s the earliest flight he could get on, unless he drives for seven hours, which he really doesn’t want to do, she said, and the guards are OK with him arriving back in Dublin Sunday morning once he actually does that. What’s it there now? Thursday lunchtime? You have the rest of today and all day tomorrow. All you have to do is keep going. Carry on as you were.’

‘But due to recent events,’ Carolyn said, ‘this might be the only time we get with Jack, so … We need to prioritize.’ She paused. ‘Delicately.’

‘Jack is hardly going to supply a confession now,’ Emily said.

‘He came to us , remember. He wants to do this book. I think there’s a part of him that needs to. I suspect he’ll be prepared to proceed as is until the situation changes – especially because he himself doesn’t anticipate that it will.’

‘But the situation has changed. He’s getting arrested.’

‘Listen,’ Beth said, gently, in a more appeasing tone. ‘If you’re not comfortable with this, we understand.’ Emily actually didn’t think Carolyn did, but sure. ‘When you signed up for this, there was no arrest on the horizon. We get it. So you have a choice. You can transfer what you’ve collected so far, wait to go home and forget all about this. You are free to make that decision. But we had an agreement, and if you choose not to fulfil your part in it, well …’ She looked directly into the camera, meeting Emily’s eye. ‘Then we won’t have an agreement.’

Translation: Emily would have had a brief, free trip to Florida, but she’d be back to owing Morningstar about as much money as she made in a year.

‘From what we hear,’ Beth continued, ‘you and him are getting on like a house – are, ah, getting on well. So why not just talk to him for another few hours? All you’re doing is listening to him say what he wants to say.’

‘And steering him towards the confession,’ Carolyn added, as if that weren’t already crystal clear.

‘OK,’ Emily said. ‘I mean, I’ll try.’

She didn’t know what other choice she had, at this point. And mainly, she just wanted to get off this call.

The two heads on screen tried not to look overly pleased with themselves, but failed miserably.

‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ Carolyn promised.

‘Good luck,’ Beth said, just as the screen went black.

Emily closed the laptop lid and put her head in her hands. What kind of mess had she got herself into? And Beth and Carolyn didn’t even know about the threatening emails.

She dug out her phone, wanting to call Alice and unload the whole horrific story, and saw that Mark had sent yet another message about his stupid voice-recorder. He was looking for a file on it. Something about a spoken-word event he’d been at. Could she check if it was there? And if it was, could she download it and send it to him?

Emily rolled her eyes, annoyed.

But her backpack was sitting directly in front of her, in a corner of the couch. She might as well cross one thing off her list of problems.

She unzipped the main compartment, certain that that was where she’d put everything yesterday, when she’d been getting herself organized for Jack Smyth Interviews: Day One and didn’t yet know that she wasn’t supposed to bring her own electronic devices. She went from there to the internal zipped pocket. Then the side pockets. The front pocket, even though it was too small. She went back to the start and revisited each site, digging her hands right down inside them, spreading her fingers into the seams, checking and double-checking. Finally, she went to the window and held the mouth of the backpack open in a yawn, tilting it to every angle so she had enough light to do a visual search too, but Mark’s Olympus wasn’t there.

Someone had taken it.