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E mily had her neck thrown back to facilitate the swallowing of two chalky white headache pills when she heard a knock on Bookmark’s front door. She turned expecting to see Grace, back to collect her laptop and demand a debrief on the meeting with Morningstar, but it was Jack, bent at the waist a little so he could make eye contact with her through the glass.

Can we talk? he mouthed.

This day last week, Emily had been sat in a featureless, claustrophobic cubicle, listening to a woman complain for half an hour about how the discounted prices available to loyalty card holders were displayed within the supermarket. She had one point, which was that they should be made clearer, and Emily had accepted that and promised to escalate the issue within the first minute of the call. And yet the woman kept talking, making the same point over and over, with no deviation, repeating herself ad nauseam. In return for patiently listening, or trying to, Emily was paid a little more than the minimum hourly wage. Now, walking towards the door that would let in a man who had maybe murdered his wife and was definitely writing a book in which he confessed to it, she longed for the simple, inconsequential boredom of that cubicle and that call.

Jack moved to come in but she stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind her, and motioned to the two chairs on the deck.

‘I have a headache,’ she said. ‘I could do with some air.’

And she didn’t really want to be alone with him inside. She had no idea how this conversation was going to go. Better to have it in the open.

‘I’m really sorry about all this,’ he said once they were both seated.

‘Which part?’

Jack exhaled. ‘I suppose that’s fair.’

‘Ruth told me that you promised Morningstar a confession, and Beth and Carolyn just confirmed that that was true. You say you’re innocent, that you didn’t do this, but in this book you were planning on saying that you did . And nobody bothered to tell me, including you.’

‘I am planning to say it,’ Jack corrected. ‘I still want to. And I’m sorry you weren’t told, but we were having enough trouble as it was getting someone to do this without throwing that into the mix as well. And then I didn’t tell you because …’ He looked away, his jaw working. ‘I thought if you got to know me a little first, you’d understand why I have to do this.’

‘But I don’t. At all. Confessing to something you say you didn’t do? In print ? Jack, it’s madness. And now, with the arrest—’

‘Look, I know how it sounds, OK? I’m not stupid.’

Emily bit down on the and yet all the evidence suggests otherwise sitting on her tongue.

‘Try and consider this situation from my point of view,’ Jack went on. ‘Everyone thinks I did it. But you know what? I don’t really care. Why would I care what strangers think of me? They don’t know me. They don’t know what’s in my heart or in my head. And I know the truth. In time, they’ll move on. They’ll forget about me. And if they don’t, I could always move away. The suspicion, yeah, it doesn’t make life very nice, but I can live with it.’

‘So this is about what? Money? Confess so you can sell more books?’

‘No,’ Jack said firmly. He seemed offended at the suggestion. ‘That side of things isn’t exactly great for me right now, but when Kate died, finances became the least of my worries. I don’t want Exis to fail, but I’m happy to let it. And, look, it’s not like we’re out there making a cancer vaccine. We sell clothes to people who want other people to think they’re on their way to or coming from the gym. Yes, there’ll be job losses, but it’s mostly going to be people who are either related to me or twenty-somethings working in retail for almost no money and a staff discount.’

‘Then why , Jack?’

‘It’s the price I have to pay to get this book published. It was the only way I could get anyone interested and it was the only reason Morningstar offered me the deal.’ He paused. ‘It’s just one chapter.’

‘In which you plan on saying you killed your wife.’

‘I’ll make it clear that part is fiction.’

No one will believe you , Emily thought. She said, ‘You could’ve self-published it.’

‘What difference would that make? I’d still have to give people a reason to read it. And I needed a big publisher to help shoulder any legal risk. Besides, I suspect it’s going to be an uphill battle to get people to take this book seriously. Self-publishing it wasn’t going to help.’

‘But why do this in the first place? You said you were doing this book because you wanted everyone to know that you had nothing to do with Kate’s death. How exactly does confessing to her murder help achieve that?’

Silence.

Then Jack said, very quietly, ‘Have you considered that maybe this isn’t about me?’

‘Who else would it be about?’

But the answer came to Emily as soon as she’d said it: Kate.

‘I knew before the arrest,’ Jack said, ‘that the Gardaí were totally convinced that I’d done it. They have been, right from the start. This arrest doesn’t surprise me, really – I mean, it’s a shock, of course, to hear you’re being arrested – but it was only a matter of time. But I know I didn’t do this. I know I came home and the house was on fire and Kate was lying at the bottom of the stairs. But I also know that the coroner says it couldn’t have happened the way I thought, that she wasn’t injured in a fall, and that she died before the fire really started. So someone did do this. There’s someone out there who is responsible for the death of my wife and not only have they not been found or identified, but the guards don’t even believe they exist.’

Please God, no , Emily prayed silently. Don’t start talking about the real killer or killers.

She’d been a toddler during the OJ Simpson trial, but she’d sat through all seven hours of the ESPN documentary, completely captivated – and alone, because the only thing Mark hated more than true crime was organized sports.

‘I want to know what really happened that night,’ Jack said. ‘I need to know.’

‘I don’t see how this book could possibly achieve that.’

‘But it happens all the time.’

‘What does?’

‘There’s a crime that hasn’t been solved,’ Jack said, ‘sometimes for years, sometimes with the wrong guy rotting in prison for it, and then someone makes a podcast or a TV show or writes an article about it, and the people listening start digging and investigating and uncovering stuff – because no, they’re not the authorities, but they only have one case, this one, and they’re trying to get to the truth for no reason other than they want to, so they’re happy to give it their time. And the general public aren’t tied to the methods and the’ – he waved his hands on either side of his head – ‘ mindset of an official investigation. They think outside the box. And they find things.’

‘But you said you didn’t want to do a podcast or an article—’

‘And I don’t,’ he said, cutting her off. ‘Because that would be ignoring the most important reason people do that kind of armchair investigating: because they care . I have to get them to care. About Kate, yes – well, they already do that, I think. But about me too. About a man who didn’t do this, despite what everyone thinks. A man who lost everything, and a future miscarriage of justice.’

‘So this is about you.’

‘That’s not what I—’ He stopped to exhale, frustrated. ‘Look, if everyone believes I did it, they’ll think, well, case closed. I need some public pressure, which means I have to raise doubt in people’s minds. If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it, but I’ve thought about this long and hard and I’m convinced a book is the best way. The only way, really. To get all the information out there.’

Emily had a much better idea: do nothing at all. Go home, talk to the Gardaí, plead your case, then disappear. Find somewhere you can live out the rest of your life. Stop talking about this. Forget about doing this crazy book.

‘What information?’ she asked.

‘Well, that’s just it. I don’t know what’s pertinent. But there were things that week, things that didn’t quite add up. I thought nothing about them at the time, but afterwards … Maybe they were important.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like on the night of the fire,’ Jack said, ‘I was going to meet a friend. I was tired and didn’t feel like it, so I said that maybe I’d skip it and stay at home. And Kate had a really weird reaction to that. She was … I wouldn’t say panicked , that’s too strong, but she was definitely anxious. She wanted me to go. She wanted me out of the house.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, but if I found out that someone had come over that night, someone she was expecting, I wouldn’t be surprised. It would fit.’

‘Are you saying you think Kate was having an affair?’

Jack’s eyes widened. ‘What? No. Absolutely not.’ He seemed genuinely taken aback at the suggestion. ‘I meant, like, a friend coming over or something. Although I don’t know who that could’ve been. Everyone we knew was back in Dublin. Or maybe she was planning to do something she needed me out of the house for. I don’t know. And that’s my point: I don’t know . But these are things that I think need to be investigated.’

‘But surely they have been. You must have told the guards all this.’

‘I told them everything, but if it wasn’t something that pointed the finger at me, they didn’t seem to care. For instance, that week, one evening, a car drove down our lane. Our house is at the end of a lane, out in the middle of the countryside – there’s no reason for you to be on it unless you’re coming to us or our neighbours, and this car was right outside our gate. At night, just sitting there with the engine running and the headlights pointed at the house. Kate saw it and called me to the window, and when I looked out, the car sped off. Who was that?’ Jack threw up his hands. ‘I don’t know. The guards said it wasn’t important, that it was probably just someone who’d got lost. But it had never happened before, whoever it was drove off when they saw that I was home, and forty-eight hours later Kate was attacked in the same house when I wasn’t there. How can that not be important?’

Emily could see how, in the situation Jack was in, something innocuous could transform itself into a tantalizing mystery, a clue to something as yet uncovered, a discovery that would change everything. But a car in a country lane that had reversed back out? He was clutching at straws – and, if he were to put that straw-clutching in a book, potentially harming his own case.

‘My solicitor flew all the way out here to tell me in person that I need to reassess my priorities,’ Jack said, ‘but I only have one and it’s Kate. Just imagine, for one second, I can beam my thoughts into your brain and you can see that I’m innocent, that you can know for absolute certain that I didn’t do this, that what’s happening here is that the wrong person is about to be charged with his wife’s murder, which means that his wife’s actual murderer is out there getting away with it. And maybe he’s done it before or will again. Would you still walk away?’

Emily sighed heavily. ‘I never said I was walking away. I was just trying to understand why you want to confess to something you didn’t do.’

‘Do you? Now?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Do you need to?’

‘I suppose …’ If Jack wanted to do this, who was she to stop him? And why would she try to stop him, when it was a solution to her own financial problems? ‘No, I suppose I don’t.’

‘Look, I appreciate your concern,’ Jack said. ‘I do. But I know what I’m doing. And whatever happens, you were hired to do a job, Emily. That’s all. Nothing will be your fault or your responsibility. The only person who has to worry about the consequences of my actions is me. How about …’ Jack checked his watch, ‘we meet upstairs in thirty minutes? Pick up where we left off? Joe and Ruth have gone to check in to their hotel. We should have an hour or two before they come back.’

‘If that’s what you want. But, ah …’ She hesitated. ‘If we only have the rest of today and tomorrow here, we should probably skip ahead. To the night of. If that’s all right with you?’

A shadow of something crossed Jack’s face but he said, ‘Yeah. OK.’

They both stood up.

‘Oh, Jack – this is a weird question, but did you by any chance see a digital voice-recorder around the place? It’s about this big’ – she demonstrated its size with a gap between her hands – ‘and silver.’

‘You mean the one up in the room? It’s still there. On the desk.’

‘No, it’s like that but I mean my personal one.’

‘Did you lose it?’

‘I think so. But don’t worry about it. I’ll ask Grace.’

‘OK. I’ll see you up there?’

‘See you up there.’

Emily watched Jack go, then went back into Bookmark, feeling deflated.

She wasn’t a ghostwriter anymore – if she ever really had been. She was a double agent. She had to transcribe Jack’s fake confession, but she also had to help him protest his innocence and redirect the Gardaí’s attention to other, hitherto ignored, aspects of the investigation. And all this while everyone else, including his own publishers, appeared to think his guilt was a foregone conclusion and was plotting the publication of a book that would do the exact opposite of everything Jack hoped.

I know what I’m doing , he’d said.

But he didn’t.

He may have thought about this, and planned everything, and considered all angles, but he was missing a crucial piece of information.

Tell him or I will .

He didn’t really know who he’d hired to help him do it, or about the terrible thing she’d done.

But someone wanted to make sure he found out.