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F riday’s construction-site cacophony woke Emily up at 7:30a.m. sharp.

She felt like shit, as if she hadn’t slept at all – and she hadn’t, really. She made two coffees in one cup and took it outside, onto the balcony. The sun was still low behind the house, but there were no clouds. A blue-sky day for Jack’s fake confession.

She showered and dressed. She found a safe place for the Olympus – she ripped a small hole in the lining of her suitcase and slipped it in there – and she did that after emailing another copy of Ben’s recording to Mark, this time with instructions not to delete. She silenced her phone and put it on Airplane mode too, for good measure, then slipped it into her jeans pocket before she went outside, down the steps and across the courtyard. It was deserted and in a chilly shadow.

When she entered the main house, it felt empty.

She thought of her first morning here, which was only seventy-two hours ago but felt like a scene from another life. Following Grace into the main house, down a long corridor and through the barn-style doors. Being surprised by the view out of the window: cloudless sky, shimmering water. Grace’s stern instructions, security precautions, rules.

Where was Grace?

She ducked into the kitchen, but there was no one there and no evidence that anyone had been so far this morning. It occurred to Emily that something seismic could’ve happened overnight or early this morning, and she wouldn’t know. Jean had left quickly after their conversation the evening before, scurrying away into Sanctuary’s empty night. She hadn’t heard anything from Jack since, although she hadn’t expected to. There’d been no more emails, no other notes.

As she climbed the back stairs, Emily wondered how the hell she was supposed to do this.

What this even was now.

She hadn’t decided who to believe. On one hand, what Jean had said about Jack had made sense. She had no reason to lie and seemed genuinely devastated when she’d learned that Emily wasn’t the help she’d hoped for. After Jean left, Emily had put her headphones in and listened to Ben’s recording in its entirety. It made sense, too, and slotted pieces into the puzzle.

But she kept seeing Ben’s face, inches from hers, red and angry, on the beach yesterday. Recalling the tension when they’d first met, up in the room she was heading to now. The fact that he’d followed her. Stared at her, from the beach.

Yesterday evening, she’d been sure that he was the villain here.

How did she know that everything that had happened since wasn’t all some elaborate scheme to throw her off the scent?

What Emily really wanted was to not have to decide who to believe at all. She wanted to check out, to quit. And she was going to. She’d already made that decision. But she’d go through with this last session just so no one – not Jack, Ben or Jean – would be alerted to her plan. It seemed like the safest option. Then she’d fly home, tell Morningstar and go back to being thousands of euro in debt. After her time here – after everything she’d seen and heard – it was starting to look like the best-case scenario.

Jack was already in the room.

He was standing by the window, looking out over the beach, hands dug deep in his pockets.

‘Morning,’ she said.

‘Morning.’ He turned around to face her. ‘How are you feeling? Did you sleep?’

He looked pale and a little dishevelled, as if he hadn’t.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘You?’

‘Fine.’

‘Did you talk to Ben last night?’

Jack nodded but said no more; she wasn’t going to get any details.

‘How was your night?’ he asked. ‘Was everything OK?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did you do?’

He’d never asked her how she’d spent her other evenings. She froze, searching for clues in his expression. Did he know? Had he somehow found out about Jean coming to Bookmark last night?

Or had he forced Ben to confess all back at the hotel?

‘My boyfriend rang,’ she said. ‘I spoke to him for a while. After that I was so tired, I just went straight to bed.’

He nodded, seemingly accepting this.

‘Um, Jack. Listen. I didn’t want to tell you this yesterday – there was so much else going on – but Morningstar—’

‘—want the confession,’ Jack finished. ‘I know.’ He crossed the room to take up his usual spot on the couch. ‘Let’s just get it over with, then.’

She tried to cover her surprise. ‘You still want to do that?’

‘Nothing’s changed, Emily. I want to do this book for the same reason I always did: Kate. I know it won’t happen unless I give them the confession chapter. I’m getting arrested as soon as I get home, so I’m betting they told you to make sure that’s what we use our last day here to do.’

If she hadn’t heard Ben’s message on the Olympus or spoken to Jean, this would make sense. Jack had a plan and he wanted to proceed with it. Getting the book out there was the most important thing to him, because he saw it as a way to prove his own innocence and, in doing so, force the authorities to look for Kate’s real killer.

But she had heard the message and spoken to Jean, so she couldn’t begin to understand any of this.

Unless Ben and Jean weren’t telling the truth.

She didn’t know what to do, so she decided to do what she’d been hired to do: be Jack Smyth’s ghostwriter. Get his fake confession. Finish this job.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Then let’s begin.’

Emily may not have seen Grace, but there was evidence that she’d already been here, in the room. The laptop and voice-recorder were neatly lined up on the desk as before, along with the legal pads and pens. She took her seat and pulled the laptop closer, opened its lid, booted it up. There were now two files on the desktop: T RANSCRIPTS and Transcripts2 . She powered up the voice-recorder, checked its memory: no files. It was just as Grace had promised. The audio recordings were being deleted at the end of each day, once she’d finished transcribing them.

She slipped her phone out of her pocket and put it in one of the desk drawers. If Jack saw her do this, he said nothing.

At the same moment, he was doing something on his own phone. Probably silencing it.

‘The thing is,’ Jack said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ He met her eye. ‘Will you help me? With the confession? I don’t know if I can, you know, make something up. I’ve never written fiction before.’

That makes two of us , she said silently.

And then she wondered if he knew she’d think that, if he was needling her, reminding her of the huge secret she’d revealed.

Emily pressed R ECORD , checked for the blinking light, and swivelled the device around until its microphone was facing Jack.

‘How about we take it one step at a time, OK? Think about what Carolyn and Beth want.’ She started typing some nonsense onto a virtual blank page just so she wouldn’t have to look directly at Jack as she spoke to him. ‘What they know the reader will be expecting. They’re going to want questions answered, right? Like I said yesterday.’

‘But that’s just it. I can’t answer their questions because I wasn’t there.’

‘Neither were they. So they won’t know what’s true and what’s not. They’ll just want you to say that you did it, and offer a satisfying explanation. All you have to do is provide one that fits for long enough to keep them reading this chapter, and then afterwards, you can do your denial.’ She checked the blinking red light one more time. ‘Why don’t we start with reality? That will make it easier. That night. When you were at home and you were getting ready to leave to go meet Ben, Kate was where? What was she doing?’

Jack raised a single eyebrow. ‘This is the real bit, now?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was upstairs, in our room.’

‘Doing what?’

A shrug. ‘I don’t know. Organizing her wardrobe or something.’

‘She was planning to stay in, right? She wasn’t going anywhere.’

‘We were both supposed to be staying in, until Ben called. We were going to get a takeaway and watch a few episodes of something—’

‘Do you remember what, specifically?’

‘Some murder show on Amazon,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t remember the name. More her thing than mine.’

‘Do you remember talking to her before you left?’

‘Not specifically. But it was probably the usual. You know, what time I’d be back. Say hi to Ben for me.’

‘She said that?’

A shadow of something crossed Jack’s face. ‘Yeah.’

‘But I thought she didn’t like him?’

‘Who told you that?’

Shit. Emily was just about to enter a full-blown panic when she remembered that she could blame it on—

‘Ruth,’ she said. ‘Ruth told me.’

Jack rolled his eyes. ‘My sister doesn’t know what she’s talking about almost all of the time.’

There was no way Emily was going to invite him to say more on that subject. She needed to keep this on track, and they were coming to their first crucial juncture.

‘Then what?’ she asked.

‘Then I kissed her goodbye, left her upstairs, went to go meet Ben.’

‘But you didn’t.’

Jack looked annoyed for a beat, then something like uncertain.

‘Not for the purposes of this,’ Emily clarified. ‘If you’re guilty – which you’re saying you are here, in this chapter – you would’ve had to have done it before you left the house, because by the time you got back, the fire had taken hold and Kate was already gone. Right?’

Jack looked down at his hands, which made Emily look at them, which made her think again about the pain of his injuries.

‘I can’t, Emily,’ he said softly.

‘It’s just a few lines.’

‘You’re asking me to say I did something I didn’t.’

‘ I’m not asking anything. This is what you agreed.’ This was probably a dangerous game but … ‘Do you want to stop? Forget about all this? We can, you know. You can. You could just go back to Morningstar and tell them it’s off. That you’ve changed your mind. That Joe changed your mind, after the arrest.’

‘That wouldn’t be a lie,’ Jack said. ‘He’s been trying to.’

‘But if you do that, then this might be the end. You said yourself, if we don’t get this done before you go back home, it might never happen. So if you don’t do the confession today, and then, I don’t know, a few days or weeks from now you change your mind and decide that, actually, it’s worth it to get the book published, Morningstar mightn’t be interested anymore. They might decide to move on. To go to Plan B.’

What followed was an awkwardly long, excruciating silence.

‘Could you write it?’ Jack asked then. ‘The confession?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just, you know, make something up and then I’ll say, yeah, that’s how it happened. I know you said you haven’t technically written fiction before, but—’

He stopped when he saw her grab the voice-recorder and hit it to turn it off.

‘Jack!’ she said, partly in reprimand, partly in disbelief.

‘What? What’s wrong?’

‘Please don’t do that. Don’t say anything about what I told you while we’re recording. I can’t have it on the record here. All the material we generate belongs to Morningstar. Morningstar . Who published me, too.’

‘Oh, shit,’ Jack said, either realizing what he’d done or putting on a good show of pretending to. She couldn’t tell. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t even thinking. Can you delete that bit?’

‘I don’t know.’ She picked up the device, studied the options on its digital display. ‘I don’t think I can do it without deleting the whole file.’

‘Maybe you should. We can start again.’

But he’d already spoken about being with Kate that evening, and she didn’t want to have to get him to repeat it.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. We can worry about that later. Just, please, don’t do it again.’

‘I think the recorder is the problem, actually,’ Jack said. ‘It’s too much pressure. Could we leave it off?’

‘But we have to record it. That’s sort of the whole point.’

‘I know, but what if we do a dry run first, to, like, figure out what I’m going to say, and then we do it properly, for the record? I think that might be easier for me.’

She searched his face, trying to figure out if this was a scheme or what he genuinely needed to make this happen.

The look he returned was one of hopeful pleading, and it felt real.

But she didn’t love the idea of an unrecorded dry run, and she didn’t like his use of the word we at all.

But she wanted this to be over already, and if that was what it was going to take …

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s try that.’

Jack pointed at the legal pad. ‘You could take notes, so we know what we said. The main points, I mean. So we can come back to them when we’re recording.’

‘I might do that on the laptop, actually. I’m quicker at typing than writing.’

‘No laptop,’ he said. ‘Please.’

Why? Was he worried she might use it to secretly record him?

If he was worried about that, then maybe she should. And what if Jean and Ben were telling the truth, and Jack was about to reveal, inadvertently or otherwise, his guilt beyond any doubt?

She thought of her phone, sitting in the drawer of the desk.

‘I’m going to grab a water.’ Jack stood up. ‘You want one?’

‘No, thanks.’

As he crossed the room to the snack table, she opened the desk drawer and put the laptop in there, letting it fall into place with a loud, careless thump that caught Jack’s attention. Once his back was turned again – he was opening the silver ice-bucket, transferring cubes to a glass – she quickly woke her phone, tapped in her passcode and set a voice-memo recording.

Then she closed the drawer again, but not all the way.

Emily had no idea if it would even be able to pick up the voices in the room, but it was all she could do. She pushed the voice-recorder away, to the far side of the desk; she wanted Jack to be able to see that it was indeed off. When he turned back around, glass of iced water in hand, she had only a legal pad directly in front of her.

‘Right,’ she said as Jack resumed his seat. ‘You were saying that you said goodbye to Kate and left the house, but you can’t have done that, so …’

Jack opened his mouth, closed it again.

He was still struggling.

‘OK, look,’ Emily said. ‘How about this? How about you say it in the third person? He was there, he did that, then he did this. Pretend you’re talking about some other guy. Tell it that way. It might be easier for you.’

‘I am talking about some other guy.’

‘Right. Yes.’

He took a long drink of his water, then held it with two hands and stared into it.

‘Where do I begin?’ he asked then.

‘Well, he didn’t leave the house, did he? And we know that, before the fire, Kate was attacked. So something must have set him off, right? Unless he was planning it in advance, but it doesn’t really seem like that kind of crime, does it? I don’t think the reader would buy that it was premeditated. It seems more like a spur-of-the-moment, crime-of-passion thing. An argument that got out of hand.’

‘Yeah,’ Jack said and she wondered if that was Yes, that’s where I should start or Yes, that’s exactly what happened.

Emily picked up her pen. ‘Ready when you are.’

‘This is horrible.’

‘It’s a means to an end, Jack. Like you said yourself, let’s just get it over with.’

He took a deep breath. ‘So, ah, he was on his way out,’ he started. He looked to Emily as if to check he was doing it right; she nodded encouragingly. ‘He went to their bedroom, to say goodbye to Kate. And to get his phone. He’d left it there, on the dressing table. And what was weird – what he thought was weird – was that when he first walked into the room, she was putting a suitcase back in the wardrobe. And he said, what are you doing with that? And she said, Nothing, I was just moving stuff around in here, it’s a mess. I think when you’re away next week I’m going to pull everything out and go through it .’

During this, Emily had written bedroom, phone, film/takeaway, suitcase .

‘He kisses her goodbye,’ Jack continued, ‘takes the phone and goes downstairs. But when he gets to the bottom, when he’s almost at the door, his phone goes, in his pocket. He thinks maybe it’s his friend, checking the time they agreed or asking for directions or something. But when he takes it out and looks at it, he sees it’s a text. A new message, from someone called Jean.’