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T he room is twenty storeys above London, in the north-west corner of a giant glass castle. Two walls of windows look down over a carpet of mostly dull, grey concrete running all the way to the horizon. A third offers a view into open-plan workspaces at the building’s core, a puzzle of interconnecting desks and Kallax bookcases stocked with Morningstar’s own titles. The only solid wall is the one directly behind Carolyn Heatherington’s desk, on which she’s hung a bookshelf and several classic book covers, blown up to poster size and framed. Francis Cugat’s The Great Gatsby . David Pelham’s A Clockwork Orange . Wendell Minor’s Jaws .

A driver had met Emily at Heathrow and brought her straight here. It’s so early, and on a Sunday the city below looks deserted, missing its swarming ant-people and silent matchbox cars. There isn’t any white-noise office thrum; there is no one here, bar the cleaners and security, and the nervous assistant who met Emily downstairs, brought her zooming skywards in a lift that needed a code, and deposited her here, in this office with C AROLYN H EATHERINGTON printed on the nameplate by the door. The light outside is weak and watery, the autumn sun struggling to rise above the horizon, still trapped beneath the smog for now.

But it’s not Carolyn who eventually appears. It’s not Beth either. It’s an older woman Emily has never met before, with a pixie-cut of silver hair and a roll-neck cashmere sweater. She introduces herself as Diane Woods, Morningstar’s managing director, offers coffee and water, and asks Emily how she’s been.

She got back from Florida four days ago and has spent most of her time since talking to some very nice Garda detectives who make her tell them everything three, four, five times. The repetition isn’t helping anything that happened in Florida feel real. More and more, with each passing day, it’s like a movie she watched, not an event she was a part of. Surely Sanctuary was a set, Jack an actor, his death just a climactic scene from a script.

But the evidence that it wasn’t, that it did happen, is all around her. Mark, treating her like she’s made of crackle glass. Her croaky voice, what feels like desert sands lining her throat. The emails from ‘Emily Joyce’ she’s moved back into her inbox. Ben’s recorded message. The voice-memo of Jack’s confession from that last day, named automatically for the place it was recorded, Sanctuary.

‘I’m fine,’ she tells Diane.

When she’d told Alice that she was struggling to take it in, Alice had said, ‘But what would it look like if you had taken it in? What are you even aiming for here?’

Emily didn’t know.

‘Sorry to force you onto a plane again, and at such an early hour,’ Diane says, ‘but I wanted to have this conversation in person and at a time when no one else was here. I’m afraid my schedule didn’t permit me to come to you, so …’

‘I understand. It’s fine.’

‘You’re probably wondering why you’re having this conversation with me.’

Emily had assumed it was because things had been, to use a term she deployed daily in her normal job, escalated .

‘Carolyn has left the company,’ Diane announces, ‘and Beth has moved on to another department.’ She gives Emily a meaningful look that suggests both the leaving and the moving weren’t by choice. ‘I can’t go into too much detail, but I want you to know that when this project was presented in-house, it was very different. If we had known the reality of the situation, we would never have proceeded with it. Morningstar is not that kind of publisher.’

Emily didn’t know if she believed this. She wondered whether, if everything had gone as planned and Jack were still alive, they’d still be having this conversation.

And how contracts could’ve been drawn up, flights paid for and Emily herself hired without the approval of everyone in the chain of command.

This Carolyn-went-rogue storyline was, she suspected, damage control.

‘The other thing I want you to know,’ Diane continues, placing both beautifully manicured hands flat on the desk in front of her, ‘is that we were not, and are not, pursuing you for any part of your advance. This is a creative endeavour, our authors are not machines, and we know that sometimes unforeseen situations occur. So please rest assured, you are not – and never were – in debt to us.’ The full stop at the end of that sentence came with another of Diane’s meaningful looks.

So, Carolyn and Beth had lied to her.

Or, Diane was lying to her now.

‘In fact, I checked on our system, and The Witness has almost earned out. The paperback is still in print, and ebook sales have been very consistent. I suspect that, soon, we’ll owe you money.’

Emily knows this means that, twice a year, Morningstar will pay her, maybe, if she’s lucky, a grand or two – she can’t quit the day-job or anything – but still, it’ll be something .

‘You should also know that, last Friday, Carolyn received an email from Jack Smyth making accusations about The Witness . About the basis for it. He wanted us to know that it wasn’t strictly fiction and that he wasn’t going to continue with you as a ghost for that reason. But I want you to know that we are not concerned. All good fiction comes from something real. It might be a single moment in the author’s life that sparks an idea, something they see or hear someone say, or it might be a real-life event or crime or conflict that inspires a story, or they might take something that happened to them and fictionalize it. I know when I think of my favourite novels, they all feel like the author was making something up to work out something real.’ Diane pauses. ‘How did he find out, do you think? About The Witness ?’

‘I’m not sure yet,’ Emily says. ‘But if you look hard enough online, you’ll find people posting theories. I presume that, either before I was hired or after, Jack found that stuff. If it was before, it might explain why Beth and Carolyn lied about the money, about me owing it. Because Jack might have said it had to be me.’

‘I have a theory myself,’ Diane says. ‘Jack’s email included a prompt for us to contact a Deirdre Lyons, whose daughter was murdered in Tipperary in 2004. He said we could contact her through her solicitor, David O’Reilly, of Roche and O’Reilly Associates, and that she would confirm that details in The Witness weren’t fictitious. In our negotiations with Jack Smyth, he was represented by the same firm.’

Emily raises her eyebrows. ‘You think he found out through his solicitor ?’

‘We don’t want to accuse Roche and O’Reilly of anything, but it’s an amazing coincidence, don’t you think?’ Diane pauses. ‘Anyway, from a legal standpoint, we don’t have to worry for The Witness . The disclaimer is more than sufficient protection.’

‘The disclaimer?’

There is a short stack of books to the side of the desk: three hardbacks, two paperbacks and one with a strange blank, blue cover that Emily thinks must be a very early bound proof. Diane picks up the top one – a hardcover, looks like something bloody and dark – and flips past a couple of pages, before handing it to Emily.

It’s open to the copyright page.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental .

‘Even when, strictly speaking, it’s not,’ Diane says. ‘What was Jack’s plan, do you think? I’m still not clear.’

‘Neither am I.’ Emily closes the book and puts it down on the desk. ‘But I think it was to pin everything on Ben. Or to get me to do it for him. Kate and Ruth, his sister, seem to be the only ones he ever said all that stuff about Ben to, presumably as a strategy for keeping Kate away from him and maybe so Ruth would help with that. Everyone else saw Ben and Jack as friends, which meant he could be thoroughly shocked and upset when I put Ben to him as a suspect. The arrest threw a spanner in the works, along with Jean having contacted Kate and visited the house that evening. And he didn’t know that Ben wasn’t still under his control.’

‘What about the confession?’

‘I think Jack was telling the truth about that – that it was a means to an end. He’d do it to get the book published, and then claim that I, the fiction-writer, had made that bit up. He always had his phone with him in the room, and once when we were talking in his car … I think it’s possible he recorded me saying things that I think, out of context, could’ve corroborated that somewhat. And you would only have had the transcripts, which he could deny too – and maybe even edit, since his own PA typed them up.’

‘But if the book had come out, and he’d been able to distance himself from the confession chapter, then what?’ Diane asks.

‘Then it would set public suspicion onto Ben,’ Emily says. ‘Jack gets the public’s sympathy back – and well paid, since I don’t believe for a second that that “charitable foundation” thing wasn’t just a well-covered path to his own coffers. But I think he ended up confessing to me just to get off on frightening me. To let me know that he was guilty. To scare me. And just because he could.’

Diane shakes her head. ‘The whole thing sounds like pure insanity. How could he possibly have thought it was going to work the way he hoped?’

‘Everyone who has ever committed a crime,’ Emily says, ‘and didn’t immediately surrender themselves to the authorities, thinks they’re going to get away with it. I’m no expert, but I suspect that Jack Smyth was a narcissist, and they don’t walk around thinking, I hope it all works out OK for me . They never doubt it will. And it did work out for him, for many years, in his cycling days. He got away with doing terrible things. When he signed this book deal, it looked like he was going to get away with murder. And this is a man, let’s not forget, who not only killed his wife, but who then set a fire to hide the evidence. Are we really expecting good life decisions from someone like that?’

‘I take your point,’ Diane says. ‘And the fire?’

Emily tells her the same thing she told the first responders on the scene, Ruth and Joe, the Walton County Sheriff’s Office, and the Gardaí.

‘Why Jack did that, I don’t know. My guess is he planned to escape, but only after ensuring that all my evidence was destroyed. He didn’t know I had the recording or that I’d managed to get the transcripts onto my device. Or maybe he’d decided the jig was finally up and he couldn’t face the music, and I was going to be collateral damage. Maybe he was punishing me.’

So far, she hasn’t told anyone what Ben had said to her outside on the street.

‘What’s next?’ Diane asks. ‘Do you have any plans?’

‘No.’

Emily’s gaze moves to the windows, to the deserted, foreign city below, lit by a ghostly grey light.

And, quite unexpectedly, feels the tendrils of disparate ideas reaching to entwine themselves with one another from the edges of her conscious mind.

The week in Florida that doesn’t feel real. Jack Smyth confessing to murder, to her. Transcripts and recordings and memories and feelings, all of which have nowhere to go because this book isn’t happening, can’t happen now.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental .

She could write it as a novel.

Everything that happened. All of it. Not just what happened to her in Florida, but what happened to Jean and Ben and Kate. The Witness . What she saw on that fateful night all those years ago.

She’d have to change all the names, including her own, and all identifying characteristics, but she could do it.

The point wouldn’t be to write the story, but to tell the truth.

When I think of my favourite novels, they all feel like the author was making something up to work out something real .

‘But,’ she says to Diane, ‘I might have an idea.’