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E mily stumbled back out onto Stephen’s Green feeling dazed.

It was an unusually hot September day; the heat and the glare were an assault on two fronts. The street around her was a blur of moving crowds and a white-noise hum of engines and conversation. She darted in front of a tram already sounding its warning bell, crossed the tracks and entered the park, making a sharp left turn at the first patch of green dotted with pale, languid limbs and plastic picnics, and straight into a cluster of pecking pigeons gathered around a man tearing chunks off a baguette. Several of the birds launched themselves into the air close by her head. While trying to avoid them, she bumped against an Italian family trying to take a selfie.

She didn’t know where she was going, only that it was away .

She wanted to be somewhere dark and cool where most other people were not. She needed to think. To tell someone what had happened, to say the words out loud, to make it real.

Morningstar want me to do a ghostwriting gig for a man the whole country is sure is a murderer. If I say no, the small fortune I owe them immediately falls due and they’ll want payment in full.

And I have no money.

And I’m not a ghostwriter.

Emily left the park through a side gate and found herself walking down Dawson Street, towards the bookshop where Mark was currently on shift. He was on the second floor, in Cookery, muttering complaints to a colleague of his about having to find room for yet another book of air-fryer recipes.

‘All it is is a countertop oven,’ he was saying as she approached. ‘How much longer are we going to let this madness continue?’

‘Mark.’

He turned towards her voice and said, ‘Hey,’ in happy surprise, which immediately switched to confusion, then quickly became concern. ‘Everything OK?’ He searched her face. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’

‘Do you have a break coming up, by any chance?’

‘What’s going on?’

She told him everything was fine, that she just needed to talk to him about something, which did nothing to convince him that the first part was true. He told her to go to the coffee shop next door and that he’d join her there as soon as he could. Thinking wine , she suggested the Italian restaurant next to that instead.

Mark was frowning. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ she said again.

On the way back down the stairs, she spotted a sign for the Reference section. There were three books about ghostwriting on its shelves, which was two more than she’d been expecting. Ghostwriting: The Art of Writing Other People’s Books , The Ultimate Ghostwriting Handbook and The Ghost: Everything You Need to Know to Break Into the World of Ghostwriting for Profit – and Break Out! The first one was twice the price of the other two and she refused to become a person who bought books with exclamation marks in their titles, so she took The Ultimate Ghostwriting Handbook to the till.

The woman behind the counter smiled at her pleasantly, then did a double-take.

‘Wait,’ she said, recognition dawning. ‘Aren’t you—?’

Being book-famous was a strange and specific thing. At first, only your friends and family knew that you wrote. Then you got a book deal and people in publishing became aware of your existence. As your release day neared, that small flame of fame spread to other writers, to booksellers and to media types, until finally, on publication, it reached members of the general reading public. What had surprised Emily was how, on the other side, it retracted in the exact reverse order. Readers forgot about you first. Then the media no longer had any reason to be interested in you. Booksellers reverted to treating you like any other customer. You lost touch with your writer friends because you were no longer invited to the events and parties and festivals where you might have met them. Ultimately publishing forgot about you too, and finally your friends and family stopped asking about it.

‘—Mark’s girlfriend?’ the girl behind the counter finished. ‘Emer?’

‘Emily,’ she corrected, forcing a smile.

Part of her wanted to be forgotten. What was she supposed to say when someone remembered? Yes, that’s me. Yeah … Yes, still writing. Well, no. Not really. Trying to. Drowning in a sea of self-doubt except when I’m writhing in the flames of self-loathing, thanks for asking . But another, more confusing part of her needed not to be, because it was in those moments of recognition that she was thrown life buoys and fire extinguishers. People were so impressed, ridiculously impressed, with the act of having written a book and got it published. They didn’t care about anything that had come after, or what now never might. And so it was nice to play along, to feel like somebody who was better at this, if only for a few minutes.

To feel better .

The other woman whispered conspiratorially about giving her the staff discount which, considering the current state of affairs, was probably more meaningful than recognizing her as an author.

The Italian restaurant was practically deserted, still awaiting the start of the lunchtime rush. Emily had her pick of tables and chose the one furthest from the door, tucked into a tight corner. She was hot, thirsty and on edge, so she ordered water, a Coke and a large glass of pinot grigio, and got a strange look from her server just for free.

While she waited for Mark, she took out her phone and Googled Jack Smyth.

There were, as expected, an infinite number of virtual column inches about the case, but very little actual detail. The Irish media had trodden carefully and they continued to. No one wanted to get sued, especially by someone who could demonstrably prove a hitherto good reputation and had the resources to hire the best libel lawyers around to do it for him. The coverage didn’t speculate. By law, it wasn’t allowed to. It simply dropped the cold, hard facts on the ground and invited you to pick them up and fit them together.

Jack and Kate had lived in a former parochial house in a village near the River Shannon called Adoran. One Saturday night last November, Jack was at a local pub waiting to meet a friend when a neighbour alerted him to the fire. He’d dashed home, getting there moments before the emergency services. Witnesses said he ran straight into the flames, screaming his wife’s name. He said he found her at the bottom of the stairs. The first responders saw him carrying her outside, an act which cost him third-degree burns on his hands and forearms, and permanent lung damage from the smoke. Jack would later tell the media that Kate had died in his arms, but an autopsy showed that she’d died of a traumatic head injury – a skull fracture, ‘not inconsistent’ with a fall – and that her lungs were clear of carbon monoxide and there were no traces of soot in her nose or mouth.

In other words, she’d stopped breathing before the fire had started.

Photos taken the morning after showed the ground floor of the house mostly intact and untouched, at least on the outside. The upper level was scorched and blackened, its windows gone and its roof tiles completely missing in a large section at one gable end. Blue and white Garda tape stretched across a gravel driveway choked with marked vehicles. Various figures milled about in white coveralls and face masks: members of the Garda Technical Bureau at work.

A murder inquiry was opened. Still recovering from skin-graft surgery, Jack was interviewed by detectives but never formally arrested or charged. No one else had ever been either. Ten months later, the case remained open and active and unsolved.

And now, for some unfathomable reason, the only suspect there’d ever been was writing a whole book about how he didn’t do it.

Or she was.

Maybe.

An image search suggested that, physically, Jack had had three eras. Back when he was cycling, he’d been a darkly tanned, hollow-cheeked twenty-something with veined legs, skinny arms and hair shorn to the scalp. The pictures from then were all of him in action, sweaty and smiling on podiums and power-posing in liveried Lycra, sometimes so thin that when he smiled, his teeth looked too big for his head. In one of these, he was wearing a silver Olympic medal around his neck.

Post-retirement he’d put on some weight and grown out his hair, and looked all the better for it. That Jack was tall, dark and blandly handsome, stubble covering his newly filled-out cheeks. He seemed relaxed in business casual on various brightly lit stages, in arty headshots taken to illustrate glossy profiles, and looking lovingly at his wife in a photo they’d shared with the press of their wedding day. He seemed like A Nice Guy.

Most recently, he was pale and bearded, haggard, forever frozen mid-stride crossing a road or getting into a car, wearing a baseball cap and with a phone to his ear. Sometimes thick bandages were visible on one or both forearms. All of those pictures had the blur of being zoomed-in, having been snapped at a distance, their subject seemingly unaware – because these were furtive paparazzi shots of a man who had maybe killed his wife.

Or probably killed her.

After all, didn’t these things always turn out that way?

‘Hey.’ Mark had arrived. He was leaning over her, bending to kiss the top of her head. She put her phone down. ‘I got someone to swap lunch with me, so I have an hour.’ As he pulled out the opposite chair, she saw him see the wine. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’ve had a weird morning,’ she said.

Then she told him why.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ was his first question when she was done. ‘On Friday, when you got the email?’

‘I don’t know,’ she lied.

She’d met Mark nearly two years ago, four years after The Witness had been published in paperback. He’d been sitting at a busy bar on a Thursday night, alone, drinking whiskey and reading, and she’d fallen for it hook, line and Ishiguro. It took him less than half an hour to tell her that he was a mostly unpublished writer and her nearly a month to reveal to him that she’d authored a critically acclaimed bestselling book.

He’d been proud.

She’d been practically apologetic.

Alice had told her repeatedly to cop on, to adopt the confidence of a mediocre white man, to override the Irish person’s inherent terror of being accused of having notions . But it was easier said than done. Ideals were called that for a reason. Real life was messier. Her success was in the distant past and Mark was looking like her immediate future. What was there to gain by going on about it?

She’d given him the bullet points, and he’d dutifully read The Witness and said all the right things. Since then, the subject of her having had a successful book was something they were both hyper-aware of but avoided addressing directly, as if they were a second marriage in a crime novel and The Witness was the beautiful but dead first wife.

‘But ghostwriting ?’ Mark said. ‘Do you know how to do that?’

‘Funnily enough, that doesn’t seem to be relevant. Beth said all that matters is that it’s a good book and that she knows I can produce one of those, and there’ll be an assistant to help with everything else. She said Jack wants to tell his story and I just have to help him write it down and then polish it up afterwards.’

‘Are you going to do it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Emily said. After a beat she added, ‘I do know I don’t have twenty-five grand.’

‘But what if he did it? You’d be giving him a platform.’

‘ I wouldn’t be giving him anything. I’d just be the hired help. And my saying no isn’t going to stop this from happening. If I don’t do it, someone else will.’

‘You want to do it.’

He made it sound like an accusation.

‘What I want is for this to be over,’ Emily said.

‘There are other ways.’

‘Like what?’

‘You could write the book.’

I can’t write the book , she protested – but silently, because she didn’t want to get into a pointless conversation where he told her all the reasons that that fact wasn’t true. She said, ‘That’s not an option anymore. They don’t want it. They’re focusing more on non-fiction these days. My contract is getting cancelled either way.’

‘Then write the book, sell it to someone else and use that advance to pay off this one.’

I can’t write the fucking book! ‘That’s not how it works, Mark.’

Even if she somehow managed to pull a book out of her blocked brain, selling it to a publisher wouldn’t be easy. It might not even be possible. The ones big enough to pay an advance that would get her out of trouble only dealt with agents, so she’d have to get one of those first. It would take time. It might take forever. And the moment she said no to this ghostwriting gig, the money she owed Morningstar would fall due.

‘I know how it works,’ he muttered under his breath.

He didn’t, but she let it go.

‘They need to know by five,’ she said, trying to move the conversation on. ‘And if I say yes, I’d leave tomorrow.’

‘ What? ’

‘In the morning, if they can get me on a flight. My US travel approval is in date, from that time I was supposed to be going to New York.’ Hoping to go, until she did the sums and realized she couldn’t afford to. ‘They want this to get going as soon as possible. I think they’ve already wasted a lot of time trying to get someone to say yes.’

‘What does that tell you?’

‘That they’re desperate,’ Emily said. ‘Which is perfect, because so am I.’

A beat passed.

‘You know,’ Mark said then, ‘this could bring a lot of attention.’ He paused. ‘Unwanted attention.’

‘They said my name won’t be made public.’

‘Anonymity means nothing now. Not with the internet. What if your name does get out? What if everyone knows it was you who helped this guy write his book? It could be very exposing.’ Mark shifted in his seat. ‘Isn’t it weird that we never talk about it?’

‘What?’

‘Writing the book.’

She looked at him like he was crazy. ‘God, why would I want to talk about it? That would only make it worse. Imagine it’s Sunday night and you haven’t done your homework. Imagine you feel like that all the time, every day – and you can’t do your homework, but you still have to go to school. Then someone comes in and says, “Have you your homework done? No? Let’s talk about that for a while.” Is that really going to help?’

‘I meant The Witness ,’ he said quietly. ‘What it was like, writing it. I mean … Why was it easy to write that, and impossible to write anything else since?’

She felt his eyes on her, the prickly heat of his attention.

It wasn’t easy , she said silently.

‘I don’t know,’ she lied again.