Page 6

5

S eeing him in the flesh felt like a small electric shock: for one heartbeat every nerve ending flared, but by the very next everything had returned to normal.

He was in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, standing with both hands dug deep into his pockets. This was Post-Retirement Jack – a healthy weight, grown-out hair, stubbled and handsome – but a nervous, diminished version, shoulders hunched and chin down.

Emily searched him for signs that he had taken a life, but of course there weren’t any. She’d known there wouldn’t be, even if he had.

‘I’m in the …?’

‘The lock-off,’ he repeated. ‘I’d call it a granny flat, but that’s how the property manager referred to it.’

Jack pointed over her shoulder and she turned to look.

Behind her was a dining table and chairs, sitting beneath a pergola strung with greenery. A narrow spiral staircase was tucked into its deepest corner, next to a sign that said B OOKMARK. An arrow beside the word pointed upwards. When she raised her gaze, she saw a deck with two white Adirondack chairs sitting on either side of a front door with a large pane of glass in it.

She turned back to Jack.

‘I’m Emily, by the way,’ she said, extending a hand.

He hesitated before doing the same with one of his. She glimpsed tributaries of shiny new skin snaking up his forearm, an angry red river cutting across an otherwise pale landscape. As they shook, she felt an unusually smooth and hard palm, rough fingertips, a weak grip.

‘Jack.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ she said automatically.

He jammed both hands back in his pockets. ‘How was your journey?’

‘Fine. Long. When did you get here?’

‘This morning,’ he said. ‘I was in New York before, for a couple of days.’

‘So at least you were already in this time zone.’

‘Nearly. We’re one hour behind here.’

‘Are we?’

Jack nodded. ‘It’s Central, this far west.’

If the captain had told his passengers that as Emily’s plane had landed at Fort Walton Beach, she’d been too distracted by the war machinery outside the window to hear it.

Now, she did the sums in her head. It must be approaching six in the evening, local time. That meant her body thought it was almost midnight. In five hours, she’d have been up for a full twenty-four.

She swallowed a yawn.

‘Is the assistant here?’ she asked. ‘From Morningstar?’

Jack frowned. ‘Assistant?’

‘Beth said something about there being one on-site …’

‘Oh – you mean Grace? No, she’s gone to her hotel. She’s not staying here. She’s down the road a bit, in Watercolor, but she’ll be back first thing in the morning.’

‘Watercolor?’ Emily repeated.

‘And Sanctuary.’ He made a face. ‘Yeah, I know.’

‘I saw signs for somewhere called Niceville on the way here.’

‘We can’t really talk though, can we?’ Jack said. ‘After all, there’s Borris-in-Ossory.’

‘And New Twopothouse …’

‘Nobber.’

‘Muff.’

‘ Muff? ’ Jack blinked at her. ‘Where’s that?’

‘Donegal,’ she said. ‘And, ah, they have a diving club.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I think they are too, to be fair. They have merch. They may not do any actual diving.’

Jack laughed and she saw the lifeless, broken limbs of a woman tumbling down a flight of stairs. What the hell was she doing? This guy was the prime – only – suspect in a murder. He had said things about the night his wife had died that couldn’t possibly be true. And not even five minutes in, she was joking with him about place names ?

But then, what was she supposed to be doing? This was going to be a long week if she didn’t build some kind of rapport with him, and she didn’t want to be rude.

Because what if he hadn’t done it? What if he was innocent? What if this was all some tragic, unjust mistake?

‘So what is this place?’ she asked.

‘Sanctuary? A town, according to the brochure. A new town, built from scratch.’ When he saw her expression, he said, ‘I know. It’s weird. But it’s actually quite common around here. I guess because they’ve got the space. Think of it like one of those massive housing estates they built back home in the seventies, but instead of space for a corner shop, there’s an entire town square and a hotel and a golf course. Or there will be when they finish it. Did you come through Seaside on the way in? That’s the same kind of thing.’

‘Is the house yours?’

‘God, no,’ Jack said. ‘Not my style. It belongs to a friend of mine. He knew I needed somewhere to hide out and do this, so he offered it to me. There really wasn’t anywhere at home we’d have been able to go unnoticed, and going anywhere in Europe would only have been a Ryanair ride away for the vultures, so … They only got the furniture in a few days ago. We’re the first people to stay here.’

‘Nice,’ Emily said absently.

She was trying to picture Jack Smyth killing his wife. In her mind’s eye, she saw a man standing at the top of a staircase, crazed with rage, moving to push two hands against a woman’s back and then rushing to set a fire that would destroy the evidence.

But at best, he was only this man’s doppelg?nger, a physical match but otherwise unrelated and disconnected from the guy standing right in front of her.

She just couldn’t marry the two.

Jack cleared his throat. ‘Um, by the way, I wanted to say thank you. For stepping in. Neil really let us down, dropping out at the last minute. Thanks for saving the day.’

This was the first Emily had heard of any Neil. She didn’t know how to respond because she didn’t know what Jack knew. What had Morningstar told him? Had they been up-front about their struggles to get someone to be his ghostwriter, or had they come up with some kind of cover story to smooth everything over? In her experience, no one in publishing ever wanted to come straight out and deliver bad news. Beth’s gentle We need to draw a line under this was by far the harshest thing she’d ever heard.

She should check with Beth, before she stuck her foot in it.

‘No problem,’ she said. She stifled another yawn, but less successfully; Jack caught this one. She blushed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just a bit of a zombie after all the travelling. I’ve missed an entire night’s sleep.’

‘No, no, of course. I’ll let you get settled.’ He took hold of her suitcase. ‘Let me bring this up for you.’

He was off with it before she could protest, so she had no choice but to follow him under the pergola, up the narrow stairs and onto the deck.

He walked with a slight limp, she noticed.

‘There you go,’ he said, setting the case outside the front door. He was flushed, winded from the act. She remembered his reported lung damage, the after-effects of smoke inhalation. ‘I think Grace said we’d start at ten tomorrow morning, but she was going to text you. If you need anything in the meantime, I’m in there’ – he jerked a thumb at the main house – ‘so just shout.’

‘Great. Thanks.’

‘I, ah …’ Jack shifted his weight from foot to foot. ‘I appreciate you treating me like a normal person. When people have prior knowledge of me … Well, you can guess how it goes.’

Jack turned around and headed for the stairs before she could respond. She watched him go, itchy with unease.

This was all so confusing.

She didn’t know how to act, how to behave, how to treat him. She didn’t want to be rude, but nor did she want to be commended for being nice to a murderer. She wanted him to like her enough to get this book done and done well, but not any more than that. She didn’t want to like him, but she didn’t want to dislike someone because of something they hadn’t actually done.

She wished there was a rule book for this. An etiquette guide. The Ghost: Everything You Need to Know to Help a Man Who Might Have Murdered Someone Write His Story – Including Exactly How to Behave Around Him Without Turning Your Soul Necrotic!

Emily unlocked the door, dragged her case over the threshold and felt her anxiety dissipate.

Because Bookmark, her home for the next few days, was adorable .

It was a studio. Directly opposite the front door was a kitchenette, separated from the living area by a breakfast bar. There was no bed, but Emily suspected that the plush, overstuffed couch pushed against the side wall turned into one. Everything was white or woven, and despite the limited space there seemed to be every possible luxury: a top-of-the-range TV, a complicated coffee machine, even a little drinks fridge with three bottles of rosé inside.

If Jack hadn’t told her they were the first people to stay here, she’d still have known. The contents were obviously brand new. The couch cushions didn’t have as much as a dimple in them, the glass pot of the coffee machine had a small pamphlet of instructions inside and the TV screen was still protected by a film of clear plastic. The space even smelled of newness, which was to say it didn’t really smell of anything at all.

There was a small, neatly typed card stuck to the fridge with the wifi network name and password on it. Emily connected and waited while various messages and notifications flooded her phone.

Most of them were pointless noise that she could swipe away without a second thought. Both Mark and Alice had sent messages. She responded to each one, letting them know she’d made it here in one piece.

Then she checked for new emails.

There were three.

One was from Beth, hoping her journey was good and wishing her the best of luck. One was from a time-management app Emily had cancelled her subscription to months ago, trying to convince her to come back at a discounted rate. And one was from her .

A message with her own name as the sender and an empty subject line.

Emily blinked at it in confusion.

What the …?

She opened it and saw its body shouting I KNOW WHO YOU ARE in all caps.

Her mouth went dry and her heart began to pound wildly in her chest. She stared at the words until everything else in her line of vision disappeared.

Don’t overreact , she told herself. It’s just an email. It’s probably spam .

Yeah – spam. That must be it. Because she’d heard about stuff like this, hadn’t she? They wanted you to think someone had hacked into your email account and them emailing you from it was proof, so you’d transfer all your Bitcoin to stop them from sending deep-fake nudes to all your contacts or whatever.

And now, actually, when she inspected it, she saw that the email address itself was a string of random numbers at Hotmail.com. It hadn’t come from her account. Someone had just signed up for an email address and put her name on it.

Probably not even a real someone, but a bot.

Spam. It had to be.

Emily’s shoulders dropped a little as she exhaled, long and loud.

She tapped to move the message to ‘Junk’ and listened for the reassuring whoosh of it being transferred there.

Then she poured herself a very large glass of wine and took it onto the balcony at the rear of Bookmark, the one on the beach side.

And gasped.

The windows had offered framed swathes of sea, but the balcony provided an endless vista. A stretch of unspoiled white sand dotted with navy-blue parasols stretched away from the house in both directions. The water was turquoise and calm, its waves lapping lazily against the shore, while above it the setting sun had streaked the sky with oranges, pinks and purples. The beach, like Sanctuary itself, was deserted. It was a little distance from the house and on the other side of a sand dune; only this upper level had a Gulf view.

When Emily went inside for a refill, she spotted a set of switches by the door. Presuming they were for the lights, she pressed one – and startled at the sudden loud mechanical whirr . Aluminium shutters started to descend over all the glass at the rear of the property, covering the balcony door and the windows on either side of it. Panicked, she jabbed at the button again, sending them back up.

Off the main space was a small nook with two doors. The bathroom was one, and Emily expected a walk-in closet or a utility room to be behind the other, but instead, she found solid wall.

Or what at first glance looked like solid wall, but was actually a closed door.

And then she realized: lock-off was literal.

Just like connecting hotel rooms, Bookmark was separate from Beach Read but it didn’t have to be. If both these doors were opened, the nook would become a hallway, allowing passage from this self-contained unit into the main house and vice versa.

And on the other side was a man who was maybe a murderer.