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E mily kept her expression neutral. She didn’t want to look sceptical, didn’t want Jack to think that she thought he was guilty. She didn’t want to appear shocked either, in case he was guilty and had said that to get a reaction out of her. She shouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Or was neutrality the wrong call? It could seem cold, as if she didn’t care about what had happened to him, but was only here to do a job. Which she was. But if he felt that, that job would probably become a lot harder to do. Then she began to worry that several seconds had passed and she still hadn’t responded, and that that was worse, so she said, ‘You and I can start wherever you want, but I probably wouldn’t start the book there.’

He looked surprised. ‘No?’

She was surprised too, at her newfound, confident insight into the structure of true-crime memoirs. (If that was even what this was? She couldn’t think of a better label, even though that one was far from a perfect fit.) But wasn’t it just common sense? No one would be parting with their hard-earned cash to read seventy thousand words that proved Jack Smyth didn’t kill his wife, actually.

Readers would go through this book forensically, hoping to find a killer’s confession between the lines. She knew this because that’s what she’d do, were she one of them. Put a declaration of innocence in the very first paragraph and they wouldn’t even bother taking the book out of the shop.

‘I think what’s important,’ she said, ‘is to get the reader on your side from page one.’

Jack scoffed. ‘Good luck with that.’

‘No one can be certain of your guilt except you.’ His face fell slack in shock and Emily was reminded that she didn’t know what she was doing and should tread carefully. ‘There’s no member of the public who can say, “I know he did it.”’ OK, even more carefully. ‘What I’m saying is,’ she pushed on, ‘everyone has to admit to themselves that, despite what they may believe, they don’t know . So we have to get in there, at the start, and widen that crack. Say, yeah, OK, but what if he didn’t do this? What if an innocent man has lost his wife in tragic circumstances and then, compounding his pain, people think he was responsible? How would you feel if this happened to you?’

‘I’m not following,’ Jack said evenly.

Emily didn’t blame him. She took a deep breath, tried again.

‘What I’m suggesting is that we start with your lowest ebb,’ she said. ‘A moment when you’d been brought to your knees, when you truly thought you couldn’t take one more thing, and then something even worse happened. When you were asking yourself, when will this nightmare end? Why is this happening to me? How did I even get here? Then we go back to the beginning and answer that question. Because starting with “I didn’t kill my wife” will just make people think, Well, that’s exactly what someone who’d killed his wife would say .’

Jack was silent for what felt like a long time, and Emily worried that she’d completely fucked this up before she’d even got a chance to hit R ECORD .

What if she did fuck it up? What if he fired her? She’d be back to square one.

No, she’d be worse off than that, because she’d have had a second chance and totally squandered it.

And she’d have to get that money from somewhere.

Just thinking about it made the coffee she’d drunk earlier slosh around her otherwise empty stomach.

‘OK,’ he said then. ‘But how do we actually do this?’

‘Well,’ she said, trying to hide her relief, ‘we only have a few days here. Afterwards, when we’re both back home, we can hop on a call if we need to clarify something or add something in. It’s not like we’ll never speak again. But this is probably the only time we have to sit in a room together and talk uninterrupted. So I just want you to tell me your story. I might interrupt to ask a question or because I want you to go a little deeper into some specific thing, but I’m primarily here to listen and record, and to make sure we get everything we need. When I get back home, I’ll type up what you said, editing as I go—’

‘Editing?’ Jack said in alarm.

‘Polishing,’ she corrected. ‘Moving things around. Adding some connective tissue, for context. So it reads like a book. But don’t worry, because the next step will be you reading it to check that you’re happy. Nothing will go to print without your approval. Remember, this is your book.’

But Jack still looked worried.

‘So why a book?’ Emily opened the laptop, booted it up. ‘Why not a print interview or a podcast or whatever?’

The question was mostly to distract him from the idea that she’d twist his words, and to give her a chance to get her bearings before she blurted out another phrase like someone who’d killed his wife .

‘A podcast?’ Jack made a face. ‘No bloody way. And I’ve had enough of print interviews. They record exactly what you say, then they go back to the office and write something that twists it all around, and the headline will be by far the most stupid thing you said that has nothing to do with anything else you said, taken completely out of context – and that’s all most people bother to read these days. Television gets edited too. Even if it’s live, you’re still at the mercy of the interviewer, and they don’t care about you. They just want clicks and views. No. All that stuff, it’s about someone else using me to get what they want, what they need. And I know there’s an element of that here. I know Morningstar aren’t publishing this book as a public service. But at least this way, I get what I want too.’

‘And what is it you want?’

‘To tell my side of the story. To have my voice heard in all this. For people to know I had nothing to do with Kate’s death.’ He paused. ‘There’s a guy I used to ride with, Anthony Baume – do you know him?’

Emily shook her head. ‘Now might be the time to confess that I know nothing about professional cycling. The Tour de France is a thing, the winner wears a yellow jersey and Lance Armstrong cheated. That’s the extent of my knowledge.’

‘The leader wears a yellow jersey.’

‘See?’

‘Well, I don’t think you have to worry. They told me to keep cycling out of this book as much as possible and that’s fine by me.’ He paused. ‘I don’t like talking about it.’

Emily knew that by they he meant Beth and Carolyn, because they’d said pretty much the same thing to her.

‘So – your teammate?’ she prompted.

‘Ant,’ he said. ‘Yeah. He had a bad accident. Was in a lot of pain. Liked the pills they gave him for it a bit too much. One thing led to another … He ended up writing a book about it, about the addiction and the recovery, and then his comeback. It was amazing. I mean, I’m not a big reader, but I felt like I was listening to him. I could hear his voice. I met him later at some charity thing, and I was gushing about it, and that’s when he tells me he didn’t write a single word. He used a ghostwriter.’

‘Was he happy with the result?’

‘Completely, yeah,’ Jack said, nodding. ‘He’d tell the ghostwriter about, say, going to rehab, and then the guy would go away and write it up, jazz it up – Ant isn’t exactly a wordsmith, watch any of his post-race interviews and you’ll see what I mean – and then Ant would read it and give it a go/no-go. There wasn’t a single line in that book that wasn’t exactly what he’d wanted to say, and there was enough space for him to say everything.’

‘So when you had something to say …’

‘I thought, book . Well, I thought ghostwriter .’ He paused. ‘ The Witness , right? That was your book?’

‘Yeah,’ Emily said after a beat.

‘What’s it about?’

‘Well, ah …’ She shifted in her seat. ‘It’s about a twelve-year-old girl. Roxie. And how she … It’s, like, a coming-of-age sort of thing.’

Jack frowned. ‘I thought Beth said you’d written a crime novel.’

Emily wondered what else Beth had said during a conversation clearly designed to convince Jack that the only writer they’d managed to get wasn’t the worst possible choice.

‘There is a subplot about two local teenage girls who’ve gone missing,’ she said. ‘Roxie’s following all the news reports obsessively, oblivious to the fact that her father might be the culprit. The reader realizes it could be him halfway through, but she stays oblivious. So I don’t know if I’d call it a crime novel , but there is a crime in it, I suppose.’

‘How does it end?’

‘With a flash-forward,’ Emily said. ‘Roxie’s in her twenties, standing outside a Garda station, trying to decide whether or not to go in.’

‘To tell them about her father?’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Maybe not. It ends there.’

‘But you must know. It’s your story.’

‘And as far as I’m concerned, it stopped when I stopped typing it. There’s nothing to know.’

‘Is he guilty?’

‘That’s for the reader to decide.’

Her stock phrase, deployed for the first time in a long time.

Jack nodded slowly, gazing at something in the middle distance, and she wondered if he was thinking about the eventual readers of this book and what they might conclude from his story. He’d stopped hiding his hands at some point, and her gaze dropped now to the red, angry scars, the gloves of melted skin.

She looked back up at his face and saw that he had noticed.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Not right now,’ he said. ‘But my doctors tell me I have more surgeries in my future. It’s OK, though. I’m used to pain. Cycling is suffering, after all.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ She picked up the voice-recorder. ‘Mind if I …?’

‘We’re starting now?’

‘If that’s OK?’

He nodded.

She pressed the R ECORD button, set the device on the desk and turned it until the microphone was pointing at Jack.

He stared at it, unblinking, like it was a grenade she’d just pulled the pin out of.

‘Cycling is suffering,’ she prompted.

He cleared his throat. ‘Ah, yeah. So … If you’re good at road-racing, what you’re really good at is pushing through pain. There’s this guy, Tyler Hamilton. Used to race for US Postal. Famously tough. He once broke his shoulder during the Giro, but kept going. Finished second with a cracked shoulder blade. Afterwards he had to have, like, a dozen teeth replaced. He’d ground them down to stumps during the race.’

Emily winced.

‘A few weeks later, he shows up to the Tour with a twisted spine and a broken collarbone, and wins a stage . One of the other team directors wouldn’t even believe it. Accused him of a PR stunt. They had to show him the X-rays. That’s the level of suffering we’re talking about.’

‘That sounds horrific.’

‘I’m not saying you ride out with broken bones every time, but on a tough climb, those stretches when you’re up in the mountains day after day – it can feel as bad as that. And I could take it. Always. In a weird way, I kind of liked it.’

‘Why?’

‘If you break your leg,’ Jack said, ‘all you can think about is how much your leg hurts, right? But if every single part of you is in pain, you can’t think about anything. Your mind is blank. You’re just a body, pushing on the pedals, going as fast as you can. The outside is on fire, but you’re inside, totally safe.’ He looked her right in the eye. ‘Does that make sense?’

Emily opened her mouth to respond, but didn’t quite know what to say.

Jack’s face changed as realization dawned.

‘Sorry,’ he said, swallowing hard. ‘Bad choice of words. Hey – don’t put that bit in, OK?’