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A t a quarter to twelve, there was a sharp rap of knuckles on the door and then, abruptly, Grace was in the room with them. The suddenness of her entrance and the way her eyes were now darting around gave her the air of a schoolteacher who’d smelled cigarette smoke in the hall and then kicked open a cubicle, confident she’d catch a student red-handed.

But it was just a ghostwriter and her subject, surprised by the interruption and looking to her for an explanation.

‘Lunch,’ she said. ‘It arrived early.’

Jack excused himself to make a call. Grace mumbled something about emails and didn’t immediately follow Emily downstairs. It seemed obvious that she was hanging back so she could speak to Jack alone, probably to get a report out of him as to how the morning had gone that she could send back to London.

Emily wondered if he’d ask Grace about what he’d almost certainly overheard just before he’d entered the room, and what she’d tell him in response. She really needed to find out what he’d been told, so she could stick to the same story.

But that aside, after a somewhat shaky start, she was feeling cautiously optimistic.

Jack had spent the last hour talking about cycling: how he’d got into it, why he’d got into it, what being into it was like. Most of it wouldn’t make it into the book – readers would just skip ahead, scanning for Kate’s name – but she thought the pain and suffering stuff might prove useful, and it gave Jack an opportunity to warm up on neutral territory. After lunch, she planned on broaching the subject of his and Kate’s first meeting. She wondered if he’d get emotional about it.

But then, what was the ‘right’ response?

If he was stoic about his dead wife, people would say he didn’t care that she was dead. If he sobbed uncontrollably, the widower doth protest too much. If he started one way and ended up another, people could accuse him of being a psychopath who was able to turn his feelings on and off like a tap.

He couldn’t win.

It didn’t really matter to the book – it was Jack’s story, written in the first person – but on a personal level, Emily was curious to see how he’d react. So far, she was finding it almost impossible to imagine him doing what he was accused of. Already, for increasingly long stretches, she found herself forgetting to try.

There were two plastic trays on the kitchen table, jammed with enough pinwheel-sandwiches to feed a family of ten, plus a large salad bowl, bags of crisps and pretzels, and a handwritten note saying cold drinks were in the fridge. It seemed to Emily like this spread could’ve survived until they were actually due to break for lunch in fifteen minutes’ time, but she wasn’t complaining. She was famished.

She piled a plate high, grabbed a bottle of water and took her lunch outside, to the courtyard.

It was a beautiful day. Clear blue skies, bright sunshine, hot but not unpleasantly so in the shade. The courtyard blazed with colour and life, the gemstone pool shimmering at its centre. The noise of engines and shouts was still coming from the building site but, mercifully, the drilling, hammering and boom of talk-radio had stopped.

She chose a seat close to the edge of the pool, and started on a sandwich. She wanted her phone and wondered where Grace had put her bag.

And then she wondered where Grace was.

And, come to think of it, Jack.

Were they going to join her? Had they opted to stay in the kitchen? Did they think her rude for staying outside?

Emily strained to listen for voices coming from inside the house, but couldn’t hear any.

She had several large windows in front of her and to the left, but the angle of the sun had rendered them dark mirrors. They all presumably offered a clear view of her from inside the house, but all she could see in them was a woman sitting on a chair in a courtyard, balancing a plate on her knees, wondering where everyone else was.

And now, getting the distinct feeling that she was being watched.

Emily’s skin prickled.

She told herself to cop on, but the sensation refused to go away. So she did what any normal, confident, stable, thirty-something woman would do. For the benefit of any would-be audience, she animated her face to suggest she’d suddenly remembered something she’d forgotten, in the style of a bad soap-opera actor. Then she stood and hurriedly carried her lunch across the courtyard, under the pergola and up the steps to Bookmark.

Realization was just dawning that her key was in her bag and that her bag was God knows where Grace had put it when she reached the deck and saw that there was a key already sitting in the lock. She assumed that maybe a housekeeper was inside – hadn’t Jack mentioned a property manager? – but when she opened the door, she immediately spotted her backpack sitting on the couch and then her phone on the breakfast bar.

She stuck her hand into the backpack’s side pocket to feel for her key, but it wasn’t there. Which meant that not only had Grace let herself in, she’d dug around in Emily’s bag in order to do it.

Was this a rude violation or a thoughtful favour? Emily genuinely couldn’t decide. But she supposed it was too hot to leave a bag containing a laptop and a phone sitting outside for two hours in direct sunlight, and if Grace had left the bag anywhere else, she’d have to go looking for it now.

She took another bite of chicken-salad sandwich and unlocked her phone – and stopped chewing when she saw that she had a new email. It’s probably nothing , she told herself as she moved to tap the icon.

Sitting at the top of her inbox was another message from ‘Emily Joyce’.

At the sight of it, the food in her mouth instantly adopted the texture of soggy paper.

Emily didn’t have time to try to convince herself that it was the same message again, that this was merely spam on a repeat offence, that the only problem here was that her email app’s automated filters weren’t as good as they could be. She could already see this one’s threat, shouting at her from the preview pane.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

She sucked in a breath, pulling a piece of half-chewed something back into her throat, sending her into a fit of coughing and spluttering.

As she recovered, she stared at the words, blurred now by her watery eyes.

Then she called Alice and told her about it.

‘ I know what you did ,’ Alice echoed.

‘And I know who you are , before that.’

Silence.

‘Do you think—?’ Emily started.

‘No,’ Alice said firmly. ‘Not at all.’

Her confidence made Emily feel better, until she began to wonder if Alice was just trying to sound confident so she would.

‘You know, when I got that first email from Beth, the editor at Morningstar, I thought maybe they’d found out.’

‘But they didn’t,’ Alice said.

‘Did you ?’

‘What?’

‘Think that that might be a possibility? When I told you they wanted to meet with me? Just because …’ Emily bit her lip. ‘We haven’t talked about it at all. Even after I found out what this was about.’

A rush of air on the line as Alice sighed deeply.

‘What’s there to talk about?’

‘I don’t know,’ Emily said. ‘Didn’t it cross your mind that there are, you know, parallels ?’

‘No.’

‘Not at all?’

‘What I thought,’ Alice said, ‘and still think, is that this was a solution to a problem that you really needed to solve. Your involvement is anonymous and all you have to do is write down what he says. So this is nothing like that . And the reason I didn’t bring it up is because I know what you’re like and I didn’t even want to put the thought in your head.’

‘Well, it’s in there anyway.’

‘Well, get it out.’

‘You know, Mark said something weird to me before I left. He asked me why it was so easy to write The Witness and then impossible to write another book. And he was all, “If you take this job, it could be very exposing.” That was the word he used. Exposing .’

‘I think you’re reading way too much into that. And that those emails are just uninspired spam.’

‘But what if—?’

‘Emily, darling, this is going to sound harsh, but I say it with love, to reassure you: you’re not that important.’

Alice’s delivery made her snort. ‘Gee, thanks.’

‘What I mean is, no one is sitting at home obsessing over how they can mess with your head via an anonymous Hotmail address and a blatant disregard for the lower case. It’s just spam. You know I’m right.’

‘Yeah,’ Emily said. ‘Probably.’

But she wasn’t sure Alice was, on this occasion.

‘ Anyway … How’s it going? Tell me all.’

‘It’s going OK and there’s not that much to tell yet.’

‘Does he seem—’ But Alice stopped, interrupted by someone in the background saying something Emily couldn’t make out. ‘Shit, sorry. I have to go. My root canal is here. Talk later?’

‘My later will be your already-asleep-in bed, but I’ll leave a voice-note if anything exciting happens.’

‘I want a full podcast this week. New episode every morning.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘And don’t worry.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

But she mustn’t be trying very hard, because she could already feel dread swirling in her stomach.

After Alice ended the call, Emily read the email one more time before banishing it, like its predecessor, to Junk.

It’s just spam .

She repeated it silently several times, like a mantra, as if it had the power to push her feelings of dread away.

When it didn’t, she went on Amazon to look up Anthony Baume’s memoir in a bid to distract herself.

The cover of The Crash: Cycling to Hell and Back featured an extreme close-up of Anthony’s bruised and muddied face. The only physical editions available were second-hand, a sure sign it was out of print, but a digital one was still on sale. She tapped the R EAD A S AMPLE button and navigated to the title page. It was only a hunch but …

The Crash: Cycling to Hell and Back

Anthony Baume

with Neil Wallace

Neil .

She allowed herself one moment of extreme smugness, then Googled him.

The top result was his website. On it, she found a bio that mentioned several ghostwriting projects, and a contact form.

She could contact him. But should she? What was it she wanted to say, exactly? Hey, you don’t know me and I think this message is in violation of a legal agreement we both signed, but (a) were you at some point Jack Smyth’s ghostwriter and (b) if so, why aren’t you anymore, because (c) I’m just curious in case an experienced ghostwriter would have a reason not to touch this gig with a bargepole.

The phone began to ring in her hand – M ARK .

‘Oh,’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d be able to answer. What time is it there?’

‘I’m on a break. Lunch.’

‘Well? How’s it going?’

‘Fine, I think.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘He’s … You know, normal. Nice.’

‘Aren’t they all?’

‘Who?’

‘Husbands who kill their wives,’ Mark said.

‘We don’t actually know he killed her.’

‘There’s no smoke without fire. Pardon the pun.’

That’s not a pun , Emily said silently.

She walked to the window, one that looked out over the beach. The sun was overhead now, turning the surface of the Gulf into dancing tiles of light.

There was someone on the sand, she saw, directly in front of the house: a man, standing at the water’s edge.

But with his back to it, facing her.

She thought it must be Jack, just as she registered that it couldn’t be. This man seemed to be taller and thinner, and had what looked like much lighter hair.

He was motionless, as still as a statue.

Staring at her staring at him.

Emily felt a chill, an icy finger tracing a line down her back. She bolted backwards, ducking out of sight, but caught her foot on the edge of the rug and then banged her shin against the sharp corner of the coffee table.

She swore at the sudden, sharp bloom of pain.

‘Em?’ Mark said. ‘You all right?’

‘There’s a—’ But she stopped before she could say strange man outside watching me.

Because with the downslope of the dune and the breadth of the sand, you could probably fit two tennis courts between Bookmark’s balcony railing and the shoreline. No one could possibly see into her windows from that distance; she could barely make out the man’s features as it was.

And why would anyone be looking? Who even knew she was here?

It was just a guy walking on a beach who’d stopped to admire the architecture or something.

It’s just spam.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, sitting down on the couch. She rubbed her throbbing leg. ‘What were you saying?’

‘I was asking if you’re getting, you know, bad vibes or whatever.’

‘He’s not Hannibal Lecter, Mark.’

‘Has he cried for you yet? If he turns on the waterworks, then he definitely did it.’

‘You learned that from all that true crime you’ve been watching, did you?’

‘ And reading,’ he said with a smile in his voice. ‘It’s all I’ve been doing since you left.’

They both knew Mark had never knowingly consumed anything that might be labelled true crime in his life.

‘Anyway, the reason I’m ringing …’ His tone was different now, gentle and serious. ‘An envelope came for you this morning, by registered post. The return address is Roche and O’Reilly Associates on Mount Street. I looked them up, thinking they might be a literary agency or something, but they’re, ah …’

‘You looked them up ?’

‘Just out of interest,’ he said quickly, dismissively. ‘But Em, they’re a firm of solicitors. And it’s a really thick envelope. That I had to sign for.’

She closed her eyes, feeling the swirl of dread in her stomach turn into a wave of it gathering offshore, barrelling towards her, about to crest and break and wash her and everything she had clean away.

The timing of this couldn’t be a coincidence.

‘Will I open it?’ Mark asked.

‘No,’ she said, too quickly, too loud. She’d practically shouted it. She took a deep breath and said in a more normal voice, ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll deal with whatever it is when I get home. Put it away somewhere safe, OK?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah.’

A beat of silence.

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘No.’ She truly didn’t – and that was the problem. She couldn’t risk Mark seeing something that he shouldn’t. Couldn’t . ‘Listen, sorry, but I’ve got to go. My break is over.’

‘But what—’

‘Talk tomorrow, OK?’

Emily ended the call before he could say anything else and threw the phone into the couch cushions.

She gave the remains of her lunch a dirty look. She’d lost her appetite.

When she went to the window, the beach was empty.

Her would-be watcher was gone.