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Just walking up to the house two days later brought back memories. I’d had dinner here with Edna O’Brien, Stephen Fry, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan and many more – not all at once, mind you, but Charles Clover had loved to sprinkle famous names amongst his guests. On one occasion, Nigella Lawson had done the cooking. Charles had worked on her first bestseller, How to Eat , published in 1998, and also claimed that Amsterdam , which had won McEwan the Booker Prize, had been his idea, although he was almost certainly exaggerating about that. The conversation around the well-worn French fruitwood dining table embraced life and literature and it would usually be one or two o’clock in the morning before the first taxis arrived. Charles always served excellent wine and nobody ever drove home.

The house looked the same as I remembered: a neat, red-brick Victorian construction with bay windows, a front garden and four floors, standing at the end of the terrace. Like most of its neighbours, it had been knocked about with skylights above and a basement conversion below, although I remembered that Charles had baulked at a conservatory. For old times’ sake, I’d come by public transport, although I didn’t think I’d be drinking heavily tonight.

I rang the bell and heard the opening bars of C. P. E. Bach’s ‘Solfeggietto’. Charles had recorded himself playing the piano and it must have been odd for Elaine, hearing him every time anyone came to the house. Just for a moment, I expected him to fling open the door, his jacket off, a tea towel tucked into his belt and a glass of wine in his hand. He liked to cook, unless he happened to have a celebrity chef on the guest list, and the meals he prepared were first class. ‘ Hello, Susan! Come in! Come in! ’ I could almost hear his voice. Strait-laced in the office, he turned into a bon viveur when at home, and it was strange to think that he had morphed from that into a convicted murderer. There would certainly be no high-minded conversation or champignons farcis where he was now.

The door was opened just a few inches, then closed again. I heard the security chain slide and then it opened fully to reveal Elaine, now dressed in black trousers and T-shirt with a single gold chain around her neck. I was glad that I hadn’t put on anything too fancy myself. I’d gone through all the new clothes I’d bought when I got back from Crete, but what do you wear for dinner with a woman whose life you’ve managed to destroy? I still felt uncomfortable about coming here, and although Charles had always forbidden his guests to bring anything to his dinner parties, I’d decided that I couldn’t come empty-handed. I held out a bouquet of flowers and a decent bottle of wine.

Elaine took them with a smile. ‘That’s very kind of you, Susan, although there was absolutely no need.’ She was less nervous than she had been in the office, perhaps because this was her home turf, but the fact that she wouldn’t open the door until she knew who was on the other side told me a lot about her state of mind. ‘Do come in,’ she said.

Nothing had changed. The house was elegant, almost obsessively so. The furniture and lighting were modern eclectic, the colours easy on the eye, the artworks – mainly modern artists – arranged in galleries with very little of the walls left bare. The rooms were well proportioned, with the main living space taking up much of the ground floor and backing onto the garden. The kitchen and eating area were below.

She led me into the living room, with the baby grand piano that Charles had often played sitting in one corner. It was loaded up with family photographs. None of the sofas or armchairs matched. They were scattered around a coffee table and I saw that Elaine had already brought up four champagne glasses and a couple of bowls of olives and crisps.

Four glasses.

‘I hope you don’t mind …’ Elaine must have seen the look on my face ‘… I’ve invited Eliot and Gillian to join us for supper. I’m afraid your meeting at the publisher’s was cut short because of me and I thought it might be helpful to you to have some social time with him and his wife. They’re not coming until seven, so we can be together a while, just the two of us. Is that all right? I don’t want you to feel ambushed a second time.’

‘I presume they know I’m here?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘It’ll be nice to meet Gillian.’

‘Would you like some champagne?’

‘Thank you.’

She left the room and went down to the kitchen. I ran my eyes over the books on the shelves (plenty from Cloverleaf, but none by Alan Conway), then wandered over to the piano and examined the photographs, many of them showing Charles and Elaine in happier times: on their wedding day, on holiday, standing with their two teenaged daughters. There was a whole cluster of them, but right in the middle I spotted one of myself, Charles and Elaine, taken at the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. I remembered the occasion well. It had been the last day of the book festival and we’d decided we’d had enough of talks and signings, so we’d skived off and climbed all the way up in the late-summer heat, only to find ourselves surrounded by about a hundred thousand midges. ‘ They’re even more irritating than the authors. ’ It was Charles who had said that. We’d asked a German tourist to take the picture and then we’d climbed down as quickly as we could to find a pub.

I was still holding the photograph when I heard a footfall behind me and saw Elaine standing close by with an open bottle of Mo?t.

‘Edinburgh,’ she said.

‘I was thinking about the midges.’

‘I prefer to remember the Glenmorangie Lasanta.’

She was right. We’d found a pub with a vast range of single malts arranged on mirrored shelves and that was the one the barman had recommended.

‘Sit down,’ she said.

I perched on one of the sofas and she poured two glasses of champagne. I watched the bubbles chasing each other up the side of the glass, but they did nothing to change my mood. What was I doing here? Did I even want to have dinner with Eliot and his wife?

I shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t Elaine’s fault, but I felt an overpowering sense of guilt and even shame. I thought of Charles pleading with me in his office after he had confessed to the murder of Alan Conway. ‘ Alan is dead. He was going to die anyway. ’ It was true. Alan had terminal cancer. It was one of the reasons he had decided to kill off Atticus Pünd, taking his much-loved detective with him. Charles had asked me to stay silent, not to go to the police – not just for him, but for his family and for everyone who worked at Cloverleaf Books who would lose their jobs when the business closed.

Maybe he’d had a point. It was something I’d never thought about, certainly not in the murder stories I’d edited, but was there any point in locking Charles up for twenty-plus years? It wasn’t as if he was a career criminal. In a moment of fury, seeing his whole life’s work threatened, he had pushed Alan Conway off the tower of his house, and if I’d been in his shoes, it’s just possible that I might have done the same. He hadn’t planned what he was going to do and you could hardly call him a danger to society: it was extremely unlikely that he would ever have killed anyone else. Would it have made such a difference to the world at large if I had stayed silent? Certainly, it would have improved my own prospects – considerably. Charles had been planning to retire. I would now be the CEO of Cloverleaf Books with complete editorial freedom and a healthy pay packet.

It would also have made me complicit in Alan Conway’s murder – but the reason I had insisted that Charles call the police and tell them what he had done wasn’t as high-minded as that. I had been offended by him. He had been so arrogant, so coldly patronising. Frankly, he had disgusted me. In a way, I’d been as impulsive as he was.

It had done me no good at all. Charles had knocked me to the floor and set fire to the building. I still believe his attempt to kill me was more unforgivable than his attack on Alan because this time he knew exactly what he was doing. He was cowardly and cruel, but in retrospect, I have to say that I was stupid. Charles had given me the opportunity to go along with what he’d done. ‘All right,’ I could have said. ‘Maybe you’re right. I never liked Alan very much, he was already dying, and nobody could argue that the world would be a worse place without him. Let me think about it …’ If I’d said all this, we could have gone down the road to have a drink together and I could have shopped him later. Instead, I’d blithely hoisted myself up onto the moral high ground and had pretty much invited the attack on me that followed. In some respects, I had to admit that I was partly to blame.

Sitting with Elaine in her living room with a glass of champagne warming itself in my hand, I found myself questioning everything I had done. Suddenly I saw an alternative future in which Charles would have been sitting there with us, all of us laughing like we used to, and this sense of emptiness and sadness would have been absent. It was his fault, I had to remind myself. He had brought this on all of us. I had done the right thing.

But I wasn’t sure I believed it.

‘How is Charles?’ I couldn’t avoid it. I had to ask.

Elaine shrugged. ‘I see him twice a month. It takes quite a bit of getting used to … going into that place. Sometimes Laura comes with me, but Gemma finds it very hard.’ Those were her two daughters. ‘I’m not sure you’d recognise him, Susan. I’m not sure he quite believes what’s happened … that he’s taken it on board. He doesn’t look like himself and although we only have an hour together, he doesn’t have very much to say. Worse than anything, there’s the terrible shame of it all, sitting there in the horrible tracksuit they make him wear, surrounded by disgusting people. And the smell!

‘I’m not asking you to feel sorry for him – or for me, for that matter. That’s not why I invited you here. I still love him. After he was arrested and he was waiting for his trial, they let him live here. He had to pay some money and surrender his passport, but we had a lot of time together and he said he wanted to divorce me, but I wouldn’t have it. He was still my husband, whatever he had done, and although I can’t forgive him – his behaviour has ruined all our lives – I hope you won’t mind if I say this.

‘I don’t think he was in his right mind when he attacked you, or when he killed Alan Conway. I’d been married to him for thirty years and I can tell you that I’d never met a less aggressive man. He never so much as raised his voice to me and he wouldn’t even watch violent films. You might like to know that he was thoroughly ashamed of himself. He’d wake up in the night, sobbing his eyes out. He wasn’t a killer! My feeling is that it was just the pressure of work that made him go mad … first with Alan, then with you. He was fighting not just for his own survival but for the whole family, for everything he’d done. That doesn’t excuse him. But I’m not going to lie to you and say that I hate him. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. I happen to believe in those words.’

‘It does you credit.’ I regretted the words even as I spoke them. I sounded like a vicar in a country village. I threw back some of the champagne. Perhaps it would be easier to get through the evening if I was drunk.

She noticed my reaction. ‘I didn’t invite you here to talk about Charles,’ she said. ‘Do you think we can be friends again, Susan? Not like the old days. Those are gone for ever. But maybe it’ll help me to cope with all the changes in my life if I know we don’t hate each other.’

I raised my glass. ‘How many years have we known each other?’ I asked. ‘Of course we’re friends. None of this was your fault and I completely understand why you still support Charles. Maybe they’ll let him out sooner than you think.’

‘I want to talk to you about Eliot Crace.’

She refilled both our glasses.

‘You have to understand that I’ve always been very close to Eliot,’ Elaine began again. ‘When Charles first met him, he was already a very damaged child. That was the year before his grandmother, Miriam Crace, died. I’m sure you know Charles worked on her last two books: Little Angels and Little and Often . He often had to travel down to Marble Hall in Wiltshire and that was where he met Eliot, who was living there with his brother and sister and their parents – Edward and Amy.

‘Charles always used to tell me what a strange place it was. Miriam was in her early eighties, married to her husband, Kenneth, and not in good health. She had a heart condition. But she still ruled over that family with an iron fist. From what Charles said, she was quite a spiteful woman. She forced her family to live at Marble Hall. The children went to local schools. None of them had any choice. She wanted them close to her so that she could have them around her – and control them. She wasn’t just a matriarch. She was a tyrant.’

‘I’m absolutely amazed,’ I interrupted. ‘I didn’t know any of this. The Little People must have sold a billion copies all over the world. If Miriam Crace was some sort of tyrant, you’d have thought that the truth would have come out by now. Charles never said anything – not even when he started publishing Eliot.’

‘He wasn’t allowed to. Anyone who worked with the estate had to sign an NDA before they were allowed near Marble Hall and I imagine Charles would have got into terrible trouble just for telling me! In fact, he never said anything until she died. Miriam Crace nearly separated from her husband. She dominated her children, bullied the grandchildren, and gave everyone who knew her a bad time. But the family was forced to hide the truth for the same reason they gave in to her demands. They needed the money! You probably know better than I do how much The Little People was worth, but if any one of them had gone to the press and blabbed about how much they disliked Granny, they’d have been cutting off their nose to spite their face.’

‘What impact did this have on Eliot?’ I asked.

‘I’m coming to that now. Edward was her younger son and he and his wife, Amy, had three children. In the year 2003, when Miriam died, Roland was seventeen, Julia was fifteen and Eliot was twelve. The older brother, Jonathan, and his wife, Leylah, had one child, a girl called Jasmine. Later, sadly, there was an accident and she died in her twenties.

‘Eliot doesn’t like talking about his life at Marble Hall, but I do know that he worshipped his older brother and was very close to his sister. The three of them were like a gang or a fellowship.

‘As soon as Miriam Crace died, the family went its separate ways. Charles said that they couldn’t wait to get out. They had properties all over the country, so Edward and Amy moved with their children to a house in Notting Hill Gate. They sent Eliot to a local prep school and then to the City of London School near St Paul’s, which was when things began to go wrong. It wasn’t the school’s fault. Eliot fell in with the wrong crowd. You know, he’d lived his whole life out in the sticks and maybe London was just too much for him to handle. There were drugs and alcohol, all-night parties and girls, and God knows what else. When he was sixteen, Eliot was expelled and his parents sent him to some sort of crammer in the hope that he would settle down and go to university, but there was never any chance of that. Things went from bad to worse. There was trouble with the police. His uncle Jonathan was running the estate by then and I have no idea how he managed to keep that out of the papers. Miriam Crace’s grandson arrested! That would really have made the headlines.’

‘Where are his parents now?’

‘They’re in America. Both his parents are in the art world. Edward was a curator at a gallery in Bath and then at the Wallace Collection here in London. His wife was quite a well-respected portrait painter. They didn’t really know how to handle Eliot. Charles said that to start with they overindulged him and then they went too far the other way, trying to rein him in. In the end, Eliot didn’t want anything to do with them and when Edward was offered a job at some sort of institute in Miami, he grabbed it with both hands. Roland and Julia were doing all right for themselves and they saw Eliot as a lost cause – so why not?

‘Eliot wasted the next few years. He worked in an art gallery and an auction house, and I think he was an estate agent for a time. And then, when he was in his early twenties, he turned up at Cloverleaf Books with a novel he’d written.’

‘ Gee for Gunfire .’

‘Yes.’

‘Charles said he loved it.’

‘He wasn’t quite being honest with you, Susan. He remembered Eliot from Marble Hall and knew his story. He was still in touch with Jonathan Crace – for business reasons. He felt sorry for Eliot and wanted to give him a chance.’

‘It was good of him.’ That was the vicar talking again. In truth, I’d have been furious if I’d known then what Elaine had just told me. Cloverleaf Books had been a small, independent publishing house fighting in a fiercely competitive market for every single book we produced. Had Charles really diverted some of our limited resources out of a misguided sense of charity?

Elaine must have seen what I was thinking. ‘He believed in the book,’ she added. ‘He showed it to me and I enjoyed it.’

‘It didn’t sell.’ I was short with her, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘We did everything we could,’ I went on. ‘It just didn’t seem to connect.’

‘Eliot was in and out of this house quite often while he was writing both his books,’ Elaine said. ‘He was still a very troubled young man. He wasn’t looking after himself at all. He didn’t look good. He didn’t shave and he was always smoking. There was one occasion when I told him to take a bath while I put all his clothes in the washing machine. It was hard to believe that he was twenty.’ She paused. ‘But he was also very charming and funny. He was the sort of person it was hard not to like and we became friends very quickly.’

‘So why are you worried about him now?’

‘You’ve seen him, Susan! I don’t know what happened to him as a child at Marble Hall, but he still needs looking after now – and it doesn’t help that his parents have dumped him and gone off to America.’ She noticed that her champagne glass was empty. Mine too. She refilled both, then continued. ‘Throughout the publishing process, Eliot was almost like a son to us. He behaved badly. Sometimes we were expecting him and he didn’t show up. Sometimes he was late or drunk, or both. But we never gave up on him and it was strange how working on the Dr Gee books helped him. He told us that he’d always wanted to be a writer, but that he wasn’t able to get started while his grandmother was still alive and even after she died he struggled to find his self-confidence. This was his big break.

‘When the books failed, we were terrified he would go off the rails again, but by that time he was going out with Gillian and she gave him the one thing he’d never had in his life: stability. I’ll tell you how they met, but you must pretend you don’t know. Eliot took an overdose and ended up in hospital. Gillian was a nurse on the ward. She’s the angel who saved his life, in more ways than one. They started going out together and then they got married – just the two of them and a couple of witnesses at Chelsea registry office. His brother, Roland, was the best man. From that moment, he seemed to change completely. Off the booze, off the drugs. Really trying to hold himself together. I was thrilled when I heard that he’d been asked to write three more books about Atticus Pünd. Maybe Dr Gee was a bad idea, but Eliot’s a good writer and I’m sure you’ll agree that this time he has a real chance of success.’

‘I’ve read the first thirty thousand words and I think it’s very promising,’ I said.

‘I know. He told me.’ She paused. ‘I’m just worried that this could be make or break for him. The last couple of times I’ve seen him, he hasn’t been quite himself. Or rather, he’s been a bit too much like his old self. He’s smoking again, for one thing. I don’t know about the rest of it, but Gillian is as worried as I am. She’s told me.’

‘I’m sorry, Elaine, but what’s this got to do with me? I didn’t commission him. I’m only his editor.’

‘But you worked with the great Alan Conway. You made him into a star and you put Atticus Pünd on the map.’ Elaine lowered her glass. Somehow the two of us had managed to polish off three quarters of the bottle of Mo?t. ‘Eliot has pinned all his hopes on you and I’m not sure he has the resilience to fail a second time. That was the reason I wanted you to come tonight, Susan. Of course it matters to me that you and I have a relationship again, but this isn’t about us. It’s about Eliot. I want you to promise me that you’ll look after him.’

‘Can I be honest with you, Elaine?’ I knew she was asking me to commit myself, but I wanted her to understand. ‘It’s not my job to “look after” my writers. I admire them. I try to like them. But I’m not their therapist. I may not be able to help him the way you want.’

‘You don’t have other writers like Eliot. If Charles were here, he could tell you so much more than I can.’

It was the mention of Charles that did it. Whatever my feelings about the past, I felt that I owed her something. I couldn’t refuse. ‘I promise you I’ll be a friend to him,’ I said. ‘And I’ll do everything I can to make this book a success.’

‘That’s all I can ask of you, Susan. And I’m sure—’

She didn’t finish the sentence. The doorbell played its tune a second time. Elaine got to her feet.

Eliot Crace had arrived.