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I knew it was going to be one of those evenings the moment Eliot and Gillian came through the door. They had been arguing. It was obvious from their body language, the distance between them and the tears still visible in Gillian’s eyes. It was sad because at first sight they made such an attractive couple: so young, so good-looking, smartly dressed, Eliot carrying a bottle of wine for Elaine – or perhaps for himself. He had been drinking. I could see that too. He wasn’t quite drunk, but he was swaying on his feet, making every effort to keep himself steady.

‘Hello again,’ he said, a little too loudly. He was wearing jeans and a velvet jacket with an open-neck white shirt.

‘Hello, Eliot.’

‘Have you been here long?’

‘About an hour.’

‘Have you been talking about me?’

‘Of course, Eliot. What else is there to talk about?’

He gave me a crooked smile. ‘This is my wife, Gillian. Gillian, this is Susan Ryeland. My editor!’

My first impression of Gillian Crace was that she was a strikingly attractive woman, a little younger than Eliot – maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine – and she could have been born to be a nurse. She had sandy-coloured hair, neatly parted in the middle, blue eyes and freckles. When she smiled, she radiated calm and kindness.

‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ I said.

‘Eliot has told me a lot about you.’

‘We hardly know each other.’

‘Well, he knows all about you. He was buzzing when he came back from your meeting the other day.’

‘Let’s go downstairs to eat,’ Elaine said.

A flight of stairs led down to an open-plan area that ran the full length of the house, the kitchen at the front end and the French rosewood dining table at the back. The twelve chairs that surrounded it were a sad memory of former times. Tonight there would be just four of us to occupy them and, looking at the empty spaces, I was reminded of what life must be like for Elaine now that Charles was ‘away’. There were bottles of wine already laid out, lit candles, serviettes neatly rolled inside silver rings, and as we took our places, Elaine served up the cauliflower soup that was to be our first course, adding a swirl of truffle oil to each bowl. There was something about the ritual, the formality of it all, that made me feel uneasy. It was like having dinner in a lepers’ colony where nobody is allowed to mention the disease.

I had been placed opposite Eliot. Gillian was next to me, with Elaine making up the square on the other side. Eliot poured wine into his glass, not stopping until it had almost reached the brim.

We started off talking about Pünd’s Last Case . That was what connected us and it was what mattered most. If Elaine was to be believed, Eliot had invested his entire future in its success – and now that I thought about it, the same was true for me too. Michael Flynn had hired me to make the book a bestseller. If it failed, I could kiss goodbye to any long-term employment at Causton Books.

‘Eliot told me you liked the book,’ Gillian said nervously. I could tell that she wanted me to be nice to him to make up for whatever had happened between them before they arrived.

‘I liked it very much,’ I said.

‘I thought about what you suggested.’ Eliot didn’t meet my eye. He was stroking the edge of his wine glass, examining the contents. ‘I’m going to change the title.’

‘That’s good. Do you have any other ideas?’

‘I was thinking of Another Man’s Poison .’

‘I like that,’ I said, although I wondered if it was a little too generic. ‘It might be a good idea to have the name – Atticus Pünd – in the title, though.’

‘You could call it Atticus Pünd: Another Man’s Poison ,’ Gillian suggested.

Eliot ignored her. ‘I’m going to set it one year before Magpie Murders ,’ he went on. ‘That way, I can miss out on all that stuff about cancer.’

‘As long as you’re sure about it yourself, Eliot.’ I was surprised he was being so accommodating. ‘I was only making suggestions. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.’

‘I won’t make any changes until the next draft. I’m going to keep it in the South of France, though. I know there are problems, but if I changed it now, I’d have to go back to the start and I want to keep going.’

‘Eliot’s been working so hard since he saw you,’ Gillian said. ‘He hasn’t stopped!’

‘I’m really pleased. I’m just glad you’re making progress and that you weren’t put off by our discussion.’

‘Actually, I can’t wait to get to the last chapter. To the big reveal.’ As he said that, he glanced at Gillian in an unpleasant way – as if she was the one who was going to be revealed as the killer. He drank half his wine. ‘Isn’t that the only reason to read a murder mystery? To get to the end?’

I didn’t know if he was joking or not. I hoped he was. It was something Alan Conway might have said.

‘Do you think it will be a bestseller?’ Gillian asked me.

‘Of course it will,’ Elaine said. ‘I know Charles would have given his right arm to publish it. It’s going to be huge.’

It was the first time she had mentioned Charles since we had sat down. I realised everyone was waiting for me to speak, so I plunged in. ‘If there’s one thing that’s certain in publishing, it’s that you can’t predict anything,’ I began. ‘ Harry Potter was turned down by a dozen publishers and when it was finally accepted, they only printed five hundred copies. That’s how many they thought they could sell. Stephen King wrote a novel – Carrie – that was rejected thirty times. It’s insane! When we published the first Atticus Pünd novel back in 1995, we had no idea it was going to do so well. Twenty-eight weeks on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List! It sold more copies than Nick Hornby or Barack Obama, who were both huge that year. And it just shows that nobody knows anything. You only realise you have a major success on your hands when the author rings to complain he can’t find any copies in the shops.

‘The most important thing is to get the book written and worry about sales and marketing and all the rest of it later.’ I looked directly at Eliot. ‘Causton Books couldn’t be more behind you, and there’s a huge audience waiting for the next outing for Atticus Pünd. Right now, everything’s on your side … so let’s just hope for the best.’

Eliot smiled and seemed pleased. Some of the tension went out of the air.

After that, the conversation zigzagged from books to theatre, Gillian’s work at Charing Cross Hospital, Crete, politics and Parsons Green gossip. The soup bowls were cleared away and replaced by a bubbling coq au vin. Somehow, we had finished our first bottle of wine and started on a second. Gillian said nothing, although she was embarrassed by Eliot’s heavy drinking and did her best to keep the bottle away from him. Elaine, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice. As for me, I remained stone-cold sober. I wasn’t hating the evening. I just felt completely unconnected and was counting the minutes until I could make my excuses and leave.

It was as the pudding was being served that I asked the question that changed everything. It was stupid of me. I was trying to flatter Eliot, make him feel good about himself, when really I should have left well enough alone. ‘Elaine told me you always wanted to be a writer,’ I said. ‘Was that because you wanted to be like your grandmother?’

Nearly all the successful authors I’ve worked with have claimed, quite sincerely, that they were born with a pen in their hand, and that was all I meant. But I knew at once that I should have left Miriam Crace out of it.

His face fell. ‘God, no! I never wanted to be like that sour old bat. I hated her. We all did.’

His venom surprised me, even after all the wine. Elaine had already told me that Miriam was spiteful and domineering, but I hadn’t thought his feelings would run this deep. ‘I was thinking of her sales,’ I said, back-pedalling.

‘I wish she’d never sold a single bloody book. I wish her stupid Little People had died a death before they saw the light of day. Somebody should have stamped on them. They’ve been the curse of my whole bloody life.’

It was too late, I realised. He had come into the room with a sackful of resentment and I’d given him the excuse to release it.

‘You have no idea what it was like at Marble Hall,’ Eliot continued. ‘You should go and visit the place, Susan. It’s open every day of the week and it’ll only cost you fifteen quid to have a snoop around. Of course, you won’t see it the way I did. They’ve managed to get the blood out of the carpets. What you’ll see is a lovely country house with chandeliers and wood panelling and lots of awards on the shelves.’

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ Gillian suggested.

‘What else is there to talk about? My grandmother is the reason we’re all here. She’s the reason why nothing – nothing! – has ever worked out for me. That venomous old cow!’ He leaned towards me, as if drawing me into his confidence. ‘She turned that place into a rat trap and kept every one of us locked inside. We weren’t her family – we were her prisoners! My uncle Jonathan was the only one who didn’t care, but he thought the sun shone out of her withered backside and couldn’t wait to get his hands on her precious creation. It was always “legacy” with him. You know he even named his daughter after one of her characters? Jasmine Little – meet Jasmine Crace. How creepy is that? My parents hated just as much as I did, but they were too cowardly to break away. They stayed in Devizes and my dad worked in some third-rate art gallery and didn’t dare write a word about art or artists because he knew what she would say. My mum wasted her time painting the local councillors and farmers who only ever complained that she made them look too fat or too old.

‘Do you know what her power was? She knew exactly how to be cruel. She would find the weak spot in anyone and twist it until they screamed. Julia was overweight. Jasmine was useless. And as for me, when I told her I was thinking of being an author, she didn’t give me a word of encouragement. She laughed at me! I was only ten years old! But she was the same with all of us. My grandfather never went near her unless he had to. My poor uncle Freddy – only he wasn’t really my uncle – couldn’t do anything right. was a patron of an orphanage in Salisbury and she’d adopted him, brought him in to live with us. Everyone applauded and said what a saint she was, but she treated him like a skivvy from the day he arrived. He was a second-class citizen. He didn’t even eat with us!

‘I’ll tell you something that will amuse you, Susan. Roland, Julia and me – the three of us planned to kill her! We used to talk about it all the time. There was an abandoned cottage in the grounds and we used to meet there and talk about how we were going to do it. That was the game we played. Would it be poison from the garden? She always had a glass of lemon and ginger on her bedside table – it was the first thing she drank in the morning – and we thought we could put it in there. Or we could leave a roller skate at the top of the stairs and wait for her to take a tumble. We thought about setting fire to her bedroom or pushing her off the roof, like poor old Alan. Maybe that’s why I became a murder writer – because I was already thinking of murder when I was nine years old.’

‘It’s just as well she died of natural causes,’ I said.

He sneered at me. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Did anyone ever suggest otherwise?’

‘No-one would have dared.’

‘I think we should go,’ Gillian said. ‘It’s late and I’m on the first shift tomorrow.’

‘No. I want to tell Susan about Roland. We all want to talk about Roland, don’t we? He was my hero!’

Eliot drank some more wine.

‘ Miriam picked on Julia and me,’ he continued, before anyone could stop him. ‘I was the stupid one, the baby of the family. But my sister got it much worse. Have I already told you this? She was fat! That’s all there was to it. She was very fat. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t as if she was stuffing food into her mouth. It was just something genetic, and anyway, what does it matter, what shape you are? She was a darling. We all loved her. She was so kind and gentle when she was a girl. She was always out in the garden. She loved flowers and birds and all that stuff. She’s a teacher now, but I’m surprised she didn’t become a garden designer or something like that. She knew all about plants.

‘Anyway, used to make jokes about her, all the time.’ Eliot fell back on the old lady’s voice. ‘“Fat Julia. Piggy Julia. How many chocolates have you had, Julia? We’re going to have to get a stronger chair for you, Julia.”’

He reached for the wine bottle, but Gillian stopped him. ‘You’ve had enough,’ she said firmly.

‘Why would you care?’ Eliot wrenched the bottle towards him and held it close. ‘Roland protected us,’ he said. ‘Roland was the only one who stood up to her. He was only seventeen years old, but he was the bravest person in the house. Jasmine adored him. And for Julia and me, he was our knight in shining armour. was afraid of him. When he was with us, she never did any of her teasing.’

‘Where is he now?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. In London, I think. I haven’t seen him for a while.’

Gillian stood up. ‘I have to go,’ she insisted. ‘You can stay if you want to, Eliot, but I want to go to bed. I’ll call an Uber if you like.’

I came to her rescue. ‘I ought to be on my way too,’ I said. ‘It’s been a lovely meal, Elaine. Thank you for inviting me.’ I turned to Eliot. ‘Maybe you should write about your grandmother, now that she’s dead,’ I said.

He gave me a queer look, half smiling, half warning me.

‘Maybe I already have,’ he said.