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Neither Roland nor I said anything as we took the lift back down to the ground floor. We stood there rather stiffly, avoiding each other’s eyes, and I was glad nobody held us up on the way. I felt like a prisoner being escorted to the main gate by a junior warder after serving a long sentence and I couldn’t wait to be out.

But as we stepped into the reception area, Roland surprised me. ‘Would you like a coffee before you go?’ he asked. Maybe there was an attractive side to him after all.

‘Thank you.’

‘There’s a room we can use. It has a coffee machine. Not a bad one.’

The room was on the other side of the reception desk, with windows but no view. There was a capsule coffee machine, a fridge, two sofas shaped like an L. Roland pressed the right buttons and made two cappuccinos.

‘I wanted to say I’m sorry if Uncle Jon came over as a bit aggressive,’ he began.

‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘Very.’

‘If we’re all going to work together – with Eliot – I think you should know that his bark is much worse than his bite. The thing is, he’s been involved with The Little People ever since he was my age. He was pretty much running the estate while Grandma was still alive and he oversaw the opening of Marble Hall. He was the one who suggested the new characters. He was a producer on the musical and he worked on the ITV television series. It nearly killed him when Grandma told him she was planning to sell the IP to an outside company. He took it as a personal betrayal. Her creations mean everything to him and so he’s always quite nervous when someone like you comes along. It’s nothing personal, I assure you.’

‘Why did she want to sell the IP rights?’ I asked.

‘I never asked her. I was seventeen when she died. From what Uncle Jon has always said, she just hated the idea of losing control. She didn’t trust anyone and I suppose if she was going to say goodbye to Little Jack and Little Harry and all the rest of them, it was easier to pass them on to a complete stranger in return for pot loads of money.’

‘Jonathan would still have been rich if the sale had gone through.’

‘That wasn’t enough. You’ve got to understand, he really does love those characters. He grew up with them. They’re like little friends.’ He smiled in a way that was both amused and mournful at the same time. ‘You know he named his daughter after one of them.’

‘Jasmine. Yes. She died in an accident.’

There was an implied question and Roland answered it for me. ‘She fell under a train at Sloane Square tube station. That was back in 2006. She was twenty-one years old at the time … one year older than me.’

In Pünd’s Last Case , Elmer Waysmith’s first wife had also died under a train, in her case a suicide at Grand Central Station. I was beginning to see that Eliot had taken the members of his family and shuffled them like playing cards. For example, he had expressly said that the character of Cedric Chalfont was based on himself, but in the manuscript, Cedric was an only child. So what did that make Roland? If he was connected to anyone in Eliot’s book, it would have to be Robert Waysmith, Elmer’s son. ‘ Slim and athletic ’ with the ‘ waywardness of a poet ’. The description seemed to fit.

‘Uncle Jon ended up running the estate,’ Roland went on. ‘Which is exactly what he wanted. My father was also left money, which he shared with the three of us, so we can’t complain. There were no other bequests … apart from one to Uncle Frederick. He didn’t get as much as the rest of us because he wasn’t a blood relative, but at least he got something. You mustn’t be angry that he snitched on you. He’s another of the guardians at the gate. You’ve got to understand. Grandma wasn’t just a children’s writer. She was more like God issuing the Ten Commandments, with everyone in the family wanting to be Moses.’

‘Including you?’

Roland laughed. ‘I don’t need to work, but I’ve got nothing else to do and when you have a surname like Crace it doesn’t take anyone long to work out who you are. Uncle Jon offered me a job and I decided I might as well roll over and accept it. My parents weren’t too pleased.’

‘Why not?’

‘Dad hated everything to do with The Little People . He wanted his own life. He wasn’t comfortable growing up in Marble Hall and after Grandma died he moved to a house in Notting Hill Gate. That’s where Eliot lives now.’

‘Are you telling me you didn’t dislike your grandmother too?’ Before he could answer, I went on. ‘That’s what Eliot told me. He said that the three of you – you, your sister and him – hated her so much that you wanted to kill her. I know you were only children, but it still sounds as if life at Marble Hall was miserable for all of you.’

Roland thought for a minute. He glanced around, as if checking we were alone in the room. Finally he spoke: ‘All right, Susan. I can see you’re on Eliot’s side and I’m glad about that. I hear things aren’t good between him and Gillian right now. He’s drinking again, and he needs all the help he can get. So I’ll tell you what you want to know. But this is just between the two of us. Is that a deal?’

‘Of course.’

‘Grandma was not a good person or a kind person. In fact, she was vile.’ He stopped, allowing the words to hang between us. Had this room, with its hand-finished wallpaper and soft Italian lighting, ever heard anything like them? ‘Everything Eliot has told you about her is true. She was cruel. She was racist. We turned a blind eye to her failings and did what she wanted because she made it clear that if we complained she’d cut us off without a penny. Quite honestly, she wouldn’t have cared if we starved. I often wonder how she managed to create these characters who are so sweet and kind and who have given pleasure to millions. I meet kids in cancer wards who have The Little People beside their bed. You should see the letters we get sent – even in the age of emails. ‘ My parents are always arguing – can Grandma Little come and talk to them? ’ ‘ I’m being bullied at school, please ask Harry Little to sort them out! ’ ‘ My mum won’t let me have a dog. Can Little Biscuits come and stay? ’ My job is to lie to them. I spend every day of the week keeping alive the big lie that Miriam Crace was an angel when in fact she made all our lives a misery – and by that, I mean Grandpa, my parents, everyone who came close to her, with the single exception of my uncle Jonathan, who always had his eye on the main prize and blinded himself to the truth.’

‘Wow!’ I said. The word slipped out of my lips. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.

‘You may want to know how I live with myself. Funnily enough, it’s easy. There have been a lot of famous artists who have behaved badly. Look at how Charles Dickens treated his wife! Tolstoy, the same. If you look at children’s writers, Roald Dahl had some pretty ripe things to say about the Jews, Enid Blyton had loads of affairs, and Lewis Carroll … well, let’s not talk about him and little girls. The same could be said for a hundred musicians, artists, film-makers … You have to divorce their personal lives from their works or you’re going to end up with nothing on TV, nothing on your walls, nothing on your shelves. I wouldn’t put so much as a bunch of dandelions on my grandmother’s grave, but that doesn’t stop me making sure she’s piled high in Waterstones.’

‘Why do you say she was a racist?’ I asked. ‘She adopted Frederick Turner and when I spoke to him, he didn’t make any complaints.’

‘That’s because he can’t. He was left very little money in the will – even if he was her adopted son. He depends one hundred per cent on the estate and Uncle Jonathan for his lifestyle, and after his car accident he wasn’t exactly marketable.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry. That sounds a bit heartless. All I’m saying is, he toes the line because he can’t afford not to – but when he was at Marble Hall, he was always the underdog. Unlike the rest of us, he was sent to the local comprehensive and then he was pushed into accountancy school so that he could become an unpaid bookkeeper for the estate. He didn’t even eat with the family half the time.’

As much as I hated hearing it, what Roland was saying chimed with what I already knew or suspected. I remembered Frederick talking about Miriam Crace. ‘ I never thought of her as a mother. ’ Odd words to come from an adopted son.

‘And there’s more to it than that,’ Roland continued. ‘Grandma never got on with my aunt Leylah.’

‘Jonathan’s wife.’

‘She’s Egyptian. She and Jonathan met on a Nile cruise and Grandma was always making jokes about her being a belly dancer or a handmaiden or things like that. She got off more lightly than poor Freddy because she was whiter than him and because her family had money. But if you’re talking about racism, there’s something else you ought to know. It was the real reason why she fell out with Uncle Jonathan and almost sold the entire estate.’

‘Because he married an Egyptian?’

‘No. Because he was the one who persuaded her to add ethnically diverse characters to the Little People. Njinga and Karim in particular. She hated doing it, but he assured her that the books wouldn’t survive in the twenty-first century if they didn’t reflect modern times. She went along with it, but she never forgave him. It’s the reason why, at the end of her life, she was thinking of selling the rights.’

I took a breath. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I asked.

‘Because if you want to help Eliot, you need to know about my family.’

‘Why have you and Eliot fallen out?’

‘We haven’t.’

‘He told me he hadn’t seen you for a while.’

‘We’ve both been busy.’ Roland sighed. ‘All right. He never really forgave me for joining the estate. He thinks of it as treason. I’ve tried to explain that there was no harm in it, but he won’t listen to me.’

I wasn’t sure Roland was telling the whole story, but I let that go for the moment. ‘Is it true that you wanted to kill your grandmother when you were children?’ I asked.

‘I’ll tell you about that, Susan. But first you need to believe me when I say that there is absolutely no truth in the suggestion that Grandma died an unnatural death. Uncle Jonathan is right about that – and if that’s what you’re hearing from Eliot, it’s rubbish. Yes. We talked about killing her. I’ve already told you – we hated her. But we were children! We were growing up with R. L. Stine and Agatha Christie on TV. It wasn’t some sort of dark conspiracy. It was all in our heads, and for what it’s worth, Eliot was the most imaginative of the three of us.

‘Here’s the thing. I’ve already told you how horrible Grandma was to Fred and to Aunt Leylah. But she was much, much worse to my sister, Julia. You’ve spoken to Dr Lambert. Did he tell you that she had a thyroid problem? She was large. For some reason, my grandmother took this as a personal insult – that someone in the family should have a shape that didn’t conform. God knows how she managed to keep all these prejudices out of her books, but maybe that was down to her editors. At any event, she made snide remarks and teased Julia at every opportunity, and Eliot and I both hated her for it. That was why we talked about pushing her under a bus or poisoning her. I was seventeen when Grandma died. Julia was fifteen. Eliot was only twelve. Do you seriously think we had it in us to become murderers?’

‘But Eliot did steal medicine from Dr Lambert’s medicine bag.’

‘Cough medicine, yes – but it wasn’t poison. It was something called Liqufruta!’ Roland gave a sniff of laughter. ‘Eliot thought he could concoct something with it. Toothpaste, shoe polish, chilli sauce and cough medicine … You get the general idea. We were just kids! What did we know?’

Roland glanced at his watch. We had been in the room for ten minutes or more. He had to go back to work.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Would it be possible to speak to your sister Julia?’

He reached into his top pocket and took out his business card. ‘She teaches geography at a school in Lincoln. If you text me your number, I’ll ask her to call you. But she’s coming to the party, so you might meet her there.’

‘Is she married?’

‘Sadly not.’

‘What about you?’

He smiled. ‘I’m still available too.’ He stood up. ‘I just want Eliot’s book to be successful,’ he said. ‘If you can help make that happen, I’ll be more than grateful. I’m not sure why, but I think he was the most damaged of the three of us by our life at Marble Hall. Maybe it was his arguments with Dad? I don’t know. But if he became a big-shot writer like Grandma, it would be the making of him. I’d love to see that happen.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ I promised.

We moved to the door, but as we passed into the reception area, something he had told me right at the start of our conversation came to mind. ‘You said that your grandmother left no bequests in her will outside the family, apart from a small sum paid to Frederick Turner.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What about her charities?’

‘She’d already set up trusts for them while she was alive.’

‘So, no-one else?’

‘That’s what I always understood.’

We shook hands and I left the building. But as I stepped into the street, this is what I was thinking. Dr Lambert had boasted to me that his two expensive classic cars had been paid for by money left to him by Miriam Crace. Roland had just told me that wasn’t true.

So how, then, had he afforded them?