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I didn’t recognise Charles Clover until he sat down opposite me a few days later and even then, I had to look twice to make sure it was him. It wasn’t that he was fatter or older or more dishevelled, wearing an ugly, shapeless tracksuit – although he was all these things. It was more that prison had sucked something out of him. The Buddhists call it ‘vīrya’ and it means energy, vitality, positivity … the ability to overcome whatever life throws at you. The moment Charles took his seat – or sat in it, rather, as it was screwed to the floor – I saw that Belmarsh had defeated him. He was a horrible, marshmallow version of his former self.

To my surprise, Elaine had come through and arranged the visit for me, although it meant giving up her own appointment. Charles was only allowed personal visits once every two weeks. I’d been confident she would do her best, but I didn’t think she’d be able to persuade him to see me. He was in prison because of me and he had been sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty-three years. I had to wonder how the judge had arrived at that figure. Twenty years for killing Alan and three more for trying to kill me? Either way, he would be in his eighties by the time he came out and I couldn’t think of any reason why he would want to help me now.

Just the sight of HMP Belmarsh, next to the Western Way in Thamesmead, south-east London, had given me a queasy reminder of my own part in what had happened. When I’d visited Elaine at her house, I’d had the same thought, but looking at the fences and the razor wire, the solid grey walls, the gates and the barriers, the sprawling car park and the sheer size of the place brought home the reality of what I had achieved by first investigating the murder of Alan Conway and then confronting Charles. He had been my friend and now he was somewhere inside all this. Approaching the front entrance, I was overwhelmed by the amount of bricks that had been used in the prison’s construction: thousands and thousands of them, virtually unbroken by any windows. Belmarsh is a Category A prison and home to around six hundred prisoners who have been found guilty of murder, manslaughter, rape or terrorism: the very worst of the worst. Alsatian dogs patrol the grounds and sniff out visitors as they come in. Surely Charles wasn’t as bad as all that? He had been sixty-three years old when he was arrested. Like me, he had spent his whole life in books.

It took me almost an hour to get from the front entrance to the gymnasium-style room where I had been given a seat number (C11) and was instructed to wait for him to arrive. I had shown my passport to one officer who had looked at me as if I was mad to be coming here, and surrendered my phone and handbag to another who had slammed them into a locker. My photograph had been taken and I’d been patted down by a third officer who might well have held a grudge against the entire world. No friendly welcome here. Once I’d been given the all-clear, there had been a bewildering number of doors sliding and swinging, opening and closing, accompanied by the buzzing of electronic locks and the jangle of old-fashioned keys. Nobody who has entered a prison can ever forget the experience and any politician who has ever called for more prisons to be built should come and visit one. It’s an exercise in hopelessness.

There were five rows of tables, with all the prisoners on one side and the visitors on the other. I’d bought chocolate bars and crisps from the little canteen that supplied the wives, parents and friends who had all come to take part in this ghastly masquerade. And suddenly Charles was there, though not at all the Charles I remembered, wearing clothes he would never have worn, not in a million years, sitting opposite with dead eyes, a bad haircut, no colour at all.

‘Hello, Susan,’ he said.

‘Hello, Charles.’

I was back in the office in Bloomsbury. I was lying on the floor with a terrible pain in the back of my head and blood pooling around my neck. I could barely see. It wasn’t just the smoke and the flames, which were all around me. It was as if a splinter had cut into my optic nerve. I could only make out Charles Clover in silhouette, moving like some sort of demon through the flames.

And then, as abruptly as it had come, the vision disappeared and it was just this broken man in his ill-fitting tracksuit.

‘I was never expecting to see you again. Certainly not this way. You know, they run a Restorative Justice programme here in Belmarsh. Prisoners get to meet their victims. You should have come in on that.’

‘Would you have seen me if I’d tried?’

‘I don’t want to see you now! Elaine persuaded me. She told me that the two of you have become quite good chums.’

‘Charles, I am so sorry about what happened.’ I had promised myself that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to apologise to him. After what he had done, he deserved to be here and none of it was my fault. Yet here I was, barely past the ‘hellos’, already doing exactly that. ‘I didn’t want it to be you who killed Alan,’ I went on. ‘I just wanted to find the missing chapter. I never dreamed it would end up like this.’

‘How are you, Susan?’ It was as if he hadn’t heard anything I’d just said. ‘Tell me about yourself. I hear that you’re back in England. Crete didn’t work out?’

‘I loved Crete,’ I said. ‘But I couldn’t live there.’

‘So you broke up with Andreas.’

‘Yes.’

He didn’t sound particularly sympathetic and I got the sense that he was toying with me – that I had become Clarice Starling to his Hannibal Lecter. I had no choice but to play along with him. I needed information from him and although he had very little choice about anything any more, not in this world, he could choose whether to give it to me or not. At the same time, I was aware of the minutes ticking by. A clock on the wall showed ten minutes past three and visiting time finished at four. I hadn’t come here for a chat.

‘It’s a shame,’ he said. ‘I always liked Andreas.’

‘We’re still friends,’ I assured him, although I hadn’t heard from Andreas since I’d left.

‘Are you back in publishing?’

‘I’m doing some freelance work.’

‘It must be very frustrating for you. I’ve been told that nobody wants to employ you any more. I’d happily give you a reference, Susan, although it might not be worth very much nowadays. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was so dedicated to books – even at the expense of their own life. You always were a bit introverted. I could have told you that Crete wouldn’t work out for you. How many bookshops were there in … Agios Nikolaos? That was where you went, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. And there were three.’

‘You have absolutely no idea how horrible it is here,’ Charles continued, speaking as if this was the natural riposte to what I had just said. ‘When I came here, I thought I was going to die. It was the smell and the noise in the first week that I remember most. People shouting all through the night, arguing, screaming at the moon. Doors slamming all the time. All the time! And it seemed to me that everyone I met was either dead in the head or psychopathic. One extreme or the other.

‘They put me in the medical wing to begin with and I thought that might be more comfortable but in fact it was vile. Then I went to Beirut.’ He half smiled to himself, a queer little smile that hovered over his lips. ‘You won’t know what that is. It’s what they call Block Three for new arrivals and remand prisoners. Now I’m in Block One. I’m not sure why they’re keeping me here … I mean, in this prison. It’s one of the worst in the whole system, or so I’m told. They call it . I’d have thought they would have moved me on by now, given my age and my lack of previous convictions. But the first thing you learn about the prison system is never to question anything because nothing ever makes sense. Even the prison officers don’t know what they’re doing – or they may do, but they don’t know why.

‘ is the right name for it. I shared a cell for the first year. I had three different cellmates and they were all as bad as each other. Sometimes we were stuck together for twenty-three hours at a stretch. And the stench of it, Susan. Three men, one toilet, no privacy. I say they were as bad as each other, but Jez was the worst. He’d killed his girlfriend for cheating on him. He tied her up and he tortured her. They say you should never tell anyone what you’ve done to be in here, but he boasted about it. You’d have been quite right to send him here. Even if he was your closest friend. He was an animal and they put me in a cage with him for two months until someone stuck a shank in him in the shower and he was taken away.’

‘Charles, you can’t blame me for what happened …’

‘Things have got a little better for me, though. They say that men who have been to private school always fit in more easily here and that includes me, but what it tells me is that human beings will get used to anything. You learn how to cope with it. Even the food. You should see what they serve here. To start with, I couldn’t touch any of it, but now I put it in my mouth and swallow it even when I have no idea what it is. It’s probably best if you don’t.’

He half smiled.

‘But you see, the thing is, you learn how to play the system. Somehow, you need to get the doors to open. That won’t mean anything to you, not in Crete, not in Crouch End – but a door that opens, even if it’s only letting you into the corridor or out for forty-five minutes’ exercise in the yard, is a little taste of freedom. That’s why I started going to church. Not because I believe in God – because I don’t. Or maybe I do. The vicar gave me a Bible and do you know, I’ve read it cover to cover. She also put me forward to become a Listener, and as well as that, I help with the literacy programmes. Did you know that half the people who come here can’t read? It’s a funny place for a publisher to find himself, although it might interest you to know that one of the writers you discovered – Craig Andrews – is very popular. We’ve got lots of his books in the prison library and I volunteer there too.

‘In return, they’ve given me my own cell. That’s a big deal. I won’t be here much longer. They’ve got to move me. Maybe to somewhere in the country. It would be nice if I could see birds. When I was in Block Three, I could see planes taking off from City Airport and it always gave me a sense of comfort. I could imagine being on them, maybe heading off to the Frankfurt Book Fair with you. No birds ever fly over here. At least, I haven’t seen any. Not one.’

I’d had enough of all this. I hadn’t come here to listen to his endless whining.

‘I want to talk to you about Eliot,’ I said.

‘Eliot Crace.’

‘Yes.’

‘Elaine told me you were working with him. It seems to me that writers don’t have a lot of luck working with you. First Alan, now Eliot.’

‘You knew him when he was a child.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Was that why you agreed to publish his books?’ It was completely irrelevant but I couldn’t help asking.

‘No. I liked them. I thought they’d do well.’

‘We lost thousands of pounds, Charles,’ I reminded him. I swallowed my anger. ‘Eliot believed that someone killed his grandmother, Miriam Crace. He said he saw it happen. Did he ever say anything about it to you?’

Charles contemplated me and I saw that he was enjoying himself. He had no control over his life in Belmarsh, but right now he had a measure of control over me. ‘Give me one good reason why I should help you, Susan.’

‘Eliot was your friend. He looked up to you. Don’t you owe it to him?’

‘It won’t make any difference to him. Not now. And Elaine told me that the police know who ran him over.’ For a moment his eyes lit up in the same way they had once done when he stumbled across a great manuscript or persuaded a successful writer to sign up with us. ‘Maybe you’ll end up in Bronzefield Prison,’ he said. ‘That’s where they send the worst female offenders.’

‘I didn’t drive that night, Charles, and the CCTV cameras will prove it … eventually.’

‘I wonder.’ He picked up one of the chocolate bars and took a bite, chewing it slowly, daring me to interrupt him. I waited. ‘Who do you think killed her?’ he asked eventually.

I’d been prepared for this. ‘I think it had to be one of the three children,’ I said. ‘Roland, Julia or Eliot. They talked about it. They planned it. They even concocted some sort of poison out of various household chemicals. It couldn’t have been Eliot. So that leaves Roland and Julia.’

‘You know, when Miriam Crace died, I was quite sure that it was Kenneth who had killed her.’

‘Her husband?’

‘Kenneth Rivers. He was a strange man. I met him a few times. He was in his eighties by then and he was like the original eccentric professor. You know the type … stuck up in the attic with his stuffed animals and nobody to talk to. He’d been a paper-pusher in some government department when he met her, and when he married her, she was nothing. She played the organ in her local church and she would probably have ended up as a piano teacher except she wrote The Little People and became staggeringly rich.’

‘So why would he kill her?’

‘Because he genuinely loved her. I met him a few times and felt sorry for him. He was a decent man – perhaps the only decent person in the entire family. But she’d treated him abominably.’

‘How?’

‘Well, when she was young, she cheated on him. Over and over again. The big secret about Miriam Crace was that, as well as being the most popular children’s author in the world, she was incredibly promiscuous. Anyone in trousers was a target for her and there were even rumours that she had it away with one of the nannies.’ He leered at me, as if it was something that amused him. ‘Do you know about that famous breakdown of hers? When she had to go to a retreat for six months?’

‘She went to Lausanne.’

‘I don’t know where she went, but the only breakdown she had was her marriage. Kenneth finally lost his patience with all her affairs and threatened to walk out on her. Worse still, he threatened to talk to the press. It would have been the end of her reputation.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to divorce her?’

‘They were both Roman Catholic. Miriam had no faith, but she was the daughter of a deacon and divorce was out of the question. They agreed to a trial separation and she took off for six months to see if they could manage without each other. In the end, they decided it was more convenient to stay together. Better the devil you know and all that. Miriam came back to Marble Hall, which was their new home. This was a few years before the birth of their first child, Jonathan. It was a marriage of convenience. He made her respectable. She made him rich. But they were never happy.’

‘He told you all this?’

‘He didn’t need to. There was a biography of Miriam Crace written by an author called Sam Rees-Williams. A nice enough chap and he put his heart into it, but it was never published. When I was asked to work on the last books, I managed to get a look at the manuscript. It’s all in there. The infidelities, the rows, the casual racism, a dysfunctional family. No wonder the estate got it scrapped.’

There was something about this version of events that didn’t ring true, but my mind was on other things. ‘So how do you know he didn’t kill her?’ I asked.

‘Because Eliot told me who did.’

‘So who was it?’

Charles had already said he had no reason to help me. Now he hesitated, wondering what to do. Finally, a sly look came into his eyes and that was when I realised there was almost nothing left of the man I had once known. The warm, witty, cultured bon viveur I’d worked with for eleven years had been wiped away, replaced by this empty husk. What had done this to him? Was it the act of murder itself, the killing of Alan Conway on the tower of Abbey Grange, and the viciousness of his attack on me a few weeks later? Or was it his incarceration here in Belmarsh, the daily stripping away of his personality until the last shred had gone? It had never occurred to me before but crime and punishment go hand in hand. They are equally dehumanising, but in different ways.

‘You were right,’ he said eventually. He looked around him as if afraid of being overheard. When he spoke next, he lowered his voice. ‘It started with the three of them – Roland, Julia and Eliot. Eliot told me about it years later. He was drunk. He was always drunk, but this time we got talking and I’ll tell you what he told me.’ He paused. ‘When they were kids, they called themselves the Rogue Troopers. They were the resistance. And they often talked about killing their grandmother. It was a game. A fantasy. Not like the people in here. I’ve never met a single person who’s talked about killing someone. They’ve just gone out and done it.

‘What changed everything for those three children was Julia’s fifteenth birthday. Her mother helped her buy a dress …’

Julia had already told me about this. ‘She was ridiculed by her grandmother,’ I said.

‘It was more than that. Miriam tore into her in front of the whole family. She made her feel fat and ugly … it was nothing less than child abuse! Julia was devastated – and the Rogue Troopers decided enough was enough. They were going to do it! They were going to get rid of the monster who had caused them so much misery throughout their lives.’

‘They decided to poison her.’

‘Let me tell the story, Susan. You always did have a habit of jumping in whenever we had meetings. Yes. Eliot stole medicine from the family doctor. But Roland and Julia were older and they knew better. There were plants growing in the gardens at Marble Hall – deadly nightshade, wolfsbane. They’d often been warned not to touch them, so that’s what they used. They were very careful. They wore gloves. They used a pestle and mortar to crush the berries and they created a liquid which they really did believe might kill the old lady. She wasn’t well anyway. It wouldn’t be difficult. Julia put it in an old perfume bottle and took it to her room. She was the injured party. She was the one who was going to do it.

‘Isn’t it exciting? It’s just like something Alan Conway would have written. But there’s a twist. The three children had rooms next to each other and in the early hours of the twenty-seventh of June, three days after Julia’s birthday, Eliot was woken up by the sound of a door opening. He got out of bed and opened his own door just in time to see Roland coming out of Julia’s bedroom with the perfume bottle in his hand. He’d stolen it! Eliot saw him head down the corridor towards his grandmother’s room and he knew exactly what he was doing. You see, Roland had always been their protector. He would never have let his little sister get into trouble. He was going to do it for her.

‘And the next morning, Miriam Crace was dead. They said it was a heart attack, but nobody looked too closely. Eliot told me that the doctor was paid to keep his mouth shut. None of the family cared who murdered her – they just wanted to avoid the scandal that might damage the sales of her books. It was always about the books. And that was that. Apart from that one time he spoke to me, Eliot kept quiet about it for twenty years.’

Eliot had protected Roland. He had worshipped his older brother. But then Roland had betrayed him by having an affair with his wife and that had changed everything. I hated the way Charles had told the story, relishing it, but I had no doubt that it was true.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘There’s no need to thank me, Susan. It’s not going to help you.’

I met his eyes.

‘First of all, nobody knows this story except for you and me, and if anyone asks me, I’m going to deny all of it.’

‘Why …?’

‘Why do you think I agreed to meet you?’

‘I thought you wanted to help.’

‘Then you’re even more stupid than I thought.’ He took another bite of the chocolate bar. There was something animal about the way he ate it, his face showing no pleasure at all as he masticated. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he said.

‘I was wrong to kill Alan Conway. I know that. But it wasn’t as if I planned it. It wasn’t premeditated or anything like that. I mean, you weren’t there, Susan. You didn’t hear him tell me how he was going to rip the heart out of Atticus Pünd and make sure we never sold another copy of his bloody books. He was going to destroy the business. You know as well as I do that Cloverleaf couldn’t have continued without Atticus Pünd. Eleven years down the drain! He didn’t give a damn about me – or about you. And to listen to him, sneering at me in that way of his … well, if it had been you, who knows? You might have done the same. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t know what I was doing, really, until I’d done it. A simple push – that’s all it took. Children in the playground have done worse.’

‘You weren’t in the playground, Charles. You were on a tower.’

‘What difference did it make, anyway? The doctors had given him six months to live. I told you, Susan. I did it for both of us. And for everyone who worked at Cloverleaf. And for anyone who ever enjoyed the books. Alan was a pig. He was ungrateful, entitled, utterly negative – and I don’t think there’s a single person in the world who wouldn’t have had some sort of sympathy for me.’

He paused.

‘Except you.

‘You worked out the truth. I’ll give you that. But let me ask you this. What possible benefit was there, shopping me to the police like you threatened to do? I was sixty-three years old. What good did you think it would do, putting me in here? It wasn’t as if I was a mass murderer or something. I killed Alan Conway – yes. I did it to save everything I had and everything I’d planned for and if you’d left me alone, I’d have retired and spent the rest of my life going to the theatre and opera, playing with my grandchildren, and quite possibly doing good works. I wasn’t going to kill anyone else. You know that! You couldn’t have thought society needed to be protected from me. Did I give the impression that I’d enjoyed killing Alan? I can assure you that I didn’t. I felt guilty about it. I wished it hadn’t happened. Maybe you believe in the Bible, although I never saw you as the religious type. “Thou shalt not kill.” Was that what motivated you?

‘When we were in my office together, you could have tried to be more understanding. You could have put yourself in my position. It might even have occurred to you that you would have benefited from Alan’s death if you’d only left well alone. You were going to be the CEO of the company. Look at what’s happened to you since then! You’ve gained absolutely nothing. You’ve lost your job, your reputation, your boyfriend, everything that ever mattered to you. What are you now but a freelance editor that no serious publisher wants to hire unless it’s to work on a book that nobody else can be bothered to read? Don’t you sometimes wish you’d been a little bit less high-minded, Susan?’

His voice had changed. He was still trying to sound reasonable but all I could hear was the venom bubbling beneath the surface.

‘Maybe you feel justified, seeing me like this. Do you know, I haven’t even seen my new grandson? I won’t let him come in here. I won’t let him breathe the air I have to breathe. Every day I wake up here, I want to die. They put me on suicide watch for the first month. My whole life ruined for a single reflex action. My retirement taken from me. My company gone. All thanks to you.

‘Well, I’m glad you’ve come here today. Elaine didn’t think I’d want to see you. She was quite tearful on the phone. But do you know why I agreed? It was because I wanted you to get a glimpse of what could be coming your way. There’s absolutely zero proof that Roland killed his grandmother, and if he was the one who ran over Eliot, I’m pretty sure he’s going to have worked out a way to make sure no-one ever finds out. Anyway, he’s not the main suspect. You are!

‘Elaine told me everything. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a taste of your own medicine. That will give me something to smile about.’

I knew there was an answer to everything he’d said. I could have tried to argue with him or find a good put-down. But what was the point? I got up and left.

I could. He couldn’t. That was enough.