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Ian Blakeney and I didn’t meet until the weekend. I picked up a few clothes from my flat and moved in with a gay couple I’d known since university. Rob and Steve provided exactly the right amount of kindness and sympathy without digging too deeply into the various catastrophes that had brought me to them. They were well off, with a three-bedroom house on the edge of Muswell Hill and a second home in Yorkshire, and after a couple of days, they announced that they were heading off for two weeks, but they were fine about leaving me on my own. They gave me the keys to the house, instructions to eat or drink anything I found, and then disappeared in their electric Jeep Avenger with their two dogs and a pile of luggage.

With the dogs out of the way, Hugo could move in. The vet’s bill was going to be astronomical, of course, but I was glad to see that he seemed to have completely recovered from his experience and there were few side effects, apart from a missing patch of fur and a scar where his wound had been stitched together. I think we were closer than we had been before. He was certainly puzzled by his new surroundings. Every time I looked down, he would be close to my feet, and at night he slept under the bed.

Meanwhile, I’d contacted the same builders who’d done up the flat when I moved in. Blakeney’s team had removed a lot of the debris and tidied up the place, but it still needed repairs and redecorating. I’d decided by now that I had no intention of moving. I wasn’t going to let the Crace Estate, the ghost of Alan Conway or anyone else drive me out of the life I had chosen, even if that life was feeling a little fragile. Once Rob and Steve had left for Yorkshire, I was on my own – and I didn’t much like it. I had no job. I had nobody to see, though I wasn’t in the mood for dinner or the theatre anyway. I’d brought the first two parts of Eliot’s manuscript with me and read them again, no longer with any interest in their literary merits. I was more interested in finding any clues that might have led to his death. I made a few notes, but it wasn’t enough to fill the long stretch of hours that I now realised made up each day. I knew perfectly well there was nothing wrong with being an unemployed single woman in my fifties, but even so, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that, somehow, this wasn’t me.

So I was glad when my phone rang and Ian Blakeney asked if he could come round the same day. I gave him the address and then went out and bought a few snacks and drinks. I put fresh flowers in the kitchen too. They gave the illusion of home.

He arrived in the middle of the afternoon, suited and carrying a leather briefcase. He asked how I was and how the cat was doing, but otherwise he was aloof and businesslike, which made me wonder if, along with the dust in the tyres, there had been another development in the murder investigation, one he didn’t want to share with me. He said nothing about that, but sat down at the kitchen table and removed from the briefcase a sheaf of pages I recognised as a printout of Eliot’s novel and an A5 notebook with a Japanese cover – white birds flying over bamboo. That had to be Eliot’s too. I made us both tea and finally we sat down together.

‘There are three things we have to discuss,’ he said. ‘The first is the death of Lady Margaret Chalfont in the book. The second is the death of Miriam Crace twenty years ago. And the third is Eliot Crace and your relationship with him, as well as anything that might connect the first with the second.’

‘Do you have any news?’ I asked. I was concerned about his lack of warmth.

‘There’s nothing I can discuss with you, Susan. But it’s irrelevant anyway. I think we should start with something you said to me the second time we met. Eliot Crace used people he knew as characters. Find the killer in the book and we find the killer in real life. Is that how it works?’

‘I know it sounds unlikely … but yes.’

‘OK. So where do you want to start?’

‘This might help.’ I had a notepad and opened it, showing him a list of names I’d drawn up.

Miriam Crace Lady Margaret Chalfont Jonathan Crace Jeffrey Chalfont Leylah Crace Lola Chalfont Edward Crace Elmer Waysmith Roland Crace Robert Waysmith Julia Crace Judith Lyttleton Eliot Crace Cedric Chalfont Frederick Turner Frédéric Voltaire Gillian Crace Alice Carling Dr John Lambert Ma?tre Jean Lambert

‘I’ve put the Crace Estate and their associates on the left. The characters that they inspired are on the right.

‘Let’s start from the top.’

‘Fine.’

I moved the sheet of paper between us.

‘Miriam Crace is obviously Margaret Chalfont. They have the same initials, they were both matriarchs who had been married twice and they were both ill with heart disease. If Eliot’s accusations are true, then they were also both poisoned. It’s interesting that Margaret is a much nicer character than Miriam. Almost everyone in the family had a motive to kill Miriam – I’ll come to that as we go along – but there was no reason at all to kill Margaret. Elmer makes exactly that point. So does Jeffrey and so does Lola. It seems to me that the whole plot of Eliot’s book depends on it – and at the end of the first section, Atticus Pünd says something very strange. James Fraser asks the same question again. “ Why murder a woman who is already dying? ” And Pünd replies: “ Because, my friend, it does not matter. ” It’s a neat chapter end, but what does it mean? Who doesn’t it matter to? And why doesn’t it matter?’

‘Yes. I wondered about that,’ Blakeney said. ‘It’s strange because Lady Chalfont was about to change her will and the whole family needed her money. So you’d have thought that killing her to stop her doing that would be very important indeed.’

‘Unless the will had nothing to do with it.’

‘I’m pretty sure the will had everything to do with it. But go on.’

‘Jeffrey Chalfont seems to be modelled on Jonathan Crace, if only because of the ginger hair. They’re also both elder sons. Jeffrey inherited the Norfolk estate and Jonathan got the management of the Crace Estate: the books, the TV series and all the rest of it. It’s worth remembering that Miriam Crace was thinking of selling the Little People to an outside interest. Jonathan Crace would have done anything to stop that happening.’

‘Including killing her?’

‘He’s not a very attractive man.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily make him a killer.’ Blakeney glanced at the list. ‘I take it Jonathan’s wife, Leylah, becomes Lola.’

‘Apart from the fact that she wanted two thousand pounds to support her return to the theatre, Lola Chalfont doesn’t seem to have any reason to kill her mother-in-law in the book. It’s difficult to be sure, because there are at least twenty thousand words missing.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because Eliot couldn’t have delivered a manuscript under seventy thousand words, and anyway, it’s my job. I always have a feel for this sort of thing. Atticus Pünd hasn’t done nearly enough investigating. I think there may be a whole plot segment that Eliot never got around to writing.’ I checked the last pages of the batch that Blakeney had brought. There were just the eighteen chapters. ‘You didn’t find any more pages?’

‘No. Eliot has a notebook and we’ll talk about that in a minute, but otherwise he seems to have worked directly on his laptop.’

‘Like most writers.’ I sighed. ‘I’m the only person I know who still likes paper.’

‘I’ve noticed. Anyway, I had my tech department look through his files, but there was nothing else there.’

‘The denouement would have run to five or ten thousand words. All the suspects lined up in the library or whatever. But that still leaves a big hole.’ I was annoyed that I had never asked Eliot for details of what was coming next. With Magpie Murders , there had only been one chapter missing. It was much more difficult this time.

‘What about Leylah Crace?’ Blakeney asked.

‘I met her at the Savoy and she didn’t have anything bad to say about Miriam Crace. “ She never did any harm to me. ” Those were her exact words. Of course, she could have been lying,’ I went on. ‘Her mother-in-law used to make racist jokes about her. And it’s always possible that Leylah might have blamed Miriam for the death of her daughter, Jasmine. She killed herself under a train. But if there is anyone in the family Leylah really hates, it’s her husband, Jonathan.’

‘No love lost,’ Blakeney muttered. ‘I noticed that too.’

I went back to the list. ‘In the world of the book, Elmer Waysmith is the main suspect,’ I said. ‘Margaret found out he was involved in the sale of art stolen by the Nazis and she called the solicitor to talk about her will. James Fraser set it all out at the start of Chapter Sixteen, and although the sidekick is nearly always wrong, all the clues seem to be pointing to him. He was the man in the pharmacy …’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘White hair. American accent. And Harry Lyttleton said he saw him in the Place Masséna at half past twelve. He was in a hurry. It was as if he’d just got changed at the hotel and he didn’t want to be late for the meeting with his son.’

‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’

I glanced at him. ‘You sound like Atticus Pünd,’ I said. He didn’t smile and once again I knew that something had happened since I’d last seen him and he was keeping it from me. ‘Elmer Waysmith and Edward Crace both have white hair, and the way Eliot saw it, they were both difficult fathers,’ I went on. ‘There was no love lost between Eliot and Edward either, but even if Edward had decided to kill his mother, it’s hard to believe that he would have it in him to come back to England and run over his own son.’

‘I agree.’

‘So now we come to Roland, Julia and Eliot himself, and this is where it gets a bit tricky. Julia is obviously Judith Lyttleton. They’re physically the same and Julia’s a geography teacher in real life. Eliot’s turned her into an ethnologist with a thing about Peru.’

‘What about her husband, Harry Lyttleton?’

‘I wondered about him too. He isn’t anyone I’ve met. But I’ve worked out where he came from. Julia is single, but in the book, Eliot has married her to one of the Little People. Harry Little has become Harry Lyttleton. I suppose it’s a private joke.’

‘Not a very funny one.’

‘I agree. Eliot also told me that he had based the little boy, Cedric, on himself, so that’s easy. I’m not sure about Robert Waysmith, though. I’m guessing that he’s a version of Roland. He’s not part of the family. He’s Elmer’s son from his first marriage. But he’s described as good-looking, like a poet or an adventurer, and in Chapter Eighteen, Cedric says that everyone in the family likes him. All of this is true of Roland – or at least it was until he broke the faith by having an affair with Gillian.

‘The big question is – did Robert Waysmith kill Lady Chalfont? And if so, does that mean that Eliot is identifying Roland as the killer of Miriam Crace?’

I got up and poured myself a glass of cold water. This was all getting far too complicated.

‘Roland, Julia and Eliot were all children when they were living in Marble Hall,’ I went on. ‘Roland admitted to me that they often talked about killing their grandmother. They even put together some sort of potion. It was an idea they got from a Roald Dahl book – George’s Marvellous Medicine . Charles Clover knew all about this. He said that Julia had put the poison they concocted in one of her perfume bottles, which she kept in her room, but Roland stole it from her the night Miriam died. He had the room next to hers. It makes complete sense. Roland was the oldest of the children and he was their protector. If anyone was going to slip something into the old lady’s lemon and ginger pick-me-up, it would have been him. Lady Chalfont also drank lemon and ginger tea, so it follows that if it was Robert Waysmith who poisoned his stepmother in the book, then it must have been Roland who killed Miriam Crace in real life.

‘There’s just one problem. Motive. In real life, I suppose it’s quite possible that Roland might have killed Miriam Crace when he was seventeen. Miriam had been vile to his sister. He was her protector. By poisoning Miriam, he would have been getting his own back on her and preventing Julia from doing it herself. But I still can’t see him killing his own brother, especially when you consider his relationship with Gillian.’

‘You should also know that Roland Crace can’t drive,’ Blakeney said. ‘He never got a licence. He was driven to the party in a private car – like most of the guests. We’ve put together a list of everyone who drove themselves that night.’

‘Am I on it?’

‘There’s still a question mark on that one, Susan.’

‘Well, if Roland can’t drive, he can’t have killed Eliot. And if Robert Waysmith is his alter ego in the book, I’m not sure that works either because Robert has no reason to kill Lady Chalfont. He inherited ten thousand pounds in her will, but he didn’t particularly need it and he certainly wouldn’t have killed her for it. If there was anyone he might have wanted to murder, it was his father. I’m sure Eliot would have written more about Marion’s suicide in the missing pages, but it’s already clear that Robert Waysmith partly blamed his father for her death. Elmer Waysmith didn’t even break off his business trip to come home.’

‘What about the others?’ Blakeney asked. He seemed keen to move on.

‘We can deal with the last three pretty quickly. Frédéric Voltaire is my favourite character in the book and I really like his relationship with Pünd. He’s obviously based on Frederick Turner, who was adopted by Miriam Crace, and I did challenge Eliot as to why he did that. Turner gets smashed up in a road accident and Eliot turns him into a casualty of war. The same injuries. Incidentally, Leylah Crace told me that Turner lied about the cause of the accident …’

‘Had he been drinking?’

‘Maybe you can find out. If he was breathalysed, would they have kept the records?’

Blakeney nodded. ‘I’ll check.’ He took out his smartphone and tapped in a few words.

‘Julia Crace was also in the car, so maybe she’ll be able to help,’ I said. ‘What’s strange about Frederick Turner is this whole racism thing. Was Miriam a racist or wasn’t she? She seems to have treated Frederick as a second-class citizen, but he wouldn’t say a word against her. It was the same with Leylah. But neither of them had any reason to kill anyone. And that just leaves Gillian Crace and John Lambert.’

‘I’m going to let Emma Wardlaw loose on Dr Lambert,’ Blakeney said. ‘If you’re right and the family paid him to keep quiet about the cause of Miriam Crace’s death, she’ll force it out of him.’

‘I’d like to see that.’

‘As for the character of Alice Carling, you’ll be interested to know that she doesn’t appear in Eliot’s original notes,’ Blakeney said. He pushed over the notebook with the Japanese design on the cover. ‘This is Eliot’s notebook, the one I mentioned, all written in his own hand. He changed a lot of the names. Monsieur Lambert’s assistant was originally called Gabrielle Mazin – who also happens to be the head of Netflix in France.’

‘Eliot found out about the affair around the same time he started writing the books – so he put his wife in and killed her. I always thought that Alice Carling was an odd name for a young woman living in a French village.’

‘She was also Celia Carling, Clair La Cinge and Clarice Laing.’ Blakeney showed me a page full of names with letters crossed out and rearranged. ‘He seems to have spent as much time planning his anagrams as he did plotting the book.’

‘May I see that?’ I asked.

He handed it to me. ‘Of course.’

Eliot had filled about half the book with notes and diagrams using four different colours: red, blue, green and black. He had tucked in photographs of paintings by Sisley and Cézanne and there was also a clipping from a magazine that showed the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, which he had obviously used as his inspiration for the Chateau Belmar.

It was like a snapshot of his brain. He’d started with point-by-point analyses of all nine Atticus Pünd novels before he’d sat down to create his own. He’d drawn a family tree for the Chalfonts, circling the names and connecting them, adding their dates of birth and how old they were when Lady Chalfont died. There were timelines showing, for example, where everyone had been – and when – on the day of the murder. These were mixed in with pages of research and ideas for storylines, not all of which he’d used in the end. Everything was so jumbled together that if I hadn’t read the book, it would have made no sense at all, and even with the story very much in my head, it was hard to work out what fitted where. What I was mainly looking for was anything that indicated which way the book might go.

The Primogeniture System. Entail follows the title (see Julian Fellowes – Downton Abbey).

The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and The Monuments Men.

No chemical test to identify ACONITINE in the blood. Death immediate. Monkshood, wolfsbane possible ingredient in ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’.

‘PLOT IDEA – we’ll release you from concentration camp in return for art. DOUBLE CROSS!’

Mitral stenosis – a valvular disorder of the heart. Narrowness of the mitral valve which controls the flow of blood.

KENNETH RIVERS involved in taxidermy. Treated for arsenic poisoning. (Symptoms – warts and lesions, sore throat, darkening skin.)

Housewife syndrome = oppression/cruelty. Elmer Waysmith coercive. Doesn’t return from business trip. ‘He can be a monster at times.’

ESQUIRE SHOE CLEANER 3/9d. Manufactured in USA.

And then there were riddles. Eliot didn’t just think about what he was going to write. He put it all down on the page, interrogating himself. There were dozens of questions but unfortunately no answers. Once he’d worked out what he was going to do, there had been no need to make a note of it.

How do we find out that Gabrielle Alice revealed the will?

How does Lady Chalfont overhear the conversation?

Why did they buy poison from French chemist so close to using it?

Why talk about the tea as if it was poisoned? (Jeffrey and Harry could have lied.)

How did Judith know that Gabrielle Alice lived in a village?

Why did Bruno leave?

Perhaps most perplexing of all was a page simply entitled: CLUES. Eliot had used a process known as seeding whereby a seemingly innocent detail in an early chapter will have a pay-off when the reader gets to the end. In Magpie Murders , for example, Alan had mentioned a dog collar left in a drawer in an old house. It had been a perfect piece of deception: seemingly irrelevant but pointing directly at both the identity of the killer and the motive for the murder. But did these clues make any sense? I could feel Blakeney examining me as I searched through the notebook, trying to look as if I was getting somewhere.

CLUES

Judith shocked to see Pünd.

Double crease in letter to Pünd.

Ginger and lemon tea for Margaret.

Why talk about the tea as if it’s poisoned? Why not lie?

Someone goes down servants’ stairs at 4 pm.

Frédéric Voltaire mentions guillotine.

Lola performs as Mata Hari.

Matches.

Tutoyer in pharmacie scene. Surgical spirit.

I would have liked to have examined every single page, but Blakeney looked anxious to leave. I was disappointed. When he’d suggested an alliance, combining our efforts, I’d felt a distinct Tommy and Tuppence vibe and I’d thought it would be fun. But he’d been stiff and formal from the moment he’d arrived at the house. I was wondering if I should call him ‘Detective Inspector’ again.

I handed him back Eliot’s notes. ‘Did you find any of this useful?’ I asked.

‘It gave me some ideas.’

It was the vagueness of his reply, his refusal to share anything of value, that finally did it for me. ‘What’s wrong?’ I snapped. ‘You were kind to me after someone broke into my flat and I thought we’d come to some sort of understanding. You’re still wondering if my car was used to kill Eliot Crace, but you must have twigged by now that I’m hardly Jack the Ripper. Has there been some sort of development in the case that you’re not telling me? Because you’re nothing like the man I met the other night.’

Blakeney looked at me in surprise – not because I was wrong but because I had been able to see through his thin veneer of amicability. We might have been talking about the book, but the last half hour had passed with all the formality of a police interview under caution.

He took a few moments to consider what I had said. Then he nodded. ‘You’re right, Susan. I haven’t played fair with you and I’m sorry. I did wonder whether I should come here at all, but, to be honest, I needed your insights. In return, I’ve treated you badly.’

‘So what’s happened?’

‘I’m sure you’re aware that in a police investigation there are often pieces of information that we hold back from the public. I must ask you to promise me that you won’t share this with anyone else.’

‘If I’m the cold-blooded criminal that you seem to think I am, I wouldn’t have thought my promises would mean anything. But yes. You have my word.’

‘Did you know that Eliot Crace had an expensive watch?’

‘I think I did notice a watch when we first met. It was a Rolex.’

‘That’s very well observed. It was a vintage Rolex Explorer, to be precise, released in 1953. Stainless steel with a leather strap. A very nice piece, worth about fifteen thousand pounds. It belonged to Kenneth Rivers and he left it to Eliot in his will.’

‘Why is the watch relevant?’ I asked.

‘Eliot was wearing it at the party,’ Blakeney replied. ‘We have several guests who are quite certain they saw it on his wrist – and according to Gillian, he never took it off. But here’s the thing. When his body was discovered, the watch was gone.’

‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘Someone saw him lying there and they took it.’

‘That was our immediate assumption. A random pedestrian passes a man who has just been knocked down, notices his expensive watch and nicks it. It’s sick, but it’s not such a strange thing to happen in the middle of London. But we were wrong. Because we found the watch.’

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a clear plastic evidence bag, sealed at the top. He held it up and I could see the watch quite clearly, coiled up like a snake. I recognised it at once. He’d been wearing it when we met Elaine at Causton Books.

‘So where did you find it?’

His deep brown eyes settled on me. ‘It was in your flat.’