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After I had finished reading Blakeney’s manuscript, I sat in silence for a long time.

My immediate reaction was that he had written the pages incredibly quickly, but then again, Conan Doyle famously created Sherlock Holmes and wrote the whole of A Study in Scarlet in three weeks, so twenty-eight pages in two days was hardly a world record. The main thing was that it didn’t show. From the moment I had re-entered the world of Atticus Pünd, I had been impressed by Blakeney’s writing ability. There were one or two moments when the language of a lifelong police officer had intruded into the text, but otherwise it seemed to me that he had almost perfectly captured the voice of Alan Conway – or perhaps the voice of Eliot Crace imitating Alan Conway. The first continuation continuation novel? If the book ever did see the light of day, that wouldn’t look great on the cover. More importantly, he had his own perspective. There was a sensitivity in his writing, particularly in that last farewell, that had taken me by surprise.

As to the solution itself, there was a part of me that was annoyed. He had managed to see so many things that I hadn’t. It should have been obvious to me that Elmer Waysmith had never been anywhere near that blasted pharmacy or that all those clues – the teapot lid, the book of matches, etc. – had been planted on purpose. Why hadn’t I seen it? Perhaps I hadn’t trusted Eliot enough. I mean, it had occurred to me that the matches with the name of the hotel printed on the cover had been placed there all too conveniently. But I had attributed it to his authorship without seeing it for what it really was: another piece of trickery by Robert Waysmith.

The most important thing was that I was quite sure Blakeney had got it right, which wasn’t surprising, given both his experience and his liking for crime fiction. I read the pages a second time, searching for any flaws in his narrative, but could find none. Robert Waysmith had killed Lady Chalfont to take revenge on his father. He had persuaded the family to help him and they had agreed because they wanted control of the money. It was as simple as that.

I was tempted to telephone Blakeney to thank him and to congratulate him, but I couldn’t do it. I was thinking of what Emma Wardlaw had said when she handed over the manuscript. Should I believe her? She’d had it in for me from the beginning. Did she have a personal reason for breaking any connection between Ian Blakeney and me? Perhaps. But what she had told me sounded horribly plausible. He’s getting close to you … pretending to be your friend. Blakeney had come to the house and we’d spent more than an hour talking about Eliot’s book before he’d mentioned that he had new evidence against me: the Rolex watch. Everything he had done had been carefully calculated. He’d said straight out that he didn’t believe I had killed anyone, but at the same time he had made it clear that I was still under investigation. He hadn’t returned my MG! Nothing about him was straightforward.

He had also said – in his letter – that he had found the third anagram that Eliot had concealed in the book, along with Belmar and Alice Carling. I was determined to find it for myself rather than hear it from him. It was all well and good to have solved Eliot’s mystery novel, but the whole point was that it had to unlock the truth about who had killed Miriam Crace – and, perhaps, Eliot himself. That was what I needed to know.

All along, I had suspected Elmer Waysmith and in idle moments I had fiddled around with his name. Surely any character with Elmer as a Christian name would have to be an anagram! But I hadn’t found it. If his middle initial had been H, he could have made HEALTHY SWIMMER, which would have been fun, if irrelevant. Otherwise, he yielded nothing and I was glad to turn to his son, Robert Waysmith. I remembered what Eliot had said on the radio. ‘ I’ve put in a secret message. ’ So I wasn’t looking for a name. It had to be an announcement.

ROBERT WAYSMITH.

It took me ten minutes to find it and I had to kick myself because I should have got it in seconds. But then I’ve never liked anagrams, which I’ve always found (like golf, bridge and home baking) to be a complete waste of time. But there it was, and – really – his great reveal was no surprise at all. I wrote the four words in block capitals and stared at them: Eliot’s last message.

IT WAS MY brOTHER.