Page 111 of Marble Hall Murders

‘Njinga and Karim. Yes. But it wasn’t their colour that bothered her. She just didn’t like being bullied and told what to do. You know what, Susan? I think when that happened, she saw Jonathan for the complete bastard that he was. She realised he was already planning to take control of the estate and that was why she threatened to sell everything to one of the big American publishers – just to spite him. And she might well have gone ahead if she hadn’t had a heart attack and died. But racist? I don’t think so. She was a patron of the St Ambrose Orphanage, which looked after kids of every creed and colour, and as you know, she adopted Freddy. Have you spoken to him?’

‘Yes.’

‘And …?’

I remembered that Frederick Turner had referred to Miriam Crace as the woman who saved his life. ‘He didn’t make any complaints,’ I admitted.

‘Think about it. A racist with a mixed-race child? Seriously? She had a Black chauffeur too. Bruno – she adored him. He’d gone years before I arrived, but there was a photograph of the two of them on the piano standing in front of her Bentley. And there was a Nepalese gardener.’

‘But why would Eliot lie to me?’

‘Because they are all liars, Susan. Every one of them. Jonathan lied about his own daughter and how she died. Gillian lied to Eliot. That girl! Looks like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but she was having an affair with his brother, and of course Roland was lying too. The baby’s his and he knows it.’

‘Did she tell you?’ I was amazed to hear this coming from her.

‘She didn’t need to, my dear! I’ve seen the two of them together, the way they try to avoid each other’s eye. I’m not a fool. And then there’s Freddy.’ Once Leilah had started, nothing would stop her. ‘He lied about his car accident – you should ask Julia what really happened. She was in the car! Kenneth lied about his marriage to Miriam. He pretended he loved her, but they’d been sleeping in separate rooms for years before I came to Marble Hall and that hobby of his – all those grisly stuffed animals – was just his way of escaping from her.

‘And all of us were lying about Miriam – every one of us. She may not have been a racist but she was a dreadful woman and we had to make sure that the public never found out. Every public event, every time anyone asked us anything about her, we had to say anything except the truth.’

Roland had said the same thing when he’d described his work. ‘My job is to lie to them. I spend every day of the weekkeeping alive the big lie.’ What Leylah was telling me fitted in with what I already knew.

‘Can I give you a word of advice, Susan?’ Leylah had finished her third glass of champagne but there was no sense of celebration or pleasure about her.

‘What’s that, Leylah?’ I asked.

‘The police aren’t going to arrest you for the death of Eliot. I mean, that’s ridiculous. How stupid can they be?’

‘Who do you think killed him?’

‘I think it was an accident. He was drunk. He didn’t know where he was going. But this is my advice. Stay away from the Crace family. Just forget about them. Theyarethe Little People! But they don’t save the world – they do the exact opposite. They hurt everything they touch. They took my daughter from me. Really, they took my whole life. I’d walk away from them while you still can, keep going and don’t look back. It’s too late for me now. But you seem like a good person. Don’t let them do the same to you.’

Hellmarsh

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 ‘virya’ 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 Alanand 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 patteddown 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 programmehere 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.’

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