Page 113 of Marble Hall Murders

‘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 ofpoison 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 wroteThe Little Peopleand 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 wasnothing 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 saidit 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.’

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