Page 46 of Marble Hall Murders

to you – not just about us. I’m very worried

about Eliot and Gillian. Will you come to

supper on Thursday evening? 6 pm?

Please say you will. Elaine.

Thursday was the day after next. I weighed my phone in the palm of my hand for a few moments, then texted back.

Yes. Happy to see you and glad we’re

talking. Will see you then. Susan.

And there it was. With a wiggle of a thumb, my fate was sealed.

Parsons Green

Just walking up to the house two days later brought back memories. I’d had dinner here with Edna O’Brien, Stephen Fry, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan and many more – not all at once, mind you, but Charles Clover had loved to sprinkle famous names amongst his guests. On one occasion, Nigella Lawson had done the cooking. Charles had worked on her first bestseller,How to Eat, published in 1998, and also claimed thatAmsterdam, which had won McEwan the Booker Prize, had been his idea, although he was almost certainly exaggerating about that. The conversation around the well-worn French fruitwood dining table embraced life and literature and it would usually be one or two o’clock in the morning before the first taxis arrived. Charles always served excellent wine and nobody ever drove home.

The house looked the same as I remembered: a neat, red-brick Victorian construction with bay windows, a front garden and four floors, standing at the end of the terrace. Like most of its neighbours, it had been knocked about with skylights above and a basement conversion below, althoughI remembered that Charles had baulked at a conservatory. For old times’ sake, I’d come by public transport, although I didn’t think I’d be drinking heavily tonight.

I rang the bell and heard the opening bars of C. P. E. Bach’s ‘Solfeggietto’. Charles had recorded himself playing the piano and it must have been odd for Elaine, hearing him every time anyone came to the house. Just for a moment, I expected him to fling open the door, his jacket off, a tea towel tucked into his belt and a glass of wine in his hand. He liked to cook, unless he happened to have a celebrity chef on the guest list, and the meals he prepared were first class. ‘Hello, Susan! Come in! Come in!’ I could almost hear his voice. Strait-laced in the office, he turned into a bon viveur when at home, and it was strange to think that he had morphed from that into a convicted murderer. There would certainly be no high-minded conversation orchampignons farciswhere he was now.

The door was opened just a few inches, then closed again. I heard the security chain slide and then it opened fully to reveal Elaine, now dressed in black trousers and T-shirt with a single gold chain around her neck. I was glad that I hadn’t put on anything too fancy myself. I’d gone through all the new clothes I’d bought when I got back from Crete, but what do you wear for dinner with a woman whose life you’ve managed to destroy? I still felt uncomfortable about coming here, and although Charles had always forbidden his guests to bring anything to his dinner parties, I’d decided that I couldn’t come empty-handed. I held out a bouquet of flowers and a decent bottle of wine.

Elaine took them with a smile. ‘That’s very kind of you, Susan, although there was absolutely no need.’ She was lessnervous than she had been in the office, perhaps because this was her home turf, but the fact that she wouldn’t open the door until she knew who was on the other side told me a lot about her state of mind. ‘Do come in,’ she said.

Nothing had changed. The house was elegant, almost obsessively so. The furniture and lighting were modern eclectic, the colours easy on the eye, the artworks – mainly modern artists – arranged in galleries with very little of the walls left bare. The rooms were well proportioned, with the main living space taking up much of the ground floor and backing onto the garden. The kitchen and eating area were below.

She led me into the living room, with the baby grand piano that Charles had often played sitting in one corner. It was loaded up with family photographs. None of the sofas or armchairs matched. They were scattered around a coffee table and I saw that Elaine had already brought up four champagne glasses and a couple of bowls of olives and crisps.

Four glasses.

‘I hope you don’t mind …’ Elaine must have seen the look on my face ‘… I’ve invited Eliot and Gillian to join us for supper. I’m afraid your meeting at the publisher’s was cut short because of me and I thought it might be helpful to you to have some social time with him and his wife. They’re not coming until seven, so we can be together a while, just the two of us. Is that all right? I don’t want you to feel ambushed a second time.’

‘I presume they know I’m here?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘It’ll be nice to meet Gillian.’

‘Would you like some champagne?’

‘Thank you.’

She left the room and went down to the kitchen. I ran my eyes over the books on the shelves (plenty from Cloverleaf, but none by Alan Conway), then wandered over to the piano and examined the photographs, many of them showing Charles and Elaine in happier times: on their wedding day, on holiday, standing with their two teenaged daughters. There was a whole cluster of them, but right in the middle I spotted one of myself, Charles and Elaine, taken at the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. I remembered the occasion well. It had been the last day of the book festival and we’d decided we’d had enough of talks and signings, so we’d skived off and climbed all the way up in the late-summer heat, only to find ourselves surrounded by about a hundred thousand midges. ‘They’re even more irritating than the authors.’ It was Charles who had said that. We’d asked a German tourist to take the picture and then we’d climbed down as quickly as we could to find a pub.

I was still holding the photograph when I heard a footfall behind me and saw Elaine standing close by with an open bottle of Moët.

‘Edinburgh,’ she said.

‘I was thinking about the midges.’

‘I prefer to remember the Glenmorangie Lasanta.’

She was right. We’d found a pub with a vast range of single malts arranged on mirrored shelves and that was the one the barman had recommended.

‘Sit down,’ she said.

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