Page 60 of Marble Hall Murders

Neither Roland nor I said anything as we took the lift back down to the ground floor. We stood there rather stiffly, avoiding each other’s eyes, and I was glad nobody held us up on the way. I felt like a prisoner being escorted to the main gate by a junior warder after serving a long sentence and I couldn’t wait to be out.

But as we stepped into the reception area, Roland surprised me. ‘Would you like a coffee before you go?’ he asked. Maybe there was an attractive side to him after all.

‘Thank you.’

‘There’s a room we can use. It has a coffee machine. Not a bad one.’

The room was on the other side of the reception desk, with windows but no view. There was a capsule coffee machine, a fridge, two sofas shaped like an L. Roland pressed the right buttons and made two cappuccinos.

‘I wanted to say I’m sorry if Uncle Jon came over as a bit aggressive,’ he began.

‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘Very.’

‘If we’re all going to work together – with Eliot – I think you should know that his bark is much worse than his bite. The thing is, he’s been involved withThe Little Peopleever since he was my age. He was pretty much running the estate while Grandma was still alive and he oversaw the opening of Marble Hall. He was the one who suggested the new characters. He was a producer on the musical and he worked on the ITV television series. It nearly killed him when Grandma told him she was planning to sell the IP to an outside company. He took it as a personal betrayal. Her creations mean everything to him and so he’s always quite nervous when someone like you comes along. It’s nothing personal, I assure you.’

‘Why did she want to sell the IP rights?’ I asked.

‘I never asked her. I was seventeen when she died. From what Uncle Jon has always said, she just hated the idea of losing control. She didn’t trust anyone and I suppose if she was going to say goodbye to Little Jack and Little Harry and all the rest of them, it was easier to pass them on to a complete stranger in return for pot loads of money.’

‘Jonathan would still have been rich if the sale had gone through.’

‘That wasn’t enough. You’ve got to understand, he really does love those characters. He grew up with them. They’re like little friends.’ He smiled in a way that was both amused and mournful at the same time. ‘You know he named his daughter after one of them.’

‘Jasmine. Yes. She died in an accident.’

There was an implied question and Roland answered it for me. ‘She fell under a train at Sloane Square tube station.That was back in 2006. She was twenty-one years old at the time … one year older than me.’

InPünd’s Last Case, Elmer Waysmith’s first wife had also died under a train, in her case a suicide at Grand Central Station. I was beginning to see that Eliot had taken the members of his family and shuffled them like playing cards. For example, he had expressly said that the character of Cedric Chalfont was based on himself, but in the manuscript, Cedric was an only child. So what did that make Roland? If he was connected to anyone in Eliot’s book, it would have to be Robert Waysmith, Elmer’s son. ‘Slim and athletic’ with the ‘waywardness of a poet’. The description seemed to fit.

‘Uncle Jon ended up running the estate,’ Roland went on. ‘Which is exactly what he wanted. My father was also left money, which he shared with the three of us, so we can’t complain. There were no other bequests … apart from one to Uncle Frederick. He didn’t get as much as the rest of us because he wasn’t a blood relative, but at least he got something. You mustn’t be angry that he snitched on you. He’s another of the guardians at the gate. You’ve got to understand. Grandma wasn’t just a children’s writer. She was more like God issuing the Ten Commandments, with everyone in the family wanting to be Moses.’

‘Including you?’

Roland laughed. ‘I don’t need to work, but I’ve got nothing else to do and when you have a surname like Crace it doesn’t take anyone long to work out who you are. Uncle Jon offered me a job and I decided I might as well roll over and accept it. My parents weren’t too pleased.’

‘Why not?’

‘Dad hated everything to do withThe LittlePeople. He wanted his own life. He wasn’t comfortable growing up in Marble Hall and after Grandma died he moved to a house in Notting Hill Gate. That’s where Eliot lives now.’

‘Are you telling me you didn’t dislike your grandmother too?’ Before he could answer, I went on. ‘That’s what Eliot told me. He said that the three of you – you, your sister and him – hated her so much that you wanted to kill her. I know you were only children, but it still sounds as if life at Marble Hall was miserable for all of you.’

Roland thought for a minute. He glanced around, as if checking we were alone in the room. Finally he spoke: ‘All right, Susan. I can see you’re on Eliot’s side and I’m glad about that. I hear things aren’t good between him and Gillian right now. He’s drinking again, and he needs all the help he can get. So I’ll tell you what you want to know. But this is just between the two of us. Is that a deal?’

‘Of course.’

‘Grandma was not a good person or a kind person. In fact, she was vile.’ He stopped, allowing the words to hang between us. Had this room, with its hand-finished wallpaper and soft Italian lighting, ever heard anything like them? ‘Everything Eliot has told you about her is true. She was cruel. She was racist. We turned a blind eye to her failings and did what she wanted because she made it clear that if we complained she’d cut us off without a penny. Quite honestly, she wouldn’t have cared if we starved. I often wonder how she managed to create these characters who are so sweet and kind and who have given pleasure to millions. I meet kids in cancer wards who haveThe Little Peoplebeside their bed.You should see the letters we get sent – even in the age of emails. ‘My parents are always arguing – can Grandma Little come and talk to them?’ ‘I’m being bullied at school, please ask Harry Little to sort them out!’ ‘My mum won’t let me have a dog. Can Little Biscuits come and stay?’ My job is to lie to them. I spend every day of the week keeping alive the big lie that Miriam Crace was an angel when in fact she made all our lives a misery – and by that, I mean Grandpa, my parents, everyone who came close to her, with the single exception of my uncle Jonathan, who always had his eye on the main prize and blinded himself to the truth.’

‘Wow!’ I said. The word slipped out of my lips. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.

‘You may want to know how I live with myself. Funnily enough, it’s easy. There have been a lot of famous artists who have behaved badly. Look at how Charles Dickens treated his wife! Tolstoy, the same. If you look at children’s writers, Roald Dahl had some pretty ripe things to say about the Jews, Enid Blyton had loads of affairs, and Lewis Carroll … well, let’s not talk about him and little girls. The same could be said for a hundred musicians, artists, film-makers … You have to divorce their personal lives from their works or you’re going to end up with nothing on TV, nothing on your walls, nothing on your shelves. I wouldn’t put so much as a bunch of dandelions on my grandmother’s grave, but that doesn’t stop me making sure she’s piled high in Waterstones.’

‘Why do you say she was a racist?’ I asked. ‘She adopted Frederick Turner and when I spoke to him, he didn’t make any complaints.’

‘That’s because he can’t. He was left very little money inthe will – even if he was her adopted son. He depends one hundred per cent on the estate and Uncle Jonathan for his lifestyle, and after his car accident he wasn’t exactly marketable.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry. That sounds a bit heartless. All I’m saying is, he toes the line because he can’t afford not to – but when he was at Marble Hall, he was always the underdog. Unlike the rest of us, he was sent to the local comprehensive and then he was pushed into accountancy school so that he could become an unpaid bookkeeper for the estate. He didn’t even eat with the family half the time.’

As much as I hated hearing it, what Roland was saying chimed with what I already knew or suspected. I remembered Frederick talking about Miriam Crace. ‘I never thought of her as a mother.’ Odd words to come from an adopted son.

‘And there’s more to it than that,’ Roland continued. ‘Grandma never got on with my aunt Leylah.’

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