Page 86 of Marble Hall Murders

Gillian was too exhausted to argue. ‘I could see someone at St Mary’s.’

‘I’ll go with her,’ Elaine said.

I would have offered, but I was glad Elaine had got there first.

I reached out and held Gillian in a clumsy embrace. It was awkward, the two of us next to each other on the sofa, but I wanted her to know I was on her side. ‘This will all work itself out,’ I told her. ‘You’re going to have a baby. That’s a wonderful thing …’

‘Eliot wants me to get rid of it.’

‘It’s not his choice, Gillian. You know that.’

‘I don’t know anything any more.’

I got up. Suddenly I wanted to be out of here. Why was it that whenever Atticus Pünd came into my life, I inevitably found myself somewhere I didn’t want to be?

‘I’ll call you,’ Elaine said.

‘Thank you. I’ll see myself out.’

I went back into the hallway and as I was leaving, I noticed a table beside the front door with a scattering of letters, all of them too uninteresting to have been opened. One of them was a fashion catalogue or something, addressed to GILLIAN CRACE, and without even thinking about it, I saw it at once. A second anagram. It was extraordinary, really, after everything I had just heard, but maybe that’s the way anagrams work. You either see them or you don’t – but this one I most definitely had.

*

There was a parking ticket attached to my window when I got back to the car, but I ignored it. I knew that I had stumbledonto a clue that might help me unravel the secrets of Eliot’s book or, indeed, his life.

Gillian Crace was Alice Carling.

I might have spotted it earlier. After all, Alice Carling was an unusual name for a young woman living in a small French village. But that said, I had never thought of Gillian as Gillian Crace. For all I knew, she could have kept her maiden name. So half the letters in the anagram had been missing, making it impossible to see.

What exactly did it mean, though? Well, first of all, in the book, Alice Carling was having an affair with the so-called Charles Saint-Pierre and as a result she had been murdered. Could there be a clearer insight into Eliot’s mind? I wondered how much of the book he had written when he found out about the affair. It was always possible that he had changed the name of Monsieur Lambert’s assistant after he’d started writing. It also confirmed what I had feared all along.Pünd’s Last Case– or whatever he was going to call it – wasn’t just a cheerful murder mystery bringing back a much-loved character. It was a bubbling cauldron in which Eliot’s unhappy childhood, the death of his grandmother, the suicide of his cousin, the issues with his father and now his wife’s infidelity had all been stirred together. And they were giving off noxious fumes.

I think that was when I had my first presentiment that this was all going to end very badly, that Eliot might be putting not just himself in danger but quite possibly me as well. I’d been here before, don’t forget. I’d almost died in a burning office. My eyesight had been permanently damaged. I’d lost my job, my reputation and most of my friends. When was I ever going to learn?

It was time to take control of the situation and I suddenly knew where Eliot might be. When he had come to my house, he had mentioned a club he belonged to, a place called Boon’s in the Portobello Road. He’d specifically said that it was his bolt-hole, where he went when he needed to be on his own.

It took me one minute to find it on Google and that was where I went next.

Boon’s

Boon’s was at the bottom end of the Portobello Road, past the Electric Cinema and well away from the pastel-coloured houses and smart antique shops that attracted the crowds at weekends. Bizarrely, it was named after a television series that had been filmed in the eighties, the story of two out-of-work firemen – later I learned that it had been set up by one of the actors who had appeared in it. There was a framed picture in the tiny reception area showing Michael Elphick, who played the title role, and some quite uninteresting props in glass cases going up the stairs. The club had just three rooms, one on top of another, two of them bars. The walls had light bulbs coated with the yellow tinge of cigarette smoke, even though smoking was no longer allowed, and the carpets were sticky and threadbare.

I thought I’d have to argue my way past the tattooed, shaven-headed receptionist who guarded the entrance, but I only had to ask for Eliot by name and she waved me upstairs. I found him on the top floor, slumped in a chair as if all the air had been sucked out of him, full of self-pity … anddrink. There were another eight or nine people in the room, all of them in various stages of self-destruction, grouped together at tables or on sofas, a couple of them staring at a chessboard without moving any pieces, another pair leaning into each other, deep in conversation. They were all men and it occurred to me that Boon’s was a cut-price Garrick Club where an exclusively male clientele came to hide from their girlfriends, their wives, their mothers or all the women who had made the world such a difficult place. The master of ceremonies – the barman – stood behind a wooden counter, slowly wiping a glass in a way that suggested that although he had been doing the same thing for hours, it still wasn’t dry.

He was the only one who noticed me as I walked in and sat down opposite Eliot. I was already wondering how we were going to talk to each other with so many people in earshot, but just then some jazz music started playing – the system must have been between tracks – and I was grateful for the cover it provided. Eliot didn’t appear to be happy to see me. His expression didn’t change, but everything about him was a little more alert – like a drunk driver who had spotted a police car in his rear-view mirror.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘I’m looking for you, Eliot.’

‘Who let you in?’

‘A very charming lady downstairs told me you were here. Can I buy you a drink or is it members only?’

‘They’ll take money from anyone.’ He straightened himself in his chair and waved at the barman. ‘Bruce! I’ll have another V and T. A double.’ He glanced at me. ‘What would you like?’

‘No alcohol for me, thanks.’ I twisted round. ‘Do you have Diet Coke?’

‘We’ve got Pepsi.’ Bruce scowled. ‘And it’s not diet.’

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