Page 101 of Marble Hall Murders

I ignored her. ‘How long do you intend to keep it for?’ I asked Blakeney. I felt a strange pang, thinking of my red MGbeing towed away and dumped in some police pound. It was like losing a friend.

‘It could be up to six months,’ Blakeney told me. ‘We’ll be keeping it while you’re under investigation.’

‘Is that what I am? Under investigation?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘I didn’t kill Eliot Crace,’ I said. ‘There’ll be CCTV cameras showing me getting on the tube at Highgate and presumably more CCTV cameras at Leicester Square.’

‘Nobody is accusing you of anything, Susan,’ Blakeney assured me. ‘We’ll take away this sample and have it analysed and I’m sure that will clear up the matter very quickly.’ He smiled reassuringly, then added, ‘You’re not planning any foreign travel in the next few days?’

‘Are you asking me to surrender my passport?’

‘No. But we’ll be keeping an eye on you.’

We walked back to the house together, none of us saying anything. I gave them the keys from the kitchen drawer. Wardlaw gave me a receipt and they left.

As soon as they had gone, I went out.

Causton Books

I was sad that Eliot Crace was dead – and for a lot of reasons. He was young. He was talented. He had hurt his wife, but his whole life had been a series of hurts, starting with his childhood at Marble Hall and continuing with the failure of his first novels, the separation from his parents, his diagnosis of infertility and the betrayal of perhaps the only woman he had ever loved. Now there was going to be a baby that couldn’t have been his, a twist of the knife. I had promised I would look after him. If only he had spoken to me at the party instead of turning his back on me. We might have had a drink together, come to some sort of understanding. Elaine could have helped patch things up between us. Instead, I’d always be haunted by the thought that I could have saved him.

First, I needed to save myself. I knew from my experiences in Suffolk – Alan Conway and Branlow Hall – that in real life, murder investigations move at a frightening speed. I somehow couldn’t imagine Detective Inspector Blakeney sitting in an armchair, mulling things over with a pipe and bedroom slippers, and as for Detective Constable Wardlaw,she’d been drooling so much over the evidence she’d plucked out of the grille of my MG, she’d risked contaminating it. They’d be back, the two of them, and soon. And the next time it wouldn’t be for a cosy decaffeinated coffee in my kitchen.

It was just possible that my MG had been vandalised at the same time I’d been at the party – one of those coincidences that Atticus Pünd so deplored – but I didn’t think so. That little scrap of cloth looked too similar in colour to the jacket Eliot had been wearing and I had to face up to the strong possibility that someone was trying to frame me. They’d kicked in the grille and added the cloth. But who … and why? Could it have been the same person who had killed Eliot? I had no answers to those questions, but sitting at home turning them over in my head wasn’t going to do me any good. I had to do something – whatever that might be.

I decided to start with Michael Flynn at Causton Books. What had he been doing at the party and why had he never mentioned his connection with the Crace Estate? It might seem the least important part of my worries, but any fly caught by a spider will need to examine every strand of the web, so that was where I was heading now. Thinking back to our meeting when Michael had told me about the new book, I remembered a few things that hadn’t felt right. How had he connected with Eliot in the first place? Why had he smiled so much, as if he knew something I didn’t? And there was something he’d said that had puzzled me at the time. ‘The book is important to us for a great many reasons.’ What reason could there be apart from the sales success of the book itself?

I took the tube to Victoria (feeling a pang for my missing MG), made my way past a row of featureless office blocksand hurried through the glass doors of Causton Books as if they might have been programmed to lock when they saw me coming. I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to be welcome and even Jeanette, the kindly receptionist, looked a little startled to see me.

‘Susan! I didn’t know you were coming in!’

‘I just wanted to see Michael Flynn for a few minutes.’

She looked at her computer, then picked up the phone. ‘I’ll tell him you’re here.’

I moved away and pretended to examine the digital book display to allow her a little privacy. She was the guardian of the gate and I hated the thought that she might be asked to keep it closed against me. However, when she put down the phone, she was smiling. ‘He’s sending someone.’

It was still a good ten minutes before a nervous-looking assistant arrived to collect me. I could tell from the silence in the lift that this meeting would not go well. Michael was waiting for me in the same conference room where we’d met before, but this time without the coffee. He was sitting in his shirtsleeves, glasses on his nose, the cord hanging down on either side.

‘I’m afraid I can’t give you a lot of time, Susan,’ he said. He hadn’t stood up as I came in and the smiles he had turned on and off the last time I was here were conspicuously absent. ‘I’ve got a sod of a day. You should have rung first.’

‘I thought it would be more sensible to meet face-to-face.’

‘You’re probably right. It’s devastating news about Eliot Crace. I was shocked to hear it.’

He had got straight to the point and I did the same. ‘What are you going to do aboutPünd’s Last Case?’ I asked. I’d usedits original title because that was the only one he knew, but it felt strange saying it. It reminded me of the conversations I’d had with Eliot.

‘We haven’t had time to discuss it yet. How much more had Eliot written?’

‘He’d got up to about fifty thousand words.’

‘Have you read it all?’

‘Yes. My gut feeling is that the book was going to come in at around seventy thousand words – a little shorter than I’d have liked.’

‘You told me you thought it was good.’

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