Page 104 of Marble Hall Murders

He would have preferred to send me away, but he didn’t have the strength. ‘Of course. I’m not thinking straight. I’m afraid the news hasn’t really sunk in yet. Please …’ He stood aside and I went in.

He led me into the kitchen, where I had met Gillian and Elaine the last time I was there. I remembered my first sight of Gillian on the sofa by the window, her legs bent and her knees together, her face bruised. Edward Crace gestured and I sat at the table.

‘Can I make you a coffee?’ he asked.

‘I can do it, if you like.’

‘No, no. It helps to keep busy.’ He set about loading a capsule into a machine, filling the reservoir with water, taking two mugs out of the cupboard. He knew where everything was kept.

‘Have you come all the way from America?’ I asked. I’d been wondering how he’d arrived so quickly. Surely, he wouldn’t have had time to fly overnight from Miami.

‘I was already here.’ He pressed the button that set a little light blinking, indicating that the water was heating up. ‘I was meeting a number of artists and writers. It’s my job.’

‘You run a gallery in Miami?’

‘It’s more of a foundation … a private club for art collectors and enthusiasts. Every now and then they send me on a fishing expedition to get people to speak. I’ve found that a personal approach works better than emails. I was in London when I heard the news.’

‘Staying here?’

‘No. A hotel in Covent Garden.’ He took a breath. ‘I don’t really feel comfortable coming here. This is my house, but I handed it over to Eliot and Gillian and I don’t like to intrude.’ I wondered if Gillian had told him she was pregnant, but there was no way I could ask him that, not with everything else that was going on. ‘I come to London quite often,’ he continued. ‘I don’t usually see Eliot. I’m sorry I didn’t contact him this time – but how was I to know what was about to happen?’

‘You weren’t at the party,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘You weren’t invited?’

‘I have no idea. It’s possible they tried to get in touch with me, but there’s nothing in this world that would have dragged me to an event celebrating the legacy of my mother.’ He was suddenly cold. ‘I didn’t even want to come to the UK this week because I knew the dates coincided, but I had no choice. I imagine Eliot will have talked to you about Marble Hall.’

‘I know he wasn’t happy there.’

‘None of us were. I should have left years ago, when he was still young. If I had, he might have grown up in a normal environment and made something of his life. He might stillbe alive. My wife, Amy, and I hated it there and she was always urging me to break away. But my mother pulled all the strings. The puppet strings. The purse strings. At the end of the day, we wouldn’t have had this house if I’d disobeyed her and gone my own way. But I’d still have my son.’

He broke down, covering his face with his hands. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I couldn’t just leave him there, standing against the counter. I went over to him and put a hand on his arm. ‘Please, Edward, sit down. I’ll make the coffee.’

He let me lead him to a chair and he sat there, sobbing, while I made two cups of coffee and carried them over. More than ever, I wished that I hadn’t taken on the book, that I hadn’t allowed myself to get involved in all this.

‘Forgive me,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m sure Eliot will have told you that we weren’t close. I’m sure he blamed me for keeping him at Marble Hall as much as I blame myself. I was weak. I was so weak. And yet, sometimes …’ There was a box of tissues on the table. He took one and wiped his eyes. ‘Sometimes I think we were like the royals … the royal family. All that wealth and comfort. My mother was famous the world over and her books were our crown jewels.The Little People. We’d all been born into it. Jonathan and me … even Freddy. None of it was our own choice. And even if we had walked out, those books would have followed us wherever we went. Jasmine tried and it didn’t do her any good.’

He drank some of the coffee, took a deep breath.

‘Would you mind leaving, Susan?’ he said. ‘I don’t think Gillian is going to come down and if she does, she won’t want to talk to anyone. Did you know that she’s expecting Eliot’s child?’

He was deluding himself even now. Or perhaps Gillian had lied to him. I might have done the same in her position. She had told me the truth when she was angry, just after Eliot had hit her. But now that he was dead and she was alone, everything had changed. She had decided to bring up the baby as his, keeping herself inside the family and ensuring their financial support. Edward was right about one thing. I was the last person she would want to see when she came down.

But I wasn’t ready to leave yet.

‘There’s something I need, Edward. Can you help me? I told you I was working with Eliot, helping him with his book. I’ve come here because I need his notes, his work in progress. They’re terribly important to me.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s difficult to explain.’ I decided to tell him the truth. ‘In his Atticus Pünd novel, Eliot was writing about his time at Marble Hall. He believed that your mother’s death might not have been natural. That someone might have poisoned her. Did he ever talk to you about that?’

‘Eliot was twelve years old when my mother died and thirteen when we left Marble Hall. He was always a fantasist and if he had said anything like that, I would have dismissed it. But he never did – not to me.’

Not to me.There was something about the way he spoke, a wistful look in his eyes, that alerted me to another possibility. ‘Could there have been someone else?’ I asked.

He hesitated. ‘There was a man who used to come down from London. He was working with my mother, overseeing the last two books she wrote. Eliot latched on to him becausehe was already thinking of becoming a writer and the two of them were close.’

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