Page 114 of Marble Hall Murders

Eliot had protected Roland. He had worshipped his older brother. But then Roland had betrayed him by having an affair with his wife and that had changed everything. I hated the way Charles had told the story, relishing it, but I had no doubt that it was true.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘There’s no need to thank me, Susan. It’s not going to help you.’

I met his eyes.

‘First of all, nobody knows this story except for you and me, and if anyone asks me, I’m going to deny all of it.’

‘Why …?’

‘Why do you think I agreed to meet you?’

‘I thought you wanted to help.’

‘Then you’re even more stupid than I thought.’ He took another bite of the chocolate bar. There was something animal about the way he ate it, his face showing no pleasure at all as he masticated. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he said.

‘I was wrong to kill Alan Conway. I know that. But it wasn’t as if I planned it. It wasn’t premeditated or anything like that. I mean, you weren’t there, Susan. You didn’t hear him tell me how he was going to rip the heart out of Atticus Pünd and make sure we never sold another copy of his bloodybooks. He was going to destroy the business. You know as well as I do that Cloverleaf couldn’t have continued without Atticus Pünd. Eleven years down the drain! He didn’t give a damn about me – or about you. And to listen to him, sneering at me in that way of his … well, if it had been you, who knows? You might have done the same. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t know what I was doing, really, until I’d done it. A simple push – that’s all it took. Children in the playground have done worse.’

‘You weren’t in the playground, Charles. You were on a tower.’

‘What difference did it make, anyway? The doctors had given him six months to live. I told you, Susan. I did it for both of us. And for everyone who worked at Cloverleaf. And for anyone who ever enjoyed the books. Alan was a pig. He was ungrateful, entitled, utterly negative – and I don’t think there’s a single person in the world who wouldn’t have had some sort of sympathy for me.’

He paused.

‘Except you.

‘You worked out the truth. I’ll give you that. But let me ask you this. What possible benefit was there, shopping me to the police like you threatened to do? I was sixty-three years old. What good did you think it would do, putting me in here? It wasn’t as if I was a mass murderer or something. I killed Alan Conway – yes. I did it to save everything I had and everything I’d planned for and if you’d left me alone, I’d have retired and spent the rest of my life going to the theatre and opera, playing with my grandchildren, and quite possibly doing good works. I wasn’t going to kill anyone else. You know that! Youcouldn’t have thought society needed to be protected from me. Did I give the impression that I’d enjoyed killing Alan? I can assure you that I didn’t. I felt guilty about it. I wished it hadn’t happened. Maybe you believe in the Bible, although I never saw you as the religious type. “Thou shalt not kill.” Was that what motivated you?

‘When we were in my office together, you could have tried to be more understanding. You could have put yourself in my position. It might even have occurred to you that you would have benefited from Alan’s death if you’d only left well alone. You were going to be the CEO of the company. Look at what’s happened to you since then! You’ve gained absolutely nothing. You’ve lost your job, your reputation, your boyfriend, everything that ever mattered to you. What are you now but a freelance editor that no serious publisher wants to hire unless it’s to work on a book that nobody else can be bothered to read? Don’t you sometimes wish you’d been a little bit less high-minded, Susan?’

His voice had changed. He was still trying to sound reasonable but all I could hear was the venom bubbling beneath the surface.

‘Maybe you feel justified, seeing me like this. Do you know, I haven’t even seen my new grandson? I won’t let him come in here. I won’t let him breathe the air I have to breathe. Every day I wake up here, I want to die. They put me on suicide watch for the first month. My whole life ruined for a single reflex action. My retirement taken from me. My company gone. All thanks to you.

‘Well, I’m glad you’ve come here today. Elaine didn’t think I’d want to see you. She was quite tearful on the phone.But do you know why I agreed? It was because I wanted you to get a glimpse of what could be coming your way. There’s absolutely zero proof that Roland killed his grandmother, and if he was the one who ran over Eliot, I’m pretty sure he’s going to have worked out a way to make sure no-one ever finds out. Anyway, he’s not the main suspect. You are!

‘Elaine told me everything. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a taste of your own medicine. That will give me something to smile about.’

I knew there was an answer to everything he’d said. I could have tried to argue with him or find a good put-down. But what was the point? I got up and left.

I could. He couldn’t. That was enough.

Killer

I tried not to be upset by my meeting with Charles Clover, but, standing on the platform at Woolwich Arsenal with a seven-minute wait for the next train, I couldn’t put it out of my mind. His accusations didn’t bother me too much. I mean, you hardly need a degree in moral philosophy to reach the conclusion that, all in all, it’s the right thing to report someone to the police for murder, particularly when they’ve also tried to kill you. But I did find it hard to get my head around his description of the murder of Alan Conway as a ‘reflex action’, something a child might have done. Was it as easy as that? All those thousands of books published every year about detectives, police investigations, suspects, clues, conspiracies … did they really hinge on something so banal? And what about that other remark of his? ‘You might have done the same.’ I couldn’t help wondering if it might not be true. Given the right circumstances, are we all potential killers? Was that the ultimate appeal of murder stories, that they reveal not just the facts of a particular crime but the truth about all of humanity, that civilisation and decency are onlyskin-deep and just beneath the surface we are all potentially monsters?

That was what had made Belmarsh so morbidly fascinating. There had been a whole crowd of prisoners in the room where I’d met Charles and all of them had been stripped of that outer layer, revealed for what they were. Sitting among them had been a disquieting experience. I thought of Charles at one of his dinner parties, standing there with a glass of Gavi – his favourite Italian wine – expounding on literary awards. Compare Ian McEwan’sAmsterdam(lightweight, it won the Booker Prize) toAtonement(a masterpiece, shortlisted, it didn’t). The Booker vs the Costa. The virtues of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. And then the Charles Clover I had just met, sullen, angry, biting into his Double Decker. It was almost impossible to accept that the two men were the same. What had separated them? Was it what they had done? Or was it being found out?

My mobile rang. I looked at the screen and saw that it was Elaine. I didn’t want to speak to her. I didn’t feel I was ready. But it would be unfair to ignore her and I still had five minutes until the train arrived. I answered.

‘Susan? Where are you?’ She knew I had come out of the prison. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to answer the phone.

‘I’m at the station,’ I told her.

‘Did you see him? How was he?’

I searched for the right words. ‘It wasn’t easy, Elaine. To be honest, I don’t know why he agreed to see me. He hates me. I suppose I can’t blame him. He thinks I was wrong to turn him in, that I should have covered up for him.’

---