Page 121 of Marble Hall Murders

‘You’re allowed to do that?’

‘I can do whatever I think is right if I think it’s going to solve the case. And you haven’t been arrested. Yet.’

‘I wish you’d left off the “yet”, Ian,’ I said.

The bill had arrived and we split it fifty-fifty. Then he drove me home.

The Watch

Ian Blakeney and I didn’t meet until the weekend. I picked up a few clothes from my flat and moved in with a gay couple I’d known since university. Rob and Steve provided exactly the right amount of kindness and sympathy without digging too deeply into the various catastrophes that had brought me to them. They were well off, with a three-bedroom house on the edge of Muswell Hill and a second home in Yorkshire, and after a couple of days, they announced that they were heading off for two weeks, but they were fine about leaving me on my own. They gave me the keys to the house, instructions to eat or drink anything I found, and then disappeared in their electric Jeep Avenger with their two dogs and a pile of luggage.

With the dogs out of the way, Hugo could move in. The vet’s bill was going to be astronomical, of course, but I was glad to see that he seemed to have completely recovered from his experience and there were few side effects, apart from a missing patch of fur and a scar where his wound had been stitched together. I think we were closer than we had beenbefore. He was certainly puzzled by his new surroundings. Every time I looked down, he would be close to my feet, and at night he slept under the bed.

Meanwhile, I’d contacted the same builders who’d done up the flat when I moved in. Blakeney’s team had removed a lot of the debris and tidied up the place, but it still needed repairs and redecorating. I’d decided by now that I had no intention of moving. I wasn’t going to let the Crace Estate, the ghost of Alan Conway or anyone else drive me out of the life I had chosen, even if that life was feeling a little fragile. Once Rob and Steve had left for Yorkshire, I was on my own – and I didn’t much like it. I had no job. I had nobody to see, though I wasn’t in the mood for dinner or the theatre anyway. I’d brought the first two parts of Eliot’s manuscript with me and read them again, no longer with any interest in their literary merits. I was more interested in finding any clues that might have led to his death. I made a few notes, but it wasn’t enough to fill the long stretch of hours that I now realised made up each day. I knew perfectly well there was nothing wrong with being an unemployed single woman in my fifties, but even so, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that, somehow, this wasn’t me.

So I was glad when my phone rang and Ian Blakeney asked if he could come round the same day. I gave him the address and then went out and bought a few snacks and drinks. I put fresh flowers in the kitchen too. They gave the illusion of home.

He arrived in the middle of the afternoon, suited and carrying a leather briefcase. He asked how I was and how the cat was doing, but otherwise he was aloof and businesslike, which made me wonder if, along with the dust in the tyres, there had been another development in the murderinvestigation, one he didn’t want to share with me. He said nothing about that, but sat down at the kitchen table and removed from the briefcase a sheaf of pages I recognised as a printout of Eliot’s novel and an A5 notebook with a Japanese cover – white birds flying over bamboo. That had to be Eliot’s too. I made us both tea and finally we sat down together.

‘There are three things we have to discuss,’ he said. ‘The first is the death of Lady Margaret Chalfont in the book. The second is the death of Miriam Crace twenty years ago. And the third is Eliot Crace and your relationship with him, as well as anything that might connect the first with the second.’

‘Do you have any news?’ I asked. I was concerned about his lack of warmth.

‘There’s nothing I can discuss with you, Susan. But it’s irrelevant anyway. I think we should start with something you said to me the second time we met. Eliot Crace used people he knew as characters. Find the killer in the book and we find the killer in real life. Is that how it works?’

‘I know it sounds unlikely … but yes.’

‘OK. So where do you want to start?’

‘This might help.’ I had a notepad and opened it, showing him a list of names I’d drawn up.

Miriam Crace

Lady Margaret Chalfont

Jonathan Crace

Jeffrey Chalfont

Leylah Crace

Lola Chalfont

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