Page 45 of Marble Hall Murders

Standing there in the reception area of Causton Books, with Jeanette in the background and people passing in and out on their way to lunch or whatever, I was feeling so many conflicting emotions that I wasn’t sure how to react. First and foremost, I was furious with Eliot. It was obvious that he had led me, quite deliberately, into a trap. He had suggested I come down with him in the lift. Why? He knew about my history with Elaine. Did he want to humiliate me or was this his way of putting me in my place? I was forced to re-evaluate everything I’d thought about him in our meeting. He’d had an edge to him – that much was sure. But I hadn’t thought of him as deliberately malicious. This scene he’d set up was something that would have delighted Alan Conway.

And then there was Elaine herself. She must have known that I was on my way because she hadn’t shown any surprise. So the two of them had planned this together. Again, I had to ask myself – why? I’d seen Elaine many times when Charlesand I were working together. I’d been to dinner at her house. The last time we’d been together, though, had been at the Old Bailey in London when I had been the star witness in her husband’s trial. At that time, we had studiously avoided each other’s eyes.

The last few years must have been traumatic and I could see it now in the heavy make-up she was wearing, which didn’t quite disguise the lines that had insinuated themselves around her eyes and mouth. She had aged, certainly. Otherwise, she was much as I remembered her, smartly dressed, with a designer handbag on her arm, expensive jewellery and immaculate silver hair … although it had been light brown at the time of the trial. She was about ten years older than me, with two daughters who must be in their early thirties by now. I wondered how they had reacted to everything that had happened. It hadn’t been my fault, but the truth was that I had destroyed this family and I was waiting for her to scream at me, to slap me, even to pull out a knife and stab me. If she had, I wouldn’t have entirely blamed her.

She surprised me. Before I could say anything, she reached forward with both hands and took hold of my arms. ‘Please don’t be cross with Eliot,’ she said. ‘I asked him not to tell you I was meeting him here.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I knew you wouldn’t want to see me.’ Her grip tightened and to my astonishment I saw tears in her eyes. ‘I am so sorry about what happened, Susan. I feel so ashamed. When they told me what Charles had done, at first I refused to believe it. You have no idea what this has done to the family … his parents, the girls, me.’

‘You don’t blame me for what happened?’

‘You were the victim in all this. He nearly killed you!’ Elaine took a deep breath. ‘I saw you that day in court, but Charles’s lawyers said I couldn’t talk to you. Afterwards, I wanted to write to you, but you’d already left Crouch End and gone to Crete and I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear from me.’

At the edge of my vision, I saw Eliot glance at his watch. It was a vintage Rolex on a leather strap – perhaps inherited and certainly valuable. I didn’t think he cared about the time. It was a signal that he wanted to leave.

Elaine saw it too. ‘I can’t talk now,’ she said. ‘Will you come to the house, Susan? Do you still have your old MG?’

‘Yes. I never got rid of it.’

‘Then you could drive over. I feel we have so much to talk about. We were friends once and maybe we can be again. Or if you felt uncomfortable coming there, we could meet in a bar or a restaurant in town.’

‘Are you still at the same address?’ I asked.

Elaine was still holding on to me, as if she was afraid I would run away. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I thought about moving. All the fuss. Reporters on the doorstep. Everyone in the street knows what Charles did and they’ll never forget. But it’s the family home. The girls grew up there and they didn’t want me to leave.’ Finally, she released me. ‘Can I text you – maybe later today? You’ve never been out of my thoughts, Susan. It was terrible what he did to you.’

‘Of course you can contact me,’ I said, although I wasn’t exactly happy about the idea. Did I want to be dragged back into a past I’d spent the last few years trying to forget?But perhaps she was right. Perhaps, together, we could put everything behind us. ‘You know how much I liked Charles,’ I went on. ‘I never wanted any of it to happen.’

‘We should go,’ Eliot said.

‘Yes.’ Elaine looked at me one last time, her expression somewhere between gratitude and dismay.

Then she let go of me and they left together.

*

I took the tube home and all the way there, rattling through the tunnels, I thought about what had happened.

Eliot first.

You might think that I’d been a little hard on him, questioning the first chapter and suggesting a complete change of location, but in fact I’d been very careful with my criticisms, effectively testing the water. I’d had other quite serious issues that I hadn’t mentioned. The whole business of the will, for example, struck me as unoriginal. Agatha Christie must have used the device at least a dozen times and it had been done to death in pretty much every TV detective series I’d ever seen. The scene with the reading of the will was as much a standby of crime fiction as a final chapter with all the suspects gathered in the library. This was just one of the things I’d kept to myself.

There had been plenty of others, but that was hardly surprising. I’ve been doing my job so long that I find it almost impossible to read any manuscript without visualising the circles and crosses, the asterisks, the underlines, the carets and the brackets that are among the tools of the editor’s trade. So,for example, I’d have crossed out the reference to the Nazi concentration camp on page two. I’m not sure a whodunnit is the right place for a casual mention of the Holocaust, and even Atticus Pünd generally preferred not to talk about it. I wasn’t sure about the Nazca Lines either: they just seemed wildly out of place.

I was concerned by the characterisations of both Judith Lyttleton and Alice Carling, the first ‘stouter’ than her mother and the second ‘plain’. I’d be the first to defend an author’s right to free speech, but the fact is that it’s not a good look for a male writer to body-shame his female characters. It just isn’t. I also wondered how Dr Benson, who was treating Pünd for a brain tumour, could also be advising Lady Chalfont on her heart condition. How many specialities could one man have?

And so on and so on. At the end of the day, I couldn’t order Eliot to make changes, but if I was going to work with him, I needed to find out how far I could push him before he turned against me. Alan Conway was a case in point. I should have known it was all over between us when he’d had a complete meltdown because I’d questioned his use of a semicolon.

How long would it be before Eliot went the same way?

He’d already kept me waiting forty minutes and then excused himself with a story that, frankly, I didn’t believe. From the start, he’d been playing with me, and that was most certainly the case when it came to Elaine Clover and our encounter in the reception area. Eliot had set me up quite deliberately. ‘Then we can go down together.’ Elaine might have asked him not to tell me she would be there, but he had been a willing participant in what could have turned into anunpleasant scene. Maybe he already knew that she was going to forgive me for her husband’s disgrace, but it made no difference. He had played a trick on me and I had found myself in a difficult position. What with the two of them acting in concert, plus Atticus Pünd and Alan Conway watching from the wings, I wondered if there weren’t too many shadows from my past closing in on me.

I heard the ping of a text arriving on my mobile.

I picked it up and glanced at the screen. I didn’t recognise the number, but I knew at once that the message had been sent by Elaine Clover. I glanced at my watch. It was only two fifteen. Either she was still at the table or her lunch with Eliot must have been a short one.

So glad we met, Susan. I need to talk

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