Page 47 of Marble Hall Murders

I perched on one of the sofas and she poured two glasses ofchampagne. I watched the bubbles chasing each other up the side of the glass, but they did nothing to change my mood. What was I doing here? Did I even want to have dinner with Eliot and his wife?

I shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t Elaine’s fault, but I felt an overpowering sense of guilt and even shame. I thought of Charles pleading with me in his office after he had confessed to the murder of Alan Conway. ‘Alan is dead. He was going to die anyway.’ It was true. Alan had terminal cancer. It was one of the reasons he had decided to kill off Atticus Pünd, taking his much-loved detective with him. Charles had asked me to stay silent, not to go to the police – not just for him, but for his family and for everyone who worked at Cloverleaf Books who would lose their jobs when the business closed.

Maybe he’d had a point. It was something I’d never thought about, certainly not in the murder stories I’d edited, but was there any point in locking Charles up for twenty-plus years? It wasn’t as if he was a career criminal. In a moment of fury, seeing his whole life’s work threatened, he had pushed Alan Conway off the tower of his house, and if I’d been in his shoes, it’s just possible that I might have done the same. He hadn’t planned what he was going to do and you could hardly call him a danger to society: it was extremely unlikely that he would ever have killed anyone else. Would it have made such a difference to the world at large if I had stayed silent? Certainly, it would have improved my own prospects – considerably. Charles had been planning to retire. I would now be the CEO of Cloverleaf Books with complete editorial freedom and a healthy pay packet.

It would also have made me complicit in Alan Conway’smurder – but the reason I had insisted that Charles call the police and tell them what he had done wasn’t as high-minded as that. I had been offended by him. He had been so arrogant, so coldly patronising. Frankly, he had disgusted me. In a way, I’d been as impulsive as he was.

It had done me no good at all. Charles had knocked me to the floor and set fire to the building. I still believe his attempt to kill me was more unforgivable than his attack on Alan because this time he knew exactly what he was doing. He was cowardly and cruel, but in retrospect, I have to say that I was stupid. Charles had given me the opportunity to go along with what he’d done. ‘All right,’ I could have said. ‘Maybe you’re right. I never liked Alan very much, he was already dying, and nobody could argue that the world would be a worse place without him. Let me think about it …’ If I’d said all this, we could have gone down the road to have a drink together and I could have shopped him later. Instead, I’d blithely hoisted myself up onto the moral high ground and had pretty much invited the attack on me that followed. In some respects, I had to admit that I was partly to blame.

Sitting with Elaine in her living room with a glass of champagne warming itself in my hand, I found myself questioning everything I had done. Suddenly I saw an alternative future in which Charles would have been sitting there with us, all of us laughing like we used to, and this sense of emptiness and sadness would have been absent. It was his fault, I had to remind myself. He had brought this on all of us. I had done the right thing.

But I wasn’t sure I believed it.

‘How is Charles?’ I couldn’t avoid it. I had to ask.

Elaine shrugged. ‘I see him twice a month. It takes quite a bit of getting used to … going into that place. Sometimes Laura comes with me, but Gemma finds it very hard.’ Those were her two daughters. ‘I’m not sure you’d recognise him, Susan. I’m not sure he quite believes what’s happened … that he’s taken it on board. He doesn’t look like himself and although we only have an hour together, he doesn’t have very much to say. Worse than anything, there’s the terrible shame of it all, sitting there in the horrible tracksuit they make him wear, surrounded by disgusting people. And the smell!

‘I’m not asking you to feel sorry for him – or for me, for that matter. That’s not why I invited you here. I still love him. After he was arrested and he was waiting for his trial, they let him live here. He had to pay some money and surrender his passport, but we had a lot of time together and he said he wanted to divorce me, but I wouldn’t have it. He was still my husband, whatever he had done, and although I can’t forgive him – his behaviour has ruined all our lives – I hope you won’t mind if I say this.

‘I don’t think he was in his right mind when he attacked you, or when he killed Alan Conway. I’d been married to him for thirty years and I can tell you that I’d never met a less aggressive man. He never so much as raised his voice to me and he wouldn’t even watch violent films. You might like to know that he was thoroughly ashamed of himself. He’d wake up in the night, sobbing his eyes out. He wasn’t a killer! My feeling is that it was just the pressure of work that made him go mad … first with Alan, then with you. He was fighting not just for his own survival but for the whole family, for everything he’d done. That doesn’t excuse him. But I’m not goingto lie to you and say that I hate him. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. I happen to believe in those words.’

‘It does you credit.’ I regretted the words even as I spoke them. I sounded like a vicar in a country village. I threw back some of the champagne. Perhaps it would be easier to get through the evening if I was drunk.

She noticed my reaction. ‘I didn’t invite you here to talk about Charles,’ she said. ‘Do you think we can be friends again, Susan? Not like the old days. Those are gone for ever. But maybe it’ll help me to cope with all the changes in my life if I know we don’t hate each other.’

I raised my glass. ‘How many years have we known each other?’ I asked. ‘Of course we’re friends. None of this was your fault and I completely understand why you still support Charles. Maybe they’ll let him out sooner than you think.’

‘I want to talk to you about Eliot Crace.’

She refilled both our glasses.

‘You have to understand that I’ve always been very close to Eliot,’ Elaine began again. ‘When Charles first met him, he was already a very damaged child. That was the year before his grandmother, Miriam Crace, died. I’m sure you know Charles worked on her last two books:Little AngelsandLittle and Often. He often had to travel down to Marble Hall in Wiltshire and that was where he met Eliot, who was living there with his brother and sister and their parents – Edward and Amy.

‘Charles always used to tell me what a strange place it was. Miriam was in her early eighties, married to her husband, Kenneth, and not in good health. She had a heart condition. But she still ruled over that family with an iron fist. From what Charles said, she was quite a spiteful woman. She forcedher family to live at Marble Hall. The children went to local schools. None of them had any choice. She wanted them close to her so that she could have them around her – and control them. She wasn’t just a matriarch. She was a tyrant.’

‘I’m absolutely amazed,’ I interrupted. ‘I didn’t know any of this.The Little Peoplemust have sold a billion copies all over the world. If Miriam Crace was some sort of tyrant, you’d have thought that the truth would have come out by now. Charles never said anything – not even when he started publishing Eliot.’

‘He wasn’t allowed to. Anyone who worked with the estate had to sign an NDA before they were allowed near Marble Hall and I imagine Charles would have got into terrible trouble just for telling me! In fact, he never said anything until she died. Miriam Crace nearly separated from her husband. She dominated her children, bullied the grandchildren, and gave everyone who knew her a bad time. But the family was forced to hide the truth for the same reason they gave in to her demands. They needed the money! You probably know better than I do how muchThe Little Peoplewas worth, but if any one of them had gone to the press and blabbed about how much they disliked Granny, they’d have been cutting off their nose to spite their face.’

‘What impact did this have on Eliot?’ I asked.

‘I’m coming to that now. Edward was her younger son and he and his wife, Amy, had three children. In the year 2003, when Miriam died, Roland was seventeen, Julia was fifteen and Eliot was twelve. The older brother, Jonathan, and his wife, Leylah, had one child, a girl called Jasmine. Later, sadly, there was an accident and she died in her twenties.

‘Eliot doesn’t like talking about his life at Marble Hall, but I do know that he worshipped his older brother and was very close to his sister. The three of them were like a gang or a fellowship.

‘As soon as Miriam Crace died, the family went its separate ways. Charles said that they couldn’t wait to get out. They had properties all over the country, so Edward and Amy moved with their children to a house in Notting Hill Gate. They sent Eliot to a local prep school and then to the City of London School near St Paul’s, which was when things began to go wrong. It wasn’t the school’s fault. Eliot fell in with the wrong crowd. You know, he’d lived his whole life out in the sticks and maybe London was just too much for him to handle. There were drugs and alcohol, all-night parties and girls, and God knows what else. When he was sixteen, Eliot was expelled and his parents sent him to some sort of crammer in the hope that he would settle down and go to university, but there was never any chance of that. Things went from bad to worse. There was trouble with the police. His uncle Jonathan was running the estate by then and I have no idea how he managed to keep that out of the papers. Miriam Crace’s grandson arrested! That would really have made the headlines.’

‘Where are his parents now?’

‘They’re in America. Both his parents are in the art world. Edward was a curator at a gallery in Bath and then at the Wallace Collection here in London. His wife was quite a well-respected portrait painter. They didn’t really know how to handle Eliot. Charles said that to start with they overindulged him and then they went too far the other way, tryingto rein him in. In the end, Eliot didn’t want anything to do with them and when Edward was offered a job at some sort of institute in Miami, he grabbed it with both hands. Roland and Julia were doing all right for themselves and they saw Eliot as a lost cause – so why not?

‘Eliot wasted the next few years. He worked in an art gallery and an auction house, and I think he was an estate agent for a time. And then, when he was in his early twenties, he turned up at Cloverleaf Books with a novel he’d written.’

‘Gee for Gunfire.’

‘Yes.’

‘Charles said he loved it.’

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