Page 50 of Marble Hall Murders

‘I wish she’d never sold a single bloody book. I wish her stupid Little People had died a death before they saw the light of day. Somebody should have stamped on them. They’ve been the curse of my whole bloody life.’

It was too late, I realised. He had come into the room with a sackful of resentment and I’d given him the excuse to release it.

‘You have no idea what it was like at Marble Hall,’ Eliot continued. ‘You should go and visit the place, Susan. It’s open every day of the week and it’ll only cost you fifteen quid to have a snoop around. Of course, you won’t see it the way I did. They’ve managed to get the blood out of the carpets. What you’ll see is a lovely country house with chandeliers and wood panelling and lots of awards on the shelves.’

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ Gillian suggested.

‘What else is there to talk about? My grandmother is the reason we’re all here. She’s the reason why nothing – nothing! – has ever worked out for me. That venomous old cow!’ He leaned towards me, as if drawing me into his confidence. ‘She turned that place into a rat trap and kept every one of us locked inside. We weren’t her family – we were her prisoners! My uncle Jonathan was the only one whodidn’t care, but he thought the sun shone out of her withered backside and couldn’t wait to get his hands on her precious creation. It was always “legacy” with him. You know he even named his daughter after one of her characters? Jasmine Little – meet Jasmine Crace. How creepy is that? My parents hated Grandma just as much as I did, but they were too cowardly to break away. They stayed in Devizes and my dad worked in some third-rate art gallery and didn’t dare write a word about art or artists because he knew what she would say. My mum wasted her time painting the local councillors and farmers who only ever complained that she made them look too fat or too old.

‘Do you know what her power was? She knew exactly how to be cruel. She would find the weak spot in anyone and twist it until they screamed. Julia was overweight. Jasmine was useless. And as for me, when I told her I was thinking of being an author, she didn’t give me a word of encouragement. She laughed at me! I was only ten years old! But she was the same with all of us. My grandfather never went near her unless he had to. My poor uncle Freddy – only he wasn’t really my uncle – couldn’t do anything right. Grandma was a patron of an orphanage in Salisbury and she’d adopted him, brought him in to live with us. Everyone applauded and said what a saint she was, but she treated him like a skivvy from the day he arrived. He was a second-class citizen. He didn’t even eat with us!

‘I’ll tell you something that will amuse you, Susan. Roland, Julia and me – the three of us planned to kill her! We used to talk about it all the time. There was an abandoned cottage in the grounds and we used to meet there and talk about how wewere going to do it. That was the game we played. Would it be poison from the garden? She always had a glass of lemon and ginger on her bedside table – it was the first thing she drank in the morning – and we thought we could put it in there. Or we could leave a roller skate at the top of the stairs and wait for her to take a tumble. We thought about setting fire to her bedroom or pushing her off the roof, like poor old Alan. Maybe that’s why I became a murder writer – because I was already thinking of murder when I was nine years old.’

‘It’s just as well she died of natural causes,’ I said.

He sneered at me. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Did anyone ever suggest otherwise?’

‘No-one would have dared.’

‘I think we should go,’ Gillian said. ‘It’s late and I’m on the first shift tomorrow.’

‘No. I want to tell Susan about Roland. We all want to talk about Roland, don’t we? He was my hero!’

Eliot drank some more wine.

‘Grandma Miriam picked on Julia and me,’ he continued, before anyone could stop him. ‘I was the stupid one, the baby of the family. But my sister got it much worse. Have I already told you this? She was fat! That’s all there was to it. She was very fat. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t as if she was stuffing food into her mouth. It was just something genetic, and anyway, what does it matter, what shape you are? She was a darling. We all loved her. She was so kind and gentle when she was a girl. She was always out in the garden. She loved flowers and birds and all that stuff. She’s a teacher now, but I’m surprised she didn’t become a garden designer or something like that. She knew all about plants.

‘Anyway, Grandma used to make jokes about her, all the time.’ Eliot fell back on the old lady’s voice. ‘“Fat Julia. Piggy Julia. How many chocolates have you had, Julia? We’re going to have to get a stronger chair for you, Julia.”’

He reached for the wine bottle, but Gillian stopped him. ‘You’ve had enough,’ she said firmly.

‘Why would you care?’ Eliot wrenched the bottle towards him and held it close. ‘Roland protected us,’ he said. ‘Roland was the only one who stood up to her. He was only seventeen years old, but he was the bravest person in the house. Jasmine adored him. And for Julia and me, he was our knight in shining armour. Grandma was afraid of him. When he was with us, she never did any of her teasing.’

‘Where is he now?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. In London, I think. I haven’t seen him for a while.’

Gillian stood up. ‘I have to go,’ she insisted. ‘You can stay if you want to, Eliot, but I want to go to bed. I’ll call an Uber if you like.’

I came to her rescue. ‘I ought to be on my way too,’ I said. ‘It’s been a lovely meal, Elaine. Thank you for inviting me.’ I turned to Eliot. ‘Maybe you should write about your grandmother, now that she’s dead,’ I said.

He gave me a queer look, half smiling, half warning me.

‘Maybe I already have,’ he said.

Marble Hall

Marble Hall stood close to Salisbury Plain, surrounded by so much land that even if you climbed to the top of its highest tower you wouldn’t see anything you didn’t own. There were gardens, orchards, great swathes of pasture and broadleaf woodland. The house itself was a mishmash of different styles, mainly Tudor and Jacobean, knocked around by different owners until Miriam Crace bought it. Goodness knows what she must have been thinking at the time. She’d already made a ton of money, but this was a couple of years before her first child was even born. Why did she think she would need nine bedrooms, a dining room, a breakfast room, a library, a conservatory and a ballroom – not to mention the coach house, stables, tennis court, swimming pool, lodge house and gamekeeper’s cottage in the grounds? Did she see herself as the Citizen Kane of children’s authors, building a retreat from the world that would become a world in itself?

Less than half of the property was open to the public, but that was more than enough. It wasn’t the carpets or the chandeliers that drew ten thousand visitors a year, it was the lifeof its famous occupant. Or, at least, her ghost. Her books, in forty-seven languages, including Latin and Welsh, filled the library. Her shoes, summer dresses, hats, gloves, the mink coat she wore to the premiere of theLittle Peoplemusical at the London Palladium, were displayed in the bedroom. The twenty-three left-handed fountain pens she’d had specially made for her were laid out on the desk in her office, along with notebooks and manuscripts covered with her almost illegible handwriting.

Here was her CBE, resting on the grand piano she played for an hour every morning. Here was her favourite egg cup and a silver spoon, one of the dozen she had been given for her wedding by Lord Mountbatten, a huge fan of her books. And everywhere you looked there were the Little People themselves: models, photographs, cartoons, toys, framed newspapers and magazines, chocolate bars, dolls, games, jigsaws, key rings, cushions, beer mats and playing cards. After an hour or so, even the most ardent fan must have felt exhausted. It was lucky, then, that the stables had been converted into a café where you could enjoy Grandma Little’s Cream Tea or a glass of Grandpa Little’s Ginger Beer.

I had driven down from London a few days after my dinner with Elaine, although there were plenty of other things I could have been doing. Michael Flynn had surprised me by sending me a second manuscript to edit – another piece of Nordic noir. It was wanted by the end of the month, but it had been horribly translated and almost every line needed work. I couldn’t focus on any of it.

My thoughts were all over the place. It looked as if I was stuck as Eliot’s editor whether I liked it or not; certainly ifI was to have any hope of continuing my career at Causton Books. I had also promised Elaine that I would be a friend to him, which went against all my professional instincts. But she’d persuaded me that I owed it to her and, much to my annoyance, I’d decided she was right. And then there was Eliot himself. Every word he had said at the dinner table had come as a hammer blow, smashing all my preconceptions about his famous grandmother. Could Miriam really have been the horror he had described? How could she possibly have created the world’s most lovable family when she’d been so hateful to her own?

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