*

There were two photographs of Cecily attached, both taken on the day of her wedding.

Lawrence had described his daughter as beautiful and of course, as her father and on that particular day, what other word would he use? But it wasn’t exactly true. She was wearing an ivory wedding dress with a locket of platinum or white gold engraved with a heart and an arrow and three stars. Her naturally blonde hair had been styled immaculately in a way that made me think of Grace Kelly and she was looking past the camera as if she had just caught sight of the perfect happiness that lay ahead and that was to be hers. And yet there was something inescapably ordinary about her. I really don’t want to be cruel. She was an attractive woman. Everything about the photograph suggested to me that she was somebody I would like to have known and still hoped, faintly, to meet.

I suppose all I’m saying is that I could imagine her filling in her tax forms or doing the washing-up and the gardening, but not speeding round a series of hairpin bends in 1950s Monaco in an Aston Martin convertible.

I closed my laptop and walked back to the car. I still had to hit London and then take the North Circular Road all the way round to Ladbroke Grove. Craig Andrews had said he would be home by four to let me in and I wanted to shower and change clothes before dinner at Le Caprice.

I should have spent longer thinking about what I had read. Lawrence’s email contained a great many of the answers to the puzzle. I just hadn’t seen them yet.

Ladbroke Grove

When I was working as an editor, I liked to see where my writers lived and worked. I wanted to know what books they had on their shelves and the art they had on their walls, whether their desks were neat and orderly or a battlefield of notes and discarded ideas. It always irritated me that my most successful author, Alan Conway, never once invited me to the sprawling folly that was Abbey Grange (he’d renamed it after a Conan Doyle short story). I only saw it after he was dead.

I’m not sure that we need to know the life story of an author to appreciate his or her work. Take Charles Dickens, for example. Does it add very much to our enjoyment of Oliver Twist to know that he had himself been a street urchin in London, working at a blacking factory with a boy who happened to be called Fagin? Conversely, when we meet his female characters is it a distraction to recall how badly he treated his first wife? Literary festivals all over the country turn writers into performers and open doors into their private lives that, I often think, would be better left closed. In my view, it’s more satisfying to learn about authors from the work they produce rather than the other way round.

But editing a book is a very different experience from just reading it. It’s a collaboration and I always saw it as my job to get inside my writer’s head, to share something of the process of creativity. Books may be written in isolation, but their creators are to an extent defined by their surroundings and I always found that the more I knew about them, the more I could help them with what they were trying to achieve.

I’d visited Craig Andrews once when I was editing his first novel. He had a three-bedroom house on a quiet street with residential parking and lots of trees. He had converted the basement into a spacious kitchen and dining area with French windows opening onto a patio. The ground floor was given over to a study/library and a sitting room with a widescreen TV on the wall and an upright piano. The bedrooms were further up on two more floors. Craig had plenty of female friends but he had never been married so the taste was entirely his: expensive but restrained. There were books everywhere, hundreds of them on shelves that had been designed to fit into every nook and cranny, and it goes without saying that anyone who collects books can’t be all bad. It might seem strange that someone whose work included graphic descriptions of gang violence and the lengths – or depths – to which women would go to smuggle drugs into jail should have a fondness for romantic poetry and French watercolours, but then it had always been the elegance of his writing – along with its authenticity – that I had admired.

I was the one who had discovered Craig. At least, I had believed the young agent who had recommended him to me and after I had read his manuscript I had snapped him up immediately with a two-book contract. His first novel came with the title A Life Without Mirrors, which was actually a rather marvellous quotation from Margaret Atwood: ‘To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.’ It was also the first thing I changed. His book was well written but it wasn’t literary fiction and Craig certainly wasn’t interested in the sort of sales that, unfortunately, go with that territory. Jail Time may have been crasser, but it was short and sharp and looked good on the cover. As he’d told me in his email, he’d been doing time ever since.

He greeted me at the door, dressed in his trademark T-shirt and jeans with, I noticed, bare feet. I suppose anyone who has spent twenty years in banking has earned the right to go without a tie or socks. He was forty-four, I remembered from his biography. He looked younger. He belonged to a local gym and he used it. He had the sort of cover photograph that helped sell books.

‘Susan! How great to see you.’ A kiss on both cheeks. ‘Let me help you with that bag. Come on in.’

He showed me up to a comfortable room on the top floor. It was built into the eaves with windows overlooking communal gardens at the back; certainly a step up from the Premier Inn. There was an en-suite bathroom with one of those showers that squirt water in every direction, and Craig suggested I might like to use it and change while he put on the kettle. We would both be out that evening. He was going to the theatre. I had dinner with James Taylor.

‘I’ll give you a spare set of keys and show you where the fridge is and after that you’re on your own.’

It was good to see him again, a reminder of the life I had managed to mislay in the course of my involvement with Alan Conway. I unzipped my wheelie and pulled out my clothes, along with the purchases I’d made in Woodbridge. I’d transferred them to the case when I got out of the car; there was no way I was going to turn up on his doorstep looking as if I’d just been to the sales.

Even so, I was a little uncomfortable as I laid everything out on the bed. Part of it was a feeling I often get when I stay in other people’s houses: a sense of crossing a line, of intrusion. It was one of the reasons I had decided against asking Katie to put me up. Had I really come here to save the cost of a couple of nights in a cheap hotel? No. That wasn’t fair. Craig had invited me and I hadn’t seen any reason not to accept. It would be more pleasant than being on my own.

But I had definitely felt a pang of guilt when I’d called him and now, glancing at my laptop, which was also on the bed, I knew why. I was engaged to Andreas. We might have postponed the wedding but we hadn’t completely called it off. The diamond ring was back in the shop, but there were other diamond rings. So what was I doing in the home of a man I barely knew – moreover, a man who was wealthy, single and about my age? I hadn’t mentioned any of this to Andreas. What would I have said if he had gone sneaking off to some Athenian lovely? How would I have felt?

Of course, I reminded myself, nothing was going to happen. Craig had never shown any interest in me, or the other way round. But it probably didn’t help that even as these thoughts went through my head I was standing in his shower, enjoying, incidentally, the sort of water pressure that we had never been able to achieve in Crete. I felt exposed in every way. I wondered if I should FaceTime Andreas and tell him where I was. At least it would remove any hint of betrayal. I was on business. I was earning ten thousand pounds, which would all go into the hotel. With the time difference, it would be eight o’clock in Crete, dinner time for the guests even though the locals preferred to eat much later. Andreas might be helping out in the kitchen. He might be looking after the bar. He must have read my email by now! Why hadn’t he FaceTimed me?

The laptop was still sitting there accusingly when I came out. I decided to give it another day before I emailed him again. Craig was waiting for me downstairs and it would be rude to keep him waiting too long. And maybe I didn’t want to talk to Andreas. He was the one who needed to talk to me.