‘Our first granddaughter.’ Pauline’s voice faltered. ‘She’s a lovely child, everything we could have ever wanted.’

‘Pauline and I are semi-retired,’ Lawrence went on. ‘We have a house near Hyères in the South of France and we spend quite a bit of time down there. Anyway, a few days ago, Cecily rang us. I took the call. This would have been around two o’clock, French time. I could tell at once that Cecily sounded very upset. More than that, I’d say she was nervous. I don’t know where she was calling from, but this was a Tuesday so she was probably at the hotel. We normally have a bit of banter but she got straight to the point. She said she’d been thinking about what happened—’

‘The murder.’

‘Exactly. She said that she had been right all along and that Stefan Codrescu was not responsible for the crime. I asked her what she was talking about and she said she’d come across something in a book she’d been given. “It was right there – staring me in the face.” Those were her exact words. Anyway, she told me she’d already sent it to me and sure enough, it turned up the very next day.’

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a paperback. I recognised it at once – the picture on the cover, the typeface, the title – and at that moment, this entire meeting began to make sense.

The book was Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, number three in the series written by Alan Conway that I had edited and published. I immediately recalled that it was largely set in a hotel, but in the county of Devon, not in Suffolk, and in 1953, not the present day. I remembered the launch party at the German embassy in London. Alan had had too much to drink and had insulted the ambassador.

‘Alan knew about the murder?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes. He came to the hotel and stayed a few nights, six weeks after it happened. We both met him. He told us that he had been a friend of the dead man, Frank Parris, and he asked us a lot of questions about the murder. He talked to our staff as well. We had absolutely no idea that he was going to turn the whole thing into an entertainment. If he’d been honest with us, we might have been more circumspect.’

Which was exactly the reason he wasn’t honest with you, I thought.

‘You never read the book?’ I said.

‘We forgot all about it,’ Lawrence admitted. ‘And Mr Conway certainly never sent us a copy.’ He paused. ‘But Cecily read it and she found something that cast new light on what had happened at Branlow Hall … at least, that’s what she believed.’ He glanced at his wife as if seeking her approbation. ‘Pauline and I have both read the book and we can’t see any connection.’

‘There are similarities,’ Pauline said. ‘Firstly, nearly all the characters are recognisable, clearly based on people that Mr Conway met in Woodbridge. They even have the same names … or very similar ones. But what I don’t understand is that he seems to have taken pleasure in twisting people so that they come out like horrible caricatures of themselves. The owners of the Moonflower, which is the hotel in the book, are clearly based on Lawrence and myself, for example. But they’re both crooks. Why would he do that? We’ve never done anything dishonest in our lives.’ She seemed more indignant than upset. The way she was looking at me, it was almost as if I was to blame.

‘In answer to your question, we had no idea the book had been published,’ she went on. ‘I don’t read murder mysteries myself. Neither of us does. Sajid Khan told us that Mr Conway is no longer alive. Maybe that’s just as well because if he were, we might be very tempted to take legal action.’

‘So let me get this straight,’ I said. I had the sense of facts tumbling on top of each other, yet I knew there was something they hadn’t told me. ‘You believe that maybe, despite all the evidence, not to mention the confession, Stefan Codrescu did not kill Frank Parris and that Alan Conway came to the hotel and discovered – in a matter of days – who the real killer was. He then somehow identified that person in Atticus Pünd Takes the Case.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But that makes no sense at all, Pauline. If he knew the killer and there was an innocent man in prison, surely Alan would have gone straight to the police! Why would he turn it into a work of fiction?’

‘That’s precisely why we’re here, Susan. From what Sajid Khan told us, you knew Alan Conway better than anyone. You edited the book. If there is something in there, I can’t think of anyone more likely to find it.’

‘Wait a minute.’ Suddenly I knew what was missing. ‘This all started when your daughter spotted something in Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. Was she the only one who read it before she sent it to you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But what was it she saw? Why didn’t you just call her and ask her what she meant?’

It was Lawrence Treherne who answered my question. ‘Of course we called her,’ he said. ‘We both read the book and then we rang her several times from France. Finally we got through to Aiden and he told us what had happened.’ He paused. ‘It seems that our daughter has disappeared.’

Departure

I lost my temper with Andreas that evening. I really didn’t mean to but the day had brought so many mishaps, one after another, that I was going to scream either at the moon or at him and he just happened to be nearer.

It had begun with that nice couple Bruce and Brenda from Macclesfield, who turned out not to be that nice after all, demanding a fifty per cent reduction in their bill or they were going to hit TripAdvisor with a list of complaints that they’d stacked up from the day they’d arrived and which, they assured us, would put anyone off ever coming anywhere near us again. And what was their problem? An hour without Wi-Fi. The sound of guitar music at night. The sighting of a solitary cockroach. What annoyed me was they had complained every morning, always with tight little smiles, and I’d known all along that they were going to try something on. I’d developed an antenna for the tourists who arrived with extortion as part of their holiday plans. You’d be amazed how many of them there were.

Panos didn’t show up. Vangelis was late. Andreas’s computer had a glitch – I’d asked him to get it looked at – and it had managed to send two room requests into spam. By the time we noticed, the clients had booked elsewhere. Before we went to bed, we had a glass of Metaxa, the Greek brandy that only tastes nice in Greece, but I was still in a bad mood and it was when Andreas asked me what the matter was that I finally snapped.

‘What do you think is the fucking matter, Andreas? Everything!’

I don’t usually swear … at least, not at people I like. Lying in bed, watching Andreas getting undressed, I was annoyed with myself. Part of me wanted to blame him for everything that had happened since I’d come to Crete, while another part blamed myself for letting him down. But the worst of it was the sense of helplessness – that events had taken over and I was being steered by them rather than the other way round. Had I really chosen a life where complete strangers could humiliate me for a few euros and where my entire well-being could be decided by a lost reservation?

Right then I knew I had to go back to England and that actually I’d known it for some time, even if I’d tried to pretend otherwise.

Andreas cleaned his teeth and came out of the bathroom naked, which is how he slept, looking every inch like one of those figures – an ephebe or a satyr perhaps – that you might see on the side of an ancient vase. And it did seem to me that he had become more Greek in the past couple of years. His black hair was a little shaggier, his eyes a little darker and he had a sort of swagger that I’m sure he’d never displayed when he was teaching at Westminster School. He’d put on some weight too – or perhaps it was just that I noticed his stomach more now that he was out of a suit. He was still a handsome man. I was still attracted to him. But suddenly I needed to be away from him.

I waited until he got into bed. We slept under a single sheet with the windows open. We hardly got any mosquitoes right next to the sea and I preferred the night air to the artificial chill of the air conditioning.

‘Andreas … ’ I said.

‘What?’ He would have fallen asleep in seconds if I’d let him. His voice was already drowsy.

‘I want to go back to London.’

‘What?’ He twisted round, propping himself up on his elbow. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s something I have to do.’

‘In London?’

‘No. I have to go to Suffolk.’ He was looking at me, his face full of concern. ‘I won’t be long,’ I said. ‘Just a couple of weeks.’

‘We need you here, Susan.’

‘We need money, Andreas. We’re not going to be able to pay our bills if we don’t get some extra finance. And I’ve been offered a great deal of money to do a job. Ten thousand pounds. Cash!’

*

It was true.