‘I hope you can help him, Sue,’ he said. ‘Because actually, I quite liked him and I think what happened to him was pretty crook. And I hope you find Cecily. Do they have any idea what happened to her?’

‘Not yet.’ There was one last thing I wanted to ask. ‘You said that, at first, you thought it might be Aiden with Lisa in the wood. Was that because he was usually promiscuous?’

‘Promiscuous! That’s a funny word to use. You mean did he fool around?’ Lionel gave me a crooked smile. ‘I don’t know anything about his marriage, and when I saw those two people out there I don’t know why it popped into my head that it might be him. Maybe he and Cecily were happy together and maybe they weren’t – but I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t think Aiden would’ve dared go behind her back. I mean, she was the one who’d found him and brought him up from London, and in her own way Cecily was as tough as her sister. If she’d found out he was cheating on her, she’d have had his balls for breakfast.’

We shook hands. Another trainer had come into the café, also in Lycra, and I watched the two of them give each other a man hug, bumping chests and rubbing each other’s back.

I still wasn’t sure that I liked Lionel Corby. Could I believe the version of events that he had presented to me? I wasn’t sure about that either.

Michael Bealey (Lunch)

Michael J. Bealey was a busy man.

His PA had rung to say that drinks at Soho House would no longer work but could I meet him for lunch at twelve thirty? Lunch turned out to be a sandwich and a cup of coffee at a Prêt just around the corner from his flat on the King’s Road, but that was fine by me. I wasn’t sure if Michael would have had enough conversation for a two-course meal. He had always been a man of few words, despite having published millions of them. The “J.” on his business card was important to him, by the way. It was said that he had known both Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick and had adapted his own name as a sort of tribute to them both. He was well known as an expert on their work and had written long articles that had been published in Constellations (which he had also edited at Gollancz) and Strange Horizons.

He was already there when I arrived, scrolling through a typescript on his iPad. There was something mole-like about the way he worked, hunched forward as if he was trying to burrow his way into the screen. I had to remind myself that he was about the same age as me. His grey hair, glasses and old-fashioned suit added an extra ten years, which he seemed to embrace. There are some men who are never really young, who don’t even want to be.

‘Oh, hello, Susan!’ He didn’t get up. He wasn’t the kissing sort, not even a peck on the cheek. But he did at least fold the cover over his iPad and smile at me, blinking in the sun. He already had a coffee and a Bakewell tart, which was sitting on the paper bag it had come in. ‘What can I get you?’ he asked.

‘Actually, I’m all right, thank you.’ I had glanced at the rather depressing muffins and pastries on offer and hadn’t been tempted. Anyway, I wanted to get this over with.

‘Well, do help yourself to a piece of this.’ He pushed the tart towards me. ‘It’s quite good.’

That clipped speech. I remembered it so well. He was like an actor in one of those plays from between the wars where everyone talks for a long time but very little happens.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m very well, thank you.’

‘And in Greece, I understand!’

‘Crete, actually.’

‘I’ve never been to Crete.’

‘You should. It’s beautiful.’

Even on a Sunday, the traffic trundled past on the King’s Road, and I could smell dust and petrol in the air.

‘So how are things?’ I asked, snatching at the question to fill the silence.

He sighed and blinked several times. ‘Well, you know, it’s been one of those years.’ It always was, where Michael was concerned. He’d turned gloom into an art form.

‘I was pleased to see you picked up the Atticus Pünd series.’ I was determined to be positive. ‘And you kept my old covers. Somebody gave me a copy the other day. I thought it looked great.’

‘It seemed both pointless and uneconomical to rejacket them.’

‘Are they selling well?’

‘They were.’

I waited for him to explain what he meant but he just sat there, sipping whatever was in his paper cup. ‘So what happened?’ I asked eventually.

‘Well, it was that business with David Boyd.’

I vaguely knew the name but couldn’t place it. ‘Who is David Boyd?’

‘The writer.’

There was another silence. Then, hesitantly, Michael continued. ‘I actually brought him into the company so in a way I suppose it was my fault. I bought his first book at Frankfurt. A three-way auction, but we were lucky. One publisher dropped out and the second wasn’t overenthusiastic, so we got it at a good price. We published the first book eighteen months ago and the second last January.’

‘Science fiction?’

‘Not exactly. Cybercrime. Very well researched. Quite well written. It’s actually quite terrifying stuff. Big business, fraud, politics, the Chinese. Disappointing sales, though. I don’t know what went wrong, but the first book underperformed and the second book was actually much weaker. At the same time, he had an aggressive agent – Ross Simmons at Curtis Brown – trying to tie us down to a new deal, so we took a decision and let him go. Sad, but there you are. These things happen.’

Was that the end of the story? ‘What did happen?’ I asked.

‘Well, he took umbrage. Not the agent. The writer. He felt we’d let him down, gone back on our word. It was all very unpleasant, but the worst of it was that he – actually, you’re not going to believe this – but it seems that he hacked into the Hely Hutchinson Centre to get his revenge.’

A whole series of terrifying possibilities opened up before my eyes. I had read about Hely Hutchinson in the Bookseller: a brand-new, state-of-the-art distribution centre near Didcot in Oxfordshire. Two hundred and fifty thousand square feet. Robot technology. Sixty million books shipped every year.

It had been a nightmare, Michael explained. ‘It was absolute chaos. We had the wrong titles being sent to the wrong bookstores. Orders got ignored. We had one customer who received thirty copies of the same Harlan Coben … one a day for a whole month. Other books just disappeared. If you tried to find them it was as if they had never been written. That included the reissues of Atticus Pünd.’ He realised that he had managed several sentences in one go and stopped himself. ‘Very annoying.’

‘How long did this go on for?’ I asked.

‘It’s still going on. We’ve got people in there now, sorting it out. The last two months were the worst. God knows what it’s going to do to our sales and operating profit for this quarter!’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said. ‘Have you gone to the police?’

‘The police are involved, yes. I really can’t say any more than that. We’ve managed to keep it out of the press. I shouldn’t really even be talking to you about it.’

Why was he talking to me about it? I guessed. ‘I suppose this isn’t a very good time to be approaching you,’ I said. ‘I mean, for a job.’

‘I’d love to help you, Susan. I think you did a very good job with the Pünd novels – and I understand Alan Conway wasn’t an easy man to work with.’

‘You don’t know the half of it.’

‘What actually happened? At Cloverleaf Books?’

‘It wasn’t my fault, Michael.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’ He broke off a piece of Bakewell tart. ‘But, of course, there were rumours.’

‘The rumours weren’t true.’

‘Rumours very rarely are.’ He popped the fragment into his mouth and waited until it had melted. He didn’t chew or swallow. ‘Look, I’m firefighting at the moment and I really can’t help you. But I can put the word out and see. What are you looking for? Publisher? Editorial director?’

‘I’ll take anything.’

‘How about freelance? Project by project?’

‘Yes. That might work.’

‘There might be something.’

Or there might not. That was it.

‘Are you sure you won’t have a coffee?’ he asked.

‘No. Thank you, Michael.’

He didn’t dismiss me quite yet. To have done so would have been a humiliation. We talked for another ten minutes about the business, about the collapse of Cloverleaf, about Crete. He finished his coffee and his pastry and then we parted company without shaking hands because he had icing sugar on his fingers. So much for the Ralph Lauren jacket! The meeting had been a complete waste of time.

Craig Andrews (Dinner)

It was my third meal of the day and I still hadn’t eaten.

This time, however, I was going to make up for it. Craig had taken me to an old-fashioned trattoria in Notting Hill, one of those places where the waiters wear black and white and the pepper grinders are about six inches too long. The pasta was home-made, the wine rough and reasonably priced and the tables a little too close together. It was exactly the sort of restaurant I liked.

‘So what do you think?’ he asked as we tucked into very good bruschetta with ripe tomatoes and thick leaves of fresh basil.