‘The food? The restaurant?’

‘The crime! Do you think they’ll find Cecily Treherne?’

I shook my head. ‘If she was going to turn up, I think she’d have done so by now.’

‘So she’s dead.’

‘Yes.’ I thought for a moment. I hated writing her off like that. ‘Probably.’

‘Do you have any idea who killed her?’

‘It’s complicated, Craig.’ I tried to collect my thoughts. ‘Let’s start with the call that Cecily made to her parents. And let’s assume that someone overheard her talking. I thought at first that she had telephoned from Branlow Cottage, in which case it could only have been Aiden or Eloise, the nanny. But actually she made the call from her office in the hotel and that widens the field.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because Derek, the night manager, was there and he told me. “I knew something was wrong when she made that phone call. She was so upset.” That was what he said.’

‘So he overheard her.’

‘Yes. But Lisa Treherne had the office next door and she might have too. It could have been one of the guests. It could have been someone walking past the window outside.’ I sighed. ‘Here’s the problem. If you accept that Cecily had to be silenced because she knew something about the death of Frank Parris, then it follows that whoever killed her killed him. But as far as I can tell, none of the people I’ve mentioned had ever met Frank before. Not Derek, not Aiden, not Lisa. None of them had any motive.’

‘Could they have killed Cecily to protect someone else?’

‘I suppose so. But who? Frank Parris had been in Australia. He turned up by chance on the weekend of the wedding and he had no connection whatsoever with Branlow Hall except that he had booked himself in for three days.’ I drank some of the wine, which had rather pleasingly arrived at the table tucked into a straw basket. ‘Funnily enough, I have found two people who had a proper motive for killing him. And they’ve lied to me! But the trouble is, they live outside the hotel and I can’t see any way that they could have overheard Cecily making her telephone call.’ I thought about it. ‘Unless they happened to be there for a drink … ’

‘Who are they?’

‘Joanne and Martin Williams. Sister and brother-in-law of the deceased. They live in Westleton and Frank had a half-share in their house. That was the reason he was in Suffolk. He was going to force them to sell it.’

‘How do you know they lied?’

‘It was a small thing, really.’

It was Aiden who had first mentioned it. The marquee for the wedding had arrived late. It hadn’t come to the hotel until Friday lunchtime. When Martin Williams was talking about his brother-in-law, he had said that Frank had complained about the wedding and in particular about the marquee, which spoiled the view of the garden. But he had also told me that Frank had come to the house early, after breakfast. So, putting two and two together, Frank couldn’t possibly have seen the marquee.

On the other hand, Martin most certainly had. He must have gone to Branlow House sometime after Friday afternoon. Why? It was just possible that he wanted to find out which room Frank was in because he’d decided to kill him. Which would also explain Joanne’s last words to me: ‘Piss off and leave us alone.’ She knew what had happened and she was scared.

I told Craig all this and he smiled. ‘That’s very clever, Susan. Do you think this guy, Martin Williams, had it in him to kill his brother-in-law?’

‘Well, as I say, he was the only one with any motive. Unless … ’ I hadn’t meant to put my thoughts into words, but Craig was fascinated by the whole story and I knew I had to go on. ‘Well, it’s a crazy idea, but it has occurred to me that Frank might not have been the target.’

‘Meaning?’

‘First of all, he changed rooms. He was originally in room sixteen but apparently it was too modern for him. So they put him in room twelve.’

‘Who went into room sixteen?’

‘A retired headmaster called George Saunders. He taught at a local school. Bromeswell Grove. But suppose someone didn’t know that. They knock on the door of room twelve in the middle of the night and he opens it and in the half-light they whack him on the head with a hammer and kill him before they know what they’ve done.’

‘Would he have opened the door in the middle of the night?’

‘That’s a good point. But I’ve had another thought. Suppose this wasn’t about Frank Parris or George Saunders or any of the guests. It could have been all about Stefan Codrescu. It seems that he was having an affair with Lisa Treherne and there was all sorts of sexual jealousy and anger bubbling away at Branlow Hall. Suppose someone wanted to frame him?’

‘For murder?’

‘Why not?’

‘And just killed a guest at random?’ He didn’t need to inject so much scepticism into his voice. I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. ‘I can see why you need to talk to Stefan,’ he said.

‘If he ever gets back to me.’

‘It may take a while. The prison system makes things as difficult as possible for everyone involved – inside and out. That’s what it looks like, anyway.’

The main course came. We talked for a while about prisons.

When I’d first met Craig, four years earlier, he’d had the nervousness of all new writers; the sense that he needed to apologise for what he was doing. He had just turned forty, quite old to be starting out as a writer, although quite a bit younger than Alexander McCall Smith had been when he published his first major hit, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and maybe that was partly in my mind when I took him on. He was also wealthy. He didn’t show off, but his clothes, his car, the house in Ladbroke Grove, all told their own story. He had just left Goldman Sachs, where he’d headed up their UK Shares division. This information never appeared in his blurb.

I had assured him that Jail Time (as it eventually became) didn’t need any apology and I had enjoyed working with him. His main character, Christopher Shaw, was a plain-clothes policeman, sent into maximum-security jails to get information from high-profile inmates, and this was a formula that had worked well for the first three books in the series.

‘What got you interested in prisons?’ I asked him now. We were getting to the end of the main course. We’d worked our way through the bottle of wine.

‘Didn’t I ever tell you?’ I saw him hesitate. The lights from the candles were reflecting in his eyes. ‘My brother was in prison.’

‘I’m sorry … ’ I was surprised he had never told me before. The more cynical part of me could have used it as publicity.

‘John was the chief executive of one of the high-street banks. He was trying to raise investment from Qatar – this was in 2008, just after the financial crisis. He was paying them sweeteners, which of course he didn’t declare. The Serious Fraud Office went after him. And … ’ he waved a hand ‘ … he got three years.’

‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘No. It’s OK. John was scared and stupid rather than greedy, and what happened to him made me rethink my whole career. It could just as easily have been me. And prison! I’m not saying he shouldn’t have been punished, but prison is such a bloody waste of time. I’m convinced that one day people will look back on the twenty-first century and wonder how we could perpetuate such an absurd, Victorian idea. Do you want a dessert?’

‘No.’

‘Then let’s have coffee at home.’

It was another warm night and we decided to walk back. I wondered if I had spoiled the evening by asking about his personal life, but it had actually brought us closer.

‘Were you ever married?’ he asked.

‘No.’ The question took me by surprise.

‘Me neither. I came close a couple of times but it didn’t work out, and now I suppose it’s too late.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘You’re not even fifty.’

‘That’s not what I mean. Who in their right mind would want to marry a writer?’

‘I know lots of writers who are very happily married.’

‘I was seeing someone last year. She was divorced, about my age. We shared a lot of interests. I really liked her. But I never allowed her anywhere near me … not when I was working. And the trouble was, I was working all the time. In the end she got fed up with it and I can’t blame her. When you’re writing a book, the book is all that matters and some people can’t accept that.’

We had reached his front door. He opened it and we went inside.

‘Are you with anyone, Susan?’ he asked.

That was the moment when everything changed. God knows, I’ve read enough romantic novels to recognise when subtext comes galloping over the horizon and I knew exactly what Craig was asking – or rather, I saw the invitation behind the question he had just put to me. It should have been obvious the moment I’d entered his swish bachelor’s home or accepted dinner at that quaint local restaurant with its candles and its wine bottles in straw baskets.