There was no answer so I rang him on the mobile, which went straight to voicemail. I thought of calling Nell or Panos or anyone else who worked at the Polydorus, but that smacked of desperation. Anyway, I didn’t want to get them involved in our personal affairs. That’s the trouble with living in Crete. Everyone has a village mentality, even if they live in the towns.

I was still puzzled and, to be honest, a little annoyed that he hadn’t replied. It wasn’t as if I had pushed him into a corner. All I’d done was set out some of my feelings and suggest that we should talk them through. Was that really so extreme? It was true that Andreas was often slow opening his emails, but he must have seen the heading and known it was from me. There was a side to his character, I knew, that made him reticent about discussing issues, relationships, ‘us’. Maybe it was something to do with the long-drawn-out days in the Mediterranean sunshine that somehow made them feel disconnected, even lazy, but a lot of the Greek men I had met were the same.

In the end, I gave up. I would only be in England for another few days. Cecily Treherne was still missing and I was running out of people to talk to, questions I could ask. Reading Atticus Pünd Takes the Case had provided me with almost no revelations at all. As to my own future, Michael Bealey had more or less told me that there was no chance of my picking up any publishing work, freelance or otherwise. So what options did that leave me? I could only go back to the Polydorus, sit down with Andreas and work out together what we were going to do.

I showered, got dressed and went downstairs. Breakfast was served in the same room where I’d had dinner with Lawrence, the waiters dressed in black trousers and white shirts, all of them bussed in from Woodbridge. There was a traditional buffet with fried eggs, bacon and beans all glistening in a slightly unappealing way under old-fashioned heat lamps. I had a sudden yearning for Greek yoghurt and fresh watermelon, but ordered from the menu and sat on my own with my notebook and a percolator of good coffee until the food arrived.

I had just started eating when I looked up and realised I was no longer alone. Lisa Treherne was standing over me, smiling – but it was the sort of smile that would put anyone off their Weetabix. I could imagine her looking at Stefan Codrescu in exactly the same way before she fired him.

‘Good morning, Susan,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’

‘Be my guest.’ I gestured at the empty chair on the other side of the table.

‘Actually, I’d say it was the other way round.’ She sat down primly. A waiter came across to offer her coffee but she waved him away. ‘We’re the ones looking after you.’

‘And very well, thank you.’

‘You like the hotel?’

‘It’s lovely.’ I could see trouble coming. It wouldn’t hurt to be nice. ‘I can see why you’re so popular.’

‘Yes. And this is the high season, of course. In fact, that’s what I want to talk to you about. How’s your investigation coming on?’

‘I wouldn’t really call it an investigation.’

‘Is there anything you can tell me about Cecily?’

‘I reread the book yesterday. Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. I have a few thoughts about what may have happened.’ I closed my notebook as if guarding its secrets.

‘A few thoughts?’ She glanced down at my plate. I hadn’t ordered very much – a poached egg on toast – but from the look on her face you’d have thought I had emptied the buffet. ‘The thing is, Susan, I don’t want to be rude but you’re staying in a room that we could be renting out for two hundred and fifty pounds a night. You’re eating our food and probably dipping into our minibar too. You’ve managed to persuade my parents to pay you a quite extortionate sum of money and the only communication they’ve had from you so far is a demand for the first instalment. As far as we can see, you’ve done nothing.’

If this was her trying not to be rude I wondered what she was like when she was really determined to be offensive. I was reminded of Lionel Corby’s description of her – ‘a real piece of work’. Perhaps I had been too hard on him when we met in London.

‘Do your parents know you’re talking to me?’ I asked.

‘Actually, my father has asked me to have this conversation. We want to bring an end to this arrangement and we think you should leave.’

‘When?’

‘Today.’

I put down my knife and fork, laying them neatly on the plate. Then I looked her in the eye and asked, as sweetly as I could: ‘Did you tell your father you were having sex with Stefan Codrescu before you fired him?’

Her face flushed with anger when she heard that and the strange thing was that it made the scar on the side of her mouth stand out as if the injury had happened just a minute ago. ‘How dare you!’ she muttered in a low voice.

‘You were asking me about my investigation,’ I reminded her. ‘I would have said that was quite a useful piece of information and that it casts a different light on things. Wouldn’t you?’

It was interesting. I hadn’t been a hundred per cent confident when I had made the accusation, but she hadn’t denied it. Then again, all the evidence was there. At that first dinner, Lawrence Treherne had said how much Lisa had liked Stefan and that the two of them had spent lots of time together. Then she had fired him on what Corby had insisted were trumped-up charges. There were also sexual issues between her and her sister. ‘They were always jealous of each other’s boyfriends,’ Lawrence had said and it struck me that a large part of her dislike of Aiden MacNeil could have been down to old-fashioned envy.

‘Who told you that?’ she demanded. I was quite surprised she hadn’t stormed out of the room. I probably would have.

‘You fired him because he wouldn’t sleep with you any more.’

‘He was a thief.’

‘No. That was Natasha M?lk, the maid who discovered the body. Everyone knew that.’

I was only repeating what Lionel Corby had told me but it seemed that once again he had been spot on. Lisa’s face fell. ‘He’s wrong,’ she muttered in a low voice.

‘Lisa,’ I said. ‘I’ve arranged to see Stefan at HMP Wayland, in Norfolk. There’s no point lying to me.’ Actually, I was the one lying to her as I hadn’t yet heard from Stefan – but she wasn’t to know that.

She scowled in a way that would have congealed my poached egg if the heat lamps hadn’t already done the work for her. ‘Why would you believe anything he has to say? He’s a convicted murderer.’

‘I’m not so sure that he killed Frank Parris.’

It was funny but even as I spoke the words I knew with absolute certainty that they had to be true. Stefan had been arrested by a police officer who would quite cheerfully have locked him away for life simply because he was Romanian. The case against him was ridiculously slight. A hundred and fifty pounds hidden under his mattress? Nobody hides money under their mattress unless they’re old ladies in a bad TV comedy and anyway, would he really have risked years in jail for such a tiny amount?

There were too many unexplained circumstances: the barking dog, the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign that had been hung on the door and then mysteriously removed, Frank Parris lying about the opera. And, for me, there was still the biggest question of all. If Alan Conway had known the true identity of the killer (which had to be the reason why Cecily Treherne had disappeared), why had he chosen not to reveal it?

‘If Stefan didn’t kill him, who did?’ Lisa demanded.

‘Give me a week here and I’ll tell you.’

She stared at me. ‘I’ll give you two more days.’

‘All right.’ I wanted to bargain with her but it would only have made me look weak. At least I wasn’t going to be thrown out before lunch.

She started to rise but I hadn’t finished with her. ‘Tell me about you and Cecily,’ I said.

She sat down again. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Did you get on?’

‘We got on well enough.’

‘Why won’t you tell me the truth, Lisa? Don’t you want me to find out what’s happened to her?’ She glared at me so I asked her: ‘How did you get that mark on the side of your mouth?’

‘That was her.’ Lisa brought a protective hand up, briefly hiding the scar. ‘But she didn’t mean it. She was only ten years old. She didn’t know what she was doing.’

‘What were you arguing about?’

‘It’s irrelevant!’

‘It might not be.’

‘It was a boy. Not a boy … a man. You know how little girls are. His name was Kevin and he worked in the kitchen. He must have been about twenty and we both had crushes on him. And he kissed me. That’s all. One day, I was talking to him and I was giggling with him and he gave me a kiss on the cheek. When I told Cess about it, she got furious. She said I’d stolen him from her and there was a knife, a kitchen knife, and she threw it at me. She wasn’t even aiming at me. But the blade caught me on the side of my face. It was very sharp and it cut me.’ She dropped her hand. ‘There was a lot of blood.’

‘Do you still blame her for it?’

‘I never blamed her. She didn’t know what she was doing.’

‘What about her and Aiden?’

‘What about them?’

‘When we last talked, I got the sense that you didn’t like him very much.’

‘I’ve got nothing against him personally. I just don’t think he pulls his weight, that’s all.’