“Okay, so they didn’t go to the hotel…” mutters Josh. “What about the Norfolk boarding kennels?”
“Yeah, that bit’s true. Except—oh, God, how could I forget this? Niall Sullivan’s wife, the surprise betrayer of Champ, is not called Jill Harris. Like, not even a little bit. Her name is Julie Sullivan. But, since she’s a definite baddie in the story, my theory is that Corinne couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a swipe at both Jill Biden and Kamala Harris when naming her.”
“Oh, come on! That’s a stretch.” Josh is laughing.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Meredith says. “Can you think of any other reason for the writer to change this nasty-piece-of-work character’s name to Jill Harris? I can’t. Corinne’s politically switched on and Sally isn’t; it was Corinne who made the remark about Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer vying for the position of ‘Thief in Chief.’”
“Fair point,” Josh concedes.
“Anyway, the boarding kennels are real and the Lamberts went there and to Corinne’s Lake District house—and after Norfolkthey went to Taunton to stay with Corinne’s ex-husband, Ronan, the non-entrepreneurial one, for nearly a week. And it was while they weretherethat Vicky started trying to contact Sally about her WhatsApp, with the twee Champ -talk in it. And Sally working out Lesley must have bitten Tess happened there too.”
“It’s all so bizarre.” Josh stands up. “I’m dying to hear the rest. I’ll be one minute.”
“That’s pretty much it,” Meredith tells him. “Oh—apart from one thing that I’ve thought was weird from the start. Why is Connor Chantree referred to throughout as ‘Detective’? That’s an American cop thing, not an English one.”
“You think someone’s got their eye on U.S. publication?” asks Josh.
Meredith doesn’t know.
Maybe.
Josh heads for the bathroom, and she reaches for her phone, then puts it down immediately, realizing that she does have one more important thing to say: part of the reason she’s certain Corinne wroteLambertsis that surely Sally would have sent any book she wrote to a publisher that already existed rather than seeking out a brand-new start-up that hadn’t even leased office space yet; Corinne was the one who would want to reward entrepreneurship by doing that.
Multimillionaires who are nearly billionaires are also far more likely than ordinary working mums from East Anglia to have people killed. Everything makes sense if Corinne is the killer, or the kill-commissioner, except…
There’s just one thing Meredith can’t come up with a plausible theory about.
Unless…
“No,” Meredith mutters to herself. “No way.” It’s such an outlandish idea, so out there… She should definitely forget all about it. No point wasting a phone call on it.
On the other hand, there’s nothing foolish about ruling out a possibility—that is, in fact, the best way to proceed when you want to forget about something. Not checking will only make it stick in her mind.
She looks up the number for Cambridgeshire Police, rings it, and is given a different number to ring. After three people pass her on to other people, she is finally able to ask if Saul Hollingwood is an officer with Cambridgeshire Police, because she would very much like to speak to him if he is.
Josh, back at the table and listening avidly, says, “This is all a bit out of left field, isn’t it? Why have you decided Saul Hollingwood is a cop?”
Meredith moves her phone away from her mouth and says, “All I know is that the name Saul Hollingwood is significant. Must be. The writer tells us it is. And I can think of no good reason why the real name of the cop who turned up at the Hayloft to accuse Champ on 17 June wouldn’t be in the book, unless—”
“Can’t find any Saul Hollingwood, I’m afraid,” says the voice on the other end of the call. “You sure he’s Cambridgeshire?”
“Never mind,” Meredith tells her. “It was a long shot.”
“Hold on, let me just check once more. He might be… Hold on.”
No point, thinks Meredith, but she can hardly disappear. That would be rude. She’ll have to wait for the woman who’s trying to help her to return. To Josh she says, “Imagine if Saul Hollingwoodwas the 17 June cop—and then, when Champ was revealed as being the victim of an attempted miscarriage of justice, he felt awful for having been part of it… And next imagine that he somehow got persuaded by Corinne, or bribed, to make up for what he’d done by starting that fire.”
“I’m imagining it all,” says Josh, “but…you’re making it up as you go along, to be fair.”
“I know.” Meredith sighs. “Theremustbe a reason why that name got changed, though.”
“Nope, sorry, love,” says the woman from Cambridgeshire Police. “No Saul Hollingwood here.”
“Never mind. Thanks for looking.”
“Not anymore—says here he left us last November. Oh, that’s funny—it looks like he went to work for Therriault, for their security team. Oops—shouldn’t really have told you that. Never mind. Funny coincidence, though, because my daughter works for Therriault, in HR. It’s some sort of fancy, new biofuel start-up company, up at Milton Park.”
Meredith feels as if she’s just been given an electric shock.
