Chapter Wednesday 19 March 2025 London Meredith and Josh #3
“Did you ask her about Lamberts the book?” says Josh.
“I did, yes, after we’d said our goodbyes on her doorstep. I did that cheesy TV-show thing of turning back and going, ‘Oh, just one more thing…’”
“What did she say?”
“Picture of complete and total innocence! ‘What book? No, I haven’t sent you anything.’ I spelled it out: asked her if she’d written a novel about Champ’s…
adventures and sent it to you and me in the hope that we’d publish it.
She looked sad for a second and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I never have.
Maybe I will one day.’ And…I don’t know.
She seemed very sincere and genuine, which is probably why my money’s on Corinne as the writer.
Anyway, I was getting into my car to head home when Ree appeared, banging on my window—a bonus I was not expecting.
She and I ended up going for a drink together at the local pub, the Rebel of the Reeds.
That’s real, by the way. So is Cupwardly Mobile, the van café, which Ree said we couldn’t go to because they’d unreasonably fired her for calling her boss a heartless cow who didn’t understand that sometimes you were too busy saving your dog’s life to turn up for your coffee-selling shifts.
“Josh, so much of what’s in the book is real and accurate.
And so much isn’t! So much is completely made up.
Ree told me which parts were real and which were invented.
Oh!” Meredith changes tack. “I told her about Lamberts the book, and she confirmed Sally hadn’t written it.
They’re all still so busy with Champ’s new fame, apparently—no time to think about doing much else.
Ree was desperate to see Lamberts, though.
Wants to read it as soon as possible, she said.
Come to think of it… She did kind of behave throughout our chat as if us publishing the book was a given. ”
“Which bits aren’t true?” asks Josh.
“Well, for a start, there was never a Sarah Sergeant or a Bonnie—can you believe that? That was all made up.”
“What, really?” says Josh. “How weird.”
“And the chronology’s all messed up, from what Ree told me,” Meredith goes on.
“In the real-life version, both the strong suspicion that Lesley Gavey must have been the biter and the message from Auntie Vicky about Sally’s WhatsApp message came later—whereas in the manuscript it’s, like, 19 June, just two days after the Lamberts and Corinne first fled Swaffham Tilney.
Oh—and there was no five-star hotel either.
The Langley Hotel in Buckingham is real, but the Lamberts and Corinne never went there.
Ree was annoyed about that—she liked the sound of it.
And that’s another reason why I think Corinne’s the author.
I’ve looked up the Langley. It’s top of the range.
Corinne’s bound to have stayed there and…
met all those frogs. Whereas Sally? Less likely. ”
“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 Norfolk they went to Taunton to stay with Corinne’s ex-husband, Ronan, the non-entrepreneurial one, for nearly a week.
And it was while they were there that 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 wrote Lamberts is 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 Hollingwood was 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. “There must be 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.
Start-up. And we know who loves start-ups…
She manages a quick “Thanks,” then ends the call and does a search on her phone: “Therriault Milton Park Companies House.”
Here we go… Hurry up, the internet.
Meredith clicks on the People tab and there she is: Corinne Sullivan, company director. “Corinne paid him to do it,” she murmurs. “Then got him a new job…”
“For you, madam!” It’s the waiter, at her side.
He places a full cocktail glass on the table in front of her: long stemmed, full of orange liquid that’s fizzing.
“Here is your Bellini,” he says. There’s a pink-and-gold umbrella in it.
Meredith didn’t order the drink, but she knows it well.
It’s the one she pictured before Josh arrived, the exact drink that was in her mind: same glass, same color, same color umbrella.
Also a type of drink she would never order even if it wasn’t lunchtime on a weekday.
“I didn’t order an alcoholic drink,” she says.
“You did not,” the waiter agrees. “Consider it a gift. A delicious, peach-flavored gift. Peaches and bubbles—what is there not to like?”
Peaches…
It’s a coincidence. It must be. Coincidences are an everyday occurrence.
That’s what she and Josh must do when Varndall Miles opens for business: publish lots of novels, hundreds, in which huge coincidences happen and no one seems surprised or doubtful when they do.
Coincidences are everywhere, and as real as the glass in Meredith’s hand—because she does seem, now, to be drinking the cocktail.
That’s not the point, though. The point is that it’s time for the publishing industry to stop acting as a form of controlled opposition to the prominent role coincidence plays in all of our lives.
Josh’s voice comes to her as if from far away. “Meredith, what’s happening?”
“I can’t believe we haven’t talked about Alastair Gavey being innocent, and what it means,” she tells him.
“Alastair didn’t know that Champ biting Tess was a lie, and that’s why he had to die too.
It makes sense: The Lamberts nearly lost someone innocent—Champ—thanks to the Gaveys.
That’s why punishing the guilty Gaveys wasn’t enough.
Their army had to lose an innocent too.”
“You’re scaring me,” Josh says.
He’s being silly. There’s nothing scary about a coincidence, and that’s all this is—that and her talent for having creative ideas about how to fill plot holes, because…
how many intricately plotted mystery novels has she edited over the years?
Loads. Her guess about Alastair was simply that: a guess.
There’s nothing going on here that can’t be explained.
Meredith is far too rational to believe she’s been gifted a drink, or let into any special secrets, by the ghost of Furbert Herbert Lambert.
“Maybe we should publish the book after all,” she says. “Shall we give ourselves a bit longer to think about it before saying no?”