The whole festival was buzzing with talk of what had happened the previous evening. After a showdown in the White Hart, the police had (apparently) arrested none other than Bryce’s ‘Asian babe’ girlfriend for the murder. What a bizarre turn-up for the books! Nobody could believe it, or (to be honest) quite follow the motive. Something to do with ‘honour killing’, which was still, wasn’t it, a very real issue in parts of the Asian community, however hard it was for outsiders to believe in or understand; that family members might murder each other to prevent some bizarre, outdated idea of ‘shame’. Was it possible that such things still took place in twenty-first century England? Apparently, it was.

But life itself must go on – particularly literary life. This sunny late July morning was an important one for Mold. Laetitia Humble, after much lobbying in London, had scored a coup. This year, for the first time, it was from Mold-on-Wold that the Booker Prize longlist was to be announced, at 11 a.m. in the packed Big Tent.

Towards the back, a fifty-something female with an odd, badger-like streak of white in her otherwise glossy dark hair was fidgeting in her seat. Last night had been riveting, unexpected, novelistic almost (could this be her next subject?), but this morning Virginia could hardly contain herself, as Laetitia stood behind the microphone to read out the names of the lucky contenders. They proceeded in scrupulous alphabetical order, each accompanied on the big screen by an author photograph.

No, she told herself, as the roll call of the acceptably brilliant was read out. No, I do not stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Nice of Erica to put me up for it, but no, I must accept my fate.

‘John Banville,’ read Laetitia, ‘Julian Barnes … A.S. Byatt … Peter Carey … J.M. Coetzee … Dan Dickson … Hilary Mantel … David Mitchell. … Rose Tremain …’

How absurd it was to even hope that Sickle Moon Rises might be amongst this glittering crowd. Why had she bothered to turn up? Her books were not the kind to win prizes. They were, let’s face it, better than that. More lasting, deeper than the transient fluff of the zeitgeist. As she so often remarked at dinner parties, Shakespeare had never won a prize. Trollope neither. Virginia’s eye was fixed on a harsher, fairer judge than that haphazard team of modish quasi-intellectuals who made up the Booker panel.

Posterity.

With Sarah Waters they had reached eleven – out of twelve. Virginia’s heart was, as she might have put it in one of her novels, in her mouth. They were at the end of the alphabet, a place she had never enjoyed being, from school days onwards. Catch her another time and she’d have told you at length how authors whose surnames began with A, B, C were bound to do better than those unfortunate to be cursed with V, W, Y or Z, always at the wrong end of the bookshops’ shelves.

Laetitia’s lips parted.

‘Virginia …’ she began, and at that moment, the badger woman saw her literary life flash before her. Right from the very start and the two unpublished novels she had written in her early twenties in Cambridge and London, before her Parisian-set debut, Entente Cordiale, had put her firmly on the map. The six titles since, each one a long-drawn-out labour of love. And now …

‘Westcott,’ she heard, as if in a dream. And then: ‘Sickle Moon Rises.’

‘Oh my giddy … god!’ squealed Virginia, despite her best intentions. It was true, it was true, it was true. The sniff of a prize. After all these years. And not just any old prize. The Booker, no less. Oh, oh, OH … and OH again. And what a dreadful shame that her ancient rival in the world of letters, Bryce Peabody, that evasive bastard, father of her murdered child, whose death in truth she wished she’d had the courage to have a hand in herself, was not around to see this.

Five yards behind her, Francis Meadowes heard her little scream and smiled. He had grown almost fond of her over the past three days and was happy that she should at last be allowed her little moment of triumph. He doubted she would make the shortlist.

He was heading back to London soon, eager to leave the bizarre events of the last four days behind him. He doubted that he would ever forget the look that Priya had given him as she leapt to her feet and left the games room at speed. Not that she had got far. DS Povey and DS Wright had been right behind her, and Francis had heard that almost ritual mantra of arrest as if in a dream. ‘You do not have to say anything. However, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on …’

He felt sick at heart for her. She who had overreached herself so insanely, acting on who knows what twisted sense of honour or revenge. For a moment there, down by the river, he had felt his heart reopen, he had seen a future. And then, so quickly afterwards, he had realised the truth. And what alternative had there been for him then?

Now he would go on his way up the long and beautiful valley, onto the A roads and the motorway and the M25 and the crowded North Circular and back to his flat and his life in London. He could console himself with this: that real life did occasionally throw up the kinds of scenarios he had started to doubt were credible. Maybe George Braithwaite wasn’t such a busted flush after all.