Mandi Solomon is the ghost/co-writer of Paul Craddock’s unfinished memoir, Guarding JESS: My Life With One of The Three.

My main objective when I meet the subject for the first time is to win their trust. There’s usually a tight deadline on celeb memoirs, so I generally have to work fast. Most of my clients have spent their careers seeing exposés or just plain bullshit written about them (or their PR agencies have collaborated in the bullshit) so they’re practised at keeping their true selves under wraps. But readers aren’t stupid, they can smell fakery a mile off. It’s important to me that we include at least some new material, balance the usual PR buff with some genuine revelations and shockers. I didn’t have that problem with Paul of course. He was up front right from the beginning. My publishers and his agent put the deal together in double-quick time. They wanted the inside story of how Jess was coping; they knew the attention on her would be mega, and they weren’t wrong. The story grew bigger every day.

Our first meeting was at a coffee bar in Chislehurst, gosh, sometime in early February. Jess was still in hospital and Paul was busy moving his stuff into her house, getting the place ready for her to come home. My first impression of him? He was fairly charming, witty, slightly camp of course, but then he is–or was–an actor. His brother’s death had obviously hit him hard, and when I touched on that, there were a few tears, but he didn’t seem at all embarrassed about showing emotion in front of me. And he was remarkably candid about his past, the fact that in his twenties he drank too much, experimented with drugs, slept around a bit. He didn’t go into detail about his stint in Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital, but he didn’t deny it either. Said his breakdown was stress-related after he had a professional disappointment. I never for one second thought he wouldn’t be capable of looking after a child. If anyone asked me after that first meeting what I thought of him, I would’ve said he was a good guy, maybe a bit self-obsessed, but nothing compared to some I’ve dealt with.

After I’ve won their trust, I give my clients a Dictaphone–a digital voice recorder actually–and I encourage them to talk into it as often as possible without thinking too much about what they’re saying. I always reassure them that I won’t put in any information they’re uncomfortable with. Most insist on a contract to this effect, which is fine by me. There are always ways to get around that kind of thing, and in any case, most of them like to add an edge to their life story. You’d be amazed at how quickly they get used to the Dictaphone method, some of them using it as their personal therapist. Have you read Fighting for Glory? The tell-all biography of Lennie L, the cage fighter? Came out last year. Gosh, the things he used to say. I could only use half of them. Quite often he’d leave the recorder on while he was having sex, which I eventually began to think was deliberate.

Paul took to the Dictaphone method like a duck to water. At the beginning, things appeared to be going well. I had the rough draft of the first three chapters down, and I sent him an email detailing what else I thought we might need. The downloads came as regular as clockwork, and then–about a week or so after Jess got home–they stopped. I rationalised that he had his hands full dealing with Jess, the press attention, and the crazies who wouldn’t leave them alone, so I covered for him for a month or so. He kept promising he’d send me more. Out of the blue, he said the book was off. My publishers were furious, threatened to sue. They’d paid the advance, you see.

It was Mel who found it. Paul had left a flash drive for me in an envelope on the dining-room table, with my name and telephone number on it. I gave it to the police of course, but not before I downloaded it and made a copy. I had some idea of transcribing it, maybe publishing it later, but I couldn’t listen to it after that first time.

It scared me, Elspeth. It scared the living shit out of me.