It was 1933, early spring but still cold, and she’d been sitting in the Loeanneth airing cupboard all morning with her feet against the hot-water tank, reading through the collection of newspaper clippings she kept beneath lock and key in the filigree metal box Grandfather Horace had brought back from India and she’d purloined from the attic. She’d found an article about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh boy in America and it had got her thinking about ransoms and notes and how a criminal might best baffle police. She’d realised recently (an awareness that coincided with her new obsession with Agatha Christie) that what her previous story attempts were missing was a puzzle, a complex, knotty twist of events designed to mislead and bewilder readers. Also, a crime. The key to the perfect novel, Alice had decided, was to revolve the story around a crime’s solution, all the while tricking the reader by making it seem she was doing one thing when in fact she was merrily doing another.
