House of Malice

THREE

Because in fact, the events surrounding Ellen Grace’s disappearance in November 2005 were still shrouded in mystery.

She had been born Georgina Ellen Potts fifty-two years earlier, the only daughter of Lyndon Potts, a bank clerk, and Judith, a history teacher, in the country town of Whitchurch, Shropshire. She could read fluently by the age of four, by seven was writing her own little stories, and by eight was developing full-sized novels imbued with the historical themes that were a passion she’d inherited from her mother. Just nine years later, she’d won a scholarship to Cambridge to read English Lit. It was there that she met and fell in love with a dashing young final-year medical student named Harry Grace. When Harry graduated and left Cambridge to work as a GP in the Peak District, to her parents’ dismay Ellen, who’d now dropped the name Georgina, quit her studies and followed him.

Harry and Ellen were married at a little church in Buxton. Ellen found part-time work as a library assistant, which brought little extra money to the household but allowed her to indulge her passion for books. In the second year of the marriage, Ellen became pregnant; in the summer of 1973 Sarah, who would be their only child, was born.

The years passed. Ellen went on working at the library, eventually becoming its manager. In the meantime, she’d resumed her childhood pastime of writing historical fiction, now with a romantic twist. To begin with, she didn’t regard her stories as anything more than for her own amusement. It was Harry who first suggested that she should submit one to a popular women’s magazine. To Ellen’s amazement, they not only accepted it right away for publication but offered payment and seemed keen to see anything else she’d written. She duly sent them a whole stack of short stories.

Over the next two years, they published every one of them. Ellen Grace the author was born. Inspired, she began writing in earnest and spent late nights working on the manuscript of what would become her first published novel, A Maiden’s Choice. It was 1991.

It was during that phase of her life that tragedy tore the family apart.

Harry Grace was a conscientious and hard-working doctor who was devoted to his patients. When a misdiagnosed case of meningitis caused the avoidable death of a nine-year-old boy in his care, he took it badly and began to drink heavily.

The car was found smashed into a tree one wet night in October 1991. It took two hours for the fire crew to cut the vehicle open. Inside they found the corpse of its sole occupant, along with the bottle of vodka Dr Grace had apparently been clutching when the Saab had veered out of control and gone off the road at over fifty miles an hour. The autopsy showed him to be several times over the drink-drive limit.

Devastated, Ellen threw herself completely into her writing. A Maiden’s Choice was published the following year. On the back of its instant runaway success, her publishers signed her to a six-figure four-book deal that made headlines in the trade press. A Promise Made, A Promise Broken, Sir Radcliffe’s Bride and The Black Rose followed in quick succession and established their author as the leading light in British historical romantic fiction. She was hailed variously as ‘the new Jane Austen’, ‘the new Charlotte Brontë’ and ‘the slush queen’, depending on which critics you read. Ellen didn’t heed the bad reviews. Her publishers and her agent loved her. Her bank manager loved her even more — as did the legions of devoted fans. Ellen adored her fans every bit as much in return. She gave generously of herself, answering every letter personally and always happy to give interviews. In private, her relationship with her daughter Sarah was less rosy. By now Sarah was twenty-seven and working internationally for an aid charity. They seldom saw one another.

It was in the spring of the year 2000 that Ellen, while travelling around the Cotswolds to research her next book, came across a badly neglected, virtually derelict seventeenth-century cottage outside the village of Fairwood. It was a sinkhole for money, but by this stage in her writing career Ellen had all the money she needed, and more. She bought the cottage the same day she saw it, sold up the house in Buxton and moved to a rented manor on the other side of Fairwood while Summer Cottage was being restored to its former glory.

In June 2002, the restoration was complete. During the two years the project had taken, in between overseeing its progress Ellen had gone on working assiduously in her temporary home to produce Take My Heart and Julia’s Tale. The combined advance fees she earned for both bestsellers just about covered the vast cost of turning Summer Cottage from a semi-derelict shell surrounded by a miserable weed-bound acre to a magnificent period home standing in one of the prettiest landscaped gardens in the county.

It was that August that the photo had been taken and made it to the cover of Starstruck magazine, one of the leading celeb glossies. The image stuck. For millions of her fanatical readers, Ellen Grace and Summer Cottage became synonymous, entwined in literary legend.

Though in fact, as some critics had unpopularly pointed out since those days, Ellen Grace had already passed her peak as an author by the time she came to live there. She wrote only one more novel during her days at Summer Cottage. One Night in December was her biggest bestseller, if not her greatest critical success.

After its publication, instead of launching straight into the next book as her fans had become used to her doing, Ellen Grace went silent. There were no more novels. No more replies to fan mail. No more interviews. Photographers would occasionally try to get a snap of her at Summer Cottage, whose curtains remained drawn for weeks on end. The last known photo had been taken by a fan who’d virtually had to camp in the grounds to get a glimpse of her. It showed a thin, wasted, ashen-faced woman peeking furtively, almost fearfully, through a gap in the curtains. The radiant, smiling Ellen Grace the world had known seemed to have withered away.

Rumours weren’t slow to spread. The word was that Ellen Grace had ‘gone strange’. Why the sudden reclusion? Was she ill? Depressed? Many questions were asked. No answers ever came to light.

One misty day in late November 2005, a rare visitor appeared on the doorstep of Summer Cottage. Burt Barrington of the Barrington & Liddle Literary Agency in Kensington had tried and failed for almost a month to get his client on the phone. Under pressure from Ellen’s publishers to get her signature on a hot new contract that would reinvigorate her career and sales, he’d driven down from London in person to see her.

Barrington would later describe his shock at finding the front door hanging open. He told reporters how he’d knocked and called her name repeatedly before venturing inside.

Ellen Grace was not there. She had disappeared.

Nobody ever saw her again.