The story of how I came to be offered this job is, as I mentioned, a long and complicated one, and must wait its turn; but once the offer was made, I had little hesitation in accepting it. The prospect of a regular income was itself too much to resist, but I was also, if truth be told, in no hurry to start writing another work of fiction. So it seemed like the perfect arrangement. I bought my flat in Battersea (property was cheaper in those days) and set to work with some eagerness. Inspired by the very novelty of the enterprise, I wrote the first two thirds of the book in a couple of years, delving deep into the Winshaws’ early history and recording everything that I found there with absolute candour: for it was quite obvious to me, from the very beginning, that I was essentially dealing with a family of criminals, whose wealth and prestige were founded upon every manner of swindling, forgery, larceny, robbery, thievery, trickery, jiggery-pokery, hanky-panky, plundering, looting, sacking, misappropriation, spoliation and embezzlement. Not that the Winshaws’ activities were openlycriminal, or indeed ever recognized as such by polite society: in fact, as far as I could determine, there was only one convicted felon in the family. (I refer, of course, to Matthew’s great uncle, Joshua Winshaw, universally acknowledged as the most brilliant pickpocket and burglar of his time – the most celebrated of his achievements being, as you will scarcely need to be reminded, his audacious visit to the country home of a rival family, the Kenways of Britteridge: where, during the course of a public guided tour in the company of seventeen tourists, he succeeded – quite unnoticed – in pilfering a Louis XV grandfather clock worth tens of thousands of pounds.) But because every penny of the Winshaw fortune – dating right back to the seventeenth century, when Alexander Winshaw first made it his business to corner a lucrative portion of the burgeoning slave trade – could be said to have derived, by some route or other, from the shameless exploitation of persons weaker than themselves, I felt that the word ‘criminal’ fitted the bill well enough, and that I was performing a useful service by bringing this fact to the attention of the public, while staying scrupulously within the bounds of my commission.

There came a point, however, somewhere in the mid 1980s, when I realized that I had lost nearly all enthusiasm for the project. For one thing there was my father’s death. I hadn’t been in close contact with my parents for a number of years, but the days of my childhood – a calm, happy and untroubled childhood – had formed bonds of empathy and affection between us which made the fact of our physical separation irrelevant. My father was only sixty-one when he died and his loss affected me deeply. I spent several months in the Midlands, doing whatever I could to comfort my mother, and when I returned to London and the Winshaws it was with unmistakable feelings of distaste.

In another two or three years’ time I was to abandon work on the book altogether, but before that happened a significant change had taken place in the nature of my research. I had by now reached the final chapters, in which I was to have the honour and the duty of celebrating the achievements of those members of the family who still had the good fortune to be with us: and it was here that I began to meet with serious opposition, not only from my own conscience, but from the Winshaws themselves. Some of them, it grieves me to say, became unaccountably shy in the face of my inquiries, and even began to show a scarcely befitting modesty when I invited them to discuss the details of their glittering careers. Thus it became something of a pattern for my interviews to break up amid scenes of what can only be described as unpleasantness. Thomas Winshaw threw me out on to the street when I asked him to disclose the precise nature of his involvement with the Westland Helicopters incident which had resulted in the resignation of two cabinet ministers in 1986. Henry Winshaw attempted to throw my manuscript on to the fire at the Heartland Club, when he discovered that it drew attention to some minor discrepancies between the socialist programme upon which he had first risen to power, and his subsequent role (for which he will perhaps be better remembered) as a prominent spokesman for the extreme right and, above all, one of the key figures behind the clandestine dismantling of the National Health Service. And I sometimes wonder, even now, whether it was entirely by coincidence that I happened to be assaulted in the street late one night as I walked back to my flat, only two days after a meeting with Mark Winshaw during which I had pressed him – perhaps a little too forcibly – for further information about his post as ‘sales co-ordinator’ for the Vanguard Import and Export Company, and the real reasons for his frequent visits to the Middle East throughout the bloodiest years of the Iraq–Iran war.

The more I saw of these wretched, lying, thieving, self-advancing Winshaws, the less I liked them, and the more difficult it became for me to preserve the tone of the official historian. And the less I was able to get access to solid and demonstrable facts, the more I had to bring my imagination to bear on the narrative, fleshing out incidents of which I had been able to learn only the shadowy outline, speculating on matters of psychological motivation, even inventing conversations. (Yes, inventing: I won’t fight shy of the word, even if I’d fought shy of the thing itself for nearly five years by then.) And so, out of my loathing for these people came a rebirth of my literary personality, and out of this rebirth came a change of perspective, a change of emphasis, an irreversible change in the whole character of the work. It began to take on the aspect of a voyage of discovery, a dogged, fearless expedition into the darkest corners and most secret recesses of the family history. Which meant, as I soon came to realize only too well, that I would never be able to rest, would never consider my journey at an end, until I had uncovered the answer to one fundamental question: was Tabitha Winshaw really mad, or was there a vestige of truth in her belief that Lawrence had, in some devious and obscure way, been responsible for his brother’s death?

Not surprisingly, this was another subject on which the family was reluctant to give me anything in the way of concrete information. Early in 1987, I was lucky enough to be granted an interview with Mortimer and Rebecca at a hotel in Belgravia. I found them by far the most approachable and helpful of the Winshaws, and this in spite of Rebecca’s serious ill-health: it is largely to them that I owe what little knowledge I have of the events surrounding Mortimer’s fiftieth birthday party. Lawrence had died a couple of years earlier and they now, as Rebecca had once fearfully predicted, found themselves in possession of Winshaw Towers, although they spent as little time there as possible. In any case, she too passed away within a few months of my visit; and shortly afterwards Mortimer returned, a broken man, to live out his last days in the family seat which he had always so heartily detested.

My investigations became ever more sporadic and desultory, until one day they stopped altogether. I forget the exact date, but it was on the same day that my mother came down to stay with me. She arrived one evening and we went out for a meal at a Chinese restaurant in Battersea and then she drove straight back home again the same night. After that I didn’t go out or talk to anyone for two, perhaps three years.

∗

On Saturday morning I settled down to continue work on the manuscript. As I suspected, it was in a serious mess. Parts of it read like a novel and parts of it read like a history, while in the closing pages it assumed a tone of hostility towards the family which was quite unnerving. Worse still, it didn’t even have a proper ending, but simply broke off with the most tantalizing abruptness. When I finally rose from my desk, then, late in the afternoon of that hot, sweaty, summer Saturday, the obstacles which stood between me and the book’s completion had at least taken on a certain starkness and clarity. I would have to decide once and for all whether to present it as a work of fact or fiction, and I would have to renew my efforts to delve into the mystery of Tabitha’s illness.