My own study, occupying a large room at the opposite end of the house, was a more austere place, and tidier. Dark stained bookshelves lined two of the walls. The books that stood there, randomly acquired over the years and added to slowly all the time, constituted my primary research source. Apart from my immediate reference shelf, next to my desk, I had accumulated hundreds of books directly or indirectly concerned with true crime. Many of them were transcripts of significant criminal hearings, some were the memoirs of eminent jurists, private detectives, criminal lawyers, journalists, and so on. A few described the political or social ramifications that followed the conviction of certain criminals. But the majority of the books discussed my own area of interest: alleged cases of wrongful conviction, imprisonment or execution, and the loosely connected similar matter: the cases that remained a mystery, where the perpetrator was never identified or arrested, or which had baffled the police and all other investigators.

Only a few of the books on my shelves were fiction – thrillers or crime novels. Some of them were gifts from friends or colleagues. I kept most of those. Others were sent to me by publishers or the writers themselves, in the hope of a favourable endorsement that might be quoted on publication. I kept only a few. I was always nervous of inadvertently ‘borrowing’ an ingenious idea from other writers’ novels, so I was not an enthusiastic reader of my colleagues’ works. Every year I would hand out a few of these books to the local library, and pass on the rest to a secondhand shop in Raba City, from which they were quickly sold.

Copies of my own books were sent by my publishers to other writers, for similar reasons. No doubt these too ended up a year or two later in the same sort of bookstore.

My desk, with both my laptop and desktop computers, stood in the centre of the room, with a secondary table placed behind for the printer, a box of paper, and so on. When I worked at my desk I faced north towards the sea, but because of the trees in the garden and the steep slope down to the shore there was no distracting view. During the warmest months I worked with the large picture window open, and a sun shade pulled over the decking outside my study. If I sat outside I could hear the breaking of the waves on the shingly beach, and the happy cries of children. When the weather was hottest I would go out to the deck to read or doze, cooled by an electric fan, but the sunshine was too annoyingly bright for me to work for long at a computer monitor.