At one point in my life I became a suspected murderess.  I was living in Japan at the time, and became interested in the life of Edith Carew, an Englishwoman who had lived in Japan at the end of the 1800s.   Edith had settled with her husband in the port city of Yokohama, one of five treaty ports where foreigners were allowed to reside.  In 1898 flighty Edith became the centre of a notorious murder trial that shook the British community of Yokohama.  She was accused of murdering her husband by feeding him arsenic.  Under the law of extraterritoriality prevailing at that time, the British community had their own court.  Convicted by a jury of her husband’s friends, Edith escaped hanging in Japan by a hair’s breath and was returned to England to serve a prison sentence.

After reading the little I could find about Edith Carew, I felt certain there had been a miscarriage of justice.  Her story took hold of me and I was determined to examine her life in Yokohama and speak for her over the years.  I hoped the evidence I found would prove her innocent, but if instead it pointed to her guilt, then I would explain that too.

And so I began my research on the life of this real woman.  Research can be a dangerously seductive thing in the service of fiction.  Although my publishers told me rather curtly, you are writing a novel not a biography, it was suddenly not enough to know how many rikishas were used in Yokohama or the apparel of their runners, the style of Edith’s shoes, whether beeswax or walnut oil was used to polish her furniture, or if she used alum as an underarm deodorant.  I felt an overwhelming need to find a time machine, to physically travel back in time to the scene of the fiction I was writing.  Were it possible I would have done it whatever the risk, for I needed to know the exact sound a rikisha wheel might have made on the cobbles of a Yokohama street, how did the light reflect off the sea below her house, and what view of Yokohama did Edith see through her windows?  These things suddenly seemed of great importance for, in order to speak of the injustice suffered by this woman, I felt I must know her intimately.  I took every detail unearthed almost personally, as if I were searching for a lost relative.  Eventually, at the Yokohama archives I was told that all the evidence from Edith’s trial had been sent back to London at the turn of the century, and could now be found at the Home Office in London.

On my next visit to London, I made my way to Victoria to the Home Office, to ask for information about Edith Carew.  It took some days, but eventually the Home Office got back to me and said they were sorry, they had nothing; whatever evidence had been sent to them had probably been destroyed decades ago in a fire.  My disappointment was extreme, Edith Carew was lost in the mists of time, and I wondered where to look next.  I tried placing an advertisement in newspapers for relatives of Edith to come forward, but nobody responded.

I was fast giving up all idea of writing the book, and was preparing to return to Japan when, a few weeks later, the Home Office unexpectedly contacted me.  A dusty metal box had been discovered in a dusty basement room, unopened since the time of the trial of Edith Carew and they thought this might contain the evidence I was so interested in.  I went along immediately, the box was opened in front of me, and I was left alone with the contents.  Before me was not only a verbatim account of the Yokohama trial, but also Edith Carew’s diaries, chemists receipts for the arsenic with which she had supposedly killed her husband, and love letters from a man she had become involved with.  These letters, that later helped to convict her of murder, Edith had torn into shreds and tossed carelessly into a wastepaper basket.  Her children’s English governess and her friend, another governess employed in a nearby house, were both envious of popular, vivacious Edith.  Carefully, they collected the scraps of shredded letter from the wastepaper bucket, and painstakingly sewed them back together again, reading them avidly by candlelight.  It was these very letters that I now held in my own hands, the brittle threads that bound the fragments together now yellowed by age.  I read the entries in the diaries written by Edith’s quick pen and the chits from the chemist’s shop for arsenic.  The substance was a popular medication taken by men in those days as a remedy for venereal disease, and Edith’s husband was known to take.  I held Edith’s gloves and her lace handkerchief in my hands.  It was as if the ghost of the woman were released from that old box to take possession of me.

After a while I returned to Japan and sat down to begin my novel.  My study was full of maps and pictures of old Yokohama and Xeroxed copies of Victorian newspapers with bit and pieces about the trial.  I was very confident when I sat down to write.  I thought I had a great story before me, already worked out in all its details.  I wanted to stick faithfully to the true story of Edith Carew and to prove her innocent.  Yet time and time again as I tried to write I found that I dried up.  It was then that I perceived my difficulty.  I was writing a novel, not a biography of Edith Carew.  I found I had weighed down my imagination so heavily with the facts of the real Edith Carew and her life, that I could no longer move about freely in my imagination to create the fantasy I needed for fiction.  I had become a prisoner of the real Edith Carew, held tight in the dreadfulness of her life.  To write I realised I must reverse the process.  I must cut myself free of her, seize her afresh and make her my own creature.

To do this I first took down all the maps and pictures of old Yokohama in my study.  I put away the copies of the Victorian newspapers I had collected.  Then I cut an invisible umbilical cord, I threw away Edith Carew’s real name, and gave her a new one of my own making.  I called my character, Amy Redmore.  Then, I began my novel in a part of her life about which I knew nothing, her childhood in England.  It was not the beginning I wanted but it forced my terrified imagination to come out of hiding.  At first I felt awkward with this new and unknown person, Amy Redmore.  But slowly, as I travelled with her through her early life I began to get to know her, until finally I felt I had her in my grasp.

Somehow this seemed to work.  Edith, Amy and I were now an easy partnership.  Edith Carew no longer held me captive and Amy Redmore flew ahead of me through the pages as I slipped into her skin.  When at last I reached the end of my novel I found I had done my duty by both women.  Amy Redmore I had filled with a life of her own and set her free upon her own fictional path in the pages of my book.  And I had also spoken to the world for Edith Carew, as nobody had before.  Looking back I could no longer even separate fact from fiction.  It had all welded together in my mind, just as those two women had welded together, factual Edith and fictional Amy, and dissolved into myself.