Magpie Murders (29 page)

I’m also interested in the holiday that Osborne took with his wife in Devonshire. Certainly he’s reluctant to talk about it when Pünd questions him (‘the vicar seemed nonplussed’) and refuses to give even the name of the hotel. I may be reading too much into it but Brent’s parents also died in Devonshire. Is this in some way connected?

4. Matthew Blakiston, the father

Really, he should be at the top of my list as we are told, quite unequivocally, that he murdered his wife. Pünd says so at the end of part six – ‘He killed his wife’ – and it is inconceivable that he’s lying. In all eight books, even when he makes a mistake (the false arrest in
Atticus Pünd’s Christmas
which infuriated readers who felt that Conway hadn’t played fair), he has never been less than 100 per cent honest. If he announces that Matthew Blakiston killed his wife, then that is what happened, although annoyingly he doesn’t say why. Nor, for that matter, does he explain how he came to this conclusion. The explanation, of course, will be contained in the missing chapter.

Did Matthew also kill Sir Magnus? I don’t think so. I’ve managed to work out at least one detail: the handprint in the flower bed was left by Blakiston when he was looking through the letter box. ‘I felt myself falling and I thought I was going to faint’. These are his own words. He must have stretched out his hand to steady himself and left the print in the soft earth. He kills his wife and for some reason returns to the scene of the crime. If this is the case then, as unlikely as it sounds, there’s a second killer in Saxby-on-Avon who deals with Sir Magnus for a quite different reason.

5. Clarissa Pye, the sister

Sometimes, when I read a whodunnit, I get a feeling about someone for no particularly good reason and that’s the case here. Clarissa had every reason to hate her brother and might have intended to kill both Lady Pye and her son, Freddy, in order to inherit Pye Hall. The whole story about stealing the physostigmine to commit suicide could have been a lie – and would also explain the need to do away with Mary Blakiston. And let’s not forget that Clarissa had a key to the front door of Pye Hall. It’s mentioned once – on page 25 – though not again.

There’s also the case of Dr Rennard and the twins-exchanged-at-birth. When did Clarissa discover the truth? Was it really when Dr Redwing told her? I only ask this because there’s an odd reference to Ashton House, where Dr Rennard lives – on page 62. In his funeral address, the vicar mentions that Mary Blakiston was a regular visitor there. It could be that Rennard had told her what had happened and she, being the sort of person she was, had then told Clarissa. That would give Clarissa a compelling reason to kill both Mary and Sir Magnus. The physostigmine could have been for Lady Pye and Freddy. It could even be that Dr Rennard’s fall hadn’t actually been an accident … although perhaps I’m taking this too far?

I dismissed the Whiteheads, Dr Redwing and her artist husband, Frances Pye and the slightly improbable Jack Dartford. They all had motives for the murder of Sir Magnus but I couldn’t see any reason why any of them would have wanted to harm Mary Blakiston. That just left Joy Sanderling, the least likely suspect of them all. But why would she have wanted to kill anyone and, more to the point, why would she have gone to Atticus Pünd in the first place?

Anyway, that was how I spent Sunday afternoon, leafing through the manuscript, making notes and really getting nowhere. That evening I met a couple of friends at the BFI for a screening of
The Maltese Falcon
but I wasn’t able to focus on the labyrinthine plot. I was thinking about Magnus and Mary and bloody scraps of paper, dead dogs and letters in wrong envelopes. I wondered why the manuscript was incomplete and I was annoyed that Charles hadn’t called me back.

Later that night I found out why. I’d treated myself to a taxi and the driver had the radio on. It was the fourth item on the evening news.

Alan Conway was dead.

Cloverleaf Books

My name is Susan Ryeland and I am the Head of Fiction at Cloverleaf Books. The role isn’t as grand as it sounds as there are only fifteen of us (and a dog) in the building and we produce no more than twenty books a year. I work on about half of them. For such a small operation, we don’t have a bad list. There are a couple of well-respected authors who have won literary awards, a bestselling fantasy writer and a children’s author who has just been announced as the new laureate. We can’t afford the production costs of cookery books but in the past we’ve done well with travel guides, self-help and biographies. But the simple truth is that Alan Conway was by far our biggest name and our entire business plan depended on the success of
Magpie Murders
.

The company was set up eleven years ago by Charles Clover, who is well known throughout the industry and I’d been with him from the start. We were together at Orion when he decided to branch out on his own, working out of a building that he’d bought near the British Museum. The look of the place absolutely suited him: three floors, narrow corridors, worn carpets, wooden panels, not much daylight. At a time when everyone else was nervously embracing the twenty-first century – publishers are generally not the first off the line when it comes to social or technological change – he was quite happy in his role as a throwback. Well, he had worked with Graham Green, Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark. There’s even a photograph of him having dinner with a very elderly Noël Coward, although he always says he was so drunk he can’t remember the name of the restaurant nor a single word that the great man said.

Charles and I spend so much time together that people assume we must once have been lovers although we never were. He’s married with two grown-up children, one of whom – Laura – is about to give birth to his first grandchild. He lives in the rather grand double-fronted house in Parson’s Green that he and his wife, Elaine, have owned for thirty years. I’ve been there for dinner a few times and the evenings have always been marked by interesting company, really good wine and conversation that goes on late into the night. That said, he doesn’t tend to socialise much outside the office, at least not with people from the world of publishing. He reads a great deal. He plays the cello. I’ve heard it said that he took a lot of drugs when he was in his teens and early twenties but you wouldn’t believe it looking at him now.

I hadn’t actually seen him for a week. I’d been on the road with an author from Tuesday to Friday; we’d had events in Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin along with radio and newspaper interviews. It had gone surprisingly well. When I’d come in late on Friday afternoon, he’d already left for the weekend. The typescript of
Magpie Murders
had been waiting for me on my desk. It occurred to me as I threw my bag down and flicked on my computer the following Monday that he and I must have read it at the same time and that, after all, he couldn’t have known it was incomplete when he left it for me.

He was already in his office, which was on the first floor at the opposite end of the corridor to mine. He looked out onto the main road – New Oxford Street and Bloomsbury Way. My part of the building was quieter. He had an elegant, square room with three windows, bookshelves of course, and a surprising number of trophies on display. Charles doesn’t actually like award ceremonies. He thinks of them as a necessary evil but over the years Cloverleaf has managed to win quite a few of them – Nibbies, Gold Daggers, IPG Awards – and somehow they’ve found their way here. It was all very neat. Charles liked to know where everything was and he had a secretary, Jemima, who looked after him although she didn’t seem to be around. He was sitting behind his desk with his own copy of
Magpie Murders
in front of him. I saw that he’d been making notes in the margin, using a fountain pen filled with red ink.

I must describe Charles as he was that day. He was sixty-three years old, dressed as always in a suit and tie, with a narrow gold band on his fourth finger. Elaine had given it to him for his fiftieth birthday. Coming into the slightly darkened room, he always struck me as a godfather figure, as in the famous film. There was no sense of menace but Charles looked Italian with piercing eyes, a very thin nose and quite aristocratic cheekbones. He had white hair, which swept down in a careless sort of way, brushing against his collar. He was quite fit for a man of his age, not that he would have dreamed of going anywhere near a gym, and he was very much in command. He often brought his dog when he came in to work and it was there now, a golden Labrador asleep on a folded blanket under the desk.

The dog’s name was Bella.

‘Come in, Susan,’ he said, waving me in from the door.

I was carrying the typescript with me. I came in and sat down and saw now that he was looking very pale, almost in shock. ‘You’ve heard,’ he said.

I nodded. There were articles in all the newspapers and I’d heard the author Ian Rankin talking about him on the
Today
programme. My first thought when I heard the news was that he must have had a heart attack. Wasn’t that what most commonly struck down men of his age? But I was wrong. Now they were saying it was an accident. It had happened at his home near Framlingham

‘It’s terrible news,’ Charles said. ‘Absolutely terrible.’

‘Do you know what happened?’ I asked.

‘The police rang me last night. I spoke to a Detective Superintendent Locke. He was calling from Ipswich, I think. He said exactly what they’re saying on the radio – an accident – but he wouldn’t go into any more detail than that. And then, this morning, just a few minutes ago, I received this.’ He picked up a letter that had been lying on the desk. There was a roughly torn open envelope beside it. ‘It came in the morning post. It’s from Alan.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘Of course.’ He handed it to me.

The letter is important so I am including an exact reproduction.

1.

ABBEY GRANGE,
FRAMLINGHAM,
SUFFOLK.

28 August 2015

Dear Charles,

I don’t like apologies but I wasn’t on my best form at dinner last night I will admit. You know I’ve been out of sorts recently and I didn’t want to tell you but I might as well come straight out with it. I’m not well.

Actually, that’s putting it mildly. Dr Sheila Bennett at the London Clinic has all the details but effectively I’m about to be killed by the biggest bloody cliché on the planet. I have cancer. It’s inoperable.

Why me? I don’t smoke. I hardly drink. Both my parents lived to a ripe old age etc etc. Anyway, I have about six months, maybe more if I go for chemotherapy and all the rest of it.

But I’ve already decided against it. I’m sorry but I’m not going to spend my last remaining days plugged into an intravenous drip with my head halfway down a toilet and my hair all over the bedroom floor. What’s the point of that? And I’m not going to have myself wheeled around London literary functions, stick-thin and coughing my guts out with everyone queuing up to tell me how terribly sorry they all are when actually they can’t wait to see me go.

2.

Anyway, I know I was pretty foul to you but in a way our whole relationship has been a profound fuck-up and it might as well end the way it all began. When you and I first met, I remember the promises you made me and to be fair to you, they’ve all come true. The money anyway. So thank you for that.

As to the money, there are bound to be rows when I’ve gone. James isn’t going to be happy for one. I don’t know why I’m mentioning this to you as it’s none of your business but you might as well know that the two of us had more or less gone our separate ways and I’m afraid I’ve cut him out altogether.

God! I sound like a character in one of my own books. Anyway, he’s just going to have to live with it. I hope he doesn’t make too much trouble for you.

On the literary side, things didn’t work out quite the way I’d hoped but we’ve talked about that often enough and I’m not going to waste time rehearsing it here. You don’t give a damn what I think about my career. You never have. It’s one of the things I like about you. Sales. Bestseller lists. Those fucking Nielsen charts. All the stuff I’ve always loathed about publishing has always been bread, butter and jam to you. What will you do without me? It’s just a shame I won’t be around to find out.

3.

By the time that you read this, it will all be finished. You will forgive me for not having spoken to you earlier, for not taking you into my confidence but I am sure that in time you will understand.

There are some notes which I have written and which you will find in my desk. They relate to my condition and to the decision that I have made. I want it to be understood that the doctor’s diagnosis is clear and, for me, there can be no possibility of reprieve. I have no fear of death. I would like to think that my name will be remembered.

I have achieved great success in a life that has gone on long enough. You will find that I have left you a small bequest in my will. This is partly to recognise the many years that we have spent together but it is also my hope that you will be able to complete the work of my book and prepare it for publication. You are now its only guardian but I am confident that it will be safe in your hands.

Otherwise, there are few people who will mourn for me. I leave behind me no dependents. As I prepare to take leave of this world, I feel that I have used my time well and hope that I will be remembered for the successes that you and I shared together.

4.

It’s been quite an adventure, hasn’t it? (Why not take another look at
The Slide
, just for old time’s sake?) Don’t be angry with me. Remember all the money you’ve made. And here they are – my two favourite words.