Magpie Murders (33 page)

The girl rang through. Mr Khan would see me. I was shown upstairs and into what must have been the master bedroom, now converted into a no-nonsense office looking out onto the garage. Sajid Khan – his full name was on the door – rose up from behind a reproduction antique desk with a green leather top and brass handles. It was the sort of desk you chose if you wanted to make a point. He was a large, effusive man in his forties, bullish in his movements and in the way he spoke.

‘Come in! Come in! Please take a seat. Have you been offered tea?’

He had very black hair and thick eyebrows that almost met. He was wearing a sports jacket with patches on the elbows and what might well be a club tie. It seemed unlikely that he had been born in Framlingham and I wondered what had brought him to such a backwater and, for that matter, how he fitted in with Mr Wesley. There was a photograph frame beside him, one of those modern, digital ones with the image changing every thirty seconds, either sliding or corkscrewing into itself. Before I’d even sat down, I’d been introduced to his wife, two daughters, his dog, and an elderly woman in a hijab who might have been his mother. I don’t know how he lived with it. It would have driven me mad.

I declined the offer of tea and sat down in front of the desk. He took his place and I briefly explained why I was there. His demeanour changed at the mention of Alan’s name.

‘I found him, you know,’ he told me. ‘I went round there on Sunday morning. Alan and I were having a meeting. Have you been out to the house? And although you may not believe it, I must tell you that I had a feeling something was wrong, even as I drove up. That was before I saw him – and to start with I had no idea what I was looking at. I thought someone had thrown some old clothes onto the lawn, really I did! Then I realised it was him. I knew at once he was dead. I did not go near! I called the police at once.’

‘You were quite close to him, I understand.’ Sajid Khan was SK in the diary. The two of them played tennis together, and he had gone over to the house on a Sunday.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d read many of the Atticus Pünd novels before I met him and you could certainly say I was a great admirer of his work. As things turned out, we did a lot of business with him and I’m very happy to say that I got to know him well. In fact, I would go so far as to say that – yes, we were definitely friends.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘About a week ago.’

‘Did you have any idea he was planning to kill himself?’

‘Absolutely none at all. Alan was in this office, sitting exactly where you are now. We were actually talking about the future and he seemed to be in perfectly good spirits.’

‘He was ill.’

‘So I understand. But he never mentioned it to me, Miss Ryeland. He called me on Saturday evening. I must have been one of the last people who spoke to him while he was still alive.’

It would have been hard to speak to him if he wasn’t, I thought. Always the editor. ‘May I ask what you talked about, Mr Khan? And why were you visiting him on a Sunday? I know it’s not my business …’ I smiled sympathetically, inviting him to take me into his confidence.

‘Well, I suppose it can’t hurt telling you now. There had been certain changes to his domestic arrangements and Alan had decided to rethink his will. I’d actually drawn up a new draft and I took it over to show it to him. He was going to sign it on Monday.’

‘He was going to cut out James Taylor.’

He frowned. ‘Forgive me if I do not go into the details. I don’t think it would be appropriate …’

‘It’s all right, Mr Kahn. He wrote to us at Cloverleaf Books. He actually told us he was going to take his own life. And he mentioned that James was no longer in his will.’

‘Again, I don’t think it’s my place to comment on any communication he may have had with you.’ Kahn paused, then let out a sigh. ‘I will be honest with you and say that I did find that side of Alan quite hard to fathom.’

‘You mean his sexuality?’

‘No. Of course not. That’s not what I meant at all! But having a partner who was quite so much younger than him.’ Kahn was getting himself into difficulties, trying to balance his different prejudices. A picture of him, arm in arm with his wife, slid across the frame. ‘I knew Mrs Conway quite well, you know.’

I had met Melissa Conway a few times at publishing events. I remembered her as a quiet, fairly intense woman. She always gave the impression that she knew something terrible was about to happen but didn’t want to put it in words. ‘How did you know her?’ I asked.

‘Well, actually, she introduced Alan to us. When they bought their first house in Suffolk – that was in Orford – she came to us for the conveyancing. Of course, very sadly, they parted company a few years later. We weren’t involved in the divorce, but we did act for Alan when he bought Abbey Grange – or Ridgeway Hall as it was known then. He actually changed the name.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘She remarried. I believe she lives near Bath.’

I played back what he had just told me. Sajid Khan had drawn up the new will and taken it round on Sunday morning. But when he had got there … ‘He never signed it!’ I exclaimed. ‘Alan died before he could sign the new will.’

‘That is correct. Yes.’

The unsigned will is one of those tropes of detective fiction that I’ve come to dislike, only because it’s so overused. In real life, a lot of people don’t even bother to make a will but then we’ve all managed to persuade ourselves that we’re going to live for ever. They certainly don’t go round the place threatening to change it in order to give someone the perfect excuse to come and kill them.

It looked as if Alan Conway had done exactly that.

‘I would be grateful if you did not repeat this conversation, Miss Ryeland,’ Khan continued. ‘As I said to you, I really should not be discussing the will.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Mr Khan. It’s not the reason I’m here.’

‘Then how can I help you?’

‘I’m looking for the manuscript of
Magpie Murders
,’ I explained. ‘Alan had finished it just before he died but it’s missing the last chapters. I don’t suppose …?’

‘Alan never showed me his work before it was published,’ Khan replied. He was glad to be back on safer ground. ‘He was kind enough to autograph a copy of
Atticus Pünd
Abroad
before it was published. But I’m afraid he never really talked about his work with me. You might try his sister.’

‘Yes. I’m seeing her tomorrow.’

‘It would be better not to mention the will to her, if you’d be so kind. The two of us will be meeting later in the week. And we have the funeral next weekend.’

‘I’m just looking for the missing pages.’

‘I hope you find them. We’re all going to miss Alan. It would be nice to have one last memory.’

He smiled and got to his feet. On the desk, the photograph changed again and I saw that it had completed its circuit. It was showing the same picture I’d seen when I came in.

It was definitely time to go.

Extract from
The Slide
by Alan Conway

The dining room at the Crown was almost empty when I went in for dinner and I might have felt a little self-conscious, eating on my own. But I had company. I had brought
The Slide
with me, the novel which Alan Conway had written and which he had pleaded with Charles to publish, even as he prepared to end his life. Was Charles right? Here’s how it opened.

Lord Quentin Trump comes slumping down the staircase, lording it as he always does over the cooks and maids, the under-butlers and the footmen that exist only in his anfractuous imagination, that have in truth slipped hugger-mugger into the adumbration of family history. They were there when he was a boy and in some ways he is still a boy, or perhaps it is more true to say that the boy he was lurks obstinately in the fleshy folds that fifty years of unhealthy living have deposited on the barren, winter tree that is his skeleton.
Two boiled eggs, cookie. You know how I like them. Soft but not runny. Marmite soldiers like Mummy used to make … all present and correct. The chickens not laying? Damn their eyes, Agnes. What’s the point of a chicken that don’t lay?
Is this not his inheritance? Is it not his right? He lives in the stately pile where he was brought squealing and mewling into the world, a damp, unlovely ball of poisonous mauve, tearing open the curtain of his mother’s vagina with the same violence with which he will rampage through the rest of his life. Here he is now with his cheeks rampaged by spider veins, as ruby red as the oh-so-fine wines that brought them erupting to the surface, his cheeks jostling for position on a face that barely has the room to contain them. A moustache is smeared across his upper lip as if it has crawled out of his nostril, taken one look back at its own progenitor, lost all hope and died. His eyes are mad. Not ‘let’s cross and walk on the other side of the road mad’ but lizardy and definitely dangerous. He has the Trump eyebrows and they are a little mad too, leaping out of his flesh like the hoary ragwort,
senecio aquaticus
, which he has been unable to eradicate from the croquet lawn. Today, it being a Saturday and the weather a little cold for the time of year, he is dressed in tweed. Tweed jacket, tweed waistcoat, tweed trousers, tweed socks. He likes tweed. He even likes the sound of it when he orders a suit from the place he frequents in Savile Row though not so frequently now, not at two thousand pounds a throw. Still, it’s worth it; that moment of pleasant reassurance as the black cab stutters round the bend and spits him out at the front door.
Very good to see you, my lord. And how is Lady Trump? Always a pleasure to see you down. How long in town? A nice Cheviot tweed, perhaps, in brown? Where’s the tape measure. Look lively, Miggs! I fancy our waistline may need revisiting since our last appointment, my lord.
His waist no longer has a line. It’s all just flesh. He is corpulent now almost to pantomime proportions and knows that he is floundering in the scummy waters of ill health. His ancestors watch him from their curling gold frames as he descends the staircase, not one of them smiling, disappointed perhaps that this fat twerp should now be the master of the family home, that four hundred years of careful in-breeding should amount to nothing more. But does he care? He wants his breakfast, his brekky. He infantilises everything. And when he eats he will dribble his food down his chin and still wonder, in one corner of his mind, why nanny doesn’t appear to wipe it away.

He enters the breakfast room and sits down, his adipose buttocks narrowly missing the arms of the eighteenth-century Hepplewhite chair that now strains to support him. There is a white linen serviette which he unfolds and tucks into his collar beneath his chin, or rather chins for he has the double ration that is the standard issue of the well-bred English gentleman. There is a
Times
newspaper waiting for him but he does not pick it up quite yet. Why should he share the world’s bad news, the daily communion of depression, disorientation and decay, when he has plenty enough of his own to be getting on with? He is deaf to the whining, stentorian voices that warn of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the fall of the pound. His childhood home, the manor, is in danger. It may not last until the end of the month. These are the thoughts, the noisome squatters that occupy his mind.

It went on in this vein for some four hundred and twenty pages. I’m afraid I was skim-reading after the first chapter and picking out only the odd sentence after that. The novel seemed to be an attempt at satire, a grotesque fantasy about the British aristocracy. The plot, in so far as it had one, concerned Lord Trump’s bankruptcy and his attempts to turn his crumbling stately home into a tourist attraction by lying about its history, inventing a ghost and transferring the elderly and largely docile animals from a local zoo to wander in his grounds. The slide of the title was intended to be the centrepiece in an adventure playground, which he had constructed, although clearly it also referred – portentously – to the state of the nation. It was revealing that when the first visitors arrive – ‘the women in nylon puff jackets, fat, thick, ugly, whining slags with nicotine-stained nails, their brain-dead sons trailing wires from their ears, with branded boxer shorts rising over the belts of their sagging, unfit jeans’ – they are treated with the same contempt as the Trumps themselves.

The Slide
worried me for all sorts of reasons. How could a man who had written nine hugely popular and entertaining novels – the Atticus Pünd series – have come up with something that was, at the end of the day, quite so hateful? It was almost like discovering that Enid Blyton, in her spare time, had turned to pornography. The style was painfully derivative; it reminded me of another writer but at the moment I wasn’t quite sure who. It seemed obvious to me that Conway was labouring for effect with every sentence, with every ugly metaphor. Worse still, this wasn’t early work, juvenilia written before he had found his voice. The reference to Islamic fundamentalism proved that. He had been tinkering with it recently and had mentioned it in his final letter, asking Charles to take a second look. It had still mattered to him. Did it represent his world view? Did he really think it was any good?

I didn’t sleep well that night. I’m used to bad writing. I’ve looked at plenty of novels that have no hope of being published. But I’d known Alan Conway for eleven years, or I thought I had, and I found it almost impossible to believe that he could have produced this, all four hundred and twenty pages of it. It was as if he was whispering to me as I lay there in the darkness, telling me something I didn’t want to hear.

Orford, Suffolk

Magpie Murders
is set in a fictitious village in Somerset. Most of the stories take place in villages that Alan has made up and even the two London-based novels (
No Rest for the Wicked
and
Gin & Cyanide
) use false names for anything that might be recognisable: hotels and restaurants, museums, hospitals and theatres. It’s as if the author is afraid of exposing his fantasy characters to the real world, even with the protection of a 1950s setting. Pünd is only comfortable when he’s strolling on the village green or drinking in the local pub. Murders take place during cricket and croquet matches. The sun always shines. Given that he had named his house after a Sherlock Holmes short story, it’s possible that Alan was inspired by Holmes’s famous dictum: ‘The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’