Magpie Murders (36 page)

I knew all about Andreas’s past: he didn’t want there to be secrets between us. The first time he had got married, he had been far too young, just nineteen, and the marriage had fallen apart while he was doing his national service in the Greek army. His second wife, Aphrodite, lived in Athens. She was a teacher, like him, and she had come with him to England. That was when things had gone wrong. She missed her family. She was homesick. ‘I should have seen she was unhappy and gone back with her,’ Andreas told me. ‘But it was too late. She went on her own.’ They were still friends and he saw her from time to time.

We walked down to Crouch End for dinner. There was a Greek restaurant, actually run by Cypriots, and although you would have thought it was the last food he would want after a summer at home, it was a tradition that we always went there. It was another warm evening so we ate outside, sitting close to each other on the narrow balcony with heaters blazing down unnecessarily above our heads. We ordered taramasalata, dolmades, loukaniko, souvlakia … all prepared in the tiniest of kitchens beside the front door, and shared a bottle of rough red wine.

It was Andreas who raised the subject of Alan’s death. He had read about it in the newspapers and he was concerned about what it would mean for me. ‘Will it hurt the company?’ he asked. He spoke perfect English, by the way. His mother was English and he had been brought up bilingual. I told him about the missing chapters and, after that, quite naturally, the rest of it came out too. I didn’t see why I should keep anything back from him and it actually felt good having someone I could use as a sounding board. I described my visit to Framlingham and all the people I’d met there.

‘I saw Katie,’ I added. ‘She asked after you.’

‘Ah, Katie!’ Andreas had always liked her when he had known her as a parent at the school. ‘How are the children, Jack and Daisy?’

‘They weren’t there. And they’re hardly children any more. Jack will be going to university next year …’

I told him about the letter and how I’d come to the conclusion that, perhaps, Alan hadn’t killed himself after all. He smiled. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Susan. You’re always looking for the story. You read between the lines. Nothing is ever straightforward.’

‘You think I’m wrong?’

He took my hand. ‘Now I’ve annoyed you. I don’t mean to. It’s one of the things I like about you. But don’t you think the police would have noticed if someone had pushed him off the tower? The killer must have broken into the house. There would have been a struggle. They’d have left fingerprints.’

‘I’m not sure they looked.’

‘They didn’t look because it’s actually pretty obvious. He was ill. He jumped.’

I wondered how he could be so sure. ‘You didn’t like Alan very much, did you,’ I said.

He thought for a moment. ‘I didn’t like him at all if you want the truth. He got in the way.’ I waited for him to explain what he meant but he shrugged it off. ‘He wasn’t someone it was easy to like.’

‘Why not?’

He laughed and went back to his food. ‘
You
complained about him often enough.’

‘I had to work with him.’

‘So did I. Come on, Susan, I don’t want to talk about him. It’ll only spoil the evening. I think you should be careful – that’s all.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked.

‘Because it’s not your business. Maybe he committed suicide. Maybe someone killed him. Either way, it’s not something you should get involved with. I’m only thinking of you. It could be dangerous.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Why not? You should always think before you dig around in someone else’s life. Maybe I say that because I was brought up on an island, in a small community. We always believed in keeping things in the family. What difference does it make to you how Alan died? I’d stay away—’

‘I still have to find the missing chapters,’ I interrupted.

‘Maybe there
are
no missing chapters. Despite what you say, you can’t be sure he ever wrote them. They weren’t on his computer. They weren’t on his desk.’

I didn’t try to argue. I was a little disappointed that Andreas had shot down my theories so carelessly. It also seemed to me that there had been a slight awkwardness between us, a disconnection which had been there from the moment he had turned up at the flat. We’ve always been very companionable. We’re comfortable in each other’s silences. But that wasn’t true tonight. There was something he wasn’t telling me. I even wondered if he’d met somebody else.

And then, at the end of the meal, as we sipped the thick, sweet coffee that I knew never to refer to as Turkish, he suddenly said: ‘I’m thinking of leaving Westminster.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘At the end of term. I’m want to give up teaching.’

‘This is very sudden, Andreas. Why?’

He told me. A hotel had come up for sale on the edge of Agios Nikolaos; an intimate, family-run business with twelve rooms right next to the sea. The owners were in their sixties and their children had left the island. Like so many young Greeks, they were in London, but Andreas had a cousin who worked there and they looked on him almost as a son. They had offered him the opportunity to buy it and the cousin had come to him to see if he could help with the finance. Andreas was tired of teaching. Every time he went back to Crete, he felt more at home and he was beginning to ask himself why he had ever left. He was fifty years old. This was a chance to change his life.

‘But Andreas,’ I protested. ‘You don’t know anything about running a hotel.’

‘Yannis has experience and it’s small. How difficult can it be?’

‘But you said tourists weren’t going to Crete any more.’

‘That was this year. Next year will be better.’

‘But won’t you miss London …?’

All my sentences were beginning with ‘but’. Did I genuinely think it was a bad idea or was this the change that I had been fearing, the realisation that I was about to lose him? It was exactly what my sister had warned me about. I was going to end up on my own.

‘I hoped you’d be more excited,’ he said.

‘Why would I be excited?’ I asked, miserably.

‘Because I want you to come with me.’

‘Are you serious?’

He laughed a second time. ‘Of course! Why do you think I’m telling you all this?’ The waiter had brought raki and he poured two glasses, filling them to the brim. ‘You’ll love it, Susan, I promise you. Crete is a wonderful island and it’s about time you met my family and friends. They’re always asking about you.’

‘Are you asking me to marry you?’

He raised his glass, the mischief back in his eyes. ‘What would you say if I did?’

‘I probably wouldn’t say anything. I’d be too shocked.’ I didn’t mean to offend him, so I added: ‘I’d say I’d think about it.’

‘That’s all I’m asking you to do.’

‘I have a job, Andreas. I have a life.’

‘Crete is three and a half hours away. It’s not the other side of the world. And maybe, after everything you’ve told me, soon you won’t have a choice.’

That was certainly true. Without
Magpie Murders
, without Alan, who could say how long we could go on?

‘I don’t know. It’s a lovely idea. But you shouldn’t have sprung it on me so suddenly. You’re going to have to give me time to think.’

‘Of course.’

I picked up my raki and drank it in one gulp. I wanted to ask him what would happen if I decided to stay. Would that be it? Would he leave without me? It was too soon to have that conversation but the truth is that I thought it unlikely that I would swap my life – Cloverleaf, Crouch End – for Crete. I liked my job and I had my relationship with Charles to consider, particularly now when everything was so difficult. I couldn’t see myself as some twenty-first century Shirley Valentine, sitting on the rocks, a thousand miles from the nearest Waterstones.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘You might be right. By the end of the year I could be out of a job. I suppose I can always make the beds.’

Andreas stayed the night and it was good to have him back again. But as I lay there in the darkness, with his arms around me, there were a whole lot of thoughts racing through my mind, refusing to let me sleep. I saw myself getting out of the car at Abbey Grange with the tower looming over me, examining the tyre tracks, searching Alan’s office. Once again the photographs in Sajid Khan’s office seemed to slide in front of me but this time they showed Alan, Charles, James Taylor, Claire Jenkins and me. At the same time, I replayed snippets of conversation.

‘I was just worried you might get dizzy.’ James grabbing hold of me at the top of the tower.

‘I think someone killed him.’ Alan’s sister in Orford.

And that same evening, Andreas at dinner: ‘It’s not your business. It’s not something you should get involved with.’

Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn’t say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognised Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.

The Club at the Ivy

‘How did you get on?’ Charles asked me.

I told him about my visit to Framlingham, my meetings with James Taylor, Sajid Khan and Claire Jenkins. I had not found the missing chapters. They were not on his computer. There were no handwritten pages. I’m not quite sure why, but I didn’t raise the subject of how Alan had really died or my belief that his letter might have been used purposefully to mislead us. Nor did I tell him that I had read – or tried to read –
The Slide
.

I had chosen to play the detective – and if there is one thing that unites all the detectives I’ve ever read about, it’s their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks the necessary questions but he doesn’t actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn’t trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It’s a relationship based entirely on deception and it’s one that, ultimately, goes nowhere. Once the killer has been identified, the detective leaves and is never seen again. In fact, everyone is glad to see the back of him. I felt some of this with Charles: there was a distance between us that had never been there before. It struck me that, if Alan really had been murdered, Charles might be a suspect – although I couldn’t think of a single reason why he would want to kill his most successful author, ruining himself in the process.

Charles had changed too. He was looking gaunt and tired, his hair less well groomed and his suit perhaps more crumpled than I’d known. It was hardly surprising. He was involved in a police investigation. He had lost a guaranteed bestseller and seen an entire year’s profits potentially wiped out. None of this was very helpful in the run-up to Christmas. Plus he was about to become a grandfather for the first time. It was showing.

But still I waded in. ‘I want to know more about the Ivy meeting,’ I said. ‘The last time you saw Alan.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘I’m trying to work out what was going on in his head.’ That was only part of the truth. ‘Why he deliberately held back some of the pages.’

‘Is that what you think he did?’

‘It does look that way.’

Charles hung his head. I had never seen him so defeated. ‘This whole business is a disaster for us,’ he said. ‘I’ve been talking to Angela.’ Angela McMahon was our head of Marketing & Publicity. If I knew her, she would already be looking for a new job. ‘She says we can expect a spike in sales, especially when the police announce that Alan killed himself. There’ll be publicity. She’s trying to get a retrospective piece in the
Sunday Times
.’

‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps. But it’ll all be over very quickly. It’s not even certain that the BBC will continue with the dramatisation.’

‘I can’t see that his death would make any difference,’ I said. ‘Why would they pull out now?’

‘Alan hadn’t signed the contract. They were still arguing about casting and they’ll have to wait and find out who owns the rights and that may mean starting negotiations all over again.’ Underneath the desk, Bella rolled over and grunted and my thoughts flickered, just for a moment, to the collar that Atticus Pünd had found in the second bedroom at the Lodge. Bella, Tom Blakiston’s dog, had had its throat cut. The collar was obviously a clue. How did it fit in?

‘Did Alan talk about the TV series – at the Ivy?’ I asked.

‘He didn’t mention it. No.’

‘The two of you argued.’

‘I wouldn’t call it that, Susan. We disagreed about the title of his book.’

‘You didn’t like it.’

‘I thought it sounded too much like
Midsomer Murders
, that’s all. I shouldn’t have mentioned it – but I hadn’t read the book at that stage and there was nothing else to talk about.’

‘And this was when the waiter dropped the plates.’

‘Yes. Alan was mid-sentence. I can’t remember what he was saying. And then there was this almighty crash.’

‘You said he was angry.’

‘He was. He went over and talked to him.’

‘The waiter?’

‘Yes.’

‘He left the table?’ I don’t know why I was pressing the point. It just seemed such an odd thing to do.

‘Yes,’ Charles said.

‘You didn’t think that was strange?’

Charles considered, ‘Not really. The two of them spoke for a minute or two. I assumed Alan was complaining. After that, he went to the toilet. Then he came back to the table and we finished the meal.’

‘I don’t suppose you can describe the waiter? Do you know his name?’

At this stage, I didn’t have a lot to go on but it seemed to me that something must have been going on that evening, when Alan met Charles. All sorts of strands come together and meet at that table. At the very moment when he handed over the manuscript something had upset him, making him argumentative. He had behaved strangely, leaving the table to complain to a waiter about an accident that had nothing to do with him. The manuscript was missing pages and two days later he had died. I said nothing to Charles. I knew he would tell me that I was wasting my time. But later that afternoon I walked down to the private members’ club and set about talking my way in.