Magpie Murders (37 page)

It wasn’t difficult. The receptionist told me that the police had been in the club only the day before, asking questions about Alan’s behaviour, his state of mind. I was his editor. I was a friend of Charles Clover. Of course I could come in. I was shown up to the restaurant on the second floor. It was empty, the tables now being laid for dinner. The receptionist had given me the name of the waiter who’d had the accident with the plates on that Friday and he was waiting by the door as I came in.

‘That’s right. I was meant to be working in the bar that evening but they were short-staffed so I came up and helped in the restaurant. The two gents were starting their main course when I came out the kitchen. They were sitting over in that corner …’

Many of the waiters at the Club are young and Eastern European but Donald Leigh was neither of those things. He was from Scotland, as became obvious the moment he spoke, and in his early thirties. He was from Glasgow, he said, married with a two-year-old son. He had been in London for six years and loved working at the Ivy.

‘You should see some of the people we get in here, especially when the theatres come down.’ He was a short, stubby man with the weight of life pressing down on his shoulders. ‘Not just writers. Actors, politicians – the works.’

I had told him who I was and why I was here. He had already been questioned by the police and he gave me a shorthand version of what he had told them. Charles Clover and his guest had booked a table in the restaurant at half past seven and had left shortly after ten. He hadn’t served them. He didn’t know what they had eaten, but he remembered that they had ordered an expensive bottle of wine.

‘Mr Conway wasn’t in a very good mood.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m just telling you. He didn’t look happy.’

‘He delivered his new novel that evening.’

‘Did he? Well, bully for him. I didn’t see it, but then I was in and out. It was very busy and as I said, we were short-staffed.’

From the start, I’d had the impression that there was something he wasn’t telling me. ‘You dropped some plates,’ I said.

He looked at me sullenly. ‘I’m never going to hear the end of it. What’s the big deal?

I sighed. ‘Look, Donald – can I call you that?’

‘I’m off duty. You can call me what you like.’

‘I just want to know what happened. I worked with him. I knew him well and I didn’t much like him, if you want the truth. Anything you tell me is just between the two of us but I’m not convinced he killed himself and if you know something, if you heard something, it really might help.’

‘If you don’t think he killed himself, what
do
you think?’

‘I’ll tell you if you tell me what I want to know.’

He thought for a moment. ‘You mind if I have a cigarette?’ he asked.

‘I’ll join you,’ I said.

The good old cigarettes again, breaking down the barriers, putting us on the same side. We left the restaurant. There was a smokers’ area outside, a small, square patio walled off from a disapproving world. We both lit up. I told him that my name was Susan and once again promised him that this was just between the two of us. Suddenly he was eager to talk.

‘You’re a publisher?’ he said.

‘I’m an editor.’

‘But you work for a publisher.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then maybe we can help each other.’ He paused. ‘I knew Alan Conway. I knew who he was the moment I set eyes on him and that’s why I dropped those bloody plates. I forgot I was holding them and they burned through the serviette.’

‘How did you know him?’

He looked at me quite strangely. ‘Did you work on one of the Atticus Pünd novels,
Night Comes Calling
?’

That was the fourth in the series, the one set in a prep school. ‘I worked on all of them,’ I said.

‘What did you think of it?’

Night Comes Calling
has a headmaster killed during the performance of a play. He is sitting in the darkened auditorium when a figure runs through the audience and the next thing you know, he’s been stabbed with surgical precision in the side of the neck. What’s clever is that the main suspects are all on stage at the time so couldn’t possibly have done it, although it turns out that one of them did. It takes place very shortly after the war and there’s a backstory involving cowardice and dereliction of duty. ‘I thought it was ingenious,’ I said.

‘It was
my
story.
My
idea.’ Donald Leigh had intense, brown eyes and for a moment they came alive with anger. ‘Do you want me to go on?’

‘Yes. Please tell me.’

‘All right.’ He put the cigarette to his lips and sucked hard. The tip glowed a bright red. ‘I used to love books when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘I always wanted to be a writer, even when I was at school. It wasn’t the sort of thing you admitted to at the school I went to, Bridgeton, east of Glasgow. Horrible, bloody place where they said you were queer if you used the library. It didn’t bother me. I read all the time, as many books as I could get my hands on. Spy stories – Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum. Adventure stories. Horror stories. I loved Stephen King. But best of all were detective stories. I couldn’t get enough of them. I didn’t go to university or anything like that. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to write and I’ll get there one day, Susan, I’m telling you. I’m working on a book now. I’m only doing this job to keep me going until I get there.

‘But the trouble was, it never worked out the way I wanted. When I started writing I’d have this book in my head. I knew what I wanted to write. I got the ideas and the characters, but when I put it down on the page, it wouldn’t come together. I tried and I tried and I just sat there, staring at the page and then I’d rewrite. I could do it fifty times and it still wouldn’t work. Anyway, a few years ago I saw this advertisement. There were these people who were offering weekend courses to help new writers and there was one that was available – all the way down in bloody Devonshire. But it was focusing on murder mystery. It wasn’t cheap. It was going to cost me seven hundred quid. But I’d saved up enough money and I thought it was worth a shot. So I enrolled.’

I leant forward and tapped ash into one of the neat, silver receptacles the Ivy Club had provided. I knew where this was going.

‘We all went to this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere,’ Leigh went on. He was standing there with his hands balled into fists, as if he had been rehearsing, as if this was his moment on the stage. ‘There were eleven of us in the group. A couple of them were complete tossers and there were these two women who thought they were better than the rest of us. They’d had short stories published in magazines so they were completely full of themselves. You probably meet people like that all the time. The rest of them were OK, though, and I really enjoyed being with them. You know, it made me realise that it wasn’t just me, that we all had the same problems and we were there for the same thing. There were three tutors running the course. Alan Conway was one of them.

‘I thought he was really good. He drove a beautiful car – a BMW – and they put him up in a little house on his own. We were all sharing. But he still mucked in with the rest of us. He really knew what he was talking about and of course he’d made a ton of money out of the Atticus Pünd books. I read a couple of them before I went down there. I liked them, and they weren’t that different from what I was trying to do. We had lectures and tutorials in the day. We ate together – in fact, everyone in the group had to help with the cooking. And there was plenty of booze in the evening so we could just chat and unwind. That was my favourite part of it. We all felt like equals. And one evening there was just the two of us in this little snug area and I told him about the book I was writing.

His fists tightened as he came to the inevitable point of his narrative. ‘If I give you my manuscript, will you read it?’ he asked.

It’s a question I normally dread – but I bowed to the inevitable. ‘Are you saying that Alan stole your ideas?’ I asked.

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, Susan. That’s exactly what he did.’

‘What’s your book called?’

‘
Death Treads the Boards
.’

It was a terrible title. But of course I didn’t say that. ‘I can look at it for you,’ I said. ‘But I can’t promise I can help you.’

‘All I want you to do is look at it. That’s all I’m asking.’ He looked me in the eye as if daring me to refuse. ‘I told Alan Conway my story,’ he went on. ‘I told him all about the murder I’d thought up. It was late and there were just the two of us in the room, no witnesses. He asked me if he could look at the manuscript and I was delighted. Everyone wanted him to read their work. That was the whole point.’

He finished his cigarette and ground it out, then promptly lit a second.

‘He read it very quickly. There were only two days of the course left and on the last day he took me aside and gave me some advice. He said I used too many adjectives. He said my dialogue wasn’t realistic. What’s realistic dialogue meant to sound like for heaven’s sake? It’s not real! It’s fiction! He gave me some quite good ideas about my main character, my detective. I remember one of the things he said was that he should have a bad habit, like he should smoke or drink or something. He said he’d get in touch with me again and I gave him my email address.

‘I never heard from him. Not a word. And then, almost exactly a year later,
Night Comes Calling
came out in the shops. It was all about the production of a school play. My book wasn’t set in a school. It was set in a theatre. But it was the same idea. And it didn’t stop there. He’d nicked my murder. It was
exactly
the same. The same method, the same clues, almost the same characters.’ His voice was rising. ‘That’s what he did, Susan. He took my story and used it for
Night Comes Calling
.’

‘Did you tell anyone?’ I asked. ‘When the book came out, what did you do?’

‘What
could
I do? You tell me! Who would have believed me?’

‘You could have written to us at Cloverleaf Books.’

‘I
did
write to you. I wrote to the managing director, Mr Clover. He didn’t write back. I wrote to Alan Conway. I wrote to him quite a few times, as a matter of fact. Let’s just say that I didn’t hold back. But I got nothing from him either. I wrote to the people who set up the course in the first place. I got a letter from them. They gave me the brush-off. They denied any responsibility, said it had nothing to do with them. I thought about going to the police. I mean, he’d stolen something from me. There’s a word for that, isn’t there? But when I talked to my wife, Karen, she said to forget it. He was famous. He was protected. I was nobody. She said it would just hurt my writing if I tried to fight it and it was best to move on. So that’s what I did. I’m still writing. At least I know I’ve got good ideas. He wouldn’t have done what he did if I hadn’t.’

‘Have you written any other novels?’ I asked.

‘I’m working on one now. But it’s not a detective story. I’ve moved on from that now. It’s a children’s book. Now that I’ve got a child it felt like the right thing to do.’

‘But you’ve kept
Death Treads the Boards
.’

‘Of course I’ve kept it. I’ve kept everything I’ve ever written. I know I’ve got the talent. Karen loves my work. And one day …’

‘Send it to me.’ I fished in my handbag and took out a card. ‘So what happened when you saw him in the restaurant?’ I asked.

He was waiting for me to give him my business card. It was a lifeline for him. I was in the ivory tower and he was on the outside. I’ve seen it in so many new writers, this belief that publishers are any different – smarter, more successful than them – when actually we’re just shuffling along, hoping we’ll still have a job at the end of the month. ‘I came out of the kitchen,’ he said. ‘I was carrying two main courses and a side for table nine. I saw him sitting there – he was arguing about something – and I was so shocked I just stood there. The plates were hot. They burned through the cloth and I dropped them.’

‘And then? I was told that Alan came over. He was angry with you.’

He shook his head. ‘That’s not how it happened. I cleaned up the mess and put a new order in to the kitchen. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back into the room but I had no choice – and at least I wasn’t serving his table. Anyway, the next thing I know, Mr Conway got up to go to the toilet and he walked right past me. I wasn’t going to say anything but seeing him so close, inches away, I couldn’t stop myself.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said good evening. I asked him if he remembered me.’

‘And?’

‘He didn’t. Or he pretended he didn’t. I reminded him that we’d met in Devonshire, that he had been kind enough to read my novel. He knew exactly who I was and what I was referring to. So then he got shirty with me. “I don’t come here to talk to the waiters.” That was what he said, those exact words. He asked me to step out of his way. He was keeping his voice low but I knew exactly what he would do if I wasn’t careful. It was the same thing all over again. He’s successful, with his fancy car and that big house of his up in Framlingham. I’m no one. He’s a member here. I’m waiting tables. I need this job. I’ve got a two-year-old kid. So I mumbled I was sorry and stepped away. It made me feel sick to my stomach doing that but what choice did I have?’

‘You must have been quite pleased to hear he was dead.’

‘You want the truth, Susan? I was delighted. I couldn’t have been happier if—’

He had said too much but I pressed him anyway. ‘If what?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

But we both knew what he’d meant. I gave him the business card and he tucked it away in his top pocket. He finished his second cigarette and stubbed that one out too.

‘Can I ask you one last thing?’ I said as we moved back inside. ‘You said that Alan was having an argument. I don’t suppose you heard anything of what was being said?’

He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t near enough.’

‘How about the people at the next table?’ I had seen for myself the layout of the room. They would have been virtually rubbing shoulders.