Magpie Murders (43 page)

He never told me he was ill. You have no idea how much that upsets me. But I will finish where I began. Alan was a fighter all his life. Sometimes this could make him seem difficult and aggressive but I don’t think he was either of those things. He simply knew what he wanted and he never allowed anything to get in his way. Above all, he was a writer. His writing meant everything to him. Do you really believe he would finish a novel and kill himself before he saw it published? It’s unthinkable! It’s just not the Alan Conway I knew.

St Michael’s

It seemed to me that Claire had arrived at her conclusion for all the wrong reasons. She was right to believe Alan had not committed suicide. But the way she had got there was confused. ‘
I know he would have called me before he did anything foolish
.’ That’s where she begins. That’s her main justification. By the end, though, she’s trying another tack. ‘
Do you really believe he would finish a novel and kill himself before he saw it published
?’ They’re two quite different arguments and we can deal with them separately.

Alan was never one to forget a grudge. The two of them fell out badly when Claire asked to be paid for the work she was doing and despite what she thought, I don’t believe they were ever really that close again. For example, although he told her that he was leaving Melissa it’s clear that she knew nothing about his relationship with James Taylor: he left her to read about that in the newspapers. It may be that when Alan came out as a gay man, he had left his old life behind him like a discarded suit and sadly that included Claire. If he wasn’t prepared to share his sexuality with her, why should he have shared his suicide?

She also makes the mistake of thinking that the leap from the tower was something he had planned. ‘
He would never have left me on my own, not without warning me first
.’ But that’s not necessarily the case. He could have just woken up and decided to do it. He might have completely forgotten that he had a book coming out. He would have been dead before it was published anyway. What did it matter to him?

Her account was interesting in other ways. I hadn’t realised, even now, how much of his private life Alan had woven into
Magpie Murders
. Did he know, before he was diagnosed, that this would be his final novel? ‘We were pirates, treasure hunters, soldiers, spies,’ Robert Blakiston tells Atticus Pünd but he’s also talking about Alan’s childhood. Alan liked codes – Robert rapped out codes on his bedroom wall. And then there are the anagrams and the acrostics. Robeson becomes Osborne. Clarissa Pye solves an anagram in the
Daily Telegraph
crossword. Could Alan have hidden some sort of secret message inside his book, something that he knew about someone? What message could it be? For that matter, if he knew something horrible enough to get himself killed, why play around? Why not just come straight out with it?

Or could it be that the message was actually concealed in the final chapters? Had someone stolen them for that reason, killing Alan at the same time? That made some sort of sense, although it would beg the question of who, if anyone, had read them.

There were still a couple of hours until dinner and I decided to walk up to the Castle Inn. I needed to clear my head. It was already getting dark and Framlingham had a forlorn quality, the shops closed, the streets empty. As I passed the church, I saw a movement, a shadowy figure moving between the tombstones. It was the vicar. I watched him disappear into the church, the door booming shut behind him, and on an impulse I decided to follow. My steps took me past Alan’s grave and it was horrible to think of him lying beneath that freshly dug earth. I had thought him cold and silent when I had met him. He was eternally so in death.

I hurried forward and entered the church. The interior was huge, cluttered, draughty, a collage of different centuries. It was probably unhappy to have arrived at this one: the twelfth century had provided the arches, the sixteenth the lovely wooden ceiling, the eighteenth the altar – and what had the twenty-first bestowed upon St Michael? Atheism and indifference. Robeson was at the back of the pews, quite close to the door. He was on his knees and for a brief moment I assumed he was praying. Then I saw that he was attending to an old radiator, bleeding it. He turned a key and there was a hiss of stale air followed by a rattle as the pipes began to fill. He turned as I approached and half-remembered me, getting unsteadily to his feet. ‘Good evening, Mrs …?’

‘Susan Ryeland,’ I reminded him. ‘Miss. I was the one who asked you about Alan.’

‘A lot of people have been asking me about Alan today.’

‘I asked if he bullied you.’

He remembered that and looked away. ‘I think I told you what you wanted to know.’

‘Were you aware that he had put you in his latest book?’

That surprised him. He ran a hand over the slab that was his chin. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s a vicar in it who looks like you. He even has a similar name.’

‘Does he mention the church?’

‘St Michael’s? No.’

‘Well, that’s all right then.’ I waited for him to continue. ‘It would be quite typical of Alan to say something unpleasant about me. He had that sort of sense of humour – if you can call it that.’

‘You didn’t like him very much.’

‘Why are you asking me these questions, Miss Ryeland? What exactly is your interest?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? I was his editor at Cloverleaf Books.’

‘I see. I’m afraid I never read any of his novels. I’ve never been very interested in whodunnits and mysteries. I prefer non-fiction.’

‘When did you meet Alan Conway?’

He didn’t want to answer but he could see I wasn’t going to stop. ‘Actually, we were at school together.’

‘You were at Chorley Hall?’

‘Yes. I came to Framlingham a few years ago and I was quite surprised to see him in my congregation – not that he came to church very often. The two of us were exactly the same age.’

‘And?’ There was a silence. ‘You said he had a dominant personality. Did he bully you?’

Osborne sighed. ‘I’m not sure it’s quite appropriate to be discussing these things, today of all days. But if you must know, the circumstances were quite unusual in that his father was the headmaster at the school. That gave him a certain power. He could say things … do things … and he knew that none of us would dare to say a word against him.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Well, I suppose you could say that they were practical jokes. I’m sure that’s how he viewed them. But they could also be quite hurtful and malicious. In my case, certainly, he caused me a certain amount of upset although it’s all water under the bridge now. It was a very long time ago.’

‘What did he do?’ Robeson was still reluctant, so I pressed him. ‘It is very important, Mr Robeson. I believe Alan’s death wasn’t quite as straightforward as it seems and anything you can tell me about him, in confidence, would be very helpful.’

‘It was a prank, Miss Ryeland. Nothing more.’ He waited for me to go away and when I didn’t, he added: ‘He took photographs …’

‘Photographs?’

‘They were horrible photographs!’

It wasn’t the vicar who had spoken. The words had come from nowhere. That’s the thing about church acoustics. They lend themselves to surprise appearances. I looked round and there was the ginger-haired woman I had seen at the hotel, presumably his wife, striding towards us, her shoes rapping out a determined rhythm on the stone floor. She stopped next to him, gazing at me with undisguised hostility. ‘Tom really doesn’t want to talk about it,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand why you’re bothering him. We buried Alan Conway today and as far as I’m concerned, that’s an end to it. We’re not going to engage in any further tittle-tattle. Did you fix the radiators?’ She had asked this last question in exactly the same tone, without stopping for breath.

‘Yes, dear.’

‘Then let’s go home.’

She put her arm in his and although her head barely came up to his shoulder, it was she who propelled him out of the church. The door banged shut behind them and I was left wondering exactly what the photographs had shown and, at the same time, whether it had been photographs that Mary Blakiston had found on the kitchen table in the vicarage at Saxby-on-Avon and if, perhaps, they had been responsible for her death.

Dinner at the Crown

I didn’t mean to get drunk with James Taylor and I still can’t remember how it happened. It’s true that he was quite distracted when he arrived and promptly ordered a bottle of the most expensive champagne on the menu followed by a good wine and several whiskies but I’d intended to leave the drinking to him. I’m not sure how much I learned in the next two hours. I was certainly no closer to learning
who
might have killed Alan Conway, or why, and when I woke up the following morning, I was fairly close to death myself.

‘God, I hate this fucking place.’ Those were his opening words as he slumped down at the table. He had changed into the same black leather jacket he had been wearing when I first met him and a white T-shirt. Very James Dean. ‘I’m sorry, Susan,’ he went on. ‘But I couldn’t wait for the funeral to end. That vicar didn’t have anything good to say about Alan. And that voice of his! I mean, gravelly is one thing but he could have been digging the grave himself. I didn’t even want to be there but Mr Khan insisted and he’s been helping me so I felt I owed him. Of course, everyone knows by now.’ I looked at him, questioning. ‘The money! I get the house, the land, the cash, the book rights, the lot! Well, he left quite a bit to Freddy – that’s his son – and he looked after his sister too. There’s a bequest to the church. Robeson made him pay that in return for the plot. One or two other things. But I’ve got more money than I’ve ever had in my life. Dinner’s on me, by the way – or on Alan. Did you find the missing pages of the manuscript?’

I told him that I hadn’t.

‘That’s a shame. I’ve been rummaging around for you but no luck. It’s funny to think that you’ll be dealing with me from now on, about the books, I mean. I’ve already had someone called Mark Redmond on the phone about
The Atticus Adventures
. He’s welcome to them as long as I don’t have to watch the bloody thing.’ He glanced at the menu, made an instant decision and slid it aside. ‘They all hate me, you know. Of course, they have to pretend. Everyone’s too nervous to come out with it but you can still see the way most of them were looking at me. I’m Alan’s bum boy and now I’ve got the lot. That’s what they were thinking.’

The champagne arrived and he waited while the waitress poured two glasses. I couldn’t help smiling. He had just become a millionaire and he was complaining about it but he was doing it in a light-hearted, even a humorous way. It was a deliberate self-parody.

He drained his glass in one go. ‘I’m putting Abbey Grange on the market first thing tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They’ll probably hold that against me too but I can’t wait to go. Mr Khan says it could be worth a couple of million pounds and I’ve already had interest from John White. Did I mention him to you? He’s the hedge fund guy next door. Super-rich. He and Alan had this huge argument a short while ago. Something to do with investments. After that, the two of them weren’t even speaking. It’s funny, isn’t it? You buy a house in the middle of the countryside with about fifty acres and the one person you don’t get on with is your neighbour. Anyway, he might buy me out – to get the extra land.’

‘Where will you go?’ I asked.

‘I’ll buy a place in London. It’s what I always wanted. I’m going to try and kick-start my career. I want to get back into acting. If they make
The
Atticus Adventures
, they might even offer me a part. That would be a turn-up for the books, wouldn’t it? They could cast me as James Fraser so I’d end up playing a character based on me in the first place. Do you know why he was called Fraser, by the way?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘Alan named him after Hugh Fraser, the actor who played Poirot’s sidekick on TV. And the flat that Atticus Pünd lived in, Tanner Court in Farringdon? That was another of Alan’s jokes. There’s a real place called Florin Court which they used in the Poirot filming. Do you get it? Tanner? Florin? They’re both old coins.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He told me. And he used to do other things too. He used to hide things.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well … names. One of the books is set in London and all the names are actually tube stations or something like that. And there’s another one where the characters are called Brooke, Waters, Forster, Wilde …’

‘They’re all writers.’

‘They’re all
gay
writers. It was a game he played to stop himself getting bored.’

We drank more champagne and ordered fish and chips. The restaurant was on the far side of the hotel, tucked around the corner from where the funeral drinks had taken place. There were a couple of families eating but we’d been given a corner table. The lighting was low. I asked James about the way Alan Conway had worked. He had hidden almost as much as he had revealed in his writing and there was an odd disconnect between the bestselling author and the books he had actually produced. Why all these games, these codes and secret references? Wasn’t it enough simply to tell the story?

‘He never talked to me about it,’ James said. ‘He worked incredibly hard, sometimes seven or eight hours a day. There was a notebook he filled up with clues and red herrings – all that stuff. Who was where and when, what they were doing. He said it gave him a headache, sorting everything out and if I came into the room and disturbed him, he would really yell at me. There were times when he talked about Atticus Pünd as if he was a real person and I got the idea that they weren’t the best of friends – if that doesn’t sound a little bit weird. “Atticus is destroying me! I’m fed up with him. Why do I have to write another book about him?” He said that sort of thing all the time.’

‘Is that why he decided to kill him?’

‘I don’t know. Does he die in the last book? I never saw any of it.’