Magpie Murders (48 page)

Extract from
Death Treads the Boards
by Donald Leigh

CHAPTER 21: THE FINAL ACT

It was very dark in the theatre. The light of the day was fading quickly outside and the ominous sky was full of heavy, ugly clouds. In just six hours time, 1920 would come to an end and 1921 would begin. But Detective Superintendent MacKinnon was already celebrating the New Year inside his head. He had worked it all out. He knew who had committed the murder and soon he would confront that person, pinning him to the floor with the ruthlessness of a scientist with a rare butterfly.

Sergeant Browne looked carefully at the suspects, asking himself for the thousandth time, which one of them could have stabbed the history teacher, Ewan Jones, in the throat on that unforgettable night? Which one of them?

They were sitting in the half-abandoned theatre, not looking comfortable, each one of them doing their best to avoid the other’s eyes. Henry Baker, the director of the play, was stroking his moustache as he always did when he was nervous. The writer, Charles Hawkins, was smoking a cigarette, which he was holding in those stubby fingers that were always stained with ink. Was it just a coincidence that he had been badly wounded at Ypres at the same time as the second victim, the theatre manager, Alastair Short, who had been mysteriously poisoned with arsenic a few days later? Could there be a connection? Short had two hundred pounds stashed away in his bedside cupboard and it looked very much as if blackmail could have been the name of his game. Where else could he have got the money? It was a shame that he hadn’t lived to tell the tale.

Which one of them? Browne still suspected Lila Blaire. His thoughts hurtled back to the moment when she had thrown herself at Short, screaming at him and accusing him of destroying her career. ‘I hate you!’ she had screamed. ‘I wish you were dead!’ And seventy minutes later he had indeed been dead, just as she had wanted. And what about Iain Lithgow? The young, handsome, smiling actor had been too young to fight at Ypres. There could be no connection there but he had gambling debts and people who need money desperately will often do desperate things. Browne waited for his boss to collect his thoughts.

And now the moment he had been waiting for arrived. As MacKinnon got to his feet, there was a brief roll of thunder in the heavy, oppressive air. The New Year was going to start with a bad storm. Everyone stopped and looked up as he adjusted his monacle and then began to speak.

‘On the night of 20 December,’ he began, ‘a murder was committed here, in the Roxberry Theatre, during a performance of
Aladdin
. But it was the wrong murder! Alastair Short was the real target but the killer got it wrong because, at the last moment, Mr Short and Mr Jones had swapped seats.’

MacKinnon paused for a moment, examining each one of the suspects as they drank in his words. ‘But who was the killer who ran off the stage and plunged the knife into Jones’s throat?’ he continued. ‘There were two people who it couldn’t have been. Charles Hawkins couldn’t have run through the theatre. He only had one leg. And as for Nigel Smith, he was on stage at the time, in full view of the audience. It couldn’t be him either.

‘At least, that’s what I thought …’

There can be no doubt that Alan stole Donald Leigh’s idea. He changed the time period from the twenties to the late forties and the setting from an end-of-the-pier theatre to a preparatory school, which he based on Chorley Hall, renaming it Fawley Park. Elliot Tweed is a thinly disguised portrait of his father, Elias Conway. Oh yes – and all the teachers are named after British rivers. The name of the detective, Inspector Ridgway, may have been borrowed from Agatha Christie’s
Death on the Nile
. Another river. But the mechanism is the same and so is the motive. An officer abandons his men at a time of war and, years later, the only survivor joins forces with the son of one of the men who died. They swap places during the performance of a play, committing the murder in full view of the audience. Detective Superintendent Locke would have found it a tad unlikely, but in the world of whodunnit fiction, it worked just fine.

After I read the two books, I rang the Arvon Foundation, which, I correctly guessed, had hosted the course that Donald had attended. They were able to confirm that Donald Leigh had indeed been at their manor house at Totleigh Barton, Devonshire. It’s a lovely place, by the way. I’ve been there myself. I would have said that the chances of a visiting tutor stealing the work of one of his students was about a million to one, but looking at the two versions, that’s what had happened. I felt sorry for Donald. Frankly, he can’t write. His sentences are leaden, lacking any rhythm. He uses too many adjectives and his dialogue is unconvincing. Alan was right on both counts. But he didn’t deserve to be treated this way. Could he have done anything about it? He told me he had written to Charles and had received no reply. That wasn’t surprising. Publishers get crank letters all the time and this one wouldn’t have got past Jemima. She’d simply have binned it. The police wouldn’t have been interested. It would have been easy enough for Alan to claim that he had given the idea to Donald rather than the other way round.

What else could he have done? Well, he could have found Alan’s address in the records of the Ivy Club, travelled up to Framlingham, pushed him off the roof and ripped up the final chapters of his new novel. I’d have been tempted to do the same in his place.

I’d managed to spend most of the morning reading and I was meant to be having lunch with Lucy, our rights manager. I wanted to talk to her about James Taylor and
The Atticus Adventures
. It was half past twelve and I thought I’d slip out for a quick cigarette on the pavement outside the front door – but then I remembered the letter at the top of the pile, the one that had spelled my name wrong. I opened it.

There was a photograph inside. No note. No name of any sender. I snatched the envelope back and looked at the postmark. It had been sent from Ipswich.

The photograph was a little blurry. I guessed it had been taken with a mobile phone, enlarged and printed at one of those Snappy Snaps shops you find everywhere. You can plug directly into their machines so, assuming they paid cash, the person who had taken the photograph would have been completely anonymous.

It showed John White murdering Alan Conway.

The two men were at the top of the tower. Alan had his back to the edge and he was bent over towards it. He was dressed in the same clothes – the loose jacket and black shirt – that he had been wearing when he was found. White had his hands on Alan’s shoulders. One push and it would all be over.

So that was it. The mystery was solved. I rang Lucy and cancelled lunch. Then I began to think.

Detective work

It’s one thing reading about detectives, quite another trying to be one.

I’ve always loved whodunnits. I’ve not just edited them. I’ve read them for pleasure throughout my life, gorging on them actually. You must know that feeling when it’s raining outside and the heating’s on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover. That is the particular power of the whodunnit which has, I think, a special place within the general panoply of literary fiction because, of all characters, the detective enjoys a particular, indeed a unique relationship with the reader.

Whodunnits are all about truth: nothing more, nothing less. In a world full of uncertainties, is it not inherently satisfying to come to the last page with every i dotted and every t crossed? The stories mimic our experience in the world. We are surrounded by tensions and ambiguities, which we spend half our life trying to resolve and we’ll probably be on our own deathbed when we reach that moment when everything makes sense. Just about every whodunnit provides that pleasure. It is the reason for their existence. It’s why
Magpie Murders
was so bloody irritating.

In just about every other book I can think of, we’re chasing on the heels of our heroes – the spies, the soldiers, the romantics, the adventurers. But we stand shoulder to shoulder with the detective. From the very start, we have the same aim – and it’s actually a simple one. We want to know what really happened and neither of us are in it for the money. Read the Sherlock Holmes short stories. He’s hardly ever paid, and although he’s clearly well off, I’m not sure he once presents a bill for his services. Of course the detectives are cleverer than us. We expect them to be. But that doesn’t mean they’re paragons of virtue. Holmes is depressed. Poirot is vain. Miss Marple is brusque and eccentric. They don’t have to be attractive. Look at Nero Wolfe who was so fat that he couldn’t even leave his New York home and had to have a custom-made chair to support his weight! Or Father Brown who had ‘
a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling … eyes as empty as the North Sea
.’ Lord Peter Wimsey, ex-Eton, ex-Oxford, is thin and seemingly weedy and sports a monocle. Bulldog Drummond might have been able to kill a man with his bare hands (and may have been the inspiration for James Bond) but he was no male model either. In fact H.C. McNeile hits the nail on the head when he writes that Drummond had ‘
the fortunate possession of that cheerful type of ugliness which inspires immediate confidence in its owner
.’ We don’t need to like or admire our detectives. We stick with them because we have confidence in them.

All of this makes me a poor choice of narrator/investigator. Quite apart from the fact that I’m completely unqualified, I may not actually be all that good. I have tried to describe everyone I saw, everything I heard and, most importantly, everything I thought. Sadly, I have no Watson, no Hastings, no Troy, no Bunter, no Lewis. So I have no choice but to put everything onto the page, including the fact that, until I opened the letter and saw the photograph of John White, I was getting absolutely nowhere. In fact, in my darker moments, I was beginning to ask myself if there really had been a murder at all. Part of the trouble was that there was no pattern, no shape to the mystery I was trying to solve. If Alan Conway had lent his hand to the description of his own death, as he had with Sir Magnus Pye, I’m sure he’d have given me a variety of clues, signs and indications to lead me on my way. For example, in
Magpie Murders
, there’s the handprint in the earth, the dog’s collar in the bedroom, the scrap of paper found in the fireplace, the service revolver in the desk, the typed letter in the handwritten envelope. I might not have any idea what they add up to but at least, as the reader, I know that they must have some significance or why else would they have been mentioned? As the detective, I had to find these things for myself and perhaps I’d been looking in the wrong direction because I seemed to have precious little to work with: no torn buttons, no mysterious fingerprints, no conveniently overheard conversations. Well, of course, I had Alan’s handwritten suicide letter, which had been sent to Charles in a typed envelope, the exact reverse of what I had read in the book. But what did that mean? Had he run out of ink? Had he written the letter but asked someone else to write the address? If you read a Sherlock Holmes story, you can be pretty sure that the detective will know exactly what’s going on even if he won’t necessarily tell you. In this case, that’s not true at all.

There was also that dinner at the Ivy. I still couldn’t get it out of my mind. Alan had become annoyed when Charles had suggested changing the title of his book. Mathew Prichard, sitting at the next table, had heard what he had said. He had pounded the table, then jabbed with a finger. ‘
I’m not having the
—’ The what? I’m not having the title changed? I’m not having the discussion? I’m not having the dessert, thanks? Even Charles wasn’t sure what he had meant.

I might as well come straight out with it. I didn’t think John White killed Alan Conway even though I had photographic evidence of him committing that very act. It was like the suicide letter that wasn’t actually a suicide letter except that this time I didn’t even have the beginning of an explanation. I simply didn’t believe it. I had met White and I didn’t see him as being a particularly violent or aggressive person. And anyway, he had no reason to kill Alan. If anything, it was the other way round.

There were other questions too. Who had sent me the photograph? Why had they sent it to me, rather than the police? It must have been posted on the same day as the funeral and the postmark showed Ipswich. How many people at the funeral knew that I worked at Cloverleaf Books? My name was misspelled on the envelope. Was that a genuine error or a deliberate attempt to make it appear that they didn’t know me well?

Sitting on my own in the office – just about everyone else had gone out to lunch – I drew up a list of suspects. I could think of five people who were far more likely than White to have committed the murder and I set them out in order of likelihood. It was quite confusing. I’d already performed exactly the same exercise when I’d finished Alan’s book.

1. James Taylor, the boyfriend

As much as I liked James, he was the one who most directly benefited from Alan’s death. In fact, if Alan had lived another twenty-four hours, he would have lost several million pounds. He knew Alan was in the house. He would have guessed that Alan would have breakfast on the tower because the weather was so good on that penultimate day in August. He was still living there and could have let himself in, crept upstairs and pushed him off in the blink of an eye. He had told me he was in London over the weekend but I only had his word for that and he’d seemed completely at home when I met him, as if he knew that Abbey Grange was his. Of course, it’s the first rule of whodunnits that you discard the most obvious suspect. Was that what I should do here?