Magpie Murders (49 page)

2. Claire Jenkins, the sister

In all those pages she gave me, she went on about how much she adored her brother, how generous he was to her and how close they had always been. I wasn’t sure I quite believed her. James thought she was jealous of his success and it’s certainly true that in the end the two of them argued about money. That wasn’t necessarily a motive for murder but there was another very good reason to put her second on my list and it related to the unfinished book.

Alan Conway took a spiteful pleasure in creating characters based on people he knew. James Taylor turned up as the slightly dim, foppish James Fraser. The vicar appeared as an anagram of himself. Even Alan’s own son was in there by name. I had no doubt at all that Clarissa Pye, Sir Magnus’s lonely, spinster sister was based on Claire. It was a grotesque portrait, which Alan made more pointed by deliberately including his address in Daphne Road (although in the book, it’s Brent who lives there). If Claire had seen the manuscript, she might have a very good reason to push her brother off the roof. It would also have been in her interest to ensure that the book was never published – something she would have achieved by stealing the last chapters.

Why then would she insist that Alan had been murdered? Why draw attention to what she had done? I had no real answer to that, but thinking it through I remembered reading somewhere that killers have an urge to claim ownership. It’s why they return to the scene of their crime. Could it be that Claire had asked me to investigate her brother’s death for the very same reason that she wrote that long account? A pathological desire to be centre stage.

3. Tom Robeson, the vicar.

It was a pity that Robeson wouldn’t tell me exactly what had happened at Chorley Hall when I confronted him at the church. If his wife had arrived a few minutes later it would have made all the difference. But the incident had involved a photograph used to humiliate a boy in an all-boys school and I didn’t need to work too hard to get the general idea. It was interesting, incidentally, that Claire saw her brother as one of the victims of the school’s various cruelties while Robeson saw him as more of an active participant. The more I learnt about Alan, the more I was inclined to believe the vicar’s account.

All this had taken place back in the seventies and it had clearly been on Alan’s mind because he had written about it in the first chapter of
Magpie Murders,
when Mary Blakiston turns up in the vicarage. ‘
And there they were, just lying in the middle of all his papers
.’ What had she seen? Were Henrietta and Robin Osborne perverts of some sort? Had they left out incriminating photographs, similar in nature to the ones that had tormented Robeson? From what he had said in his funeral address, the vicar hadn’t forgotten any of this and, having met him, I could quite easily see him creeping up to the top of the tower to get his revenge. That said, it’s always been my belief that vicars make poor characters in crime novels. They’re somehow too obvious, too Little England. If Robeson did turn out to be the killer, I think I’d be disappointed.

4. Donald Leigh, the waiter

‘
You must have been quite pleased to hear he was dead
.’ I had said. ‘
I was delighted,
’ he’d replied. Two men don’t see each other for several years. One hates the other. They meet quite by chance and forty-eight hours later, one of them is dead. When I put it in black and white like that, Robert had to be on my list and it would have been a simple matter for him to get Alan’s address from the club records. What else is there to say?

5. Mark Redmond, the producer

He lied to me. He said that he went back to London on the Saturday when the register showed that he had actually stayed the entire weekend at the Crown. He also had every reason to want Alan dead.
The Atticus Adventures
would have been worth a fortune if he could get them off the ground and Redmond had invested a lot of his own money seeding the project. He certainly knew a thing or two about murder having masterminded hundreds of them on British TV. Would it really have been so difficult to move from fiction to reality? After all, the murder had been a bloodless one. No guns, no knives. Just a simple push. Anyone could do that.

Those were the five names on my list, the
Five Little Pigs
, if you like, that I suspected of committing the crime. But there were two other names, which I didn’t add but which should perhaps have been there.

6. Melissa Conway, the ex-wife

I hadn’t had a chance to speak to her yet, but decided I would travel down to Bradford-on-Avon as soon as I could. I was beginning to obsess about Alan’s murder and I wasn’t going to get any work done at Cloverleaf until it was solved. According to Claire Jenkins, Melissa had never forgiven Alan for the way he had left her. Had they met recently? Could something have happened that might have prompted her to take revenge? I was annoyed that I’d missed her at the hotel. I would have liked to have asked her why she had travelled all the way up to Framlingham to attend her husband’s funeral. Had she made the same journey to push him off the tower?

7. Frederick Conway, the son

It may not be fair to include him – I had only glimpsed him at the funeral and knew almost nothing about him – but I still remembered how he had looked that day, staring at the grave, his face positively distorted by anger. He had been abandoned by his father. Worse than that, his father had come out as a gay man and as a schoolboy that might not have been easy for him either. A motive for murder? Alan must have been thinking about him when he wrote
Magpie Murders
. Freddy turns up as the son of Sir Magnus and Lady Pye, the only character who retains his true name.

These were the notes that I made, sitting in my office that Monday afternoon, and by the time I left I had got precisely nowhere. It’s all very well having suspects. When push comes to shove (as, indeed, it had) all seven of them – eight, counting John White – could have killed Alan Conway. For that matter, it could have been the postman, the milkman, someone I’ve forgotten to mention, or someone I hadn’t met. What I didn’t have was that interconnectivity you get in a murder mystery, the sense that all the characters are moving in tandem, like pieces on a Cluedo board. Any one of them could have knocked on the door of Abbey Grange on that Sunday morning. Any one of them could have done it.

In the end I shoved my notepad aside and went for a meeting with one of our copy editors. If I had just worked a little harder, I would have realised that the clue I had been seeking was actually there, that somebody had said something to me, quite recently, that had identified them as the killer, and that the motive for Alan’s murder had been in front of my eyes the moment I had begun reading
Magpie Murders
.

Just half an hour more might have made all the difference in the world. But I was late for my meeting and I was still thinking about Andreas. It was going to cost me dear.

Bradford-on-Avon

Bradford-on-Avon was the last stopping point of my journey into the fictitious world of
Magpie Murders
. Although Alan had used Orford as a model for Saxby-on-Avon, the very name shows where his thoughts lay. What he had done in effect was to synthesise the two. The church, the square, the two pubs, the castle, the meadowland and the general layout belonged to Orford. But it was Bradford-on-Avon, which lay a few miles outside Bath and which was filled with the ‘
solid, Georgian constructions made of Bath stone with handsome porticos and gardens rising up in terraces
’ that the book describes. I don’t think it was a coincidence that it happened to be the place where his ex-wife lived. Something had happened that had made him think of her. Somewhere inside
Magpie Murder
s there was a message intended for her.

I had telephoned ahead and travelled down on Tuesday morning, taking the train from Paddington station and changing at Bath. I would have driven, but I had the manuscript with me and planned to work on the way. Melissa had been pleased to hear from me and had invited me to lunch. I arrived just after twelve.

She had given me an address – Middle Rank – that led me to a row of terraced houses high above the town, unreachable except on foot. It was in the middle of an extraordinary warren of walkways, staircases and gardens, which could have been Spanish or Italian in origin if they hadn’t been so determinedly English. The houses stretched out in three rows with perfectly proportioned Georgian windows, porticos above many of the front doors and, yes, that honey-coloured Bath stone. Melissa had three floors and a busy garden that picked its way in steps down the hill to a stone pavilion below. This was where she had moved after Orford, and although I hadn’t seen where she had lived when she was there, it struck me that this must be the antithesis. It was peculiar. It was secluded. It was somewhere you would come if you wanted to escape.

I rang the doorbell and Melissa answered it herself. My first impression was that she was much younger than I remembered her, although we must have been both about the same age. I had barely recognised her at the funeral. In her coat and scarf with the rain falling, she had blurred into the crowd. Now that she was standing in front of me, in her own home, she struck me as confident, attractive, relaxed. She was slim, with high cheekbones and an easy smile. I was sure her hair had been brown when she was married to Alan. Now it was a dark chestnut and cut short, down to the neck. She was wearing jeans and a cashmere jersey, a white gold chain and no make-up. It’s often occurred to me that divorce suits some women. I’d have said that about her.

She greeted me formally and led me upstairs to the main living room which ran the whole length of the house with lovely views over Bradford-on-Avon and on to the Mendip Hills. The furniture was modern/traditional and looked expensive. She’d laid out lunch – smoked salmon, salad, artisan bread. She offered me wine but I stuck to sparkling water.

‘I saw you at the funeral,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you but Freddy was in a hurry to be away. I’m afraid he’s not here. He’s got an open day in London. ‘

‘Oh yes?’

‘He’s applying to St Martin’s School of Art. He wants to do a course in ceramics.’ She went on quickly. ‘He didn’t really want to be there, you know, in Framlingham.’

‘I was quite surprised to see you.’

‘He was my husband, Susan. And Freddy’s father. I knew I had to go as soon as I heard he was dead. I thought it would be good for Freddy. He was quite badly hurt by what happened. More than me, I’d say. I thought it might give him some sort of closure.’

‘Did it?’

‘Not really. He complained all the way there and he said nothing on the way back. He was plugged into his iPad. Still, I’m glad we went. It felt like the right thing to do.’

‘Melissa …’ This was the difficult bit. ‘I wanted to ask you about you and Alan. There are some things I’m struggling to understand.’

‘I did wonder why you’d come all this way.’

On the telephone, I’d told her that I was searching for the missing chapters and that I was trying to work out why Alan had killed himself. She hadn’t needed any more explanation than that and I certainly wasn’t going to mention the fact that he might have been murdered. ‘I don’t want to embarrass you,’ I said.

‘You can ask me anything you want, Susan.’ She smiled. ‘We’d been apart for six years when he died and I don’t feel embarrassed about what happened. Why should I? Of course, it was very difficult at the time. I really loved Alan and I didn’t want to lose him. But it’s odd … Are you married?’

‘No.’

‘When your husband leaves you for another man, it sort of helps. I think I’d have been angrier if it had been a younger woman. When he told me about James, I saw it was his problem – if it was a problem. I couldn’t blame myself if that was the way he felt.’

‘Did you have any inkling of it, while you were married?’

‘If you’re talking about his sexuality, no. Not at all. Freddy was born two years after we were married. I’d say we had a normal relationship.’

‘You said it was harder for your son.’

‘It was. Freddy was thirteen when Alan came out and the worst thing was that the newspapers got hold of the story and the children read about it at school. Of course he was teased. Having a gay dad. I think it would be easier if it happened now. Things have moved on so fast.’

She was completely without rancour. I was surprised and made a mental note to cross her off the list I had drawn up the day before. She explained that the divorce had been amicable; that Alan had given her everything she wanted and had continued to support Freddy even though there had been no contact between the two of them. There was a trust fund to take him through university and beyond and, as James Taylor had mentioned, he had been left money in the will. She herself had a part-time job; she was a supply teacher in nearby Warminster. But there was plenty of money in the bank. She didn’t need to work.

We talked a lot about Alan as a writer because that was what I had told her interested me. She had known him at the most interesting time in his career: struggling, getting published for the first time, finding fame.

‘Everyone at Woodbridge School knew that he wanted to be a writer,’ she told me. ‘He wanted it desperately. That was all he ever talked about. I was actually going out with another of the teachers there but that ended when Alan came to teach at the school. Are you still in touch with Andreas?’

She had asked it so casually and I don’t think she noticed when I froze. We had talked, long ago, at publishing parties, and I had mentioned to her that I knew Andreas but either I hadn’t told her that we were going out together or she had forgotten it. ‘Andreas?’ I said.

‘Andreas Patakis. He taught Latin and Greek. He and I had a huge fling – it lasted about a year. We were crazy about each other. You know what these Mediterraneans are like. I’m afraid I treated him badly in the end but, as I say, there was something about Alan that just suited me more.’