Magpie Murders (51 page)

‘He fired you on the spot?’

‘Not exactly. I was very upset. I mean, the thing with the coffee, it really wasn’t me. I was going to put it on his desk like I always did but he reached out to take it and knocked it out of my hand. And it wasn’t as if I’d made loads of mistakes. I’d been with him for a year and everything had gone all right. We had a long talk and I think it was me who said to him that it would be better if I went straight away and he said he’d pay me a month’s salary so that was it. He also said he’d give me a good reference and that if anyone asked, I hadn’t been fired, I’d just decided to leave.’ Charles had stuck with that. It was what he had told me. ‘I suppose that was nice of him,’ she went on. ‘I just left at the end of the day and that was that.’

‘What day was that?’ I asked.

‘It was Friday morning. You were on your way back from Dublin.’ She remembered something. ‘Did Andreas ever catch up with you?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry?’ I could feel my head spinning. It was the second time that Andreas had been mentioned today. Melissa had suddenly dragged him into the conversation and now Jemima had done the same. She knew him, of course. She’d met him a few times and taken messages from him. But why was she mentioning him now?

‘He came in the day before,’ Jemima continued, cheerfully. ‘He wanted to see you. After his meeting with Charles.’

‘I’m sorry, Jemima.’ I tried to take this slowly. ‘You must be making a mistake. Andreas wasn’t in England that week. He was in Crete.’

‘He did look very tanned but I’m not making a mistake. It was a horrible week for me and I sort of remember everything that happened. He came in on Thursday at about three o’clock.’

‘And he saw Charles?’

‘That’s right.’ She looked perplexed. ‘I hope I haven’t done something wrong. He didn’t say not to tell you.’

But he hadn’t told me himself. Quite the opposite. We’d had our big reunion dinner. He had said he was in Crete.

I wanted to leave Andreas out of this. I went back to Charles. ‘There’s no way he’d want to lose you,’ I said. I wasn’t really talking to her. I was talking to myself, trying to work it out. And it was true. I could easily see Charles losing his temper in the way she’d described – but not with her. Jemima had been his third secretary in as many years and I know he liked her. There had been Olivia who’d got on his nerves. And Cat who was always late. Third time lucky – that was what he’d said. Jemima was efficient and hard-working. She made him laugh. How could he have changed his mind so suddenly?

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He’d had a bad couple of weeks. When all the reviews came out for that book,
The One-Armed Juggler
, he was really upset and I know he wasn’t too happy about
Magpie Murders
either. He was worried about his daughter. Honestly, Susan, I was doing everything I could to help but he just needed someone to shout at and I was the one who happened to be in the room. Did Laura have her baby?’

‘Yes,’ I said, although actually I didn’t know. ‘I haven’t heard if it’s a boy or a girl.’

‘Well, send good wishes from me.’

We talked a little more. Jemima was working part-time, helping her mother who was a solicitor. She was thinking about spending the winter in Verbier. She was a keen snowboarder and thought she could get work as a chalet girl. But I didn’t really listen to what she was saying. I wanted to telephone Andreas. I wanted to know why he had lied to me.

It was just as we were separating that another thought struck me. I was replaying something she had said to me. ‘You mentioned that Charles wasn’t happy with
Magpie Murders
,’ I said. ‘What was the problem?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t say. But he was definitely upset about something. I thought maybe it wasn’t any good.’

‘But he hadn’t read it yet.’

‘Hadn’t he?’ She sounded surprised.

She was anxious to be on her way but I stopped her. None of this was making any sense. Alan had delivered the new book after Jemima had left. He had given it to Charles at the Ivy Club on Thursday, 27 August, the same day – it now turned out – Andreas had visited him at Cloverleaf Books. I had got back on the twenty-eighth and had found a copy of the manuscript waiting for me. We had both read it over the weekend – the same weekend Alan died. So what could Charles have been unhappy about?

‘Charles was only given the book after you’d left,’ I said.

‘No. That’s not true. It came in the post.’

‘When?’

‘On Tuesday.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I opened it.’

I stared at her. ‘Did you see the title?’

‘Yes. It was on the front page.’

‘Was the book complete?’

That confused her. ‘I don’t know, Susan. I just gave it to Charles. He was very pleased to have it but he didn’t say anything afterwards and anyway a few days later the coffee thing happened and that was that.’

There were people swirling past. A voice boomed out over the tannoys, announcing the departure of a train. I thanked Jemima, gave her a brief hug and hurried off to find a taxi.

Cloverleaf Books

I didn’t call Andreas. I wanted to. But there was something else I had to do first.

The offices were closed by the time I got there but I had a key and let myself in, deactivated the alarms and climbed the stairs up to the first floor. I turned on the lights, but without anyone in there, the building still felt dark and oppressive, the shadows refusing to budge. I knew exactly where I was going. Charles’s office was never locked and I went straight in. There were the two armchairs in empty conference with Charles’s desk in front of me. The shelves with all his books, his awards, his photographs, were on one side. Bella’s basket was on the other, tucked next to a cabinet that contained bottles and glasses. How many times had I sat here, late into the evening, sipping Glenmorangie malt whisky, talking over the problems of the day? I was here now as an intruder and I had a sense that I was smashing everything that I had helped to build up over the past eleven years.

I walked over to the desk. I was in such a mood that if the drawers had been locked I wouldn’t have hesitated to break them open, antique or not. But Charles hadn’t taken even this measure of security. The drawers slid open eagerly in my hands to reveal contracts, cost reports, invoices, proofs, newspaper clippings, unwanted wires from old computers and mobile phones, photographs and, at the very bottom, clumsily concealed, a plastic folder containing about twenty sheets of paper. The first page was almost blank with a heading in capitals.

SEVEN: A SECRET NEVER TO BE TOLD

The missing chapters. They had been here all the time.

And in the end, the title had been absolutely true. The solution to the murder of Sir Magnus Pye had to be kept secret because of the way it related to the murder of Alan Conway. I thought I heard something. Had there been a creak on the stairs outside? I turned the page and began to read.

Atticus Pünd took one last walk around Saxby-on-Avon while James Fraser paid the bill at the Queen’s Arms. He had arranged to meet Detective Inspector Chubb – and two others – at the Bath police station in an hour’s time. He had not been here long but in a strange way he had come to know the village quite intimately. The church, the castle, the antique shop in the square, the bus shelter, the Queen’s Arms and the Ferryman … he could no longer see them separately. They had become the chessboard on which this particular game, surely his last, had been played.

It was his last game because he was dying. Atticus Pünd and Alan Conway were going out together. That was what this was all about. A writer and a character he hated, both heading towards their Reichenbach Falls.

It had all come to me at Paddington Station, the extraordinary moment that all of them must have felt – Poirot, Holmes, Wimsey, Marple, Morse – but which their authors had never fully explained. What was it like, for them? A slow process, like constructing a jigsaw? Or did it come in a rush, one last turn in a toy kaleidoscope when all the colours and shapes tumbled and twisted into each other, forming a recognisable image? That was what had happened to me. The truth had been there. But it had taken a final nudge for me to see it, all of it.

Would it have happened if I hadn’t met Jemima Humphries? I’ll never know for sure, but I think I would have got there in the end. There were little bits of information, red herrings that I’d had to get out of my head. For example, the television producer, Mark Redmond, hadn’t told me that he’d stayed at the Crown Hotel in Framlingham over the weekend. Why not? The answer was quite simple when I thought about it. When he’d talked to me, he’d deliberately made it seem that he was on his own. It was only the receptionist at the hotel who’d mentioned that he was with his wife. But suppose it wasn’t his wife? Suppose it was a secretary or a starlet? That would have been a good reason for a longer stay – and a good reason to lie about it. And then there was James Taylor. He really had been in London with friends. The photograph of John White and Alan on the tower? White had gone round to see Alan on that Sunday morning. No wonder he and his housekeeper had looked uncomfortable when I spoke to them. The two of them had argued about the lost investment. But it wasn’t White who had attempted to kill Alan. It was the other way round. Wasn’t that obvious? Alan had grabbed hold of him at the top of the tower and the two of them had grappled for a moment. That was what the photograph showed. It was actually Alan’s killer who had taken it.

I flicked through a few more pages. I’m not sure I particularly cared who had killed Sir Magnus Pye, not at that moment anyway. But I knew what I was looking for and, sure enough, there it was, in part two of the final chapter.

It took him a short time to write the letter.

Dear James,

By the time that you read this, it will all be finished. You will forgive me for not having spoken to you earlier, for not taking you into my confidence but I am sure that in time you will understand.

There are some notes which I have written and which you will find in my desk. They relate to my condition and to the decision that I have made. I want it to be understood that the doctor’s diagnosis is clear and, for me, there can be no possibility of reprieve. I have no fear of death. I would like to think that my name will be remembered.

‘What are you doing, Susan?

That was as far as I’d got when I heard the voice, coming from the door, and looked up to see Charles Clover standing there. So there had been someone on the stairs. He was wearing corduroy trousers and a baggy jersey with a coat hanging loosely open. He looked tired.

‘I’ve found the missing chapters,’ I said.

‘Yes. I can see that.’

There was a long silence. It was only half past six but it felt later. There was no sound of any traffic outside.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

‘I’m taking a few days off. I came to get some things.’

‘How’s Laura?’

‘She had a little boy. They’re going to call him George.’

‘That’s a nice name.’

‘I thought so.’ He moved into the room and sat down in one of the armchairs. I was standing behind his desk so it was as if our positions had been reversed. ‘I can explain to you why I hid the pages,’ Charles said. I knew that he had already started thinking up an explanation and that, whatever he said, it wouldn’t be true.

‘There’s no need to,’ I said. ‘I already know everything.’

‘Really?’

‘I know you killed Alan Conway. And I know why.’

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ He waved a hand towards the cabinet where he kept his drinks. ‘Would you like a glass of something?’

‘Thank you.’ I went over and poured two glasses of whisky. I was glad that Charles had made it easier for me. The two of us had known each other for a very long time and I was determined that we were going to be civilised. I still wasn’t sure what would happen next. I assumed that Charles would telephone Detective Superintendent Locke and turn himself in.

I gave him the drink and sat down opposite. ‘I think the tradition is that you tell me what happened,’ Charles said. ‘Although we can always do it the other way round – if you prefer.’

‘Aren’t you going to deny it?’

‘I can see it would be completely pointless. You’ve found the pages.’

‘You could have hidden them more carefully, Charles.’

‘I didn’t think you’d look. I must say, I was very surprised to find you in my office.’

‘I’m surprised to see you too.’

He raised his glass in an ironic toast. He was my boss, my mentor. A grandfather. The godfather. I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. Nonetheless, I began … not quite at the beginning as I would have liked but I was finally wearing the hat of the detective, not the editor. ‘Alan Conway hated Atticus Pünd,’ I said. ‘He thought of himself as a great writer – a Salman Rushdie, a David Mitchell – someone people would take seriously, when all he was doing was churning out potboilers, murder mysteries which were making him a fortune but which he himself despised. That book that he showed you,
The Slide
– that was what he really wanted to write.’

‘It was dreadful.’

‘I know.’ Charles looked surprised, so I told him. ‘I found it in his office and I read it. I agree with you. It was derivative and it was rubbish. But it was
about
something. It was his view of society – how the old values of the literary classes had rotted away and how, without them, the rest of the country was slipping into some sort of moral and cultural abyss. It was his big statement. And he just couldn’t see that it would never be published and it would never be read because it was no good. He believed that was what he was born to write and he blamed Atticus Pünd for getting in the way and spoiling everything for him. Did you know that it was Melissa Conway who first suggested he should write a detective novel?’

‘No. She never told me that.’

‘It’s one of the reasons he divorced her.’

‘Those books made him a fortune.’