Magpie Murders

by Anthony Horowitz

  I went up to the room and dumped my case on the bed: a four-poster, no less. I wished Andreas was here to share it with me. He had a particular liking for olde England, especially if the olde was spelled with an e. He found things like croquet, cream teas and cricket both incomprehensible and irresistible and he would have been in his element here. I sent him a text, then washed and ran a comb through my hair. It was lunchtime but I didn’t feel like eating. I got back in the car and drove out to Abbey Grange.

  Alan Conway’s home was a couple of miles outside Framlingham and it would have been almost impossible to find without sat nav. I’ve lived my whole life in a city where roads actually go somewhere because, frankly, they can’t afford not to. The same couldn’t be said for the country lane that twiddled its way through far too much country before an even narrower lane brought me to the private track that finally led me to the house itself. When did I realise that I was looking at the inspiration for Pye Hall? Well, the stone griffins beside the entrance gate would have been the first clue. The lodge house was exactly as described. The drive curved round to the front door, cutting through extensive lawns. I didn’t see any rose gardens but the lake was there and so was the woodland that might have been Dingle Dell. I could easily imagine Brent standing beside the corpse of Tom Blakiston while his brother desperately gave him mouth-to-mouth. Most of the work had been done for me.

  And the house itself? ‘What remained was a single, elongated wing with an octagonal tower – constructed much later – at the far end.’ As I drew up, that was exactly what I saw: a long, narrow building with about a dozen windows spread out over two floors joined to a tower which might provide great views but which was, in itself, ridiculous. I guessed it had all been built in the nineteenth century, the creation of some Victorian industrialist who’d brought his memories of London’s mills and mausoleums to rural Suffolk. It was nowhere near as attractive as Sir Magnus Pye’s ancestral home, at least as Alan had described it. Abbey Grange was built out of the dirty red brick that I’ve always associated with Charles Dickens and William Blake. It didn’t belong here and it was saved only by its setting. The garden must have spread out over four or five acres with a huge sky and no other houses in sight. I wouldn’t want to live here and frankly I couldn’t see why it had appealed to Alan Conway either. Wouldn’t he have been too metrosexual for this folly?

  This was where he had died. I was reminded of it as I got out of the car. Just four days ago, he had thrown himself off the tower that loomed over me even now. I examined the crenellations at the top. They didn’t look very safe. If you leant too far, suicidal or not, you might easily topple over. The tower was surrounded by lawn – the grass knotted and uneven. In Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love there’s an extremely good description of what happens to a human body when it falls from a great height and I could easily imagine Conway, all mangled up with his bones broken and his limbs pointing in the wrong direction. Would the fall have been enough to kill him instantly or would he have lain there in agony until someone came along and found him? He lived alone so it might have been a cleaner or a gardener who had raised the alarm. Did that make any sense? He had killed himself to avoid suffering but in fact he might have suffered horribly. It wasn’t the way I would have chosen. Get in a warm bath and cut your wrists. Jump in front of a train. Either would have been more certain.

  I took out my iPhone and moved away from the front door so that I could get a picture of the whole thing. I didn’t know why I did that, but then why does anyone take photographs ever? We never look at them any more. I had driven past a large shrub (it wasn’t in the book) and, walking back, I noticed two tyre tracks. Quite recently, when the grass was damp, a car had parked behind it. I took a picture of the tyre tracks too; not because they meant anything but simply because I thought I should. I slipped the phone into my pocket and I was walking back to the front door when it opened and a man came out. I’d never met him but I knew instantly who he was. I’ve mentioned that Alan was married. Shortly after the third book in the Atticus Pünd series came out, so did Alan. He left his family for a young man called James Taylor – and by young I mean barely twenty at a time when Alan himself was in his mid-forties with a son aged twelve. His private life was no concern of mine but I will admit I was a little uneasy and worried about the effect it might have on sales. The story was reported in quite a lot of newspapers but fortunately this was 2009 and the journalists weren’t able to sneer too much. Alan’s wife, Melissa, and his son moved to the West Country. They agreed terms very quickly. That was when Alan had bought Abbey Grange.

  I had never met James Taylor but knew I was looking at him now. He was wearing a leather jacket and jeans with a low-cut T-shirt that showed a thin gold chain around his neck. Although he was now twenty-eight or twenty-nine, he still looked incredibly young with a baby face that thick stubble did nothing to disguise. He had long, fair hair, which he hadn’t brushed. It was slightly greasy, following the curve of his neck. He could have just got out of bed. His eyes were haunted, suspicious. I got the feeling that he had been damaged at some time in his life. Or maybe it was just that he wasn’t pleased to see me.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Susan Ryeland,’ I said. ‘I work at Cloverleaf Books. We’re Alan’s publishers.’ I fished in my handbag and gave him my business card.

  He glanced at it, then looked past me. ‘I like your car.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s an MG.’

  ‘An MGB actually.’

  He smiled. I could tell it amused him, a woman of my age driving a car like that. ‘I’m afraid that if you’re here to see Alan, you’re too late.’

  ‘I know. I know what happened. Do you think I could come in?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s difficult to explain. I’m looking for something.’

  ‘Sure.’ He shrugged and opened the door as if he owned the place. But I had read Alan’s letter. I knew he didn’t.

  If this had been the world of Magpie Murders, the front door would have led into a grand hall with wood panels, a stone fireplace and a staircase leading up to a galleried landing. But all that must have come out of Conway’s imagination. In fact the interior was disappointing: a reception room, stripped wooden floor, country furniture, expensive modern art on the walls – all very tasteful, but ordinary. No suits of armour. No animal trophies. No dead bodies. We turned right and went along a corridor that ran the full length of the house, finally bringing us into a serious kitchen with an industrial oven, an American fridge, gleaming surfaces and a table that could seat twelve. James offered me a coffee, which I accepted. He fixed it in one of those machines that uses capsules and froths up the milk on the side.

  ‘So you’re his publisher,’ he said.

  ‘No. His editor.’

  ‘How well did you know Alan?’

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that. ‘It was a working relationship,’ I said. ‘He never invited me here.’

  ‘This is my home – or at least it was until about two weeks ago when Alan asked me to move out. I hadn’t left yet because I didn’t have anywhere to go and now I suppose, I may not have to.’ He brought the coffees over and sat down.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I asked. I’d noticed an ashtray on the table and the smell of cigarette smoke in the air.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Actually, if you’ve got some cigarettes, I’ll have one too.’ I held out the packet and suddenly we were friends. That’s one of the only good things about being a smoker these days. You’re part of a persecuted minority. You bond easily. But actually I’d already decided that I liked James Taylor, this boy alone in a big house.

  ‘Were you here?’ I asked. ‘When Alan killed himself?’

  ‘No, thank God. We weren’t together at that stage. I was in London, hanging out with some people I know.’ I watched as he tapped ash. He had ver
y long, slender fingers. His nails were dirty. ‘I got a call from Mr Khan – he was Alan’s solicitor – and I came back late on Monday. By then, the place was crawling with police officers. It was Mr Khan who found him, you know. He came over to drop off some papers, probably cutting me out of the will or something, and Alan was on the lawn in front of the tower. I have to say, I’m glad it wasn’t me. I’m not sure I’d have coped.’ He sucked in smoke, holding the cigarette cupped in his hand, like a soldier in an old film. ‘What is it you’re looking for?’

  I told him the truth. I explained that Alan had delivered his last novel just a couple of days before he’d died and that it was missing the last chapter. I asked him if he had read any of Magpie Murders and he gave a sniff of laughter. ‘I read every one of the Atticus Pünd books,’ he said. ‘You know I’m in them?’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. James Fraser, the dumb blond assistant – that’s me.’ He flicked his own hair. ‘When I met Alan, he was just about to start Night Comes Calling. That’s the fourth book in the series. At that time, Atticus Pünd didn’t have an assistant. He just worked by himself. But after Alan and I started going out together, he said he was going to change that and he put me in.’

  ‘He changed your name,’ I said.

  ‘He changed lots of things. I mean, I never went to Oxford University for a start, although it’s true I’d done some acting when we met. That was one of his little jokes. In every book he always says Fraser was out-of-work or unsuccessful or failed and of course he was completely thick – but Alan said that was true of every sidekick. He used to say that they were there to make the detective look cleverer and to divert the attention away from the truth. Everything my character ever said in the books was wrong. He did it quite deliberately, to make you look the wrong way. In fact, you could ignore whatever Fraser said. That was how it worked.’

  ‘So did you read it?’ I asked again.

  He shook his head. ‘No. I knew Alan was working on it. He used to spend hours in his office. But he never showed me anything until it was finished. To be honest with you, I didn’t even know he had finished it. Usually, he’d have given it to me before he showed it to anyone it but because of what had happened he might have decided not to. Even so, I’m surprised I didn’t know. I could usually tell when he he’d come to the end.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He became human again.’

  I wanted to know what had happened between them but instead I asked if I could see his study and maybe look for the missing pages. James was quite happy to show me and we left the room together.

  Alan’s office was next to the kitchen, which made sense. If he ever needed a break – lunch or a drink – he didn’t have far to go. It was a large room, at the very end of the house with windows on three sides, and it had been knocked through to incorporate the tower. A spiral staircase dominated the space and presumably led all the way to the top. There were two walls of books, the first of which turned out to be Alan’s, the nine Atticus Pünd novels translated into thirty-four languages. The blurb (which I had written) says thirty-five but that includes English and Alan liked round numbers. For the same reason, we upped his sales figures to eighteen million, a figure we more or less plucked out of the air. There was a purpose-built desk with an expensive-looking chair; black leather, ergonomically designed with sections that would move to provide support for his arms, his neck and his back. A writer’s chair. He had a computer, an Apple with a twenty-seven inch screen.

  I was interested in the room. It seemed to me that it was as close as I would get to walking into Alan Conway’s head. And what did it tell me? Well, he wasn’t out to hide his light. All his awards were on display. PD James had written a letter congratulating him on Atticus Pünd Abroad and he had framed it and hung it on the wall. There were also photographs of him with Prince Charles, with JK Rowling and (odd, this one) with Angela Merkel. He was methodical. Pens and pencils, note-pads, files, newspaper clippings and all the other detritus of a writer’s life were laid out carefully, with no sense of clutter. There was a shelf of reference books: the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (two volumes), Roget’s Thesaurus, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Brewer’s Book of Phrase and Fable and encyclopaedias of chemistry, biology, criminology and law. They were lined up like soldiers. He had a complete set of Agatha Christie, about seventy paperbacks arranged, as far as I could see, in chronological order beginning with The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It was significant that they were also in his reference section. He had not read them for pleasure: he had used them. Alan had been entirely businesslike in the way he wrote. There were no diversions anywhere to be seen, nothing irrelevant to his work. The walls were white, the carpet a neutral beige. It was an office, not a study.

  A leather diary sat beside the computer and I flicked it open. I had to ask myself what I was doing. It was the same reflex that had made me take a photograph of the tyre tracks in the garden. Was I looking for clues? A page torn out of a magazine had been slotted in beneath the cover. It was a black and white photograph, a still from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List. It showed the actor Ben Kingsley sitting at a desk, typing. I turned to James Taylor. ‘What’s this doing here?’ I asked.

  He answered as if it was obvious. ‘That’s Atticus Pünd,’ he said.

  It made sense. ‘His eyes, behind the round, wire-framed glasses, examined the doctor with endless benevolence. It had often been remarked that Atticus Pünd looked like an accountant and in his general demeanour – which was both timid and meticulous – he behaved like one too.’ Alan Conway had borrowed, or perhaps stolen, his detective from a film that had been released ten or so years before he had written the first book. This might be where the link with the concentration camps, which I had thought so clever, had begun. For some reason, I was deflated. It was disappointing to find out that Atticus Pünd was not an entirely original creation; that he was in some way second-hand. Perhaps I was being unfair. After all, every character in fiction has to begin somewhere. Charles Dickens used his neighbours, his friends, even his parents as inspiration. Edward Rochester, my favourite character in Jane Eyre, was based on a Frenchman called Constantin Héger, with whom Brontë was in love. But tearing an actor out of a magazine was different somehow. It felt like cheating.

  I turned the pages of the diary until I arrived at the week we were in now. It would have been busy if he’d managed to live through it. On Monday he was having lunch with someone called Claire at the Jolly Sailor. He had a hair appointment in the afternoon: that was the obvious assumption from the single word hair with a circle round it. On Wednesday he was playing tennis with someone identified only by their initials, SK. On Thursday, he was coming to London. He had another lunch – he’d just written ‘lch’ – and at five he was seeing Henry at the OV. It took me a worrying amount of time to work out that this was actually Henry the Fifth at the Old Vic. Simon Mayo was still in the diary for the following morning. This was the interview that Alan had decided to cancel but he hadn’t got round to crossing it out. I flicked back a page. There was the dinner with Charles at the Ivy Club. In the morning, he’d seen SB. His doctor.

  ‘Who’s Claire?’ I asked.

  ‘His sister.’ James was standing beside me, peering at the diary. ‘The Jolly Sailor’s in Orford. That’s where she lives.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know the password for the computer?’

  ‘Yes. I do. It’s Att1cus.’

  The same name as the detective except with the figure one instead of the letter i. James turned the computer on and tapped it in.

  I don’t need to go into all the details of Alan’s computer. I wasn’t interested in his emails, his Google history or the fact that he played electronic Scrabble. All I wanted was the manuscript. He used Word for Mac and we quickly found the last two novels – Red Roses For Atticus and Atticus Pünd Abroad. There were several
drafts of each, including the ones I had sent him with the final amendments. But there wasn’t a single word of Magpie Murders in any of his files. It was as if the computer had been deliberately wiped clean.

  ‘Is this his only computer?’ I asked.

  ‘No. He’s got another one in London and he also had a laptop. But this is the one he used for the book. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Could he have put it on a memory stick?’

  ‘I’m not sure I ever saw him with memory sticks, to be honest with you. But I suppose it’s possible.’

  We searched the room. We went through every cupboard and every drawer. James was keen to help. We found hard copies of all the Atticus Pünd novels apart from the most recent. There were notepads containing lengthy extracts scratched out in pen and ink but anything relating to Magpie Murders was curiously absent, as if it had been deliberately removed. One thing I did find that interested me was an unbound copy of The Slide, the novel that Charles had mentioned and which he had rejected. I asked James if I could borrow it and set it aside to take back with me. There were piles of newspapers and old magazines. Alan had kept everything ever written about him: interviews, profiles, reviews (the good ones) – the works. It was all very neat. One cupboard was given over to stationery with envelopes stacked up in their respective sizes, reams of white paper, more writing pads, plastic folders, a full spectrum of Post-it notes. There was no sign of a memory stick though, and if it had been there it was probably too small to find.

  In the end, I had to give up. I’d been there an hour. I could have continued all day.

  ‘You could try Mr Khan,’ James suggested. ‘Alan’s solicitor,’ he reminded me. ‘He’s got offices in Framlingham, on the Saxmundham Road. I don’t know why he would have it, but Alan gave a lot of stuff to him.’ He paused, a fraction too long. ‘His will, for example.’