Magpie Murders

by Anthony Horowitz

  We talked about this for a while. Then I changed the subject, asking about Gordon and the children. He was fine. He was enjoying work. They were going skiing at Christmas: they’d rented a chalet at Courchevel. Daisy and Jack were coming to the end of their time at Woodbridge School. They had been there for almost all their lives; first at Queen’s House, the pre-prep school, then at The Abbey, now in the main school. It was a lovely place. I had visited it a couple of times. You didn’t expect to find so much land and so many handsome buildings tucked away in a little town like Woodbridge. It struck me that the school suited my sister’s personality very well. Nothing changed. Everything was perfect. The outside world was all too easy to ignore.

  ‘The children never really liked Alan Conway,’ Katie said, suddenly.

  ‘Yes. You told me.’

  ‘You didn’t like him either.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Are you sorry I introduced him to you?’

  ‘Not at all, Katie. We made a fortune out of him.’

  ‘But he gave you a hard time.’ She shrugged. ‘From what I heard, nobody was sorry when he left Woodbridge School.’

  Alan Conway stopped teaching soon after the first book came out. By the time his second book appeared, he was earning way more than he ever had as a teacher.

  ‘What was wrong with him?’ I asked.

  Katie thought for a moment. ‘I’m not sure I know. He just had a reputation – the way some teachers do. I think he was quite strict. He didn’t have much of a sense of humour.’

  It’s true. There are very few jokes in the Atticus Pünd stories.

  ‘I think he was always quite secretive,’ she went on. ‘I met him a few times at sports day and things like that and I was never sure what he was thinking. I always got the feeling that he was hiding something.’

  ‘His sexuality?’ I suggested.

  ‘Perhaps. When he left his wife for that boy, it was completely unexpected. But it wasn’t that. It was just, when you met him, it was as if he was angry about something but had no intention of telling you what it was.’

  We had been chatting for a while and I didn’t want to get caught up in the London traffic. I finished my tea and refused more cake. I’d already had a huge slice and what I really wanted was a cigarette – Katie hated me smoking. I began to make my excuses.

  ‘Will you be back soon?’ she asked. ‘The kids would love to see you. We could all have dinner.’

  ‘I’ll probably be up and down quite a few times,’ I said

  ‘That’s good. We miss you.’ I knew what was coming and sure enough Katie didn’t disappoint me. ‘Is everything all right, Sue?’ she asked, in the sort of voice that said it clearly wasn’t.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘You know I worry about you, on your own in that flat.’

  ‘I’m not alone. I’ve got Andreas.’

  ‘How is Andreas?’

  ‘He’s very well.’

  ‘He must be back at school by now.’

  ‘No. They don’t start until the end of the week. He’s been in Crete for the summer.’ As soon as I said that, I wished I hadn’t. It meant I was alone after all.

  ‘Why didn’t you go with him?’

  ‘He invited me but I was too busy.’ That was only half true. I had never been to Crete. Something in me resisted the idea, stepping into his world, putting myself under examination.

  ‘Is there any chance …? I mean, are the two of you …?’

  That’s what it always came down to. Marriage, for Katie with twenty-seven years of it behind her, was the be-all and end-all, the only reason really to be alive. Marriage was her Woodbridge School, her grounds, the wall surrounding her – and as far as she was concerned, I was stuck outside, looking in through the gate.

  ‘Oh, we never talk about it,’ I said, breezily. ‘We like things the way they are. Anyway, I would never marry him.’

  ‘Because he’s Greek?’

  ‘Because he’s too Greek. He’d drive me mad.’

  Why did Katie always have to judge me by her standards? Why couldn’t she see that I didn’t need what she had and that I might be perfectly happy the way things were? If I sound irritated it’s only because I worried she was right. Part of me was asking myself the very same thing. I would never have children. I had a man who had been away the whole summer and who, during term time, only came over at weekends – if he wasn’t tied up with football, school play rehearsals or a Saturday trip to the Tate. I had devoted my whole life to books; to bookshops; to booksellers; to bookish people like Charles and Alan. And in doing so, I had ended up like a book: on the shelf.

  I was glad to get back into the MGB. There are no speed cameras between Woodbridge and the A12 and I kept my foot hard on the accelerator. When I reached the M25, I turned on the radio and listened to Mariella Frostrup. She was talking about books. By then I felt OK.

  The letter

  You’d have thought that after twenty years editing murder mysteries I’d have noticed when I found myself in the middle of one. Alan Conway had not committed suicide. He had gone up to the tower to have his breakfast and someone had pushed him off. Wasn’t it obvious?

  Two people who knew him well, his solicitor and his sister, had insisted that he was not the sort to kill himself, and his diary – which showed that he had been cheerfully buying theatre tickets and arranging tennis games and lunches for the week following his demise, seemed to confirm it. The manner of his death, painful and uncertain, felt wrong. And then there were the suspects already queuing up to take a starring role in the last chapter. Claire had mentioned his ex-wife, Melissa, and his neighbour, a hedge fund manager called John White, with whom he’d had some sort of dispute. She herself had argued with him. James Taylor had the most obvious motive. Alan had died just one day before he intended to sign his new will. James also had access to the house and would know that, if the sun were shining, Alan would have his breakfast on the roof. And August had been warm.

  I thought about all this as I drove home but it still took me a while to accept it. In a whodunnit, when a detective hears that Sir Somebody Smith has been stabbed thirty-six times on a train or decapitated, they accept it as a quite natural occurrence. They pack their bags and head off to ask questions, collect clues, ultimately to make an arrest. But I wasn’t a detective. I was an editor – and, until a week ago, not a single one of my acquaintances had managed to die in an unusual and a violent manner. Apart from my own parents and Alan, I hardly knew anyone who had died at all. It’s strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery and what is it that attracts us – the crime or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable? I made a mental note to check out Alan’s sales figures in San Pedro Sula in the Honduras (the murder capital of the world). It might be that they didn’t read him at all.

  Everything came down to the letter. Without telling anyone, I had made a copy of it before Charles sent it to the police and as soon as I got home I took it out and examined it again. I remembered the strange anomaly – a handwritten letter in a typewritten envelope – that I had seen in Charles’s office. It was an exact reflection, an inverse of what Atticus Pünd had discovered at Pye Hall. Sir Magnus had been sent a typewritten death threat in a handwritten envelope. What, in each instance, did it mean? And, if you put the two of them together, was there some greater significance, a pattern I could not see?

  The letter had been sent the day after Alan had handed over the manuscript at the Ivy Club. I wished now that I had looked at the envelope more closely to see if it had been sent from London or from Suffolk although Char
les had ripped off some of the postmark when he opened it. Either way, it was certain that Alan had composed it himself. It was his handwriting – and unless he had been forced to write with a gun at his head, it set out his intentions quite clearly. Or did it? Back in my flat in Crouch End, with a glass of wine in my hand and a third cigarette on the go, I wasn’t so sure.

  The first page is an apology. Alan has behaved badly. But it’s part of a general pattern of behaviour. He’s ill. He says that he has decided against treatment and this will kill him very soon anyway. There is nothing on this page about suicide – quite the opposite. It’s the cancer that’s going to kill him because he’s not going to have chemotherapy. And look again at the bottom of page one, all that stuff about London literary functions. He’s not writing about his life being over. He’s writing about how it’s going to continue.

  Page two does relate to his death, particularly in the paragraph about James Taylor and the will. But again, it’s non-specific. ‘There are bound to be rows when I’ve gone.’ He could be talking about any time: six weeks from now, six months, a year. It’s only on page three that he cuts to the chase. ‘By the time you read this, it will all be finished.’ When I first read the letter, so soon after hearing what had happened, I automatically assumed that by ‘it’, Alan was referring to his life. His life would be over. He would have killed himself. Rereading it, though, it occurred to me he could just as easily have been talking about his writing career – which was the subject of the paragraph before. He had delivered the last book. There weren’t going to be any more.

  And then we come to ‘the decision that I have made’ a few lines later. Is it really the decision to jump off his tower? Or is it simply the decision, which he has already explained, not to have chemotherapy, to kill himself in that sense only? By the end of the letter he’s writing about the people who will mourn him but, again, he has already established that he is going to die. Nowhere does he state outright that he is planning to take matters into his own hands. ‘As I prepare to take leave of this world …’ Isn’t that a bit gentle for what he supposedly has in mind, jumping off a tower?

  This was what I thought. And although there was something else about the letter, which I missed completely, and which would prove that almost everything I’ve written here was wrong, by the end of that day, everything had changed. I knew that the letter was not what it seemed; that it was no more than a general valedictory and that someone must have read it and realised that it could be misinterpreted. Claire Jenkins and Sajid Khan were right. The most successful murder writer of his generation had himself been murdered.

  The doorbell rang.

  Andreas had telephoned me an hour before and there he was on my doorstep with a bunch of flowers and a bulging supermarket bag that would contain Cretan olives, wonderful thyme honey, oil, wine, cheese, and mountain tea. It wasn’t just that he was generous. He had a real love of his country and everything it produced. It’s very Greek. The endlessly protracted financial crisis of this summer and the year before might have dropped out of the British newspapers – how many times can you predict the total collapse of a country? – but he had told me how much it was still hurting at home. Business was down. The tourists were staying away. It was as if the more he brought me, the more he would convince me that everything was going to be all right. It was sweet and old-fashioned of him to ring the bell, by the way. He had his own key.

  I had tidied the flat, showered and changed and I hoped I looked reasonably desirable. I was always quite nervous about seeing him after these long separations. I wanted to be sure that nothing had changed. Andreas was looking very well. After six weeks in the sunshine his skin was darker than ever and he was slimmer too: a combination of swimming and low-carb Cretan food. Not that he was ever fat. He’s built like a soldier with square shoulders, a chiselled face and black hair falling in thick curls like a Greek shepherd – or a god. He has mischievous eyes and a slightly crooked smile, and although I wouldn’t say he’s a conventionally handsome man, he’s fun to be with, intelligent, easy-going, always good company.

  He’s also linked to Woodbridge School because that’s where I first met him. He was teaching Latin and ancient Greek and it’s funny to think that he knew Alan Conway before I did. Melissa, Alan’s wife, also taught there, so the three of them were together long before I came onto the scene. I was introduced to him at the end of a summer term. It was sports day and I was there to support Jack and Daisy. We got talking and I liked him immediately, but it wasn’t until a year later that we met again. By then he had moved to Westminster School in London and he rang Katie to get my number. It was nice that he’s remembered me after all that time but we didn’t begin a romance straight away. We were friends for a long time before we became lovers: in fact we’d only been in our present relationship for a couple of years. We hardly ever talked about Alan, by the way. There was bad blood between them although I didn’t ask why. I would never call Andreas the jealous sort but I got the impression that deep down he resented Alan’s success.

  I knew all about Andreas’s past: he didn’t want there to be secrets between us. The first time he had got married, he had been far too young, just nineteen, and the marriage had fallen apart while he was doing his national service in the Greek army. His second wife, Aphrodite, lived in Athens. She was a teacher, like him, and she had come with him to England. That was when things had gone wrong. She missed her family. She was homesick. ‘I should have seen she was unhappy and gone back with her,’ Andreas told me. ‘But it was too late. She went on her own.’ They were still friends and he saw her from time to time.

  We walked down to Crouch End for dinner. There was a Greek restaurant, actually run by Cypriots, and although you would have thought it was the last food he would want after a summer at home, it was a tradition that we always went there. It was another warm evening so we ate outside, sitting close to each other on the narrow balcony with heaters blazing down unnecessarily above our heads. We ordered taramasalata, dolmades, loukaniko, souvlakia … all prepared in the tiniest of kitchens beside the front door, and shared a bottle of rough red wine.

  It was Andreas who raised the subject of Alan’s death. He had read about it in the newspapers and he was concerned about what it would mean for me. ‘Will it hurt the company?’ he asked. He spoke perfect English, by the way. His mother was English and he had been brought up bilingual. I told him about the missing chapters and, after that, quite naturally, the rest of it came out too. I didn’t see why I should keep anything back from him and it actually felt good having someone I could use as a sounding board. I described my visit to Framlingham and all the people I’d met there.

  ‘I saw Katie,’ I added. ‘She asked after you.’

  ‘Ah, Katie!’ Andreas had always liked her when he had known her as a parent at the school. ‘How are the children, Jack and Daisy?’

  ‘They weren’t there. And they’re hardly children any more. Jack will be going to university next year …’

  I told him about the letter and how I’d come to the conclusion that, perhaps, Alan hadn’t killed himself after all. He smiled. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Susan. You’re always looking for the story. You read between the lines. Nothing is ever straightforward.’

  ‘You think I’m wrong?’

  He took my hand. ‘Now I’ve annoyed you. I don’t mean to. It’s one of the things I like about you. But don’t you think the police would have noticed if someone had pushed him off the tower? The killer must have broken into the house. There would have been a struggle. They’d have left fingerprints.’

  ‘I’m not sure they looked.’

  ‘They didn’t look because it’s actually pretty obvious. He was ill. He jumped.’

  I wondered how he could be so sure. ‘You didn’t like Alan very much, did you,’ I said.

  He thought for a moment. ‘I didn’t like him at all if you want the truth. He got in the way.
’ I waited for him to explain what he meant but he shrugged it off. ‘He wasn’t someone it was easy to like.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He laughed and went back to his food. ‘You complained about him often enough.’

  ‘I had to work with him.’

  ‘So did I. Come on, Susan, I don’t want to talk about him. It’ll only spoil the evening. I think you should be careful – that’s all.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because it’s not your business. Maybe he committed suicide. Maybe someone killed him. Either way, it’s not something you should get involved with. I’m only thinking of you. It could be dangerous.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Why not? You should always think before you dig around in someone else’s life. Maybe I say that because I was brought up on an island, in a small community. We always believed in keeping things in the family. What difference does it make to you how Alan died? I’d stay away—’

  ‘I still have to find the missing chapters,’ I interrupted.

  ‘Maybe there are no missing chapters. Despite what you say, you can’t be sure he ever wrote them. They weren’t on his computer. They weren’t on his desk.’

  I didn’t try to argue. I was a little disappointed that Andreas had shot down my theories so carelessly. It also seemed to me that there had been a slight awkwardness between us, a disconnection which had been there from the moment he had turned up at the flat. We’ve always been very companionable. We’re comfortable in each other’s silences. But that wasn’t true tonight. There was something he wasn’t telling me. I even wondered if he’d met somebody else.