Magpie Murders

by Anthony Horowitz

  Still, we chatted pleasantly enough once we’d left the worst of the traffic behind us. I was more relaxed by the time we hit the A12 and picked up speed. I mentioned that I’d met Mathew Prichard, which amused him, and that allowed me to ask him, once again, about his dinner at the Ivy Club and in particular about the argument concerning the title, Magpie Murders. I didn’t want him to feel that I was interrogating him and I still wasn’t sure why that last conversation meant so much to me.

  Charles was also puzzled by my interest. ‘I told you I didn’t like the title,’ he said, simply. ‘I thought it was too similar to Midsomer Murders on TV.’

  ‘You asked him to change it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he refused.’

  ‘That’s right. He got quite angry about it.’

  I reminded him of what Alan had said, the four words he had spoken just before the waiter had dropped the plates. I’m not having the— Did he know what Alan had been about to say?

  ‘No. I can’t remember, Susan. I have no idea.’

  ‘Did you know that he thought up the title years ago?’

  ‘I didn’t. How do you know?’

  In fact Mathew Prichard had overheard Alan telling him exactly that. ‘I think he mentioned it to me once,’ I lied.

  We didn’t talk about Alan much more after that. Neither of us was looking forward to the funeral. Well, of course, you never do – but in Alan’s case we were only going out of a sense of obligation although I was interested to know who would be there. I’d actually called James Taylor that morning. We were going to have dinner later that evening at the Crown Hotel. I also wondered if Melissa Conway would show up. It had been several years since I had met her and, after what Andreas had said, I was keen to see her again. The three of them together at Woodbridge School – where Atticus Pünd had begun.

  We drove in silence for about twenty minutes but then, just after we had entered the county of Suffolk, a sign helpfully informing us that was what we’d done, Charles suddenly announced: ‘I’m thinking of stepping aside.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I would have stared at him except that I was in the process of overtaking a monster four-axle lorry complete with tow-bar trailer, possibly on its way to Felixstowe.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you for some time, Susan – before this business with Alan. I suppose that’s the last nail in the coffin – if that’s not a horribly inappropriate expression, given the circumstances. But I’ll be sixty-five soon and Elaine has been on at me to slow down.’ Elaine, I may have mentioned, was his wife. I had only ever met her a couple of times and knew she had little interest in the publishing world. ‘And then, of course, there’s the new baby on its way. Becoming a grandfather certainly makes you think. It just might be the right time.’

  ‘How soon?’ I didn’t know what to say. The idea of Cloverleaf Books without Charles Clover was unthinkable. He was as much a part of the place as the wooden panelling.

  ‘Maybe next spring.’ He paused. ‘I was wondering if you might like to take over.’

  ‘What – me? As CEO?’

  ‘Why not? I’ll stay on as chairman so I’ll still have some involvement, but you’ll take over the day-to-day running. You know the business as well as anyone. And let’s face it, if I were to parachute someone in, I’m not sure you’d be happy working with them.’

  He was right about that. I was hurtling through my forties and I was vaguely aware that the older I got, the more stuck in my ways I became. I suppose it’s something that happens in publishing, where people often stay in the same job for a very long time. I wasn’t good with new people. Could I do it? I knew about books but I had no real interest in the rest of it: employees, accountants, overheads, long-term strategy, the day-to-day running of a medium-sized business. At the same time, it occurred to me that this was my second job offer in less than a week. I could become CEO of Cloverleaf or I could run a small hotel in Agios Nikolaos. It was quite a choice.

  ‘Would I have complete autonomy?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. We’d come to some sort of financial agreement, but effectively it would be your company.’ He smiled. ‘It changes your priorities, becoming a grandfather. Tell me you’ll consider it.’

  ‘Of course I will, Charles. It’s very kind of you to have such confidence in me.’

  We stayed silent for the next ten or twenty miles. I’d misjudged the amount of time I needed to get out of London and it looked as if we were going to be late for the funeral. In fact we would have been if Charles hadn’t warned me to take a right, cutting round through Brandeston and so missing the roadworks that had held me up at Earl Soham the last time I had come through. That saved us a quarter of an hour and we pulled in to Framlingham comfortably at ten to three. I’d booked the same room at the Crown so I was able to leave the MGB in their car park. They were already setting up the front lounge for drinks after the funeral and we just had time to snatch a coffee, then hurried out the front entrance and across the road.

  There was going to be a funeral …

  The first words of Magpie Murders.

  The irony wasn’t lost on me as I joined the other mourners who were assembling around the open grave.

  The church of St Michael the Archangel, to give it its full name, is really much too large for the town in which it finds itself – but then the whole of Suffolk is studded with monumental buildings, locked in combat with the surrounding landscape as if each parish felt a need to bully its way into peoples’ lives. It feels uncomfortable – not just penned in but in the wrong place altogether. As you glance back through the cast-iron gates, it’s surprising to find yourself looking across a busy street to Mr Chan’s Chinese restaurant. There’s something odd about the cemetery too. It’s slightly raised up so that the dead bodies are actually buried above street level and the grass is too green, the graves clustered together in irregular lines with so much space around them that there’s no economy of scale. The cemetery is both too full and too empty at the same time and yet this was where Alan had chosen to be buried. I guessed that he had selected his plot with some care. It was right in the middle, between two Irish yews. Nobody would be able to miss it as they made their way to the church. His closest neighbours had died almost a century before him and the newly dug earth appeared as a fresh scar; as if it had no right to be there.

  The weather had changed during the course of the day. The sun had been shining when we left London but now the sky was grey and there was a thin drizzle sweeping through the air. I understood why Alan had started Magpie Murders with a funeral. It had been a useful device, introducing all the main characters in a way that allowed him to consider them at leisure. I was able to do the same now. I was quite surprised how many of them I knew.

  First there was James Taylor, wrapped in a black, designer raincoat with his damp hair sticking to his neck and looking for all the world as if he had just stepped out of a spy novel. He was doing his best to look sombre and composed but there was a smile about him that he could not control; not on his lips but in his eyes and the very way he stood. Sajid Khan was standing next to him, holding an umbrella. The two of them had arrived together. So James had inherited. He knew that Alan had failed to sign his most recent will and Abbey Grange and everything else was his. That was interesting. James saw me and nodded and I smiled back at him. I don’t know why, but I was really glad for him and it didn’t even bother me, the thought that Alan might have died at his hand.

  Claire Jenkins was there. She was dressed in black and crying, really sobbing, with the tears coursing down her cheeks, helped on their way by the rain. She was holding a handkerchief but it must have been useless by now. A man stood next to her, awkwardly holding her arm with a gloved hand. I had not met him before but would easily remember him when I saw him again. For a start, he was black, the only black person to come to the funeral. He also had an extraordinary physical presenc
e, very well built with solid arms and shoulders, a thick neck, intense eyes. I thought at first that he might be an ex-wrestler – he had the build – but then it occurred to me that he was more likely to be a policeman. Claire had told me that she worked for the Suffolk constabulary. Was this the elusive Detective Superintendent Locke whose enquiry had been parallel-tracking my own?

  My eye settled on another man who was standing on his own with the church tower rising monstrously behind him, too big for a church that was too big for its town. It was his Hunter Wellington boots I noticed first. They were brand new and bright orange – an odd choice for a funeral. I couldn’t see much of his face. He was wearing a cloth cap and a Barbour jacket turned up at the collar. As I watched him, his mobile phone rang and instead of putting it on silent, he took the call, turning away for privacy. ‘John White …’ I heard him give his name but nothing else. Still, I knew who he was. This was Alan’s neighbour, the hedge fund manager he’d fallen out with just before he died.

  Still waiting for the service to begin, I searched through the crowd and found Melissa Conway and her son, standing next to the cemetery’s war memorial. She was wearing a raincoat tucked so tightly around her that it appeared to be breaking her in half. Her hands were deep in her pockets, her hair concealed beneath a scarf. I might not have recognised her but for her son who must have been in his late teens now. He was the spitting image of his father – at least in Alan’s later incarnation – uncomfortable in a dark suit that was a little too large for him. He was not happy to be here; by which I mean he was angry. He was staring at the grave with something like murder in his eyes.

  I hadn’t seen Melissa for at least six years. She had come to the launch party of Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, which had been held at the German embassy in London, an evening of champagne and miniature Bratwurst. I was seeing Andreas occasionally by then and because we had him in common we were able to strike up a conversation of sorts. I remember her as being polite but disengaged. It can’t be much fun being married to a writer and she made it clear that she was only there because it was expected of her. She knew nobody in the room and nobody had anything to say to her. It was a shame that the two of us had never met properly at Woodbridge School: I had no knowledge of her outside her relation to Alan. She had the same blank look on her face now, even though it was a coffin rather than canapés that was being brought in. I wondered why she had come.

  The hearse had arrived. The coffin was carried forward. A vicar appeared, walking out of the church. This was the Reverend Tom Robeson whose name had been mentioned in the newspaper. He was about fifty years old and although I had never seen him before I knew him immediately. ‘ … his tombstone face and his long, slightly unkempt hair.’ That was how Alan had described Robin Osborne in Magpie Murders and, even as I thought that, something else occurred to me. I had seen it as I entered the cemetery, his name written on a sign. It helped having that visual prompt.

  Robeson is an anagram of Osborne.

  It was another one of Alan’s private jokes. James Taylor had become James Fraser, Claire was Clarissa and, now that I thought about it, John White the hedge fund manager had been turned into Johnny Whitehead the second-hand furniture dealer and petty crook, this the result of an argument about money. As far as I knew, Alan had never been a religious person despite this very conventional funeral and I had to ask myself what his relationship with the vicar has been and why he had chosen to celebrate it in his novel. Osborne had been number three on my list of suspects. Mary Blakiston had discovered some sort of secret, left out on his desk. Could Robeson have had a reason to murder Alan? He certainly looked the part of the vengeful killer with his rather grim, colourless features and his robes hanging forlornly off him in the rain.

  He described Alan as a popular writer whose books had given pleasure to many millions of people around the world. It was as if Alan was being introduced on a Radio 4 panel show rather than at his own funeral. ‘Alan Conway may have left us all too soon and in tragic circumstances but he will, I am sure, remain in the hearts and the minds of the literary community.’ Even ignoring the question of whether the literary community actually had a heart, I thought this was unlikely to be the case. It’s my experience that dead authors are forgotten with remarkable speed. Even living authors find it hard to stay on the shelves; there are too many new books and too few shelves. ‘Alan was one of our country’s most celebrated mystery writers,’ he went on. ‘He lived much of his life in Suffolk and it was always his wish that he should be buried here.’ In Magpie Murders, there is something hidden in the funeral address that relates in some way to the murder. On the very last page of the typescript, when Pünd is talking about the clues that will solve the crime, he specifically refers to ‘the words spoken by the vicar’. Unfortunately, Robeson’s speech was almost deliberately bland and unrevealing. He didn’t mention James or Melissa. There was nothing about friendship, generosity, humour, personal mannerisms, small kindnesses, special moments … all those things we actually miss when somebody dies. If Alan had been a marble statue stolen from a park, the Reverend Tom Robeson might have cared as much.

  There was just one passage that stayed with me. It certainly struck me that it might be worth asking the vicar about it later.

  ‘Very few people are now buried in this cemetery,’ he said. ‘But Alan insisted. He had given a great deal of money to the church which has allowed us to undertake much needed restoration work to the clerestory windows and the main chancel arch. In return he demanded this resting place and who was I to stand in his way?’ He smiled as if trying to make light of what he had just said. ‘All his life, Alan had a dominant personality, as I discovered at quite an early age. Certainly I was not going to refuse him this last wish. His contribution assures the future of St Michael’s and it is only fitting that he should remain here, within the church grounds.’

  This whole section of the speech had an edge to it. On the one hand Alan had been generous. He deserved to be allowed to lie here. But that wasn’t quite the case, was it? Alan had ‘demanded’ it. He had ‘a dominant personality’. And ‘as I discovered at quite an early age’. Alan and the vicar obviously had some sort of history. Was I really the only person who noticed the discordance in what was being said?

  I was going to ask Charles what he thought as soon as the service was over but in fact I never made it to the end. The rain was beginning to ease off and Robeson had reached his closing remarks. Bizarrely, he had forgotten Alan altogether. He was talking about the history of Framlingham and, in particular, Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, whose tomb was inside the church. For a moment my attention wondered and that was when I noticed a mourner who must have arrived late. He was lingering over by the gate, watching the service from a distance, anxious to be on his way. Even as I examined him, and with the vicar still speaking, he turned on his heels and walked out onto Church Street.

  I had not seen his face. He was wearing a black, Fedora hat.

  ‘Don’t leave,’ I whispered to Charles. ‘I’ll meet you at the hotel.’

  It had taken Atticus Pünd one hundred and thirty pages to discover the identity of the man who had attended Mary Blakiston’s funeral. I couldn’t wait that long. Nodding at the vicar and detaching myself from the crowd, I set off in pursuit.

  The Atticus Adventures

  I caught up with the man in the Fedora hat at the corner of Church Street, just where it met Market Square. Now that he had escaped from the cemetery, he no longer seemed to be in such a hurry to get away. It helped that the drizzle had finally eased off and there were even a few patches of bright sun illuminating the puddles. He was taking his time and I was able to catch my breath before I approached him.

  Some instinct made him turn and he saw me. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was at the funeral,’ I said.

  ‘So was I.’

  ‘I wondered …’ It was only then that it dawned on me th
at I had no earthly idea what I was going to say. It was all far too difficult to explain. I was investigating a murder which, as far as I knew, nobody else was aware had taken place. I had chased after him only because of his choice of headgear, the relevance of which was tangential, to say the least. I drew a breath. ‘My name is Susan Ryeland,’ I said. ‘I was Alan’s editor at Cloverleaf Books.’

  ‘Cloverleaf?’ He knew the name. ‘Yes. We’ve spoken a few times.’

  ‘Have we?’

  ‘Not you. There’s a woman there … Lucy Butler.’ Lucy was our Rights Manager. She had the office next to mine. ‘I talked to her about Atticus Pünd.’ Suddenly I had a good idea who I was talking to but I didn’t need to ask. ‘I’m Mark Redmond,’ he said.

  Charles and I had often talked about Redmond and his company – Red Herring Productions – during our weekly conferences. He was a TV and film producer and it was he who had optioned the rights to the Atticus Pünd novels, which he was developing with the BBC. Lucy had visited him at his offices in Soho and had reported back favourably: a young, enthusiastic staff, a shelf full of BAFTAs, phones ringing, dispatch riders in and out, a sense that this was a company that made things happen. As the name suggested, Red Herring specialised in murder mystery. Redmond had started his career as a runner on Bergerac, presumably running all over Jersey, which was where it was set. From there he’d moved on to another half dozen shows before setting up on his own. Atticus would be his first independent production. From what I understood, the BBC was keen.

  He was actually someone I was very glad to meet: his future and mine were intertwined. A television series would give the books a whole new life. There would be new covers, new publicity, a complete relaunch. We needed it more than ever, given our problems with Magpie Murders. I still had Charles’s offer to consider. If I really was going to take over the running of Cloverleaf Books I would need its star author – and posthumously was good enough for me. Red Herring Productions might make it possible.