Magpie Murders (32 page)

‘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.’

He had already joked about that when I arrived. ‘Are you going to continue living here?’ I asked him. It was a loaded question. He must know that Alan had been intending to disinherit him.

‘God no! I couldn’t sit here by myself in the middle of nowhere. I’d go mad. Alan once told me that he’d left the house to me, but if that turns out to be the case, I’ll go back to London. That’s where I was living when we met.’ He curled his lip. ‘We’d had a bad patch recently. We’d more or less split up. So maybe he changed things … I don’t know.’

‘I’m sure Mr Khan will tell you,’ I said.

‘He hasn’t said anything yet.’

‘I’ll go and see him.’

‘I’d talk to his sister if I were you,’ James suggested. ‘She used to do a lot of work for him. She did all his administration and his fan mail. I think she may even have typed some of the earlier books and he used to show them to her in manuscript. There’s always a chance he gave her the latest one.’

‘You said she’s in Orford.’

‘I’ll give you the address and number.’

While he took out a sheet of paper and a pen, I wandered over to the one cupboard which I hadn’t opened and which was set in the middle of the wall, behind the spiral staircase. I thought it might contain a safe – after all, Sir Magnus Pye had had one in his study. It opened peculiarly, one half sliding up, the other down. There were two buttons set in the wall. I realised it was a dumb waiter.

‘Alan had that built,’ James explained, without looking up. ‘He always ate outside if the weather was warm enough – breakfast and lunch. He’d put the plates and food in and send them up.’

‘Could I see the tower?’ I asked.

‘Sure. I hope you’ve got a head for heights.’

The staircase was modern, made of metal, and I found myself counting the steps as I tramped up. It seemed to go on too long. Surely the tower hadn’t been this high? Finally, a door, locked from inside, led out to a wide, circular terrace with a very low, crenulated wall – Charles had been right about that. From here, I could see across a green sea of treetops and fields, all the way back to Framlingham. In the far distance, Framlingham College, nineteenth-century Gothic, perched on a hill. I noticed something else. Although it was screened by woodland and invisible from the road, there was a second property right next to Abbey Grange. I would have reached it if I had continued up the drive, but there was also what looked like a footpath between the trees. It was large and fairly modern with a very well-kept garden, a conservatory, a swimming pool.

‘Who lives there?’ I asked.

‘That’s the neighbour. His name is John White. He’s a hedge fund manager.’

Alan had arranged a table and four chairs, a gas barbecue and two sun loungers on the terrace. Quite nervously, I made my way to the edge and looked down. From this angle, the ground looked a long way away and I could easily imagine him plunging down. I had a sick feeling in my stomach and stepped back only to feel James’s hands pressing into my back. For a horrible moment I thought he was about to push me. The surrounding wall was really inadequate. It barely came up to my waist.

He stepped away, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just worried you might get dizzy. A lot of people do, coming up here for the first time.’

I stood there with the breeze tugging at my hair. ‘I’ve seen enough,’ I said. ‘Let’s go down.’

It would have been so easy to throw Alan Conway over the edge. He wasn’t a large man. Anyone could have crept up here and done it. I don’t know why I thought that because it was clear that no crime had been committed. He had left a handwritten suicide note. Even so, once I’d got back to my car, I rang the Old Vic in London and they confirmed that he had booked two tickets for Henry V on Thursday. I told them he wouldn’t be needing them. What was interesting was that he had only made the booking on the Saturday, one day before he had killed himself. His diary had shown that he had also arranged meetings, lunches, a haircut and a tennis match. And despite everything, I had to ask myself.

Was this really the behaviour of a man who had decided to take his own life?

Wesley & Khan, Framlingham

I drove back to Framlingham, parked the car in the main square and walked the rest of the way. The town really was a bit of a mishmash. At the far end there was a well-preserved castle surrounded by swathes of grass and a moat, a perfect fantasy of England as it might have been at the time of Shakespeare, complete with a pub and a duck pond nearby. But another fifty yards and the charm came to an abrupt end with Saxmundham Road, wide and modern, stretching into the distance, a Gulf garage one side and an assortment of very ordinary houses and bungalows on the other. Wesley & Khan, the firm of solicitors used by Alan Conway, occupied a mustard-coloured building on the edge of the town. It was a house, not an office, despite the signage beside the front door.

I wasn’t sure if Mr Khan would see me without an appointment but I walked in anyway. I needn’t have worried. The place was quite dead, with a girl reading a magazine behind the reception desk and a young man staring vacantly at a computer screen opposite. The building was old with uneven walls and floorboards that creaked. They’d added grey carpets and strip lighting but it still looked like somebody’s home.