Magpie Murders (38 page)

‘I suppose that’s possible. I can tell you who they were, if you like. Their names will still be on the system.’

He left the terrace and went back into the restaurant to do just that. I watched him as he walked into the distance, remembering what he had just said.
‘… that big house of his up in Framlingham.
’ He hadn’t had to look up the name of the town. He already knew where Alan lived.

The grandson

The man who had been sitting at the table next to Alan Conway that night and who might or might not have overheard the conversation was called Mathew Prichard. It was very curious. His name may not be familiar to you but I recognised it at once. Mathew Prichard is the grandson of Agatha Christie. He was famously given the rights to
The Mousetrap
when he was nine years old. It feels odd to be writing about him and it may seem unlikely that he should have been there. But he is a member of the Club. The offices of Agatha Christie Ltd are a short walk away, in Drury Lane. And, as I’ve already mentioned,
The Mousetrap
is still showing at St Martin’s theatre, which is just down the road.

I had his number on my mobile. We had met two or three times at literary events and a few years ago I had been in negotiations to buy his memoir,
The Grand Tour
. It was a very entertaining account of a round-the-world trip his grandmother had made in 1922 (I was outbid by HarperCollins). I called him and he remembered me at once.

‘Of course, Susan. Lovely to hear from you. How are you?’

I wasn’t quite sure how to explain myself. Again, the fact that I was involving him in a real-life mystery that I was investigating struck me as bizarre and I didn’t really want to go into all that on the phone. So I simply mentioned the death of Alan Conway – he knew all about that – and said there was something I wanted to ask him about. That was enough. As it happened, he was close by. He gave me the name of a cocktail bar near Seven Dials and we agreed to meet there for a drink that evening.

If there is one word I would use to describe Mathew it is affable. He must be about seventy and looking at him, with his ruffled white hair and slightly ruddy complexion, you get the sense that he has lived life to the full. He has a laugh that you can hear across the room, a raucous, sailor’s laugh that sounds as if he has just been told the filthiest joke. He was looking immaculate in a blazer and an open-neck shirt as he wandered into the cocktail bar and although I offered, he insisted on paying for the drinks.

We talked a little about Alan Conway. He expressed his sympathies, said how much he had always enjoyed the books. ‘Very, very clever. Always surprising. Full of good ideas.’ I remember the words exactly, because there was a nasty part of me that was wondering if it might be possible to slip them onto the back cover: Agatha Christie’s grandson endorsing Alan Conway’s work could only be a good thing for future sales. He asked me how Alan had died and I told him that the police suspected suicide. He looked pained at that. A man so full of life himself, he would find it hard to understand anyone who could choose to do away with theirs. I added that Alan had been seriously ill and he nodded as if that made some kind of sense. ‘You know, I saw him a week or so ago – at the Ivy,’ he said.

‘That was what I wanted to ask you about,’ I replied. ‘He was having dinner with his publisher.’

‘Yes. That’s right. I was at the next table.’

‘I’d be interested to know what you saw – or heard.’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘I have. Charles has told me a certain amount but I’m trying to fill in the gaps.’

‘Well, I wasn’t really listening to the conversation. Of course, the tables are quite close to each other but I can’t tell you very much of what was said.’

I found it rather endearing that Mathew hadn’t asked me why I was interested in what had happened. He had lived much of his life in the world created by his grandmother and the way he saw it, detectives asked questions, witnesses answered them. It was as simple as that. I reminded him of the moment when Leigh had dropped the plates and he smiled. ‘Yes, I do remember that. As a matter of fact, I did hear some of what they were saying just before it happened. Raised voices and all that! They were talking about the title of his new book.’

‘Alan delivered it that night.’

‘
Magpie Murders
. I’m sure you’ll understand, Susan, I can’t hear the word “murder” without my ears pricking up.’ He chortled at that. ‘They were arguing about the title. I think your publisher chap made some comment and Mr Conway wasn’t at all happy. Yes. He said he’d planned the title years ago – I heard him say that – and he banged his fist on the table. Made the cutlery jump. That was when I turned round and realised who he was. It hadn’t actually dawned on me until then. Anyway, there was a moment’s silence. A couple of seconds, perhaps. And then he pointed his finger and he said: “I’m not having the—”’

‘The what?’ I asked.

Prichard smiled at me. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, because that was when the waiter dropped the plates. It made an absolutely terrible din. The entire room came to a halt. You know how it is. The poor chap went quite red – I’m talking about the waiter now – and started clearing up the mess. I’m afraid I didn’t really hear any more after that. I’m sorry.’

‘Did you see Alan get up?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I think he went to the loo.’

‘He talked to the waiter.’

‘He might have done. But I don’t remember anything more. In fact, I’d finished my meal by then and I left shortly afterwards.’

‘
I’m not having the
—’

That was what it boiled down to. Four words that could have meant anything. I made a mental note to ask Charles about it the next time I saw him.

Prichard and I talked about his grandmother as we finished our cocktails. It had always amused me how much she had come to hate Hercule Poirot by the time she finished writing about him. What had she famously called him? ‘A detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep.’ Hadn’t she once said that she wanted to exorcise herself of him? He laughed. ‘I think that, like all geniuses, she wanted to write all sorts of different books and she got very frustrated when her publishers only wanted, at one stage, for her to write Poirot. She got very impatient when she was told what to do.’

We got up. I had ordered a gin and tonic and it must have been a double because it made my head spin. ‘Thank you for your help,’ I said.

‘I don’t think I’ve been much help at all,’ he replied. ‘But I’ll look forward to seeing the new book when it comes out. As I say, I always liked the Atticus Pünd mysteries – and Mr Conway was obviously a great devotee of my grandmother’s work.’

‘He had the complete collection in his office,’ I said.

‘I’m not surprised. He borrowed lots of things from her, you know. Names. Places. It was almost like a game. I’m sure he did it quite deliberately but when I was reading the books, I’d find all sorts of references buried in the text. I’m quite certain he was doing it on purpose and I did sometimes think of writing to him, to ask him what he was up to.’ Prichard smiled one last time. He was too good-natured to accuse Alan of plagiarism, although it was a strange echo of my conversation with Donald Leigh.

We shook hands. I went back to the office, closed my door, and took the manuscript out to examine it one more time.

He was right.
Magpie Murders
pays quiet homage to Agatha Christie at least half a dozen times. For example, Sir Magnus Pye and his wife stay at the Hotel Genevieve in Cap Ferrat. There’s a villa in
The Murder on the Links
that has the same name. The Blue Boar is the pub in Bristol where Robert Blakiston is involved in a fight. But it also appears in St Mary Mead, home of Miss Marple. Lady Pye and Jack Dartford have lunch at Carlotta’s, which seems to have been named after the American actress in
Lord Edgware Dies
. There’s a joke, of sorts, on page 124. Fraser fails to notice a dead man on the three-fifty train from Paddington, an obvious reference to the
4.50 From Paddington
. Mary Blakiston lives in Sheppard’s Farm. Dr James Sheppard is the narrator of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, which is set in King’s Abbott, a village that is also mentioned on page 62, which is where old Dr Rennard is buried.

For that matter, the entire mechanism of
Magpie Murders
, the use of the old nursery rhyme, deliberately imitates a device that Christie used many times. She liked children’s verse.
One Two Buckle my Shoe
,
Five Little Pigs
,
Ten Little Indians
(
And Then There Were None
as it later became),
Hickory Dickory Dock
– all of them appear in her work. You would have thought that any writer whose work has a similarity to an author much better known than himself would do everything he could to disguise the fact. Alan Conway, in his own peculiar way, seems to do the exact opposite. What exactly was going on in his mind when he put these obvious signposts in? Or to put it another way, what exactly were they pointing to?

Not for the first time, I got the sense that he had been trying to tell me something, that he hadn’t just written the Atticus Pünd mysteries to entertain people. He had created them for a purpose that was slowly becoming clear.

The road to Framlingham

The following Friday, I drove back to Suffolk for Alan Conway’s funeral. Neither me nor Charles had been invited and it was unclear who actually was making the arrangements: James Taylor, Claire Jenkins or Sajid Khan. I’d been tipped off by my sister who had read about it in the local newspaper and emailed me with the time and the place. She told me that the funeral was being conducted by the Reverend Tom Robeson, vicar of Saint Michael’s Church, and Charles and I decided to drive up together. We took my car. I was going to stop a little longer.

Andreas had been staying with me all week and he was annoyed that I wasn’t going to be around at the weekend. But I needed time alone. The whole question of Crete was hanging over us and, although we hadn’t discussed it again, I knew he was waiting for an answer that I wasn’t yet ready to give. Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about Alan’s death. I was convinced that another few days in Framlingham would lead me both to the discovery of the missing chapters and, more broadly, the truth of what had happened at Abbey Grange. I was quite sure that the two were related. Alan must have been killed because of something in his book. It might well be that if I could find out who had killed Sir Magnus Pye, I’d know who had killed him. Or vice versa.

The funeral started at three. Charles and I left London just after midday and from the very start I knew it was a mistake. We should have gone by train. The traffic was horrible and Charles looked awkward in the low-slung seat of my MGB. I felt uneasy myself and was wondering why until it dawned on me (just as we hit the M25) that the two of us had always had a face-to-face relationship. That is, I would meet him in his office and he would be on one side of the desk and I would be on the other. We would eat together, facing each other in restaurants. We were often on opposite sides of the conference table. But here we were, unusually, side-by-side and I was simply less familiar with his profile. Being so near to him was also peculiar. Of course, we’d been in taxis together and occasionally on trains, but somehow my little classic car brought us much closer than I would have liked. I had never noticed how unhealthy his skin looked; how years of shaving had scraped the life out of his cheeks and neck. He was dressed in a dark suit with a formal shirt and I was slightly fascinated by his Adam’s apple, which seemed to be constrained, bulging over his black tie. He was going back to London on his own and I rather wished I’d been a bit less forward with my invitation and had allowed him to do the same both ways.

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.