Magpie Murders (41 page)

I finished. Charles shook his head. ‘A murder writer murdered,’ he said. ‘Are you really serious about this, Susan?’

‘Yes, Charles,’ I said. ‘I think I am.’

‘Have you told anyone else? Have you been to the police?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘For two reasons. I don’t want to see you make a fool of yourself. And frankly I think you could be stirring up more trouble for the company.’

‘Charles …’ I began but then came the sound of a fork being struck against the side of a glass and the room fell silent. I looked round. James Taylor was standing on the staircase that led up to the bedrooms with Sajid Khan next to him. He was at least ten years younger than anyone else in the room and couldn’t have looked more out-of-place.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘Sajid has asked me to say a few words … and I’d like to start by thanking him for making all the arrangements today. As most of you know, I was Alan’s partner until very recently and I want to say that I was very fond of him and I will miss him very much. Quite a lot of you have been asking what I plan to do next so I might as well tell you that now that he’s gone, I won’t be staying in Framlingham although I’ve always been very happy here. In fact, if anyone’s interested, Abbey Grange is about to go on the market. Anyway, I want to thank you all for coming. I’m afraid I’ve never much liked funerals but, as I say, I’m glad to have had this chance to see you all and to say goodbye. And goodbye to Alan especially. I know it meant a lot to him, being buried in the cemetery at St Michael, and I’m sure lots of people will come here and visit him – people who liked his books. Please have some more to eat and drink. And thank you again.’

It wasn’t much of a speech and it had been delivered not just awkwardly but a little carelessly too. James had already told me that he couldn’t wait to get out of Suffolk and he had made it clear to everyone else too. While I was speaking, I had glanced around the room, trying to gauge the different reactions. The vicar was standing to one side, stony-faced. A woman had joined him, much shorter than him, plump with sprawling, ginger hair. I presumed she was his wife. John White hadn’t come to the reception but Detective Superintendent Locke was there – if indeed he was the black man I had identified at the cemetery. Melissa Conway and her son had left the moment James had started speaking. I saw them slip away through the back door and I could understand how they must have felt, listening to Alan’s boyfriend. It was still annoying, though, as I’d wanted to talk to them. But I couldn’t dash off a second time.

James shook hands with the solicitor and left the room, stopping briefly to mutter a few words to one or two well-wishers. I turned back to Charles, expecting to pick up our conversation, but at that moment his mobile pinged. He took it out and glanced at the screen.

‘My car’s here,’ he said. He had arranged a taxi to take him to Ipswich station.

‘You should have let me drive you,’ I said.

‘No. It’s all right.’ He reached for his coat and draped it over his arm. ‘Susan, we really need to talk about Alan. If you’re going to go on with this enquiry of yours, obviously I can’t stop you. But you should think what you’re doing … the implications.’

‘I know.’

‘Are you any closer to finding the missing chapters? If you want my honest opinion, that’s much more important.’

‘I’m still looking.’

‘Well, good luck. I’ll see you on Monday.’

We didn’t kiss each other goodbye. I have never kissed Charles, not once in all the years I’ve known him. He’s too formal for that, too strait-laced. I can’t actually even imagine him kissing his wife.

He left. I threw back the rest of my wine and went to fetch my key. I planned to have a bath and a rest before my dinner with James Taylor but as I made my way back towards the stairs – the other guests were dispersing now, leaving trays of uneaten sandwiches behind – I found my way blocked by Claire Jenkins. She was holding a brown A4 envelope, which must have contained at least a dozen sheets of paper from the look of it. For a moment, my heart leapt. She had found the missing pages! Could it really be as easy as that?

It wasn’t.

‘I said I’d write something about Alan,’ she reminded me, waving the envelope uncertainly in front of her. ‘You asked what he was like as a boy, how we grew up together.’ Her eyes were still red and weepy. If there was a website that sold exclusive funeral wear, she must have found it. She was wearing velvet and lace, slightly Victorian and very black.

‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Jenkins,’ I said.

‘It made me think about Alan and I enjoyed writing it. I’m not sure it’s any good. I couldn’t write the way he did. But it may tell you what you want to know.’ She weighed the envelope one last time as if reluctant to part with it, then pushed it towards me. ‘I’ve made a copy so you don’t need to worry about sending it back.’

‘Thank you.’ She was still standing there, as if expecting something more. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’

Yes. That was it. She nodded. ‘I can’t believe he’s gone,’ she said. And then she went herself.

My brother, Alan Conway

I can’t believe Alan is dead.

I want to write about him but I don’t know where to start. I’ve read some of Alan’s obituaries in the newspapers and they don’t even come close. Oh yes, they know when he was born, what books he wrote, what prizes he won. They’ve said some very nice things about him. But they haven’t managed to capture Alan at all and I’m frankly surprised that not one of those journalists telephoned me because I could have given them a much better idea of the sort of man he was, starting with the fact (as I told you) that he would never have killed himself. If Alan was one thing, it was a survivor. We both were. He and I were always close, even if we did disagree from time to time, and if his illness really had driven him to despair, I know he would have called me before he did anything foolish.

He did not jump off that tower. He was pushed. How can I be so sure? You need to understand where we had come from, how far we had both travelled. He would never have left me on my own, not without warning me first.

Let me go back right back to the beginning.

Alan and I were brought up in a place called Chorley Hall, just outside the Hertfordshire town of St Albans. Chorley Hall was a preparatory school for boys and our father, Elias Conway, was the headmaster. Our mother also worked at the school. She had a full-time job as the headmaster’s wife, dealing with parents and helping the matron when the children fell sick, although she often complained that she was never actually paid.

It was a horrible place. My father was a horrible man. They were well suited. He had come to the school as a maths teacher and as far as I know he had always worked in the private sector, perhaps because, back then, they weren’t too fussy about the sort of people they employed. That may sound a terrible thing to say about your own father, but it’s the truth. I’m glad I wasn’t taught there. I went to a day school for girls in St Albans – but Alan was stuck with it.

The school looked like one of those haunted houses you get in a Victorian novel, perhaps something by Wilkie Collins. Although it was only thirty minutes from St Albans it was at the end of a long, private drive, surrounded by woodland and felt as if it was in the middle of nowhere. It was a long, institutional sort of building with narrow corridors, stone floors and walls half-covered in dark-coloured tiles. Every room had huge radiators but they were never turned on because it was part of the school’s ethos that biting cold, hard beds and disgusting food are character-forming. There were a few modern additions. The science block had been added at the end of the fifties and the school had raised money to build a new gymnasium, which also doubled as a theatre and an assembly hall. Everything was brown or grey. There was hardly any colour at all. Even in the summer, the trees kept out a lot of the sunshine and the water in the school swimming pool – it was a brackish green – never rose above fifty degrees.

It was a boarding school with one hundred and sixty boys aged from eight to thirteen. They were housed in dormitories with between six and twelve beds. I used to walk through them sometimes and I can still remember that strange, musty and slightly acrid smell of so many little boys. Children were allowed to bring a rug and a teddy bear from home but otherwise they had few personal possessions. The school uniform was quite nasty: grey shorts and very dark red V-neck jerseys. Each bed had a cupboard beside it and if they didn’t hang their clothes up properly they would be taken out and caned.

Alan wasn’t in a dormitory. He and I lived with our parents in a sort of flat that was folded into the school, spread over the second and third floor. Our bedrooms were next to each other and I remember that we used to tap out coded messages to each other on the dividing wall. I always liked hearing the first knocks coming quick and slow just after mother had turned out the lights, even though I didn’t ever really know what he meant. Life was very difficult for Alan; perhaps our father wanted it to be. By day he was part of the school, treated exactly the same as the other boys. But he wasn’t exactly a boarder because at night he was at home with us. The result of this was that he never fitted into either world and, of course, being the son of the headmaster he was a target from the day he arrived. He had very few friends and as a result he became solitary and introspective. He loved reading. I can still see him, aged nine, in short trousers, sitting with a large volume of something in his lap. He was a very small boy so the books, particularly the old-fashioned ones, often looked curiously oversized. He would read whenever he could, often late into the night, using a torch hidden under the covers.

We were both afraid of our father. He was not what you would call a physically powerful man. He was old before his time with curly hair that had gone white and which had thinned out to allow his skull to show through. He wore glasses. But there was something about his manner that transformed him into something quite monstrous, at least to his children. He had the angry, almost fanatical eyes of someone who knew they were always right and when he was making a point, he had a habit of jabbing a single finger in your face as if daring you to disagree. That was something we never did. He could be viciously sarcastic, putting you in your place with a sneer and a whole tirade of insults that searched out your weaker points and hammered them home. I won’t tell you how many times he humiliated me and made me feel bad about myself. But what he did to Alan was worse.

Nothing Alan ever did was right. Alan was stupid. Alan was slow. Alan would never amount to anything. Even his reading was childish. Why didn’t he like playing rugby or football or going out camping with the cadets? It’s true that Alan was not physically active when he was a child. He was quite plump and perhaps a bit girlish with blue eyes and long, fair hair. During the day he was bullied by some of the other boys. At night he was bullied by his own father. And here’s something else that may shock you. Elias beat the boys in the school until they bled. Well, there was nothing unusual about that, not in a British prep school in the seventies. But he beat Alan too, many times. If Alan was late for class or if he hadn’t done his homework or if he was rude to another teacher, he would be marched down to the headmaster’s study (it never happened in our private flat) and at the end of it he would have to say ‘Thank you, sir.’ Not ‘thank you, Father,’ you notice. How could any man do that to his son?

My mother never complained. Maybe she was scared of him herself or maybe she thought he was right. We were a very English family, locked together with our emotions kept firmly out of sight. I wish I could tell you what motivated him, why he was so unpleasant. I once asked Alan why he had never written about his childhood although I have a feeling that the school in
Night Comes Calling
owes a lot to Chorley Hall – it even has a similar name. The headmaster who gets killed is also similar in some ways to our father. Alan told me he had no interest in writing an autobiography, which is a shame because I would have been interested to see what he made of his own life.

What can I tell you about Alan during this time? He was a quiet boy. He had few friends. He read a lot. He didn’t enjoy sport. I think he was already living very much in the world of his imagination although he didn’t begin writing until later. He loved inventing games. During the school holidays, when the two of us were together, we would become spies, soldiers, explorers, detectives … We would scurry through the school grounds, searching for ghosts one day, for buried treasure the next. He was always so full of energy. He never let anything get him down.

I say he wasn’t writing yet, but even when he was twelve and thirteen years old, he loved playing with words. He invented codes. He worked out quite complicated anagrams. He made up crosswords. For my eleventh birthday, he made me a crossword that had my name in it, my friends, and everything I did as clues. It was brilliant! Sometimes he would leave out a book for me with little dots underneath some of the letters. If you put them together they would spell out a secret message. Or he would send me acrostics. He would write a note, which would look ordinary if mother or father picked it up, but if you took the first letter of every sentence, once again it would spell out a message that would be known just to the two of us. He liked acronyms too. He often called mother ‘MADAM’ which actually stood for ‘Mum and Dad are mad’. And he’d refer to father as ‘CHIEF’ which meant ‘Chorley Hall is extremely foul’. You may think all this a bit childish but we were only children and anyway, it made me laugh. Because of the way we were brought up, we both got used to being secretive. We were afraid of saying anything, expressing any opinion that might get us into trouble. Alan invented all sorts of ways of expressing things so that only he and I understood. He used language as a place for us to hide.

Chorley Hall came to an end for both of us in different ways. Alan left when he was thirteen and then, a couple of years later, my father suffered a massive stroke that left him semi-paralysed. That was the end of his power over us. Alan had moved to St Albans School and he was much happier there. He had an English teacher he liked, a man called Stephen Pound. I once asked Alan if this was the inspiration for Atticus Pünd but he laughed at me and said that the two weren’t connected. Anyway, it was clear that, one way or another, his career was going to be in books. He had started writing short stories and poetry. When he was in sixth form, he wrote the school play.