Magpie Murders (42 page)

From this time on, I saw less and less of him and I suppose in many ways we grew apart. When we were together, we were close, but we were beginning to live our own, separate lives. When we got to university age, Alan went to Leeds and I didn’t go to university at all. My parents were against it. I got a job in St Albans working in the records department of the police force and that’s how I ended up marrying a police officer and eventually coming to live and work in Ipswich. My father died when I was twenty-eight. By the end, he was bedridden and needed round-the-clock support and I’m sure my mother was grateful when he finally conked out. He had taken out a life insurance policy so she was able to support herself. She’s still alive, although I haven’t seen her for ages. She moved back to Dartmouth, where she was born.

But back to Alan. He studied English literature at Leeds University and after that he moved to London and went into advertising, something a lot of young graduates were doing at the time, particularly if they had a degree in humanities. He worked at an agency called Allen Brady & Marsh and as far as I can tell he had a wonderful time, not working very hard, getting paid quite well and going to a lot of parties. This was the eighties and advertising was still a very self-indulgent industry. Alan worked as a copywriter and actually came up with quite a famous line: WHAT A LOVELY LOOKING SAUSAGE! It’s another one of his acrostics. It spells out the name of the brand. He rented a flat in Notting Hill and for what it’s worth he had plenty of girlfriends.

Alan stayed in advertising throughout his twenties but in 1995, the year before he turned thirty, he surprised me by announcing that he had left the agency and enrolled in a two-year postgraduate course in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He had invited me down to London especially to tell me. He took me to Kettner’s and ordered champagne and it all came spilling out of him. Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan had both gone to East Anglia. They had both been published. McEwan had even been shortlisted for the Booker prize! Alan had applied and although he didn’t think he would be accepted, that was what had happened. There had been a written application, a portfolio of writing and then a tough interview with two faculty members. I had never seen him happier or more animated. It was as if he had found himself and it was only then that I realised how much being an author mattered to him. He told me he would have two years to write a novel of eighty thousand words under supervision and that the university had strong links with publishers, which might help him get a deal. He already had an idea for a novel. He wanted to write about the space race, seen from the British perspective. ‘The world is getting smaller and smaller,’ he said. ‘And at the same time we’re getting smaller within it.’ That was what he wanted to explore. The main character would be a British astronaut who never actually left the ground. It was called
Look to the Stars
.

We had a lovely weekend and I was very sad to leave him and go back on the train to Ipswich. There’s not much I can say about the next couple of years because I hardly saw him at all, although we talked on the telephone. He loved the course. He wasn’t too sure about some of the other students. I’ll be honest and say that there was a prickly side to Alan, which I hadn’t noticed before, but which seemed to be growing. Maybe it was because he was working so hard. He clashed with one or two of the tutors who criticised his work. The funny thing is that he had gone to UEA for guidance, but now that he was there he had come to believe he didn’t need it. ‘I’ll show them, Claire,’ he used to say to me. I heard it all the time. ‘I’ll show them.’

Well,
Look to the Stars
never got published and I’m not sure what became of it. In the end, it was over a hundred thousand words long. Alan showed me the first two chapters and I’m glad he didn’t ask me to read the rest because I didn’t like them very much. The writing was very clever. He still had this wonderful ability to use language, to twist words and phrases the way he wanted but I’m afraid I didn’t understand what he was going on about. It was like every page was shouting at me. At the same time, I knew I wasn’t the audience for the book. What did I know? I liked reading James Herriot and Danielle Steel. Of course I made the right noises. I said it was very interesting and I was sure publishers would like it, but then the rejection letters started coming in and Alan was terribly disheartened. He was just so sure that the book was brilliant and you have to ask yourself, if you’re a writer sitting alone in a room, how can you keep going otherwise? It must be awful having that total self-belief, only to find that you’ve been wrong all the time.

Anyway, that was how it was for him in the autumn of 1997. He’d sent
Look to the Stars
to about a dozen literary agents and a whole lot of publishers and nobody was showing any interest. It was even worse for him because two of the students on the course with him had actually got deals. But the thing is, he didn’t give up. That wasn’t in his nature. He told me he wasn’t going back to advertising. He was afraid that he wouldn’t continue with his real work – that was what he called it now – because he’d be too distracted and he wouldn’t have the time and the next thing I knew, he’d got a job as a teacher, teaching English literature at Woodbridge School.

He was never particularly happy there and the children must have sensed it because I got the impression that he wasn’t very popular either. On the other hand, he had long holidays, weekends, plenty of time to write and that was all that mattered to him. He wrote another four novels. At least, those are the ones that he mentioned to me. None of them were published and I’m not sure Alan would have been able to continue at Woodbridge if he had known that it would be eleven years before he finally got a taste of success. He once said to me that it was like being in one of those Russian prisons where they lock you up without telling you the length of your sentence.

Alan got married while he was at Woodbridge. Melissa Brooke, as she was then, taught foreign languages, French and German, and started the same term as him. I don’t need to describe her to you. You’ve met her often enough. My first impressions were that she was young, attractive and that she was very fond of Alan. I don’t know why but I’m afraid the two of us didn’t get on very well. She barely even acknowledged me at Alan’s funeral but I have to admit that it may have been partly my fault. I felt we were in competition, that she had taken Alan away from me. Writing this now, I can see how stupid that is but I’m trying to give you as honest an account as I can of Alan and me and that’s how it was. Melissa had read all his novels. She believed in him 100 per cent. They were married at the register office in Woodbridge in June, 1998 and had their honeymoon in the south of France, in Cap Ferrat. Their son, Freddy, was born two years later.

It was Melissa who advised Alan to write the first Atticus Pünd novel. By this time, they had been married seven years. I know that’s a giant leap forward but there’s nothing else I can write about in this period of time. I was working for Suffolk constabulary. Alan was teaching. We weren’t living far apart geographically but we had completely different lives.

Melissa had her light-bulb moment in the Woodbridge branch of W.H. Smith. Who were the bestselling authors on the shelves? They were Dan Brown, John Grisham, Michael Crichton, James Patterson, Clive Cussler. She knew Alan could write better than any of them. The problem was that he was aiming too high. Why bother writing a book which all the critics rave about but which hardly anyone reads? He could use his talents to write something quite simple, a whodunnit. If it sold, it would launch his career and later on he could try other things. What was important was to get started. That was what she said.

Alan showed me
Atticus Pünd Investigates
not long after he’d written it and I absolutely loved it. It wasn’t just the cleverness of the mystery. I thought the main character of the detective was brilliant. The fact that he’d been in a concentration camp and seen so much death and here he was in England solving murders – it just seemed so right. It had only taken him three months to write the book. He had done most of it during the summer holidays. But I could tell that he was pleased with the result. The first question he asked me was if I’d guessed the ending and he was delighted when I told him I’d been completely wrong.

I don’t need to add much more because you know the rest as well as me. The manuscript found its way to Cloverleaf Books and you bought it! Alan went down to your offices in London and that night we all had dinner together: Alan, Melissa and me. Melissa cooked; Freddy was asleep upstairs. It was meant to be a celebration but Alan was in a strange mood. He was apprehensive, subdued. There was something between him and Melissa, a tension that I couldn’t quite understand. I think Alan was nervous. When you’ve been pursuing an ambition all your life, it’s actually quite frightening to achieve it because where will you go next? And there was something else. Suddenly Alan saw that the world is full of first novels; that every week dozens of new books fall onto the shelves and not many of them make any impact. For every famous writer, there must be fifty who simply disappear and it was quite possible that Atticus Pünd might not just be the realisation of a dream. It might be the end of it.

Of course, that didn’t happen.
Atticus Pünd Investigates
was published in September 2007. I loved seeing the first copy when it arrived with Alan’s name on the front cover and his photograph on the back. Somehow it made everything feel all right, as if our whole lives had been leading to this one moment. The book got a wonderful review in the
Daily Mail
. ‘Watch out Poirot. There’s a smart new foreigner in town and he’s stepping into your shoes.’ By Christmas, Atticus Pünd was appearing in the bestseller lists. There were more good reviews. They even talked about Atticus on the
Today
programme. When the paperback came out the following spring, it seemed that the whole country wanted to buy a copy. Cloverleaf Books asked Alan to write three more and although he never told me how much he was paid, I know it was a fantastic amount.

He was suddenly a famous writer. His book was translated into lots of different languages and he was invited to all the literary festivals: Edinburgh, Oxford, Cheltenham, Hay-on-Wye, Harrogate. When the second book came out, he did a signing in Woodbridge and the queue stretched all the way round the corner. He left Woodbridge School (although Melissa continued working there) and bought a house in Orford, looking out over the river. It was just at this time that Greg, my husband, died and Alan suggested I move closer to him. He helped me buy the house in Daphne Road that you visited.

The books kept on selling. The money was pouring in. Alan asked me to help him with the third book,
Atticus Pünd Takes the Case
. He’d always been a terrible typist. He always did his first drafts in pen and ink and he asked me to type up the first draft on the computer. Then he would make his revisions by hand and I would type them up again before he sent the manuscript to his publisher. He also asked me to help him with the research. I introduced him to one of the detectives in Ipswich and dug out information about poisons and things like that. I actually worked on four of the books. I loved being involved and I was sorry when that came to an end. It was completely my fault.

Alan changed as a result of his success. It was as if he was overwhelmed by it. If he wasn’t writing the books, he was travelling all over the world promoting them. I used to read about him in the newspapers. Sometimes I would hear him on Radio 4. But at this stage, I was seeing him less and less. And then, in 2009, just a few weeks after
Night Comes Calling
was published, Alan shocked me by telling me that he was leaving Melissa and I couldn’t believe it when I read that he had moved in with a young man.

It’s very difficult to explain how I felt because there was such a whirl of emotions in my head and so much that I didn’t know. Living in Orford, I saw Melissa all the time but I had absolutely no idea that the marriage wasn’t working. They always seemed so comfortable together. It all happened very quickly. No sooner had Alan told me the news than Melissa and Freddy had moved out and their home was on the market. There were no lawyers involved in the divorce. They agreed to split everything fifty-fifty.

Speaking personally, I found it quite hard to come to terms with this new side of him. I’ve never had a problem with homosexual men. There was a man I worked with who was openly gay and I got on with him perfectly well. But this was my brother, someone I had been close to all my life, and suddenly I was being asked to look at him in a completely different light. Well, you might say, he had changed in many ways. He was fifty now, a rich and successful author. He was more reclusive, harder-edged, the father of a child, a public figure. And he was gay. Why should this last fact have any special significance? Well, part of the answer was that his partner was so very young. I had nothing against James Taylor. In fact I liked him. I never thought of him as a gold-digger or anything like that although I will admit that I was horrified when Alan mentioned that he had once worked as a rent boy. I was just uneasy seeing the two of them together, sometimes holding hands or whatever. I never said anything. These days, you’re not allowed to, are you? I just felt uncomfortable. That’s all.

That wasn’t the reason we fell out, though. I was doing an awful lot of work for Alan. Somehow it hadn’t ended with the books. I was helping him with his fan mail. Some weeks he was getting more than a dozen letters and although he had a standard reply, someone still had to do the administration. I worked on some of his tax returns, in particular the double tax forms that had to be filled in so he didn’t pay tax twice. He often sent me out to get stationery or new printer cartridges for him. I looked after Freddy. In short I was working as a secretary, an office manager, an accountant and a nanny as well as holding down a full-time job in Ipswich. I didn’t mind doing any of this but one day I suggested he ought to put me on his payroll, partly as a joke. Alan was furious. It was the only time he was ever really angry with me. He reminded me that he had helped me buy my house (although he had made it clear at the time that it was a loan rather than a gift). He said he thought I had been glad to help and that if it was such a chore he would never have asked in the first place. I backed down as fast as I could but the damage had been done. Alan didn’t ask me to do anything for him again and a short time later he moved out of Orford altogether when he bought Abbey Grange.