Magpie Murders (45 page)

I rang the front door. I guessed the house must have at least eight bedrooms and that, given its size, I might wait quite a time before anyone reached me but in fact the door opened almost at once and I found myself facing an unfriendly-looking woman with black hair parted in the middle, dressed in quite masculine clothes: sports jacket, tight-fitting trousers, ankle-length boots. Was she his wife? She hadn’t been at the funeral. Somehow, I doubted it.

‘I wonder if I could speak to Mr White?’ I said. ‘Are you Mrs White?’

‘No. I’m Mr White’s housekeeper. Who are you?’

‘I’m a friend of Alan Conway. Actually, I was his editor. I need to ask Mr White about what happened. It’s quite important.’

I think she was about to tell me to get lost but at that moment a man appeared behind her, in the hallway. ‘Who is it, Elizabeth?’ a voice asked.

‘It’s someone asking about Alan Conway.’

‘My name is Susan Ryeland.’ I was addressing him over her shoulder. ‘It’ll only take five minutes but I really would appreciate it.’

I sounded so reasonable that it would have been difficult for White to refuse me. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said.

The housekeeper stepped aside and I went past her into the hall. John White was standing in front of me. I recognised him instantly from the funeral. He was quite small, very slim and rather nondescript in appearance with close-shaven, dark hair that was reflected by the permanent stubble on his chin. He was wearing an office shirt and a V-neck pullover. I found it hard to imagine him behind the wheel of the Ferrari. There was nothing aggressive about him at all.

‘Can I get you some coffee?’ he asked.

‘Thank you. That would be nice.’

He nodded at the housekeeper who had been expecting this and went off to get it. ‘Come into the sitting room,’ he said.

We went into a large room that looked over the back gardens. There was modern furniture and expensive art on the walls including one of those neons by Tracey Emin. I noticed a photograph of two attractive-looking girls, twins. His daughters? I could tell at once that, apart from the housekeeper, he was alone in the house. So either his family was away or he was divorced. I suspected the latter.

‘What do you want to know about Alan?’ he asked.

It all seemed so very casual, but I’d been on Google that morning and knew that this was a man who had run not one but two of the most successful hedge funds for a big city firm. He had made a name for himself and a fortune for everyone else by predicting the credit crunch and had retired at the age of forty-five with more money than I would ever dream about, if I had those sorts of dreams. He still worked, though. He invested millions and made millions more – from clocks, car parks, property, whatever. He was the sort of man I could easily dislike – in fact, the Ferrari made it easier – but I didn’t. I don’t know why not. Maybe it was those orange Hunters. ‘I saw you at the funeral.’

‘Yes. I thought I ought to pop along. I didn’t stay for the drinks though.’

‘Were you and Alan close?’

‘We were neighbours, if that’s what you mean. We saw quite a bit of each other. I read a couple of his books but I didn’t much like them. I don’t get a lot of time to read and his stuff wasn’t my sort of thing.’

‘Mr White …’ I hesitated. This wasn’t going to be easy.

‘Call me John.’

‘… I understand that you and Alan had a disagreement, shortly before he died.’

‘That’s right.’ He was unfazed by the question. ‘Why are you asking?’

‘I’m trying to work out how he died.’

John White had soft, hazel eyes but when I said that I thought I saw something spark in them, a sense of some inner machinery clicking into gear. ‘He committed suicide,’ he said.

‘Yes. Of course. But I’m trying to understand his state of mind when he did it.’

‘I hope you’re not suggesting—’

I was suggesting all sorts of things but I backtracked as gracefully as I could. ‘Not at all. As I explained to your housekeeper, I worked for his publishers and, as it happens, he left us one last book.’

‘Am I in it?’

He was. Alan had turned him into Johnny Whitehead, the crooked antique dealer who had been sent to prison in London. That was the final finger raised to his erstwhile friend. ‘No,’ I lied.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

The housekeeper came in with a tray of coffee and White relaxed. I noticed that after she had poured two cups and offered cream and home-made biscuits, she made no effort to leave and he was happy to have her there. ‘Here’s what happened, since you want to know,’ he said. ‘Alan and I had known each other from the day he moved in and, like I say, we got along on fine. But it went wrong about three months ago. We did a bit of business together. I want to make it quite clear to you, Susan, that I didn’t twist his arm or anything like that. He liked the sound of it and he wanted to come along for the ride.’

‘What was it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t suppose you know much about my sort of work. I’ve been dealing a lot with NAMA. It stands for the National Asset Management Agency and it was set up by the Irish government after the crash of ’98, basically selling off businesses that had gone bust. There was an office development in Dublin that had caught my eye. It would cost twelve million to buy and it needed another four or five spent but I thought I could turn it around and when I mentioned this to Alan, he asked if he could join the SPV.’

‘SPV?’

‘Special Purpose Vehicle.’ If my complete ignorance annoyed him, he didn’t let it show. ‘It’s just a cost-effective way to bring six or seven people together to make this sort of investment. Anyway, I’ll cut a long story short. The whole thing went belly-up. We were buying the development from a man called Jack Dartford and he turned out to be a complete rogue – a liar, a fraud – you name it. I’ll tell you, Susan, you couldn’t meet a more charming man. He’s sat where you’re sitting now and he’d have the whole room in stitches. But it turned out he didn’t even own the property and the next thing I know is he’s gone west with four million quid of our cash. I’m still looking for him now but I don’t think he’s going to be found.’

‘Alan blamed you?’

White smiled. ‘You could say that. Actually, he was bloody furious. Look. We’d all lost the same and I warned him, going in, you can never be 100 per cent certain in these things. But he got it into his head that I’d somehow ripped him off which was well out of order. He wanted to sue me. He threatened me! I couldn’t make him see sense.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

He had been about to take a biscuit. I saw his hand hesitate and at the same time he glanced in the direction of the housekeeper. He might have learned how to keep a poker face when he was at business school but she hadn’t been to the same class and I saw her nervousness, naked and obvious. It signalled the lie that was to come. ‘I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks,’ he said.

‘Were you here on the Sunday when he died?’

‘I suppose so. But he didn’t contact me. If you want the truth, we were only talking through solicitors. And I wouldn’t like you to think that his dealings with me were in any way connected with what happened – his death, I mean. Sure, he lost some money. We all did. But it wasn’t anything he couldn’t afford. He wasn’t going to have to sell up or anything like that. If he couldn’t afford it, I wouldn’t have let him in.’

I left soon after that. I noticed that Elizabeth, the housekeeper hadn’t offered me a second cup of coffee. They waited on the doorstep as I climbed into my MBG and they were still standing there together, watching, as I drove back down the drive.

Starbucks, Ipswich

There’s a well-marked one-way system that takes you round the edge of Ipswich, which suits me because it’s one city I’ve never much enjoyed entering. There are too many shops and too little else. People who live there probably like it but I have bad memories. I used to take Jack and Daisy, my nephew and niece, to the Crown Pools and I swear to God I can still smell the chlorine. I could never find a space in the bloody car parks. I’d have to queue up for ages just to get in and out. More recently, they’d opened one of those American-style complexes just opposite the station, with about a dozen fast-food restaurants and a multiplex cinema. It seems to me that it kills the city, separating the entertainment like that – but it was here that I met Richard Locke for the fifteen minutes he’d been kind enough to give me.

I arrived first. At twenty past eleven, I had more or less decided that he wasn’t going to come but then the door opened and he strode in, looking pissed off. I raised a hand, recognising him at once. He was indeed the man I’d seen with Claire at the funeral but he had no reason to know me. He was wearing a suit but without a tie. This was his day off. He came over and sat down heavily, all that well-toned flesh and muscle hammering into the plastic chair, and my first thought was this wasn’t someone I’d want to arrest me. I felt uncomfortable even offering him a coffee. He asked for tea and I went over and got it for him. I bought him a flapjack too.

‘I understand you’re interested in Alan Conway,’ he said.

‘I was his editor.’

‘And Claire Jenkins was his sister.’ He paused. ‘She has this idea that he was killed. Is that what you think?’

There was grim, no-nonsense tone to his voice that was actually on the edge of anger. It was in his eyes, too. They were fixed on me as if he was the one who had ordered this interrogation. I wasn’t quite sure how to reply. I wasn’t even sure what to call him. Richard was probably too informal. Mr Locke was wrong. Detective Superintendent felt too TV but that was the one I plumped for. ‘Did you see the body?’ I asked.

‘No. I saw the report.’ Almost grudgingly, he broke off a piece of his flapjack but he didn’t eat it. ‘Two officers from Leiston were called to the scene. I only got involved because I happened to know Mr Conway. Also, he was famous and there was obviously going to be interest from the press.’

‘Claire had introduced you to him?’

‘I think it was the other way round, actually, Ms Ryeland. He needed help with his books and so she introduced him to me. But you didn’t answer my question. Do you think he was murdered?’

‘I think it’s possible. Yes.’ He was going to interrupt me so I went on quickly. I told him about the missing chapter which had first brought me to Suffolk. I mentioned Alan’s diary, the number of appointments he had made for the week after he died. I didn’t talk about the people I’d spoken to – it didn’t seem fair to drag them in. But for the first time I explained my feeling about the suicide letter, how it didn’t quite add up. ‘It’s only on page three that he talks about dying,’ I explained. ‘But he was dying anyway. He had cancer. The letter doesn’t actually say anywhere that he’s about to kill himself.’

‘You don’t think it’s a bit odd then that he sent it to his publisher one day before he threw himself off that tower?’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t the one who sent it. Perhaps someone read the letter and realised that it could be misinterpreted. They pushed Alan off the tower and then sent the letter themselves. They knew we’d leap to the wrong conclusion precisely because of the timing.’

‘I don’t think I’ve leapt to any wrong conclusions, Ms Ryeland.’

He was not looking at me sympathetically and although I was a little annoyed, the strange thing is that, right then, he was not wrong to doubt me. There was something about the letter which I, of all people, should have noticed but which I hadn’t. I called myself an editor but I was blind to the truth even when it was right there in front of my eyes.

‘There were a lot of people who didn’t like Alan—’ I began.

‘There are a lot of people who don’t like a lot of people but they don’t go around the place murdering them.’ He had come here with the intention of telling me this and now that he had started, he wasn’t going to stop. ‘What people like you don’t seem to understand is that you’ve got more chance of winning the lottery than you have of being murdered. Do you know what the murder rate was last year? Five hundred and ninety-eight people – that’s out of a population of around sixty million! In fact, I’ll tell you something that may amuse you. There are some parts of the country where the police actually solve more crimes than are committed. You know why that is? The murder rate’s falling so fast, they’ve got time to look into the cold cases that were committed years ago.

‘I don’t understand it. All these murders on TV – you’d think people would have better things to do with their time. Every night. Every bloody channel. People have some sort of fixation. And what really annoys me is that it’s nothing like the truth. I’ve seen murder victims. I’ve investigated murder. I was here when Steve Wright was killing prostitutes. The Ipswich Ripper – that’s what they called him. People don’t plan these things. They don’t sneak into their victims’ houses and throw them off the roof and then send out letters hoping they’re going to be misinterpreted, as you put it. They don’t put on wigs and dress up like they do in Agatha Christie. All the murders I’ve ever been involved in have happened because the perpetrators were mad or angry or drunk. Sometime all three. And they’re horrible. Disgusting. It’s not like some actor lying on his back with a little red paint on his throat. When you see someone who’s had a knife in them, it makes you sick. Literally sick.

‘Do you know why people kill each other? They do it because they’re out of their heads. There are only three motives. Sex, anger and money. You kill someone in the street. You stick a knife in them and you take their money. You have an argument with them and you smash a bottle and rip open their throat. Or you kill them because you get off on it. All the murderers I’ve met have been thick as shit. Not clever people. Not posh or upper class. Thick as shit. And you know how we catch them? We don’t ask them clever questions and work out that they don’t have an alibi, that they weren’t actually where they were meant to be. We catch them on CCTV. Half the time, they leave their DNA all over the crime scene. Or they confess. Maybe one day you should publish the truth although I’m telling you, nobody would want to read it.