Magpie Murders

by Anthony Horowitz

  ‘I always knew the police would want to speak to me,’ he said. ‘Will you have some tea?’ He put the kettle on the hob and managed to start a flame with a third click of the switch.

  ‘We are not, strictly speaking, the police,’ Pünd told him.

  ‘No. But you’re investigating the deaths.’

  ‘Your wife and Sir Magnus Pye. Yes.’

  Blakiston nodded, then ran a hand over his chin. He had shaved that morning, but with a razor he had used too many times. Hair was sprouting in the cleft underneath his lip and there was a small cut on his chin. ‘I did think about calling someone,’ he said. ‘I was there, you know, on the night he died. But then I thought – why bother? I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything. It’s got nothing to do with me.’

  ‘That may not be the case at all, Mr Blakiston. I have been looking forward to meeting you.’

  ‘Well, I hope you won’t be disappointed.’

  He emptied the teapot, which was still full of old leaves, washed it out with boiling water and added new ones. He took a bottle of milk out of a fridge that had little else inside. At the bottom of the garden, a train rumbled past, billowing steam, and for a moment the air was filled with the smell of cinders. He didn’t seem to notice. He finished making the tea and brought it to the table. The three of them sat down.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You know why we are here, Mr Blakiston,’ Pünd said. ‘Why don’t you tell us your story? Begin from the beginning. Leave nothing out.’

  Blakiston nodded. He poured the tea. Then he began to talk.

  He was fifty-eight years old. He had been living in Cardiff ever since he had left Saxby-on-Avon twelve years ago. He’d had family here; an uncle who owned an electrical shop, not far away, on the Eastern Road. The uncle was dead now but he had inherited the shop and it provided a living – at least, for the sort of life he led. He was on his own. Fraser had been right about that.

  ‘I never actually divorced Mary,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why not. After what happened with Tom, there was no way the two of us were going to stay together. But at the same time, neither of us was ever going to get married again, so what was the point? She wasn’t interested in lawyers and all that stuff. I suppose that makes me officially her widower.’

  ‘You never saw her again after you left?’ Pünd asked.

  ‘We stayed in touch. We wrote to each other and I called her now and then – to ask her about Robert and to see if there was anything she needed. But if she’d needed anything, she would never have asked me.’

  Pünd took out his Sobranies. It was unusual for him to smoke when he was working on a case but nothing about the detective had been quite the same recently and Fraser had been desperately worried since he had been taken ill in Dr Redwing’s surgery. Pünd had refused to say anything about it. In the car, on the way here, he had barely spoken at all.

  ‘Let us go back to the time when you and Mary met,’ Pünd suggested. ‘Tell me about your time at Sheppard’s Farm.’

  ‘That was my dad’s place,’ Blakiston said. ‘He got it from his dad and it had been in the family for as long as anyone can remember. I come from a long line of farmers but I never really took to it. My dad used to say I was the black sheep, which was funny, because that’s what we had – a couple of hundred acres and lots of sheep. I feel sorry for him, looking back on it. I was his only child and I just wasn’t interested so that was that. I’d always been good at maths and science at school and I had ideas about going to America and becoming a rocket engineer which is a bit of a laugh because I worked for twenty years as a mechanic and I never got any further than Wales. But that’s how it is when you’re a kid, isn’t it. You have all these dreams and, unless you’re lucky, they never amount to anything. Still, I can’t complain. We all lived there happily enough. Even Mary liked it to begin with.’

  ‘In what circumstances did you meet your wife?’ Pünd asked.

  ‘She lived in Tawbury, which was about five miles away. Her mother and my mother were at school together. She came over for lunch one Sunday with her parents and that’s how we met. Mary was in her twenties then and as pretty as you can imagine. I fell for her the moment I saw her and we were married within a year.’

  ‘And what, I wonder, did your parents make of her?’

  ‘They liked her well enough. In fact, there was a time when I would say everything was pretty much perfect. We had two sons: Robert first, then Tom. They grew up on the land and I can still see them, racing around, helping my dad when they got back from school. I think we were probably happier there than we ever were anywhere else. But it couldn’t last. My dad was up to his eyes in debt. And I wasn’t helping him. I’d got a job at Whitchurch Airport, which was an hour and half away, near Bristol. This was the end of the thirties. I was doing routine maintenance on planes for the Civil Air Guard and I met a lot of the young pilots coming in for training. I knew there was a war on the way but in a place like Saxby-on-Avon it was easy to forget it. Mary was doing jobs in and around the village. We were already going our separate ways. That’s why she blamed me for what happened – and maybe she was right.’

  ‘Tell me about your children,’ Pünd said.

  ‘I loved those boys. Believe me, there isn’t a day when I don’t think about what happened.’ He choked on his words and had to pause for a moment to recover. ‘I don’t know how it all went so wrong, Mr Pünd. I really don’t. When we were up at Sheppard’s Farm, I won’t say it was perfect but we used to have fun. They could be right little sods, always fighting, always at each other’s throats. But that’s true of any boys, isn’t it?’ He gazed at Pünd as if needing affirmation and when none came he went on. ‘They could be close too. The best of friends.

  ‘Robert was the quiet one. You always got the impression that he was thinking about something. Even when he was quite young, he used to take himself off for long walks along the Bath valley and there were times we’d get quite worried about him. Tom was more of a livewire. He saw himself as a bit of an inventor. He was always mixing potions and putting things together from the insides of old machines. I suppose he might have got that from me and I’ll admit he was the one I used to spoil. Robert was closer to his mother. It was a difficult birth. She nearly lost him, and when he was a baby he had all sorts of illnesses. The village doctor, a chap called Rennard, was always in and out of the house. If you ask me, that’s what made her so overprotective. There were times when she wouldn’t let me come near him. Tom was the easier boy. I was closer to him. Always, him and me …’

  He took out a packet of ten cigarettes, tore off the cellophane and lit one.

  ‘Everything went wrong when we left the farm,’ he said and suddenly he was bitter. ‘The day that man came into our life, that’s when it began. Sir Magnus bloody Pye. It’s easy enough to see it now and I wonder how I could have been so blind, so stupid. But at the time what he was offering seemed an answer to our prayers. A regular salary for Mary, somewhere to live, nice grounds for the boys to run around in. At least, that’s how Mary saw it and that’s how she sold it to me.’

  ‘You argued?’

  ‘I tried not to argue with her. All it did was turn her against me. I said I had a couple of misgivings, that’s all. I didn’t like the idea of her being a housekeeper. I thought she was better than that. And I remember warning her that, once we were there, we’d be trapped. It would be like he owned us. But the thing was, you see, we didn’t really have any choice. We didn’t have any savings. It was the best offer we were going to get.

  ‘And at first it was fine. Pye Hall was nice enough and I got on well enough with Stanley Brent who was the groundsman there with his son. We weren’t paying any rent and in some ways it was better to be on our own as a family, without my mum and dad around all the time. But there was something about the Lodge House that rubbed us up the wrong way. It was dark all the year round and it ne
ver really felt like home. We all started getting on each other’s nerves, even the boys. Mary and I seemed to be sniping at each other all the time. I hated the way she looked up to Sir Magnus, just because he had a title and so much money. He was no better than me. He’d never done a proper day’s work in his life. He only had Pye Hall because he’d inherited it. But she couldn’t see that. She thought it made her special in some way. What she didn’t understand was that when you’re cleaning a toilet, you’re still cleaning a toilet and what difference does it make if some aristocratic bum is going to sit on it? I said that to her once and she was furious. But the way she saw herself she wasn’t a cleaner or a housekeeper. She was the lady of the manor.

  ‘Magnus had one son of his own – Freddy – but he was still very young and he was quite surly. There was no real love there. So his lordship started interesting himself in my boys instead. He used to encourage them to play on his land and spoil them with little gifts – three pence here, sixpence there. And he’d get them to play practical jokes on Neville Brent. His parents were dead by then. They’d been killed in a car accident and Neville had taken over, working on the estate. If you ask me, there was something queer about him. I don’t think he was quite right in the head. But that didn’t stop them spying on him, teasing him, throwing snowballs, that sort of thing. It was cruel. I wish they hadn’t done it.’

  ‘You couldn’t stop them?’

  ‘I couldn’t do anything, Mr Pünd. How can I make you understand? They never listened to me. I wasn’t their father any more. Almost from the day we moved into that place, I found myself being pushed to one side. Magnus, Magnus … that was all anyone ever talked about. When the boys got their school reports, nobody cared what I thought. You know what? Mary would get the boys to take them up to the main house and show them to him. As if his opinion mattered more than mine.

  ‘It got worse and worse over time, Mr Pünd. I began to loathe that man. He always had a way of making me feel small, reminding me that I was living in his house, on his land … as if I’d ever wanted to be there in the first place. And it was his fault, what happened. I swear to you. He killed my son as if he did it with his own hands and at that same moment he ruined me. Tom was the light of my life and when he went there was nothing left for me.’ He fell silent and wiped his eye with the back of his hand. ‘Look at me! Look a this place! I often ask myself what I did to deserve it. I never hurt anyone and I end up here. I sometimes think I’ve been punished for something I didn’t do.’

  ‘I am sure you are blameless.’

  ‘I am blameless. I did nothing wrong. What happened had nothing to do with me.’ He stopped, fixing his eyes on Pünd and Fraser, daring them to disagree. ‘It was Magnus Pye. Bloody Magnus Pye.’

  He took a breath, then went on.

  ‘The war had started and I’d been sent off to Boscombe Down, working mainly on Hawker Hurricanes. I was away from home and I didn’t really know what was going on and when I came back occasional weekends, it was like I was a stranger. Mary had changed so much. She was never pleased to see me. She was secretive … like she was hiding something. It was hard to believe she was the same girl I’d met and married and been with at Sheppard’s Farm. Robert didn’t want to have too much to do with me either. He was his mother’s child. If it hadn’t been for Tom, it would hardly have been worth showing up.

  ‘Anyway, Sir Magnus was there in my place. I told you about games. There was this game he played with the boys – with my boys. They were obsessed with buried treasure. Well, all boys like that sort of thing but I’m sure you know the Pyes had dug up a whole load of stuff – Roman coins and the rest of it in Dingle Dell. He had them on display in his house. And so it was easy for him to turn the two of them into treasure hunters. He’d take chocolate bars wrapped in foil or, sometimes, sixpenny pieces or half crowns and he’d hide them all over the estate. Then he’d give them clues and set them off. They might spend the whole day doing that and you couldn’t really complain because it got them out in the open air. It was good for them, wasn’t it? It was fun.

  ‘But he wasn’t their father. He didn’t know what he was doing and one day he took it too far. He had a piece of gold. Not real gold. Iron pyrite – what they call fool’s gold. He had a big lump of it and he decided to make that the prize. Of course Tom and Robert didn’t know the difference. They thought it was the real thing and they were desperate to get their hands on it. And do you know where he put it, the bloody fool? He hid it in a clump of bulrushes, right on the edge of the lake. He led them to the water’s edge. Fourteen years old and twelve years old. He led them there as surely as if he’d put up a sign.

  ‘This is what happened. The two boys had separated. Robert was in Dingle Dell, searching in the trees. Tom went down to the water. Maybe he saw the gold glinting in the sun or maybe he’d worked out one of the clues. He didn’t even need to get his feet wet but he was so excited, he decided to wade in. And what then? Maybe he stumbled. There are a lot of weeds and they could have wrapped themselves around his legs. Here’s what I know. Just after three o’clock in the afternoon, Brent comes along with the lawnmower and he sees my boy lying face down in the water.’ Matthew Blakiston’s voice cracked. ‘Tom had drowned.

  ‘Brent did what he could. Tom was only a few feet out from the shore and Brent dragged him back to dry land. Then Robert came out of the wood and saw what was happening. He plunged into the water. He was screaming. He waded over to them and shouted at Brent to get help. Brent didn’t know what to do but Robert had learned basic first aid at school and tried to save his brother with mouth-to-mouth. It was too late. Tom was dead. I only heard about all this later, from the police. They’d talked to everyone involved: Sir Magnus, Brent, Mary and Robert. Can you imagine how I felt, Mr Pünd? I was their father. But I hadn’t been there.’

  Matthew Blakiston bowed his head. His fist, with the cigarette, was clenched against his head and smoke curled upwards as he sat there, silent. At that moment, Fraser was utterly aware of the smallness of the room, the hopelessness of a life broken. It occurred to him that Blakiston was an outcast. He was in exile from himself.

  ‘Do you want some more tea?’ Blakiston asked suddenly.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Fraser said.

  Nobody wanted tea but they needed time, a pause before he could go on. Fraser went over to the kettle. He was glad to break away.

  ‘I went back to Boscombe Down,’ he began again, once the fresh cups had been brought. ‘And the next time I came home, I knew exactly which way the wind was blowing. Mary and Robert had pulled up the drawbridge. She never let go of him after that, not for a minute, and it was like they didn’t want to know me. I would have done my bit for my family, Mr Pünd, I swear I would have. But they never let me. Robert always said that I walked out on them but that isn’t true. I came home but there was nobody there.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw your son, Mr Blakiston?’

  ‘Saturday, 23 July. At his mother’s funeral.’

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘No.’ Blakiston took a deep breath. He had finished his cigarette and stubbed it out. ‘They say that when you lose a child, it brings you closer together or tears you apart. What most hurt me about Mary was that after Tom went, she never let me get close to Robert. She was protecting him from me! Can you believe that? It wasn’t enough that I had lost one son. I ended up losing two.

  ‘And part of me never stopped loving her. That’s the pathetic thing. I told you, I used to write to her on her birthday, at Christmas. I talked to her on the phone sometimes. At least she’d let me do that. But she didn’t want me anywhere near. She made that clear enough.’

  ‘Did you speak to her recently?’

  ‘The last time I spoke to her was a couple of months ago – but here’s something you won’t believe. I actually called her the day she died. It was the weirdest thing. I was woken up that morning by a bird in a tree a
nd it was making this horrible noise, this cawing. It was a magpie. “One for sorrow.” Do you know that old song? Well, I looked at it on the other side of the bedroom window, black and white, an evil little thing with its glinting eye and suddenly I felt sick to the stomach. It was like I’d had a premonition. I knew something bad was going to happen. I went to the shop but I couldn’t work and no one came in anyway. I was thinking about Mary. I was convinced something was going to happen to her and, in the end, I couldn’t stop myself. I rang her. I tried her at the Lodge and then at the main house – but she didn’t answer because I was too late. She was already dead.’

  He was playing with the cellophane from the cigarette packet, pulling it apart between his fingers.

  ‘I heard about her death a few days later. There was a piece in the newspaper … Would you believe it? Nobody even bothered to ring me. You’d have thought Robert might have got in touch, but he didn’t care. Anyway, I knew I had to go to the funeral. It didn’t matter what had happened. There’d been a time when the two of us were young and we’d been together. I wasn’t going to let her go without saying goodbye. I’ll admit, I was nervous about showing my face. I didn’t want to make a big thing of it with everyone crowding around me so I arrived late and I wore a hat pulled down over my face. I’m a lot thinner than I used to be and I’m nearly sixty years old. I thought if I kept well clear of Robert I’d be all right and that was how it turned out.

  ‘I did see him there. He was standing with a girl and I was glad to see that. It’s just what he needs. He was always very solitary when he was a boy and she looked a pretty little thing. I hear they’re going to get married and maybe if they have children, they’ll let me visit them. People change in time, don’t they? He says I wasn’t there for him but maybe, if you see him, you’ll tell him the truth.