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.
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.
Magpie Murders Page 33
