‘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?’<
br />
‘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.
‘I’ll tell you what really annoyed me about Alan Conway. I helped him – not that he ever gave me anything by way of a thank you. But that’s another story. No. First of all, he wasn’t interested in the truth. Why are all the detectives in his books so fucking stupid? You know he even based one on me? Raymond Chubb. That’s me. Oh, he’s not black. He wouldn’t have dared go that far. But Chubb – you know who they are? They manufacture locks. Get it? And all that stuff he wrote about the wife in No Rest for the Wicked. That was my wife he was writing about. I’d been stupid enough to tell him and he went ahead and put it in his book without ever asking me.’
So this was the source of his anger. From the way Locke was talking, I knew he wasn’t interested in me and he wasn’t going to help. I might almost have added him to my list of suspects.
‘The public have no idea what the police are really doing in this country and it’s thanks to people like Alan Conway and people like you,’ he concluded. ‘And I hope you don’t mind my saying this, Ms Ryeland, but I find it a little bit pathetic that you’re trying to make a real-life mystery out of what is actually a textbook-case suicide. He had the motive. He was ill. He wrote a letter. He’d just split up with his boyfriend. He was alone. So he makes a decision and he jumps. If you want my advice, you’ll go back to London and forget it. Thanks for the tea.’
He had finished drinking and he walked out. He had left the flapjack, in pieces, on his plate.
Crouch End
Andreas was waiting for me when I got in. I could tell the moment I opened the door because of the smell coming from the kitchen. Andreas is a fantastic cook. He cooks in a very masculine way, rattling pans, throwing in the ingredients without measuring them, everything high speed on roaring flames with a glass of red wine in hand. I’ve never seen him consult a cookery book. The table was laid for two with candles and flowers that looked like they’d come from a garden, not a shop. He grinned when he saw me and gave me a hug.
‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ he said.
‘What’s for dinner?’
‘Roast lamb.’
‘Can you give me five minutes?’
‘I can give you fifteen.’
I showered and changed into a loose-fitting jumper and leggings, the sort of clothes that assured me I wouldn’t be going out again tonight. I came to the table with damp hair and picked up the giant glass of wine that Andreas had poured for me.
‘Cheers.’
‘Yamas.’
English and the Greek. That was another of our traditions.
We sat down and ate and I told Andreas everything that had happened in Framlingham: the funeral, all the rest of it. I knew at once that he wasn’t very interested. He listened politely but that wasn’t what I’d hoped for. I wanted him to question me, to challenge my assumptions. I thought we might work it out like some sort of north London Tommy and Tuppence (Agatha Christie’s slightly less successful detective duo). But he didn’t really care who had killed Alan. I remembered that he hadn’t wanted me to investigate in the first place and I wondered if I had annoyed him – the Greek side of him – going ahead anyway.
In fact, his mind was on other things. ‘I’ve given in my notice,’ he suddenly announced as he served up.
‘At the school? Already?’ I was surprised.
‘Yes. I’m leaving at the end of term.’ He glanced at me. ‘I told you what I was going to do.’
‘You said you were thinking about it.’
‘Yannis has been pushing me to make a decision. The hotel owners won’t wait much longer and the money is in place. We managed to get a loan from the bank and there may be various grants available from the EU. It’s all happening, Susan. Polydorus will be open next summer.’
‘Polydorus? Is that what it’s called?’
‘Yes
.’
‘It’s a pretty name.’
I have to admit, I was a little thrown. Andreas had more or less asked me to marry him but I’d assumed he would give me a little time to make up my mind. Now it seemed he was offering me a done deal. Just bring out the air ticket and the apron and we could be on our way. He had his iPad with him and slid it round on the table while we ate, showing me pictures. Polydorus did look a lovely place. There was a long verandah with crazy paving and a straw pergola, brightly coloured wooden tables and a dazzling sea beyond. The building itself was whitewashed with blue shutters and I could just make out a bar with an old-fashioned coffee machine, tucked away inside, in the shade. The bedrooms were basic but they looked clean and welcoming. I could easily imagine the sort of people who would want to stay there: visitors rather than tourists.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘It looks lovely.’
‘I’m doing this for both of us, Susan.’
‘But what happens to “both of us” if I don’t want to come?’ I closed the cover of the iPad. I didn’t want to look at it any more. ‘Couldn’t you have waited a little longer before you went ahead?’
‘I had to make up my mind – about the hotel – and that’s what I’ve done. I don’t want to be a teacher all my life and anyway, you and me … is this the best we can do?’ He laid down his knife and fork. I noticed how neatly he arranged them on each side of his plate. ‘We don’t see each other all the time,’ he went on. ‘There are weeks when we don’t see each other at all. You made it clear you didn’t want me to move in with you—’
I bridled at that. ‘That isn’t true. You’re welcome here but most of the time you’re at school. I thought you preferred it this way.’
‘All I’m saying is that we could be together more. We could make this work. I know I’m asking a lot but you won’t know until you try. You’ve never even been to Crete! Come for a few weeks in the spring. See if you like it.’ I said nothing so he added: ‘I’m fifty years old. If I don’t make a move on this, it’s never going to happen.’
Magpie Murders Page 36
