Magpie Murders

by Anthony Horowitz

  Why then would she insist that Alan had been murdered? Why draw attention to what she had done? I had no real answer to that, but thinking it through I remembered reading somewhere that killers have an urge to claim ownership. It’s why they return to the scene of their crime. Could it be that Claire had asked me to investigate her brother’s death for the very same reason that she wrote that long account? A pathological desire to be centre stage.

  3. Tom Robeson, the vicar.

  It was a pity that Robeson wouldn’t tell me exactly what had happened at Chorley Hall when I confronted him at the church. If his wife had arrived a few minutes later it would have made all the difference. But the incident had involved a photograph used to humiliate a boy in an all-boys school and I didn’t need to work too hard to get the general idea. It was interesting, incidentally, that Claire saw her brother as one of the victims of the school’s various cruelties while Robeson saw him as more of an active participant. The more I learnt about Alan, the more I was inclined to believe the vicar’s account.

  All this had taken place back in the seventies and it had clearly been on Alan’s mind because he had written about it in the first chapter of Magpie Murders, when Mary Blakiston turns up in the vicarage. ‘And there they were, just lying in the middle of all his papers.’ What had she seen? Were Henrietta and Robin Osborne perverts of some sort? Had they left out incriminating photographs, similar in nature to the ones that had tormented Robeson? From what he had said in his funeral address, the vicar hadn’t forgotten any of this and, having met him, I could quite easily see him creeping up to the top of the tower to get his revenge. That said, it’s always been my belief that vicars make poor characters in crime novels. They’re somehow too obvious, too Little England. If Robeson did turn out to be the killer, I think I’d be disappointed.

  4. Donald Leigh, the waiter

  ‘You must have been quite pleased to hear he was dead.’ I had said. ‘I was delighted,’ he’d replied. Two men don’t see each other for several years. One hates the other. They meet quite by chance and forty-eight hours later, one of them is dead. When I put it in black and white like that, Robert had to be on my list and it would have been a simple matter for him to get Alan’s address from the club records. What else is there to say?

  5. Mark Redmond, the producer

  He lied to me. He said that he went back to London on the Saturday when the register showed that he had actually stayed the entire weekend at the Crown. He also had every reason to want Alan dead. The Atticus Adventures would have been worth a fortune if he could get them off the ground and Redmond had invested a lot of his own money seeding the project. He certainly knew a thing or two about murder having masterminded hundreds of them on British TV. Would it really have been so difficult to move from fiction to reality? After all, the murder had been a bloodless one. No guns, no knives. Just a simple push. Anyone could do that.

  Those were the five names on my list, the Five Little Pigs, if you like, that I suspected of committing the crime. But there were two other names, which I didn’t add but which should perhaps have been there.

  6. Melissa Conway, the ex-wife

  I hadn’t had a chance to speak to her yet, but decided I would travel down to Bradford-on-Avon as soon as I could. I was beginning to obsess about Alan’s murder and I wasn’t going to get any work done at Cloverleaf until it was solved. According to Claire Jenkins, Melissa had never forgiven Alan for the way he had left her. Had they met recently? Could something have happened that might have prompted her to take revenge? I was annoyed that I’d missed her at the hotel. I would have liked to have asked her why she had travelled all the way up to Framlingham to attend her husband’s funeral. Had she made the same journey to push him off the tower?

  7. Frederick Conway, the son

  It may not be fair to include him – I had only glimpsed him at the funeral and knew almost nothing about him – but I still remembered how he had looked that day, staring at the grave, his face positively distorted by anger. He had been abandoned by his father. Worse than that, his father had come out as a gay man and as a schoolboy that might not have been easy for him either. A motive for murder? Alan must have been thinking about him when he wrote Magpie Murders. Freddy turns up as the son of Sir Magnus and Lady Pye, the only character who retains his true name.

  These were the notes that I made, sitting in my office that Monday afternoon, and by the time I left I had got precisely nowhere. It’s all very well having suspects. When push comes to shove (as, indeed, it had) all seven of them – eight, counting John White – could have killed Alan Conway. For that matter, it could have been the postman, the milkman, someone I’ve forgotten to mention, or someone I hadn’t met. What I didn’t have was that interconnectivity you get in a murder mystery, the sense that all the characters are moving in tandem, like pieces on a Cluedo board. Any one of them could have knocked on the door of Abbey Grange on that Sunday morning. Any one of them could have done it.

  In the end I shoved my notepad aside and went for a meeting with one of our copy editors. If I had just worked a little harder, I would have realised that the clue I had been seeking was actually there, that somebody had said something to me, quite recently, that had identified them as the killer, and that the motive for Alan’s murder had been in front of my eyes the moment I had begun reading Magpie Murders.

  Just half an hour more might have made all the difference in the world. But I was late for my meeting and I was still thinking about Andreas. It was going to cost me dear.

  Bradford-on-Avon

  Bradford-on-Avon was the last stopping point of my journey into the fictitious world of Magpie Murders. Although Alan had used Orford as a model for Saxby-on-Avon, the very name shows where his thoughts lay. What he had done in effect was to synthesise the two. The church, the square, the two pubs, the castle, the meadowland and the general layout belonged to Orford. But it was Bradford-on-Avon, which lay a few miles outside Bath and which was filled with the ‘solid, Georgian constructions made of Bath stone with handsome porticos and gardens rising up in terraces’ that the book describes. I don’t think it was a coincidence that it happened to be the place where his ex-wife lived. Something had happened that had made him think of her. Somewhere inside Magpie Murders there was a message intended for her.

  I had telephoned ahead and travelled down on Tuesday morning, taking the train from Paddington station and changing at Bath. I would have driven, but I had the manuscript with me and planned to work on the way. Melissa had been pleased to hear from me and had invited me to lunch. I arrived just after twelve.

  She had given me an address – Middle Rank – that led me to a row of terraced houses high above the town, unreachable except on foot. It was in the middle of an extraordinary warren of walkways, staircases and gardens, which could have been Spanish or Italian in origin if they hadn’t been so determinedly English. The houses stretched out in three rows with perfectly proportioned Georgian windows, porticos above many of the front doors and, yes, that honey-coloured Bath stone. Melissa had three floors and a busy garden that picked its way in steps down the hill to a stone pavilion below. This was where she had moved after Orford, and although I hadn’t seen where she had lived when she was there, it struck me that this must be the antithesis. It was peculiar. It was secluded. It was somewhere you would come if you wanted to escape.

  I rang the doorbell and Melissa answered it herself. My first impression was that she was much younger than I remembered her, although we must have been both about the same age. I had barely recognised her at the funeral. In her coat and scarf with the rain falling, she had blurred into the crowd. Now that she was standing in front of me, in her own home, she struck me as confident, attractive, relaxed. She was slim, with high cheekbones and an easy smile. I was sure her hair had been brown when she was married to Alan. Now it was a dark chestnut and cut short, down to the neck. She was wearing jeans and a cashme
re jersey, a white gold chain and no make-up. It’s often occurred to me that divorce suits some women. I’d have said that about her.

  She greeted me formally and led me upstairs to the main living room which ran the whole length of the house with lovely views over Bradford-on-Avon and on to the Mendip Hills. The furniture was modern/traditional and looked expensive. She’d laid out lunch – smoked salmon, salad, artisan bread. She offered me wine but I stuck to sparkling water.

  ‘I saw you at the funeral,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you but Freddy was in a hurry to be away. I’m afraid he’s not here. He’s got an open day in London. ‘

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘He’s applying to St Martin’s School of Art. He wants to do a course in ceramics.’ She went on quickly. ‘He didn’t really want to be there, you know, in Framlingham.’

  ‘I was quite surprised to see you.’

  ‘He was my husband, Susan. And Freddy’s father. I knew I had to go as soon as I heard he was dead. I thought it would be good for Freddy. He was quite badly hurt by what happened. More than me, I’d say. I thought it might give him some sort of closure.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Not really. He complained all the way there and he said nothing on the way back. He was plugged into his iPad. Still, I’m glad we went. It felt like the right thing to do.’

  ‘Melissa …’ This was the difficult bit. ‘I wanted to ask you about you and Alan. There are some things I’m struggling to understand.’

  ‘I did wonder why you’d come all this way.’

  On the telephone, I’d told her that I was searching for the missing chapters and that I was trying to work out why Alan had killed himself. She hadn’t needed any more explanation than that and I certainly wasn’t going to mention the fact that he might have been murdered. ‘I don’t want to embarrass you,’ I said.

  ‘You can ask me anything you want, Susan.’ She smiled. ‘We’d been apart for six years when he died and I don’t feel embarrassed about what happened. Why should I? Of course, it was very difficult at the time. I really loved Alan and I didn’t want to lose him. But it’s odd … Are you married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When your husband leaves you for another man, it sort of helps. I think I’d have been angrier if it had been a younger woman. When he told me about James, I saw it was his problem – if it was a problem. I couldn’t blame myself if that was the way he felt.’

  ‘Did you have any inkling of it, while you were married?’

  ‘If you’re talking about his sexuality, no. Not at all. Freddy was born two years after we were married. I’d say we had a normal relationship.’

  ‘You said it was harder for your son.’

  ‘It was. Freddy was thirteen when Alan came out and the worst thing was that the newspapers got hold of the story and the children read about it at school. Of course he was teased. Having a gay dad. I think it would be easier if it happened now. Things have moved on so fast.’

  She was completely without rancour. I was surprised and made a mental note to cross her off the list I had drawn up the day before. She explained that the divorce had been amicable; that Alan had given her everything she wanted and had continued to support Freddy even though there had been no contact between the two of them. There was a trust fund to take him through university and beyond and, as James Taylor had mentioned, he had been left money in the will. She herself had a part-time job; she was a supply teacher in nearby Warminster. But there was plenty of money in the bank. She didn’t need to work.

  We talked a lot about Alan as a writer because that was what I had told her interested me. She had known him at the most interesting time in his career: struggling, getting published for the first time, finding fame.

  ‘Everyone at Woodbridge School knew that he wanted to be a writer,’ she told me. ‘He wanted it desperately. That was all he ever talked about. I was actually going out with another of the teachers there but that ended when Alan came to teach at the school. Are you still in touch with Andreas?’

  She had asked it so casually and I don’t think she noticed when I froze. We had talked, long ago, at publishing parties, and I had mentioned to her that I knew Andreas but either I hadn’t told her that we were going out together or she had forgotten it. ‘Andreas?’ I said.

  ‘Andreas Patakis. He taught Latin and Greek. He and I had a huge fling – it lasted about a year. We were crazy about each other. You know what these Mediterraneans are like. I’m afraid I treated him badly in the end but, as I say, there was something about Alan that just suited me more.’

  Andreas Patakis. My Andreas.

  All at once, a whole lot of things fell into place. So this was the reason why Andreas had disliked Alan and why he resented Alan’s success! It was also the reason why, on Sunday evening, he had been so reluctant to tell me what it was about Alan that had annoyed him. How could he admit that he had been going out with Melissa before he met me? What should I think about it? Should I be upset? I had inherited him second-hand. No. That was ridiculous. Andreas had been married twice. There had been plenty of other women in his life. I knew that. But Melissa …? I found myself looking at her in a completely different light. She was definitely much less attractive than I had thought: too thin, boyish even, better suited to Alan than to Andreas.

  She hadn’t stopped talking. She was still telling me about Alan.

  ‘I absolutely love books and I found him fascinating. I’d never met anyone so driven. He was always talking about stories and ideas, the books he’d read and the books he wanted to write. He’d done a course at East Anglia University and he was certain it was going to help him break through. It wasn’t enough for him to be published. He wanted to be famous – but it took a lot longer than he’d expected. I was with him throughout the whole process: writing the books, finishing them and then the horrible disappointment when nobody was interested. You have no idea what it’s like, Susan, being rejected, those letters that turn up in the post with six or seven lines dismissing the work of a whole year. Well, I suppose you’re the one who writes them. But to spend all that time writing something only to find that nobody wants it. It’s horribly destructive. They’re not just rejecting your work. They’re rejecting who you are.’

  And who was Alan?

  ‘He took writing very seriously. The truth is, he didn’t want to write mysteries. The first book he showed me was called Look to the Stars. It was actually very clever and funny and a little sad. The main character was an astronaut but he never actually got into space. In a way, I suppose, that was a bit like Alan. Then there was a book set in the south of France. He said it was inspired by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw. It took him three years to finish but again no one was interested. I couldn’t understand it because I loved his writing and I completely believed in it. And what makes me angry is that, in the end, I was the one who spoiled it all.’

  I poured myself more sparkling water. I was still thinking about Andreas. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Atticus Pünd was my idea. No – really, it was! You’ve got to understand that what Alan wanted more than anything was to be published, to be recognised. It killed him to be stuck in a boring independent school in the middle of nowhere, teaching a bunch of kids he didn’t even like and who would forget him the moment they moved on to university. And one day – we’d just been to a bookshop – I suggested that he should write something simpler and more popular. He was always great at puzzles – crosswords and things like that. He had a fascination with tricks and trompe l’oeils. So I told him he should write a whodunnit. It seemed to me that there were writers out there who were earning thousands, millions of pounds from books that weren’t half as good as his. It would only take him a few months. It might be fun. And if it was a success he could leave Woodbridge and become a writer full-time, which is what he really wanted.

  ‘I
actually helped him write Atticus Pünd Investigates. I was there when he thought up the main character. He told me all his ideas.’

  ‘Where did Atticus come from?’

  ‘They’d just shown Schindler’s List on TV and Alan took him from that. He may have been based on an old English teacher too. His name was Adrian Pound or something like that. Alan read loads of Agatha Christie books and tried to work out how she wrote her mysteries and only then did he begin writing. I was the first person to read it. I’m still proud of that. I was the first person in the world to read an Atticus Pünd novel. I loved it. Of course, it wasn’t as good as his other work. It was lighter and completely pointless, but I thought it was beautifully written – and of course, you published it. The rest you know.’

  ‘You said you spoiled things for him.’

  ‘Everything went wrong after the book came out. You have to understand, Alan was such a complex person. He could be very moody, introvert. For him, writing was something mysterious. It was like he was kneeling at the altar and the words were being sent down to him – or something like that. There were writers that he admired, and more than anything in the world he had always dreamed of being like them.’

  ‘What writers?’

  ‘Well, Salman Rushdie, for one. Martin Amis. David Mitchell. And Will Self.’