Magpie Murders

by Anthony Horowitz

  ‘Sir Magnus has read the letter. It is hard to be sure of his reaction. He is shocked, certainly. Does he suspect Robert Blakiston of his mother’s murder? It is quite possible. But he is an intelligent – one might say a quite diffident – sort of man. He has known Robert well for many years and he has no fear of him. Has he not always acted as Robert’s mentor? However, just to be sure, he searches out his service revolver and places it in the drawer of his desk where Inspector Chubb will find it later. It is an insurance policy, nothing more.

  ‘At seven o’clock, the garage closes. Robert returns home to wash and to change into smarter clothes for a meeting at which he intends to plead his innocence and ask for Sir Magnus’s understanding. Meanwhile, other forces are at play. Matthew Blakiston is on his way from Cardiff to interrogate Sir Magnus about the treatment of his wife. Brent, who has recently been fired, works late and then goes to the Ferryman. Robin Osborne has a crisis of conscience and goes to seek solace in the church. Henrietta Osborne becomes concerned and searches for her husband. Many of these paths will cross but in such a way that no true pattern will emerge.

  ‘At about twenty past eight, Robert makes his way to the fateful meeting. He sees the vicar’s bicycle outside the church and, on a whim, decides to borrow it. He can have no way of knowing that the vicar is in fact inside the church. He arrives, unseen at Pye Hall, parks the bicycle at the Lodge and walks up the drive. He is admitted by Sir Magnus, and what takes place, the actual murder itself, I will describe in a minute. But first let me complete the larger picture. Matthew Blakiston also arrives and parks his car beside the Lodge, at the same time noticing the bicycle. He walks up the driveway and is seen by Brent who is just finishing work. He knocks at the door, which is opened a few moments later by Sir Magnus. You will remember, Fraser, the exchange which took place and which was described to us, quite accurately, by Matthew Blakiston.

  ‘“You!” Sir Magnus is surprised and with good reason. The father has arrived at the very moment when the son is inside and the two of them are engaged in a discussion of the greatest delicacy. Sir Magnus does not say his name out loud. He does not wish to alert Robert to the fact that his father is here, at the worst possible time. But before he dismisses him, he uses the opportunity to ask Matthew a question. “Do you really think I killed your dog?” Why would he ask such a thing unless he was wishing to confirm something he had been discussing with Robert just moments before? At any event, Sir Magnus closes the door. Matthew leaves.

  ‘The murder takes place. Robert Blakiston hurries from the house, using the bicycle that he has borrowed. It is dark. He does not expect to meet anyone. Inside the Ferryman, Brent hears the bicycle go past during a lull in the music and assumes it is the vicar. Robert replaces the bicycle at the church but there has been a great deal of blood and he has managed to transfer some of it to the handlebars. When the vicar comes out of the church and returns home on the bicycle, some of that blood will surely be found on his clothes. It is why, I believe, Mrs Osborne was so very nervous when she spoke to me. It may well be that she believed him to be guilty of the crime. Well, they will know the truth soon enough.

  ‘There is one last act in the drama of the night. Matthew Blakiston has changed his mind and returns to have his confrontation with Sir Magnus. He misses his son by a matter of minutes but sees the dead body through the letter box and collapses into the flower bed, leaving a print of his hand in the soft earth. Afraid that he will be suspected, he leaves as quickly as he can but he is spotted by Lady Pye, who has just returned from London, and who will now enter the house and find her husband.

  ‘That leaves only the murder itself which I must now describe.

  ‘Robert Blakiston and Sir Magnus Pye meet in the study. Sir Magnus has retrieved the letter that Mary Blakiston wrote all those years ago and you will recall that the picture, which covers the safe, is still ajar. The letter is on his desk and the two men discuss its contents. Robert urges Sir Magnus to believe that he has done nothing wrong, that he was not responsible for his mother’s tragic death. As chance would have it, there is a second letter, also on the desk. Sir Magnus has received it that day. It concerns the demolition of Dingle Dell and contains some threatening, even some violent language. As we now know, it was written by a local woman, Diana Weaver, using the typewriter of Dr Redwing.

  ‘Two letters. Two envelopes. Remember this.

  ‘The conversation does not go well. It may be that Sir Magnus threatens to expose his former protégé. Perhaps he says he will consider the matter before he goes to the police. I would imagine that Robert is at his most charming and persuasive as Sir Magnus shows him out. But when he reaches the main hall, he strikes. He has already noted the suit of armour and he draws the sword from its sheath. It comes out silently and easily because, as it happens, Sir Magnus has used it quite recently when he attacked the portrait of his wife. Robert is taking no chances. He will not be exposed. His marriage to Joy Sanderling will go ahead. From behind, he decapitates Sir Magnus, then returns to the study to get rid of the evidence.

  ‘But this is where he makes his two critical mistakes. He crumples up his mother’s letter and burns it in the fire. At the same time, he manages to get some of Sir Magnus’s blood onto the paper and this is what we will later find. But much worse than that – he burns the wrong envelope! I knew at once that an error had been made and not only because Mrs Weaver’s letter had been produced on a typewriter while the surviving envelope was handwritten. No. The envelope was addressed quite formally to Sir Magnus Pye and this was completely out of character with its contents. The correspondent had referred to him as ‘you bastard’. She had threatened to kill him. Would she then have written Sir Magnus on the envelope? I did not think so, and intended to ask Mrs Weaver this, but unfortunately I was taken ill before I could put the question to her. It does not matter. We have the envelope and we have the diary written by Mary Blakiston. As I remarked to Fraser, the writing on both was the same.’

  Pünd had drawn to a halt. There was to be no dramatic conclusion, no final declamation. That had never been his style.

  Chubb shook his head. ‘Robert Blakiston,’ he intoned. ‘I am arresting you for murder.’ He continued with the formal warning, then added, ‘Is there anything you want to say?’

  For the last few minutes, Blakiston had been staring at a fixed point on the floor as if he could find his whole future there. But suddenly he looked up and there were tears streaming from his eyes. At that moment, Fraser could very easily imagine him as the thirteen-year-old child who had killed his brother in a rage and who had been hiding from that crime ever since. He turned to Joy. He spoke only to her. ‘I did it for you, my darling,’ he said. ‘Meeting you was the best thing that ever happened to me and I knew I could only be completely happy with you. I wasn’t going to let anyone take that away from me and I’d do it again if I had to. I’d do it for you.’

  4

  From The Times, August 1955

  The death of Atticus Pünd has been widely reported in the British press but I wonder if I might add a few words of my own as I knew him perhaps better than anyone, having worked for him for six years in the capacity of personal assistant. I first met Mr Pünd when I replied to an advertisement placed in the Spectator magazine. It stated that a businessman, recently arrived from Germany, required the services of a confidential secretary to assist him with typing, administration and associated duties. It is revealing that he did not refer to himself as an investigator or private detective even though he already had a formidable reputation, particularly following the recovery of the Ludendorff Diamond and the spectacular series of arrests that followed. Mr Pünd was always modest. Although he helped the police on numerous occasions, including the recent murder of a wealthy landowner in the Suffolk village of Saxby-on-Avon, he preferred to remain in the shadows, seldom taking the credit for what he had achieved.

  There has been some speculation about
the manner of his death and I wish to set the record straight. It is true that Mr Pünd had come into possession of a large dose of the poison physostigmine during his last investigation and that he should, of course, have returned it to the police. He did not because he had already decided to take his own life, as he made clear in a letter which he had left behind and which was forwarded to me after his cremation. Although I had not been aware of it, Mr Pünd had been diagnosed with a particularly malignant form of brain tumour which would have ended his life shortly anyway and he had chosen to prevent himself unnecessary suffering.

  He was the kindest and the wisest man I ever knew. His experiences in Germany before and during the war had given him a perspective that must have aided him in his work. He had an innate understanding of evil and was able to root it out with unerring precision. Although we spent much time together, he had few friends and I cannot pretend that I completely understood the workings of his remarkable mind. He made it clear that he wanted no monument left behind but requested that his ashes should be scattered close to Saxby-on-Avon in Dingle Dell, the woodland that he in part helped to save.

  That said, I am in possession of all the pages, notes and material relating to the treatise, which occupied much of his later life, a major work entitled The Landscape of Criminal Investigation. It is a tragedy that it remains unfinished but I have forwarded everything that I have been able to find to Professor Crena Hutton at the Oxford Centre for Criminology and it is very much my hope that this landmark volume will be made available to the public soon.

  James Fraser

  Agios Nikolaos, Crete

  There’s not much more to add.

  Cloverleaf Books folded – which is about as apt a description as you can get for a publishing firm going out of business. It was all very messy, with Charles in jail and the insurers refusing to pay out for the building, which had been completely destroyed in the fire. Our successful authors jumped ship as fast as they could, which was a little disappointing but not entirely surprising. You don’t want to be published by someone who might murder you.

  I no longer had a job, of course. Sitting at home after I had got out of hospital, I was surprised to learn that I was getting some of the blame for what had happened. It’s like I said in the beginning. Charles Clover was entrenched in the publishing industry and the general feeling was that I had betrayed him. After all, he had published Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark and he had only ever killed one writer – Alan Conway, a well-known pain in the neck. Had it really been necessary to make such a fuss about his death when he was going to die anyway? Nobody actually put this into so many words, but when I finally limped out to a few literary events – a conference, a book launch – that was the feeling I got. The Women’s Prize for Fiction decided not to have me as a judge after all. I wished they could have seen Charles as I had finally seen him, preparing to burn me alive and kicking me so hard that he broke my ribs. I wasn’t going back to work any time soon. I no longer had a heart for it and anyway, my vision hadn’t recovered. That remains the case. I’m not quite as blind as poor Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre but my eyes tire if I read too much and the words move around on the page. These days I prefer audiobooks. I’ve gone back to nineteenth century literature. I avoid whodunnits.

  I live in Agios Nikolaos, in Crete.

  The decision was more or less made for me in the end. There was nothing to keep me in London. A lot of my friends had turned their backs on me and Andreas was leaving whatever happened. I would have been a fool not to go with him and my sister, Katie, spent at least a week telling me exactly that. At the end of the day, I was in love with him. I’d come to realise that when I was sitting on my own at Bradford-on-Avon station and it had certainly been confirmed when he had appeared as my knight in shining armour, battling his way through the blaze to rescue me. If anything, he should have been the one who had second thoughts. I didn’t speak a word of Greek. I wasn’t much of a cook. My vision was impaired. What possible use could I be?

  I did say some of this to him and his response was to take me out to the Greek restaurant in Crouch End, to produce a diamond ring (which was much more than he could afford) and to go down on one knee in front of all the diners. I was horrified, and couldn’t accept fast enough just to get him to behave properly, back on his feet. He didn’t need a bank loan in the end. I sold my flat and, although he wasn’t entirely happy about it, I insisted on investing some of the money in Hotel Polydorus, making myself an equal partner. It was probably madness but after what I’d been through, I didn’t really care. It wasn’t just that I’d almost been killed. It was that everything I’d trusted and believed in had been taken away from me. I felt that my life had been unravelled as quickly and as absolutely as Atticus Pünd’s name. Does that make sense? It was as if my new life was an anagram of my old one and I would only learn what shape it had taken when I began to live it.

  Two years have passed since I left England.

  Polydorus hasn’t actually made a profit yet, but guests seem to like it and we’ve been full for most of this season so we must be doing something right. The hotel is on the edge of Agios Nikolaos, which is a bright, shabby, colourful town with too many shops selling trinkets and tourist tat, but it’s authentic enough to make you feel it’s somewhere you’d want to live. We’re right on the seafront and I never tire of gazing at the water, which is a quite dazzling blue and makes the Mediterranean look like a puddle. The kitchen and reception area open onto a stone terrace where we have a dozen tables – we’re open for breakfast, lunch and dinner – and we serve simple, fresh local food. Andreas works in the kitchen. His cousin Yannis does almost nothing but he’s well connected (they call it ‘visma’) and comes into his own with local PR. And then there’s Philippos, Alexandros, Giorgios, Nell and all the other family and friends who bundle in to help us during the day and who sit drinking raki with us until late into the night.

  I could write about it, and maybe one day I will. A middle-aged woman takes the plunge and moves in with her Greek lover and his eccentric family, various cats, neighbours, suppliers and guests, making a go of it in the Aegean sunshine. There used to be a market for that sort of thing, although of course I won’t be able to write the full truth, not if I want it to sell. There’s still a part of me that misses Crouch End and I miss publishing. Andreas and I are always worrying about money and that puts a strain on us. Life may imitate art – but it usually falls short of it.

  The strange thing is that Magpie Murders did get published in the end. After the collapse of Cloverleaf, a few of our titles were picked up by other publishers, including the entire Atticus Pünd series, which, as it happened, went to my old firm, Orion Books. They reissued it with new covers and brought out Magpie Murders at the same time. By now, the whole world knew the nasty truth behind the detective’s name, but in the short term it didn’t matter. All the publicity about the real-life murder and the trial made people more interested in the book and I wasn’t surprised to see it in the bestseller lists. Robert Harris gave it a very good review in the Sunday Times.

  I even saw a copy the other day, as I walked along the beach. A woman was sitting in a deckchair reading it, and there was Alan Conway staring out at me from the back cover. Seeing him I felt a spurt of real anger. I remembered what Charles had said about Alan, how he had selfishly, needlessly, spoiled the pleasure of millions of people who had enjoyed the Atticus Pünd novels. He was right. I had been one of them and just for a moment, I imagined that it was I, not Charles, who had been on the tower at Abbey Grange, shoving out with both hands, pushing Alan to his death. I could actually see myself doing it. It was exactly what he deserved.

  I had been the detective and now I was the murderer.

  And do you know? I think I liked it more.

  Anthony Horowitz interviews Alan Conway

  Reprinted from the Spectator magazine

  When I met Alan Conway at th
e Ivy Club in London, it struck me that we actually had a great deal in common. At least, that was what I thought at the start.

  He and I both write detective fiction although in different ways. He is the author of the phenomenally successful Atticus Pünd series while I’ve spent many years writing crime drama for television: Midsomer Murders, Foyle’s War and Agatha Christie’s Poirot. We’re now both published by Orion Books. We also have a Suffolk connection. Alan lives in a Victorian folly just outside Framlingham while I have a small house in Orford, just the other side of the A12. Finally, for what it’s worth, we’re both members of the Ivy Club although it was he who chose to meet here, not me.

  A week before the publication of his seventh novel, Red Roses for Atticus, I was asked to interview him by the Spectator and I was looking forward to it. I’m a fan of the books. I actually spent a couple of months working on Atticus Pünd Investigates, the first in the series, adapting it for the BBC. That didn’t end well. The production company – Red Herring Productions – abruptly fired me and the last I heard, Alan was adapting the book himself.

  To mention this to him was probably a mistake – but his reaction was, to say the least, surprising. ‘Yes. I told them I wanted to take it over. To be honest, I was never a big fan of Midsomer Murders. It always struck me as very lightweight and silly. I thought there was an opportunity, with the screenplay of my book, maybe to do something more subtle.’

  An unspoken contract usually exists between writers promoting a book and the journalists – or whoever – interviewing them. The writer will be pleasant and cooperative. And even if the journalist hates the book, he or she will be polite. It’s why you’ll never read bad reviews before a book is published. So I was puzzled why Conway should be so carelessly insulting and I suppose, in return, I should have a sly dig at his work.