‘Were you living with Alan at the time Frank was murdered?’
‘No. Not yet. Although we were seeing quite a bit of each other and Alan was already talking about us moving in together. We were actually away when it happened. We heard the news on the radio.’ He thought back. ‘I have to say, I was quite shocked. I mean, if Frank had been hammered to death in his London flat or in a backstreet in Soho, you wouldn’t have blinked. It would have just gone with the territory – particularly with his predilections. But in a posh hotel in the middle of the country . . . !’
‘Was Alan upset?’
That was more difficult to answer. ‘I wouldn’t say he was upset. No. But he was intrigued. He was on a book tour in Europe. You probably remember. Alan hated touring. That was the funny thing about him. He hated the people who loved his books. We were in France and Holland and Germany, and after it was all over he rented a villa in Tuscany for three weeks, up in the hills. It was a beautiful place.’
‘So when did he hear about the death?’
‘I heard about it on the radio and I told him. Anyway, he went round to the hotel almost as soon as we got back – not because he gave a toss about Frank Parris, but because he thought he might be able to use it in his next book.’
The second course came. Steak for James, Dover sole for me. As I watched the waiter expertly slicing away with two knives, it occurred to me that in a way he and I were doing exactly the same thing: separating the flesh to find the bones underneath. The only difference was that he would discard them. I needed them to make sense of what had happened.
‘The thing is that Alan was stuck,’ James went on. ‘He was in a foul mood in Tuscany. The first two books had done brilliantly. He was already well known and the money was pouring in. Well, of course, you’d know that, wouldn’t you. It was mainly thanks to you. But the third book wouldn’t come.’
‘Not until he visited Branlow Hall.’
‘That’s right. He actually took a room and stayed there a couple of nights, although there was hardly any need as he only lived twenty minutes away and he was quite nervous he was going to run into Melissa.’
‘Why?’ I was puzzled. ‘I thought she’d moved to Bradford-on-Avon.’
‘No. That was later. After they split up and sold their house in Orford, she wanted to stay close for a while. I don’t know why. Maybe she just needed time to work things out. So she rented a house that was actually right next to the hotel. In fact, there was a gate at the bottom of her garden and it led into the grounds.’
So Melissa had been on the scene too! I filed the information away for later.
‘That never happened, thank goodness,’ James went on. ‘You have to remember that she knew he was gay but nobody else did. He hadn’t come out yet and he hadn’t told anyone about me! Did you know about him?’
‘No! I only found out when I read about it in the newspapers.’
‘Well, that was Alan for you. Anyway, he spent three or four days there and I knew he’d got the story for his book because when he came back he was in a great mood and he said he’d spoken to loads of people and knew what he was going to write.’
My ears pricked up at that. ‘Do you know who he spoke to?’
‘Everyone!’ When James had come in, he had been carrying a plastic shopping bag that he had dumped on the floor, under the table. Now he picked it up and showed it to me. ‘I’ve brought everything I could find. There are photographs, notes, memory sticks . . . some of them with recordings. There may be more stuff at the house. If I find anything else, I’ll let you know.’
‘That’s fantastic, James. Thank you.’ I was actually very surprised. ‘I didn’t think you’d have kept his old papers.’
James nodded. ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he said. ‘When I sold the house I was going to chuck it all out. You have no idea how much of it there was. For a start there were hundreds of books. Nine titles in thirty languages!’
‘Thirty-four,’ I corrected him.
‘What was I going to do with Atticus Pünd in Japanese? And then there were the manuscripts, the proof copies, the notepads, all the different drafts. I actually had someone coming in a van from Ipswich to take it all to the local dump. But then two things happened. First of all, I got a call from some university in America. They said they were very sorry to hear of Alan’s death and that they were interested in acquiring his archive. Note the word “acquiring”! They didn’t say they would pay, at least not in so many words, but they did make it clear that all his old manuscripts and all the rest of it had a value.
‘And then – this was before probate came through and I was very short of cash – I decided to sell some of Alan’s books. I chose some of his Agatha Christies. He had the whole lot, you know. So I took a handful into a second-hand bookshop in Felixstowe and I was very lucky that the owner was honest because he told me that they were all first editions and they were worth a small fortune! The one about Roger Ackroyd was worth two thousand on its own. And there was me expecting to get enough money for fish and chips . . . and I’m not talking about the sort of fish and chips you get here!’
‘So you’ve still got everything,’ I said.
‘I’ve told the university to make an offer. I’m still waiting. But I kept everything else – the whole lot of it! I was meaning to go through it all and work out what was what, but I’m a lazy bastard and I still haven’t got round to it. Anyway, after you rang, I pulled out everything I could find relating to Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. That was the right book, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re lucky that everything is labelled. Alan was like that. If anyone wrote anything about him in the newspapers, he cut it out and stuck it in a book. He was quite an expert on himself.’ He laughed gleefully. ‘I’d like to have it all back, if you don’t mind. You might be looking at my old age pension.’
It was hard to imagine James Taylor ever being old.
‘Did he talk to you about the murder?’
‘Alan never talked to me about his books, even when he put me in them. But, like I say, he was in a much better mood when he came home and I’ll tell you one thing he did say: “They’ve got the wrong man.” He was quite smug about it.’
‘He was talking about Stefan Codrescu.’
‘I don’t know who that is.’
‘He was the man who was arrested.’
‘Well, I think that’s exactly what Alan meant. He actually knew the detective in charge of the investigation and he was quite convinced he’d ballsed it all up.’
‘But he didn’t tell you who the killer was.’
‘No. I’m sorry.’
‘You’d have thought if he really knew who murdered Frank Parris, he’d have said. Especially since Frank was his friend.’
James grimaced. ‘That’s not necessarily true. I was fond of Alan, but he could be a complete tosser. He was one of the most selfish men I’ve ever met. I don’t think he gave a damn about Frank Parris or whoever killed him.’ He prodded his fork in my direction. ‘Anyway, it’s quite possible he didn’t know. Do you?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘But you’ll find out.’ He smiled. ‘I must say, Susan, it is funny the two of us here, together again. And the ghost of Alan still hovering over us. I wonder if he’ll ever leave us alone?’ He picked up his glass. ‘To Alan!’
We clinked glasses.
But I didn’t drink.
Cecily Treherne
It was late when I got back to Ladbroke Grove but there was no way I was going to sleep. I upended the plastic bag that James had given me and allowed the contents to spill out onto the bed. There was a full typescript of Atticus Pünd Takes the Case with annotations in the margins, the whole thing bound in a plastic cover, several notebooks, half a dozen photographs, some drawings, newspaper clippings about the murder at Branlow Hall, including the pieces from the East Anglian Daily Times I had already read, various computer printouts and three memory sticks. Looking at this collection, I
was quite certain that the answers I was looking for must be in front of me. Who had killed Frank Parris and where was Cecily Treherne? This was evidence that even the police hadn’t seen. But where was I to begin?
The manuscript was, as far as I could see, a second draft and it might have been of interest to a keen-eyed archivist. For example, the first sentence of the book originally read: Tawleigh-on-the-Water was a tiny village that consisted of little more than a harbour and two narrow streets surrounded by no fewer than four different stretches of water. Alan had circled three words, tiny, little and narrow, and I would have done the same. There are just too many descriptions relating to smallness in one sentence. He then crossed out the whole paragraph and used it later on in the first chapter, opening it instead in the kitchen of Clarence Keep, or Clarence Court, as it was originally called.
And so on. There was nothing here that would have been of any interest to the world at large and it certainly had no relevance to the murder.
The notebooks were similarly academic. I recognised Alan’s neat, cramped handwriting, the pale blue ink that he favoured. There were dozens of pages filled with questions, ideas, crossings-out, arrows.
Algernon knows about will.
Blackmails him?
Jason had one-night stand with Nancy.
£60
Knickers stolen from drawer.
Some of the names would change but most of these ideas would turn up in one form or another. He had drawn detailed floor plans of Branlow Hall, which he had used as the basis of the Moonflower Hotel in his book, simply lifting it up brick by brick and depositing it in Devon. As with all of his books, the village where the crime takes place does not really exist, but looking at the maps, he seemed to have imagined it somewhere just down the coast from Appledore.
The computer printouts mainly came from the writer’s best friend, Wikipedia, and included articles about famous diamonds, cinema in the UK, the growth of St-Tropez, the Homicide Act of 21 March 1957, and other plot strands that I recognised from the novel.
One of the memory sticks contained images of the people he had met. I recognised Lawrence and Pauline Treherne, Lisa and Cecily, Aiden MacNeil and Derek. Another picture showed a short, stocky woman with cropped hair and narrow eyes wearing a black dress and a white apron. I assumed this must be Natasha Mälk, the Estonian maid who had found the body. Another man – possibly Lionel Corby – had been snapped posing outside the spa. There were also pictures of the building: room 12, the stable block, the bar, the lawn where the wedding had taken place. It gave me an uneasy feeling to recognise that, from the very start, I had been following in his footsteps.
James had added one old-fashioned photograph, actually printed on paper, and it caught my eye at once because Alan was in it. He was sitting between two people in what looked like an expensive restaurant, possibly in London. A very much younger James was on one side. A man with curly grey hair and a deep suntan, dressed in a velvet jacket, was on the other. This had to be Frank Parris. Had James been with Frank or with Alan that night? It was hard to be sure. The three of them were close together, smiling.
I had assumed that the picture must have been taken by a waiter, but looking at it more closely, I realised that the camera was too low and too close. The table was laid for four and it was being held by the fourth member of the group. Could this have been Leo, the rent boy James had mentioned? Two men and two boys. It seemed quite possible.
Downstairs, I heard the front door open and close. Craig had got back from the theatre. I had only put on one bedside lamp and had drawn the curtains before I sat down, and it was when I found myself staying quite still and holding my breath that I realised I had done all this quite deliberately, so that no light would escape and there was no chance that I would be disturbed. I waited as Craig climbed the stairs. I heard a second door open and close. I let out a breath.
I turned my attention to the other memory sticks. I plugged the second one into my laptop. It contained interviews with Lawrence, with Pauline and with Lisa. Those weren’t the ones I was interested in, not right now. I took the last one and plugged it in. And there it was – exactly what I had hoped for.
Cecily Treherne.
I’d brought headphones and, feeling quite nervous, I plugged them in. I didn’t know if Cecily was dead or alive, but she was the reason I was here and I had felt her ghost hovering over me from the moment I had arrived in Suffolk. Did I actually want to hear her voice? There was something quite macabre in the thought that this might be all that remained of her. For that matter, it had been quite a few years since I had heard Alan Conway and I certainly had no desire to commune with him beyond the grave. But this was the interview I most needed to hear. There was no way I was going to wait until the morning.
I moved the cursor and hit PLAY.
There was a brief pause and then I heard them. It was a shame that video cameras wouldn’t be introduced into smart phones for another few years because I would have loved to have seen them too. What was Cecily wearing? What did she look like, even, when she moved? And where were they? Somewhere inside the hotel from the sounds of it, but it was impossible to be sure.
Alan was on his best behaviour. I almost smiled, recognising the slightly smarmy quality to his voice. He could be ingratiating when he wanted to be, as I knew from experience, although in my case it had always been followed by a series of complaints or an unreasonable demand. It didn’t bother me that I couldn’t see him. Nearly all of my conversations with him had been over the telephone and this was how I knew him. With Cecily it was different. For the first time, she had half come to life – though only half. She had a similar voice to her sister, Lisa. She sounded like a nice person, warm and relaxed.
It was hard to believe that the conversation had taken place eight years ago. The voices were perfectly preserved and it suddenly struck me that when my parents died, the first memory that I’d lost had been what they sounded like. That would never happen again. Modern technology has changed the nature of death.
ALAN:Hello, Mrs MacNeil. Thank you for talking to me.
CECILY: I’m still not used to being called that. Please, call me Cecily.
ALAN:Ah yes. Of course. How was the honeymoon?
CECILY: Well, obviously it was quite difficult, at first, after what happened. It was two weeks late. But we stayed at a lovely hotel. Have you ever been to Antigua?
ALAN:No.
CECILY: Nelson’s Bay. We both needed a holiday, that’s for sure.
ALAN:Well, you’ve managed to get a fantastic tan.
CECILY: Thank you.
ALAN:I don’t want to take up too much of your time.
CECILY: That’s OK. Everything’s very quiet today. How’s your room?
ALAN:It’s very nice. This is a lovely hotel.
CECILY: Yes.
ALAN:By the way, did you know that my ex-wife is renting a property from you?
CECILY: Which property?
ALAN:Oaklands.
CECILY: Melissa! I didn’t know the two of you . . .
ALAN:We separated last year.
CECILY: Oh. I’m sorry. We’ve chatted once or twice. I sometimes see her in the spa.
ALAN:Don’t worry. It was all very amicable and I’m just glad that she’s happy here. I hope it doesn’t upset you, talking about what happened.
CECILY: No. It’s been more than a month now and we’ve had room twelve cleaned out. A lot of bad things happen in hotels . . . it’s like in that film, The Shining. I don’t know if you ever saw it? I hardly met Frank Parris and fortunately I didn’t see into the room, so it doesn’t bother me too much. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be dismissive. I know he was your friend.
ALAN:I hadn’t seen him for a while. We met in London.
CECILY: And you live in Framlingham now?
ALAN:Yes.
CECILY: Aiden tells me you’re a writer.
ALAN:Yes. I’ve had two books published. Atticus Pünd Investigates and No Rest for the Wicked.
CECILY: I’m afraid I haven’t read them. I never have time to read very much.
ALAN:They’ve done quite well.
CECILY: Are you going to write about us?
ALAN:That’s not my plan. As I explained to your parents, I just want to know what happened. Frank was very kind to me when I was trying to work things out and I feel I owe it to him.
CECILY: I’d just feel very uncomfortable being in a book.
ALAN:I never put people in my books and certainly not without their permission. And I don’t write true crime.
CECILY: Well, I suppose that’s all right, then.
ALAN:Anyway, I understand the police have made an arrest.
CECILY: Stefan. Yes.
ALAN:Can you tell me about him?
CECILY: What do you want to know?
ALAN:Were you surprised when they arrested him?
CECILY: Yes, I was. Very. In fact, I was shocked. You know my parents have always employed young offenders at the hotel and I think it’s a wonderful idea. We have to help these people. I know Stefan had been in trouble but that wasn’t his fault. He never really had a chance when you think about the world he grew up in. But once he came to the hotel, he was always very grateful, he worked hard and I think he was kind-hearted. I know my sister didn’t like him, but that was because he wouldn’t do what she wanted.
ALAN:And what was that?
CECILY: I mean, he didn’t work hard enough. That’s what she said. She also thought he was stealing, but that could have been anyone. It could have been Lionel or Natasha or anyone. She only picked on him because she knew I liked him and I thought it was wrong to fire him. I wouldn’t tell you this if I hadn’t said exactly the same to her. She didn’t have any proof. I think it was unfair.
ALAN:The police think he may have broken into Frank’s room because he had been fired . . . because he knew he was leaving the hotel.
CECILY: That’s what they said, but I’m not sure it’s true.
ALAN:You don’t think he did it?
CECILY: I don’t know, Mr Conway. I didn’t think so to begin with. I talked about it with Aiden and even he agreed with me, even though he’d never been one of Stefan’s greatest fans. Stefan was one of the gentlest people I’d ever met. He was always very proper in his dealings with me. And like I said, he knew my parents had given him a real opportunity having him here and he would never have let them down. When I heard he’d confessed, I couldn’t believe it. And now the police are saying that they’ve got more than enough evidence to prosecute, although they won’t tell me what it is. I don’t know. They seem to think it’s an open-and-shut case. They say they found money in his room . . . I’m sorry. Can you excuse me a moment? It’s just that it’s all so horrible and upsetting . . . someone getting killed.
Moonflower Murders Page 15
