Moonflower Murders

by Anthony Horowitz

  Madeline Cain twisted in her seat. ‘I’ve had enough of this!’ she exclaimed. ‘First you accuse me of lying to you. And now you say I’m a thief.’

  ‘I am saying that you are a fanatic,’ Pünd said. ‘Melissa James attracted many people who wrote to her and who adored her and who came to Tawleigh only to see her. You were one of them. You had a fanatical admiration for her.’

  ‘There’s no crime in that.’

  ‘But murder is a crime. Just now, when Dr Collins was exposed as Melissa James’s killer, you appeared shocked. Why was that?’

  ‘I’m not answering any more of your questions, Mr Pünd.’

  ‘Then I will tell you. You were shocked because when you murdered Francis Pendleton you did so in error. You killed the wrong man!’

  The silence in the room was extraordinary. Now all the attention was on Miss Cain.

  ‘You were in the room when the detective chief inspector accused Francis Pendleton of the murder, and of course Francis believed that he was guilty and confessed. He had no way of knowing that his wife had in fact recovered and had subsequently been strangled by someone else. He said he was glad that it was all over and that he would make a full confession.

  ‘At this point, he went upstairs to collect his jacket and his shoes and all would have been well except that we were then distracted by the arrival of Miss Mitchell at the window. The detective chief inspector and I left the house immediately. The uniformed officers, also, were occupied with searching for the intruder. Eric Chandler and his mother were upstairs. That left you alone on the ground floor of the house, and you were there, moments later, when Francis Pendleton returned. You acted without thinking. I believe that you were motivated by an uncontrollable sense of anger and outrage. You picked up the Turkish dagger, climbed the stairs towards him and stabbed him in the chest.

  ‘Moments later, the detective chief inspector and I arrived through the front door. You had your back to us so we were unable to see that you must have had a great deal of blood on you. And that is why you embraced Francis Pendleton as he fell – to conceal the blood that was already there. I do not think that it was an act of murder for you, Miss Cain, at least not in your mind. It was an act of retribution.’

  Madeline Cain did not attempt to deny it. Her face was filled with a dreadful indifference, a sense that she had been right to do what she had done. She was on the edge of madness. ‘I thought he had killed her,’ she said, simply. She glanced accusingly at Hare. ‘That’s what you said. It was your fault.’ She turned back to Pünd. ‘And he confessed. I heard him.’

  ‘There was no need to kill him!’ Hare exclaimed. ‘If he had been found guilty, the law would have taken its due course.’

  Pünd shook his head sadly. ‘But there, again, I am to blame. Just before I left London, I wrote a speech. In it, I suggested that capital punishment in this country might soon be abolished, and that in the last fifty years, almost half the death sentences handed down by the courts were commuted. Miss Cain typed it for me and we even discussed it.’

  ‘If it was Francis Pendleton who killed her, he should have been hanged.’ Madeline Cain was refusing to confront the fact that she had made a terrible mistake. Her eyes were out of focus. There was a strange half-smile on her lips. ‘Melissa James was a force of nature. She was one of the greatest actresses this country has ever produced and it was just as I wrote in my letter. Now that she has gone, a light has been extinguished for ever.’ She stood up. ‘I’d like to go now.’

  ‘I have just one question for you, Miss Cain,’ Pünd said. ‘Who was it on the telephone who called me, playing the part of Edgar Schultz?’

  ‘It was a friend of mine, an actor. But he wasn’t part of it. I just asked him to do it as a joke.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’

  Hare went over to her. ‘I’ll drive you to the police station, Miss Cain.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Detective Chief Inspector.’ She looked at him beseechingly. ‘Do you think, just one last time, we could go past Clarence Keep?’

  * * *

  ‘Well, Mr Pünd, I suppose this is where we say goodbye.’

  It was later that afternoon and Detective Chief Inspector Hare and Atticus Pünd were standing on the platform at Barnstaple station.

  All the other witnesses had left the Moonflower Hotel. Algernon Marsh was on his way back to his cell in the police station in Barnstaple. He would be joined there by Lance and Maureen Gardner, who also had questions to answer. Pünd had been sorry to see Eric Chandler and his mother leave separately, still not speaking to each other. Was Phyllis Chandler really so disgusted by her son’s behaviour, he wondered, or had she realised that she was in part responsible for the mess that his life had become?

  At least Nancy Mitchell had departed on a more positive note. After Miss Cain had gone, she had approached Pünd with her mother and it had seemed evident to him that the two women shared a strength that had not been there before.

  ‘I want to thank you, Mr Pünd,’ she said. ‘For what you did on the bridge.’

  ‘I am glad that I was able to help you, Miss Mitchell. This has been a painful experience for everyone, but I hope you will soon be able to recover from what has happened.’

  ‘I’m going to look after her,’ Brenda Mitchell said, taking her daughter’s hand. ‘And we’re going to keep the baby if that’s what Nancy wants. I don’t care what my husband says. I’m tired of being bullied by him.’

  ‘I wish you both great happiness,’ Pünd said, thinking that at least some good had come out of the events at the Moonflower Hotel.

  Simon Cox had driven back to London. He had offered Pünd a lift, which the detective had declined. ‘You’re remarkable, Mr Pünd,’ the businessman had said. ‘Someone should make a film about you.’ His eyes had brightened. ‘Perhaps we could talk about that!’

  ‘I think not, Mr Cox.’

  Pünd had looked for Samantha Collins but she had left on her own. Hare had assured him that a policewoman would look in on Church Lodge to make sure that she and the children were all right.

  The train, pulled by an old LMR 57 steam engine, puffed into the station with a great clanking of wheels and an exploding cloud of white vapour. Porters hurried forward as the doors opened and the first passengers got out.

  ‘What will you do when you get back to London?’ Hare asked.

  ‘The first thing will be to find a new assistant,’ Pünd replied. ‘It seems that there is now a situation vacant.’

  ‘Yes. It’s too bad about that. I thought she was actually very helpful – when she was being helpful, I mean.’

  ‘It is true. And what of you, my friend? You now begin your retirement!’

  ‘That’s right,’ Hare replied. ‘And thanks to you, I bow out on a high note. Not that I deserve any credit.’

  ‘On the contrary, it was entirely down to you that the mystery was solved.’

  The two men shook hands and then, carrying his case, Pünd climbed onto the train. Doors were being slammed shut all around him and a few seconds later the driver blew the whistle and released the brakes and with another burst of hissing and grinding, the train pulled out.

  Hare watched it as it left the station and stood there until it had disappeared far down the track, then turned round and walked back to his car.

  Moonflower Murders

  The Book

  It was a strange experience returning to Atticus Pünd Takes the Case after so many years. By and large, I don’t reread books that I have edited, just as many of the authors I know seldom return to their earlier works. The act of editing, like the act of writing, is so intensive and occasionally so fraught with problems that no matter how pleased I may be with the finished product, I’m always happy to put it behind me. I don’t need to go back.

  And how did I feel as Detective Chief Inspector Hare walked back to his car and I turned the last page? It had taken me an entire afternoon and part of the evening to finish the book and I was afra
id it had all been a complete waste of time.

  On the face of it, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case had almost no connection with the events that took place at Branlow Hall in June 2008. There is no wedding, no visiting advertising executive, no Romanian maintenance man, no sex in the wood. The story is set in Devon, not Suffolk. Nobody is beaten to death with a hammer. In fact, many of the incidents in the book are quite fantastical: a famous actress being strangled – twice! – the clue from Othello, the crazed fan writing on lilac paper, an aunt dying and leaving an inheritance of seven hundred thousand pounds. Alan clearly made these up and had no need to travel to Branlow Hall for inspiration.

  And yet, unless I’d got everything wrong from the start, Cecily Treherne had read the book and had come away convinced that Stefan Codrescu was innocent. She had rung her parents in the South of France and told them: ‘It was right there – staring me in the face.’ That was what she had said, according to her father. I had just read the book from cover to cover. I thought I knew all the facts about the real murder. And yet I still had no idea what Cecily had actually seen.

  Somewhat to my own surprise, I had enjoyed the book, even though I was aware of the identity of the two killers from the start. As much as Alan Conway disliked writing murder mysteries and even looked down on the genre, he was undoubtedly good at what he did. There’s something very satisfying about a complicated whodunnit that actually makes sense, and some of the pleasure I’d had reading the manuscript for the first time all those years ago came back to me now. Alan never cheated the reader. I think that was part of his success.

  Not that it had been a lot of fun dealing with him. I must have spent hours working on the details, going over those ten moments in time, for example, making sure that they actually stitched together and that everything made sense. Most of the editing work was done over the Internet – Alan and I had always had a fractious relationship – but we did sit down together once in my London office and as I reread the book in the garden of Branlow Hall, I was reminded of the arguments we’d had on that long autumn afternoon. Why did he have to be so unpleasant? It’s one thing for writers to defend their work. But he would raise his voice and jab his finger and make me feel that I was somehow trespassing in the sacred fields of his imagination rather than trying to help him sell the bloody thing.

  For example, I would have liked him to have opened with Atticus Pünd. It was his story after all, and I wondered if readers would put up with four whole chapters before they met him. Nor was I happy with the chapter entitled ‘The Ludendorff Diamond’, which really sits as a short story outside the main investigation and has nothing to do with what happens in Tawleigh-on-the-Water. I wanted to drop it but he wouldn’t listen. I might have rubbed a nerve because we both knew that, at seventy-two thousand words, the book had come in under length. This didn’t matter terribly: quite a few Agatha Christie novels are short. By the Pricking of My Thumbs and Death on the Nile (a masterpiece) both sit in the high sixties. Taking out the theft of the diamond would reduce the book almost to the length of a novella and might damage its commercial chances, but the simple truth was that Alan wasn’t prepared to do the necessary work to bulk out the rest of it so I was stuck with what he’d given me. I do like the chapter, by the way. It was my idea to put the tear in the wallpaper in Melissa James’s bedroom so that at least there would be some excuse for including it.

  Our most serious disagreement concerned the character of Eric Chandler. Eric had struck me as a fairly unsympathetic creation, and this was some years before modern sensibilities would make any author think twice before introducing a disabled character. Giving a man a club foot is one thing. Making him an overgrown child with a sexual perversion seemed almost deliberately offensive, somehow equating disability with inadequacy. Of course, at the time I had no idea that he was based on Derek Endicott, the night manager at Branlow Hall. It was, as Lawrence Treherne had said, a particularly cruel caricature and if I’d known about him I’d have fought all the harder.

  I also came to blows with Alan over a moment in the denouement. When Atticus Pünd visits Nancy Mitchell in hospital – after saving her life on the bridge – he tells her that he will always be her friend and wants to help her. And yet, a couple of chapters later, he accuses her of murdering Francis Pendleton. ‘He’s hardly very kind!’

  ‘He does it for effect!’ I still remember Alan sneering at me in that slightly superior way of his.

  ‘But it’s not in character.’

  ‘It’s a convention. The detective gathers all the suspects and he picks them off one by one.’

  ‘I know that, Alan. But does he have to pick on her?’

  ‘Well, what do you suggest, Susan?’

  ‘Does she even need to be in the scene?’

  ‘Of course she has to be in the scene! The scene won’t work without her!’

  In the end, he softened it slightly – though with plenty of ill grace. I still didn’t like it.

  And so it went on. As I’ve mentioned, Alan liked to hide things in his books and it occurred to me now that he might have fought against some of the edits I wanted to make because I was unknowingly removing some of the secret messages that were so precious to him: Easter eggs, I suppose you might call them now. I’ve already mentioned that I disliked the name Algernon because I thought it was a bit pantomime. I thought it was unlikely that Algernon would have been driving a French-manufactured Peugeot in 1953. I didn’t like the Latin numerals in the chapter called ‘Darkness Falls’. They seemed to me to be stylistically out of keeping with the rest of the book. And, for the same reason, I was unhappy with the real people who cropped up throughout the text: Bert Lahr, Alfred Hitchcock, Roy Boulting, and so on.

  He refused to change any of these.

  I also had problems with ‘Darkness Falls’ as a chapter title – and this was definitely one of his Easter eggs. Despite everything, Conway revered Agatha Christie and often stole ideas from her. ‘Darkness Falls’ and the descriptions of Tawleigh at night are an obvious riff on her novel Endless Night, just as another chapter, ‘Taken by the Tide’, pays homage to Taken at the Flood. Using Othello to plant a clue is very much in her style; after all, she named four of her novels after Shakespeare’s plays. She even makes a guest appearance in the text. On the train down to Devon, Miss Cain is reading the new Mary Westmacott, which was, in fact, Christie’s nom de plume.

  It wasn’t just me. The copy editor got slapped down too. She had various issues, but one that I do remember was the LMR 57 steam engine that arrives to carry Pünd back to London in the final chapter. It was actually withdrawn a hundred years before the story takes place. It operated on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway rather than in Devon and it was mainly used for freight. Alan didn’t care. ‘Nobody will notice,’ he said and it stayed in. But why? Surely it wouldn’t have been so difficult to make the change. She also agreed with me that it would have been very hard to find a right-hand-drive Peugeot in 1953.

  None of these discussions seemed to have any relevance to the question of who had actually killed Frank Parris, though. But the fact was, Alan knew the truth. He’d told his partner James Taylor when he got back from Branlow Hall, ‘They’ve got the wrong man.’ So why did he hide it? Why hadn’t he told the police? It was a question I had asked myself before, but after reading Atticus Pünd Takes the Case I was none the wiser, even if it now seemed that it contained not one but two sets of solutions between its covers. How could I get the book to unlock its secrets?

  I began with the names.

  Alan always played games with the names of his characters. In Night Comes Calling, the fourth Pünd novel, they were all English rivers. In Atticus Pünd Abroad, they were manufacturers of fountain pens. It didn’t take me very long to work out what he had done in Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. Although some of them are quite obscure, the names all belong to famous crime writers. Eric and Phyllis Chandler give it away. Obviously, that’s Raymond Chandler, who created Philip Marlowe, perhaps t
he most iconic of private detectives. Algernon Marsh comes from Ngaio Marsh, Madeline Cain from James M. Cain, who wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice and the wonderful Double Indemnity, Nancy Mitchell from Gladys Mitchell, who wrote over sixty crime novels – Philip Larkin was a fan.

  But Alan had been cleverer than that. He had also linked each one of the main characters to the people he had met and interviewed at Branlow Hall, giving many of them the same initials and all of them similar-sounding first names. One example is Lance Gardner (from Erle Stanley Gardner), who had so offended Lawrence Treherne. Another is Dr Leonard Collins, who clearly has a connection with Lionel Corby (LC). By the same token, the Latvian producer Sīmanis Čaks must relate to Stefan Codrescu, although it’s interesting that he has almost no role in the book. He isn’t even really a suspect.

  I realised that if I was going to work out what was going on in Alan Conway’s mind, I had to draw some sort of map between the worlds of Branlow Hall in Suffolk and Tawleigh-on-the-Water in Devon, and the most obvious landmarks were all these characters and their relationships both to each other and to their real-life counterparts. I had finished the book sitting at one of the tables outside the hotel, but now the sun had gone in so I returned to my room, grabbed a notepad and sketched out the following.

  Melissa James

  Name taken from: P. D. James, author of Innocent Blood and A Taste for Death. Or possibly Peter James (he provided a quote for the book!).

  Character based on: Lisa Treherne, Cecily’s sister.

  Notes: The characters have very little in common except for their first name: Lisa/Melissa. There is also one mention of the actress having a scar on her face (page 5). Lisa Treherne was possibly having sex with Stefan Codrescu, as seen by Lionel Corby. But in APTTC, Melissa is having an affair with Dr Leonard Collins.