At the same time, Lawrence’s cheque had taken care of most of our debts and to our surprise the second half of the season suddenly took off and we were completely full. With my new salary, we were able to bring in extra help, so although in the morning I was still rushing around looking after our guests and our staff (and trying to work out which of them caused me the more trouble), by lunchtime I was free to sit on the terrace doing the work I’d done all my life, completely at ease.
Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking about everything that had happened – both at the time of Frank Parris’s murder and immediately afterwards when Alan Conway had written his book. When I left London, I had brought with me all the notes that I had made during the investigation as well as the old manuscripts from my days at Cloverleaf. I’d also gone out and bought a complete set of the Atticus Pünd novels, even though it irked me having to fork out the money. As the summer wore on, I found myself poring over them, certain that there was something missing. I knew Alan too well. He was dangling something in front of my eyes but I just couldn’t see it.
I understood why he had been unable to reveal the identity of the killer, why he had deliberately concealed it. Aiden had been right about that. Alan was riding the first wave of what would become international success with two bestsellers under his belt and a third on his way. His name was becoming known.
He had not yet come out as a gay man. Of course, it wouldn’t matter. When he did finally announce that he had divorced Melissa and moved in with James, nobody cared. It’s one of the better ways that the world has changed: nobody is afraid to express their sexuality, unless, perhaps, they’re a hate preacher or a major Hollywood actor. At the same time, though, Alan must have been worried about the stories that ‘Leo’ might tell. Being gay is one thing but the sort of stuff he’d been getting up to with rent boys wouldn’t have gone down so well. He was insecure. He preferred to keep these things quiet.
Exposing Aiden to the police would have put his own career in danger. At least, that was how he saw it. And, from a PR point of view, I have to admit that it might have been tricky. After all, Atticus Pünd is so wholesome. There’s almost no sex in any of the books. Nobody even swears.
But surely he would have done something more than that dedication. Alan being the sort of man he was wouldn’t have been able to sit on the secret. He would have to hint at it with his special brand of clues, his twists and turns, his little jokes. I reread Atticus Pünd Takes the Case half a dozen times and there were several passages I could have quoted almost off by heart. I made pencil markings on the pages. I sat there scowling in the sun.
Until finally I saw it.
With all the knowledge I had accumulated at Branlow Hall, I saw what he had done. It was the Red Lion pub in Tawleigh-on-the-Water that started me; such an ordinary name and yet chosen, I was sure, deliberately.
Everything hinged on Leo. And so Alan had mentioned him over and over again in the text, banging a subconscious drum that must have resounded in Cecily Treherne’s mind.
But not quite Leo.
Instead, he put about a dozen lions into the book. They’re everywhere.
It’s not just the pub in Tawleigh-on-the-Water. The church is also dedicated to St Daniel who famously went into the lions’ den. Atticus Pünd visits the church and sees the saint’s ordeal depicted in the stained-glass windows.
Clarence Keep, the house where Melissa James lived, is named after Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion, a comedy film from the sixties, and William Railton who had supposedly owned it at one time was the architect who designed the four monumental lions in London’s Trafalgar Square. Melissa’s dog is a chow, a breed from China also known as ‘puffy lion dog’ and it’s even called Kimba, a white lion in a television series from Japan. In the hallway, Madeline Cain notices a poster from The Wizard of Oz signed by the actor Bert Lahr. She remarks that Melissa never acted in that film. Lahr, of course, played the Cowardly Lion.
As the weeks passed, I became quite obsessive and I noticed Andreas becoming agitated as I found myself going back to the pages whenever I had the opportunity. Still they kept coming. Samantha has just started reading C. S. Lewis to her two children in Church Lodge so the book must be the first one: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Melissa was meant to be starring in a film in which she would play Eleanor of Aquitaine. She would therefore be the mother of Richard the Lionheart. The silver cigarette box in Melissa’s lounge is engraved with the MGM logo – a roaring lion. And on page 194 Detective Chief Inspector Hare makes a completely random remark about the first labour of Hercules, which he believes relates to the cleaning of the Augean stables. It isn’t. It’s the slaying of the Nemean lion.
Now I remembered some of the editorial disagreements that I’d had with Alan during the editing of the book. Of course he’d wanted Algernon’s car to be a Peugeot. The silver badge that ends up smeared with the opera singer’s blood is in the shape of a prancing lion. And a quick search of Wikipedia showed me that the LMR 57 steam engine that carried Pünd out of Bideford station, even though it was about a hundred years out of date, was also known as ‘Lion’.
By the end of the month I was actually stealing out of bed at night to continue my lion hunt. I hadn’t even started the edit of my four-hundred-page manuscript and I noticed Andreas frequently looking askance at me.
And yet I still worried that I’d missed something in Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. I was sure that Cecily had seen something that I hadn’t. I had the book. I had all my notes. There had to be something else. What was it?
I can remember exactly the epiphany, the moment when the novel revealed the last secret buried in its unpleasant heart. The awful truth is that it had been in front of my eyes all the time although I’m not quite sure why I saw it at that moment, sitting in my little office above the bar with the sun streaming in. I wish I could say that an owl flew past – we actually have quite a lot of them in Crete – but it didn’t. For no reason at all, I was thinking how Cecily Treherne had liked anagrams. She had taken the name of the hotel and rearranged the letters to make ‘barn owl’. And that was when it hit me.
The first murder is committed by Leonard Collins. His name, obviously, conceals another lion. He is Leo.
But Madeline Cain is also a murderer and she kills Francis Pendleton – FP – the fictional equivalent of Frank Parris.
Madeline Cain is an anagram of Aiden MacNeil.
Andreas was in the room with me when I saw it. I remember howling with excitement, throwing paper into the air, rushing into his arms, almost crying with the stupid simplicity of it. He looked past me at the newspaper cuttings, the notepads, the letters – and the nine volumes that made up the adventures of Atticus Pünd.
He took my hands in his. ‘Susan,’ he said, ‘will you be angry with me if I make a suggestion?’
‘Of course I won’t be angry with you.’
‘We have each other. We have the hotel. You have your editing. Everything is going well for us.’
‘So . . . ?’
‘So maybe it’s time to finish with all this.’ He gestured at the scattered documents. ‘You’ve found enough lions. And honestly, I think you’ve allowed Alan Conway to do enough damage to your life.’
I nodded slowly. ‘You’re right.’
‘Here is what I would like to suggest. Why don’t you take all this . . . all these papers and the books. Especially the books. Let’s put them in the car and drive up to the Lasithi Plateau. It’s beautiful at this time of the year with the olive trees and the windmills. I want to take you to the Psychro Cave, which is also known as the Cave of Zeus because they say that is where he was born. And I want you to put everything in a pile at the entrance and set fire to it as an offering to the gods, to thank them for bringing you back to me and to release you from all the dark shadows, the memories of what you’ve left behind. And after that I’ll take you to a little hotel I know near Kaminaki and we’ll have dinner together and we’ll sit on the terrace drinking raki,
surrounded by the mountains and looking at the stars, because, believe me, there is nowhere the stars look more magnificent.’
‘Is Leo in the ascendant?’
‘I hope not.’
‘Then let’s go.’
And that’s exactly what we did.
About the Author
ANTHONY HOROWITZ is the author of New York Times bestsellers Magpie Murders and The Sentence Is Death, as well as the New York Times bestselling Alex Rider series for young adults. As a television screenwriter he created Midsomer Murders and the BAFTA-winning Foyle’s War on PBS. He lives in London.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Anthony Horowitz
The House of Silk
Moriarty
Trigger Mortis
Magpie Murders
The Word Is Murder
Forever and a Day
The Sentence Is Death
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MOONFLOWER MURDERS. Copyright © 2020 by Nightshade Limited. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Century Penguin Random House UK.
Cover design by Will Staehle
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Horowitz, Anthony, 1955– author.
Title: Moonflower murders / Anthony Horowitz.
Description: First edition. | New York : HarperCollins Publishers, [2020] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022623 (print) | LCCN 2020022624 (ebook) | ISBN
9780062955456 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062955470 (ebk)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6058.O715 M66 2020 (print) | LCC PR6058.O715
(ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022623
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022624
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request.
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-295547-0
Version 09192020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-295545-6
Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-5990-7 (Canada hc)
Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-5991-4 (Canada pbk)
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