There was a photograph inside. No note. No name of any sender. I snatched the envelope back and looked at the postmark. It had been sent from Ipswich.
The photograph was a little blurry. I guessed it had been taken with a mobile phone, enlarged and printed at one of those Snappy Snaps shops you find everywhere. You can plug directly into their machines so, assuming they paid cash, the person who had taken the photograph would have been completely anonymous.
It showed John White murdering Alan Conway.
The two men were at the top of the tower. Alan had his back to the edge and he was bent over towards it. He was dressed in the same clothes – the loose jacket and black shirt – that he had been wearing when he was found. White had his hands on Alan’s shoulders. One push and it would all be over.
So that was it. The mystery was solved. I rang Lucy and cancelled lunch. Then I began to think.
Detective work
It’s one thing reading about detectives, quite another trying to be one.
I’ve always loved whodunnits. I’ve not just edited them. I’ve read them for pleasure throughout my life, gorging on them actually. You must know that feeling when it’s raining outside and the heating’s on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover. That is the particular power of the whodunnit which has, I think, a special place within the general panoply of literary fiction because, of all characters, the detective enjoys a particular, indeed a unique relationship with the reader.
Whodunnits are all about truth: nothing more, nothing less. In a world full of uncertainties, is it not inherently satisfying to come to the last page with every i dotted and every t crossed? The stories mimic our experience in the world. We are surrounded by tensions and ambiguities, which we spend half our life trying to resolve and we’ll probably be on our own deathbed when we reach that moment when everything makes sense. Just about every whodunnit provides that pleasure. It is the reason for their existence. It’s why Magpie Murders was so bloody irritating.
In just about every other book I can think of, we’re chasing on the heels of our heroes – the spies, the soldiers, the romantics, the adventurers. But we stand shoulder to shoulder with the detective. From the very start, we have the same aim – and it’s actually a simple one. We want to know what really happened and neither of us are in it for the money. Read the Sherlock Holmes short stories. He’s hardly ever paid, and although he’s clearly well off, I’m not sure he once presents a bill for his services. Of course the detectives are cleverer than us. We expect them to be. But that doesn’t mean they’re paragons of virtue. Holmes is depressed. Poirot is vain. Miss Marple is brusque and eccentric. They don’t have to be attractive. Look at Nero Wolfe who was so fat that he couldn’t even leave his New York home and had to have a custom-made chair to support his weight! Or Father Brown who had ‘a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling … eyes as empty as the North Sea.’ Lord Peter Wimsey, ex-Eton, ex-Oxford, is thin and seemingly weedy and sports a monocle. Bulldog Drummond might have been able to kill a man with his bare hands (and may have been the inspiration for James Bond) but he was no male model either. In fact H.C. McNeile hits the nail on the head when he writes that Drummond had ‘the fortunate possession of that cheerful type of ugliness which inspires immediate confidence in its owner.’ We don’t need to like or admire our detectives. We stick with them because we have confidence in them.
All of this makes me a poor choice of narrator/investigator. Quite apart from the fact that I’m completely unqualified, I may not actually be all that good. I have tried to describe everyone I saw, everything I heard and, most importantly, everything I thought. Sadly, I have no Watson, no Hastings, no Troy, no Bunter, no Lewis. So I have no choice but to put everything onto the page, including the fact that, until I opened the letter and saw the photograph of John White, I was getting absolutely nowhere. In fact, in my darker moments, I was beginning to ask myself if there really had been a murder at all. Part of the trouble was that there was no pattern, no shape to the mystery I was trying to solve. If Alan Conway had lent his hand to the description of his own death, as he had with Sir Magnus Pye, I’m sure he’d have given me a variety of clues, signs and indications to lead me on my way. For example, in Magpie Murders, there’s the handprint in the earth, the dog’s collar in the bedroom, the scrap of paper found in the fireplace, the service revolver in the desk, the typed letter in the handwritten envelope. I might not have any idea what they add up to but at least, as the reader, I know that they must have some significance or why else would they have been mentioned? As the detective, I had to find these things for myself and perhaps I’d been looking in the wrong direction because I seemed to have precious little to work with: no torn buttons, no mysterious fingerprints, no conveniently overheard conversations. Well, of course, I had Alan’s handwritten suicide letter, which had been sent to Charles in a typed envelope, the exact reverse of what I had read in the book. But what did that mean? Had he run out of ink? Had he written the letter but asked someone else to write the address? If you read a Sherlock Holmes story, you can be pretty sure that the detective will know exactly what’s going on even if he won’t necessarily tell you. In this case, that’s not true at all.
There was also that dinner at the Ivy. I still couldn’t get it out of my mind. Alan had become annoyed when Charles had suggested changing the title of his book. Mathew Prichard, sitting at the next table, had heard what he had said. He had pounded the table, then jabbed with a finger. ‘I’m not having the—’ The what? I’m not having the title changed? I’m not having the discussion? I’m not having the dessert, thanks? Even Charles wasn’t sure what he had meant.
I might as well come straight out with it. I didn’t think John White killed Alan Conway even though I had photographic evidence of him committing that very act. It was like the suicide letter that wasn’t actually a suicide letter except that this time I didn’t even have the beginning of an explanation. I simply didn’t believe it. I had met White and I didn’t see him as being a particularly violent or aggressive person. And anyway, he had no reason to kill Alan. If anything, it was the other way round.