There were other questions too. Who had sent me the photograph? Why had they sent it to me, rather than the police? It must have been posted on the same day as the funeral and the postmark showed Ipswich. How many people at the funeral knew that I worked at Cloverleaf Books? My name was misspelled on the envelope. Was that a genuine error or a deliberate attempt to make it appear that they didn’t know me well?
Sitting on my own in the office – just about everyone else had gone out to lunch – I drew up a list of suspects. I could think of five people who were far more likely than White to have committed the murder and I set them out in order of likelihood. It was quite confusing. I’d already performed exactly the same exercise when I’d finished Alan’s book.
1. James Taylor, the boyfriend
As much as I liked James, he was the one who most directly benefited from Alan’s death. In fact, if Alan had lived another twenty-four hours, he would have lost several million pounds. He knew Alan was in the house. He would have guessed that Alan would have breakfast on the tower because the weather was so good on that penultimate day in August. He was still living there and could have let himself in, crept upstairs and pushed him off in the blink of an eye. He had told me he was in London over the weekend but I only had his word for that and he’d seemed completely at home when I met him, as if he knew that Abbey Grange was his. Of course, it’s the first rule of whodunnits that you discard the most obvious suspect. Was that what I should do here?
2. Claire Jenkins, the sister
In all those pages she gave me, she went on about how much she adored her brother, how generous he was to her and how close they had always been. I wasn’t sure I quite believed her. James thought she was jealous of his success and it’s certainly true that in the end the two of them argued about money. That wasn’t necessarily a motive for murder but there was another very good reason to put her second on my list and it related to the unfinished book.
Alan Conway took a spiteful pleasure in creating characters based on people he knew. James Taylor turned up as the slightly dim, foppish James Fraser. The vicar appeared as an anagram of himself. Even Alan’s own son was in there by name. I had no doubt at all that Clarissa Pye, Sir Magnus’s lonely, spinster sister was based on Claire. It was a grotesque portrait, which Alan made more pointed by deliberately including his address in Daphne Road (although in the book, it’s Brent who lives there). If Claire had seen the manuscript, she might have a very good reason to push her brother off the roof. It would also have been in her interest to ensure that the book was never published – something she would have achieved by stealing the last chapters.
Why then would she insist that Alan had been murdered? Why draw attention to what she had done? I had no real answer to that, but thinking it through I remembered reading somewhere that killers have an urge to claim ownership. It’s why they return to the scene of their crime. Could it be that Claire had asked me to investigate her brother’s death for the very same reason that she wrote that long account? A pathological desire to be centre stage.
3. Tom Robeson, the vicar.
It was a pity that Robeson wouldn’t tell me exactly what had happened at Chorley Hall when I confronted him at the church. If his wife had arrived a few minutes later it would have made all the difference. But the incident had involved a photograph used to humiliate a boy in an all-boys school and I didn’t need to work too hard to get the general idea. It was interesting, incidentally, that Claire saw her brother as one of the victims of the school’s various cruelties while Robeson saw him as more of an active participant. The more I learnt about Alan, the more I was inclined to believe the vicar’s account.
All this had taken place back in the seventies and it had clearly been on Alan’s mind because he had written about it in the first chapter of Magpie Murders, when Mary Blakiston turns up in the vicarage. ‘And there they were, just lying in the middle of all his papers.’ What had she seen? Were Henrietta and Robin Osborne perverts of some sort? Had they left out incriminating photographs, similar in nature to the ones that had tormented Robeson? From what he had said in his funeral address, the vicar hadn’t forgotten any of this and, having met him, I could quite easily see him creeping up to the top of the tower to get his revenge. That said, it’s always been my belief that vicars make poor characters in crime novels. They’re somehow too obvious, too Little England. If Robeson did turn out to be the killer, I think I’d be disappointed.
4. Donald Leigh, the waiter
‘You must have been quite pleased to hear he was dead.’ I had said. ‘I was delighted,’ he’d replied. Two men don’t see each other for several years. One hates the other. They meet quite by chance and forty-eight hours later, one of them is dead. When I put it in black and white like that, Robert had to be on my list and it would have been a simple matter for him to get Alan’s address from the club records. What else is there to say?
5. Mark Redmond, the producer
He lied to me. He said that he went back to London on the Saturday when the register showed that he had actually stayed the entire weekend at the Crown. He also had every reason to want Alan dead. The Atticus Adventures would have been worth a fortune if he could get them off the ground and Redmond had invested a lot of his own money seeding the project. He certainly knew a thing or two about murder having masterminded hundreds of them on British TV. Would it really have been so difficult to move from fiction to reality? After all, the murder had been a bloodless one. No guns, no knives. Just a simple push. Anyone could do that.
Those were the five names on my list, the Five Little Pigs, if you like, that I suspected of committing the crime. But there were two other names, which I didn’t add but which should perhaps have been there.
6. Melissa Conway, the ex-wife
I hadn’t had a chance to speak to her yet, but decided I would travel down to Bradford-on-Avon as soon as I could. I was beginning to obsess about Alan’s murder and I wasn’t going to get any work done at Cloverleaf until it was solved. According to Claire Jenkins, Melissa had never forgiven Alan for the way he had left her. Had they met recently? Could something have happened that might have prompted her to take revenge? I was annoyed that I’d missed her at the hotel. I would have liked to have asked her why she had travelled all the way up to Framlingham to attend her husband’s funeral. Had she made the same journey to push him off the tower?
7. Frederick Conway, the son
It may not be fair to include him – I had only glimpsed him at the funeral and knew almost nothing about him – but I still remembered how he had looked that day, staring at the grave, his face positively distorted by anger. He had been abandoned by his father. Worse than that, his father had come out as a gay man and as a schoolboy that might not have been easy for him either. A motive for murder? Alan must have been thinking about him when he wrote Magpie Murders. Freddy turns up as the son of Sir Magnus and Lady Pye, the only character who retains his true name.