Cloverleaf Books folded – which is about as apt a description as you can get for a publishing firm going out of business. It was all very messy, with Charles in jail and the insurers refusing to pay out for the building, which had been completely destroyed in the fire. Our successful authors jumped ship as fast as they could, which was a little disappointing but not entirely surprising. You don’t want to be published by someone who might murder you.
I no longer had a job, of course. Sitting at home after I had got out of hospital, I was surprised to learn that I was getting some of the blame for what had happened. It’s like I said in the beginning. Charles Clover was entrenched in the publishing industry and the general feeling was that I had betrayed him. After all, he had published Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark and he had only ever killed one writer – Alan Conway, a well-known pain in the neck. Had it really been necessary to make such a fuss about his death when he was going to die anyway? Nobody actually put this into so many words, but when I finally limped out to a few literary events – a conference, a book launch – that was the feeling I got. The Women’s Prize for Fiction decided not to have me as a judge after all. I wished they could have seen Charles as I had finally seen him, preparing to burn me alive and kicking me so hard that he broke my ribs. I wasn’t going back to work any time soon. I no longer had a heart for it and anyway, my vision hadn’t recovered. That remains the case. I’m not quite as blind as poor Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre but my eyes tire if I read too much and the words move around on the page. These days I prefer audiobooks. I’ve gone back to nineteenth century literature. I avoid whodunnits.
I live in Agios Nikolaos, in Crete.
The decision was more or less made for me in the end. There was nothing to keep me in London. A lot of my friends had turned their backs on me and Andreas was leaving whatever happened. I would have been a fool not to go with him and my sister, Katie, spent at least a week telling me exactly that. At the end of the day, I was in love with him. I’d come to realise that when I was sitting on my own at Bradford-on-Avon station and it had certainly been confirmed when he had appeared as my knight in shining armour, battling his way through the blaze to rescue me. If anything, he should have been the one who had second thoughts. I didn’t speak a word of Greek. I wasn’t much of a cook. My vision was impaired. What possible use could I be?
I did say some of this to him and his response was to take me out to the Greek restaurant in Crouch End, to produce a diamond ring (which was much more than he could afford) and to go down on one knee in front of all the diners. I was horrified, and couldn’t accept fast enough just to get him to behave properly, back on his feet. He didn’t need a bank loan in the end. I sold my flat and, although he wasn’t entirely happy about it, I insisted on investing some of the money in Hotel Polydorus, making myself an equal partner. It was probably madness but after what I’d been through, I didn’t really care. It wasn’t just that I’d almost been killed. It was that everything I’d trusted and believed in had been taken away from me. I felt that my life had been unravelled as quickly and as absolutely as Atticus Pünd’s name. Does that make sense? It was as if my new life was an anagram of my old one and I would only learn what shape it had taken when I began to live it.
Two years have passed since I left England.
Polydorus hasn’t actually made a profit yet, but guests seem to like it and we’ve been full for most of this season so we must be doing something right. The hotel is on the edge of Agios Nikolaos, which is a bright, shabby, colourful town with too many shops selling trinkets and tourist tat, but it’s authentic enough to make you feel it’s somewhere you’d want to live. We’re right on the seafront and I never tire of gazing at the water, which is a quite dazzling blue and makes the Mediterranean look like a puddle. The kitchen and reception area open onto a stone terrace where we have a dozen tables – we’re open for breakfast, lunch and dinner – and we serve simple, fresh local food. Andreas works in the kitchen. His cousin Yannis does almost nothing but he’s well connected (they call it ‘visma’) and comes into his own with local PR. And then there’s Philippos, Alexandros, Giorgios, Nell and all the other family and friends who bundle in to help us during the day and who sit drinking raki with us until late into the night.
I could write about it, and maybe one day I will. A middle-aged woman takes the plunge and moves in with her Greek lover and his eccentric family, various cats, neighbours, suppliers and guests, making a go of it in the Aegean sunshine. There used to be a market for that sort of thing, although of course I won’t be able to write the full truth, not if I want it to sell. There’s still a part of me that misses Crouch End and I miss publishing. Andreas and I are always worrying about money and that puts a strain on us. Life may imitate art – but it usually falls short of it.
The strange thing is that Magpie Murders did get published in the end. After the collapse of Cloverleaf, a few of our titles were picked up by other publishers, including the entire Atticus Pünd series, which, as it happened, went to my old firm, Orion Books. They reissued it with new covers and brought out Magpie Murders at the same time. By now, the whole world knew the nasty truth behind the detective’s name, but in the short term it didn’t matter. All the publicity about the real-life murder and the trial made people more interested in the book and I wasn’t surprised to see it in the bestseller lists. Robert Harris gave it a very good review in the Sunday Times.
I even saw a copy the other day, as I walked along the beach. A woman was sitting in a deckchair reading it, and there was Alan Conway staring out at me from the back cover. Seeing him I felt a spurt of real anger. I remembered what Charles had said about Alan, how he had selfishly, needlessly, spoiled the pleasure of millions of people who had enjoyed the Atticus Pünd novels. He was right. I had been one of them and just for a moment, I imagined that it was I, not Charles, who had been on the tower at Abbey Grange, shoving out with both hands, pushing Alan to his death. I could actually see myself doing it. It was exactly what he deserved.
I had been the detective and now I was the murderer.
And do you know? I think I liked it more.
Anthony Horowitz interviews Alan Conway
Reprinted from the Spectator magazine
When I met Alan Conway at the Ivy Club in London, it struck me that we actually had a great deal in common. At least, that was what I thought at the start.