Sometimes, when I read a whodunnit, I get a feeling about someone for no particularly good reason and that’s the case here. Clarissa had every reason to hate her brother and might have intended to kill both Lady Pye and her son, Freddy, in order to inherit Pye Hall. The whole story about stealing the physostigmine to commit suicide could have been a lie – and would also explain the need to do away with Mary Blakiston. And let’s not forget that Clarissa had a key to the front door of Pye Hall. It’s mentioned once – on page 25 – though not again.
There’s also the case of Dr Rennard and the twins-exchanged-at-birth. When did Clarissa discover the truth? Was it really when Dr Redwing told her? I only ask this because there’s an odd reference to Ashton House, where Dr Rennard lives – on page 62. In his funeral address, the vicar mentions that Mary Blakiston was a regular visitor there. It could be that Rennard had told her what had happened and she, being the sort of person she was, had then told Clarissa. That would give Clarissa a compelling reason to kill both Mary and Sir Magnus. The physostigmine could have been for Lady Pye and Freddy. It could even be that Dr Rennard’s fall hadn’t actually been an accident … although perhaps I’m taking this too far?
I dismissed the Whiteheads, Dr Redwing and her artist husband, Frances Pye and the slightly improbable Jack Dartford. They all had motives for the murder of Sir Magnus but I couldn’t see any reason why any of them would have wanted to harm Mary Blakiston. That just left Joy Sanderling, the least likely suspect of them all. But why would she have wanted to kill anyone and, more to the point, why would she have gone to Atticus Pünd in the first place?
Anyway, that was how I spent Sunday afternoon, leafing through the manuscript, making notes and really getting nowhere. That evening I met a couple of friends at the BFI for a screening of The Maltese Falcon but I wasn’t able to focus on the labyrinthine plot. I was thinking about Magnus and Mary and bloody scraps of paper, dead dogs and letters in wrong envelopes. I wondered why the manuscript was incomplete and I was annoyed that Charles hadn’t called me back.
Later that night I found out why. I’d treated myself to a taxi and the driver had the radio on. It was the fourth item on the evening news.
Alan Conway was dead.
Cloverleaf Books
My name is Susan Ryeland and I am the Head of Fiction at Cloverleaf Books. The role isn’t as grand as it sounds as there are only fifteen of us (and a dog) in the building and we produce no more than twenty books a year. I work on about half of them. For such a small operation, we don’t have a bad list. There are a couple of well-respected authors who have won literary awards, a bestselling fantasy writer and a children’s author who has just been announced as the new laureate. We can’t afford the production costs of cookery books but in the past we’ve done well with travel guides, self-help and biographies. But the simple truth is that Alan Conway was by far our biggest name and our entire business plan depended on the success of Magpie Murders.
The company was set up eleven years ago by Charles Clover, who is well known throughout the industry and I’d been with him from the start. We were together at Orion when he decided to branch out on his own, working out of a building that he’d bought near the British Museum. The look of the place absolutely suited him: three floors, narrow corridors, worn carpets, wooden panels, not much daylight. At a time when everyone else was nervously embracing the twenty-first century – publishers are generally not the first off the line when it comes to social or technological change – he was quite happy in his role as a throwback. Well, he had worked with Graham Green, Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark. There’s even a photograph of him having dinner with a very elderly No?l Coward, although he always says he was so drunk he can’t remember the name of the restaurant nor a single word that the great man said.
Charles and I spend so much time together that people assume we must once have been lovers although we never were. He’s married with two grown-up children, one of whom – Laura – is about to give birth to his first grandchild. He lives in the rather grand double-fronted house in Parson’s Green that he and his wife, Elaine, have owned for thirty years. I’ve been there for dinner a few times and the evenings have always been marked by interesting company, really good wine and conversation that goes on late into the night. That said, he doesn’t tend to socialise much outside the office, at least not with people from the world of publishing. He reads a great deal. He plays the cello. I’ve heard it said that he took a lot of drugs when he was in his teens and early twenties but you wouldn’t believe it looking at him now.
I hadn’t actually seen him for a week. I’d been on the road with an author from Tuesday to Friday; we’d had events in Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin along with radio and newspaper interviews. It had gone surprisingly well. When I’d come in late on Friday afternoon, he’d already left for the weekend. The typescript of Magpie Murders had been waiting for me on my desk. It occurred to me as I threw my bag down and flicked on my computer the following Monday that he and I must have read it at the same time and that, after all, he couldn’t have known it was incomplete when he left it for me.
He was already in his office, which was on the first floor at the opposite end of the corridor to mine. He looked out onto the main road – New Oxford Street and Bloomsbury Way. My part of the building was quieter. He had an elegant, square room with three windows, bookshelves of course, and a surprising number of trophies on display. Charles doesn’t actually like award ceremonies. He thinks of them as a necessary evil but over the years Cloverleaf has managed to win quite a few of them – Nibbies, Gold Daggers, IPG Awards – and somehow they’ve found their way here. It was all very neat. Charles liked to know where everything was and he had a secretary, Jemima, who looked after him although she didn’t seem to be around. He was sitting behind his desk with his own copy of Magpie Murders in front of him. I saw that he’d been making notes in the margin, using a fountain pen filled with red ink.
I must describe Charles as he was that day. He was sixty-three years old, dressed as always in a suit and tie, with a narrow gold band on his fourth finger. Elaine had given it to him for his fiftieth birthday. Coming into the slightly darkened room, he always struck me as a godfather figure, as in the famous film. There was no sense of menace but Charles looked Italian with piercing eyes, a very thin nose and quite aristocratic cheekbones. He had white hair, which swept down in a careless sort of way, brushing against his collar. He was quite fit for a man of his age, not that he would have dreamed of going anywhere near a gym, and he was very much in command. He often brought his dog when he came in to work and it was there now, a golden Labrador asleep on a folded blanket under the desk.
The dog’s name was Bella.
‘Come in, Susan,’ he said, waving me in from the door.