‘He changed your name,’ I said.
‘He changed lots of things. I mean, I never went to Oxford University for a start, although it’s true I’d done some acting when we met. That was one of his little jokes. In every book he always says Fraser was out-of-work or unsuccessful or failed and of course he was completely thick – but Alan said that was true of every sidekick. He used to say that they were there to make the detective look cleverer and to divert the attention away from the truth. Everything my character ever said in the books was wrong. He did it quite deliberately, to make you look the wrong way. In fact, you could ignore whatever Fraser said. That was how it worked.’
‘So did you read it?’ I asked again.
He shook his head. ‘No. I knew Alan was working on it. He used to spend hours in his office. But he never showed me anything until it was finished. To be honest with you, I didn’t even know he had finished it. Usually, he’d have given it to me before he showed it to anyone it but because of what had happened he might have decided not to. Even so, I’m surprised I didn’t know. I could usually tell when he he’d come to the end.’
‘How?’
‘He became human again.’
I wanted to know what had happened between them but instead I asked if I could see his study and maybe look for the missing pages. James was quite happy to show me and we left the room together.
Alan’s office was next to the kitchen, which made sense. If he ever needed a break – lunch or a drink – he didn’t have far to go. It was a large room, at the very end of the house with windows on three sides, and it had been knocked through to incorporate the tower. A spiral staircase dominated the space and presumably led all the way to the top. There were two walls of books, the first of which turned out to be Alan’s, the nine Atticus Pünd novels translated into thirty-four languages. The blurb (which I had written) says thirty-five but that includes English and Alan liked round numbers. For the same reason, we upped his sales figures to eighteen million, a figure we more or less plucked out of the air. There was a purpose-built desk with an expensive-looking chair; black leather, ergonomically designed with sections that would move to provide support for his arms, his neck and his back. A writer’s chair. He had a computer, an Apple with a twenty-seven inch screen.
I was interested in the room. It seemed to me that it was as close as I would get to walking into Alan Conway’s head. And what did it tell me? Well, he wasn’t out to hide his light. All his awards were on display. PD James had written a letter congratulating him on Atticus Pünd Abroad and he had framed it and hung it on the wall. There were also photographs of him with Prince Charles, with JK Rowling and (odd, this one) with Angela Merkel. He was methodical. Pens and pencils, notepads, files, newspaper clippings and all the other detritus of a writer’s life were laid out carefully, with no sense of clutter. There was a shelf of reference books: the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (two volumes), Roget’s Thesaurus, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Brewer’s Book of Phrase and Fable and encyclopaedias of chemistry, biology, criminology and law. They were lined up like soldiers. He had a complete set of Agatha Christie, about seventy paperbacks arranged, as far as I could see, in chronological order beginning with The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It was significant that they were also in his reference section. He had not read them for pleasure: he had used them. Alan had been entirely businesslike in the way he wrote. There were no diversions anywhere to be seen, nothing irrelevant to his work. The walls were white, the carpet a neutral beige. It was an office, not a study.
A leather diary sat beside the computer and I flicked it open. I had to ask myself what I was doing. It was the same reflex that had made me take a photograph of the tyre tracks in the garden. Was I looking for clues? A page torn out of a magazine had been slotted in beneath the cover. It was a black and white photograph, a still from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List. It showed the actor Ben Kingsley sitting at a desk, typing. I turned to James Taylor. ‘What’s this doing here?’ I asked.
He answered as if it was obvious. ‘That’s Atticus Pünd,’ he said.
It made sense. ‘His eyes, behind the round, wire-framed glasses, examined the doctor with endless benevolence. It had often been remarked that Atticus Pünd looked like an accountant and in his general demeanour – which was both timid and meticulous – he behaved like one too.’ Alan Conway had borrowed, or perhaps stolen, his detective from a film that had been released ten or so years before he had written the first book. This might be where the link with the concentration camps, which I had thought so clever, had begun. For some reason, I was deflated. It was disappointing to find out that Atticus Pünd was not an entirely original creation; that he was in some way second-hand. Perhaps I was being unfair. After all, every character in fiction has to begin somewhere. Charles Dickens used his neighbours, his friends, even his parents as inspiration. Edward Rochester, my favourite character in Jane Eyre, was based on a Frenchman called Constantin Héger, with whom Bront? was in love. But tearing an actor out of a magazine was different somehow. It felt like cheating.
I turned the pages of the diary until I arrived at the week we were in now. It would have been busy if he’d managed to live through it. On Monday he was having lunch with someone called Claire at the Jolly Sailor. He had a hair appointment in the afternoon: that was the obvious assumption from the single word hair with a circle round it. On Wednesday he was playing tennis with someone identified only by their initials, SK. On Thursday, he was coming to London. He had another lunch – he’d just written ‘lch’ – and at five he was seeing Henry at the OV. It took me a worrying amount of time to work out that this was actually Henry the Fifth at the Old Vic. Simon Mayo was still in the diary for the following morning. This was the interview that Alan had decided to cancel but he hadn’t got round to crossing it out. I flicked back a page. There was the dinner with Charles at the Ivy Club. In the morning, he’d seen SB. His doctor.
‘Who’s Claire?’ I asked.
‘His sister.’ James was standing beside me, peering at the diary. ‘The Jolly Sailor’s in Orford. That’s where she lives.’
‘I don’t suppose you know the password for the computer?’
‘Yes. I do. It’s Att1cus.’