It looked as if Alan Conway had done exactly that.
‘I would be grateful if you did not repeat this conversation, Miss Ryeland,’ Khan continued. ‘As I said to you, I really should not be discussing the will.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Mr Khan. It’s not the reason I’m here.’
‘Then how can I help you?’
‘I’m looking for the manuscript of Magpie Murders,’ I explained. ‘Alan had finished it just before he died but it’s missing the last chapters. I don’t suppose …?’
‘Alan never showed me his work before it was published,’ Khan replied. He was glad to be back on safer ground. ‘He was kind enough to autograph a copy of Atticus Pünd Abroad before it was published. But I’m afraid he never really talked about his work with me. You might try his sister.’
‘Yes. I’m seeing her tomorrow.’
‘It would be better not to mention the will to her, if you’d be so kind. The two of us will be meeting later in the week. And we have the funeral next weekend.’
‘I’m just looking for the missing pages.’
‘I hope you find them. We’re all going to miss Alan. It would be nice to have one last memory.’
He smiled and got to his feet. On the desk, the photograph changed again and I saw that it had completed its circuit. It was showing the same picture I’d seen when I came in.
It was definitely time to go.
Extract from The Slide by Alan Conway
The dining room at the Crown was almost empty when I went in for dinner and I might have felt a little self-conscious, eating on my own. But I had company. I had brought The Slide with me, the novel which Alan Conway had written and which he had pleaded with Charles to publish, even as he prepared to end his life. Was Charles right? Here’s how it opened.
Lord Quentin Trump comes slumping down the staircase, lording it as he always does over the cooks and maids, the under-butlers and the footmen that exist only in his anfractuous imagination, that have in truth slipped hugger-mugger into the adumbration of family history. They were there when he was a boy and in some ways he is still a boy, or perhaps it is more true to say that the boy he was lurks obstinately in the fleshy folds that fifty years of unhealthy living have deposited on the barren, winter tree that is his skeleton. Two boiled eggs, cookie. You know how I like them. Soft but not runny. Marmite soldiers like Mummy used to make … all present and correct. The chickens not laying? Damn their eyes, Agnes. What’s the point of a chicken that don’t lay? Is this not his inheritance? Is it not his right? He lives in the stately pile where he was brought squealing and mewling into the world, a damp, unlovely ball of poisonous mauve, tearing open the curtain of his mother’s vagina with the same violence with which he will rampage through the rest of his life. Here he is now with his cheeks rampaged by spider veins, as ruby red as the oh-so-fine wines that brought them erupting to the surface, his cheeks jostling for position on a face that barely has the room to contain them. A moustache is smeared across his upper lip as if it has crawled out of his nostril, taken one look back at its own progenitor, lost all hope and died. His eyes are mad. Not ‘let’s cross and walk on the other side of the road mad’ but lizardy and definitely dangerous. He has the Trump eyebrows and they are a little mad too, leaping out of his flesh like the hoary ragwort, senecio aquaticus, which he has been unable to eradicate from the croquet lawn. Today, it being a Saturday and the weather a little cold for the time of year, he is dressed in tweed. Tweed jacket, tweed waistcoat, tweed trousers, tweed socks. He likes tweed. He even likes the sound of it when he orders a suit from the place he frequents in Savile Row though not so frequently now, not at two thousand pounds a throw. Still, it’s worth it; that moment of pleasant reassurance as the black cab stutters round the bend and spits him out at the front door. Very good to see you, my lord. And how is Lady Trump? Always a pleasure to see you down. How long in town? A nice Cheviot tweed, perhaps, in brown? Where’s the tape measure. Look lively, Miggs! I fancy our waistline may need revisiting since our last appointment, my lord. His waist no longer has a line. It’s all just flesh. He is corpulent now almost to pantomime proportions and knows that he is floundering in the scummy waters of ill health. His ancestors watch him from their curling gold frames as he descends the staircase, not one of them smiling, disappointed perhaps that this fat twerp should now be the master of the family home, that four hundred years of careful in-breeding should amount to nothing more. But does he care? He wants his breakfast, his brekky. He infantilises everything. And when he eats he will dribble his food down his chin and still wonder, in one corner of his mind, why nanny doesn’t appear to wipe it away.
He enters the breakfast room and sits down, his adipose buttocks narrowly missing the arms of the eighteenth-century Hepplewhite chair that now strains to support him. There is a white linen serviette which he unfolds and tucks into his collar beneath his chin, or rather chins for he has the double ration that is the standard issue of the well-bred English gentleman. There is a Times newspaper waiting for him but he does not pick it up quite yet. Why should he share the world’s bad news, the daily communion of depression, disorientation and decay, when he has plenty enough of his own to be getting on with? He is deaf to the whining, stentorian voices that warn of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the fall of the pound. His childhood home, the manor, is in danger. It may not last until the end of the month. These are the thoughts, the noisome squatters that occupy his mind.