‘He wrote a letter.’ I felt I had to tell her. ‘The day before he killed himself he wrote to us and told us what he was going to do.’
She looked at me with a mixture of disbelief and resentment in her eyes. ‘He wrote to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘To you personally?’
‘No. The letter was addressed to Charles Clover. His publisher.’
She considered this. ‘Why did he write to you? He didn’t write to me. I can’t understand that at all. We grew up together. Until he was sent away to boarding school, the two of us were inseparable. And even afterwards, when I saw him …’ Her voice trailed away and I realised that I had been foolish. I had really upset her.
‘Would you like me to leave?’ I asked.
She nodded. She had taken out a handkerchief but she wasn’t using it. She was balling it in her fist.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said.
She didn’t come with me to the door. I showed myself out and when I looked back through the window, she was still sitting where I had left her. She wasn’t crying. She was just staring at the wall, offended, angry.
Woodbridge
Katie, my sister, is two years younger than me although she looks older. It’s a running joke between us. She complains that I’ve had it easy, living on my own in a small, chaotic flat while she’s looked after two hyperactive children, a variety of pets and an unreconstructed husband who can be kind and romantic but who still likes his food on the table at the right time. They have a large house and half an acre of garden, which Katie keeps like something out of a magazine. The house is seventies modern with sliding windows, gas-effect fires and a giant TV in the living room. There are almost no books. I’m not making any judgment. It’s just the sort of thing I can’t help but notice.
The two of us live in different worlds. She’s much slimmer than I am and takes more care with her appearance. She dresses in sensible clothes, which she buys from catalogues, and has her hair done once a fortnight, somewhere in Woodbridge where, she tells me, the hairdresser is her friend. I hardly know my hairdresser’s name – it’s Doz, Daz or Dez or something but I don’t know what it’s short for. Katie doesn’t need to work but she’s spent ten years managing a garden centre half a mile down the road. God knows how she’s been able to balance that with her full-time job as wife and mother. Of course, there’s been a succession of au pairs and nannies as the children have grown up. There was the anorexic one, the born-again Christian one, the lonely Australian one, and the one who disappeared. We talk to each other two or three times a week on FaceTime and it’s funny how, although we have so little in common, we’ve always been such good friends.
I certainly couldn’t leave Suffolk without seeing her. Woodbridge was only twelve miles from Orford and, as luck would have it, she had the afternoon off. Gordon was in London. He commuted there every single day: Woodbridge to Ipswich, Ipswich to Liverpool Street, and then back again. He said he didn’t mind but I didn’t like to think how many hours he’d wasted on trains. He could easily afford a pied-à-terre but he said he hated being apart from his family, even for one or two nights. They always made a big deal about going away together: summer holidays, skiing at Christmas, various expeditions at weekends. The only time I ever felt lonely was when I thought about them.
After I’d left Claire Jenkins, I drove straight over. Katie was in the kitchen. Despite the size of the house, that’s where she always seemed to be. We embraced and she brought me tea and a great slab of cake, home-made of course. ‘So what are you doing in Suffolk?’ she asked. I told her that Alan Conway had died and she grimaced. ‘Oh yes. Of course. I heard about it on the news. Is that very bad?’
‘It’s not good,’ I said.
‘I thought you didn’t like him.’
Had I really said that to her? ‘My feelings have got nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘He was our biggest author.’
‘Hadn’t he just finished another book?’
I told her that the manuscript was missing two or three chapters, that there was no trace of it on his computer and that all his handwritten notes had disappeared too. Even as I was explaining all this, I realised that it sounded very odd, like a conspiracy thriller. I remembered what Claire had said to me, that her brother would never have committed suicide.
‘That’s very awkward,’ Katie said. ‘What will you do if you can’t find them?’
It was something I had been thinking about and which I intended to raise with Charles. We needed Magpie Murders. But when you consider all the different types of story out there in the market, the whodunnit is the one that really, absolutely, needs to be complete. The Mystery of Edwin Drood was the one example I could think of that had managed to survive but Alan was no Charles Dickens. So what were we going to do? We could find another writer to step in and finish it. Sophie Hannah had done a great job with Poirot but she would have to solve the murder first, something which I had signally failed to do. We could publish it as a very annoying Christmas present: something to give someone you didn’t like. We could have a competition – Tell us who killed Sir Magnus Pye and win a weekend on the Orient Express. Or we could keep looking and just hope that the wretched chapters would turn up.
We talked about this for a while. Then I changed the subject, asking about Gordon and the children. He was fine. He was enjoying work. They were going skiing at Christmas: they’d rented a chalet at Courchevel. Daisy and Jack were coming to the end of their time at Woodbridge School. They had been there for almost all their lives; first at Queen’s House, the pre-prep school, then at The Abbey, now in the main school. It was a lovely place. I had visited it a couple of times. You didn’t expect to find so much land and so many handsome buildings tucked away in a little town like Woodbridge. It struck me that the school suited my sister’s personality very well. Nothing changed. Everything was perfect. The outside world was all too easy to ignore.
‘The children never really liked Alan Conway,’ Katie said, suddenly.
‘Yes. You told me.’
‘You didn’t like him either.’
‘Not really.’
‘Are you sorry I introduced him to you?’
‘Not at all, Katie. We made a fortune out of him.’
‘But he gave you a hard time.’ She shrugged. ‘From what I heard, nobody was sorry when he left Woodbridge School.’
Alan Conway stopped teaching soon after the first book came out. By the time his second book appeared, he was earning way more than he ever had as a teacher.
‘What was wrong with him?’ I asked.
Katie thought for a moment. ‘I’m not sure I know. He just had a reputation – the way some teachers do. I think he was quite strict. He didn’t have much of a sense of humour.’
It’s true. There are very few jokes in the Atticus Pünd stories.