Magpie Murders

‘I think he was always quite secretive,’ she went on. ‘I met him a few times at sports day and things like that and I was never sure what he was thinking. I always got the feeling that he was hiding something.’

‘His sexuality?’ I suggested.

‘Perhaps. When he left his wife for that boy, it was completely unexpected. But it wasn’t that. It was just, when you met him, it was as if he was angry about something but had no intention of telling you what it was.’

We had been chatting for a while and I didn’t want to get caught up in the London traffic. I finished my tea and refused more cake. I’d already had a huge slice and what I really wanted was a cigarette – Katie hated me smoking. I began to make my excuses.

‘Will you be back soon?’ she asked. ‘The kids would love to see you. We could all have dinner.’

‘I’ll probably be up and down quite a few times,’ I said

‘That’s good. We miss you.’ I knew what was coming and sure enough Katie didn’t disappoint me. ‘Is everything all right, Sue?’ she asked, in the sort of voice that said it clearly wasn’t.

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

‘You know I worry about you, on your own in that flat.’

‘I’m not alone. I’ve got Andreas.’

‘How is Andreas?’

‘He’s very well.’

‘He must be back at school by now.’

‘No. They don’t start until the end of the week. He’s been in Crete for the summer.’ As soon as I said that, I wished I hadn’t. It meant I was alone after all.

‘Why didn’t you go with him?’

‘He invited me but I was too busy.’ That was only half true. I had never been to Crete. Something in me resisted the idea, stepping into his world, putting myself under examination.

‘Is there any chance …? I mean, are the two of you …?’

That’s what it always came down to. Marriage, for Katie with twenty-seven years of it behind her, was the be-all and end-all, the only reason really to be alive. Marriage was her Woodbridge School, her grounds, the wall surrounding her – and as far as she was concerned, I was stuck outside, looking in through the gate.

‘Oh, we never talk about it,’ I said, breezily. ‘We like things the way they are. Anyway, I would never marry him.’

‘Because he’s Greek?’

‘Because he’s too Greek. He’d drive me mad.’

Why did Katie always have to judge me by her standards? Why couldn’t she see that I didn’t need what she had and that I might be perfectly happy the way things were? If I sound irritated it’s only because I worried she was right. Part of me was asking myself the very same thing. I would never have children. I had a man who had been away the whole summer and who, during term time, only came over at weekends – if he wasn’t tied up with football, school play rehearsals or a Saturday trip to the Tate. I had devoted my whole life to books; to bookshops; to booksellers; to bookish people like Charles and Alan. And in doing so, I had ended up like a book: on the shelf.

I was glad to get back into the MGB. There are no speed cameras between Woodbridge and the A12 and I kept my foot hard on the accelerator. When I reached the M25, I turned on the radio and listened to Mariella Frostrup. She was talking about books. By then I felt OK.





The letter

You’d have thought that after twenty years editing murder mysteries I’d have noticed when I found myself in the middle of one. Alan Conway had not committed suicide. He had gone up to the tower to have his breakfast and someone had pushed him off. Wasn’t it obvious?

Two people who knew him well, his solicitor and his sister, had insisted that he was not the sort to kill himself, and his diary – which showed that he had been cheerfully buying theatre tickets and arranging tennis games and lunches for the week following his demise, seemed to confirm it. The manner of his death, painful and uncertain, felt wrong. And then there were the suspects already queuing up to take a starring role in the last chapter. Claire had mentioned his ex-wife, Melissa, and his neighbour, a hedge fund manager called John White, with whom he’d had some sort of dispute. She herself had argued with him. James Taylor had the most obvious motive. Alan had died just one day before he intended to sign his new will. James also had access to the house and would know that, if the sun were shining, Alan would have his breakfast on the roof. And August had been warm.

I thought about all this as I drove home but it still took me a while to accept it. In a whodunnit, when a detective hears that Sir Somebody Smith has been stabbed thirty-six times on a train or decapitated, they accept it as a quite natural occurrence. They pack their bags and head off to ask questions, collect clues, ultimately to make an arrest. But I wasn’t a detective. I was an editor – and, until a week ago, not a single one of my acquaintances had managed to die in an unusual and a violent manner. Apart from my own parents and Alan, I hardly knew anyone who had died at all. It’s strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery and what is it that attracts us – the crime or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable? I made a mental note to check out Alan’s sales figures in San Pedro Sula in the Honduras (the murder capital of the world). It might be that they didn’t read him at all.

Everything came down to the letter. Without telling anyone, I had made a copy of it before Charles sent it to the police and as soon as I got home I took it out and examined it again. I remembered the strange anomaly – a handwritten letter in a typewritten envelope – that I had seen in Charles’s office. It was an exact reflection, an inverse of what Atticus Pünd had discovered at Pye Hall. Sir Magnus had been sent a typewritten death threat in a handwritten envelope. What, in each instance, did it mean? And, if you put the two of them together, was there some greater significance, a pattern I could not see?

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