The letter had been sent the day after Alan had handed over the manuscript at the Ivy Club. I wished now that I had looked at the envelope more closely to see if it had been sent from London or from Suffolk although Charles had ripped off some of the postmark when he opened it. Either way, it was certain that Alan had composed it himself. It was his handwriting – and unless he had been forced to write with a gun at his head, it set out his intentions quite clearly. Or did it? Back in my flat in Crouch End, with a glass of wine in my hand and a third cigarette on the go, I wasn’t so sure.
The first page is an apology. Alan has behaved badly. But it’s part of a general pattern of behaviour. He’s ill. He says that he has decided against treatment and this will kill him very soon anyway. There is nothing on this page about suicide – quite the opposite. It’s the cancer that’s going to kill him because he’s not going to have chemotherapy. And look again at the bottom of page one, all that stuff about London literary functions. He’s not writing about his life being over. He’s writing about how it’s going to continue.
Page two does relate to his death, particularly in the paragraph about James Taylor and the will. But again, it’s non-specific. ‘There are bound to be rows when I’ve gone.’ He could be talking about any time: six weeks from now, six months, a year. It’s only on page three that he cuts to the chase. ‘By the time you read this, it will all be finished.’ When I first read the letter, so soon after hearing what had happened, I automatically assumed that by ‘it’, Alan was referring to his life. His life would be over. He would have killed himself. Rereading it, though, it occurred to me he could just as easily have been talking about his writing career – which was the subject of the paragraph before. He had delivered the last book. There weren’t going to be any more.
And then we come to ‘the decision that I have made’ a few lines later. Is it really the decision to jump off his tower? Or is it simply the decision, which he has already explained, not to have chemotherapy, to kill himself in that sense only? By the end of the letter he’s writing about the people who will mourn him but, again, he has already established that he is going to die. Nowhere does he state outright that he is planning to take matters into his own hands. ‘As I prepare to take leave of this world …’ Isn’t that a bit gentle for what he supposedly has in mind, jumping off a tower?
This was what I thought. And although there was something else about the letter, which I missed completely, and which would prove that almost everything I’ve written here was wrong, by the end of that day, everything had changed. I knew that the letter was not what it seemed; that it was no more than a general valedictory and that someone must have read it and realised that it could be misinterpreted. Claire Jenkins and Sajid Khan were right. The most successful murder writer of his generation had himself been murdered.
The doorbell rang.
Andreas had telephoned me an hour before and there he was on my doorstep with a bunch of flowers and a bulging supermarket bag that would contain Cretan olives, wonderful thyme honey, oil, wine, cheese, and mountain tea. It wasn’t just that he was generous. He had a real love of his country and everything it produced. It’s very Greek. The endlessly protracted financial crisis of this summer and the year before might have dropped out of the British newspapers – how many times can you predict the total collapse of a country? – but he had told me how much it was still hurting at home. Business was down. The tourists were staying away. It was as if the more he brought me, the more he would convince me that everything was going to be all right. It was sweet and old-fashioned of him to ring the bell, by the way. He had his own key.
I had tidied the flat, showered and changed and I hoped I looked reasonably desirable. I was always quite nervous about seeing him after these long separations. I wanted to be sure that nothing had changed. Andreas was looking very well. After six weeks in the sunshine his skin was darker than ever and he was slimmer too: a combination of swimming and low-carb Cretan food. Not that he was ever fat. He’s built like a soldier with square shoulders, a chiselled face and black hair falling in thick curls like a Greek shepherd – or a god. He has mischievous eyes and a slightly crooked smile, and although I wouldn’t say he’s a conventionally handsome man, he’s fun to be with, intelligent, easy-going, always good company.
He’s also linked to Woodbridge School because that’s where I first met him. He was teaching Latin and ancient Greek and it’s funny to think that he knew Alan Conway before I did. Melissa, Alan’s wife, also taught there, so the three of them were together long before I came onto the scene. I was introduced to him at the end of a summer term. It was sports day and I was there to support Jack and Daisy. We got talking and I liked him immediately, but it wasn’t until a year later that we met again. By then he had moved to Westminster School in London and he rang Katie to get my number. It was nice that he’s remembered me after all that time but we didn’t begin a romance straight away. We were friends for a long time before we became lovers: in fact we’d only been in our present relationship for a couple of years. We hardly ever talked about Alan, by the way. There was bad blood between them although I didn’t ask why. I would never call Andreas the jealous sort but I got the impression that deep down he resented Alan’s success.
I knew all about Andreas’s past: he didn’t want there to be secrets between us. The first time he had got married, he had been far too young, just nineteen, and the marriage had fallen apart while he was doing his national service in the Greek army. His second wife, Aphrodite, lived in Athens. She was a teacher, like him, and she had come with him to England. That was when things had gone wrong. She missed her family. She was homesick. ‘I should have seen she was unhappy and gone back with her,’ Andreas told me. ‘But it was too late. She went on her own.’ They were still friends and he saw her from time to time.
We walked down to Crouch End for dinner. There was a Greek restaurant, actually run by Cypriots, and although you would have thought it was the last food he would want after a summer at home, it was a tradition that we always went there. It was another warm evening so we ate outside, sitting close to each other on the narrow balcony with heaters blazing down unnecessarily above our heads. We ordered taramasalata, dolmades, loukaniko, souvlakia … all prepared in the tiniest of kitchens beside the front door, and shared a bottle of rough red wine.
It was Andreas who raised the subject of Alan’s death. He had read about it in the newspapers and he was concerned about what it would mean for me. ‘Will it hurt the company?’ he asked. He spoke perfect English, by the way. His mother was English and he had been brought up bilingual. I told him about the missing chapters and, after that, quite naturally, the rest of it came out too. I didn’t see why I should keep anything back from him and it actually felt good having someone I could use as a sounding board. I described my visit to Framlingham and all the people I’d met there.
‘I saw Katie,’ I added. ‘She asked after you.’