And that same evening, Andreas at dinner: ‘It’s not your business. It’s not something you should get involved with.’
Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn’t say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognised Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.
The Club at the Ivy
‘How did you get on?’ Charles asked me.
I told him about my visit to Framlingham, my meetings with James Taylor, Sajid Khan and Claire Jenkins. I had not found the missing chapters. They were not on his computer. There were no handwritten pages. I’m not quite sure why, but I didn’t raise the subject of how Alan had really died or my belief that his letter might have been used purposefully to mislead us. Nor did I tell him that I had read – or tried to read – The Slide.
I had chosen to play the detective – and if there is one thing that unites all the detectives I’ve ever read about, it’s their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks the necessary questions but he doesn’t actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn’t trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It’s a relationship based entirely on deception and it’s one that, ultimately, goes nowhere. Once the killer has been identified, the detective leaves and is never seen again. In fact, everyone is glad to see the back of him. I felt some of this with Charles: there was a distance between us that had never been there before. It struck me that, if Alan really had been murdered, Charles might be a suspect – although I couldn’t think of a single reason why he would want to kill his most successful author, ruining himself in the process.
Charles had changed too. He was looking gaunt and tired, his hair less well groomed and his suit perhaps more crumpled than I’d known. It was hardly surprising. He was involved in a police investigation. He had lost a guaranteed bestseller and seen an entire year’s profits potentially wiped out. None of this was very helpful in the run-up to Christmas. Plus he was about to become a grandfather for the first time. It was showing.
But still I waded in. ‘I want to know more about the Ivy meeting,’ I said. ‘The last time you saw Alan.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I’m trying to work out what was going on in his head.’ That was only part of the truth. ‘Why he deliberately held back some of the pages.’
‘Is that what you think he did?’
‘It does look that way.’
Charles hung his head. I had never seen him so defeated. ‘This whole business is a disaster for us,’ he said. ‘I’ve been talking to Angela.’ Angela McMahon was our head of Marketing & Publicity. If I knew her, she would already be looking for a new job. ‘She says we can expect a spike in sales, especially when the police announce that Alan killed himself. There’ll be publicity. She’s trying to get a retrospective piece in the Sunday Times.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Perhaps. But it’ll all be over very quickly. It’s not even certain that the BBC will continue with the dramatisation.’
‘I can’t see that his death would make any difference,’ I said. ‘Why would they pull out now?’
‘Alan hadn’t signed the contract. They were still arguing about casting and they’ll have to wait and find out who owns the rights and that may mean starting negotiations all over again.’ Underneath the desk, Bella rolled over and grunted and my thoughts flickered, just for a moment, to the collar that Atticus Pünd had found in the second bedroom at the Lodge. Bella, Tom Blakiston’s dog, had had its throat cut. The collar was obviously a clue. How did it fit in?
‘Did Alan talk about the TV series – at the Ivy?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t mention it. No.’
‘The two of you argued.’
‘I wouldn’t call it that, Susan. We disagreed about the title of his book.’
‘You didn’t like it.’
‘I thought it sounded too much like Midsomer Murders, that’s all. I shouldn’t have mentioned it – but I hadn’t read the book at that stage and there was nothing else to talk about.’
‘And this was when the waiter dropped the plates.’
‘Yes. Alan was mid-sentence. I can’t remember what he was saying. And then there was this almighty crash.’
‘You said he was angry.’
‘He was. He went over and talked to him.’
‘The waiter?’
‘Yes.’
‘He left the table?’ I don’t know why I was pressing the point. It just seemed such an odd thing to do.
‘Yes,’ Charles said.
‘You didn’t think that was strange?’
Charles considered, ‘Not really. The two of them spoke for a minute or two. I assumed Alan was complaining. After that, he went to the toilet. Then he came back to the table and we finished the meal.’
‘I don’t suppose you can describe the waiter? Do you know his name?’
At this stage, I didn’t have a lot to go on but it seemed to me that something must have been going on that evening, when Alan met Charles. All sorts of strands come together and meet at that table. At the very moment when he handed over the manuscript something had upset him, making him argumentative. He had behaved strangely, leaving the table to complain to a waiter about an accident that had nothing to do with him. The manuscript was missing pages and two days later he had died. I said nothing to Charles. I knew he would tell me that I was wasting my time. But later that afternoon I walked down to the private members’ club and set about talking my way in.
It wasn’t difficult. The receptionist told me that the police had been in the club only the day before, asking questions about Alan’s behaviour, his state of mind. I was his editor. I was a friend of Charles Clover. Of course I could come in. I was shown up to the restaurant on the second floor. It was empty, the tables now being laid for dinner. The receptionist had given me the name of the waiter who’d had the accident with the plates on that Friday and he was waiting by the door as I came in.
‘That’s right. I was meant to be working in the bar that evening but they were short-staffed so I came up and helped in the restaurant. The two gents were starting their main course when I came out the kitchen. They were sitting over in that corner …’
Many of the waiters at the Club are young and Eastern European but Donald Leigh was neither of those things. He was from Scotland, as became obvious the moment he spoke, and in his early thirties. He was from Glasgow, he said, married with a two-year-old son. He had been in London for six years and loved working at the Ivy.