‘You should see some of the people we get in here, especially when the theatres come down.’ He was a short, stubby man with the weight of life pressing down on his shoulders. ‘Not just writers. Actors, politicians – the works.’
I had told him who I was and why I was here. He had already been questioned by the police and he gave me a shorthand version of what he had told them. Charles Clover and his guest had booked a table in the restaurant at half past seven and had left shortly after ten. He hadn’t served them. He didn’t know what they had eaten, but he remembered that they had ordered an expensive bottle of wine.
‘Mr Conway wasn’t in a very good mood.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m just telling you. He didn’t look happy.’
‘He delivered his new novel that evening.’
‘Did he? Well, bully for him. I didn’t see it, but then I was in and out. It was very busy and as I said, we were short-staffed.’
From the start, I’d had the impression that there was something he wasn’t telling me. ‘You dropped some plates,’ I said.
He looked at me sullenly. ‘I’m never going to hear the end of it. What’s the big deal?
I sighed. ‘Look, Donald – can I call you that?’
‘I’m off duty. You can call me what you like.’
‘I just want to know what happened. I worked with him. I knew him well and I didn’t much like him, if you want the truth. Anything you tell me is just between the two of us but I’m not convinced he killed himself and if you know something, if you heard something, it really might help.’
‘If you don’t think he killed himself, what do you think?’
‘I’ll tell you if you tell me what I want to know.’
He thought for a moment. ‘You mind if I have a cigarette?’ he asked.
‘I’ll join you,’ I said.
The good old cigarettes again, breaking down the barriers, putting us on the same side. We left the restaurant. There was a smokers’ area outside, a small, square patio walled off from a disapproving world. We both lit up. I told him that my name was Susan and once again promised him that this was just between the two of us. Suddenly he was eager to talk.
‘You’re a publisher?’ he said.
‘I’m an editor.’
‘But you work for a publisher.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then maybe we can help each other.’ He paused. ‘I knew Alan Conway. I knew who he was the moment I set eyes on him and that’s why I dropped those bloody plates. I forgot I was holding them and they burned through the serviette.’
‘How did you know him?’
He looked at me quite strangely. ‘Did you work on one of the Atticus Pünd novels, Night Comes Calling?’
That was the fourth in the series, the one set in a prep school. ‘I worked on all of them,’ I said.
‘What did you think of it?’
Night Comes Calling has a headmaster killed during the performance of a play. He is sitting in the darkened auditorium when a figure runs through the audience and the next thing you know, he’s been stabbed with surgical precision in the side of the neck. What’s clever is that the main suspects are all on stage at the time so couldn’t possibly have done it, although it turns out that one of them did. It takes place very shortly after the war and there’s a backstory involving cowardice and dereliction of duty. ‘I thought it was ingenious,’ I said.
‘It was my story. My idea.’ Donald Leigh had intense, brown eyes and for a moment they came alive with anger. ‘Do you want me to go on?’
‘Yes. Please tell me.’
‘All right.’ He put the cigarette to his lips and sucked hard. The tip glowed a bright red. ‘I used to love books when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘I always wanted to be a writer, even when I was at school. It wasn’t the sort of thing you admitted to at the school I went to, Bridgeton, east of Glasgow. Horrible, bloody place where they said you were queer if you used the library. It didn’t bother me. I read all the time, as many books as I could get my hands on. Spy stories – Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum. Adventure stories. Horror stories. I loved Stephen King. But best of all were detective stories. I couldn’t get enough of them. I didn’t go to university or anything like that. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to write and I’ll get there one day, Susan, I’m telling you. I’m working on a book now. I’m only doing this job to keep me going until I get there.
‘But the trouble was, it never worked out the way I wanted. When I started writing I’d have this book in my head. I knew what I wanted to write. I got the ideas and the characters, but when I put it down on the page, it wouldn’t come together. I tried and I tried and I just sat there, staring at the page and then I’d rewrite. I could do it fifty times and it still wouldn’t work. Anyway, a few years ago I saw this advertisement. There were these people who were offering weekend courses to help new writers and there was one that was available – all the way down in bloody Devonshire. But it was focusing on murder mystery. It wasn’t cheap. It was going to cost me seven hundred quid. But I’d saved up enough money and I thought it was worth a shot. So I enrolled.’
I leant forward and tapped ash into one of the neat, silver receptacles the Ivy Club had provided. I knew where this was going.
‘We all went to this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere,’ Leigh went on. He was standing there with his hands balled into fists, as if he had been rehearsing, as if this was his moment on the stage. ‘There were eleven of us in the group. A couple of them were complete tossers and there were these two women who thought they were better than the rest of us. They’d had short stories published in magazines so they were completely full of themselves. You probably meet people like that all the time. The rest of them were OK, though, and I really enjoyed being with them. You know, it made me realise that it wasn’t just me, that we all had the same problems and we were there for the same thing. There were three tutors running the course. Alan Conway was one of them.
‘I thought he was really good. He drove a beautiful car – a BMW – and they put him up in a little house on his own. We were all sharing. But he still mucked in with the rest of us. He really knew what he was talking about and of course he’d made a ton of money out of the Atticus Pünd books. I read a couple of them before I went down there. I liked them, and they weren’t that different from what I was trying to do. We had lectures and tutorials in the day. We ate together – in fact, everyone in the group had to help with the cooking. And there was plenty of booze in the evening so we could just chat and unwind. That was my favourite part of it. We all felt like equals. And one evening there was just the two of us in this little snug area and I told him about the book I was writing.
His fists tightened as he came to the inevitable point of his narrative. ‘If I give you my manuscript, will you read it?’ he asked.
It’s a question I normally dread – but I bowed to the inevitable. ‘Are you saying that Alan stole your ideas?’ I asked.
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, Susan. That’s exactly what he did.’
‘What’s your book called?’