Of course, that didn’t happen. Atticus Pünd Investigates was published in September 2007. I loved seeing the first copy when it arrived with Alan’s name on the front cover and his photograph on the back. Somehow it made everything feel all right, as if our whole lives had been leading to this one moment. The book got a wonderful review in the Daily Mail. ‘Watch out Poirot. There’s a smart new foreigner in town and he’s stepping into your shoes.’ By Christmas, Atticus Pünd was appearing in the bestseller lists. There were more good reviews. They even talked about Atticus on the Today programme. When the paperback came out the following spring, it seemed that the whole country wanted to buy a copy. Cloverleaf Books asked Alan to write three more and although he never told me how much he was paid, I know it was a fantastic amount.
He was suddenly a famous writer. His book was translated into lots of different languages and he was invited to all the literary festivals: Edinburgh, Oxford, Cheltenham, Hay-on-Wye, Harrogate. When the second book came out, he did a signing in Woodbridge and the queue stretched all the way round the corner. He left Woodbridge School (although Melissa continued working there) and bought a house in Orford, looking out over the river. It was just at this time that Greg, my husband, died and Alan suggested I move closer to him. He helped me buy the house in Daphne Road that you visited.
The books kept on selling. The money was pouring in. Alan asked me to help him with the third book, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. He’d always been a terrible typist. He always did his first drafts in pen and ink and he asked me to type up the first draft on the computer. Then he would make his revisions by hand and I would type them up again before he sent the manuscript to his publisher. He also asked me to help him with the research. I introduced him to one of the detectives in Ipswich and dug out information about poisons and things like that. I actually worked on four of the books. I loved being involved and I was sorry when that came to an end. It was completely my fault.
Alan changed as a result of his success. It was as if he was overwhelmed by it. If he wasn’t writing the books, he was travelling all over the world promoting them. I used to read about him in the newspapers. Sometimes I would hear him on Radio 4. But at this stage, I was seeing him less and less. And then, in 2009, just a few weeks after Night Comes Calling was published, Alan shocked me by telling me that he was leaving Melissa and I couldn’t believe it when I read that he had moved in with a young man.
It’s very difficult to explain how I felt because there was such a whirl of emotions in my head and so much that I didn’t know. Living in Orford, I saw Melissa all the time but I had absolutely no idea that the marriage wasn’t working. They always seemed so comfortable together. It all happened very quickly. No sooner had Alan told me the news than Melissa and Freddy had moved out and their home was on the market. There were no lawyers involved in the divorce. They agreed to split everything fifty-fifty.
Speaking personally, I found it quite hard to come to terms with this new side of him. I’ve never had a problem with homosexual men. There was a man I worked with who was openly gay and I got on with him perfectly well. But this was my brother, someone I had been close to all my life, and suddenly I was being asked to look at him in a completely different light. Well, you might say, he had changed in many ways. He was fifty now, a rich and successful author. He was more reclusive, harder-edged, the father of a child, a public figure. And he was gay. Why should this last fact have any special significance? Well, part of the answer was that his partner was so very young. I had nothing against James Taylor. In fact I liked him. I never thought of him as a gold-digger or anything like that although I will admit that I was horrified when Alan mentioned that he had once worked as a rent boy. I was just uneasy seeing the two of them together, sometimes holding hands or whatever. I never said anything. These days, you’re not allowed to, are you? I just felt uncomfortable. That’s all.
That wasn’t the reason we fell out, though. I was doing an awful lot of work for Alan. Somehow it hadn’t ended with the books. I was helping him with his fan mail. Some weeks he was getting more than a dozen letters and although he had a standard reply, someone still had to do the administration. I worked on some of his tax returns, in particular the double tax forms that had to be filled in so he didn’t pay tax twice. He often sent me out to get stationery or new printer cartridges for him. I looked after Freddy. In short I was working as a secretary, an office manager, an accountant and a nanny as well as holding down a full-time job in Ipswich. I didn’t mind doing any of this but one day I suggested he ought to put me on his payroll, partly as a joke. Alan was furious. It was the only time he was ever really angry with me. He reminded me that he had helped me buy my house (although he had made it clear at the time that it was a loan rather than a gift). He said he thought I had been glad to help and that if it was such a chore he would never have asked in the first place. I backed down as fast as I could but the damage had been done. Alan didn’t ask me to do anything for him again and a short time later he moved out of Orford altogether when he bought Abbey Grange.
He never told me he was ill. You have no idea how much that upsets me. But I will finish where I began. Alan was a fighter all his life. Sometimes this could make him seem difficult and aggressive but I don’t think he was either of those things. He simply knew what he wanted and he never allowed anything to get in his way. Above all, he was a writer. His writing meant everything to him. Do you really believe he would finish a novel and kill himself before he saw it published? It’s unthinkable! It’s just not the Alan Conway I knew.
St Michael’s
It seemed to me that Claire had arrived at her conclusion for all the wrong reasons. She was right to believe Alan had not committed suicide. But the way she had got there was confused. ‘I know he would have called me before he did anything foolish.’ That’s where she begins. That’s her main justification. By the end, though, she’s trying another tack. ‘Do you really believe he would finish a novel and kill himself before he saw it published?’ They’re two quite different arguments and we can deal with them separately.
Alan was never one to forget a grudge. The two of them fell out badly when Claire asked to be paid for the work she was doing and despite what she thought, I don’t believe they were ever really that close again. For example, although he told her that he was leaving Melissa it’s clear that she knew nothing about his relationship with James Taylor: he left her to read about that in the newspapers. It may be that when Alan came out as a gay man, he had left his old life behind him like a discarded suit and sadly that included Claire. If he wasn’t prepared to share his sexuality with her, why should he have shared his suicide?