She also makes the mistake of thinking that the leap from the tower was something he had planned. ‘He would never have left me on my own, not without warning me first.’ But that’s not necessarily the case. He could have just woken up and decided to do it. He might have completely forgotten that he had a book coming out. He would have been dead before it was published anyway. What did it matter to him?
Her account was interesting in other ways. I hadn’t realised, even now, how much of his private life Alan had woven into Magpie Murders. Did he know, before he was diagnosed, that this would be his final novel? ‘We were pirates, treasure hunters, soldiers, spies,’ Robert Blakiston tells Atticus Pünd but he’s also talking about Alan’s childhood. Alan liked codes – Robert rapped out codes on his bedroom wall. And then there are the anagrams and the acrostics. Robeson becomes Osborne. Clarissa Pye solves an anagram in the Daily Telegraph crossword. Could Alan have hidden some sort of secret message inside his book, something that he knew about someone? What message could it be? For that matter, if he knew something horrible enough to get himself killed, why play around? Why not just come straight out with it?
Or could it be that the message was actually concealed in the final chapters? Had someone stolen them for that reason, killing Alan at the same time? That made some sort of sense, although it would beg the question of who, if anyone, had read them.
There were still a couple of hours until dinner and I decided to walk up to the Castle Inn. I needed to clear my head. It was already getting dark and Framlingham had a forlorn quality, the shops closed, the streets empty. As I passed the church, I saw a movement, a shadowy figure moving between the tombstones. It was the vicar. I watched him disappear into the church, the door booming shut behind him, and on an impulse I decided to follow. My steps took me past Alan’s grave and it was horrible to think of him lying beneath that freshly dug earth. I had thought him cold and silent when I had met him. He was eternally so in death.
I hurried forward and entered the church. The interior was huge, cluttered, draughty, a collage of different centuries. It was probably unhappy to have arrived at this one: the twelfth century had provided the arches, the sixteenth the lovely wooden ceiling, the eighteenth the altar – and what had the twenty-first bestowed upon St Michael? Atheism and indifference. Robeson was at the back of the pews, quite close to the door. He was on his knees and for a brief moment I assumed he was praying. Then I saw that he was attending to an old radiator, bleeding it. He turned a key and there was a hiss of stale air followed by a rattle as the pipes began to fill. He turned as I approached and half-remembered me, getting unsteadily to his feet. ‘Good evening, Mrs …?’
‘Susan Ryeland,’ I reminded him. ‘Miss. I was the one who asked you about Alan.’
‘A lot of people have been asking me about Alan today.’
‘I asked if he bullied you.’
He remembered that and looked away. ‘I think I told you what you wanted to know.’
‘Were you aware that he had put you in his latest book?’
That surprised him. He ran a hand over the slab that was his chin. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s a vicar in it who looks like you. He even has a similar name.’
‘Does he mention the church?’
‘St Michael’s? No.’
‘Well, that’s all right then.’ I waited for him to continue. ‘It would be quite typical of Alan to say something unpleasant about me. He had that sort of sense of humour – if you can call it that.’
‘You didn’t like him very much.’
‘Why are you asking me these questions, Miss Ryeland? What exactly is your interest?’
‘Didn’t I tell you? I was his editor at Cloverleaf Books.’
‘I see. I’m afraid I never read any of his novels. I’ve never been very interested in whodunnits and mysteries. I prefer non-fiction.’
‘When did you meet Alan Conway?’
He didn’t want to answer but he could see I wasn’t going to stop. ‘Actually, we were at school together.’
‘You were at Chorley Hall?’
‘Yes. I came to Framlingham a few years ago and I was quite surprised to see him in my congregation – not that he came to church very often. The two of us were exactly the same age.’
‘And?’ There was a silence. ‘You said he had a dominant personality. Did he bully you?’
Osborne sighed. ‘I’m not sure it’s quite appropriate to be discussing these things, today of all days. But if you must know, the circumstances were quite unusual in that his father was the headmaster at the school. That gave him a certain power. He could say things … do things … and he knew that none of us would dare to say a word against him.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Well, I suppose you could say that they were practical jokes. I’m sure that’s how he viewed them. But they could also be quite hurtful and malicious. In my case, certainly, he caused me a certain amount of upset although it’s all water under the bridge now. It was a very long time ago.’
‘What did he do?’ Robeson was still reluctant, so I pressed him. ‘It is very important, Mr Robeson. I believe Alan’s death wasn’t quite as straightforward as it seems and anything you can tell me about him, in confidence, would be very helpful.’
‘It was a prank, Miss Ryeland. Nothing more.’ He waited for me to go away and when I didn’t, he added: ‘He took photographs …’
‘Photographs?’
‘They were horrible photographs!’
It wasn’t the vicar who had spoken. The words had come from nowhere. That’s the thing about church acoustics. They lend themselves to surprise appearances. I looked round and there was the ginger-haired woman I had seen at the hotel, presumably his wife, striding towards us, her shoes rapping out a determined rhythm on the stone floor. She stopped next to him, gazing at me with undisguised hostility. ‘Tom really doesn’t want to talk about it,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand why you’re bothering him. We buried Alan Conway today and as far as I’m concerned, that’s an end to it. We’re not going to engage in any further tittle-tattle. Did you fix the radiators?’ She had asked this last question in exactly the same tone, without stopping for breath.
‘Yes, dear.’
‘Then let’s go home.’
She put her arm in his and although her head barely came up to his shoulder, it was she who propelled him out of the church. The door banged shut behind them and I was left wondering exactly what the photographs had shown and, at the same time, whether it had been photographs that Mary Blakiston had found on the kitchen table in the vicarage at Saxby-on-Avon and if, perhaps, they had been responsible for her death.
Dinner at the Crown