I didn’t mean to get drunk with James Taylor and I still can’t remember how it happened. It’s true that he was quite distracted when he arrived and promptly ordered a bottle of the most expensive champagne on the menu followed by a good wine and several whiskies but I’d intended to leave the drinking to him. I’m not sure how much I learned in the next two hours. I was certainly no closer to learning who might have killed Alan Conway, or why, and when I woke up the following morning, I was fairly close to death myself.
‘God, I hate this fucking place.’ Those were his opening words as he slumped down at the table. He had changed into the same black leather jacket he had been wearing when I first met him and a white T-shirt. Very James Dean. ‘I’m sorry, Susan,’ he went on. ‘But I couldn’t wait for the funeral to end. That vicar didn’t have anything good to say about Alan. And that voice of his! I mean, gravelly is one thing but he could have been digging the grave himself. I didn’t even want to be there but Mr Khan insisted and he’s been helping me so I felt I owed him. Of course, everyone knows by now.’ I looked at him, questioning. ‘The money! I get the house, the land, the cash, the book rights, the lot! Well, he left quite a bit to Freddy – that’s his son – and he looked after his sister too. There’s a bequest to the church. Robeson made him pay that in return for the plot. One or two other things. But I’ve got more money than I’ve ever had in my life. Dinner’s on me, by the way – or on Alan. Did you find the missing pages of the manuscript?’
I told him that I hadn’t.
‘That’s a shame. I’ve been rummaging around for you but no luck. It’s funny to think that you’ll be dealing with me from now on, about the books, I mean. I’ve already had someone called Mark Redmond on the phone about The Atticus Adventures. He’s welcome to them as long as I don’t have to watch the bloody thing.’ He glanced at the menu, made an instant decision and slid it aside. ‘They all hate me, you know. Of course, they have to pretend. Everyone’s too nervous to come out with it but you can still see the way most of them were looking at me. I’m Alan’s bum boy and now I’ve got the lot. That’s what they were thinking.’
The champagne arrived and he waited while the waitress poured two glasses. I couldn’t help smiling. He had just become a millionaire and he was complaining about it but he was doing it in a light-hearted, even a humorous way. It was a deliberate self-parody.
He drained his glass in one go. ‘I’m putting Abbey Grange on the market first thing tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They’ll probably hold that against me too but I can’t wait to go. Mr Khan says it could be worth a couple of million pounds and I’ve already had interest from John White. Did I mention him to you? He’s the hedge fund guy next door. Super-rich. He and Alan had this huge argument a short while ago. Something to do with investments. After that, the two of them weren’t even speaking. It’s funny, isn’t it? You buy a house in the middle of the countryside with about fifty acres and the one person you don’t get on with is your neighbour. Anyway, he might buy me out – to get the extra land.’
‘Where will you go?’ I asked.
‘I’ll buy a place in London. It’s what I always wanted. I’m going to try and kick-start my career. I want to get back into acting. If they make The Atticus Adventures, they might even offer me a part. That would be a turn-up for the books, wouldn’t it? They could cast me as James Fraser so I’d end up playing a character based on me in the first place. Do you know why he was called Fraser, by the way?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Alan named him after Hugh Fraser, the actor who played Poirot’s sidekick on TV. And the flat that Atticus Pünd lived in, Tanner Court in Farringdon? That was another of Alan’s jokes. There’s a real place called Florin Court which they used in the Poirot filming. Do you get it? Tanner? Florin? They’re both old coins.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He told me. And he used to do other things too. He used to hide things.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well … names. One of the books is set in London and all the names are actually tube stations or something like that. And there’s another one where the characters are called Brooke, Waters, Forster, Wilde …’
‘They’re all writers.’
‘They’re all gay writers. It was a game he played to stop himself getting bored.’
We drank more champagne and ordered fish and chips. The restaurant was on the far side of the hotel, tucked around the corner from where the funeral drinks had taken place. There were a couple of families eating but we’d been given a corner table. The lighting was low. I asked James about the way Alan Conway had worked. He had hidden almost as much as he had revealed in his writing and there was an odd disconnect between the bestselling author and the books he had actually produced. Why all these games, these codes and secret references? Wasn’t it enough simply to tell the story?
‘He never talked to me about it,’ James said. ‘He worked incredibly hard, sometimes seven or eight hours a day. There was a notebook he filled up with clues and red herrings – all that stuff. Who was where and when, what they were doing. He said it gave him a headache, sorting everything out and if I came into the room and disturbed him, he would really yell at me. There were times when he talked about Atticus Pünd as if he was a real person and I got the idea that they weren’t the best of friends – if that doesn’t sound a little bit weird. “Atticus is destroying me! I’m fed up with him. Why do I have to write another book about him?” He said that sort of thing all the time.’
‘Is that why he decided to kill him?’
‘I don’t know. Does he die in the last book? I never saw any of it.’
‘He gets ill. He may die at the end.’
‘Alan always said there would be nine books. He’d decided that from the very start. There was something about that number that was important to him.’
‘What happened to the notebook?’ I asked. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve found it.’
James shook his head. ‘I didn’t find it. I’m sorry, but I’m pretty sure it’s not there.’
So whoever had taken the last chapters of Magpie Murders, erasing every last word from Alan’s hard drive, had also made sure that his notes had disappeared. That told me something. They knew how he worked.
We talked more about James’s life with Alan. We finished the champagne and drank the bottle of wine. The other families finished and left and by nine o’clock we had the room to ourselves. I got the impression that James was lonely. Why would a man in his end-twenties want to bury himself in a place like Framlingham? The truth was that he’d had little choice. He’d been defined by his relationship with Alan and that, if nothing else, must have been a reason to end it. James was very relaxed as he spoke to me. The two of us had become friends; maybe because of that first cigarette, maybe because of the strange circumstances that had brought us together. He told me about his early life.