Elizabeth Faber
I woke up the next morning just after seven o’clock with a headache and a nasty taste in my mouth. Bizarrely, James’s car keys were still clutched in my hand and for a ghastly moment I half expected to open my eyes and find him lying next to me. I went into the bathroom and had a long, hot shower. Then I dressed and went downstairs to black coffee and grapefruit juice. I had the manuscript of Magpie Murders with me and, despite my state, it didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for.
All the characters are named after birds.
When I’d read the book for the first time, I’d made a note to tackle Alan about Sir Magnus Pye and Pye Hall. The names had struck me as a little childish – old-fashioned at the very least. They felt like something out of Tintin. Going through it again, I realised that almost everyone, even the most minor characters, had been given the same treatment. There are the obvious ones – the vicar is Robin and his wife is Hen. Whitehead (antique dealer), Redwing (doctor) and Weaver (undertaker) are all fairly common species, as are Crane and Lanner (the estate agents in Bath) and Kite (the landlord of the Ferryman). Some are a little more difficult to pin down. Joy Sanderling is named after a small wading bird and Jack Dartford after a warbler. Brent, the groundsman, is a type of goose – and his middle name is Jay. A nineteenth-century naturalist called Thomas Blakiston had an owl named after him and inspires the family at the heart of the story. And so on.
Does it matter? Well, yes, actually. It worried me.
Character names are important. I’ve known writers who’ve used their friends while others have turned to reference books: the Oxford Book of Quotations and the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia are two I’ve heard mentioned. What’s the secret of a good name in fiction? Simplicity is often the key. James Bond didn’t get to be who he was by having too many syllables. That said, the name is often the first thing you learn about a character and I think it helps if it fits comfortably, if it feels appropriate. Rebus and Morse are both very good examples. Both are types of code and as the role of the detective is effectively to decode the clues and the information, you’re already halfway there. Nineteenth-century authors like Charles Dickens took the idea a stage further. Who would want to be taught by Wackford Squeers, cared for by Mr Bumble or married to Jerry Cruncher? But these are comic grotesques. He was more circumspect when it came to the heroes and heroines with whom he wanted you to connect.
Sometimes authors stumble onto iconic names almost by accident. The most famous example is Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker. You have to wonder if they would have achieved the same worldwide success if Conan Doyle hadn’t had second thoughts and plumped for Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson. I’ve actually seen the manuscript where the change is made: one sweep of the pen and literary history was made. By the same token, would Pansy O’Hara have set the world on fire in quite the same way as Scarlett did after Margaret Mitchell changed her mind when she finished Gone With the Wind? Names have a way of stamping themselves on our consciousness. Peter Pan, Luke Skywalker, Jack Reacher, Fagin, Shylock, Moriarty … can we imagine them as anything else?
The point of all this is that the name and the character are intertwined. They inform each other. But it’s not the case in Magpie Murders – or in any other of the books that Alan Conway wrote and which I edited. By turning all his subsidiary characters into birds or tube stations (or makes of fountain pen in Atticus Pünd Takes the Case), he had trivialised them and that in turn had demeaned them. Maybe I’m overstating this. After all, his detective stories were never meant to be more than entertainments. It just suggested a sort of carelessness, almost a disdain towards his own work and it depressed me. I was also sorry that I hadn’t noticed it before.
After breakfast, I packed, paid for the room, then drove over to Abbey Grange to drop off James Taylor’s keys. It was strange seeing the house for what I was fairly sure would be the last time. Maybe it was the grey, Suffolk sky but it seemed to have a mournful quality as if it had somehow sensed not only the death of its old owner but the fact that it was no longer wanted by his successor. I could barely bring myself to look at the tower which now seemed grim and threatening. It occurred to me that if ever a building was destined to be haunted, it was this one. Some day, not far in the future, a new owner would be woken in the middle of the night, first by a cry in the wind and then the soft thud of something hitting the turf. James was absolutely right to leave.
I thought of ringing the doorbell but decided against it. Most likely, James was still in bed and anyway, fuelled by alcohol, he might have been more open with me than he had intended. Better to avoid the morning-after recriminations.
I had an appointment in Ipswich. Claire Jenkins had been true to her word and had arranged for me to meet Detective Superintendent Locke, not at the police station but at a Starbucks near the cinema. I’d received a text with instructions. Eleven o’clock. He could give me fifteen minutes. I had plenty of time to get over there but first I wanted to visit the house next door to Alan’s. I had seen John White, in his orange wellington boots, at the funeral but we hadn’t yet had a chance to talk. James had mentioned that Alan had fallen out with him and he had turned up as a character in Magpie Murders. I wanted to know more. This being a Sunday, there was every chance that I would find him at home so I dropped James’s keys through the letter box, then drove round.
Despite the name, there was no sign of any apple trees at Apple Farm and nor for that matter did it look anything like a farm. It was a handsome building, much more conventional than Abbey Grange, built, I would have said, in the forties. It was all very presentable with a neat gravel driveway, perfect hedges and extensive lawns cut into green stripes. There was an open garage opposite the front door with a quite fabulous car parked outside: a two-seater Ferrari 458 Italia. I wouldn’t have said no to tearing around a few Suffolk lanes in that – but it wouldn’t have left me much change out of ￡200,000. It certainly made my own MGB look a little sad.
I rang the front door. I guessed the house must have at least eight bedrooms and that, given its size, I might wait quite a time before anyone reached me but in fact the door opened almost at once and I found myself facing an unfriendly-looking woman with black hair parted in the middle, dressed in quite masculine clothes: sports jacket, tight-fitting trousers, ankle-length boots. Was she his wife? She hadn’t been at the funeral. Somehow, I doubted it.
‘I wonder if I could speak to Mr White?’ I said. ‘Are you Mrs White?’