And then, at the end of the meal, as we sipped the thick, sweet coffee that I knew never to refer to as Turkish, he suddenly said: ‘I’m thinking of leaving Westminster.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘At the end of term. I’m want to give up teaching.’
‘This is very sudden, Andreas. Why?’
He told me. A hotel had come up for sale on the edge of Agios Nikolaos; an intimate, family-run business with twelve rooms right next to the sea. The owners were in their sixties and their children had left the island. Like so many young Greeks, they were in London, but Andreas had a cousin who worked there and they looked on him almost as a son. They had offered him the opportunity to buy it and the cousin had come to him to see if he could help with the finance. Andreas was tired of teaching. Every time he went back to Crete, he felt more at home and he was beginning to ask himself why he had ever left. He was fifty years old. This was a chance to change his life.
‘But Andreas,’ I protested. ‘You don’t know anything about running a hotel.’
‘Yannis has experience and it’s small. How difficult can it be?’
‘But you said tourists weren’t going to Crete any more.’
‘That was this year. Next year will be better.’
‘But won’t you miss London …?’
All my sentences were beginning with ‘but’. Did I genuinely think it was a bad idea or was this the change that I had been fearing, the realisation that I was about to lose him? It was exactly what my sister had warned me about. I was going to end up on my own.
‘I hoped you’d be more excited,’ he said.
‘Why would I be excited?’ I asked, miserably.
‘Because I want you to come with me.’
‘Are you serious?’
He laughed a second time. ‘Of course! Why do you think I’m telling you all this?’ The waiter had brought raki and he poured two glasses, filling them to the brim. ‘You’ll love it, Susan, I promise you. Crete is a wonderful island and it’s about time you met my family and friends. They’re always asking about you.’
‘Are you asking me to marry you?’
He raised his glass, the mischief back in his eyes. ‘What would you say if I did?’
‘I probably wouldn’t say anything. I’d be too shocked.’ I didn’t mean to offend him, so I added: ‘I’d say I’d think about it.’
‘That’s all I’m asking you to do.’
‘I have a job, Andreas. I have a life.’
‘Crete is three and a half hours away. It’s not the other side of the world. And maybe, after everything you’ve told me, soon you won’t have a choice.’
That was certainly true. Without Magpie Murders, without Alan, who could say how long we could go on?
‘I don’t know. It’s a lovely idea. But you shouldn’t have sprung it on me so suddenly. You’re going to have to give me time to think.’
‘Of course.’
I picked up my raki and drank it in one gulp. I wanted to ask him what would happen if I decided to stay. Would that be it? Would he leave without me? It was too soon to have that conversation but the truth is that I thought it unlikely that I would swap my life – Cloverleaf, Crouch End – for Crete. I liked my job and I had my relationship with Charles to consider, particularly now when everything was so difficult. I couldn’t see myself as some twenty-first century Shirley Valentine, sitting on the rocks, a thousand miles from the nearest Waterstones.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘You might be right. By the end of the year I could be out of a job. I suppose I can always make the beds.’
Andreas stayed the night and it was good to have him back again. But as I lay there in the darkness, with his arms around me, there were a whole lot of thoughts racing through my mind, refusing to let me sleep. I saw myself getting out of the car at Abbey Grange with the tower looming over me, examining the tyre tracks, searching Alan’s office. Once again the photographs in Sajid Khan’s office seemed to slide in front of me but this time they showed Alan, Charles, James Taylor, Claire Jenkins and me. At the same time, I replayed snippets of conversation.
‘I was just worried you might get dizzy.’ James grabbing hold of me at the top of the tower.
‘I think someone killed him.’ Alan’s sister in Orford.
And that same evening, Andreas at dinner: ‘It’s not your business. It’s not something you should get involved with.’
Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn’t say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognised Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.
The Club at the Ivy
‘How did you get on?’ Charles asked me.
I told him about my visit to Framlingham, my meetings with James Taylor, Sajid Khan and Claire Jenkins. I had not found the missing chapters. They were not on his computer. There were no handwritten pages. I’m not quite sure why, but I didn’t raise the subject of how Alan had really died or my belief that his letter might have been used purposefully to mislead us. Nor did I tell him that I had read – or tried to read – The Slide.
I had chosen to play the detective – and if there is one thing that unites all the detectives I’ve ever read about, it’s their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks the necessary questions but he doesn’t actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn’t trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It’s a relationship based entirely on deception and it’s one that, ultimately, goes nowhere. Once the killer has been identified, the detective leaves and is never seen again. In fact, everyone is glad to see the back of him. I felt some of this with Charles: there was a distance between us that had never been there before. It struck me that, if Alan really had been murdered, Charles might be a suspect – although I couldn’t think of a single reason why he would want to kill his most successful author, ruining himself in the process.
Charles had changed too. He was looking gaunt and tired, his hair less well groomed and his suit perhaps more crumpled than I’d known. It was hardly surprising. He was involved in a police investigation. He had lost a guaranteed bestseller and seen an entire year’s profits potentially wiped out. None of this was very helpful in the run-up to Christmas. Plus he was about to become a grandfather for the first time. It was showing.
But still I waded in. ‘I want to know more about the Ivy meeting,’ I said. ‘The last time you saw Alan.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I’m trying to work out what was going on in his head.’ That was only part of the truth. ‘Why he deliberately held back some of the pages.’
‘Is that what you think he did?’
‘It does look that way.’
Charles hung his head. I had never seen him so defeated. ‘This whole business is a disaster for us,’ he said. ‘I’ve been talking to Angela.’ Angela McMahon was our head of Marketing & Publicity. If I knew her, she would already be looking for a new job. ‘She says we can expect a spike in sales, especially when the police announce that Alan killed himself. There’ll be publicity. She’s trying to get a retrospective piece in the Sunday Times.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Perhaps. But it’ll all be over very quickly. It’s not even certain that the BBC will continue with the dramatisation.’
‘I can’t see that his death would make any difference,’ I said. ‘Why would they pull out now?’
‘Alan hadn’t signed the contract. They were still arguing about casting and they’ll have to wait and find out who
owns the rights and that may mean starting negotiations all over again.’ Underneath the desk, Bella rolled over and grunted and my thoughts flickered, just for a moment, to the collar that Atticus Pünd had found in the second bedroom at the Lodge. Bella, Tom Blakiston’s dog, had had its throat cut. The collar was obviously a clue. How did it fit in?
‘Did Alan talk about the TV series – at the Ivy?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t mention it. No.’
‘The two of you argued.’
‘I wouldn’t call it that, Susan. We disagreed about the title of his book.’
‘You didn’t like it.’
‘I thought it sounded too much like Midsomer Murders, that’s all. I shouldn’t have mentioned it – but I hadn’t read the book at that stage and there was nothing else to talk about.’
‘And this was when the waiter dropped the plates.’
‘Yes. Alan was mid-sentence. I can’t remember what he was saying. And then there was this almighty crash.’
‘You said he was angry.’
‘He was. He went over and talked to him.’
‘The waiter?’
‘Yes.’
‘He left the table?’ I don’t know why I was pressing the point. It just seemed such an odd thing to do.
‘Yes,’ Charles said.
‘You didn’t think that was strange?’
Charles considered, ‘Not really. The two of them spoke for a minute or two. I assumed Alan was complaining. After that, he went to the toilet. Then he came back to the table and we finished the meal.’
‘I don’t suppose you can describe the waiter? Do you know his name?’
At this stage, I didn’t have a lot to go on but it seemed to me that something must have been going on that evening, when Alan met Charles. All sorts of strands come together and meet at that table. At the very moment when he handed over the manuscript something had upset him, making him argumentative. He had behaved strangely, leaving the table to complain to a waiter about an accident that had nothing to do with him. The manuscript was missing pages and two days later he had died. I said nothing to Charles. I knew he would tell me that I was wasting my time. But later that afternoon I walked down to the private members’ club and set about talking my way in.
It wasn’t difficult. The receptionist told me that the police had been in the club only the day before, asking questions about Alan’s behaviour, his state of mind. I was his editor. I was a friend of Charles Clover. Of course I could come in. I was shown up to the restaurant on the second floor. It was empty, the tables now being laid for dinner. The receptionist had given me the name of the waiter who’d had the accident with the plates on that Friday and he was waiting by the door as I came in.
‘That’s right. I was meant to be working in the bar that evening but they were short-staffed so I came up and helped in the restaurant. The two gents were starting their main course when I came out the kitchen. They were sitting over in that corner …’
Many of the waiters at the Club are young and Eastern European but Donald Leigh was neither of those things. He was from Scotland, as became obvious the moment he spoke, and in his early thirties. He was from Glasgow, he said, married with a two-year-old son. He had been in London for six years and loved working at the Ivy.
‘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.