His fists tightened as he came to the inevitable point of his narrative. ‘If I give you my manuscript, will you read it?’ he asked.
It’s a question I normally dread – but I bowed to the inevitable. ‘Are you saying that Alan stole your ideas?’ I asked.
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, Susan. That’s exactly what he did.’
‘What’s your book called?’
‘Death Treads the Boards.’
It was a terrible title. But of course I didn’t say that. ‘I can look at it for you,’ I said. ‘But I can’t promise I can help you.’
‘All I want you to do is look at it. That’s all I’m asking.’ He looked me in the eye as if daring me to refuse. ‘I told Alan Conway my story,’ he went on. ‘I told him all about the murder I’d thought up. It was late and there were just the two of us in the room, no witnesses. He asked me if he could look at the manuscript and I was delighted. Everyone wanted him to read their work. That was the whole point.’
He finished his cigarette and ground it out, then promptly lit a second.
‘He read it very quickly. There were only two days of the course left and on the last day he took me aside and gave me some advice. He said I used too many adjectives. He said my dialogue wasn’t realistic. What’s realistic dialogue meant to sound like for heaven’s sake? It’s not real! It’s fiction! He gave me some quite good ideas about my main character, my detective. I remember one of the things he said was that he should have a bad habit, like he should smoke or drink or something. He said he’d get in touch with me again and I gave him my email address.
‘I never heard from him. Not a word. And then, almost exactly a year later, Night Comes Calling came out in the shops. It was all about the production of a school play. My book wasn’t set in a school. It was set in a theatre. But it was the same idea. And it didn’t stop there. He’d nicked my murder. It was exactly the same. The same method, the same clues, almost the same characters.’ His voice was rising. ‘That’s what he did, Susan. He took my story and used it for Night Comes Calling.’
‘Did you tell anyone?’ I asked. ‘When the book came out, what did you do?’
‘What could I do? You tell me! Who would have believed me?’
‘You could have written to us at Cloverleaf Books.’
‘I did write to you. I wrote to the managing director, Mr Clover. He didn’t write back. I wrote to Alan Conway. I wrote to him quite a few times, as a matter of fact. Let’s just say that I didn’t hold back. But I got nothing from him either. I wrote to the people who set up the course in the first place. I got a letter from them. They gave me the brush-off. They denied any responsibility, said it had nothing to do with them. I thought about going to the police. I mean, he’d stolen something from me. There’s a word for that, isn’t there? But when I talked to my wife, Karen, she said to forget it. He was famous. He was protected. I was nobody. She said it would just hurt my writing if I tried to fight it and it was best to move on. So that’s what I did. I’m still writing. At least I know I’ve got good ideas. He wouldn’t have done what he did if I hadn’t.’
‘Have you written any other novels?’ I asked.
‘I’m working on one now. But it’s not a detective story. I’ve moved on from that now. It’s a children’s book. Now that I’ve got a child it felt like the right thing to do.’
‘But you’ve kept Death Treads the Boards.’
‘Of course I’ve kept it. I’ve kept everything I’ve ever written. I know I’ve got the talent. Karen loves my work. And one day …’
‘Send it to me.’ I fished in my handbag and took out a card. ‘So what happened when you saw him in the restaurant?’ I asked.
He was waiting for me to give him my business card. It was a lifeline for him. I was in the ivory tower and he was on the outside. I’ve seen it in so many new writers, this belief that publishers are any different – smarter, more successful than them – when actually we’re just shuffling along, hoping we’ll still have a job at the end of the month. ‘I came out of the kitchen,’ he said. ‘I was carrying two main courses and a side for table nine. I saw him sitting there – he was arguing about something – and I was so shocked I just stood there. The plates were hot. They burned through the cloth and I dropped them.’
‘And then? I was told that Alan came over. He was angry with you.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s not how it happened. I cleaned up the mess and put a new order in to the kitchen. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back into the room but I had no choice – and at least I wasn’t serving his table. Anyway, the next thing I know, Mr Conway got up to go to the toilet and he walked right past me. I wasn’t going to say anything but seeing him so close, inches away, I couldn’t stop myself.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said good evening. I asked him if he remembered me.’
‘And?’
‘He didn’t. Or he pretended he didn’t. I reminded him that we’d met in Devonshire, that he had been kind enough to read my novel. He knew exactly who I was and what I was referring to. So then he got shirty with me. “I don’t come here to talk to the waiters.” That was what he said, those exact words. He asked me to step out of his way. He was keeping his voice low but I knew exactly what he would do if I wasn’t careful. It was the same thing all over again. He’s successful, with his fancy car and that big house of his up in Framlingham. I’m no one. He’s a member here. I’m waiting tables. I need this job. I’ve got a two-year-old kid. So I mumbled I was sorry and stepped away. It made me feel sick to my stomach doing that but what choice did I have?’
‘You must have been quite pleased to hear he was dead.’
‘You want the truth, Susan? I was delighted. I couldn’t have been happier if—’
He had said too much but I pressed him anyway. ‘If what?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
But we both knew what he’d meant. I gave him the business card and he tucked it away in his top pocket. He finished his second cigarette and stubbed that one out too.
‘Can I ask you one last thing?’ I said as we moved back inside. ‘You said that Alan was having an argument. I don’t suppose you heard anything of what was being said?’
He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t near enough.’
‘How about the people at the next table?’ I had seen for myself the layout of the room. They would have been virtually rubbing shoulders.
‘I suppose that’s possible. I can tell you who they were, if you like. Their names will still be on the system.’
He left the terrace and went back into the restaurant to do just that. I watched him as he walked into the distance, remembering what he had just said. ‘… that big house of his up in Framlingham.’ He hadn’t had to look up the name of the town. He already knew where Alan lived.
The grandson
The man who had been sitting at the table next to Alan Conway that night and who might or might not have overheard the conversation was called Mathew Prichard. It was very curious. His name may not be familiar to you but I recognised it at once. Mathew Prichard is the grandson of Agatha Christie. He was famously given the rights to The Mousetrap when he was nine years old. It feels odd to be writing about him and it may seem unlikely that he should have been there. But he is a member of the Club. The offices of Agatha Christie Ltd are a short walk away, in Drury Lane. And, as I’ve already mentioned, The Mousetrap is still showing at St Martin’s theatre, which is just down the road.
I had his number on my mobile. We had met two or three times at literary events and a few years ago I had been in negotiations to buy his memoir, The Grand Tour. It was a very entertaining account of a round-the-world trip his grandmother had made in 1922 (I was outbid by HarperCollins). I called him and he remembered me at once.
‘Of course, Susan. Lovely to hear from you. How are you?’
&n
bsp; I wasn’t quite sure how to explain myself. Again, the fact that I was involving him in a real-life mystery that I was investigating struck me as bizarre and I didn’t really want to go into all that on the phone. So I simply mentioned the death of Alan Conway – he knew all about that – and said there was something I wanted to ask him about. That was enough. As it happened, he was close by. He gave me the name of a cocktail bar near Seven Dials and we agreed to meet there for a drink that evening.
If there is one word I would use to describe Mathew it is affable. He must be about seventy and looking at him, with his ruffled white hair and slightly ruddy complexion, you get the sense that he has lived life to the full. He has a laugh that you can hear across the room, a raucous, sailor’s laugh that sounds as if he has just been told the filthiest joke. He was looking immaculate in a blazer and an open-neck shirt as he wandered into the cocktail bar and although I offered, he insisted on paying for the drinks.
We talked a little about Alan Conway. He expressed his sympathies, said how much he had always enjoyed the books. ‘Very, very clever. Always surprising. Full of good ideas.’ I remember the words exactly, because there was a nasty part of me that was wondering if it might be possible to slip them onto the back cover: Agatha Christie’s grandson endorsing Alan Conway’s work could only be a good thing for future sales. He asked me how Alan had died and I told him that the police suspected suicide. He looked pained at that. A man so full of life himself, he would find it hard to understand anyone who could choose to do away with theirs. I added that Alan had been seriously ill and he nodded as if that made some kind of sense. ‘You know, I saw him a week or so ago – at the Ivy,’ he said.
‘That was what I wanted to ask you about,’ I replied. ‘He was having dinner with his publisher.’
‘Yes. That’s right. I was at the next table.’
‘I’d be interested to know what you saw – or heard.’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘I have. Charles has told me a certain amount but I’m trying to fill in the gaps.’
‘Well, I wasn’t really listening to the conversation. Of course, the tables are quite close to each other but I can’t tell you very much of what was said.’
I found it rather endearing that Mathew hadn’t asked me why I was interested in what had happened. He had lived much of his life in the world created by his grandmother and the way he saw it, detectives asked questions, witnesses answered them. It was as simple as that. I reminded him of the moment when Leigh had dropped the plates and he smiled. ‘Yes, I do remember that. As a matter of fact, I did hear some of what they were saying just before it happened. Raised voices and all that! They were talking about the title of his new book.’
‘Alan delivered it that night.’
‘Magpie Murders. I’m sure you’ll understand, Susan, I can’t hear the word “murder” without my ears pricking up.’ He chortled at that. ‘They were arguing about the title. I think your publisher chap made some comment and Mr Conway wasn’t at all happy. Yes. He said he’d planned the title years ago – I heard him say that – and he banged his fist on the table. Made the cutlery jump. That was when I turned round and realised who he was. It hadn’t actually dawned on me until then. Anyway, there was a moment’s silence. A couple of seconds, perhaps. And then he pointed his finger and he said: “I’m not having the—”’
‘The what?’ I asked.
Prichard smiled at me. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, because that was when the waiter dropped the plates. It made an absolutely terrible din. The entire room came to a halt. You know how it is. The poor chap went quite red – I’m talking about the waiter now – and started clearing up the mess. I’m afraid I didn’t really hear any more after that. I’m sorry.’
‘Did you see Alan get up?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I think he went to the loo.’
‘He talked to the waiter.’
‘He might have done. But I don’t remember anything more. In fact, I’d finished my meal by then and I left shortly afterwards.’
‘I’m not having the—’
That was what it boiled down to. Four words that could have meant anything. I made a mental note to ask Charles about it the next time I saw him.
Prichard and I talked about his grandmother as we finished our cocktails. It had always amused me how much she had come to hate Hercule Poirot by the time she finished writing about him. What had she famously called him? ‘A detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep.’ Hadn’t she once said that she wanted to exorcise herself of him? He laughed. ‘I think that, like all geniuses, she wanted to write all sorts of different books and she got very frustrated when her publishers only wanted, at one stage, for her to write Poirot. She got very impatient when she was told what to do.’
We got up. I had ordered a gin and tonic and it must have been a double because it made my head spin. ‘Thank you for your help,’ I said.
‘I don’t think I’ve been much help at all,’ he replied. ‘But I’ll look forward to seeing the new book when it comes out. As I say, I always liked the Atticus Pünd mysteries – and Mr Conway was obviously a great devotee of my grandmother’s work.’
‘He had the complete collection in his office,’ I said.
‘I’m not surprised. He borrowed lots of things from her, you know. Names. Places. It was almost like a game. I’m sure he did it quite deliberately but when I was reading the books, I’d find all sorts of references buried in the text. I’m quite certain he was doing it on purpose and I did sometimes think of writing to him, to ask him what he was up to.’ Prichard smiled one last time. He was too good-natured to accuse Alan of plagiarism, although it was a strange echo of my conversation with Donald Leigh.
We shook hands. I went back to the office, closed my door, and took the manuscript out to examine it one more time.
He was right. Magpie Murders pays quiet homage to Agatha Christie at least half a dozen times. For example, Sir Magnus Pye and his wife stay at the Hotel Genevieve in Cap Ferrat. There’s a villa in The Murder on the Links that has the same name. The Blue Boar is the pub in Bristol where Robert Blakiston is involved in a fight. But it also appears in St Mary Mead, home of Miss Marple. Lady Pye and Jack Dartford have lunch at Carlotta’s, which seems to have been named after the American actress in Lord Edgware Dies. There’s a joke, of sorts, on page 124. Fraser fails to notice a dead man on the three-fifty train from Paddington, an obvious reference to the 4.50 From Paddington. Mary Blakiston lives in Sheppard’s Farm. Dr James Sheppard is the narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is set in King’s Abbott, a village that is also mentioned on page 62, which is where old Dr Rennard is buried.
For that matter, the entire mechanism of Magpie Murders, the use of the old nursery rhyme, deliberately imitates a device that Christie used many times. She liked children’s verse. One Two Buckle my Shoe, Five Little Pigs, Ten Little Indians (And Then There Were None as it later became), Hickory Dickory Dock – all of them appear in her work. You would have thought that any writer whose work has a similarity to an author much better known than himself would do everything he could to disguise the fact. Alan Conway, in his own peculiar way, seems to do the exact opposite. What exactly was going on in his mind when he put these obvious signposts in? Or to put it another way, what exactly were they pointing to?
Not for the first time, I got the sense that he had been trying to tell me something, that he hadn’t just written the Atticus Pünd mysteries to entertain people. He had created them for a purpose that was slowly becoming clear.
The road to Framlingham
The following Friday, I drove back to Suffolk for Alan Conway’s funeral. Neither me nor Charles had been invited and it was unclear who actually was making the arrangements: James Taylor, Claire Jenkins or Sajid Khan. I’d been tipped off by my sister who had read about it in the local newspaper and emailed me with th
e time and the place. She told me that the funeral was being conducted by the Reverend Tom Robeson, vicar of Saint Michael’s Church, and Charles and I decided to drive up together. We took my car. I was going to stop a little longer.
Andreas had been staying with me all week and he was annoyed that I wasn’t going to be around at the weekend. But I needed time alone. The whole question of Crete was hanging over us and, although we hadn’t discussed it again, I knew he was waiting for an answer that I wasn’t yet ready to give. Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about Alan’s death. I was convinced that another few days in Framlingham would lead me both to the discovery of the missing chapters and, more broadly, the truth of what had happened at Abbey Grange. I was quite sure that the two were related. Alan must have been killed because of something in his book. It might well be that if I could find out who had killed Sir Magnus Pye, I’d know who had killed him. Or vice versa.
The funeral started at three. Charles and I left London just after midday and from the very start I knew it was a mistake. We should have gone by train. The traffic was horrible and Charles looked awkward in the low-slung seat of my MGB. I felt uneasy myself and was wondering why until it dawned on me (just as we hit the M25) that the two of us had always had a face-to-face relationship. That is, I would meet him in his office and he would be on one side of the desk and I would be on the other. We would eat together, facing each other in restaurants. We were often on opposite sides of the conference table. But here we were, unusually, side-by-side and I was simply less familiar with his profile. Being so near to him was also peculiar. Of course, we’d been in taxis together and occasionally on trains, but somehow my little classic car brought us much closer than I would have liked. I had never noticed how unhealthy his skin looked; how years of shaving had scraped the life out of his cheeks and neck. He was dressed in a dark suit with a formal shirt and I was slightly fascinated by his Adam’s apple, which seemed to be constrained, bulging over his black tie. He was going back to London on his own and I rather wished I’d been a bit less forward with my invitation and had allowed him to do the same both ways.