‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, I suppose it depends on what you intend to do. Have you told anyone else what you’ve told me?’
‘No.’
‘Then you might take the view that you don’t need to. Alan is dead. He was going to die anyway. You’ve read the first page of his letter. He had at best six months. I shortened his life by that amount of time and quite possibly saved him a great deal of suffering along the way.’ He smiled. ‘I won’t pretend that was uppermost in my mind. I think I did the world a favour. We need our literary heroes. Life is dark and complicated but they shine out. They’re the beacons that we follow. We have to be pragmatic about this, Susan. You’re going to be the CEO of this company. My offer was made in good faith and it still stands. Without Atticus Pünd there will be no company. If you don’t want to think of yourself, think of everyone else in this building. Would you like to see them put out of their jobs?’
‘That’s a little unfair, Charles.’
‘Cause and effect, my dear. That’s all I’m saying.’
In a way, I’d been dreading this moment. It was all very well to unmask Charles Clover but all along I’d been wondering what I’d do next. Everything that he had just said had already occurred to me. The world was not exactly going to be a worse-off place without Alan Conway. His sister, his ex-wife, his son, Donald Leigh, the vicar, Detective Superintendent Locke – they had all, to a greater or a lesser extent, been harmed by him, and it was certainly true that he had been about to play a very mean trick on the people who loved his books. He was going to die anyway.
But it was that ‘my dear’ that decided me. There was something quite repellent about the way he had addressed me. They were exactly the sort of words that Moriarty would have used. Or Flambeau. Or Carl Peterson. Or Arnold Zeck. And if it was true that detectives acted as moral beacons, why shouldn’t their light guide me now? ‘I’m sorry, Charles,’ I said. ‘I don’t disagree with what you say. I didn’t like Alan and what he did was horrible. But the fact is that you killed him and I can’t let you get away with it. I’m sorry – but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.’
‘You’re going to turn me in?’
‘No. I don’t need to be involved and I’m sure it’ll be a lot easier for you if you call the police yourself.’
He smiled, very thinly. ‘You realise that they’ll send me to prison. I’ll get life. I’ll never come out.’
‘Yes, Charles. That’s what happens when you commit murder.’
‘You surprise me, Susan. We’ve known each other a very long time. I never thought you’d be so petty.’
‘Is that what you think?’ I shrugged. ‘Then there’s nothing else to say.’
He glanced at his empty glass, then back at me. ‘How long can you give me?’ he asked. ‘Would you allow me a week’s grace? I’d like to spend some time with my family and with my new grandson. I’ll need to find Bella a home … that sort of thing.’
‘I can’t give you a week, Charles. That would make me an accomplice. Maybe until the weekend …?’
‘All right. That’s fair enough.’
Charles got up and walked over to the bookshelf. His whole career was spread out in front of him. He had published many of those books himself. I also stood up. I had been sitting down for so long that I felt my knees creak. ‘I really am sorry, Charles,’ I said. Part of me was still wondering if I’d made the right decision. I wanted to be out of the room.
‘No. It’s all right.’ Charles had his back to me. ‘I completely understand.’
‘Good night, Charles.’
‘Good night, Susan.’
I turned and took a step towards the door and right then something hit me, incredibly hard, on the back of the head. I saw an electric white flash and it felt as if my whole body had been broken in half. The room tilted violently to one side and I crashed down to the floor.
Endgame
I was so shocked, so taken by surprise that it actually took me a few moments to work out what had happened. It may be that I was also briefly unconscious. When I opened my eyes, Charles was standing over me with a look that I can only describe as apologetic. I was lying on the carpet, my head close to the open door. Something trickled round my neck, coming from under my ear, and with difficulty I reached up and touched it. When I moved my hand away, I saw that it was covered in blood. I had been hit, extremely hard. Charles was holding something in his hand but my eyes didn’t seem to be working properly, as if something had been disconnected. In the end I managed to focus and if I hadn’t been frightened and in pain I might almost have laughed. He was holding the Golden Dagger Award that Alan had won for Atticus Pünd Investigates. If you’ve never seen one of these before, it’s a miniature-sized dagger encased in a fairly substantial block of Perspex, rectangular, with sharp edges. Charles had used it to club me down.
I tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. Perhaps I was still dazed or perhaps I simply didn’t know what to say. Charles examined me and I think I actually saw the moment when he came to his decision. The life went out of his eyes and it suddenly occurred to me that murderers are the loneliest people on the planet. It’s the curse of Cain – the fugitive and the vagabond driven out from the face of the earth. However he might try to justify it, Charles had parted company with the rest of humanity the moment he had pushed Alan off that tower and the man who was standing over me now was no longer my friend or colleague. He was empty. He was going to kill me, to silence me, because when you have killed one person you have entered a sort of existential realm where to kill two more or to kill twenty will make no difference. I knew this and I accepted it. Charles would never know peace. He would never play happily with his grandchild. He would never be able to shave without seeing the face of a murderer. I found a little solace in that. But I would be dead. There was nothing I could do to prevent it. I was terrified.
He set the award down.
‘Why did you have to be so bloody obstinate?’ he asked in a voice that wasn’t quite his own. ‘I didn’t want you to go looking for the missing chapters. I didn’t care about the bloody book. All I was doing was protecting everything I’d worked for – and my future. I tried to get you to back off. I tried to send you in the wrong direction. But you wouldn’t listen. And now what am I going to do? I still have to protect myself, Susan. I’m too old to go to prison. You didn’t have to go to the police. You could have just walked away. You’re so bloody stupid …’
He wasn’t exactly talking to me. It was more a stream of consciousness, a conversation that he was having with himself. For my part, I lay where I was, unmoving. There was a searing pain in my head and I was furious with myself. He had asked me if I had told anyone else what I knew. I should have lied. At the very least I could have pretended I was with him, that I was happy to be an accomplice to Alan’s death. I could have said that and walked out of the office. Then I could have called the police. I had brought this on myself.
‘Charles …’ I croaked the single word. Something had happened to my eyesight. He was going in and out of focus. The blood was spreading around my neck.
He had been looking around him and picked something up. It was the box of matches that I had used to light my cigarette. I only understood what he was doing when I saw the flare of the phosphorous. It looked huge. He seemed to disappear behind it.
‘I’m sorry, Susan,’ he said.
He was going to set fire to the office. He was going to leave me to burn alive, getting rid of the only witness and, for that matter, the incriminating pages, which were still sitting on the desk where I had left them. I saw his hand move in an arc and it was as if a fireball had streaked across the room, whumping down beside the book shelves. In a modern office, it would have hit the carpet and gone out but everything about Cloverleaf Books was antique; the building, the wood panelling, the carpets, the furnishings. The flames le
apt up instantly and I was so dazzled by the sight of them that I didn’t even see him throw a second match, starting a second blaze on the other side of the room, this time the fire rushing up the curtains and licking at the ceiling. The very air seemed to turn orange. I couldn’t believe how quickly it had happened. It was as if I was inside a crematorium. Charles moved towards me, a huge, dark figure that filled my vision. I thought he was going to step over me. I was lying in front of the door. But before he went he lashed out one last time and I screamed as his foot slammed into my chest. I tasted blood in my mouth. There were tears flooding out of my eyes, from the pain and the smoke. Then he was gone.
The office burned gloriously. The building dated back to the eighteenth century and it was a fire that was worthy of that time. I could feel it scorching my cheeks and hands and I thought I must be alight myself. I might simply have lain there and died but alarms had gone off throughout the building and they jolted me awake. Somehow I had to find the strength to get up and stagger out of there. There was an explosion of wood and glass as one of the windows disintegrated and that helped me too. I felt a cold wind rush in. It revived me a little and prevented the smoke from asphyxiating me. I reached out and felt the side of the door, used it to pull myself up. I could barely see. The orange and red of the flames were burning themselves into my eyes. It hurt me to breathe. Charles had broken some of my ribs and I wondered, even then, how he could have brought himself to behave so brutally, this man I had known for so long. Anger spurred me on and somehow I found myself on my feet but that didn’t help me. I had actually been safer closer to the floor. Standing up, I was surrounded by smoke and toxic fumes. I was seconds away from passing out.
The alarms were pounding at my ears. If there were fire engines on the way, I wouldn’t be able to hear them. I could hardly see. I couldn’t breathe. And then I screamed as an arm snaked round my chest and grabbed hold of me. I thought Charles had come back to finish me off. But then I heard a single word shouted into my ear. ‘Susan!’ I recognised the voice, the smell, the feel of his chest as he pressed my head against it. It was Andreas who had, impossibly, come out of nowhere to rescue me. ‘Can you walk?’ he shouted.
‘Yes.’ I could now. With Andreas next to me, I could do anything.
‘I’m going to get you out of here.’
‘Wait! There are some pages on the desk …’
‘Susan?’
‘We’re not bloody leaving them!’
He thought I was mad but he knew not to argue. He left me for a few seconds, then dragged me out of the room and helped me down the stairs. Tendrils of grey smoke followed us but the fire was spreading up not down and although I could barely see or think, with my whole body in pain and blood pouring from the wound in my head, we managed to make it out. Andreas dragged me through the front door and across the road. When I turned round, the second and third floors were already ablaze and although I could now hear approaching sirens, I knew that nothing of the building would be saved.
‘Andreas,’ I said. ‘Did you get the chapters?’
I passed out before he could reply.
Intensive care
I spent three days at the University College Hospital on the Euston Road, which actually didn’t feel nearly long enough after what I’d been through. But that’s how it is these days: the marvels of modern science and all that. And, of course, they need the beds. Andreas stayed with me all the time and the real intensive care came from him. I had two broken ribs, massive bruising, and a linear fracture to the skull. They gave me a CT scan but fortunately I wouldn’t need surgery. The fire had caused some scarring to my lungs and mucous membranes. I couldn’t stop coughing and hated it. My eyes still hadn’t cleared up. This was fairly common after a head injury but the doctors had warned me that the damage might be more permanent.
It turned out that Andreas had come to the office because he was upset about the argument we’d had on Sunday night and had decided to surprise me with flowers and walk with me to the restaurant. It was a sweet thought and it saved my life. But that wasn’t the question I most wanted to ask.
‘Andreas?’ It was the first morning after the fire. Andreas was my only visitor although I’d had a text from my sister, Katie, who was on the way down. My throat was hurting and my voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Why did you see Charles? The week when I was on book tour, you came to the office. Why didn’t you tell me?’
It all came out. Andreas had been chasing a loan for his hotel, the Polydorus, and had flown back to England and gone to a meeting at his bank. They had agreed to the idea in principal but they’d needed a guarantor and that was what had brought him to Charles.
‘I wanted to surprise you,’ he said. ‘When I realised you were out of the office, I didn’t know what to do. I felt guilty, Susan. I couldn’t tell you about seeing Charles because I hadn’t told you about the hotel. So I asked him to say nothing. I told you about it the very next time I saw you. But I felt bad all the same.’
I didn’t tell Andreas that after I had spoken to Melissa, I had briefly suspected him of killing Alan. He’d had a perfectly good motive. He was in the country. And at the end of the day, wasn’t he the least likely suspect? It really should have been him.
Charles had been arrested. Two police officers came to see me on the day I left hospital and they were nothing like Detective Superintendent Locke – or, for that matter, Raymond Chubb. One was a woman, the other a nice Asian man. They spoke to me for about half an hour, taking notes, but I couldn’t talk very much because my voice was still hoarse. I was drugged and in shock and coughing all the time. They said they would come back for a full statement when I was feeling better.
The funny thing is, after all that I didn’t even want to read the missing chapters of Magpie Murders. It wasn’t that I’d lost interest in who’d killed Mary Blakiston and her employer, Sir Magnus Pye. It was just that I felt I’d had more than my fair share of clues and murder and anyway there was no way I could manage the manuscript; my eyes weren’t up to it. It was only after I’d got back to my flat in Crouch End that my curiosity returned. Andreas was still with me. He’d taken a week off school and I got him to skim through the whole book so that he would know the plot before he read the final chapters out loud. It was appropriate that I should hear them in his voice. They had only been saved thanks to him.
This is how it ended.
SEVEN
A Secret
Never to be Told
1
Atticus Pünd took one last walk around Saxby-on-Avon, enjoying the morning sunshine. He had slept well and taken two pills when he woke up. He felt refreshed and his head was clear. He had arranged to meet Detective Inspector Chubb at the Bath police station in an hour’s time and had left James Fraser to see to the suitcases and to settle the bill while he stretched his legs. He had not been in the village very long but in a strange way he felt he had come to know it intimately. The church, the castle, the antique shop in the square, the bus shelter, Dingle Dell and, of course, Pye Hall – they had always related to each other in various ways but over the past week they had become fixed points in a landscape of crime. Pünd had chosen the title of his magnum opus carefully. There really was a landscape to every criminal investigation and its consciousness always informed the crime.
Saxby could not have looked lovelier. It was still early and for a moment there was nobody in sight – no cars either – so it was possible to imagine the little community as it might have been a century ago. For a moment the murder seemed almost irrelevant. After all, what did it matter? People had come and gone. They had fallen in love. They had grown up and they had died. But the village itself, the grass verges and the hedgerows, the entire backdrop against which the drama had been played, that remained unchanged. Years from now, someone might point out the house where Sir Magnus had been murdered or the place where his killer had lived and there might be an ??
?Oh!’ of curiosity. But nothing more. Wasn’t he that man who had his head cut off? Didn’t someone else die too? Snatches of conversation that would scatter like leaves in the wind.
And yet there had been some changes. The deaths of Mary Blakiston and Sir Magnus Pye had caused a myriad of tiny cracks that had reached out from their respective epicentres and which would take time to heal. Pünd noticed the sign in the window of the Whiteheads’ antique shop: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. He did not know if Johnny Whitehead had been arrested for the theft of the stolen medals but he doubted that the shop would open again. He walked up to the garage and thought of Robert Blakiston and Joy Sanderling who wanted only to get married but who had found themselves up against forces well beyond their comprehension. It saddened him to think of the girl on the day she had come to visit him in London. What was it she had said? ‘It’s not right. It’s so unfair.’ At the time, she could have had no idea of the truth of those words.
A movement caught his eye and he saw Clarissa Pye walking briskly towards the butcher’s shop, wearing a rather jaunty three-feathered hat. She did not see him. There was something about the way she carried herself that made him smile. She had benefited from the death of her brother. There could be no denying it. She might never inherit the house but she had regained control of her own life, which mattered more. Would that have been a reason to kill him? It was curious, really, how one man could make himself the target of so much hostility. He found himself thinking of Arthur Redwing, the artist whose best work had been desecrated, sliced apart and burned. Arthur might consider himself an amateur. He had never achieved greatness as an artist. But Pünd knew all too well the passion that burned in the heart of any creative person and which could all too easily be subverted and turned into something dangerous.