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.