Magpie Murders by Horowitz Anthony

Author:Horowitz, Anthony [Horowitz, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: ORION
Published: 2016-10-05T23:00:00+00:00

4.

It’s been quite an adventure, hasn’t it? (Why not take another look at The Slide, just for old time’s sake?) Don’t be angry with me. Remember all the money you’ve made. And here they are – my two favourite words.

The End.

As ever,

Alan

‘This came this morning?’ I asked.

‘Yes. You know, the two of us had dinner on Thursday night. I took him to the Club at the Ivy. This is dated 28 August, which is the next day. He must have written it as soon as he got home.’

Alan had a flat in Fitzrovia. He would have stayed overnight and taken the train from Liverpool Street the following morning.

‘What’s The Slide?’ I asked.

‘It was a book that Alan wrote a while back.’

‘You never showed it to me.’

‘I didn’t think you’d be interested, to be honest. It wasn’t a whodunnit. It was something more serious, a sort of satire about twenty-first century Britain, set in a stately home.’

‘I’d still have liked to have seen it.’

‘Trust me, Susan. You’d have been wasting your time. There was no way I was going to publish it.’

‘Did you tell Alan that?’

‘Not in so many words. I just said that it wouldn’t fit into our list.’ An old publishing euphemism. You don’t tell your most successful author that his new book is no bloody good.

The two of us sat in silence. Underneath the desk, the dog turned over and groaned. ‘This is a suicide letter,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘We have to send it to the police.’

‘I agree. I was about to call them.’

‘You didn’t know he was ill?’

‘I knew absolutely nothing about it. He’d never told me and he certainly didn’t mention it on Thursday night. We had dinner. He gave me the manuscript. He was excited! He said it was his best work.’

I hadn’t been there and I’m writing this after the event, but this is what Charles told me had happened. Alan Conway had promised to deliver Magpie Murders by the end of the year and, unlike some writers I’ve worked with, he was always very prompt. The dinner had been planned a few weeks before and it was no coincidence, incidentally, that it had been arranged while I was away. Alan and I didn’t get on for reasons I’ll come to. He had met Charles at the Ivy, not the restaurant but a private, members only club just off Cambridge Circus. There’s a piano bar on the first floor and a restaurant above and all the windows have stained glass so you can’t see in – or, for that matter, out. Quite a few celebrities go there and it’s exactly the sort of place that Alan would have enjoyed. Charles had booked his usual table on the left of the door with a wall of bookshelves behind him. The scene couldn’t have been better staged if it had been in a theatre. In fact, the St Martin’s Theatre and the Ambassadors which had, between them, shown The Mousetrap for God knows how many years, were both down the road.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.