Anthony Horowitz

He looked at the first page and smiled. ‘Already the handwriting is known to me …’

‘How?’

But Pünd didn’t answer. He had begun to read.

We had a row that morning. I can’t even remember what started it. But then he started screaming at me – how I was his, how he would never let me go. I’d heard it all before. Only this time, he was crazier than ever. You noticed that there was a painting missing in the great hall. It was a portrait of me, which he’d commissioned as a present for my fortieth birthday. As a matter of fact it was done by Arthur Redwing.’ She turned to Pünd. ‘Have you met him?’

Later that night I found out why. I’d treated myself to a taxi and the driver had the radio on. It was the fourth item on the evening news.

Alan Conway was dead

. I grew up on Agatha Christie and when I’m on a plane or on a beach there’s nothing I’d rather read than a whodunnit.

Alan’s suicide note and the envelope it had come in had been on Charles’s desk. The letter was handwritten. The envelope was typed

here is a Times newspaper waiting for him but he does not pick it up quite yet. Why should he share the world’s bad news, the daily communion of depression, disorientation and decay, when he has plenty enough of his own to be getting on with?

It was as if he was whispering to me as I lay there in the darkness, telling me something I didn’t want to hear

There was even a Daphne Road. In the book it had been Neville Brent’s address but in the real world it was Alan’s sister who lived there.

Which made Alan Conway the real-life Magnus Pye. It was interesting that he identified with the main character of his book: an obnoxious and arrogant landowner. Did he know something I didn’t?

I’m not having the—”’

‘The what?’ I asked