Moonflower Murders (Susan Ryeland, #2)

by Anthony Horowitz

‘Horowitz … has never been better at surprising the reader and playing fair. This is a flawless update of classic golden age whodunnits’ Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

After an intermittent sleep and a breakfast – egg, sausage, bacon, beans – that looked identical to every breakfast ever served in a cut-price hotel chain,

It was midmorning and the traffic wasn’t too bad, which is to say that it was actually moving.

Well, I suppose it was the editor in me that noticed that every single one of the reports had described the murder as brutal, as if anyone was ever murdered gently or with affection.

The carpet in the new section had one of those nasty patterns that you would never find in anyone’s home.

‘Can you tell me what happened on the night of the murder?’ I asked and even as I uttered the words I felt slightly ridiculous. They sounded so old-fashioned, so clichéd. If I’d seen them in a novel, I’d have edited them out.

‘Alan had a strange sense of humour,’ I said. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I turned up in one of his books too.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes. Sarah Lamb in Gin & Cyanide. Ryeland is a breed of sheep, apparently. She’s a complete monster and she gets murdered near the end.’

‘Every writer is different,’ I said. ‘But they don’t steal, exactly. They absorb. It’s such a strange profession, really, living in a sort of twilight between the world they belong to and the world they create. On the one hand, they’re monstrous egotists. Self-confidence, self-examination, self-hatred even … but it’s all about self. All those hours on their own! And yet at the same time, they’re genuinely altruistic. All they want to do is please other people.

‘But the chief constable wouldn’t sanction so much as an iced bun in the station canteen. At least, he might – but it would take three committee meetings and a mountain of paperwork.’

The greatest evil occurs when people, no matter what their aims or their motives, become utterly convinced that they are right.’

Pünd could not help feeling how much better their lives would have been if she had loved her husband a little less and her son a little more.

‘Well, you can stay here tonight and we’ll eat the most expensive meal we can manage in the hotel restaurant. At least that’s free. Maybe you can bully a cheque out of Lawrence Treherne. And tomorrow we’ll go back.’ ‘To Crete?’ ‘Polydorus.’ ‘And what are we going to do until dinner?’ ‘I think I’ve got an answer to that.’

‘I feel bad about leaving you,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. I flew all the way from Greece in the hope of being abandoned in a car park outside a maximum-security jail.’

‘If they don’t let me out, dial 999.’ ‘I’m dialling 999 in the hope they’ll keep you in.

It was an extraordinary moment, meeting him. It was like coming across the central character in a novel but only after two or three hundred pages and in the knowledge that there are very few more before the end.

‘So what happens next?’ ‘I don’t know. That’s the worst of it. I just don’t know what else I can do.’

‘I know who killed Frank Parris,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry?’ Andreas stared at me. ‘I thought you just said—’ ‘I know what I said. But I’ve worked it out!’

‘Did Stefan tell you?’ ‘No. He told me more than he meant to. But it wasn’t him. It all just came together.’ Andreas stared at me. ‘Are you going to tell me?’ ‘Yes. Of course. But not yet. I need to think.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Give me a little time.’ He smiled at me. ‘You’re worse than Alan Conway!’ We didn’t eat the sandwiches. We got back in the car and drove off.

I know scenes like this work well on television. I’ve seen David Suchet as Poirot, John Nettles as Barnaby, Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, and between them they must have done it a hundred times, closing in on one suspect after another until finally they reveal the real culprit.

But that was exactly my point. I was worried that even in what was intended to be a homage to the Golden Age of detective fiction, the climax was a little overdone.

Well, you’ve read the book. You know how much faith Alan had in my editorial judgement. So he would probably have been amused to see me in the lounge of Branlow Hall, surrounded by no fewer than seven people and a dog. The dog was Bear, Cecily’s golden retriever, and he at least was asleep in a corner. But the rest of them had come to hear...

This was my last day at the hotel. In fact, it was already past my checkout time. Lisa Treherne had asked me to leave, she had said, with the full support of her father, but I had rung Lawrence and told him that I knew who had killed Frank Parris and also what had happened to his daughter. I had reminded him that so far he hadn’t paid me a penny of the mon...

‘Come to the lounge at three o’clock and I’ll explain the whole thing,’ I said. ‘And bring a cheque for what you owe me. Ten thousand pounds made out to Andreas Patakis.’ Of course it should have had my name on it but Andreas had flown about two thousand miles in time to save me from a fa...

I had hoped that Lawrence would come alone, but Pauline was with him when he arrived and Aiden MacNeil had joined them too. I suppose that was fair enough: he ...

‘We’re waiting, Susan,’ Lisa said. ‘I’m sorry. I was just collecting my thoughts.’ I smiled. Maybe I could enjoy this after all. I was certainly never going to do it again.

I was aware of the others watching me and dreaded what was coming next. But it wasn’t my fault. I had wanted to see Lawrence Treherne on his own. He was the one who had invited the entire family.

And later on? Women are intuitive. We sort of get the idea when we’re married to a homicidal maniac.

The night we finally arrived back at Polydorus, Andreas and I threw a party for all our friends, partly to celebrate our return, partly to put the whole thing behind us. Panos, assisted by his eighty-six-year-old mother, cooked what looked like an entire sheep. We drank a crate of Argyros wine from the island of Santorini. Vangelis played his guitar and his bouzouki and we danced under an ink-black sky with the slenderest of crescent moons.

A couple of the guests came down to complain but decided instead to join in.

Now I remembered some of the editorial disagreements that I’d had with Alan during the editing of the book. Of course he’d wanted Algernon’s car to be a Peugeot. The silver badge that ends up smeared with the opera singer’s blood is in the shape of a prancing lion.

And a quick search of Wikipedia showed me that the LMR 57 steam engine that carried Pünd out of Bideford station, even though it was about a hundred years out of date, was also known as ‘Lion’.

I can remember exactly the epiphany, the moment when the novel revealed the last secret buried in its unpleasant heart. The awful truth is that it had been in front of my eyes all the time

For no reason at all, I was thinking how Cecily Treherne had liked anagrams. She had taken the name of the hotel and rearranged the letters to make ‘barn owl’. And that was when it hit me.

The first murder is committed by Leonard Collins. His name, obviously, conceals another lion. He is Leo.

But Madeline Cain is also a murderer and she kills Francis Pendleton – FP – the fictional equivalent of Frank Parris. Madeline ...

He took my hands in his. ‘Susan,’ he said, ‘will you be angry with me if I make a suggestion?’ ‘Of course I won’t be angry with you.’ ‘We have each other. We have the hotel. You have your editing. Everything is going well for us.’

‘So …?’ ‘So maybe it’s time to finish with all this.’ He gestured at the scattered documents. ‘You’ve found enough lions. And honestly, I think you’ve allowed Alan Conway to do enough damage to your life.’ I nodded slowly. ‘You’re right.’

‘Here is what I would like to suggest. Why don’t you take all this … all these papers and the books. Especially the books. Let’s put them in the car and drive up to the Lasithi Plateau. It’s beautiful at this time of the year with the olive trees and the windmills. I want to take you to the Psychro Cave, which is also known as the Cave of Zeus because they say that is...

And after that I’ll take you to a little hotel I know near Kaminaki and we’ll have dinner together and we’ll sit on the terrace drinking raki, surrounded by the mountains and looking at the stars, because, believe me, there is nowhere the stars look more magnificent.’

‘Is Leo in the ascendant?’ ‘I hope not.’ ‘Then let’s go.’ And that’s exactly what we did.

Writers often feel isolated and alone but the truth is that producing a book is a huge team effort. It’s my pleasure to acknowledge the fantastic support I’ve been given in the long journey from idea to manuscript to finished publication.