‘At this point, he went upstairs to collect his jacket and his shoes and all would have been well except that we were then distracted by the arrival of Miss Mitchell at the window. The detective chief inspector and I left the house immediately. The uniformed officers, also, were occupied with searching for the intruder. Eric Chandler and his mother were upstairs. That left you alone on the ground floor of the house, and you were there, moments later, when Francis Pendleton returned. You acted without thinking. I believe that you were motivated by an uncontrollable sense of anger and outrage. You picked up the Turkish dagger, climbed the stairs towards him and stabbed him in the chest.

‘Moments later, the detective chief inspector and I arrived through the front door. You had your back to us so we were unable to see that you must have had a great deal of blood on you. And that is why you embraced Francis Pendleton as he fell – to conceal the blood that was already there. I do not think that it was an act of murder for you, Miss Cain, at least not in your mind. It was an act of retribution.’

Madeline Cain did not attempt to deny it. Her face was filled with a dreadful indifference, a sense that she had been right to do what she had done. She was on the edge of madness. ‘I thought he had killed her,’ she said, simply. She glanced accusingly at Hare. ‘That’s what you said. It was your fault.’ She turned back to Pünd. ‘And he confessed. I heard him.’

‘There was no need to kill him!’ Hare exclaimed. ‘If he had been found guilty, the law would have taken its due course.’

Pünd shook his head sadly. ‘But there, again, I am to blame. Just before I left London, I wrote a speech. In it, I suggested that capital punishment in this country might soon be abolished, and that in the last fifty years, almost half the death sentences handed down by the courts were commuted. Miss Cain typed it for me and we even discussed it.’

‘If it was Francis Pendleton who killed her, he should have been hanged.’ Madeline Cain was refusing to confront the fact that she had made a terrible mistake. Her eyes were out of focus. There was a strange half-smile on her lips. ‘Melissa James was a force of nature. She was one of the greatest actresses this country has ever produced and it was just as I wrote in my letter. Now that she has gone, a light has been extinguished for ever.’ She stood up. ‘I’d like to go now.’

‘I have just one question for you, Miss Cain,’ Pünd said. ‘Who was it on the telephone who called me, playing the part of Edgar Schultz?’

‘It was a friend of mine, an actor. But he wasn’t part of it. I just asked him to do it as a joke.’

‘I see. Thank you.’

Hare went over to her. ‘I’ll drive you to the police station, Miss Cain.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Detective Chief Inspector.’ She looked at him beseechingly. ‘Do you think, just one last time, we could go past Clarence Keep?’

*

‘Well, Mr Pünd, I suppose this is where we say goodbye.’

It was later that afternoon and Detective Chief Inspector Hare and Atticus Pünd were standing on the platform at Barnstaple station.

All the other witnesses had left the Moonflower Hotel. Algernon Marsh was on his way back to his cell in the police station in Barnstaple. He would be joined there by Lance and Maureen Gardner, who also had questions to answer. Pünd had been sorry to see Eric Chandler and his mother leave separately, still not speaking to each other. Was Phyllis Chandler really so disgusted by her son’s behaviour, he wondered, or had she realised that she was in part responsible for the mess that his life had become?

At least Nancy Mitchell had departed on a more positive note. After Miss Cain had gone, she had approached Pünd with her mother and it had seemed evident to him that the two women shared a strength that had not been there before.

‘I want to thank you, Mr Pünd,’ she said. ‘For what you did on the bridge.’

‘I am glad that I was able to help you, Miss Mitchell. This has been a painful experience for everyone, but I hope you will soon be able to recover from what has happened.’

‘I’m going to look after her,’ Brenda Mitchell said, taking her daughter’s hand. ‘And we’re going to keep the baby if that’s what Nancy wants. I don’t care what my husband says. I’m tired of being bullied by him.’

‘I wish you both great happiness,’ Pünd said, thinking that at least some good had come out of the events at the Moonflower Hotel.

Simon Cox had driven back to London. He had offered Pünd a lift, which the detective had declined. ‘You’re remarkable, Mr Pünd,’ the businessman had said. ‘Someone should make a film about you.’ His eyes had brightened. ‘Perhaps we could talk about that!’

‘I think not, Mr Cox.’

Pünd had looked for Samantha Collins but she had left on her own. Hare had assured him that a policewoman would look in on Church Lodge to make sure that she and the children were all right.

The train, pulled by an old LMR 57 steam engine, puffed into the station with a great clanking of wheels and an exploding cloud of white vapour. Porters hurried forward as the doors opened and the first passengers got out.

‘What will you do when you get back to London?’ Hare asked.

‘The first thing will be to find a new assistant,’ Pünd replied. ‘It seems that there is now a situation vacant.’

‘Yes. It’s too bad about that. I thought she was actually very helpful – when she was being helpful, I mean.’

‘It is true. And what of you, my friend? You now begin your retirement!’

‘That’s right,’ Hare replied. ‘And thanks to you, I bow out on a high note. Not that I deserve any credit.’

‘On the contrary, it was entirely down to you that the mystery was solved.’

The two men shook hands and then, carrying his case, Pünd climbed onto the train. Doors were being slammed shut all around him and a few seconds later the driver blew the whistle and released the brakes and with another burst of hissing and grinding, the train pulled out.

Hare watched it as it left the station and stood there until it had disappeared far down the track, then turned round and walked back to his car.

The Book

It was a strange experience returning to Atticus Pünd Takes the Case after so many years. By and large, I don’t reread books that I have edited, just as many of the authors I know seldom return to their earlier works. The act of editing, like the act of writing, is so intensive and occasionally so fraught with problems that no matter how pleased I may be with the finished product, I’m always happy to put it behind me. I don’t need to go back.

And how did I feel as Detective Chief Inspector Hare walked back to his car and I turned the last page? It had taken me an entire afternoon and part of the evening to finish the book and I was afraid it had all been a complete waste of time.

On the face of it, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case had almost no connection with the events that took place at Branlow Hall in June 2008. There is no wedding, no visiting advertising executive, no Romanian maintenance man, no sex in the wood. The story is set in Devon, not Suffolk. Nobody is beaten to death with a hammer. In fact, many of the incidents in the book are quite fantastical: a famous actress being strangled – twice! – the clue from Othello, the crazed fan writing on lilac paper, an aunt dying and leaving an inheritance of seven hundred thousand pounds. Alan clearly made these up and had no need to travel to Branlow Hall for inspiration.

And yet, unless I’d got everything wrong from the start, Cecily Treherne had read the book and had come away convinced that Stefan Codrescu was innocent. She had rung her parents in the South of France and told them: ‘It was right there – staring me in the face.’ That was what she had said, according to her father. I had just read the book from cover to cover. I thought I knew all the facts about the real murder. And yet I still had no idea what Cecily had actually seen.

Somewhat to my own surprise, I had enjoyed the book, even though I was aware of the identity of the two killers from the start. As much as Alan Conway disliked writing murder mysteries and even looked down on the genre, he was undoubtedly good at what he did. There’s something very satisfying about a complicated whodunnit that actually makes sense, and some of the pleasure I’d had reading the manuscript for the first time all those years ago came back to me now. Alan never cheated the reader. I think that was part of his success.