Anthony Horowitz

. 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

that Christie used many times. She liked children’s verse. One Two Buckle my Shoe, Five Little Pigs, Ten Little Indians (And Then There Were None as it later became), Hickory Dickory Dock – all of them appear in her work.

Not for the first time, I got the sense that he had been trying to tell me something, that he hadn’t just written the Atticus Pünd mysteries to entertain people. He had created them for a purpose that was slowly becoming clear.

‘Did you know that he thought up the title years ago?’

‘I didn’t. How do you know?’

In fact Mathew Prichard had overheard Alan telling him exactly that. ‘I think he mentioned it to me once,’ I lied.