Everything has a story to tell. Several, in fact. A late chapter in the story of that magpie standing guard over a hand-written manuscript on the cover of Solomon’s Magpie began soon after Maggie and I had moved to Leominster. We were walking through town and pausing from time to time to take a look at the window displays in some of the many antiques and second-hand shops. And there, in one of the shops near Corn Square was this wonderful creature fashioned from a cow’s horn. We stopped several times over just a few weeks to say hello and admire that bird. And then, one day, he had gone. Flown.

Alas, said Maggie, each time we passed that shop. We should have popped in there when we had the chance and claimed that bird. What she did not know until her birthday was that the bird was sitting in a box in my study waiting to fly again. At last he gained his freedom and took up residence on top of our glassware cabinet looking down over the living room.

And then I began writing another novel, with Judy Whitaker, a quirky 15-year-old trying to decipher her ancestor Solomon’s badly hand-written tale of family history. To put the final pieces to her puzzle, though, Judy would need to find some missing pages and with them Solomon’s magpie – the crazy bird which played a sinister role in the forgotten tale.

There’s a footnote to this snippet of a tale: shortly after I had published Solomon’s Magpie with that bird gracing the cover Maggie and I went to Spain to spend some time with Ben, our son, who had settled in Ubeda deep in Andalucia. We stopped for a couple of days en route at a remote village near Antequera. Then, when walking back to our air bnb from the village store we spotted a white van parked at the roadside. It caught our attention right away with the name on the side: Leominster Antiques. And sitting at the wheel was the antique dealer from whom I had bought the magpie. I have to admit that I sometimes wonder whether he might have read Solomon’s Magpie after I had shared with him the tale of that bird’s doings after it had flown his shop.