The Endings Man (12 page)

He had been invited out to lunch yet again by Jonah, whom he’d seen more of in the last week than in a normal month or two. This didn’t give him any kind of warm glow, since he put it down less to friendship than a love of gossip. As newspaper fodder, Curle, feeling a need to earn his keep, had shared the experience of that morning’s expedition to Peebles.

‘What were you thinking of?’ Jonah wondered, spooning up a mouthful of tiramisu.

‘It felt as if I was doing something. It was either that or sit at home.’

‘You could escape into your work.’

As a man under suspicion of murder, Curle didn’t dignify that with an answer.

‘At least I found out that she wasn’t away in some private hospital. She was at home. Why would Tilman have lied about that? And not just to me. To Meldrum, who’s a policeman.’

‘People lie to policemen all the time.’

‘About how fast they’ve been driving.’

‘Well, he wasn’t lying about a murder. This was before Ali Fleming was killed. You were there to complain that his wife had been sending you rude letters. There’s no law says a man can’t protect his wife – and if there is, there shouldn’t be.’

Moodily, Curle pushed his pudding away.

‘I’m wondering if I should tell Meldrum.’

‘Why, in God’s name, would you do that?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Not to me. Why unleash your detective on the poor woman, when she’s clearly demented?’

‘She wasn’t in a hospital. She could have been in Edinburgh. You could say she’s obsessed with murder. She’s written to me about murdering people. All right, about murdering men – but she was angry with me for changing her men to women – so why shouldn’t she change it, too, and choose a woman victim? And she’s demented. Count that in as well.’

Jonah made a face, ‘You don’t believe any of that, do you?’

‘It would give them something else to think of – apart from me.’

‘You’re not really a nice man.’

Curle sighed. ‘I don’t like myself. Is that what you want to hear?’

Jonah set down his spoon. ‘I’ve lost my appetite, too.’

‘You’ve finished it!’

‘Hmm. Want to go somewhere else? We could have a half pint and go on with this.’

‘I can’t. It’s Liz’s day off, but there’s a meeting of the pharmacists in charge of the shops in the group. I’ve sworn I’ll be home for Kerr getting back from school.’

‘Your detective won’t wear it, you know.’

‘Why not?’

‘From what I’ve read, Ali Fleming was beaten to death. It must have been a man.’

Curle shrugged. ‘Maybe she used a hammer.’ As soon as he’d said it, he felt sick. The words from his own mouth appalled him.

To hide his feelings, he spun the book lying beside Jonah’s plate until he could decipher the title and author’s name. ‘Another one? I can’t keep up with him.’

‘Second this year. You know he’s just been given an OBE?’

‘Fuck!’

‘Afraid so,’ said Jonah who’d been around writers too long not to share their pain at another’s good fortune. ‘Think of it as an OBE for exports.’

‘It’s a silly idea,’ Kerr said.

‘It’s not mine,’ said Curle.

He’d been outlining to his son the concept of the pillow glove. It arose from the insight that the human animal was far from being ideal in construction. The list of faults might begin with the head, which was rather too large to slide comfortably through the birth canal. Later, the appendix, a trifling organ no bigger than a man’s pinkie, was capable of causing agony, even death, despite having no useful function to perform. The bones of the back popped out at a stretch and a sneeze. Starting from scratch, what reasonably capable designer would have come up with teeth that decayed? All of which acted as preamble to the problem of finding a comfortable position for sleep with a limb attached at each of four corners. One of the best was to slide your arm under the pillow and rest your head on your upper arm as you slept. This, however, left the relevant hand and forearm poking out into what, in winter, might well be cold air. The answer was the pillow glove, a padded mitten that would cover fingertips to elbow.

Alone with his son at table, since Liz hadn’t come home by dinnertime, Curle, feeling the need to make conversation, had outlined the conceit of the pillow glove,
together with its theoretical underpinning, leaving out the problems of the birth canal.

‘Whose idea was it?’

‘Jonah’s. You remember my agent? I took you in to see his office.’

‘Not recently.’

‘No. A while ago.’

‘I sleep on my front.’

‘He must sleep on his side, or the idea wouldn’t have occurred to him, I suppose.’

‘If his arm gets cold, he should shut the window.’

‘I’ll tell him that.’

‘I wonder what gave him the idea.’

Curle laughed. ‘He sleeps alone.’

To the best of his knowledge that had been true and still was. He had never heard Jonah so much as hint at anyone in his life. Naturally, he’d wondered if he might be gay, without ever catching any sign of it. It was possible that he had a secret mistress.

Smiling to himself as he ran over the married women Jonah knew, he gathered up plates, knives and forks and stacked them into the dishwasher. As he turned, he surprised Kerr biting his lip as he studied him.

‘What is it?’

‘It was cold last night.’

Curle warily nodded agreement.

Avoiding his eye, Kerr observed, ‘You could have done with one of those things.’

‘Things?’ No sooner had he spoken than he cursed himself, guessing what the answer had to be.

‘One of those pillow gloves.’

Later a number of things he might have replied occurred to him, among them the information that he too slept on
his front, leaving unsaid the implication that he did so even when exiled out of the bedroom on to a couch in his study.

Instead, he asked brusquely, ‘Have you any homework? If not, you can watch television for a bit.’

Three hours later when he was beginning the process of sending him to bed, Kerr asked, ‘When will Mum be home? Why is she so late?’

‘I’ve no idea. I’ll ask her when she comes in.’

Liz didn’t get back till almost ten o’clock, just after he had finally persuaded Kerr to go to bed. He heard tyres crunch on the gravel, the garage door go up and slam down, the key in the front door and was out in the hall, just happening to be on his way to the kitchen, as she came in.

‘Kerr’s in bed,’ he told her. ‘Maybe you want to say goodnight to him, before he goes to sleep.’

‘Of course I do,’ she said, ‘no maybe about it.’

‘I didn’t mean—’ What was the use?

He caught a trace of her perfume, one he’d bought her for Christmas, expensive, not one she wore every day. She was wearing a long Burberry-style raincoat and as she unbuttoned it, he saw under it the broad-shouldered jacket and the skirt that showed the plump sleekness of her thighs. What kind of meeting was it again? Did she always get dressed up to meet the pharmacists from the other shops? He tried to remember, but the fact was he hadn’t paid much attention.

‘I’m just going up,’ she said.

‘What about something to eat? I was going to make a sandwich.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Have you eaten?’

‘I’ve eaten,’ she said impatiently. ‘We went for a meal.’

After the meeting? He was sure they hadn’t done that
before. Donald the owner had ten shops and three children. Maybe he’d added a child or a shop and taken them out to celebrate.

‘Is that why you’re so late?’

She gave him a glance and went upstairs, leaving the faint trace of her perfume lingering in the hall.

The way it sometimes happens, everything fell into place the next morning. Before he’d got to breakfast, two things made Curle decide to check up on his wife that afternoon. The first was her announcement that she’d be late home.

‘Thanks for letting me know,’ he said lifting his head from the pillow. He had a stiff neck from spending yet another night on the couch in his study. ‘Another meeting?’

‘Don’t be silly. Betty rang and asked if I wanted to meet her after work. I’m telling you in case you fret about where I am.’

‘So you want me to look after Kerr?’

‘No need,’ she said. ‘He’s having a sleepover with Graeme Anderson. His mother’s collecting them both from school.’

The information that he wouldn’t be on call for Kerr made up his mind. He’d be there when the shop closed and follow her to see where she went, hopefully, almost definitely, though no longer certainly, straight home.

After breakfast he went into the study, switched on the computer and sat for a while staring at the single sentence he’d composed yesterday as the start of a new chapter. It was a nicely balanced sentence with an adjective like a ballerina poised on a noun solid as a rock, and an adverbial
clause wagging its tail all the way to the full stop. He changed one ‘the’ to an ‘a’ and sat back well pleased. A little light as the total of a day’s work, if you wanted to carp, but a nice sentence. After a while, he dozed off looking at it and woke up with a dry mouth needing a cup of coffee. I’m a murder suspect, he thought, and my wife is behaving oddly. Could Flaubert cope with that? I’ll go into town and get a coffee there.

Normally, he would have taken the bus, but having decided this wasn’t going to be an ordinary day, he backed his eight-year-old Vectra out of the garage. Fortunately, he wasn’t a car buff; if he needed to make a show for someone, he borrowed Liz’s.

Driving down through Morningside, he intended to use the park at the foot of Lothian Road. The heavy traffic, though, started him worrying in case he might have difficulty timing his arrival at Liz’s shop at the end of the afternoon. Making up his mind, he crossed Princes Street and ran down to Stockbridge. There was a side street just outside the Zone where Liz parked her car; he knew about it because on occasion when he was in town he’d walk down to get a lift home from her. Mostly, it would have been more convenient for her to get a bus, but she had bitter memories of waiting at bus stops on winter evenings when she was a girl. He made a pass along the street without spotting the Subaru and was about to try the next street when impulse made him swing into a vacancy at the kerb. Parking places were so hard to come by in this city that taking one was almost a matter of instinct. It was early for lunch, but he could go for a walk and then find somewhere to eat.

He strolled to Inverleith Park and watched half a dozen Indian boys playing cricket. As he made his way back, a thin rain turned from harmless persistence into an
intention to turn nasty. As the first big drops launched themselves, he dived down a stairway and took refuge in an Italian restaurant. Bean soup, veal, bitter coffee and a look at the morning paper, an hour and a half later he was back on the street, wondering how to kill time for the rest of the afternoon.

As he walked aimlessly, his feet led him out of habit to a familiar curve of buildings. He pressed the bell and waited until a woman’s voice answered.

‘It’s Barclay Curle. I’d understand if you didn’t want to talk to me.’

‘Come up.’

Linda Fleming met him at the door of the flat.

‘I’m glad you came,’ she said.

The warmth of her welcome took him by surprise. As he followed her along the passage into the front room, he caught the faintest trace of a perfume. Rich almost cloying, petals that hinted at their own decay, it was a scent he had despised himself for responding to so entirely. He had never asked for its name, but Ali had worn it all the time.

He took a seat in the room that had been so familiar and now seemed like part of another time, a lost world. He struggled as he had done before to find a resemblance between Linda Fleming and her dead sister. Something perhaps about the mouth, the shape of the eyes, but if there was one it was no greater than that between two people picked at random from a crowd in the street, strangers bred from the same Lowland stock. As she sat down and crossed her legs, he looked automatically at the curve of her calf and the sleek swell of her thighs. The red shirt she wore had the top buttons undone to show her breasts almost to the nipples and it seemed to him that her skirt was shorter than the one she’d worn to his house. She
had struck him then as being restrained, modest even, if that wasn’t too out of date a concept. He wondered if she had dressed for that first meeting to make some kind of statement about the difference between her and Ali. If so, what did the way she was dressed now mean?

‘You came to the funeral,’ she said.

‘I tried to stay well back. I hope no one was upset.’

‘Aunts and some people who had known my parents,’ she said dismissively.

‘I was thinking of your parents. I wouldn’t have wanted to upset them.’

‘No need, they weren’t there. They live in Inverness now. My father’s senile and my mother wouldn’t leave him. He wouldn’t understand.’

Curle’s quick imagination conjured up a picture of the old woman faced by the empty smile of her husband as the hour passed during which she knew her daughter was being buried far away. ‘How awful for her,’ he said.

‘She’s a strong woman. When my grandmother died, she didn’t put up a stone over her grave. They’d quarrelled over something. Ali and I shared the cost of a stone as soon as we were independent. I can’t tell you how angry she was with us for doing that. In a funny way, we almost welcomed her being so angry. If she ever felt much in the way of emotion normally, she never showed it. We were all glad to get out when our time came.’

‘What kind of man was your father?’

She stared at him. ‘Why would you want to know?’

‘Ali never spoke about her parents.’

‘Why would she?’ She cleared her throat. ‘Did she talk about me?’

He shook his head. She made a face, which might have been disappointment.

‘A quiet man,’ she said. And when he looked puzzled, added, ‘My father. If it matters. Did you want him to be a monster?’

‘Why would I have wanted that?’

‘After Ali got involved with you, I read your books. You don’t write about nice people.’

He shrugged. ‘Books aren’t life.’

‘You can’t write books without giving something away.’

‘That’s true.’ Goaded, he observed impulsively, ‘Ali had a dark side to her nature.’

‘Not with me,’ she said, her face frozen into a mask. ‘Not ever with me.’

Scrambling to retrieve his mistake, he said, ‘I don’t mean dark dark. Lovers’ games. They don’t count.’ What’s said at night should be set aside in the morning.

‘What did you talk about?’

Fucking. Being fucked. Power and submission.

He could find nothing to say, all the glib words deserted him. In the silence, he waited for her to condemn him.

‘You might think we’d be remote from one another, given that upbringing,’ she said. ‘For some reason, it didn’t work like that. All three of us loved one another. But she and I had time to get very close before Jean came along. Because there wasn’t much affection around, she looked for it to me. There was only four years between us, but I felt like a mother to her. At least, I suppose that’s how a mother would feel. I never had a child of my own.’

Overt emotion always embarrassed him. For something to say, he asked, ‘Was Jean at the funeral?’

‘Jean’s dead. The youngest went first. She’d never been sick in her life. One morning, she felt unwell. From the diagnosis to the day of her death was only a matter of weeks.’

Surreptitiously, he turned his wrist so that he could check his watch.

She caught the movement, however, and looking at her own watch cried, ‘Oh, it’s time. Would you come with me?’

‘Where?’

‘He came down last night, but I told him it was late and I was going to have an early night. Then he invited me for tea today, since it’s his afternoon off.’

‘Are we talking about Haskell?’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m not usually in such a muddle. Truth is, he gives me the creeps, just like Ali described. If there was anything to be found out, I was determined to go. But I wasn’t looking forward to it. And then you knocked at the door. The last person I expected to see. You have to come with me. It’s like fate, you do see that?’

That explained the short skirt and the tight top, he thought. Did she imagine Bobbie Haskell would give himself away by grabbing a breast or sticking a hand up to see if she was wearing knickers? The shame that accompanied the thought (if she believed this fantasy that Haskell might have killed her sister, you couldn’t deny her courage) weakened his resistance to going with her.

‘He hasn’t invited me,’ was the best he could do by way of protest.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, picking up her handbag. ‘How would it look if he refused?’