The Endings Man (16 page)

The following morning, Curle announced that he would take Kerr to school. A subdued and withdrawn Liz made no objection. Since she needed the car for work, however, and the Vectra, which he’d been driving without a spare, had picked up a flat tyre, they would have to walk.

‘It’s raining,’ Kerr announced.

Curle checked out of the window.

‘Drizzling,’ he said firmly.

‘You don’t need to come. I can go by myself.’

‘I’ll enjoy the walk. Get your coat on. We don’t want to be late.’

Curle followed him into the hall. It looked wet rather than cold outside, so he put on an old blue anorak he kept in the cupboard under the stairs. He waited at the door until Kerr trudged back down from his bedroom.

‘Got everything?’

‘Other people go to school by themselves. Graeme goes by himself.’

‘His mother fetches you both home.’

‘In the morning. He goes by himself in the morning.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Sometimes. He does sometimes. Why can’t I? I’m not a baby.’

‘Of course, you’re not. Do it for your mother’s sake. You know she worries.’

It was the easy way out. You’re a manly little chap. I’m a man. Man to man, blame it on the woman. A good preparation for life. Only this time, Curle was stabbed by a horrible sense of guilt. It took only a second to place the cause. He was betraying his wife. Again. What the hell had he been thinking of when he’d told Jonah about Liz going to the hotel and being humiliated by Brian Todd? What kind of man would do a thing like that? He remembered his father once telling him that his own mother had come to see him as a baby. She’d bent over the crib and said after inspecting him, ‘Ah, weel, ye’ll never mak a gentleman o that yin.’ She’d died when he was seventeen. He’d a memory of wrinkles, fierce blue eyes, jet-black hair. Black hair? She must have been over ninety. Old witch!

As they went down the path, he said awkwardly, ‘We both worry. I know you’re not a baby. Put up with us. Wait till the summer. When you start school again in August, you can walk by yourself. I’ll speak to your mother about it.’

They walked along in silence. The fine rain washed the cold air. The world smelled as if it had been freshly laundered. He took the school bag from the boy and carried it dangling from his hand.

At the school gates, Kerr took the bag back and stood hesitating. At last, he asked, ‘Promise?’

Fortunately, Curle understood at once. He nodded firmly. ‘I’ll speak to her.’

He stood by the railings as mothers came and went. Cars drew up and disgorged uniformed muppets. Once through the circling eddies of children he spotted Kerr alone by the wall. He could imagine the boy’s
embarrassment at having a father who remained fixed in place, one hand gripping a railing, instead of marching off to work:
places to go people to see.
Mercifully, the bell rang at last, though even then he stood and watched until the last child from the last column had been sucked in through the entrance.

What was the point of going home? His deadline was in ruins. The last timetable he’d drawn up just before Ali’s death had estimated he’d have to write three thousand words a day to meet it, every day, no weekend breaks, no flu, no depression lay-offs, every day without exception until the day it was due to be posted. On good form he could manage five hundred a day. He wasn’t going to make it. Being a murder suspect, wasn’t that an excuse? Maybe not for a crime writer.

He spent the morning in the Central Library. Wandering up and down the open shelves, he picked at random a book on Wagner, one of Agnes Mure Mackenzie’s histories of Scotland and a biography of an Indian astrophyicist who discovered black holes and was humiliated for his efforts by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, who’d posed as his friend. He read them turn and turn about, a chapter here and another there, until they fused into a broth in his head and the morning was disposed of. As he came out blinking into daylight and set off to walk down the Mound to Princes Street, he consoled himself with the thought he could call it research. At once a lively sense of guilt conjured up a sceptical tax inspector: ‘And have you actually started this novel about a big contralto in a kilt who goes through a black hole to the next universe in pursuit of this wee Indian bloke she fancies to tell him he’s won a Nobel Prize?’ ‘Might have.’

On Princes Street, he lingered at shop windows, staring
at shoe displays as if deep in thought. As he tried to hold off images of murder and arrest, random thoughts scurried around like mice trying to escape a cat and he realised how tired he had grown of his own company. At a brisk pace, he set off going west towards Jonah’s office. Once there, he baulked at going in, shamed by the idea he might start talking again about Liz. If he’s in a meeting, what excuse could I possibly make for barging in? I should have phoned, he told himself. He might be with anyone, somebody I know, Edinburgh was a small world. After what had been in the papers, he wanted to avoid people he knew. Tainted by suspicion, he felt like a man with a sickness. Unclean, unclean. He walked on, slowly this time, drifting. The garden in the middle of Charlotte Square was like a vacant room waiting to be filled by the bustle of the Book Festival in August. Staring through the railings at the forlorn grass, he remembered how lonely Kerr had looked standing against the wall of the crowded playground. In George Street, scanning the faces of passers-by (they couldn’t all be without a care in the world – that wouldn’t make sense), he realised he’d washed ashore outside the Italian place where Jonah and he had eaten the day before. There was no reason to believe he’d be taking lunch there two days running. On the other hand, there was no harm in trying.

In the restaurant, there was no sign of Jonah. No surprise there. What he hadn’t expected was to look down and find himself standing over ACC Bob Fairbairn alone at a table. Perversely, it was the look of alarm that brought him to a stop.

‘Bob! Good to see you. It’s been a while.’

He listened to himself being hearty, false as a six-pound note.

To his surprise, Fairbairn, too habitually the diplomat for snubbing to come easily to him, made an attempt at a smile. His eyes, however, ran over Curle head to foot and came to a verdict.

Registering this, Curle had to stop himself from rubbing his chin. He’d made only a token gesture of shaving that morning since he was only walking down to the school. For the same reason, he’d shoved on the old anorak he wore for taking rubbish to the dump. Christ, he thought. Buddy can you spare a dime?

With a nod, he turned to make his escape only to find Fairbairn’s lunch companion bearing down on him.

Joe Tilman came to an abrupt halt, glancing from Curle to his brother-in-law. He gave off the impression of an enormous contained energy, an arrested stillness like a jungle cat that could kill with a swipe of its paw. Instead of swiping, though, the hand he lifted brushed slowly over the mane of iron-grey hair.

‘You went to see my wife,’ he said quietly. ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’

I’ve been slapped, Curle thought. Once is enough.

Before he could say anything, Tilman went on, ‘She’s in a mental home. The state she was in when I got home, you left me no choice. I’ve had her sectioned.’

Curle was making his way blindly towards the vestibule, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned, expecting Tilman.

‘DI Meldrum is looking for you,’ Fairbairn told him. ‘It would be better if you went in yourself rather than waiting to be taken in. Shall I phone and tell him you’re on your way?’

In the days before the nightmare began, he had been shown around this building by the Assistant Chief Constable himself and been privately amused by the appetite of people in every profession to have their realities validated by fiction. He might even have been shown this room. He sat alone, having turned down the idea of a lawyer, facing Meldrum and McGuigan on the other side of a narrow table. After it had been switched on, he imagined he could hear a noise from the recording machine in moments of silence.

‘I’m disappointed in you,’ Meldrum said. ‘What made you imagine you could get away with lying about being home the night Eva Johanson was killed?’

That was the beginning of a long strange day.

As happened before, he found himself confessing at least part of the truth with hardly even a token show of resistance. He was a talented fabulist, not a practised liar. At lying, any streetwise nine-year-old villain would have handled the detectives more brazenly. Timid and instinctively law-abiding, he admitted more or less at once to having spent the night in a hotel.

‘You were meeting someone?’ Meldrum asked.

‘No!’ His indignation was absurd, but genuine. ‘I needed time alone to think. That was all. Kerr, my son, was
having a sleepover with friends and, I thought, I’ll have a night away too. It was just an impulse.’

‘You take an overnight away from home often?’ McGuigan asked.

‘Not often. Occasionally at conferences or whatever.’

‘What about with Ali Fleming? All those years when she was your mistress. You never spent the night with Ali Fleming?’

Curle shook his head. It was true. McGuigan stared at him sceptically. Hard blue eyes in a tough handsome Scots Irish face; if he had a mistress as well as a wife, Curle thought, he’d have managed a weekend now and then, maybe even a holiday together, because he’d want it all, because he was braver, because he was less cautious. And he’d have had it all, until something happened and everything went smash. He was that type, too, one of the ones who self-destruct.

‘Did you tell your wife you were going to be away?’ Meldrum wondered.

Curle couldn’t find a glib answer to that. He said hesitantly, ‘I left her a note.’

‘Why would she say you were there all night?’

‘She thought she was helping me.’

‘You let her do that?’ McGuigan wondered. ‘You know a lie like that could get her into trouble?’

‘Wives can’t be forced to give evidence against their husbands.’

‘Not the same.’

Before Curle could answer, Meldrum asked, ‘How would she be helping you? What did she think you’d done?’

He found that although his absurd uncontrollable imagination conjured up only too easily unwanted pulp
fiction associations for McGuigan of back rooms, bright lights, even rubber hoses, he was more wary of the big dour man with the workman’s hands.

‘Nothing. I said I’d spent the night at home, so she supported me. And you took it for granted she’d been home.’

Meldrum nodded at some thought of his own. ‘And wasn’t she?’

Alarmed, Curle blurted, ‘I didn’t mean – I didn’t say she wasn’t. All I meant was all she had to do was agree. She wasn’t really lying, she was just agreeing.’

McGuigan opened his mouth to snarl, Curle thought, at the nonsense he was talking, but Meldrum sighed and said, ‘Let’s go and talk to the people at the hotel.’

He sat in the back of the unmarked police car, watching the innocent pavements go by as the streets unwound at high speed. McGuigan, it seemed, was no respecter of limits. The sky, grey when they got into the car, had cleared as they pulled into a parking space outside the Smiddy Hotel. Stepping out into the brightness, feeling the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, Curle thought how good it would be on a day like this to go walking with Kerr on the paths between the open parks of the zoo.

The girl at the reception desk said she would fetch the manager. Curle recognised the hard-faced woman in her fifties who came out from a door at the rear, and from the way her gaze lingered on him he was sure the recognition was mutual. She offered the tall policeman a wary smile and took them back into the little room, cramped by a desk and filing cabinets, which she described as her office.

‘Have you ever seen this man before?’

To Curle’s relief, she nodded.

‘Could you tell me when that was?’ Meldrum asked.

‘Day before yesterday. Later on. In the evening. He took a room. It’s in the register.’

‘Could we see it?’

She got up reluctantly. When she came back with the book, she laid it on the desk, sat down and opened it.

‘Just show us the entry,’ McGuigan said.

She turned the book and pushed it across to him.

‘Four down.’

‘Sure?’

‘I’ve a good memory.’

‘Fine.’ He grinned. ‘So I don’t need to check the other pages?’

She stared at him sourly.

He pushed the register to Meldrum, putting his finger on the entry, tapping it on the page once and then again.

‘He signed in just after seven o’clock,’ she said.

‘And he was alone?’ Meldrum asked.

‘That’s what it says.’ Meldrum stared at her. After a moment of the silent treatment, she added, ‘He asked where the restaurant was.’

‘So?’

‘He was looking for some couple that had been in the bar.’

They talk about me as if I’m not here, Curle thought, staring at his hands as if pretending that he wasn’t.

‘Did he find them?’

‘No idea.’

‘Really?’

‘…I don’t think so. That’s when he came back and asked for a room.’

‘Can you describe this couple?’

‘No.’

‘How did he know they’d been in the bar?’

‘He looked.’

‘You like to explain that?’

Her heavy bosom rose and fell in a sigh at the unreasonableness of the question. ‘I was at the desk. He came in out of the rain, trailed water all over the floor, looked in the bar and went out again. Came back later, looked in the bar again, then asked where the restaurant was.’

‘And you can’t describe this couple?’

‘Never saw them.’

‘Busy night, was it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If we checked the bar takings, restaurant takings, lot of people in?’

She shrugged. ‘It was quiet. We’re always quiet except at the weekends. But I don’t stand at the desk all night. I’ve got things to do. So whoever they were,’ she glanced at Curle, ‘I missed them, all right?’

‘So Mr Curle here checked in around seven. When did he leave?’

‘He paid for his room in the morning.’ For the first time, she volunteered a statement unprompted: ‘Just don’t ask me if he was in his room all night. Like I say, there are things I might miss.’

Back in the car, McGuigan said, ‘That was like pulling teeth.’

He hadn’t switched on and both men turned to look at Curle in the back seat.

Meldrum said, ‘Want to tell us now?’

After a moment, McGuigan said, ‘Just above your name, there’s a Mr and Mrs John Smith booked in. For a double room. That sound like an old joke to you?’

‘We can guess who the woman was,’ Meldrum said. ‘Who was the man?’

‘We can always ask your wife,’ McGuigan said.

How could it be another betrayal when he had been driven into a corner? He admitted that he had been following his wife, and that the man was Brian Todd. A little smirk tugged at the corners of McGuigan’s lips.

Meldrum, however, expressionless as ever, asked sharply, ‘Todd? The man in the pub the night Ali Fleming was killed? The one you were at school with? I thought the two of you had lost touch?’

‘We had.’

‘So where did your wife meet him?’

‘He came to the house.’

‘When would that be?’

‘Just after Ali was murdered.’

This time McGuigan smiled openly, a big wolfish grin showing a line of straight white teeth.

‘As quick as that,’ he said.

Angered, Curle said, ‘Nothing happened!’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘I trust my wife!’

With a sinking heart, he could see the smirk on McGuigan’s face as he asked, why was he following her then?

It was Meldrum, however, who put the next question.

‘When did she tell you nothing happened? Did you go to their double room at the hotel?’

Miserably, Curle shook his head. ‘I didn’t know which room it was. She told me next day at home.’

‘So she stayed the night?’

‘Yes. But not with Todd. He left – he left after she told him it wasn’t on.’

Meldrum nodded. It seemed the question of whether or not Liz had been truthful didn’t interest him. Instead he said, ‘You can prove where you were at seven o’clock that night and where you were the next morning. It’s the bit in between that’s the problem.’

‘I didn’t kill Eva Johanson. For God’s sake, what reason would I have had to kill her?’

‘What reason would anybody have had?’ McGuigan asked. ‘On the other hand, we’re pretty sure the same man murdered her and Ali Fleming. And we know you had a reason to kill Ali Fleming.’

‘That place leaks like a sieve,’ Meldrum said, nodding at the hotel. ‘You could have slipped out and come back.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘All we know is you were alone in the room,’ Meldrum said.

They studied Curle for a moment, and then satisfied, as if by an unspoken agreement both turned to face forward. McGuigan turned on the engine.

‘No,’ Curle said.

‘What?’

‘I wasn’t alone.’

He eased up and reached for the billfold in his hip pocket. Meldrum who’d turned back watched as he took a folded slip of paper from the front compartment.

‘The number’s written on it,’ he said, passing it over.