The Endings Man (3 page)

Curle’s first impulse had been to refuse.

‘I hate AGMs. Balance sheets I can’t read and the risk of being elected to some bloody committee.’

‘Assuming you’re asked,’ Jonah said. They were having lunch for the second time that week. Not a usual occurrence. He’d been surprised when Jonah had rung to invite him.

‘Ye of little faith. I’m the committee-man type. People think of me as solid and sensible.’

‘I won’t say anything about appearances being deceptive. You could always say no.’

Curle shook his head and, as an old friend who had a sense of his weaknesses, Jonah didn’t pursue it. Instead, he returned to the attack from a different direction. ‘Napier lays on a decent buffet, I hear. And the wine should be drinkable.’

‘Why are you so keen on me going?’

‘It would do you good. You need to put yourself about a bit more. You can’t use work as an excuse. You’ve hardly started the new book.’ He frowned. ‘If you’ve started it at all.’

‘It’s gestating. I’m taking notes.’

Dismissing that with a flap of the hand, Jonah said, ‘No excuse not to mingle – it’s what you do when a new book’s
on the shelves, get out and make yourself available.’

‘You’re in the wrong business. You should have been a pimp.’

‘Hemingway said you had to get out of the house; go and see the fights once a year, he said, or you’ll finish up alone in a room staring at the wall.’

‘Look what happened to him.’

‘Maybe he stopped going.’

Whether due to Hemingway or not, Curle overcame his wife’s objections to his running in and out of the house by telling her he’d a professional duty to attend that evening’s AGM of the Society of Authors in Scotland.

He had been at the Craigton campus of Napier University some time before to do a reading to a group of first-year students. Later he was told the university had one of the highest drop-out rates in the country that year and claimed till the joke grew stale that he was almost sure it had nothing to do with him. He’d forgotten how to get into the building, driven past it and turned before finding the entry off a side street. Tucking the car into the first park, he walked up the drive towards the new building opened only the previous year. A curve of glass bulged from the façade, the lit area beyond showing the tiered blue seats of a lecture room. As he approached, his eye was caught by a notice – SMOKING AREA – marking off a length of raked gravel and some hopefully placed bins. Despite this, the wooden planks that covered the path to the doorway were littered with cigarette butts.

The woman at the reception desk directed him upstairs and he came out on to an open gallery with two long tables carrying glasses of wine and soft drinks. A few people were standing around but there was no sign of Jonah so he crossed a bridge-like structure that moved gently under his
feet to the lecture room itself. Inside he checked again before finding a place in an upper row of the blue seats at a comfortable distance from the speakers’ table. Waiting, he passed the time by studying the net of broad wooden struts that ran across the walls and roof bracing the shell of the egg-shaped interior.

As people came in, he nodded to familiar faces, usual suspects and some he couldn’t put a name to, and fretted over the non-appearance of Jonah. Gloomily, he watched the chairman, secretary and treasurer take their places behind the table, and sank in his seat as the minutes of the last meeting were read. His fears of being elected to a place on the committee were unnecessary. Arms had been twisted beforehand and the nominations were made and seconded without fuss. He was reminded of an old communist telling him how it should be done: ‘I-nominate-I-second-I-accept-Mr Chairman, and no other bugger gets a look in.’ When no one took the bait of Any Other Competent Business, he was congratulating himself on it being over when the chairman produced a guest speaker. A stout man, his manner an unattractive combination of diffidence and self-satisfaction, he gave a brief history of Napier, lingering as a highlight on the fact that it had been a hospital for shell shock in the first world war. Two of its patients had later become famous. ‘That’s why,’ he pointed to one side and the other, ‘the new halls are called Sassoon and Owens.’ Apart from that, his talk consisted of the importance of the market in Chinese students.

‘Not my idea of what a university should be doing,’ murmured a plump man called Hale, a writer of love stories, buttonholing him as he tried to make his escape.

Before Curle could respond, Jonah accompanied by
another man edged his way along a row of seats into the passage and joined them.

‘Where did you get to?’ Curle asked.

With a bland smile that wouldn’t have been out of place in a sudden onset of deafness, Jonah indicated his companion. ‘My guest,’ he said. ‘He wanted to meet you. He’s a fan of your books.’

‘An admirer,’ the man said. He was sturdily built with a thick fleshy neck and cheeks that shone as if they had been barber shaven. ‘I wouldn’t claim to be a great reader. I’m an accountant; numbers are more my thing.’

Hale said with the slight edge of a writer listening to someone else being praised, ‘Every man to his trade. You won’t have any strong feelings about Owens and Sassoon then?’

‘I’m not with you,’ the man said.

‘A forgotten writer who was fond of foxhunting and a minor poet who died in the first world war. This place has named two of its new halls after them.’

Jonah waved a hand in protest. ‘Come on, I think Owens was better than that.’

‘Because you read him at school,’ Hale said. ‘People get exposed to him before their critical faculties are properly developed. A university named after Napier of Merchiston who was a great man; you’d think they could have done better. I expect it’s because there was a film about the two of them, holding hands in the hospital to avoid going back to the trenches.’

This produced a pause. If Jonah had an answer, he didn’t volunteer it. The man with him said at last, ‘Was it a good film?’

‘It was a bloody awful film,’ Hale said, ‘and I haven’t even seen it.’

Jonah looked after him as he went off, swinging meaty hips as if stamping the conquered underfoot.

‘Would you believe that man is our Scottish Barbara Cartland?’ he wondered. ‘Maybe that’s what makes him so aggressive. All that sugar.’

Curle nodded no more than a vague appreciation of the joke for he was studying the stranger trying to place why his face seemed familiar.

Catching his look, the man said with a smile, ‘You don’t remember me?’

‘Should I?’ And then it came to him, ‘The other day in the Atrium… You wanted to say hello. Is that right?’

‘And before that?’ the man asked.

Before? Curle looked from the red-headed stranger to Jonah and shook his head.

‘I don’t seem to have made as much of an impression as you suggested the other day then?’

And some shade in the voice, something about the way as he smiled he sucked in the lower lip as if to bite on it; it was like the wipe of a hand across a steamed mirror to show a face. A face from a lifetime ago.

‘Yes,’ Barclay Curle said, drawing the word out slowly, surprised by the steadiness of his voice, ‘we were at school together. Isn’t that right, Jonah? All three of us.’

I’m a believer that facing our fears is good for us, Jonah had told him, as justification. But he’d told him bollocks to that. Idle curiosity, like poking animals with a stick, would be nearer the mark. Without even a hint to warn him of what was coming. It was unforgivable. If I’d told you, Jonah had pointed out, you might not have come.

There was a thought.

Facing fears wasn’t his style.

Until he had physically turned to his left stepping off Princes Street and into the doorway, he was in doubt as to whether or not he would keep the appointment.

In the event, he’d misunderstood for it wasn’t a meeting between the two of them: there must have been forty people in the room. He’d asked for Brian Todd at reception and been directed into the lift and up to this room on the third floor of the Club. Not seeing Todd and not knowing what else to do, he wandered through the groups around the leather couches until he arrived at the windows looking down on to the busy night street and the floodlit outline of the Castle on the hill opposite blurred in the falling rain.

‘Sir?’

At the voice, he turned to find a waiter holding out a tray of glasses. He picked a glass of red wine and went back to staring out of the window. Listening to the murmuring
voices at his back, the little spikes of fat chuckling laughter, he felt as if at any moment he might be charged as an impostor and the wine taken from his hand. I’ll finish it, he thought, and then I’ll get out of here. Even when the murmur of voices stilled and someone began to make a speech, he stayed with his back to the room, for some reason unable to bring himself to turn round. Staring out at the night shapes below, he made out how good the cause was and twice heard the name of Brian Todd, once to applause.

As the speech ended, a voice at his side said, ‘It’s Barclay Curle, isn’t it?’

A portly man with a high colour and thinning white hair smiled down at him. He felt his usual surprise and unease at being recognised.

‘We met once before,’ the man said. ‘It was an event at the Book Festival. I’d published a memoir that year. I remember we became involved in a conversation about crime. You made the point that we both owed our livelihood to it.’

A memory stirred. ‘The bench a more elevated one than the pen?’ And with a bloody pension. A High Court judge. McNaughtan, was it?

The judge nodded at the window. ‘I never tire of that view. Even at night.’

‘It’s a fine view,’ said Curle neutrally, unlikely to tire of it since he wasn’t a member of the Club.

‘Were you at the inaugural meeting?’

Meeting? Curle looked at him blankly. Of course, of the good cause. ‘Brian Todd asked me along this evening.’

‘Ah, Brian. Well, he’s been the moving spirit. Or his firm has. But he’s been the one who’s taken to do with it. He’s been a tower of strength from what I’m told.’

‘…He always had plenty of energy.’

The judge cocked his head shrewdly. ‘Have you known him for long?’

‘I wouldn’t claim to know him well. We were at school together.’

‘That’s a claim in itself. We unpack ourselves to one another at school. The masks haven’t formed yet.’

Curle shook his head. ‘People change. Don’t you think people change?’

‘Fundamentally? I doubt it. You know what the Jesuits say about seven-year-olds?’

Fortunately, they were interrupted before Curle could speculate: yum, yum?

‘The very man,’ the judge exclaimed. ‘I was just hearing that you two were at school together.’

‘A long time ago,’ Brian Todd said. ‘When we met the other evening, Barclay didn’t recognise me.’

‘But you recognised him?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You must have changed more than he has then,’ the judge offered. ‘Either that or he left more of an impression on you than you did on him.’

‘He left an impression,’ Barclay Curle said.

There must have been something in his tone that made the judge narrow those shrewd eyes.

Todd laughed. ‘Some people,’ he said, ‘manage to keep their boyish looks.’

In a moment, with a parting pleasantry, he drew Barclay away from the judge. The affair was winding down but still it took ten minutes to get out of the room as the accountant ran a gauntlet of well-wishers. In a quiet room on the first floor, they sat over coffee and looked at one another in silence.

Curle, who didn’t take sugar, found himself spooning it in and stirring the cup for something to do.

‘You’re not in the phone book,’ Todd said.

‘No. We’re ex-directory.’

‘Too many fans calling you?’

‘No. It’s a long story.’

‘Aren’t stories your thing?’

‘I don’t feel like telling this one.’

Todd leaned forward. ‘I do like your books,’ he said, ‘but that wasn’t the only reason for wanting to talk, of course. I heard that interview on the radio. Where you talked about being bullied at school.’

‘If you’re wondering, was I talking about you, the answer’s yes.’

Todd blinked and sat back. ‘You can’t still be angry with me? I thought in that interview you were just talking for effect. You’d said something of the same sort before. About being bullied at school. In an article in a magazine. My wife read it to me.’

‘You’d talked to her about me?’

‘No, no. She likes detective stories. She’d no idea. To be honest,’ Todd said, ‘I’d feel silly saying I was sorry. We’re both different people.’

‘It was a long time ago,’ Curle agreed. ‘I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d forgotten it.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘I was the victim.’

‘That sounds like self-pity,’ Todd said and made a face at his own words. ‘All right, I am sorry. Though the truth is, I don’t remember in all that much detail, if you want me to be honest. I doubt if I’d have got in touch at all if it hadn’t been for something else in that article you wrote.’

‘Something else?’

‘It was what made my wife read to me. She had an idea it might help. God knows what she was thinking of. The times coincided, maybe that got to her.’

‘I can’t imagine what time you’re talking about.’

‘Eight years ago. Like you, I lost a child eight years ago.’

Curle felt as if a hand was squeezing the air out of his lungs. With an effort, he said, ‘You’ve got that wrong. Eight years ago, my son was born.’

That had been a wet night too, the night his son was born. He’d phoned the hospital and a nurse had told him nothing would happen till the morning. Later he’d learned that while the bitch was lying to him, his wife had been waving frantically to say he should come in because her pains were starting. She was in the intensive care unit because of high blood pressure and hating every moment of it, not least the attentions of the mad woman from the mental home who wandered around behind the great curve of her belly shaking the drips and smiling down in the night. Nothing till the morning and so he’d gone to that party and met the woman in the red dress and gone home with her, and at some point when they were fucking, the time against the wall in the lobby or the first or second time in the bed, some time around there his son had been born. He’d wakened half across the woman and gingerly unclutched her breast to roll as quietly as a thief out of her bed. At home he’d found the nurse’s call on the answerphone – his son had been born at half two in the morning.

Mother and son both well. No deaths that night. It had been six years before that night that their five-year-old daughter Mae had been killed.

After leaving Todd in the Club, he walked up the damp slope of Frederick Street, shining under the lamps, to where he’d left his car almost at the far end of George Street. Finding a parking place in Edinburgh was never easy. The events of Mae’s death churned in his mind like dirt from the bottom of a pool. Todd had leaned over the pool, stick in hand, and up it had all come.

He had intended to go home after meeting Todd, but there was no way he could face Liz now, or Kerr either, not with that foulness of dirt swirling around the face of his dead daughter. He drove the car on automatic pilot to the building in which Ali Fleming had her flat, drove past it and parked three streets away. That was one of his precautions. There were others: like not taking a key for her flat, like not phoning her from his house, like not taking her out for meals or to the theatre or at all. That had been the way of things during their relationship. He was a cautious man, and she had accepted it, maybe because there were other men in her life, maybe because of some masochistic streak in her. Eight years, though, was a long time for a woman’s patience, whatever streak was in her, and a long enough time for luck to have played some part in their affair going undetected.

That night, with his head full of Mae’s death, the luck ran out. He hit the buzzer and the bolt went back. As he climbed the carpeted stair to the third landing, sounds of laughter and voices drifted down to him. In all his visits, he’d never heard anything like it. All these years, he could recall passing anyone on the stairs only a handful of times. He froze, one foot raised, alert as a forest animal. He was turning to go back down when the noise was cut off. He let the silence stretch for a moment and stepped on to the landing.

It was no surprise to find Ali’s door, the second on the landing, lying a shade open. Going in, he pushed it shut behind him, but when he went through the flat, living room, dining room, bedroom, sticking his head round the door to check the bathroom, the place was empty. If she had pulled a vanishing trick in front of his eyes, he couldn’t have been more puzzled. He went back into the living room and was standing in front of the gas fire when he heard the front door being opened. A moment later, Ali was there, raising her eyebrows at the sight of him and stepping aside to let a young man follow her into the room.

He had a mop of blond hair that fell over his forehead and pale eyebrows plucked into two neat arcs. His name, Ali said, was Bobbie Haskell ‘from the fourth floor. I can’t get the video to work and he’s going to have a look at it for me.’

‘Jack,’ Curle said, by way of introducing himself. ‘Jack Brown.’

‘I can do it another time,’ the young man said. ‘I mean since you’ve got company.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Jack won’t mind.’ Curle heard the faint emphasis of her irritation. She went on at once, ‘How did you get in?’

‘Your door was open.’

‘The outside door, I mean.’

‘I rang the buzzer.’

‘You must have pressed the wrong one. I wasn’t here. I was upstairs.’

‘The chap on the fifth floor had us all in for a kind of council of war,’ the young man said. ‘We’ve had bother with the roof.’

‘You have a Scottish accent,’ Curle said.

‘Yes?’

‘And an English name?’

‘I don’t think of it that way,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes. It’s the other way round with journalists in Edinburgh. They have Scottish names, but when you meet them they all have English accents.’

‘He gets bees in his bonnet,’ Ali said to the young man. ‘They don’t mean anything.’

Barclay felt the smile pull at the corners of his mouth like a snarl.

‘Everybody gets those,’ he said, watching her as if they were alone. ‘For a while with you, it was friends. I remember last New Year you made a resolution to find friends who were less boring than an unexpurgated religious tract. It made me smile at the time. Later it made me realise how discontented you were.’ He acknowledged the young man’s presence. ‘It’s what happens to women when they get near forty.’

As quickly as that, they were at war. Not even the sight of Haskell swinging his face like a spectator at a tennis match applied the brake. It was only when he’d left, shown out at last by Ali, that Curle began to cool down.

‘What took you so long?’ he asked as she came back.

‘What are you on about now?’

‘You should have got rid of the little bastard right away.’

‘He’s as tall as you are!’ And before he could react to the stupid inconsequentiality of that, she blurted, ‘Maybe I wanted him here as protection.’

‘Protection? Protection from what, for Christ’s sake?’

‘From you. In case you hit me.’

He stared at her then sank down into a chair.

‘That’s not my style. I’m not your bloody professor.’

In bed later, he said, ‘If I had hit you, you’d have liked it, wouldn’t you?’

‘Not for real. For real’s different. I can’t imagine what made you so angry.’

He put an arm across to hide his eyes and said nothing. It felt as if only a moment passed, but it also felt like wakening so perhaps for a time he slept.

She was speaking in a soft reflective murmur. ‘I was in a shop, a little shop, a very small space, this man tries to come in, he has a pack on his back, no room, I can see there’s no room for him. As I tried to squeeze out his bulk pressed me back over the counter. It was horrible.’

He took the arm away and turned his head to look at her.

‘When was this?’

‘No when at all. It was a dream.’

A dream. Why tell him her dreams? He wasn’t her psychiatrist. Anyway, it was so unlike her usual confidences that he was disappointed.

After a time, he said, ‘At least the little bastard doesn’t know my name.’

‘…Jack,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t it have been John? Isn’t that what prostitutes call their clients?’

‘Jack will do.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘What? What?’

‘Bobbie Haskell works in a bookshop.’

‘Oh…fuck.’