The Endings Man (4 page)

In a reaction towards the uxorious, Curle took his wife and son out for the afternoon. Naturally, it turned out badly. For one thing, although it was her day off, it was a schoolday and Liz disapproved on principle. No sooner had they left Edinburgh than the sunshine, which had put the idea into his head in the first place, ebbed away as the islands on the Forth sank into a mist and chopping waves on the estuary indicated a rising wind.

‘Yellowcraigs to North Berwick,’ Liz said grimly. ‘I don’t think so.’

A walk along the beach had been her suggestion. For a stubborn instant, he felt like insisting they do it, but then had an image of them head down as the wind scoured the beach up to sandpaper their faces.

‘I know,’ he turned the car inland, ‘we’ll go and see Jane Carlyle’s house.’ Speaking firmly into the silence, he said, ‘It’s in Haddington. Twenty minutes or so will take us there. I’ve always meant to visit it.’

He filled the journey with an account for Kerr’s sake of who Thomas Carlyle was and why he had been a great man. Had been? Has-been? he wondered as he talked. Who reads him now? He tried to remember what he could about Jane. Great letter writer. Sharp wit. Not particularly happy: being a great man’s wife wasn’t easy. Desperately mourned
by Thomas after her death, guilt as much as anything.

It was a nice little market town, with a main street of undistinguished shops.

Getting out of the car, as they stepped into the beginning of a drizzle, he promised, ‘Look, there’s a café. We’ll get afternoon tea after we’ve seen the house.’

There was a sign like an inn sign above the pend. He pushed back the white gate that lay half open and they walked down the narrow lane. On the blank gable end of the first house there was a plate: JANE WELSH BAILLIE. It said she’d lived in that house, that she had been Thomas Carlyle’s wife and gone to live in London but come back to be buried in Haddington. Better than being buried in Haddington while you were alive, he thought. The gate into the yard at the back of the house, though, was marked ‘private’. They went on down the narrow lane. At the end, there was an arch and another sign.

The house was shut, not for lunch or a half-day, but seasonally.

‘We’ll come back in April,’ Liz said neutrally. But added, ‘That’ll be something to look forward to.’

As they walked back, he took a little jump to peep over the wall and saw a tree with apples on the grass underneath. It was a tall cramped house with long narrow windows in a line on the first floor. In each window dirty cream shutters were drawn behind the glass.

In the café he asked for tea, coffee and a Coke. On impulse, he ordered a slab of gateau for Kerr, who deserved to have something out of the trip. When he asked Liz if she wanted one, she grunted and looked out of the window. They had gone down steps into the café so that what she saw was people’s legs and the hems of their coats as they splashed past in the rain. They sipped at their drinks and
watched Kerr eating the cake, cutting into it with the edge of his fork and putting chunks in his mouth.

When they were finished, he led them back to where he’d spotted the butcher’s shop as they drove in. Colin Peat’s. He’d read about it in one of the local papers. ‘It’s got game pies and good meat sourced to the farm. We could get something for dinner.’

‘Are you home tonight?’ his wife asked.

‘Of course I am!’

‘I have to know,’ she said. ‘So I know what to get.’

When they came out, he took the plastic bag with the steak pie and the venison sausages from her and carried it close against his side to protect it from the rain. While they had been in the shop, the weather had got much worse so that they were soaked before they got to the car.

Fuelled by government warnings, premonitions of atrocity had become a background to everyday life, like the heart’s pulse you could never again take for granted after the first faltering. In only the last month, this endemic uneasiness had imperceptibly sharpened as if, by some instinct, the heads of grazing animals had lifted to sniff the wind.

Too fancy, Curle thought as he contemplated the words on the monitor screen, I’m writing a detective story not
War and
fucking
Peace
. He took a mouthful of coffee, long gone cold, and tried again.

Some kind of terrorist threat seemed to have been around for ever. This time, though, the evidence was overwhelming. No one doubted some great atrocity was imminent. Fortunately, so much Prozac had leaked from Londoners’ piss into the drinking water that the city remained admirably calm.

Toilet jokes. Was that supposed to be an improvement? At least no one could accuse it of being fancy. Had Tolstoy ever written a toilet joke?

He hit TOOLS and WORD COUNT and studied the dismal total. By contract he was obliged to deliver the manuscript of the novel in three months’ time. A bit of mental arithmetic confirmed that at this rate of progress he should be finished in two and half years.

Have to work harder, he thought, and got up and wandered about. He looked out of the window at the back garden and the back gardens of his neighbours. If the view had been of mountains, he was pretty sure he would work better. Or one of the sea, or of the Forth estuary with its road bridge, rail bridge, tankers going up and down to the terminal at Grangemouth.

He picked up the cup and went down to the kitchen, stepping lightly as a thief on the treads of the stairs. In the hall he stood listening until the roar of the Dyson vacuum started up reassuringly in the front room. Moving quietly past the closed door, he went into the kitchen where he boiled a cupful of water, made instant coffee and negotiated the return journey without mishap.

He didn’t have an office in the city to go to; he worked at home. Most writers worked at home. Some worked in a hut at the bottom of the garden. John Byrne worked in a hut. Maybe that was why he was so prolific: to take his mind off the cold.

Curle worked in what had been a bedroom. He closed its door behind him and put the coffee down beside the computer. There were four bedrooms upstairs. One was for Liz and him, one for Kerr, one that he had lined with bookcases was kept for guests. Which left this one. The smallest one. With a computer table and a case of reference books, two office chairs, a desk. Which about filled it. Maybe if he had space to walk about, he’d work better. Maybe not.

In the middle of the room, he stretched his arms wide as if to push back the walls. Working at home could drive you crazy.

Back at the window, he noticed that last night’s high wind had torn loose a strip of felt from the roof of the
garden hut. No one could blame him if he went down and fixed it, even if he was supposed to be working. He hung suspended between options until after a while an image of his father came unbidden out of the past. He was standing on the lawn, standing beside Curle’s mother, and it must have been summer and a party for there were lots of people and the sun was shining. His father with his light cream summer suit and his false face, his professorial smiling face, false as a mask. Like him, his father had been an adulterer and he had hated him for it.

Finally he sat down at the computer again, read over what he had written. Shrank the page and brought up solitaire. None of the games worked out. When he remembered his coffee and took a mouthful, it was cold. It was a relief when the phone rang.

He listened to the voice and said, ‘No, of course, I remember you.’

Meldrum. The policeman.

Her name was Martha Tilman and she lived at the top of a hill in the Border town of Peebles.

‘You want to go now?’ he’d asked in surprise when Meldrum phoned.

‘Why not?’

Leave the cold coffee behind. Get out of the house. Why not?

‘What age is she?’ Curle asked in the car.

‘What age would you want her to be?’ Meldrum responded.

And what kind of answer was that? Perhaps he didn’t know; perhaps he didn’t like being questioned; perhaps he couldn’t help himself from testing, probing, needing to find out. It was what policemen did after all, and it seemed to Curle that Meldrum was one of those men defined by their job. Assuming he had a private life at all, it was hard to imagine what it might be. A glance to the side gave him a glimpse of the raw-boned profile, big nose, long chin, thin mouth, giving nothing away. The hands surrounding the steering wheel were thick fingered, old scars white on the back of the nearer, hands shaped by grasping tools, a workman’s hands.

‘Just curious,’ Curle said. ‘I never thought you’d find her.’

‘Why did you ask me then?’ Meldrum wondered and then shook his head. ‘Of course, you didn’t. You asked Fairbairn. And where did you do that? For a bet, not at his office. Nothing official, since you didn’t really think we could find her. Did you happen to run across Fairbairn at some function? Some kind of dinner maybe, eh?’

‘Some kind of function,’ Curle said.

‘Don’t tell me. It came up in the conversation. Made a good story. And you thought that was the end of it. But then Fairbairn decided to wag his willie and show you how high an assistant chief constable could pee.’

Curle kept his peace, and they were in Peebles Main Street before Meldrum said, ‘I didn’t find her.’

‘Who did?’

‘Nearly there.’

And Curle had to content himself with that for an answer as they wound up the hill and came to a stop at the last house, two storeys of new brick behind a wide stretch of lawn.

The man who opened the door was in his middle years, about fifty perhaps, with close-cropped iron-grey hair. As Meldrum introduced them he nodded and gestured them inside. He pointed them to a door and as they went in turned back into the hall, listening all the while to the mobile phone he held clamped against his ear.

They stood looking at one another in silence.

‘Private call apparently,’ Curle said.

Meldrum dismissed that with a look.

Irritated, Curle offered a volley of questions, ‘Who is he? Why are we here? Is the woman here?’

Meldrum surprised him by saying, ‘Sorry. His name’s Tilman. Joe Tilman. He’s by way of being a millionaire. Or he was until the bottom fell out of his business, one of
those dot.com things. He’s the husband.’ After a pause, he finished, ‘Like I said, I didn’t find her. He came to us.’

The room they’d been shown into was a kind of snug, four comfortable chairs, a coffee table, one of the new televisions with a screen that served as a mirror, glass cabinets with books and sculptures made out of white driftwood and lumps of burled walnut. As the minutes passed, Curle read the titles behind the glass of the nearest cabinet:
Wainwright In Scotland, National Geographic Expeditions Atlas, Britain’s Highest Peaks, White Death, October On Everest, South Col, The Munros, The Game Of Ghosts, Antartica, Storms Of Silence.
He recognised the name of the writer of the last book. Joe Simpson. A climber who’d crawled off a mountain with a broken leg.

He turned at the sound of the door being opened. Meldrum was looking at a photograph framed on the wall, hands behind his back in the at ease position.

Tilman came in, sliding the mobile into the pocket of his shirt. He glanced at Meldrum then focused his attention on Curle.

‘I take it you’re the one who made the complaint?’

Curle, who’d been expecting some apology however perfunctory for keeping them waiting, couldn’t find an answer to that. After a moment, he confined himself to a nod.

‘You can forget it. You won’t have any more trouble from Martha. I hope you’ll take my word for that.’ And as he finished, he half turned as if to lead them out of the room again to the front door.

There was an oddly compelling quality to the gesture, the assumption of a man accustomed to being given what he wanted. Thinking about it later, Curle had the embarrassing suspicion that if he had been on his own he
would have followed meekly into the hall to find himself immediately afterwards on the front step with the door being closed in his face. Meldrum, however, turning from the photograph, took one long stride and was folding his length into the chair on the other side of the fireplace without waiting to be invited. Tilman frowned in something like disbelief. Suspended between them, Curle resolved his discomfort by going to the other chair by the fireside. As he sat, he took in the photograph framed on the wall above him. It showed Tilman and another man with between them two blonde sharp-featured women. The two women linked one another and their male companions by an arm around the waist. Each man draped a possessive arm across the shoulder of the woman beside him. All four offered broad smiles to the camera. The second man was unmistakably Assistant Chief Constable Fairbairn. He saw that Meldrum was watching him. Had the policeman deliberately left him this chair hoping that he would notice the photograph?

He saw that Tilman was also watching him.

‘Bob Fairbairn is married to my wife’s sister,’ Tilman said.

Tilman and Fairbairn. There was a theory that you could connect any two people on the planet in six steps. Scotland was a small world. Call it four.

‘Can we speak to your wife?’ Meldrum asked.

‘No.’

Meldrum raised his brows at the abrupt negative.

‘That wasn’t part of the bargain,’ Tilman said.

‘Whatever you’ve been told, I might decide it is necessary to talk to her.’

In the pause that followed, Curle had the impression that Tilman took account of Meldrum, actually saw him,
for the first time. He showed no response to Meldrum’s tone, but went to the remaining chair in front of the fireplace, leaning back with his hands relaxed on its thickly padded arms. Like that, attentive and alert, he seemed suddenly formidable to Curle; of course, he thought, he’s getting ready to negotiate. Making deals is what he does.

‘As I explained to Bob – Bob Fairbairn,’ he said, ‘my wife has been getting more unwell for the last year or so.’ Looking at Curle, he added, ‘She sent you letters, isn’t that right?’

Curle nodded. ‘For more than a year, though. It must be more than three years since the first one came.’

Tilman nodded. ‘I know the dates. I’ve read them.’

Shocked, Curle glanced at Meldrum. Had those letters been given to Fairbairn? Had Fairbairn chosen to show them around? It was outrageous.

Tilman seemed to allow himself a moment to appreciate the effect he had created before he began an explanation.

‘My wife was admitted to a private nursing home last week. Florid, you know that word? Her doctors used it. Her delusions were florid. So then I was on my own. It took a few days for it to occur to me that respecting her privacy was no help to her, not by that stage. I decided to have a look through her study, that’s what she calls it; it’s just a room where she can be by herself. I found a diary in a drawer of her desk. I read bits of it, but I couldn’t see how they would be of any help to her doctors. The drawer hadn’t even been locked. I was ready to put it back when I saw she’d written a couple of words inside the back cover. Her mother’s maiden name. The name of a holiday cottage we have.’ He shook his head with a mixture of disbelief and what could have been contempt, but might have been pity. ‘It’s what people do apparently. I knew at once what they
must be. Passwords. I used them to open files on her computer. There were reviews of your books, newspaper articles, that kind of stuff, and the letters. The letters she’d written to you. Forty or fifty of them.’

‘That can’t be right,’ Curle said. ‘Nine or ten. There were only nine or ten.’

‘Then she wrote more than she sent,’ Tilman said.

Meldrum intervened. ‘Have you taken them to her doctors?’

‘Not yet. I’ll have to think about that.’

‘But you took them to the Assistant Chief Constable?’

‘Not the way you mean. His wife was worried about her sister. I needed to talk to somebody. I told them the latest from the clinic and that led on to how I’d found these letters. I’d hardly started when Bob jumped up and said, “You’ve solved a mystery”. He was full of apologies for mixing the police up in it, called himself all kinds of a fool. It was his idea that I should see Mr Curle and put his mind at rest. For Martha’s sake, that’s what I decided to do.’

‘I see, and the easiest way to put you in touch with Mr Curle was to ask me to deal with it,’ Meldrum said.

Curle wondered whether Tilman was conscious of the dryness of Meldrum’s tone, or if he sensed it himself only because of that earlier interview at which he had been made aware of the policeman’s resentment. A touchy bastard, he thought, who doesn’t like being treated as an errand boy. By this point, Curle badly wanted to put an end to the proceedings. In retrospect, he felt uncomfortable about having got so worked up over a handful of letters from an unfortunate woman. That overreaction had led to what he now felt as an intrusion into a private grief. As it happened, he was disinclined, not the most useful trait for a writer, to get involved in the messiness of other people’s emotions.

While he was shaping a graceful speech, however, vowing to forget the whole wretched business, Meldrum began again. ‘It is the case, though, that one of the letters sent to Mr Curle claimed to describe a murder. I saw that one myself.’

Tilman, presumably still in negotiating mode, didn’t react.

It was an incensed Curle who blurted, ‘A murder that took place only in the pages of one of my books!’

‘A piece of fiction, that was certainly my impression,’ Tilman said, smiling at Curle, ‘though I don’t know how accurate her account was. I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books.’

And Curle almost offered the little self-deprecating remark about ‘joining the great majority’ that he produced in such situations.

He was saved from this by Meldrum asking, ‘In the letter I saw, your wife doesn’t name the person she claims to have murdered. Does she in any of the letters she didn’t send?’

‘Why would you want to know?’ Tilman wondered. He spoke quietly, but his right hand that had lain relaxed on the chair arm suddenly clenched. If he was angered, though, that was the only sign he gave.

‘If we had the name of this person, it gives something that can be checked.’

‘The victim she imagines wasn’t a woman. It was a man. She talks about a friend of ours. And no, he wasn’t murdered. So no need to check.’

Curle the peacemaker found himself smiling and nodding, but when Meldrum waited in silence, Tilman went on, ‘He’s dead. Of natural causes.’

‘What would they be?’

‘Would cancer of the testicles be natural enough for you? He was best man at our wedding. It occurs to me as late as this that my wife might always have been a little in love with him. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence that those letters of hers about murder were written just after his death. Does that cover whatever it is you wanted to know?’

The woman in his book, Curle remembered, had an affair with a neighbour, both of them married, and she’d killed him because he’d fallen too much in love with her and wanted to tell the world. The playfulness of reversing the usual roles played by the sexes had pleased him. Queen Kong. Ms Hyde. Cancer of the testicles. Punishment for adultery.

He was on his feet.

‘I’ve had enough of this. There was no need for me to come here. All that stuff about the letters, it’s all forgotten. As far as I’m concerned, all forgotten.’

Negotiation concluded.

They rode back to Edinburgh in silence. He stared straight ahead all the way, not risking a glance at his companion. Time enough later, he thought, to try to work out what Meldrum had thought he was doing, what had possessed him, what had been going on. However irrationally, for the moment he felt endangered and just wanted the journey to be over. Weakly he muttered some kind of conventional parting as he got out of the car, but the policeman drove off without a word.