The Endings Man (9 page)

Meldrum frowned. ‘I’m not sure why you brought this to us. Why do you want me to look at it?’

‘I think it will be obvious once you’ve read it,’ Curle said. ‘It’s just a few pages. It wouldn’t take long for both of you to look at it. It’s a note I made of something Ali told me.’

As Meldrum bent his head, Curle could envisage the words on each leaf he had torn from his notebook.

‘I was late and he’d changed house. [This was the Classics Professor you told me about? – Yes, she said] It was pretty tense when I got there. There was a ritual of transformation we did – it sounds silly but it made a difference. I had to bath and then he’d inspect me. I wasn’t allowed to be the least wet. This time he laid me down on the bed and put the blindfold on. Then he asked me how much I’d been online, who I’d met, what I’d done, how often I’d cum without thinking of him. It was all quite gentle but it made me very uncomfortable. Eventually he came up with a figure – forty-eight strokes I owed him for tardiness and general slutty inconsideration. Normally I could cope, but I heard the belt slide out from his trousers. He gave me six hard strokes – it was bearable, just bearable, but I had to count and he talked to me all the time, which made it hard to keep count. [Did he fuck you?] Then he fucked me, lying face down still; he took
me from behind. [In the arse?] After another two sets of six he told me he was going to fuck me in the arse. I’ve only had two cocks in my arse and both times it was very painful and unpleasant. He’s not very big but it must have excited him what he was going to do to me so that he was very hard. It hurt a lot. By the end of the afternoon, I was only up to twenty-four. It’s going to be hard on you, twenty-four to be taken quickly, he told me. I didn’t think I could do it. My arse was so sore as if it had been sandpapered. I’ll tell you what he said. Six of the cane and we’ll write off the rest of the strokes. He’d never caned me. He’d used his hand – and he could cause pain with that – and a belt and the flogger and the crop. [Was there a ritual?] He told me I had to kiss the cane before and after. And I had to count them. When the first blow came it was like a white light in my head.’

With a grunt, Meldrum handed the sheets to McGuigan.

Turning to Curle, he said, ‘You told us you didn’t have a key to Miss Fleming’s flat. You refused it, wasn’t that what you said? In case your wife found it.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you made this note and kept it? When did you do that?’

‘I can’t give you an exact date. Three years ago, maybe four. I did it from memory after I got home the same night she told me about what he’d done to her.’

‘What about your wife? Wasn’t it a risk putting stuff like that on paper? Weren’t you afraid of her finding it?’

‘I’m a writer. I wanted to write down what she’d told me while it was fresh in my mind. If my wife had come across it, I’d have told her I was making notes for a novel. I make notes all the time.’

‘Notes like that?’

‘Not exactly like that.’

‘Out of your imagination?’

‘Yes. Or things I hear or see. Anything that might be useful.’

Meldrum accepted the sheets back from McGuigan, and laid them on the desk. ‘Was this out of your imagination?’

Curle stared in surprise. ‘No!’ he said indignantly. ‘It’s what she told me. Word for word. I have an excellent memory.’

‘Those bits in the square brackets,’ McGuigan asked. ‘That’s you talking to her?’

‘Yes.’

Meldrum took up the questioning from a different angle. ‘If you weren’t worried about your wife finding these notes, why hide them inside a book in your workroom? Isn’t that where you said you kept them?’

‘I didn’t have the nerve to leave them in the open. It’s what I should have done. We don’t always – what we do doesn’t always make sense. It’s an idea I’ve used in some of my books. We don’t always behave logically. In everyday life, I mean. You must know that.’

‘We know you write fiction. Let me ask you again, why did you want us to look at this stuff?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? She had this perverse relation with a man who had a taste for cruelty. I should think you’d want to question him. Ask him where he was when she was murdered.’

‘You’re suggesting he murdered her?’

‘I’m only saying it’s possible. When I came across this note I’d made, I thought it was my duty to let you see it.’

‘So that we would know there was another suspect?’ McGuigan asked.

Curle stared at him in silence.

‘You think we should interview him?’ McGuigan asked.

‘You’d want to, I should think.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘I don’t know. She never said. But a Professor of Classics! How many of those are there?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ McGuigan said. ‘Have you made enquiries yourself?’

Curle shook his head.

After a pause, Meldrum said, ‘If your wife had found this note, you were going to tell her it was for a novel, right? Isn’t that in fact what it was? Something you made up?’

‘Maybe for a novel,’ McGuigan said, ‘maybe not.’

‘No! Why would I have brought it here, if I’d made it up?’ But, of course, McGuigan had already suggested an answer: to provide them with a suspect other than himself.

And now it was McGuigan who asked, ‘Did you find it sexually exciting writing this kind of thing?’

‘Did you find it sexually exciting to read?… Sorry. Forget I said that. But whether it’s sexually exciting or not isn’t the point. What matters is whether she told me these things. And she did.’

‘There’s another possibility,’ Meldrum said. ‘Suppose these are the notes of a conversation you had with Miss Fleming. In that case, the things you said to her, those bits you’ve put in the square brackets, we’d call those leading questions.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You say things and she comes up with something in reply. The way it reads to me, whether you realise it or not, you’re suggesting things for her to say.’

‘I was involved, I wanted to hear what she’d say next,’ Curle said. ‘All right, I’ll admit it, I was sexually excited. Of course I was. What’s wrong with that?’

‘Has it never occurred to you she might have been making it up?

‘Why would she do that?’

‘Maybe she was trying to keep you interested?’ Meldrum said. ‘In case you got tired of her.’

Curle opened his mouth as if to reply, and found he could think of nothing to say.

Though it was hardly possible to imagine that Calvinist Meldrum getting sexually excited by reading the note of what Ali Fleming had said, the handsome McGuigan was a different proposition. The thought there might be a stiffness down there hidden by the desk had helped him to meet the detective’s gaze as it was raised from the papers, and while he was being questioned lingered at the back of his mind like a shield or talisman until the formulation ‘leading the witness’ came on him like a hammer blow. Useless to claim I don’t understand; he had understood only too well. Why would she make it up? Just because she wanted to hold his attention? Could it possibly be true that she had loved him? For most of their affair, he had wanted to break it off and despised himself for not having the strength. Whatever it had been about for him, it had had nothing to do with love. Had he ever seen her clearly, made the effort to think of how things were for her? He had always been too self-absorbed. Something corrupt in her had fascinated him. For the first time, it occurred to him that he might be the corrupter. To go through the world without causing harm, how carefully a man would have to make his way. If things had been different, if she had killed herself for love, however impossible the idea still was for him, sitting at his desk that morning it seemed to
him that he would never have got over the guilt.

The rest of the morning after the debacle he sat in front of the computer. At intervals he played solitaire and got it out at intervals, ace to king in four piles, far more often than when he’d played with cards. It must be rigged, he decided, to keep you interested. He decided this regularly but it didn’t stop him playing, since he hated battleships and had to play something. Some writers read the Bible before they started work, some sharpened pencils, he played solitaire. About noon when he’d added three sentences to Chapter 3 of the novel, the doorbell rang.

The sky behind the woman was the darkest shade of grey as if it might be about to yield up snow.

‘Mr Curle? I think you knew my sister.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said firmly, but laughing at the same time since he had no objections to being interrupted by a reasonably good-looking woman. ‘Who might that be?’

‘Ali Fleming.’

Shocked, he blurted, ‘How did you know where to come?’

‘Your friend Brian Todd gave me your address. Can I come in?’

He actually found himself looking beyond her. There were no witnesses in the empty street. It would be hours yet before Kerr came home. He stood aside and she came past him into the hall.

Seated in the front room, he asked, ‘How on earth do you know Brian Todd?’

‘I don’t know him. Bobbie Haskell gave me his number.’

It was possible. That night in the pub, Jonah and he had left Haskell and Todd still drinking together.

As if to forestall any more questions, she said, ‘I’m
staying in Ali’s flat until the funeral.’

‘The funeral…’

‘She’s to be buried in Glasgow beside her grandmother. It’s what Ali would have wanted. She cared for her grandmother more than anyone in the world.’

He had never heard of this grandmother. I didn’t know Ali at all, he thought. She could have told me. I would have listened.

‘I’m very sorry.’ He never knew what to say to the bereaved. Shuffling out with the other mourners, shaking hands with relatives lined up at the church door, that’s when it would be useful to be a Christian, ‘I’ll pray for you’, or an Irish peasant, ‘God be with you in your sorrow’, little ritual containers that would hold as much feeling as you had to pour into them; as a Protestant atheist he was prone to mumbling.

She looked at him in silence. In her early forties at a guess, he couldn’t see any resemblance to her sister. She had strong features, handsome rather than pretty. Despite himself, he couldn’t help noticing the swell of her thighs under her skirt and the long smooth muscles of her calves.

‘I was waiting for you to say that,’ she said. ‘I was beginning to think you’d never get round to it.’

‘You know about us.’

‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘I had nothing to do with her death.’ Tears prickled in his eyes, taking him by surprise. He was ashamed of them in front of her sister, afraid that she would think he was play-acting. ‘And I am sorry.’

It seemed after that the atmosphere changed. However strange it was, he felt as if for the first time he was able to share with someone his aching sense of the tragedy of Ali’s death. At one point, he asked again about the funeral and
was told that the police would release the body the following day and that the funeral would take place the day after.

‘I’d like to be there,’ he said. ‘The family wouldn’t need to know. I’d stay well back.’

Later again, she suddenly said, ‘By the way, I should have said. I’m Linda.’

‘Ali told me she had two sisters,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember her telling me your name.’

‘Did she say Rosalind?’ And went on before he could shake his head, ‘From Shakespeare. It was hell at school when we did
As You Like It.
My youngest sister avoided that. My father called her Jean. He’d lost interest in strange names by the time she came along.’

‘Alexina,’ Curle said. ‘The police told me.’

‘Did they? No, Alexia. My father got it into his head that it was a beautiful name. She looked it up when she was fifteen and found it wasn’t a Christian name at all – it’s a medical condition. It means word blindness. That’s when she became Ali.’

He began to laugh, then stopped because it seemed inappropriate. The laugh had been genuine, however. ‘I’m grateful to you for talking to me like this. I don’t know why…’ He trailed off. Had he really been about to say something like, I don’t know why you should trust me? That would have been stupid.

‘Why? Because Ali phoned me every week. I feel as I’ve known you for the last eight years.’

‘She talked about me?’

The thought dismayed him. He imagined a portrait to make her sister despise him.

‘You know how much she loved you?’ Linda Fleming asked. ‘I don’t think she ever gave up hope that you would
leave your wife and be with her.’

Bewildered, he blurted out the simple truth. ‘I couldn’t ever have done that. I have a son.’

‘Parents leave their children all the time now.’

‘Not me.’

‘I’m glad you never spelled that out. She told me, if you left her she would kill herself.’

He shook his head in denial. He couldn’t believe that. It wasn’t possible that she could have felt so strongly. How had love come into what was between them?

‘…I had no idea.’

‘Poor Ali,’ her sister said.

‘…You couldn’t have been mistaken?’

‘Poor Ali,’ she said again and this time, whether it was truly there or not, he seemed to hear a shade of contempt.

They sat in silence for so long that he thought that was the end of it.

When she began to speak again, her tone was more withdrawn, her voice softer as if sharing a confidence. ‘She spoke of this man Haskell too. I can’t remember the first time she mentioned him. I’ve been trying to remember if she told me how they got talking. I have the impression she’d known him for some time before she first mentioned him to me. He fixed things for her, electrical stuff. She wanted to move a sideboard from the front room into her bedroom, but it was too awkward for her to manage on her own. He helped her. Ali was always like that. She’d always find someone to help her. She took him pretty lightly, almost as a joke, I don’t mean in a nasty way. The faithful swine, she called him. The faithful swine was down last night, asking if there was anything I needed, I’d a job getting rid of him. That’s how she’d talk. That stopped though. She didn’t mention him much at all. But then
apparently one night he was there when you turned up.’

Curle waited but she seemed lost in thought. ‘Like you said, he was mending something.’

‘She didn’t ask him to do that. He’d come down without being asked to see if she needed anything. He’d started doing that. She said he gave her the creeps.’

He stared at her. ‘I’m not sure what you’re saying.’

‘Do you think I’m sure?’ She shook her head. ‘I haven’t told him Ali and I spoke every week. I’ve given him the impression we were out of touch, that I knew nothing of her life. I even let him tell me about you. When I speak to him, I have to be careful not to mention the things she’s told me.’ She looked up and held his gaze. ‘I try to be careful.’

‘Have you told the police?’

‘It’s nothing they’d pay attention to. And if they did and questioned him, he’d know it came from me. All I can do is talk to him. Maybe he’ll give something away. And maybe I’m grasping at straws and it’s all nonsense. All the same…I’m being careful.’