The Endings Man (10 page)

Curle had parked his car a street away and waited until the last moment before going into the church. His idea had been to sit unnoticed at the back and slip out again just before the service ended. To his dismay there was no back any more. The church had been converted so that the pulpit had been removed from the chancel and now stood against the east wall of the nave with the congregation arranged on padded blue benches set in a half circle around it. As he slipped into the last row, curves of empty seats separated him from the group of no more than a dozen people who seemed huddled together for comfort in front of the empty pulpit. He assumed they were Ali’s family, but when a figure much taller than the others turned to look at him he saw that it was the policeman Meldrum. It hadn’t occurred to him that a policeman would come to her funeral. He bent his head over a hymn book and read the same verse over and over until after what seemed an interminable wait the service began.

There were stained-glass windows at either end of the nave, but the pulpit had been situated under tall windows of plain glass so that the congregation was in the full light of a low morning sun and the minister in shadow. As uncomfortable as a tyro extra on a stage, Curle sat staring at his knees or squinting against the sunshine. He imagined
the minister in his shadowy pulpit staring down and wondering who the solitary man, an isolated figure in all that brightness, might be. When it was over, he could not have repeated anything which had been sung or said, but was left with the sense that the minister, embellishing scraps given by her family, mouthing the platitudes of hope to set against the facts of mortality, had never met Ali Fleming, not even once in all her life.

He hurried out before anyone else and made for the safety of his car intending to set out at once for home. As he pulled out, however, the hearse like a black fish nosed across the end of the street, and he turned after it, following the three or four cars that made up the procession. He could see that Meldrum drove the one immediately in front of him, and he was sure the policeman must know he was following. They moved slowly past a stretch of waste ground and then more quickly along an avenue of bungalows until they came into streets of brown tenements. Once he was held up at traffic lights and thought he had lost them, but caught up again as the hearse led them past a supermarket and not long afterwards through the cemetery gates.

It was an old urban settlement of the dead and the cars made their way after the hearse along one narrow path after another winding up between untended graves, overgrown with tangles of briar, grass and weeds. Curle who had been lagging had to brake as a Land Services vehicle pulled out in front of him. It turned right into a path narrower than any so far and he inched along until it came to a stop blocking further progress.

Getting out, he walked slowly up to where the minister had already started the burial service. Perhaps, Curle thought, he couldn’t wait because he too found the
desolation of the place intolerable. A green tarpaulin was spread over the earth piled beside the open grave. Behind the cemetery wall, a shoddy grey high-rise pockmarked with tiny windows rose up like a cliff face of ugliness.

As Curle stood a little way off watching the mourners, he was moved to pity for Ali Fleming. Even the name they would carve on the tombstone under her grandmother’s would be that exotic name she had rejected. Thinking of it made her seem a stranger again. ‘Can you read without moving your lips?’ he had asked the first time they met. Absurd, drunken, inanely aggressive question; but then all of it was absurd, their meetings, the long interlocking of their imaginations, their fantasies. How much of her life had that time given to him been? How much had it mattered to her? He thought of almost the last time they’d been together and of a dream she had told him – she had been in a shop, a very small space; this man had tried to come in, he had a pack on his back, no room, as she tried to squeeze past him and get out his bulk pressed her back over the counter. It had been so unlike her usual fantasies that he had been disappointed, and so now he thought that perhaps it had been a true dream. He was pierced by the mystery of her and that she was dead and he would never have the chance to ask her all the questions that came to him now and none of them to do with sex. What did it matter what name she was given on the stone? Who would come to this forgotten corner to see it? In time, it would wear away as the names were wearing from all the stones around them. The group by the grave stepped back as the minister stopped speaking and Meldrum, bending down, was speaking to the sister. As they turned and looked at him, he felt the wetness of tears on his cheeks and realised that he had been crying. What were they thinking as they
looked at him? Wasn’t there an old saying that the criminal couldn’t resist making an appearance, scene of the crime, scene of the grave.

He turned and forced himself to walk slowly back down to his car, expecting to hear a voice behind him. The Land Services vehicle was empty and still blocking his way. He stood beside it watching as the cortege disappeared. After a time the two workmen, who had no room to pull the vehicle aside for him and presumably didn’t want to go ahead, came back and told him, ‘You’d be as well to back up. It’s all brambles ahead and you’ll get your car scratched.’

Slowly Curle reversed down the path until he could turn and make his escape.

‘Do you like it?’ Jonah Murray asked, waving a proprietary hand as Curle sat down. ‘Don’t you think it lives up to its billing?’

‘This place?’ Curle looked around. ‘What about it?’

‘You don’t see a change? From the last time you were here?’

Curle thought about it. He’d last been in Jonah’s office at the top of a winding stone staircase in the Pleasance during the Edinburgh Festival the preceding August when the agent had held a party for his clients and visiting celebrities.

‘All I remember about that is getting drunk and spilling a glass of wine over that woman from A and P Watt.’

‘Your most embarrassing moment.’

‘No,’ Curle said. ‘My most embarrassing moment was being introduced to Muriel Spark. Mind a blank, I told her how much I’d enjoyed
Do Not Disturb.
It was like watching an apple shrivel in a snowstorm. After a while, she parted her lips and whispered
Not to Disturb.
And that was that.’ Jonah laughed. ‘It was a quote from Shakespeare apparently. I should have stuck to
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Never read it, but I could have told her I enjoyed the film.’

‘Novelists like to be told that.’ Jonah waved a hand
again. ‘Don’t change the subject. What do you think of it?’

‘You’ve had it done up?’

‘God, you are so unobservant. Remind me, what do you do for a living?’

‘I’m a student of human nature not a pansy decorator.’

‘This month’s
Scottish Homes and Interiors
has a lyrical piece about how I transformed a neglected flat into a masterpiece of modern taste.’ He spoke with the satisfaction of a self-publicist who made more of an impact on the media than most of his clients. ‘They don’t usually do offices.’

‘Well,’ Curle decided after a thoughtful look around, ‘it isn’t quite one any more, is it? Take the computer and stuff from through there where Alice does her secretarial stuff and you’d have a bedroom. Easy enough after what you’ve done here to imagine it as a sitting room. And you’ve done up the kitchen. Office back into flat, it’ll sell for a nice profit when you’re ready to bugger off back to London.’

‘Cynicism isn’t an attractive trait.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘So what can I do for you?’

Curle took a breath and tried to keep the tension out of his voice. ‘Last time I saw you, you were going off for a think. So what have you thought?’

‘This isn’t the best place to talk about…what’s happened. And I’ve someone coming in to see me.’

Curle jumped to his feet. ‘Fine. My apologies.’

Two strides took him to the door. As he opened it, he got a glimpse of Alice at the computer turning to look over her shoulder.

Behind him, he heard Jonah crying, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ as he bustled up out of his chair. Then the door was taken out of his grasp and closed. The agent stood close, glaring at him. ‘The moment of truth! You want the
moment of truth? I was absolutely taken aback when you told me you were at that woman’s flat the night she was killed.’

‘Not “that woman”. She had a name. Her name was Ali Fleming.’

‘Well, bloody exactly. That matters to you. And I don’t, not for one second, believe that you killed her. That’s my thought, if it matters to you. I know all the stuff about everyone’s capable of murder. Don’t imagine I didn’t think about that. And about all the pervasive stuff we live with that tells us every man’s an island, we’re all separate from one another, you can’t ever see what’s going on in someone else’s mind. Fuck all of that. I’ve known you for a long time. All right, you had an affair. But if you killed that woman, above all if you killed her in that hellish way, then every face I’ve ever met is nothing but a mask. I don’t want to live in a world like that.’

He reached out and squeezed Curle’s shoulder. Apart from handshakes, it was their first physical contact since schooldays.

Curle went back and sat down again. He had come for a verdict without any belief it would be in his favour since, for ever it seemed, he had been an advocate of the idea that no one could be sure of what went on behind another man’s eyes: a notion he’d drawn on glibly enough in his novels. He felt, at least for the moment, absolved. He was moved by the other man’s trust and made ashamed by it. He rested his face between his hands and said quietly, ‘I’m pretty frightened.’

Jonah settled one buttock on the edge of his desk and swung his leg in tiny arcs back and forward. ‘They’ll get whoever did it.’

‘I don’t know why they haven’t arrested me already.’

‘That must mean something. Maybe they have a suspect we don’t know about.’

‘Ali’s older sister came to see me. She’s living in the flat.’

‘Where her sister was killed? How morbid of her!’

Curle hesitated. ‘Do you remember Bobbie Haskell?’

‘Who?’

‘The young guy who fastened on to us after the talk at the Library. Said he worked in a bookshop.’

‘And came to the pub? The Velcro man? What about him?’

‘Linda Fleming thinks he’s the killer.’

Jonah’s leg stopped at the top of its arc and sank.

‘How extraordinary!’

‘I don’t believe it either. She said Ali told her he’d been making a nuisance of himself. I can’t see him as a murderer, though, can you?’

Jonah shook his head. ‘Nuisance, certainly. Not a murderer.’

‘Anyway, she turned up at the house. Luckily Liz was at work. She claimed Brian Todd gave her my address.’ He glanced up with a glint of suspicion. ‘I wonder how he got it in the first place.’

‘Ask him.’

‘I suppose I could.’

‘No. I mean now. He’s due any minute.’

‘Here?’

‘Just business. He’s coming in to discuss a book.’ At Curle’s blank stare, he smiled. ‘Everyone has a book in them. Only one, in most cases. Half my success has been in sniffing out the right one.’

‘But why him?’

‘He approached me. He’s anxious it seems to dig some dirt.’

‘On his clients? Why on earth would he want to do that?’

Before Jonah could answer, his assistant Alice tapped and put her head round the door.

‘Mr Todd’s here.’

It didn’t matter where he tugged, every end was a loose one. He’d walked out as Brian Todd walked in, feeling as Jonah had said earlier that the agent’s office was no place for asking questions about Ali Fleming’s death. Chances were, he decided, that it had anyway been Jonah who had given his address to Todd. He couldn’t imagine why Todd would have asked for it, but he knew Jonah too well to have any difficulty with the idea of him giving it cheerfully and without a second thought. It was even possible that Jonah, that lover of gossip, might at this moment be sharing with Todd the risible image of Bobbie Haskell as Ali’s killer.

He chewed over that unsavoury morsel all the way home on the bus, staring out of the window determinedly when the man seated next to him showed signs of wanting to start a conversation. With parking scarce in Edinburgh and a bus service that was fast and frequent, it made sense to take the bus into the centre. Sometimes that meant talking to people. Occasionally, he’d even found it useful. He’d a bad habit of incorporating snatches of conversation into his novels, a kind of found art like pieces of driftwood sculpted by the tides. On the other hand, sometimes it wasn’t all right and he’d find himself wishing that more Edinburgh people would live up to their reputation for
reserve. On bad days, he tended to put the phenomenon of being accosted down to the number of unfortunates released into the care of the community.

He escaped from the bus a mile or so before his usual stop and walked home. It was lunchtime but, too restless to stay in the house, he took the car from the garage with some vague idea of running into the country. On impulse, however, after he’d crossed the main road he turned into the street that led to Kerr’s school and pulled up a few hundred yards beyond the entrance. As he walked back, he could hear the babble of children before he came in sight of them. Watching as they scurried around in a frenzy of Brownian motion, there was no way of telling if they were agitated by enjoyment or anxiety in these last moments of freedom before the bell summoned them inside. Almost when it was too late, he spotted his son standing by himself in a corner of the playground. Shoulders hunched, he seemed to be studying the ground at his feet, his stillness among all that activity infinitely pathetic. For the first time, it occurred to Curle that his son might be a victim of bullying. With a convulsive gesture he threw his hand into the air and, as Kerr lifted his head, waved him to approach.

‘We’re going for a run. Come on.’

Kerr had to hurry to keep up.

‘Should we tell the teacher?’

‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll give you a letter to her.’

In the car, the boy asked, ‘What will Mummy say?’

‘Don’t look so worried.’ Please don’t look so worried. ‘I won’t tell her if you don’t. All right?’

‘…Where are we going?’

‘Where would you want to go?’

‘Some of the boys in the class have seen
The Invincibles.
Is it on anywhere?’

‘The sun’s shining.’ He wanted to talk to his son. Not sit beside him in the dark letting the time pass when too much of it had passed already. ‘We could go to the zoo.’

‘Won’t it be closed?’

‘It’s open all the year round. It’s interesting at this time of the year.’

As he drove down Lothian Road, however, intending to take the Western Approach out to Corstorphine, he recalled how on free afternoons in the first job he had after leaving school in Glasgow he would go to the zoo. He had a memory of mangy beasts in cramped cages and a sudden image of a lone polar bear in a narrow pit rocking endlessly back and forward. The Edinburgh zoo was different, he told himself: wide open paddocks climbing the sides of a lofty hill. When they got there, though, it was snowing. He sat in the car park looking at the fat flakes spinning down. What a bloody country! How could sun and blue skies transform so fast into grey clouds and snow?

‘Let’s sit for a minute. It might clear up again.’

In a moment the snow condensed into little stones, little white stones of hail that drummed a deafening tattoo on the roof and clogged the windscreen.

‘What a country!’

‘I don’t have gloves,’ the boy said. ‘They’re in my bag under my desk.’

Time to head for Leith and the cinema on the top floor of the new complex at Ster Century. And, of course, when they got out of the car, having wound up four floors, they looked over the railing, the wind stiff in their faces, at the sun sparkling on the waters of the harbour and the sky above the distant coast of Fife high and cold and cloudless. It didn’t matter, he’d given up on the zoo and the snow would be back before the afternoon ended.

They’d just missed a showing of
The Invincibles
and the next one wasn’t until twenty past three. He found a phone and called home to leave a message on the answer machine for Liz. They ate fish and chips in the food hall in front of the vast windows looking out to Platinum Point, then wandered around from floor to floor, looking at the shops. Kerr went into Thomas Kincade, painter of light, and stood in front of paintings of chapels in mountain valleys and stagecoaches and sea harbours, settling at last in front of a gabled wooden house by a stream in what could only be called a dell. When the assistant joined them, Curle couldn’t resist speculating, ‘If the door opened, would a man holding a bloodstained axe come out?’ ‘Oh,’ the assistant said, ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

At one point, he finally got around to asking, ‘How are things? Everything all right at school?’ Kerr muttered, ‘Fine,’ and he had no skill to get behind the suddenly veiled expression. Next moment the boy had hurried over to look through the glass down to where the royal yacht Britannia bobbed at anchor. ‘Can we go on it?’ ‘Another time. The film’s almost ready to start.’

And so, after all, their stolen afternoon was spent in the dark.

When they came out, the evening light was washing out of the sky. They drove back talking about the picture they’d just seen and Kerr laughed a lot and explained bits to his father.

A police car was sitting outside the house when they arrived home.

As he opened the door, Liz swooped from the living room and gathered Kerr in her arms.

‘Where have you been?’ she cried at him over the boy’s head.

Muffled against her chest, Kerr explained, ‘We saw
The Invincibles.
It was brilliant.’

She said, ‘Upstairs. Come on, Kerr.’

As Curle stood bewildered, Meldrum and McGuigan came from the room she’d left. The hall shrank with their arrival.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ The tremor in his voice dismayed him.

It was McGuigan who answered. ‘Your neighbour Mrs Anderson got upset when she went to collect the children from school and Kerr wasn’t there. Apparently she kicked up a fuss with the class teacher, and then phoned your wife. Who hit the panic button.’

‘But I phoned!’ Curle led the way into the kitchen. The oval light at the side of the phone that should have shown a message had been recorded wasn’t lit. ‘I don’t understand.’ Trying to ignore their scepticism, he picked up the phone and pressed two. To his relief, the message he’d sent was there. He held out the phone so that they could hear his voice.

‘I don’t know why she panicked. She should have guessed he’d be with me.’

‘Have you taken him away for the afternoon before?’ Meldrum asked.

He evaded the question. ‘Who else could it have been? She should have known.’

‘Maybe she did,’ McGuigan said. Why is he angry? Curle wondered. ‘Maybe she was afraid you were going to do something foolish.’

‘What?’

‘Think about it,’ and he turned on his heels and left the kitchen. There was the sound of his feet mounting the stairs.

Curle made to follow. ‘I don’t want him frightening my son.’

‘That’s not his style,’ Meldrum said.

There was no sympathy in the harsh lines of the big man’s face, but Curle found something reassuring in his calmness and the slow measure of his speech. He felt a firmness like granite, the ungivingness of a rock, and it was to that firmness he appealed.

‘I feel as if he wants to arrest me.’

‘It’s not up to him.’

‘You took away my clothes. Aren’t there DNA tests? I didn’t do it. I can give samples. Any kind of samples.’

‘There wasn’t any semen,’ Meldrum said. ‘If that’s what you’re asking.’

‘What about Ali’s blood? There must have been blood on him, the man who beat her.’

‘If we’d found blood on your clothes, you wouldn’t be here.’

Curle felt his legs weaken under him. He let himself sink into a chair at the table.

‘All the same, your sergeant would lock me up if he could. It’s personal. I know he feels like that.’ And he couldn’t stop himself from finishing on a note of bathos. ‘It’s – it’s not professional, is it?’

‘He has a strong moral sense. He’s got no time for adulterers,’ Meldrum said. ‘He’s not too keen on abortion either.’

‘For Christ’s sake, is he too stupid to know there’s a difference between adultery and murder?’

‘He’d know that. He’s pretty smart. Very smart actually. He won’t be with me for long, he’s a high flyer. The best detective sergeant I ever had.’ He paused. ‘Not that I’ve had much luck with detective sergeants.’

As feet sounded on the stairs, Curle asked with a touch of desperation. ‘Why haven’t you arrested me?’

Meldrum seemed to think before answering.

‘An arrest changes things,’ he said. ‘It commits you to that being the truth of what happened. You can make it be the truth.’

It didn’t seem to bother him that McGuigan was behind him listening, his face set in a frown.

‘It’s best not to arrest someone until you are very sure,’ Meldrum said.