The Endings Man (11 page)

Curle woke in the middle of the night and knew at once as if by instinct he was alone. Slowly after that, he made out the dim outline of the desk looming above him and realised he was in his study and then remembered reluctantly why he had been banished there. ‘Even in our worst times, I thought I knew you so well. Better than anyone in the world,’ Liz had said. ‘I don’t know who you are any more.’ She’d spoken quietly, but then all their arguments for years had been like that. For Kerr’s sake, they never shouted.

Misery kept him awake, but he must have escaped from it at some point for the next time he opened his eyes it was daylight. Determined not to get up until they had gone, for there was no way he could face either wife or son that morning, he lay listening for signs of activity. When at long last he heard the slam of the front door, he rolled off the couch and, gathering a blanket round him, padded over and pulled the curtain apart just wide enough to watch the car backing out of the drive.

He was in the kitchen making himself breakfast when the phone began ringing. He couldn’t think of anyone he wanted to talk to. With the broken shell of the egg he’d just cracked into the pan dripping in his hand, he stared at it willing it to stop. Warily, when it didn’t, he lifted it to his ear.

‘Yes?’

‘At last!’

‘Jonah?’

‘What were you doing, having a bath?’

‘Having a pee.’

‘Anyway I got you. Didn’t want you going out into the big world until I’d warned you.’

‘About what?’ His stomach sank with fright.

‘Have you seen a paper this morning?’

‘No. I haven’t been out of the house.’

‘You’re in them. One of them at least.’

‘Tell me you’re joking, for God’s sake.’

‘Alice reads the
Sun
. Terrible thing for an intelligent woman to do. I tell her not to leave it lying about the office. She showed me it as soon as I walked in the door. And there you were. You took Kerr away for the afternoon, that right?’

‘Is this a joke?’ But how could Jonah know about Kerr being off school? ‘I take my son to the pictures and it’s in the papers? My son played truant! That’s the story?’

‘When a detective inspector goes looking for him, I’m afraid it is. It’s cleverly done. You have to hand it to them. It’s done with a light touch, but the point’s made. “Detective Inspector Meldrum, who is investigating the brutal murder of a woman in Royal Circus, took time off apparently to check on the whereabouts of a schoolboy.” And not just any schoolboy – “the son of well-known crime novelist Barclay Curle”. Whose novels, they mention in passing, feature a serial killer who kills women by beating them to death.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Fuck, indeed. They’ve got a photo of you too. Don’t know where they got it, but it makes you look like Myra Hindley.’

Half an hour later, he answered the doorbell to be met by two men, the one on the doorstep in his late forties smiling and holding out a copy of the morning paper folded to the page with Curle’s photograph. It had been shot in close up from below with lighting that put a stare in his eyes and a touch of madness in his grin. Three or four years earlier, he’d been persuaded into the pose by a magazine photographer who fancied himself to be an artist. From his first sight of it, it had been an embarrassment.

‘That photo’s copyright,’ Curle said. ‘You’d no right to use it.’

‘Not the
Sun,
’ the man said, ‘the other one. We didn’t think this was playing the game. Felt you might want to give your side of the story.’

‘There isn’t a bloody story! I took my son to the pictures.’

‘It says here you came back to find DI Meldrum waiting for you. Is that right?’

Curle stared at him in silence.

‘You must have thought that was a bit odd. Why do you think he was there?’

‘My wife phoned for the police.’

‘She got herself a good one then. Look, can we talk inside?’

‘No.’

‘Why give the neighbours an eyeful? For all you know, it was one of them gave the
Sun
a bell.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said without conviction.

‘It’s police harassment, isn’t it? Get them off your back. Get it out in the open.’

‘I didn’t say anything about harassment.’

‘Don’t worry about wasting your time.’ The words
tumbled out. ‘I’d make it quick. I know you’re a busy man. Writing a book, are you? There’s no such thing as bad publicity, isn’t that what they say?’

As Curle began to close the door, the man stepped aside. Next moment, the one behind him had his camera up and the picture taken before Curle was out of sight.

And then the phone began ringing at regular intervals.

When it happened the first time, he picked it up and a voice he recognised said without preamble, ‘We could be talking five figures. And I can fix you up with a magazine deal that’ll pay more.’

After that he managed to ignore it for almost two hours.

When he cracked, he snatched up the phone and cursed into it.

‘You’ve had the press in touch.’

‘Who is that?’

‘DI Meldrum. What did they ask you?’

‘Police harassment came up.’

There was a silence. Then Meldrum asked, ‘Did you talk to them?’

‘I’m not that stupid.’

‘Fine.’

‘Why would anyone want to tell the
Sun
? The reporter who doorstepped me thought it might have been a neighbour.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘For the same reason it wasn’t a teacher. You kept your son off school; who’d tell a paper? It had to be somebody who knew you were connected to Miss Fleming’s death and knew about the boy being off.’

The only person Curle could think of was DS McGuigan.

Meldrum let the silence run until Curle cleared his throat and said, ‘Anyway, I didn’t talk to them.’

‘I can’t tell you what to do, but it would be best if you didn’t. I’m under enough pressure,’ Meldrum said.

Another night spent on the couch in his study, another day in which he’d avoided speaking to his wife or son, another morning of lying staring at the ceiling until he was sure they’d left the house.

Penitent, he should have been on bread and water. Instead, when he managed to go into the kitchen at last, he was ravenous. He put three slices of bacon into the George Foreman, broke two eggs into the frying pan and made toast and coffee. As an afterthought, he washed half a dozen mushrooms and put them in beside the eggs. Sitting in a patch of sunlight at the kitchen table, he chomped his way steadily through everything on the plate, drank a second coffee and then a third and was settled in the front room, biliousness standing in for repentance, when the morning post clattered through the letterbox.

Shuffling through the usual bills and unsolicited offers of credit, he came on a plain white envelope and was shocked to recognise a handwriting he’d never expected to see again.

‘I didn’t know that you had a son. I read it in the paper this morning. And felt I had to write for the boy’s sake. Not for yours; I’m still angry with you. I never thought I could forgive you and this isn’t forgiveness. I don’t think it is. I don’t know what to call it. For the boy’s sake I don’t want you to come to
any harm, not now, whatever you’ve done. Do you have other children? I always wanted a little girl of my own to care for. Children are precious, try to remember that, try to be good for your children’s sake. Tie a millstone round their neck and throw them in the sea, that’s what Christ would have done to those who make the little children suffer. People don’t understand that Christ is fierce as well as gentle. Fierce and angry as well as gentle. Better for you not to forget that.’

Like the others, it was signed
An Admirer.

He turned the envelope in his hand and studied the postmark. It had been posted in Peebles. He was in no doubt that it had come from Martha Tilman. Was there a nursing home in Peebles? For some reason, he’d got the impression she’d been taken into care somewhere else. Would she have seen a morning paper there, wherever it was? And been in a position to write and post a letter quickly? And so he came full circle to the Peebles postmark. The more he thought about these things, the more he began to wonder if Joe Tilman had told them the truth.

Envelope in hand, he wandered like a caged beast from room to room. I’m under pressure, Meldrum had said. What else could he have meant than that he was under pressure to make an arrest? And if there was pressure, who could be applying it? There was only one obvious candidate: Assistant Chief Constable Fairbairn, Joe Tilman’s brother-in-law. It was the only option that made sense. The rooms shrank as he paced and the walls closed in on him. Better do something, Curle decided, better do anything than wait for a knock on the door, an outstretched warrant, fists gripping his elbows, a hand steering his head down into the back of a police car.

Every writer understood the dangerous evocative power
of images and yet, like a looped tape, helplessly he couldn’t stop himself from running the vignette of his arrest as he drove from Edinburgh. In his distraction, he came into Peebles without recalling a foot of the road that had taken him there. Pulling himself together, he made his way with exaggerated care along the main street and up to Tilman’s house on the crest of the hill. He drove past it on to a country road, turned in a farm gate and came back to park opposite the house, poised to return the way he’d come. Preparing my escape, he thought, like a robber parking outside a bank. He’d an image of himself fleeing the house with Tilman in pursuit.

When he rang the bell, however, it was a woman who answered. She was very pale, with blonde hair in lifeless straggles on either side of a thin face, but he recognised her as a shadow of the woman who’d stood smiling beside her sister, the two of them held like trophies between Tilman and Bob Fairbairn.

‘I didn’t ask you to come,’ Martha Tilman said, her eyes widening in recognition then staring over his shoulder as if at someone standing behind him.

‘It was your husband I came to see.’

‘Why would you want to talk to my husband?’ The question came sharply, taking him by surprise.

‘I have some questions for him. About things he told me.’

‘You’ve met my husband?’

She sounded appalled.

‘Only once.’ On some instinct, he added, ‘I wouldn’t claim to know him. I’m not a friend of his.’

After a moment of abstraction, she said politely, ‘Perhaps you’d better come in.’

He followed her through the hall and along a short
corridor. The room she led him into had a leather chair and a desk, a computer on a table and beside it a shelf of magazines. There were family photographs in matching frames hung on one wall, all featuring the same group, a man and woman with two blonde girls; some showed the girls as children, in others they were young and then older adults, as the sequence progressed the woman grew stouter, the man lost his hair: Martha Tilman, her sister and their parents. On a side wall, there was a painting of half a dozen tall languid flowers with feathery heads. As she perched on the desk seat and indicated he should take the comfortable chair, Curle assumed the room to be the one Tilman had described to Meldrum and himself as ‘just a place where she can be by herself’.

‘You won’t tell my husband I wrote to you again? He made me promise not to send you any more letters.’

‘He won’t find out from me. Can I speak to him?’

‘He isn’t here.’

Was that true? Tilman’s study was at the front of the house, but perhaps he’d been busy and left it to her to answer the doorbell. Perfectly possible that he was through there now, ubiquitous phone clutched to his ear negotiating some deal or other. Curle glanced uneasily at the door, which hadn’t been closed properly and lay half-open. How would Tilman react if he found him here with his wife?

‘You changed them from men to women,’ Martha Tilman said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘That was so wicked. Women have enough reason to be afraid.’

But it was he who felt, if not fear, the sharp stab of discomfort. Physically timid, he’d always disliked the company of drunks, people not in control of themselves; how much worse the mad.

‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he said, hitching himself to the edge of the chair. ‘Don’t upset yourself.’

‘Do you have a little girl?’

Shocked, he was silent; then, ‘No,’ he said grimly. At that moment, if a paper committing her to a mental home had been laid in front of him, he would have signed it.

‘I always wanted a little girl. My mother had two little girls. When I’m told how much I resemble my mother, I always think but I have no children.’

With a sigh, the tension went out of him. ‘I should be going.’ Then on impulse, he asked, ‘Why me? I haven’t done anything you would have to forgive.’

‘If you can’t see,’ she said.

Now all he wanted was to get away.

‘You must have been at home,’ he said. ‘Yesterday, when you saw the article about me in the paper.’

‘It was delivered by mistake. We get the
Telegraph
and
The Times
and the
Herald
. Sometimes I look at them. I used to read a great deal. I loved Jane Austen, too… Now, not so much.’

Don’t tell me, he thought, now it’s crime fiction. Nice to meet his target audience.

‘When did you get home?’

She looked at him puzzled. ‘This is where I live.’

‘Yes, but I know you’ve been away.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t go out much,’ she said in the same stilted, carefully formal tone.

Still he plodded on. In the moment, he told himself it was because he’d come all this way and should get something answered. Later, he would wonder if he had been trying to punish her for asking if he had a little girl.

‘Your husband told me you had been away from home.’

As startlingly as scaffolding collapsing on a city street,
the façade broke apart. Her calmness, politeness, formality, restraint, even her moments of abstraction that must have been one more defence, smashed apart like ice in the boiling up of the fear and turmoil they had concealed.

‘Is that what’s going to happen? Is that what he’s planned for me?’ Her hands, as she stretched them out in appeal, shook uncontrollably. ‘Tell him you’re not angry. Tell him I haven’t written to you. Even if it’s not true. Don’t be angry.’ The last word faltered into a thin stretched moan: ‘Please.’

He blurted out some kind of disclaimer, an apology, for what he wasn’t sure, even a promise, the stream of words didn’t matter, all he wanted was to get away from her distress.

As he got to his feet, however, she twisted down in her seat to open the bottom drawer of the desk.

‘Take them!’ she said, holding out to him at the full stretch of her arms a pair of shoes. She caught his hand and pressed one of the shoes into it. ‘Please!’ she pleaded, pressing until his grip closed around it.

‘You see?’

It was a court shoe, black leather soft under his fingers, heel a few inches high, nothing remarkable except for a long gash scored back from the toe. When he looked at the one she was holding, he saw that it was marked in the same way.

‘Daddy had Mummy taken away. She died in that place. Even when I was a little girl, I never believed she was mad. I never believed them. That made my aunt so angry she fetched these shoes. Look at them, she told me. Those marks were made when the men came and dragged your mother away.’

As he made his escape along the hall, she came after him.

‘Such cold people. My father and his sister. They were rich and they had power. Daddy could be so charming. They could make people do anything. Daddy could make the doctors do anything.’

She gave a cry of pain and he had to stop himself from telling her to be quiet for fear her husband should hear them. He used both hands to get the door open, but once he was outside he found that he was still holding the shoe. He dropped it on the step and half ran down the path towards his car.