The Endings Man (2 page)

The card had arrived with a small bundle of others the morning of his lunch with Murray. They had made their appearance, together with a cup of coffee and a poached egg on toast, on a tray carried in by his eight-year-old son.

‘Happy birthday!’ Kerr said solemnly, waiting as his father propped himself up on two pillows.

Curle held up his cheek to be kissed. ‘Breakfast in bed. Luxury.’

‘Because it’s your birthday.’

‘A nice tradition,’ Curle said.

‘You’ve got cards,’ Kerr said.

‘So I have.’ He shuffled them. One from Kerr, one from his wife, one from his sister and her husband. From his ageing aunts, three separate cards in three separate envelopes despite the fact they lived together. The seventh one was addressed in a hand he didn’t recognise, but was the same unmistakable envelope for an occasion. ‘Shall I open them?’

‘Not ours!’

‘You sure?’

‘Save them for your presents when we have dinner… You are home for dinner?’

‘Wouldn’t miss it. I could open the others.’

‘Mum’s just getting the car out. Do you want to wait for her?’

Curle caught the hesitation in the question and the faintly anxious look common to the sons and daughters of the unhappily married. It seemed no matter how good a face you put on, it was hard to fool children.

‘Let’s do that.’

‘I’ll put on my school stuff so we’re ready to go.’

Curle watched him leave and forked up a triangle of egg and toast. The yolk ran yellow as he cut into it. A good boy, a kind boy, earnest, conscientious, doing well at school, a son to be proud of. The only thing a father with a professional feeling for euphony might hold against him was his name. Kerr had been Liz’s father’s name and when she had suggested it for their newborn son he had limited his objection to mouthing Kerr Curle and raising an eyebrow. ‘Very nice,’ she’d said and, things being as they were, he’d left it at that, shutting his mind to the effects of going through life with a name like a hen clucking, and so from the beginning his relation with his son had as an undertow a sense of guilt.

He heard the car backing out from under the bedroom and then the garage door bang as Liz slammed it down.

A moment later, the boy led his mother into the room.

‘We only have a minute,’ she said. Job sharing, she worked as a pharmacist five mornings and two afternoons a week.

‘Dad’s going to open his cards,’ the boy said. ‘Not ours. The other ones.’

She gave them a glance. ‘From the aunts,’ she said impatiently. ‘Same as always.’

He opened them one after the other and sat them on his tray. From Chat. From Annie. From May. His three maiden aunts. With love, with love, with love. From his sister, more love.

‘There’s another one,’ Kerr said.

‘So there is.’ He turned it in his hand.

‘Who’s it from?’ his wife asked and then abruptly shook her head as if disclaiming the question.

‘I’ve no idea. I don’t recognise the writing.’

‘We’d better get off.’

She turned away but the boy hung back curious over the small mystery.

‘Wait!’ Curle said and putting his forefinger under ripped the flap up, slid out the card and opened it.

As if at a distance, he heard the boy’s voice. ‘Who’s it from?’

He shook his head.

‘Come on,’ Liz said, taking the boy by the hand and drawing him away.

‘But—’

‘Never mind. Daddy doesn’t want to show us.’

Cursing himself for a fool, he got up and followed, card in hand, but got to the landing just in time to hear the outer door slam shut.

After their lunch, he stood on the pavement watching Jonah’s taxi pull out into the traffic streaming along Queen Street. Only when it had turned the corner into Hanover Street did he begin to walk back the other way. Secretiveness was a habit he’d grown into over the last eight years.

The wonderful (or terrible) thing was that it had been touch and go whether or not he went to the party where he’d met Ali Fleming. It was being held he had assumed because the hostess wanted to make her individual claim on as many of their circle as she could now that her marriage was officially over. Before the split, he’d been friendly with both of them, but if he had to choose one or the other it was no contest. The husband had just taken a job with a London publisher.

He had made an excuse to get out of the invitation, but when the evening of that day eight years ago arrived he was beyond such petty considerations as cultivating journalists. In the morning, he’d heard the front doorbell as he was shaving and run down to be handed a fat envelope by the postman. The typescript of his fourth novel had come back from the firm that had published numbers two and three. He hadn’t paid as much attention as he should have to the sales figures of those books; the advances had been good
and he hadn’t really expected to get royalties. That, so he had been told, was the way things worked for most writers, and happy to be counted among them at all he hadn’t given it much thought. He’d glanced at the letter that lay under the elastic band that went round the typescript. ‘It is with real regret,’ the editor had written. He’d met her once on a trip to London, a willowy blonde past her best days. ‘Let me say, I have no doubt you will find another publisher.’ Most of the conversation at their lunch that day had consisted of stories of how she had managed to survive successive changes of owner and staff shakeouts; the anecdotes of a self-absorbed survivor and a bad sign that he had been too naïve or inexperienced to take in at the time. Rejected typescript in hand, he’d plodded back upstairs and phoned her, hiding his fury so successfully that their conversation had gone on for quarter of an hour. It ended with her saying, ‘Thank you for being so understanding.’ He wished her a lingering death.

After a day on his own by evening he was drunk, still able to walk straight and talk clearly but with all his internal monitors switched off. Why not go to the party? He would probably never have another book in need of a review, good or bad.

As he came in, the crowded room seemed to open a path so that almost the first thing he saw was a woman in the far corner. Her dress clung to her breasts and accentuated the fullness of her bottom, making it jut out like the behind of a black woman. She was white, though, with red hair and the jut of her behind was largely an illusion produced by the way she was standing. By the time he’d worked that out, though, it didn’t matter and when the man she was talking to had been sent off on an errand carrying their two glasses he walked over and stood in front of her.

She looked at him expectantly and, as he stood with his mind a blank, began to smile.

‘Can you read without moving your lips?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Ah,’ he said, his voice admirably unslurred. ‘A woman of above average intelligence.’

‘You’re not very sure of yourself, are you?’

It didn’t much matter what they said. Later that night when she took off her shoes, she wasn’t so tall.

Eight years later it was still going on, though he’d tried once at least to end it and kept away for almost a fortnight. The familiar building rose five storeys above him and he mounted the steps and pressed the button by her name. After a moment, the heavy bolt swung back and he went inside. The stairs were carpeted, the landings variously ornamented, the first with a little table carrying a vase of flowers, the second by a line of prints showing views of the Castle and the open parkland of the Meadows. As he climbed to the third floor, he opened his coat and fingered the card in his jacket pocket. Liz had stamped off with his son before he had a chance to show it to her. He had balked at showing it to Jonah Murray. Third time lucky; he would show it to Ali.

The door eased back under his knock. She wasn’t there, though. She must have opened it and gone back inside, which always annoyed him. Maybe it was her way of punishing him for refusing to accept keys for the street door and the flat. He had told her it was because he didn’t want his wife to find them. Why take a risk? he’d said to her. The truth was it would have seemed too much like making a commitment. No doubt she knew that.

She wasn’t in the front room, a long high-ceilinged room complete with elaborate cornice and a bay window looking out across the street to one of the private gardens
common to the New Town. He went back along the short corridor. The kitchen was empty, but when he looked in her bedroom she was there sitting in front of the angled drawing board. She was a graphic artist.

Without looking round, she said, ‘I’ve been wanking for four days.’ She spoke in a little throaty murmur almost like talking to herself.

He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Dangers of working at home.’

‘And I’ve got a big job to do.’

‘Maybe it’s not a high sex drive. Maybe you just hate work.’

She leaned back against him. ‘Bastard.’

In bed looking up at him as he pushed into her, she said, ‘Chione.’

‘Uhh?’

‘She was a pretty goddess who thought too much of herself.’

He pulled almost out and slid slowly in again.

She made a small contented sound, then went on, ‘A professor of classics called me that. He was older, almost an old man. But he could last a long time.’

He grunted and began pumping back and forward. He started to count backwards from fifty. Somewhere around thirty, she clenched her muscles round him and he came in great shuddering gasps.

‘He had a beautiful head of white hair. He called me Chione.’

She wasn’t even breathing fast.

‘Fuck Chione,’ he said.

‘Lots of people must have. It was a popular name with prostitutes in Greece, so he told me.’

He eased out and rolled his weight off her. The sun lay on the ceiling as if it had been spread with a knife.

‘Before you turned up, I was thinking about him. I imagined he was painting me with radium.’

‘That’s physics, not classics.’

‘I had to lie still and he painted me. Cunt, ass, tits. I lay glowing in the dark and I could feel the poison seeping into me.’

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘If you’d told me that earlier…’

It beat counting to fifty.

‘It’s all about ritual, you see.’

He rolled over and fished in the pocket of his jacket hung over the chair beside the bed. Before he could show her the card, though, the phone rang. She lifted it clear of the stand, gave a grunt, got out of bed and carried it out of the room as she listened.

She came back with two glasses of red wine.

Putting the phone back, she said, ‘That was the most boring woman in the world. And I’ve offended her by cutting the call short.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it.’

‘At my age you don’t find it easy to make new friends, so you hang on to the old ones.’

‘If we knew that when we were young, we could avoid the bad ones.’

‘They don’t necessarily start out that way, just get worse as they go along.’

‘It’s hard to give up on an old friend. It’s like one step nearer the grave.’

‘Christ, you know how to cheer a girl up.’

‘What about this then?’ He handed her the card.

‘This is supposed to cheer me up?’ She stared at it, ‘It’s a condolence card.’ He watched the heavy white card
turning in her fingers. ‘
Thinking of you in your hour of grief
? What the hell? Who’s dead?’

‘No one. It came in this morning’s post. See who it’s from.’

She turned the open card towards him. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘
Jack’s Friend.
It’s signed
Jack’s Friend
.’

She looked up at him blankly. ‘You know someone called Jack?’

‘Christ,’ he said bitterly, ‘I thought you’d read my books.’

‘Is this all?’

The policeman was disconcertingly tall, four inches at least over six feet, Curle calculated, with spatulate thumbs on big hands, the kind of hands he associated with manual work. He’d been behind his desk when Curle was shown in and without getting up had nodded him unsmilingly towards a chair. He looked to be in his late forties with the beginnings of a drinker’s nose and dark stiff-cropped hair shot through with grey. His name was Meldrum.

Responding to the tone as much as the question, Curle said, ‘I appreciate this might not seem important to you.’

He paused, but instead of disclaiming a lack of interest the policeman waited him out in silence.

‘I should say,’ he persisted, ‘that I didn’t ask for – I mean I didn’t expect this to be dealt with by an officer of your rank.’

‘The ACC seems to have felt it appropriate.’

Despite the studied lack of expression, Curle took the flat statement of fact as an indication of ill feeling. So that’s it, he thought. He resents me for being able to get access to an assistant chief constable; he’s got me down as someone who can pull strings and he doesn’t like that. ACC Fairbairn had given a talk chaired by Curle at the Crime Writers Association Conference the year it had
been held in Edinburgh. He’d spoken of a famous unsolved murder from early in his career and Curle, genuinely moved and impressed, had been warm, maybe even a shade effusive, in his vote of thanks. Afterwards Fairbairn had invited him to visit police HQ and personally shown him round the building from the data-handling suite and interview rooms to the gun range in the basement. As thanks, he’d sent a book, the third in the Doug Kirk series; got a note in return to say that Fairbairn had enjoyed it in the summer on a beach in Corfu; and kept up enough of a desultory acquaintance to feel that he might approach the ACC for help. It was that impulse which had brought him to this meeting with the forbidding figure across the desk. He wondered now if Meldrum had been asked to see him as a kind of chore, a staging post on the way to police officers’ Siberia perhaps. He looks a dour bugger, Curle thought, the kind to put backs up – not least that of a smooth politically adept operator like Bob Fairbairn.

‘I feel as if I’m being stalked,’ Curle said.

‘Stalking isn’t a crime,’ Meldrum said, ‘not in Scotland. We deal with it under harassment.’

‘Whatever it’s called, I don’t want to be the victim of an obsession. I’ve been told the temptation for most people is to try to ignore this kind of thing and hope it goes away. But from what I’ve read, that would be a mistake. If it isn’t nipped in the bud chances are it’ll get worse. Maybe a lot worse.’ To his own dismay, he heard a shade of pleading as he finished, ‘At this stage, a visit from a policeman would probably put a stop to it.’

‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?’ the policeman Meldrum said. ‘You haven’t told me what there is to stop. More than this card, I take it.’

Curle opened the envelope that had been sitting on his lap.

‘I’ve mislaid the first one,’ he said, handing over the letters. ‘I took it for granted I’d kept it, I keep everything. I’m a hoarder, maybe because I’m a writer. I imagine things might come in useful later on.’ Stick to the point, he admonished himself. He realised this policeman was making him more nervous than he had felt for a long time. And for no reason, no sensible reason. Maybe it was some kind of professional skill the man had. Must be an asset. I confess, I confess, maybe that was how it worked.

‘They’re all from the same woman. In the first one she wrote to say that my detective Doug Kirk reminded her of her father. This was just after the second book in the series came out.’

‘Series?’

‘I’ve done five of them. Five novels.’ And people buy them, he thought, including fucking policemen, they’ve told me so. ‘Murder stories, mysteries, different names for the same thing. Some people call them police procedurals. They all feature the same character, Doug Kirk, an Edinburgh detective. He reminds me of my father, her letter said, even though my father wasn’t actually a policeman. And she went on to write in detail of her love life. I put it down as a crank letter, but I was bothered enough to tell my agent. There was something eerie about it.’

‘Your agent?’

‘Jonathan Murray. He’s well known. He lives in Edinburgh now.’

‘And he’ll remember this?’

‘At the time of the first one, he laughed and said, there’s a lot of strange people out there. But I told him about the other letters, I’m sure I did, some of them anyway. He’ll
remember.’ He looked at the little pile of sheets. ‘I’ll be quiet and let you read them.’

But Meldrum set them down, tapping the edges to stack them neatly. ‘I’d prefer if you told me about them. What there was in them to bother you.’

Curle gathered his thoughts. ‘Not so much the first one. Maybe that’s why I was careless with it. God knows where it’s got to. It was the next one that bothered me, the letter that came after the third book. She sent me this extraordinary letter claiming it was about her. This is about my mental problems, she wrote. I didn’t like that at all. I’m not brave about these things.’

‘You were afraid of being sued?’

‘No! That never crossed my mind. The book was fiction, for God’s sake! I mean, I made it up, all of it. No, it was just that I’ve always had this feeling that there are people out there that if you’re lucky you’ll never meet, never get mixed up with them. You must meet them, it’s your job. But I don’t even mean murderers, it doesn’t have to be that extreme. I’d a friend who married a brute; when she went back to her parents, he came round and kicked the kitchen door in. Her father had a heart attack. When I got that letter after the third book, that’s how it felt. As if one of those people I never wanted to meet had come into my life.’ He chewed his lip. ‘Anonymously.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It wasn’t signed. I’m not sure, maybe the first one was. The others certainly weren’t. An Admirer, that’s what she called herself.’

‘And no address?’

Curle shook his head. ‘No. Maybe the first one had, but it’s gone. God, it’s so infuriating. You keep a diary?’ The policeman looked at him, said nothing. ‘It’s like when you
look back at your diary to check a date. The important thing’s missing. All you’ve got is a note about a dental appointment.’ For God’s sake, he thought, pull yourself together. ‘She sent another two after that, not adding anything new, going over the same ground. I kept them, but I stopped worrying about them. Repetition dulled the impact. But then after the fourth book – you’ll see when you read them – another letter came. The book was only in the shops a week, something like that. How did you know? she wrote. I committed this murder you wrote about in your book. You call the girl Sally, she wrote, but you know that wasn’t her name. It was a grotesque notion. There were five murders in the book, five of them! Why claim that one? At that point someone else might have laughed. I didn’t laugh. It made me feel sick.’

‘And after that?’

‘Same pattern. More letters. More than the time before. Five, is it? Six? They’re all there. And then, like before, they stopped. Nothing until I published the fifth book, the one that’s just come out. To be honest, when it did, I expected another letter, more madness. Instead, the damned card came. I hadn’t expected that.’

‘You’re sure it’s from this woman?’ Meldrum asked.

As he had done when Fairbairn asked the same question, Curle responded with a mixture of surprise and impatience.

‘It must be.’

‘The condolence card is printed in red ink. These,’ he glanced down at the top sheet of the letters, ‘are they all typed?’

‘All of them. And the An Admirer signature. There isn’t any handwriting to recognise.’ He’d been through all this with Fairbairn. ‘And I threw away the envelopes the letters
came in. It never occurred to me to keep them. I do have the envelope for the card.’

‘Which may or may not be from this woman. No envelopes. No handwriting. No return address.’ Meldrum sat for a moment, then patted the stack of letters. ‘I’ll read them,’ he said, ‘but I don’t see there’s much I can do.’

Curle found himself being ushered out. He took a stand at the door and said, ‘I’ll let you know if anything else comes. I just know it’s the same woman. The thing is her first letter came after I’d introduced this character called Jack’s Friend. And I’ve kept him in every book since. Readers like a good villain.’ It struck him how little time he’d been given to explain, how unsatisfactory the interview had been. ‘Did I say that the Jack in that is Jack the Ripper?’

‘If something does come,’ Meldrum said, ‘remember to keep the envelope.’