The Endings Man (8 page)

‘He said you were at school together.’ She spoke quietly as they sat at the kitchen table, still cluttered with dishes from dinner. From the front room gunshots sounded faintly; Kerr was watching an old Western. ‘Was that true?’

‘He made my life intolerable for a while.’

‘You never mentioned him to me.’

As he looked at her and the silence went on, he had a sudden memory of the afternoon at school when Harriet Strang had slapped Todd’s face. Stop it! she’d said, her voice trembling with nerves and rage. Leave him alone! He’s had enough! Todd had stared at her in shock, but just then the teacher came back into the lab and the lesson went on. By the time it was over, Todd was his usual smiling self and nothing was changed. No, that wasn’t true. Things were worse, a girl had defended him, of course it was worse. How could he ever tell Liz any of that?

‘Telling everything? That’s a lovers’ illusion,’ he said, and hated her for a moment. ‘Most people grow out of it.’

‘Is that when they start to keep secrets?’

‘Leave it!’

‘Keep your voice down!’ She glanced towards the distant sound of guns fired in anger. After a moment, she said, so softly he could hardly hear her, ‘Thing is, I don’t have any secrets.’

‘It was over,’ he said. ‘I’d told her before…it happened.’

‘Before she was murdered.’

‘I’d told her it was over.’

‘You’d stopped seeing her?’

‘I’d told her.’ It was too hard to explain.

‘We weren’t happy,’ she said, ‘but I never thought of another woman. It just didn’t occur to me. You must think I’m an awful fool. Even after the policemen came, I believed what you told me. I suppose I did know really, but it was as if I couldn’t focus, you know when you put those drops in that make your eyes blur? It was talking to your friend Todd that made me see.’

‘Is that what he came for?’ Curle asked, questioning himself as much as her.

But she dismissed that. ‘He didn’t tell me anything. It was just that what he said took it for granted she was your mistress. I’m sure he thought I must know.’

‘You know what he thought? I don’t think so,’ Curle said. ‘God knows what goes on in his head.’

‘So why did he come? What did he say to you?’

‘You want to know, I’ll tell you. I don’t want to have any secrets,’ he said, aware he was being a bastard. ‘He came to tell me how she was killed. I don’t know how he knew. He claims some reporter told him. If you can believe him, she was kicked and stamped until she was broken inside. Whoever did it beat her face into a pulp. And after all that she was strangled.’

She put up her hands as if pushing something away. It was a gesture he might have anticipated. How could his words not shock her? If there was shock in her look, however, there was something else as well.

‘Did he really say that?’ she asked, and he understood
that the time was past when she would believe everything he told her.

‘Yes.’

‘This is a bad dream.’

‘I’ll tell you what’s worse,’ he said. ‘I recognised the description.’

As she stared at him blankly, he felt an irrational moment of anger.

Doesn’t anyone read my books properly? he wondered.

In his last three books, Jack’s Friend had beaten women to death and afterwards strangled them in some grotesque effort to seal their dying.

The bench he’d chosen should have been a haven since it was set on the far side of a grass enclosure behind the towering hedge that sheltered the demonstration gardens. Just after he’d sat down, a young man in a green anorak took the bench in the other corner, put his radio down beside him and switched it on. He didn’t put it on loudly, might even have thought he was playing it only for himself, which made the impact worse since all that carried was the pulse of some percussion instrument marking a triple rhythm endlessly, soft-loud-loud, like a head being bumped down a flight of stairs. The sky was overcast and the air was cold, but instead of moving off the man took out a packet from the side pocket of his anorak. Carefully unwrapped, it gave up what seemed to be a squashed sandwich, which he proceeded to eat as the tune changed and a new beat went on remorselessly.

As Curle picked over and over at the problem of why he hadn’t been arrested, endless and unremitting came a spaced no-hurry thump-pause-thump like blows to the head of a helpless opponent.

He’d been collected from home the previous morning by Meldrum and DS McGuigan and taken to police headquarters. Alone in the house, he’d been too dispirited to resist their request or even to ask questions.

As he came out of the lift in the police building with a detective on either side of him, he saw Assistant Chief Constable Fairbairn approaching from the other end of the long freshly painted corridor. Even as he raised his hand in a kind of automatic greeting, he knew it was a stupid thing to do. All the same, he was shocked when Fairbairn spun on his heel and, without any pretence of dignity, hurried off the way he’d come. Involuntarily, he glanced up at Meldrum, who gave no sign of having noticed. They walked slowly in the opposite direction to a door at the end of the corridor. It led to a flight of stairs, which McGuigan with a touch on his elbow indicated they should descend. ‘Repairs on the side car park,’ he said. ‘Up and come down again’s the fastest way at the moment.’

As they came into a short corridor at the bottom of the stair, a door opened, giving a glimpse of a JCB digging up the car park, and a man came through. At sight of them, he stopped abruptly and turned back bumping into the uniformed officer who was following him. McGuigan sucked air through his teeth with a hiss. Curle had never seen the man before; he realised that he’d been expecting to see Bobbie Haskell. He glanced at Meldrum who was expressionless. As they walked on, he tried to reconstruct the face of the stranger. A man of about fifty with greying hair and patches of stubble in the corners of his jaw, wearing a padded jacket and jeans; he stirred not the faintest of recollections.

They came into the room at the end of the corridor to find a group of men already standing in line with the awkwardness of strangers at a bus stop. ‘Stand anywhere you want,’ McGuigan said. Curle couldn’t decide whether the others in the line-up were policemen in plain clothes or
members of the public. In either case, none of them bore much of a resemblance to himself. One had a white beard, another was well under average height. He counted eight places along and stepped into the line. Eight was his lucky number. Relieved, it even occurred to him that whoever the witness was there was a good chance he would identify somebody else.

Later, in the interview room, Meldrum said, ‘He’s absolutely sure.’

McGuigan added, ‘One hundred and ten per cent – his words.’

‘Sure of what?’ Curle asked. He still felt detached from it all, waiting for them to admit their mistake.

‘His name’s Peter Stiller,’ McGuigan explained. ‘It took us some time to find him. But it was worth it. He’s identified you as the passenger he took in his taxi to Ali Fleming’s address in Royal Circus on the Tuesday night she died.’

How can that be? he thought quite calmly. When I’ve never seen him before in my life.

‘I can’t imagine,’ he said aloud, ‘how a taxi driver would remember any passenger in particular. They must have so many.’

He caught the glance that went between them, and understood that his first response should have been that he hadn’t been anywhere near Ali’s house that night.

‘He picked you up in Princes Street and you gave him an address he doesn’t remember,’ McGuigan said with an effect of being scrupulously fair. ‘As he recalls, though, it might have been your home address. Certainly in that direction. Halfway up Lothian Road, though, you changed your mind and gave him the Royal Circus address.’

He paused as if for comment. Curle said sceptically,
‘You’re saying he remembered this passenger because of a change of destination?’

‘When the taxi arrived at Royal Circus, you asked him to wait for you,’ McGuigan went on. ‘But he had another call and refused. You lost your temper and called him a bastard. That made him angry, but he just took your money and drove off. He said he’d really wanted to punch you, but told us all the sensible reasons for not getting out of the cab. Apart from common sense, he gave the impression you’d frightened him. According to him, when you lost your temper it was very violent and sudden. I’d guess he was a bit ashamed of being frightened.’

At last, Meldrum broke his silence. ‘That’s why he remembers you,’ he said.

With that, Curle’s resistance was over. He was one of those people for whom telling lies made for a sense of strain, which was why during the eight years of his affair he had never been perfectly at peace. True to type, once he’d started he gave up every detail. He told how he had met Ali Fleming, how they had become lovers, how hard he had tried to keep it a secret. His account of the last time he saw her was as accurate and full as recollection could manage. Too intelligent not to see that his account of breaking off with her could easily have had a different ending, one in which a threat from her to go to Liz might plausibly have ended in violence, yet he had no way of preventing himself from plodding stubbornly forward.

At the end, in a last spasm of honesty, he’d confessed, ‘I’ve no memory of the taxi driver. All I can say is that I don’t usually swear at people.’

McGuigan asked sympathetically, ‘Do you often lose your temper and then forget what happened?’

Ignoring that, Curle asked, ‘That was the taxi driver we
met coming in from the car park, wasn’t it?’ And when neither of them answered, he realised belatedly, ‘Doesn’t that mean his identification of me is useless?’

‘Could be,’ McGuigan said, ‘but doesn’t really matter now, does it?’

At some point not long afterwards, a swab was rubbed down the inside of his cheek. A sample of his DNA, they said, and he wondered what they held to match it against.

It had come as a surprise when he found himself in a police car again and not a cell. They took him home and he was grateful that it was still too early for Liz or Kerr to be there for it felt as if he had been away a very long time. The two policemen were gone by the time Kerr came home with one of the neighbours and her son who was a classmate. At half six, Liz came home and they ate and later that night he explained to her that the police had taken away some of his clothes and two pairs of heavy outdoor shoes and all the gloves that were his. But he didn’t tell her how he’d asked, ‘Was he wearing gloves when he beat her?’ and how at the question McGuigan had swung round from his task of clearing the drawer to stare at him.

Going over it again and again until the steady beat of music from the opposite bench throbbed in his head like a vessel ready to burst, he could find no explanation. Fairbairn had thought he was about to be arrested. McGuigan, he felt sure, must have wanted to arrest him.

Why had Meldrum not arrested him?

Bobbie Haskell squealed as the door of Ali Fleming’s flat opened.

‘What? What’s wrong?’ The woman stared, one hand thrown up in alarm.

‘Who are you?’ Haskell came cautiously closer and, as if anticipating the same question explained, ‘I live in the flat upstairs.’

‘Are you Bobbie Haskell?’

Looking even more alarmed, Haskell nodded.

‘My sister told me about you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m Ali Fleming’s sister.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Trying to recover himself, he said, ‘When the door opened, I thought – I thought it was her.’

‘But I look nothing like her.’

‘It was just – I thought the flat was empty – seeing the woman shape. My heart’s still pounding.’

When the woman smiled, he saw that there was a resemblance, though Ali had been slimmer and taller and this woman had the solid build of a swimmer. She was probably in her late forties, so she might be ten years or so older than her dead sister, though he wasn’t a good judge of age.

‘I’d better warn you then, I’ll be here for a bit.’

‘Is the flat yours now? I mean did Ali leave it to you?’

‘It wasn’t hers to leave,’ the woman said. She glanced behind her. ‘Do you want to come in? I was just going out to get some food, but there’s milk for a cup of tea.’

He failed to stop a shudder. ‘I couldn’t. Not where it happened. How can you?’

‘I’m managing.’

Quick to meet a mood, he said, ‘I’m sorry! Look, why not come up to my place? We could have tea there. And a biscuit if you want.’

As they climbed the stairs, the woman said, ‘I’ve made up the couch in the living room. I couldn’t sleep in the bedroom.’

Neuf
points for sensitivity, he thought, but said aloud, ‘I’m so sorry about Ali. I was devastated. I should have said that at once, but I was so taken aback.’

‘My fault for giving you a fright. My name’s Linda. Linda Fleming.’

As he unlocked the door and led the way in, he said, ‘It’s the same set-up as – as the flat below. That’s the lounge through there. Have a seat and I’ll bring tea.’

Five minutes later, when he brought through the tray she was seated in the easy chair that had its back to the window. As he lifted a little table to the side of her chair, she crossed her legs and he was conscious of a faint smell of her sweat.

‘They’re such nice rooms,’ she said. ‘High ceilings. Did you furnish it yourself?’

‘Every stick,’ he said. ‘The colour scheme’s mine too. I bought the flat when I inherited money from an aunt. A wonderful buy, as things turned out.’

‘Downstairs belongs to my parents, always has done. My youngest sister lived in it after I had it for a while. Then
Ali got the use of it. My parents are quite old and retired and I live in London.’

He poured tea and offered her a choice of sweet biscuits laid out in a fan on an oval china plate with a blue border.

‘I suppose it will be sold now,’ he suggested.

‘Oh, yes.’

She sipped her tea in silence while he tried to think of something else to say.

‘We got on very well together,’ he said at last. ‘I’d like to think she thought of me as a friend.’

‘I wonder how many friends she had.’

He shrugged and shook his head.

‘There was a difference in your ages, of course,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘Maybe she didn’t have many friends!’

She looked at him. ‘That sounded almost spiteful.’

‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ he said.

‘Maybe she didn’t have friends,’ Linda Fleming observed. ‘How would I know? There’s no harm in saying something if it’s true.’

‘Don’t you know? I mean with you being her sister.’

‘Her sister in London. We weren’t all that close.’

‘She did mention me, though, you said that.’ He leaned forward and frowned.

‘Something had broken and you fixed it. She was very impressed.’

He sat back smiling. ‘That happened more than once. I’ve always been good with computers and stuff. She wasn’t very technically minded.’

Linda Fleming nodded and seemed about to smile in response but then her eyes filled with tears.

‘It hits you in unexpected ways,’ he said. ‘When my grandmother died, I was fine. I blamed myself for not
feeling more. But when they were putting her coffin into the hole, the earth on the sides was damp and shiny. That upset me.’

The woman looked down as if studying her hands folded in her lap. Without looking up, she said quietly, ‘I just wish we’d kept more in touch.’

‘Well,’ Haskell said, ‘I don’t know if I should tell you, but there was somebody who seems to have been close to her.’

‘A friend?’

‘A good deal more than that, I’m afraid. A man called Barclay Curle. He’s a writer. Quite well known, but I wouldn’t rate him all that highly, to be honest with you.’