The Endings Man Page 6

  They began to walk along Princes Street, the Castle looming on their left above shadowy spaces of grass and trees. When they were almost at the west end of the street, Jonah said, ‘There’s a taxi. You take it. I’ll get the next one.’

  There were plenty of them about, the city was generous with its licences, and Curle flagged down the first one.

  He gave his address and waved to Jonah who, nearly at the corner, could hardly miss noticing if the taxi didn’t turn left into Lothian Road. The opposite direction, as it happened, to that in which Ali Fleming’s apartment lay. Jonah, in his turn, would be crossing Princes Street and going back the way they’d come.

  Curle sat back in the seat and watched the shopfronts go by. All he had to do was let the cab take him home. He leaned forward and tapped on the glass. What was it Wilde had said? I can resist everything but temptation.

  From the beginning, this visit was different. He was surprised after climbing the stairs to see Ali waiting in her doorway to greet him. It seemed she had been roused out of bed for she was in a pyjama top and shorts and her feet were bare. She smiled at him, ‘I needed cheering up tonight.’ He could smell the muskiness of her body warm from the blankets. As he went in past her, the bedroom was on his left. He turned right into the front room. There was a scatter of magazines on the couch and a bottle of whisky and a glass on the low table. In the grate, the artificial coals of the unlit gas fire piled in lumps of black and grey.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked following him. ‘It’s cold in here. I was feeling lousy so I had a whisky and an early night. I’ve been in bed since eight o’clock.’

  He no longer knew why he had come. After a moment, she sat in a chair and gathered her feet under her.

  ‘Aren’t you going to take your coat off?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’ll be hot in bed.’ As he stood abstracted, her smile flickered and faded.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘It’s no good any more.’

  ‘Do I have a say in this?’

  ‘It’s no good for you.’

  ‘And you’re only thinking of me. Of course you are.’ She looked down at her hands in her lap. ‘Would you like me to beg?’

  ‘You’ve too much pride for that.’

  ‘What did I ever do or say that gave you that idea?’

  He made a chopping gesture of impatience. ‘Don’t tell me I’m the only one in your life.’

  ‘How many are there? Have I always had someone? All the time you’ve known me? If you thought that, why did you never say?’

  Had he always believed she had other lovers? Not always. Perhaps lately. He shrugged. Men are cowards, they always say they’ll phone. Where had he heard that?

  ‘I could have written you a letter,’ he said. ‘But you deserve more than that.’

  Her laugh took him by surprise. He had heard her laugh before, at one time very often, but it had never sounded like this.

  ‘A letter? You must be joking. If you go, you’ve taken care to leave nothing behind.’

  ‘I won’t be back,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken up enough of your life.’

  All the way down the stairs, he expected to hear her door opening, her voice calling after him.

  The night had turned colder. It wasn’t true that you couldn’t be alone in a city. The pavement ahead of him was deserted. He needed a taxi to take him home. He turned up his collar against the wind. Last winter on a night as cold as this, he had been about to cross the Meadows with Liz, when a young man had begun to walk alongside them. He was wearing an anorak, trainers, no gloves on his hands. He spoke in a low confidential tone, not coaxing, or wheedling, just describing how he lived and that he would be sleeping rough that night. The three of them walked side by side with the dark expanses of grass on either side, and Curle waited for the boy, for he didn’t seem much more than a boy, to ask them for money. It occurred to him that if he could get at his wallet, he could extract a note by feel and even be sure that it was a pound and not twenty for he ranked his money so that he wouldn’t make a mistake of that kind. He could fold it in his hand and simply pass it over to the boy as they parted, saving him the awkwardness of having to ask, for it seemed to him that the boy was hungry for company almost more than anything. When they came to the end of the path, however, the boy wished them a good night and turned away. It happened quickly, but not so quickly that Curle couldn’t have said, here’s something for you; but by then it would have meant taking out his wallet and he was too cautious for that. Afterwards naturally he was ashamed, but what good was that?

  Head huddled into his collar, Curle made his way up the hill under the burden of his guilt, which was real however self-indulgent.

  Chapter Fourteen

  He woke in the morning smiling and lay watching a fragment of a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling sway in an air current trying to work out why he was happy. He felt carefree, not a worry in the world. All my bills paid, he thought, I can look anyone in the eye. Who knows, I may even finish the book in time. Stranger things had happened.

  He got up and drank a glass of water, washed his face, stuck his head under the tap and towelled himself dry. He put on his dressing gown and stuck his feet in slippers then came out on to the landing. Not a sound. He’d had broken sleeps for a long time, wakening at five, lying awake, getting up tired and heavy eyed. Was it possible he’d overslept? He felt refreshed and ready for anything. In the kitchen, he found it was almost ten. Liz would be at work, Kerr at school. To his surprise he was disappointed not to see his wife this morning. He thought about that as he made toast and coffee. With a kind of disbelief he contemplated the possibility of making a new start. Things had gone wrong, but it didn’t have to be that way. I’ll get my life back on track, he thought.

  It was in that spirit that he went to see ACC Fairbairn.

  ‘I have a meeting at twelve,’ Fairbairn said glancing at his watch. ‘That gives me quarter of an hour free.’

  He had a phone for the outside world on his desk and, for some reason, a pen and pencil set, perhaps some kind of award or gift, and a silver-framed picture of his wife, whom Curle recognised from the photograph he’d seen in Joe Tilman’s house.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come without an appointment,’ Curle said. ‘I came on impulse. I didn’t really expect you’d be able to see me.’

  ‘Not for long, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I wanted to thank you for helping me with the anonymous letters.’ Watching Fairbairn tense slightly, he knew he’d begun in the wrong way. Hurrying on, he said, ‘I appreciated it very much; you didn’t have to. I wanted to say that. Of course, once I’d learned who sent them, the background to it, a sad story, I regretted ever raising the matter. It’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned.’ He paused. ‘I just wanted to say that too.’

  At ease now, Fairbairn sat back in his seat and nodded. ‘I’m told she’s being helped. We just have to hope for the best.’

  Curle hitched himself to the edge of his chair and they stood up more or less together.

  As Fairbairn walked him to the door, he asked, ‘When can we expect another book?’

  ‘By the end of this year,’ Curle said, and added superstitiously, ‘God willing.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

  They were shaking hands when Curle said, ‘I should thank DI Meldrum, too. It was good of him to come with me.’

  Fairbairn closed the door he’d just opened.

  ‘Meldrum was with you?’

  Surprised by his tone, Curle confined himself to a nod.

  Fairbairn shook his head slowly. His expression was that of a man silently rehearsing a vocabulary of swear words.

  ‘He ran me down to Peebles,’ Curle explained. ‘I was glad of the offer. It saved me the trouble of trying to find the house.’

  ‘It’s not difficult to find,’ Fairbairn said grimly.

  ‘He wasn’t supposed to take me?’ Curle guessed.

  ‘My fault,
’ Fairbairn said. ‘I gave him the information because he was working on this problem you had with the anonymous letters. He’s the type you have to call off. Otherwise, once he’s got his teeth in something… I should have phoned you myself, but having spoken to him it seemed tidier to get him to round it off. And this is all he was supposed to do. Give you a ring and ask you to contact Joe Tilman.’

  Without perhaps giving it enough thought, Curle said, ‘He struck me as someone who wouldn’t much like being used as a messenger.’

  Fairbairn seemed to rehearse silently a darker range of curses. ‘That’s not the way we work. If I give an order—But I’ll be told I didn’t spell it out clearly enough. If there was a shade of ambiguity—That’s how the Meldrums of this world—’ He broke off as another thought struck him. ‘Did he take you there and wait outside?’

  ‘No. He came in with me.’

  ‘No need to say any more. No doubt, I’ll hear about it.’ From Tilman, Curle thought. At once, though, Fairbairn asked, ‘Did he just sit and listen?’

  Uneasy by now, Curle tried to keep his tone as neutral as possible. ‘He asked some questions.’ The last thing he wanted was to get embroiled in a matter of police discipline.

  As if reading his mind, Fairbairn said, ‘He’s a difficult man. His career’s more or less blocked – not by me! – something that happened years ago. Past time probably that he left the force, but that’s not easy to do if it’s all you’re good at. I sometimes wonder if he’s trying to get himself kicked out.’

  Unconsciously, did he mean? As one himself, Curle was deeply sceptical of amateur psychologists. He mumbled what might have passed more or less for an agreement of sorts, which brought Fairbairn to a halt. He reopened the door, offered his hand again and said, ‘Best ignore all that, eh? I know I can count on your discretion.’ He laughed. ‘Doesn’t matter since you’ll never see him again.’

  Curle was in the lift before he allowed himself a smile. A writer’s discretion, he thought, there’s an oxymoron.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On a balance of probabilities, the best estimate was that Ali Fleming had died in the last hours of the previous day. Somewhere around the time on the following morning when Curle was leaving the office of ACC Fairbairn, the stillness of the dead woman’s flat was being disturbed by the persistent ringing of the bell on the street door. The owner of the small agency where she worked had stopped by on his way to lunch. It was by chance that the design she had been working on was urgently needed. At a loss, sure that she would have phoned to explain if she was ill, her employer came back to try again just after five in the afternoon. By coincidence, Bobbie Haskell arrived home to find him there and, having heard of his anxiety, used his key to let them both in from the street. Repeated knocking, followed by banging, on the door of her flat brought no response.

  Haskell repeated the performance twice that evening with the same lack of response. The following morning he delayed going to work until he could phone the agency where Ali had worked, using the number the owner had left him. Learning that she still hadn’t appeared, he went down and beat such a tattoo on her door that her downstairs neighbour, a widow in her late fifties, came up to enquire about the disturbance. She volunteered the information that when she had been sitting up in bed reading, not the previous night but the one before, she had been startled by ‘thumping’ noises from upstairs. This confidence led to a long conference about what they might do, which ended only when Haskell, torn about being so late for work, trailed off indecisively to the bookshop. It was the widow, Mrs Eva Johanson, who having spent much of the day pondering her anxiety made the call to the police, which led to the discovery of the body that evening. Soon after, the process was initiated which brought to the building and filled the rooms of the flat with scene of crime officers for pictures, swabs, fingerprints, and a medical examiner and detectives under the senior officer available when the call came.

  It was then almost sixty hours after Ali Fleming’s death, just before noon on the Friday morning, before Curle was summoned from his study by his wife.

  ‘There’s a policeman wanting to speak to you,’ Liz told him.

  He pushed to roll back his chair from the computer and stared at her.

  ‘A policeman?’ Like most people, he associated a visit from a policeman with news of some accident or mishap. ‘It’s not Kerr?’ As he spoke his son’s name, his stomach sank in fear.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said, as if the idea had just forced itself upon her.

  When he followed her into the front room and saw that the taller of the two men waiting for them was Meldrum, his first reaction was relief. They weren’t here about Kerr. This was followed by something like embarrassment for it occurred to him that perhaps Meldrum had been ordered to apologise to him. He even had time in the hurry of his thoughts to consider that the second policeman might be there as a witness to sharpen the penance or to make sure it had been undertaken at all.

  As if they hadn’t met, Meldrum introduced himself and then his companion, ‘DS McGuigan.’

  Still caught in the improbable scenario of an apology, Curle asked, ‘It is just me you want to see?’

  It was Liz’s turn to look relieved.

  After she had left the room, Meldrum asked, ‘Do you know a woman called Alexina Fleming?’

  In his surprise, Curle failed to recognise the name in this unfamiliar form. He shook his head.

  ‘We’ve been given to understand,’ Meldrum said, ‘that you’ve been in the habit of visiting her at her flat in Royal Circus.’

  Ali?

  He shook his head again. Wouldn’t it be foolish to admit anything until he knew what this was about?

  ‘You’re saying that you don’t know Alexina Fleming?’

  ‘No.’

  He waited for the same question to be asked again. It was what policemen did; hammer away at the same question. This time I’ll tell the truth, he thought.

  ‘Would you mind telling me where you were on Tuesday evening?’

  To his horror his mind went blank. ‘Tuesday?’

  ‘Tuesday evening.’

  Of course. He knew where he’d been. He told himself to calm down; it was ridiculous to feel such relief. ‘On Tuesday evening I had a talk to give at the National Library. That’s on George the Fourth Bridge,’ he explained.

  ‘I know where it is. Can you give me times?’

  ‘The reading started just after half past seven. The event finished – I can’t give you an exact time – before half past nine.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I went home. No – I went with some people for a drink.’

  ‘Could you give their names?’

  ‘Jonathan Murray. I can give you his telephone number. He’s my agent, an old friend. And a man called Brian Todd. I don’t know how to contact him, but he’s a partner in a firm of accountants in the city, so it wouldn’t be hard to trace him.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  Curle hesitated. Haskell? Yes, Bobbie Haskell. But he lived in the same flats as Ali Fleming. And she was a secret, his secret life. He couldn’t give Haskell’s name. And then at once he realised that was no longer relevant. Meldrum had already asked him about her. Why?

  And so at last he asked, ‘What is this about?’

  Chapter Sixteen

  DI MELDRUM: I gather you were the one who reported that something was wrong, Mrs Johnson.

  EVA JOHANSON: Johanson! My husband was Norwegian. He worked for a firm of shippers. Everyone in Edinburgh loved him, he threw such wonderful parties. It was only after he died – he dropped dead in the street, not a moment of warning, a heart attack, he was only fifty-one – it was only after that it was found he’d been using the firm’s money for the parties. Not for himself, just transferring the money from elsewhere in his budget for the parties; you couldn’t call it stealing. The firm honoured his pension.

  DI MELDRUM: (slowly, impression of an unhurried patience) What made you worried eno
ugh about Miss Fleming to call the police?

  EVA JOHANSON: Have you spoken to the young man upstairs? I don’t know his name, isn’t that silly? You’d think you’d know your neighbours, but you don’t, not unless there’s something wrong with the roof; it takes a crisis before you get to know people. You pass on the stairs and nod. Sometimes not even that. I don’t remember even passing him all that often. I couldn’t even tell you how long he’s lived upstairs. People on my landing and the ones below me, you get their names from the doorplates. But he’s on the top floor. You’ll be able to find him.

  DI MELDRUM: I’m sure we will. How does he come into this?

  EVA JOHANSON: I heard him banging on Miss Fleming’s door this morning! He told me he’d tried yesterday too. It seemed very strange that she wasn’t answering.

  DS McGUIGAN: How did you know she wasn’t at work?

  EVA JOHANSON: He’d phoned her work.

  DS McGUIGAN: This man upstairs had phoned her work? Did he say why?

  EVA JOHANSON: He was worried. I mean, I was worried too. Especially after I remembered the thumping noises.

  DI MELDRUM: Thumping noises?

  EVA JOHANSON: From upstairs! Last night.

  DI MELDRUM: Noises from Miss Fleming’s flat? Can you say more exactly what they were?

  EVA JOHANSON: Thumping noises.

  DI MELDRUM: Like someone walking heavily?

  EVA JOHANSON: No! I know what that sounds like! When my husband and I lived in Brussels, the woman above us had parquet flooring. The noise was terrible. When I complained, she made even more of a racket. Stamp, stamp, stamp. I asked if she could wear slippers in the flat. Slippers are for peasants, she told me. High heels and painted an inch thick. I was sure she was the retired Madam of a brothel. Let it go, my husband said, laughing at me, you’ll get us in trouble. God knows what kind of friends she has!