‘Wait!’ Jonah held up a finger to make his point more emphatically. ‘Tuesday evening! You were with me all the time. At the talk, then we went to the pub. We walked down to Princes Street. And I saw you into the taxi to go home. It’s what they call an alibi. Call yourself a detective novelist? Nothing to worry about.’
Curle took no more than a fraction of a second too long before he nodded, just enough to be too late.
‘You did go home?’ Jonah asked slowly.
Chapter Twenty
There was wine left in the bottle when Jonah got up to go, which was unheard of. To be fair, Curle reflected as he came out of Rutland Square to weave his way along the crowded pavement on the shop side of Princes Street, at least the agent hadn’t pretended to have an urgent appointment. He’d got to his feet, leaned down and squeezed Curle by the shoulder. ‘I’ll love you and leave you,’ he’d said, ‘I need some time by myself to think’.
Curle knew he should go home. He had to honour the contract for the new book and already he was thousands of words behind schedule. He had an image of his study, a quiet room at the back of the house, looking out on to the garden. By contrast, his first book had been handwritten using a succession of cheap biros the summer before he went to university, crouched on a chair in his bedroom, trying to ignore the sounds of his father stumbling about downstairs. Not long after he was married, he’d begun yet another novel, hammering it out on a second-hand typewriter at a makeshift desk in the back room of their rented accommodation. Books that were left unfinished, ones that struggled to the last page, none of them published. Yet Liz had never stopped believing in him. Then Mae had been born and they had been happy. Five minutes earlier, five minutes later, and they might have gone on being happy. The timing had been precise and the lorry came out of the side street and smashed them across the road. He’d fought his way out of the car and into the back seat where he’d held Mae in his arms as her head fell to one side and the world went silent. The next year Liz went back out to work and his first novel was published and was enough of a success that he left the library and became a full-time writer. A book published at last and now he had a house with a study, the kind of room the boy had dreamed of having, the young man had dreamed of having. He had betrayed them both.
Afraid to go home, he wandered the length of Princes Street and then up the Bridges. He went into a bookshop and left in a panic for fear it was the one where Bobbie Haskell worked. He read the posters outside the Festival Theatre as if studying for an exam, and pacing on desultorily could not remember a word of what he had read. In Melville Drive the sun slanted between the trees and joggers ran with slack fists and swinging arms around the perimeter of the Meadows. By the time he got to Bruntsfield, he was tired and thought about going into the hotel for a coffee and then, for no better reason than that one was pulling up as he arrived at the stop, got on a bus that would take him home.
He sat on the front seat upstairs, watched the light changing on the Pentland Hills as they went up through Morningside and thought how it must be desirable in every city to be on the side that caught the morning sun. Leave the cold side to the poor, which must be why an East Ender from London or Glasgow was prone sooner or later to bore you with hints of hardness. Fuck off and learn to appreciate the sunset, he thought, and kept up the same distracting chatter in his head in place of thought even on the short walk after he’d left the bus until he was confronted by his own house, cosy as an egg in a nest of similar properties laid by a builder fifty years earlier.
As he pushed open the garden gate, the chatter in his head quietened leaving him with the single thought: I want to be forgiven. More than anything else he wanted to be forgiven.
He went round the side of the house and tried the kitchen door. It was unlocked. Liz must be at home. It was an old point of dispute that she never locked it. He was a compulsive locker of doors. He checked his watch; too early for Kerr to be home from school. He squinted into the empty kitchen and then closed the door softly and went on into the garden. At the corner, he stood motionless watching little birds acrobatically pecking at a container of nuts he’d hung from one of the naked branches of the cherry tree. Abruptly, he swung about, the birds flew off and he went at last into the house.
In the utility room, he kicked off his shoes and put on the slippers he kept in a box under the work surface. Going through into the hall, he hung his coat in the cupboard and had his hand out to open the front-room door when he heard the murmur of a man’s voice.
Brian Todd, his Judas-coloured hair pale in a shaft of winter sun from the window behind him, put down his coffee cup as Curle went in.
‘I’m so glad you’re back before I had to go,’ he said. ‘Your wife was just getting ready to collect your son from school.’
He was on the couch by the window, Liz in one of the easy chairs placed opposite the television.
‘If I don’t go now, I’ll be late,’ she said getting up. She looked down at Todd and said carefully, ‘I’m sure you meant to be helpful.’
Curle followed her into the hall. ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ he whispered.
‘The police have spoken to him too,’ she said in the same guardedly polite tone, like a woman concealing her symptoms from a doctor. Before he could respond, she was gone.
Curle took the seat she’d left. A dozen thoughts went through his mind. At last he said, ‘The school isn’t far away. She’ll be back in twenty minutes.’
‘Does she go for him every day?’
‘There are two main roads.’
‘Oh, yes.’
The questioning note was so faint that it might not have been there at all, yet Curle felt it as a criticism of his son. Yes, there are crossing patrols. Yes, other children come home by themselves. You didn’t lose a child, you bastard.
Stupid to say any of that.
‘I can’t imagine how you found where I lived.’
‘Looked you up in the phone book,’ Todd said.
‘We’re not in the phone book.’
Todd smiled, not at all put out. ‘You’re a public figure,’ he said easily. ‘One of my partners does work for the Arts Council. You were in one or another list of writers.’
‘I still don’t understand…’
‘Why I’m here? Like your wife said, believe it or not, I wanted to see if there was any way I could help.’
‘I don’t need help.’
Todd put his head to the side and studied him thoughtfully.
After this became intolerable, Curle said, ‘My wife tells me the police have been to see you.’
‘Two of them. The one that mattered was called Meldrum. Big chap. Grim face. He looks as if life has disappointed him.’ He nodded as if pleased with himself. ‘I can see you recognise the description.’
‘What did he want?’
Todd made a face at the stupidity of the question. ‘They wanted to talk about that night in the pub after the National Library do.’
‘What has that got to do with me?’
‘Oh, come off it. It was all about you. They were very particular about when you left. I’m afraid I was rather vague about exactly when that might have been. It’s not the kind of thing you make a note of, not on an evening out.’
‘I still don’t see why you’ve come here.’
‘You have a view of me from school. I think what happened then mattered more to you than to me. I honestly can’t understand why you would still care about it. You’re very successful, a public figure like I said. I’ve read bits about you in the papers. Same thing with me, I’m a successful man. I’m not that boy.’ As he leaned forward his face seemed shiny with sincerity. ‘Believe me, I do want to help.’
Curle felt as if he’d been put in the wrong in some way he couldn’t quite understand. ‘Even so,’ he said, ‘I can’t see how you could.’
‘For one thing, I know what happened that night. If that’s any good to you.’
Curle felt his heart begin to pound. He fo
rced himself to keep still. As he waited for Todd to accuse him of being with her that night – how could he know? who else knew? how could he know? – he grew afraid that the beating of his heart could be heard.
‘Thing is,’ Todd said, ‘they can’t ask questions without giving something away. By the time they’d finished I was sure there had been a murder. It wasn’t hard to check the papers and decide which one. The bit of luck was that I recognised the byline on the newspaper report as belonging to a client of mine who hadn’t filled in a tax return for five years. He came to me after the Revenue caught up and I got him out of the mess. A phone call and he filled in the blanks – the bits that weren’t in the papers.’ He paused. It was Curle’s chance to say he didn’t want to hear any more, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that. Satisfied, Todd went on, ‘She was beaten on the face and body. On the body, she’d been kicked, front and back, breasts and stomach, kicked in the kidneys, stamped on. The worst, though, was her face. Most of the bones in it were broken. With those kinds of injuries, she could have choked on her own blood, had a brain haemorrhage. One of the kicks had ruptured her spleen, she could have died of that. Whoever the killer was, he didn’t leave anything to chance. After the beating, she was choked so hard that her voice box was crushed.’
‘How could you imagine knowing any of that horror would help me?’
He felt an overwhelming desire to vomit. Bad food you could sick out of your system, bad thoughts once they were in there was no way to get rid of them. All the time Todd had been talking, he’d watched each word shaped from his mouth as though hypnotised. Without the intensity of that focus, he would have failed to catch a fleeting compression of the wide narrow lips. He was certain of the movement, but unsure at once of what it might mean, though at first he had thought it could only be the flickering suppression of a smile.
‘Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight,’ Todd said. ‘Knowing someone involved in a murder is a new experience for me.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘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.
Chapter Twenty-Two
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, w
earing 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.’
The Endings Man Page 8
