The Endings Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  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?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  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 k
now 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.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Meldrum frowned. ‘I’m not sure why you brought this to us. Why do you want me to look at it?’

  ‘I think it will be obvious once you’ve read it,’ Curle said. ‘It’s just a few pages. It wouldn’t take long for both of you to look at it. It’s a note I made of something Ali told me.’

  As Meldrum bent his head, Curle could envisage the words on each leaf he had torn from his notebook.

  ‘I was late and he’d changed house. [This was the Classics Professor you told me about? – Yes, she said] It was pretty tense when I got there. There was a ritual of transformation we did – it sounds silly but it made a difference. I had to bath and then he’d inspect me. I wasn’t allowed to be the least wet. This time he laid me down on the bed and put the blindfold on. Then he asked me how much I’d been online, who I’d met, what I’d done, how often I’d cum without thinking of him. It was all quite gentle but it made me very uncomfortable. Eventually he came up with a figure – forty-eight strokes I owed him for tardiness and general slutty inconsideration. Normally I could cope, but I heard the belt slide out from his trousers. He gave me six hard strokes – it was bearable, just bearable, but I had to count and he talked to me all the time, which made it hard to keep count. [Did he fuck you?] Then he fucked me, lying face down still; he took me from behind. [In the arse?] After another two sets of six he told me he was going to fuck me in the arse. I’ve only had two cocks in my arse and both times it was very painful and unpleasant. He’s not very big but it must have excited him what he was going to do to me so that he was very hard. It hurt a lot. By the end of the afternoon, I was only up to twenty-four. It’s going to be hard on you, twenty-four to be taken quickly, he told me. I didn’t think I could do it. My arse was so sore as if it had been sandpapered. I’ll tell you what he said. Six of the cane and we’ll write off the rest of the strokes. He’d never caned me. He’d used his hand – and he could cause pain with that – and a belt and the flogger and the crop. [Was there a ritual?] He told me I had to kiss the cane before and after. And I had to count them. When the first blow came it was like a white light in my head.’

  With a grunt, Meldrum handed the sheets to McGuigan.

  Turning to Curle, he said, ‘You told us you didn’t have a key to Miss Fleming’s flat. You refused it, wasn’t that what you said? In case your wife found it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you made this note and kept it? When did you do that?’

  ‘I can’t give you an exact date. Three years ago, maybe four. I did it from memory after I got home the same night she told me about what he’d done to her.’

  ‘What about your wife? Wasn’t it a risk putting stuff like that on paper? Weren’t you afraid of her finding it?’

  ‘I’m a writer. I wanted to write down what she’d told me while it was fresh in my mind. If my wife had come across it, I’d have told her I was making notes for a novel. I make notes all the time.’

  ‘Notes like that?’

  ‘Not exactly like that.’

  ‘Out of your imagination?’

  ‘Yes. Or things I hear or see. Anything that might be useful.’

  Meldrum accepted the sheets back from McGuigan, and laid them on the desk. ‘Was this out of your imagination?’

  Curle stared in surprise. ‘No!’ he said indignantly. ‘It’s what she told me. Word for word. I have an excellent memory.’

  ‘Those bits in the square brackets,’ McGuigan asked. ‘That’s you talking to her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Meldrum took up the questioning from a different angle. ‘If you weren’t worried about your wife finding these notes, why hide them inside a book in your workroom? Isn’t that where you said you kept them?’

  ‘I didn’t have the nerve to leave them in the open. It’s what I should have done. We don’t always – what we do doesn’t always make sense. It’s an idea I’ve used in some of my books. We don’t always behave logically. In everyday life, I mean. You must know that.’

  ‘We know you write fiction. Let me ask you again, why did you want us to look at this stuff?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? She had this perverse relation with a man who had a taste for cruelty. I should think you’d want to question him. Ask him where he was when she was murdered.’

  ‘You’re suggesting he murdered her?’

  ‘I’m only saying it’s possible. When I came across this note I’d made, I thought it was my duty to let you see it.’

  ‘So that we would know there was another suspect?’ McGuigan asked.

  Curle stared at him in silence.

  ‘You think we should interview him?’ McGuigan asked.

  ‘You’d want to, I should think.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘I don’t know. She never said. But a Professor of Classics! How many of those are there?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ McGuigan said. ‘Have you made enquiries yourself?’

  Curle shook his head.

  After a pause, Meldrum said, ‘If your wife had found this note, you were going to tell her it was for a novel, right? Isn’t that in fact what it was? Something you made up?’

  ‘Maybe for a novel,’ McGuigan said, ‘maybe not.’

  ‘No! Why would I have brought it here, if I’d made it up?’ But, of course, McGuigan had already suggested an answer: to provide them with a suspect other than himself.

  And now it was McGuigan who asked, ‘Did you find it sexually exciting writing this kind of thing?’

  ‘Did you find it sexually exciting to read?… Sorry. Forget I said that. But whether it’s sexually exciting or not isn’t the point. What matters is whether she told me these things. And she did.’

  ‘There’s another possibility,’ Meldrum said. ‘Suppose these are the notes of a conversation you had with Miss Fleming. In that case, the things you said to her, those bits you’ve put in the square brackets, we’d call those leading questions.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You say things and she comes up with something in reply. The way it reads to me, whether you realise it or not, you’re suggesting things for her to say.’

  ‘I was involved, I wanted to hear what she’d say next,’ Curle said. ‘All right, I’ll admit it, I was sexually excited. Of course I was. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Has it never occurred to you she might have been making it up?

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Maybe she was trying to keep you interested?’ Meldrum said. ‘In case you got tired of her.’

  Curle opened his mouth as if to reply, and found he could think of nothing to say.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Though it was hardly possible to imagine that Calvinist Meldrum getting sexually excited by reading the note of what Ali Fleming had said, the handsome McGuigan was a different proposition. The thought there might be a stiffness down there hidden by the desk had helped him to meet the detective’s gaze as it was raised from the papers, and while he was being questioned lingered at the back of his mind like a shield or talisman until the formulation ‘leading the witness’ came on him like a hammer blow. Useless to claim I don’t understand; he had understood only too well. Why would she make it up? Just because she wanted to hold his attention? Could it possibly be true that she had loved him? For most of their affair, he had wanted to break it off and despised himself for not having the strength. Whatever it had been about for him, it had had nothing to do with love. Had he ever seen her clearly, made the effort to think of how things were for her? He had always been too self-absorbed. Something corrupt in her had fascinated him. For the first time, it occurred to him that he might be the corrupter. To
go through the world without causing harm, how carefully a man would have to make his way. If things had been different, if she had killed herself for love, however impossible the idea still was for him, sitting at his desk that morning it seemed to him that he would never have got over the guilt.

  The rest of the morning after the debacle he sat in front of the computer. At intervals he played solitaire and got it out at intervals, ace to king in four piles, far more often than when he’d played with cards. It must be rigged, he decided, to keep you interested. He decided this regularly but it didn’t stop him playing, since he hated battleships and had to play something. Some writers read the Bible before they started work, some sharpened pencils, he played solitaire. About noon when he’d added three sentences to Chapter 3 of the novel, the doorbell rang.

  The sky behind the woman was the darkest shade of grey as if it might be about to yield up snow.

  ‘Mr Curle? I think you knew my sister.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said firmly, but laughing at the same time since he had no objections to being interrupted by a reasonably good-looking woman. ‘Who might that be?’

  ‘Ali Fleming.’

  Shocked, he blurted, ‘How did you know where to come?’

  ‘Your friend Brian Todd gave me your address. Can I come in?’

  He actually found himself looking beyond her. There were no witnesses in the empty street. It would be hours yet before Kerr came home. He stood aside and she came past him into the hall.

  Seated in the front room, he asked, ‘How on earth do you know Brian Todd?’

  ‘I don’t know him. Bobbie Haskell gave me his number.’

  It was possible. That night in the pub, Jonah and he had left Haskell and Todd still drinking together.

  As if to forestall any more questions, she said, ‘I’m staying in Ali’s flat until the funeral.’

  ‘The funeral…’

  ‘She’s to be buried in Glasgow beside her grandmother. It’s what Ali would have wanted. She cared for her grandmother more than anyone in the world.’