He chewed over that unsavoury morsel all the way home on the bus, staring out of the window determinedly when the man seated next to him showed signs of wanting to start a conversation. With parking scarce in Edinburgh and a bus service that was fast and frequent, it made sense to take the bus into the centre. Sometimes that meant talking to people. Occasionally, he’d even found it useful. He’d a bad habit of incorporating snatches of conversation into his novels, a kind of found art like pieces of driftwood sculpted by the tides. On the other hand, sometimes it wasn’t all right and he’d find himself wishing that more Edinburgh people would live up to their reputation for reserve. On bad days, he tended to put the phenomenon of being accosted down to the number of unfortunates released into the care of the community.
He escaped from the bus a mile or so before his usual stop and walked home. It was lunchtime but, too restless to stay in the house, he took the car from the garage with some vague idea of running into the country. On impulse, however, after he’d crossed the main road he turned into the street that led to Kerr’s school and pulled up a few hundred yards beyond the entrance. As he walked back, he could hear the babble of children before he came in sight of them. Watching as they scurried around in a frenzy of Brownian motion, there was no way of telling if they were agitated by enjoyment or anxiety in these last moments of freedom before the bell summoned them inside. Almost when it was too late, he spotted his son standing by himself in a corner of the playground. Shoulders hunched, he seemed to be studying the ground at his feet, his stillness among all that activity infinitely pathetic. For the first time, it occurred to Curle that his son might be a victim of bullying. With a convulsive gesture he threw his hand into the air and, as Kerr lifted his head, waved him to approach.
‘We’re going for a run. Come on.’
Kerr had to hurry to keep up.
‘Should we tell the teacher?’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll give you a letter to her.’
In the car, the boy asked, ‘What will Mummy say?’
‘Don’t look so worried.’ Please don’t look so worried. ‘I won’t tell her if you don’t. All right?’
‘…Where are we going?’
‘Where would you want to go?’
‘Some of the boys in the class have seen The Invincibles. Is it on anywhere?’
‘The sun’s shining.’ He wanted to talk to his son. Not sit beside him in the dark letting the time pass when too much of it had passed already. ‘We could go to the zoo.’
‘Won’t it be closed?’
‘It’s open all the year round. It’s interesting at this time of the year.’
As he drove down Lothian Road, however, intending to take the Western Approach out to Corstorphine, he recalled how on free afternoons in the first job he had after leaving school in Glasgow he would go to the zoo. He had a memory of mangy beasts in cramped cages and a sudden image of a lone polar bear in a narrow pit rocking endlessly back and forward. The Edinburgh zoo was different, he told himself: wide open paddocks climbing the sides of a lofty hill. When they got there, though, it was snowing. He sat in the car park looking at the fat flakes spinning down. What a bloody country! How could sun and blue skies transform so fast into grey clouds and snow?
‘Let’s sit for a minute. It might clear up again.’
In a moment the snow condensed into little stones, little white stones of hail that drummed a deafening tattoo on the roof and clogged the windscreen.
‘What a country!’
‘I don’t have gloves,’ the boy said. ‘They’re in my bag under my desk.’
Time to head for Leith and the cinema on the top floor of the new complex at Ster Century. And, of course, when they got out of the car, having wound up four floors, they looked over the railing, the wind stiff in their faces, at the sun sparkling on the waters of the harbour and the sky above the distant coast of Fife high and cold and cloudless. It didn’t matter, he’d given up on the zoo and the snow would be back before the afternoon ended.
They’d just missed a showing of The Invincibles and the next one wasn’t until twenty past three. He found a phone and called home to leave a message on the answer machine for Liz. They ate fish and chips in the food hall in front of the vast windows looking out to Platinum Point, then wandered around from floor to floor, looking at the shops. Kerr went into Thomas Kincade, painter of light, and stood in front of paintings of chapels in mountain valleys and stagecoaches and sea harbours, settling at last in front of a gabled wooden house by a stream in what could only be called a dell. When the assistant joined them, Curle couldn’t resist speculating, ‘If the door opened, would a man holding a bloodstained axe come out?’ ‘Oh,’ the assistant said, ‘I shouldn’t think so.’
At one point, he finally got around to asking, ‘How are things? Everything all right at school?’ Kerr muttered, ‘Fine,’ and he had no skill to get behind the suddenly veiled expression. Next moment the boy had hurried over to look through the glass down to where the royal yacht Britannia bobbed at anchor. ‘Can we go on it?’ ‘Another time. The film’s almost ready to start.’
And so, after all, their stolen afternoon was spent in the dark.
When they came out, the evening light was washing out of the sky. They drove back talking about the picture they’d just seen and Kerr laughed a lot and explained bits to his father.
A police car was sitting outside the house when they arrived home.
As he opened the door, Liz swooped from the living room and gathered Kerr in her arms.
‘Where have you been?’ she cried at him over the boy’s head.
Muffled against her chest, Kerr explained, ‘We saw The Invincibles. It was brilliant.’
She said, ‘Upstairs. Come on, Kerr.’
As Curle stood bewildered, Meldrum and McGuigan came from the room she’d left. The hall shrank with their arrival.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ The tremor in his voice dismayed him.
It was McGuigan who answered. ‘Your neighbour Mrs Anderson got upset when she went to collect the children from school and Kerr wasn’t there. Apparently she kicked up a fuss with the class teacher, and then phoned your wife. Who hit the panic button.’
‘But I phoned!’ Curle led the way into the kitchen. The oval light at the side of the phone that should have shown a message had been recorded wasn’t lit. ‘I don’t understand.’ Trying to ignore their scepticism, he picked up the phone and pressed two. To his relief, the message he’d sent was there. He held out the phone so that they could hear his voice.
‘I don’t know why she panicked. She should have guessed he’d be with me.’
‘Have you taken him away for the afternoon before?’ Meldrum asked.
He evaded the question. ‘Who else could it have been? She should have known.’
‘Maybe she did,’ McGuigan said. Why is he angry? Curle wondered. ‘Maybe she was afraid you were going to do something foolish.’
‘What?’
‘Think about it,’ and he turned on his heels and left the kitchen. There was the sound of his feet mounting the stairs.
Curle made to follow. ‘I don’t want him frightening my son.’
‘That’s not his style,’ Meldrum said.
There was no sympathy in the harsh lines of the big man’s face, but Curle found something reassuring in his calmness and the slow measure of his speech. He felt a firmness like granite, the ungivingness of a rock, and it was to that firmness he appealed.
‘I feel as if he wants to arrest me.’
‘It’s not up to him.’
‘You took away my clothes. Aren’t there DNA tests? I didn’t do it. I can give samples. Any kind of samples.’
‘There wasn’t any semen,’ Meldrum said. ‘If that’s what you’re asking.’
‘What about Ali’s blood? There must have been blood on him, the man who beat her.’
‘If we’d found blood on your clothes, you wouldn’t be here.’
Curle
felt his legs weaken under him. He let himself sink into a chair at the table.
‘All the same, your sergeant would lock me up if he could. It’s personal. I know he feels like that.’ And he couldn’t stop himself from finishing on a note of bathos. ‘It’s – it’s not professional, is it?’
‘He has a strong moral sense. He’s got no time for adulterers,’ Meldrum said. ‘He’s not too keen on abortion either.’
‘For Christ’s sake, is he too stupid to know there’s a difference between adultery and murder?’
‘He’d know that. He’s pretty smart. Very smart actually. He won’t be with me for long, he’s a high flyer. The best detective sergeant I ever had.’ He paused. ‘Not that I’ve had much luck with detective sergeants.’
As feet sounded on the stairs, Curle asked with a touch of desperation. ‘Why haven’t you arrested me?’
Meldrum seemed to think before answering.
‘An arrest changes things,’ he said. ‘It commits you to that being the truth of what happened. You can make it be the truth.’
It didn’t seem to bother him that McGuigan was behind him listening, his face set in a frown.
‘It’s best not to arrest someone until you are very sure,’ Meldrum said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Curle woke in the middle of the night and knew at once as if by instinct he was alone. Slowly after that, he made out the dim outline of the desk looming above him and realised he was in his study and then remembered reluctantly why he had been banished there. ‘Even in our worst times, I thought I knew you so well. Better than anyone in the world,’ Liz had said. ‘I don’t know who you are any more.’ She’d spoken quietly, but then all their arguments for years had been like that. For Kerr’s sake, they never shouted.
Misery kept him awake, but he must have escaped from it at some point for the next time he opened his eyes it was daylight. Determined not to get up until they had gone, for there was no way he could face either wife or son that morning, he lay listening for signs of activity. When at long last he heard the slam of the front door, he rolled off the couch and, gathering a blanket round him, padded over and pulled the curtain apart just wide enough to watch the car backing out of the drive.
He was in the kitchen making himself breakfast when the phone began ringing. He couldn’t think of anyone he wanted to talk to. With the broken shell of the egg he’d just cracked into the pan dripping in his hand, he stared at it willing it to stop. Warily, when it didn’t, he lifted it to his ear.
‘Yes?’
‘At last!’
‘Jonah?’
‘What were you doing, having a bath?’
‘Having a pee.’
‘Anyway I got you. Didn’t want you going out into the big world until I’d warned you.’
‘About what?’ His stomach sank with fright.
‘Have you seen a paper this morning?’
‘No. I haven’t been out of the house.’
‘You’re in them. One of them at least.’
‘Tell me you’re joking, for God’s sake.’
‘Alice reads the Sun. Terrible thing for an intelligent woman to do. I tell her not to leave it lying about the office. She showed me it as soon as I walked in the door. And there you were. You took Kerr away for the afternoon, that right?’
‘Is this a joke?’ But how could Jonah know about Kerr being off school? ‘I take my son to the pictures and it’s in the papers? My son played truant! That’s the story?’
‘When a detective inspector goes looking for him, I’m afraid it is. It’s cleverly done. You have to hand it to them. It’s done with a light touch, but the point’s made. “Detective Inspector Meldrum, who is investigating the brutal murder of a woman in Royal Circus, took time off apparently to check on the whereabouts of a schoolboy.” And not just any schoolboy – “the son of well-known crime novelist Barclay Curle”. Whose novels, they mention in passing, feature a serial killer who kills women by beating them to death.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Fuck, indeed. They’ve got a photo of you too. Don’t know where they got it, but it makes you look like Myra Hindley.’
Half an hour later, he answered the doorbell to be met by two men, the one on the doorstep in his late forties smiling and holding out a copy of the morning paper folded to the page with Curle’s photograph. It had been shot in close up from below with lighting that put a stare in his eyes and a touch of madness in his grin. Three or four years earlier, he’d been persuaded into the pose by a magazine photographer who fancied himself to be an artist. From his first sight of it, it had been an embarrassment.
‘That photo’s copyright,’ Curle said. ‘You’d no right to use it.’
‘Not the Sun,’ the man said, ‘the other one. We didn’t think this was playing the game. Felt you might want to give your side of the story.’
‘There isn’t a bloody story! I took my son to the pictures.’
‘It says here you came back to find DI Meldrum waiting for you. Is that right?’
Curle stared at him in silence.
‘You must have thought that was a bit odd. Why do you think he was there?’
‘My wife phoned for the police.’
‘She got herself a good one then. Look, can we talk inside?’
‘No.’
‘Why give the neighbours an eyeful? For all you know, it was one of them gave the Sun a bell.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said without conviction.
‘It’s police harassment, isn’t it? Get them off your back. Get it out in the open.’
‘I didn’t say anything about harassment.’
‘Don’t worry about wasting your time.’ The words tumbled out. ‘I’d make it quick. I know you’re a busy man. Writing a book, are you? There’s no such thing as bad publicity, isn’t that what they say?’
As Curle began to close the door, the man stepped aside. Next moment, the one behind him had his camera up and the picture taken before Curle was out of sight.
And then the phone began ringing at regular intervals.
When it happened the first time, he picked it up and a voice he recognised said without preamble, ‘We could be talking five figures. And I can fix you up with a magazine deal that’ll pay more.’
After that he managed to ignore it for almost two hours.
When he cracked, he snatched up the phone and cursed into it.
‘You’ve had the press in touch.’
‘Who is that?’
‘DI Meldrum. What did they ask you?’
‘Police harassment came up.’
There was a silence. Then Meldrum asked, ‘Did you talk to them?’
‘I’m not that stupid.’
‘Fine.’
‘Why would anyone want to tell the Sun? The reporter who doorstepped me thought it might have been a neighbour.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘For the same reason it wasn’t a teacher. You kept your son off school; who’d tell a paper? It had to be somebody who knew you were connected to Miss Fleming’s death and knew about the boy being off.’
The only person Curle could think of was DS McGuigan.
Meldrum let the silence run until Curle cleared his throat and said, ‘Anyway, I didn’t talk to them.’
‘I can’t tell you what to do, but it would be best if you didn’t. I’m under enough pressure,’ Meldrum said.
Chapter Thirty
Another night spent on the couch in his study, another day in which he’d avoided speaking to his wife or son, another morning of lying staring at the ceiling until he was sure they’d left the house.
Penitent, he should have been on bread and water. Instead, when he managed to go into the kitchen at last, he was ravenous. He put three slices of bacon into the George Foreman, broke two eggs into the frying pan and made toast and coffee. As an afterthought, he washed half a dozen mushrooms and put them in beside the eggs. Sitting in a patch of sunlight at the kitchen
table, he chomped his way steadily through everything on the plate, drank a second coffee and then a third and was settled in the front room, biliousness standing in for repentance, when the morning post clattered through the letterbox.
Shuffling through the usual bills and unsolicited offers of credit, he came on a plain white envelope and was shocked to recognise a handwriting he’d never expected to see again.
‘I didn’t know that you had a son. I read it in the paper this morning. And felt I had to write for the boy’s sake. Not for yours; I’m still angry with you. I never thought I could forgive you and this isn’t forgiveness. I don’t think it is. I don’t know what to call it. For the boy’s sake I don’t want you to come to any harm, not now, whatever you’ve done. Do you have other children? I always wanted a little girl of my own to care for. Children are precious, try to remember that, try to be good for your children’s sake. Tie a millstone round their neck and throw them in the sea, that’s what Christ would have done to those who make the little children suffer. People don’t understand that Christ is fierce as well as gentle. Fierce and angry as well as gentle. Better for you not to forget that.’
Like the others, it was signed An Admirer.
He turned the envelope in his hand and studied the postmark. It had been posted in Peebles. He was in no doubt that it had come from Martha Tilman. Was there a nursing home in Peebles? For some reason, he’d got the impression she’d been taken into care somewhere else. Would she have seen a morning paper there, wherever it was? And been in a position to write and post a letter quickly? And so he came full circle to the Peebles postmark. The more he thought about these things, the more he began to wonder if Joe Tilman had told them the truth.
Envelope in hand, he wandered like a caged beast from room to room. I’m under pressure, Meldrum had said. What else could he have meant than that he was under pressure to make an arrest? And if there was pressure, who could be applying it? There was only one obvious candidate: Assistant Chief Constable Fairbairn, Joe Tilman’s brother-in-law. It was the only option that made sense. The rooms shrank as he paced and the walls closed in on him. Better do something, Curle decided, better do anything than wait for a knock on the door, an outstretched warrant, fists gripping his elbows, a hand steering his head down into the back of a police car.
The Endings Man Page 11
