Every writer understood the dangerous evocative power of images and yet, like a looped tape, helplessly he couldn’t stop himself from running the vignette of his arrest as he drove from Edinburgh. In his distraction, he came into Peebles without recalling a foot of the road that had taken him there. Pulling himself together, he made his way with exaggerated care along the main street and up to Tilman’s house on the crest of the hill. He drove past it on to a country road, turned in a farm gate and came back to park opposite the house, poised to return the way he’d come. Preparing my escape, he thought, like a robber parking outside a bank. He’d an image of himself fleeing the house with Tilman in pursuit.
When he rang the bell, however, it was a woman who answered. She was very pale, with blonde hair in lifeless straggles on either side of a thin face, but he recognised her as a shadow of the woman who’d stood smiling beside her sister, the two of them held like trophies between Tilman and Bob Fairbairn.
‘I didn’t ask you to come,’ Martha Tilman said, her eyes widening in recognition then staring over his shoulder as if at someone standing behind him.
‘It was your husband I came to see.’
‘Why would you want to talk to my husband?’ The question came sharply, taking him by surprise.
‘I have some questions for him. About things he told me.’
‘You’ve met my husband?’
She sounded appalled.
‘Only once.’ On some instinct, he added, ‘I wouldn’t claim to know him. I’m not a friend of his.’
After a moment of abstraction, she said politely, ‘Perhaps you’d better come in.’
He followed her through the hall and along a short corridor. The room she led him into had a leather chair and a desk, a computer on a table and beside it a shelf of magazines. There were family photographs in matching frames hung on one wall, all featuring the same group, a man and woman with two blonde girls; some showed the girls as children, in others they were young and then older adults, as the sequence progressed the woman grew stouter, the man lost his hair: Martha Tilman, her sister and their parents. On a side wall, there was a painting of half a dozen tall languid flowers with feathery heads. As she perched on the desk seat and indicated he should take the comfortable chair, Curle assumed the room to be the one Tilman had described to Meldrum and himself as ‘just a place where she can be by herself’.
‘You won’t tell my husband I wrote to you again? He made me promise not to send you any more letters.’
‘He won’t find out from me. Can I speak to him?’
‘He isn’t here.’
Was that true? Tilman’s study was at the front of the house, but perhaps he’d been busy and left it to her to answer the doorbell. Perfectly possible that he was through there now, ubiquitous phone clutched to his ear negotiating some deal or other. Curle glanced uneasily at the door, which hadn’t been closed properly and lay half-open. How would Tilman react if he found him here with his wife?
‘You changed them from men to women,’ Martha Tilman said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘That was so wicked. Women have enough reason to be afraid.’
But it was he who felt, if not fear, the sharp stab of discomfort. Physically timid, he’d always disliked the company of drunks, people not in control of themselves; how much worse the mad.
‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he said, hitching himself to the edge of the chair. ‘Don’t upset yourself.’
‘Do you have a little girl?’
Shocked, he was silent; then, ‘No,’ he said grimly. At that moment, if a paper committing her to a mental home had been laid in front of him, he would have signed it.
‘I always wanted a little girl. My mother had two little girls. When I’m told how much I resemble my mother, I always think but I have no children.’
With a sigh, the tension went out of him. ‘I should be going.’ Then on impulse, he asked, ‘Why me? I haven’t done anything you would have to forgive.’
‘If you can’t see,’ she said.
Now all he wanted was to get away.
‘You must have been at home,’ he said. ‘Yesterday, when you saw the article about me in the paper.’
‘It was delivered by mistake. We get the Telegraph and The Times and the Herald. Sometimes I look at them. I used to read a great deal. I loved Jane Austen, too… Now, not so much.’
Don’t tell me, he thought, now it’s crime fiction. Nice to meet his target audience.
‘When did you get home?’
She looked at him puzzled. ‘This is where I live.’
‘Yes, but I know you’ve been away.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t go out much,’ she said in the same stilted, carefully formal tone.
Still he plodded on. In the moment, he told himself it was because he’d come all this way and should get something answered. Later, he would wonder if he had been trying to punish her for asking if he had a little girl.
‘Your husband told me you had been away from home.’
As startlingly as scaffolding collapsing on a city street, the façade broke apart. Her calmness, politeness, formality, restraint, even her moments of abstraction that must have been one more defence, smashed apart like ice in the boiling up of the fear and turmoil they had concealed.
‘Is that what’s going to happen? Is that what he’s planned for me?’ Her hands, as she stretched them out in appeal, shook uncontrollably. ‘Tell him you’re not angry. Tell him I haven’t written to you. Even if it’s not true. Don’t be angry.’ The last word faltered into a thin stretched moan: ‘Please.’
He blurted out some kind of disclaimer, an apology, for what he wasn’t sure, even a promise, the stream of words didn’t matter, all he wanted was to get away from her distress.
As he got to his feet, however, she twisted down in her seat to open the bottom drawer of the desk.
‘Take them!’ she said, holding out to him at the full stretch of her arms a pair of shoes. She caught his hand and pressed one of the shoes into it. ‘Please!’ she pleaded, pressing until his grip closed around it.
‘You see?’
It was a court shoe, black leather soft under his fingers, heel a few inches high, nothing remarkable except for a long gash scored back from the toe. When he looked at the one she was holding, he saw that it was marked in the same way.
‘Daddy had Mummy taken away. She died in that place. Even when I was a little girl, I never believed she was mad. I never believed them. That made my aunt so angry she fetched these shoes. Look at them, she told me. Those marks were made when the men came and dragged your mother away.’
As he made his escape along the hall, she came after him.
‘Such cold people. My father and his sister. They were rich and they had power. Daddy could be so charming. They could make people do anything. Daddy could make the doctors do anything.’
She gave a cry of pain and he had to stop himself from telling her to be quiet for fear her husband should hear them. He used both hands to get the door open, but once he was outside he found that he was still holding the shoe. He dropped it on the step and half ran down the path towards his car.
Chapter Thirty-One
He had been invited out to lunch yet again by Jonah, whom he’d seen more of in the last week than in a normal month or two. This didn’t give him any kind of warm glow, since he put it down less to friendship than a love of gossip. As newspaper fodder, Curle, feeling a need to earn his keep, had shared the experience of that morning’s expedition to Peebles.
‘What were you thinking of?’ Jonah wondered, spooning up a mouthful of tiramisu.
‘It felt as if I was doing something. It was either that or sit at home.’
‘You could escape into your work.’
As a man under suspicion of murder, Curle didn’t dignify that with an answer.
‘At least I found out that she wasn’t away in some private hospital. She was at home. Why would Tilman have lied about that? And not just to me. To Meldrum,
who’s a policeman.’
‘People lie to policemen all the time.’
‘About how fast they’ve been driving.’
‘Well, he wasn’t lying about a murder. This was before Ali Fleming was killed. You were there to complain that his wife had been sending you rude letters. There’s no law says a man can’t protect his wife – and if there is, there shouldn’t be.’
Moodily, Curle pushed his pudding away.
‘I’m wondering if I should tell Meldrum.’
‘Why, in God’s name, would you do that?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘Not to me. Why unleash your detective on the poor woman, when she’s clearly demented?’
‘She wasn’t in a hospital. She could have been in Edinburgh. You could say she’s obsessed with murder. She’s written to me about murdering people. All right, about murdering men – but she was angry with me for changing her men to women – so why shouldn’t she change it, too, and choose a woman victim? And she’s demented. Count that in as well.’
Jonah made a face, ‘You don’t believe any of that, do you?’
‘It would give them something else to think of – apart from me.’
‘You’re not really a nice man.’
Curle sighed. ‘I don’t like myself. Is that what you want to hear?’
Jonah set down his spoon. ‘I’ve lost my appetite, too.’
‘You’ve finished it!’
‘Hmm. Want to go somewhere else? We could have a half pint and go on with this.’
‘I can’t. It’s Liz’s day off, but there’s a meeting of the pharmacists in charge of the shops in the group. I’ve sworn I’ll be home for Kerr getting back from school.’
‘Your detective won’t wear it, you know.’
‘Why not?’
‘From what I’ve read, Ali Fleming was beaten to death. It must have been a man.’
Curle shrugged. ‘Maybe she used a hammer.’ As soon as he’d said it, he felt sick. The words from his own mouth appalled him.
To hide his feelings, he spun the book lying beside Jonah’s plate until he could decipher the title and author’s name. ‘Another one? I can’t keep up with him.’
‘Second this year. You know he’s just been given an OBE?’
‘Fuck!’
‘Afraid so,’ said Jonah who’d been around writers too long not to share their pain at another’s good fortune. ‘Think of it as an OBE for exports.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘It’s a silly idea,’ Kerr said.
‘It’s not mine,’ said Curle.
He’d been outlining to his son the concept of the pillow glove. It arose from the insight that the human animal was far from being ideal in construction. The list of faults might begin with the head, which was rather too large to slide comfortably through the birth canal. Later, the appendix, a trifling organ no bigger than a man’s pinkie, was capable of causing agony, even death, despite having no useful function to perform. The bones of the back popped out at a stretch and a sneeze. Starting from scratch, what reasonably capable designer would have come up with teeth that decayed? All of which acted as preamble to the problem of finding a comfortable position for sleep with a limb attached at each of four corners. One of the best was to slide your arm under the pillow and rest your head on your upper arm as you slept. This, however, left the relevant hand and forearm poking out into what, in winter, might well be cold air. The answer was the pillow glove, a padded mitten that would cover fingertips to elbow.
Alone with his son at table, since Liz hadn’t come home by dinnertime, Curle, feeling the need to make conversation, had outlined the conceit of the pillow glove, together with its theoretical underpinning, leaving out the problems of the birth canal.
‘Whose idea was it?’
‘Jonah’s. You remember my agent? I took you in to see his office.’
‘Not recently.’
‘No. A while ago.’
‘I sleep on my front.’
‘He must sleep on his side, or the idea wouldn’t have occurred to him, I suppose.’
‘If his arm gets cold, he should shut the window.’
‘I’ll tell him that.’
‘I wonder what gave him the idea.’
Curle laughed. ‘He sleeps alone.’
To the best of his knowledge that had been true and still was. He had never heard Jonah so much as hint at anyone in his life. Naturally, he’d wondered if he might be gay, without ever catching any sign of it. It was possible that he had a secret mistress.
Smiling to himself as he ran over the married women Jonah knew, he gathered up plates, knives and forks and stacked them into the dishwasher. As he turned, he surprised Kerr biting his lip as he studied him.
‘What is it?’
‘It was cold last night.’
Curle warily nodded agreement.
Avoiding his eye, Kerr observed, ‘You could have done with one of those things.’
‘Things?’ No sooner had he spoken than he cursed himself, guessing what the answer had to be.
‘One of those pillow gloves.’
Later a number of things he might have replied occurred to him, among them the information that he too slept on his front, leaving unsaid the implication that he did so even when exiled out of the bedroom on to a couch in his study.
Instead, he asked brusquely, ‘Have you any homework? If not, you can watch television for a bit.’
Three hours later when he was beginning the process of sending him to bed, Kerr asked, ‘When will Mum be home? Why is she so late?’
‘I’ve no idea. I’ll ask her when she comes in.’
Liz didn’t get back till almost ten o’clock, just after he had finally persuaded Kerr to go to bed. He heard tyres crunch on the gravel, the garage door go up and slam down, the key in the front door and was out in the hall, just happening to be on his way to the kitchen, as she came in.
‘Kerr’s in bed,’ he told her. ‘Maybe you want to say goodnight to him, before he goes to sleep.’
‘Of course I do,’ she said, ‘no maybe about it.’
‘I didn’t mean—’ What was the use?
He caught a trace of her perfume, one he’d bought her for Christmas, expensive, not one she wore every day. She was wearing a long Burberry-style raincoat and as she unbuttoned it, he saw under it the broad-shouldered jacket and the skirt that showed the plump sleekness of her thighs. What kind of meeting was it again? Did she always get dressed up to meet the pharmacists from the other shops? He tried to remember, but the fact was he hadn’t paid much attention.
‘I’m just going up,’ she said.
‘What about something to eat? I was going to make a sandwich.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I’ve eaten,’ she said impatiently. ‘We went for a meal.’
After the meeting? He was sure they hadn’t done that before. Donald the owner had ten shops and three children. Maybe he’d added a child or a shop and taken them out to celebrate.
‘Is that why you’re so late?’
She gave him a glance and went upstairs, leaving the faint trace of her perfume lingering in the hall.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The way it sometimes happens, everything fell into place the next morning. Before he’d got to breakfast, two things made Curle decide to check up on his wife that afternoon. The first was her announcement that she’d be late home.
‘Thanks for letting me know,’ he said lifting his head from the pillow. He had a stiff neck from spending yet another night on the couch in his study. ‘Another meeting?’
‘Don’t be silly. Betty rang and asked if I wanted to meet her after work. I’m telling you in case you fret about where I am.’
‘So you want me to look after Kerr?’
‘No need,’ she said. ‘He’s having a sleepover with Graeme Anderson. His mother’s collecting them both from school.’
The information
that he wouldn’t be on call for Kerr made up his mind. He’d be there when the shop closed and follow her to see where she went, hopefully, almost definitely, though no longer certainly, straight home.
After breakfast he went into the study, switched on the computer and sat for a while staring at the single sentence he’d composed yesterday as the start of a new chapter. It was a nicely balanced sentence with an adjective like a ballerina poised on a noun solid as a rock, and an adverbial clause wagging its tail all the way to the full stop. He changed one ‘the’ to an ‘a’ and sat back well pleased. A little light as the total of a day’s work, if you wanted to carp, but a nice sentence. After a while, he dozed off looking at it and woke up with a dry mouth needing a cup of coffee. I’m a murder suspect, he thought, and my wife is behaving oddly. Could Flaubert cope with that? I’ll go into town and get a coffee there.
Normally, he would have taken the bus, but having decided this wasn’t going to be an ordinary day, he backed his eight-year-old Vectra out of the garage. Fortunately, he wasn’t a car buff; if he needed to make a show for someone, he borrowed Liz’s.
Driving down through Morningside, he intended to use the park at the foot of Lothian Road. The heavy traffic, though, started him worrying in case he might have difficulty timing his arrival at Liz’s shop at the end of the afternoon. Making up his mind, he crossed Princes Street and ran down to Stockbridge. There was a side street just outside the Zone where Liz parked her car; he knew about it because on occasion when he was in town he’d walk down to get a lift home from her. Mostly, it would have been more convenient for her to get a bus, but she had bitter memories of waiting at bus stops on winter evenings when she was a girl. He made a pass along the street without spotting the Subaru and was about to try the next street when impulse made him swing into a vacancy at the kerb. Parking places were so hard to come by in this city that taking one was almost a matter of instinct. It was early for lunch, but he could go for a walk and then find somewhere to eat.
The Endings Man Page 12
