‘My wife was admitted to a private nursing home last week. Florid, you know that word? Her doctors used it. Her delusions were florid. So then I was on my own. It took a few days for it to occur to me that respecting her privacy was no help to her, not by that stage. I decided to have a look through her study, that’s what she calls it; it’s just a room where she can be by herself. I found a diary in a drawer of her desk. I read bits of it, but I couldn’t see how they would be of any help to her doctors. The drawer hadn’t even been locked. I was ready to put it back when I saw she’d written a couple of words inside the back cover. Her mother’s maiden name. The name of a holiday cottage we have.’ He shook his head with a mixture of disbelief and what could have been contempt, but might have been pity. ‘It’s what people do apparently. I knew at once what they must be. Passwords. I used them to open files on her computer. There were reviews of your books, newspaper articles, that kind of stuff, and the letters. The letters she’d written to you. Forty or fifty of them.’
‘That can’t be right,’ Curle said. ‘Nine or ten. There were only nine or ten.’
‘Then she wrote more than she sent,’ Tilman said.
Meldrum intervened. ‘Have you taken them to her doctors?’
‘Not yet. I’ll have to think about that.’
‘But you took them to the Assistant Chief Constable?’
‘Not the way you mean. His wife was worried about her sister. I needed to talk to somebody. I told them the latest from the clinic and that led on to how I’d found these letters. I’d hardly started when Bob jumped up and said, “You’ve solved a mystery”. He was full of apologies for mixing the police up in it, called himself all kinds of a fool. It was his idea that I should see Mr Curle and put his mind at rest. For Martha’s sake, that’s what I decided to do.’
‘I see, and the easiest way to put you in touch with Mr Curle was to ask me to deal with it,’ Meldrum said.
Curle wondered whether Tilman was conscious of the dryness of Meldrum’s tone, or if he sensed it himself only because of that earlier interview at which he had been made aware of the policeman’s resentment. A touchy bastard, he thought, who doesn’t like being treated as an errand boy. By this point, Curle badly wanted to put an end to the proceedings. In retrospect, he felt uncomfortable about having got so worked up over a handful of letters from an unfortunate woman. That overreaction had led to what he now felt as an intrusion into a private grief. As it happened, he was disinclined, not the most useful trait for a writer, to get involved in the messiness of other people’s emotions.
While he was shaping a graceful speech, however, vowing to forget the whole wretched business, Meldrum began again. ‘It is the case, though, that one of the letters sent to Mr Curle claimed to describe a murder. I saw that one myself.’
Tilman, presumably still in negotiating mode, didn’t react.
It was an incensed Curle who blurted, ‘A murder that took place only in the pages of one of my books!’
‘A piece of fiction, that was certainly my impression,’ Tilman said, smiling at Curle, ‘though I don’t know how accurate her account was. I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books.’
And Curle almost offered the little self-deprecating remark about ‘joining the great majority’ that he produced in such situations.
He was saved from this by Meldrum asking, ‘In the letter I saw, your wife doesn’t name the person she claims to have murdered. Does she in any of the letters she didn’t send?’
‘Why would you want to know?’ Tilman wondered. He spoke quietly, but his right hand that had lain relaxed on the chair arm suddenly clenched. If he was angered, though, that was the only sign he gave.
‘If we had the name of this person, it gives something that can be checked.’
‘The victim she imagines wasn’t a woman. It was a man. She talks about a friend of ours. And no, he wasn’t murdered. So no need to check.’
Curle the peacemaker found himself smiling and nodding, but when Meldrum waited in silence, Tilman went on, ‘He’s dead. Of natural causes.’
‘What would they be?’
‘Would cancer of the testicles be natural enough for you? He was best man at our wedding. It occurs to me as late as this that my wife might always have been a little in love with him. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence that those letters of hers about murder were written just after his death. Does that cover whatever it is you wanted to know?’
The woman in his book, Curle remembered, had an affair with a neighbour, both of them married, and she’d killed him because he’d fallen too much in love with her and wanted to tell the world. The playfulness of reversing the usual roles played by the sexes had pleased him. Queen Kong. Ms Hyde. Cancer of the testicles. Punishment for adultery.
He was on his feet.
‘I’ve had enough of this. There was no need for me to come here. All that stuff about the letters, it’s all forgotten. As far as I’m concerned, all forgotten.’
Negotiation concluded.
They rode back to Edinburgh in silence. He stared straight ahead all the way, not risking a glance at his companion. Time enough later, he thought, to try to work out what Meldrum had thought he was doing, what had possessed him, what had been going on. However irrationally, for the moment he felt endangered and just wanted the journey to be over. Weakly he muttered some kind of conventional parting as he got out of the car, but the policeman drove off without a word.
Chapter Twelve
It came as a shock to Curle to realise that even Jonah Murray, who’d been there, didn’t understand what being bullied by Brian Todd had meant to him. He’d been thirteen when it began and it had lasted for only eighteen months: too old, it might be natural to assume, to be deeply marked by a suffering that had lasted for such a limited time. When he thought of that assumption, though, he recalled how on two or three occasions, into his twenties, brooding over the memory of Todd had turned into a calculation as to how long that dark cloud had hung physically over his existence and how the answer always brought a reaction of disbelief. Only eighteen months! When he came across one or another popularisation of Einstein, he’d had no difficulty in accepting the idea that time was relative.
One day he’d come home in such despair that he had tried to tell his father, that weak pleasant man, what was going on. It had taken an effort even to begin but his father had seemed to be listening, gathering his son down beside him where he sat slack in the big chair. The story had been painfully hard to put into words for he could not help feeling that the fault was his, and the guilt made him ashamed. He might not have managed at all if it had not been for the protective weight of his father’s arm laid reassuringly across his shoulder. At last he’d come stumbling to a finish, and sat staring at the picture of his mother that had been brought down from the bedroom. The silence stretched as he waited for a verdict until he wondered if what he had confessed was too shameful to be worth a response; but when he summoned the courage to look up he saw that his father had fallen asleep, mouth open and just then dribbling a first snore.
Around that time, his grandmother had begun to question him as to how often his father came home early from the office, and in a roundabout fashion that soon became insistent and open as to whether or not he had been drinking. He had lied and later would wonder whether something might have been done if he had become her willing spy. As he grew older, however, he encountered other men in the process of falling apart and there didn’t ever seem much chance of stopping any of them. Fortunately, it had taken another eight years before his father went bankrupt so that by the time it happened he was finished with university and no longer dependent.
His life had gone awry when his mother died. Todd had paid him no attention before her death. A shark can detect minute dilutions of blood in the water. The bully smells unhappiness.
And now, aided by Jonah, Todd had come back into his life. Over a couple of weeks, there he was, at a dinner given by an acquaintance, at the theatre, at
a private view at the Scottish Gallery.
On the last Tuesday of the month, then, it was no surprise to see him among a group of people drinking wine in a room of the National Library while they waited for the reading to begin.
It didn’t help that his approach was that of an old friend.
‘All prepared? I wouldn’t have the nerve myself.’ His proprietary smile passed from Curle to the librarian who was going to introduce him. ‘I’d rather climb a mountain in a snowstorm than make a speech in public.’
‘You know what happened to Joe Simpson,’ Curle said inconsequentially.
‘Came off the mountain with a broken leg,’ the librarian said. ‘Wrote a book about it. Did a lot of public speaking after that.’
Todd looked at them blankly. Not a mountaineer; a conclusion from which Curle drew an obscure satisfaction.
‘I thought you weren’t interested in books.’
‘It’s true I don’t have a lot of time for fiction,’ Todd said. ‘There’s so much else to do. But when Jonah told me you were reading from the latest masterpiece, I couldn’t resist coming along.’ He cast a glance towards the entrance. ‘I thought he’d be here by now. The three of us were at school together,’ he explained to the librarian.
Aware that the librarian, as much as himself, would reserve the term ‘masterpiece’ for a very few books indeed and none of them his, Curle drained the glass of wine he’d been given and reached for another. Five minutes later, Jonah arrived and ten minutes after that was registering mild alarm as he watched Curle put away two more glasses.
It was Curle’s opinion that no one could get drunk on wine. It was true that in the year after their first child was born Liz and he, lacking a babysitter, would get a bottle of wine as a Saturday night treat and get from it a buzz of happiness. But then little Mae died held across his knees and wine lost its power to help him unwind. All the same, five glasses before doing his turn, if he’d thought about it that was hardly professional. When it came to it, though, he read as well as ever, he felt that to be true, and answered the gently leading questions of the librarian deftly enough. The trouble, such as it was, arrived with the questions from the audience. Even then, it wasn’t that he was drunk, for he wasn’t, not in the slightest. The difficulty was that the wine had taken the edge off the tension he usually felt about performing in public, a tension that typically translated into a feeling of responsive gratitude as he made his connection with the people in front of him. Deprived of that, he suffered the unfamiliar sensation of being bored. ‘At one time, you wrote poetry for some of the small magazines. Do you still write poetry?’ ‘I gave up the sin of committing poetry some time ago.’ Laughter. Why were they laughing? It was no more than the truth. ‘How do you write?’ With great fucking difficulty. But the questioner went on: ‘I mean, are you very disciplined? Do you keep regular hours?’ You could always count on one fucking idiot to ask that. Why did they ask it? Who cared? Were they looking for tips? Climbing Parnassus without tears. Parnassus my arse. How old-fashioned could you get? More like: the beginners’ guide to making a supplementary shilling. To that stock question, he’d a stock answer: giving an honest account of the way he wrote irregularly, afflicted with procrastination, but thinking of the book all the time at the back of his mind. Now, bored with the truth as much as the question, he firmed his jaw and lied in his teeth, ‘I get up at seven, have a coffee, a black coffee,’ nice afterthought, ‘and work through till two o’clock when I break for a plate of soup.’ He thought about saying vegetable soup but lost his nerve, and after that hurried through to the end of his working day without pulling the long bow too far, a trick he left to bigger artists. The librarian asked hopefully if there were no more questions. A hand waved. With dismay, Curle saw that it was attached to Brian Todd. ‘I was wondering,’ he asked, ‘do you ever base any of your characters on real people?’ He had an effective projection, cushioned on a full lungful of air, without a trace of nerves, with that deeper timbre that gives a man’s voice authority. It wasn’t a voice that would have any difficulty in commanding a room, so why claim he couldn’t speak in public? On automatic pilot, Curle made the usual joke about the law of libel and trotted out the anecdote about how Simenon as a protest had published his autobiography with all the bits left blank to show how many threats he’d had of being sued. When he stopped, the librarian took his chance and it was over, leaving nothing to do but sign a few books.
That finished, he would have made for home but was gathered up by the sociable Jonah and added to a group consisting of Todd and a young man who said something flattering but didn’t take the trouble to introduce himself. The night was cold so they didn’t venture far. As he walked, Curle was struck by desire for Ali Fleming, whom he hadn’t visited in almost a fortnight. The two in front were laughing, the young man beside him said something and he made some sort of reply, all of it blurred by images of her breasts, the curve of her arse, the intricate familiar mystery of her cunt under his hand. Get away as soon as I can, he thought.
In the pub, he tried to buy the drinks, not wanting to stay for a second round, but Todd was before him and brought a pint with a whisky beside it though he’d asked for a half pint only.
‘Those admirable work habits of yours,’ Jonah said, settling back on the bench and blowing his nose. ‘It’s a wonder you haven’t written ten times as much.’
For some reason as he drank his whisky, it seemed that the story of Grogan would be a suitable riposte to that. It was the tale of a young man who was a whore for the repartee and had no fear of being interviewed by a Dublin wit. Came the moment when the wit asked was he the front end of an ass, was he the back end of an ass, why then he must be no end of an ass. The audience laughed and any other man would have been discomfited. Not Grogan, however. Taking a pace back he looked the wit up and down before responding, Fuck you!
Possibly because he got it slightly muddled in the middle, this story did not go down as well as Curle might have hoped. As he pondered this, the young man appeared with a fresh round, imitating Todd in fetching for the writer, that creative spirit, a whisky as well as a pint, though the others seemed content with just a beer.
As he settled down again, he said to Jonah as if in response to an earlier question, ‘I’ve always worked with books. I started with Thins. I’d left before they went into administration, though.’
‘A good bookshop as bookshops go,’ Jonah said, ‘and as bookshops go, it went.’
‘Nothing stays the same,’ Curle pronounced gloomily.
He tasted the whisky and decided it was crap. Maybe the young guy hadn’t much money. But why buy whisky at all if you weren’t going to buy a malt? He hadn’t asked him to buy a whisky. He watched the young man push a lock of blond hair back and decided that he disliked him a good deal. He’d pushed himself in, a pest, an intruder, a nuisance, an irrelevance. While coming to this conclusion, following the habit of a child trained never to leave his plate uncleared, he finished the whisky and started on his pint to take the taste away.
Todd, who’d been sitting with the young man also in his sights, suddenly said, ‘I was talking to a client from St Andrews about his tax return. He told me there was a biologist in the University there studying flies.’
‘Fruit flies,’ Jonah said, encyclopaedic as ever. ‘Use them for genetics.’
‘No. Ordinary flies, dance flies he called them, out in the fields. Know what they found? They found that males that tried to bribe females with insects didn’t do any better than ones that offered them bits of twig. And they got a grant to do it!’ He laughed. ‘To prove that women are stupid!’
And then two voices spoke at once.
Jonah said, ‘Or that men are bastards!’
And the young man turned to Curle with a wide white smile. ‘I imagine Ali would have something to say to that!’
As Curle recognised Bobbie Haskell ‘from the fourth floor’, Ali Fleming’s upstairs neighbour, he stood up so abruptly that he bumped the
glass carried by a man passing behind his chair. Not stopping to apologise, or make the customary placatory offer to buy him another one, he fled.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Never mix the grape and the barley,’ Jonah said, buttoning up his coat against the searching wind.
‘What are you following me out for?’ Curle asked ungraciously. ‘Stay and finish your drink.’
He began to walk down the hill towards Princes Street. Why hadn’t he recognised the bloody man? That night in Ali’s flat he’d done his best to ignore him, of course. Not a face or personality you’d remember.
‘Was it something he said?’ Jonah asked, catching up.
‘Who?’
‘It looked like he said something that upset you. Who was he anyway? I didn’t catch his name.’
‘I thought you were the one who’d come across him somewhere and invited him to join us.’
‘Not me. I thought you knew him.’
‘No,’ Curle said, trying to put the whole absurdity of the idea into one word.
‘Maybe Todd knew him.’
The possibility horrified Curle. ‘No,’ he said again. ‘I’m sure he didn’t.’
‘A Velcro man then,’ Jonah said. ‘One of those people that come along and stick to you. Never mind, if Todd didn’t know him before, now’s his chance.’ He gave a little snort of laughter.
Curle grunted. Oddly enough, what he was missing at that moment was the chance to talk over what had happened. If it had been anything else, Jonah and he would have been going along with their heads together, weighing, assessing, teasing it out, more often than not processing it into gossip or joking about its possibilities for the making of fiction. He was a private man but not a particularly self-contained one. The keeping of a secret didn’t come naturally to him, and more and more recently he had found the need to conceal his relations with Ali Fleming somehow chilling, like a shadow unexpectedly cast across spontaneity. A shadow cast over small as much as large things, like now when Jonah was assuming they were both on their way home. Should he go home?
The Endings Man Page 5