DI MELDRUM: Not someone walking around then… So what did it suggest to you?
EVA JOHANSON: (lowering her voice) A struggle. I thought it was a fight. Moving around. Falling down. Like I said, thumping noises.
DS McGUIGAN: You didn’t go up to see what it was?
EVA JOHANSON: Because I went up this morning? Knocking isn’t the same thing as thumping at all. Last night I was in my bed. It’s easier to be brave in daylight.
DI MELDRUM: Can you place the time you heard these noises last night?
EVA JOHANSON: I was sleeping and I woke up. I do that. I read in bed and fall asleep. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I still have my glasses on. The lamp was still on when I woke up, but I knew it was still night. Then I heard the noises and knew what had wakened me. After a while, they stopped. Someone’s won, I thought. It took me a while to get back to sleep.
DI MELDRUM: Do you have a bedside clock? Did you check the time?
EVA JOHANSON: I don’t think I did.
DI MELDRUM: So you couldn’t place the time for me?
EVA JOHANSON: Oh, yes. It must have been not long before midnight. I got up to make a cup of tea because I was upset and when I was bringing it back the clock in the living room was chiming twelve. The noises must have been half an hour or twenty minutes before that.
DS McGUIGAN: (clears his throat)
EVA JOHANSON: (sharply) I’m sorry if I talk too much. I don’t talk to many people now. It’s funny all those people we knew. They seemed to disappear when the parties stopped.
BOBBIE HASKELL: I’m not usually home as early as that. I got away early from the shop because I was feeling unwell. (Laughs uneasily) I put it down to the winter bug. Truth is, I’d been out drinking with friends the night before. I’m not a big drinker and I must have had more than usual. I felt terrible the next day, and by the afternoon I’d had enough.
DI MELDRUM: About what time did you get back to the building?
BOBBIE HASKELL: Some time after five. As I came along the street, I saw this man at the door. When I saw it was Ali’s buzzer he was pressing, I told him she would be at her work. That’s when he told me who he was. Mr French, the man she worked for. I took him upstairs and he banged on her door. I mean, he knocked, but it was really loud knocking. When he went off, he gave me his card so that I could phone if she turned up. Sorry. (Wiping his eyes.) I still can’t believe it.
DI MELDRUM: Take your time.
BOBBIE HASKELL: I tried that night more than once. I just couldn’t think of any reason why she wouldn’t be at home. No luck. Tried again this morning and that’s when Mrs Johanson got involved. She was the one who called the police, do you know that? They were here when I got home from work. I can’t tell you anything else.
DI MELDRUM: How well did you know Miss Fleming?
BOBBIE HASKELL: We were friends.
DI MELDRUM: Close friends?
BOBBIE HASKELL: What does that mean? Are you asking were we lovers?
DS McGUIGAN: Were you?
BOBBIE HASKELL: No! We were friends. That was enough.
DI MELDRUM: You would describe yourself as a close friend though?
BOBBIE HASKELL: I don’t find it hard to make friends. I was only in my flat a few months when I got talking to Ali. She had an armful of books and was having difficulty getting her key into the lock. So many books, I thought she must be a great reader! She wasn’t, in fact – not the way I am – they were for research, a project she was working on. She was an artist, you know. We liked one another at once.
DI MELDRUM: Firm friends then. Did you spend much time with her?
BOBBIE HASKELL: We talked every week. Sometimes just a word or two. Sometimes we’d have a coffee and a natter. We had a few meals together. Mostly in my flat; she didn’t like to cook!
DS McGUIGAN: Did she ever confide in you?
BOBBIE HASKELL: About how she felt? Oh, yes! For example, when I met Mr French it was quite strange. She’d told me so much about him, what a slave driver he was. And here was this fat little man with just a few white hairs over his scalp banging on her door and looking so flustered.
DI MELDRUM: What about other friends?
BOBBIE HASKELL: …I don’t know how many other friends she had. Sorry.
DS McGUIGAN: Was she in a relationship with anyone?
BOBBIE HASKELL: Yes.
DI MELDRUM: Did she tell you his name?
BOBBIE HASKELL: She didn’t have to. She didn’t ever talk about it, but I was sure there was someone. She was so discreet, I just knew it had to be a married man. And then when I met this man in her flat, I knew he had to be the one.
Chapter Seventeen
Curle started awake in the dark of the night and berated himself for a fool. What in God’s name had he thought he was doing? He’d told them he didn’t know Ali Fleming. He’d claimed to have gone straight home on the Tuesday night after leaving Jonah. They could probably prove that he knew her, probably prove that he hadn’t gone straight home. If they could somehow also prove that he had seen her that night, then he would become the obvious suspect. His quick imagination in half a dozen images had him charged, in the dock, sitting in a prison van on his way to a life sentence. Beyond that, there were images he turned away from; he wasn’t the kind of man who could cope with prison. How could he be anything else but a victim in that environment? If it comes to that, I’ll kill myself, he thought. But even as he thought it, he disbelieved it; he wasn’t the kind of man to commit suicide either. And with that he wondered about the book he might write when he got out of prison. Would you be allowed to write in prison? He didn’t think he would have the strength of character for that. No Jeffrey Archer, he. And he saw himself at the other end of a prison sentence alone in a room, abandoned by everyone, too sunk in depression and self-contempt to do anything but stare at a wall.
Abandoned by Liz. He found that possiblity unbearable.
Meldrum had asked her what time he had arrived home, and she had told him she had no idea since she had been feeling unwell and had taken a sleeping tablet and been asleep by ten o’clock that night. It was the truth, but what good was the truth? Anyway, Meldrum probably thought, a wife’s testimony: she’s lying to protect him. In that case, why not say he’d come home by eleven? Because she didn’t know what it was all about. Because the detectives had taken him by surprise, given him no chance to tell her what to say. Or perhaps, Meldrum might think, because though she didn’t want to condemn him yet she wouldn’t lie for him; in which case claiming to have been asleep would be the easy way out.
He lay listening to her breath sighing, hesitating, starting again, and wondered if she was feigning sleep.
After the policemen had gone, he had lied to her, claiming he’d never heard of the dead woman. What else would he do, after eight years of lying to her about where he’d been and what he’d been doing?
He had shown nothing when the policeman told him Ali was dead. He was sure he had shown nothing. He was sure he had played the part of a man hearing of the death of a stranger.
What would that lack of emotion mean to them if they learned that he had been sleeping with her?
And he hadn’t been hearing about the death of a stranger. He felt the warmth of the woman beside him and thought of that other warmth. Now cold. ‘Murdered,’ Meldrum had said. No details, they never gave details. But when he’d added, ‘No doubt about that,’ his face had seemed even grimmer than before. What had been done to her? His stomach heaved and as he slid, carefully, so carefully, out of the bed, his mouth filled with vomit.
He crossed the floor in the dark, closed the bedroom door softly behind him and made it into the bathroom. Leaning over the basin, he spat and heaved a little, threw cold water up into his face and scrubbed himself dry with a towel. He padded downstairs without putting on the light, guided by a hand trailing down the bannister. In the kitchen, the tiles struck up cold on his bare feet. He took the decanter of whisky from the cupboard, but when he took out th
e cork the sweet-flavoured smell made him sicken. Instead, he made a mug of instant coffee, took a few sips and emptied the rest into the sink. On impulse, he turned away from the foot of the stairs and went into the room he used as his study. The air felt cold and when he put down the switch the light fell with an effect of desolation on the desk with its blank computer and scatter of scribbled notes.
From the shelf of reference books, he took down The Oxford History of the Classical World. He had picked it as unlikely to be taken off the shelf by anyone else. Inside he’d concealed the notes he’d taken at times over the years, late at night, about what she had said or what they had done. Ruffling through the pages, he took out the first notes he came to, scribbled down on leaves torn from a notebook.
‘I’ll tell you a fantasy that works for me. I imagine I’ve married a man from some place far away. It’s maybe a remote farm somewhere in Italy. We live with his mother and his brothers. His mother learns that he hasn’t consummated the marriage and she decides to do something about it. She gets me up on the table on all fours and milks me with her witchy fingers. My husband stands watching helplessly with his big dark eyes. The mother says, “My son’s failure to breed the stupid city whore is about to be remedied.” And she goes round her sons and strokes their cocks with her scary witchy magic fingers.’
He sat at the desk looking at the page under the circle of the lamp. He had known the woman who thought up that stuff. What kind of woman could think of it? It wasn’t something a man could make up, he thought. Had he really known her? And wondered at last: what kind of man had it been who came home and wrote these things down? Alone in the middle of the night, as he had been when they were first written, the notes began to seem like messages in a language of which he had lost the meaning and the years with Ali like a dream from which, however hard he struggled, there might be no way of wakening.
Chapter Eighteen
He opened his eyes reluctantly on another day. And then at evening morning is so far away. Some Irish writer said that. But wasn’t it just as true, at morning evening is so far away? And then at morning evening is so far away. A Scottish writer said that. I said it, Curle thought. The bed was empty. He slid an arm out and the place beside him was cold.
When he made it downstairs, he put on the kettle and found an egg in the fridge. He was putting water in a pan when the kitchen door was pushed open. Water splashed on his arm.
‘Christ, Liz! I nearly jumped out of my skin. What are you doing here?’
‘I ran Kerr to school and came back.’
‘Are you not feeling well?’
‘That’s what I told Donald. I coughed down the phone.’
‘How will they manage without a pharmacist?’
‘He’ll get cover from one of the other shops.’
She sat at the kitchen table and watched as he laid the egg into the pan. Defensively, he drew his dressing gown round him and fastened the belt. Using the palms of his hands, he smoothed down his hair. Without looking round, he asked, ‘Should you be in bed? I’ll bring you up something.’
‘That’s not what I came back for.’
‘I need to shave,’ he said, staring down at the water bubbling gently round the egg. With his fingertips, he rasped the stubble on his cheek. ‘Not like me to come down without shaving.’
‘We haven’t been happy,’ she said, ‘but it never occurred to me you might have someone else. Not until last night. I feel stupid.’
‘You are being stupid,’ he said. ‘I told you last night. I don’t know the woman. Never heard of her. The police came here because they found she’d made a note of my name and address. Among others, I suppose. They were just being thorough. Maybe she was a fan.’
‘Sit down and talk to me,’ his wife said.
He sat on the other side of the table.
‘Maybe she was going to write a letter,’ he suggested. ‘Remember those crazy letters I got last year?’
‘When they asked me to come back in, you were white as a ghost.’
‘No!’ He was dismayed.
‘Did you go white when they told you she was dead?’
‘I don’t like policemen. Tramping in here. Into my house. A lot of people feel that way.’
‘Don’t insult me. Please.’ She had been watching his face; now she looked down at her hands folded on the table.
Moved by an old sympathy, perhaps by no more than a habit of his body, he put out his hand and covered hers.
She didn’t pull them away, but went on, ‘I must have been very easy to deceive. You would hardly have to make any effort at all. As easy as that. I don’t see how you wouldn’t have come to despise me, even a little bit.’
He knew he should break out in denials, but he couldn’t, so great an effort, it was too much. And so, they sat in silence, until she got up and put off the gas where the egg was knocking in the pan.
Chapter Nineteen
Breakfastless, Curle was ready for lunch at the Arts Club. By custom, it was eaten communally at the large table set in the window. There were about a dozen of them that lunchtime, members and guests of members, those he had seen before and unknown faces in more or less equal numbers. The conversation, again by custom, was general around the table.
‘I’ve biked since I was nine or ten,’ announced one of the strangers. ‘But this February, first of the month, I was out and didn’t need gloves. That’s never happened to me before. I’ve never not needed gloves on the first of February, not even in the south of England.’
‘More proof the climate’s changing,’ said another. ‘Not that we need more; the evidence is overwhelming.’
And a third: ‘I heard a scientist from London University on the radio. According to him, they haven’t paid enough attention to sunspots. The mini ice age a couple of hundred years ago was caused by sunspots. They had braziers and dancing on the ice on the Thames.’
‘You can always buy a scientist,’ someone said. ‘Do you know that Exxon has set aside a budget of eighty billion dollars to argue against global warming? Or would it be millions, billions seems too much, doesn’t it?’
‘My daughter graduated from Bristol University last year. It was held in the Cathedral. There was an address by an ecologist. He told the graduands, you’re the ones who have to change the world. My generation’s failed, he told them. We can’t go on with big cars and all the rest. We’ve got to change our ways.’
‘That would cheer them up.’
‘Youngsters get told that all the time. When I graduated just after the war, the Thirties generation told us the same thing. We failed, you change the world.’
‘Bristol Cathedral? Lovely setting for a graduation.’
‘Absolutely. The Provost welcomed us. Not a word about God. This is the way it used to be, he said, the Cathedral at the service of the community. We’re very glad to see you here. First-class speech.’
‘Know what my son said to me? Turns out his partner doesn’t want to have children. Dad, he said to me, would you mind not being a grandfather? I thought that was sweet.’
And so on.
Curle contributed nothing, keeping his eyes on his plate as he steadily disposed of his stew. Beside him, Jonah Murray was also silent, though giving every appearance of following the conversation with keen interest.
Later, in the bar upstairs, settled in front of a bottle of Sangiovese, he gave a fat chuckle and said, ‘Edinburgh, the city of conversation. Remind you of the great days of the Scottish Enlightenment?’
Curle lifted his head and asked, ‘Sorry?’
‘You haven’t been hearing a word, have you? What the hell’s wrong?’
‘I had—’
‘I can’t hear you.’ Jonah cupped a hand jocularly behind his ear.
‘I had the police at my door last night.’
His friend leaned forward in concern. ‘Not an accident in the car? For God’s sake, don’t tell me anyone was hurt.’
‘They came about this woman.’ He took a deep b
reath. ‘They came about this woman I knew.’
‘What woman?’
‘I’m sorry to put this on you.’
‘Wait a bit… Is this the woman you’ve been having an affair with?’
Surprise jolted Curle out of his misery. He gaped and asked, ‘You knew?’
‘Suspected.’
‘I have to tell someone. But I can’t imagine how you knew.’
‘How did you imagine you could hide anything in Edinburgh? There’s always somebody who spots something going on. And that somebody never fails to talk to somebody else. The whole town clatters with gossip. You know that.’
‘Haskell?’ Curle asked, saying the first name that came into his head. And as Jonah looked blank, went on, ‘Bobbie Haskell. He was there when we’d a drink on Tuesday – after the National Library reading.’
‘The Velcro man? What has he got to do with it?’
‘You don’t know him?’
‘First time I’d ever clapped eyes on him. Didn’t have much to offer, I thought. Seems as if I was wrong.’
‘He lives in the same building as her.’
‘She has a name?’
‘Ali Fleming.’
Jonah looked intrigued. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Not one of the names I’ve put under review the last couple of years. When do I get to meet her? Do I get to meet her?’ He frowned. ‘Not sure that I should. Not sure that I want to. I have to say I’m very fond of that wife of yours.’
‘Don’t worry about meeting her,’ Curle said. ‘She’s dead.’
Jonah looked more bewildered than shocked. ‘Some kind of car accident? Why would the police come to you?’
‘She was found dead in her flat. Not an accident.’ And before Jonah could get it wrong again, he said almost with impatience. ‘She was murdered. It happened late on Tuesday evening apparently. But she wasn’t found until yesterday.’
‘They don’t suspect you?’
Curle rubbed a hand over his mouth. The thick aftertaste of stew on his palate made him nauseous. ‘They came to see me.’
The Endings Man Page 7