He had never heard of this grandmother. I didn’t know Ali at all, he thought. She could have told me. I would have listened.
‘I’m very sorry.’ He never knew what to say to the bereaved. Shuffling out with the other mourners, shaking hands with relatives lined up at the church door, that’s when it would be useful to be a Christian, ‘I’ll pray for you’, or an Irish peasant, ‘God be with you in your sorrow’, little ritual containers that would hold as much feeling as you had to pour into them; as a Protestant atheist he was prone to mumbling.
She looked at him in silence. In her early forties at a guess, he couldn’t see any resemblance to her sister. She had strong features, handsome rather than pretty. Despite himself, he couldn’t help noticing the swell of her thighs under her skirt and the long smooth muscles of her calves.
‘I was waiting for you to say that,’ she said. ‘I was beginning to think you’d never get round to it.’
‘You know about us.’
‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘I had nothing to do with her death.’ Tears prickled in his eyes, taking him by surprise. He was ashamed of them in front of her sister, afraid that she would think he was play-acting. ‘And I am sorry.’
It seemed after that the atmosphere changed. However strange it was, he felt as if for the first time he was able to share with someone his aching sense of the tragedy of Ali’s death. At one point, he asked again about the funeral and was told that the police would release the body the following day and that the funeral would take place the day after.
‘I’d like to be there,’ he said. ‘The family wouldn’t need to know. I’d stay well back.’
Later again, she suddenly said, ‘By the way, I should have said. I’m Linda.’
‘Ali told me she had two sisters,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember her telling me your name.’
‘Did she say Rosalind?’ And went on before he could shake his head, ‘From Shakespeare. It was hell at school when we did As You Like It. My youngest sister avoided that. My father called her Jean. He’d lost interest in strange names by the time she came along.’
‘Alexina,’ Curle said. ‘The police told me.’
‘Did they? No, Alexia. My father got it into his head that it was a beautiful name. She looked it up when she was fifteen and found it wasn’t a Christian name at all – it’s a medical condition. It means word blindness. That’s when she became Ali.’
He began to laugh, then stopped because it seemed inappropriate. The laugh had been genuine, however. ‘I’m grateful to you for talking to me like this. I don’t know why…’ He trailed off. Had he really been about to say something like, I don’t know why you should trust me? That would have been stupid.
‘Why? Because Ali phoned me every week. I feel as I’ve known you for the last eight years.’
‘She talked about me?’
The thought dismayed him. He imagined a portrait to make her sister despise him.
‘You know how much she loved you?’ Linda Fleming asked. ‘I don’t think she ever gave up hope that you would leave your wife and be with her.’
Bewildered, he blurted out the simple truth. ‘I couldn’t ever have done that. I have a son.’
‘Parents leave their children all the time now.’
‘Not me.’
‘I’m glad you never spelled that out. She told me, if you left her she would kill herself.’
He shook his head in denial. He couldn’t believe that. It wasn’t possible that she could have felt so strongly. How had love come into what was between them?
‘…I had no idea.’
‘Poor Ali,’ her sister said.
‘…You couldn’t have been mistaken?’
‘Poor Ali,’ she said again and this time, whether it was truly there or not, he seemed to hear a shade of contempt.
They sat in silence for so long that he thought that was the end of it.
When she began to speak again, her tone was more withdrawn, her voice softer as if sharing a confidence. ‘She spoke of this man Haskell too. I can’t remember the first time she mentioned him. I’ve been trying to remember if she told me how they got talking. I have the impression she’d known him for some time before she first mentioned him to me. He fixed things for her, electrical stuff. She wanted to move a sideboard from the front room into her bedroom, but it was too awkward for her to manage on her own. He helped her. Ali was always like that. She’d always find someone to help her. She took him pretty lightly, almost as a joke, I don’t mean in a nasty way. The faithful swine, she called him. The faithful swine was down last night, asking if there was anything I needed, I’d a job getting rid of him. That’s how she’d talk. That stopped though. She didn’t mention him much at all. But then apparently one night he was there when you turned up.’
Curle waited but she seemed lost in thought. ‘Like you said, he was mending something.’
‘She didn’t ask him to do that. He’d come down without being asked to see if she needed anything. He’d started doing that. She said he gave her the creeps.’
He stared at her. ‘I’m not sure what you’re saying.’
‘Do you think I’m sure?’ She shook her head. ‘I haven’t told him Ali and I spoke every week. I’ve given him the impression we were out of touch, that I knew nothing of her life. I even let him tell me about you. When I speak to him, I have to be careful not to mention the things she’s told me.’ She looked up and held his gaze. ‘I try to be careful.’
‘Have you told the police?’
‘It’s nothing they’d pay attention to. And if they did and questioned him, he’d know it came from me. All I can do is talk to him. Maybe he’ll give something away. And maybe I’m grasping at straws and it’s all nonsense. All the same…I’m being careful.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
Curle had parked his car a street away and waited until the last moment before going into the church. His idea had been to sit unnoticed at the back and slip out again just before the service ended. To his dismay there was no back any more. The church had been converted so that the pulpit had been removed from the chancel and now stood against the east wall of the nave with the congregation arranged on padded blue benches set in a half circle around it. As he slipped into the last row, curves of empty seats separated him from the group of no more than a dozen people who seemed huddled together for comfort in front of the empty pulpit. He assumed they were Ali’s family, but when a figure much taller than the others turned to look at him he saw that it was the policeman Meldrum. It hadn’t occurred to him that a policeman would come to her funeral. He bent his head over a hymn book and read the same verse over and over until after what seemed an interminable wait the service began.
There were stained-glass windows at either end of the nave, but the pulpit had been situated under tall windows of plain glass so that the congregation was in the full light of a low morning sun and the minister in shadow. As uncomfortable as a tyro extra on a stage, Curle sat staring at his knees or squinting against the sunshine. He imagined the minister in his shadowy pulpit staring down and wondering who the solitary man, an isolated figure in all that brightness, might be. When it was over, he could not have repeated anything which had been sung or said, but was left with the sense that the minister, embellishing scraps given by her family, mouthing the platitudes of hope to set against the facts of mortality, had never met Ali Fleming, not even once in all her life.
He hurried out before anyone else and made for the safety of his car intending to set out at once for home. As he pulled out, however, the hearse like a black fish nosed across the end of the street, and he turned after it, following the three or four cars that made up the procession. He could see that Meldrum drove the one immediately in front of him, and he was sure the policeman must know he was following. They moved slowly past a stretch of waste ground and then more quickly along an avenue of bungalows until they came into streets of brown tenements. Once he was held up at traffic lights and thought he had lost t
hem, but caught up again as the hearse led them past a supermarket and not long afterwards through the cemetery gates.
It was an old urban settlement of the dead and the cars made their way after the hearse along one narrow path after another winding up between untended graves, overgrown with tangles of briar, grass and weeds. Curle who had been lagging had to brake as a Land Services vehicle pulled out in front of him. It turned right into a path narrower than any so far and he inched along until it came to a stop blocking further progress.
Getting out, he walked slowly up to where the minister had already started the burial service. Perhaps, Curle thought, he couldn’t wait because he too found the desolation of the place intolerable. A green tarpaulin was spread over the earth piled beside the open grave. Behind the cemetery wall, a shoddy grey high-rise pockmarked with tiny windows rose up like a cliff face of ugliness.
As Curle stood a little way off watching the mourners, he was moved to pity for Ali Fleming. Even the name they would carve on the tombstone under her grandmother’s would be that exotic name she had rejected. Thinking of it made her seem a stranger again. ‘Can you read without moving your lips?’ he had asked the first time they met. Absurd, drunken, inanely aggressive question; but then all of it was absurd, their meetings, the long interlocking of their imaginations, their fantasies. How much of her life had that time given to him been? How much had it mattered to her? He thought of almost the last time they’d been together and of a dream she had told him – she had been in a shop, a very small space; this man had tried to come in, he had a pack on his back, no room, as she tried to squeeze past him and get out his bulk pressed her back over the counter. It had been so unlike her usual fantasies that he had been disappointed, and so now he thought that perhaps it had been a true dream. He was pierced by the mystery of her and that she was dead and he would never have the chance to ask her all the questions that came to him now and none of them to do with sex. What did it matter what name she was given on the stone? Who would come to this forgotten corner to see it? In time, it would wear away as the names were wearing from all the stones around them. The group by the grave stepped back as the minister stopped speaking and Meldrum, bending down, was speaking to the sister. As they turned and looked at him, he felt the wetness of tears on his cheeks and realised that he had been crying. What were they thinking as they looked at him? Wasn’t there an old saying that the criminal couldn’t resist making an appearance, scene of the crime, scene of the grave.
He turned and forced himself to walk slowly back down to his car, expecting to hear a voice behind him. The Land Services vehicle was empty and still blocking his way. He stood beside it watching as the cortege disappeared. After a time the two workmen, who had no room to pull the vehicle aside for him and presumably didn’t want to go ahead, came back and told him, ‘You’d be as well to back up. It’s all brambles ahead and you’ll get your car scratched.’
Slowly Curle reversed down the path until he could turn and make his escape.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘Do you like it?’ Jonah Murray asked, waving a proprietary hand as Curle sat down. ‘Don’t you think it lives up to its billing?’
‘This place?’ Curle looked around. ‘What about it?’
‘You don’t see a change? From the last time you were here?’
Curle thought about it. He’d last been in Jonah’s office at the top of a winding stone staircase in the Pleasance during the Edinburgh Festival the preceding August when the agent had held a party for his clients and visiting celebrities.
‘All I remember about that is getting drunk and spilling a glass of wine over that woman from A and P Watt.’
‘Your most embarrassing moment.’
‘No,’ Curle said. ‘My most embarrassing moment was being introduced to Muriel Spark. Mind a blank, I told her how much I’d enjoyed Do Not Disturb. It was like watching an apple shrivel in a snowstorm. After a while, she parted her lips and whispered Not to Disturb. And that was that.’ Jonah laughed. ‘It was a quote from Shakespeare apparently. I should have stuck to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Never read it, but I could have told her I enjoyed the film.’
‘Novelists like to be told that.’ Jonah waved a hand again. ‘Don’t change the subject. What do you think of it?’
‘You’ve had it done up?’
‘God, you are so unobservant. Remind me, what do you do for a living?’
‘I’m a student of human nature not a pansy decorator.’
‘This month’s Scottish Homes and Interiors has a lyrical piece about how I transformed a neglected flat into a masterpiece of modern taste.’ He spoke with the satisfaction of a self-publicist who made more of an impact on the media than most of his clients. ‘They don’t usually do offices.’
‘Well,’ Curle decided after a thoughtful look around, ‘it isn’t quite one any more, is it? Take the computer and stuff from through there where Alice does her secretarial stuff and you’d have a bedroom. Easy enough after what you’ve done here to imagine it as a sitting room. And you’ve done up the kitchen. Office back into flat, it’ll sell for a nice profit when you’re ready to bugger off back to London.’
‘Cynicism isn’t an attractive trait.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘So what can I do for you?’
Curle took a breath and tried to keep the tension out of his voice. ‘Last time I saw you, you were going off for a think. So what have you thought?’
‘This isn’t the best place to talk about…what’s happened. And I’ve someone coming in to see me.’
Curle jumped to his feet. ‘Fine. My apologies.’
Two strides took him to the door. As he opened it, he got a glimpse of Alice at the computer turning to look over her shoulder.
Behind him, he heard Jonah crying, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ as he bustled up out of his chair. Then the door was taken out of his grasp and closed. The agent stood close, glaring at him. ‘The moment of truth! You want the moment of truth? I was absolutely taken aback when you told me you were at that woman’s flat the night she was killed.’
‘Not “that woman”. She had a name. Her name was Ali Fleming.’
‘Well, bloody exactly. That matters to you. And I don’t, not for one second, believe that you killed her. That’s my thought, if it matters to you. I know all the stuff about everyone’s capable of murder. Don’t imagine I didn’t think about that. And about all the pervasive stuff we live with that tells us every man’s an island, we’re all separate from one another, you can’t ever see what’s going on in someone else’s mind. Fuck all of that. I’ve known you for a long time. All right, you had an affair. But if you killed that woman, above all if you killed her in that hellish way, then every face I’ve ever met is nothing but a mask. I don’t want to live in a world like that.’
He reached out and squeezed Curle’s shoulder. Apart from handshakes, it was their first physical contact since schooldays.
Curle went back and sat down again. He had come for a verdict without any belief it would be in his favour since, for ever it seemed, he had been an advocate of the idea that no one could be sure of what went on behind another man’s eyes: a notion he’d drawn on glibly enough in his novels. He felt, at least for the moment, absolved. He was moved by the other man’s trust and made ashamed by it. He rested his face between his hands and said quietly, ‘I’m pretty frightened.’
Jonah settled one buttock on the edge of his desk and swung his leg in tiny arcs back and forward. ‘They’ll get whoever did it.’
‘I don’t know why they haven’t arrested me already.’
‘That must mean something. Maybe they have a suspect we don’t know about.’
‘Ali’s older sister came to see me. She’s living in the flat.’
‘Where her sister was killed? How morbid of her!’
Curle hesitated. ‘Do you remember Bobbie Haskell?’
‘Who?’
‘The young guy who fastened on to us after the talk at the Library. Said he wor
ked in a bookshop.’
‘And came to the pub? The Velcro man? What about him?’
‘Linda Fleming thinks he’s the killer.’
Jonah’s leg stopped at the top of its arc and sank.
‘How extraordinary!’
‘I don’t believe it either. She said Ali told her he’d been making a nuisance of himself. I can’t see him as a murderer, though, can you?’
Jonah shook his head. ‘Nuisance, certainly. Not a murderer.’
‘Anyway, she turned up at the house. Luckily Liz was at work. She claimed Brian Todd gave her my address.’ He glanced up with a glint of suspicion. ‘I wonder how he got it in the first place.’
‘Ask him.’
‘I suppose I could.’
‘No. I mean now. He’s due any minute.’
‘Here?’
‘Just business. He’s coming in to discuss a book.’ At Curle’s blank stare, he smiled. ‘Everyone has a book in them. Only one, in most cases. Half my success has been in sniffing out the right one.’
‘But why him?’
‘He approached me. He’s anxious it seems to dig some dirt.’
‘On his clients? Why on earth would he want to do that?’
Before Jonah could answer, his assistant Alice tapped and put her head round the door.
‘Mr Todd’s here.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It didn’t matter where he tugged, every end was a loose one. He’d walked out as Brian Todd walked in, feeling as Jonah had said earlier that the agent’s office was no place for asking questions about Ali Fleming’s death. Chances were, he decided, that it had anyway been Jonah who had given his address to Todd. He couldn’t imagine why Todd would have asked for it, but he knew Jonah too well to have any difficulty with the idea of him giving it cheerfully and without a second thought. It was even possible that Jonah, that lover of gossip, might at this moment be sharing with Todd the risible image of Bobbie Haskell as Ali’s killer.
The Endings Man Page 10