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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
There's a fine line between fact and fiction...Following the publication of his latest crime novel, Barclay Curle receives a letter from a woman accusing him of writing about the murders she has committed. Is it just the wild ramblings of a crazed fan, or could there really be a violent murderess out there? The discovery of a body killed by the favoured method of Curle's fictional killer seems to suggest there may be some truth to the letter...But for Detective Inspector Jim Meldrum, Curle seems the obvious suspect. Faced with a second murder and a darkening cloud of suspicion, Curle decides the time has come to take action. After all, he asks himself, who has more experience of solving murder mysteries than a crime novelist?
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Seitenzahl: 329
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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The Endings Man
FREDERIC LINDSAY
For Ellen
Contents
Chapter One
He said, ‘I don’t want any of my characters to be cardboard.’ Worried that was too abrupt, he went on at once, ‘In a crime story, the reader has to care about the victims. Sure, you can begin with a bang, start with a body, but sooner or later you have to care. Unless it’s just a puzzle, of course—’
‘And yours are certainly more than that.’ Alex Dickson was an interviewer who took books seriously. He was a man who made you feel better about yourself, Curle thought.
Relaxing, he continued, ‘It isn’t hard to get a good beginning. Middles are the hard bit. And the ending has to be right. It’s the ending that sums up the book, puts it all into some kind of perspective, leaves a good or bad taste in the mouth.’
‘Jack’s Friend. That’s how the killer signs his notes to the detective. He’s referring to Jack the Ripper, isn’t that right?’ Dickson, an interviewer who read the books he talked about, nodded encouragingly to indicate he knew the answer but that it would be a good idea to share it with their listeners.
Barclay Curle nodded, then remembered it was radio. ‘Yes, he’s referring to Jack the Ripper, of course. As far as crime goes, there’s only one Jack that matters. Jack the Ripper is the prototype of what later, after the fad in the States for profiling and the invention of Hannibal Lecter, came to be known as the serial killer. In Victorian London he killed, what was it, half a dozen prostitutes?’
‘Your murderer has beaten that score. By my count, he’s disposed of fourteen women.’
‘As many as that? To be fair, it is over three books. In Russia, didn’t they catch someone who had killed hundreds? Fiction can’t keep up with reality nowadays. Never mind, Jack was the first serial killer. Same way, come to think of it, that Sherlock Holmes was the first consulting detective.’ Leaving aside, it occurred to him, Poe’s Dupin; never mind, push on. ‘Both of them looming out of a London fog, one of those pea-soupers they used to have.’
‘This murderer of yours, though,’ Dickson said with the air of a man getting back to the point. ‘He survived your first two books about him. And you haven’t killed him off in this one either – or identified him or had him packed off to jail. Does that mean we can expect another book about Jack’s Friend?’
‘It’s always nice to have the option,’ Curle said. ‘Anyway, it would have been wasteful to finish him off.’
‘Wasteful?’
‘A good villain is worth keeping.’
‘Don’t you mean a bad villain?’
Curle laughed. ‘As bad as they come.’ He settled back in the seat and then eased forward again in case that put him too far from the microphone. ‘Writing about him late at night when the house is quiet, I’ve got up from the desk and gone around checking the doors are locked.’
‘Did you do that when you wrote the chapter in which he kills the traveller?’
‘Traveller? Oh, you mean the guy in the next seat who irritates him by being drunk on the plane.’
‘Drunk on the plane. Drunk when he gets off it with his new friend Jack. Drunk in the restaurant in Manhattan. In the taxi. In the hotel room. All the way through, in fact, until the moment before his death. It’s funny and horrible. There’s so much feeling there. Do drunks irritate you like that?’
‘I don’t kill them.’ He waited for Dickson’s chuckle then said, ‘I’ve known a lot of people who drank. I’ve even been drunk myself.’ That was all he needed to say. What made him go on? ‘I wouldn’t say my father was a drunk, but I came home a few times to find him sitting in front of the microwave waiting for the news to come on.’
Did he need another laugh? Whatever possessed him? It wasn’t true, but what humour would there have been in the real reason for the microwave incident? For the last ten years of his life my father had Alzheimer’s; and he wasn’t in his own house, it was in the kitchen of the Home where he was waited on hand and foot – they wouldn’t have let him boil a kettle even if he’d remembered how – paid for by me and my sister, or rather her husband who was generous that way. He could picture the face of the carer who had told them about the old man and the microwave, and the way she’d laughed, showing a wide strip of gum. Too much information. If she ever heard this broadcast, his sister would be offended, but chances were she wouldn’t; they didn’t get Radio Clyde in Sussex. If she ever did, he’d tell her: haven’t you heard? Drunks are funny, drunks are characters, nobody wants to think about old men with their brains addled, or at least I don’t. I’m a crime novelist not a peddler of self-pitying slop – I’ll leave that to others, plenty of them about, try any bookshop.
‘Is there anything of your father in the traveller who gets murdered?’ Dickson wondered.
‘What? No. Why do you ask that?’ The question made no sense to him for a moment. Recovering himself, he saw the connection. ‘You mean because he’s drunk?’
‘Oh, it’s more than that,’ the interviewer said. ‘Only five pages, but you feel you know the man. And you care when he is killed. It comes as a shock. You feel as if it is a man being killed, not a cardboard figure. That’s why I wondered if some of that emotion you create might have come, even subconsciously, from memories of your father.’
How the hell did I get into this? Curle wondered. ‘I doubt it,’ he said.
‘Looking at the other side of the equation, your killer, Jack’s Friend, seems very real. Is it hard getting into the mind of a killer?’
‘Anyone might kill, I think, if the circumstances were right. Call it war, provide a uniform and a clergyman to say bless you, my son, and you can mass produce human killing machines.’
‘Oh, no,’ Dickson said. ‘That’s too—’
‘Too glib?’
‘Not the same. Not what we’re talking about. These serial killers provide their own context, they don’t need wars.’
Curle, who enjoyed an argument, leaned forward. ‘It’s interesting, though. The American military was shocked after the second world war that so few of their soldiers had actually wanted to kill the enemy. They brought in psychologists and set up programmes to get the numbers up. I believe now it’s eighty or ninety per cent, something like that. Young men and women primed to kill. Makes you proud of science.’ At Dickson’s frown, added on impulse, ‘Leaving that aside, in private life I do think almost all of us would be capable of killing. I was bullied at school, bullied by one boy in particular. He made my life a misery. I still think of him sometimes. I don’t know what would happen if I met him again.’
‘You mean you might kill him?’ Dickson wondered with a sceptical shake of the head.
‘Or roll over again just the way I did all those years ago,’ Curle heard himself saying. He admitted, ‘That’s what worries me.’
Dickson studied him for a moment then said, ‘Let’s get back to the book.’
Ten minutes later they were finished. Walking him back out to the parking area in front of the studio, Dickson laughed and said, ‘Would you believe I’ve had writers on the show who managed to get the title of their new book into every answer?’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Curle said. ‘I’ve been told I’m a lousy salesman. It drives my agent up the wall.’
Chapter Two
Curle fingered the card in his pocket. It had come in the morning post and he could still feel the sickness in his stomach at his first sight of the signature. He needed to talk out that odd feeling, but before he could draw the card from his pocket, Jonathan Murray asked, ‘I take it you got the title in a few times? And what about Doug Kirk? How many times did you manage to mention him?’
Barclay Curle turned his wineglass uneasily. ‘I’m sure his name came up,’ he said.
‘Came up? Came up?’ Murray repeated, pink cheeks flushing with scorn. ‘He’s just your bloody detective. Put it another way, he’s your bloody bread and butter.’
‘And not much more than a corner of a slice from your loaf, Jonah, with a dab of margarine on it.’
Murray, Johnny to friends, Jonah to people he’d gone to school with, frowned but in the same instant put a small plump hand over his lips to hide a smirk of pleasure. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.’
Catching the gesture, Curle felt an impulse of affection for the plump little man seated across the lunch table. They had first met more than thirty years ago when Murray had arrived in midterm as a boarder to the school in which Curle was engaged in spending the unhappiest days of his life. Too late to become a friend, since Curle was already isolated in his solitary ghetto as Brian Todd’s victim, the plump newcomer had at least remained neutral and even made stray offerings of sympathy. Given the schoolboy need not to be picked out from the herd, it had been as much as Curle could have expected. Even then, he had never been in doubt about the goodness of Jonah Murray’s heart. A conviction he’d seen no reason to change since they’d renewed their acquaintance after Murray’s return from London ten years previously to set up his own literary agency in Edinburgh.
By that time, Curle had published two novels. The first had done well enough for him to give up working in the library; the second, in which he’d attempted to break new ground, had been a disappointment. When the third one came out three years later, it did even less well and the fourth two years after that had been refused by his then publisher and afterwards by five others. ‘And they keep the book for months and you have to chase them up even to get a no,’ he’d complained to Murray. With most people pride had kept him silent about the dreariness of that process, but the casual meeting with someone he’d known at school, at a party to which he’d been almost too depressed to turn up, had opened the floodgates. ‘I don’t think it’ll ever see the light of day. When you start, it never occurs to you it could end this way. I’m going to have to look for a job.’ Murray had offered to read the manuscript. Collected it on the Monday and rung the next day to say, ‘I’ll get it published for you. But you’ll have to rewrite it. There’s a crime novel in there, heavily disguised at the moment. Why should the old man’s death be suicide? If the work he’s done for this secret group was so shameful, there would be people who couldn’t take the risk of him getting a bad conscience. Suppose he’s confided his doubts to the wrong person, an old colleague say. Simple as that, we’d have a murder and be getting somewhere. And you can’t get away with vague secret groups any more; go the whole hog, and let it be MI5. And you need a villain; a good public-school type never goes wrong. And this nephew Doug Kirk who stumbles over the body and sets out to find out why his uncle committed suicide – forget about him being a librarian. Make him a policeman; amateur sleuths are out of fashion. Call him a detective inspector and I’ll get a series for you.’ And so he had, in the process adding Curle to his client list.
‘And you know the next question,’ Jonah Murray said, lovingly deconstructing the tower of meat and vegetables in the middle of his plate, ‘Have you started the new book?’
‘Early days yet,’ Curle muttered.
‘You’re a lazy bastard. That was the trouble with the first books – too long between them. Crime is a book a year game.’
‘Five out in five years,’ Curle said. ‘When you told me it would have to be one a year, I wasn’t at all sure I could do it.’
‘You looking for sympathy? Next book would make six Doug Kirks and that will finish the second contract. If you don’t want another one, you only have to say.’
‘Doug,’ Curle said moodily. ‘Why do all fictional policemen have names like Bob, Jim, Jack?’
‘They don’t.’
‘They do in Edinburgh. Monosyllabic names to go with their personalities. Dour buggers. I’d like to break new ground. Why shouldn’t I have a Church of Scotland minister as my sleuth?’
‘Because you’re an atheist?’
‘Agnostic,’ Curle said.
By the time they had finished arguing the contrasting prospects of an updated Father Brown as against a reheated version of Philip Marlowe, the meal was over. They had got up from the table before Curle thought again of the card that had troubled him. As they walked through the restaurant, he took it from his pocket, but as he did a flurry of movement at the corner of his eye turned into a man starting up in his path.
‘What a coincidence,’ the man said, catching him by the arm as he went to step aside. He felt the muscle of his arm tighten under the man’s grip as if in protest.
‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’
Reddy-brown hair, plump cheeks, smooth shaven, the neck thickening and fleshy under the chin, a man who had eaten a lot of good meals in places like this. Three other men at the table, his lunch companions, were looking up in curiosity. And Jonah, belatedly realising, broke stride and turned to see what was going on.
‘Forget it. Stupid of me.’ As he spoke, the man released his grip, but said something else as he sat back down with his companions. It might have been, ‘Another time,’ but Curle was already moving away and couldn’t be sure.
‘What was that about?’ Jonah asked.
‘I’m not sure… He seemed to think he knew me.’
‘Too much wine with the meal.’
It was only as they parted company that Curle remembered the card in his pocket, but he didn’t feel like calling his friend back specially to show it. That might have seemed to give it too much importance. Drawn to his attention like that, the little man might even find it funny. Best to let it go. He didn’t want to seem overly concerned.
Chapter Three
The card had arrived with a small bundle of others the morning of his lunch with Murray. They had made their appearance, together with a cup of coffee and a poached egg on toast, on a tray carried in by his eight-year-old son.
‘Happy birthday!’ Kerr said solemnly, waiting as his father propped himself up on two pillows.
Curle held up his cheek to be kissed. ‘Breakfast in bed. Luxury.’
‘Because it’s your birthday.’
‘A nice tradition,’ Curle said.
‘You’ve got cards,’ Kerr said.
‘So I have.’ He shuffled them. One from Kerr, one from his wife, one from his sister and her husband. From his ageing aunts, three separate cards in three separate envelopes despite the fact they lived together. The seventh one was addressed in a hand he didn’t recognise, but was the same unmistakable envelope for an occasion. ‘Shall I open them?’
‘Not ours!’
‘You sure?’
‘Save them for your presents when we have dinner… You are home for dinner?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it. I could open the others.’
‘Mum’s just getting the car out. Do you want to wait for her?’
Curle caught the hesitation in the question and the faintly anxious look common to the sons and daughters of the unhappily married. It seemed no matter how good a face you put on, it was hard to fool children.
‘Let’s do that.’
‘I’ll put on my school stuff so we’re ready to go.’
Curle watched him leave and forked up a triangle of egg and toast. The yolk ran yellow as he cut into it. A good boy, a kind boy, earnest, conscientious, doing well at school, a son to be proud of. The only thing a father with a professional feeling for euphony might hold against him was his name. Kerr had been Liz’s father’s name and when she had suggested it for their newborn son he had limited his objection to mouthing Kerr Curle and raising an eyebrow. ‘Very nice,’ she’d said and, things being as they were, he’d left it at that, shutting his mind to the effects of going through life with a name like a hen clucking, and so from the beginning his relation with his son had as an undertow a sense of guilt.
He heard the car backing out from under the bedroom and then the garage door bang as Liz slammed it down.
A moment later, the boy led his mother into the room.
‘We only have a minute,’ she said. Job sharing, she worked as a pharmacist five mornings and two afternoons a week.
‘Dad’s going to open his cards,’ the boy said. ‘Not ours. The other ones.’
She gave them a glance. ‘From the aunts,’ she said impatiently. ‘Same as always.’
He opened them one after the other and sat them on his tray. From Chat. From Annie. From May. His three maiden aunts. With love, with love, with love. From his sister, more love.
‘There’s another one,’ Kerr said.
‘So there is.’ He turned it in his hand.
‘Who’s it from?’ his wife asked and then abruptly shook her head as if disclaiming the question.
‘I’ve no idea. I don’t recognise the writing.’
‘We’d better get off.’
She turned away but the boy hung back curious over the small mystery.
‘Wait!’ Curle said and putting his forefinger under ripped the flap up, slid out the card and opened it.
As if at a distance, he heard the boy’s voice. ‘Who’s it from?’
He shook his head.
‘Come on,’ Liz said, taking the boy by the hand and drawing him away.
‘But—’
‘Never mind. Daddy doesn’t want to show us.’
Cursing himself for a fool, he got up and followed, card in hand, but got to the landing just in time to hear the outer door slam shut.
Chapter Four
After their lunch, he stood on the pavement watching Jonah’s taxi pull out into the traffic streaming along Queen Street. Only when it had turned the corner into Hanover Street did he begin to walk back the other way. Secretiveness was a habit he’d grown into over the last eight years.
The wonderful (or terrible) thing was that it had been touch and go whether or not he went to the party where he’d met Ali Fleming. It was being held he had assumed because the hostess wanted to make her individual claim on as many of their circle as she could now that her marriage was officially over. Before the split, he’d been friendly with both of them, but if he had to choose one or the other it was no contest. The husband had just taken a job with a London publisher.
He had made an excuse to get out of the invitation, but when the evening of that day eight years ago arrived he was beyond such petty considerations as cultivating journalists. In the morning, he’d heard the front doorbell as he was shaving and run down to be handed a fat envelope by the postman. The typescript of his fourth novel had come back from the firm that had published numbers two and three. He hadn’t paid as much attention as he should have to the sales figures of those books; the advances had been good and he hadn’t really expected to get royalties. That, so he had been told, was the way things worked for most writers, and happy to be counted among them at all he hadn’t given it much thought. He’d glanced at the letter that lay under the elastic band that went round the typescript. ‘It is with real regret,’ the editor had written. He’d met her once on a trip to London, a willowy blonde past her best days. ‘Let me say, I have no doubt you will find another publisher.’ Most of the conversation at their lunch that day had consisted of stories of how she had managed to survive successive changes of owner and staff shakeouts; the anecdotes of a self-absorbed survivor and a bad sign that he had been too naïve or inexperienced to take in at the time. Rejected typescript in hand, he’d plodded back upstairs and phoned her, hiding his fury so successfully that their conversation had gone on for quarter of an hour. It ended with her saying, ‘Thank you for being so understanding.’ He wished her a lingering death.
After a day on his own by evening he was drunk, still able to walk straight and talk clearly but with all his internal monitors switched off. Why not go to the party? He would probably never have another book in need of a review, good or bad.
As he came in, the crowded room seemed to open a path so that almost the first thing he saw was a woman in the far corner. Her dress clung to her breasts and accentuated the fullness of her bottom, making it jut out like the behind of a black woman. She was white, though, with red hair and the jut of her behind was largely an illusion produced by the way she was standing. By the time he’d worked that out, though, it didn’t matter and when the man she was talking to had been sent off on an errand carrying their two glasses he walked over and stood in front of her.
She looked at him expectantly and, as he stood with his mind a blank, began to smile.
‘Can you read without moving your lips?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Ah,’ he said, his voice admirably unslurred. ‘A woman of above average intelligence.’
‘You’re not very sure of yourself, are you?’
It didn’t much matter what they said. Later that night when she took off her shoes, she wasn’t so tall.
Eight years later it was still going on, though he’d tried once at least to end it and kept away for almost a fortnight. The familiar building rose five storeys above him and he mounted the steps and pressed the button by her name. After a moment, the heavy bolt swung back and he went inside. The stairs were carpeted, the landings variously ornamented, the first with a little table carrying a vase of flowers, the second by a line of prints showing views of the Castle and the open parkland of the Meadows. As he climbed to the third floor, he opened his coat and fingered the card in his jacket pocket. Liz had stamped off with his son before he had a chance to show it to her. He had balked at showing it to Jonah Murray. Third time lucky; he would show it to Ali.
The door eased back under his knock. She wasn’t there, though. She must have opened it and gone back inside, which always annoyed him. Maybe it was her way of punishing him for refusing to accept keys for the street door and the flat. He had told her it was because he didn’t want his wife to find them. Why take a risk? he’d said to her. The truth was it would have seemed too much like making a commitment. No doubt she knew that.
She wasn’t in the front room, a long high-ceilinged room complete with elaborate cornice and a bay window looking out across the street to one of the private gardens common to the New Town. He went back along the short corridor. The kitchen was empty, but when he looked in her bedroom she was there sitting in front of the angled drawing board. She was a graphic artist.
Without looking round, she said, ‘I’ve been wanking for four days.’ She spoke in a little throaty murmur almost like talking to herself.
He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Dangers of working at home.’
‘And I’ve got a big job to do.’
‘Maybe it’s not a high sex drive. Maybe you just hate work.’
She leaned back against him. ‘Bastard.’
In bed looking up at him as he pushed into her, she said, ‘Chione.’
‘Uhh?’
‘She was a pretty goddess who thought too much of herself.’
He pulled almost out and slid slowly in again.
She made a small contented sound, then went on, ‘A professor of classics called me that. He was older, almost an old man. But he could last a long time.’
He grunted and began pumping back and forward. He started to count backwards from fifty. Somewhere around thirty, she clenched her muscles round him and he came in great shuddering gasps.
‘He had a beautiful head of white hair. He called me Chione.’
She wasn’t even breathing fast.
‘Fuck Chione,’ he said.
‘Lots of people must have. It was a popular name with prostitutes in Greece, so he told me.’
He eased out and rolled his weight off her. The sun lay on the ceiling as if it had been spread with a knife.
‘Before you turned up, I was thinking about him. I imagined he was painting me with radium.’
‘That’s physics, not classics.’
‘I had to lie still and he painted me. Cunt, ass, tits. I lay glowing in the dark and I could feel the poison seeping into me.’
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘If you’d told me that earlier…’
It beat counting to fifty.
‘It’s all about ritual, you see.’
He rolled over and fished in the pocket of his jacket hung over the chair beside the bed. Before he could show her the card, though, the phone rang. She lifted it clear of the stand, gave a grunt, got out of bed and carried it out of the room as she listened.
She came back with two glasses of red wine.
Putting the phone back, she said, ‘That was the most boring woman in the world. And I’ve offended her by cutting the call short.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it.’
‘At my age you don’t find it easy to make new friends, so you hang on to the old ones.’
‘If we knew that when we were young, we could avoid the bad ones.’
‘They don’t necessarily start out that way, just get worse as they go along.’
‘It’s hard to give up on an old friend. It’s like one step nearer the grave.’
‘Christ, you know how to cheer a girl up.’
‘What about this then?’ He handed her the card.
‘This is supposed to cheer me up?’ She stared at it, ‘It’s a condolence card.’ He watched the heavy white card turning in her fingers. ‘Thinking of you in your hour of grief? What the hell? Who’s dead?’
‘No one. It came in this morning’s post. See who it’s from.’
She turned the open card towards him. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘Jack’s Friend. It’s signed Jack’s Friend.’
She looked up at him blankly. ‘You know someone called Jack?’
‘Christ,’ he said bitterly, ‘I thought you’d read my books.’
Chapter Five
‘Is this all?’
The policeman was disconcertingly tall, four inches at least over six feet, Curle calculated, with spatulate thumbs on big hands, the kind of hands he associated with manual work. He’d been behind his desk when Curle was shown in and without getting up had nodded him unsmilingly towards a chair. He looked to be in his late forties with the beginnings of a drinker’s nose and dark stiff-cropped hair shot through with grey. His name was Meldrum.
Responding to the tone as much as the question, Curle said, ‘I appreciate this might not seem important to you.’
He paused, but instead of disclaiming a lack of interest the policeman waited him out in silence.
‘I should say,’ he persisted, ‘that I didn’t ask for – I mean I didn’t expect this to be dealt with by an officer of your rank.’
‘The ACC seems to have felt it appropriate.’
Despite the studied lack of expression, Curle took the flat statement of fact as an indication of ill feeling. So that’s it, he thought. He resents me for being able to get access to an assistant chief constable; he’s got me down as someone who can pull strings and he doesn’t like that. ACC Fairbairn had given a talk chaired by Curle at the Crime Writers Association Conference the year it had been held in Edinburgh. He’d spoken of a famous unsolved murder from early in his career and Curle, genuinely moved and impressed, had been warm, maybe even a shade effusive, in his vote of thanks. Afterwards Fairbairn had invited him to visit police HQ and personally shown him round the building from the data-handling suite and interview rooms to the gun range in the basement. As thanks, he’d sent a book, the third in the Doug Kirk series; got a note in return to say that Fairbairn had enjoyed it in the summer on a beach in Corfu; and kept up enough of a desultory acquaintance to feel that he might approach the ACC for help. It was that impulse which had brought him to this meeting with the forbidding figure across the desk. He wondered now if Meldrum had been asked to see him as a kind of chore, a staging post on the way to police officers’ Siberia perhaps. He looks a dour bugger, Curle thought, the kind to put backs up – not least that of a smooth politically adept operator like Bob Fairbairn.
‘I feel as if I’m being stalked,’ Curle said.
‘Stalking isn’t a crime,’ Meldrum said, ‘not in Scotland. We deal with it under harassment.’
‘Whatever it’s called, I don’t want to be the victim of an obsession. I’ve been told the temptation for most people is to try to ignore this kind of thing and hope it goes away. But from what I’ve read, that would be a mistake. If it isn’t nipped in the bud chances are it’ll get worse. Maybe a lot worse.’ To his own dismay, he heard a shade of pleading as he finished, ‘At this stage, a visit from a policeman would probably put a stop to it.’
‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?’ the policeman Meldrum said. ‘You haven’t told me what there is to stop. More than this card, I take it.’
Curle opened the envelope that had been sitting on his lap.
‘I’ve mislaid the first one,’ he said, handing over the letters. ‘I took it for granted I’d kept it, I keep everything. I’m a hoarder, maybe because I’m a writer. I imagine things might come in useful later on.’ Stick to the point, he admonished himself. He realised this policeman was making him more nervous than he had felt for a long time. And for no reason, no sensible reason. Maybe it was some kind of professional skill the man had. Must be an asset. I confess, I confess, maybe that was how it worked.
‘They’re all from the same woman. In the first one she wrote to say that my detective Doug Kirk reminded her of her father. This was just after the second book in the series came out.’
‘Series?’
‘I’ve done five of them. Five novels.’ And people buy them, he thought, including fucking policemen, they’ve told me so. ‘Murder stories, mysteries, different names for the same thing. Some people call them police procedurals. They all feature the same character, Doug Kirk, an Edinburgh detective. He reminds me of my father, her letter said, even though my father wasn’t actually a policeman. And she went on to write in detail of her love life. I put it down as a crank letter, but I was bothered enough to tell my agent. There was something eerie about it.’
‘Your agent?’
‘Jonathan Murray. He’s well known. He lives in Edinburgh now.’
‘And he’ll remember this?’
‘At the time of the first one, he laughed and said, there’s a lot of strange people out there. But I told him about the other letters, I’m sure I did, some of them anyway. He’ll remember.’ He looked at the little pile of sheets. ‘I’ll be quiet and let you read them.’
But Meldrum set them down, tapping the edges to stack them neatly. ‘I’d prefer if you told me about them. What there was in them to bother you.’
Curle gathered his thoughts. ‘Not so much the first one. Maybe that’s why I was careless with it. God knows where it’s got to. It was the next one that bothered me, the letter that came after the third book. She sent me this extraordinary letter claiming it was about her. This is about my mental problems, she wrote. I didn’t like that at all. I’m not brave about these things.’
‘You were afraid of being sued?’
‘No! That never crossed my mind. The book was fiction, for God’s sake! I mean, I made it up, all of it. No, it was just that I’ve always had this feeling that there are people out there that if you’re lucky you’ll never meet, never get mixed up with them. You must meet them, it’s your job. But I don’t even mean murderers, it doesn’t have to be that extreme. I’d a friend who married a brute; when she went back to her parents, he came round and kicked the kitchen door in. Her father had a heart attack. When I got that letter after the third book, that’s how it felt. As if one of those people I never wanted to meet had come into my life.’ He chewed his lip. ‘Anonymously.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It wasn’t signed. I’m not sure, maybe the first one was. The others certainly weren’t. An Admirer, that’s what she called herself.’
‘And no address?’
Curle shook his head. ‘No. Maybe the first one had, but it’s gone. God, it’s so infuriating. You keep a diary?’ The policeman looked at him, said nothing. ‘It’s like when you look back at your diary to check a date. The important thing’s missing. All you’ve got is a note about a dental appointment.’ For God’s sake, he thought, pull yourself together. ‘She sent another two after that, not adding anything new, going over the same ground. I kept them, but I stopped worrying about them. Repetition dulled the impact. But then after the fourth book – you’ll see when you read them – another letter came. The book was only in the shops a week, something like that. How did you know? she wrote. I committed this murder you wrote about in your book. You call the girl Sally, she wrote, but you know that wasn’t her name. It was a grotesque notion. There were five murders in the book, five of them! Why claim that one? At that point someone else might have laughed. I didn’t laugh. It made me feel sick.’
‘And after that?’
‘Same pattern. More letters. More than the time before. Five, is it? Six? They’re all there. And then, like before, they stopped. Nothing until I published the fifth book, the one that’s just come out. To be honest, when it did, I expected another letter, more madness. Instead, the damned card came. I hadn’t expected that.’
‘You’re sure it’s from this woman?’ Meldrum asked.
As he had done when Fairbairn asked the same question, Curle responded with a mixture of surprise and impatience.
‘It must be.’
‘The condolence card is printed in red ink. These,’ he glanced down at the top sheet of the letters, ‘are they all typed?’
‘All of them. And the An Admirer signature. There isn’t any handwriting to recognise.’ He’d been through all this with Fairbairn. ‘And I threw away the envelopes the letters came in. It never occurred to me to keep them. I do have the envelope for the card.’
‘Which may or may not be from this woman. No envelopes. No handwriting. No return address.’ Meldrum sat for a moment, then patted the stack of letters. ‘I’ll read them,’ he said, ‘but I don’t see there’s much I can do.’
Curle found himself being ushered out. He took a stand at the door and said, ‘I’ll let you know if anything else comes. I just know it’s the same woman. The thing is her first letter came after I’d introduced this character called Jack’s Friend. And I’ve kept him in every book since. Readers like a good villain.’ It struck him how little time he’d been given to explain, how unsatisfactory the interview had been. ‘Did I say that the Jack in that is Jack the Ripper?’
‘If something does come,’ Meldrum said, ‘remember to keep the envelope.’
Chapter Six
Curle’s first impulse had been to refuse.
‘I hate AGMs. Balance sheets I can’t read and the risk of being elected to some bloody committee.’
‘Assuming you’re asked,’ Jonah said. They were having lunch for the second time that week. Not a usual occurrence. He’d been surprised when Jonah had rung to invite him.
‘Ye of little faith. I’m the committee-man type. People think of me as solid and sensible.’
‘I won’t say anything about appearances being deceptive. You could always say no.’
Curle shook his head and, as an old friend who had a sense of his weaknesses, Jonah didn’t pursue it. Instead, he returned to the attack from a different direction. ‘Napier lays on a decent buffet, I hear. And the wine should be drinkable.’
‘Why are you so keen on me going?’
