The Endings Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

no. She likes detective stories. She’d no idea. To be honest,’ Todd said, ‘I’d feel silly saying I was sorry. We’re both different people.’
    ‘It was a long time ago,’ Curle agreed. ‘I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d forgotten it.’
    ‘You didn’t.’
    ‘I was the victim.’
    ‘That sounds like self-pity,’ Todd said and made a face at his own words. ‘All right, I am sorry. Though the truth is, I don’t remember in all that much detail, if you want me to be honest. I doubt if I’d have got in touch at all if it hadn’t been for something else in that article you wrote.’
    ‘Something else?’
    ‘It was what made my wife read to me. She had an idea it might help. God knows what she was thinking of. The times coincided, maybe that got to her.’
    ‘I can’t imagine what time you’re talking about.’
    ‘Eight years ago. Like you, I lost a child eight years ago.’
    Curle felt as if a hand was squeezing the air out of his lungs. With an effort, he said, ‘You’ve got that wrong. Eight years ago, my son was born.’

Chapter Eight
    That had been a wet night too, the night his son was born. He’d phoned the hospital and a nurse had told him nothing would happen till the morning. Later he’d learned that while the bitch was lying to him, his wife had been waving frantically to say he should come in because her pains were starting. She was in the intensive care unit because of high blood pressure and hating every moment of it, not least the attentions of the mad woman from the mental home who wandered around behind the great curve of her belly shaking the drips and smiling down in the night. Nothing till the morning and so he’d gone to that party and met the woman in the red dress and gone home with her, and at some point when they were fucking, the time against the wall in the lobby or the first or second time in the bed, some time around there his son had been born. He’d wakened half across the woman and gingerly unclutched her breast to roll as quietly as a thief out of her bed. At home he’d found the nurse’s call on the answerphone – his son had been born at half two in the morning.
    Mother and son both well. No deaths that night. It had been six years before that night that their five-year-old daughter Mae had been killed.
     
    After leaving Todd in the Club, he walked up the damp slope of Frederick Street, shining under the lamps, to where he’d left his car almost at the far end of George Street. Finding a parking place in Edinburgh was never easy. The events of Mae’s death churned in his mind like dirt from the bottom of a pool. Todd had leaned over the pool, stick in hand, and up it had all come.
    He had intended to go home after meeting Todd, but there was no way he could face Liz now, or Kerr either, not with that foulness of dirt swirling around the face of his dead daughter. He drove the car on automatic pilot to the building in which Ali Fleming had her flat, drove past it and parked three streets away. That was one of his precautions. There were others: like not taking a key for her flat, like not phoning her from his house, like not taking her out for meals or to the theatre or at all. That had been the way of things during their relationship. He was a cautious man, and she had accepted it, maybe because there were other men in her life, maybe because of some masochistic streak in her. Eight years, though, was a long time for a woman’s patience, whatever streak was in her, and a long enough time for luck to have played some part in their affair going undetected.
    That night, with his head full of Mae’s death, the luck ran out. He hit the buzzer and the bolt went back. As he climbed the carpeted stair to the third landing, sounds of laughter and voices drifted down to him. In all his visits, he’d never heard anything like it. All these years, he could recall passing anyone on the stairs only a handful of times. He froze, one foot raised, alert as a