Free The Endings Man by Frederic Lindsay

trying to get himself kicked out.’
    Unconsciously, did he mean? As one himself, Curle was deeply sceptical of amateur psychologists. He mumbled what might have passed more or less for an agreement of sorts, which brought Fairbairn to a halt. He reopened the door, offered his hand again and said, ‘Best ignore all that, eh? I know I can count on your discretion.’ He laughed. ‘Doesn’t matter since you’ll never see him again.’
    Curle was in the lift before he allowed himself a smile. A writer’s discretion, he thought, there’s an oxymoron.

Chapter Fifteen
    On a balance of probabilities, the best estimate was that Ali Fleming had died in the last hours of the previous day. Somewhere around the time on the following morning when Curle was leaving the office of ACC Fairbairn, the stillness of the dead woman’s flat was being disturbed by the persistent ringing of the bell on the street door. The owner of the small agency where she worked had stopped by on his way to lunch. It was by chance that the design she had been working on was urgently needed. At a loss, sure that she would have phoned to explain if she was ill, her employer came back to try again just after five in the afternoon. By coincidence, Bobbie Haskell arrived home to find him there and, having heard of his anxiety, used his key to let them both in from the street. Repeated knocking, followed by banging, on the door of her flat brought no response.
    Haskell repeated the performance twice that evening with the same lack of response. The following morning he delayed going to work until he could phone the agency where Ali had worked, using the number the owner had left him. Learning that she still hadn’t appeared, he went down and beat such a tattoo on her door that her downstairs neighbour, a widow in her late fifties, came up to enquire about the disturbance. She volunteered theinformation that when she had been sitting up in bed reading, not the previous night but the one before, she had been startled by ‘thumping’ noises from upstairs. This confidence led to a long conference about what they might do, which ended only when Haskell, torn about being so late for work, trailed off indecisively to the bookshop. It was the widow, Mrs Eva Johanson, who having spent much of the day pondering her anxiety made the call to the police, which led to the discovery of the body that evening. Soon after, the process was initiated which brought to the building and filled the rooms of the flat with scene of crime officers for pictures, swabs, fingerprints, and a medical examiner and detectives under the senior officer available when the call came.
    It was then almost sixty hours after Ali Fleming’s death, just before noon on the Friday morning, before Curle was summoned from his study by his wife.
    ‘There’s a policeman wanting to speak to you,’ Liz told him.
    He pushed to roll back his chair from the computer and stared at her.
    ‘A policeman?’ Like most people, he associated a visit from a policeman with news of some accident or mishap. ‘It’s not Kerr?’ As he spoke his son’s name, his stomach sank in fear.
    ‘Oh, God,’ she said, as if the idea had just forced itself upon her.
    When he followed her into the front room and saw that the taller of the two men waiting for them was Meldrum, his first reaction was relief. They weren’t here about Kerr. This was followed by something like embarrassment for it occurred to him that perhaps Meldrum had been ordered to apologise to him. He even had time in the hurry of histhoughts to consider that the second policeman might be there as a witness to sharpen the penance or to make sure it had been undertaken at all.
    As if they hadn’t met, Meldrum introduced himself and then his companion, ‘DS McGuigan.’
    Still caught in the improbable scenario of an apology, Curle asked, ‘It is just me you want to see?’
    It was Liz’s turn to look relieved.
    After she had left the room, Meldrum asked,