The Endings Man by Frederic Lindsay

she’d killed him because he’d fallen too much in love with her and wanted to tell the world. The playfulness of reversing the usual roles played by the sexes had pleased him. Queen Kong. Ms Hyde. Cancer of the testicles. Punishment for adultery.
    He was on his feet.
    ‘I’ve had enough of this. There was no need for me to come here. All that stuff about the letters, it’s all forgotten. As far as I’m concerned, all forgotten.’
    Negotiation concluded.
    They rode back to Edinburgh in silence. He stared straight ahead all the way, not risking a glance at his companion. Time enough later, he thought, to try to work out what Meldrum had thought he was doing, what had possessed him, what had been going on. However irrationally, for the moment he felt endangered and just wanted the journey to be over. Weakly he muttered some kind of conventional parting as he got out of the car, but the policeman drove off without a word.

Chapter Twelve
    It came as a shock to Curle to realise that even Jonah Murray, who’d been there, didn’t understand what being bullied by Brian Todd had meant to him. He’d been thirteen when it began and it had lasted for only eighteen months: too old, it might be natural to assume, to be deeply marked by a suffering that had lasted for such a limited time. When he thought of that assumption, though, he recalled how on two or three occasions, into his twenties, brooding over the memory of Todd had turned into a calculation as to how long that dark cloud had hung physically over his existence and how the answer always brought a reaction of disbelief. Only eighteen months! When he came across one or another popularisation of Einstein, he’d had no difficulty in accepting the idea that time was relative.
    One day he’d come home in such despair that he had tried to tell his father, that weak pleasant man, what was going on. It had taken an effort even to begin but his father had seemed to be listening, gathering his son down beside him where he sat slack in the big chair. The story had been painfully hard to put into words for he could not help feeling that the fault was his, and the guilt made him ashamed. He might not have managed at all if it had not been for the protective weight of his father’s arm laidreassuringly across his shoulder. At last he’d come stumbling to a finish, and sat staring at the picture of his mother that had been brought down from the bedroom. The silence stretched as he waited for a verdict until he wondered if what he had confessed was too shameful to be worth a response; but when he summoned the courage to look up he saw that his father had fallen asleep, mouth open and just then dribbling a first snore.
    Around that time, his grandmother had begun to question him as to how often his father came home early from the office, and in a roundabout fashion that soon became insistent and open as to whether or not he had been drinking. He had lied and later would wonder whether something might have been done if he had become her willing spy. As he grew older, however, he encountered other men in the process of falling apart and there didn’t ever seem much chance of stopping any of them. Fortunately, it had taken another eight years before his father went bankrupt so that by the time it happened he was finished with university and no longer dependent.
    His life had gone awry when his mother died. Todd had paid him no attention before her death. A shark can detect minute dilutions of blood in the water. The bully smells unhappiness.
    And now, aided by Jonah, Todd had come back into his life. Over a couple of weeks, there he was, at a dinner given by an acquaintance, at the theatre, at a private view at the Scottish Gallery.
    On the last Tuesday of the month, then, it was no surprise to see him among a group of people drinking wine in a room of the National Library while they waited for the reading to begin.
    It didn’t help that his approach was that of an old