The Last Darkness Page 12

  Perlman interrupted. ‘You have my sympathy. You’re doing a terrific job. Can Dogue talk?’

  ‘There’s damage to the larynx and if he tries too hard to speak the damage may well be permanent.’

  ‘We’ll need a minute of his time,’ Perlman said.

  Nimmo sighed. ‘Spare room. Last door on the left. We’re awfully short of space. One minute.’ He dashed off, white coat rising behind like a sail in an updraft.

  Scullion and Perlman entered a room that was in disarray, a half-dozen empty beds stripped of sheets, bed-screens, cardboard boxes filled with bottles of disinfectant, a rubber bucket that caught leaks from a dripping overhead pipe. A single low-wattage lightbulb was screwed into the wall and cast a sad light. The back rooms of the NHS. The underbelly. Forty watts and leaking pipes. What did that scream about the system? Perlman surveyed the place. There was no evidence of Terry Dogue in the clutter.

  ‘Check behind the screens,’ Scullion said.

  Both men did. No Dogue. Just more empty beds. One had been used recently. The pillow was indented, and damp where the last sliver of an ice-cube melted. Probably Dogue had been given an ice-pack to hold to his throat, and a single cube had slipped loose when he’d decided to get out of bed and scarper.

  Perlman stepped into the corridor. Scullion followed him. Nurses hurried this way and that, the child with the nail in her nose still screamed, a young man with half of his left leg missing lay unconscious on a gurney pushed by orderlies who formed a blood-soaked caravan. Perlman thought it was like rushing through a nightmare that just kept coming at you. He took off his glasses. The lenses were streaked. The world was sometimes better viewed without them. Edges softened, nobody was wrinkled, nobody grew old in this world.

  He stuck them back on and saw the Irish nurse again. She was bent over the face of a very old man, and she had a cotton swab in her hand she was trying to apply to the man’s eye.

  ‘It was a fly,’ the man said. ‘Flew right in. Cheeky bastard. Gonny hurry, nurse.’

  ‘Hold your head still, Mr Mckay.’

  ‘I can feel the fucker crawl in there. Probably laying bloody eggs.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ She rolled his eyelid back and peered into the white.

  Perlman interrupted her. ‘Dogue’s gone.’

  ‘I know. Daft old gobshite. I saw him leave five minutes ago. Couldn’t stop him. This isn’t a jail.’

  ‘Did he leave on his own?’

  ‘He had company. Jaysus, will you hold your head still, Mr Mckay?’

  ‘Come on, nurse. Get that damn fly out before my head’s filled with maggots,’ the old man said.

  ‘Can you describe the company?’ Perlman asked.

  ‘One man. Tall. Very very wet. He had a coat, looked sort of old-fashioned. Long, sort of a jacket more than a coat. Black velvet collar. What do you call these people who think it’s still the early 1960s?’

  ‘Beatniks?’

  ‘No. Oh, what’s the term? Teddy Boys?’

  Teds. Teddy Boys. Perlman remembered them. Their world was lost and sunken, mainly found nowadays in souvenir or nostalgia shops. Shoes with fat crepe soles. Stovepipe trousers. Long sideburns. The Teds were anathema to parents who had wild-spirited teenage daughters. You rarely saw them any more. Now and then some ageing geezer could be spotted wandering along in full Edwardian gear. A curiosity.

  ‘They left in a rush,’ the nurse said.

  Perlman thanked her. He and Scullion hurried along the corridor in the direction of the exit. They stood behind the glass doors and scanned the car park for a sign of a car zooming off, or two figures running through the vile weather.

  Nothing, nobody out there.

  Perlman sighed and said, ‘So what have we got, Sandy? Dogue’s in the parking garage at the same time as the bearded guy. The Arab, as Billie Houston described him. Then this “Arab” attacks Dogue. Do we know why? No, we don’t. Was Dogue just loitering with intent? Did he fancy breaking into a car? Was he following the Arab, for some fiendish purpose of his own? A mugging? Fucked if I know. Then Terry skips hospital, accompanied by this … Teddy Boy. I’m not all that worried about Dogue. I just wonder who his companion is. Anyway, Terry’s not going far. I don’t think he’s ever left Glasgow in his life. He’d have withdrawal symptoms and nosebleeds a few miles beyond the city limits. I’ll give young Murdoch a bell, and get him to check on Dogue’s last known address. Meantime, I’m going home, get an early start in the morning. I’ll drop you off at Pitt Street if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll make sure we get prints of the attacker and float them into circulation tonight.’

  Perlman thought of pictures going out to the various Sub-Divisions throughout the Strathclyde Region. He pondered the assailant’s young face, the intensity of expression, and how upset he’d looked when he struck Billie Houston. Did he feel just as bad about throttling Terry Dogue, or did his regret extend only to women? Maybe he’d broken a rule of his own code of ethics: you don’t hit women. He didn’t look brutal. It wasn’t a thug’s face.

  Scullion said, ‘There’s also been the usual babble of media inquiries about the case of the hanging man, and I’ll have to deal with that. The telly people grind you down. I hate making public statements anyway.’

  ‘What’s the party line?’

  ‘Apparent suicide,’ Scullion said. ‘For the moment.’

  ‘The hacks and hackettes will love you to death for that one. They always want a murder. Suspicious circumstances at the very least.’

  ‘They’ll have to be disappointed for a day or so. I pilfered a photograph of Lindsay from his house. I’ll give them that much.’

  ‘You still happen to have that key to Lindsay’s? I thought I’d drop in there on my way home.’

  ‘Since when was Langside on your way home?’

  ‘Have you never taken a detour in your life, Sandy?’

  ‘I always regretted it when I did,’ Scullion said.

  They went outside. The night chucked sleet at them with the abandon of an enraged wife throwing cutlery at an errant husband. The car park was slushy, goor roaring in gutters.

  ‘Ready to make a run?’ Perlman asked.

  ‘Any time you like.’

  Perlman pushed the door open, and the night pounded him like the hoofs of an icy black cavalry. He ran as fast as he could across the car park and by the time he reached the Mondeo he was chilled deep into the bone, he couldn’t catch his breath, and slicks of icy water slid down the surface of his glasses, blinding him.

  24

  The Kelvin, a tributary of the Clyde, flowed in spate between Glasgow University and Kelvingrove Park. In summer, the banks were leafy and pleasant to walk; on a vicious winter night, when the Kelvin churned, the place was wild and hostile. Empty plastic bags, casually discarded by pedestrians, were snared on bushes and trees, and crackled under the force of wind and hard rain.

  BJ Quick said, ‘He fucking saw you, he fucking saw you, wee man. That was the first mistake.’

  Terry Dogue’s voice was an emphysematous whisper. ‘He tried to kill me, BJ.’

  Quick said, ‘You were supposed to be a shadow. But no, he sees you. He spots you.’

  ‘No big deal,’ Dogue whispered.

  ‘No big deal?’ He slung an arm round Dogue’s shoulder and walked the wee man to the edge of the muddy bank where water, whipped well and frothed, roared past. ‘Let me explain it, Dogue. The fellow sees you and then gives you a bit of a hammering.’

  ‘He choked me,’ Dogue croaked.

  ‘And the consequences of this choking? The kindness of strangers allows wee Terry to be whisked off to the Royal for treatment. The doctor examines you, you babble too many details of the attack –’

  ‘Had to tell him something –’

  ‘But why the truth, for fuck’s sake? You could’ve said you got your head stuck in a revolving door, Terry. You could’ve said you were choked by an athletic hooker while you were head down in her muff. You
didn’t have to say you were attacked by a madman. You have no fucking imagination. Does he, Furf? No imagination.’

  ‘None.’ Furfee stood straight-backed and indifferent to the sleet. Once a Private in the Scots Guards – discharged after he’d drunkenly razored an eyeball out of a hoor in a Libyan brothel – he was accustomed to an assortment of climates.

  Quick rubbed water from his eyes and said, ‘The thing is, Terry, these doctors make reports to the police. See where I’m going with this?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking.’ Terry Dogue didn’t like the weight of Quick’s arm round his neck. That whole area was sensitive. Cold water soaked through his baseball hat. He felt like a dookit Halloween apple.

  ‘You should always be thinking, Terry. Always.’ Open-handed, Quick smacked the back of Dogue’s head with a wet hand. Once, twice, a third time for emphasis.

  ‘Hurtsssss,’ Dogue whimpered.

  ‘Consider this, Terry. The doc’s report lands on some cop’s desk. He sees your name – a name you were fucking idiot enough to give the fucking doctor in the first place. And that was mistake number two. The cop says, aye aye, somebody did a serious number on wee Terry. What’s this all about? So this cop thinks, smells juicy, I’ll check into it, might be drug-connected. Mibbe I’ll squeeze some information out of the wee man. Mibbe I’ll get news of a drug deal and I’ll look good and I’ll get promoted. Cops think that way.’

  Dogue shook his head vehemently. ‘Naw, naw –’

  ‘Terry. Your breaking point is so close to the surface you can practically see it under your skin. A few questions, a wee bit of pressure, and you’d tell the polis anything.’

  ‘Naw, BJ. Swear to God.’

  ‘I can fucking hear it now. I was doing a job for BJ, following this Arab tit about – and then before you know it, Terry, the shite lands on my fucking doorstep, and I’m left there to take the heat, I’m standing there trying to answer questions, who’s this Arab, why are you having him followed, and okay, I can fucking lie to these cop cunts and get them out my hair for a wee while, but at the same time I’ve probably ruined the work I’m being paid to do, which means no more fucking income, and quite likely some violence coming down on my head from people I don’t want to know, Terry. And I value my scalp, wee man. I seriously do. Are you seeing where I’m going?’

  ‘Naw,’ Dogue said. Flagstaff, I wanna be in Flagstaff. Fly me there. Take me home, country roads. Take me to the tall pines. I dream of the valleys and the San Francisco Peaks.

  ‘You’d land me in the shite,’ BJ Quick roared, and squeezed harder on Terry Dogue’s neck. ‘Five minutes, mibbe ten, and you’d be singing to the fucking cops like Madonna. And that’s a risk. Intit, Furf?’

  ‘High risk,’ Furfee said.

  ‘I blame myself,’ Quick said. ‘I selected the wrong man for the job. Simple as that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t speak,’ Dogue said.

  ‘Too big a chance for me to take, Terry.’

  Dogue suddenly felt weird, as if he was somehow floating over the sleet level. Maybe a consequence of the painkillers he got at the Royal. Or else connected to the dread that devoured him. His baseball cap felt like a band of cold wet steel on his skull and his heart was going like a bell calling the faithful to Mass. He opened his mouth to speak and it filled up with ice-cold water and his larynx felt like raw hamburger. The river churned past, threatening to rise and engulf the whole world. Somewhere high above were a few points of light from the University, specks in the sleety mist.

  ‘I’m sorry, I am,’ Quick said.

  ‘Sorry –’

  ‘Furf,’ Quick said.

  Furf said, ‘Wilco.’

  ‘Naw naw naw,’ Dogue whispered. ‘Please, BJ. Oh please, I’ll do anything, I’ll lie, I’ll tell the polis nothing –’

  Furfee gripped Dogue by the neck and dragged him moaning and kicking and clawing to the edge of the Kelvin and forced him to his knees in the wet grass and sodden broken-necked nettles, and just as he opened the blade of his razor and drew a single line across Dogue’s throat, like a man slaughtering a sacrificial creature, Terry clamped his teeth into Furfee’s knuckles and whispered The Monte Vista Hotel, ya bastart, as if it was the first phrase in a prayer of deep longing, and Furfee said, ‘Fucker,’ and finished the cut with one last angry stroke.

  Dogue fell face forward and Furfee rolled him into the river with the toe of his sodden blue suede shoe. The little man floated in a flamingo-tinted rinse down through the black waters of the Kelvin.

  ‘Let’s fuck off out of here,’ BJ Quick said.

  ‘Cool,’ Furfee said.

  Quick said, ‘I need a bloody good drink.’

  ‘Just the job.’

  They walked to a pub called the Brewery Taps at the extreme western end of Sauchiehall Street. They were drenched by the time they reached it. The place was empty.

  ‘Two pints of heavy,’ BJ Quick said to the barman. ‘Graveyard in here, intit?’

  The barman, whose name was Bear, had the chest and arms of a weight-lifter. He pulled two pints. ‘Aye, the weather keeps people at home, BJ.’

  ‘No kidding,’ Quick said.

  ‘I think money’s short as well,’ the barman said. ‘Mibbe a recession coming.’

  ‘When is there never a bloody fucking recession coming, Bear?’ Quick didn’t want to hear about such shite. All he wanted was to reopen his club, and great wealth would follow. Media profile: BJ Quick, Owner of club farraday – lower case made it feel more hip, gave it more cred – speaks freely of his success.

  Recession. Shag that.

  The barman said, ‘By the by, got something for you.’ He reached under the counter and produced a manila envelope. He slid it across the bar and Quick picked it up.

  ‘Who left this?’ Quick asked.

  ‘A delivery-boy on a bike. Same boy as before.’

  Quick took the envelope, opened it carefully when he was at a table, glanced at the photograph, saw a man’s face stare back at him. He flicked the pic over and registered the name, but at some level he really didn’t want to know. Normally he valued information as a commodity. But the vibes right then were not copacetic. He stuck the thing in the pocket of his coat. He’d deliver it to the Arab.

  Quick thought: Fuck me, this is crazy. Somebody on the end of a phoneline tells you you’ll get twenty K in two halves, and all you have to do is carry messages to this third party, this Arab. Clean hands, in and out. Easy-ozey. No questions asked.

  He swallowed half his beer.

  club farraday here we come in neon. The Rajah of Quick is coming HOME, Glasgow. I’ll kick King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut and any other competition into the Clyde.

  Somebody on the end of the bloody phoneline.

  Somebody you never met. Somebody who says he sympathizes with your ‘fiscal’ problems.

  Ten K gets delivered by messenger to the Brewery Taps. Crinkly old notes. Instructions attached. Pick up a certain guy in a certain place at a certain time. Drive him to an address in Maryhill. Key enclosed. Provide him with occasional information. Keep an eye on him, watch his moves.

  That’s all you have to do. No unlawful act involved. No nasty strings.

  Who the hell are you? BJ Quick had asked.

  You don’t need to know that. Think of me as your Santa Claus, Mr Quick.

  Quick didn’t recognize the voice. He thought at first the accent was Edinburgh, maybe some posh part like Morningside. But the accent during the second call was different, raw Glaswegian. Maybe the second call had been made by a another person altogether. Maybe maybe maybe. He wondered often who was behind the deal. He knew a lot of dodgy people, so there was a cartload of candidates. His business problems were well documented, and his private life had been exposed in a Glasgow tabloid pursuing a vendetta against him: a tangle of alimony demands, an affair with a teenage lap-dancer, nooners with a convent schoolgirl. One headline had read: Club Czar’s Convent Conquest. There was also an alleged connection with a paedophile ring. (O
kay, so he sometimes scanned certain borderline websites. So what? So did a lot of people.) Anyone with a need for utter discretion may have surveyed the wreckage of Quick’s life and said to himself: This is the git I’d hire for a dubious job.

  Furfee drank half his pint and belched. He sat down and gazed at the TV. BJ Quick sat beside him.

  ‘I hope Dogue didn’t have rabies,’ Furfee said, and looked at his hand.

  Both men stared at the telly for a time.

  Quick finished his pint and when he reached the end of his drink he saw, through the base of the glass, a distorted image of the screen: as a fish might see things, he thought. The photograph of a black-haired man floated in the bevelled disc of sudsy glass.

  I know that face, Quick thought, and the thought speared him.

  A TV voice said: Joseph Lindsay, sixty-two, was a Glasgow solicitor …

  There was a stock shot of a bridge.

  He was found shortly after midnight hanging from Central Station railway bridge, an apparent suicide …

  A police spokesman, whose name came up on the screen as Detective-Inspector Scullion, said, ‘He left no note, the investigation is ongoing …’

  The glass slipped from Quick’s hand and shattered on the floor.

  ‘You awright?’ the barman called out.

  ‘Wee accident,’ BJ Quick said.

  ‘No problem, squire,’ the barman said. ‘I’ll clean it up.’

  BJ Quick looked at Furfee, who was staring at the TV as if hypnotized, and said, ‘What the fuck.’

  25

  Perlman parked outside Lindsay’s redbrick house in Langside. He got out of the Ford, surveyed the area at the front of the house. No car, no garage attached to the house. He slipped the house-key into the front-door lock, stepped inside. The air smelled of expiry, flowers rotting in stagnant water in a distant room.

  He turned on lights as he walked. Comfortable home, the kind of furniture that was expensive and solid and built to last until the apocalypse. Dark patterns, dark carpets, brown velvet curtains: all too heavy, Perlman thought. Too funeral parlour.

  In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator. He found a slab of cold lamb, sniffed it, plucked a big pink chunk from the bone and chewed on it. When had he eaten last? He couldn’t remember lunch. He poured a glass of flat seltzer water from a bottle, washed down the lamb, then wiped his greasy fingertips in a paper towel.