The Last Darkness Read online

  Ramsay and the big man went out into the hall.

  Marak listened to the front door open and close. There was the sound of footsteps descending on stone. He sat down, gazed at the photograph. A man. You couldn’t look at this face and see any suggestion of evil. It was only a picture of an unfamiliar man looking back at you. A man you’d pass on the street without noticing him. But evil was rooted in the ordinary.

  He drifted, thought of wind blowing through dry scrub-land. He saw a Land Rover approach in a storm of dust. The vehicle stopped and the man who stepped out was his father. He wore a handkerchief, bandit-fashion, over his face. His father said, They don’t believe me.

  Marak said, You haven’t done anything.

  They say I am guilty, and I cannot prove otherwise.

  There has to be some way, Marak said.

  The sand blew, swirling around the Land Rover and into Marak’s eyes, and the handkerchief his father wore flapped up and down. Sunlight came ruined through stirred grit.

  There is no way. They say I’m a thief.

  Marak looked down at the photograph in his lap. The face, so bland and self-assured and well-fed, gazed back at him. Don’t ask me for pity, Marak thought. Because I have none.

  The well of mercy is dry.

  27

  Lou Perlman hurried quickly through freezing rain towards the entrance of his house. He stumbled over the girl huddled in the doorway, coat drawn up over her head, her knees clamped together.

  ‘Sadie?’

  She looked up at him. Rain fell into her eyes. ‘Riley said he’d kill me, Mr Perlman.’

  ‘Let’s get inside.’ Perlman unlocked the door. He helped her to her feet and led her into the house, and kick-slammed the door behind him. For years he’d considered going ex-directory, but the argument against that was simple for him: a public servant should be listed in a phone book. Accessible, accountable. He had nothing to hide. So clearly Sadie had looked up his name and found him.

  She was sodden. Hair, coat, blouse, jeans. What was he supposed to do with her? Step one. Show charity. He propelled her towards the kitchen, which was warm, and he stuck a kettle on the stove. He rubbed his hands together for heat.

  ‘You’ll need to get out of those clothes,’ he said. He recognized the old coat he’d given her.

  ‘I didn’t know where else to come,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right, love, it’s all right,’ he said, and he had the momentary panic of a lifelong bachelor presented with a baby whose nappy needs changing. What to do first?

  ‘Just get out of those clothes. I’ll make some tea.’

  ‘What will I wear?’ she asked.

  Step two. Find warm dry clothes. He ran upstairs, puffing, rummaged in his bedroom, found a thick flannel robe, stopped in the bathroom to grab a towel, and then rushed back downstairs. Sadie had already removed her coat, blouse and jeans. See nothing, he thought. She had fine small breasts. He held the robe out towards her, and the towel.

  ‘Dry your hair,’ he said. ‘But put the robe on first, eh?’

  She stood up. With his back to her, Perlman fussed with the kettle. He whistled, hummed. Boil, kettle, boil. He heard the sound of her wrapping herself in the robe.

  ‘Come nearer to the stove,’ he said. ‘Get warm.’ He touched her hand as he moved a chair from table to stove. ‘You’re ice, girl. How long have you been sitting out there?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t have a watch.’

  Step three. Make tea. He dropped a tea-bag, his last, into a cup, filled it with boiled water, rescued the bag and lowered it into a second cup, which he also filled with water. ‘Here, pet,’ and he passed her one of the cups.

  She blew on the surface and smiled at him.

  Oh, this is cosy, he thought, the policeman and the junkie, the warm Aga, the cups of tea, the beauty in the flannel robe. This was a picture, right enough. If you were paranoid you might imagine blackmail, a hidden snapper somewhere, click-click. He was weary enough to entertain such fantasies: fatigue was a crucifix, and he was nailed to it. He sipped his tea, hoping for a brief revival. But his eyelids were weighted with lead like the bases of those little Subbuteo football figures kids played with. Relax, relax, Lou. This is just an everyday occurrence at Chez Perlman, the flash of a lovely girl’s breasts, her nakedness swaddled in an old robe.

  He opened a packet of cigarettes, offered her one, and she took it. He lit hers first, then his own. Ever the gentleman. ‘You said Riley threatened you.’

  ‘With one of them knives people use to cut lino,’ she said.

  ‘A Stanley knife.’

  She nodded, sipped tea. Her dark hair was flat against her scalp. She looked childlike, lost, skittish. He gazed at the bruise on her face and felt a profound loathing for Riley.

  ‘You want to press charges?’

  ‘You know what’ll happen, Mr Perlman.’

  ‘Bail, then he’ll come looking for you.’

  ‘Great system, intit,’ she said.

  ‘Flawed to fuck,’ he said.

  She looked into her tea. ‘I’m scared.’

  Perlman set his cup on the edge of the stove and slipped off his glasses. He massaged his eyes. ‘I’d love to send a couple of big fat uniforms round to see him.’

  ‘What? Lean on him?’

  ‘Right.’

  Where the hell was he drifting with this kind of cockeyed notion? Two fat-necked red-faced uniforms looming up in Riley’s doorway with violent intent? Illicit use of force. Against the law. But the idea tempted him because this girl needed his protection. He gazed at her. Some kinds of beauty couldn’t be erased by narcotics. You could always see the remains of it. A flower battered and wilted by acid rain: it still held a little of its wonder. This Sadie was a bundle of possibilities. Was it too late to rescue her?

  Send me your junkies, your addicts yearning to be free.

  ‘Riley’s not your problem,’ she said.

  He finished his tea. Riley’s my problem all right, he thought. I’d be remiss if I ignored him. But the violent road wasn’t the way. Two huge cops in a doorway. It wasn’t an option.

  ‘Is it all right if I stay here tonight?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s a couch,’ he said. ‘It’s not great. I’ll show you.’

  They walked into the living room. He indicated the couch. Brown corduroy, old. How depressing it seemed. How drab this room. This whole bloody house. I should move. Pack up, head to the Southside, let my aunts find me a nice Jewish wife, matzo balls and chopped herring, tzimmes, blintzes, weddings and funerals and a slew of functions to attend. Shul even. A new life.

  But he was attached to the old one, that was the problem.

  Sadie looked at the photographs on the wall. ‘Family pictures?’

  ‘Some of them.’

  ‘I like old photos.’

  He picked up a newspaper from the couch and tossed it to the floor. ‘This okay for you?’

  ‘It’s fine, it’s great.’

  ‘I’ll find a blanket.’

  ‘Listen, are you sure you’re not bothered I’m here?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. A lie. I’m just a wee bit uneasy. He left the room. He discovered an old grey blanket in a closet. When he went back he found her looking at his record collection.

  ‘You like the old-fashioned LPs,’ she said.

  ‘It’s an age thing.’

  ‘CDs are more convenient. Take up less space. Or DVDs.’

  He spread the blanket. ‘This should keep you warm enough.’

  ‘Great,’ she said. She sat down. She rolled her head from side to side, relaxing.

  He said, ‘I need to get some sleep, Sadie. If you want anything, you know where the kitchen is. Slim pickings, though. A mouse working three shifts a day couldn’t make a living in the emporium that’s my kitchen. He’d strike. He’d call the other mice out for industrial action. All rodents down tools.’

  She smiled. She had perfect white teeth. A lot of users had teeth missing
, or rotten and discoloured. But not Sadie. Not yet. He was taken by an urge to press a paternal goodnight kiss on her brow. He resisted it.

  ‘You want me to leave the light on?’ he asked.

  ‘Please, I don’t like the dark,’ she said.

  ‘See you in the morning then.’ He stopped on the way out of the room, and his head filled up with a sense of the city stretching off into the rain, and the infinite permutations of relationships between inhabitants, the buzz of commerce, legal and illegal. He turned to look back at Sadie. ‘One question for you, love. Do you ever have dealings with a man called Terry Dogue?’

  ‘Now that would be clyping,’ she said.

  ‘Honour among dopers, eh? Come on, dear.’

  She ran both hands through her hair. ‘Okay. I’ve scored off him a few times.’

  ‘Where does he hang out these days?’

  ‘The last time I went to a flat in Ruchazie. I took a bus. I remember that. I went past Barlinnie Prison, and a golf course. I think.’

  ‘You remember the address?’

  She stretched the corners of her eyes with her fingertips and looked oriental. Perlman imagined her in a kimono. Sadie Geisha. She let her hands drift down to her lap. ‘Dunottar Street.’

  ‘Any number?’

  ‘Come on, lucky I remember the street, Mr Perlman.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He went into the kitchen and took the portable phone upstairs. The air in his bedroom was cold. He lit the gas fire. Yellow-blue flame burned. He undressed. He put on an old pair of pyjamas with a check pattern that had faded over the years. He shivered, sat on the edge of the bed, and telephoned Force HQ. He gave his name and asked to be connected to PC Murdoch. The operator had a hard nasal Glasgow accent. She brutalized her words. ‘Please hang on, Sergeant.’ It came out as Pleaz hing oan Sarjint.

  Perlman waited. He heard the couch creak downstairs. Sadie lying down, turning over, getting comfy. It was weird, somebody else in the house. A funny thing. A girl sleeps on your sofa and your solitude’s dynamited, and suddenly winter’s over and it’s nearly spring, hey nonny no.

  ‘Murdoch here, Sergeant Perlman.’

  ‘Do a wee job for me. See if you can locate a man called Terry Dogue. He might be at an address in Ruchazie. Dunnotar Street. I don’t have a number. You could ask for some assistance from Easterhouse Office, see if anybody there has a specific address.’

  ‘I’ll get on to it, Sergeant,’ Murdoch said.

  Easterhouse was where the ED Sub-Division operated along the extreme eastern edges of Glasgow. This area encompassed a number of housing schemes, Ruchazie, Garthamlock, Cranhill, Easterhouse itself, pebbledash gulags where Glasgow City Council had shipped many thousands of inner-city inhabitants in the late 1950s and early 1960s, an exodus from old tenement communities to a Promised Land that turned out to be a sorry deception in which people exchanged a familiar but decrepit world for barren estates, and a lack of social facilities, and every face belonged to a stranger. Instead of compassion and the friendship of your longtime neighbours, you got a brand-new two- or three-bedroom flat with hot and cold running water and, if you were lucky, a balcony.

  A balcony, Perlman thought.

  They took your known world away and they gave you a fucking verandah.

  You drank tea and looked out at people on other verandahs drinking tea. What was that all about? So you could imagine you were the sahibs of the schemes, lords of some new order?

  He turned off the lamp and lay down, pulling blankets up around his body. He shut his eyes and tried to let the day seep out of his mind. He thought of Billie Houston, and remembered the face of her attacker. Angular, dark-bearded: it wasn’t a face that smiled a lot. Who was he? And why had he throttled Terry Dogue? Simply because Terry had witnessed the attack on Billie – or was there another explanation Perlman couldn’t think of? He wondered about the identity of the man who’d taken Terry Dogue out of the hospital.

  The night was popping with questions. And he had no answers.

  He listened to the metallic tick of the cheap alarm-clock. Typical this, sleepy – and his damned head wouldn’t stop churning. He thought of Colin, his damaged heart, the operation. And Miriam, dear Miriam’s concerns. He felt privileged that she’d chosen him as the repository for her fears. She’d needed him. He remembered the feel of her hand on his. That intimacy. You’re far too old to be infatuated, Perlman. Infatuation is what you grow out of, you alter bokher.

  And he slid to sleep, down into the black canyons, and he woke only when he heard the girl climb into bed beside him.

  ‘I’m cold downstairs,’ she said. ‘D’you mind me coming up to your room?’

  He felt her body against him. How long since he’d shared his bed with a woman? Oh, Christ, years: he lived a monastic life. He occupied a cell of his own making. Was Sadie really cold, or was this some skimpy pretext, and she wanted to screw? Vulnerable and attractive – what in Christ’s name could she possibly see in him?

  Easy. You’re kind and generous to her. Hers is a brute world. Scraping along, scoring dope. Living in fear of an arsehole like Riley. And you, Lou, you’re fatherly. She doesn’t have a father. That’s it. She’s a frightened wee girl a long way from home.

  She caught one of his hands and rubbed it between her palms. ‘Nobody ever gave me the coat off his back before,’ she said. ‘I want to give you something in return.’

  ‘There’s nothing I want, Sadie.’

  ‘You don’t find me attractive, eh?’

  ‘No, you’re beautiful.’

  ‘You say the nicest things. Here I am. All yours.’

  He turned on the lamp. He looked into her face. He hoped he appeared stern, resolute. Her eyes were dark, appealing. Please take me, Perlman.

  ‘You want me to go back downstairs?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he said.

  ‘If you’re worried about Aids, don’t be. Honest, I’m HIV-neg.’

  How foreplay had changed since his heyday. Here’s the result of my clinical test, love. Now can we get down to it? He said, ‘I’m sure you’re clean, love. Look, I’m almost fifty-six years old, and I appreciate your offer, it’s generous beyond anything I deserve. It’s just – I’m not a one-night-stand sort of person,’ and he knew this was a lie, he desired her, in the muted light of the bedside lamp she looked alluring. But also innocent and easy to hurt, and he wanted to enclose her in his arms and just hold her and tell her the world was going to be fresh and clean again, if she gave it a chance, if she worked at it. His head was filled with conflict.

  He felt a faint tingle in his scrotum, electrodes of sexual longing.

  ‘Sadie, love. This isn’t the way.’

  ‘Okay, you tell me the way, you tell me what you want.’

  ‘You sleep here. I’ll take the couch.’

  ‘It’s not how I want it, Lou.’

  ‘It’s the way it has to be, love.’

  He shoved the blanket aside and stepped out of bed. I’m crazy, he thought. Leaving this girl and a warm bed for solitude on an uncomfortable couch. A bed of stones. What was he – some Jewish mystic, dressed only in a loincloth, freezing his willie off in the desert?

  She said, ‘I want to thank you.’

  ‘No need,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t remember the last time anyone’s been so kind.’

  ‘I’m not looking for repayment, Sadie.’

  ‘I’ll fuck you, Lou. Whatever you fancy.’

  ‘No, love, no.’ He moved out of the room before she could say anything else, because sooner or later he’d falter, and he’d be unable to convince himself that he should leave, and he’d get back in bed and they’d make love, or some semblance of it, and for a few minutes he’d be gratified, then when morning came he’d feel bad because he was just another bandit who’d used this girl, he was only one short rung up the moral ladder from that fuckwit Riley. And he wanted to believe he was better than that.

  I don’t want to fuck you, he thought.

&n
bsp; Only to help. A helping hand. Accept that, lassie. You owe me damn all. But in Sadie’s world when somebody did you a good turn, you owed that person. You paid back with the only thing you had. The debt was cleared.

  Downstairs he lit a cigarette and lay on the couch with his eyes open. He felt tense and cramped, and his groin ached, and for a moment he thought – what the fuck difference will it make if I go back upstairs? would a spoke get twisted out of shape in the great cosmic wheel if an ageing Glasgow cop got it on with a junkie girl he’d busted a few years before? Man, woman, cop, junkie, these liaisons happened, desire, mad lust, what did it matter? You could always avert your eyes at dawn.

  He crushed his cigarette out in an empty teacup and thought of an old truism: a fuck missed is a fuck missed. Stay upstairs, Sadie. Don’t come down here. He summoned pictures of Miriam. He thought of her splattering a big canvas with paint, bold strokes of a brush. He imagined her standing outside the synagogue in Garnethill, the light-show of Glasgow spread beneath. Miriam Miriam. He adored the name, the way it began and ended with the same letter. The perfection of that closure. Eventually he floated into sleep listening to rain. It was a sleep so deep he didn’t hear Sadie descend nor did he feel her kiss him lightly on the side of his face before she let herself out of the house and into the wet morning-dark streets of Egypt.

  28

  Artie Wexler woke afraid and confused. The red digital numbers of the bedside clock shimmered like the scales of tropical fish in shallow water. He had a sense of his throat closing, but he knew no physical agent was responsible for it, it belonged in the dream he’d just aroused himself from – dream? no, more a nightmare of a cold lime-green room and ornate iron grating overhead and the shadow of a man walking back and forth above him. The click of steel-tipped shoes on metal.

  He was dry as a dead fire, needed water, reached for the glass he usually left beside the clock, couldn’t find it. He sat up. He remembered he’d taken one of Ruthie’s sleepers, maybe that was what had dehydrated him –

  The dream had been about money. Right.

  Tell me Artie, you remember taking that money?

  Perlman’s voice in the dream, and yet not; the way of dreams was to buff the edge of the known and replace anything familiar with a skewed facsimile.