The Last Darkness Page 16

  ‘Some things just knock the feet out from under you, Lou,’ she said.

  ‘Aye, don’t they,’ Perlman said. He caught a whiff of her cologne, a bit on the peachy side, just enough to remind you of better seasons and happier places. ‘Sid says a sword.’

  Mary Gibson said, ‘I think he’s right. You knew Artie Wexler, Sandy’s been telling me.’

  ‘A little,’ Lou said. ‘From the old days.’

  ‘Anyone or anything come to mind?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’ Perlman lit a cigarette. Rain dampened the paper. ‘Where’s Ruth Wexler?’

  ‘Indoors. Sedated. Can I have one of your cigarettes, Lou?’

  ‘Sure. Help yourself.’ He offered Mary Gibson the packet. She took a cigarette and he lit it for her. Sedated, the only way for Ruth to be. But she had to wake some time and the horror was going to detonate in her face.

  ‘First one in months,’ Mary Gibson said, and dragged deeply.

  ‘Good time for bad habits,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Ruth was the one who discovered the body. She came down looking for her husband at around eight, as far as I can gather, she became hysterical, alerted her neighbours …’

  Discovering Artie. Discovering your husband like that. Perlman thought of the rich suburb all around him, the walls and electronic gates designed to keep out the scruff and the mad and the disenfranchised, the elaborate security systems configured to help you sleep at night. Nobody’s safe. Not in this world. Not in this swank little Southside corner of Glasgow with its green enclaves and high-tech alarm systems. A swordsman in the dark. He could hear the rumblings of fear behind the wired gates and steel-shuttered windows as one hears the first deep stirrings of an earthquake.

  Okay, he hadn’t exactly liked Wexler, but who would wish such a termination on him, so vile an ending? He felt drained, angry with the kind of anger that has nowhere to go but twist back in on itself like a reptile. He heard it hiss in his head, this serpent thing that inhabited a place beyond language.

  Sandy Scullion said, ‘The body’s inside, Lou. We moved it out of the rain. You want to see it?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Neither did I, Lou.’

  Perlman stared through broken glass patio doors into the interior of the house. Figures moved in the gloom. A flashbulb popped a couple of times. I don’t want to go in there. Perlman’s mind drifted to Lindsay, the cocaine-filled rubber shoved into his mouth, here, swallow that. Now Artie Wexler, sword-split, cleaved, sinking in the water of his pool.

  ‘Let’s go indoors,’ Mary Gibson said. ‘At least it’s dry.’

  Perlman followed her through the broken doors. He saw rain on slivers of glass, and a single bamboo wind chime that hung from a bent wire. Two photographers moved around with unusual restraint. Fingerprint guys did their thing softly. Murder was a way of life for some people. It kept them busy, gave them income. Their salary was blood money.

  Sandy Scullion suggested they go inside the kitchen. Perlman was dazzled by the steel surfaces of the room. The granite countertops were smooth. Very modish, this pseudo-industrial decor. He remembered Wexler’s face in the white beams of the Mondeo outside Lindsay’s house, that expression of – what? Surprise? Surprised by what? Perlman had a giddy moment, as if he were about to lose his balance. He clutched the edge of a counter and held on and the feeling went away. Murder on an empty stomach. It created mutiny among the intestinal acids.

  Scullion said, ‘As far as we can reconstruct this, Artie Wexler got up in the night and came downstairs – maybe he heard a noise, we’ll never know – and somebody attacked him with a weapon, probably a sword, and he fell through the glass doors of the patio and he just kept backtracking to the edge of the pool. Judging from the blood patterns – admittedly disturbed by rainfall – he was struck once before he fell through the doors, and a second time when he was a few feet from the pool. The first blow was into the chest. The second was, well, the neck.’

  Blow. This word softened the reality. Blow was what you did when you funnelled your lips and expelled air. ‘How did this fucker get indoors?’ Perlman asked. He glanced at Mary Gibson and he wanted to apologize for his language, but all the little etiquettes of acceptable behaviour had been cancelled in the circumstances. ‘There’s a security system, I saw the electronic keypad as we came inside, so how did this guy get in?’

  Scullion said, ‘We’re not sure how he got round the system. We do know he killed the dog.’

  ‘How?’ Perlman said.

  ‘The same way as Wexler,’ Scullion said. He looked pallid.

  ‘He took a sword to the dog?’

  ‘The dog was decapitated, Lou,’ Mary Gibson said. ‘We can safely assume the assailant killed the dog first, to silence it, and then entered the house. As Sandy says, we don’t know how the killer circumvented the security system. There’s no evidence of a break-in.’

  ‘Then maybe somebody had a key,’ Lou Perlman said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Or Wexler himself let the killer in.’

  ‘Another possibility,’ Scullion said.

  Perlman closed his eyes a second: welcome darkness. Except he had weird flashing impressions under his eyelids. ‘Let’s say he entered the house with a key. Start with that. If he had a key, then either he’d obtained it illegally, or Wexler had given him one. Right?’

  ‘The only person who could possibly tell us about anyone having a spare key is Ruth,’ Scullion said.

  ‘So that leaves us tapping our fingers until she wakes,’ Perlman said. ‘Unless anybody feels like rousing her before the sedative wears off.’

  ‘Let her sleep,’ Mary Gibson said. ‘There’s no guarantee she’ll be in any state to tell us anything when she wakes, Lou. Who knows what she’ll be like? And I don’t want to bring her back into the world right at this moment, because she’s going to have a rotten enough time when she comes out of that sleep normally …’

  Perlman agreed. It was the wise thing, the charitable thing. He walked to the doorway and looked into the living room. He thought: keys, fucking keys, it was more than a matter of security systems and locked doors that disconcerted him, more than the brutality of Wexler’s murder that perturbed him. Far more. He knew he’d have to go places he didn’t want to go, and think thoughts he had no desire to entertain. And he ran a hand down his face in a tired massaging motion, and tried to conjure up something warm and good, Sadie’s face in his bed, say, or Miriam’s touch, but cheering images were as thin on the ground as lilacs in frost.

  He had a feeling of quiet desolation.

  He stepped into the living room. He was aware of Linklater on the edge of his vision, and the fingerprint guys, and two medics in green coats making shadows in the frame of the patio doors, and a photographer saying I’ve got what I need now. Perlman knew this snapper, a white-bearded man called Robbie McPhail, AKA Rumbleguts, because of his generally miserable demeanour and his obsession with the movement of his bowels. I’m passing what looks like Guinness, he’d say. Or I’m hours on the lavvy and it’s all thunder, no lightning, catch my drift?

  Perlman stopped, stood very still, held his breath.

  The body lay on a massage-table, the kind you can fold up and carry away. A sheet covered it. The photographers would have taken pictures of Wexler in the pool before uniforms drew the corpse out of water and carried it inside. Perlman observed Linklater pull back the sheet and study the body, as if some new possibility had just occurred to the young forensics expert.

  He found himself staring at Wexler’s bare white shoulders and the red raw stump of neck, as devastating to the eye as something hung on an abattoir hook. Linklater said nnnnn, covering the corpse with the sheet and stepping back, lost in his own little world of death and echoes.

  Perlman turned from the body, wondered where the head was, and then saw it on the coffee table wrapped in clear plastic of the kind you use to preserve leftover food, laid in a foam cooler and surrounded b
y ice, and weirdly fetal in appearance, a being half-formed and emerging. He was spooked by the sight of Artie’s blind red eyes staring through creased plastic into absolute infinity, and the discoloured lips parted as if a word had been frozen in his mouth at the point of the sword’s entrance to the neck.

  What were you trying to say, Artie? What the fuck were you trying to say? Tell me now. He walked outside into the rain and a lit a cigarette and his hand shook. Get it together, Lou. Stiff resolve, all that. Scotland the Brave.

  Mary Gibson came up to him, tapped his shoulder. Sandy Scullion stood just behind her, holding a black umbrella over her head.

  She said, ‘I read your report on Joseph Lindsay. And Sandy’s too. I also read McLaren’s post-mortem report. Lindsay and Wexler, two old friends, Jewish – who’d want them dead? What had they done to anyone? I hope to God we’re not at the start of something here, Lou … I hope we’re not going to see swastikas and the desecration of synagogues or anything like that.’

  Perlman saw in Mary Gibson’s eyes a genuine concern. The old highway of anti-Semitism was one he didn’t want to travel. It ran through a landscape strewn with barbed-wire and Xyklon-B canisters and old newsreels of bones. He remembered his mother and how, whenever she served boiled eggs, she always said ‘Hitler’s head’ as she cracked the shells with a spoon. A family ritual, this battering of shells and imagining it was Uncle Ade’s skull you were breaking open.

  ‘I don’t want to sound complacent, but we don’t get much in the way of active anti-Semitism in Glasgow,’ Scullion said. ‘I don’t lie awake worrying that some fascist group is coming here to torch Jewish houses or places of business.’

  ‘And visit our own little Kristallnacht on us, eh?’ Perlman said. ‘No, I don’t believe Wexler and Lindsay had a lethal encounter with neo-fascism. A solicitor and a retired moneylender? They weren’t prominent enough to be Jewish targets for some deviant National Fronters looking for headlines. What I do think – and this is gut – is that it’s the same killer in both cases. Wexler and Lindsay had done something very wrong, at least in the murderer’s eyes. Maybe they cheated him. Maybe they ruined him in some business deal. Whatever it was, the victim goes right off the wall looking for blood. More than that. He wants these men to die very badly.’

  ‘He,’ Scullion said. ‘Or they.’

  They’d walked round the pool twice. The rain was still coming down, but slowly now. The sky over Glasgow was a grey membrane. Perlman paused at the deep end and gazed at the diving board, and he imagined Artie, flabby in swimming trunks, looking down at his own white body mirrored in blue water.

  Mary Gibson took her gloved hands from the pockets of her raincoat. ‘God, I need to smoke again. One bad situation and I’m reaching for the cigs without thinking about consequences.’

  ‘Here.’ Lou offered her his packet. He flicked his lighter and lit the cigarette she took.

  ‘These things killed my mother,’ she said. ‘I swore never again.’

  ‘You can quit after the one you’re smoking now,’ Lou Perlman said.

  She smiled faintly. He imagined her pouring tea from a silver tea-pot into delicate china cups, and passing around a tiered cake-stand where delicate confections, some pink and others icy white, sat in virginal paper containers. Do help yourself, ladies. The other side of Mary Gibson, when she wasn’t being a cop.

  She said, ‘Our first priority is to dig deeper into the relationship between Wexler and Lindsay. See what we can really establish there. We’ll want access to all Lindsay’s files. We’ll want to know everything we can learn about Wexler’s business. Maybe Ruth can help. Do you agree with that approach, Sandy? Lou?’

  Perlman agreed. Sandy Scullion, who seemed a little preoccupied and remote all at once, simply nodded his head. They moved across the patio. Perlman stood aside, allowing Mary Gibson and Scullion, folding the umbrella, to enter ahead of him. As he was about to follow them, he became aware of a uniformed figure approaching: Dennis Murdoch, the black and white chequered band on his cap discoloured from rain. His face was dark.

  ‘I don’t like your expression,’ Perlman said. ‘You’re too solemn for a young man. You haven’t earned the right to that look, Murdoch.’

  ‘Sir?’ Murdoch was puzzled. Perlman thought: Get used to bafflement. You’ll meet it again and again. It’s a constant in a policeman’s lot.

  ‘I wager you’re here to add a little more weight to my general burden, son, right?’

  Murdoch said, ‘You asked last night about Terry Dogue, sir.’

  ‘And you’ve come to tell me you found him.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Why is my spine icy all of a sudden?’ Perlman said.

  31

  Shimon Marak purchased a Glasgow A-Z Street Atlas in Ottakar’s bookshop in the Buchanan Galleries at the top of Buchanan Street. He bought a black coffee and flicked the pages while he drank. When he came to the index he found Lassiter Place. He turned back to the appropriate map page and saw yellow and white veins indicating roads and motorways. Lassiter Place was located close to a golf course called Whitecraigs on the far south side of the city. This meant a long taxi ride. He considered buses, but he was unfamiliar with the complexity of routes and numbers.

  For that matter, he was unfamiliar with everything here. And this made him uneasy. He’d imagined it all so differently. He’d envisaged himself coming and going quickly, doing what he was here to do, then leaving without trace. But there had been deviations he hadn’t anticipated, and bad attitudes. Ramsay. Ramsay’s big friend, whose name hadn’t been revealed. The little man in the baseball cap. The blonde woman in the lift.

  This weird solitude he felt, this lack of grounding, he hadn’t expected that either. He’d imagined he’d be too busy, the intensity of his focus so sharp he’d have no time for loneliness or uncertainty. Instead, it was the opposite. He had a sense of chasing spectres through a wintry city whose secrets were inviolate, even to those who lived in the heart of them. A mysterious river city made of stone, and yet somehow insubstantial to him, a holograph.

  He walked down Buchanan Street where the Christmas lights glowed in the dim morning. The rain had quit. The shops were busy. A skinny man with a saxophone played a jazz tune on a corner. Shoppers, bundled up against the chill, went about their business in a dedicated manner. Starlings screamed in the wires above the street. A couple of dreadlocked teenage boys in green and white hooped jerseys rushed past, and one of them collided with Marak, who tried in vain to sidestep.

  ‘Watch where you’re going, you blind bastart,’ the boy said.

  Marak kept moving. He wouldn’t let this rude little encounter rattle him. It was of no significance. And yet he wanted to turn round and go back after the boy and … and what? Strike him in the face. The mouth.

  What was wrong with him? He didn’t need such impulses.

  He reached Argyle Street and walked to the knife shop he’d seen under the railway bridge the day before. Victor Morris. He was drawn by the brilliant display of knives in the window, hunting knives, skinning knives, stilettos, a gorgeous shining steel array. There were also airguns, air rifles, saxophones and guitars: a shop with a split personality. Violence and music. Harsh notes and gentle ones.

  If he had a knife he’d feel less vulnerable.

  He went inside, studied the displays. I want something small, he thought. Light in the hand.

  ‘Yon’s a beauty,’ a skinhead boy said. He tapped a display case and pointed out a hunting knife.

  ‘Are you talking to me?’ Marak asked.

  The boy, fifteen, sixteen, had a tattoo inked into his scalp. It was a face with an open distended mouth, a diminutive copy of ‘The Scream’, by Edvard Munch, done badly. It was a weird thing for a teenager to have tattooed into his scalp; such despair.

  ‘Five-inch blade. Sheffield carbon steel. Samba stag handle. Great knife. You a hunter then?’

  Marak didn’t want to converse.

  ‘I’d recommend that knif
e. Zall I’m saying.’

  ‘I’ll take your word.’ Marak moved away. He sought out a salesman, an enthusiastic young man with a gold tooth. He bought the knife, and a leather sheath. He counted out the cash. Thirty-five pounds.

  ‘Can’t do a better deal than that anywhere,’ the salesman said.

  The tattooed kid said, ‘I told him how good the knife is, so do I get a commission?’

  ‘Commission? What you’ll get is a kick up the arse if you keep bothering me.’ The salesman looked at Marak. ‘Boy’s a real knife lover. You want this in a bag?’

  ‘Please.’ Impatient, Marak grabbed his purchase and hurried out of the shop. He turned left, passed a shop called Silks & Secrets that sold tawdry underwear, faux-fur bikinis, tiger-skin print panties and matching bras: the blatant nature of the display caught his attention a moment, and he thought how little he knew of women, how small a role they’d played in his life. He’d never loved. He’d admired faces from afar, or the sight of somebody passing close to him in a hotel lobby or a street, or how a woman’s perfume might spice the night, but he’d steered a course away from intimacy. Sometimes, in self-questioning moments, he’d wondered if he’d ever love, or if the life he’d chosen had killed the chance of such a possibility: how could anyone know what fate held?

  He walked past the Royal Thai restaurant, smelled a sharp spice on the air – cumin, chilli. At the end of the block, he crossed the street. Outside a pawnshop on the corner of Robertson Street, he hailed a taxi. As he climbed into the back seat he wondered if he was still being followed, if the little man in the baseball cap had been replaced. He looked from the window of the taxi. So many faces, how could you tell?

  ‘Lassiter Place,’ he told the driver.

  Lou Perlman was relieved to step out of Artie Wexler’s house. The air was brisk and clean, didn’t smell of death. He walked to the end of the drive and then turned to look back. White house, pale-blue window frames, red-tiled roof: all vaguely Mediterranean, the home of a rich man in a prosperous cul-de-sac.