The Last Darkness Page 17

  It wasn’t a house that shrieked bloody murder.

  He faced the street. Four patrol cars, his Mondeo, Mary Gibson’s Honda Civic, an ambulance, cars belonging to residents, a couple of uniforms hanging crime-scene tape in place, a few neighbours warily watching the house with the troubled expressions of people puzzled by this puncture in their airtight world. Word would be whispered back and forth between the houses: somebody has murdered Artie Wexler. Soon phone calls would be made, and the media players arrive in dozens, TV vans throttling the street. Ruth Wexler would be wakened by the commotion, and just for a moment she’d wonder why, and then she’d remember, and she’d see young WPC Meg Gayle, who’d been given the task of sitting at the side of the bed, and all the breath would be sucked out of her lungs. No dream, Mrs W, no nightmare. You saw what you saw, floating on the surface of the pool.

  Sandy Scullion appeared beside him. ‘This isn’t professional of me, Lou. I feel sick. I mean throw-up sick.’

  ‘You must have missed the news, Sandy. It’s a sick world and it’s getting sicker all the time. There are some neuroses out there that defy understanding. If you’d asked me a few years ago whether I’d ever see somebody beheaded in Glasgow, I would probably have laughed. When it actually fucking happens, funny it ain’t.’

  ‘No, it’s bleak,’ Scullion said. ‘Ugly. Depressing. But not funny.’

  Perlman shook his head. ‘And now Terry Dogue.’

  ‘I heard. Throat slit and dumped in the river. It’s a jolly sort of day altogether …’

  Perlman experienced an internal slump. He longed to get away from this house, this cul-de-sac. ‘We need Dogue’s death on top of everything else. Sometimes the crap just keeps on coming. Now wee Terry’s in that place where you can ask questions until you’re blue in the bloody face about what he was doing in that parking garage at the same time as our Arab friend, and it’s all fucking silence …’

  He was quiet a moment. His head ticked like a clock. Organize, Lou. What to do first. That terrible word the Americans love: prioritize. He needed fresh input, a helping hand. He asked to borrow Scullion’s mobile and then moved a few paces away from the DI and tapped in a number.

  Perseus McKinnon answered in his deep voice. ‘Cremoni’s.’

  ‘Perse, I need to fish.’

  ‘Lou Perlman? My favourite Jew. I’ll fish with you, Lou. Come and see me.’

  ‘Soon as I can.’ Perlman cut the connection, handed the cellphone back to Scullion.

  ‘I eavesdropped,’ Scullion said.

  ‘I go back a long way with Perseus. He’s supposed to be my secret weapon.’

  ‘I know more than you think, Lou, about your secrets.’

  ‘What a spooky notion,’ Perlman said. ‘Listen. When the media assault begins, you want me to talk to them?’

  ‘You don’t have the touch.’

  ‘I’m smooth as velvet.’

  ‘You’re sandpaper, Lou.’

  ‘You saying I rub people the wrong way? Fuck me, I always thought I was an old enchanter.’ He moved the conversational tone to banter; keep it airy for a few minutes. He sucked on his cigarette. The smoke felt good in his chest. It belonged there. ‘What line are you taking?’

  ‘Mary Gibson wants me to go easy on the lurid details. Until we have the coroner’s report.’

  Perlman wondered how a coroner’s report was going to make Wexler’s death palatable for public consumption. There was no damn way round it: what happened to Wexler couldn’t be soft-shoed. Then the public clamour would begin. The newspaper boys and girls would whip up a blood and fear frenzy. They were good at horror. They knew to jangle the nerves of their readers. Ghoul Loose in Glasgow.

  He stared at the street, the knot of vehicles. He said, ‘I’ve asked young Murdoch to see what he can get on this Nexus thing. It’s a loose end I need to tie up because it’s needling me. Murdoch can hunt through files, which saves me the slog. And this relationship between Wexler and Lindsay that Mary Gibson wants us to examine, Sandy – would you mind if I ran with that one for a while, unless you have other plans for me?’

  Scullion shook his head. ‘Do what you can. I’m heading over to Lindsay’s office to secure his files and documents. Billie Houston has already prepared a list of his clients.’

  Perlman tossed his cigarette away and thought of Terry Dogue with his throat pumping blood. Floating down the Clyde – at what point had he been dumped into the river? Almost anywhere. It didn’t even have to be the Clyde. It might have been the Kelvin, fast-running and bloated by rains.

  He was about to take a fresh cigarette from his packet when a black taxi turned into the cul-de-sac from the main road. It wasn’t going anywhere. Too many vehicles restricted its advance. It could only back up. Perlman watched the driver turn to ask a question of the passenger, whose face was concealed by shadow. The driver shrugged, swung the vehicle in a tight circle and for a second Perlman found himself staring at the passenger’s face in the window. Christ. He acted without pause, total reflex, running towards his Mondeo, which was blocked by the ambulance and an old Jaguar, red and glossy, lip-sticked by recent rain.

  He got behind the wheel and tried to squeeze his car through a narrow space between Jag and ambulance, but he wasn’t going to get anywhere unless –

  Unless he creased both vehicles.

  Whoever owned the Jag was going to love him.

  He leaned on the accelerator and the Mondeo started forward. Poor judgement of space: get your eyesight checked, Lou. The Mondeo became wedged between the other two vehicles. Perlman couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back, couldn’t get out through either front door. He clambered over the seats and struggled through a back door, then he ran in the direction of the taxi, which had already turned on to the main road.

  Coat flapping, tie rising from his neck in the updraught, he chased the cab. Soon he was puffing, lungs in extremis. He ran and ran, hoping for a red light where the cab would stop. Two hundred yards, two-fifty, who’s counting? A gathering of polka dots tapdanced in his vision as the cab went sailing further and further away. Enough, Lou. You’re not a sprinter these days. Once upon a time maybe. Three hundred yards, three-fifty. Blood rocketed to his brain.

  Five hundred. Six and rising.

  He gave up.

  Is this where it ends? Dying at the side of the Ayr Road while traffic whizzed north to the city centre, and south to Newton Mearns and points beyond? He sat on the kerb and stuck his head between his knees as the sky came falling down. He imagined cardiac arrest and the unacceptable irony of having to share a hospital room with his brother. Hello Colin, fancy seeing you here.

  ‘Lou? You okay?’

  He peered up into Scullion’s face.

  ‘What’s the matter? You took off like a stallion in heat.’

  Perlman held up a hand, meaning: wait. His chest was empty of air. When he recovered the power of speech his voice was dry as kindling.

  ‘Did you circulate that print?’ he asked.

  ‘It went out late last night,’ Scullion said. ‘Why?’

  ‘The guy’s in a taxi heading towards the city.’

  ‘Did you get the registration number?’

  Perlman shook his head. He hadn’t managed to get that close. ‘It was a black cab,’ he said.

  Sandy Scullion immediately took his cellphone from his coat, and tapped in a number. Perlman, too proud and stubborn to collapse entirely, raised himself on one knee and stared at the sky and tried to level the capsized ship of himself, even as he wondered how long the chorus of effervescent polka dots would jitterbug in his eyesight.

  ‘You all right, Lou?’ Scullion asked.

  ‘I look the picture of health to you?’

  ‘Here. Let me help you up.’

  ‘It’s a matter of some principle, Sandy, that I get to my feet unaided. You know why? I see into the future … and I’m this frail old dosser in a nursing home … and I have no control over my bladder and I wear nappies and I can’t move withou
t the help of nurses.’

  ‘And that’s your nightmare.’

  ‘One of a batch,’ Perlman said. ‘I don’t want to live in my future before I actually have to, okay?’

  ‘I think you’ve got a long way to go,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Must remember. Never sprint after fast-moving taxis.’

  Perlman grunted, got to his feet, jiggled his arms as if to promote the circulation of blood, and peered at the stream of passing traffic. ‘We need to snare that bastard, Sandy. He’s got a lot to tell us.’

  32

  Marak sat in the cab, eyes shut and hands clasped tightly on his thighs. The cabbie talked endlessly.

  ‘Did you see all the polis there? Has to be something really bad for that many patrol cars. Mibbe a murder. Mibbe a drugs raid. What do you think, eh?’

  Marak made a cursory reply, a meaningless sound. He kept seeing the face of the man who’d given fruitless chase for a couple of hundred metres. And he remembered that same man in Bath Street in the company of the blonde woman who worked in Lindsay’s office.

  A policeman, clearly. The last thing he needed.

  The cabbie hadn’t mentioned the man diminishing in brief pursuit. Obviously he’d been too intent on making pointless talk to look in his side mirror.

  ‘Were you intending to visit somebody in that cul-de-sac, eh? You got friends there? Do you think anything happened in the house you were intending to visit, eh? Something awful. Christ, I hope not. What do you think, eh?’

  A cul-de-sac. Marak thought, I didn’t know it was a dead-end street. I wanted to look at the house. I wanted to see where Wexler lived. A glance, no more, at how the place was fenced and gated, how it lay in relation to neighbouring houses, what kind of alarm might be visible from outside. Reconnaissance, quick. But the street had been invaded by law officers erecting crime-scene tape around Wexler’s house, and people who stood in fixated curiosity.

  What had happened to bring so many policemen to the scene?

  And the man who’d pursued the taxi. He’d seen Marak’s face and reacted instantaneously, which indicated that he recognized him – but how? The blonde woman would have given the police a description – dark eyes, complexion, black beard, early twenties, foreign accent; what else could she offer? That scant verbal portrait wasn’t enough for any policeman to identify him.

  Had Ramsay betrayed him? was that possible? When it came to a man like Ramsay anything was possible if there was profit involved. But that raised another question: to whom would Ramsay betray him? The police? No. What was there to gain from that? Perhaps there were complexities of which Marak was unaware, loyalties divided by greed: greed was at the source of all this, after all.

  The treason of greed.

  Marak told the driver to stop. He stuffed some money into the cabbie’s hands and got out, entering a big supermarket in Shawlands, an oasis of bright light in the gloom of the day. He cruised the aisles and wondered about his next move. Perplexity dogged him. He stood in the dairy section and stared absently at the yoghurts and skimmed milks and butter, half-expecting somebody to lay a heavy hand on his shoulder and say, We need to have a chat, sir. How long would it take the police to trace the taxi anyway? They’d call the cab companies, talk to despatchers, who’d talk in turn to drivers: everything was computerized, everything logged. The driver would be found, and he’d tell his story. He’d say he dropped his passenger outside a supermarket, and he’d specify the exact place, and the police would come.

  And they might come very soon.

  He hurried from the supermarket, walked a couple of blocks from the main road, found himself in side streets. Tenements rose above him like cliffs into which windows had been cut. Too many windows. Too many points of view. He found himself lost in a grid of streets. Tassie Street. Hector Road. Rossendale. He was moving deeper into a maze without a centre. He saw a face in a third-storey window looking down impassively. One set of eyes: his imagination multiplied eyes. In every window somebody observing … absurd. He had to stay calm and think clearly.

  The rational man is the one who survives.

  He came to a phone booth. Remains of pizza sauce had dried on the glass in streaky swirls. He opened the door, went inside. It was time, he thought, to make this call. He had to reassure himself, recharge his confidence. He gathered all the change he had in his pockets. He picked up the plastic handset, which was gummy to the touch. He knew the number, he’d memorized it. Why commit something to paper when you can store it in your head? He punched in the digits, and when he heard a voice answer he began to feed coins into the slot. Ding ding ding.

  In Hebrew, a woman was saying: ‘Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot. Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot. Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot –’

  Marak replaced the handset. The number you have called is no longer in service. Okay, he’d misdialled. Or something had gone wrong with the connection. He pushed the digits again, and waited, and after a moment he heard: ‘Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot –’

  He hung up, ran a hand nervously across his mouth. He’d remembered the sequence of numbers wrongly. Or. Or what. He felt panic.

  He tried the number a third time.

  ‘Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot –’

  Marak stepped out of the booth. He’d forgotten the number, that was it. He was too tense. He needed calm before his memory, usually a well-calibrated instrument, could function again. He walked and walked through unfamiliar neighbourhoods, and felt the temperature around him fall. By dark, ice would form on the pavements, the streets become treacherous.

  Remember the number. Relax, let it flow back to you. A set of simple digits. It had to be easy. But he was blocked. He heard Zerouali’s voice again: you are doing a wonderful thing, young man, and may God be with you, and if you need a word of moral support at any time, telephone me here …

  Marak listened to a nearby train rattle past in the midday gloaming, and wished he were riding it, travelling out of this city without once looking back. The longer he remained, the more dangerous Glasgow was going to become for him; already it was beginning to feel like an icy prison in which he was being held without trial.

  He walked until he came to a rubbish bin and there he ripped into slivers the photograph of Artie Wexler, and the manila envelope, and he dumped them, fisting them deep into the rubbish already inside the container.

  33

  Mould in the lungs? Spores and spots? Get an X-ray. Cough me up a sample of lung, if you will, my good man. Aye, doc, right, doc, anything you say, hack and spit. Lou Perlman pondered dire medical matters as he climbed the stairs of the renovated warehouse in Merchant City where a breed of people, the Loft Dwellers, had come into existence during the last fifteen years or so. Sharp boys in even sharper suits had refurbished the old tobacco warehouses of the nineteenth century, and turned them into comfortable spaces. The city centre, in particular those streets that had formerly been drab no-go areas between George Square and Argyle Street, had become modish. People lived here again. There were bars, shops, restaurants.

  Perlman paused halfway up the stairs. Fucking lofts, he thought. Why did anyone want a loft? And why, when you truly needed it to work, was the lift jiggered? The world is in the process of breaking down.

  The face in the cab came back to him. You see it once on videotape, and it’s flat, half-real; you see it again behind the window of a taxi and suddenly it’s flesh, it exists in other dimensions. The hot blast of recognition.

  Sandy Scullion had reassured him that copies of That Face had gone out to all the Sub-Divisions of the Force, and that he’d issue a priority follow-up.

  The bearded man had serious questions to answer.

  Perlman reached the top. He rang the doorbell that faced him. The door, he noticed, was a heavyweight item. Steel, with a peephole, and three keyholes. Keep bogeymen at bay. News flash for the world: bogeymen would always find a way in if they wanted access badly enough.

  The door
opened.

  Miriam, in jeans and an old Levi’s shirt, smiled at him. ‘Come in, Lou,’ she said, and she kissed him on the cheek. Her lips were chill. It was cold in this place, he thought. He stepped past her into a big space that initially seemed endless. The room went to infinity, and so did the window, which was a great band of grey light. He could see the dome of the City Chambers in George Square over the surrounding rooftops.

  ‘You’ve never been in my studio before,’ Miriam said. ‘Red-letter day.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a place.’ He rubbed his hands together and approached a canvas in the middle of the loft. Thickly applied oil glistened. The painting, half-done, was a collection of tiny squares in gradations of purple. The first word that came to Lou Perlman’s mind was painstaking. Each little square stood on top of another. ‘This isn’t your usual colour explosion, is it?’

  ‘It’s my version of the patchwork quilt, Lou. Work for idle hands. Keeping my mind occupied.’

  ‘I thought you’d be at the hospital,’ he said.

  ‘Twiddling the thumbs? Flicking magazine pages? Rifkind said he’d phone when the op was done. Up here I can work on my wee squares at least. I hate waiting rooms.’ Her hands were purple from paint. Her hair was pinned up. Her neck was graceful and long. She looked slim in jeans. He was touched by the mauve streak of paint on her cheek. She was apparently unaware of it.

  ‘I was pleased when you phoned,’ she said. ‘Serious bone to pick, though. You didn’t tell me about Lindsay.’

  ‘So can I help it if all my life I’ve hated being the bearer of bad news?’

  ‘I imagine that’s a drawback in your profession. You could’ve told me he was dead. You had the opportunity.’

  ‘I know, I know –’

  ‘Sometimes you go at things in a sideways manner, Lou. Like a crab.’

  ‘I deny any affinity with crustaceans,’ he said. ‘I don’t even eat them.’