The Last Darkness Read online

  Furf said, ‘It pongs, BJ. What do we do?’

  ‘Do? We keep delivering the photos, what else? We go about our business and we ask no questions.’

  ‘If it’s dodgy –’

  ‘Dodgy or not, either I deliver or I’m out of work. No moolah flows in. No moolah, no club farraday. And no future. See my drift?’

  ‘Clear’s a.’

  Quick looked in the direction of the Moat House, where a white stretch limousine was drawing up. He watched a uniformed lackey leap into position like a startled scullery-maid, bowing, opening the passenger door. A long-legged woman and a tall man, both fashionably dressed, both too beautiful for this world, emerged from the stretch and glided inside the hotel. Quick was shot through with flames of resentment. He used to get the toady treatment in the Moat House. In The Corinthian, waiters jumped when he clicked his fingers. Yes Mr Quick, no Mr Quick, anything you say Mr Quick. He’d been a celebrity, and he hated the way it had all turned to shite.

  Furf lit a cigarette. ‘Listen. What if everything blows up in our faces?’

  ‘Blows up how?’

  ‘What if these people who are one step ahead of Abdullah decide they need to remove all traces of him, and everybody and everything associated with him?’

  ‘What am I hearing? Are you panicking, Furf?’

  ‘I never panic. Never.’

  BJ Quick laid a hand on Furf’s broad shoulder. ‘One step at a time, big man. If it goes badly wrong, we bail out. Simple. Have I ever led you into a bad situation?’

  Furf shook his head.

  ‘See,’ Quick said. ‘Just trust me. I’ll never let you down. Remember that.’

  His mobile vibrated in his coat pocket. He took it out, flipped it open, answered. A man’s voice said, ‘Bear. You got another message.’

  36

  Lou Perlman parked the Mondeo outside a fish and chip shop called Cremoni’s in Dumbarton Road, a couple of blocks from Partick underground station. The restaurant, founded by an Italian immigrant family years before, was no longer the property of the Cremonis. The present owner, Perseus McKinnon, had kept the name for the sake of authenticity.

  Perlman stepped into a room filled with the scent of deep-fried foods, a familiar greasy perfume of hot melted lard in which fish and meat pies and battered black puddings and haggis were cooking. He listened to the bubble and hiss of the fryer where the chips were done. Satisfying, sniff sniff, redolent of childhood: it was all very old-style Glasgow, stainless-steel fryers and formica-topped tables and bottles of malt vinegar and ketchup spillage stuck to the floor.

  He approached a doorway where strands of long coloured plastic hung. He pushed these aside, entered a small back room that was part storage space, part office. A black man in his late forties sat at a metal desk. He wore shades. He had a big plump face and a pile of unruly curls such as you might see on a child before his first haircut. A barred window, located behind his head, provided slices of daylight.

  ‘Lou,’ he said. ‘Pull up a chair.’

  ‘Brrrr. It’s a cold one out there, Perseus.’ Perlman gazed at Perseus McKinnon’s black glasses, and considered the fact that, in all the years he’d known the chip-shop proprietor, he’d never seen the man’s eyes.

  ‘There’s a new Monk collection on the market,’ McKinnon said.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘You should keep up, Lou. Serious jazz buffs like you and me, we’ll be dinosaurs one day. Who played bass on “Straight No Chaser”, recorded 23 July 1951?’

  ‘Tip of my tongue,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Want a hint?’

  ‘I never take hints.’ Perlman ransacked his overworked mind. ‘Al McKibbon.’

  ‘Well done,’ Perseus McKinnon said. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘Okay. Name the backup vocalist on Gram Parsons’s “Hickory Wind”.’

  ‘Aw, man, you’re cheating. You know I don’t follow that shite. How can you stand that country crap?’

  ‘I try to keep an open mind,’ Perlman said. ‘I wish I had time on my hands the way you have. I’d gladly play trivial musical pursuits all day long.’

  ‘You saying you’re busy?’ Perseus McKinnon had a staccato laugh that came from the depths of his chest; a bronchial woodpecker, Perlman thought.

  ‘Up-the-Khyber busy, Perse. No-sleep busy.’

  ‘Some bad boys out there.’ McKinnon nodded towards the doorway, the city beyond. ‘More firearms in circulation than ever. Grenades, submachine guns. These are violent times, Lou.’

  ‘This I don’t know?’

  Perseus McKinnon smiled. He had a big winning smile that made the recipient of it feel as if a blessing had just been bestowed. Perse was the offspring of a one-nighter between a black French seaman and an alcoholic red-haired stripper from Leith. His consuming interest was crime. He collected and collated the vital statistics of Glasgow’s criminal world with the avidity of a Victorian collector in pursuit of cataloguing all known species of tapeworm. As some men sought out stamps and others souvenirs of the Golden Age of Steam, Perseus McKinnon gathered facts – about killers and thieves and con-men, loan sharks and debt collectors, hard men and their hired muscle. He stored on computer disks the data pertaining to a great assortment of crimes, the more extravagant the better, and he kept updated files on the prison sentences dished out to those miscreants the police apprehended. He was obsessed by the often incestuous happenings in the vibrant Glasgow crime scene, which he followed as if it were an addictive soap opera. He employed a small army of gossips, paying them with free meals or nominal financial considerations. He spent hours every day sifting newspapers, phoning his sources, updating his records. He kept backup copies of his disks in a safe-deposit box at a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Partick.

  ‘You got some problems at the moment, Lou?’

  ‘You know damn well I do.’

  ‘What I hear is that a certain solicitor died from too much force-fed cocaine.’

  ‘Your sources gobsmack me.’

  ‘Would you come to me if I was just some common or garden wanker?’

  Perlman had quit wondering long ago about McKinnon’s sources. He suspected there had to be at least one inside the Force, maybe a young constable who knew McKinnon might be helpful down the road, or an ambitious detective who understood the biblical principle that as ye sow so shall ye reap, and when you gave Perseus some tasty item you got something just as good in return eventually. It was pointless to speculate about this informant’s identity. All Perlman knew was this: when you wanted information you were too busy to dig out through the usual avenues – pavement-plodding, door-knocking, unreliable touts – you came to Perseus. He had mishits, of course, items of utter nonsense and hearsay, but he was often reliable. Perlman’s own knowledge of the Glasgow underworld was huge, but not so wide-ranging as McKinnon’s, who’d amassed an encyclopaedic amount of intelligence on Big Men and Small, on Bosses and Gofers and Hangers-On. It was reputed that Perse’s fascination with crime was rooted in his childhood, when his alcoholic mother dragged him across Glasgow to one gangster movie after another, four or five noir films in the course of a day. He always said he’d practically been breastfed by Jimmy Cagney, and that instead of Winnie the Pooh or Rupert the Bear, posters of George Raft and Peter Lorre and Edward G were taped to the walls around his bed. His mother, who’d died years ago from cirrhosis, had been besotted with baddies.

  ‘I also hear a rumour you have a snapshot of an Arab in circulation, Lou.’

  ‘What else do you hear?’

  ‘On the Arab, rien. Je regrette. Why is he important?’

  ‘Is the French really necessary, Perse?’

  ‘Mon père was French. It’s a wee link with my heritage.’

  ‘Fucksake. You were born and brought up in Scotland. You’ve spent most of your life in Glasgow. Your accent’s crap.’

  ‘And you’d know good French, right?’

  Weary, Perlman wafted a hand in the air. He was still trying to rec
over his dignity after the encounter with Riley. A young thug sticks a lead pipe in your face, you should do something about it. Maybe he’d get the chance some other day. It was a small defeat. ‘The Arab’s connected. I don’t know how. He desperately wanted to see Lindsay. Why? I don’t know. He turned up in a taxi in Wexler’s street. Again, don’t ask me why.’

  ‘A criminal revisiting the scene?’ McKinnon said.

  Lou Perlman shrugged. ‘Maybe. You know any swordsmen?’

  ‘Not many,’ McKinnon said. ‘Bad boys with knives, sure. Plenty of them. I heard once of a guy mugging people with an épée. That was downright eccentric. But you don’t behead somebody with an épée. At least I don’t believe you do.’

  Perlman leaned forward, thinking of the long day that stretched behind him already, and the hours that remained ahead. Some days seemed to consist of thirty-six hours, or forty-eight, unnatural loops of time in which day became night and slid back into day again, and you were jet-lagged without ever having flown anywhere.

  ‘You heard anything about Terry Dogue?’ Perlman said.

  ‘Wee Terry. Now there was a lost soul.’

  ‘Who was he running with recently?’

  ‘Bad company.’

  ‘He always ran with bad company,’ Perlman said.

  ‘He’d been seen with that well-known boulevardier and royal shitebag, BJ Quick.’

  ‘The self-styled monarch of Glasgow Rock? Lover of tiny girls? Bankrupt, I heard. Does the king still have Furfee in his court?’

  ‘The King of Rock and the Pollokshaws Peeler are seemingly inseparable.’

  Perlman sat back, spread his legs. His calf muscles ached. He’d once interviewed Quick about an incident in which a hysterical thirteen-year-old girl had accused him of raping her, but then the kid had recanted. Perlman never learned if there had been a pay-off, or what pressure had been applied to her. Quick got away clean. As for Furfee, he was a seriously disturbed piece of work who’d done hard time in Peterhead Prison for violence of an especially nasty nature. He’d skinned the entire arm of some poor bugger in Pollokshaws with an open razor.

  ‘I haven’t seen or heard of the Peeler for a while,’ Perlman said.

  ‘He’s out and about, sad to say. He’s a fucking menace. He should still be in maximum security.’

  ‘I don’t make the laws, Perse. Sometimes I wish I did. Where do this ungodly twosome congregate?’

  ‘No fixed abode. Try the former Club Memphis, Gallowgate area. You might find them there. One other thing. A wee bird was telling me that Quick and the Peeler have been seen in the company of Leo Kilroy.’

  ‘Fat Leo, eh?’ Perlman considered Kilroy, whom he’d interviewed a number of times. The fat man, despite a kind of cheerful willingness to help the police in any way he might, gave nothing away. His business interests and income sources were cloaked in fog. There were rumours of a high-dollar protection racket involving several of the city’s elegant restaurants and boutiques and hotels, ownership of a freight company, and involvement in contraband cigarettes and single malts; a slew of stories, none of them verifiable. Inquiries into his activities had always dead-ended. Kilroy had powerful suck somewhere. Bigtime clout. Almost certainly he belonged in one of Her Majesty’s Hotels, but you didn’t get that kind of accommodation unless the law could make the shit stick.

  ‘Why would BJ Quick be hanging round with Kilroy?’

  ‘He’s trying to buy his club back, Lou.’

  ‘Is this a loser or what? He fails, comes back for more. Where’s the money coming from? Kilroy?’

  Perseus McKinnon said, ‘Fuck only knows.’

  Perlman got up. BJ Quick and Furfee, King and Jester. A joker with a taste for sharp razors. And Terry Dogue floats down the Clyde with a gash in his throat. Well well.

  ‘I appreciate the assistance, Perse.’

  ‘Glad to help.’ Perseus McKinnon opened his desk and took out a canister of lemon-scented air-freshener and blasted the little room with such ferocity that a fog developed.

  ‘I can’t stand the stench of fried food, Lou. Never could.’

  ‘So you bought a fish and chip shop?’

  ‘It’s the characters I meet, Lou. That’s why I’m in the chipper business.’

  37

  Perlman drove back to Force HQ in Pitt Street. Without taking off his coat he sat behind his desk and hurriedly created a Shit to Do list. Underneath this he wrote down a number of tasks:

  find out any responses to Arab print –

  see if Murdoch has got anywhere with his

  Nexus research –

  ask Sandy if he’d learned anything about the

  cab and where the driver had picked up and/or

  dropped off his passenger –

  contact Bannerjee, discuss Wexler & Lindsay –

  Quick & Furfee, find & question –

  Colin, check on health & security

  Moon Riley, who was outside the scope of his present inquiries, came back to bug him. He placed his pencil on the desk, rolled it round with the tip of his finger for a minute, then ripped the sheet out of the pad and stuffed it into the pocket of his coat and thought: Years ago I could have stored these notes in my brain, no paper needed, no reminders. A crick in the memory. Too many lapses these days. Too many synapses withered or snapped.

  He sat back, sought a moment of peace, but phones kept ringing and the sound of a somebody’s high-strung laugh irked him as surely as a person playing scales endlessly on a tin whistle. He tried to will himself into a state of stillness. Thoughts of Miriam slid through the baleen that protected his brain. Maintaining a perspective, Lou. That’s fine and dandy, but a man can’t help who he loves, my little mandel. Do you truly know what I feel?

  He was restless, needed to move, had to get back on to the streets before long: the city waited like an unfinished crossword. He wasn’t going to find the answers in Pitt Street. He rose from his desk and went upstairs in search of Sandy Scullion. His office was empty. Perlman went inside anyway, attention drawn to a little pile of Xeroxes on the edge of Scullion’s desk. Copies of the Arab print. He picked one up, looked at the face, the determination in the eyes: the lips were parted a little, because the camera had caught him in mid-sentence during his encounter with Billie Houston. Who are you? Where did you come from? What did you want with Joe Lindsay? And why did you choke Terry Dogue?

  He folded one of the copies and put it in the inside pocket of his blazer, then continued along the corridor, passing the open door of Mary Gibson’s office. She saw him, called his name. He went inside, noticed a vase of carnations on top of a filing cabinet and a photograph of a smiling boy of about fourteen on the desk. Her kid, he assumed. Sandy Scullion, Mary Gibson, family people: they went home at night and immersed themselves in lives of pleasing regularity. They ate meals at decent times, and bathed before bed. They brushed their teeth and gargled and slept in clean pyjamas. Scullion probably had slippers under his bed and Mary Gibson wore some kind of expensive moisturizer before she called it a day. Such lives of structure.

  ‘Just the man,’ she said.

  ‘Looking for me?’ He glanced at her wall-clock. Three p.m. on the nose. His mind wandered to Colin. He was anxious, more than he expected to be. Brotherly love. Hard to express, and hard to show, but it bubbled up from a mysterious well-spring in moments of potential crisis.

  ‘Some talkative young constable spilled the beans about the murder,’ she said.

  He wondered how long it was since he’d heard that quaint phrase. ‘You mean he spoke to the press.’

  ‘Without authorization. I don’t blame the boy, Lou. Those journalists pile a lot of pressure on. The boy buckled. He didn’t know any better. Anyway, the greyhound’s out of the trap and running, and now all Glasgow knows there’s some maniac wandering about with a sword, beheading people … Oh, Ruth Wexler woke just after noon. I’ve got a brief statement WPC Gayle took down. Here, have a look.’ She passed him two sheets of paper. ‘There’s a littl
e bit at the end of the report you might find interesting.’

  Perlman read:

  Statement of Ruth Wexler, taken by WPC Meg Gayle.

  I woke because my husband wasn’t in bed. Or maybe because I heard glass break. I thought it was a dream. It was four-thirty a.m. on the bedside clock. I went downstairs. The patio doors were broken. I cut my foot on a piece of glass. The room was cold. I walked outside. I saw a man in the swimming pool. I didn’t know who he was, not immediately. I thought he was taking a swim. But the night was freezing and the pool wasn’t heated. I remember seeing him float towards me and then I understood something awful had happened to him, and I must have screamed. I don’t remember too well what happened right after that. The police arrived. They found our dog dead.

  Perlman tried to imagine Ruth’s voice. If Meg Gayle had captured the tone accurately, if she’d taken it down verbatim, then the voice came across as a repressed drone, a monotone.

  He read: I saw my husband’s head had been severed.

  One stark sentence, he thought. Where was the hysteria? Where the turmoil of mind, the fractured recall? Maybe when she’d wakened more drugs had been administered for calming reasons, a little top-up of tranquillizer.

  ‘Read on,’ Mary Gibson said.

  He turned to the next page.

  I remember now. I thought at first it wasn’t Artie, but another man. I wonder if I had been dreaming and when I went downstairs I was still confused. The man I thought I saw floating in the pool was called Colin Perlman. But it wasn’t him. It was Artie. Poor Artie. I recognized his face.

  (End)

  ‘Colin’s your brother, isn’t he?’ Mary Gibson asked.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Scullion mentioned something about him being in hospital.’

  ‘Cardiac problems.’ Perlman looked at Gayle’s report again. He imagined the inside of Ruth Wexler’s head as much as he could. Strange twists of the brain, the eye, the horror of what moonlight revealed in the water. Poor Artie. I recognized his face. He pictured her again on the rim of the pool, her attention drawn initially to the body, and maybe moments later to the head, and he wondered at the sudden warp of recognition, the shock when you looked at two separate objects which, in everyday life, were always joined together. You saw a head, you assumed a body. You saw a body, you assumed a head. Suddenly you’re in another world, one of terrifying amputation.