The Last Darkness Page 2

  He needs another life, Perlman thought.

  Presently, Linklater hovered over the body that had been removed from the Central Station Bridge. Undressed, stretched on an examination table, the corpse had the look of a man just a little annoyed by his departure from the world. Things left undone, that cruise of the Nile never sailed, Crime and Punishment only half-read.

  His flesh was pallid under the glow of two arc-lights. Linklater carefully examined the blue-purple marks left by the rope. Lou Perlman, who couldn’t quite shake off the tiny feeling of familiarity the dead man had aroused, turned and gazed into the shadows beyond the lamps. He didn’t like forensics labs, organic matter floating in bottles, amputated hands or feet suspended in formaldehyde. He didn’t like the smell of chemicals and medicinal soap.

  He said, ‘Don’t know about you, Sid, but I’m seriously convinced he’s dead.’

  ‘He’s crossed the great divide all right,’ Linklater remarked, and looked at Perlman over his glasses.

  ‘So is there a chance we can wrap the poor bastard up and get the hell out of here?’

  ‘Indeed we can,’ Linklater said. He drew a sheet over the dead man’s body, then scrubbed his hands at the sink.

  Perlman stepped into an adjoining room, a storage area for chemicals and equipment; there was a shaky table and an electric kettle, mugs and tea-bags. He plugged the kettle into the wall and set two mugs beside it. One of them contained a dead fly, which he dumped on the floor. He dropped a tea-bag in each cup.

  ‘Bloody cold in here,’ Linklater said. He found a stool and sat on it, stretching his long legs.

  ‘Is there milk?’ Perlman asked.

  ‘Milk? Lucky there’s tea, Lou.’

  ‘I like mine milky.’ Perlman couldn’t wait for the kettle to boil. When the water was hot, he poured it into the cups, and shoved one towards Linklater.

  ‘We don’t have a spoon either,’ Linklater said. ‘Cheers.’

  Perlman poked a fingertip at the tea-bag, then sipped his tea. Utter pish. He made a face. ‘Right. One dead man. Apparent suicide.’

  ‘Apparent,’ Linklater said.

  ‘Except. No evidence he climbed the concrete column to the girders. No wee crumbs of concrete under the fingernails or on the soles of the shoes. No rough or broken skin, no chipped fingernails. Just oil stains.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Perlman swirled the awful tea around in his mouth before swallowing it, and thought how quickly you could get used to rubbish if you had no alternative. We are obliged to choke down a load of shite and we don’t even taste it after a while, especially the utterances of politicians. Bad mood, Lou. Fatigue, three in the morning and a corpse you don’t need, ballocks.

  ‘All right, Sid, so no evidence the poor sod did any climbing. And if he came down from the rail tracks above, how come he’s not totally covered in crap? We’re probably talking about a half century of oil leaks and who knows what substances on the track.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any deep mystery here, Lou. There’s grease on his coat.’

  ‘My main concern is whether it’s enough. You come clambering down from that bridge to the underside, Sid, and it’s not going to be here a smudge, there a smudge, is it? You’d be bathed in black lubricants. I also bet there’s layers of soot trapped up there from away before the Clean Air Act. You might not remember our fair city in its foggy heyday. Darkness at noon. The air was pure schmutz. You know what the people looked like? The Living Dead, Sid. You could leave the house nice and clean at eight a.m. and your pores would be clogged with coal smoke in a matter of twenty minutes … The good old days, Sid, when you sucked down a ton of pollutants on a daily basis.’

  ‘Excuse me for pointing this out: the city’s still polluted, Lou.’

  ‘Polluted?’ He lit a cigarette, a Silk Cut. ‘You should’ve been here when they didn’t have pollution in the dictionary.’

  ‘I see you’re smoking,’ Linklater said.

  ‘My choice,’ Perlman said. He could smell that old Glasgow suddenly, the stench of soot and smoke and how, when you blew your nose, your mucus was black and had a metallic whiff; even the wax in your ears turned black. ‘So do I get the speech about killing myself, Sid? I smoke because I like it. Also because my nerves cry out for it.’

  ‘Studies show that nicotine isn’t a tran –’

  ‘Fuck the studies. They’re all anti-tobacco propaganda. Back to our man at the end of the rope, Sid.’

  ‘My theory.’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘Give me a minute.’

  Linklater left the room. Perlman took another sip of tea, then poured the rest down the sink. He didn’t want to hear Linklater’s theory: he guessed it would match his own thoughts, basically. He wanted this to be a suicide. He didn’t want it to be something else, even if he already suspected it was heading into perplexity and turbulence, questions without obvious answers, sleepless nights. I need my bloody sleep, he thought. He envisaged the dead man’s face: who was he? This Brylcreemed man with a hair-parting that might have been made by a precision instrument, and the expensive coat from Mandelson of Buchanan Street, and the unengraved wedding ring?

  Linklater came back. He carried the dead man’s clothes in a neat pile, shoes on top. He set everything down on the small table, then picked up the shoes. He turned them over, pointed to the soles. ‘A couple of grease-marks, but not a lot. And nothing to indicate he’d climbed a concrete pillar, certainly. No scrapes. Nice shoes, by the way. Soft and Italian, new. Expensive.’

  ‘So’s the coat,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Anyway,’ and here Linklater held the shoes, one in each hand, beneath Perlman’s face. ‘Regard the heels, Lou. See. They’re seriously scuffed.’

  ‘I saw that when they were lifting him into the ambulance.’

  ‘Deep scuffs. Which suggests?’

  Lou Perlman adjusted his glasses. They kept slipping. He needed those little nonslip pads you could buy at an optician’s. Check that for another day. Check so many things for another day. A loose filling at the back of his mouth, the occasional shot of pain when cold liquid was going down. Library books months overdue. A Thelonious Monk CD – Solo – he still hadn’t disinterred from its cellophane, and an old vinyl album of Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel he’d found in a second-hand shop and longed to hear. ‘In My Hour of Darkness’: yes indeed. Life marched all over you in tackety boots and somehow you couldn’t find the time to arrest its progress. His mood was blackening. He might have had rooks nesting inside his head.

  ‘It suggests he was dragged, Sid,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Exactly. Consistent with these stains on the back of his trousers. See?’ Linklater touched the garment, then studied the oil stain between his thumb and the tip of his index finger. ‘A man crawling along the girders would have stained the front of his trousers. Unless he slithered along on his back –’

  ‘He wouldn’t have to slide flat on his back. There’s room under that bridge.’

  ‘Now the coat.’ Linklater set the trousers to one side. ‘Oily marks on the back of the coat, again consistent with dragging. You’ll notice the “smudges” you referred to earlier are confined more or less to one central area of the back of the garment, corresponding to the spine. The front of the coat is relatively unsullied.’

  Perlman tossed his cigarette into the sink. ‘Don’t tell me what I don’t want to hear. Feed me pleasant fictions, Sid. Lie to me.’

  ‘I’m saying there’s a possibility somebody killed him.’

  ‘And hung him from the bridge and wants it to be written off as a suicide.’

  ‘Just so. The killer – or killers – hauled him along the track, lowered him to the underside, knotted one end of a rope round his neck, the other round a girder, then pushed. Away he goes. A pedestrian sees the body and phones the Force. And here we are, you and me, alone in this godforsaken place at this bloody awful hour sifting a dead man’s clothes.’

  ‘Because it’s
what we do,’ Perlman said. ‘We keep awful hours.’

  He looked at the back of the coat. There was more oil on the herringbone garment than he’d first noticed. He could smell the lubricants. He was reminded of foundries and forges and pits where mechanics examined the underbodies of cars. He was reminded of trains racketing into bad-smelling tunnels that plunged beneath rivers. Dragged, he thought. Had the poor fucker been killed elsewhere and taken to the bridge and hung? It wasn’t likely that he’d gone willingly along the bridge and down into the girders. Walk this way, chum. Let’s have a palaver beneath the Central Station Rail Bridge. So where had he been slain, and how?

  Perlman coughed. There. That little twinge in the chest. You don’t want to know what it might really mean. Twenty cigarettes a day for thirty years, give or take: that was a massive intake of smoke and wear on the tread of the lungs. Calculate. No, don’t. More than 200,000 cigarettes. A quarter of a million? Oy, fuck. That many? He felt giddy. How many times had he inhaled? Say a dozen times for every cigarette. Multiply a dozen by a quarter of a million and –

  Change subject.

  ‘The suicide ploy isn’t very clever,’ he said. ‘Whoever did it wasn’t blessed with smarts. The assumption we’d overlook the evidence is …’ He groped for a word. ‘Amateur.’

  ‘Or arrogant,’ Linklater said.

  ‘Somehow I prefer to think I’m dealing with an amateur.’

  ‘You could be dealing with an arrogant amateur, Lou.’

  Perlman stared into the sink where his discarded tea-bag lay like something washed up on the bank of an industrial river. ‘I’ll need to run his fingerprints. See if I can give him a name at least.’

  ‘I’ll arrange a post-mortem,’ Linklater said, and glanced at Perlman as if he wanted to expand on the subject of autopsy, but he knew Perlman didn’t have a scientific turn of mind, and grew bored with technicalities. ‘If he wasn’t a suicide, Lou, then maybe he was killed by some means other than strangulation. Leave no stone unturned.’

  ‘Is that your motto too?’ Perlman asked.

  ‘Look at my dirty fingernails, if you will.’

  Perlman said, ‘Aye, manicures are pointless in this line of work, Sid. You’re not alone.’ He held up a hand for Linklater to look at.

  ‘You bite your nails, I see.’

  ‘I’m devouring myself quietly, old son. Piece by piece.’

  ‘Better no nails than no lungs.’

  Perlman walked to the door. ‘Nag nag. I’m away. I’ve a report to write.’

  4

  Artie Wexler peered from the bedroom window into the street at the parked cars shining under lamps. He knew all the cars in this prosperous cul-de-sac, Sinclair’s red Land Rover, Tutterman’s antique Jaguar, fifty years old and still as showroom-glossy as a wax apple, Mackinlay’s silver Lexus, all of them. I’m looking for something else, he thought. But what? A car I’ve never seen before? Too much imagination. Something goes wrong in your schedule, an old friend fails to keep an appointment, and you feel little breakdowns inside. He closed the slit in the curtain. The palms of his hands were damp.

  Ruthie was out cold in bed. Artie glanced at her. Artie and Ruthie, man and wife, thirty years of matrimony. She was ten years younger than him, and a handsome woman. He loved her as much as the day he’d married her. A different kind of love, admittedly, a matter of comfort and mutual support, it had long ago ceased to be the hot seething passion of youth. You couldn’t keep that up, the sexual energy, always grabbing each other any chance you got. Love changed. A settlement took place in the foundations of marriage. You didn’t have the old appetites.

  Ruthie’s sleep was Dalmane-induced. She raised her face suddenly and peered at him, eyes slits.

  ‘How was dinner?’

  ‘He didn’t show up,’ Wexler said.

  ‘Strange. Did he call?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe …’ Ruthie didn’t finish her sentence. She turned on her side, slipped immediately back into sleep. Artie Wexler walked out of the room and went downstairs. He turned on the lights in the kitchen. He heard the dog, Reuben, a quiveringly fat Dalmatian, growl in the back yard. The kitchen was over-bright. Artie blinked, lit a cigar.

  He thought about the broken engagement again. There had to be some good reason. Something came up, last-minute business, whatever. He’d waited in the restaurant for a while, sipped a G&T slowly, fidgeted with cutlery, then he’d left. He’d stopped for a drink in the Horseshoe, thinking perhaps somebody had seen Joe there. Nobody had. It was odd, and hard to dismiss. A monthly dinner, same night every month, same place and time, La Lanterna at nine, Artie and Joe. What am I, obsessive? Let it go.

  He turned his thoughts to another matter troubling him.

  Miriam.

  Too late to telephone. Maybe. He blew smoke and it hung in the eyes of the spotlights overhead. Ruthie loved the spotlight effect. She’d installed twenty spots on a series of tracks in the ceiling. She also liked stainless-steel appliances, the fridge, the oven, the big extractor hood over the stove.

  He picked up the telephone and punched in Miriam’s number. It rang for a long time. He thought, hang up, leave it until morning. He tightened the cord of his robe and listened to the central-heating system come to life, the whisper of hot air flowing through vents. Ruthie liked the house hot.

  He heard Miriam. ‘Yes …’

  ‘It’s Artie,’ he said.

  ‘Artie, do you know the time?’

  ‘Just tell me how he is.’

  Miriam was quiet. Artie pictured her exquisite face, the dark Mediterranean eyes. She’d been a beautiful young woman and you could still see the ghost of that loveliness about her; time had refined the overt sexuality of her youth. She was graceful now, and elegant. Women admired and envied Miriam. She’s so thin, how does she keep her figure, and that smooth skin, what’s her secret?

  And if that isn’t enough she’s talented as well.

  ‘He’s just the way he was when you called before, Artie. Were you expecting divine intervention?’

  ‘I don’t know what I was expecting,’ Artie said. ‘You’ll keep me informed?’

  ‘Yes yes.’

  ‘This was all so bloody sudden.’

  ‘One minute I have a healthy husband. The next.’

  ‘When can I see him?’

  ‘A few years go past and you don’t see him, and suddenly you can’t stop asking after him?’

  Artie Wexler knew this was true. But so was the reverse. ‘He didn’t contact me either, Miriam. It’s not my fault completely.’

  ‘The trouble is, Artie, time slips away. Then one day it’s too late for renewing old friendships.’

  He said, ‘Maybe,’ and knew it sounded feeble. Time. Once, you had it in abundance. You thought you had a surplus. ‘What hospital is he in?’

  She told him.

  ‘That’s Rifkind’s hospital. I know him quite well. He’s a good doctor. Maybe we can pay a visit together tomorrow.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll be in touch.’

  Artie Wexler hung up. He saw his cigar had died but he didn’t light it again. He wandered up and down the kitchen, restless. Outside the dog barked and the sensor lights tripped in the yard and Artie stared out and saw wind shake the trees and ripple the grass, which had long ago shed its rich summer lustre. The swimming pool glimmered like a sea of spilled oil.

  He watched the dog prowl back and forth, sniffing air, disturbed no doubt by the way Ruthie’s wind chimes – souvenirs of a trip to the Grand Canyon: or had it been that time in Jerusalem? – bonged ever so quietly on the patio. The sensor lights went out and the wind receded and Artie Wexler, pausing to check on the security system, climbed the stairs to the bedroom. Ruthie said something in her sleep, a sound dredged up from the unfathomable sludge of the mind.

  Wexler lay down beside his wife and stared at the ceiling and listened to acid rumbling in his gut. He thought of circles interlinking, old acquaintances renewed, a history, and he felt sweat fo
rm on his skin. He fell asleep and dreamed of the empty chair at his table in the Lanterna, and when he woke at 4 a.m. he was soaked.

  5

  There were no pyramids in Egypt, Glasgow, where Lou Perlman lived. He’d wondered many times about the name of this neighbourhood, which lay pocketed in the East End of Glasgow between Shettleston Road to the north and Tollcross Road to the south. Small area, a cluster of a few streets, some two-storey blocks of 1930s vintage, none of the classic Victorian sandstone tenements you found in other parts of the city. On some maps Egypt wasn’t even noted, as if cartographers were so baffled by the origins of the name that they ignored it. It was, Perlman often thought, a place lacking character. It was certainly not scenic. You wouldn’t drag tourists out here from such picturesque places as the Botanic Gardens or the Glasgow Art Gallery. But there was an anonymity about it he enjoyed, a sense of privacy, tucked away from the roar of traffic rolling east and west along the main roads.

  He guessed he was the only Jew living in Egypt. The Jewish community in Glasgow – some 4,000 out of a total population of around 610,000 (about 1.2 million if you included the whole Metropolitan area) – had usually lived in the Southside, particularly in the slums of the old Gorbals, where they’d first come at the turn of the twentieth century as immigrants from Eastern Europe. Later they’d graduated to the suburbs of Shawlands, then Giffnock, and later still into the prosperous beyond of Newton Mearns. Perlman’s family considered it an act of defiance on Lou’s part to live this far into the East End, and typical of his contrary nature, but he didn’t give a damn what that cake-making, tea-drinking rabble of aunts and uncles and cousins thought.

  I’m a Jew in Egypt, and I like it.

  Five-twenty a.m. and freezing when he parked his dented Mondeo and hurried, head bent, towards his house, which was one of two old blackened sandstones in the street. He stuck the key into the lock, shut and bolted the door behind him. He switched on the light in the hallway. Superstitiously, he touched the mezuzah on the door jamb. It had been painted over many times in the years Perlman had lived here. Now it was covered in the same dull blue gloss as the door itself.