White Rage (The Glasgow Novels) Read online

  ‘Feh,’ Perlman said. He suddenly remembered the dead gull he’d found in his driveway yesterday morning. It had dropped mysteriously from the sky. No evidence of a wound, no broken wing or leg. It occurred to him that the bird had fallen about twenty yards from the place where Colin had died. Practically on my own doorstep, he thought.

  And hadn’t he heard on the car radio only this morning of somebody falling from the balcony of a flat in Great Western Road? A suicide? He couldn’t remember what the newsreader had said.

  The leaping dog, the stiff gull, the balcony jumper – were these all signs of some kind? Did we live in an age of portents? Maybe. But who was wise enough to interpret them?

  He had an image of the gull. Eyes void, claws paralysed.

  I’d fly away if I had wings, he thought. Who are you kidding? Without your job, life would be one long kvetch. Unemployed, you’d go down Domino Drive and shuffle the ivory tablets with the other old Jewish geezers in a senior citizens’ centre, and bitch in the bittersweet language of mightabeens. If I’d gone to Israel when my son asked me, I’d be sucking fresh oranges in Tel Aviv instead of. I shoulda saved harder for my old age, here I am counting pennies and. He thought: I need the city, the streets, a sense of purpose. Sandy was right: you signed on for life.

  I belong to Glasgow. Dear old Glasgow.

  Where else would I go?

  3

  Bobby Descartes wrote in his journal with a ballpoint: I hate Pakis and Indians, and jews and Nijerians and niggers in jeneral.

  He was a man with pale lifeless grey eyes. He had a tiny mouth he often forgot to close – a trap for flies, his father used to say. He breathed through his open mouth a lot. He had nasal problems and often thunked at the back of his throat. He wore purple and green tracksuit trousers of a shiny synthetic material, and a green fleecy top with a hood. He also wore a pair of chunky black running shoes. He liked the mazy footprints made by the contoured rubber soles.

  He closed his journal, which had a hundred and twenty pages. So far he’d covered eighty-seven of them with his tiny handwriting. One day he’d have to start a new journal, all blank crisp pages. Volume Two of Bobby’s World View. He had a lot to get off his chest. Two times one hundred and twenty pages was two hundred and forty. He liked numbers, the act of counting. Arithmetic was an orderly world all to itself.

  A TV jabbered in the next room, where his mother lay on her decrepit velvet sofa. She was addicted to self-humiliation shows imported from America. Mountainous men and women, ranting blubbery persons who came screaming and strutting out of the wings. Check my fucking attitude. There were Brit clones of these shows on telly. What was wrong with the UK mentality that it had to mimic the American? Turn your head one way, wham, another big fucking yellow McDonald’s M in the sky. Swivel it the other, you get an eyeful of long-necked Budweiser bottles lying broken in the gutters and discarded packets of Camel Lights. Newsagents were filled with glossy magazines devoted to the troubled histories of Hollywood film stars. Sluts, shoplifters, cokeheads.

  I give a fuck, he thought.

  Credit where it was due all the same: the Yanks understood love of country. Yessiree, they did. My Country, Love It Or Leave It. Bobby had that bumper sticker tacked to the plywood-panelled walls of his room. He wondered how come national pride had been trashed. Who stood up these days when the band played ‘God Save The Queen’, eh? Patriotism was just a bad word. The nation was under an evil spell. An air of despair hung over the land. Try to find a decent hospital. Trains a joke. Buses always overcrowded. Post Office workers downright fucking rude. Factories shutting down. Ordinary people couldn’t pay rent.

  The country reeked of decay.

  He teased back a strip of plywood from the wall and concealed his journal behind it, then he looked from the window down into the street. He saw a burnt-out old Vauxhall and a bunch of shaven-headed locals – he counted six – smoking skunk under a twisted lamp-post that hadn’t had a bulb replacement in eight years. A teenage Temazepam addict Bobby knew as Annie swerved along the pavement in the manner of a twig shuttled this way and that by a wind.

  Pretty wee thing, Bobby thought. Always dazed and bone-white and nothing in her eyes.

  Drug dealers were royalty around here. The police did bugger all. They drove past in their cars like slumming tourists. Look, there’s a druggie, just drive on. Upholders of the law, o aye, sure.

  He stared at the crummy flats across the way. Some windows had been blocked with sheets of steel. A spray-painted message splattered on one sheet read: Welcome to Hell. When he considered how dopers and hoors and an influx of immigrant scum had wrecked this corner of Glasgow, and by extension the whole United Kingdom, he heard a blood-red hum in his brain and his vision went dark at the edges. His rage, which he struggled to maintain on a low-altitude frequency for the purposes of making it through the day, rose to radioactive levels.

  In a dark room, by Christ he’d glow with fury.

  He sat down in front of his computer and checked his email. He had one message. The one he’d been expecting. Even so, it caused a rush of blood to his head.

  Go, the message read.

  He sent a reply to [email protected]. He tapped the keys in picky little strokes. The note he transmitted read: Beezer will do his duty.

  Beezer, his war name. Magistr32 had given him that one. He didn’t know why. He didn’t want to think about Magistr32 right now because it was a line of thought that always disturbed him, and he gave in to feelings he didn’t need. He had to be absolutely fucking focused.

  He deleted all his messages in and out, shut the machine down and slid open the drawer of the woodwormed table on which the computer sat. The Seecamp was wrapped in a dirty linen handkerchief.

  He removed the gun. He admired its compact design. Amazing how this wee thing, less than five inches long and weighing about ten ounces, could kill. He balanced it in the palm of his hand, and thought lovely. He stuck the gun in the right pocket of his tracksuit trousers.

  When the time comes. Reach, find, remove, fire.

  Today’s the day, he thought. No turning back. Enough’s enough.

  He walked inside the room where his mother, Her Highness, lay. Sandrine Descartes, sixty-six and leathery from half a century of smoking, adjusted her shawl. She looked as if some high-tech latex special effects had been used on her face; her eyes were bright but her skin was pure crone.

  Ugly old cow, Bobby thought. Day after day she lay in this dim room and smoked cigarettes with the blinds drawn. She lived in a state of perpetual shade. One day he expected he’d come into the room in time to see her fade into infinity.

  On the telly a white-faced woman with long greasy hair was weeping. ‘I never told her I loved her,’ she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  The show’s hostess squeezed the moment. ‘It can’t be easy to admit you have lesbian feelings for your own sister –’

  Bobby picked up the remote and zapped the TV.

  ‘I was watching that, Robert.’

  ‘It’s shite,’ Bobby said.

  ‘It interests me. The whole human drama.’ She smoked a Kensitas.

  ‘You see more human drama from your own window.’

  ‘It depresses me to look out, Robert.’

  He had the feeling his mother was about to launch into her usual mumbo about her late father, an important Frog lawyer with a big house in the Loire Valley. Fine wines, crystal, silver candlesticks, the works. Bobby sometimes wondered how much of this story was true.

  The plotline was total suds: young French woman of a certain class marries beneath herself, falling for a charming adventurer called Jacques Descartes, who drags her halfway round the world in doomed pursuit of lost gold mines and oil deposits, riches based on wild rumours eavesdropped in the taverns of shabby port cities where travellers traded dodgy map fragments or dog-eared geological reports for a few drams of booze or some cash. The lovers marry in Mozambique and, having survived various disasters – a sh
ipwreck, an earthquake, according to Sandrine – they wash up in Glasgow many years later because Monsieur Le Loverboy has learned of a forgotten silver mine in the hills of Lanarkshire.

  Of all places. Lanarkshire. The sticks.

  The story culminated in sickness and poverty, Jacques dying from TB, and Sandrine living out a miserable widowhood in this unpleasant corner of a cold Scottish city, her only legacy Bobby, who remembered his dad, his papa, as an embittered man with a frighteningly big head and thick white hair, who sometimes sang ‘La Marseillaise’ if he was pished. Which was often.

  It was all rubbish, Bobby sometimes thought. Pure keich. Or maybe there was some nub of truth, enough to keep Sandrine warm on cold nights. Fuck did it matter?

  ‘I’m going out,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Don’t interrogate me, Ma. I’m thirty-seven years old.’

  ‘In your head, ah, you are an adolescent.’ She made a Gallic gesture, shrugging then throwing her hands up in the fashion of a juggler. ‘No job. No prospects. No girl, Robert. No love. Where is love? Life needs love.’

  Her accent turned Robert into Robair. She pronounced their last name Daycart instead of Deskarts. He hated that. Daycart. It was like something with wheels.

  ‘You do not make anything of yourself.’

  ‘At least I don’t lie around on a clapped-out old sofa watching crap TV.’

  ‘Ah, no. You are so busy acquiring a university degree, of course. Forgive me, I forget.’

  Her sarcasm. Her love story. Her broken heart. Her maroon sofa and that bloody shawl. What else didn’t he like about his mother? He headed towards the door. ‘One day you’ll be proud of me.’

  ‘I hold my breath.’

  He paused on the way out. Just for a second his nerve wilted, but he pushed his uncertainty aside and shut the door before hitting the stairs. Beezer – one of whose ancestors was a famous French philosopher, a fact Sandrine had fruitlessly tried to impress on her son years ago – was on the go.

  With murder in his heart.

  4

  Leo Kilroy weighed twenty-five stone, give or take. He dominated the space of Scullion’s small office. His great jellied jowls wattled his neck; his eyes were lost in mounds of flab the shape of gnocchi. Perlman never knew which was more overwhelming: the man’s sheer presence or the garish nature of his clothing. He wore a long red leather coat, a suit of brushed blue suede, an antique brocade waistcoat, and a broad-brimmed beige hat with a wide band of neo-Aztec design. It was difficult not to think of an overstuffed trotter got up for a fancy-dress ball.

  ‘You look pale, Lou,’ Kilroy said. ‘Peely-wally.’

  ‘It’s the effect you have, Leo. You drain the blood from my face.’

  Kilroy smiled. ‘Have you changed your hairstyle or did you just get your finger stuck in a light socket?’

  ‘Tell me where I can catch your stand-up act.’ Perlman went to the window of Scullion’s office, which overlooked Pitt Street. He needed light, even if it was only this insipid grey muslin that enclosed Glasgow like yesterday’s ectoplasm. Kilroy’s presence was oppressive, an eclipse.

  Kilroy said, ‘A sea cruise in sunny climes might be just the thing to get some colour into your cheeks. I can recommend a first-rate vessel sailing the Caribbean. I know el capitano.’

  ‘I don’t have holiday time coming up.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  ‘Mibbe this has escaped your notice, Leo, but the majority of people work for a living. Most of us are on schedules and incomes that don’t allow much time for globe-trotting. Most of us aren’t on first-name terms with the el capitanos of seagoing vessels.’

  ‘My, don’t tell me we’re going down the slope to snide, Lou. My ears are pricked. Will you be calling me Fatso next?’

  Perlman stuck a hand in his coat pocket and fingered his cigarettes. He regretted his brief foray into cheap sarcasm. There was no dignity in it. Kilroy would see it as a victory: I got under the Sergeant’s skin easy as breaking wind, heh heh.

  A smoke, a smoke, Lou thought. His need for a stick of tobacco was profound. In the street below he saw the Dalmatian still hauling its owner along the pavement. What did a little old man want with such a big dog? Protection against the terror of the city, of course. Tenements were fitted with security doors and alarm systems. Fear of violence was a condition of the world. Old people were lost in a savage jungle they didn’t understand.

  Leo Kilroy’s lawyer, Nat Blum, stood directly behind his client. Blum was as slim as Kilroy obese, a spindle of a man with a narrow face and dark eyebrows. He was handsome the way the head of an axe might be handsome. His black hair was glossy. Perlman wondered if it was dyed.

  ‘Let’s try and keep this cordial, Lou,’ Blum said.

  ‘Working at it, Nat. Sweating over it.’

  ‘After all, we’re here in the service of the due process of law. The least you can do is show appreciation.’

  Appreciation. Perlman choked back a number of responses, none witty. He glanced at Scullion, who was rearranging the framed pictures on the desk. Sandy’s private icons – his pretty wife, Madeleine, his two sweet kids. The Inspector had an existence beyond Pitt Street, a home to go to. Perlman’s life was laundry he never got round to doing, a ton of old newspapers he’d never managed to discard – some of them dating back to a misty age when tramcars swayed on electric wires through cobbled city streets, and the coins in your pockets were big hefty pennies or chunky florins.

  Blum looked at his watch and said, ‘Let’s get to the point. You have some quote unquote fresh evidence, so I’m told.’

  Perlman propped himself against the window ledge. He remembered the blue classic car pass under the streetlamps, and heard the blast of the weapon rolling through his head like a memory of thunder. He said, ‘Kilroy’s car, the Bentley –’

  Blum interrupted. ‘Again with the car? We dealt with the bloody car months ago.’

  Kilroy said, ‘The night your brother died my Bentley was stolen. It’s a matter of record. A felonious person, or persons, made off with my pride and joy.’

  ‘The car was subsequently torched,’ Blum added. ‘The charred ruin was found a couple of months ago in a godforsaken part of Ayrshire. This is ancient history –’

  Perlman said, ‘I know that –’

  ‘In any case, haven’t we already proved that my client had nothing to do with the slaying of your brother?’

  ‘Not to my satisfaction,’ Perlman said.

  ‘I’m heartbroken to learn that you aren’t happy, Lou, but the Procurator-Fiscal threw your case out, or have you forgotten?’

  ‘I’d forget a thing like that?’

  ‘I’m sorry Colin’s dead, but you can’t keep trying to dump the blame on my client.’ A greased lank of black hair had fallen over Blum’s forehead, and he swept it back. ‘You saw a gun in the window of a classic Bentley one night last December. Somebody, whose face you didn’t see, fired a shot that killed your brother. My client doesn’t even know how to use a gun, for God’s sake. You don’t have anything that links the killer to Mr Kilroy. What’s so interesting about the car all of a sudden?’

  Blum’s confidence riled Perlman. Nat was infatuated with himself, the slickly dressed man about Glasgow familiar to maître d’s and chefs alike, one who drew waiters to him as a magnet attracts metal shavings. Nat’s world was champagne cocktails in the Rogano and a penthouse flat in some flash new development on the river. He was the boy who’d risen from a mean background – Dad an impoverished tailor – to become the high-paid legal representative of assorted gangsters and criminals. He’d bought himself expensive implanted teeth, and buffed the rough edges from his Glasgow accent. He never swore. As he’d risen in the world, he’d elevated his language.

  Perlman said, ‘If you’ll just listen without getting your silk boxers in a fankle, Nat, I might get a word in … An eyewitness says he saw Kilroy driving the Bentley after the time of my brother’s murder. If that’s true, it hammers a
stake through the heart of your client’s alibi. Correct me if I’m wrong.’

  ‘An eyewitness, Lou? Four months later and suddenly an eyewitness?’ Blum looked at Scullion. ‘Is the Sergeant in his right mind, Sandy?’

  Scullion said, ‘A person made contact.’

  ‘A person made contact? How exactly? Letter? Email? Did he tell you my client was driving the car after it was reported stolen?’

  Scullion blew his nose, then glanced at Perlman. ‘Lou, why don’t you tell Blum your story?’

  Perlman was quiet for a moment. Okay, this was a shot in the dark with a crooked crossbow, but the important thing was to appear confident, a man privy to great secrets. ‘The contact was made by telephone last night.’

  ‘And the caller left a name and address?’ Blum asked.

  Perlman smiled at the lawyer. Hold the smile, sustain the confidence, the ease. ‘As a matter of fact, no.’

  ‘I’m hitting rewind. A total stranger phoned, spun you a story, then – what? He gave you nothing by way of ID?’

  ‘He said he’d call back.’

  ‘And he hasn’t?’

  Perlman nodded. ‘No, but it’s only a matter of time.’

  Blum said, ‘And you recorded the message, I assume.’

  ‘I don’t tape my calls. He said he’d call with more details –’

  ‘And that’s it? Some schmuck phones you with a message he doesn’t substantiate, he gives you no indication of its provenance, he doesn’t even identify himself, and you have me drag Mr Kilroy down here on this basis? It’s a nonsense. I know what you’re doing, Lou. You’re harassing my client. This is part of a pattern you’ve established over the years.’

  Perlman waved a hand dismissively. ‘Fuck’s sake, Nat. I’m not harassing anyone. I’m presenting you with a simple statement of fact that contradicts your client’s story.’

  ‘An anonymous phone call doesn’t constitute a statement of fact, Lou. Is this all you’ve got?’

  Perlman shrugged. ‘Somebody out there knows something, Nat. I just thought you should be aware.’