Butcher Page 25

  ‘If I ruled the world.’ Perlman lit the cigarette and quietly admired the layered patterns of rising smoke a moment. ‘You got an ashtray?’

  ‘I don’t s-smoke. Why would I have an ashtray?’

  ‘That’s a very good point, Dorcus.’

  Dorcus slung the mac over a peg in the wall. ‘I th-think the rain’s letting up.’

  He wants me out, Perlman thought. Jackie Ace was the same, wanted him out. I’m a serpentine presence, he thought. A suit filled with rattlers.

  ‘When you worked with Jackie at Tartakower’s chop-shop, what did you do there? Some cutting, a little butchery, this and that?’

  ‘T-Tartakower – is that wh-why you’re really here?’

  ‘In a roundabout way, aye. But do me a favour, drop the big astonishment act. One, you’re no good at it. And two, I know Jackie’s told you we talked and Tartakower’s name came up.’

  Dysart had the expression of a man who’d always hoped his past misdeeds had been forgotten, only now somebody had come along to expose them. He was the kind of schlemiel Perlman always wished he could give a break, not just because of the stutter, but because he transmitted rays of old hurts, the strange guy routinely singled out for mockery by careless teachers and cruel schoolmates and, later in life, by heartless nurses or callous professors. What did he feel when he heard laughter behind his back or when somebody impersonated his impediment?

  ‘I’m not interested in anything you did in your Tartakower days, Dorcus.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘Far as I’m concerned, that’s bygones.’

  ‘Then w-why are you here?’

  Perlman walked in deliberate little circles and talked in a patient manner about the severed hand. He explained he was following up this information, he wasn’t here to make accusations or bring charges, this was – oh, that dear wrinkled old chestnut plucked from the fire – routine. Did Dysart understand?

  Dysart had been leaning against the wall with his arms tightly crossed and his eyes fixed to the floor all the time Perlman talked. Only when Perlman finished did he raise his face and look at him. ‘So the w-woman you said y-you were looking for, that was a pretext—’

  ‘No, that was a genuine report.’

  ‘Now you’re talking about s-something t-totally different. I c-can’t follow you. I never c-cut off anyone’s hand. I never did anything like that.’

  ‘I’m not accusing you, Dorcus.’

  ‘B-but you’re thinking I did—’

  ‘No, no, I told you, I’m only making inquiries.’

  ‘T-tartakower’s c-crazy. You can’t b-believe anything he ever says. He tells ter-terrible stories and …’ Dysart faltered, brain-blocked.

  This stutter was agony to Perlman: so what was it like for Dysart, who heard his own mangled words echo in his ears? Perlman wished he could grab him around the chest and perform a kind of Heimlich that would free the word jam. ‘I didn’t say I believed Tartakower, Dorcus.’

  ‘How can I t-trust you? It s-seems p-peculiar you come here about one th-thing and then suddenly move on to something else—’

  ‘Sorry if I give you the impression of a deception.’

  ‘You set t-traps. That’s wha-what you do.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ Trapper Lou. Snowshoes and caribou pelt and an Eskimo wife called Nanda. He was finished with his cigarette. He wondered where he could put the stub. He raised his eyebrows at Dorcus, who was conscious of Perlman’s little predicament but offered no suggestion.

  Perlman said, ‘No ashtray, no sweat. Smokers are ingenious. I can hold it until it dies completely, then I can stick it in my pocket.’

  ‘A smoker’s d-dilemma,’ Dorcus said.

  ‘One among many.’ Perlman smiled his biggest smile, the one reserved for the admission of his own weakness.

  ‘Think of your lungs.’

  ‘I never stop,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Think of emphysema. Then you need a portable oxygen supply if you g-go out. I’m only p-pointing these things out as a doctor.’

  ‘Your concern’s noted. You’re just not the kind of guy who’d inflict a needless cruelty. Like cutting off somebody’s hand.’

  ‘N-never.’

  Perlman felt a floorboard move underfoot. Joists creaked. All this talk of cigarette diseases screwed with his head, accentuated his own lugubrious fears. And the house was having a disquieting effect on him too, as if in other rooms people were sharing whispered secrets. It was like a weird dream – you hear whispers, you burst into the room, nobody’s there, just a circle of empty chairs still warm from recent use. But no evidence of anyone. He was tuning in to the sounds and rhythms of an old house dying, that was all. Every ancient house had its own terminal illness, its idiosyncratic gasps and sighs as extinction loomed.

  The portraits glowered at him. What are you really here for, Perlman? Have you come to bully our son? The woman seemed to be fading into a mauve nothingness, a lavender afterlife.

  Perlman asked, ‘Your parents?’

  Dysart said yes.

  Perlman regarded the portrait of Dysart’s father, the sterile blue of the eyes. He edged a little further down the hall. A staircase rose into dusky uncertainty.

  ‘So what kind of shape is it in up there?’

  ‘Y-you won’t be happy until you g-get the tour, will you?’

  ‘Honest, I wouldn’t mind a gander. OK with you?’ Perlman shook the handrail and then, without Dysart’s approval, climbed the first four or five steps. The staircase was infirm, but it wasn’t exactly on the edge of collapse.

  Dysart caught up with him. ‘Wait.’

  He doesn’t want me to go up here. And yet – Perlman had the inexplicable feeling that for some reason Dysart did want him to explore. Why the mixed signals, the scrambled radar? The atmosphere of this house, the brooding light, Dysart’s stiff awkwardness, his strangeness – a combination of them all, who could say?

  Perlman paused on the stairs and let Dysart lead the way up.

  At the top Dysart said, ‘There’s r-really n-nothing of interest.’ He moved down a long hall that stretched into a series of closed doors.

  ‘You could have a bowling-alley here,’ Perlman said.

  Dysart opened the first door he came to, and showed Perlman a room, bare and carpetless, walls with faded spots where mirrors or pictures had hung.

  ‘This was my f-father’s bedroom,’ Dysart said.

  ‘What did you do – hock the furniture?’

  ‘I had no n-need for it …’

  ‘You and your dad got along?’

  ‘We g-got on all right. He was a judge.’ Dysart was fidgety. He fiddled with the tie knot a couple of times, then adjusted the buckle of his belt.

  ‘You like this room, Dorcus?’

  ‘It’s j-just a room, a b-bare room.’

  Problems with Dad? Perlman wondered. Fair to assume. The portrait downstairs was of an aloof man, a severe man who maybe didn’t have time for a kid. A judge, for God’s sake, what could you expect? Perlman had never met a judge he liked. They were all black-cloaked gods of their own demonic little worlds.

  He followed Dysart back into the hall.

  Dysart opened another door and showed him a room similar to the Judge’s – no furnishing, no carpet, bare walls. Acrid mildew permeated both rooms.

  ‘This was m-my mother’s room, b-before …’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘She g-got sick and we h-had to s-send her to hospital.’

  Bad memories of mother. Sickness and loss. Perlman didn’t feel like lingering in this room. He was cold. The deeper you went into this house, the colder it seemed to get. He felt a draught from somewhere. He surreptitiously dropped his dead cigarette-end on the floor.

  ‘How do you heat this place?’

  ‘There’s an oil central-heating s-system that n-needs a new boiler. You don’t notice the cold after you’ve lived h-here a while.’

  I’d notice if I lived here an eternity,
Perlman thought, and moved back into the hall and turned the handle of the next door he reached. It didn’t yield.

  ‘Oh, that r-room’s locked, Sergeant.’

  ‘What’s in here?’

  ‘It’s only s-some old stuff.’

  ‘Got a key?’

  ‘I have a k-key, yeh.’ Dysart reached into his pocket and produced a ring of keys. He inserted one into the lock, click, pushed the door open.

  Perlman said, ‘After you.’

  Dysart stepped into the room, where half-open slatted white blinds allowed strips of insipid grey light to enter. Perlman was instantly struck by two layers of scents, one the cloying perfume of an air-freshener liberally applied, the other an underscent of disinfectant that reminded him of the time he’d spent in hospital with the gunshot wound. He was also conscious of smooth white walls, a bed with a white lacy quilt, a stainless steel sink with long-stemmed taps. Beside the bed was a wooden locker painted white. Halfway up the wall a shower head had been installed behind a frosted glass partition, the door of which lay open. Inside was a sponge in a ceramic dish, a bar of Nivea soap still in its box, and a full bottle of Pantene shampoo.

  White-tiled floors and a mix of scents and soap in a box.

  This room troubles me. It’s not right. Or maybe it was just Dysart’s presence that made him feel this way. Something about Dysart, a quality of combustibility, say, as if inside his head a lake of lava simmered.

  He looked up at the ceiling and saw two light fixtures that contained no bulbs. Then he turned and noticed a wheelchair folded in the corner, beside a small white sitz-bath.

  The thought popped into his head: somebody died here.

  He looked at Dysart and asked, ‘Your mother?’

  Dysart said, ‘When she c-came home from Hairmyres Hospital, this was her r-room. My father had it specially prepared for her. He didn’t want her dying in a hospital. We had a p-private nurse for her. The room’s pretty much as it was when she passed away.’

  Makes sense, who wants to die in a hospital.

  He looked at the bedside locker. ‘Mind if I take a peek?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’d want to. But g-go ahead. It’s not l-locked.’

  Perlman opened it. Inside lay some personal items, presumably the property of the late Mrs Dysart. He found a slender silver watch, a well-thumbed deck of cards, a spray-bottle labelled Essence of Rose, and a book called A Life of Elizabeth the First. A long-dead rose was stuck somewhere in the middle, a withered bookmark. Mrs Dysart hadn’t finished the book. She probably knew the ending anyway.

  Dysart looked at the stuff. ‘She suffered. It w-was so t-terrible to watch.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ The unbearable nature of human endings. The way death ate through tissue day by day, the erosion of the will to endure.

  ‘She c-couldn’t breathe. My f-father brought in cylinders of oxygen. I watched the n-nurse put a mask on her face. She fought for life, you know. She didn’t j-just give in. M-my father spent hours with h-her in this room. Sometimes he fell asleep sitting on the edge of the b-bed.’

  ‘Devoted.’

  ‘Completely. He n-never believed she really died. He always thought she c-could be contacted.’ Dorcus looked alarmed, stung by the pain of an old memory. ‘He h-held s-séances in the d-dining room all the time. I w-wasn’t supposed to l-look b-but I sneaked in.’

  Séances. Congregations of optimists. ‘Ever see anything?’

  ‘People lighting candles and h-holding hands and praying. My f-father never knew I was w-watching. I h-hid behind a curtain, s-scared – all these p-people praying to the spirit w-world and calling out m-my mother’s name. And my f-father would sink h-his head into his hands and s-sob, it was … terrifying. I k-kept thinking, oh, these are all g-grown up people, they k-know what they’re d-doing, so I expected m-my m-mother to appear, I always did. I w-watched shadows in the l-lamp and imagined I could s-see her b-but it w-wasn’t her …’

  A small kid gatecrashes a séance. A child on the edge of a world of mysterious suggestions, candle flames flickering, the company of adults who believed in the penetrability of the other side. How did this experience affect a kid’s mind?

  Dysart said, ‘This room is an unhappy place.’

  ‘So why keep it this way?’

  Dysart shrugged. ‘To remind me, I s-suppose.’

  ‘My own feelings about the dead. You bury them. You remember them. You move on. You don’t linger the way you do.’

  ‘I d-don’t c-come in here and t-talk to her or anything c-crazy like that. I d-don’t come in here at all in f-fact.’

  ‘Unless you have a janitor, you must come in sometimes. I don’t see any webs, and I don’t see dust. And obviously you disinfect. I’d say you disinfected quite recently. Then you sprayed something else to cover the pong, Dorcus.’

  ‘W-well, of course, I come in now and then to c-clean.’

  ‘I’m wondering why you spray the place this heavily.’

  ‘Because I remember this r-room always smelled of rose oil. It smothered m-me. After my father died, I s-started to use the d-disinfectant. Sometimes the d-disinfectant is too s-strong so I spray something s-sweet over it. But not r-rose, n-never rose.’

  A panoply of scents. Perlman folded his arms across his chest, and rocked very slightly against the wall. ‘You and Jackie – do you ever come in here?’

  ‘No.’

  The Pickler said he saw this room lit the night Jackie was here. Unless he was dreaming or deluded. He’d been sober that night.

  The room was cold and had all the welcome of a deep-freeze. Perlman pictured Mrs Dysart in this bed, covered by the white quilt. Death was everywhere in the air here – the mother, the séances actively seeking to communicate with her, the house itself dying.

  ‘You don’t really use this room for anything.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But you lock it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why? What’s to steal? Anyway, what burglar’s going to get past the mighty Dobermans?’

  ‘S-somebody might.’

  ‘Did you bring the girl to this room?’

  ‘G-girl?’

  ‘Girl, Dorcus. The one who ran away?’

  ‘N-no, I never brought h-her in here.’

  ‘You admit she was here, right?’

  ‘N-no, I d-don’t admit that, I don’t.’

  ‘She was seen. She was heard shouting.’ Perlman paused a moment on the cusp of a lie. Go for it. ‘She already told me you brought her here.’

  ‘I d-don’t believe you. There’s no g-girl.’

  ‘Why was she so scared, Dorcus? What did you do to terrify her?’

  ‘If you t-talked to her, why don’t you ask her y-yourself?’

  ‘I want to hear it from you, Dorcus. Tell me what you did. Bring her in here and tell her some ghostie stories and scare her? Maybe you had her witless and trembling. She’s susceptible, she believes your stories—’

  ‘P-Perlman, no, how m-many times—?’

  ‘Mibbe I’m wrong about ghost stories. Mibbe you keep some of your old instruments from Tartakower days and you dragged them out and scared her shitless. You might even have tied her down on this bed and pretended she was a client at Tartakower’s and you just couldn’t help yourself, trip back in time, memory lane, good old days at Tarty’s, eh? Just a game, you told her. And you had the scalpels all ready and shining, and maybe some chloroform handy, and let’s say she was too drunk to resist, too snookered to know it was only a harmless game.’

  ‘No, n-no—’

  ‘Speak to me Dorcus. Speak.’

  ‘I d-don’t have anything to say—’

  Perlman stared into Dysart’s eyes. What did he see there – fear? Sickness?

  Old instruments from chop-shop days.

  The idea kicked and turned inside his head. Ill-shaped mirages shifted disconcertingly at the back of his skull. He had a vibe of the kind he’d had a thousand times in his career, and it was something he�
�d learned not to ignore. Old instruments. Sometimes the phantoms took shape, sometimes they didn’t, then the vibe, the instinct, call it what you like, vanished.

  But he had something. He knew it. He wished it was clear.

  ‘I n-need to f-eed the dogs, Perlman. It’s that time—’

  ‘The dogs can wait. Answer my questions.’

  ‘I n-need to feed them.’

  Perlman couldn’t shake the smells of this room. They wrapped themselves around him, choked him. He remembered lying in a hospital ward, his shoulder burning, his mind swept out to sea on the good ship pethidine. The smell of the ward. The nurses floating like apparitions. He had a sudden flash as the fog dispersed and the mirages took recognizable form in his head and he saw Kirk McLatchie lying in the morgue, neatly stitched.

  A bed. Scalpels. A place to drain away the blood.

  He looked at the shower head, at the sink set in tiles. You’d need a rubber tube attached to the sink to carry blood from the body on the bed. This room could be transformed in minutes, halogens attached to the sockets in the ceiling, a saw that was easily portable, instruments that came in their own nifty cases, and somebody who knew not only how to use these tools, but had the desire to do so.

  Could Kirk have been brought here and butchered? Was he drugged and dragged to this place and sliced open and his organs cut out and ferried to wealthy buyers awaiting transplants and his blood sluiced through a rubber tube into the sink and down and down? No, it’s unreal. And then the body was driven away in the van and dumped where two young people on a date found him? No, this isn’t the way to go. He was agitated, his mind surfboarding, this wave, that wave, this current, that. He reached quickly inside his jacket. He took his notebook from his pocket and opened it at the page where Kirk’s photo was placed, and slipped the snapshot out and shoved it under Dysart’s face.

  ‘You seen this man before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look carefully.’

  Dysart glanced, then said, ‘Never.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  What else could Dysart say? Yes, I worked on this man, I cut his heart out. Perlman thought: I’m jumping to conclusions like a fucking salmon leaping upstream without knowing why he’s making the bloody effort in the first place. Kirk McLatchie might never have been here – it’s wild, wayward, my head catapulting me into no-go areas, thickets of nonsense, the sensors are off target.