The Last Darkness Page 27

  Mary Gibson stood up. Her skirt was pleated, Quick noticed. Warm tweedy material. Her stomach was flat.

  ‘That’s all you have to say?’ she asked.

  ‘He wants an address,’ Quick said. ‘I can give it to him. Understand what I’m telling you? I can give him this fucking address. Sorry. Beg pardon for the language.’

  ‘I’ve heard worse,’ Mary Gibson said.

  Why wasn’t she interested? why wasn’t she agog? She just walked past him to the door.

  He got up from his chair and said, ‘Braeside Street.’

  ‘Number forty-five,’ she said.

  ‘Right –’

  ‘Top floor, no name on the door.’ In a bored monotone. ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘Aye but –’

  ‘This is exactly what Mr Furfee told me less than ten minutes ago,’ she said. ‘He’s as desperate to help as you are. Funny to get as much cooperation. I sniff guilt. But you were just that little bit slower, Mr Quick. He who snoozes, loses.’

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck. What the hell did you promise Furfee?’

  ‘The moon,’ she said. ‘What else?’

  ‘And what will he get?’

  ‘He’ll get justice, Mr Quick. He’ll get a fair trial.’

  ‘And me, what about me?’

  ‘The same.’

  She went out and closed the door and Quick, cursing the way the world worked, cursing his taste for underage girls and fast drugs and rock clubs, cursing everything that had conspired to bring him to this place at this particular time, including the moon and the stars and the drift of tides, tried in his anger to lift the table and topple it over.

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck,’ he roared. He quit when the pain in his neck became unbearable.

  The table, he observed, was bolted to the floor.

  51

  Scullion took Mary Gibson’s call on his cellphone in room 408 of the Waterloo Hotel and immediately pulled Perlman to one side. ‘We’re needed elsewhere. Now.’

  ‘What about Charlotte Leckie?’

  ‘Bailey can take her statement down. He writes, you know. I’ve seen examples.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’

  ‘I’ll tell you on the way.’

  Perlman turned to the woman and said, ‘I’m leaving you in the very capable hands of Detective-Sergeant Bailey.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘It’s okay. Really it is. Besides, he’s nicer than me. He really is.’

  Bailey came out of the bathroom, shutting the door quickly as if to hide the sight of something Charlotte Leckie had already seen.

  Perlman said, ‘Look after her. Take her statement.’

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ Perlman said.

  Charlotte Leckie said, ‘I’d like to get dressed.’

  ‘Bailey will be a gentleman and look the other way,’ Perlman said. ‘Won’t you, Bailey?’

  Perlman and Scullion went out into the corridor, where the uniforms had cleared most of the spectators away. They hurried towards the stairs, descended quickly. Perlman bumped along behind the Inspector. He’d yanked a muscle in his upper leg, probably when he’d given chase to the taxi. Now it had begun to ache.

  They reached the street and walked to where Scullion’s Rover was parked. Slippery underfoot. Glasgow was a city of whoopsadaisy surfaces, slick sheets of ice where any passing pedestrian might perform a pratfall.

  Scullion unlocked his car. Perlman clambered into the passenger seat. ‘Where are we headed?’

  ‘You want to find Abdullah, don’t you?’

  Perlman buckled his seatbelt. ‘Damn right I want to find him. Tell me you’ve got the address.’

  ‘Furfee broke, gave it to Mary Gibson.’

  ‘Furfee did? Well well well. Face to face with the mystery man. How far?’

  ‘Braeside Street.’

  ‘Off Maryhill Road. I know it.’

  ‘I hate driving in these conditions.’ Scullion switched on his de-icer, and wiped condensation from the windscreen with a rag he kept on the dash. He drove down Elmbank Street to St Vincent Street, where he crossed the motorway that slashed the gut of the city; below, the lights of slow-moving cars cut through the mist of exhaust fumes. He turned into North Street and headed for St George’s Cross, and then Maryhill Road. Perlman watched the city go past in a tableau of dark buildings rising beyond streetlamps, the occasional illumination of a restaurant or bar. He was thinking of Abdullah, of the enigmatic envelopes BJ had supposedly delivered.

  ‘Did Furfee say anything about the envelopes?’ he asked.

  ‘Not so far as I know. Christ, it’s an ordeal driving.’ The car failed to grip, slid, tobogganed a few yards to the right before Scullion had it under control again.

  ‘I don’t want to die in a car accident,’ Perlman said. ‘It’s so bloody banal.’

  ‘What kind of death are you looking for anyway?’

  ‘Oh. Something heroic.’

  ‘Tell me how you’d ever find yourself in heroic circumstances.’

  ‘Saving a beautiful girl from drowning.’

  ‘You don’t swim, Lou.’

  ‘That’s why it would be heroic.’

  Perlman pushed his seat back and stared out as Scullion drove up Maryhill Road. He thought of Nina with her garinim and the sheets of pretentious yellow bond on which she wrote her prose; funny how marriage could distil itself in so few sorry memories. He wondered if intensely cold weather induced an occasional melancholy in him.

  More likely it was the three murders that stoked this mood; that, and the recurring anxiety he felt about Colin. No, wait, you’re kidding yourself, Lou: it was more than Colin’s physical well-being that bothered you. It was his fucking past. When he was healthy and back on his feet, would his history stand up to scrutiny? Or would Bannerjee’s accusation be forgotten, as if the Indian’s words had never been said in the first place? Shiv was no longer around to make any claims about Colin, and the comments existed only in Lou Perlman’s memory; and who could say he wouldn’t forget them?

  But that question made him uneasy because he suspected he knew the answer: yes, yes, dammit, he’d protect his brother. He knew he would. He’d known it ever since the conversation with Bannerjee. He’d turn the old blind eye because the demands of blood were seemingly more compelling than those of the law. This revelation dismayed him. It came out of a place in his heart he’d never known about before now, an unlit corner where bad impulses hatched. He’d spent his life upholding the law, observing it dutifully, and now he realized he was actually prepared to look the other fucking way, like any sleazy cop on the take.

  He had a sudden longing to speak to Miriam. Or simply to see her. Would she be at the hospital now? Sitting at Colin’s bed. Talking quietly to him. Holding his hand. The loving wife.

  ‘On the left, I think,’ Scullion said.

  He swung the car very slowly. He drove down a street of tenements, and when he saw forty-five he pulled the Rover into the kerb, where he switched off the engine. ‘Here we are.’

  ‘Do we know if he’s home or if we wait down here until he appears?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Scullion said.

  ‘You want to go in?’

  Scullion said, ‘I want a backup unit first. I’ll call.’ He used his mobile, made the arrangements for a second vehicle. ‘I like a little extra security.’

  Perlman looked at lit windows burning in the dark. The city compressed space, and thus compressed people. So many lives in boxes. His mind shifted briefly to Bannerjee, blood in that thick white hair, blood on porcelain. The impulsion of the screwdriver, the strength behind it.

  His leg muscle twinged again and he changed position. A car slipped in behind the Rover, and flashed its lamps twice. Scullion got out. Perlman followed. There were two plainclothes men in the other car. Perlman knew them vaguely. He’d seen them around. He couldn’t recall their names. They looked suitably aggressive, wide of shoulder, hard-edged.r />
  ‘Watch the close,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Right you are, Inspector,’ the man behind the wheel said.

  ‘If you hear a commotion, get your arses in the building. The flat’s on the top floor.’

  ‘Gotcha.’ The pair nodded. The one in the passenger seat, a bullock of a man, chewed gum vigorously.

  Perlman and Scullion entered the narrow close that led to the stairs. They went up slowly. The lights on the landings were dim. The building had a feel of abandonment. Or like a vacuum. Airless and still, a space where nothing could survive. A food smell hung in the silence, but he couldn’t identify it. Old lard, maybe, last week’s bacon grease. He imagined people sitting in rooms in front of the hypnotic lights of TVs. People eating frozen dinners, reconstituted chicken parts and artificial mashed potatoes in MSG gravy. But no sounds punctured the quiet of the building.

  Up they climbed, Perlman lagging behind Sandy Scullion. Chasing taxis at your age. Not bright. He thought of the face in the cab’s window. Was it a killer’s face? How were killers supposed to look anyway? They came in all kinds of masks.

  Scullion stopped. ‘You okay?’

  Perlman nodded. ‘Dandy.’

  He noticed Scullion’s voice was a whisper. ‘One more flight, Lou.’

  Scullion started to go up. Perlman laid his hand on the banister. On the top floor, Scullion stopped again. Three doors on the landing, three separate flats, but only one door had no name-plate. Both men stood very still a moment, then Scullion pressed the bell and it buzzed inside the flat. He buzzed it a second time.

  Inside the bedroom Marak was hurriedly stuffing his clothes into his backpack when he heard the bell. His heart skittered. At first he thought Ramsay had come to see him; but Ramsay had a key. Maybe it was the downstairs neighbour, the man with the blue snakes tattooed on the backs of his hands. But why? A drunken argument, a rant? Marak thought about his toilet items. He’d get them next. He’d ignore the bell and eventually whoever was on the other side of the door would go away.

  He entered the bathroom and gathered his toiletries and placed them in one of the outside pockets of the backpack. He zipped it. In the living room he checked the items he intended to carry on his person. Passport. Traveller’s cheques. Cash. He was ready now. Ready for departure. Wait –

  He drew from the left-hand pocket of his coat Bannerjee’s photograph. He’d meant to dispose of it, but in his haste he’d overlooked it. Burn it. Just burn the thing. The doorbell rang again. Three long persistent rings. They left an electric echo in the flat.

  He went inside the kitchen and found an old book of matches in a drawer and struck one, holding it to the photograph. The match was damp, and died. He let it slip into the sink. The bell rang and rang. He struck another match. The glossy caught flame briefly, then fizzled out. He lit a third match and applied it to the picture and this time the flame took, but it burned too slowly for him, spreading in a leisurely way from the corner of the shot towards the centre. Faster, he thought. Burn burn. He coughed as the chemical fumes rose to his face.

  When he’d reduced the photo to a shiny black cinder, he dropped it into the plastic litterbin. But the smell, that stench of petroleum by-products, lingered in the air.

  Rrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrr.

  He touched the knife in the inside pocket of his coat. He’d go to the front door. Just to listen. If he felt confident, perhaps he’d ask the person outside to identify himself. It was a nuisance, bad timing; he didn’t need any interruptions now. He was leaving. He was going home.

  He walked down the hallway very quietly and listened. He heard nothing. The door had no peephole, therefore he had no idea who was out there, if it was one man, or two, or that drugged-out woman ‘selling’ raffle tickets.

  He stood very still. Waited. Tried not to breathe. He was jangled. The doorbell rang again. The sound went through him like a saw on hard wood. A loose floorboard creaked under his foot. Perhaps the noise didn’t carry beyond the flat to the landing. He thought he heard somebody whisper from the other side of the door, but he couldn’t make out words. He couldn’t even be sure he’d heard anything.

  He backed away, returned to the living room. He glanced down into the street. Streetlamps glimmered on ice. He walked into the bathroom. He opened the window, looked out. The possibility of a fire-escape had popped into his mind, but he couldn’t remember seeing any building in this city equipped with such a thing. The view was restricted to the backcourts behind the tenements, expanses of dark penetrated here and there by light from rear windows. You could see into other people’s flats, other lives. A woman at a sink peeling something.

  He leaned from the window: no fire-escape, only an arrangement of drainpipes bolted to the wall. What did people do in a fire? Jump? It was a long way down. He drew his head back in, shut the window, returned to the hallway.

  The doorbell rang again. Two short bursts.

  Marak felt like a man drawn down into a spinning funnel of water. Panic.

  ‘Here,’ Lou Perlman said. He’d gone downstairs to the car and come back again with the tyre-iron, which he handed to Scullion.

  ‘It was your idea,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Aye, but you’re fitter and stronger. You think you can get it open?’

  ‘Worth a try.’

  Scullion inserted the iron into the narrow space between door and jamb. He pushed hard on the length of metal. Wood splintered, little chips flew into the air. He kept angling the implement back and forth until the wood around the mortice split. The lock was a rusted antique, and it popped out easily. He pushed the door, which opened into a small hallway.

  He stepped in, Perlman at his side.

  There were four doors, two on either side. All lay open. Perlman glanced inside the empty bathroom, while Scullion opened a door that yielded to a cupboard stuffed with rusted old tins of cleaning solvents, brushes, paints. Nothing of interest. They walked to the end of the hall and stepped cautiously through the door on the right, entering a bedroom with greasy yellow wallpaper and a girlie calendar dated 1992. A crucifix hung aslant above a chest of drawers.

  Perlman slid the drawers open. Empty except for outdated newspapers used as lining. The room smelled of damp wallpaper. There was another scent on the air, fainter, suggestive of burnt plastic.

  ‘One more room,’ Scullion said quietly.

  ‘Wait.’ Perlman nodded across the bedroom to a door, presumably a cupboard. Scullion turned the handle, an old plastic globe that slid off in his fingers. The door swung open, revealing a heavy-as-lead upright vacuum cleaner of a kind rarely seen since the 1950s, when these gadgets were more labour-intensive than labour-saving. A generation of women had schlepped these monsters, thinking them state-of-the-art. A couple of tweed jackets hung from a rod, and a punctured football lay on the floor.

  There was something else, and Perlman almost failed to notice it. He bent down, shoved the dented football aside and fingered a plastic bag containing stuffed toys, a broken-necked giraffe, a furry monkey without eyes, a battered rodent.

  A small black leather wallet was jammed between rodent and monkey. He opened the wallet, examined the contents. With a swift intake of breath, he handed it to Scullion -just as a noise from the lobby made both men turn to see a bearded young man, with a backpack dangling from one shoulder, step quickly towards the front door.

  Scullion called out, ‘Hey. You.’

  The young man didn’t stop.

  Scullion moved with an unusual elegance, and ghosted sweetly and quickly into the lobby where he threw himself, arms extended, at the young man. He must have done this a hundred times on the muddy rugby fields of his adolescence. A swift tackle round the waist, and both men went down. They rolled together for a few moments, hands locked, expressions fierce, two men fighting for possession of an invisible ball. The young man freed one hand and prodded Scullion in the eye, and Sandy said, ‘Fucker.’ Perlman seized a broom from the lobby cupboard and smacked the kid across the ba
ck of the head with the metal shaft.

  The kid, scalp bleeding, rolled over on his back. Perlman sat heavily on his chest. Scullion got to his feet and dusted his coat down with his hands and said, ‘My eye, my damned eye. Christ.’ He rubbed it with the tips of his fingers. Then he bent and searched the kid’s inside pocket and found a knife and a bunch of papers.

  ‘A nice knife, if you like these things,’ he said to Perlman.

  Perlman stared at the blade, which was impressive in a malevolent way. Glasgow was Blade City these days. He looked down at the young man. ‘So where were you sneaking off to in such a hurry?’

  ‘Out of here. Can I get up now?’

  ‘I’m too much of a burden for you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Perlman rolled away from the young man and stood up, then helped him rise. This was the face from the taxi. This was the face from the lift in the parking garage. Up close, it was less sinister than it had seemed on the videotape; younger, leaner. He probably had to work at looking tough and menacing. How old was he? Twenty-two, -three? Without the beard, he’d seem more like sixteen. Babyface with whiskers.

  Scullion examined the papers he’d seized from the young man’s coat. ‘Okay. What have we here? One passport … Israeli. About three hundred pounds in sterling. Couple of hundred drachma. And a thousand US dollars in American Express TCs.’

  ‘Let me see the passport,’ Perlman said. He took it from Scullion and flicked the pages. A photograph, a name: Shimon Marak. An occupation: Student. An address in Haifa. ‘No stamps. No visas. Why is that, Shimon?’

  ‘Perhaps an oversight of your immigration authorities?’

  ‘Lazy sods. They’re always missing things. Where did you enter the United Kingdom?’

  ‘Dover.’

  ‘And how did you get to Scotland?’

  ‘I took a bus from London.’

  ‘We can check all that.’ Perlman looked at the passport again. Shimon Marak. It didn’t sound like an Arab name. ‘Abdullah’ was no Arab: he was more likely a Sephardic Jew of North African origin, perhaps Iraq, possibly Iran.