The Last Darkness Read online

  ‘Why are you in Glasgow?’ Perlman asked.

  ‘I’m a tourist.’

  ‘In the dead of winter?’ Scullion asked.

  ‘I like the cold.’

  ‘Right. People from all over the world flock to Glasgow in December for the cold. It’s one big bloody cheerful freezefest. You can’t get a hotel room anywhere in the city unless you bribe the manager.’

  Scullion was leafing through the wallet. He frowned at Perlman, then flashed the wallet under Marak’s face. ‘How did you get this, Shimon?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘A wallet obviously, but I’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘It belongs to a man called Artie Wexler. It contains his credit cards and a photograph of his wife. Do you know him?’

  Marak shook his head.

  Scullion said, ‘Then how come his wallet is in your bedroom?’

  ‘I can only assume you put it there.’

  ‘Why would we do that?’

  ‘You must have your reasons.’

  Perlman realized he felt a curiously misplaced sense of pity for this kid. He was a long damn way from home, and in serious trouble; and who did he have to turn to for support? He was relying on a certain aloof arrogance, and making a show of being cool, almost disdainful, but this was a façade constructed with thin putty, and Perlman knew it would crumble eventually.

  ‘Let’s all sit down,’ Scullion said. ‘Make ourselves comfy.’

  Marak rubbed his head. He had blood on his fingertips. Perlman held his elbow, and guided him inside the living room.

  ‘I think I prefer to stand,’ Marak said.

  ‘The Inspector tells you to sit, you sit,’ Perlman said.

  Marak shrugged. He sat, looking bored.

  ‘Is all this too much trouble for you, Marak?’ Perlman asked. ‘I mean, we can easily turn you over to people who are far less pleasant than Inspector Scullion and me.’

  ‘I’m sure you can.’

  Scullion, whose eye was swelling, looked at Lou. ‘Do you think our boy is suggesting we planted this wallet, Sergeant Perlman?’

  ‘Somebody had to,’ Marak said.

  ‘Since it wasn’t us, who was it?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  Perlman said, ‘Maybe you took it yourself. Maybe you stole it from Wexler.’

  ‘Who’s Wexler?’

  ‘What were you doing in the street where Wexler lived?’

  ‘Ah, now I remember you,’ Marak said. ‘You chased me. I found it amusing. You were puffing and huffing.’

  ‘Glad I brought a smile to your face,’ Perlman said. ‘Don’t irritate me, son. Just answer the fucking question.’

  ‘The cab driver took a wrong turning.’

  ‘So you didn’t know Wexler lived on that street?’

  ‘No –’

  ‘Explain the wallet then.’

  ‘I told you. I can’t.’

  ‘Got here by magic, did it?’

  Scullion leaned forward in his chair. ‘What were you doing in that particular neighbourhood anyway?’

  ‘Sightseeing.’

  ‘Right, I keep forgetting. You’re a winter tourist. A man called BJ Quick said he delivered envelopes to you at this address.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Quick.’

  ‘I have never heard of this person.’

  ‘He knows you, Shimon. What about Furfee?’

  ‘I never heard of him either.’

  ‘Strange. He also says he knows you.’

  ‘How odd.’

  Perlman lit a cigarette. ‘You’re not making this easy on yourself, sonny boy.’

  ‘But I have nothing to fear.’

  ‘Mr Cool,’ Perlman said. ‘Thinks he can walk on fucking water, Sandy.’

  ‘I only ever heard of one Jew who could pull off that stunt,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Aye, right enough.’ Perlman glared at the young man. There was defiance in the set of face and the straight-backed alignment of body. You needed an ice-pick to chip away at Marak. ‘What was your business with Joseph Lindsay?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Fuck these games. The solicitor. You phoned his office. You tracked his secretary.’

  Marak looked as if he didn’t remember.

  ‘The fucking garage, Marak,’ Perlman said. ‘Where we got some nice shots of you, courtesy of the magic of closed-circuit TV, assaulting the secretary.’

  Marak frowned and said, ‘Yes. I remember now.’

  ‘You’ve got a very selective memory.’

  ‘I wanted to see Lindsay on a business matter.’

  ‘Why did you need to see a Scottish lawyer?’

  ‘I was interested in acquiring property in this country –’

  ‘Oh, aye, so you could be closer to the cold. It doesn’t explain why you assaulted the secretary, does it?’

  ‘She was being obstructive. I lost control. I regretted it.’

  ‘Do you lose control often?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Perlman looked for an ashtray. He couldn’t find one. He walked inside the kitchen. There was that smell, that aroma of burnt plastic he’d noticed before, but stronger now. He tossed his cigarette into the sink and the butt sizzled.

  There were spent matches in the sink. What had young Shimon been burning? he wondered. He looked around the kitchen. He opened the rubbish bin and saw the charred remains of what clearly had been a photograph. He picked it out of the rubbish with a gentle hand. It was flaky and would disintegrate if he didn’t handle it gently. One edge hadn’t burned entirely; a sliver of white border was blackened but visible. There were no images. The surface was composed of tiny black bumps as impenetrable as a sky without stars. Very carefully he carried the relic inside the living room and set it down on the coffee table, as if it were precious moth-eaten lace about to disintegrate.

  ‘What’s that?’ Scullion asked.

  ‘Let’s ask Shimon. Why were you burning this photograph?’

  ‘Is that what that is – a photograph?’

  ‘That’s what it is. We’ve got people with fancy machines, Shimon, and they can tease all kinds of information out of unlikely places. Take this photograph. They have some kind of computer that would restore the image you burned. Maybe it wouldn’t be perfection, but it would be enough to see what you destroyed.’

  ‘I destroyed nothing,’ Marak said.

  ‘Explain that smell,’ Perlman said.

  ‘I don’t smell anything.’

  ‘Judging from the pong, somebody’s burned this within the last few minutes or so, Marak. And I don’t see any other candidate but you.’

  ‘I’ll tell you again, I burned nothing.’

  The old denial game, Perlman thought. See nothing, remember nothing. He made his hands into soft fists and wished he could skelp young Marak into answering questions.

  Scullion sighed. ‘Did you go to Lindsay’s house?’

  ‘How could I? The secretary wouldn’t give me his address.’

  Perlman thought about Joe Lindsay’s abandoned Mercedes. ‘You ever ride in his car?’

  ‘That would also be very difficult, considering I never met the man.’

  ‘Do you ever eat garinim?’

  ‘What a strange question.’

  ‘Just answer it.’

  ‘Sometimes I eat it, yes,’ Marak said.

  Perlman sat down, sinking into a big sponge of an armchair, the kind that only a contortionist could escape with any semblance of dignity. He heard springs creak. Good to take the weight off the aching leg. He stared at Marak. ‘Summary so far. You don’t know Lindsay. You don’t know Wexler. You don’t know how you came into possession of the wallet. You didn’t burn that photograph. You don’t know Furfee, you don’t know Quick. Basically speaking, you know fuck all.’

  ‘I think you are barking up a wrong tree,’ Marak said.

  This flat might have been a butcher’s storage freezer. Perlman shiver
ed and flipped a switch on the electric heater and heard one of the bars come on, clicking as it warmed. He smelled dust burning. It was like the stench of a mouse on fire.

  Perlman asked, ‘How did you hear about Lindsay? Were you sitting in Haifa one day with the Glasgow phone book in front of you and looked under solicitors and jabbed the page with a pin?’

  Marak said, ‘I knew his name.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I heard it mentioned in Haifa. Lindsay did business there now and then.’

  ‘Oh aye? What kind?’

  ‘I don’t know what kind. I heard his name, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re truly getting on my wick, son. Come on, tell me something you really know. Give me concrete. Hit me with gospel.’

  ‘My date of birth.’

  ‘I’m not easy to insult, but you’re pushing me to the edge. Tell me something juicy.’

  ‘Juicy? You mean interesting.’

  ‘Bolt me to my seat.’

  ‘I believe in justice.’

  ‘I suppose that’s a start. Isn’t that a start, Inspector? You and me and Marak have something in common.’

  Scullion said, ‘Tell us more. Marak.’

  ‘And I believe in peace,’ Marak said.

  Perlman said, ‘Oh-oh. Justice and peace. We’ve got an idealist here, Sandy.’

  Marak looked at the carpet, a soiled threadbare thing whose design had long ago faded into a few indistinct floral blotches. ‘You’re mocking me.’

  ‘No. I was admiring your idealism,’ Perlman said.

  ‘I suppose you have none,’ Marak said.

  ‘I had most of my ideals kicked out of me working the streets of this city, son. A few wee bits and pieces are intact. Only just. Generally, I think idealism is a young man’s game.’

  ‘How sad,’ Marak said.

  ‘We’re here to talk about your tsurris, Marak. Not ours. Face it. You’ve got serious problems.’ Scullion blinked his swollen eye rapidly. It was almost shut.

  ‘You can prove nothing against me,’ Marak said.

  ‘You think so, eh?’ Scullion said. ‘Check the list. Assaulting a police officer. The possibility of illegal entry into the country. The unprovoked attack on Joseph Lindsay’s secretary. Possession of a wallet belonging to a man who was murdered –’

  ‘Murdered? I’m to be blamed for that?’

  Scullion said, ‘Let me continue. There’s the small matter of your presence at the scene of Shiv Bannerjee’s murder.’

  ‘Whose murder?’

  ‘The Waterloo Hotel, Sauchiehall Street, remember? You were there, Marak. We have an eyewitness. She identified you from the print. What were you doing in that room at that particular time?’

  ‘She’s mistaken,’ Marak said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Scullion said.

  Marak tilted his head back, laid his palms upturned on his thighs like a man seeking a source of relaxation. Perlman watched him and thought: Lindsay, Wexler, Bannerjee. Is this kid the one? Is this the killer? The connections were there, certainly, and they were strong enough to be audible. Marak and Lindsay, that fiction about buying a house was total shtuss. Marak and Wexler: how had Shimon come into possession of the wallet if he hadn’t met Wexler somewhere along the way? And the Waterloo Hotel: he’d been present in the bathroom with Bannerjee, according to Charlotte Leckie.

  But it was all circumstantial. Incriminating, aye, but still circumstantial. Where was the sword that had killed Wexler, and how had Marak acquired the cocaine to murder Lindsay, how had he coerced Lindsay into swallowing the condom unless he’d used a gun, and where was that gun now? The questions foamed and fizzed in Perlman’s head. He tried to imagine this young man in the act of decapitation, but the pictures were grainy. Nor could he see him force a gun to Lindsay’s head.

  And the wallet, that fucking wallet. That bothered Perlman. You throw away a wallet if you’ve stolen it from a man you’ve killed. True or false? You take the cash, dump the wallet. If you’re prepared to gamble, you might nick a credit-card or two. No matter what you take, you dump the bloody wallet if you have any smarts whatsoever. Unless you were a behayma like Furfee, who’d held on to a murder weapon.

  But Shimon Marak hadn’t tossed it. So why not?

  Maybe he didn’t know it was in the flat. Maybe it had been placed there by somebody else.

  Quick? Furfee?

  Perlman pondered the idea of taking Marak to Pitt Street and confronting him with Quick and Furfee. It might be interesting, even revelatory. On the other hand, anything Quick and Furfee had to say would invariably be self-serving and consequently unreliable. There would be enough layers of exaggeration, false claims and accusations to keep a polygraph technician busy for years.

  Perlman lit a cigarette. His throat was dry and raspy: if he was to break into song he’d sound like an old-time blues singer. Blind Lemon Jefferson, maybe.

  ‘I think I’ll talk to Linklater about what he can restore of the photograph, Sandy.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Scullion said.

  ‘It’ll give us some idea if Shimon was destroying incriminating evidence.’ He reached for the telephone that lay on the floor under the coffee table and he dialled Linklater’s number. He got Sid Linklater’s answering machine. ‘Call me back, Sid. I’ll be on Inspector Scullion’s mobile. ASAP. I’ve got a nice wee restoration job for you.’

  Marak said, ‘He would have to be a magician to retrieve an image from that black stuff.’

  ‘He’s an alchemist, Shimon. He can take lead and turn it into the sweetest gold. Right, Inspector?’

  Scullion, beginning to look like a prizefighter in need of a good cuts man, nodded. ‘He’s the best. Far and away.’

  ‘As I told you, I have nothing to fear,’ Marak said.

  ‘Bully for you.’ Perlman dragged on his smoke. ‘You live in Haifa?’

  Marak didn’t answer.

  Perlman asked, ‘With your family? Are you married?’

  Marak said, ‘I don’t discuss my family.’

  ‘I’m interested in your background. Sisters? Brothers? What does your father do?’

  ‘My father …’ Marak glanced at the ruins of the photograph on the coffee table then switched subjects. ‘When you check, you’ll see that my fingerprints are nowhere on that wallet.’

  ‘Fine. We’ll go over the wallet with a toothcomb, Shimon. What were you saying about your father?’

  Marak slumped a little. ‘My father’s dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘You didn’t know him. How can you be sorry?’

  Perlman said, ‘Prickly, Shimon. I was expressing a common human condolence. Your father’s dead, and I’m sorry. How did he die?’

  Marak said, ‘He was shot.’

  ‘Who shot him?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘I’m interested,’ Perlman said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Marak replied, a little pitch of sorrow in the voice.

  Perlman sensed the young man’s anger and loss. A damaged psyche was always difficult terrain to travel, but that didn’t deter Lou Perlman, intrepid explorer. ‘Somebody shoots your father, it doesn’t matter? I don’t believe that, Shimon. Why was he shot?’

  ‘His associates thought he’d cheated them.’

  ‘Cheated them how?’

  Marak gazed at the floor. His hands were damp. They left prints on the dark wooden arms of his chair. He’s in pain, Perlman thought. The death of his father is an open wound and he’s covered it over in a gauze so thick, so congealed with old blood, it will never heal. Therefore the arrogance, the cold front, this was his armour.

  ‘Cheated them out of what, Shimon?’

  Marak stood up suddenly. ‘Money.’

  ‘But he didn’t do it?’

  ‘He’d never steal or cheat. He was a very honest man. He was the finest man I have ever known.’ Marak clenched his hands so tightly his knuckles stood out like tiny sharp stones. ‘They gunned h
im down in the street. I was fifteen years old and I saw it and I will never forget it. I don’t want to talk about my father any more.’

  Marak was silent. Perlman observed him, thinking how tightly wound he was, how tense his emotional sinews were drawn. A kid sees his father shot down in the street: what effect would that have on a life? Anger and loss and what else? A slow-burning fuse of vengeance? Something you tended carefully every day, making sure the fire hadn’t gone out, a flame you fanned? Every day and every night, the same thought scalded you. And anything else around the edges, joy and love and laughter and music, lay in a shadow you couldn’t penetrate because you were focused on only one thing. And so you prepare, and when you’re ready, when you think you’re old enough and tough enough, you make your move.

  Settle old scores. Close the ledgers.

  Marak said, ‘I need to use the toilet. Is that permissible?’

  ‘I’ll keep you company,’ Perlman said.

  ‘I’m allowed no privacy?’

  ‘In the circumstances.’

  ‘Ah, of course, the circumstances.’

  Perlman followed the young man out of the room. Scullion came behind.

  ‘I’ll hang around the front door,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Afraid I’ll try to run away?’ Marak asked.

  ‘I’m not taking chances.’

  Perlman went inside the bathroom with Marak and felt awkward when he heard the young man undo his zip and the sound of his urine striking water. He turned his face away: a small illusion of privacy, he thought. Why not? He heard Marak flush the toilet, then zip his trousers up. The young man sighed as if with relief. And then suddenly the room was blasted with cold air, and Perlman swung his head in time to see Marak open the window and climb up on to the cistern and step out into the dark.

  Perlman rushed to the window and saw Marak clinging to a drainpipe. ‘You fucking idiot! Give me your hand. Come back inside.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Marak was about four, five feet away, his hands clenched on the icy surface of the pipe. He couldn’t climb in these slippery conditions, he’d fall, he’d go down until he struck the ground eighty or ninety feet below.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Perlman said. ‘Just reach out, I’ll help you back inside.’