The Last Darkness Page 29

  But Marak was climbing somehow, pushing himself up the pipe towards the edge of the roof, straining and grunting as he moved. His hard breathing steamed the air. Perlman heard Scullion come into the bathroom.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Scullion said. He stuck his head out of the window. ‘Marak, don’t be an arsehole. You’re safer in here with us than you are out there.’

  ‘I am safer where I am,’ Marak said. He was already out of reach, a dark-coated figure flattened against the side of the building and climbing slowly.

  ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ Perlman roared.

  ‘Where you can’t follow.’

  Perlman clambered on to the lid of the cistern and twisted his head to the side and watched Marak continue his climb, arms hugging the drainpipe, towards the roofline. I’m going out there, Perlman thought. I was the one that lost him, I have to be the one that brings him back down. The lunacy of this act wasn’t even a consideration: it was his responsibility, plain and simple. He had a good head of adrenaline going and his leg no longer ached and he felt weirdly youthful, as if the decision to go out into the precarious structures of the night rejuvenated him.

  ‘No,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Watch me, Sandy,’ and Perlman stepped on to the window ledge and felt the chill air sneak under his trousers.

  ‘No, Lou,’ Scullion shouted. ‘For God’s sake.’

  ‘Here I go, singing low.’ Perlman reached out for the drainpipe, and swung his body into space, and for a moment he thought he’d lost contact with the pipe and was going to tumble out into nothingness, which he understood was no philosophical abstraction but something dreadfully and inevitably real. It was where your life ended, and your world stopped. But he had the pipe, cold as it was, under the palms of his hands. The slick ice that had formed on the surface wasn’t going to help him climb. Ice and gravity, co-conspirators. He looked up and saw Marak scramble on to the roof.

  ‘Shimon, come back down, do it now, do it nice and slow and we’ll be fine.’ Perlman thought his own voice was a thin flute and unconvincing. Face it, Lou: you’re clinging to a fucking drainpipe and hanging on for that condition people call ‘dear life’ and you’re trying to convince some daring young guy to turn himself over to you? Dear life indeed. He glanced down, saw the wall of the tenement sheer beneath him, saw light from windows here and there, saw the outlines of the iron fences that marked one back yard from another, sharp railings; if you slipped there was every chance you’d be impaled. Very nice.

  Cop kebab.

  Looking down: wrong thing to do, Sergeant.

  He shinned a couple of inches up the pipe. What an effort. He looked at the roofline above. He heard Marak’s feet on the slates.

  Scullion shouted, ‘For fuck’s sake, Lou. Get your arse back in here.’

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Don’t move, I’ll get some help, a ladder, the fire brigade.’

  But Perlman was rising again, inch by hard-gained inch. His hands felt frozen to the pipe. He made it to the roofline, where the pipe adjoined a section of guttering, which looked too frail to support him. He had only two choices: reach up and grasp the guttering and hoist himself on to the slates and hope the whole arrangement didn’t collapse, or begin his descent and pray he could make it back down to the ledge of the bathroom window without slipping off the cliff of the tenement.

  ‘Yippee aye o,’ he said, and scrambled up the last piece of pipe and hauled himself over the guttering and on to the slates. Done it. The slates were so sleek they might have hosted an ice-hockey game.

  Crouching, Perlman felt himself slip back towards the edge, then he countered this trend by flattening his face and body against the roof and locking every muscle hard in place and gripping any slight crevice he could find between the slates. The sky was high and starry above him. The city lit the air in blooms of orange and yellow. My funeral colours, he thought. Somewhere nearby floodlights burned unblinkingly around the edge of a stadium.

  ‘Perlman,’ Marak said.

  Lou Perlman looked up. Marak was perhaps ten feet away, his back pressed to the base of a chimney.

  ‘I thought we might continue our chat, Marak.’ Perlman slid a few inches. He felt he was part of some strange deep earthly motion; tectonic plates were shifting beneath him. The earth was about to split. High in the Glasgow night, he sensed the city stretching away all around him, the thinning of lights as the river slogged down to the coast, the steadiness of its current disrupted only by the occasional vortex, the odd fluke of undertow. My river, my city, my place of my birth and my dying.

  ‘You’re going to fall,’ Marak said.

  ‘Absolute shite. I climb roofs in all seasons.’ He slithered forward and up, still clinging to little crannies in the contours of slate. He was breathless, heart moving in his chest like an octopus flapping. His lungs pained him. He raised his face and looked at Marak. ‘See? I’m so fucking nimble you wouldn’t believe it, Marak.’

  ‘Now what? Do you try to convince me I should give myself up?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re ready to be convinced,’ Perlman said. A plane roared above on a flight path to Glasgow Airport. The sound thundered in his head. The roof seemed to tremble.

  Marak slipped suddenly, and sat down with his back to the chimney. ‘I’m not used to these surfaces,’ he said. ‘How can you stand this city, this weather?’

  ‘Born to it,’ Perlman said.

  Marak said, ‘A man is killed in a street in Haifa. Years later, as a direct consequence of his father’s death, his son sits on a rooftop in Glasgow in winter. Strange connections.’

  ‘Aye, the world’s a funny place,’ Perlman said. His hands shook, his muscles strained. How long could he hold off the inevitable slide over slate and ice? ‘Who killed your father, Marak?’

  ‘You’re asking two different questions, Perlman. Do you want to know who pulled the trigger? Or do you want the names of the real assassins?’

  ‘Whatever you’re prepared to give.’

  Marak said, ‘The men who pulled the triggers are of no consequence. They were once my father’s associates. They accused him of embezzling an enormous amount of money that was supposed to reach them. And so they killed him. But they’re dead now. I shot them three months ago in Tel Aviv. They were sitting outside a café, I went up to them while they were drinking wine. One I shot directly in the heart, the other the head. I walked away. I had a taste of justice. I’d waited a long time for it. The strange thing, it had no flavour.’

  How casually Marak referred to these killings. Was some part of him numb? Had the muscles of his conscience been severed?

  ‘Where did this money go?’

  ‘The men who’d stolen it claimed they’d given it to my father to be disbursed for a noble purpose. I assume they kept it for themselves. What else would they do? Distribute it among charities?’

  Perlman saw a sudden shooting star in the western sky, beyond the Campsie Hills, bright and brief and shocking. ‘And this noble purpose – did it have something to do with the idea of peace in the Middle East?’

  ‘How do you know that, Perlman?’

  ‘I was always good at guessing games.’

  ‘It’s more than guesswork, I’m sure.’ Marak’s face was shadowed, his expression hidden. ‘A few people dreamed they could change the climate of the Middle East. My father and his associates, for example.’

  ‘And big dreams require big cash,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Of course. But the dreamers overlooked one fact: there is not enough money in the world to solve the problem of eternal hatred. Nor eternal greed. The money was stolen. My father was wrongly blamed, with tragic consequences.’

  Marak moved away. He’s almost lost to me now, Perlman thought. ‘You told me you were an idealist, Marak. You don’t sound like one.’

  ‘Idealists have a cross to carry,’ Marak said. ‘I believe even as I doubt.’

  Perlman laid a cheek against sl
ate. He was fused to it by a film of cold. His thoughts tumbled. He had an after-image of the shooting star, dying lights flashing at the end of a tunnel in his brain. ‘Let me see if I can guess the names of the thieves. Lindsay, Wexler, Bannerjee.’

  ‘These were the names I received from a man who called himself Ramsay. Tall man, strange hair, weak chin.’

  ‘BJ Quick.’

  ‘Ah, he uses two names.’

  ‘At the very least,’ Perlman said.

  Marak rubbed his hands together. A wind came up and blew across the rooftops. ‘He gave me photographs, addresses. The burned photograph that so intrigued you was of Bannerjee.’

  Perlman felt his coat rise and fall around his legs, the wind riding roughshod across him. ‘I wonder how Quick got this information.’

  ‘I didn’t ask. All I know is I didn’t kill them. The men were dead before I could ever get close to them. I was brought here only to be blamed for murders I didn’t commit.’

  ‘Why and by whom?’

  ‘One day perhaps I’ll think about those questions. My only interest now is to make my way home.’

  ‘How do you propose to do that?’

  ‘We’ll see. What about you? How will you get down from this roof?’

  Perlman raised his head. ‘That’s my problem, intit?’

  ‘Yes. It is.’ Marak moved slowly. In a moment he’d disappear on the other side of the sandstone chimney block. And then he’d be gone, and maybe he’d make it, maybe he wouldn’t. Perlman called out his name, as if to stall him further and ask more questions, but the wind lashed his voice away, and besides Marak had vanished, moving behind the chimneys and heading for the other side of the roof, the downslope, and from there – who could say?

  Perlman pressed his face into the slates. He was cold and weary. He heard Scullion’s voice float up from a place below. ‘You all right, Lou?’

  Perlman hadn’t the strength to answer.

  ‘We’re coming up with a rope. Hang on.’

  Hang on. Oy. I spend much of my life hanging on. He shut his eyes: dear Jesus, had he really climbed on to this roof? Was he truly lying here on this slick of tiles? Had he forgotten entirely the fact he suffered from vertigo?

  And now he remembered, and his stomach churned sluggishly over and over and all the stars in the sky imploded in his head.

  52

  He was giddy for some time after he’d been helped down from the roof by means of a rope and the two beefy cops from the backup car. His impulse was to go home and sleep, and forget he’d ever been daft enough to climb on to the roof of a tall Glasgow tenement. But he went back to Pitt Street and began to work on a report of the encounter with Marak. He knew he wouldn’t sleep if he went home. Things on his mind. Too many.

  He typed a sentence on the portable Olivetti he liked, then quit. He pushed his chair back from his desk and pondered a call to the hospital, but it was almost midnight and he wondered if that was too late. Instead, he dialled Colin and Miriam’s home number. He got the answering machine. Miriam’s voice: Please leave a message and we’ll return your call as soon as we can. Did that mean she was asleep, or that she was at the hospital? He was tempted to dial again, just to hear her voice. It had a richness, a chanteuse’s lilt. It was a voice that implied more than it ever said.

  He gazed at the paper inside the olive-green typewriter, and what he’d written, and his mind changed gears, and all of a sudden he was back on that iced roof, that parlous place. He knew tonight he’d dream of rooftops and chimneys and scary visions of himself dangling from a rope knotted round his waist while the two cops fed him down slowly to the bathroom window, where Scullion watched the descent with concern. If he slept.

  All this began with a man hanging from a rope under a railway bridge, he thought.

  He pushed the typewriter away. The report could wait. His mind wasn’t on it. He paced around his desk. He wondered if Marak had made it back down to the street, and where he might be in the city now. Scullion had patrol cars out looking for him, because he wasn’t convinced of Marak’s innocence. He wasn’t buying the proclamation the kid had made to Perlman on the rooftop of a tenement. Why should he, without interrogating Marak thoroughly for himself? The city had been violated, and Scullion felt a deep responsibility, and as long as he wasn’t sure of Marak in his own head, then he’d make every effort to track him down.

  Scullion appeared in the doorway. ‘You okay?’

  ‘For a man with a few murders on his mind, fine.’

  ‘When you climbed that drainpipe …’

  ‘That’s all I need, to be reminded.’

  ‘I thought you’d fall. I was sure you’d fall. I kept thinking I’d have to ask Madeleine to cancel her plans to ask you to dinner next week.’

  ‘What an inconvenience,’ Perlman said.

  Scullion patted Perlman’s shoulder. ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Slight headache. Maybe a cold coming on. My leg muscles are sore.’

  ‘And I can’t see anything in one eye.’

  ‘Such a catalogue of misery,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Incidentally, Quick admitted delivering photographs of the three victims to Marak. He doesn’t know who hired him as courier. All done by phone, he says. Never saw anyone’s face …’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He believes Marak couldn’t have killed Lindsay or Wexler. As for Bannerjee, he isn’t sure. He thinks not. According to the impresario, Marak’s a major loser.’

  Scullion sat on the edge of the desk. ‘If Marak’s off the hook – and I’m not saying he is, mind you, because Quick’s not famous for his veracity – who’s the swordsman? Who’s the killer?’

  ‘Who indeed.’ Perlman tugged a Kleenex from a box on his desk and blew his nose. He tossed the Kleenex directly into his waste-paper basket. ‘Quick was trying to buy back the lease to that slum of a club belonging to Leo Kilroy. Do you suppose Fat Leo has any involvement in all of this?’

  ‘It wouldn’t floor me with surprise, because nothing Fat Leo does astounds me. But he doesn’t come into the Lindsay-Wexler-Bannerjee axis, does he?’

  ‘Not that I know,’ Perlman said.

  ‘I’m going to get a cup of coffee from the machine. You need anything?’

  Perlman looked at the half-eaten cheese and cucumber sandwich on his desk. Stale, lathered with a highly dubious mayonnaise-based sauce that was whipped up in a local take-away by grubby-fingered boys, it was utterly inedible. ‘Nothing for me. I’m fine, Sandy.’

  Scullion vanished down the hall. Perlman slumped in his chair, shut his eyes. Think think. He forced his eyes open, picked up the phone and called Perseus McKinnon.

  ‘Perse, one question.’

  ‘The hour is late, but fire away,’ McKinnon said.

  ‘You heard the news about Bannerjee?’

  ‘It’s been on the telly. Very gruesome.’

  ‘I want you to tell me if you know of any connection between Leo Kilroy and any of the three dead men. Anything at all, it doesn’t matter what.’

  ‘How about asking me something difficult,’ Perseus McKinnon said. ‘Kilroy supplied some muscle when Shiv was just another ambitious Asian running for public office.’

  ‘What kind of muscle?’

  ‘How shall I say? Persuaders? Guys that got the vote out. They wore nice suits and charmed old ladies. They drove elderly people to polling stations. Every now and then I heard a story about one of them getting a wee bit argumentative. But Kilroy managed to keep a very tight lid on his boys.’

  ‘So Bannerjee was indebted to Kilroy?’

  ‘Big time. Kilroy wanted influence in high places. But Bannerjee, as history has duly recorded, fucked up.’

  ‘Do they keep in contact?’

  ‘That I couldn’t say. Where are you taking this, Lou?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. Thanks.’ Perlman hung up and stared at the sheet in the Olivetti, then tore it out and crumpled it into a ball. He threw it at the wall. Bannerj
ee and Kilroy. This connection made him uncomfortable. Was it possible that Fat Leo belonged on the same bus as the three dead men? Had he bought a ticket and shared a trip with them, then he’d decided to get off before the point of destination? You’d never find Leo’s prints on anything, because he was too smart; but that didn’t mean he failed to leave some spidery little traces of his activities at least.

  Okay. Was it possible that Leo Kilroy, for reasons that eluded Perlman, had engineered the deaths of the three men?

  Think. Motives?

  The money factor? Had there been some rabid falling-out, a fierce disagreement concerning loot and its disbursement?

  Or was it less obvious?

  Such as what?

  He picked up his sandwich and stared at it critically. He sniffed it. Tainted. He dropped it in his waste-paper basket. There were clouds gathering in his head, and he didn’t like their formation. He longed for some spike of sunshine to pierce the glum congregation. He thought about Colin again, like a man constantly drawn back to a lingering mystery; bruder, you kept some dubious company.

  If you knew Bannerjee, did you know Kilroy too, Colin?

  And then Perlman remembered, and he slapped his forehead in dismay at the failure of his memory. Murdoch. You yutz, Lou, he thought. You’d forget your name if it wasn’t for your driving licence or your library card. He picked up his telephone and asked the switchboard to connect him to PC Dennis Murdoch.

  Murdoch came on the line almost at once. ‘I only just finished collecting that material for you, Sergeant.’

  ‘Great. Let’s get together. You hungry?’

  53

  Perlman met the young Constable at Café Insomnia, an all-night eatery in Partick. The clientele was mainly the post-pub set, young and ready to gorge themselves on carbohydrates. Wonderful smells perfumed the air, bacon, toast, coffee. You could get breakfast here all day long. Perlman asked for coffee and dry toast, Murdoch ordered a bacon roll and tea.

  ‘Thanks for the material,’ Perlman said, and laid the manila folder Murdoch had given him on the table.

  Murdoch sipped his tea. ‘I did it quickly. If you think I should spend more time on it. I’d be happy to –’