The Last Darkness Read online

  This faded house seemed to gather itself around him as he walked, turning on more sixty-watt lights, into the living room. He struck a match and held it to the gas fire and heard the familiar swish of blue flame rushing through the old-fashioned mantles. He spread his hands for warmth. What the house needed was modern central heating with thermostats. The bloody house needs more than heat, he thought. It needs new paint, new roof, new carpets, furniture, all kinds of stuff. He sat down in a chair close to the fire and kicked off his shoes and pushed his toes towards the gas flames.

  Living like this, he thought. Tut tut. Upstairs rooms you never use. Cupboards crammed with old newspapers and magazines you don’t get round to throwing away, and books in haphazard stacks, and a bird cage for the canary you once considered buying, but didn’t. Nice to have something yellow and chirpy and fluffy, you’d thought in a lonesome moment. But the bird would have died from neglect.

  Perlman, canary killer.

  He gazed at the framed photographs above the fireplace. He’d hung these years ago in an attempt to make the house feel like a place where a person actually lived, but now as he looked at them he remembered his own desperation at the time. That instinct to connect yourself and your history to the soul of this house, as if you wanted to belong in the same way as the mortar, the bricks, the floorboards. The photographs were of immigrant families taken in the early years of the twentieth century in the Gorbals, unsmiling bearded men and their plain sturdy women and their shoeless kids. Some of the men had a rabbinical intensity about them. The women looked careworn.

  The black-grey tenements, a little fuzzy in the background, seemed already to be vanishing into a future that would demolish them. Lou had found these pictures in a cardboard box at the Barras market, and when he’d first hung them he’d pretended they were family members, but they were just unknown Jews from this shtetl or that, Poles, Russians, Latvians: they’d journeyed to a new life from the anti-Semitism and pogroms of Eastern Europe only to find a different form of purgatory in the Gorbals.

  The one personal photograph in this gallery of strangers was of his parents, Etta and Ephraim, who’d fled the menace of Bavaria in 1935. Etta, small and fair-haired, almost Teutonic; Ephraim dark-eyed and secretive, Semitic. They’d chosen Glasgow because Ephraim had a cousin who operated a small car-repair business in the Gorbals, and there were promises of work and accommodation. Ephraim laboured grudgingly in the shop for three years – pishtons, carberryators, what do I know of zuch zings? – before he found work in his old trade as a printer. Overjoyed, he and Etta had moved out of Cousin Lev’s cramped quarters in Nicholson Street just before the outbreak of war, and settled in a two-room flat in Kingston Street. How proud Etta had been of this spacious paradise, how tidy and particular, forever sweeping, polishing, attacking cobwebs with a broomstick, setting and emptying mouse-traps. Lou could close his eyes and see her, all whirl and purpose.

  He gazed at his parents for a moment longer. When Lou was ten Etta died suddenly. One day she’d been bright and industrious, the next dead on the kitchen floor, surrounded by the broken pieces of a porcelain bowl and the browning crab-apples it had contained. Ephraim overnight became old and distant, wedded to a grief. Lou remembered how his father would sit in front of the fire, hunched over a copy of the Evening Citizen, scanning the front page endlessly as coals sparked and kindling spat and split in the chimney. If Ephraim heard these sounds or absorbed anything of the newspaper, he gave no sign. He went through the motions of a life for another ten years before he followed his wife. His death was recorded as cardiac failure.

  Heartbreak, Lou thought, was nearer to the truth.

  At the funeral, Colin had whispered in his ear: This is only a shell we’re burying, little brother. The real man died the same day as his wife. Lou had felt an unbearable sadness at the waste of his father’s life, and his eyes had filled with tears during the service. By contrast, Colin had seemed detached, as if death was something that happened only to other people. The expression on his face said: This isn’t going to happen to me, oh no.

  Perlman looked away from the picture of his parents.

  Once, many years before, he’d hung another picture alongside that of Etta and Ephraim, but he’d taken it down. He thought of it now, that lovely oval face and the mouth so intelligent you knew it belonged to a woman who’d never utter anything shallow or dull. I desire her, he thought. It’s wrong, and I know it, and I can’t help myself any more than poor Ephraim could help being married to the dead.

  He found the CD he hadn’t opened, and he ripped the cellophane from it and slid the disc into the slot of the player: his sound-system, a Bose, was the only expensive thing he owned. He sat back and listened to Monk play ‘Dinah’. The sound was mischievous, pert, Monk having some fun. Lou listened, tapped a foot. ‘I Surrender Dear’ came up next, slow and touching and then briefly upbeat. By the time ‘Ruby, My Dear’ played, and the room filled with the melancholy of the tune, Lou Perlman was asleep.

  Troubled sleep.

  He dreamed of black iron girders, which were strangely aligned, joined in defiance of logic. He dreamed he was walking beneath them and they cast weird shadows across his face. He dreamed of a man hanging, not from a rope, but from a nylon stocking.

  He woke cold even though the gas fire hissed and the mantles glowed red. Wrapping himself tightly in his coat, he stumbled towards the stairs and staggered up to his bedroom, which felt like the inside of an ice-cube. There was a narrow unmade bed and a heap of clothes and shoes and newspapers and a poster on the wall of the Celtic team that had won the European Cup in 1967. The Lisbon Lions.

  Old heroes.

  He lay face down and slumped back into sleep, this time dreamless.

  6

  The telephone ringing in the kitchen woke him shortly before eight a.m. and he rose, dry-mouthed and befuddled, and made his way downstairs. He grabbed the receiver, dropped it, went down on his knees.

  ‘Lou?’

  Detective-Inspector Sandy Scullion had one of those voices that was always sunny. Scullion, ginger hair and pleasant looks, could deliver bad news and make it seem like you’d just won the bloody lottery. Perlman supposed it was a gift, the knack of cheerfulness.

  ‘Lou, did I wake you?’

  ‘Aye, it was a long night.’

  ‘I read your report. I fear it’s going to be a long day.’

  Perlman listened to the old Aga humming comfortingly. The hot core of the room. He edged closer to it. Somewhere in the night he’d removed his coat, but not his suit. Brown and crumpled, a double-breasted number that had come into fashion and then gone out at least twice in the time he’d had it. He owned only two suits and the other had been in the dry-cleaners for months. He couldn’t remember where he’d left the claim ticket. He gazed round the kitchen, not really seeing it. Without his glasses the world was an acceptable sort of blur.

  ‘No record of your dead man’s prints, I’m afraid,’ Scullion said.

  ‘So he was a law-abiding citizen.’

  ‘Why does a law-abiding citizen get killed, Lou?’

  ‘Good question. If it was a murder.’ Perlman opened the refrigerator and looked inside. He grabbed a carton of apple juice and slugged some back.

  ‘He shouldn’t be too hard to identify,’ Scullion said. ‘Sooner or later somebody’s going to report a missing person.’

  ‘Unless he lived alone.’

  ‘Not everybody lives like a monk, Lou. Anyway, he had a wedding ring.’

  ‘It doesn’t follow he had a wife,’ Perlman said.

  Scullion was quiet a moment. ‘The coat’s distinctive. Somebody might remember him at Mandelson’s.’

  Perlman saw his day stretch ahead in a series of little investigative jabs. The coat. Probing the memory of a salesman. Who bought this damned garment? Trudging through the cold. Making out reports. He wanted to sit here and hug the Aga. He looked at the window. A few soft snowflakes drifted against the pane. Dark as night out there. Th
e city in winter had a feel of having been abandoned. The sun was rare, and even when it shone it had all the warmth of a tangerine stored in a freezer.

  He plugged the electric kettle into the wall. Coffee, hot coffee, kick the day in the arse. And music, that was what he needed for the full blast. He took the phone inside the living room and found his glasses lying beside the Bose. He slipped them on and stuck Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel on his old turntable, and lowered the stylus carefully to ‘Cash on the Barrelhead’. Volume up, fast fiddling, whooping voices of merriment. Just the thing for clearing out the tangled webs of morning. Lord they put me in the jailhouse … He thought of Scullion in his office at Force HQ, an architectural conundrum of buildings jammed together in Pitt Street, close to the city centre. Scullion’s little room was decorated with bright drawings his kids had made. Stick figures with big grins and smiley-face suns in the sky.

  ‘What’s that racket, Lou?’ Scullion asked.

  ‘Gram Parsons.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your idea of music is Barbra Streisand warbling.’

  ‘It’s more than that –’

  ‘Okay. I’ll throw in Shirley Bassey.’ Perlman attempted to sing, managed a croak. ‘What now my love …’

  Scullion said, ‘There’s a word for you.’

  ‘Slovenly? Cantankerous?’

  ‘They go without saying. I was thinking eclectic.’

  ‘That’s the sweetest thing you ever said to me, Sandy.’

  ‘Jazz concerts, classical, that country stuff, there’s no limit to your taste,’ Scullion said.

  Perlman said, ‘I draw a line at reggae.’

  ‘McLaren’s doing the post-mortem later this morning.’

  Perlman lowered the volume of the music. ‘McLaren? His hand’s about as steady as a live toad in aspic’

  ‘Then we should be thankful he works only on the dead.’

  ‘A small mercy.’ He went back inside the kitchen, poured hot water into a cup, stirred in a big spoonful of instant coffee.

  ‘Are you coming in?’ Scullion asked.

  ‘Give me about an hour, Sandy. I’m popping in to see my brother first.’

  ‘I heard about that. I hope he’ll be okay.’

  ‘We all do.’

  When Perlman hung up, he drained his coffee and went back upstairs and stripped. He stepped inside the shower, a narrow fibreglass cubicle with a plastic curtain, and turned on the taps. He let the force of water needle his skull and run down his body, then he dried himself and hurried inside his bedroom where he found an old dark-blue blazer with silver buttons, and a pair of baggy flannels that needed pressing. He discovered a clean but crumpled white shirt. What the hell. You were investigating a death, not posing in a fancy cardigan for a knitwear pattern. He couldn’t find a tie. All right. So he was going into the office looking like a downmarket yachtsman, blazer and bags and silver buttons. All he needed was a captain’s cap and a collapsible telescope. Ahoy.

  He put on his glasses, brushed his teeth, looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. What could you say about that face? A battered duffel-bag pummelled by the demands of too many long nights working the streets, climbing staircases in rundown tenements, ringing the doorbells of sleazy flats whose occupants were psychotic, homicidal, and often armed, too many years wading through the guff the city barfed up from its lower intestinal levels, the pervs, scumbags, dossers, alkies, druggies, molesters, wifebeaters, the whole sad lawless crew that lay concealed in Glasgow’s gut.

  My eyes have life at least, he thought. Of a kind. Unflinching, albeit bloodshot from lack of sleep. Years of interrogation had gone into those eyes, years of asking questions and watching for the tics and funny little mannerisms that indicated somebody was lying. He scanned the map of his entire clock. The underchin was fleshy. The cheeks, you could say, had a slight hollow quality. The hair, aye, well, he’d tried for years to do something about it, and nothing had worked, and he wasn’t going to grease it down at his age. So he’d yielded to a spiky look, tufts of silver rising like sharp shoots from a thin lawn of dark grey. Politely, it was a failed crewcut.

  He stepped out of the house. The morning was blurry with snow that fell through streetlamps. A figure appeared under a lamp and moved towards him, a woman dressed in a long brown coat and a headscarf. She reminded Perlman of a bow-legged table.

  ‘Maggie,’ he said. ‘I forgot it was your day.’

  ‘You’d forget your bum if it wasn’t welded to you,’ the woman said. She had dentures that slipped and clicked as she talked. She was a widow who’d been cleaning Perlman’s house for years.

  ‘How’s that pigsty of yours?’

  ‘The kitchen is spotless. It’s like a model home –’

  ‘Aye, right, you were on your knees all night long scrubbing the floor in the endless war against e-coli. I’ll do your bedroom and bathroom, then I’ll get stuck into the kitchen. If there’s time. Which I doubt. What you need, Lou –’

  ‘Maggie, don’t say it –’

  ‘A wife, Lou. You need a wife.’

  ‘I had one once,’ he said. ‘It didn’t take.’

  ‘Find another.’ She took a key from her pocket. ‘Watch how you drive. The road’s slippery.’ She entered the house, closed the door. Where would he be without Maggie McGibbon? In more chaos. He unlocked the Mondeo and got inside, turned the key in the ignition. Battery dead, very very dead. Fuck it all. December in Glasgow, snow as thin as consommé, the rag and bone end of the year.

  7

  The man whose passport identified him as Shimon Marak had slept for ten hours after Ramsay delivered him to a top-floor flat in a Maryhill tenement, on the north side of the city. You’ll like it here, Abdullah, Ramsay had said. It’s a lovely flat, and very quiet, and none of the neighbours will trouble you. What Marak discovered, shortly after waking, was that Ramsay had been lying. Construction work took place in a tenement across the street, hammers and drills and the clatter of discarded rubble rushing down disposal chutes, and labourers playing their radios. As for the neighbours leaving him be, more lies: a thin-faced woman with bright-green hair had come to his door to sell him raffle tickets for the renovation of a church, she claimed, but Marak noticed how she sweated, and the circles under her eyes, and he guessed she was on drugs. She grabbed his sleeve and said, Please mister buy some tickets, eh.

  Shaking his head, he closed the door. He heard her curse on the landing. Bloody Arab bastart. Then she kicked his door a couple of times before she went away, still swearing.

  Arab, he thought. What an easy racial assumption.

  Half an hour later a man claiming to be the woman’s husband turned up on the doorstep. He was dressed in black leather motorcycle gear. He had an ugly face, thick-lipped and malicious. An old scar trawled the length of his cheek. His hands were tattooed with blue snakes. He pushed Marak hard in the chest. You chancing your arm with my wife, eh? You taking certain liberties while I’m working, are ye?

  Marak backed off, tried to shut his door. The man leaned into it with his shoulder. Ya fucken piece of shite. You think you can come here and help yerself to our women, ya wanker. Marak met the brutality of the man’s eyes and held them. He wasn’t afraid. He knew he could maim this intruder, but the last thing he needed was trouble. The idea of the police coming here – no, he couldn’t have that.

  Smiling like an idiot and nodding, he told the man he meant no harm, and finally forced the door shut. The man had made a strange baying noise, like a wolf maddened by moonlight, and then he’d gone downstairs, and within minutes loud bass-driven music had begun to play from below, sending reverberations up through the floors and walls to the rooms Marak occupied. He hadn’t been able to escape the music.

  He spent a few minutes taking clothes from his backpack – two pairs of black Levi’s, a couple of black flannel shirts, socks, underwear – and folding them neatly inside a chest of drawers in the bedroom. The drawers were lined with yellowed newspapers, pages of the News of the
World dating from the mid-1970s. He took his toilet items into the bathroom. Somebody’s turds, in an advanced state of deterioration, floated in the bowl. He flushed the cistern and the water roared.

  Before stacking his toiletries inside a rusted medicine cabinet, he cleaned the shelf with water and tissues. He aligned his things carefully: razor, shaving soap, comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, and the small gold-handled scissors he used on his beard. The scissors were special. A gift from his father. His initials had been carved in tiny letters on the blades.

  He walked through the rooms, expecting the phone to ring, thinking about Ramsay and his ‘lovely’ flat. When a man tells one lie, usually he tells many. He felt a distinct uneasiness: how could Ramsay be trusted? Marak had come a long way. He’d received promises, and made promises in return. He’d sworn an oath.

  Patience, have patience.

  He paced the three dull rooms with their dirty curtains and shabby furniture. The kitchen was filled with mouldy food left behind by a previous occupant. He came across some edible bits and pieces in the refrigerator, bread and cheese and two imploded pears, not enough for sustenance.

  Hungry, he left the place and walked through the poor morning light to a small grocery, where the staff was Pakistani. He bought milk, tea, cheese, pitta bread, oranges, houmus, a packet of dates. He paid, counted his change. He examined the coins and notes, trying to familiarize himself with them.

  Back in the flat, the telephone rang. He dropped his groceries on the floor as he rushed to answer.

  Ramsay asked, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Abdullah, eh? Leaving the premises?’

  ‘You’re having me watched. Why?’

  ‘I’m protecting our interests,’ Ramsay said.

  ‘I don’t like being observed.’