White Rage (The Glasgow Novels) Read online

  ‘And I’m supposed to take your word that this phone call actually happened?’

  ‘Are you saying I’m a liar, Nat?’

  ‘I’ve had consommé that was thicker than what you’re trying to serve up,’ Blum said. ‘Just because some murderous bastard with a pistol stole Leo’s car, you jump – no, you leap – to the conclusion that it was Leo who killed Colin. Now you’re reduced to anonymous eyewitnesses. You’re a sad old bastard, Lou –’

  Perlman said, ‘My phone’ll ring again. Today. Tomorrow. Whenever. And when I pick it up, wham!’

  Blum looked at Scullion. ‘Do I have to listen to any more of this, Sandy? Perlman’s been harassing my client for years. Every petty little thing he can dream up. If it’s not contraband cigarettes, it’s some kind of protection racket for the better boutiques and clubs of our dear city. Or it’s alleged bribery of some city official. One fake accusation follows another.’

  ‘My brother and Kilroy were involved in serious fraud, Nat,’ Perlman said.

  ‘So you claim,’ Blum said.

  ‘All right, I don’t have documentary evidence, and I don’t have corroborating statements because the people who might have been in a position to make them are all fucking boxed and dead.’

  ‘Anything you’ve got is either fabricated or circumstantial.’

  Perlman ignored the lawyer: let a lawyer rabbit on and you’re shafted. ‘Your client killed my brother because Colin knew the scam in and out and up and down, how it worked, who profited and who was cheated. And because Kilroy feared exposure, he killed Colin. Just the way Colin killed the men he thought might expose him.’ Perlman felt an ache in the lower area of his spine. That damn dog. That big spotted hellhound. ‘One day, Nat, I’ll nail your fucking client to the wall. I promise you.’

  ‘You’re going too far,’ Blum said. ‘You’re really pushing your luck.’

  Kilroy said, ‘Boys, boys, boys, this talk of nails is troubling me. It’s upsetting my ulcer. There’s been a misunderstanding here. These things happen.’

  Perlman noticed a sharp little light of something – malice? manipulation? – beneath the flaps of Kilroy’s eyelids. You saw Kilroy in the pantomime clothes, and it was easy to forget that his heart was black. Now he began to rise, a monstrous undertaking, a complicated process of flab displacing flab, a series of soft rings of flesh yielding so that muscle and bone might be liberated long enough to allow him leverage to a standing position.

  He made it. Kilroy Erectus, a mighty sight.

  ‘Lou, a word in your ear,’ he said. ‘I bear you absolutely no hard feelings. I swear. Justice hasn’t been served. The killer’s still out there. But I’m not the answer, Lou. I was awfully fond of Colin. And I miss him sorely. I do.’

  ‘You expect some thanks for this speech?’ Perlman asked. I want to murder you, he thought. He had the wild urge to gather the ends of Kilroy’s long silk scarf and choke him slowly. But you can’t do stuff like that, you’re a policeman, you obey the book of rules, and so you live your professional life in a series of small acts of restraint.

  Blum laid a hand on the fat man’s sleeve. ‘He’s not listening, Leo. Let’s get away from this … pesterment.’

  ‘Pesterment? Nice word that,’ Perlman said.

  Blum escorted his client to the door, where he turned round. ‘Any more stupid stunts, Lou, I’m going all the way up to Chief Superintendent Tay, and even higher if I need to. At which point you go in the grinder and you come out sausage. Loud and clear?’

  ‘Loud anyway,’ Perlman said. He listened to lawyer and client go along the hallway. He imagined Blum reporting him to the straight-faced William Tay, Presbyterian Church elder, a man suffering a terminal humour deficit. Perlman’s waging a private war on my client. Perlman’s acting beyond his authority. Tay would hear him out unblinkingly, all the time storing away the lawyer’s complaints. It was no secret William Tay disliked Perlman, whom he considered a dinosaur living on borrowed time. Tay wanted Perlman to retire; it was even rumoured that the Chief Superintendent had composed a farewell speech for the occasion of the Last Supper. We come to say goodbye to a valuable comrade…

  Scullion asked, ‘What do you think?’

  Perlman watched ragged clouds blown west across the city. ‘I’m deeply impressed by that look of wounded innocence Blum’s cultivated. Then the way he switches in a flash to outrage. He’d get my BAFTA vote. As for the fat man, who knows? I enjoyed the quiet word of confidentiality, and the woeful expression he tries on. Sorry about your brother, Lou. I felt like asking him for the loan of a hankie so I could dry my fucking eyes.’

  ‘I’m a wee bit troubled I didn’t see Kilroy squirm, Lou,’ Scullion said. ‘Nor did I see Blum miss a beat. He didn’t go all pale and trembly. Quite the opposite. He went on the offensive.’

  ‘I’m hearing a tiny off-note in your voice, Sandy. You think I jumped the gun? I should’ve waited for the caller to get back to me? I should’ve put some meat on the bones before we brought the khazer and his lawyer here?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I just thought I’d plant a tiny seed, see what grows. You said to go for it. You had the chance to stop me.’

  ‘You were hot. I didn’t want to burn my fingers holding you back.’

  ‘I wanted to niggle them, ventilate some of that bloody smugness out of them –’

  ‘I know what you wanted, Lou. But you didn’t think this little confrontation through. I understand you’re in a hurry. I know what you feel. You want Kilroy in jail where he belongs, and you want it yesterday. But now that you’re asking me, okay, with the benefit of hindsight I have to say we should’ve waited for a second phone call from the mystery man, more info, some kind of verification, before we pulled Kilroy down here, I was wrong to let you rush –’

  ‘I’ve lost my objectivity, Sandy?’

  ‘In this matter, aye. How could it be any other way? Your own brother. You’re haunted.’

  ‘I need an exorcist. Where’s the Yellow Pages?’

  ‘You need a diversion, Lou. You’re too close to the situation.’

  Perlman was quiet for a time. The sky was surly. Glasgow had a veneer of gloom. He thought: I saw the slaying, I recognized the car. And I don’t believe for a moment Kilroy’s claim that he doesn’t know how to handle a gun, even if the Procurator-Fiscal had bought into it.

  He laid the palm of a hand on a window pane. He noticed liver spots on his skin. Decay and deterioration. How soon they set in. He thought of Colin decomposing in the soil. Four months in damp earth, what was left?

  He said, ‘I loved my brother.’

  ‘I know you did.’

  ‘He was a bad bastard. I loved him anyway.’

  ‘You love who you love, it’s all a bloody mystery.’ Scullion drummed his fingertips on his desk. ‘Change of topic. Madeleine’s expecting you for dinner tonight. Remember?’

  ‘How could I forget?’

  ‘I don’t know why, but she’s got a soft spot for you.’

  ‘I’m blessed with a certain charm. Only people of discretion see it.’

  ‘Let’s get some perspective here. Madeleine’s also very much taken with lost dogs and stray cats as well.’

  ‘So she has a soul,’ Perlman said.

  Scullion propped himself on the edge of his desk. ‘No matter what she serves up, Lou, say you like it. I know she’s not exactly Nigella in the kitchen –’

  ‘Maddy does fine,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Your idea of fine is a bag of greasy chips drowned in malt vinegar.’

  ‘The fuck you say. I like a greasy sausage to go with the chips.’

  Scullion made a face. ‘Do you want to know what she’s preparing?’

  ‘So long as it’s not fish pie.’

  ‘Fish pie? Did you say fish pie?’

  ‘Break it to me gently, Sandy.’

  ‘I wish I knew a way of breaking anything gently to you.’

  Fish pie, Perlman thought. His mother Etta used to make
it every Tuesday. In her limited repertoire of dishes, fish pie was far and away the most scary. It transgressed all the rules of inedibility. Lou and Colin used to deconstruct the pie and shove soggy pastry round their plates, trying to create an illusion of having eaten at least something. Etta was never fooled. She served the same dish the next Tuesday, and all the Tuesdays after that: Tuesdays were an infinity of uneaten scraps of haddock, cod and other slimy marine matter afloat in a lumpy white sauce.

  ‘You’ll eat it,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Is that an order, Inspector?’

  ‘Take it any way you like.’

  Before Perlman had a chance to reply, his mobile phone rang; it played the first few notes of ‘Take Five’. He spoke his name into the mouthpiece. He was surprised – astonished – to hear her voice. His heart felt like the tight-stretched skin of a drum.

  ‘Can I see you, Lou?’ she asked.

  5

  Bobby Descartes pulled the hood of his jacket over his skull and knotted the drawstring, which gave his head a cylindrical look. Wind whined through the thin stand of trees and whipped slanty rain at him.

  He stared at the building beyond the trees. One storey, squat, functional. He’d come here many times before. He knew this place. He knew the specs: diesel-fired central heating fuelled from a six-hundred-gallon tank, twelve rooms, three toilets, a kitchen. The number of windows. Twelve in front, twelve at the back. One at each end. Twenty-six in all. There was one front door and one back, where four big green wheelie-bins sat.

  He gathered these details as a miser might hoard coins. A good plan was an accretion of small facts and you memorized them all. The number of people inside the building – that was important. On an average day, with no absences, there were about fifty, which included staff. The part-time kitchen staff, two plump women of about sixty who were almost twinlike in hairstyle and bearing, a couple of bollards, usually left around 2 p.m. Bobby had followed them once or twice. They lived nearby in an estate of two-storey houses where, years before, there had been the tenements that had housed generations of immigrants, Jews, Irish, Poles, Latvians, all the dross of Europe that had washed up in central Scotland.

  He felt a rant begin to rip through his head. Don’t go there. You don’t have time to waste. Rain dripped from leaves and slicked over his hood. He heard the rush of traffic on the nearby M8, where the motorway cut through Kinning Park and Kingston, and then crossed Paisley Road. It traversed the Clyde at the Kingston Bridge and headed, in the manner of a surgical scar that would never heal cleanly, through the west of the city centre.

  He checked his watch. The face was blurry. Two thirty. The hour approacheth. No nerves, Beezer. This is your destiny.

  He left the trees and crossed the yard quickly. Ten seconds, maybe fifteen, he reached the side of the building. He ducked his head under the window and slipped round the back.

  He opened the rear door quietly and stepped inside a storage room adjoining the kitchen. He was surrounded by big bottles of ketchup and industrial-sized tubs of bright yellow mustard. Monster cans of baked beans formed a huge stack on a shelf. He thought: I’m breathing a little too quickly. Pulse up, heartbeat raised a notch.

  Cool it, Beezer. Keep your mouth closed. Breathe through your nose.

  He gazed across the empty kitchen: steel surfaces, pots and pans hanging from hooks. It was the cleanest room he’d ever seen. Scrubbed, sanitized, polished; the air smelled of strong disinfectant. It was almost a shame to step into the kitchen with your muddy running shoes. Besides, they made a distinctive pattern, and he wasn’t happy about leaving a trace behind; you might as well lay your business card on the counter-top. He took off his shoes and hooked them over the fingers of his left hand and only then did he enter the kitchen.

  He heard a woman’s voice in a room down the corridor. ‘This little piggy went to market.’

  Bobby felt suddenly very calm, like he wasn’t attached to himself any more, he was weightless in space. It was similar to the feeling he got when he’d been in pain with a broken leg one time and the doc had shot him with morphine, max strength, deep into the vein, a lovely wee ship sailing on a tranquil blue surface straight to his brain.

  He moved across the kitchen, opened a door, stepped into a corridor. The woman’s voice was louder. ‘And what did the next little piggy do? Justin, can you tell me?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ A wee boy’s voice. Presumably Justin.

  ‘Come on, Justin. You do know.’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ the woman said.

  Bobby thought: Leave Justin alone, you bullying cunt. The next little piggy shit his pants. Tell her that, Justin, wee man. Or tell her the next little piggy had a fucking good wank.

  ‘Can you tell me, Alexandra?’

  ‘Went to market,’ a girl said.

  ‘No, Alex, pet, that was the first little piggy.’

  Bobby thought: Who gives a shit where any of the piggies went? Why drum this crap into the heads of kindergarten kids?

  No time to waste, he knew which door to enter, which room he wanted. Room 2. The doors were all bright red. Each had a small pane of reinforced glass set at eye level.

  Bobby stopped outside 2. He pressed his face to the glass.

  There she was. That bitch. She didn’t see him. She was busy yacking about the comings and goings of pigs. You cunt, leave the kids alone, they don’t need this.

  ‘Which little piggy ran all the way home?’

  Bobby opened the door and said, ‘I am that fucking piggy.’

  The woman stared at him. She was brown-skinned, good-looking if you liked that dark-eyed, brown-skinned, long-lashed type. The pale green sari, the headscarf, where did she think she was, bloody Bombay?

  Leave your mark, Bobby. Leave your sign. Go on.

  ‘You know this is private property?’ she asked. ‘What business do you have here?’

  ‘Private business,’ Bobby said. The air smelled of sour milk, chalk: did every school and every kindergarten in the world smell the same damn way?

  ‘I must ask you to leave.’

  ‘Ask me. See what happens.’

  ‘Go, please, you’re scaring the children,’ she said. She had a Glasgow accent. Her type always thought that if they pronounced their words like locals, if they dropped their ‘t’s’ in ‘bottle’ or ‘spittle’, that was enough to fool everybody into believing they belonged.

  It ain’t fooling me, Bobby thought. He said, ‘I know you.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Please. Just go.’

  The kids were in motion now, shrinking away from him, moving towards the woman. She gathered some of them around her. A few weans, four years old or so, had begun to snivel. You hadn’t foreseen that, Beezer. Crying kids hadn’t been part of the plan. What did you think? She’d be alone in the classroom and you’d just do your stuff and walk away? What does it matter, you don’t have to harm the kids. You just do the thing and go.

  Yeh. Now.

  He took a couple of quick strides forward. ‘Indra,’ he said. ‘I fucking know you, you bitch.’

  ‘We’ve never met,’ she said.

  ‘I know your name, I watched you, I saw you coming and going, all airs and graces and floating along the street like your shite didn’t stink, what do you think you are, eh? Some fucking rajah’s bint? Eh? Look at the clothes. You don’t belong here.’

  ‘Go, please please go –’

  ‘Scared, right? I’ve got you scared. Scared and running, pishing your knickers. You pishing, Indra? Hiss hiss.’

  Reach, find, remove, fire. He realized he had the tiny gun in his hand. He didn’t remember taking it out.

  Kids were screaming.

  ‘Put that gun away,’ she said.

  ‘Aw, fuck you.’

  He fired at a range of four feet directly into her forehead. She made a weird sound, as if her breath had all been sucked back into her throat, then she slipped to the floor and lay on her side. Little kids were sprayed w
ith her blood and brain-soup and bone fragments. He wanted to linger, say something to calm them down, explain why he’d had to shoot the woman, and how he was sorry they witnessed it, but some things had to be done, he had a duty.

  They’d thank him one day. Some of them anyway.

  He rushed from the room. A man appeared at the end of the corridor. He was big and bearded, and wore a white turban.

  A raghead, Bobby thought. This school was crawling with these fuckers.

  The man shouted. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing?’

  Bobby fired a shot that hit the man in his chest.

  The man slumped against the wall and said, ‘Oh no, oh no.’

  Bobby raced down the corridor, crossed the kitchen, left the building the way he’d entered it, and skidded across the yard to the trees. Then he was moving quickly beneath a sky the colour of cold volcanic ash. He was running, and the motorway roared and spat damp spray nearby.

  When he’d run as far as Scotland Street he remembered he was still carrying his shoes. He sat on the pavement and put them on and he thought: You’re a prince, Beezer. A national hero. He didn’t feel the rain now. He didn’t feel his sodden feet inside the chunky shoes. He was running a Union Jack up the flagpole of his imagination, then saluting it with great dignity; and the brass bands in his head played patriotic marches.

  6

  Perlman drove his battered Mondeo east along Edinburgh Road, past housing estates that had been built in the mid-1950s and early ’60s to accommodate the mass exodus of people from the doomed slums of the old city. These communities, Cranhill, Easterhouse, Barlanark, were once considered part of a great utopian experiment in living. But entire blocks of flats had decayed, some in the space of less than twenty years, while others lay gutted and abandoned. So much for the dark, wacky craft of social engineering, Perlman thought.

  He smoked one blue Silk Cut after another.

  The idea of seeing Miriam after four months brought him pleasure, but also tension. He pictured her as he’d last seen her: black-veiled and sad-eyed at Colin’s funeral, and yet in some way above her grief, as if an inner grace prevented her from a public display of loss. She’d floated over her sorrow – assuming sorrow was what she felt. Who could say?