The Last Darkness Page 32

  Colin Perlman seemed to have read the unfinished question. He said, ‘Yes, I had to. Everything had to appear truly brutal. Everything had to come back to the twisted psychology of the kid. He was filled with hatred and capable of anything, after all.’

  ‘God help you.’

  ‘God’s not involved, Lou. He never is. You worry too much, wee brother.’

  ‘Christ. How did you ever think you could pull this off? Even if I hadn’t seen your body, no marks, no stitches, nothing, what about Miriam? What would she say when she saw you?’

  ‘Do you want an answer to that question, Lou? Think of the implications first. If I tell you that she wouldn’t be surprised, then it means she’s implicated in the whole pantomime. Do you want to hear that kind of thing about the woman you love, little bruder?’

  Lou said nothing. Sometimes truth was the last thing you wanted. Even if you’d given your life to discovering it, there were times you didn’t want to hear it.

  Colin said, ‘Relax, Lou –’

  Relax? Lou Perlman wondered. What did that mean? How did you relax –

  ‘– we don’t have a sexual relationship. The last time we fucked, it had to be eight or nine years ago. Some things lose their allure. We haven’t slept together since then. I haven’t seen her naked in all that time either. She hasn’t seen me. But it’s a comfortable marriage after a fashion. Separate bedrooms.’ Colin adjusted his bandage. ‘What now, mon petit gendarme? Where do you go with all your little discoveries? Back to Force HQ? Talk them over with your superiors? Process warrants for my arrest? And Rifkind’s too. Oh, and let’s not forget Kilroy. He’s an accomplice before and after the fact.’

  Lou Perlman rose and walked across the room. It seemed to take a very long time. He wasn’t sure if he knew where he was headed. He had no destination in mind. He couldn’t quite recall where he lived or how to get there. It was somewhere in the eastern reaches of the city, a black house, a lonely house, he just couldn’t bring it into focus. He had to get out of this hospital. That was all he understood. Get away. He clamped a hand over his mouth. He thought he was going to shed tears or throw up; some weight or fluid had to be released from his body, something to make him feel light again.

  He thought of how damned his brother had become.

  Colin said, ‘I’m betting you do nothing, wee brother.’

  Was there a veiled threat in that remark? A hint of something yet to come? Lou wasn’t sure.

  Colin looked sad all at once. ‘Before you leave. I have something to say to you, Lou. I should have said it a long time ago. But somehow our family always had difficulty with emotional expressions. We stifled the things we felt. And you may not believe me now. But I love you, brother. That’s all. No matter what I said to you a moment ago, no matter how deeply you despise me for what I’ve done in my life, that one fact doesn’t alter.’

  I love you.

  White-faced, Lou Perlman went into the corridor and then moved in the direction of reception. I love you. What was that supposed to be – Colin’s lifeline to cheap redemption? Three easy words. The magician steps from the magic cabinet and says I love you and all the world is right again and sunshine melts the snow away? I love you.

  Didn’t he know? Didn’t he see? Everything was damaged.

  Lou’s step was heavy. What to do now? What to do with his knowledge? Outside he walked to the middle of the car park and he stood very still. He took the icy city into his lungs, sucking deeply as if to cleanse himself. The air was tack-sharp in his throat and nostrils. And if it smelled of anything, it was of Glasgow, of cold sandstone and tiled closes, frozen ponds and brittle leaves in the city’s black silent parks.

  He was aware of a figure emerging from a parked car, some kind of antique vehicle. He glanced at the man, who was moving in quick short steps towards the entrance. A big man, fat, a coat down to his ankles, hands gloved, a long scarf slung round his neck and trailing both back and front. As he approached the entranceway the man began to glitter as light played on the silvery pendant that hung outside his coat.

  A man of the night, Perlman thought, a man shining in the dark.

  Perlman reached his car and sat inside and tried to imagine the conversation between his brother and Leo Kilroy. But he couldn’t. His brain wouldn’t kick in. He felt half-dead, heart like a bag full of broken toys. He drove out of the car park, travelling too fast on treacherous roads.

  55

  He climbed the stairs. The lift was still out of order. He knew it was too late at night to come here, but it was the only place he could think of – and yet, if you pressed him for a reason, he wouldn’t have had a single easy answer. Because I love her. Because I’m sorry for her marriage. Because the man she’s married to is a monster. The reasons were interwoven like inseparable strands of tapestry.

  Make it simple. I just want to see her, he thought. That’s all.

  She was standing in the doorway of her studio. She’d buzzed the downstairs security door open for him. She wore blue jeans and a plaid shirt too big for her.

  ‘You look fragile,’ she said.

  She took his elbow and led him inside the big space of her loft and he felt like an incontinent old man in wet jammies being ushered to a lavatory by a nurse. The nursing homes of his future. The card games. The leakage of piss. Drool Street, halfway house to the bone-yard.

  He stared at the big canvas covered in tiny purple squares. He was reminded of something, couldn’t think what. A meadow of cube-headed flowers. Once, from the window of a train travelling south from Glasgow, he’d seen a field of blue sheep. They’d been dyed by their owner, and the dye had run in the rain. Blue sheep and flowers with purple cubed heads. Why not?

  ‘Sit down, Lou. I’ll get you a drink.’

  ‘No, no drink. You mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He lit a cigarette and looked at Miriam as she dropped some paintbrushes into a jam jar of white spirit. ‘You’ve been to the hospital?’ she asked.

  ‘I dropped in,’ he said. ‘Late.’

  ‘I went there as soon as he was awake. I think he looked pretty good. Considering.’

  Considering what, he thought.

  ‘Rifkind said the op was a dream,’ she said.

  ‘Rifkind’s a self-proclaimed genius.’

  ‘What am I detecting in your tone?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Not sure. Snide?’

  ‘More tired to the bone,’ he said.

  She sat on the arm of his chair and placed a hand on his sleeve. ‘I still think that coat suits you.’

  ‘Does it make me look like a cuddly toy abandoned in a dark corner?’

  ‘Does it make you look what?… I don’t know what’s bugging you, Lou.’

  ‘The world.’

  ‘Did anybody ever say the world was easy? That cuddly-toy bit. That sort of popped out of nowhere, didn’t it?’

  He flicked ash into an empty coffee tin. ‘Colin said it.’

  ‘In what context?’

  ‘He says that’s how you think of me.’

  She took her hand away. He longed to kiss her mouth. He wondered if he could lose himself for ever in such a kiss. Never coming up for air, dying gloriously, mouths locked.

  ‘I don’t remember saying anything like that, Lou. It’s horrible of him to claim I said such a thing.’

  Lou Perlman shrugged.

  She asked, ‘How did a remark like that ever come up anyway? It’s not the kind of thing people say out of the blue.’

  ‘I forget the context.’

  ‘He’s on medication. He probably isn’t thinking straight.’

  Medication. Placebos in a little brown bottle. How could he ever tell her what had transpired in Colin’s room? He couldn’t. ‘I just came by to see if there’s anything I can do for you, Miriam. If you need anything. You know.’ He looked into her small serious face. He touched her chin softly. Then he hugged her a moment, and felt her body relax against his.

>   ‘I can’t think of anything, Lou,’ she said. She looked nervous, he thought. ‘You’re kind to ask. You’re always good to me.’

  She took a step away from him. He realized she was crying.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. I get weepy sometimes. Maybe it’s that time of my life. Or it’s the stress surrounding the operation.’

  The operation, of course. The phantom waiting to be exposed, but he wasn’t the one to do it. ‘You can tell me anything you like, Miriam. You know that. You don’t have to keep anything back from me. What are pals and confidants for?’

  She continued to cry quietly. He wished he had a hankie. ‘Stop crying, dear. It upsets me. You don’t want to see me blubber, do you? Not a pretty sight, I promise you.’

  She smiled through her tears. Perlman thought his heart would break. How he wanted to hold and caress her and allow nothing to harm her. To be both guardian and lover. To take her pain when she was hurt. What kind of future did she have with Colin? Only you know the answer to that, Lou. What now, mon petit gendarme? Where do you go with all your little discoveries? Back to Force HQ?

  Is that what I do?

  And if I do, is it for the right reason?

  Is it to bring justice into the equation, or because you want the husband out of the way? There was no dignity in some questions; and even less in the answers. He stretched out his hand and took hold of Miriam’s. Tears continued to roll down her cheeks, even as she tried to blink them back.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I love him, Lou.’

  ‘Why doesn’t that make you happy?’

  ‘Because because, oh, a hundred things, Lou. A hundred.’

  I could give you more firewood for your bonfire of sorrows, neshuma. ‘What things?’

  ‘Things. Stuff that happens in a marriage.’

  ‘So much stuff happens in a marriage, Miriam. It’s a wide spectrum of joy and pain and cruelty and sweetness, you name it.’

  ‘I looked at him lying in his bed today and I realized how much I loved him and then I had this awful thought, and it struck me out of nowhere, Fuck you, Colin, I wish you’d died on the operating table –’

  ‘You wished that?’

  ‘And I thought how everything had changed.’ She paused, turned her face away from him, gazed at her canvas. ‘Lou, you don’t want to hear this. You have enough on your plate.’

  ‘No, tell me.’

  ‘It’s the drift, the way we float apart, I’m not sure I’m saying it right. It’s fucked, Lou. The train’s gone off the tracks. It went down the side of a mountain a long time ago.’

  ‘Elucidate,’ he said. ‘I’m not terrific at reading between the lines.’

  She said, ‘His fucking women, Lou. His girls. I’m so damned ashamed to say it aloud.’

  ‘His women?’ Why should Colin’s infidelity surprise me? he asked himself. Colin’s world had no known moral boundaries. He did what he liked. He plundered, he killed. What was a little infidelity?

  ‘I wanted to tell you before. So many times I was on the edge of saying it. It’s more than infidelity. It’s more than just another pretty face that catches his fancy. I could get over that if it had happened once or maybe twice down the years. At least I think I could. But it’s an obsession with him, Lou. Young women, middle-aged, it doesn’t matter.’

  Perlman said, ‘You should have told me before.’ And what would I have done anyway? he wondered. Talked to Colin? Now look here, bruder, you don’t know how much sorrow you’re causing? Indeed.

  Miriam said, ‘It’s like I’m the one who’s failed, you understand that? Not him. Me. I’m the one who’s let him down somehow. In bed maybe. Or does everything just go stale in the long run, Lou? Is that it?’

  ‘I don’t know the answer, Miriam.’

  ‘I looked at him in his hospital room today and I thought what kind of idiot am I that I still love this man who treats me like shit? What does that say about me, Lou?’

  Sadie drifted into Perlman’s moment, a flash of her. What was the difference between Sadie and Miriam when you got right down to it? Only one of social standing, of possessions and money. Moon Riley beat Sadie. And Colin beat Miriam, but in places where no bruises showed. He patted the back of Miriam’s hand, fingertips touching her wedding ring.

  ‘I know, I know, we present this front, don’t we?’ she said. ‘Husband and wife. Rich. Trips to faraway places. We’re a couple, we’re made for each other. What a twosome, people say. How lucky you are.’

  ‘It fooled me.’

  ‘And all the time, as soon as he’s out of my sight, he’s off screwing. Girls he meets. Teenagers. How does a sixty-year-old man attract teenagers? Okay, he looks fit and healthy, and he’s got that accursed charm he can turn on and off. But teenagers? I suppose he flashes money and credit-cards and buys them good dinners in smart restaurants. Sometimes it’s hookers he picks up. Sometimes it’s women I know socially. Ruthie Wexler. He was having a thing with her for years, off and on.’

  ‘Ruthie? I didn’t know.’ He remembered Ruthie’s statement, her sleepy recollection of seeing Colin Perlman around the time of her husband’s death. The swimming pool. She was probably closer to reality than to the dream she imagined she was having.

  ‘He had a key to her house, for Christ’s sake.’

  A key. ‘He came and went,’ Perlman said.

  ‘I think you have that backwards, Lou.’ She smiled, wiped her face with the cuff of a sleeve. ‘See? I can joke about it. Brave of me. I’m falling apart, Lou. Don’t let me.’

  ‘Do you want me to stay with you? I can sleep on the sofa.’

  ‘I’m tired, Lou.’

  ‘You and me both.’

  ‘I want to be on my own,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Can you sleep?’

  ‘I have some pills for an emergency.’

  ‘Take a couple. Go to sleep.’ How could Colin betray this precious woman? How could he humiliate and hurt her so? Maybe the explanation was that simple-minded old standby, that glossy magazine self-help analysis: he’s trying to prove age hasn’t hampered his virility. Or maybe the low sperm-count drove him to demonstrate that he was hot in the sack even if he couldn’t reproduce a little version of himself.

  What did it matter?

  Miriam caught his arm, raised her face, kissed him on the side of his mouth. Her hair smelled of paint, or some thinning solvent. He worried that he carried some trace on his breath of the tainted sandwich he’d half-eaten earlier. He wanted to stay. He wanted that sofa. He wanted to be near her.

  ‘I unloaded on you, Lou. I dumped all that stuff on you. It’s been knotted inside me for so long … Was that unbearable for you?’

  ‘I take it in my stride. I sit tall in the saddle, my dear.’

  ‘Except right now you’re slouching,’ she said.

  He straightened his back. ‘There. Soldierly. Proud.’

  She kissed him again, all very proper, staid, a transaction of affection between people related by the accident of marriage.

  He walked to the door. ‘I’ll phone you,’ he said.

  She walked alongside him. ‘Maybe the worst has passed. Maybe getting it off my chest will make everything … I don’t know, lighter? More manageable?’

  It could get heavier, he thought.

  ‘Maybe we’ll even make things well again,’ she said.

  This was the worst. He shut the door, seeing the small fluttery wave she left in the air like a bird with a delicate skeleton.

  56

  Three a.m., then, and Egypt, silent Egypt. He parked his car outside his house and for a moment had no urge to go indoors. The blackstone building had a haunted look. Icicles hung from the sills and the guttering. My ice house. Perlman felt the day roll through him as if it were a series of aftershocks. You think you know something about people, and up to a limited point you do, and then something unexpected happens – and whatever confidence
you might have felt about your insight into the human animal is suddenly as hollow and useless as a burnt-out lightbulb.

  His hands shook in his lap. When he raised one to take the key from the ignition, the keychain trembled between his fingers. He was all pulses and jerky movements. Colin, Colin, where did you lose the way? How did that happen?

  He opened the door and almost slid on the pavement as he stepped out of the car. He was ungainly, like a man made legless by drink. He faced the house. The windows were black slashes interrupted here and there by moons the streetlamps created. It wasn’t a house that winked and smiled and said, Come in, draw up a chair, heat yourself by the fire.

  I must move from here, seek a new home in a brighter part of the city, he thought. But where would that be – some unremarkable semi in Langside? A flat in a leafy part of the West End, near the BBC, say? Or, heaven help him, a loft in Merchant City?

  A small dog might be company too. He’d walk it every night, regular as a chapel bell. A Scottie. Or a wirehair terrier. Something small, low-maintenance. He’d meet other dog-owners in parks and they’d talk about vets, or brands of dog food, or canine ailments. He might meet some good-looking widow walking her Labrador. He’d get used to the routine of it all. Easy.

  He fumbled in coat-pockets for his door key. Every time he wanted to let himself in, he had to go through this same klutzy process, this ransacking of his pockets. Why couldn’t he keep the key in one place? For the same reason your life is untidy, Detective. You’re a creature of sprawl and clutter. The pile of fag-ends in an ashtray that so annoys some, you don’t even notice. The collection of old newspapers, in stacks that teeter, might be an unsightly fire-hazard to certain people, but to you it’s just something that has grown organically.

  The key, finally.

  He stuck it in the lock, twisted it. He thought: I can call Scullion, ask him to take me off the case. I want to step aside. And he’d ask why, and I’d say personal reasons, Sandy.

  No way Sandy would buy that particular pokey-hat.

  He pushed the door and stepped inside, flipped on the lobby light, and as he raised a leg to kick the door shut behind him, he heard somebody move. Somebody, something.