The Last Darkness Read online

  ‘Abbbekkkkmmml.’

  Quick ripped the rag from Vindy’s mouth. ‘You trying to say something?’

  ‘No more, please, BJ, I can’t take it. The bloody pain –’

  ‘I’d like to finish the tail,’ Furfee said. His eyes had the beatific light of a man in the extremes of pleasure. ‘You want me to go on, BJ?’

  ‘That’s up to Vindy.’

  ‘I’ll find you money. Swear to God.’

  ‘You hear that, Furf?’

  ‘Man swears to God. An old story.’

  ‘Ach, finish the tail, Furf.’

  Vindaloo said, ‘Wait, no, listen, I can get you five K. That’s all.’

  ‘Five K, eh? Zatso? I’d want it tonight.’

  ‘Aye. Tonight. No problem. Absolutely.’

  BJ Quick said, ‘Eight sharp.’

  ‘Eight sharp, worda honour.’

  ‘Just remember this, Vindaloo. We know where you live.’

  Furfee said, ‘Right. Ranfurly Road, Penilee.’

  ‘And does he live alone, Furf?’

  ‘Wife Mary, age thirty-four. Two kids. Tom, ten, and Cindy, seven.’

  Quick said, ‘Wee doll that Cindy. A Goldilocks.’ He untied the ropes, let them drop to the floor.

  ‘Don’t come to my house, for Christ’s sake,’ Vindy said, picking up his clothes and groaning. ‘Please. I’ll meet you anywhere.’

  ‘Govan subway station.’

  ‘Right. Fine. Fuck’s sake, I’m bleeding all over the fucking shop here,’ Vindy said.

  ‘Get dressed, Billyboy. Go home. Get the money.’

  ‘Dressed? I’m leaking pints, BJ. You got any bandages, anything like that, stop all this?’

  Furfee laughed, a sound like a poker raked through cinders. ‘We look like a chemist to you?’

  ‘He’ll be wanting rubbers next,’ BJ said.

  Furfee laughed again and wiped his blade dry against Vindy’s shirt, which the injured man was trying to button with fingers shaking.

  Vindaloo Bill, human colander, dripped blood all over the floor.

  ‘You can find your way out, I take it,’ BJ Quick said.

  ‘I’m going, I’m going.’ In slow measured steps, Vindy moved towards the door. He went out, stumbling, weeping.

  ‘What do you think?’ Furfee asked.

  ‘I think it’s bloody magical he can find money when he swears left and right he doesn’t have any.’

  ‘Carving affects people,’ Furfee said.

  BJ Quick stepped around puddles of blood and walked to the window. He looked out at snow drifting lazily across the city. He observed a ghost of his own image in the glass and touched the promontory of hair that rose from the centre of his head and powered out over his brow. It was yellow, like a bird poised for flight from the bush of surrounding black hair. This style, a jutting pompadour with attitude, was rock ‘n’ roll, flash, up yours.

  ‘Five grand’s not going to get me the ante for a new club. Kilroy wants another ten before I can get this place back.’ He breathed on the pane and drew the letters KILROY WAS HERE in the condensation with a fingertip, then rubbed them out. Leo Kilroy was the owner of the premises and he’d promised, in thon sleakit way of landlords, that BJ could have first option on the place if he could lay his hands on twenty-five K. I can’t hold that offer open too long, BJ.

  ‘I want my fucking club back.’

  ‘Five grand plus the ten you already gave him,’ Furfee said. ‘That only leaves another ten to get.’

  ‘I can do the bloody arithmetic, Furf.’ Ten grand up the chimney and into Kilroy’s coffers.

  ‘What’s this Arab guy like?’ Furfee asked.

  ‘Tense as a nun’s twat.’

  ‘What’s he here for?’

  ‘He’s here, that’s all I fucking know and all I want to know. Which reminds me. Has Wee Terry called?’

  ‘Not in a few hours.’

  ‘Get him on the horn, Furf. Let’s see what our wandering Arab has been up to.’

  ‘Wilco.’

  BJ Quick shook his head and thought how his present predicament could be traced back to a single moment in time: an autumn night in 1969, his thirteenth birthday, when his father, Frank Xavier Smith, chauffeur to the director of a real-estate company with a dodgy reputation, had given him Jerry Lee’s Greatest Hits Volume One as a present.

  ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ changed BJ’s life. It steamrolled his heart. He became a True Believer. His conversion on the road to rock ‘n’ roll Damascus took only a few seconds and the first phrase of a song – ‘Come on over baby we got chicken in the barn’ – and after that he’d given years to the cause. It was more than love of the music, more than an obsessive pastime – it was a calling, and he an apostle determined to spread the gospel.

  Right, he thought. Look where it led me.

  Bankruptcy, much dope smoked and much dope sold, three broken marriages, eight kids here and there, acts of violence; and a bloody mysterious alliance, for mercenary purposes, with some intense bearded character from the Middle East.

  He thought: Messages from somebody I don’t know and I pass them along despite the fact I don’t like working in the fucking dark, but I need the green infusion, and I was paid 10K down – which went straight into Kilroy’s plucked pigeon of a fist – with a promise of another 10K on completion. And I have a feeling the people I’m working for are right bad bastards who wouldn’t look kindly on me shirking my duties.

  He gazed round the empty room. The rubble of Club Memphis. He felt a sense of withdrawal as desperate and as bleak as that of any junkie abruptly cut off from his source. I bankrolled this fucking place. It was my dope, and I smoked it, snorted it, mainlined it. It was mine and mine alone … and now, and now. He booted aside the chair where Vindaloo Bill had been bleeding, and he thought: I should’ve listened to Father Geoghegan, parish priest, when he said rock ‘n’ roll was Satan’s music. Man had a point there.

  10

  At Force HQ in Pitt Street, Lou Perlman went to Sandy Scullion’s office. The kiddie drawings on DI Scullion’s bulletin-board had a cheering effect, all those innocent yellow suns and square houses and matchstick figures waving from windows and funny doglike things running on lime-green lawns. Sometimes he wished he had a life like Scullion’s. Would he know what to do with it? I’m home, love. What’s for dinner? My day was a nightmare, darling … I’d die for a G&T. He scanned the drawings while Scullion finished a conversation on the telephone.

  When he hung up, Scullion asked, ‘How is Colin?’

  ‘Impatient. Champing at the bit. Thinks his life is over. Colin loves control over events, and one thing you can’t control is a serious cardiac arrest. Or its consequences. So he’s flattened and a wee bit angry. You haven’t met him, have you?’

  ‘No. What’s the prognosis?’ Sandy Scullion frowned, ran a hand across his thin ginger hair. He was a genuine man, and when he was concerned about something he couldn’t hide it.

  ‘Doctors don’t say a lot.’

  Scullion said, ‘I’m sorry, Lou. Really. Still. Might have been worse. A total eclipse.’

  ‘Might have been, right enough,’ Perlman said. He thought of Colin and how, before he’d married Miriam, he’d been through a stream of girlfriends, dumping them ruthlessly. He had charm, which he used as a weapon. Master of heartbreak. Miriam seemed to have tamed that cruel streak long ago. She had strength, and Lou admired her for it.

  ‘Are you close?’ Scullion asked.

  ‘Not as much as I might have wished. He went his way, I went mine. He liked banking, sitting in his big London office and wheeler-dealing obscene sums of money from one numbered account to another. He thrived on that stuff. When he quit the bank business and returned to Glasgow, he set himself up as a financial consultant. Hordes of clients. They came in greedy droves. Make me rich, Colin, they cried.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘I imagine he did.’

  ‘Will he retire?’

  ‘Might not have
a choice,’ Lou said. Fatigue dimmed his mind. How many hours had he slept? He thought of the bridge, and the dead man’s identity; he also thought about other cases demanding his attention – a charred skeleton that had been found in a sewage-pipe under a building in Stobcross Street last week, and a young wino clubbed to death in Sighthill Park three nights ago – all things he ought to get focused on. But Miriam’s appearance had knocked him off-balance.

  ‘I got some pics of our hanging man, Lou.’ Sandy Scullion opened a folder on his desk. Lou found himself looking at photographs of the corpse’s face. He sifted the assorted black and whites, and listened to office noises seep into his consciousness: phones, clackety-clack of conversation, banter between cops, a kettle boiling, somebody humming ‘Those were the Days, My Friend’. This face. This guy. I know him, I’ve seen him. Where oh where? His memory was too often a wayward instrument. He had to coax it to work, and sometimes it took too long. He removed his coat and tossed it across a chair.

  Scullion, in dark suit, neat white shirt and dark tie, went back behind his desk and said, ‘By the way, Lou. I love the threads. Planning an ocean voyage? Got your sextant packed, and your hardtack bickies ready?’

  ‘You’re a right chucklefest. It’s a fucking blazer, Sandy. An old fucking blazer. I got dressed in the dark. Okay, so it’s got brass buttons. So what. I make no excuse for the flannels either.’

  ‘I’m not the fashion police, Lou. I’m only slagging you –’

  ‘I don’t have somebody to iron my shirts and see I’m turned out all neat and tidy, do I?’

  ‘Oh Lord. Remind me to hang a sign on my door. No Curmudgeons Need Apply.’

  ‘Bloody winter depresses me, Sandy. Dead trees, nothing growing. It gets longer every year. Roll on spring.’ Perlman swatted a hand through the air in a gesture of irritation, sat down, longed to smoke. One reason he hated the confines of Pitt Street. Tobacco-Free Zone.

  ‘Anyone reported missing lately?’ he asked.

  ‘Usual runaway kids, sad stories, anxious parents. A woman who said she was going to the corner shop for cigarettes, never came back. Nobody matching the face in the photographs, Lou. Not yet.’

  Perlman stood up. He had to get out. This place was overheated, he was sweating, and the sirens of nicotine were ululating. ‘I’ll pop over to Mandelson’s,’ he said. ‘Take one of those glossies with me.’

  ‘We can send a uniform, Lou. We’ve got the Stobcross Skeleton on the desk. And that kid who was beaten. It’s not like we’re looking for something to do –’

  ‘I know, I know. I need a walk, Sandy. Clear my head.’

  ‘Is your mobile powered on?’

  Perlman patted his pockets, searched his coat, couldn’t find his mobile. Then he remembered seeing it last on the kitchen table.

  Scullion said, ‘Take mine. And remember not to switch it off. I want to be able to call you in case McLaren’s finished the P-M before you come back.’ He slid a slimline royal-blue gizmo across the desk. Perlman shoved it in his pocket, then struggled back into his coat.

  ‘See you shortly, Sandy.’

  Scullion, who’d worked his way up through the ranks under Perlman’s guidance, watched him step out of the room. He was very fond of Lou; he couldn’t imagine a time when Perlman would retire, any more than he could conceive of him ever leaving Glasgow. The sometimes abrasive nature of the city, the often melancholy countenance of the place, found correspondences in Perlman’s character. And just as the city could be good-natured and gregarious, so could Lou Perlman – a scratched gem of a man, and too often alone for his own well-being.

  Scullion’s wife Madeleine adored Perlman, although she’d once famously remarked that, like Lagavulin, he was an acquired taste. Sandy made a little note on a slip of paper. Invite LP to dinner soon.

  11

  Artie Wexler entered the driveway and drove towards the house, which was big and imposing, a redbrick Edwardian monstrosity far too large for one man. He’d told Joe Lindsay this a hundred times. You’re alone, go live somewhere smaller, and Joe had rambled on about all the happy memories of raising his kids here, and how his long-dead wife had loved this house, and what a wrench it would be to find some bloody little box in which to live.

  There was no sign of life. Even Joe’s Mercedes, usually parked at the front door, was missing. Wexler braked, got out of his Lexus, rang the doorbell. No answer. Bloody weird. Joe’s gone, and so’s the Merc. Business trip? Last-minute thing? He peered through windows. Saw nothing. He walked round the house. Back door locked. He rapped on it anyway, even if he knew he wouldn’t get a response. It was something to do, an action. He was at a loss.

  He stared across the garden; Joe’s vegetables were all dead and gone, limp stalks, brown relics of broccoli leaning to ground. He had an uneasy feeling as he looked at the garden, somebody walking on his grave.

  Joe, Joe, where did you go?

  Wexler returned to his car. This house was giving him the creeps. His life was a series of watertight compartments. Marriage. Business. Old friendships. History. Secrets he kept from Ruthie. When something didn’t feel right, when an irregularity occurred, it threatened the entire structure. He couldn’t have that. Insomniac hours. Night sweats. You worry too much, Ruthie had told him. You hear a car backfire in the distance and imagine a nuclear reactor explosion. Every little upset is like your own personal Hiroshima.

  He adjusted his scarf, shivered. He took his mobile phone from the glove compartment and punched in the number of Joe’s office. He got Joe’s secretary, a divorcee called Wilhelmina, or Billie as she liked to be called.

  ‘Is he in?’ he asked.

  ‘No, and he didn’t call. I’m a very unhappy woman. People have been phoning all morning, looking for him.’

  ‘He didn’t keep our dinner engagement last night, and that worries me. Any idea where he is?’

  ‘There’s nothing in his appointment book. He didn’t tell me he was going anywhere. Usually he tells me everything.’

  ‘Maybe he left town, Billie. Something urgent.’

  ‘Excuse me for saying so, Mr Wexler, but nothing urgent ever happens here. This isn’t some hotshot criminal practice, as you well know. Sometimes he changes a will for a client – which might involve a mad dash to get to the deathbed in time, I grant you – but he deals mainly in land transactions, which is hardly the stuff of legal thrillers. I’ll get him to call you when he shows up.’

  ‘Fine, fine, Billie.’ Wexler killed his phone and stared at the house and thought how big empty houses filled him with dread; all those quiet rooms, darkness in an attic.

  What if Joe lay dead inside?

  But the Mere was gone.

  Somebody might have stolen it. Killed Joe, stolen the car. These things happened.

  Your own Hiroshima, Artie Wexler.

  He backed up the car quickly and drove through the streets of Langside in the distracted manner of somebody lost. He had the feeling that the fabric of his world was about as strong as an old canvas sail in a tempest.

  He turned left on Mansionhouse Road and wondered: who do I talk to about my apprehensions?

  One name occurred to him.

  12

  Perlman walked out of Force HQ, head bent at an angle against wind blowing out of the north; he could taste the frigid deeps of winter. Beyond the city, in the Campsie Hills and on Ben Lomond, snow would be falling heavily and quietly. Inside Glasgow, it had quit for the time being, but the wind was a bastard.

  Eyes smarting under his glasses, lips chilled, Perlman lit a cigarette behind cupped hands, then crossed West George Street, two blocks south of Bath Street. Walking east, he had some cover from the cold except when he came to cross-streets, Blythswood Street, West Campbell, Wellington, where he was exposed. Folly, maybe, to have left his car behind in Pitt Street, but on a normal day he enjoyed this walk. From Force HQ to Buchanan Street took only – what? five minutes at most?

  He stopped for a traffic signal at Hope Street, cursing th
e fact he didn’t have gloves. His hands felt as if they were ice-bound in his coat pockets. One thing about this air: it kept you awake.

  ‘Mister Perlman, that you?’

  He turned when he heard the girl’s voice. He looked at her. She had the beauty of an angel totalled in a car crash. Black mascara ran down her cheeks. Her lipstick was askew and her hair, tinted maroon, hung uncombed around her unhealthy white cheeks.

  ‘Sadie?’

  ‘You remember me, that’s nice, Mr Perlman.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, girl, you’ll catch your bloody death.’

  ‘Aye, it’s cold.’ She wore a thin velvet blouse and a short tight black skirt. No coat. No scarf.

  ‘You’re using again,’ he said.

  ‘Gets me through the hard times.’ She leaned close to him and he wondered how a girl so heavenly, so blessed by looks – and brains when she wasn’t drug-addled – had squandered her possibilities. She’d been busted three years ago for possession of heroin, and sent for counselling and Methadone treatment.

  ‘Drugs don’t get you through a damn thing, Sadie,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not hooked.’

  Thanks, but I’ve got my own addiction, he thought. The kind you can’t buy in some alley behind a pub. He noticed a bruise staining her flesh from the corner of her left eye to the edge of her ear. ‘What did he hit you with this time?’

  ‘He drinks, he gets carried away, Mr Perlman.’

  ‘I know where I’d like to carry that bastard,’ Lou Perlman said, angry. ‘You’ve got a tattoo on your forehead, love, and it says V for Victim. Which is how come you attract scum like that sadist Riley, who has all the charisma of a bloody stormtrooper. You pick up these arseholes who batter you the first time they’ve had enough booze. Big men. Tough guys. You’re drawn to these wasters. What is it with you?’