The Last Darkness (15 page)

Sandy Scullion came into the room. ‘Home movie night, eh? What's showing?'

Perlman said, ‘Have a close look.'

Scullion walked to the frozen image on the screen. ‘When did Terry Dogue become a film star and what the devil has he been up to?'

Confirmation
. Terry Dogué, felon, drug-dealer, credit-card thief. Lou Perlman smiled and said, ‘Keep watching, Sandy. Wee Terry's about to vanish right in front of your eyes. So much for the fragile nature of stardom, eh? Let me tell you the story so far.'

22

PC Dennis Murdoch was fond of WPC Meg Gayle. He liked her tall flat-chested body and the touchingly self-conscious way she slouched to diminish her height. Some people considered her awkward in her movements, but not Murdoch. He loved her laugh – a bell's sound, he thought – and the way she cut her black hair in a bob.

He shone his flashlight into the doorway of the shop. Sleet pierced the narrow beam of light. Bending, Meg Gayle examined the space illuminated by the torch. There was no evidence anything out of the ordinary had occurred here, no body, no bloodstains, just a plain old doorway, a few scraps of uninteresting litter – Crunchie Bar wrapper, dented Tizer can, spent matches – and a darkened insurance office beyond.

‘What are we supposed to be looking for, anyway?' she asked.

‘Evidence of violence. This is where the encounter took place.' Murdoch directed the beam around the space again. He'd been taught to be thorough. Look, and if you see nothing, look again. Then a third time.

‘Perlman showed me the videotape.'

She said, ‘I bet he doesn't want to be out in this weather, does he?'

Murdoch smiled. ‘I don't think he gives a monkey's about the weather. He's too busy thinking. He's got, how would you describe it … an elsewhere look? I like him.'

‘They say his bark's worse than his bite.'

Murdoch said, ‘Ah, he doesn't bark that much.'

‘All the worse when he
does
bite,' she said.

‘I sort of admire how he goes about his business.'

‘And you want to be just like him when you grow up, Den?'

‘It'll be years before I grow up.' Murdoch smiled and killed the beam.

He stood with Meg Gayle in the doorway. He enjoyed the intimacy of this, him and Meg and the empty street. In other circumstances, off-duty say, he might have reached for her hand and warmed it between his own. He imagined undressing her in a half-dark room. Red scarf draped round a lampshade. That flat body. The hard stomach. Flimsy knickers, peel them off gently, slide them down over her legs. You've a mind like a cesspool, he thought.

‘We might as well drive back,' he said. ‘I'll call in, tell Perlman there's nothing at the scene.'

‘Spose.'

They rushed to the patrol car parked nearby. Inside, melting sleet dripped from Murdoch's black and white chequered cap. Meg Gayle blew her nose quietly into a Kleenex. Sniffle weather, Murdoch thought. Weather for coming down with bugs and calling in sick.

The carphone rang and he answered. He heard the throaty voice of PC ‘Diamond Jim' Brady. ‘Come in, Dick Tracy, speak your mind. Diamond Jim's here most of the night to answer your calls, ease your worries, soothe your concerns, give you good advice on loving and living, on vitamins and nutrition, alternative medication as against traditional, anything you need, you just ask the Diamond –'

‘Christ,' Murdoch said. ‘The Mouth Machine. We're just on our way back. Anything happening?'

‘Possible victim of violence Terence Dogue was taken by a passer-by to Emergency at the Royal Infirmary.'

‘Have you told Perlman?'

‘Yepski. He was out of here like a whippet in heat.'

‘Any instructions for us?'

‘Aye. You're to meet him for tea and cream buns tomorrow afternoon at the Willow Tearooms. Two-thirty, don't be late. His treat. And wear your best suit. As for you, WPC Gayle, Perlman wants to see you there in a really skimpy mini-kilt and transparent blouse and absolutely no bra. Something utterly suggestive, he said. Something you can see your nipples through. I'd suggest PVC.'

‘Piss off,' Meg Gayle said.

‘You don't
believe
me?'

‘You're up to here in crap, Brady,' Murdoch said.

‘And damnably proud of it,' Brady said.

‘Bampot.' Murdoch cut the connection. Back to Pitt Street through the sleet. He looked at the wipers and thought of Meg Gayle in mini-kilt and see-through blouse. Aye aye. Hot thoughts on a nippy night.

He needed a steaming cup of Bovril.

23

At nine p.m. Lou Perlman parked the Mondeo at the Royal Infirmary. Sandy Scullion was with him. As they rushed across the car park, Scullion said, ‘Lindsay's house is neat and tidy, at least until I send the technical boys in tomorrow. Newspapers folded. The kitchen shipshape. Bed made. Absolutely immaculate. Just like your place in Egypt, Lou.'

‘Aye, right enough, sounds like home,' Perlman said. ‘Did you find anything interesting?'

‘Would you call the
Jewish Telegraph
interesting?'

‘My aunts all love it, if that means anything.' Perlman said.

Driving sleet skelped his face. He heard the wind blow out of the Necropolis, where it roared between headstones and crosses and mausoleums, and battered the gothic structure of Glasgow Cathedral before it thudded the big dark edifice of the Infirmary. This was the cervix of old Glasgow, where the city had been birthed in the sixth century by a wandering monk later canonized as St Mungo. His bones lay interred in the Cathedral.

Perlman and Scullion entered the hospital, and found their way to Emergency, where they asked a bustling nurse the whereabouts of Terry Dogue. She was Irish and pretty, and held a bedpan over which lay a soiled towel. ‘It's Dr Nimmo you'll be wanting to see.'

‘And where might we find him?' Scullion asked.

The woman jabbed a finger in the air. ‘Down there, office on the right,' and then she was gone, bedpan held aloft.

Perlman and Scullion moved along a corridor thronged with sorry people awaiting medical attention. They passed curtained partitions where they glimpsed bleeders, accident victims, the casualties of everyday violence. One screaming child had a long nail hammered through her right nostril. This is where they come, Perlman thought, Glasgow's wounded, the accident victims, the wrecks of domestic or criminal violence. They come for drugs, stitches, bandages, tourniquets, hasty surgery. And some come to die.

A big man in heavy black-framed spectacles came out of an office. He wore a plastic tag that identified him as Dr George Nimmo.

Perlman said, ‘Just the man we want,' and flashed his badge.

‘Bloody hell,' Nimmo said. He had a harassed expression. He lived along the borderline between life and death, a location that made him impatient and nervy. He was also very English, and in his most stressful nightmares had probably never imagined he'd end up working in an Emergency unit in a huge Glasgow hospital. Some Englishmen, Perlman knew, didn't travel well. Especially to barbaric Scotland.

‘I've got better things to do than chat to you police chaps –'

‘I'm sure, doc,' Perlman said. ‘We want to ask about Terry Dogue.'

‘Dogue?' Nimmo blinked, puzzled. ‘Oh, Dogue, of course.'

‘He was brought in here, correct?' Perlman asked.

‘Some kindly Samaritan found him in a sorry state. Half-dead from asphyxiation. Seems somebody tried to throttle him. I'll make out the necessary police report for you fellows whenever I have a minute to sit down. God, I've been going non-stop for fifteen hours and it doesn't look as if I'll ever get a chance to put my feet up –'

Perlman interrupted. ‘You have my sympathy. You're doing a terrific job. Can Dogue talk?'

‘There's damage to the larynx and if he tries too hard to speak the damage may well be permanent.'

‘We'll need a minute of his time,' Perlman said.

Nimmo sighed. ‘Spare room. Last door on the left. We're awfully short of space. One minute.' He dashed off, white coat rising behind like a sail in an updraft.

Scullion and Perlman entered a room that was in disarray, a half-dozen empty beds stripped of sheets, bed-screens, cardboard boxes filled with bottles of disinfectant, a rubber bucket that caught leaks from a dripping overhead pipe. A single low-wattage lightbulb was screwed into the wall and cast a sad light. The back rooms of the NHS. The underbelly. Forty watts and leaking pipes. What did that scream about the system? Perlman surveyed the place. There was no evidence of Terry Dogue in the clutter.

‘Check behind the screens,' Scullion said.

Both men did. No Dogue. Just more empty beds. One had been used recently. The pillow was indented, and damp where the last sliver of an ice-cube melted. Probably Dogue had been given an ice-pack to hold to his throat, and a single cube had slipped loose when he'd decided to get out of bed and scarper.

Perlman stepped into the corridor. Scullion followed him. Nurses hurried this way and that, the child with the nail in her nose still screamed, a young man with half of his left leg missing lay unconscious on a gurney pushed by orderlies who formed a blood-soaked caravan. Perlman thought it was like rushing through a nightmare that just kept coming at you. He took off his glasses. The lenses were streaked. The world was sometimes better viewed without them. Edges softened, nobody was wrinkled, nobody grew old in this world.

He stuck them back on and saw the Irish nurse again. She was bent over the face of a very old man, and she had a cotton swab in her hand she was trying to apply to the man's eye.

‘It was a fly,' the man said. ‘Flew right in. Cheeky bastard. Gonny hurry, nurse.'

‘Hold your head still, Mr Mckay.'

‘I can feel the fucker crawl in there. Probably laying bloody eggs.'

‘I doubt it.' She rolled his eyelid back and peered into the white.

Perlman interrupted her. ‘Dogue's gone.'

‘I know. Daft old gobshite. I saw him leave five minutes ago. Couldn't stop him. This isn't a jail.'

‘Did he leave on his own?'

‘He had company.
Jaysus
, will you hold your head still, Mr Mckay?'

‘Come on, nurse. Get that damn fly out before my head's filled with maggots,' the old man said.

‘Can you describe the company?' Perlman asked.

‘One man. Tall. Very very wet. He had a coat, looked sort of old-fashioned. Long, sort of a jacket more than a coat. Black velvet collar. What do you call these people who think it's still the early 1960s?'

‘Beatniks?'

‘No. Oh, what's the term? Teddy Boys?'

Teds. Teddy Boys. Perlman remembered them. Their world was lost and sunken, mainly found nowadays in souvenir or nostalgia shops. Shoes with fat crepe soles. Stovepipe trousers. Long sideburns. The Teds were anathema to parents who had wild-spirited teenage daughters. You rarely saw them any more. Now and then some ageing geezer could be spotted wandering along in full Edwardian gear. A curiosity.

‘They left in a rush,' the nurse said.

Perlman thanked her. He and Scullion hurried along the corridor in the direction of the exit. They stood behind the glass doors and scanned the car park for a sign of a car zooming off, or two figures running through the vile weather.

Nothing, nobody out there.

Perlman sighed and said, ‘So what have we got, Sandy? Dogue's in the parking garage at the same time as the bearded guy. The Arab, as Billie Houston described him. Then this “Arab” attacks Dogue. Do we know why? No, we don't. Was Dogue just loitering with intent? Did he fancy breaking into a car? Was he following the Arab, for some fiendish purpose of his own? A mugging? Fucked if I know. Then Terry skips hospital, accompanied by this … Teddy Boy. I'm not all that worried about Dogue. I just wonder who his companion is. Anyway, Terry's not going far. I don't think he's ever left Glasgow in his life. He'd have withdrawal symptoms and nosebleeds a few miles beyond the city limits. I'll give young Murdoch a bell, and get him to check on Dogue's last known address. Meantime, I'm going home, get an early start in the morning. I'll drop you off at Pitt Street if that's all right with you.'

‘Fine. I'll make sure we get prints of the attacker and float them into circulation tonight.'

Perlman thought of pictures going out to the various Sub-Divisions throughout the Strathclyde Region. He pondered the assailant's young face, the intensity of expression, and how upset he'd looked when he struck Billie Houston. Did he feel just as bad about throttling Terry Dogue, or did his regret extend only to women? Maybe he'd broken a rule of his own code of ethics: you don't hit women. He didn't look brutal. It wasn't a thug's face.

Scullion said, ‘There's also been the usual babble of media inquiries about the case of the hanging man, and I'll have to deal with that. The telly people grind you down. I hate making public statements anyway.'

‘What's the party line?'

‘Apparent suicide,' Scullion said. ‘For the moment.'

‘The hacks and hackettes will love you to death for that one. They always want a murder. Suspicious circumstances at the very least.'

‘They'll have to be disappointed for a day or so. I pilfered a photograph of Lindsay from his house. I'll give them that much.'

‘You still happen to have that key to Lindsay's? I thought I'd drop in there on my way home.'

‘Since when was Langside on your way home?'

‘Have you never taken a detour in your life, Sandy?'

‘I always regretted it when I did,' Scullion said.

They went outside. The night chucked sleet at them with the abandon of an enraged wife throwing cutlery at an errant husband. The car park was slushy,
goor
roaring in gutters.