The Last Darkness (35 page)

She looked at the image and closed her eyes and whispered
yes
so softly that Perlman could barely hear.

50

Mary Gibson stepped into the interview room where BJ Quick sat smoking the last of the Silk Cut cigarettes Perlman had left him. He turned his head as the Detective-Superintendent approached. Good-looking for a mature babe, even if she was a cop. He'd never had any kind of encounter with a policewoman before. He doubted they were any easier to deal with than their male counterparts. Maybe even tougher. A lot of career women were fucking ball-breakers these days.

He watched her sit down at the other end of the table and he realized he should behave, cull the swear words, clean up the act.

Women liked men who projected manners.

‘Sergeant Perlman's out,' she said.

‘So I was told,' Quick said. He curbed the urge to add Your Highness. Don't play sarcasm cards.

‘What did you want to see him about so urgently?' She folded her hands on the table. Manicured nails, subdued pale varnish. Stern look about her. This is one woman you wouldn't want to cross.

‘You're aware of this, er, situation?' he asked.

She nodded. ‘You have some problems.'

‘Aye, well, that's your point of view. And you're entitled to it, don't get me wrong. The way I see it, we can come to some arrangement.'

‘How cosy that sounds,' she said. ‘Isn't there a saying about lying down with dogs and getting up with fleas?'

BJ Quick played with the empty cigarette packet. ‘Dogs and fleas, aye, right, ha ha.'

‘What are you angling for? A deal?'

‘Let's call it I scratch your back you scratch mine.'

‘Scratch your back? I hardly know you.'

‘Ha ha.' Quick heard this nervous laugh he'd suddenly developed, and he didn't like the sound of it. ‘What I mean is we can work something out, like.'

‘Like?'

‘I've been sitting here thinking,' Quick said. And so he had. He'd been scanning the folly of his life. It was a superficial sort of examination, though; nothing deep, no analytical probe. Here he was in an interview room, looking at the possibility – vague, mind you, but a possibility nonetheless – of complicity in the murder of Terry Dogue. It only took a single sentence from Furfee for that to happen.
He was with me when I slashed Terry's throat, I swear to God
. Quick recognized that unless he could strike some sort of exchange with the constabulary, this situation was going to be like sinking into a big bucket of soft creamy shite.

‘And what have you been thinking, Mr Quick?'

‘Perlman wants a piece of information from me.'

‘Oh?'

‘Now,' and here Quick scratched the surface of the table with his fingernails in small circular patterns. ‘I'm thinking along these lines. Say I give him this information. Just imagine … In exchange, what's the chance I won't be drawn into any charges brought against that half-wit Furfee? If he killed a man, I swear, I had nothing to do with it.'

Mary Gibson stood up. Her skirt was pleated, Quick noticed. Warm tweedy material. Her stomach was flat.

‘That's all you have to say?' she asked.

‘He wants an address,' Quick said. ‘I can give it to him. Understand what I'm telling you? I can give him this fucking address. Sorry. Beg pardon for the language.'

‘I've heard worse,' Mary Gibson said.

Why wasn't she interested? why wasn't she agog? She just walked past him to the door.

He got up from his chair and said, ‘Braeside Street.'

‘Number forty-five,' she said.

‘Right –'

‘Top floor, no name on the door.' In a bored monotone. ‘Tell me something I don't know.'

‘Aye but –'

‘This is exactly what Mr Furfee told me less than ten minutes ago,' she said. ‘He's as desperate to help as you are. Funny to get as much cooperation. I sniff guilt. But you were just that little bit slower, Mr Quick. He who snoozes, loses.'

‘Fuck fuck
fuck
. What the hell did you promise Furfee?'

‘The moon,' she said. ‘What else?'

‘And what will he get?'

‘He'll get justice, Mr Quick. He'll get a fair trial.'

‘And me, what about me?'

‘The same.'

She went out and closed the door and Quick, cursing the way the world worked, cursing his taste for underage girls and fast drugs and rock clubs, cursing everything that had conspired to bring him to this place at this particular time, including the moon and the stars and the drift of tides, tried in his anger to lift the table and topple it over.

‘
Fuck fuck fuck
,' he roared. He quit when the pain in his neck became unbearable.

The table, he observed, was bolted to the floor.

51

Scullion took Mary Gibson's call on his cellphone in room 408 of the Waterloo Hotel and immediately pulled Perlman to one side. ‘We're needed elsewhere. Now.'

‘What about Charlotte Leckie?'

‘Bailey can take her statement down. He writes, you know. I've seen examples.'

‘What's the hurry?'

‘I'll tell you on the way.'

Perlman turned to the woman and said, ‘I'm leaving you in the very capable hands of Detective-Sergeant Bailey.'

‘But –'

‘It's okay. Really it is. Besides, he's nicer than me. He really is.'

Bailey came out of the bathroom, shutting the door quickly as if to hide the sight of something Charlotte Leckie had already seen.

Perlman said, ‘Look after her. Take her statement.'

‘Where are you off to?'

‘It's a mystery,' Perlman said.

Charlotte Leckie said, ‘I'd like to get dressed.'

‘Bailey will be a gentleman and look the other way,' Perlman said. ‘Won't you, Bailey?'

Perlman and Scullion went out into the corridor, where the uniforms had cleared most of the spectators away. They hurried towards the stairs, descended quickly. Perlman bumped along behind the Inspector. He'd yanked a muscle in his upper leg, probably when he'd given chase to the taxi. Now it had begun to ache.

They reached the street and walked to where Scullion's Rover was parked. Slippery underfoot. Glasgow was a city of whoopsadaisy surfaces, slick sheets of ice where any passing pedestrian might perform a pratfall.

Scullion unlocked his car. Perlman clambered into the passenger seat. ‘Where are we headed?'

‘You want to find Abdullah, don't you?'

Perlman buckled his seatbelt. ‘Damn right I want to find him. Tell me you've got the address.'

‘Furfee broke, gave it to Mary Gibson.'

‘Furfee did? Well well well. Face to face with the mystery man. How far?'

‘Braeside Street.'

‘Off Maryhill Road. I know it.'

‘I hate driving in these conditions.' Scullion switched on his de-icer, and wiped condensation from the windscreen with a rag he kept on the dash. He drove down Elmbank Street to St Vincent Street, where he crossed the motorway that slashed the gut of the city; below, the lights of slow-moving cars cut through the mist of exhaust fumes. He turned into North Street and headed for St George's Cross, and then Maryhill Road. Perlman watched the city go past in a tableau of dark buildings rising beyond streetlamps, the occasional illumination of a restaurant or bar. He was thinking of Abdullah, of the enigmatic envelopes BJ had supposedly delivered.

‘Did Furfee say anything about the envelopes?' he asked.

‘Not so far as I know. Christ, it's an ordeal driving.' The car failed to grip, slid, tobogganed a few yards to the right before Scullion had it under control again.

‘I don't want to die in a car accident,' Perlman said. ‘It's so bloody banal.'

‘What kind of death are you looking for anyway?'

‘Oh. Something heroic.'

‘Tell me how you'd ever find yourself in heroic circumstances.'

‘Saving a beautiful girl from drowning.'

‘You don't swim, Lou.'

‘That's why it would be heroic.'

Perlman pushed his seat back and stared out as Scullion drove up Maryhill Road. He thought of Nina with her
garinim
and the sheets of pretentious yellow bond on which she wrote her prose; funny how marriage could distil itself in so few sorry memories. He wondered if intensely cold weather induced an occasional melancholy in him.

More likely it was the three murders that stoked this mood; that, and the recurring anxiety he felt about Colin. No, wait, you're kidding yourself, Lou: it was more than Colin's physical well-being that bothered you. It was his fucking
past
. When he was healthy and back on his feet, would his history stand up to scrutiny? Or would Bannerjee's accusation be forgotten, as if the Indian's words had never been said in the first place? Shiv was no longer around to make any claims about Colin, and the comments existed only in Lou Perlman's memory; and who could say he wouldn't forget them?

But that question made him uneasy because he suspected he knew the answer: yes, yes, dammit, he'd protect his brother. He knew he would. He'd known it ever since the conversation with Bannerjee. He'd turn the old blind eye because the demands of blood were seemingly more compelling than those of the law. This revelation dismayed him. It came out of a place in his heart he'd never known about before now, an unlit corner where bad impulses hatched. He'd spent his life upholding the law, observing it dutifully, and now he realized he was actually prepared to look the other fucking way, like any sleazy cop on the take.

He had a sudden longing to speak to Miriam. Or simply to see her. Would she be at the hospital now? Sitting at Colin's bed. Talking quietly to him. Holding his hand. The loving wife.

‘On the left, I think,' Scullion said.

He swung the car very slowly. He drove down a street of tenements, and when he saw forty-five he pulled the Rover into the kerb, where he switched off the engine. ‘Here we are.'

‘Do we know if he's home or if we wait down here until he appears?'

‘We don't know,' Scullion said.

‘You want to go in?'

Scullion said, ‘I want a backup unit first. I'll call.' He used his mobile, made the arrangements for a second vehicle. ‘I like a little extra security.'

Perlman looked at lit windows burning in the dark. The city compressed space, and thus compressed people. So many lives in boxes. His mind shifted briefly to Bannerjee, blood in that thick white hair, blood on porcelain. The impulsion of the screwdriver, the strength behind it.

His leg muscle twinged again and he changed position. A car slipped in behind the Rover, and flashed its lamps twice. Scullion got out. Perlman followed. There were two plainclothes men in the other car. Perlman knew them vaguely. He'd seen them around. He couldn't recall their names. They looked suitably aggressive, wide of shoulder, hard-edged.

‘Watch the close,' Scullion said.

‘Right you are, Inspector,' the man behind the wheel said.

‘If you hear a commotion, get your arses in the building. The flat's on the top floor.'

‘Gotcha.' The pair nodded. The one in the passenger seat, a bullock of a man, chewed gum vigorously.

Perlman and Scullion entered the narrow close that led to the stairs. They went up slowly. The lights on the landings were dim. The building had a feel of abandonment. Or like a vacuum. Airless and still, a space where nothing could survive. A food smell hung in the silence, but he couldn't identify it. Old lard, maybe, last week's bacon grease. He imagined people sitting in rooms in front of the hypnotic lights of TVs. People eating frozen dinners, reconstituted chicken parts and artificial mashed potatoes in MSG gravy. But no sounds punctured the quiet of the building.

Up they climbed, Perlman lagging behind Sandy Scullion. Chasing taxis at your age. Not bright. He thought of the face in the cab's window. Was it a killer's face? How were killers supposed to look anyway? They came in all kinds of masks.

Scullion stopped. ‘You okay?'

Perlman nodded. ‘Dandy.'

He noticed Scullion's voice was a whisper. ‘One more flight, Lou.'

Scullion started to go up. Perlman laid his hand on the banister. On the top floor, Scullion stopped again. Three doors on the landing, three separate flats, but only one door had no name-plate. Both men stood very still a moment, then Scullion pressed the bell and it buzzed inside the flat. He buzzed it a second time.

Inside the bedroom Marak was hurriedly stuffing his clothes into his backpack when he heard the bell. His heart skittered. At first he thought Ramsay had come to see him; but Ramsay had a key. Maybe it was the downstairs neighbour, the man with the blue snakes tattooed on the backs of his hands. But why? A drunken argument, a rant? Marak thought about his toilet items. He'd get them next. He'd ignore the bell and eventually whoever was on the other side of the door would go away.

He entered the bathroom and gathered his toiletries and placed them in one of the outside pockets of the backpack. He zipped it. In the living room he checked the items he intended to carry on his person. Passport. Traveller's cheques. Cash. He was ready now. Ready for departure.
Wait
–

He drew from the left-hand pocket of his coat Bannerjee's photograph. He'd meant to dispose of it, but in his haste he'd overlooked it. Burn it. Just burn the thing. The doorbell rang again. Three long persistent rings. They left an electric echo in the flat.

He went inside the kitchen and found an old book of matches in a drawer and struck one, holding it to the photograph. The match was damp, and died. He let it slip into the sink. The bell rang and rang. He struck another match. The glossy caught flame briefly, then fizzled out. He lit a third match and applied it to the picture and this time the flame took, but it burned too slowly for him, spreading in a leisurely way from the corner of the shot towards the centre. Faster, he thought. Burn burn. He coughed as the chemical fumes rose to his face.