The Last Darkness (36 page)

When he'd reduced the photo to a shiny black cinder, he dropped it into the plastic litterbin. But the smell, that stench of petroleum by-products, lingered in the air.

Rrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrr
.

He touched the knife in the inside pocket of his coat. He'd go to the front door. Just to listen. If he felt confident, perhaps he'd ask the person outside to identify himself. It was a nuisance, bad timing; he didn't need any interruptions now. He was leaving. He was going home.

He walked down the hallway very quietly and listened. He heard nothing. The door had no peephole, therefore he had no idea who was out there, if it was one man, or two, or that drugged-out woman ‘selling' raffle tickets.

He stood very still. Waited. Tried not to breathe. He was jangled. The doorbell rang again. The sound went through him like a saw on hard wood. A loose floorboard creaked under his foot. Perhaps the noise didn't carry beyond the flat to the landing. He thought he heard somebody whisper from the other side of the door, but he couldn't make out words. He couldn't even be sure he'd heard anything.

He backed away, returned to the living room. He glanced down into the street. Streetlamps glimmered on ice. He walked into the bathroom. He opened the window, looked out. The possibility of a fire-escape had popped into his mind, but he couldn't remember seeing any building in this city equipped with such a thing. The view was restricted to the backcourts behind the tenements, expanses of dark penetrated here and there by light from rear windows. You could see into other people's flats, other lives. A woman at a sink peeling something.

He leaned from the window: no fire-escape, only an arrangement of drainpipes bolted to the wall. What did people do in a fire? Jump? It was a long way down. He drew his head back in, shut the window, returned to the hallway.

The doorbell rang again. Two short bursts.

Marak felt like a man drawn down into a spinning funnel of water. Panic.

‘Here,' Lou Perlman said. He'd gone downstairs to the car and come back again with the tyre-iron, which he handed to Scullion.

‘It was your idea,' Scullion said.

‘Aye, but you're fitter and stronger. You think you can get it open?'

‘Worth a try.'

Scullion inserted the iron into the narrow space between door and jamb. He pushed hard on the length of metal. Wood splintered, little chips flew into the air. He kept angling the implement back and forth until the wood around the mortice split. The lock was a rusted antique, and it popped out easily. He pushed the door, which opened into a small hallway.

He stepped in, Perlman at his side.

There were four doors, two on either side. All lay open. Perlman glanced inside the empty bathroom, while Scullion opened a door that yielded to a cupboard stuffed with rusted old tins of cleaning solvents, brushes, paints. Nothing of interest. They walked to the end of the hall and stepped cautiously through the door on the right, entering a bedroom with greasy yellow wallpaper and a girlie calendar dated 1992. A crucifix hung aslant above a chest of drawers.

Perlman slid the drawers open. Empty except for outdated newspapers used as lining. The room smelled of damp wallpaper. There was another scent on the air, fainter, suggestive of burnt plastic.

‘One more room,' Scullion said quietly.

‘Wait.' Perlman nodded across the bedroom to a door, presumably a cupboard. Scullion turned the handle, an old plastic globe that slid off in his fingers. The door swung open, revealing a heavy-as-lead upright vacuum cleaner of a kind rarely seen since the 1950s, when these gadgets were more labour-intensive than labour-saving. A generation of women had schlepped these monsters, thinking them state-of-the-art. A couple of tweed jackets hung from a rod, and a punctured football lay on the floor.

There was something else, and Perlman almost failed to notice it. He bent down, shoved the dented football aside and fingered a plastic bag containing stuffed toys, a broken-necked giraffe, a furry monkey without eyes, a battered rodent.

A small black leather wallet was jammed between rodent and monkey. He opened the wallet, examined the contents. With a swift intake of breath, he handed it to Scullion -just as a noise from the lobby made both men turn to see a bearded young man, with a backpack dangling from one shoulder, step quickly towards the front door.

Scullion called out, ‘Hey. You.'

The young man didn't stop.

Scullion moved with an unusual elegance, and ghosted sweetly and quickly into the lobby where he threw himself, arms extended, at the young man. He must have done this a hundred times on the muddy rugby fields of his adolescence. A swift tackle round the waist, and both men went down. They rolled together for a few moments, hands locked, expressions fierce, two men fighting for possession of an invisible ball. The young man freed one hand and prodded Scullion in the eye, and Sandy said, ‘Fucker.' Perlman seized a broom from the lobby cupboard and smacked the kid across the back of the head with the metal shaft.

The kid, scalp bleeding, rolled over on his back. Perlman sat heavily on his chest. Scullion got to his feet and dusted his coat down with his hands and said, ‘My eye, my damned eye. Christ.' He rubbed it with the tips of his fingers. Then he bent and searched the kid's inside pocket and found a knife and a bunch of papers.

‘A nice knife, if you like these things,' he said to Perlman.

Perlman stared at the blade, which was impressive in a malevolent way. Glasgow was Blade City these days. He looked down at the young man. ‘So where were you sneaking off to in such a hurry?'

‘Out of here. Can I get up now?'

‘I'm too much of a burden for you?'

‘Yes.'

Perlman rolled away from the young man and stood up, then helped him rise. This was the face from the taxi. This was the face from the lift in the parking garage. Up close, it was less sinister than it had seemed on the videotape; younger, leaner. He probably had to work at looking tough and menacing. How old was he? Twenty-two, -three? Without the beard, he'd seem more like sixteen. Babyface with whiskers.

Scullion examined the papers he'd seized from the young man's coat. ‘Okay. What have we here? One passport … Israeli. About three hundred pounds in sterling. Couple of hundred drachma. And a thousand US dollars in American Express TCs.'

‘Let me see the passport,' Perlman said. He took it from Scullion and flicked the pages. A photograph, a name:
Shimon Marak
. An occupation:
Student
. An address in Haifa. ‘No stamps. No visas. Why is that, Shimon?'

‘Perhaps an oversight of your immigration authorities?'

‘Lazy sods. They're always missing things. Where did you enter the United Kingdom?'

‘Dover.'

‘And how did you get to Scotland?'

‘I took a bus from London.'

‘We can check all that.' Perlman looked at the passport again. Shimon Marak. It didn't sound like an Arab name. ‘Abdullah' was no Arab: he was more likely a Sephardic Jew of North African origin, perhaps Iraq, possibly Iran.

‘Why are you in Glasgow?' Perlman asked.

‘I'm a tourist.'

‘In the dead of winter?' Scullion asked.

‘I like the cold.'

‘Right. People from all over the world flock to Glasgow in December for the cold. It's one big bloody cheerful freezefest. You can't get a hotel room anywhere in the city unless you bribe the manager.'

Scullion was leafing through the wallet. He frowned at Perlman, then flashed the wallet under Marak's face. ‘How did you get this, Shimon?'

‘What is it?'

‘What does it look like?'

‘A wallet obviously, but I've never seen it before.'

‘It belongs to a man called Artie Wexler. It contains his credit cards and a photograph of his wife. Do you know him?'

Marak shook his head.

Scullion said, ‘Then how come his wallet is in your bedroom?'

‘I can only assume you put it there.'

‘Why would we do that?'

‘You must have your reasons.'

Perlman realized he felt a curiously misplaced sense of pity for this kid. He was a long damn way from home, and in serious trouble; and who did he have to turn to for support? He was relying on a certain aloof arrogance, and making a show of being cool, almost disdainful, but this was a façade constructed with thin putty, and Perlman knew it would crumble eventually.

‘Let's all sit down,' Scullion said. ‘Make ourselves comfy.'

Marak rubbed his head. He had blood on his fingertips. Perlman held his elbow, and guided him inside the living room.

‘I think I prefer to stand,' Marak said.

‘The Inspector tells you to sit, you sit,' Perlman said.

Marak shrugged. He sat, looking bored.

‘Is all this too much trouble for you, Marak?' Perlman asked. ‘I mean, we can easily turn you over to people who are far less pleasant than Inspector Scullion and me.'

‘I'm sure you can.'

Scullion, whose eye was swelling, looked at Lou. ‘Do you think our boy is suggesting we planted this wallet, Sergeant Perlman?'

‘Somebody had to,' Marak said.

‘Since it wasn't us, who was it?'

‘How would I know?'

Perlman said, ‘Maybe you took it yourself. Maybe you stole it from Wexler.'

‘Who's Wexler?'

‘What were you doing in the street where Wexler lived?'

‘Ah,
now
I remember you,' Marak said. ‘You chased me. I found it amusing. You were puffing and huffing.'

‘Glad I brought a smile to your face,' Perlman said. ‘Don't irritate me, son. Just answer the fucking question.'

‘The cab driver took a wrong turning.'

‘So you didn't know Wexler lived on that street?'

‘No –'

‘Explain the wallet then.'

‘I told you. I can't.'

‘Got here by magic, did it?'

Scullion leaned forward in his chair. ‘What were you doing in that particular neighbourhood anyway?'

‘Sightseeing.'

‘Right, I keep forgetting. You're a winter tourist. A man called BJ Quick said he delivered envelopes to you at this address.'

‘Who?'

‘Quick.'

‘I have never heard of this person.'

‘He knows you, Shimon. What about Furfee?'

‘I never heard of him either.'

‘Strange. He also says he knows you.'

‘How odd.'

Perlman lit a cigarette. ‘You're not making this easy on yourself, sonny boy.'

‘But I have nothing to fear.'

‘Mr Cool,' Perlman said. ‘Thinks he can walk on fucking water, Sandy.'

‘I only ever heard of one Jew who could pull off that stunt,' Scullion said.

‘Aye, right enough.' Perlman glared at the young man. There was defiance in the set of face and the straight-backed alignment of body. You needed an ice-pick to chip away at Marak. ‘What was your business with Joseph Lindsay?'

‘Who?'

‘Fuck these games. The solicitor. You phoned his office. You tracked his secretary.'

Marak looked as if he didn't remember.

‘The fucking
garage
, Marak,' Perlman said. ‘Where we got some nice shots of you, courtesy of the magic of closed-circuit TV, assaulting the secretary.'

Marak frowned and said, ‘Yes. I remember now.'

‘You've got a very selective memory.'

‘I wanted to see Lindsay on a business matter.'

‘Why did you need to see a Scottish lawyer?'

‘I was interested in acquiring property in this country –'

‘Oh, aye, so you could be closer to the cold. It doesn't explain why you assaulted the secretary, does it?'

‘She was being obstructive. I lost control. I regretted it.'

‘Do you lose control often?'

‘No, I don't.'

Perlman looked for an ashtray. He couldn't find one. He walked inside the kitchen. There was that smell, that aroma of burnt plastic he'd noticed before, but stronger now. He tossed his cigarette into the sink and the butt sizzled.

There were spent matches in the sink. What had young Shimon been burning? he wondered. He looked around the kitchen. He opened the rubbish bin and saw the charred remains of what clearly had been a photograph. He picked it out of the rubbish with a gentle hand. It was flaky and would disintegrate if he didn't handle it gently. One edge hadn't burned entirely; a sliver of white border was blackened but visible. There were no images. The surface was composed of tiny black bumps as impenetrable as a sky without stars. Very carefully he carried the relic inside the living room and set it down on the coffee table, as if it were precious moth-eaten lace about to disintegrate.

‘What's that?' Scullion asked.

‘Let's ask Shimon. Why were you burning this photograph?'

‘Is that what that is – a photograph?'

‘That's what it is. We've got people with fancy machines, Shimon, and they can tease all kinds of information out of unlikely places. Take this photograph. They have some kind of computer that would restore the image you burned. Maybe it wouldn't be perfection, but it would be enough to see what you destroyed.'

‘I destroyed nothing,' Marak said.

‘Explain that smell,' Perlman said.

‘I don't smell anything.'

‘Judging from the pong, somebody's burned this within the last few minutes or so, Marak. And I don't see any other candidate but you.'

‘I'll tell you again, I burned nothing.'

The old denial game, Perlman thought. See nothing, remember nothing. He made his hands into soft fists and wished he could
skelp
young Marak into answering questions.

Scullion sighed. ‘Did you go to Lindsay's house?'

‘How could I? The secretary wouldn't give me his address.'

Perlman thought about Joe Lindsay's abandoned Mercedes. ‘You ever ride in his car?'