White Rage (35 page)

The sleeve came loose from the shoulder, in a series of quick little pops of stitching. ‘Ah Jesus,' Perlman said. ‘Sorry.'

‘Fucking hell,' Gupta said. ‘This cost me a fortune.'

‘It must have been
shmatte
. I hardly touched it.'

I'll vouch for that,' Scullion said.

‘Pair of tossers,' Gupta said, and opened the door of the MG. Perlman kicked it shut and Gupta took a step back to avoid being struck.

Perlman said, ‘All I want is an answer, Dev.'

‘Nothing to say, Perlman. Where do I send the repair bill for my jacket?'

‘We'll get to that. Let's talk about something else first.'

‘I'm going home,' Gupta said.

‘Just hang on.' Perlman stuck his foot against the door panel. ‘Let's talk about cargo, Dev. Let's just talk about what it is that Bargeddie Haulage hauls.'

Dev Gupta had a way of looking arrogant with a mere motion of eyelids. ‘We move whatever we get paid to move.'

‘Does that include people?'

‘People?'

‘Illegals.'

‘What the hell are you talking about, Perlman?'

‘It's big business, I suppose. Poor bastards pay their life-savings for a long ride to a strange land, heads stuffed with notions of freedom and buying a car and strolling the aisles of well-stocked supermarkets and oh look at all the breakfast cereals and biscuits,
scrummy
, and then they get dumped by the side of the road, or in a ditch, or the middle of a field in the centre of nowhere, and who gives a shite about them.'

‘Our company doesn't do anything like –'

‘Oh but it does, it does, son. You bring them in. You drop them off. Thanks for your
shekels
and cheerio. Find your own way in the dark.' Perlman rubbed the top of Gupta's head like an ominous uncle, a nasty little gesture.

Gupta ducked away. ‘You're out of your turnip, Perlman.'

Sandy Scullion looked at his watch. ‘Even as we speak, Dev, policemen are searching the premises of Bargeddie Haulage on the basis of information received.'

‘Fuck this, I'll talk to my lawyer before I say another –'

‘Lawyers, lawyers, all I ever hear is lawyers.' Perlman leaned close to Gupta, faces almost touching. ‘All right, don't tell me anything. Let
me
see if I can tell
you
. It's Frankie Chasm, right? It's Bute Transport.'

Dev Gupta was silent. Perlman smelled mint on the kid's breath.

‘Don't waste my time, Dev. Cooperate with me. And when you've satisfied my curiosity, you can go back to acting all smart and cool and drive home in your chickmobile. You can go back to being a
macher
.'

‘A what?' Gupta asked.

‘Think of it like a lightning rod for babes,' Perlman said.

Gupta looked at Scullion, then gazed across the car park. He was quiet for a long time. He chewed on his lower lip, looking years younger, and for all the world like a kid caught shoplifting. He scanned the area, as if the possibility of making a run for a place of illusory safety had crossed his mind.

‘There's nowhere to hide,' Perlman said.

Gupta said, ‘Right. All right. Fuck you. It's Chasm. It's Bute. There. You happy with that?'

‘See how easy that was,' Perlman said. ‘There's one thing I don't get. There are plenty other trucking companies all over the city. Why did Chasm pick on yours?'

‘You stupid?'

‘No more so than the next punter, I hope.'

‘Because he's in the same fucking
game
, diddy.'

‘The people game,' Perlman said, letting the insult slide off him.

‘Right, right. You got it. He moves flesh from here to there. He wants a monopoly. We're not talking about loose change. This is big business.'

‘And merciless,' Perlman said.

‘Money's money, no matter how you make it.'

‘All those poor suffering bastards you transport, they'd agree with you, eh?'

‘I look like I give a fuck, Perlman? Why don't you just nail Chasm, okay? Castrate him. Hang him up somewhere and leave him until his fucking skin rots off.' He shrugged, kicked stones, walked in small restless circles. ‘If my father … if he'd had enough brains and guts to report everything to the cops at the time when we received those threatening letters, if he'd picked up the phone and called you, if he hadn't acted in such a pig-headed way, then maybe all the other crap would never have happened, and Indra …'

Perlman watched a train go in the direction of Glasgow Central. ‘Go home, Dev.'

The young man opened the door of his MG and sat behind the wheel and inclined his face against it in an attitude of defeat or sorrow, or both. Neither Perlman nor Scullion could see his expression.

Scullion said, ‘Pitt Street.'

41

At Force HQ, Perlman found a memo from Tay on his desk. Terse, as Tay's messages usually were, it read:
Request update on Colin Perlman data ASAP
. Tay was relentless about this. Yielding to an impatience he wished he didn't feel, Perlman took ten quick minutes to study Colin's file. He was squeezing this chore in between what were matters of greater urgency, a realization that caused him a stab of guilt. I should've done more for Colin, he thought. Pushed harder. But other developments occurred, diversions arose, and the business of policing this city brought new situations daily. How could you concentrate on just one? Crime was sometimes tidal, sometimes a typhoon. You couldn't get out of its way.

Perlman still couldn't understand Tay's interest in Colin. Months, he'd never enquired. Never a word. He was apparently catching up for lost time. But why now?

He leafed through the file. It contained the pathologist's report, a description of the bullet that had killed Colin, and Perlman's own account of what he'd seen and heard in Dalness Street that night: the big car, the Bentley of legend and myth, the gunman's shot. There were a couple of photographs of the victim. Hurry, hurry past them, they still cause pain. There was a list of Colin's clothing. His possessions. These were scraps, assembled quickly.

The file also contained a report of the discovery of the burnt-out Bentley in a wooded area near the Ayrshire town of Dalmellington, and a statement, made to a constable in U-Division, by the ten-year-old kid who'd come across the wreck of the car.
I was taking a shortcut through the woods
…

The good discoveries only happened when people were taking shortcuts, Perlman thought. And only then if they were going through the woods.

He'd appended printed notes of his interviews with Kilroy and Blum, and an opinion from the Procurator-Fiscal's office that there was no evidence of Kilroy's involvement in Colin's death, and therefore no case to bring. He rapped out a short account of the anonymous caller on his computer keyboard, then printed the sheet, the only electronic task he knew how to perform. He slid the sheet from the printer and put it in the file. The next step would be to include a transcription of the message he'd received on his answering machine. He looked in the middle drawer of his desk, saw the cassette resting on a salad of rubber bands, paperclips, and varied scraps of paper.

Later, he thought. When there was time. Tay would have to wait. He closed the drawer, locked it, then rolled his chair back from his desk. The castors squeaked on the floor. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. Without the specs, he always had a slightly startled look.

He went in search of Scullion. Sandy was studying some papers on his desk when Perlman came into his office. ‘You done that stuff for Tay?'

‘Most of it.'

‘He'll come looking for you, Lou.'

‘I'll make sure I'm out of the building.' Perlman followed Scullion down the stairs. ‘Where is this place we're going?'

‘Near Hillington.'

Outside, they walked to Scullion's car. The city was darkening. Perlman felt hunger; his stomach whined like a bow drawn badly across a fiddle string. When would the day end? He strapped himself into the passenger seat and imagined food: good thick chips with little bits of skin still attached, HP sauce, a thickly battered lump of cod and a wee drizzle of hot grease.

Later. Like Colin's file. Life was all postponements.

Scullion was racing through the Clyde Tunnel now. Here and there the walls were damp where the river had seeped through. Perlman never liked being in the Tunnel. He imagined a deluge one day, total disaster, water crashing mercilessly through plaster. He was glad when the car emerged from the cylinder and the Southern General Hospital came in sight.

They travelled along Shieldhall Road and then skirted the edge of Hillington Industrial Estate. ‘It's somewhere around here,' Scullion said. He took a left turn and drove into the estate.

Perlman asked, ‘Street name?'

‘Gladys Road.'

Yellow streetlights were coming on. The area, caught between the last of the day's natural light and the glow of the artificial, had a look of unreality. It was as if the whole place lay under a haze the colour of daffodils. Low concrete buildings housed small companies, light engineering, electronics, all shut and shuttered at the end of the day's business. These small enterprises were dwarfed by huge warehouses that contained thousands of barrels of whisky.

He spotted the sign for Gladys Road at the same time as Scullion.

‘Here we are,' Scullion said, and parked alongside a fence built out of tall steel poles that rose to a height of about eight feet and then tapered into ugly swordpoints. A sign welded to the front gate read:
Bute Transport
.

Perlman got out. He had a limited view of the yard between the slatted poles. Some kind of galvanized metal structure, about the size of a small garage, sat dark and unlit in the middle of the compound.

Scullion said, ‘See anything?'

‘Not a thing. Place looks abandoned.'

‘I don't see any kind of transportation.' Scullion grabbed the gate and shook it, a fruitless effort. ‘No trucks. No cars.'

‘I get the funny feeling Bute Transport has moved on,' Perlman said.

‘You think Bute did a flit?'

‘It's possible. Things were getting a wee bit too hot for Chasm.'

Scullion kicked the gate, grunted. The steel poles didn't yield. ‘Okay, we find him and ask where and how he operates his business these days. Especially the how.'

‘You got a number for him?'

Scullion said, ‘No, but I assume Kilroy does.'

‘Kilroy's bound to be ex-directory.'

‘I can run him down through Pitt Street. We've got to have his details on file.' Scullion produced his mobile and tapped numbers into it.

He stared into the gathering dark while Scullion talked on the mobile. He walked the length of the fence, peering between the poles at the empty compound. He heard something. He wasn't sure what or where exactly it came from. It might have been the sound of a stone falling from a high place, a cat disturbing loose masonry on a wall; or it might have been a footfall nearby, somebody's stealthy walk arrested in mid-movement. He listened hard.

Some yards away, Scullion was pissed off with the person at the other end of his phone, and raising his voice. ‘Don't tell me we don't have it. I know for a bloody fact we do.'

I'm jumpy, Perlman thought. He tried to listen to the silences that lay under the surface of Sandy Scullion's voice, as if they might suddenly yield another sound. He had a moment when the night seemed totally disjointed, and his surroundings were as much out of alignment as his spinal column, which throbbed again. Why this sense of danger, if that's what it was? Maybe it was something else, a consciousness of being observed by an invisible onlooker, say. My own stalker. Somebody to watch over me.

Scullion said, ‘It's like pulling teeth to get information out of people.'

‘Did you see anybody just then, Sandy?'

‘No. Why?'

‘I thought somebody was hanging around nearby.'

‘I don't see a soul,' Scullion said, looking this way and that.

Perlman shrugged; the feeling of uneasiness didn't lift.

Scullion said, ‘Anyway, I got Kilroy's number.
Finally
.' He held the handset to his ear, tapped the keys, waited. He looked jaundiced in the lemon light. ‘No answer.'

‘So do we run out to Bearsden?'

Scullion said, ‘I'm dead, Lou. We'll track down Chasm in the morning, first thing. I think it's time I remember I have a home life I neglect too much.'

‘Fine, I'll go back and transcribe the cassette,' Perlman said. ‘One chore less, then I can sleep without dreaming of Tay.'

They walked back to the car. Perlman had a last look round. He saw nothing. He settled in the passenger seat and wondered if the sound he'd heard was merely a little blip in the radar of his imagination.

Scullion dropped him off at Pitt Street. Perlman walked inside the building, climbed the stairs, passed a few WPCs drinking coffee. One of them was Meg Gayle, the others he recognized but didn't know by name. He smiled at Meg, and she returned the expression in a coy way.

‘Would you happen to have an aspirin, Meg?' he asked.

‘I can find one for you, Sergeant.'

‘I'd appreciate it. I'll be at my desk. Thanks.'

He moved down the corridor. He sat in front of the computer console. He unlocked the drawer where he'd stashed the cassette.

Meg Gayle appeared with a small cardboard cup of water, and two aspirins in the palm of her hand. ‘Here,' she said.

‘Thanks, dear.' Perlman swallowed the tablets, washed them down with water.

‘You look a wee bit weary, Sergeant,' Meg Gayle said.

‘I don't think I'm alone,' Perlman remarked.

‘I know what you mean.'

Perlman noticed the young woman's long thin neck, the sweet small mouth, the darkly serious eyes. He wondered what had compelled Meg Gayle into a police career, but he didn't ask.