The Last Darkness (14 page)

‘Like when?'

‘I'll leave that open, laddie. I'm being wildly generous to you. But I have a weak spot for dreamers, hence I'm giving you a chance to get back in the biz. You have the inside track on the lease.' He raised his cane –
ciao
with a flourish – and vanished into the sleet.

Quick watched him go. All that money disappearing in Kilroy's fat hand. Made him sick to his heart.

The woman was still harassing Willie Furfee.
You should see the state you left him in, you evil bastard, you know how much blood my man lost? I hope you choke on the money. I hope it kills you
.

Furfee shoved her back against the wall. Quick said, ‘Let's get out of here, Furf.'

‘Bastards! Fucking
bastards
!' the woman screamed.

Quick and Furfee walked outside. They hurried to where Furfee had parked his car. The woman came after them and, oblivious to both weather and spectators huddled in shop doorways, screamed and rushed at the black Peugeot, hammering on the side windows and kicking the hubcaps as Furfee slipped the vehicle into gear and drove away.

‘What a bloody carry-on,' BJ Quick said. He yanked the rear-view mirror and checked his hair: flattened by sleet, ruined. A stupid hairdo, my arse. That bitch.

‘You got the dosh,' Furfee said.

‘Aye. For a few lovely seconds before Fat Pig took the bulk of it. Jesus, I'm freezing. Crank up the heater, Furf.'

‘Wilco. Is Kilroy a poof?'

‘I don't know what he does for sex, Furf. I'm not about to ask him either. You better get me Wee Terry on the phone. Find out about that Arab.'

‘Right away,' Furfee said, and punched a number into his mobile with one hand, while he steered with the other.

He passed the unit to BJ, who asked, ‘Terry?'

The voice that answered was authoritarian. ‘This is Dr Nimmo. Who's this?'

‘Nimmo? I don't know any Nimmo. This must be a wrong number.'

‘Are you by any chance trying to reach Terence Dogue?'

‘Right.'

‘Then you'll find him here at the Royal Infirmary,' Dr Nimmo said.

21

Perlman rushed through a rage of sleet on his way back to Force HQ. By the time he stepped inside the building his new coat was sodden. Probably ruined already. Bloody winter. I want the tropics. I want al fresco dining, mangoes dangling on trees. He climbed the stairs slowly, taking off the coat as he moved. He pondered Colin's bypass operation, Colin going under the knife tomorrow afternoon. Rifkind wasted no time. Maybe there was no time to waste.

He entered his cluttered cubicle and sat at his desk and was about to try Artie Wexler's number again, when PC Murdoch's benign young face appeared in the doorway.

‘That woman who was attacked,' Murdoch said.

‘Refresh an old duffer's memory, son.'

‘The one in the multi-storey parking garage?'

‘Oh, aye, right,' Perlman said, but he felt scattered, preoccupied with Wexler, Colin, Lindsay, old associations, confluences of a shapeless past. He yearned for a younger man's agile brain, recall like a razor, a thousand details brought to mind in a flash of time. Sometimes his brain felt like a turnip in his skull, fibrous roots clotted with soil.

‘She wants to see you,' Murdoch said.

‘Can you deal with her for me?'

‘Says you talked to her earlier. Name's Billie Houston.'

‘She was the one
attacked
?' Perlman stood up.

Murdoch said, ‘Some guy hit her.'

‘Send her in, send her in.'

Murdoch went away a moment, then ushered Billie Houston inside the cubicle. The young cop vanished. Billie Houston sat down. Her nose was slightly puffy, eye makeup pale.

‘Great service around here. I got a cup of tea and a ginger snap.'

‘That's a damn sight more than
I
get,' Perlman said. He blew into his cold red hands. ‘I'd murder for a cup of hot tea. So what happened to you? Who attacked you?'

‘He didn't pause to introduce himself, Sergeant.'

‘They seldom do,' Perlman said. ‘What was he after? Purse? Those bracelets?'

‘Robbery wasn't the motive,' she said. ‘He wanted information.'

‘Funny way of asking for it.'

‘Dead funny,' she said. She crossed her legs, and her coat fell open to expose the short suede skirt and the matching knee-length boots. He imagined Joe Lindsay eyeballing the legs while he dictated letters. Why did a quiet wee man get murdered?

‘What information was he so keen to get?'

‘Wanted to know where he could find Mr Lindsay. Desperate to know.'

‘Desperate enough to thump you.'

‘I got him back,' she said.

‘I bet you did.'

‘I'm not a punching bag for some arsehole. No way.'

‘Strange he didn't come to the office in Bath Street if he was looking for Lindsay. Why follow you into a parking garage?'

‘I think he phoned hours before you turned up. I remember his accent. I told him Mr Lindsay hadn't come in and he asked for his home number, which I didn't give, of course.'

‘What kind of accent?'

‘I don't know. I don't have an ear for things like that. I can't place it.'

‘What did he look like?'

‘Dark beard. Dark hair. Quite good-looking. He wouldn't be my type. I can't imagine him ever relaxing, enjoying a night on the town. If I was forced to pin it down, I'd say he looked Middle Eastern. Iranian, I dunno. An Arab. That kind of complexion.'

That kind of ‘complexion' covered all sorts of nationalities in the Middle East, Perlman thought. Arab was an easy label, a generic. ‘Anything else you remember about him?'

‘Sure. He was sorry he hit me. Even apologized. Oh – one other thing. I didn't tell him Mr Lindsay was dead. I told him if he wanted to know anything about Joe, he ought to ask you or Inspector Scullion.'

‘So I can expect to be assaulted on my way home?'

‘I doubt it. He might phone you, though.'

‘People who've committed an assault don't usually telephone the police for the information they've failed to get by violent means,' Lou Perlman said.

‘No, I suppose they don't,' she said.

He considered Lindsay's life: what had he been hiding? An act of fraud, fiddling the ledgers of somebody's estate? Perlman wasn't inclined to buy. The cocaine bothered him. The staged suicide also. A desperate man who might be from the Middle East – that niggled him as well. Lindsay had been part of that group, Nexus, which advocated peace in Palestine, Jew and Arab, good neighbours together. Could a connection lie there? Some disaffected person who had a serious grudge against Lindsay? But the solicitor had seemingly drifted away from the movement, if that's what it was. So Billie Houston had said, and Perlman had no reason to doubt her.

‘Unless you have any more questions, I'll be running along,' Billie Houston said.

‘You want somebody to escort you to the garage?'

‘I think I'll be fine.'

‘I'd feel negligent if I didn't get PC Murdoch to make sure you were safe.'

‘If you insist.'

‘I do.' He picked up his phone, pressed a button, asked for Murdoch. The young policeman appeared within moments. How eager, Perlman thought. A young dog panting to please. Did I ever have such enthusiasm? ‘See that Ms Houston gets back to her car safely, would you?'

‘No problem, Sarge.'

From his doorway, Perlman watched Murdoch lead Billie Houston across the outer office towards the stairs. He listened a moment to the ringing of phones and the upraised voices of policemen and women indulging in the joking banter that made the job of law enforcement tolerable. A dedicated crew, he thought. Most of them fresh, most of them keen as young Murdoch. Many of them would become jaded and stale in time. In the tumult of the city's criminal world, a few would even lose their way entirely and break down in exhaustion and nerves, and occasional delusions of grandeur,
I'm above the law, I can swagger and throw my weight around and do whatever the hell I like
.

He started to punch in Artie Wexler's number when a tall stout man loomed in the doorway. Bloody hell. Was he
never
going to get the chance to call Artie? He put the handset down and, slipping his fingers under his glasses, massaged his eyelids. ‘And who the devil are you?'

‘Tony Curdy. Clyde Valley Security.'

Perlman regarded the man's dark-blue uniform. Nice little red shoulder chevrons, he noticed. ‘And what brings you to my lair?'

Tony Curdy had a sorrowful face. You could see him doing a tearful clown
shtick
in a circus. ‘I have a videotape. Your Constable said you might like to see it. It's the incident in the garage?'

‘You have
that
on tape?'

‘We maintain extensive CC surveillance of the garage twenty-four hours a day, Sergeant.' He talked like a sales brochure. He tugged a video cassette from the pocket of his coat. ‘You got a VCR somewhere?'

Perlman remembered there was one in Scullion's office. ‘Follow me,' he said. He walked through the outer office, and Curdy came after him. They climbed the stairway to the next floor and went along a corridor to Scullion's office, which was empty and dark. Perlman switched on an overhead light and indicated the VCR and TV in the corner of the room. Curdy slid the cassette into the slot and turned on the TV.

Perlman watched grey static on the screen, and then the picture cleared, and he saw the inside of a lift and the face of Billie Houston, and her image made him uneasy because he knew what was going to happen to her. The camera swivelled and another face appeared in the frame and this was the bearded man she'd described, the attacker. The
Arab
. Perlman braced himself for the inevitable moment of the assault. Words were exchanged: mouths opened and closed in silence. The lift door opened. Billie Houston started to make an exit, but then her face was rendered invisible by the man's body as he stepped in front of her.

The camera angle changed. Perlman saw a quick downward gesture of the man's hand. Billie Houston's face jerked back and then blood came from her nose, and again the angle of vision changed and Perlman saw the assailant's face in close-up. An expression that might have been one of self-disgust, regret. The attacker dragged the scarf from his neck and held it out to Billie like a peace offering, and that was when she belted him.

Clearly you didn't mess with Billie.

Then both characters vanished off camera and Perlman found himself looking at an empty lift.

Curdy said, ‘Wait, we pick it up again. Right here.'

A row of parked cars. The bearded man was moving after Billie and caught up with her, an image wrapped in shadow. He turned her around so that she faced him. Oy, she looked tough, her expression one of determined self-preservation. She shoved the guy away, and then she hurried out of the shot and was lost entirely. The attacker moved in the opposite direction and then he too was gone.

Perlman's eye was drawn to another figure who appeared briefly between parked cars. Wait, he thought. Who's the wee lurker? ‘Can you roll it back and freeze it?'

Curdy rewound, then stopped. ‘This the spot you want?'

Perlman moved closer to the screen, peering at the dim shape loitering among motionless cars. ‘Him,' he said.

‘I noticed him too,' Curdy said. ‘He must've seen the confrontation between the man and the woman, and buggered off.'

‘Can you make it clearer? Can you zoom in or something?'

‘We don't have that capacity, but I could leave you the tape and your tech guys could enhance that image for you.'

Perlman didn't have the patience to wait for technicians. He got in as close to the screen as he could. The face that looked out, from beneath a baseball cap, was familiar. Perlman wasn't sure. The image was grainy. He stepped away, took off his glasses, replaced them, looked again. Yes. No. Maybe.

Curdy said, ‘If this guy interests you, there's one more bit you might want to see. A street sequence. We've got cameras outside the building as well as in.' He fast-forwarded the tape, then played it. The picture depicted a pavement, a few lights reflected from surrounding offices. The image was gritty, as if the picture had been shot through sand. A man rushed into the frame, stopped, looked back. It was the guy from the lift. He turned, then moved away from the camera. A few yards ahead a second figure appeared – and this time Perlman, down on all fours, gazed at the picture like an assessor evaluating a painting of uncertain provenance. The ‘Arab' moved a few paces towards the second figure, a small man who slipped quickly into the doorway of a shop and out of sight. The bearded man stopped and abruptly disappeared into the same doorway, and the frame was empty for perhaps twenty or thirty seconds, before Billie's attacker emerged and ran along the pavement and finally out of the camera's range.

The second figure, the small man in the baseball cap, didn't reappear.

Curdy said, ‘One guy goes into the doorway and doesn't come out again.'

‘Maybe he
couldn't
come out,' Perlman said.

‘Probably the bearded joker kicked his arse.'

‘Why not? The little guy's a witness to the fact the other guy committed an assault.' Perlman stared at the pavement, the reflection of lights in wet stone. It resembled an artsy monochromatic photograph: ‘Glasgow Sidewalk in Winter'. He stood upright, massaged the sides of his aching legs. Shouldn't go down on all fours, he thought. Harder than ever to get up again.

‘Run it back a little for me,' he said. ‘To where the guy in the cap slips into the shop doorway. Then hold it.'

Curdy obliged. Perlman stared at the face under the peak of the cap until his eyesight began to vibrate. You're sure. But not one hundred per cent.