The Last Darkness (32 page)

The light in the room came from a street-lamp or traffic passing in the street. He liked this sense of being in the heart of city and all its clamour, and yet tucked away in a secret place. He smelled Charlotte's skin as he hid between her soft breasts. Here, the world didn't intrude. No peevish policemen, sharp journalists, Revenue agents. No criminal alliances, no slush-funds and secret accounts, no envelopes and messengers. And no immediate trips to some rank Third World sewer masquerading as a city where corrupt local dignitaries regarded you as a panacea. You could cure drought, famine, housing problems. They thought you could fly without wings.

Lying here in a cheap room above Sauchiehall Street, ah, now this was the simple life.

Charlotte Leckie looked at his face. ‘You have very sad eyes, Shiv. Dark brown and inconsolable.'

‘It's genetic,' Bannerjee said.

‘You sometimes look like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.'

Bannerjee smiled. ‘Like Atlas.'

‘Do you want me to massage you?'

‘I'd like to rest. Nap a wee while.'

‘I'll stay. If you like.'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘I don't mean to snooze for ever. I'll wake up filled with lust. And if you're not here, then I'll be
truly
inconsolable.'

She kissed his forehead. He shut his eyes. He listened to the carol singing in the distance, kiddie voices buried at times by the rumble of delivery-vans and lorries bringing Christmas goodies to the shops.

‘Close your eyes,' he said.

She did so. ‘You like it when we just hold one another, don't you?'

‘I like it enormously.'

‘If I sleep, and you wake before me, nudge me.'

‘I'll kiss you awake,' he said. Lovemaking produced a sweet drowsiness in him. He was inside a dark velvet space. Charlotte, face down on the pillow, draped an arm across his chest.

The drift was lovely and smooth, down the brae all the way.

Marak entered the narrow hallway adjacent to the Jade Song and saw before him a flight of stairs covered with a tartan carpet, black and green, shabby and badly stained. He detected a scent of hot cooking oil. He climbed slowly, reached a landing where a reception desk was situated. Newspapers lay in disarray on a coffee table, and a cracked brown leather couch leaked tufts of padding. There was nobody behind the desk. A life-sized cardboard figure of a man dressed in a kilt moved one hand up and down in greeting. Marak could hear the whirr of the little motor that drove the motion. A cardboard balloon attached to the figure's cheerfully florid face read:
Welcome to Bonnie Scotland
.

He skipped past this effigy to the next flight of stairs. He moved softly. He was barely breathing. Up and up. He was hot. The place was overheated. Outside, pavements were frozen and lorries spread grit on the streets, and yet the heat in this building was almost tropical. He paused on the next landing and gazed upwards. At the top was a black skylight, a dome of glass smudged by recent rain. He wondered if this was the right place, this shabby hotel, if the address written on the back of the photograph had been wrong. And why had a date and time been added to the address?

Neither of the previous pictures had come with that information. Perhaps this time was the only time.

He climbed again. He had a strong impulse to turn and go back down into the street and climb aboard the first bus that came his way and ride it to its destination, wherever that might be. But he kept ascending. He was beyond retreat. On the next landing a corridor went off at a sloping angle. The ceiling was crooked. A door to his right opened and a middle-aged couple emerged, the woman swaddled in an enormous fur coat and the man dressed in a pearl-grey overcoat that reached to his ankles. Marak turned away as they passed, coughing, covering his mouth with his hand.

The man said to the woman, ‘Bloody Christmas rush. You know I hate that Princes Square. I'm knackered.'

The woman said, ‘
You're
knackered? What about me? I've been carrying heavy bags all day.'

‘What have we got in common, eh?' the man asked.

‘I often wonder, Erchie. I really do.'

‘Let's have a bloody good argument,' the man said.

‘I'd prefer a bloody good drink personally. Mibbe we can do both.'

Marak heard them go down the stairs, squabbling. He stood with his back to the wall. A phone rang unanswered some floors below. He touched the knife in the inside pocket of his coat. He heard his nerve-ends zing.
Turn and leave
, he thought. Listen to that earlier impulse. But he kept going. He owed the dead. When you had debts to the dead you didn't walk away from them.

He owed the living too.

He rose another floor, and now he was at the top of the building, standing directly beneath the dome. The rain on the dome was starting to freeze. It resembled an extra skein of glass forming over the first.

He was looking for room 408.

He stepped into a corridor where a sign read,
Rooms 400-416
.

He paused, fingered the sheathed knife. He knew how to use a knife, he knew the angle at which to drive a blade into the human body for best effect, which artery to sever and the slickest way to puncture the heart. He'd learned the art of the knife during his two years of National Service. He'd learned guns and grenades. He'd bayoneted straw-filled dummy figures and he'd fired machine guns on target ranges. He'd learned hand-to-hand combat skills. He knew how to strangle a man efficiently.

He knew too much about killing.

He slipped the knife from the sheath, keeping the blade concealed under his coat.
408
. He'd reach the door, try the handle, and if the door was locked – would he knock and wait for an answer? For somebody to appear in the doorway?

He heard a woman singing from one of the rooms down the corridor. Quietly, liltingly. He couldn't tell what she was singing, but the sound captivated him. It released him. He was reminded of water running over stones, or the clarity of a monastery bell ringing slowly on a hill of ripe olive trees.

And then the singing stopped abruptly.

45

‘Smoke?' Lou Perlman asked. He pushed a packet of Silk Cut across the table.

BJ Quick took one and Perlman leaned forward with his lighter. The interview room was small, lit by a little too much fluorescence. It smelled of old smokes and nervous tension. BJ eyed Perlman sideways, his mind flying like clouds on a windy day: where had they taken Furfee, and what was the big man saying? And how much did Perlman believe of Quick's story?
I was only trying to help, man
. The trouble with Perlman was you couldn't gather much information from his expression. His face was liked a crumpled newspaper left out too long in the rain.

Perlman switched on a small cassette-player, punched the
RECORD
button. Quick's bandaged neck throbbed. For a while Perlman withdrew into silence, head shrouded with smoke.

‘What now?' Quick asked.

‘Just giving you time to readjust your thoughts.'

‘They don't need readjusting, Lou.'

Perlman stood up. ‘I think they do. This story of yours. It's puerile, BJ. You expect me to believe it? BJ Quick, scoundrel and perve, suddenly gets all holy and turns law-abiding? Character transformation just like that? Did the skies part above your head and God gave you a cheeky wee grin? Take the straight and narrow, my child. All will be well. Yours sincerely, God.'

‘God doesn't come into it, Lou.'

‘You just had a seismic change of heart, eh?'

‘Sudden like, aye.'

Perlman folded his arms. The tape-player hummed. The overhead strip of light flickered a second as if a spike had jolted the city's electric grid.

Quick asked, ‘Listen. Can you not grant me some kind of immunity?'

‘I couldn't grant you a free bus-pass, BJ. Immunity against what anyway?'

‘Anything. The fact I was in Furfee's company. Guilt by association. Whatever. I mean, I helped the law, that's got to count for something.'

Perlman thought how some criminals lived in a fabulous world where cops could make quick hassle-free deals. There were no petitions involved, no consultations, no bargaining: it was just
gimme immunity, gimme a break. You can do it
. They didn't take into account the people with real power, those who sat Upstairs where all the important rubber stamps were stored. These were the men who could cut deals.

‘No can do,' Perlman said.

Quick inhaled smoke. ‘The way I see it, you fucking owe me.'

‘Perspective is a funny thing. From my angle, you're a liar, you're withholding information, and you might be implicated in a murder. And I should help you?'

‘Murder my arse. I had nothing to do with Dogue.' Quick saw club farraday float out to sea like a big abandoned galleon. Wind in the sails. Disappearing to the horizon. He was depressed. Dead dreams did a terrible thing to your head.

‘I wonder what Furfee is telling Inspector Scullion,' Perlman said.

Quick didn't want to think what Furfee might say. Probably nothing. Probably. In all likelihood. Which came down to: well, maybe. What the hell, Quick could deny anything Furfee said. He remembered Furfee producing the big razor and flicking the blade open and how at that very moment he'd felt his heart plunge deep into his intestines. That razor, that fucking razor. Furfee, you fucking moron, you braindead tit, you gorilla, you hadn't ditched the weapon. Hadn't bloody well thrown it into the river or dropped it down a sewer.

Quick tried not to think. He stubbed out his cigarette in the blue tin ashtray on the table.

Perlman said, ‘Our man could be from the Middle East.'

‘Shite. Not him again.'

‘Suppose you just play your cards face-up, and tell me what you know about him.'

‘I think I'd like to phone my lawyer now. I'll phone Binks. I should've done it before all this got out of hand.'

‘Frazer Binks is a joke,' Perlman said. ‘He couldn't punch his way through a wafer-thin brief. Last time he failed to save you a twelve month stretch in the Bar-L on a forged phone-card scam. Didn't he get his degree from some correspondence school in the wilds of Wales or somewhere?'

The door opened, and Scullion looked in. ‘A minute, Lou?'

Perlman switched off the tape-recorder and went out into the hallway.

Alone, Quick helped himself to another cigarette. He shut his eyes against the harsh light and wished he had a way of reversing the flow of time to that very point where he'd thrown himself at Furf. Impetuous, aye, foolish, aye, but it had seemed to him at that moment he was doing the right thing, lunging at Furf and thinking he'd disarm him and ingratiate himself with the police …

He opened his eyes.

Who the
fuck
am I kidding? I was going like a rocket for the door. I wanted nothing to do with Furf and the bloody razor in his hand. I wanted
away
and club farraday be damned, Glasgow be damned. I had no bloody interest in helping anybody but BJ Quick. I was heading far far away, the Island of Arran, say, maybe find a cave halfway up Goat Fell.

No, no, nope, that wasn't it at all. It only
seemed
like that. I was
really
trying to help Perlman, right. Stick to that one, BJ. It's the better story. You're the hero of your own fiction. The nice thing about fantasies, you can pick the one that shows you in the best possible light.

He dragged on his cigarette and wondered what Scullion and Perlman were gassing about in the corridor. After a couple of minutes, Perlman came back in. He looks stupid in that old blazer, Quick thought.

Perlman said, ‘Your friend Furfee can be a talkative bugger sometimes, according to the Inspector.'

Quick smoked, staring at the tip of his cigarette and trying not to seem interested. ‘Talkative my arse. He makes Charlie Chaplin seem like a chatterbox.' The cigarette burned his fingers and he dropped it in the ashtray. His wounded neck was aflame. He wished he could rip off the bandage and apply ice-cold water to his skin.

‘Denies killing anybody, of course,' Perlman said.

‘Zatso.'

‘Denies knowing Terry.'

Quick said nothing, but saw a light in Perlman's eyes, a kind of predatory brightening. He didn't like it. ‘And?'

‘But he was prepared to talk about Abdullah.'

‘Abdullah? Who's Abdullah?'

Perlman slapped the table hard. ‘I'm tired of your shite, Quick. I've had a long day, and it's been a bloody cold one, and I'd like to get home before dawn. Don't fuck around with me.'

‘Furf's the one fucking around.'

‘He tells a very interesting story of you delivering envelopes to this Abdullah in Maryhill. But you weren't working for the Post Office. More a private courier.'

‘This is a load of –'

‘According to Furfee, you picked up the envelopes in a pub called the Brewery Taps.'

‘The man's away with the fairies.'
Fuck you to hell, Furfee
.

Perlman pushed his chair back from the table and stretched his legs. Quick noticed that the cop was wearing mismatched socks.

‘Three envelopes, three deliveries,' Perlman said.

‘He's on medication, you know that? He dreams up shite. He's always imagining stuff.'

‘Right, right.'

‘Some trank drug, fancy name –'

‘Furfee says he went with you a couple of times to an address in Maryhill.'

Clammy, Quick forced a look of incredulity. ‘Oh, aye, sure he did. Did he also tell you what was in these imaginary envelopes?'

‘No, he went very quiet then. Said you'd tell us that. Quite emphatic about it, in fact.'

‘How can I tell you what I don't know, Perlman?'

‘Understand this. He's not pleased with you, BJ. In fact he said he'd like to cut your heart out. Exact words,
I'll cut that fucker's black heart out and stuff it up his arsehole
. The way he sees it, you prevented him from getting the hell out of that loft. I have the feeling that with a wee bit more pressure, he'll tell us anything we want to know.'