The Last Darkness (9 page)

‘Drugs don't get you through a damn thing, Sadie,' he said.

‘You're not hooked.'

Thanks, but I've got my own addiction, he thought. The kind you can't buy in some alley behind a pub. He noticed a bruise staining her flesh from the corner of her left eye to the edge of her ear. ‘What did he hit you with this time?'

‘He drinks, he gets carried away, Mr Perlman.'

‘I know where I'd like to carry
that
bastard,' Lou Perlman said, angry. ‘You've got a tattoo on your forehead, love, and it says V for Victim. Which is how come you attract scum like that sadist Riley, who has all the charisma of a bloody stormtrooper. You pick up these arseholes who batter you the first time they've had enough booze. Big men. Tough guys. You're drawn to these wasters. What is it with you?'

‘We've been this road before, you and me,' she said.

‘Am I talking to a brick wall, Sadie?'

She shivered violently and stamped her feet in a flamenco manner for warmth. She was turning blue. Perlman took off his coat and draped it over her shoulders. She'd been in rehab, seen shrinks, but she always ended up in the same trap, wasted on smack, and always with the moronic Eric ‘Moon' Riley as her lover and violator and part-time pimp. He wanted to find Riley, an altogether ugly fucker, and bust his head open as you might take a sledgehammer to a watermelon, but what was the point?

The last time he'd leaned on Riley the dumb little fuck had got himself a low-rent lawyer who'd threatened to bring a police brutality lawsuit – even though Lou hadn't laid a hand on the guy. Fuckers like Riley, so quick to violate the rights of others, screamed navy-blue murder when they imagined their own rights under attack. Now, standing in front of this shivering girl, Perlman had the urge to seek Riley out again. He repressed it. You can't be the avenger, Lou. You can't go strutting around protecting people like Sadie. It was a thankless task. There were just too many Sadies on the streets of Glasgow.

‘I can't take your
coat
, Mr Perlman,' she said. She looked small in the folds of the garment.

‘And I can't see you die of hypothermia, love. Just take the bloody thing.' He took two fivers out of his blazer and stuffed them into her hand. ‘Your mother still living in Partick?'

‘Aye.'

‘Then jump in a taxi and go home. Go on.'

‘Riley'll find me there.'

He patted the side of her face softly, and felt sad for her. Face like that belonged in a fashion magazine. But she'd end up dead before she was thirty unless she made a big-time life change. ‘Go home. Get warm. Do me a favour, eh?'

She closed her hand round the money. ‘Thanks a lot. One day I'll maybe do something for you.'

‘Return the coat to HQ?'

‘You've got dimples. You know that?'

‘No, love, my jaws are collapsing where the dentist yanked out the back teeth, that's all.' Perlman called a passing cab, then helped her get inside. ‘Go home, Sadie.'

He slammed the door and watched the taxi pull away and he realized his little act of charity had deprived him of his coat and the wind blowing down Hope Street cut through his blazer and bagged up the legs of his flannels. Act of charity – she'd probably take the cab round the corner and get out at the nearest bar and have a drink, then she'd phone Riley and he'd come for her and the sorry cycle of her life would continue.

Ah, fuck it, you did what you could. You hoped. You sent out lifeboats, and some of them never came back.

He hurried now into Buchanan Street where there was no shelter. The Christmas lights overhead failed to project warmth: just a sort of chill sterility. He entered Mandelson's. Hot inside, deliciously so. The air had that comforting smell of new clothes, of expensive Harris tweed jackets and wool trousers and hand-finished linen shirts. Rubbing his palms together, he approached the counter where a skinny-faced assistant with an effete manner assessed him in a sniffy way.

‘I know, I know,' Perlman said. ‘It looks like the charge of the hoi polloi, and I'm the advance scout.'

‘Mmmm,' the assistant said. ‘Perhaps I can interest you in something?'

Lou fished his wallet out and showed his ID. ‘This is the only thing I'm interested in, son.' He produced the glossy, and laid it on the counter in front of the assistant. ‘Tell me who that is.'

The man looked at the photograph just as the phone in Lou's left pocket rang. Sandy Scullion had set the ringer to play the first bars of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas'.

Lou answered. ‘That's embarrassing.'

‘I knew you'd like it. My kids set it,' Sandy Scullion said. ‘Okay. The news of the hanging man isn't pleasant.'

‘And I was longing for cheap and easy closure.'

‘Sorry to let you down, Lou.'

‘I'll be right back, Sandy.' Perlman killed the connection.

The assistant said, ‘I
think
I know him. It's hard to be sure. He looks awfully like one of Mr Mandelson's personal customers.'

‘So what's his name?'

‘Let me talk to Mr Mandelson. A minute, please.' The assistant went into a back room.

Perlman wandered around the racks. He scanned a heavy coat in navy-blue wool, and he checked the price-tag, which was hefty enough to dry the saliva in his mouth. He tried it on anyway, looked at himself in the mirror. He was smart all of a sudden. He'd buy this damn coat and sod the price. It was time to treat himself.

The assistant came back, followed by an arthritic old fellow with a pear-shaped pink face. This was Mandelson, a gent of the old school, a time when suits were bespoke and young men of means paid their accounts quarterly.

‘May I take a wee peek at this photograph, please?' he asked.

13

When Perlman returned to Force HQ in Pitt Street he found Charlie McLaren, pathologist, in Sandy Scullion's office.

McLaren asked, ‘How come you're not out chewing the cud yet, Lou?'

They can't retire me, Charlie. I know where all the skeletons are stored.'

‘I bet you do.' Charlie McLaren, who had a roaring laugh and a big red face, wore a three-piece pin-striped suit and an old school tie. He had a public-school manner; you could imagine him, legs parted, roasting his arse against the blazing fire of a gentleman's club on a cold afternoon. Old port in hand, maybe the occasional sly fart aimed towards the chimney. He had a very refined Scots accent. ‘Personally, Lou, I'm seeing the finishing line. I did a reckoning the other day, and I calculate I've cut open five thousand corpses in my time. That's an awful lot of dead flesh and dipping your hands inside wet carcasses. Hard to stay enthusiastic about the job.'

‘Enthusiasm's as slippery as a bar of soap in a bathtub,' Lou said. ‘Now you have it, now you don't.' He couldn't imagine losing his own zeal altogether. Weary at times, sure, jaded, but he always bounced back. Something always cropped up to crank his motor. The unforeseen. An unexpected turn of events.

Sandy Scullion picked up a plastic Ziploc bag from his desk. ‘Have a gander at this,' he said.

Lou Perlman looked at the bag. He saw what appeared to be small pieces of shredded latex, but it was hard to be sure. ‘I give up, Sandy. What is it?'

Scullion said, ‘The remains of a condom.'

Charlie McLaren said, ‘Right. Damnedest thing.'

‘Explain it to me,' Lou said.

Scullion said, ‘There was a french letter in the dead man's stomach.'

‘His stomach?'

‘Burst in his gut,' McLaren said.

‘He'd
swallowed
a condom?'

‘Right. And it killed him.' Sandy Scullion poked the plastic bag with a fingertip.

‘More specifically, the
contents
of the contraceptive killed him,' McLaren said.

‘And what were these contents?' Lou asked.

‘Cocaine. Fatally high concentrations of the substance in the subject's blood. I'd say very pure cocaine, pharmaceutical quality. The condom splits, cocaine melts into the bloodstream, whack, heart isn't equipped to handle the chemical blast. Positively
atomic
. A few seconds of clammy terror. If that. Then death.'

‘Cocaine in condoms, everyday smuggling tactic,' Scullion said.

Perlman perched himself on the edge of Scullion's desk. ‘If you're a smuggler, right. But tell me why Joseph Lindsay, respectable solicitor – if that's not an oxymoron – would swallow a condom filled with prime cocaine?'

‘You're sure he's Lindsay?' Scullion asked.

‘No two ways. According to Frank Mandelson, Lindsay had been his customer since Moses came down from the mountain. Had an account there. Never in arrears. I had a feeling from the minute I saw Lindsay's body I knew him from him somewhere. Then when I heard his name the mist rolled back. Nine or ten years ago, he was involved with some group advocating peace and coexistence in Palestine. The name of the group was Connect. No, wait, wrong, it was Nexus. Or
The
Nexus. I was hijacked by one of my liberal relatives into attending a bloody
awful
chicken dinner in honour of a visiting Israeli luminary. The man who introduced this Israeli to the assembly was Joseph Lindsay. Offices in Bath Street, Mandelson says, and a house in Langside. Butter wouldn't melt. So how do we go from being a quiet-mannered lawyer to somebody with a coke-filled rubber in his gut? That's a leap, Sandy.' He looked at McLaren and asked, ‘Who uses pharmaceutical cocaine these days in conventional medicine?'

‘Ear nose and throat fellows,' McLaren answered. ‘It's not in great demand.'

‘Except by drug dealers,' Perlman said.

‘Who steal from pharmaceutical warehouses.' McLaren's stomach rumbled. ‘Before I leave you chaps to get on with your investigative matters, let me just say you'll have my full report in the morning, cc to Detective-Superintendent Mary Gibson, although I understand she's away at some law-enforcement seminar until tomorrow. For your immediate purposes, the drug definitely killed him, and he was hung post-mortem. Also, that he died last night between eleven and midnight. Lord God, I'm famished. I need some grub.' He picked up his overcoat and said, ‘Happy hunting,' then stepped out of the room.

‘Lucky sod,' Scullion said. ‘He just drops the ball and walks away.'

‘He had the brains to attend medical school, Sandy. He doesn't have to sit round with grunts like us, does he?'

‘Grunts? Speak for yourself.' Scullion switched on his desk lamp. Although it was only early afternoon, the sky was darkening and the office grew dim. ‘How do you force somebody to swallow something he knows will probably kill him? Hold a gun to his head, I suppose.'

‘It's a good way of getting what you want. Lindsay takes the condom into his mouth and gags it down. Better than a bullet in the skull, he thinks. At least he's alive for a wee while longer. And where there's life etcetera. I'd swallow a barrowload of coke myself if somebody was pointing a gun at my noggin.'

‘What had Lindsay done, I wonder.'

‘He was a lawyer, Sandy. You show me a lawyer and I'll show you a man with a few enemies.'

Scullion tilted his head back, studied the ceiling. ‘Whoever did the deed took his wallet, money, anything that might have identified him.'

‘Except the ring. Which I'm assuming was maybe too tight to yank off.' Perlman walked round in slow pensive circles. He was back on the riverbank, hearing the goods train roll across the railway bridge. He imagined somebody dragging Joseph Lindsay along the edge of track. Somebody strong – unless the task was split between two. Why go to the trouble of trying to make it look like suicide?

‘Lindsay was a widower, Mandelson says. There are a couple of kids. One in Australia, he thinks. The other in Canada. He's not sure. I'll ask around. Since Lindsay was connected in certain Jewish circles, I'll probably get any personal information I want without too much trouble – unless I'm persona non grata with my relatives for what they think of as my antisocial behaviour. Frankly, Sandy, I'm weary of my aunts trying to fix me up with allegedly eligible women. If I lived back inside the circle, I swear I'd never go short of food. There'd be beef casserole or gefilte fish every day. I'd be a sitting target for the widows' brigade. Do I look like marital material?'

‘Not quite. But the coat's very nice. You clean up pretty well, Lou.'

‘I thought you'd never notice,' Lou Perlman said.

‘Let's get this show on the road.' Scullion stood up, stretched his arms. ‘Lindsay's office first, I think.'

‘What about the Stobcross bones?' Perlman asked.

‘Still no ID. The skeleton's been buried in that pipe for more than twenty years, Sid Linklater estimates, so you're looking at a very cold trail.'

‘And the dead kid in Sighthill Park?'

‘Uniforms are still taking statements. The usual painstaking stuff. Time-consuming. It'll keep, Lou.'

Perlman walked to the door.
It'll keep
. He hated leaving investigations in mid-air, things unfinished, questions unasked. The criminal puzzles of the city could drive you mad if you let them. Don't spread yourself too thin, Lou.

Scullion said, ‘I already called Lindsay's secretary. She's waiting. And before I forget, where's my mobile phone?'

Perlman took the phone from his pocket and handed it back.

‘I thought you'd lose it somewhere,' Scullion said.

‘I never lose anything that isn't mine, Sandy.' Perlman followed Scullion downstairs and into the street, away from the hubbub of Force HQ and out into the miserly afternoon light.

14

Terry Dogue, whose cracked Docs leaked, mumbled into his cellphone. ‘He went down Buchanan Street to the river. Stared into the water. Turned round. Gawked in the window of that shop selling knives, know the one I mean under the bridge? Victor Morris? Now he's going back up Buchanan Street. He's turning about a block ahead of me. I bet he's going back to Bath Street.'