Butcher (37 page)

Perlman heard the ping of a tuning-fork vibrate in his head. Were Dysart and Chuck connected in some form of commerce? He couldn't begin to imagine it: an ‘arrangement'. What were their conversations like? Chuck speaking clipped hardman Glasgow, with that characteristic nasal edge, Dysart stammering in his agitated manner. Odd socks, so how did they match?

Annie said, ‘Dysart's a bagga nerves right from the start. He doesn't want me there. But since Chuck sent me, maybe Dysart doesn't like to offend the Big Man. Not many people do. Chuck's displeasure isn't always welcome … I've massaged some uptight people in my time, Perlman, but this guy – this was like trying to revive a corpse in an advanced state of rigor. Think OK, I'm wasting time, I'll split, so when I decide to call a taxi he goes weird on me and smacks my mobie out my hand and it breaks on the floor … I'm not happy about this, obviously. I'm thinking, uh oh, this is not a cool place to be.'

‘This was upstairs or down?'

‘Downstairs. The room was just a couch, a small table. He had all these big thick medical books. He's a doctor. He
says
. Oh – and he delivers office supplies on the side.'

Office supplies? Ding dong. Dysart hadn't mentioned that. His only income was seemingly from the legacy.
I have just about enough to live on …
The house was a demanding and ultimately insatiable mistress; she needed great wads of money. And delivering office supplies wasn't going to provide enough to appease this harridan, nor the depleted relics of an inheritance, nor help from Jackie – if in fact she provided
any
. Then he thought about her surgical expenses and wondered where that kind of cash was coming from. Insurance? Or did she also have a legacy?

‘Does he deliver these supplies to Chuck?'

‘I said I wouldn't talk about Chuck's business.'

‘Right, you did.'

‘But I don't believe that's what Dysart does. I know where Chuck gets his office supplies, and it's not from the doctor.'

‘What happened after the phone demolition?'

‘Strange. Suddenly he turns pale and he
flies
upstairs. I hear a door slam and then the sound of him being violently sick. I mean
violently
.'

‘So you took this opportunity and left?'

‘How could I leave when Dysart had the key to the gates? So I went looking for him.'

Brave girl. Perlman waited. She's confused, the ordeal's a puzzle for her, give her time.

‘If this comes out jumbled it's because it's how I remember it … I walk along the hallway, tapping on doors, I can't find him. I think, OK I'll go back downstairs. It wasn't rational thinking, because I didn't have the key. Maybe I imagined I'd be able to climb the gates. Fucking daft, eh? So downstairs I take a wrong turning and find myself in a room where mice are running over the keys of a piano.
Mice
. I swear. And there was this old wingback chair and somebody was sitting in it and he started to get up … very slowly.'

‘A man?'

‘A man, I think, I didn't see a face. I don't know if I imagined it. I was beginning to panic, Perlman. I ran out of the room and found the hallway and then I was outside, and Dysart was coming after me and shouting … Maybe I
did
scream, I don't remember. But anyway, he's still shouting and he's coming behind me. I also hear dogs and I lose my shoes. Look at my feet,' and she kicked off her slippers and showed him her soles, which were covered with strips of Band-Aid. ‘Blisters.'

‘Nasty. What was he shouting?'

‘He's sorry, he wants to apologize, I don't remember.'

‘OK, you still have the gates to get over.'

‘The fucking gates. Some kids tossed me a rope and I climbed.'

‘Kids?'

‘Little kids. They had a whacky plan to climb the gates and poison the dogs.'

‘But instead they rescued you.'

‘Thank Christ they did. I climbed and climbed and my hands hurt like hell. Then these kids took me to the guy who owns the hearse.'

Perlman had the feeling she was skipping something. ‘Roll it back a bit, Annie. Dysart went inside a room to throw up. Did he unlock that room?'

‘I never knew which room he went into because I couldn't find him.'

‘You knocked on a couple of doors in the upstairs hallway. And he didn't respond.'

‘Right … I remember a smell.' She wrinkled her nose.

‘A strong disinfectant by any chance?'

‘Very strong …' She held a hand to the side of her face and closed her eyes. He wondered where she'd drifted.

‘You smelled this upstairs mainly?'

‘Upstairs, yeh. But also on Dysart's clothes. He reeked of it.' She looked at Perlman: something clearly distressed her, because she grabbed the hem of her robe and twisted it, curling it round her fingers.

‘What else do you remember.'

‘There's this other room … The smell was stronger …'

‘Was this room locked?'

‘No … I thought he might be in there because of the smell, and I wanted that key to the gates, Perlman. I had to have that fucking key. What was I thinking? He'd hand it over to me? Here, let yourself out … was I thinking that?'

‘Slow down, take it easy, Annie.'

‘This room was different from the rest of the house.'

‘What way.'

‘… the floor. No carpet. It was tiled.'

‘White tiles.'

‘Right.'

‘Was there a bed?'

She hunched forward over her glass. Her body seemed to have locked, as if she'd become paralyzed in this awkward curved position.

‘A sink … I remember a sink. I think I found a light switch and turned it on and I saw this steel sink.'

‘What else?'

‘A naked woman was standing at the sink … she was running hot water very slowly out of the tap into a cloth, and she was washing her hands and body and her hair was hanging over her shoulders … the room was clouded with steam.' She caught her breath. ‘I feel giddy.'

‘It's the wine, the tobacco.'

‘There's a breeze following me around, and footsteps in the distance but nobody's coming. And the person getting out of that chair … He isn't real, he's kind of shadowy, like he's almost transparent … Maybe the place is haunted after all.'

Perlman tried to redirect her. ‘Go back to the room with the tiles, Annie.' He sat on the bed. She was trembling.

‘I don't need to go there, Perlman.'

‘Try.'

‘Easy for you to say …' She blinked rapidly. ‘The woman turns and I think she sees me and she's surprised because she drops her towel. And that's when I see.'

‘See what?'

‘This woman has a
cock
.'

‘You saw this for sure?'

‘Not for sure … I look away because I'm what? Embarrassed, shocked? I don't know, Perlman.'

‘All this took a few seconds?' Perlman said.

‘You think I was looking at my watch?'

‘You see the woman's actually a
man
and you look away quickly.'

‘I think I did … yes …'

‘You step back out of the room? Come on, I want this through your eyes, Annie.'

‘I turn my head because I'm looking away and … Remember there's steam, a lot of steam … but I see a bed, a kind of a bed.'

Perlman waited.
A woman who's a man. A kind of bed
.

‘There's a bundle on the bed. I don't know, it's laundry wrapped up in a sheet, ready to be taken away … That's when I turned and ran down the hallway.'

‘A bundle of laundry. Why would it scare you?'

‘The room's spinning, Lou. Hold me or I'll float away.'

He put his arms around her. ‘Take your time. Just take your time.' He was talking in the hushed reassuring voice he'd use to a frightened child. ‘Tell me about the laundry.'

‘I thought: laundry. It passed through my mind in a flash. It's a white sheet soaked with blood, it's bulky, because it's laid across something. But I realize it's not laundry, Perlman. It's not.'

‘You can tell what this
something
is?' Perlman felt tension rise inside.

She looked at him, dazed. ‘The shape I see under the bloodstained sheet is human.'

‘Human? Covered all over? No view of the face?'

‘Covered totally. Head to toe. In this bloody sheet.'

Perlman got up from the bed and walked to the window and looked out into the rain. It fell miserably: the city was draining away. He thought of Kirk McLatchie's photograph. He thought of Dysart showing him this sickroom where he said his mother had died.

How many others had died in that room?

A bloodstained shroud. Only now the bed isn't a souvenir of his mother, her deathbed – something else. He moved back to Annie and for a moment saw the vulnerable child in her, the kid from The Drum drawn into a world she didn't comprehend.

She stared at him. ‘How could that bastard Chuck send me to a place like that? How could he do that to me?' Now she was angry, outraged – but also perplexed. She'd been let down, she'd been sent out and abandoned inside a bad dream, and she couldn't figure why.

Flecks of spit gathered at the corners of her mouth. She drew back from Perlman. ‘You don't ship somebody like me to a guy you know fuck all about. And that room, Christ, that
room
… I dreamed it, I want to believe I did.'

‘I know you do.' Perlman listened to the screaming rain assault the window.

41

He was already running late when he left St Jude's. He wasn't looking forward to HQ, passing through the front door and watching faces turn to clock him, or catching sleekit smiles and hearing sly whispers. Nobody inside Pitt Street had forgotten Miriam's trial, and most resented Perlman for his actions. He had few friends in this place.

PC Jack Wren was one of the few. He stood at the reception desk when Perlman came in and peered at him over the rims of his specs. He'd shaved off his walrus moustache.

‘Evening, Lou,' Wren said.

‘I turn my back, you get a face lift,' Perlman said.

Wren winked. ‘Flattery will get you anything.'

‘I live in hope,' Perlman said.

‘You really think it works?'

‘What – hope or flattery?'

‘The shave, Lou. The
shave
.'

Perlman said, ‘I swear, ten years younger, Jack,' and headed for the stairs.

Wren said, ‘Good to see you. I mean that.'

The warmth Perlman felt at Wren's greeting faded as he climbed, hurrying past figures coming down, some who looked openly hostile, or merely nodded, others who pretended they were involved in conversation and didn't see him. Fuck them.

He reached the landing, paused to collect himself. He listened to the beat of his heart and he thought of Annie's story. Was it enough to take to the Proc-Fisc's office for a search warrant? Dysart's house was in Adamski's territory. Maybe Adamski would think he had sufficient to go on. If there was a body in that house, he'd want to move in with a crime-scene team before all evidence had been destroyed. You couldn't wipe everything away. Hairs, blood in the septic system, something damning always remained.

And now he had Tay, and no time to think of anything else.

He looked along the landing at the flight of stairs leading up to Tay's eyrie and he felt the stab of a sudden headache. He was queasy and tired, and couldn't remember when he'd last eaten.

Tay's door was shut. He straightened his back, knocked and went inside without waiting for a response – politeness wasn't expected of him, so he'd live up to expectations.

The room was lit only by a small desk lamp.

Very Gestapo, Perlman thought.

Tay sat behind his desk, big hands clamped. Because of shadow, Perlman could see only half Tay's face – it was like a rock fallen from a sea cliff and eroded by tides into an impressionistic human countenance. One eye, one nostril, one ear.
Tay by Picasso
. Perlman ransacked the gloom.

There was Latta, in his Sunday best, a dark brown serge three-piece number and a necktie of horrible red and yellow stripes. Latta's chair was drawn close to Tay's desk as if he might feed off any fallen crumbs of authority. And in the corner, bearded and taciturn, sat the long-armed Tigge, gazing at Perlman with a frown. Tigge's nasal passages made a quiet squeaking sound as he breathed.

The gang's here, Perlman thought. And they know something I don't. He was at a disadvantage, which was the way they'd want him to feel.

Tay made a mighty show of looking at his watch. Wait for the sarcasm. Tay never disappointed.
Harumph
. ‘Glad you could see your way clear, Perlman.'

‘I've been busy.' Perlman noticed an empty chair but didn't take it, although he longed to sit. Upright, he hoped he gave the impression of self-confidence.

‘We'll take your word for that.' Tay had a folder in front of him, the only object on the desk except the lamp. He opened it slowly, tapped the papers inside with his stub of an index finger. ‘These are the conclusions of forensic examinations carried out by Sidney Linklater,' Tay said with measured formality, needlessly adding, ‘Doctor of Medicine.'

He leaned over the sheets. Latta tilted himself slightly forward, ever closer to il Duce, and turned his face briefly to Perlman and there it was, that bitter glint in the eye, a provocation:
let's see you walk away from this, Perly
. The desk lamp buzzed curiously, a weird glitch in the stream of electricity.

This hand was violently amputated from the body of …

Perlman heard him intone Miriam's name and he lurched. He experienced a ghost pain sear his own arm. Sweet Christ no, Miriam, no, he was hearing this wrong, picking up distorted signals. Tay's voice became a dirge that rendered language as blocks of grievous sound, like a pibroch.