The Last Darkness

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing's best-kept secret.” —
The Sunday Times

“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —
GQ

“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —
Daily Mail

“Armstrong's skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —
The Scotsman

“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.”
—The Daily Telegraph
on
Agents of Darkness

“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —
Books
on
Heat

“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on
Jig

“A full throttle adventure thriller.”
—The Guardian
on
Mambo

“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —
Publishers Weekly
on
Mazurka

The Last Darkness

A Glasgow Novel

Campbell Armstrong

For different kinds of assistance
,

my gratitude goes to Erl and Anne Wilkie
,

Brenda Harris, Stephen McGinty, Hazel Frew
,

Jeannine Khan, Kirsten Wilkie, Sydney Altman
,

Robert Burns, Joy Frew, Tomasso, Ed Breslin
,

Diana Tyler, and my wife Rebecca

This book is dedicated

to the memory of my mother
,

May Black, 1919–2001
.

1

Lou Perlman stood on the dark riverbank and gazed up at the body dangling from a girder under Central Station Bridge.

This was the second hanging he'd seen in his life.

The first – long ago, almost fifty years – had been a milk delivery-man called Kerr who'd hung himself from an oak in a scrubby little park at the edge of the old Gorbals. Perlman hadn't thought about Kerr in ages, but now he remembered the dead man had worn a white work uniform with the logo Southern Cooperative Dairy.

Dresses for work, hangs himself instead. Little Lou, about six and chubby, had watched cops cut Kerr down and place him on the grass.
Obviously a suicide
, one of the cops had said.

Lou had never heard that word. He'd looked it up in his father's big dictionary. ‘
The act of killing oneself intentionally.
' It had seemed strange to him that anyone would take his own life. Years later, as the recipient of several hard-won diplomas from the academy of rough streets, it no longer astonished him. Depression, melancholy, debt, terminal weariness – there were a thousand reasons or more for slashing your wrists in a bathtub or swallowing fifty Temazepam or tying a noose round your neck.

The air beneath the bridge smelled dank. A goods train rumbled overhead. Perlman watched the wagons as they passed out of view. He stamped his feet for warmth. The tip of his nose was an ice-cube. He could sense snow in the air, an early December downfall. He searched the pockets of his coat for his gloves, but could find only one. Christ knows where the other was. He was always losing gloves. Socks too. Anything that comes in pairs I lose one, he thought. Why couldn't they sell gloves and socks in threes?

He glanced at his watch: 1:15 a.m. He lit a cigarette and watched two cops climb an extension ladder. Another uniform was already up in the girders fiddling with the knotted rope. An ambulance appeared. A couple of medics came out carrying a stretcher, which they set at the foot of the ladder. Perlman scanned the casual observers who stood here and there, the night people, the homeless, the curious who just happened to stumble upon this unexpected cameo of the city.

Suicide
. That's from the Latin, of course, Colin had said. Perlman remembered how his brother had remarked, in a smart-arse offhand manner, that the word was derived from
sui
, oneself, and
cidium
, a killing. Clever Colin, four years older than Lou and even in those days the proud owner of a Very Big Brain, top of his class in everything.

Poor Colin, all things considered. Two days ago he'd been a Polaroid of good health. Strong, fit, lean. A weight-lifter, cyclist, non-smoker, a man who abstained from all toxic ingestion except the occasional glass of good wine. Very good wine.

Things change, zoom, zap, God never gives warnings.

The cops were lowering the body now. Carefully, in slow stages, they brought the dead man down. Perlman looked at the corpse's herringbone overcoat; expensive wool, no
shmatte
. The fellow's scarf was grey silk and his slip-on shoes gleamed in the headlights of the ambulance. One trouser leg had ridden up, showing a short black sock and a stretch of white skin. He wore a plain gold wedding ring. He'd come here, rope presumably in coat pocket and, stalked by God knows what horrors, he'd either climbed up into the girders from the stone support plinth on the riverbank, or he'd descended from the railway line above.

Then he'd made the necessary killing attachments and jumped.

Perlman stepped towards the stretcher, looked down at the dead man. What had driven him to finish his life hanging from the underside of a railway bridge that straddled the River Clyde in the middle of Glasgow? Eyes open, lips parted, head tilted limply to one side, the guy had black and silver Brylcreemed hair parted in a razor-sharp line to one side. He might have been dressed for a night out, a serious date. He was sixty, Perlman guessed. Maybe more.

Perlman bent over, and his bones creaked, and he thought how, especially on these biting wintry nights, you could hear the Reaper's advance signals in the realignment of joints. He studied the rope, one end of which lay across the dead man's chest; the other was bound hard round the throat and gathered at the back of the neck in a big thick slipknot that looked like a cancerous growth, a lethal melanoma. The end that had been fixed to the girder was stained dark and oily from the city's emissions, from railway residues and lubricants and leakages.

‘I had to cut that top knot, Sergeant. With my knife.'

Perlman looked up at the young policeman who'd spoken. How like kids they seemed to him these days, callow boys, some of them barely at the age of shaving. This one was called Murdoch. He had an open pink face that shone from the cold and earnest eyes.

‘I couldn't work it loose with my hands,' Murdoch said. ‘I tried.'

Perlman shrugged. ‘No big deal, son. We couldn't leave the poor sod hanging up there until we'd located somebody with nimble wee fingers, could we? Might've taken all night.' He wondered why the young cop sounded so apologetic: eager to please, he assumed. Young and keen, didn't want to
wreck
what might have been a vital item of evidence, in this case a knot in a length of rope recently tethered to a girder.

Perlman sometimes had an unsettling effect on young cops. God knows, he always tried to be friendly and understanding, even compassionate, but maybe they were intimidated by the longevity of his career, or his legend as a cop who knew just about every ned in the city. Or they were perturbed, as ambitious young men and women might be, by his refusal to accept promotion beyond the rank of Detective-Sergeant.
This
was so tough for these kids to understand? It was simple: he didn't want to get caught up in the internal politics of the Force, which grew more complex the higher you rose. He'd seen too many useful cops taken off the streets and shackled to their desks, clamped in the chains of administration. He thought: if I don't want to get my arse kicked upstairs, it's because this is my job and this is my city, and I don't want to change a bloody thing, not even a situation like this, kneeling on the bank of a black river in the freezing night air in the cold cold heart of Glasgow.

He rummaged in the pockets of the coat. Empty. He fingered the wedding ring, checked it for an inscription, found none. He felt the softness of the dead man's palm. He undid the buttons of the coat, slid his fingers inside. He had an uneasy sensation, a stark sense of trespass. Going through a dead man's clothing in front of twenty or so night-crawlers – he knew he ought to have waited until the poor bastard was inside the ambulance before starting this rudimentary exploration, but he'd always been impetuous. A weakness in his psychological structure, too late to fix.

He called to Murdoch. ‘Son, get these bloody gawkers out of here. Scatter the whole crew of them. And don't be polite either. Use the authority of the uniform, and
lean
if you need to.' He gestured to the small crowd. Murdoch and his fellow uniforms began to make the appropriate loud noises,
Come on, move along
,
nothing for you to see here, shove off the lotta you
. The pedestrians began to shuffle away. They'd regroup further down the street, of course: death was magnetic.

Perlman took off his glasses, wiped them on the cuff of his coat, then returned to his examination of the suicide's jacket. The label read:
Tailored in Italy for Mandelson's of Glasgow
. Mandelson's was an expensive menswear shop in Buchanan Street: it wasn't where Lou Perlman bought his clothes. He slipped a hand into the inside pocket. Two spare buttons wrapped in clear plastic, nothing else. No wallet, no keys, nothing. It was the same with the side and breast pockets. All empty. Perlman frisked the trouser pockets: nothing – no loose change, hankie, crumpled slip of paper, match-book. A dead man, a well-dressed, well-nourished Caucasian, with no identification and only one personal possession, an anonymous gold ring.