The Last Darkness (10 page)

BJ Quick said, ‘Anything else he's done?'

Terry said, ‘Aye. He went into Queen Street Station earlier and made a phone call.'

BJ Quick said, ‘You get close enough to hear him?'

‘Naw, no chance. It was over and done in a flash. Listen, BJ, my arse is as cold as a witch's tit. My feet are ice –'

‘You're getting paid,' Quick said.

Terry Dogue said, ‘I haven't seen a penny yet.'

‘You'll get some scratch tonight, wee man.'

‘That'd be welcome.'

‘Phone me, eight-thirty, nineish.'

Terry Dogue heard the line click dead. He had a mind to phone Quick back and tell him to piss off. Terry Dogue didn't do dogsbody jobs like this, Terry Dogue may be five feet tall but he had dignity, and Terry Dogue didn't didn't
didn't ever
work without pay. But he held back. The last thing you did was get on the wrong side of BJ.

Let's not overlook the Furf.

What a pair: Mr Quick and Mr Razor. Fucking terrorists. Terry Dogue had spent time in Barlinnie and he knew some hard cases. But Furfee and Quick were something else: total fucking nutters, headcases of the first order.

Terry Dogue screwed his Northern Arizona University Lumberjack's dark-blue baseball cap on to his frozen skull. He'd always had a mysterious
thing
about Flagstaff, although he'd never visited it in his life. When he'd first heard the name of the town as a kid he'd imagined a stark white flagpole in the middle of nowhere.
Magic
. Then he'd seen pictures in
Arizona Highways
, and begun a lifelong yearning for a sight of the San Francisco Peaks or a quiet stroll through the old town on a soft summery night when the air was said to be scented with pine.

Flagstaff, Az, dream destination.

He needed to win the Lottery, buy a plane ticket, piss off into the skies.

But. Here he was. Glasgow. His lot. The only place he knew. He was trapped like a doomed fly in a jar of Dundee marmalade.

The crowds streamed past him down Buchanan Street, walking under Christmas tinsel and bright lights strung between buildings. ‘Good King Wenceslas' issued from a loudspeaker somewhere. Who the hell was Wenceslas and what was so good about him anyway? Terry Dogue wondered.

Up ahead he saw the Arab moving, and he hurried after him.

Lose the Arab, you lose your credibility. Maybe also something else.

One slice of the Furf's blade and, whoops, gelded.

Marak entered a cafeteria for soup and a sandwich. But the soup, in which the letters of the alphabet floated, was lukewarm and didn't heat him. The weather was depressing. He felt blunted by the way the clouds hung low in a dismal sky.

He walked back to Bath Street and stood directly across from the premises of Joseph Lindsay. Light burned in the window. Soon people would be leaving work. He'd already decided on a course of action. It was a risk, certainly, because it meant he'd have to come out into the open – but in the absence of any practical guidance he saw no other way. His father used to say: if you have faith in your heart, the world will one day make sense.

Yes, I have faith in my heart and my father's blood in my veins and memories that go on and off inside my head like electric signals that have short-circuited. He thought of his mother and the white-walled room where she lay in Haifa, just below HaZiyonut Boulevard, and the nurses who'd been bringing her medication in little plastic cups for years. He saw the ceiling fan going round and round, stirring dust and dead air and desiccated insects snared in webs. He saw his mother's dry lips and the distance in her eyes and remembered how he'd sit on the edge of the bed and swab her mouth with a damp cloth.

She still screamed now and then in her dreams. Awake, she spoke incoherently of scorpions and ghosts. She recognized nobody. Dr Solomon had said,
Lifamen anashim kol kach mitrachakim she aynaynou yecholim yoter limsto et ha derech elayhem le olam …

Sometimes people go away where we can't reach them …

And if we can't reach them, we can't recover them.

Marak thought: They killed my father. They drove my mother to an inaccessible hell. The whole intricate mosaic of family destroyed.

Traffic along Bath Street was ponderous now. The work-day was winding down. Streetlamps were lit. He walked to the corner, stopped, looked this way and that. He saw no sign of the little man in the baseball cap he'd observed hours before, but he was sure he was somewhere nearby.

Ramsay's spy. He wasn't very good at spying.

Marak turned, walked back, looked up at Lindsay's window. The woman would come out, he knew that.

He'd worked out his approach. He'd rehearsed it in his mind.

Yes yes. It would be fine.

15

Lou Perlman thought: This Billie is a real peroxide chickadee. She reminded him of a latter-day version of Betty Grable, or maybe Lana Turner, except when she opened her mouth what came out was more Castlemilk, with affectations, than California. She wore a brown suede skirt and a silk blouse and calf-length boots that matched the skirt. She had a pert face, pointy little nose, blue eyes, red lips just a little too full. Loads of navy eye-shadow, and a bunch of silvery bracelets that clanked when she moved. She might have been thirty, probably more.

‘It's a bloody tough one to take in,' she said. ‘He was such a … well, a sweetheart. A nice man.'

Sandy Scullion, solicitous, said, ‘I'm sorry. I wish I had an easier way of telling you.'

‘A man's been murdered. How can you rephrase that so it's digestible? You can't.'

They were in Joseph Lindsay's office, high-ceilinged, corniced, over-elaborate plaster plums and cherries and apples. The window looked directly down into Bath Street. Perlman glanced down at the streetlamps; fresh snow began to drift into the lights.

He surveyed the room as Billie Houston pulled Kleenexes from a pop-up box on the desk and pressed them to her eyes. He absorbed the surroundings – peach walls, cutesy little prints of mushrooms and toadstools he attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Billie's influence, certificates attesting to various legal qualifications and memberships of this or that society, or good citizenship awards. Joe Lindsay had been civic-minded, a trophy-gatherer.

Perlman wondered if Billie had been one of his trophies. Nubile secretary, sixtyish solicitor, throw them together into the cauldron of an office – had Lindsay been set alight by Billie? Ageing men could be such idiots, he thought. All the remembered appetites of youth they tried to recapture. Hunt the Erection. No more Mister Softee.

‘Was anyone bothering him? Was anyone
threatening
him?' Scullion was asking. He was just so bloody
good
at putting questions in a mild way that you half-expected him to whip out a prescription pad and write you a script for Librium.

She said, ‘No, I don't think so …'

‘Would you have known?' Perlman asked.

‘I knew a lot about his business, Sergeant. I can safely say he wasn't being …
menaced
by anyone. To the best of my knowledge.'

‘Did he seem, um, oh, troubled?' Scullion asked.

‘No …'

‘Any strange phone calls, or unusual visitors you might remember?'

She shook her head, blew her nose. The bracelets chinked. ‘I don't believe so.'

‘You can't think of a reason why anyone would want him dead?'

‘No. Really. He was a decent man.'

‘Tell us about his life,' Perlman said. ‘Hobbies. Friends. Anything you can think of.'

‘He grew vegetables,' she said. ‘He occasionally played bowls.'

Vegetables and bowls, Perlman thought. This wasn't what you'd call a keg of dynamite.

‘He specialized in growing different types of broccoli.'

Perlman wondered if his heart could take these revelations. ‘The problem is, Miss Houston, broccoli and bowls aren't the kind of things that get men killed. Drug deals, theft, revenge, aye, definitely. But growing broccoli isn't a dangerous pursuit.'

‘You're looking for something underneath, right? Solicitor's sleazy secrets, stuff like that. I can't think of any, Detective.'

‘Forgive me for this, but I
have a personal question –'

‘You're going to ask if we were an item, right?'

‘You're a mind-reader.'

‘We were friends. Nothing more. We sometimes had dinner. He behaved very well towards me. He didn't try to grope me under the table. Are you satisfied?' She looked at him with some hostility, as if he'd wrongly attacked her virtue.

‘Lou said. I'm sorry. I had to ask. Look at it from my point of view. What if you had a boyfriend who was jealous of your relationship with Joseph Lindsay, say, and what if this boyfriend, in a fit of insane jealousy, decided to kill the lawyer?'

‘But I don't have a boyfriend –'

‘Fine. So we eliminate that possibility. One less road to explore. Saves time.'

‘You always suspect the worst of people?' she asked.

‘Not always,' Perlman said.

Sandy Scullion interrupted. ‘What about his clients, Miss Houston?'

‘Generally old people with too much money and property. Mr Lindsay handled a lot of wills.'

‘I'll need a list of them,' Scullion said.

‘I can do that for you.'

‘I'm also going to need access to his house.'

She hesitated. Scullion said, ‘It's necessary.'

‘There's a spare key in his desk.'

‘His family. What do you know about them?'

‘His wife died sixteen or seventeen years ago. A stroke, I think. His daughter Michaela lives in Australia. His son David is in Canada. Both married. They don't come back to Scotland often.'

‘Do you have phone numbers for them?'

‘They're in Mr Lindsay's address book. I don't envy you the job of calling them with news like this.'

Scullion said, ‘You haven't mentioned friends.'

‘He wasn't an outgoing man. I'd say he had acquaintances more than close friends. He used to do work for a committee that had something to do with Palestine, but I don't know a whole lot about that part of his life. He'd drifted away from it, though.' She fell silent, buried her face in a clump of Kleenex, and sobbed quietly.

Lou Perlman's instinct was to comfort her, because he was a sucker for a weeping woman; show him a woman crying and he'd rush to the nearest flower shop and buy out the whole lily supply and have it wrapped and ribboned, toot sweet.

Scullion was already uttering sympathy. ‘Take your time, there's no hurry.'

Billie Houston dropped the tissues into the trash and looked up at the ceiling and sniffed. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘When you've worked for a person for eight years you …'

‘It's all right,' Scullion said.

‘I can't
believe
somebody
killed
him. And the
way
he died … Where were we? Friends. Right. He had dinner once a month with a man he'd known for years. An old friend from university.'

Scullion asked, ‘Do you have a name?'

‘Yes. Artie Wexler.'

Perlman was instantly intrigued. ‘Artie Wexler? Fellow of about sixty, sort of square jaw, hair like a wig?'

‘I only saw him once,' she said. ‘I don't remember what he looked like. Once a month he and Mr Lindsay had dinner at La Lanterna.'

‘You know this guy, Lou?' Scullion asked.

Perlman said, ‘Unless there's another Artie Wexler I never heard of.'

Scullion was quiet a moment, then he looked at Billie Houston and said, ‘I'd like you to keep our conversation completely confidential, Miss Houston. For the time being at least.'

‘I will. Don't worry.'

Artie Wexler
, Perlman thought, and remembered the man's smile as he'd escorted Miriam out of the reception area at the Cedars and into the corridor beyond. That smirk. No, Lou, you only imagined it that way. It was a straightforward smile, maybe even sympathetic:
Sorry about your brother, Lou
. You could read all you liked into an expression. And quite often you read the wrong things – especially, it seemed, when it came to Miriam.

Forget her. Think of something else.

This new coat, say. Bloody brilliant. It suits me. I feel well-dressed. Raised in class and status. Spend a great wad of money and it uplifts you.

Scullion's mobile rang and he fished it out of his pocket, answered it. ‘For you, Lou.'

Perlman took the phone and heard Miriam's voice. ‘I don't mean to disturb you, Lou. Can we meet later?'

‘Of course.'

‘Is seven suitable? Outside the Art School?'

‘I'll be there.' He was about to ask the purpose of the invitation, but she'd hung up. He gave the phone back to Sandy Scullion and thought: What does she want with me?

What did that question matter?

She could have asked for a meeting in an igloo in Greenland or an assignation on a dying space station and he'd have gone anyway, with or without explanation.

16

Marak saw the blonde woman step out of the building, but as he prepared to cross the street and squeeze through traffic he realized she had company. Two men, one tall and straight-backed with hair the colour of sand, the other bespectacled and a little round-shouldered, escorted her along the pavement. They stood on either side of her like guardians. Marak had a feeling about these two, that they represented some branch of officialdom – lawyers, perhaps, tax or immigration inspectors, policemen, he wasn't sure. They had a certain air, almost a watchfulness, such as he'd seen on the faces of bodyguards.

They all stopped on a corner and exchanged a few words, and then the woman walked away. She was alone now. He watched the men continue to move along Bath Street.

The woman went south into West Campbell Street and Marak hurried between slow traffic lest he lose sight of her. She walked about ten yards in front of him. There were no Christmas decorations along this street. She turned a corner, and Marak went after her and saw her step into a building with the letter P outside. P, Parking,
yes
, of course, she was going to fetch her car. He moved behind her, closing the distance, aware on the edges of his perception that there were no pedestrians, only a few cars coming down the exit ramp, and there was nobody waiting outside the lift where the woman had paused.