The Last Darkness (45 page)

‘It's your call,' Scullion said.

‘You're not happy with it.'

Scullion shrugged. ‘I didn't say that.'

‘You're about as subtle as a tabloid, Sandy. You could always pull rank.'

‘Aye, right, I could. Except I'm taking the easy way out. I'm leaving this one entirely to you.' Scullion was Perlman's superior officer, but always treated him as an equal. Certain Very Big Shots who occupied the upper slopes of Force HQ, the men who sent out reams of brain-numbing bumf weighted with stats and regs to the foot soldiers, thought Scullion gave Perlman a wee bit too much freedom. Lou, twenty years older than Scullion, reckoned that his long experience in the Force compensated for the difference in rank.

He'd never aspired to a level beyond Detective-Sergeant; the higher you rose, the more tangled the thickets of politics, the more demanding the bureaucracy. You had to play too many daft games. He'd seen good men bleached of vitality by promotion. He'd seen them vanish for ever inside the wormholes of the system or mutate from humans into rubber stamps. Not for him, thanks.

‘I'd like to make Kilroy sweat, Sandy.'

‘And Blum? What about Blum?'

‘I doubt if he has the glands for it. Maybe it'll give him something to think about.'

‘Like what? His conscience?'

‘A lawyer with a conscience? That must be a rare beast.'

Both men paused outside the door of Scullion's office, and Perlman sighed and looked suddenly serious. ‘Sometimes I wish I'd led a life of the mind. A cloistered wee world among the spires of Glasgow University. Harris tweed jacket, leather elbow patches. Prof Perlman, surrounded by nubile undergrads. I'd sit on committees and eat decrusted sandwiches. I'd have no seedy villains and their sordid lawyers to deal with.'

‘Bullshit, Lou. You love your work.'

‘One of love's flaws is the fact it grows cold,' Perlman said. ‘Faulty heat-retention system.'

‘You signed on for life,' Scullion said. ‘Divorce isn't an option.'

‘Feh,' Perlman said. He suddenly remembered the dead gull he'd found in his driveway yesterday morning. It had dropped mysteriously from the sky. No evidence of a wound, no broken wing or leg. It occurred to him that the bird had fallen about twenty yards from the place where Colin had died. Practically on my own doorstep, he thought.

And hadn't he heard on the car radio only this morning of somebody falling from the balcony of a flat in Great Western Road? A suicide? He couldn't remember what the newsreader had said.

The leaping dog, the stiff gull, the balcony jumper – were these all signs of some kind? Did we live in an age of portents? Maybe. But who was wise enough to interpret them?

He had an image of the gull. Eyes void, claws paralysed.

I'd fly away if I had wings, he thought. Who are you kidding? Without your job, life would be one long
kvetch
. Unemployed, you'd go down Domino Drive and shuffle the ivory tablets with the other old Jewish geezers in a senior citizens' centre, and bitch in the bittersweet language of mightabeens.
If I'd gone to Israel when my son asked me, I'd be sucking fresh oranges in Tel Aviv instead of. I shoulda saved harder for my old age, here I am counting pennies and
. He thought: I need the city, the streets, a sense of purpose. Sandy was right: you signed on for life.

I belong to Glasgow. Dear old Glasgow.

Where else would I go?

3

Bobby Descartes wrote in his journal with a ballpoint:
I hate Pakis and Indians, and jews and Nijerians and niggers in jeneral
.

He was a man with pale lifeless grey eyes. He had a tiny mouth he often forgot to close – a trap for flies, his father used to say. He breathed through his open mouth a lot. He had nasal problems and often
thunked
at the back of his throat. He wore purple and green tracksuit trousers of a shiny synthetic material, and a green fleecy top with a hood. He also wore a pair of chunky black running shoes. He liked the mazy footprints made by the contoured rubber soles.

He closed his journal, which had a hundred and twenty pages. So far he'd covered eighty-seven of them with his tiny handwriting. One day he'd have to start a new journal, all blank crisp pages.
Volume Two of Bobby's World View
. He had a lot to get off his chest. Two times one hundred and twenty pages was two hundred and forty. He liked numbers, the act of counting. Arithmetic was an orderly world all to itself.

A TV jabbered in the next room, where his mother lay on her decrepit velvet sofa. She was addicted to self-humiliation shows imported from America. Mountainous men and women, ranting blubbery persons who came screaming and strutting out of the wings.
Check my fucking attitude
. There were Brit clones of these shows on telly. What was wrong with the UK mentality that it had to mimic the American? Turn your head one way, wham, another big fucking yellow McDonald's M in the sky. Swivel it the other, you get an eyeful of long-necked Budweiser bottles lying broken in the gutters and discarded packets of Camel Lights. Newsagents were filled with glossy magazines devoted to the troubled histories of Hollywood film stars. Sluts, shoplifters, cokeheads.

I give a fuck, he thought.

Credit where it was due all the same: the Yanks understood love of country. Yessiree, they did.
My Country, Love It Or Leave It
. Bobby had that bumper sticker tacked to the plywood-panelled walls of his room. He wondered how come national pride had been trashed. Who stood up these days when the band played ‘God Save The Queen', eh? Patriotism was just a bad word. The nation was under an evil spell. An air of despair hung over the land. Try to find a decent hospital. Trains a joke. Buses always overcrowded. Post Office workers downright fucking rude. Factories shutting down. Ordinary people couldn't pay rent.

The country reeked of decay.

He teased back a strip of plywood from the wall and concealed his journal behind it, then he looked from the window down into the street. He saw a burnt-out old Vauxhall and a bunch of shaven-headed locals – he counted six – smoking skunk under a twisted lamp-post that hadn't had a bulb replacement in eight years. A teenage Temazepam addict Bobby knew as Annie swerved along the pavement in the manner of a twig shuttled this way and that by a wind.

Pretty wee thing, Bobby thought. Always dazed and bone-white and nothing in her eyes.

Drug dealers were royalty around here. The police did bugger all. They drove past in their cars like slumming tourists. Look, there's a druggie, just drive on. Upholders of the law, o aye, sure.

He stared at the crummy flats across the way. Some windows had been blocked with sheets of steel. A spray-painted message splattered on one sheet read:
Welcome to Hell
. When he considered how dopers and hoors and an influx of immigrant scum had wrecked this corner of Glasgow, and by extension the whole United Kingdom, he heard a blood-red hum in his brain and his vision went dark at the edges. His rage, which he struggled to maintain on a low-altitude frequency for the purposes of making it through the day, rose to radioactive levels.

In a dark room, by Christ he'd
glow
with fury.

He sat down in front of his computer and checked his email. He had one message. The one he'd been expecting. Even so, it caused a rush of blood to his head.

Go
, the message read.

He sent a reply to [email protected]. He tapped the keys in picky little strokes. The note he transmitted read:
Beezer will do his duty
.

Beezer, his war name. Magistr32 had given him that one. He didn't know why. He didn't want to think about Magistr32 right now because it was a line of thought that always disturbed him, and he gave in to feelings he didn't need. He had to be absolutely fucking
focused
.

He deleted all his messages in and out, shut the machine down and slid open the drawer of the woodwormed table on which the computer sat. The Seecamp was wrapped in a dirty linen handkerchief.

He removed the gun. He admired its compact design. Amazing how this wee thing, less than five inches long and weighing about ten ounces, could kill. He balanced it in the palm of his hand, and thought
lovely
. He stuck the gun in the right pocket of his tracksuit trousers.

When the time comes. Reach, find, remove, fire.

Today's the day, he thought. No turning back. Enough's enough.

He walked inside the room where his mother, Her Highness, lay. Sandrine Descartes, sixty-six and leathery from half a century of smoking, adjusted her shawl. She looked as if some high-tech latex special effects had been used on her face; her eyes were bright but her skin was pure crone.

Ugly old cow, Bobby thought. Day after day she lay in this dim room and smoked cigarettes with the blinds drawn. She lived in a state of perpetual shade. One day he expected he'd come into the room in time to see her fade into infinity.

On the telly a white-faced woman with long greasy hair was weeping. ‘
I never told her I loved her
,' she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.

The show's hostess squeezed the moment. ‘
It can't be easy to admit you have lesbian feelings for your own sister
–'

Bobby picked up the remote and zapped the TV.

‘I was watching that, Robert.'

‘It's shite,' Bobby said.

‘It interests me. The whole human drama.' She smoked a Kensitas.

‘You see more human drama from your own window.'

‘It depresses me to look out, Robert.'

He had the feeling his mother was about to launch into her usual mumbo about her late father, an important Frog lawyer with a big house in the Loire Valley. Fine wines, crystal, silver candlesticks, the works. Bobby sometimes wondered how much of this story was true.

The plotline was total suds: young French woman of a certain class marries beneath herself, falling for a charming adventurer called Jacques Descartes, who drags her halfway round the world in doomed pursuit of lost gold mines and oil deposits, riches based on wild rumours eavesdropped in the taverns of shabby port cities where travellers traded dodgy map fragments or dog-eared geological reports for a few drams of booze or some cash. The lovers marry in Mozambique and, having survived various disasters – a shipwreck, an earthquake, according to Sandrine – they wash up in Glasgow many years later because Monsieur Le Loverboy has learned of a forgotten silver mine in the hills of Lanarkshire.

Of all places. Lanarkshire. The sticks.

The story culminated in sickness and poverty, Jacques dying from TB, and Sandrine living out a miserable widowhood in this unpleasant corner of a cold Scottish city, her only legacy Bobby, who remembered his dad, his
papa
, as an embittered man with a frighteningly big head and thick white hair, who sometimes sang ‘La Marseillaise' if he was pished. Which was often.

It was all rubbish, Bobby sometimes thought. Pure
keich
. Or maybe there was some nub of truth, enough to keep Sandrine warm on cold nights. Fuck did it matter?

‘I'm going out,' he said.

‘Where?'

‘Don't interrogate me, Ma. I'm thirty-seven years old.'

‘In your head, ah, you are an adolescent.' She made a Gallic gesture, shrugging then throwing her hands up in the fashion of a juggler. ‘No job. No prospects. No girl, Robert. No love. Where is love? Life needs love.'

Her accent turned Robert into Robair. She pronounced their last name Daycart instead of Deskarts. He hated that. Daycart. It was like something with wheels.

‘You do not make anything of yourself.'

‘At least I don't lie around on a clapped-out old sofa watching crap TV.'

‘Ah, no. You are so busy acquiring a university degree, of course. Forgive me, I forget.'

Her sarcasm. Her love story. Her broken heart. Her maroon sofa and that bloody shawl. What else didn't he like about his mother? He headed towards the door. ‘One day you'll be proud of me.'

‘I hold my breath.'

He paused on the way out. Just for a second his nerve wilted, but he pushed his uncertainty aside and shut the door before hitting the stairs. Beezer – one of whose ancestors was a famous French philosopher, a fact Sandrine had fruitlessly tried to impress on her son years ago – was on the go.

With murder in his heart.

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About the Author

Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these,
White Rage
and
Butcher
, were nominated for France's Prix du Polar. Armstrong's novels
Assassins & Victims
and
The Punctual Rape
won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.

Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Campbell Armstrong

Cover design by Angela Goddard

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0712-2

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com