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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 o
f 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.
Chilled, Perlman cupped his hands and blew into them. He stood upright. His joints felt like fused metal. He gazed at the man’s face and for a moment had a fleeting sense of familiarity. From where? He turned and squinted across the narrow river where the old Renfrew ferryboat lay at anchor: a relic of a dead Glasgow, it had once carried passengers downriver. Now it had been adapted as a floating venue for theatrical and musical events. Perlman had attended a concert there some time ago, a swing revival band from Rotterdam.
He looked down at the suicide again. No ID. No farewell letter.
Maybe that was the way he’d planned it. Just a nobody at the end of a rope with nothing to say. Sad. Perlman nodded at the two orderlies from the ambulance.
‘You can take him,’ he said.
They lifted the dead man into the ambulance. Perlman caught himself staring at the corpse’s shoes, and he thought of the man’s soft hand again, and he had one of those moments when you realize, with a quickened skip of pulse, that appearances are only surface. Stir the pond and the silt shifts and sometimes something unexpected emerges from the murk.
2
The young man walked through the park with his hands in the pockets of his big heavy coat. He listened to a breeze rattle the skeletal branches of trees. He saw a half moon in the sky. Glass from broken lamps and hypodermic syringes littered the ground. He passed a bench, glanced at a man who lay there in a tattered sleeping bag that oozed pieces of insulation. The man’s head was covered in a hood, and he snored. A drunk, a beggar.
Beyond the sleeper, the young man saw the statue and a pale light hanging above it. You’ll find a figure carved in stone. That’s the place where you wait. He tried to read the inscription on the base, but couldn’t make out the letters because too many vandals had come this way with spraypaint. Who was this fellow who’d been honoured by a statue? A political hero? a great poet? He couldn’t have been so very important if he’d been placed in this tiny swathe of park so far from the city centre.
The young man wondered how long he’d have to wait. He walked round the statue and tried to keep warm – a problem in this refrigerated city so far from home. Now and then he touched his short black beard, which was cold. The breeze came up again, arctic, and he lifted the collar of his coat against his neck.
In the darkness to his right the headlights of a car flicked on then off, and again. The sign. He walked forty or fifty yards until he reached the street. He was aware of tenement windows on the edge of his vision, so many families living one on top of the other, creatures in hives. He smelled food frying, and realized he’d eaten nothing save some tangerines and a banana and handfuls of garinim in the last twenty-four hours. He remembered the long shuddering train journey from one end of Europe to the other, and before that the voyage on the rusted fishing boat that ferried him from Port Said to Athens, and the stench of rotten sardine in the airless hold where he’d been obliged to travel, a foul odour he could still feel at the back of his throat.
He reached the car. The passenger door swung open.
‘Get in.’ The face of the man behind the wheel was in shadow.
The young man climbed in, closed the door.
The man behind the wheel said, ‘Call me Ramsay.’ Cawmeramzay.
‘Please … You will have to speak more slowly.’
‘Going too fast for you, Abdullah?’
‘Abdullah? That is not my name –’
‘Look, if I choose to call you Abdullah, that’s your name, okay? Stick your backpack on the floor and show me your passport.’
‘Why?’
‘You could be anybody. That’s why.’ This Ramsay, concealed in shadow, spoke English with an impenetrable accent. Words ran together, letters fell from the end of words, it wasn’t the well-schooled English of the teachers in the schools the young man had attended. Cautiously, he handed his passport to Ramsay, who opened it and checked it with a glance.
‘You look like your photograph, Abdullah,’ Ramsay said, passing the document back.
‘Of course. But my name –’
‘Fuck the name. Who gives a shite? Me Ramsay you Abdullah. Let’s keep it nice and simple.’
The manner in which he said ‘Abdullah’ was offensive. It was a joke name; as if all Middle Easterners were called Abdullah. The young man thought of the passport he’d been given in Athens, which identified him as Shimon Marak, a naturalized Greek of Israeli birth, and he realized that assumed names were simply tools of deception, and unimportant so long as you never lost sight of your real identity.
Ramsay said, ‘Here’s how it is. One, I’ll drive you to a place where you’ll live. It’s not fancy, but I don’t expect you’re accustomed to the Ritz. The address is 45 Braeside Street. Commit it to memory. Two, don’t ask me any questions because the chances are I don’t know the answers anyway. You follow me?’
‘Yes, yes. I follow.’ The young man had expected a warmer reception. He’d anticipated an ally in this alien city, somebody at least kind. But Ramsay’s attitude was the opposite.
I constructed an ideal in my head, Marak thought. Now I must absorb the reality. I am not here as a tourist with a camera. Ramsay’s hostility was unexpected, but what did it matter in the long run?
Ramsay turned his face, and Marak saw his profile for the first time. The nose that terminated in a sharp point, the backward slope of forehead, the strange way the chin ran almost without impediment into the neck. Ramsay’s hair was thick and brushed high from his scalp. One wedge, perhaps gelled, jutted from the front of his head, a promontory.
‘I’ll drive you to your new home, Abdullah.’
‘I’m tired. It’s been a long journey.’
‘I don’t want to know anything about it,’ Ramsay said.
The young man fell silent and stared from the window. He was aware of crossing a narrow river, the same one he’d travelled over earlier on his way to meet Ramsay. He’d ridden in a black taxicab driven by a pockmarked man who spoke as incomprehensibly as Ramsay. Laughing, the cabbie had said, You another fucking illegal then? He’d agreed with the driver: Yes yes. Illegal yes. Another foreigner. Och, there’s always a shortage of dishwashers at the kebab joints. He’d smiled at that too and nodded eagerly. I understand nothing, Mr Driver. I am moron. Yo
u do not know if I am Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, whatever. I am just idiot from a distant country.
He saw the glare of the city, the night sky ablaze with electricity. Ramsay switched on the radio and listened to some kind of popular American music.
‘You like the golden oldies, Abdullah?’ Ramsay asked.
‘Pardon me?’
‘Ah, the tunes of yesteryear,’ Ramsay said. ‘The memory lanes of our lives and times. The way we were.’
Splish splash I was taking a bath, the singer sang.
‘Bobby Darin,’ Ramsay said.
The young man glanced at Ramsay as the car passed under a streetlamp and saw that the protruding bolt of hair was a peculiar yellow emerging from the blackness of scalp. He wondered about this decoration, this dye, and whether it signified anything.
‘Bobby Darin,’ Ramsay said again. ‘You’re listening to a dead man’s voice. Amazing when you think about it, Abdullah, intit?’
Abdullah. Enough. The young man looked at a red traffic light. The colour of his feelings. He pressed his palms together hard. ‘Call me Shimon. I prefer that.’
‘Whatever bangs your bongo, pal,’ Ramsay said, and beat a hand on the dash in time to the song. ‘I was splishing and a-splashing. Splashing and a-splishing. Got it? Altogether now, Abdullah.’
3
Sidney Linklater, forensics expert, was a Force Support Officer, a civilian attached to the Strathclyde Police. He was in his early thirties and spent all his spare time in wellies and raincoat trudging through the mud of ancient graveyards in pursuit of his hobby, charcoal rubbings of headstones.
Perlman thought this ghoulish, given the nature of Linklater’s work, which took place in a world of decaying corpses and maggots channelling through rancid flesh. Why didn’t Sid have a hobby that took him well away from death? There was nothing sickly or weirdo in young Linklater’s appearance; he had the healthy open face of an eager boy-scout making his first successful sheepshank. Maybe he just felt at ease with the dead: they couldn’t hurt your feelings, couldn’t let you down. Had some flighty young number broken Linklater’s tender heart?
The Last Darkness Page 1
