‘Upfront with you. It’s gonny be tough, Mr Perlman. That place where they found him is way oot my territory.’
Perlman said, ‘It’s less than twenty minutes on a bus.’
The Pickler laughed. ‘When were you last on a bus, Mr Perlman?’
Perlman gave The Pickler another ten. ‘I’ll phone you in a few days.’
‘Right you are.’
The Pickler started to get out of the car. ‘None o my business, but if you’re on leave, how come you’re asking about this clown?’
‘Keeping my finger in,’ Perlman said. ‘You still going to meetings, I hope?’
‘Oh aye, when I’m sober enough to remember.’ The Pickler laughed again, a coarse good-natured chortle. He was a man who knew his weaknesses and tried to accommodate them. He took one last gander at the car and said, ‘Vermilion, did you say?’
‘Right.’
‘Mair like purple.’
Perlman drove off. In his rearview mirror he saw The Pickler waddling down the pavement. Choked by camphorated air, Perlman thought: desperate times. Digging up dead clowns.
4
Betty McLatchie vacuumed and dusted, then polished the big glass jar with all the coins in it. She remembered the old money. What a penny bought when she was a kid, a bag of sherbert, a jawbreaker. Two pennies would get you a loosey. A florin would buy you a whole pack of cigs.
She rearranged all the CDs and found sleeves for about a third of the vinyl albums. Perlman had a mixed collection. Jazz, Fifties and Sixties rock, classical. She slipped Sinatra into the CD slot. ‘Fly Me to the Moon.’
Fly me, Frank. She danced into the kitchen. Soiled tea towels and an ashtray full to overflowing and a piece of hard toast with a single half-moon bite out of it and some spilled egg turned to glue. The tiled floor needed a serious mop attack. This shambolic room required the full elbow grease.
Obviously, Perlman didn’t think it important to keep up domestic appearances, which meant he had few visitors – certainly no women he wanted to impress. Once or twice she’d overheard his aunts talk in a disapproving way about a woman Perlman was said to love, Miriam. She isn’t the one for Lou, Hilda would say. And Marlene would agree. You love a man, you don’t fly away leaving him stranded like a starfish on a beach. Now Lou mopes, and he’s too easily depressed. Also that part of the city where he chooses to live isn’t for him either. Egypt, what’s wrong with Shawlands or Giffnock? They analysed the condition of Lou’s existence regularly, sighing, headshaking, such a man deserves better than to live alone.
Betty remembered a call she’d been putting off. She bit on a fingernail and stared at the phone on the sideboard. She picked up the handset, then felt like putting it down again. But she dialled.
Debbie the Dreich answered, second ring.
‘This is two three one—’
Betty said, ‘Hello Debbie. Is my son there?’
‘No your bloody son’s bloody no here. Three days. Not a rat’s squeak outta him.’
Betty pulled on her lower lip. ‘I get worried.’
‘Why waste yer time? He’s done it before.’ Debbie spoke with all the icy resentment of a wife accustomed to abandonment and neglect. She was a talking popsicle.
Betty said, ‘Have you no idea?’
‘Oh, I’ve got an idea all right. I’m thinking I’ll bugger off and leave him.’
‘Ah, no, you need to give him a chance.’
‘He’s had chance after bloody chance. You spoiled him all his life.’
‘I’m a mother who just happens to love her son.’
‘He’s a brat. And you made him that way. Sun shines out his arse.’
Don’t get me started, Betty thought. Or I’ll tell you what I really think about you, Missus Debbie McLatchie née Grierson. Kirk saddled the wrong pony when he married you. The way you slurp soup, and that neighing laugh of yours would get on anyone’s nerves, and as for your temperament, well, you could curdle milk just by looking at it—
‘Listen, Deb, I’m working for this cop right now. Mibbe I can talk to him.’
‘Polis never listen.’
‘No, he’s OK. He’s nice.’
‘See you, you think everybody’s nice, so you do. You’re living in a dream, Betty McLatchie. I don’t believe your Woodstock stories and you shagging these bands. I don’t even believe you went to Woodstock—’
‘Believe what you like. I’m no in the mood for fighting.’
Whack. Debbie hung up.
Betty said, ‘Bad-mannered cow.’ She had a menopausal flush, her private sauna. The surface of her face felt hot.
Debbie was Mrs Brillo Pad, abrasive. Talking to Debbie always made her tense. She pulled a cigarette packet out of her hip pocket and opened it. Inside was half a joint. She lit the doobie with her mini red Bic and took a few hits. Kirk should never have let Annie drift out of his life. Big bloody mistake that. Lovely lively Annie – what had become of her anyway?
She let the joint go out, then stuck it back in the pack. The smoke was just enough to loosen the muscles. And she needed that feeling, the nice blur that buffed the hard edges of things.
When she heard Perlman unlock the front door, she quickly sprayed the kitchen with Ocean Breeze, then she slipped back into the living room in time to greet him. His coat was wet with rain and his thick black-grey hair, which was all over the place, sparkled.
He looked around, pleased and surprised. ‘Excuse me, I’m in the wrong house. I thought a certain Perlman lived here.’
She laughed. ‘I’ve been busy.’
He ran a fingertip along a polished shelf. ‘A miracle. I can see my reflection in wood.’
He smiled, which changed his face entirely. That shroud of sadness he carried fell away and he looked like a boy waking on his birthday filled with expectation.
Betty felt the grass ease through her head. ‘Mind if I ask for some advice?’
‘Ask away,’ he said.
5
Dorcus glanced from the window at the towers glowing in the early dark. Scarred here and there by fire, studded with satellite dishes, they stood only five hundred yards from the walls of his house. He drew a curtain swiftly across the window and motes of old dust scattered all around him.
You don’t have to look now.
But you can still hear the non-stop noise of the tower inhabitants, the Slab People. Stomping rock music, glass shattering, motorcycles roaring, babies crying, dogs barking, drunks vomiting, men and women fighting.
Nurse Payne called out from the top of the stairs with some urgency in her voice. Prepped and ready.
He hurried upstairs, passing the cold spot where he always shivered, then entered his surgery. The slatted white blinds were shut and the lamps lit. Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder was playing on the stereo. Sweetly tragic.
He remembered something his late father, Judge Dysart, had said once. I live in the afterlife, Dorcus, which is my tragedy. And, unfortunately, yours.
Forget that, concentrate on the job now.
He scrubbed his hands scrupulously with Dettol. He pulled on his surgical gloves and admired his flesh through them, white and germ-free. When he thought of germs his head filled with blown-up images of clustered staphylococci or the flamingo-pink rods of E-coli. These insurgents in the blood were his enemies, and he had to maintain a constant vigilance.
He washed his hands a second time before slipping the mask over his face. He liked to feel his breath against the cotton fibres. He brushed his teeth three times a day and mouthwashed night and morning with Corsadyl.
He stood at the table. The flaccid face below him was ageless. It was an ordinary face. If you saw it in an old school photo you wouldn’t pause over it, all you could imagine for this person was a future of drab anonymity. Dorcus reached down, touched the face gently, and marvelled at the resilience and purpose of skin: it kept blood and organs from spilling out and rain from getting in. But it was delicate and so easy to puncture, a shard of glass, a skelf of wood, even
an edge of paper would draw blood. Dorcus thought: poor thing, life hasn’t been generous to you, has it?
Scalpel, Nurse Payne.
Scalpel, Dr Dysart.
He adored Nurse Payne. He looked into her eyes as he took the scalpel from her. The connection was difficult to break. The darkness in her eyes trapped him. She knew how he felt. She was the only emotional certainty in his perilous world.
Now he had work. This body.
The steel blade cut a neat incision from belly button to sternum, and after a second blood flowed cleanly through the slit.
6
Perlman asked, ‘When did you last see Kirk?’
Betty McLatchie frowned. ‘Three days ago he came round my flat and we had a cup of tea.’
‘Did he say he was going away?’
‘Nope.’
Perlman took off his coat finally and threw it over the back of a chair. Betty McLatchie picked it up and carried it out to the hallway where she hung it on a peg. He tried to imagine Miriam doing this kind of thing, hanging up his coat or making sure he wore socks that didn’t have holes in them. He couldn’t see it. At times he thought: I’m meshugane to love her. Other times, he condemned her for being a cold-hearted bitch who just upped and left, without a word of cheerio. He was dogged by the idea she’d found a lover elsewhere, which caused him to feel that his heart had capsized.
‘Does Kirk drink?’
‘Now and then.’
‘Does he have a girl on the side?’
‘I don’t think he screws around, Lou. He’s never been a ladies’ man.’
Perlman felt a small ripple of interest at the back of his head; he heard the old metronomic rhythms of Q & A. Worried mother looks for son. OK, so it’s not hotshit-news gangland violence, and it doesn’t have the strange allure of a decapitated clown, but sometimes a mystery opens up like a night flower. Or maybe not, and the guy will just reappear with vague explanations and one shoe missing and a black eye.
‘What about his friends?’
‘He’s the only one of his crowd married. I keep thinking he must be on the razzle with some of them. One thing leads to another, and you wake up in a strange room in another town with a hangover, and you think, well, I’m already in the doghouse, I might as well stay away for a while.’
‘SMR. Standard Male Response. Problem: I’m in shite. Solution: ah screw it, why not make it worse? It’s the way men are wired, Betty.’
‘Is that how you’re wired?’
He gazed at her. She had a frank look he found challenging. She asked a straight question with every expectation of receiving a straight answer. The unblinking blue eyes never left his face. ‘Some days I don’t think there are any conduits up here at all,’ and he tapped his skull. ‘Other days I believe they just fritzed.’
He lit a cigarette, offered Betty the packet, she shook her head. He walked round the room, this glossy, waxy, reinvented room.
‘You’ll need an ashtray,’ Betty said. ‘Over there.’ She pointed to the wooden sideboard where a shiny glass ashtray was placed.
Perlman obeyed, making a big play of getting the ash dead centre.
She approved. ‘I had a sneaky wee feeling you were trainable.’
She has mischief in her all right. Perlman folded his arms, gazed at the immaculate stack of his CDs. I leave a wreck, I come back – a showroom. ‘What about Kirk’s father?’
Betty made a face like a woman crunching a sherbet lemon between her teeth. ‘Kirk’s never even met his father. One-night stand. Two drunk people in undying lust.’
‘Give me Kirk’s address.’
‘Duntarvie Avenue … number 33. Easterhouse.’
‘I’ll phone the office about your boy. They can check accident reports, hospitals, arrests …’
Perlman noticed she looked disappointed. Is this all, Sergeant? Is this as far as you go? ‘I’d pop down to Pitt Street myself, Betty, but I’m on sick leave.’ Like a man with the plague. Here’s fucking Bubonic Lou coming, quick, bar doors, lock the windies, get antibiotics, and somebody call a priest to bring a bucket of holy water.
Betty said, ‘You don’t look sick.’
‘Don’t be deceived by my healthy East End glow,’ Perlman said. It’s deeper, Betty McLatchie, it’s not something you’d notice on the surface. But he wasn’t about to unload the current state of his psyche on her, nor involve her in a narrative that included a gun being fired in this very room by a sick criminal, and his rough treatment at the hands of the Nazi Tay. ‘If I don’t hear anything from HQ …’ He hesitated. He was on the point of making a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep. ‘I’ll poke around, see what I can do.’
‘Would you?’
‘It’s nothing. I’m sure the boy’s all right.’
‘I hope so. Thanks for taking time.’ She wheeled the vacuum cleaner across the floor. ‘I was thinking I’d leave the kitchen for tomorrow because it’s an all-day sort of job. So I’ll go upstairs and knock your bedroom into some kind of shape. Is that OK with you?’
‘Anything you like. Here, let me take the Hoover for you. Then I’ll make that phone call.’ A moment of gallantry. Perlman puffed as he hauled the heavy old machine up the narrow staircase.
‘You know they make them lightweight nowadays?’ Betty, climbing ahead, looked down at him.
‘Nobody ever told me.’
Betty opened the bedroom door, Perlman followed.
The pictures on the wall didn’t bother him – the old black and white Celtic Lisbon Lions photograph, nor the framed 1967 Scotland v England programme, although these were arguably juvenile and didn’t belong in a grown man’s room – it was the general chaos that shamed him, the way everything rose up at him as if to accuse him of a lifetime of negligence: an abandonment of socks, shirts, trousers, a yellowing midden of old newspapers, the unmade bed, the bedside table where fag-ends had collected and disintegrated at the bottom of a glass filled long ago with water and now the shade of diseased urine.
He was dismayed. He saw the room through Betty McLatchie’s eyes, which made it all the more an indignity. He set the Hoover down and grunted.
‘If we get the newspapers out first,’ she said. She uttered no word of criticism this time, bless her heart.
He opened the window which overlooked the backyard. Ventilate, ventilate. Darkening air sloped into the room, bearing a damp green smell. A starling shot out of the drainpipe.
‘In the future I fancy Zen,’ he said. ‘No chest of drawers, no wardrobe, no bed. A simple futon, some joss-sticks, who knows …’ He was babbling to cover his discomfort. A messy kitchen or a nightmare living room, somehow these were not as bad as a bedroom left to decay. The bedroom was the most intimate room in any house, and he’d allowed his to turn into a loveless slum. He’d had a few unsatisfyingly brief dalliances from time to time over the years, but never in his own bed. Only once, he remembered, had a woman slept in this bed. A lovely doomed junkie called Sadie, who he had rescued from her mental boyfriend, one Moon Riley. Even then, he hadn’t slept with her despite her entreaties. But such a temptation. He’d lain awake on the couch for hours, hearing the bed creak upstairs as she turned this way and that in restless sleep. She left next morning before he woke. He’d never seen her since.
Betty was examining the stacks of newspapers. ‘The Herald, October 1998. Scotland turns into a crime-fearing nation …’
‘Right, I must have kept it for that article,’ he said. A lie. Mibbe. He didn’t remember. He scanned newspapers habitually, he just never got round to binning them.
‘The Evening Times, January 1997. Christ, Lou. How far back do these go?’
‘I don’t know, but I know where they’re going now.’ He bent down quickly and grabbed a bundle and carried them out to the top of the stairs. He dropped them, then went back inside the bedroom. He collected another pile, repeated the act. A cleansing process. He was energized by humiliation.
Betty began hauling papers as well. They had a rhythm going un
til they collided with each other in the bedroom doorway and she laughed and Perlman’s stack slipped out of his arms and fell: the tumbling newspapers released a plastic zip-lock bag, which contained something black in a pool of grey fluid. Perlman couldn’t remember any plastic baggie, unless it had contained food he’d brought upstairs one weary night, and he’d fallen asleep without eating it, and somehow it got buried under the dry dead weight of Heralds and Scotsmans.
He bent down to examine it, and immediately recoiled.
‘What is it?’ Betty asked.
‘You don’t want to know.’ Perlman caught his breath and carefully picked up the baggie between tip of thumb and index finger and held it at arm’s length. ‘Oh dear Christ,’ Betty said, and clasped the palm of one hand to her mouth.
7
In the lamplit car park of the Hilton, Dorcus stood with hands in the pockets of his hooded green duffle-coat. Rain slicked his glasses, and all the world was smudged.
Reuben Chuck held an umbrella which he kept to himself. ‘I’m very satisfied with our arrangement. So far.’
Dorcus found Chuck menacing. He looked at people as if he intended to burn their sockets out with the force of his eyes.
‘I’m assumin our partnership will be ongoin,’ Chuck said.
‘Ah, y-yes, ah, of c-course, indeed.’ Dorcus was infuriated by his lifelong inability to communicate easily. Words came out of him like broken biscuits. He’d always been this way.
Reuben Chuck adjusted the brolly over his head. ‘My clientele is elitist, worldly. They all love to spend.’ He was beautifully dressed. His black hair was so richly gelled it reflected the lights in the windows of the Hilton. He wore long sideburns cut square, one in perfect alignment with the other.
Dorcus adored symmetry.
‘Where there’s a need, Reuben Chuck’s the man to fill it. Happy customers.’
Chuck had very fine teeth, possibly expensive implants, but realistic.
‘We all profit from this, Dorco.’
Dorco, nobody had ever called him Dorco before. ‘Prof – well, of c-course, I know, you …’
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