White Rage (12 page)

‘Would you be happy if you were poor?' Chasm asked.

‘Don't talk shite.'

‘Then rejoice. You want to go out somewhere?'

Kilroy considered this, and yawned. ‘I don't think so. I may watch some TV before I call it a day. Is it time for the news?'

Chasm got up, and obligingly wheeled a TV out of the corner of the room. Kilroy liked it right in his face, the full glare. Chasm flipped the channels with the remote control. ‘Tell me when you want me to stop, Leo.'

An array of images flashed past: a whale giving birth, a football match from South America, a masked man shackled and sealed inside a block of ice, and some character with a pimp's blow-dried hairstyle reading the news. ‘Stop,' Kilroy said. He looked at the screen.

The newsreader said, ‘
The victim was in his late twenties
…'

The image changed. OB camera. Kilroy recognized Ashton Lane, just off Byres Road. Café Brel and the Ubi Chip and the cobbled street. A group of policemen wandered in front of crime-tape. They were blocking something from view. A small crowd stood idly around: ghouls from the local chapter of freaks. Somebody waved at the camera.
Hello, Ma and Da, this is your grinning turnip of a son
.

Kilroy leaned forward, drawn into the picture. He pointed a finger in excitement. ‘Good fucking Christ,
look
, there's Perlman. See him, Chasm! On the edge of the picture. Perlman, for Christ's sake. Look! Ah, shite, he's gone.'

Cut to studio. The newsreader said, ‘… Mr Ochoba, from Lagos, was a student at Strathclyde University, and planned to graduate this year. It is the second murder in the city today. Earlier, a kindergarten teacher was shot in the city's south –'

‘Off off off,' Kilroy said. ‘I've seen this kindergarten story more times than I need to.'

Chasm flicked the remote. The picture vanished.

‘Perlman on TV.' Kilroy gazed at the blank screen. ‘On my TV, in
my
fucking conservatory, in
my
house. One day he'll be the face I see when I shave in the morning.'

Frankie Chasm said, ‘Relax. Just relax, Leo. Here, you think that Nigerian's dead because he hadn't paid his witch doctor's bill?'

Kilroy smiled, perhaps for the first time all day. ‘I don't doubt it. Witch doctors are said to have seriously strict collection policies.' He rose, grunted. ‘You better phone our friends, Frankie.'

‘On my agenda.'

Kilroy climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He sat on the big green velvet quilt of his California kingsize, and stretched his legs. He thought of the encounter that morning with Perlman. He lay back and absent-mindedly fingered his pudgy dick and, since he had a hand in the general vicinity, scratched his balls for good measure.

He frowned, remembering Perlman at the scene in Ashton Lane. Was there no end to the man? The cop who goes wherever the crime takes him. He was like a fucking one-man posse.

Kilroy waddled into his pink-tiled bathroom. Lifelike mermaids had been painted on the ceiling, swimming in an array of stucco bubbles. He opened his medicine cabinet and swallowed two Zantac and pondered the dead Indian girl in the kindergarten.

Frankie Chasm took a shotgun from a rack on the wall and moved quietly through the house. This was his job at night. He patrolled. He jiggled locks and made sure the electronic security system was set. He wondered at his life: you grow up to become Big Billy Bunter's minder. It was never my ambition, he thought.

Outside, beyond the metal gates at the front of the house, lay an incalculable number of threats and menaces, according to Leo, who claimed he had enemies everywhere – people jealous of him, those who plotted to seize his power, and others, callous brutes, who simply wanted to burn his huge fat arse.

Chasm was under orders to shoot intruders on sight. He knew Kilroy had enemies. A man so involved in criminal society as Leo had a whole bloody mob of people who wouldn't exactly be
well-wishers
. Chasm had seen all sorts of gangsters come to this house to talk business in hushed voices with Leo. Jimmy ‘Bram' Stoker, an ostentatiously rich bookmaker who took bets lesser bookies offset; Gordy Curdy, nominally a restaurant supplier, but also the city's major hoormeister, running high-class girls in and out of the better hotels; Errol ‘Bungalow' Wilkes, whose fleet of taxicabs was used more for the carriage of stolen Pharmaceuticals than ferrying human beings. There were others, men who had small standing armies and who ploughed their illegal earnings into financing hotels and underground car parks and shopping malls.

If you lived in this milieu, you lived on an edge: Kilroy knew it, and had always enjoyed the risk factor, just as he'd enjoyed lording it over lesser crooks. He was, after all, the crime de la crime in this society … But lately he'd lost a bit of his energy, Chasm thought, and the long afternoon meetings with his fellow crooks didn't happen with their previous regularity. And why was he allowing Perlman to bother him, when normally he'd have brushed the cop's attentions aside like a man flicking a spider from the back of his hand?

Tired of the stress and hassle of protecting his empire from predators and pirates? Could the Fat Man be pondering retirement? It was hard for a career crim like Kilroy to retire; it would be seen as something of a weakness in the criminal fraternity – and that was when the vultures began to gather, drawn by the whiff of an edible corpse.

Kilroy's best option, if he really wanted out, was to empty his bank accounts and bugger off to a distant trop island with de luxe lodgings. But somebody would eventually remember an old grudge or offence, because in Kilroy's environment grievances were neither forgiven nor forgotten. And this somebody would find out where Kilroy was living, and an emissary sent from Glasgow with a machete in his golf bag, and on a balmy tropical night Leo would be chopped for sharkfood, blood and fat and intestinal matter floating on the tide.

Not nice, Chasm thought.

He checked the deck of monitors that received pictures from security cameras scanning the front driveway, the gardens, the sides of the house. Sensor lights had been installed all over the place. They were so sensitive a passing snail could set them off. Nothing out there. But he felt jumpy anyway. He was letting Kilroy's edgy mood get to him.

Walk the hallways, hug the shotgun, check the monitors. Oyez, eleven o'clock and all is well.

How soothing this house became after the Fat Man had gone to bed. How pleasant without Leo's whims and crybaby demands for amusement and reassurance. It was a wonderful house; great ceilings, cornices restored by artisans shipped in from Turin, a private thirty-seater screening room.

He paused at the foot of the stairs. He heard Kilroy snore. Did the Fat Man dream? Did his dormant mind throw up paranoid images of enemies, gangsters who plotted his downfall – or maybe even Lou Perlman, his private gargoyle, popped up in the midst of his dreams and turned them all into nightmares?

Chasm remembered the phone call Kilroy had told him to make. He went inside Leo's office, where the walls were decorated with photographs of Fatso in the company of dignitaries. Here he was shaking hands with Glasgow's Lord Provost. Here he was with some bishop or cardinal. And here he stood with a famous Glasgow comedian, arms linked, the best of buddies. Kilroy enjoyed the company of the rich and famous. He liked having their private phone numbers in his book.

There were also pictures from long ago: Kilroy as an obese young child astride a skinny donkey on the sands at Rothesay, circa 1950. Kilroy at five or six, cherubic curls and velvet suit, clutching the hand of his mother, a very tall veiled woman in a black coat. A shot of a gravestone:
Effie Kilroy, 1927-1962, Much Loved Mother of Leo
. Creepy, Chasm thought.

You better phone our friends, Frankie
.

Right, boss. Right away, sir. Even as you sleep, massa.

14

Perlman felt like a weary animal burrowing into the darkness of the city in search of a place to hibernate. It was raining again, albeit finely, and the lamplit streets were enveloped in the strands of a damp web. It wasn't the rain that afflicted his mood, nor the prospect of going back to his house in Egypt, and the silences of rooms which often struck him as curiously unfamiliar – it was murder that had brought him down into an emotional slump. This city had shed too much blood in one day.

He drove the streets of Merchant City, an area of converted warehouses adjacent to George Square. Miriam had a loft in this neighbourhood and he played with the notion of ringing her doorbell, regardless of the hour. Maybe she'd still be awake and offer him a cup of hot chocolate, or a coffee. A smile would do. A brush of her hand against his would be enough, more than enough. It would lift his heart.

He parked his Mondeo in Virginia Street and sat smoking for a time. He stuck a tape in the deck and listened to Gram Parsons' ‘In My Hour of Darkness'. What was this '70s kick that had possessed him lately? Usually he listened to jazz from the '50s and '60s, but recently it had been Paul Butterfield, Gram Parsons, The Band – was it some kind of compensatory visit to his history? A way of reassuring himself that once he'd been young and life unlimited?

Good morning, mortality, what's new?

He gazed the length of Virginia Street. A few black cabs drifted along Argyle Street at the bottom. I'm sick of the dead, he thought. I need life around me. A kindergarten teacher is gunned down, and her colleague Ajit Singh lies comatose in an IC unit. A Nigerian student is knifed in a busy street, a sneaky job, a stiletto blade slipped through the material of his coat and between his ribs and into his heart, and he perishes on cobblestones. He thought of the quiet black face of the young man, the eyes open wide, the lower lip distended as if in some last sulk at the abysmal cruelty of the world.

And a young man falls from a balcony, maybe pushed.

Quite a fucking casualty list.

The things I see in Glasgow. The places I go on this job.

His mobile rang in his pocket. He answered.

‘I got your message, Sergeant.' It was Dev Gupta.

‘Thanks for getting back to me. Talk to me about Tilak Gupta.'

‘What do you want to know?'

‘He's family?'

‘A cousin,' Dev Gupta said.

‘You think he was suicide material?'

‘How would I know something like that?'

The connection became crotchety; the hiss in Perlman's ear was like a snake in his brain. He shouted to be heard. ‘An informed guess would be useful, Dev.'

‘He drank and he drugged. It might have been an accident. He might have been wasted. Or depressed.'

The hiss quit. ‘Did he have a girlfriend? A regular partner?'

Dev Gupta said, ‘He knew a lot of women. I can't imagine him restricted to just one.'

Now this is all very helpful, Perlman thought. Dev Gupta's a quarry of info. Nothing useful to say about his sister, even less about his late cousin.

‘You never mentioned Tilak earlier,' Perlman said.

‘I was preoccupied, Sergeant. You might have noticed.'

Fair enough. Perlman stared into the rain. ‘Where was he likely to hang out?'

‘The Corinthian was one of his haunts. Sometimes he went to the Tunnel. What has this got to do with my sister's murder anyway?'

‘Maybe nothing,' Perlman said. ‘If you think of anything useful, get back to me. Any time of day. Obviously I keep long hours.' The line was off its rocker again, sizzling and roaring like all manner of echoes picked up in deep space. These mobile monsters. He disliked them. Everybody had one attached to his or her ear. Schoolkids yakked on pavements. Fragments of weird ringing tones irked you in cafés and pubs. Maybe in the future somebody would dream up a way of implanting Nokias into the brains of babies. Wired at birth. Born with the gift of sending text messages.
Hello world, my name is Karen and I am two minutes old :)

Perlman shoved the Thing into his pocket, then turned off the tape just as Gram Parsons was singing ‘
O Lord, grant me vision
'. Grant it indeed. Tell me the secret purpose of the universe. Or if that's too much of an ask, reveal to me the deeper strata of Glasgow.

He got out of the car and sighed, crossing the street to the door of Miriam's building. He lit a fresh cigarette and when rain soaked into the paper he tossed it aside. His throat was raw from tobacco anyway. Ring the bell, don't ring. What are you, Lou, standing here in the rainy dark like a
yold
?

He looked at the nameplates that studded the frame of the door:
Miriam Perlman
. He raised his finger and moved it towards the brass button at the centre of the nameplate. Just as he did so, the door opened and a man emerged; Perlman, surprised by recognition, stepped to one side.

Detective-Inspector Latta, tall, hunched shoulders, thick black hair, uneven teeth – some white, others brown, some pointed, others blunt: like a mouthful of chuckie-stones – gazed at him.
Midnight, Latta is coming out of the building, he's been to see Miriam
–
who else?
Perlman wondered if these facts made a sound case for the sudden pang of envy and suspicion he felt.

Lunacy lay along the faultline of this thought.
Latta and Miriam, lovers
. He cursed the sorry streak of adolescence that burned inside him; at this stage of his life all such fires should have died out. He was being an arsehole, succumbing to this silliness. Stop and think about it. What would Miriam see in this grotesque man anyway?

Latta smiled in a squeezed-out way; he was clearly conscious of his awful choppers. ‘Small world. I've just been talking to your sister-in-law.'

‘You always work this late?'

‘Tell me when crime stops, Perlman. Show me a criminal and I'll show you an insomniac.'

‘And which one is Miriam?'

Latta shrugged, and tapped Perlman's sleeve. ‘Fraud's a tough nut to crack, Perlman. You need an eye for the seemingly insignificant detail that turns out to be the smoking gun. Reams of paperwork get sifted. If I got paid by the tonnage, I could retire.'