White Rage (15 page)

‘What is?'

‘The wind, woman. The wind is.'

‘And how is this significant?'

‘It interferes with the flight path of the ball,
obviously
.'

Matty Parsonage thought her husband sometimes talked utter ballocks. He was a bore of the first order, a self-proclaimed expert on meteorology, the global economy, the Kennedy assassination, and the ventilation of buildings. He just blethered on. She didn't listen much. It would be more fun to read a book about embalming than listen to Billy.

She located her ball in line for the green. ‘You'll have to look over there,' she said, and she pointed firmly with her club towards a scrubby clump of bushes. ‘That's where your ball came to rest, Billy.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘I saw it fall.'

Billy stalked off in the direction of the bushes. He muttered to himself furiously about the horrible gloating
pleasure
Matty took in his misdirected shots. He contemplated the possibility of getting up very early one morning and catching a plane to a faraway place. Alone. Rio came to mind. So did Kuala Lumpur. Matty would never find him. She might not even look for him.

That thought worried him.

He rummaged in the bushes. He snagged his skin on a thorn and said, ‘Dammit.' He sucked the back of his finger, where blood had broken his skin.

He'd never leave Matty, he thought. It was just something to dream about. She still had shapely legs despite the fact she stuffed them into asexual opaque stockings and wore two-tone brogues and tweed skirts and looked for all the world like the retired headmistress of a certain kind of private academy that no longer existed.

He wished they'd had children. He missed his job at the bank.

He spotted the ball and reached for it.

His eye fell on something else. He failed to recognize it at first – some kind of dark organic matter, he wasn't sure. He peered closer, parting the thorn bush very carefully. An eye looked back at him, red and swollen and human and dead.

His mouth filled with tepid saliva. He dropped his ball and went running towards his wife, calling her name. Matty would know what to do in a situation like this.

Whatever this situation was.

18

In St Vincent Street Perlman drove past the mighty edifice of the church designed by Alexander ‘Greek' Thomson. Dark, uninvitingly dour, its size and austerity always had a spooky effect on him. Massive pillars created impenetrable shadows in the early morning light. If God lived in Glasgow, this would be his HQ.

Perlman drove over the motorway, past the high-rise towers of new hotels and office blocks. Old Glasgow, dead or dying, was buried under motorways and skyscrapers. Shame. Something irreplaceable was lost in the ruthless process of renewal. So much of Perlman's Glasgow had already disappeared. Trams, the Treron et Cie department store in Sauchiehall Street, J D Cuthbertson's music shop where they sold pianos upstairs and records in the basement, the Empire Theatre. St Enoch Station was now a big glass shopping structure.

A litany of the extinct.

He remembered a call he wanted to make. He drove one-handed and punched digits on his mobile with the other. Terry Bogan answered.

Perlman said, ‘Tilak turns out to be Dev Gupta's cousin. I don't know how helpful this is, but Tilak frequented the Corinthian and sometimes the Tunnel. There's always a possibility he was in one or other of those places the night of his suicide, if that's what you're still calling it.'

‘What are you calling it, Lou?' Bogan asked.

‘I'm not calling it anything yet,' Perlman answered.

‘You're thinking – cherchez la femme, right?'

‘Aye, and if you cherchez deep enough, who knows?'

Bogan said, ‘I like the Corinthian. I'll check it out first.'

‘Scruff like you get past the doorman? That place has gone downhill fast. What's the story on the Nigerian?'

‘Newby took that on himself. He's a glory-seeker.' DI Paul Newby was Bogan's immediate superior. Perlman knew him only vaguely. Newby chaired TV discussions about law enforcement matters on BBC Scotland; he was telegenic and enjoyed his modest local fame.

‘I hope you find your mysterious lady, Terry.'

‘So do I.'

Perlman hung up. He was driving along the extreme western section of Argyle Street, past the Kelvin Hall and the red sandstone extravaganza of the Art Galleries. The wind roared round the car, hammering the chassis.

He parked close to a fish and chip shop called Cremoni's in a side street off Dumbarton Road, a couple of blocks from Partick Underground station. The restaurant had been founded by a family of Italian immigrants, but now it belonged to a man called Perseus McKinnon, the black offspring of a one-night stand between a sailor of Senegalese origin and a red-haired stripper from Leith. Perlman always had the sneaky feeling that a limerick lurked somewhere in McKinnon's history.
There was a young stripper from Leith, Whose method of giving relief
… He couldn't come up with the next line.

He knocked on the door and Perseus McKinnon, who habitually wore shades, appeared behind the glass pane.

‘I gave at the office,' McKinnon said.

‘Fuck off and let me in.'

McKinnon opened the door. Perlman stepped into the empty restaurant. He clapped McKinnon's arm in a gesture of greeting, then made an exaggerated sniffing motion. The air reeked of last night's frying; battered haddock, chips, black pudding, the whole high-cholesterol diet on which generations of Glaswegians, dicing with premature cardiac death, had been reared.

‘Air fresheners, Perse. Perfumed sprays. I keep telling you.'

‘My customers would stay away in droves. They expect the fragrance of lard.'

Perlman followed McKinnon into an ill-lit back room, which served as an office. There was an array of computer equipment and a number of metal filing cabinets. The fish and chip shop was a front for McKinnon's real interest.

Perseus sat behind his cluttered desk. ‘Here's your trivia question for the day, Lou.'

Always with the trivia question for openers, Perlman thought. It was like being asked for a password. ‘Who played alto sax on
Monk's Mood
, November 21, 1947?'

‘Sahib Shabib. Try stretching me next time.'

‘You just got lucky,' McKinnon said. ‘Your turn. But don't ask me about any of that cowboy shite or that rock'n'roll you listen to. That's not real music.'

Perlman thought quickly. ‘Name the drummer on Sonny Rollins's recording of “Long Ago and Far Away”.'

‘1991?'

‘Right,' Perlman said.

‘Easy. That was Steve Jordan … You still trying to wrestle Kilroy to the mat?'

I'm giving it some attention.'

‘I haven't been able to turn up a damn thing to suggest he ever handled guns. I've looked, Lou, and I found sweet eff-all. His live-in stormtrooper Frankie Chasm would've been the perfect candidate for the shooting, but Frankie didn't enter Leo's employ until early January, as far as I can make out. Pity. It might have been nice and tidy. Fat Leo driving the car, Chasm doing the shooting.'

‘I didn't get the impression of a second man in the car,' Perlman said. He remembered Chasm from past encounters; a man cursed with a misguided intelligence and a heart like a Brillo pad. Perlman had once arrested him on a charge of GBH; the victim of Chasm's violence had been a twenty-two-year-old man who'd stubbornly refused to yield his place at a video game in a public house. Frankie had swiped the unfortunate from ear to ear with the jagged lip of a broken bottle, disfiguring him for the rest of his life. Chasm could be smooth, and convincingly civilized at times, but he wasn't a man you'd keep company with.

McKinnon stared at him for a moment with a sympathetic expression. ‘A warning, Lou. Just beware a fucking obsession,' and he gestured around his office, the computer, the disks, the filing cabinets. ‘All this began with a simple interest in the criminal mind imparted to me by my late mother, who dragged me off day after day to every bloody cinema in this city that was showing a gangster flick. Peter Lorre freak? Big-time, man. She also had a serious thing for John Garfield. She loved Robert Taylor in
Rogue Cop
. Now take a good long look at me. I'm devoured by baddies. I dream criminals. I don't have time for the fish shop. I couldn't tell you the wholesale price of haddock if you asked me. I don't know the kind of potatoes we use for making chips either. Pentland Dells? Kerr's? Buggered if I know.'

‘Point taken,' Perlman said. An obsession. How easy it was to develop one. Your brain, devoid of will-power, goes over the same terrain time and again, like one of those remote buggies they use to explore the surfaces of distant planets. ‘Can we get down to the reason I phoned you? What do you know about the Gupta family?'

‘The Guptas, eh? I've stored a few snippets.'

McKinnon turned his computer on. There was a slight wheeze and a couple of clicks, then light from the console illuminated McKinnon's dark glasses and turned his skin more blue than black. His passion was Glasgow crime, and the people who committed it. He had a small legion of informants throughout the city who sold him scraps of info. Who was doing what. Who was getting out of prison. Who'd been seen loitering in whose company. Who was planning what job. As some men spent their spare time haunting auction rooms in obscure Border towns in a demented search for first editions of Walter Scott, and others trawled derelict railway stations for precious scraps of old timetables or anything connected to the golden age of the steam engine – a fragment of sleeper, a button from a signalman's sleeve – Perseus McKinnon gathered crime data and fed them into his computer, a task that had been occupying him for more than ten years. It didn't matter the nature or gravity of the crime – a bad cheque, a random act of violence, murder – it was all porridge for McKinnon's unappeasable appetite.

Perlman treasured the man's usefulness. When you needed information, and it wasn't available on the National Criminal Intelligence Service computer, and you didn't have time for the basic slog of acquiring it the old-fashioned way, you came here and you sat in the back room of Cremoni's with Perseus, whose accuracy rate, when it came to arcane information about Glasgow's criminal fraternity, was high.

McKinnon tapped a password into his keyboard. ‘Which Gupta intrigues you, Lou?'

‘All of them. I'm wondering why the hell Indra was killed. She seems to have been a harmless wee soul, so why does she get shot? If it isn't some loony with a demented reason of his own, maybe it's connected to something inside the family. I don't know. I'm beating the heather, Perse. See what flies. Anything on Dev?'

McKinnon typed, looked at the screen. ‘Not much. Possession of cocaine, 1997. The NCIS computer could've told you that.'

‘I want something beyond dry kindling,' Perlman said. ‘What else have you got?'

‘Only this. Dev associated with the late Ben Fogarty.'

‘The greyhound trainer?'

McKinnon nodded. ‘Dev somehow connected with Fogarty, and they hatched a race-fixing scheme. It wasn't big-time. Three or four dogs doped. Fogarty had his licence cancelled, and Dev walked away free as a sparrow.'

‘I remember Fogarty had his throat slashed in Carntyne walking his hounds one night. Bled to death on the pavement. The local cops found the dogs slurping up his blood.' Borscht came to Perlman's mind. ‘The crime was never solved.'

‘He'd ripped off a lot of people,' McKinnon said. ‘He was a star when it came to making unkept promises.'

‘Anything else on Dev?'

‘That's it, Lou.'

‘Try Tilak Gupta.'

‘The boy who fell to earth?' McKinnon adjusted his shades and stared at the screen. ‘Man about town, ladykiller. The reason he's in my machine is because he was an associate of a certain Morton “Eggs” Benedict, whose name will be familiar to you.'

‘Eggs I remember,' Perlman said. ‘He had premises in the basement of a Chinese restaurant called – gimme a minute while the connections get made – the Won Ton Palace in Bellahouston where he operated an illicit gambling den. High-stakes roulette, poker, et cetera. Unfortunately, Eggs forgot to apply for a gaming licence.'

‘Right,' McKinnon said. ‘Busted three years ago. He got out of jail and vanished. South Africa is the general assumption.'

‘Eggs ran, so to speak,' Perlman said. ‘So Tilak and Dev were both connected with gamblers and gambling. You think that means anything? Was Tilak still involved in that racket?'

‘I don't have any more information,' McKinnon said.

‘Pity. If you hear, let me know.'

‘Moving up the Gupta family tree, we now come to the patriarch.'

‘Barry I met already.'

‘Sharp as a new razor. Came to Glasgow from Calcutta in the early 1960s and set up a dry-cleaning business in Dennistoun. He moved up in the world with considerable velocity. Money-lending was his first rung on the ladder. His clientele came from the dispossessed, those poor fuckers banks toss out into the street with a snort of derision.'

As McKinnon scrolled screens, Perlman gazed through the half-open office door and across the dining area. He could see traffic pass along Dumbarton Road. The wind puffed hard. It shuddered the awning of a flower shop across the street. Several bunches of daffs rolled down the pavement, pursued by an anxious florist whose hat blew off.

McKinnon beat the surface of his desk vigorously with the palms of his hands. A jazzer at heart, a drummer
manqué
. ‘Okay. Here we are, Lou. The patriarch makes a killing money-lending. His enforcement methods for delinquents seem to have been discreet. He's got a growing family and he's ambitious, so he uproots and moves to desirable Pollokshields. Big house.'