White Rage (7 page)

‘He's going to get up my nose a lot, right?'

‘All the way up.'

‘He thinks I'm just some fat dimfuck in poncey feathers.'

‘I doubt that.'

‘I don't think he gives me respect. He doesn't see there's a lean shark hidden deep down inside me, Nat. This big body, these clothes – okay, I happen to like eating,
gluttonous
eating, and I enjoy a certain mode of dress that some might find a touch extrovert in our dull-arsed society. But sometimes people make the mistake of thinking they're dealing with Coco the fucking clown. Big blunder, believe me.'

‘I don't think Perlman would make that mistake, Leo.' A lean shark, Blum thought. Extraordinary how people perceived themselves. He had an image of a huge killer fish with Kilroy's face gliding through an aquarium tank.

Kilroy sat back. He gazed out at Bearsden Road. He felt a twinge of weariness, a tweak of discontent. A shadow of unhappiness fell across him. For years he'd been juggling this business, that business, and it was hard work to stay ahead of the pack. He tried to keep his affairs cloaked in a fog. He was the exclusive supplier of bootleg Aberdeen Angus beef, Thai prawns and certain popular brands of alcohol to many of the city's elegant restaurants. He had a majority holding in a chain of motorway cafés – cheap eats for the masses on the move – and a huge investment in a no-frills airline. There were rumours of more nefarious activities involving contraband single malt whiskies and, as the Jew Perlman had intimated in the past, a high-dollar protection racket involving boutiques and hotels.

True or false, no matter, he'd been the subject of scrutiny and envy for years. The Strathclyde Police, in the form of Perlman, harassed him without mercy. And his business associates were jealous of his successes. Why the hell didn't he give this place a wide fucking berth altogether? Why not lie on a teak deck in sunlight all the days of his life? Simple answer: he didn't want anyone to think he'd run. He didn't want anyone to believe his nerve had failed. And he still had precious fragments of Glasgow in his heart.

He said, ‘I hope Perlman doesn't fuck with me, Nat. I wouldn't like that. It wouldn't sit very well with me.'

Blum said, ‘I understand.'

Kilroy closed his eyes, cleared his throat and in his rasping voice ruined the first lines of ‘Some Enchanted Evening'.

The fat man sings, Blum thought. Alas.

8

The kindergarten was surrounded by police vehicles, TV vans, cameramen, and a swarm of reporters whose duty it was to scurry here and there with microphones, searching for likely heads to interview. Perlman, who disliked the ostentatious light-show of roof strobes on cop cars, blinked behind his wet glasses.

He parked his Mondeo and skipped around the assembled news-gatherers, then walked past two uniformed constables, neither of whom he knew. They were standing, arms folded, outside the front door of the school, and they stepped aside to let him pass. They recognized him, didn't ask for ID. They nodded, looked grim, two young men solemnized by the proximity to a killing.

He entered a corridor, where Sandy Scullion stood in conversation with Detective Superintendent Mary Gibson, a middle-aged woman in a beige trouser suit and a floral scarf. She reminded Perlman of the models you saw in clothing catalogues aimed at the forty-five plus market. The Mature Woman. She was handsome and tall, and she always dressed as if she expected a last-minute invitation to afternoon tea with the Queen. She was completing a PhD at Glasgow University in Sociology, for reasons best known to herself.

Doors lay open on either side of the corridor. In one room clusters of small whimpering children and their shocked parents talked quietly to three uniformed cops. Two of the cops were women. Perlman heard sniffling and the occasional sound of a nose blown and the hesitant voices of tiny kids trying to answer questions. There was quite an ethnic mix in the room – Indians, Pakistanis, a few Africans and Orientals, a clutch of whites: Glasgow was a cauldron of colours.

Scullion said, ‘One teacher dead, another wounded. A single gunman.'

Mary Gibson glanced inside the room where parents hugged their kids. ‘They saw their teacher killed. They say the killer wore a hooded jacket. Green, maybe blue. Navy. Nobody's sure. The guy's trousers had stripes in them. Sound like tracksuit bottoms. Some kids say green and red, others green and blue, others purple and blue. Take your pick. They all agree the man was carrying his shoes.'

Scullion said, ‘A gunman who doesn't want to get the floors dirty.'

‘Who were the victims?' Perlman asked.

‘The dead woman was Indra Gupta. The wounded man is Ajit Singh,' Scullion answered.

‘How is he?'

Mary Gibson said, ‘He's not expected to survive, Lou. They'll operate, of course …' She looked at Perlman a little sadly. ‘Call me a brontosaurus, but I remember a time when guns were truly rare in this city. If you killed somebody, you used a knife or a razor.'

‘Or a hatchet. Those were good old days.'

‘You could say,' Mary Gibson remarked.

At the end of the corridor a police snapper was photographing a pool of drying blood. Bulbs popped. A young constable called Dennis Murdoch scribbled something in a notebook: scene-of-the-crime notations, position in which the wounded man had been found, manner of wound, the stuff you were taught to write down for the record.

Perlman scanned the room where the kids were gathered. He knew very little about children. Their sensitivities, perceptions of reality. He'd never been exposed to them for any length of time. His one shot at marriage, a doomed nonsense, had been mercifully barren. He gazed at the small faces and heard quiet anxious voices tremble as narratives were stitched together out of confusion. He admired the tenderness and patience the uniforms showed.

‘What kind of sorry bastard walks into a kindergarten and shoots teachers?' he asked.

‘The same kind who did it in Dunblane,' Mary Gibson said.

Perlman, like so many people, had shoved the events of Dunblane inside the pit at the back of the head where you stored the kind of unbearable human slurry you didn't have the heart to re-examine. In March, 1996, a certain Thomas Hamilton had walked into a primary school in the quiet Perthshire town of Dunblane where, armed with an assortment of handguns, he'd killed sixteen children and their teacher; an atrocity unprecedented in Scotland. Even now, seven years on, Perlman found it difficult to picture this massacre. The country had haemorrhaged that day; and nothing had ever been quite the same since.

Scullion said, ‘Hamilton killed kids, though. This one didn't.'

‘So his only targets here were teachers?' Perlman asked.

‘Teacher singular,' Mary Gibson said. ‘From what I've been able to gather, Ajit Singh came out of his classroom only because he heard the gunfire.' She looked in the direction of PC Murdoch and the photographer. ‘That's where he was shot.'

Perlman said, ‘Okay, the hooded man is only out to get Indra – why can't he wait for a less public moment?'

Scullion said, ‘He's crazed. A lover's thing? A falling-out? A heartbreak? He's off his rocker.'

Perlman sighed. ‘Or she dumped him. She was unfaithful to him. She was just sick of him and wanted to move on. He was blinded by rage. Any of the above.'

Mary Gibson said, ‘Check Indra Gupta's background. Family life. Boyfriends. The usual.'

Perlman nodded. ‘Will do. Who's in charge of this school?'

Scullion said, ‘A woman called Amy Blyth. Her office is at the end of the corridor.'

‘I'll have a wee word with her,' Perlman said.

‘This school is her baby, and she's shaken,' Mary Gibson said. ‘Go easy, Sergeant.'

‘I'm a sweetheart.' Perlman was about to move when one of the uniformed cops, a WPC he knew as Meg Gayle, came out of the classroom. She was a very tall young woman who slouched in a self-conscious way. She wore her black hair cut short and fringed at the front. A pretty girl, Perlman thought, a good-hearted face.

‘I need a wee break,' she said. She looked at Mary Gibson for approval.

‘It's tough in there,' Perlman said.

‘Children shouldn't see anything like that,' Meg Gayle said. ‘This man comes in and starts calling the teacher names and then he whips out a gun and shoots her in the face from a couple of feet away. And these kids see it all. It's sickening.'

‘What kind of names?' Perlman asked.

‘Bitch. Bint. I don't know what else. Words like that.'

‘Did any of the kids say he gave the impression that he knew Indra?'

WPC Gayle had shadows under her eyes. ‘It's a difficult situation to piece together, Sergeant. The kids tell you different things. Apparently he said he knew her name. I don't know how much stock to put in that, to be honest. The children are all … they just want to go home. They're tired and upset and horrified.'

Mary Gibson said, ‘Fine, if you think you're finished, send them all home. We can contact them later if we need to.'

WPC Gayle went back inside the room and Perlman continued along the corridor. He stopped briefly outside the door of the room where Indra Gupta had been shot. A couple of crime-scene technicians were dusting in silence. Perlman noticed lower-case words written on a blackboard in coloured chalk:
tree sun dad mum
. Blood dotted the chalk and darkened the white wood frame of the blackboard. Paperchains hung from the walls. There were shelves of kiddy stuff, plastic figures, plasticine models, puppets.

He shivered unexpectedly, although the cold he felt had no external source. You're four years old and you see somebody gunned down from a distance of a few feet, does the memory stay deep inside you and fester like a wound? How does it change you – bad dreams, anxieties? And then later in life, recurring flashes of memory?

He kept moving down the corridor. He paused beside PC Dennis Murdoch, whose expression was sombre. ‘Singh didn't look good when they took him into the ambulance, Sergeant. The wound was chest, dead centre. I'm no doctor, but –'

‘So you can't make guesses.'

‘No, Sergeant, I can't.'

‘Speculation's for the stock market, Dennis.' Perlman liked Murdoch, which was probably why he felt the need to temper the young man's enthusiasm every now and then with caution; it was a tricky craft, the practice of giving advice without coming off like a stuffy old fart, and Perlman was never sure he accomplished it. He wondered if he saw a slightly deflated look in Murdoch's eyes.

The police photographer snapping the spot where Singh had fallen was a dark-bearded man called Cameron ‘Tizer' Dunlop, nicknamed after the soft drink to which he was addicted. Tizer was bent forward, knees locked, as if he was shooting a model from an oblique angle.

Perlman said, ‘It's not a fucking fashion shoot. It's bloodstains. It's not going on the cover of
Vogue
.'

Tizer made a faux gay gesture, limping a wrist. ‘I am
constantly
berated by philistines.'

‘I'd watch out. You do that a little too convincingly.'

‘Bitch,' Tizer remarked.

Perlman stopped outside a door with a small wooden plaque that read:
Amy Blyth
. He knocked, heard a voice from inside, then he entered. Amy Blyth, a fair-haired woman in a pink shirt and black trousers, sat behind her desk with her hands clenched in front of her; an attitude of prayer, Perlman thought. She wore a tiny silver crucifix and gold-rimmed half-moon glasses.

He introduced himself. Amy Blyth acknowledged him with a slight gesture of her hand. She had a big lipsticked mouth and the foundations of a double chin. She didn't rise.

‘It's a total disaster,' she said. She was about to weep, but managed to contain herself. ‘The parents will blame me for not providing proper security. This is the last thing you expect. You read about … you never think. A gun. A man with a gun.'

Perlman observed a moment of quiet sympathy. ‘We don't live in a safe world, Miss Blyth. Even security guards can't keep everyone out. Somebody wants inside a place badly enough, they find a way. What are you supposed to do? Electric fences, watchdogs, a platoon of armed men? Don't blame yourself.'

Amy Blyth remarked, ‘Easy to say.'

Perlman glanced round the room. Amy had scores of diplomas in frames. Certificates from colleges, teaching associations, civic groups. She had a document naming her as the registered owner of this kindergarten, which was called the Sunshine Day School.

I'm going to phone my lawyer,' she said. ‘I was just about to when you came in. If the parents think about damages for, I don't know … mental and physical distress, I have to know where I stand. I worked so bloody hard for this place.' Amy Blyth whipped her glasses off and pressed the tips of her fingers into her eyelids. ‘Really I did. Built it up from … Worked hours, long hours. It isn't easy. Handling parents and children. Finding staff.'

‘Tell me about Indra,' he said.

‘Indra? Oh, the kids adored her. She was gentle. She enjoyed her work.'

‘What about her personal life?'

Amy Blyth replaced her glasses. The lenses made her brown eyes look very big. ‘I make it a rule not to intrude in the private lives of my staff, unless there are exceptional circumstances.'

‘I'll need her address.'

‘I have her file here.' Amy Blyth opened a drawer of her desk and took out a manila folder, which she slid towards Perlman.

He picked it up. ‘I have to borrow this,' he said. ‘Has anyone contacted Indra's family?'

‘I think one of the teachers did.' Amy fingered her crucifix, a small gesture of uncertainty.

Perlman tucked the folder under his arm. ‘I'll get this back to you.' He stepped from the room, shut the door, walked into the corridor. A small boy emerged from a toilet and almost collided with him.