White Rage (8 page)

‘You in a big hurry, wee man?' Perlman asked.

‘Going home,' the boy said.
Gaun hame
. He had untidy red hair and freckles and green eyes, and he wore a blue pullover and flannel shorts. A Glasgow face, Perlman thought. He'd seen this boy thousands of times in different incarnations, in buses, on street corners, a face in a crowd on the way to a football match.

‘Somebody kilt Mizz Gupta,' the boy said.

‘Did you see it happen?'

‘Aye. Man had a gun. Know what he said?'

Perlman leaned down, bringing his face level with that of the child. ‘Tell me.'

The kid whispered. ‘Are you pishing your knickers.'

Absent-mindedly, Perlman removed a length of white thread attached to the boy's sweater. ‘He said this to Miss Gupta?'

‘Aye.' The kid ran off down the corridor.

Perlman watched him go.
Are you pishing your knickers
. Was that some nasty jibe before the trigger was pulled and the gun exploded? A moment of verbal brutality imposed upon Indra Gupta before she died? Think about that. A young woman is staring into a gun and her killer is goading her. What does that tell you about your man, Lou? Cruel. Granted. But what else?

Something more. He
enjoyed
killing Indra Gupta. He made sport of it. He prolonged it. A fucking sadist.

He found Sandy Scullion inside the murder room. The technical people had gone. There was no sign of Mary Gibson. Sandy sat squeezed behind one of the small wooden desks. He looked grotesquely huge.

‘The Inspector relives his childhood,' Perlman said.

‘I was trying to imagine everything that happened here through a kid's eyes. But I've forgotten how a child sees the world.'

‘It's called growing old. It's the deal you get the day you're born. The nappy, then the shroud.'

‘It's happening faster than I like,' Scullion said.

‘You know what it does to
me
when a thirty-six-year-old man such as yourself tells me
he's
getting up in years? I feel like I'm a Polygrip junkie in Weetabix City.'

Scullion got up from the desk, stretched his legs. ‘When I was four or five I wanted to be a bus conductor. Instead, here I am at a murder scene in a kindergarten. At some point I'll go back to Pitt Street and stick coloured pins into wall maps and talk to forensic guys and collate facts – which is a far cry from how I saw my life.'

Perlman surveyed the classroom, his eyes drawn to the blood on the blackboard. A gunshot. A young woman falls dead. Little kids scream and cry. He imagined echoes. He didn't like the sounds they made in his head. He remembered something, a flicker out of childhood. ‘My earliest ambition was to be a rabbi.'

‘What stopped you?'

‘An awful weakness for ham,' Perlman said.

Both men walked outside where Mary Gibson was surrounded by a thicket of reporters. She handled them as she always did: good manners and careful words. The assembly never interrupted her. Mary Gibson had that quality people called ‘presence'. She had an educated Glasgow accent, unlike Perlman's; hers was authoritative, with crisp diction, while his was rough and unschooled, forged in his boyhood in the old south side.

‘Your car or mine?' Scullion asked.

‘Mine's shite on wheels,' Perlman said.

They went towards Scullion's car, a Citroën. Scullion unlocked it, and sat behind the wheel. Perlman climbed into the passenger seat. He looked up at the sky. The early evening sun, free of cloud and rain, glowed orange over the city. When it lay under sunlight, Glasgow always reminded him of a patient liberated from a long recuperation. Sandstone tenements cast off their austerity, like creatures shedding a wintry skin. Belated spring, blue skies, maybe even people strolling in the great parks of the city: Glasgow stirred, but warily, because those skies now clear might chuck down rain again in the morning.

Scullion drove out of the car park, and Perlman felt a familiar old electricity zap him. The first foot over the threshold of an investigation: you don't know what lies in the room beyond the door. Corridors, other rooms, staircases, whispers, whatever. You followed, you listened. You waited. Sometimes you obsessed.

‘Where are we heading?' Scullion asked.

Perlman opened Indra Gupta's file. ‘Pollokshields,' he said.

9

She sat on a bench in Elder Park, a couple of hundred yards from Govan public library. There was a dead air about Govan, she thought, an aura of unemployment, lives scratched out of nothing. She imagined a camera shot from high overhead, depicting the tenements along Govan Road, and the cranes perched at the river's edge, where only a couple of small shipyards now operated.

Her grandfather had worked in the shipyards in the days when glorious ocean-going liners were built on the Clyde. Her father might have done the same if the industry hadn't collapsed. He'd gone to Canada in search of work. He said he'd find a job in Toronto, he'd write, send money, and one day she and her mother would join him. Big shot, big promise.

Nobody ever heard from him again.

Sometimes she wondered if he'd started a new life in a Toronto suburb or wherever, and just erased the old entirely. New wife, kids, house. He disappeared inside a mist of memory, and even when she tried to bring his face to mind she wasn't sure if the image bore any resemblance to the man. Ten years after he'd vanished, her mother – who'd indiscriminately taken a series of casual lovers, sailors, salesmen, drifters – died of diabetic complications.

The past is over, she thought. You don't need to go there. But she could smell her father sometimes, stale tobacco hanging in his clothes, the damp stink when he took his shoes off and stuck his feet in front of the coal fire. And she could hear her mother have sex in the recess bed in the kitchen with strangers, the racketing of mattress springs, her mother
hushing
her partners into quiet, the eventual gasps and cries of release and intoxicated laughter. Some of these men were black. She remembered them leaving in the middle of the night, or at daybreak, faces glistening with sweat, steps stealthy. Once, late at night, she'd bumped into one of them in the narrow hallway that led to the toilet, and he'd reached out to stroke her face or pat her head, and she'd recoiled from the strangeness of his skin, and the strong odour of his sweat: from his naked
blackness
.

Little girl
, he'd said, and laughed in a deep way.
I'm just being friendly
.

She'd run to her room, which was a closet containing a tiny mattress, and she'd pulled her face under the sheets and lain there trembling. A black man, black as that oily tar spread in summers by road crews, and he'd haunted her dreams for a long time after.

The sun was slipping beyond trees now. Two adolescent boys with long shadows threw a limegreen tennis ball back and forth. She thought of the man going over the balcony. Dropped into the night like a stone.

Yes
. It was the right thing. The only thing.

She thought of him inside her. Fucking her. She felt unclean.

She gazed at the lights in the windows of the library. Some of her time she lived in a third-floor flat in Langlands Road, a few blocks from the park. The nameplate nailed to her door read
RJ McKay
, probably the previous tenant. She kept the name because it afforded her anonymity. Uncarpeted, sparsely furnished, the flat wasn't a home. She stored a few suitcases of clothing there, but not all. Her possessions were scattered in other rooms and bedsits about the city. She liked this dispersal of her belongings; anyone trying to track her movements would find a series of false trails and tantalizing clues.

She rose, walked round the bench, felt darkness gather in the greenery. She checked her watch: 7.30. She wasn't sure what time the park closed. She shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her blue jeans. A chill was forming in the night air. She zipped her brown leather jacket shut and kicked damp grass with her burgundy Docs. She was impatient.

7.42.

She saw him come from the direction of the library. He was looking down at his feet like a child counting his steps. You can't always get the people you need, she thought. You take what's available. The gullible, the lonely who wanted to belong to something, anything. Only a few had potential.

She sat on the bench, crossed her legs. She raised her face just as he reached her: it was always a rush to see the effect she had on him. He was severely smitten. His lunar white face flushed. She knew how to turn his head the full three-sixty.

‘I heard on the radio,' she said.

‘Went like a dream.'

He sat beside her. She smelled booze on his breath. She said, I told you no drinking. Emphatically. What did I tell you?'

‘One pint zall I had. Cross my heart.'

‘Alone or what?'

‘On my tod,' he said.

‘Where?'

‘Does that matter?' A small rebellion in his voice.

‘This is serious. The whole structure's serious. We're not playing some fucking game, Beezer. If I ask a question, you answer. You don't like the rules, get on your bike.'

‘Awright. Brechin's Bar.'

‘You talk to anybody there?'

‘Not a soul.'

‘You think I'm a bossy bitch.'

‘No, no, I don't –'

‘I have people I answer to. The people I answer to have people they answer to. It goes on. I don't know where it finishes. We keep secrets. You think I'm a bitch, that doesn't matter a fuck to me. The world's going down the kludgie and I don't have time for your petty-arsed concerns.'

‘I don't need lectures. Jeez-
us
.' He looked offended. He stared in the direction of the boys throwing the ball. The dog was running this way and that, confused and frothing.

‘We all need reminders,' she said. She pushed a hand through her black hair, which she wore back in a ponytail held in place by an elastic band. She snapped off the band and let her hair go loose over her shoulders. She could almost feel Beezer shiver as strands drifted close to his face. Gossamer, spiderwebs – he caught the slight updraught and liked it. She looked at his hands on the knees of his gaudy trousers. His nails were bitten down and ragged. And those shoes, those weird boats on his feet. What were they for?

‘You got the item?' she said.

He reached into his pocket and slipped a folded hankie towards her. She peeled back the dirty linen an inch and glanced at the gun, then tucked it in the breast pocket of her leather jacket.

‘It's the same bloody weapon,' he said.

‘I have to check.'

‘You don't trust me, eh?'

‘Trust isn't the point. I have to return the gun. So it has to be the same gun.'

‘You think I did a swap or something? Where would I find a gun anyway even if I
wanted
to swap?'

‘Sometimes I think you don't get the whole picture.'

‘I get it all right. I know what the fight's about. Don't you worry about me.' He looked tense. He pouted, then exhaled, relaxed his shoulders. She'd detected a slight madness about him in the past; he carried a worrisome buzz around in his head. It made him useful, but also unpredictable.

‘I did the job. I carried it off.'

‘Your assignment was one target. Only one.'

‘The fuck was I supposed to know a guy was gonny come into that corridor? He was a raghead anyway. What does it matter?'

‘If he recovers and gives a description, it matters.'

‘My hood was on tight. He couldn't see my face. I got the one that counted. I got that bitch. Clean and fast and I was out of there in a minute. Oh I was great. I was great.'

His voice rose in a disturbing way. His pendulum was out of kilter. She had to play him. She had to keep him sweet. Under control. ‘I'll send you a new email address.'

‘You keep changing it.'

‘I keep changing a lot of things. Only a fool stays in one place, Beezer.'

‘Just don't forget me, eh? I mean, I'm ready. Any time. Say the word. You know that.'

She let her hand fall to his shoulder. A small squeeze, an inconsequential intimacy. Give him a wee thrill. What was his life like anyway? Bare bones bleak, she thought. Look at him, the tracksuit trousers, the hooded top, the noise he made at the back of his throat as if he was trying to regurgitate something. He had hands like putty. She couldn't imagine those hands touching the flesh of another person. Without the battle, what would he do with his time? He had the forlorn look of a man who realizes he has no great talents to sell.

She had a thought. Why not. Okay. It would either be the making of him, or the end. Take a chance. ‘You free later tonight?'

‘I've got nothing planned.'

‘You know the Victoria Bar in Dumbarton Road. Be outside at nine fifteen.'

‘What are we going to do?' he asked.

‘Tell you then. Don't disappoint me.'

She turned, broke into a run, jogged quickly out of the park, disappeared in the direction of Langlands Road. Streetlamps had come on and burned in the twilight. In the distance an ice-cream van chimed for custom; an ambitious Glasgow entrepreneur trying to squeeze a few quid out of the summery illusion created by the change in weather.

Bobby Descartes, concrete hard-on poking a puncture in his pants, watched the woman run out of his world. Face like Mona fucking Lisa, he thought: aye, Mona Lisa with a ponytail and a gun.

It took a great effort not to follow her. One day he might, oh he just might. One day he'd like to give her a good fuck. She'd do whatever he demanded. She'd suck him and he'd come in her mouth and ooh –

Magistr32. A wee bit on the thin side, not much meat to pick at, but gorgeous, and he wasn't getting a lot of nooky these days anyway. He'd never had a lot of it, come to think of it. Some guys got all they wanted. But not Bobby. Never Bobby.