White Rage (9 page)

In fact, okay, he wasn't getting any.

Magistr32 and her long black hair; he'd take strands of it and weave it round his dick –

Aye, right. He didn't even know her name, only the one she used on her emails. And that wasn't a real name. Nobody was called Magistr32, for Christ's sake. How did you even pronounce it? Majister? Did you drop the numbers?

He'd met her in Maryhill on a wet night last January. He'd been drinking alone, and she was standing beside him at the bar, and they just sort of drifted into conversation; she
listened
more than she spoke – at first anyway. She listened to his views on the state of the nation. She was sympathetic, even when he launched into a long beer-fuelled rant, the memory of which embarrassed him.

The more she listened, the more attractive he found her. She was quietly lovely. No flash, no eyeshadow and warpaint, but definitely a face you'd look at a long time because the features – green eyes and thick black hair and an expressive mouth – were a delight to him.

Despite the slender body and the sweet face, she was as gentle as a howitzer. She had firm views about the world, and a way of expressing them that silenced Beezer, and made him feel inadequate. He was transported by her passion and the funny manner she had of chopping the bar with her small clenched hand when she had a point to make.

There were solutions to the sickness in Britain, she told him, but they'd take time and courage. Did he have that courage?

And he'd said, Fucking right.

She'd asked if he wanted to meet a few people who felt the same way. Kindred spirits, a kind of loose group.

I'm in, he said.

A few nights later, in a ground-floor flat in Garnethill, she introduced him as Beezer – a name she bestowed on him for no apparent reason –to a long-haired cadaver of a man she called Swank, who wore a beaded choker. By candlelight, Swank spoke of revolution and blood in a serious monotone. Bobby Descartes thought he looked completely wasted, a doper. Swank created a dire picture of the future: the United Kingdom would be plummeted into third-world chaos. Total breakdown. Nightmare. Bloated corpses floating in rivers. War in the streets. The last great battle, Swank said. Do you want to be a soldier, Beezer?

Bobby was overwhelmed by Swank's gloomy vision. He said he'd gladly be a soldier. Just point the way. Swank told him it wasn't that easy, the movement needed to evaluate potential recruits, he'd be observed and assessed, and when the time was right – maybe, maybe – he'd be given an important task. Swank stared at him red-eyed for such a long time Beezer felt uneasy, sort of spellbound.

A week later, Magistr32 took him to a pub near Bridgeton Cross. At a corner table in the lounge bar, she introduced him to a man by the name of Pegg, who wore an eyepatch and talked in a buzz-saw rasp about how the heavy guns were going into action. People would die. But somebody had to take a stand. Pegg raved about the number of illegals now in the country, and how they were draining the system dry; decent people were being taxed all the way up the anus so that black and yellow and brown immigrant scum and an assortment of unwanted unwashed foul-smelling asylum seekers could ride the Great British Gravy Train. Hello, newsflash. This train was out of freebies. This train wasn't running any more.

We must fight the good fight, Pegg said.

Beezer said Jesus, he'd fight. He'd be at the barricades. By Christ, he wouldn't let anybody down. Suddenly he belonged to something, a
cause
, he was meeting like-minded people – even if he'd never seen the men called Swank and Pegg again.

But that was how it worked: the less you knew the better. The fewer faces you remembered, the better chance the organization had. Magistr32 said the organization was big, even she didn't know many members; he accepted that.

An organization
. I belong to an organization, he thought. He cherished the notion.

A tennis ball came bouncing towards him. He caught and squeezed it. He enjoyed the feel of crushing it in his hand; it was like demolishing the swollen testicle of somebody he hated.

A kid shouted to him. ‘Can you toss the ball back, mister?'

‘Fuck off,' Bobby Descartes said. ‘Fuck you and your fucking ball.'

He turned away, swung his arm, launched the ball in the other direction. It rose into the last light of day and vanished as it fell against the backdrop of darkening trees. It must have gone up a hundred, a hundred and twenty feet, he thought.

‘Yer a shite,' the boy shouted. ‘A total shite.'

‘That's me,' Bobby Descartes said. ‘That's what I am. A total shite.'

He flashed a vigorous V-sign at the boy. You don't know the half of it, sonny. I have killed. I have killed another human being, and I'm ready to do it again.

Any old time.

10

Perlman felt edgy whenever he travelled deep into the southern part of the city; Pollokshields was too close to the neighbourhoods where the Aunts lived. Hilda and Marlene and Susan had small tidy bungalows in Giffnock and Newton Mearns, and led comfy lives behind lacy curtains. They baked a lot. They forced hefty scones and slabs of fruitcake on him whenever he visited, which wasn't often. They slaughtered him with kindness and well-intended counsel.
There's a lovely woman you should meet, Lou, Sadie Plotkin, recently a widow, such a shame
…

Scullion parked his Citroen outside a red sandstone Victorian villa sheltered from the street by trees. Perlman was first out of the car. He walked to an iron gate that led to the driveway and paused. Gupta. Why did that name suddenly ring a tinny little bell in his private steeple? He rummaged his memory; nothing came up. Store it away. Once upon a time, his memory would have pounced on any loose fragment like a piranha in a feeding frenzy. Not now: synaptic difficulties. Sometimes they self-repaired, sometimes not.

He pushed the gate and walked up the path. Scullion followed. The house was imposing and self-assured in the Victorian way; the future will always be British, old boy, the colonies eternally grateful. Confident nineteenth-century dreams of infinite commerce and infinite profit, Perlman thought; the city of Glasgow had been one of those dreams, where tobacco barons grew rich and built grand houses like the mansion that faced him now.

He rang the doorbell. The sky was almost entirely dark. A breeze blustered through the trees. A young man appeared in the doorway. He was Indian, wore a stylish grey suit and a grey shirt and a brown tie. Perlman and Scullion showed ID and the young man introduced himself, in a Glasgow accent, as Dev Gupta, Indra's brother. He invited them inside a foyer that was a deep burgundy colour; a mellow spice perfumed the air. Cinnamon, Perlman thought, but he wasn't sure. Candles burned on a sideboard.

The house was crowded. He listened to noises from rooms whose doorways lay open: a woman crying, other voices offering comfort, and from elsewhere a man speaking firmly and with obvious anger in what Perlman assumed was Hindi.

Dev Gupta led them into an empty room at the rear of the entranceway. ‘It's quieter in here,' he said.

‘We can come at another time,' Scullion suggested.

Kind-hearted Sandy, Perlman thought, showing respect in this house of death. But the process of law doesn't stop. We can go away, but we always come back later.

‘This time is as good as any,' the young man said.

Perlman glanced round the room. The furniture was old-fashioned; there were a few tapestries of stylized dancing girls, which he imagined had some religious significance.

‘Krishna dancing with the
gopis
,' Dev Gupta said. ‘My father's fond of these old things. If this was my house, I'd change a few items around. But it's not.'

An old family resentment, Perlman thought. It was in the voice.

Scullion said, ‘Let's talk about Indra.'

‘What do you want to know?'

‘Anything at all. Her personal life?'

‘She didn't have one. She lived for that school. Bloody awful place. Nobody in the family wanted her to work there.'

‘Why?'

‘She spurned the chance of a good marriage because she wanted a career. Great career, eh? Look how it ends.'

‘Who did she turn down?' Perlman asked.

‘The man she rejected lives in Calcutta. The marriage was one my father had arranged.'

The arranged marriage. The amalgamation of families and business interests, Perlman thought. ‘So she went to work, came home, never went out? How did she fill her spare time?'

‘She read. Watched a little TV. Mostly documentaries. She was into ecological issues. Most nights she planned her classes. She was conscientious, despite the fact she earned a pittance at that Sunshine school or whatever it's called. And now she's dead.'

‘And we have to find her killer,' Scullion said quietly.

Perlman noticed a bowl of fruit. He realized he was hungry. With a younger man's sense of acute anticipation, he'd been looking forward to afternoon tea with Miriam, but that prospect had been set aside for another time. Now he longed to reach for a pear, an apple; his belly had begun to grumble quietly.

He gazed at Dev Gupta, who gave more an impression of anger than grief. He thought of the arranged marriage Indra had refused and imagined the arguments that must have rolled around this house. The daughter defies the father's will. The daughter remains firm. The brother sides with whom? Father? Sister? They all fall out. The atmosphere is tense, one of uneasy truces shattered by outbursts of belligerent reproach.

Gupta said, ‘She once thought somebody was following her.'

‘Did she know who?' Scullion asked.

‘Just some man. She didn't know him, and she wasn't absolutely sure he was a genuine stalker anyway. Then she stopped mentioning him, and we assumed he wasn't hanging around any more. My sister, you have to understand, hated making a fuss. All she wanted was to contribute – her word, not mine – to the lives of the kids in her school. That was her choice. She could've chosen a different path, and she'd still be alive.'

‘And married,' Perlman said. A stalker who might not have been, he thought. A young woman who didn't want to make a fuss. He glanced at Scullion. Over the years they'd developed a kind of silent communication; Perlman's present expression, and the accompanying tiny shrug of the shoulder, was a way of saying that there had to be more than this to Indra Gupta's life. Otherwise, why was she killed? Did somebody just drift in off the street and shoot her randomly?

Scullion paced the room as if measuring it for a new carpet. ‘She didn't have a boyfriend?'

‘Right,' Gupta said.

‘You're absolutely sure?'

‘I knew my sister, Inspector.'

Perlman eyeballed the fruit longingly, and imagined the flesh of a pear dissolving in his mouth. ‘So she never kept any secrets from you?'

‘She wasn't the furtive type.'

‘With all due respect,' Scullion said, ‘sometimes we think we know people better than we really do. Sometimes they surprise us.'

‘Not my sister.'

Perlman picked up an apple. He remembered how WPC Meg Gayle had suggested that the killer might have known Indra's name. Might have. A child's impression. ‘Did she ever say anything
specific
about this possible stalker? A description? What he wore?'

Gupta shrugged. ‘Nothing I remember. She'd seen a man a couple of times at the end of the street when she walked to the bus stop in the morning. She also thought she saw the same man in the vicinity of the kindergarten once or twice.'

‘She never talked to this guy?'

‘I seriously doubt it.'

A tall white-haired man came into the room. He wore a black three-piece suit and a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar. He had an air of proprietorial authority; this, Perlman thought, was Gupta Senior. Dev Gupta faded immediately into the margins of the room, diminished by his father's presence. It was obvious where the control of this household lay.

‘These men are from the police, Father,' Dev Gupta said.

The older man scanned Scullion and Perlman. A sharp eye, Perlman thought. The flick of a shutter, snap, picture taken and filed in the memory. ‘I am Bharat Gupta, gentlemen. People call me Barry. Why this need for abbreviation, who can say? The Glasgow way, I suppose. Here, everything is shortened. Robert to Bob. Names are shortened. Lives too, it seems.'

Scullion was quiet a moment, then he introduced himself and Perlman.

‘There is enormous sorrow in my house today,' Barry Gupta said.

Scullion said, ‘You have our sincere condolences.'

Bharat Gupta, who spoke English in the slightly formal way of a man who has learned it as a second language, made a gesture with his hand, palm overturned, as if to suggest grief and emptiness. ‘Sometimes language is deficient for the expression of the heart.'

Barry Gupta talked to his son in Hindi, then turned back to look at the two policemen. ‘Dev says he has told you all he knows. For myself, I can add very little. Indra was a private person, perhaps a little too self-willed for her own good. Of course, she was born in Glasgow, and went to school here, and possibly she learned certain ways of behaviour of which I didn't approve. But times change, the old customs are abandoned …' He paused and plucked a handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket. He buried his face in it for a while.

Perlman wanted to say something, a phrase of comfort, but all you could ever offer were crumbs that made no difference. Scullion stood very still, head stooped. Dev Gupta touched his father's elbow and led him to a chair, but the older man refused to sit. He dropped the handkerchief from his face; a glassy track of tears slipped from his eyes to his lips.

‘You will forgive me, gentlemen.'

‘Of course,' Scullion said.

‘Find this man who killed Indra. That's all I ask. Find him. My son will show you out.'