6

The telephone ringing in the kitchen woke him shortly before eight a.m. and he rose, dry-mouthed and befuddled, and made his way downstairs. He grabbed the receiver, dropped it, went down on his knees.

‘Lou?’

Detective-Inspector Sandy Scullion had one of those voices that was always sunny. Scullion, ginger hair and pleasant looks, could deliver bad news and make it seem like you’d just won the bloody lottery. Perlman supposed it was a gift, the knack of cheerfulness.

‘Lou, did I wake you?’

‘Aye, it was a long night.’

‘I read your report. I fear it’s going to be a long day.’

Perlman listened to the old Aga humming comfortingly. The hot core of the room. He edged closer to it. Somewhere in the night he’d removed his coat, but not his suit. Brown and crumpled, a double-breasted number that had come into fashion and then gone out at least twice in the time he’d had it. He owned only two suits and the other had been in the dry-cleaners for months. He couldn’t remember where he’d left the claim ticket. He gazed round the kitchen, not really seeing it. Without his glasses the world was an acceptable sort of blur.

‘No record of your dead man’s prints, I’m afraid,’ Scullion said.

‘So he was a law-abiding citizen.’

‘Why does a law-abiding citizen get killed, Lou?’

‘Good question. If it was a murder.’ Perlman opened the refrigerator and looked inside. He grabbed a carton of apple juice and slugged some back.

‘He shouldn’t be too hard to identify,’ Scullion said. ‘Sooner or later somebody’s going to report a missing person.’

‘Unless he lived alone.’

‘Not everybody lives like a monk, Lou. Anyway, he had a wedding ring.’

‘It doesn’t follow he had a wife,’ Perlman said.

Scullion was quiet a moment. ‘The coat’s distinctive. Somebody might remember him at Mandelson’s.’

Perlman saw his day stretch ahead in a series of little investigative jabs. The coat. Probing the memory of a salesman. Who bought this damned garment? Trudging through the cold. Making out reports. He wanted to sit here and hug the Aga. He looked at the window. A few soft snowflakes drifted against the pane. Dark as night out there. The city in winter had a feel of having been abandoned. The sun was rare, and even when it shone it had all the warmth of a tangerine stored in a freezer.

He plugged the electric kettle into the wall. Coffee, hot coffee, kick the day in the arse. And music, that was what he needed for the full blast. He took the phone inside the living room and found his glasses lying beside the Bose. He slipped them on and stuck Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel on his old turntable, and lowered the stylus carefully to ‘Cash on the Barrelhead’. Volume up, fast fiddling, whooping voices of merriment. Just the thing for clearing out the tangled webs of morning. Lord they put me in the jailhouse … He thought of Scullion in his office at Force HQ, an architectural conundrum of buildings jammed together in Pitt Street, close to the city centre. Scullion’s little room was decorated with bright drawings his kids had made. Stick figures with big grins and smiley-face suns in the sky.

‘What’s that racket, Lou?’ Scullion asked.

‘Gram Parsons.’

‘Who?’

‘Your idea of music is Barbra Streisand warbling.’

‘It’s more than that –’

‘Okay. I’ll throw in Shirley Bassey.’ Perlman attempted to sing, managed a croak. ‘What now my love …’

Scullion said, ‘There’s a word for you.’

‘Slovenly? Cantankerous?’

‘They go without saying. I was thinking eclectic.’

‘That’s the sweetest thing you ever said to me, Sandy.’

‘Jazz concerts, classical, that country stuff, there’s no limit to your taste,’ Scullion said.

Perlman said, ‘I draw a line at reggae.’

‘McLaren’s doing the post-mortem later this morning.’

Perlman lowered the volume of the music. ‘McLaren? His hand’s about as steady as a live toad in aspic’

‘Then we should be thankful he works only on the dead.’

‘A small mercy.’ He went back inside the kitchen, poured hot water into a cup, stirred in a big spoonful of instant coffee.

‘Are you coming in?’ Scullion asked.

‘Give me about an hour, Sandy. I’m popping in to see my brother first.’

‘I heard about that. I hope he’ll be okay.’

‘We all do.’

When Perlman hung up, he drained his coffee and went back upstairs and stripped. He stepped inside the shower, a narrow fibreglass cubicle with a plastic curtain, and turned on the taps. He let the force of water needle his skull and run down his body, then he dried himself and hurried inside his bedroom where he found an old dark-blue blazer with silver buttons, and a pair of baggy flannels that needed pressing. He discovered a clean but crumpled white shirt. What the hell. You were investigating a death, not posing in a fancy cardigan for a knitwear pattern. He couldn’t find a tie. All right. So he was going into the office looking like a downmarket yachtsman, blazer and bags and silver buttons. All he needed was a captain’s cap and a collapsible telescope. Ahoy.

He put on his glasses, brushed his teeth, looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. What could you say about that face? A battered duffel-bag pummelled by the demands of too many long nights working the streets, climbing staircases in rundown tenements, ringing the doorbells of sleazy flats whose occupants were psychotic, homicidal, and often armed, too many years wading through the guff the city barfed up from its lower intestinal levels, the pervs, scumbags, dossers, alkies, druggies, molesters, wifebeaters, the whole sad lawless crew that lay concealed in Glasgow’s gut.

My eyes have life at least, he thought. Of a kind. Unflinching, albeit bloodshot from lack of sleep. Years of interrogation had gone into those eyes, years of asking questions and watching for the tics and funny little mannerisms that indicated somebody was lying. He scanned the map of his entire clock. The underchin was fleshy. The cheeks, you could say, had a slight hollow quality. The hair, aye, well, he’d tried for years to do something about it, and nothing had worked, and he wasn’t going to grease it down at his age. So he’d yielded to a spiky look, tufts of silver rising like sharp shoots from a thin lawn of dark grey. Politely, it was a failed crewcut.

He stepped out of the house. The morning was blurry with snow that fell through streetlamps. A figure appeared under a lamp and moved towards him, a woman dressed in a long brown coat and a headscarf. She reminded Perlman of a bow-legged table.

‘Maggie,’ he said. ‘I forgot it was your day.’

‘You’d forget your bum if it wasn’t welded to you,’ the woman said. She had dentures that slipped and clicked as she talked. She was a widow who’d been cleaning Perlman’s house for years.

‘How’s that pigsty of yours?’

‘The kitchen is spotless. It’s like a model home –’

‘Aye, right, you were on your knees all night long scrubbing the floor in the endless war against e-coli. I’ll do your bedroom and bathroom, then I’ll get stuck into the kitchen. If there’s time. Which I doubt. What you need, Lou –’

‘Maggie, don’t say it –’

‘A wife, Lou. You need a wife.’

‘I had one once,’ he said. ‘It didn’t take.’

‘Find another.’ She took a key from her pocket. ‘Watch how you drive. The road’s slippery.’ She entered the house, closed the door. Where would he be without Maggie McGibbon? In more chaos. He unlocked the Mondeo and got inside, turned the key in the ignition. Battery dead, very very dead. Fuck it all. December in Glasgow, snow as thin as consommé, the rag and bone end of the year.