32

Marak sat in the cab, eyes shut and hands clasped tightly on his thighs. The cabbie talked endlessly.

‘Did you see all the polis there? Has to be something really bad for that many patrol cars. Mibbe a murder. Mibbe a drugs raid. What do you think, eh?’

Marak made a cursory reply, a meaningless sound. He kept seeing the face of the man who’d given fruitless chase for a couple of hundred metres. And he remembered that same man in Bath Street in the company of the blonde woman who worked in Lindsay’s office.

A policeman, clearly. The last thing he needed.

The cabbie hadn’t mentioned the man diminishing in brief pursuit. Obviously he’d been too intent on making pointless talk to look in his side mirror.

‘Were you intending to visit somebody in that cul-de-sac, eh? You got friends there? Do you think anything happened in the house you were intending to visit, eh? Something awful. Christ, I hope not. What do you think, eh?’

A cul-de-sac. Marak thought, I didn’t know it was a dead-end street. I wanted to look at the house. I wanted to see where Wexler lived. A glance, no more, at how the place was fenced and gated, how it lay in relation to neighbouring houses, what kind of alarm might be visible from outside. Reconnaissance, quick. But the street had been invaded by law officers erecting crime-scene tape around Wexler’s house, and people who stood in fixated curiosity.

What had happened to bring so many policemen to the scene?

And the man who’d pursued the taxi. He’d seen Marak’s face and reacted instantaneously, which indicated that he recognized him – but how? The blonde woman would have given the police a description – dark eyes, complexion, black beard, early twenties, foreign accent; what else could she offer? That scant verbal portrait wasn’t enough for any policeman to identify him.

Had Ramsay betrayed him? was that possible? When it came to a man like Ramsay anything was possible if there was profit involved. But that raised another question: to whom would Ramsay betray him? The police? No. What was there to gain from that? Perhaps there were complexities of which Marak was unaware, loyalties divided by greed: greed was at the source of all this, after all.

The treason of greed.

Marak told the driver to stop. He stuffed some money into the cabbie’s hands and got out, entering a big supermarket in Shawlands, an oasis of bright light in the gloom of the day. He cruised the aisles and wondered about his next move. Perplexity dogged him. He stood in the dairy section and stared absently at the yoghurts and skimmed milks and butter, half-expecting somebody to lay a heavy hand on his shoulder and say, We need to have a chat, sir. How long would it take the police to trace the taxi anyway? They’d call the cab companies, talk to despatchers, who’d talk in turn to drivers: everything was computerized, everything logged. The driver would be found, and he’d tell his story. He’d say he dropped his passenger outside a supermarket, and he’d specify the exact place, and the police would come.

And they might come very soon.

He hurried from the supermarket, walked a couple of blocks from the main road, found himself in side streets. Tenements rose above him like cliffs into which windows had been cut. Too many windows. Too many points of view. He found himself lost in a grid of streets. Tassie Street. Hector Road. Rossendale. He was moving deeper into a maze without a centre. He saw a face in a third-storey window looking down impassively. One set of eyes: his imagination multiplied eyes. In every window somebody observing … absurd. He had to stay calm and think clearly.

The rational man is the one who survives.

He came to a phone booth. Remains of pizza sauce had dried on the glass in streaky swirls. He opened the door, went inside. It was time, he thought, to make this call. He had to reassure himself, recharge his confidence. He gathered all the change he had in his pockets. He picked up the plastic handset, which was gummy to the touch. He knew the number, he’d memorized it. Why commit something to paper when you can store it in your head? He punched in the digits, and when he heard a voice answer he began to feed coins into the slot. Ding ding ding.

In Hebrew, a woman was saying: ‘Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot. Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot. Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot –’

Marak replaced the handset. The number you have called is no longer in service. Okay, he’d misdialled. Or something had gone wrong with the connection. He pushed the digits again, and waited, and after a moment he heard: ‘Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot –’

He hung up, ran a hand nervously across his mouth. He’d remembered the sequence of numbers wrongly. Or. Or what. He felt panic.

He tried the number a third time.

‘Ha mispar she chiyagtem lo be sheroot –’

Marak stepped out of the booth. He’d forgotten the number, that was it. He was too tense. He needed calm before his memory, usually a well-calibrated instrument, could function again. He walked and walked through unfamiliar neighbourhoods, and felt the temperature around him fall. By dark, ice would form on the pavements, the streets become treacherous.

Remember the number. Relax, let it flow back to you. A set of simple digits. It had to be easy. But he was blocked. He heard Zerouali’s voice again: you are doing a wonderful thing, young man, and may God be with you, and if you need a word of moral support at any time, telephone me here …

Marak listened to a nearby train rattle past in the midday gloaming, and wished he were riding it, travelling out of this city without once looking back. The longer he remained, the more dangerous Glasgow was going to become for him; already it was beginning to feel like an icy prison in which he was being held without trial.

He walked until he came to a rubbish bin and there he ripped into slivers the photograph of Artie Wexler, and the manila envelope, and he dumped them, fisting them deep into the rubbish already inside the container.