51

Scullion took Mary Gibson’s call on his cellphone in room 408 of the Waterloo Hotel and immediately pulled Perlman to one side. ‘We’re needed elsewhere. Now.’

‘What about Charlotte Leckie?’

‘Bailey can take her statement down. He writes, you know. I’ve seen examples.’

‘What’s the hurry?’

‘I’ll tell you on the way.’

Perlman turned to the woman and said, ‘I’m leaving you in the very capable hands of Detective-Sergeant Bailey.’

‘But –’

‘It’s okay. Really it is. Besides, he’s nicer than me. He really is.’

Bailey came out of the bathroom, shutting the door quickly as if to hide the sight of something Charlotte Leckie had already seen.

Perlman said, ‘Look after her. Take her statement.’

‘Where are you off to?’

‘It’s a mystery,’ Perlman said.

Charlotte Leckie said, ‘I’d like to get dressed.’

‘Bailey will be a gentleman and look the other way,’ Perlman said. ‘Won’t you, Bailey?’

Perlman and Scullion went out into the corridor, where the uniforms had cleared most of the spectators away. They hurried towards the stairs, descended quickly. Perlman bumped along behind the Inspector. He’d yanked a muscle in his upper leg, probably when he’d given chase to the taxi. Now it had begun to ache.

They reached the street and walked to where Scullion’s Rover was parked. Slippery underfoot. Glasgow was a city of whoopsadaisy surfaces, slick sheets of ice where any passing pedestrian might perform a pratfall.

Scullion unlocked his car. Perlman clambered into the passenger seat. ‘Where are we headed?’

‘You want to find Abdullah, don’t you?’

Perlman buckled his seatbelt. ‘Damn right I want to find him. Tell me you’ve got the address.’

‘Furfee broke, gave it to Mary Gibson.’

‘Furfee did? Well well well. Face to face with the mystery man. How far?’

‘Braeside Street.’

‘Off Maryhill Road. I know it.’

‘I hate driving in these conditions.’ Scullion switched on his de-icer, and wiped condensation from the windscreen with a rag he kept on the dash. He drove down Elmbank Street to St Vincent Street, where he crossed the motorway that slashed the gut of the city; below, the lights of slow-moving cars cut through the mist of exhaust fumes. He turned into North Street and headed for St George’s Cross, and then Maryhill Road. Perlman watched the city go past in a tableau of dark buildings rising beyond streetlamps, the occasional illumination of a restaurant or bar. He was thinking of Abdullah, of the enigmatic envelopes BJ had supposedly delivered.

‘Did Furfee say anything about the envelopes?’ he asked.

‘Not so far as I know. Christ, it’s an ordeal driving.’ The car failed to grip, slid, tobogganed a few yards to the right before Scullion had it under control again.

‘I don’t want to die in a car accident,’ Perlman said. ‘It’s so bloody banal.’

‘What kind of death are you looking for anyway?’

‘Oh. Something heroic.’

‘Tell me how you’d ever find yourself in heroic circumstances.’

‘Saving a beautiful girl from drowning.’

‘You don’t swim, Lou.’

‘That’s why it would be heroic.’

Perlman pushed his seat back and stared out as Scullion drove up Maryhill Road. He thought of Nina with her garinim and the sheets of pretentious yellow bond on which she wrote her prose; funny how marriage could distil itself in so few sorry memories. He wondered if intensely cold weather induced an occasional melancholy in him.

More likely it was the three murders that stoked this mood; that, and the recurring anxiety he felt about Colin. No, wait, you’re kidding yourself, Lou: it was more than Colin’s physical well-being that bothered you. It was his fucking past. When he was healthy and back on his feet, would his history stand up to scrutiny? Or would Bannerjee’s accusation be forgotten, as if the Indian’s words had never been said in the first place? Shiv was no longer around to make any claims about Colin, and the comments existed only in Lou Perlman’s memory; and who could say he wouldn’t forget them?

But that question made him uneasy because he suspected he knew the answer: yes, yes, dammit, he’d protect his brother. He knew he would. He’d known it ever since the conversation with Bannerjee. He’d turn the old blind eye because the demands of blood were seemingly more compelling than those of the law. This revelation dismayed him. It came out of a place in his heart he’d never known about before now, an unlit corner where bad impulses hatched. He’d spent his life upholding the law, observing it dutifully, and now he realized he was actually prepared to look the other fucking way, like any sleazy cop on the take.

He had a sudden longing to speak to Miriam. Or simply to see her. Would she be at the hospital now? Sitting at Colin’s bed. Talking quietly to him. Holding his hand. The loving wife.

‘On the left, I think,’ Scullion said.

He swung the car very slowly. He drove down a street of tenements, and when he saw forty-five he pulled the Rover into the kerb, where he switched off the engine. ‘Here we are.’

‘Do we know if he’s home or if we wait down here until he appears?’

‘We don’t know,’ Scullion said.

‘You want to go in?’

Scullion said, ‘I want a backup unit first. I’ll call.’ He used his mobile, made the arrangements for a second vehicle. ‘I like a little extra security.’

Perlman looked at lit windows burning in the dark. The city compressed space, and thus compressed people. So many lives in boxes. His mind shifted briefly to Bannerjee, blood in that thick white hair, blood on porcelain. The impulsion of the screwdriver, the strength behind it.

His leg muscle twinged again and he changed position. A car slipped in behind the Rover, and flashed its lamps twice. Scullion got out. Perlman followed. There were two plainclothes men in the other car. Perlman knew them vaguely. He’d seen them around. He couldn’t recall their names. They looked suitably aggressive, wide of shoulder, hard-edged.

‘Watch the close,’ Scullion said.

‘Right you are, Inspector,’ the man behind the wheel said.

‘If you hear a commotion, get your arses in the building. The flat’s on the top floor.’

‘Gotcha.’ The pair nodded. The one in the passenger seat, a bullock of a man, chewed gum vigorously.

Perlman and Scullion entered the narrow close that led to the stairs. They went up slowly. The lights on the landings were dim. The building had a feel of abandonment. Or like a vacuum. Airless and still, a space where nothing could survive. A food smell hung in the silence, but he couldn’t identify it. Old lard, maybe, last week’s bacon grease. He imagined people sitting in rooms in front of the hypnotic lights of TVs. People eating frozen dinners, reconstituted chicken parts and artificial mashed potatoes in MSG gravy. But no sounds punctured the quiet of the building.

Up they climbed, Perlman lagging behind Sandy Scullion. Chasing taxis at your age. Not bright. He thought of the face in the cab’s window. Was it a killer’s face? How were killers supposed to look anyway? They came in all kinds of masks.

Scullion stopped. ‘You okay?’

Perlman nodded. ‘Dandy.’

He noticed Scullion’s voice was a whisper. ‘One more flight, Lou.’

Scullion started to go up. Perlman laid his hand on the banister. On the top floor, Scullion stopped again. Three doors on the landing, three separate flats, but only one door had no name-plate. Both men stood very still a moment, then Scullion pressed the bell and it buzzed inside the flat. He buzzed it a second time.

Inside the bedroom Marak was hurriedly stuffing his clothes into his backpack when he heard the bell. His heart skittered. At first he thought Ramsay had come to see him; but Ramsay had a key. Maybe it was the downstairs neighbour, the man with the blue snakes tattooed on the backs of his hands. But why? A drunken argument, a rant? Marak thought about his toilet items. He’d get them next. He’d ignore the bell and eventually whoever was on the other side of the door would go away.

He entered the bathroom and gathered his toiletries and placed them in one of the outside pockets of the backpack. He zipped it. In the living room he checked the items he intended to carry on his person. Passport. Traveller’s cheques. Cash. He was ready now. Ready for departure. Wait –

He drew from the left-hand pocket of his coat Bannerjee’s photograph. He’d meant to dispose of it, but in his haste he’d overlooked it. Burn it. Just burn the thing. The doorbell rang again. Three long persistent rings. They left an electric echo in the flat.

He went inside the kitchen and found an old book of matches in a drawer and struck one, holding it to the photograph. The match was damp, and died. He let it slip into the sink. The bell rang and rang. He struck another match. The glossy caught flame briefly, then fizzled out. He lit a third match and applied it to the picture and this time the flame took, but it burned too slowly for him, spreading in a leisurely way from the corner of the shot towards the centre. Faster, he thought. Burn burn. He coughed as the chemical fumes rose to his face.

When he’d reduced the photo to a shiny black cinder, he dropped it into the plastic litterbin. But the smell, that stench of petroleum by-products, lingered in the air.

Rrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrr.

He touched the knife in the inside pocket of his coat. He’d go to the front door. Just to listen. If he felt confident, perhaps he’d ask the person outside to identify himself. It was a nuisance, bad timing; he didn’t need any interruptions now. He was leaving. He was going home.

He walked down the hallway very quietly and listened. He heard nothing. The door had no peephole, therefore he had no idea who was out there, if it was one man, or two, or that drugged-out woman ‘selling’ raffle tickets.

He stood very still. Waited. Tried not to breathe. He was jangled. The doorbell rang again. The sound went through him like a saw on hard wood. A loose floorboard creaked under his foot. Perhaps the noise didn’t carry beyond the flat to the landing. He thought he heard somebody whisper from the other side of the door, but he couldn’t make out words. He couldn’t even be sure he’d heard anything.

He backed away, returned to the living room. He glanced down into the street. Streetlamps glimmered on ice. He walked into the bathroom. He opened the window, looked out. The possibility of a fire-escape had popped into his mind, but he couldn’t remember seeing any building in this city equipped with such a thing. The view was restricted to the backcourts behind the tenements, expanses of dark penetrated here and there by light from rear windows. You could see into other people’s flats, other lives. A woman at a sink peeling something.

He leaned from the window: no fire-escape, only an arrangement of drainpipes bolted to the wall. What did people do in a fire? Jump? It was a long way down. He drew his head back in, shut the window, returned to the hallway.

The doorbell rang again. Two short bursts.

Marak felt like a man drawn down into a spinning funnel of water. Panic.

‘Here,’ Lou Perlman said. He’d gone downstairs to the car and come back again with the tyre-iron, which he handed to Scullion.

‘It was your idea,’ Scullion said.

‘Aye, but you’re fitter and stronger. You think you can get it open?’

‘Worth a try.’

Scullion inserted the iron into the narrow space between door and jamb. He pushed hard on the length of metal. Wood splintered, little chips flew into the air. He kept angling the implement back and forth until the wood around the mortice split. The lock was a rusted antique, and it popped out easily. He pushed the door, which opened into a small hallway.

He stepped in, Perlman at his side.

There were four doors, two on either side. All lay open. Perlman glanced inside the empty bathroom, while Scullion opened a door that yielded to a cupboard stuffed with rusted old tins of cleaning solvents, brushes, paints. Nothing of interest. They walked to the end of the hall and stepped cautiously through the door on the right, entering a bedroom with greasy yellow wallpaper and a girlie calendar dated 1992. A crucifix hung aslant above a chest of drawers.

Perlman slid the drawers open. Empty except for outdated newspapers used as lining. The room smelled of damp wallpaper. There was another scent on the air, fainter, suggestive of burnt plastic.

‘One more room,’ Scullion said quietly.

‘Wait.’ Perlman nodded across the bedroom to a door, presumably a cupboard. Scullion turned the handle, an old plastic globe that slid off in his fingers. The door swung open, revealing a heavy-as-lead upright vacuum cleaner of a kind rarely seen since the 1950s, when these gadgets were more labour-intensive than labour-saving. A generation of women had schlepped these monsters, thinking them state-of-the-art. A couple of tweed jackets hung from a rod, and a punctured football lay on the floor.

There was something else, and Perlman almost failed to notice it. He bent down, shoved the dented football aside and fingered a plastic bag containing stuffed toys, a broken-necked giraffe, a furry monkey without eyes, a battered rodent.

A small black leather wallet was jammed between rodent and monkey. He opened the wallet, examined the contents. With a swift intake of breath, he handed it to Scullion -just as a noise from the lobby made both men turn to see a bearded young man, with a backpack dangling from one shoulder, step quickly towards the front door.

Scullion called out, ‘Hey. You.’

The young man didn’t stop.

Scullion moved with an unusual elegance, and ghosted sweetly and quickly into the lobby where he threw himself, arms extended, at the young man. He must have done this a hundred times on the muddy rugby fields of his adolescence. A swift tackle round the waist, and both men went down. They rolled together for a few moments, hands locked, expressions fierce, two men fighting for possession of an invisible ball. The young man freed one hand and prodded Scullion in the eye, and Sandy said, ‘Fucker.’ Perlman seized a broom from the lobby cupboard and smacked the kid across the back of the head with the metal shaft.

The kid, scalp bleeding, rolled over on his back. Perlman sat heavily on his chest. Scullion got to his feet and dusted his coat down with his hands and said, ‘My eye, my damned eye. Christ.’ He rubbed it with the tips of his fingers. Then he bent and searched the kid’s inside pocket and found a knife and a bunch of papers.

‘A nice knife, if you like these things,’ he said to Perlman.

Perlman stared at the blade, which was impressive in a malevolent way. Glasgow was Blade City these days. He looked down at the young man. ‘So where were you sneaking off to in such a hurry?’

‘Out of here. Can I get up now?’

‘I’m too much of a burden for you?’

‘Yes.’

Perlman rolled away from the young man and stood up, then helped him rise. This was the face from the taxi. This was the face from the lift in the parking garage. Up close, it was less sinister than it had seemed on the videotape; younger, leaner. He probably had to work at looking tough and menacing. How old was he? Twenty-two, -three? Without the beard, he’d seem more like sixteen. Babyface with whiskers.

Scullion examined the papers he’d seized from the young man’s coat. ‘Okay. What have we here? One passport … Israeli. About three hundred pounds in sterling. Couple of hundred drachma. And a thousand US dollars in American Express TCs.’

‘Let me see the passport,’ Perlman said. He took it from Scullion and flicked the pages. A photograph, a name: Shimon Marak. An occupation: Student. An address in Haifa. ‘No stamps. No visas. Why is that, Shimon?’

‘Perhaps an oversight of your immigration authorities?’

‘Lazy sods. They’re always missing things. Where did you enter the United Kingdom?’

‘Dover.’

‘And how did you get to Scotland?’

‘I took a bus from London.’

‘We can check all that.’ Perlman looked at the passport again. Shimon Marak. It didn’t sound like an Arab name. ‘Abdullah’ was no Arab: he was more likely a Sephardic Jew of North African origin, perhaps Iraq, possibly Iran.

‘Why are you in Glasgow?’ Perlman asked.

‘I’m a tourist.’

‘In the dead of winter?’ Scullion asked.

‘I like the cold.’

‘Right. People from all over the world flock to Glasgow in December for the cold. It’s one big bloody cheerful freezefest. You can’t get a hotel room anywhere in the city unless you bribe the manager.’

Scullion was leafing through the wallet. He frowned at Perlman, then flashed the wallet under Marak’s face. ‘How did you get this, Shimon?’

‘What is it?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘A wallet obviously, but I’ve never seen it before.’

‘It belongs to a man called Artie Wexler. It contains his credit cards and a photograph of his wife. Do you know him?’

Marak shook his head.

Scullion said, ‘Then how come his wallet is in your bedroom?’

‘I can only assume you put it there.’

‘Why would we do that?’

‘You must have your reasons.’

Perlman realized he felt a curiously misplaced sense of pity for this kid. He was a long damn way from home, and in serious trouble; and who did he have to turn to for support? He was relying on a certain aloof arrogance, and making a show of being cool, almost disdainful, but this was a façade constructed with thin putty, and Perlman knew it would crumble eventually.

‘Let’s all sit down,’ Scullion said. ‘Make ourselves comfy.’

Marak rubbed his head. He had blood on his fingertips. Perlman held his elbow, and guided him inside the living room.

‘I think I prefer to stand,’ Marak said.

‘The Inspector tells you to sit, you sit,’ Perlman said.

Marak shrugged. He sat, looking bored.

‘Is all this too much trouble for you, Marak?’ Perlman asked. ‘I mean, we can easily turn you over to people who are far less pleasant than Inspector Scullion and me.’

‘I’m sure you can.’

Scullion, whose eye was swelling, looked at Lou. ‘Do you think our boy is suggesting we planted this wallet, Sergeant Perlman?’

‘Somebody had to,’ Marak said.

‘Since it wasn’t us, who was it?’

‘How would I know?’

Perlman said, ‘Maybe you took it yourself. Maybe you stole it from Wexler.’

‘Who’s Wexler?’

‘What were you doing in the street where Wexler lived?’

‘Ah, now I remember you,’ Marak said. ‘You chased me. I found it amusing. You were puffing and huffing.’

‘Glad I brought a smile to your face,’ Perlman said. ‘Don’t irritate me, son. Just answer the fucking question.’

‘The cab driver took a wrong turning.’

‘So you didn’t know Wexler lived on that street?’

‘No –’

‘Explain the wallet then.’

‘I told you. I can’t.’

‘Got here by magic, did it?’

Scullion leaned forward in his chair. ‘What were you doing in that particular neighbourhood anyway?’

‘Sightseeing.’

‘Right, I keep forgetting. You’re a winter tourist. A man called BJ Quick said he delivered envelopes to you at this address.’

‘Who?’

‘Quick.’

‘I have never heard of this person.’

‘He knows you, Shimon. What about Furfee?’

‘I never heard of him either.’

‘Strange. He also says he knows you.’

‘How odd.’

Perlman lit a cigarette. ‘You’re not making this easy on yourself, sonny boy.’

‘But I have nothing to fear.’

‘Mr Cool,’ Perlman said. ‘Thinks he can walk on fucking water, Sandy.’

‘I only ever heard of one Jew who could pull off that stunt,’ Scullion said.

‘Aye, right enough.’ Perlman glared at the young man. There was defiance in the set of face and the straight-backed alignment of body. You needed an ice-pick to chip away at Marak. ‘What was your business with Joseph Lindsay?’

‘Who?’

‘Fuck these games. The solicitor. You phoned his office. You tracked his secretary.’

Marak looked as if he didn’t remember.

‘The fucking garage, Marak,’ Perlman said. ‘Where we got some nice shots of you, courtesy of the magic of closed-circuit TV, assaulting the secretary.’

Marak frowned and said, ‘Yes. I remember now.’

‘You’ve got a very selective memory.’

‘I wanted to see Lindsay on a business matter.’

‘Why did you need to see a Scottish lawyer?’

‘I was interested in acquiring property in this country –’

‘Oh, aye, so you could be closer to the cold. It doesn’t explain why you assaulted the secretary, does it?’

‘She was being obstructive. I lost control. I regretted it.’

‘Do you lose control often?’

‘No, I don’t.’

Perlman looked for an ashtray. He couldn’t find one. He walked inside the kitchen. There was that smell, that aroma of burnt plastic he’d noticed before, but stronger now. He tossed his cigarette into the sink and the butt sizzled.

There were spent matches in the sink. What had young Shimon been burning? he wondered. He looked around the kitchen. He opened the rubbish bin and saw the charred remains of what clearly had been a photograph. He picked it out of the rubbish with a gentle hand. It was flaky and would disintegrate if he didn’t handle it gently. One edge hadn’t burned entirely; a sliver of white border was blackened but visible. There were no images. The surface was composed of tiny black bumps as impenetrable as a sky without stars. Very carefully he carried the relic inside the living room and set it down on the coffee table, as if it were precious moth-eaten lace about to disintegrate.

‘What’s that?’ Scullion asked.

‘Let’s ask Shimon. Why were you burning this photograph?’

‘Is that what that is – a photograph?’

‘That’s what it is. We’ve got people with fancy machines, Shimon, and they can tease all kinds of information out of unlikely places. Take this photograph. They have some kind of computer that would restore the image you burned. Maybe it wouldn’t be perfection, but it would be enough to see what you destroyed.’

‘I destroyed nothing,’ Marak said.

‘Explain that smell,’ Perlman said.

‘I don’t smell anything.’

‘Judging from the pong, somebody’s burned this within the last few minutes or so, Marak. And I don’t see any other candidate but you.’

‘I’ll tell you again, I burned nothing.’

The old denial game, Perlman thought. See nothing, remember nothing. He made his hands into soft fists and wished he could skelp young Marak into answering questions.

Scullion sighed. ‘Did you go to Lindsay’s house?’

‘How could I? The secretary wouldn’t give me his address.’

Perlman thought about Joe Lindsay’s abandoned Mercedes. ‘You ever ride in his car?’

‘That would also be very difficult, considering I never met the man.’

‘Do you ever eat garinim?’

‘What a strange question.’

‘Just answer it.’

‘Sometimes I eat it, yes,’ Marak said.

Perlman sat down, sinking into a big sponge of an armchair, the kind that only a contortionist could escape with any semblance of dignity. He heard springs creak. Good to take the weight off the aching leg. He stared at Marak. ‘Summary so far. You don’t know Lindsay. You don’t know Wexler. You don’t know how you came into possession of the wallet. You didn’t burn that photograph. You don’t know Furfee, you don’t know Quick. Basically speaking, you know fuck all.’

‘I think you are barking up a wrong tree,’ Marak said.

This flat might have been a butcher’s storage freezer. Perlman shivered and flipped a switch on the electric heater and heard one of the bars come on, clicking as it warmed. He smelled dust burning. It was like the stench of a mouse on fire.

Perlman asked, ‘How did you hear about Lindsay? Were you sitting in Haifa one day with the Glasgow phone book in front of you and looked under solicitors and jabbed the page with a pin?’

Marak said, ‘I knew his name.’

‘How come?’

‘I heard it mentioned in Haifa. Lindsay did business there now and then.’

‘Oh aye? What kind?’

‘I don’t know what kind. I heard his name, that’s all.’

‘You’re truly getting on my wick, son. Come on, tell me something you really know. Give me concrete. Hit me with gospel.’

‘My date of birth.’

‘I’m not easy to insult, but you’re pushing me to the edge. Tell me something juicy.’

‘Juicy? You mean interesting.’

‘Bolt me to my seat.’

‘I believe in justice.’

‘I suppose that’s a start. Isn’t that a start, Inspector? You and me and Marak have something in common.’

Scullion said, ‘Tell us more. Marak.’

‘And I believe in peace,’ Marak said.

Perlman said, ‘Oh-oh. Justice and peace. We’ve got an idealist here, Sandy.’

Marak looked at the carpet, a soiled threadbare thing whose design had long ago faded into a few indistinct floral blotches. ‘You’re mocking me.’

‘No. I was admiring your idealism,’ Perlman said.

‘I suppose you have none,’ Marak said.

‘I had most of my ideals kicked out of me working the streets of this city, son. A few wee bits and pieces are intact. Only just. Generally, I think idealism is a young man’s game.’

‘How sad,’ Marak said.

‘We’re here to talk about your tsurris, Marak. Not ours. Face it. You’ve got serious problems.’ Scullion blinked his swollen eye rapidly. It was almost shut.

‘You can prove nothing against me,’ Marak said.

‘You think so, eh?’ Scullion said. ‘Check the list. Assaulting a police officer. The possibility of illegal entry into the country. The unprovoked attack on Joseph Lindsay’s secretary. Possession of a wallet belonging to a man who was murdered –’

‘Murdered? I’m to be blamed for that?’

Scullion said, ‘Let me continue. There’s the small matter of your presence at the scene of Shiv Bannerjee’s murder.’

‘Whose murder?’

‘The Waterloo Hotel, Sauchiehall Street, remember? You were there, Marak. We have an eyewitness. She identified you from the print. What were you doing in that room at that particular time?’

‘She’s mistaken,’ Marak said.

‘I don’t think so,’ Scullion said.

Marak tilted his head back, laid his palms upturned on his thighs like a man seeking a source of relaxation. Perlman watched him and thought: Lindsay, Wexler, Bannerjee. Is this kid the one? Is this the killer? The connections were there, certainly, and they were strong enough to be audible. Marak and Lindsay, that fiction about buying a house was total shtuss. Marak and Wexler: how had Shimon come into possession of the wallet if he hadn’t met Wexler somewhere along the way? And the Waterloo Hotel: he’d been present in the bathroom with Bannerjee, according to Charlotte Leckie.

But it was all circumstantial. Incriminating, aye, but still circumstantial. Where was the sword that had killed Wexler, and how had Marak acquired the cocaine to murder Lindsay, how had he coerced Lindsay into swallowing the condom unless he’d used a gun, and where was that gun now? The questions foamed and fizzed in Perlman’s head. He tried to imagine this young man in the act of decapitation, but the pictures were grainy. Nor could he see him force a gun to Lindsay’s head.

And the wallet, that fucking wallet. That bothered Perlman. You throw away a wallet if you’ve stolen it from a man you’ve killed. True or false? You take the cash, dump the wallet. If you’re prepared to gamble, you might nick a credit-card or two. No matter what you take, you dump the bloody wallet if you have any smarts whatsoever. Unless you were a behayma like Furfee, who’d held on to a murder weapon.

But Shimon Marak hadn’t tossed it. So why not?

Maybe he didn’t know it was in the flat. Maybe it had been placed there by somebody else.

Quick? Furfee?

Perlman pondered the idea of taking Marak to Pitt Street and confronting him with Quick and Furfee. It might be interesting, even revelatory. On the other hand, anything Quick and Furfee had to say would invariably be self-serving and consequently unreliable. There would be enough layers of exaggeration, false claims and accusations to keep a polygraph technician busy for years.

Perlman lit a cigarette. His throat was dry and raspy: if he was to break into song he’d sound like an old-time blues singer. Blind Lemon Jefferson, maybe.

‘I think I’ll talk to Linklater about what he can restore of the photograph, Sandy.’

‘Go ahead,’ Scullion said.

‘It’ll give us some idea if Shimon was destroying incriminating evidence.’ He reached for the telephone that lay on the floor under the coffee table and he dialled Linklater’s number. He got Sid Linklater’s answering machine. ‘Call me back, Sid. I’ll be on Inspector Scullion’s mobile. ASAP. I’ve got a nice wee restoration job for you.’

Marak said, ‘He would have to be a magician to retrieve an image from that black stuff.’

‘He’s an alchemist, Shimon. He can take lead and turn it into the sweetest gold. Right, Inspector?’

Scullion, beginning to look like a prizefighter in need of a good cuts man, nodded. ‘He’s the best. Far and away.’

‘As I told you, I have nothing to fear,’ Marak said.

‘Bully for you.’ Perlman dragged on his smoke. ‘You live in Haifa?’

Marak didn’t answer.

Perlman asked, ‘With your family? Are you married?’

Marak said, ‘I don’t discuss my family.’

‘I’m interested in your background. Sisters? Brothers? What does your father do?’

‘My father …’ Marak glanced at the ruins of the photograph on the coffee table then switched subjects. ‘When you check, you’ll see that my fingerprints are nowhere on that wallet.’

‘Fine. We’ll go over the wallet with a toothcomb, Shimon. What were you saying about your father?’

Marak slumped a little. ‘My father’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘You didn’t know him. How can you be sorry?’

Perlman said, ‘Prickly, Shimon. I was expressing a common human condolence. Your father’s dead, and I’m sorry. How did he die?’

Marak said, ‘He was shot.’

‘Who shot him?’

‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘I’m interested,’ Perlman said.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Marak replied, a little pitch of sorrow in the voice.

Perlman sensed the young man’s anger and loss. A damaged psyche was always difficult terrain to travel, but that didn’t deter Lou Perlman, intrepid explorer. ‘Somebody shoots your father, it doesn’t matter? I don’t believe that, Shimon. Why was he shot?’

‘His associates thought he’d cheated them.’

‘Cheated them how?’

Marak gazed at the floor. His hands were damp. They left prints on the dark wooden arms of his chair. He’s in pain, Perlman thought. The death of his father is an open wound and he’s covered it over in a gauze so thick, so congealed with old blood, it will never heal. Therefore the arrogance, the cold front, this was his armour.

‘Cheated them out of what, Shimon?’

Marak stood up suddenly. ‘Money.’

‘But he didn’t do it?’

‘He’d never steal or cheat. He was a very honest man. He was the finest man I have ever known.’ Marak clenched his hands so tightly his knuckles stood out like tiny sharp stones. ‘They gunned him down in the street. I was fifteen years old and I saw it and I will never forget it. I don’t want to talk about my father any more.’

Marak was silent. Perlman observed him, thinking how tightly wound he was, how tense his emotional sinews were drawn. A kid sees his father shot down in the street: what effect would that have on a life? Anger and loss and what else? A slow-burning fuse of vengeance? Something you tended carefully every day, making sure the fire hadn’t gone out, a flame you fanned? Every day and every night, the same thought scalded you. And anything else around the edges, joy and love and laughter and music, lay in a shadow you couldn’t penetrate because you were focused on only one thing. And so you prepare, and when you’re ready, when you think you’re old enough and tough enough, you make your move.

Settle old scores. Close the ledgers.

Marak said, ‘I need to use the toilet. Is that permissible?’

‘I’ll keep you company,’ Perlman said.

‘I’m allowed no privacy?’

‘In the circumstances.’

‘Ah, of course, the circumstances.’

Perlman followed the young man out of the room. Scullion came behind.

‘I’ll hang around the front door,’ Scullion said.

‘Afraid I’ll try to run away?’ Marak asked.

‘I’m not taking chances.’

Perlman went inside the bathroom with Marak and felt awkward when he heard the young man undo his zip and the sound of his urine striking water. He turned his face away: a small illusion of privacy, he thought. Why not? He heard Marak flush the toilet, then zip his trousers up. The young man sighed as if with relief. And then suddenly the room was blasted with cold air, and Perlman swung his head in time to see Marak open the window and climb up on to the cistern and step out into the dark.

Perlman rushed to the window and saw Marak clinging to a drainpipe. ‘You fucking idiot! Give me your hand. Come back inside.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Marak was about four, five feet away, his hands clenched on the icy surface of the pipe. He couldn’t climb in these slippery conditions, he’d fall, he’d go down until he struck the ground eighty or ninety feet below.

‘Stay where you are,’ Perlman said. ‘Just reach out, I’ll help you back inside.’

But Marak was climbing somehow, pushing himself up the pipe towards the edge of the roof, straining and grunting as he moved. His hard breathing steamed the air. Perlman heard Scullion come into the bathroom.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Scullion said. He stuck his head out of the window. ‘Marak, don’t be an arsehole. You’re safer in here with us than you are out there.’

‘I am safer where I am,’ Marak said. He was already out of reach, a dark-coated figure flattened against the side of the building and climbing slowly.

‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ Perlman roared.

‘Where you can’t follow.’

Perlman clambered on to the lid of the cistern and twisted his head to the side and watched Marak continue his climb, arms hugging the drainpipe, towards the roofline. I’m going out there, Perlman thought. I was the one that lost him, I have to be the one that brings him back down. The lunacy of this act wasn’t even a consideration: it was his responsibility, plain and simple. He had a good head of adrenaline going and his leg no longer ached and he felt weirdly youthful, as if the decision to go out into the precarious structures of the night rejuvenated him.

‘No,’ Scullion said.

‘Watch me, Sandy,’ and Perlman stepped on to the window ledge and felt the chill air sneak under his trousers.

‘No, Lou,’ Scullion shouted. ‘For God’s sake.’

‘Here I go, singing low.’ Perlman reached out for the drainpipe, and swung his body into space, and for a moment he thought he’d lost contact with the pipe and was going to tumble out into nothingness, which he understood was no philosophical abstraction but something dreadfully and inevitably real. It was where your life ended, and your world stopped. But he had the pipe, cold as it was, under the palms of his hands. The slick ice that had formed on the surface wasn’t going to help him climb. Ice and gravity, co-conspirators. He looked up and saw Marak scramble on to the roof.

‘Shimon, come back down, do it now, do it nice and slow and we’ll be fine.’ Perlman thought his own voice was a thin flute and unconvincing. Face it, Lou: you’re clinging to a fucking drainpipe and hanging on for that condition people call ‘dear life’ and you’re trying to convince some daring young guy to turn himself over to you? Dear life indeed. He glanced down, saw the wall of the tenement sheer beneath him, saw light from windows here and there, saw the outlines of the iron fences that marked one back yard from another, sharp railings; if you slipped there was every chance you’d be impaled. Very nice.

Cop kebab.

Looking down: wrong thing to do, Sergeant.

He shinned a couple of inches up the pipe. What an effort. He looked at the roofline above. He heard Marak’s feet on the slates.

Scullion shouted, ‘For fuck’s sake, Lou. Get your arse back in here.’

‘I don’t think I can,’ Perlman said.

‘Don’t move, I’ll get some help, a ladder, the fire brigade.’

But Perlman was rising again, inch by hard-gained inch. His hands felt frozen to the pipe. He made it to the roofline, where the pipe adjoined a section of guttering, which looked too frail to support him. He had only two choices: reach up and grasp the guttering and hoist himself on to the slates and hope the whole arrangement didn’t collapse, or begin his descent and pray he could make it back down to the ledge of the bathroom window without slipping off the cliff of the tenement.

‘Yippee aye o,’ he said, and scrambled up the last piece of pipe and hauled himself over the guttering and on to the slates. Done it. The slates were so sleek they might have hosted an ice-hockey game.

Crouching, Perlman felt himself slip back towards the edge, then he countered this trend by flattening his face and body against the roof and locking every muscle hard in place and gripping any slight crevice he could find between the slates. The sky was high and starry above him. The city lit the air in blooms of orange and yellow. My funeral colours, he thought. Somewhere nearby floodlights burned unblinkingly around the edge of a stadium.

‘Perlman,’ Marak said.

Lou Perlman looked up. Marak was perhaps ten feet away, his back pressed to the base of a chimney.

‘I thought we might continue our chat, Marak.’ Perlman slid a few inches. He felt he was part of some strange deep earthly motion; tectonic plates were shifting beneath him. The earth was about to split. High in the Glasgow night, he sensed the city stretching away all around him, the thinning of lights as the river slogged down to the coast, the steadiness of its current disrupted only by the occasional vortex, the odd fluke of undertow. My river, my city, my place of my birth and my dying.

‘You’re going to fall,’ Marak said.

‘Absolute shite. I climb roofs in all seasons.’ He slithered forward and up, still clinging to little crannies in the contours of slate. He was breathless, heart moving in his chest like an octopus flapping. His lungs pained him. He raised his face and looked at Marak. ‘See? I’m so fucking nimble you wouldn’t believe it, Marak.’

‘Now what? Do you try to convince me I should give myself up?’

‘I don’t think you’re ready to be convinced,’ Perlman said. A plane roared above on a flight path to Glasgow Airport. The sound thundered in his head. The roof seemed to tremble.

Marak slipped suddenly, and sat down with his back to the chimney. ‘I’m not used to these surfaces,’ he said. ‘How can you stand this city, this weather?’

‘Born to it,’ Perlman said.

Marak said, ‘A man is killed in a street in Haifa. Years later, as a direct consequence of his father’s death, his son sits on a rooftop in Glasgow in winter. Strange connections.’

‘Aye, the world’s a funny place,’ Perlman said. His hands shook, his muscles strained. How long could he hold off the inevitable slide over slate and ice? ‘Who killed your father, Marak?’

‘You’re asking two different questions, Perlman. Do you want to know who pulled the trigger? Or do you want the names of the real assassins?’

‘Whatever you’re prepared to give.’

Marak said, ‘The men who pulled the triggers are of no consequence. They were once my father’s associates. They accused him of embezzling an enormous amount of money that was supposed to reach them. And so they killed him. But they’re dead now. I shot them three months ago in Tel Aviv. They were sitting outside a café, I went up to them while they were drinking wine. One I shot directly in the heart, the other the head. I walked away. I had a taste of justice. I’d waited a long time for it. The strange thing, it had no flavour.’

How casually Marak referred to these killings. Was some part of him numb? Had the muscles of his conscience been severed?

‘Where did this money go?’

‘The men who’d stolen it claimed they’d given it to my father to be disbursed for a noble purpose. I assume they kept it for themselves. What else would they do? Distribute it among charities?’

Perlman saw a sudden shooting star in the western sky, beyond the Campsie Hills, bright and brief and shocking. ‘And this noble purpose – did it have something to do with the idea of peace in the Middle East?’

‘How do you know that, Perlman?’

‘I was always good at guessing games.’

‘It’s more than guesswork, I’m sure.’ Marak’s face was shadowed, his expression hidden. ‘A few people dreamed they could change the climate of the Middle East. My father and his associates, for example.’

‘And big dreams require big cash,’ Perlman said.

‘Of course. But the dreamers overlooked one fact: there is not enough money in the world to solve the problem of eternal hatred. Nor eternal greed. The money was stolen. My father was wrongly blamed, with tragic consequences.’

Marak moved away. He’s almost lost to me now, Perlman thought. ‘You told me you were an idealist, Marak. You don’t sound like one.’

‘Idealists have a cross to carry,’ Marak said. ‘I believe even as I doubt.’

Perlman laid a cheek against slate. He was fused to it by a film of cold. His thoughts tumbled. He had an after-image of the shooting star, dying lights flashing at the end of a tunnel in his brain. ‘Let me see if I can guess the names of the thieves. Lindsay, Wexler, Bannerjee.’

‘These were the names I received from a man who called himself Ramsay. Tall man, strange hair, weak chin.’

‘BJ Quick.’

‘Ah, he uses two names.’

‘At the very least,’ Perlman said.

Marak rubbed his hands together. A wind came up and blew across the rooftops. ‘He gave me photographs, addresses. The burned photograph that so intrigued you was of Bannerjee.’

Perlman felt his coat rise and fall around his legs, the wind riding roughshod across him. ‘I wonder how Quick got this information.’

‘I didn’t ask. All I know is I didn’t kill them. The men were dead before I could ever get close to them. I was brought here only to be blamed for murders I didn’t commit.’

‘Why and by whom?’

‘One day perhaps I’ll think about those questions. My only interest now is to make my way home.’

‘How do you propose to do that?’

‘We’ll see. What about you? How will you get down from this roof?’

Perlman raised his head. ‘That’s my problem, intit?’

‘Yes. It is.’ Marak moved slowly. In a moment he’d disappear on the other side of the sandstone chimney block. And then he’d be gone, and maybe he’d make it, maybe he wouldn’t. Perlman called out his name, as if to stall him further and ask more questions, but the wind lashed his voice away, and besides Marak had vanished, moving behind the chimneys and heading for the other side of the roof, the downslope, and from there – who could say?

Perlman pressed his face into the slates. He was cold and weary. He heard Scullion’s voice float up from a place below. ‘You all right, Lou?’

Perlman hadn’t the strength to answer.

‘We’re coming up with a rope. Hang on.’

Hang on. Oy. I spend much of my life hanging on. He shut his eyes: dear Jesus, had he really climbed on to this roof? Was he truly lying here on this slick of tiles? Had he forgotten entirely the fact he suffered from vertigo?

And now he remembered, and his stomach churned sluggishly over and over and all the stars in the sky imploded in his head.