52

He was giddy for some time after he’d been helped down from the roof by means of a rope and the two beefy cops from the backup car. His impulse was to go home and sleep, and forget he’d ever been daft enough to climb on to the roof of a tall Glasgow tenement. But he went back to Pitt Street and began to work on a report of the encounter with Marak. He knew he wouldn’t sleep if he went home. Things on his mind. Too many.

He typed a sentence on the portable Olivetti he liked, then quit. He pushed his chair back from his desk and pondered a call to the hospital, but it was almost midnight and he wondered if that was too late. Instead, he dialled Colin and Miriam’s home number. He got the answering machine. Miriam’s voice: Please leave a message and we’ll return your call as soon as we can. Did that mean she was asleep, or that she was at the hospital? He was tempted to dial again, just to hear her voice. It had a richness, a chanteuse’s lilt. It was a voice that implied more than it ever said.

He gazed at the paper inside the olive-green typewriter, and what he’d written, and his mind changed gears, and all of a sudden he was back on that iced roof, that parlous place. He knew tonight he’d dream of rooftops and chimneys and scary visions of himself dangling from a rope knotted round his waist while the two cops fed him down slowly to the bathroom window, where Scullion watched the descent with concern. If he slept.

All this began with a man hanging from a rope under a railway bridge, he thought.

He pushed the typewriter away. The report could wait. His mind wasn’t on it. He paced around his desk. He wondered if Marak had made it back down to the street, and where he might be in the city now. Scullion had patrol cars out looking for him, because he wasn’t convinced of Marak’s innocence. He wasn’t buying the proclamation the kid had made to Perlman on the rooftop of a tenement. Why should he, without interrogating Marak thoroughly for himself? The city had been violated, and Scullion felt a deep responsibility, and as long as he wasn’t sure of Marak in his own head, then he’d make every effort to track him down.

Scullion appeared in the doorway. ‘You okay?’

‘For a man with a few murders on his mind, fine.’

‘When you climbed that drainpipe …’

‘That’s all I need, to be reminded.’

‘I thought you’d fall. I was sure you’d fall. I kept thinking I’d have to ask Madeleine to cancel her plans to ask you to dinner next week.’

‘What an inconvenience,’ Perlman said.

Scullion patted Perlman’s shoulder. ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’

‘Slight headache. Maybe a cold coming on. My leg muscles are sore.’

‘And I can’t see anything in one eye.’

‘Such a catalogue of misery,’ Perlman said.

‘Incidentally, Quick admitted delivering photographs of the three victims to Marak. He doesn’t know who hired him as courier. All done by phone, he says. Never saw anyone’s face …’

‘Anything else?’

‘He believes Marak couldn’t have killed Lindsay or Wexler. As for Bannerjee, he isn’t sure. He thinks not. According to the impresario, Marak’s a major loser.’

Scullion sat on the edge of the desk. ‘If Marak’s off the hook – and I’m not saying he is, mind you, because Quick’s not famous for his veracity – who’s the swordsman? Who’s the killer?’

‘Who indeed.’ Perlman tugged a Kleenex from a box on his desk and blew his nose. He tossed the Kleenex directly into his waste-paper basket. ‘Quick was trying to buy back the lease to that slum of a club belonging to Leo Kilroy. Do you suppose Fat Leo has any involvement in all of this?’

‘It wouldn’t floor me with surprise, because nothing Fat Leo does astounds me. But he doesn’t come into the Lindsay-Wexler-Bannerjee axis, does he?’

‘Not that I know,’ Perlman said.

‘I’m going to get a cup of coffee from the machine. You need anything?’

Perlman looked at the half-eaten cheese and cucumber sandwich on his desk. Stale, lathered with a highly dubious mayonnaise-based sauce that was whipped up in a local take-away by grubby-fingered boys, it was utterly inedible. ‘Nothing for me. I’m fine, Sandy.’

Scullion vanished down the hall. Perlman slumped in his chair, shut his eyes. Think think. He forced his eyes open, picked up the phone and called Perseus McKinnon.

‘Perse, one question.’

‘The hour is late, but fire away,’ McKinnon said.

‘You heard the news about Bannerjee?’

‘It’s been on the telly. Very gruesome.’

‘I want you to tell me if you know of any connection between Leo Kilroy and any of the three dead men. Anything at all, it doesn’t matter what.’

‘How about asking me something difficult,’ Perseus McKinnon said. ‘Kilroy supplied some muscle when Shiv was just another ambitious Asian running for public office.’

‘What kind of muscle?’

‘How shall I say? Persuaders? Guys that got the vote out. They wore nice suits and charmed old ladies. They drove elderly people to polling stations. Every now and then I heard a story about one of them getting a wee bit argumentative. But Kilroy managed to keep a very tight lid on his boys.’

‘So Bannerjee was indebted to Kilroy?’

‘Big time. Kilroy wanted influence in high places. But Bannerjee, as history has duly recorded, fucked up.’

‘Do they keep in contact?’

‘That I couldn’t say. Where are you taking this, Lou?’

‘I don’t know yet. Thanks.’ Perlman hung up and stared at the sheet in the Olivetti, then tore it out and crumpled it into a ball. He threw it at the wall. Bannerjee and Kilroy. This connection made him uncomfortable. Was it possible that Fat Leo belonged on the same bus as the three dead men? Had he bought a ticket and shared a trip with them, then he’d decided to get off before the point of destination? You’d never find Leo’s prints on anything, because he was too smart; but that didn’t mean he failed to leave some spidery little traces of his activities at least.

Okay. Was it possible that Leo Kilroy, for reasons that eluded Perlman, had engineered the deaths of the three men?

Think. Motives?

The money factor? Had there been some rabid falling-out, a fierce disagreement concerning loot and its disbursement?

Or was it less obvious?

Such as what?

He picked up his sandwich and stared at it critically. He sniffed it. Tainted. He dropped it in his waste-paper basket. There were clouds gathering in his head, and he didn’t like their formation. He longed for some spike of sunshine to pierce the glum congregation. He thought about Colin again, like a man constantly drawn back to a lingering mystery; bruder, you kept some dubious company.

If you knew Bannerjee, did you know Kilroy too, Colin?

And then Perlman remembered, and he slapped his forehead in dismay at the failure of his memory. Murdoch. You yutz, Lou, he thought. You’d forget your name if it wasn’t for your driving licence or your library card. He picked up his telephone and asked the switchboard to connect him to PC Dennis Murdoch.

Murdoch came on the line almost at once. ‘I only just finished collecting that material for you, Sergeant.’

‘Great. Let’s get together. You hungry?’