The Last Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  It was easy. He was wasted. He wasn’t expecting it. He weighed as much as a shadow. He went over the edge and fell into the same downward path as the wine glass. She heard him shout. He struck the ground, the hard crack of his body smacking stone. Then immediate silence.

  She didn’t wait. She didn’t look down to see how he’d landed. She emptied her wine glass, hurried inside the flat, put on her coat and stuck the glass into a pocket. She picked up her bag from the coffee table. She looked round a couple of times, then she let herself out.

  She walked quickly from Fifth Avenue to Great Western Road, where she found a black taxi trawling for custom. She climbed inside and told the driver to drop her at an address in Govan, south side of the city.

  ‘Nippy for the time of year,’ the driver said.

  She hated idle talk. She settled back and watched the city go past in a series of streetlamps and shuttered shopfronts, gaunt tenements and closed pubs.

  A dead city, heart of night.

  2

  Lou Perlman struggled with his broken umbrella as he walked westward along Bath Street. The mid-morning wind blew rain under the black canopy, which had begun to collapse around a crown of bent metal spokes. Buy cheap, he thought, you get what you pay for. He tried to readjust the bloody thing. Rain smeared his glasses.

  He gave up on the brolly, dumped it in a litter bin. He wasn’t far from Force HQ in Pitt Street – so what was a little rain, a trifle of discomfort, when you were about to sit down in the same room as the man who’d killed your brother?

  He was uneasy. He needed a dispassionate distance between himself and Leo Kilroy, the killer. Sorry: alleged killer. Kilroy’s lawyer, Nat Blum, believed all his clients were innocent. On Planet Blum, where the air was so thin only lawyers could breathe it, Leo Kilroy was innocent of any crime.

  Perlman started to cross the street. Ahead, he saw the unappealing red-brick edifice of HQ. He paused to adjust his collar against the rain. He didn’t notice the big Dalmatian on the pavement slip its leash and bound with mighty steps and spring at him like a ball of iron shot from a cannon. He was blasted flat on his back, winded. The dog, whose breath smelled of rancid corned beef, licked his face with a hot tongue.

  ‘Get this beast away from me,’ Perlman said, and pushed at the dog with no result.

  An elderly man in a green rainproof jacket appeared. ‘Clem, Clem, come on now, get back, get back,’ and he clipped the end of a leash into a hook on the dog’s collar. ‘I’m awfy sorry, he’s hyper, but he usually doesn’t run away from me like this. Let me help you up –’

  ‘Just get the dog out my face,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Clem’s a good boy. Aren’t you, Clem? He wouldn’t do any harm. It’s just –’

  ‘Boisterous good fun, eh?’ Perlman got to his feet.

  The owner’s face was red from the effort of curbing his panting animal. ‘Are you injured?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘I wanted to audition Clem for that film, you know.’

  The elderly often made comments out of the blue. Perlman wondered if the same fate awaited him when he retired; days spent practising conversations in the hope that you might be lucky enough to engage a total stranger in one of them. Here’s a non sequitur I prepared earlier.

  Perlman asked, ‘What film was that?’

  ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians. But it meant travel.’

  ‘I get the impression he wouldn’t make a good traveller.’

  ‘Aye. But he’s got star quality.’ The dog was all rippling muscle and power, trying to burst free of his restraint.

  Star quality. Perlman brushed his damp coat with sweeping gestures, and felt a rush of sympathy for the elderly man. Lonely, a widower, say, probably lived in a little flat overlooking the fumes of the nearby motorway, loved his dog, dreamed his dreams, dragged out old photographs and studied them. People who harboured outrageous ambitions for their pets were a little odd, but usually harmless.

  He entered Force HQ. The air smelled of damp coats and wet shoes. A tiny ache played in the small of his back from the encounter with the dog. Just what he needed, something noodged out of alignment. He headed to the stairs, nodding at the uniformed constable behind the reception desk.

  ‘Wet one,’ the constable said. His name was Jackie Wren and he had a walrus moustache. ‘Where’s spring, eh?’

  ‘Round the corner, I hear,’ Lou Perlman said. He glanced at his watch. The encounter with the dog had made him late.

  ‘Whatever happened to all your global warming stuff, eh?’

  ‘I look like a meteorologist?’ Perlman, surprised by the snap in his reply to Wren’s light-hearted question, climbed the stairs.

  Tense is all. It was the prospect of seeing Leo Kilroy.

  Come to think of it, where the fuck was spring anyway? Christ, how he longed for it, the earth warm, winter no more than a memory. He thought of his brother Colin gunned down last December on a cold black street. The recollection was hard as crystal. Icicles hanging from eaves and sills, the big blue car slowing almost to a halt, the gunman’s hand in the window, the gaseous white flash as a shot was fired.

  Lou had held his dying brother in his arms. He still saw Colin’s face in his dreams. Eyelids fluttering, mouth slack, neck bent to one side. He thrust the images away. They angered and saddened him. If he was going to maintain his cool in Kilroy’s presence, he didn’t need rollercoaster rides of the heart. Calm down.

  Easier said.

  He reached the landing, paused. Sometimes he tried to absolve his brother from his sins, but absolution wasn’t his to bestow. He wasn’t God. Even if he could grant forgiveness, would he? Colin had committed various crimes, the least of which was his embezzlement of a large amount of money from a group of idealistic Israelis and Palestinians working to structure an improbable peace in the Middle East. And if Colin had left it there, okay, that would have been bad enough, but still tolerable up to a point. After all, what was embezzlement except robbery wrapped in layers of paper?

  But no, no, Colin had gone far beyond fiscal chicanery. He’d crossed the border where paper malfeasance became bloody, and greed led to murder. He’d killed to cover his crimes. Three men had died.

  Shovel that one aside too, Perlman thought. My bruder, the murderer. It was a tough one to budge. The tide of publicity that had roiled in the wake of Colin’s death brought Lou into the public eye in a way he’d never sought. Glasgow Cop’s Brother A Killer – Colin’s world was aired in black type, scams exposed, the convoluted web of violence unravelled. Hacks wanted to interview Lou: tell us, did you ever think your brother capable of these things?

  What did he have to say about Colin that the hounds hadn’t already sniffed out? Old girlfriends popped up like goggle-eyed glove puppets to testify to Colin’s sexual appetites. He was a tireless lover for his age, a woman in Edinburgh told the Sunday Mail. He definitely liked younger girls: this allegation came from a female blackjack dealer in London.

  Perlman wondered how these public revelations had affected Colin’s widow, Miriam. He didn’t want to think about her right now. When his head was less cluttered, when he had time to ponder how she was handling her life, maybe then–

  The babble of HQ assaulted him suddenly. Phones ringing, a toilet flushing, a young man speaking from behind a half-shut door: ‘I’m telling you. Celtic have too many diddies in the squad. Exact same thing with Rangers.’ The cantankerous fluctuations of weather and football: Glasgow preoccupations.

  He disliked the confines of this building. One reason he was happier in the streets: Force HQ was a cig-free zone. Death by clean air.

  ‘I was about to give up on you, Lou.’ Detective-Inspector Sandy Scullion stood at the end of a hallway, tapping the face of his wristwatch.

  ‘You don’t enjoy a cliffhanger?’ Perlman asked.

  ‘No head for heights.’ In dark suit and red tie, thin ginger hair combed back, Scullion had one of those sympathetic faces that lighten bleak d
ays. He was an optimist by nature; he had a tendency to look for anything that glinted in the malodorous shite of the world.

  ‘Ready to face the demons?’ Scullion asked.

  Perlman said, ‘Call me fearless.’

  ‘Kilroy’s lawyer is building up a head of steam strong enough to foam milk for a cappuccino.’

  ‘Fuck him. What have I got to lose?’

  ‘I hope nothing,’ Scullion said.

  Perlman didn’t hear a ring of confidence in the Inspector’s voice. Sandy’s doubts were usually grounded in caution. He liked ideas to mature slowly. ‘If you prefer to postpone, Sandy –’

  ‘It’s your call,’ Scullion said.

  ‘You’re not happy with it.’

  Scullion shrugged. ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You’re about as subtle as a tabloid, Sandy. You could always pull rank.’

  ‘Aye, right, I could. Except I’m taking the easy way out. I’m leaving this one entirely to you.’ Scullion was Perlman’s superior officer, but always treated him as an equal. Certain Very Big Shots who occupied the upper slopes of Force HQ, the men who sent out reams of brain-numbing bumf weighted with stats and regs to the foot soldiers, thought Scullion gave Perlman a wee bit too much freedom. Lou, twenty years older than Scullion, reckoned that his long experience in the Force compensated for the difference in rank.

  He’d never aspired to a level beyond Detective-Sergeant; the higher you rose, the more tangled the thickets of politics, the more demanding the bureaucracy. You had to play too many daft games. He’d seen good men bleached of vitality by promotion. He’d seen them vanish for ever inside the wormholes of the system or mutate from humans into rubber stamps. Not for him, thanks.

  ‘I’d like to make Kilroy sweat, Sandy.’

  ‘And Blum? What about Blum?’

  ‘I doubt if he has the glands for it. Maybe it’ll give him something to think about.’

  ‘Like what? His conscience?’

  ‘A lawyer with a conscience? That must be a rare beast.’

  Both men paused outside the door of Scullion’s office, and Perlman sighed and looked suddenly serious. ‘Sometimes I wish I’d led a life of the mind. A cloistered wee world among the spires of Glasgow University. Harris tweed jacket, leather elbow patches. Prof Perlman, surrounded by nubile undergrads. I’d sit on committees and eat decrusted sandwiches. I’d have no seedy villains and their sordid lawyers to deal with.’

  ‘Bullshit, Lou. You love your work.’

  ‘One of love’s flaws is the fact it grows cold,’ Perlman said. ‘Faulty heat-retention system.’

  ‘You signed on for life,’ Scullion said. ‘Divorce isn’t an option.’

  ‘Feh,’ Perlman said. He suddenly remembered the dead gull he’d found in his driveway yesterday morning. It had dropped mysteriously from the sky. No evidence of a wound, no broken wing or leg. It occurred to him that the bird had fallen about twenty yards from the place where Colin had died. Practically on my own doorstep, he thought.

  And hadn’t he heard on the car radio only this morning of somebody falling from the balcony of a flat in Great Western Road? A suicide? He couldn’t remember what the newsreader had said.

  The leaping dog, the stiff gull, the balcony jumper – were these all signs of some kind? Did we live in an age of portents? Maybe. But who was wise enough to interpret them?

  He had an image of the gull. Eyes void, claws paralysed.

  I’d fly away if I had wings, he thought. Who are you kidding? Without your job, life would be one long kvetch. Unemployed, you’d go down Domino Drive and shuffle the ivory tablets with the other old Jewish geezers in a senior citizens’ centre, and bitch in the bittersweet language of mightabeens. If I’d gone to Israel when my son asked me, I’d be sucking fresh oranges in Tel Aviv instead of. I shoulda saved harder for my old age, here I am counting pennies and. He thought: I need the city, the streets, a sense of purpose. Sandy was right: you signed on for life.

  I belong to Glasgow. Dear old Glasgow.

  Where else would I go?

  3

  Bobby Descartes wrote in his journal with a ballpoint: I hate Pakis and Indians, and jews and Nijerians and niggers in jeneral.

  He was a man with pale lifeless grey eyes. He had a tiny mouth he often forgot to close – a trap for flies, his father used to say. He breathed through his open mouth a lot. He had nasal problems and often thunked at the back of his throat. He wore purple and green tracksuit trousers of a shiny synthetic material, and a green fleecy top with a hood. He also wore a pair of chunky black running shoes. He liked the mazy footprints made by the contoured rubber soles.

  He closed his journal, which had a hundred and twenty pages. So far he’d covered eighty-seven of them with his tiny handwriting. One day he’d have to start a new journal, all blank crisp pages. Volume Two of Bobby’s World View. He had a lot to get off his chest. Two times one hundred and twenty pages was two hundred and forty. He liked numbers, the act of counting. Arithmetic was an orderly world all to itself.

  A TV jabbered in the next room, where his mother lay on her decrepit velvet sofa. She was addicted to self-humiliation shows imported from America. Mountainous men and women, ranting blubbery persons who came screaming and strutting out of the wings. Check my fucking attitude. There were Brit clones of these shows on telly. What was wrong with the UK mentality that it had to mimic the American? Turn your head one way, wham, another big fucking yellow McDonald’s M in the sky. Swivel it the other, you get an eyeful of long-necked Budweiser bottles lying broken in the gutters and discarded packets of Camel Lights. Newsagents were filled with glossy magazines devoted to the troubled histories of Hollywood film stars. Sluts, shoplifters, cokeheads.

  I give a fuck, he thought.

  Credit where it was due all the same: the Yanks understood love of country. Yessiree, they did. My Country, Love It Or Leave It. Bobby had that bumper sticker tacked to the plywood-panelled walls of his room. He wondered how come national pride had been trashed. Who stood up these days when the band played ‘God Save The Queen’, eh? Patriotism was just a bad word. The nation was under an evil spell. An air of despair hung over the land. Try to find a decent hospital. Trains a joke. Buses always overcrowded. Post Office workers downright fucking rude. Factories shutting down. Ordinary people couldn’t pay rent.

  The country reeked of decay.

  He teased back a strip of plywood from the wall and concealed his journal behind it, then he looked from the window down into the street. He saw a burnt-out old Vauxhall and a bunch of shaven-headed locals – he counted six – smoking skunk under a twisted lamp-post that hadn’t had a bulb replacement in eight years. A teenage Temazepam addict Bobby knew as Annie swerved along the pavement in the manner of a twig shuttled this way and that by a wind.

  Pretty wee thing, Bobby thought. Always dazed and bone-white and nothing in her eyes.

  Drug dealers were royalty around here. The police did bugger all. They drove past in their cars like slumming tourists. Look, there’s a druggie, just drive on. Upholders of the law, o aye, sure.

  He stared at the crummy flats across the way. Some windows had been blocked with sheets of steel. A spray-painted message splattered on one sheet read: Welcome to Hell. When he considered how dopers and hoors and an influx of immigrant scum had wrecked this corner of Glasgow, and by extension the whole United Kingdom, he heard a blood-red hum in his brain and his vision went dark at the edges. His rage, which he struggled to maintain on a low-altitude frequency for the purposes of making it through the day, rose to radioactive levels.

  In a dark room, by Christ he’d glow with fury.

  He sat down in front of his computer and checked his email. He had one message. The one he’d been expecting. Even so, it caused a rush of blood to his head.

  Go, the message read.

  He sent a reply to Magistr32@clydevalley.net. He tapped the keys in picky little strokes. The note he transmitted read: Beezer will do his duty.

 
Beezer, his war name. Magistr32 had given him that one. He didn’t know why. He didn’t want to think about Magistr32 right now because it was a line of thought that always disturbed him, and he gave in to feelings he didn’t need. He had to be absolutely fucking focused.

  He deleted all his messages in and out, shut the machine down and slid open the drawer of the woodwormed table on which the computer sat. The Seecamp was wrapped in a dirty linen handkerchief.

  He removed the gun. He admired its compact design. Amazing how this wee thing, less than five inches long and weighing about ten ounces, could kill. He balanced it in the palm of his hand, and thought lovely. He stuck the gun in the right pocket of his tracksuit trousers.

  When the time comes. Reach, find, remove, fire.

  Today’s the day, he thought. No turning back. Enough’s enough.

  He walked inside the room where his mother, Her Highness, lay. Sandrine Descartes, sixty-six and leathery from half a century of smoking, adjusted her shawl. She looked as if some high-tech latex special effects had been used on her face; her eyes were bright but her skin was pure crone.

  Ugly old cow, Bobby thought. Day after day she lay in this dim room and smoked cigarettes with the blinds drawn. She lived in a state of perpetual shade. One day he expected he’d come into the room in time to see her fade into infinity.

  On the telly a white-faced woman with long greasy hair was weeping. ‘I never told her I loved her,’ she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  The show’s hostess squeezed the moment. ‘It can’t be easy to admit you have lesbian feelings for your own sister –’

  Bobby picked up the remote and zapped the TV.

  ‘I was watching that, Robert.’

  ‘It’s shite,’ Bobby said.

  ‘It interests me. The whole human drama.’ She smoked a Kensitas.

  ‘You see more human drama from your own window.’

  ‘It depresses me to look out, Robert.’