Butcher

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Inclined’s iffy. I’d like to talk to this lady.’

  ‘She’s scared, Joe. She doesn’t want a certain person to know her whereabouts.’

  ‘And who is this scary person?’

  ‘Reuben Chuck.’

  ‘No wonder she’s feart. Am I to take your word for what she said?’

  ‘My word’s gold.’

  Adamski was quiet a second. ‘Forty-eight hours have passed since she claimed to see this corpse. You know that body’s long gone, Lou.’

  ‘I know. But I only learned about it this afternoon. Then I was detained by another matter.’ Another matter, but he was locking a door on that wretched encounter in Latta’s Theatre of Cruelty. Sometimes all you can do is keep swimming through the slime.

  ‘I’ll need to dig somebody up at the Proc-Fisc’s office, and a sheriff who doesn’t mind getting off his arse on a Saturday to swear out a warrant. Then I’ll have to scratch around to ferret out a couple of forensics people.’

  Ferret. A verb, an animal. Perlman remembered Issy. A drab sorry creature, dead eyes and lacklustre coat. Who keeps a fucking ferret? He lowered his voice in case Betty had some reason to come along the hall. ‘It’s possible, but no certainty, that Kirk McLatchie was inside that house at some point. Mibbe he was butchered there. I stress mibbe.’

  ‘This a hunch?’

  ‘A feeling, Joe.’

  ‘I’m working on the testimony of a girl who won’t talk, plus Lou Perlman’s feeling. My lucky day, everything so stacked in my favour.’

  ‘Nothing’s easy,’ Perlman said. ‘One final thing. Two serious Dobermans roam the grounds.’

  ‘Dogs? I love dogs,’ Adamski said.

  ‘Not this pair. Thanks, Joe.’

  ‘Thank me after I get the warrant,’ Adamski said. ‘But don’t expect it to happen too soon.’

  Perlman cut the connection.

  Inside the kitchen Betty was checking the condition of his coat in the airing cupboard.

  ‘Another wee Scotch?’

  Perlman thought about it, but said no, just as his phone rang. He checked the screen: Scullion’s name.

  ‘Excuse me.’ Half-turning away from Betty, he spoke into the mobie. ‘Whatsup, Sandy?’

  Scullion said, ‘I just heard about Miriam. It’s fucking awful. I can’t believe Tay and Latta keelhauled you like that—’

  ‘After they made me walk the plank.’

  Scullion said, ‘I don’t think it’s funny.’

  ‘You hear laughter from me?’

  ‘The whole thing’s fucking deplorable, Lou.’

  Perlman glanced at Betty, who’d risen to water a plant on the window sill. ‘They’re masters of finesse.’

  ‘That fucker Latta doesn’t have a case. You know that. It’s all sound and fury fuelled by his spite.’

  ‘I don’t intend to lose sleep over Latta. Believe me.’

  ‘They’ll drop it eventually, of course. But at a cost to you.’

  ‘I resign the Force.’

  ‘That would be Tay’s asking price.’

  ‘And Latta wins.’

  ‘He’ll think it some kind of victory, sure … it’s a clumsy question, I know, but how’re you feeling?’

  ‘I’m tired, Sandy. How are things with you?’

  ‘We lost our banker. Totally mental. It was a dead giveaway when he looked at three hundred mug shots and identified every single face as one of the fuckers who invaded his house. On the up side, we’re raiding the offices of Chuck’s lawyers this very night.’

  ‘Legally?’

  ‘How else? These are hot-shot lawyers. You don’t go near them without the right paperwork. Chuck gave a freebie bus to Ragada, and the guru tried to sell it to a sharp-eyed dealer … who knew the docs of ownership were fake. Good fakes, just not good enough. The guru has disappeared.’

  Perlman said, ‘These are the days of false prophets, Sandy.’

  ‘Call me in the morning, Lou. Better still, drop round about midday, we’ll have a beer.’

  Lou closed the connection, massaged his eyes.

  Betty said, ‘What was that about resigning?’

  ‘Pah, politics.’

  ‘In other words, don’t ask.’

  He got up from his chair. His feet were so cold they might have been welded to the floor. ‘It’s the usual polis shite, Betty. I’m not keeping anything from you.’ That comment, he knew, might come back to haunt him.

  ‘You’re in trouble, Lou,’ and she touched his hand softly.

  ‘This is new?’

  ‘I wish I could help.’

  ‘It’s time I was leaving.’

  ‘You don’t have to go. Unless you have other places …’

  ‘And miles to travel,’ he said.

  He fetched his coat and shoes and socks. The coat was warm but still damp, the socks were tolerable. ‘I’ll kick some arses out there before I go. I’ll also disable the doorbell. You can put your phone back but don’t answer unless I give you the signal.’

  She was downcast. She didn’t want to be alone. He hugged her briefly, kissed her cheek, then went down the hallway, where he paused to reach up and yank the bell-wire from the wall before he continued into the street.

  The scribblers were still milling around. Dogged crowd, hunting in packs. They clamoured for answers. They had readers to titillate, viewers to please.

  Perlman drew them together. ‘Pay attention, youse lot. Mrs McLatchie is now sedated and sleeping. The phone’s not being answered and the doorbell’s disconnected, so unless you break a window to get to her – which let me remind you is seriously against the law – there will be no statement tonight, and no interview. Awright? Got that? Now let me see you scatter, boys and girls.’

  ‘Aw fuck,’ somebody said.

  The Queen of Glasgow TV was snippy. Her diction slipped. ‘Been freezing my bloody arse off for hours here.’

  ‘Here’s a wee suggestion, dear. Go home to bed and crack open a good book.’

  ‘Don’t dear me, Perlman,’ she said. ‘I’d like to do a story on the stalling tactics of the local police, starring you.’

  ‘He’s no even on the Force,’ the guy with the wavy hair said.

  Perlman stared at the guy belligerently. ‘That’s a fucking rumour, you turnips will swallow anything. Now move, move along. Give the woman a break.’

  The hounds began slowly to disperse, muttering.

  Perlman waited, rattling car keys and change in his pocket, until the last of them had gone and the TV van had pulled away, before he walked to his car and sat behind the wheel, watching vigilantly for anyone who might chance his arm and sneak back.

  Nobody did.

  Driving home, he mourned Miriam silently.

  44

  From the kitchen window Dorcus looked at the lit towers. Grievous Saturday, damp dark Slabland. Sometimes a hundred or more empty beer cans and bottles were tossed over the wall on Saturday nights. Saturday was a pagan Glasgow festival, football in the afternoon, drunken fans rolling home hours after the game, rowdy and violent whether their team won or lost, car windows and street lamps smashed with stones, and always at least one murder, usually from stab wounds or head blows with a heavy instrument or just a damn good kicking.

  The Dobermans howled. They always knew when it was Saturday. They went berserk Saturdays.

  Jackie Ace, dressed in a yellow chenille robe, was fashioning a head full of long ringlets with her curling iron. ‘I want you to know – I’m very proud of the way you dealt with Perlman.’

  ‘I just stood my ground, I told him he was wrong about that photo.’ Dorcus wished he still had long hair. He missed it, the feel of it against the side of his face. He watched how deft Jackie was with the curling iron.

  ‘That’s all it takes. Stand your ground, don’t give way.’

  She set the iron down and took Dorcus’s hand, stroked it. At times she wanted to hold him, never let go. ‘When you showed him the OR, he accepted your story.’

&nb
sp; ‘I had your help—’

  ‘Oh, all I did was take some of your Ma’s old things out of the attic.’

  ‘But it was good—’

  ‘I’m just so brilliant.’ She laughed and wrapped her arms around him. She was filled with a longing to protect him. She kissed his forehead and was impatient for the day when she’d no longer be this incomplete creature.

  She raised a palm to the side of his face. ‘You can do anything.’

  ‘Only when you’re with me.’

  ‘I’ll always be with you. Have I ever let you down?’

  Dorcus couldn’t remember a time. All the way back as far as the Tartakower days, he’d known Jackie would be his life-partner. How eager he’d been to befriend Jackie, following him around, fetching his surgical instruments, watching the way he operated. He’d learned so much observing Jackie with a scalpel. He’d marvelled at Jackie’s nimble hands. And card tricks – Jackie could create illusions that left you laughing and baffled. Cards vanished without trace inside hankies, spades turned to diamonds, clubs to hearts, cards cascaded randomly out of his hands and yet always ended in the appropriate suites, cards set on fire in one place were restored from ashes in another …

  He loved Jackie instantly. Or if not instantly, then the day after.

  One night Jackie said, I need the operation. I need it for myself and for you.

  Dorcus remembered that with joy.

  He looked into her eyes and said, ‘I’ll sell this house.’

  ‘Let’s not go there.’

  ‘Somebody will buy it. Even if they only want the land and demolish the p-property—’

  ‘No.’ Jackie was touched whenever he suggested this. She saw how eager he was, how love and generosity brightened his face.

  ‘It makes sense—’

  ‘No, love, no, this is something I want to do through my own efforts.’

  Dorcus opened his mouth to make an objection, but Jackie said, ‘I mean it. My decision … But there’s something you can do for me, sweetie, drive me to work later.’

  ‘I always do,’ he said.

  Jackie slipped into a light-hearted mood, snapped her fingers and gyrated her hips this way, that way, and laughed from the back of her throat. ‘Arriba, arriba!’

  Dorcus was delighted whenever she danced. The house shed its dull trappings, and for a few lively minutes became a place free of the past, rescued from ruin.

  Reuben Chuck didn’t know how long he’d been driving. What he did know was that he was lost in a part of Glasgow he rarely visited, deepest Cathcart. This isn’t east, this is aw wrong. He wished he’d brought Mathieson, oh but he was damned if he’d phone Ronnie and ask for directions – total loss of face.

  Besides he was fucking stocious.

  Backing up drunkenly in a quiet side-street, he ran over somebody’s lawn, demolishing a wooden fence and squadron of garden gnomes. Tut-tut-Tutenkamen. On the sort of impulse experienced by inebriates and loonies, he got out of the Jag and seized one of the decapitated gnome heads and set it on the passenger seat, buckling the seat belt round it.

  He needed a pal. Wee cheeky pink face, whiskers, red lips, pointy ears.

  He drove away at speed. The gnome’s head, fixed by the belt, stared forward.

  ‘Been in a Jag before, wee man? Naw? Sit back and enjoy.’

  Chuck played ventriloquist, squeaky voice. ‘Thanks for the lift, I was very fed up in that garden.’

  ‘Life canny be interestin just standin there all day.’

  ‘Aye, it’s a fuckin bore, Mr Chuck.’

  ‘Want some gin?’

  ‘I swore off the booze, Mr Chuck.’

  ‘Aye, me too, me too, wee man. But I was fuckin miserable without it. Zatza fact.’

  By the time Chuck reached Daldowie Cemetery he’d finished the last of the gin and was lost again. The city was all unfamiliar intersections. For a minute he thought he’d somehow travelled into another city altogether, one he’d never seen before. He drove into a petrol station, narrowly avoided a pump, then went inside and asked for directions.

  A surly young guy with a pearl in his oil-stained right ear lobe was totting up the take, watching a paper-roll spit through an adding-machine.

  ‘Tryin to find Cobble Street,’ Chuck said, stumbling into a Coca-Cola machine. ‘Ooops. Or mibbe Cobble Drive.’

  The guy didn’t look up. He snarled, ‘Make yer mind up. And stay a few feet away, wid ye? I could smell the booze on you coming in.’

  ‘Fancy that. I musta been drinking. So what. None o your business.’

  ‘I’ve a mind to call the polis and tell them. Drunk driver on the loose.’

  Chuck thumped the counter. ‘Cobble Drive. Put a lid on the attitude, Jim.’

  ‘Oh, pardon me.’ The guy raised his face and stared at Chuck with intense animosity. ‘What are you gonny day about it? Eh? Eh?’

  ‘This.’ Chuck reached across and grabbed the guy by his earring and drew his face down, pressing it into the laminated counter. Dazzlin motion, speed and agility. Wasted he might be, but he could still move fast. He imagined this was Baba he was cramming into the counter. Take yer karma and shove it ya fraudulent fucker.

  ‘Ah-wouch,’ the guy moaned.

  ‘You’re what’s wrong with this fuckin city, too many rude bastarts, too many toe-rags like you.’ He gave the earring a twist and the lobe bled freely. ‘Geeza directions then I let you up.’

  The guy, lips kissing laminate, said, ‘Leave here, take a right, you’re headed for the M73. Keep going until you reach the M8. Follow the signs for Easterhouse … Once you’re there, stop and ask somebody.’

  ‘M73, M8.’ Chuck memorized this much. His brain was an imploded soufflé. ‘So you don’t know exactly where Cobble Drive is.’

  ‘No, but listen, you’ll be in the general area. Ask anybody.’

  Chuck stepped back, releasing the earring. ‘That’s all you had to do in the first place, sonny. Instead o this surly act. A wee bit o cooperation goes a long way in this life. Know what I’m sayin?’

  The guy said, ‘You hurt my ear.’

  ‘I coulda yanked it right off yer fuckin face, ya wanker. Think about that.’ He kicked the Coke machine and left the building, crossing the concourse and passing under tall blindingly bright lamps.

  He reached the Jag. Inside, he fumbled with his belt-buckle and looked at the gnome. ‘Some people,’ he said.

  ‘There are bad-mannered gnomes as well, Mr Chuck.’

  ‘In all walks of life bad is what you find more than anythin else,’ and Chuck gave the big car some instant pedal and zoomed out of the station and zipped quickly through oncoming traffic, screeching past flashing lights and angry horns – so much fuckin rage, just because he nipped in front of a few cars. Rudeness everywhere. He cruised the M8, dipping in and out of lanes as he fancied. He burst into loud song, This Jaguar’s so fast and sleek, it could run for a fuckin week …

  When he reached the housing scheme he drove between tower blocks, passing people on unlit corners doing sneaky wee deals in the dark, and boys and girls smoking hash. He braked, tyres squealing, and rolled his window down and asked some kids the way to Cobble Drive. They gave him directions that sounded simple enough.

  ‘Izzat a gnome’s heid in there?’

  Chuck looked at the young girl who’d asked. She was pretty, but blurred in his gin-whacked vision, as if she was underwater. A nimbus hung around the crown of her head. He was reminded of Catholic icons. He remembered tossing cash at the RC Church, and that pederast Father Skelton. You’ll get your reward when you’re in heaven, Reuben.

  ‘Lassie, come here, closer. You tell me. What the fuck is it about holy men, eh?’ he asked.

  ‘Uh?’ The girl poked her face inside the open window. She popped a bubble out of her chewing-gum. Chuck imagined it was a small balloon-like extension of her tongue.

  He said, ‘Priests and gurus, total shite. Total shite! The lotta them.’

  ‘So they are.’ The girl giggle
d. Her friends were gathering around, a bunch of teenage girls with bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Priests and popes and fuckin bishops,’ Chuck said. He understood he meant to warn these girls of some impending evil in the world, but the intention fell apart like faulty scaffolding. ‘You lassies keep an eye open. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Whiddye doin wi a gnome’s heid anyway?’

  Chuck moved his lips, did the squeaky voice. ‘Hello girls, I’m Gregory and I’m gnomeward bound.’

  High on dope, the girls found everything hysterical, doubling over and throwing their heads back and hooting at the sky.

  ‘Night girls,’ the gnome said.

  Chuck drove off and found his way to Cobble Drive, where he saw the house set back from the road. Sticks out like a plook on a fashion model’s nose, Mr Chuck. A couple of windows were lit. He braked, gazed at the high walls, the big iron gates. He stepped from the car, walked to the gates. Lockedy-locked. Two big dogs rushed through shrubbery, frantic canine energy, slavering. Fuck the fuckin dogs, Chuck thought. He rattled the gates.

  Dr Dysart, I am here to see you.

  The gates shook but wouldn’t yield. He kicked them. Come on.

  Easy solution. He got behind the wheel of the Jag and reversed. He told the gnome to hang on, changed gear to drive, and flattened his foot on the pedal and smacked the big car straight into the gates, which swayed, then buckled and finally snapped under the force of so much horsepower. He broke a headlamp and ruined his grille, but kept going, clattering through a clump of shrubbery and over a series of grassy bumps and then a stretch of gravel that crackled under the wheels and then there he was – right up at the front door, Jag scratched and dented, fender bent, two dogs howling at him, and the gnome’s head, which had fallen from the passenger seat, broken in many pieces on the floor.

  I lose friends, Chuck thought. I lose my girl.

  He rolled down his window and looked at the big dogs. ‘Fuck off ya beasts.’

  Staggering, Chuck took a gun from the glove compartment and got out of the Jag and fired the weapon in the air and the dogs scampered off terrified. He walked up the steps to the front door and kicked it open, roaring, Dorco, hey Dorco, where are you?

  Jackie saw him from the window of the sickroom and said, ‘Company, Dorcus. In a Jaguar. With a gun.’