Butcher (15 page)

‘One day give me a guided tour of this house.'

She struggled to smile again. ‘It's a date.'

He walked into the kitchen. The room gleamed. He took the pic of Colin and Miriam from his coat and stuck it into a drawer, then he found the wine and the glasses where Betty said they'd be, and as he turned back toward the living room – brimming with sympathy and the need to comfort her – his half-dead mobile phone rang weakly in his jacket pocket. Not now, not now … He dragged the phone out and heard Adamski's voice, a croak from the reaches of dead space.

‘I think we might have your missing person, Lou.'

18

All night Dorcus Dysart drove his white van around the city. He'd checked the hookers on the edges of the city centre, but they were high-risk, these girls in their hiked-up skirts and stark powdered faces. They were likely to be diseased, drug-ridden, probably both. Impurities flowed in their blood, toxifying their organs.

He travelled south of the Clyde and into the silent gritty streets that branched off Paisley Road West. Yellow street lamps, some of them shattered, and nobody moving except some late-night drunks singing
Ah'm no Hairy Mary ah'm yer maw
.

Solitary pedestrians were difficult to find. People tended to move in pairs, or three- and foursomes. They read the papers, saw the news. Bodies had been found. Somebody in this city was doing ‘spare-part surgery'. Quote unquote.

Circumstances had to be perfect – a person walking alone under dim lights. Weight mattered, and accessibility.

He drove deeper into the territory. Pollokshields, Shawlands. Locked shops, shuttered restaurants, dark tenements: he might have been driving the streets of an abandoned city. Sometimes a desperation overcame him: he'd never find anybody ever again, and then what? What would he do for money? And then he began to obsess about this Glorianna who'd telephoned him, Mr Chuck's friend. She was coming to his house, he'd never had a woman there.

Except Nurse Payne.

She was sacred to him, a love so constant he sometimes wondered if she was somebody he'd dreamed. He pictured her face. That intelligence in the eye.

Now this Glorianna was coming too …

What would he say to her? How would he say:
Look, I don't want it but thanks anyway, don't think I'm ungrateful
. He'd phone Mr Chuck and say:
Don't send the girl, I'm too busy working
, but he had the feeling Reuben Chuck was a man who didn't like his gifts rejected.

At 2.30 a.m. he changed direction and went back across the river and up into the area around the university. The thoroughfares were empty. This was Studentland but where were the inhabitants, where were the party people? He pulled over, cleaned his glasses with a special little chamois cloth he kept in the glovebox.

On Byres Road he saw a few groups of late loiterers. Then side-streets – Dowanside, Havelock, White Street, Caird Drive. Up and down and round and round. He went back the way he'd come, prowling. Along Woodlands Road a few taxis cruised, a couple of cars passed. He slid a hand under his glasses and rubbed his tired eyelids.

An unfulfilled night. No, no, you have a deal with Mr Chuck.

Mr Chuck who likes you, calls you Dorco. Says you're an artist, looks up to you, wants your skills, pays highly for them.

Halfway down West End Park Street he saw the girl come round a corner, trying to hurry on wobbly high heels. She was short, trim, lightweight.

Slowing his van, he followed her a little way.

If she made it to the main crossroad, Woodlands Road, opportunity might be lost to him in a sudden burst of traffic, or more pedestrians. He pulled his van into the curb alongside her and slid open his door.

‘Excuse me,' he said.

She didn't look, kept walking. Same pace, didn't want to appear frightened.

He edged the van forward to keep up with her. ‘Sorry to t-trouble you.'

She turned now. Her face in the headlights was plain, mouth a mournful downturned slash. Her eyes were red from crying. She was upset. He wondered why – perhaps heartache, broken promises.

People in love were vulnerable. Often they trusted their hearts to shits.

He felt sorry for the girl.

‘What the
fuck
do you want?' The expression on her face was shaped by years of urban fear:
don't talk to strangers, don't take sweeties from men you don't know, stay away from bushes
. In her emotional state she'd overlooked her own rule. Or forgotten it.

He braked, gazed down at her. He knew he had a certain awkward innocence about him. He projected harmlessness. People saw the benign face and the thick frames of his glasses and they heard the quietly hesitant way he spoke and the stutter and they felt sorry for him. They might wonder about the long hair, but they thought they divined his nature easily enough: kindly, no hidden threats, a nice guy but just a little out there. Nurse Payne always said he could knock on any door and be given shelter for the night.

‘I'm l-lost and looking for … uh, G-Great Western Road.'

‘You're not far,' she said.

‘Excuse me, are you all right,' he said.

‘What you mean, am I
all right
?'

‘You look a wee bit d-down.'

‘That's my problem, intit?'

A defensive moment. Dorcus felt she could easily slip away if he wasn't careful. ‘I'm not b-butting in, excuse me. I only wanted …'

‘Great Western, you said. Go to the end here, that's Woodlands Road. Take a right on Park Road and you'll come to Great Western, OK?'

She turned away from him, walking quicker now, but wobbling more. He jumped down from the van, landed quietly on his rubber-soled trainers. He had the chloroform out of the bottle and into a hankie in one slick well-rehearsed movement, and he grabbed her from behind and she shouted ‘
What the hell do you think you're
—' just before he crammed the hankie over her mouth. The inside of his head vibrated like a struck drum. This is always the bad time. This is where anything can go wrong, she can break loose, fight, or the chloro isn't strong enough to bring her down, or worse, the chloro is too strong.

She moaned, struggled against him, tried to bite his hand, kicked, then abruptly buckled as if life had just drained out of her, and she slid downward against his legs and slumped on the pavement.

He stuffed the hankie into his pocket and dragged the girl to the back of his van, opened the door, picked her up and laid her carefully inside. He got in beside her and tied her limp hands with straps of leather, then bound her legs with a long chain welded to an interior panel. He padlocked the chain, then he placed an old burlap sack, in which he'd scissored two holes for breathing, over her head, and he knotted the drawstring under her jaw.

He slid into the driver's seat and travelled until he was in the east of the city, moving along Edinburgh Road toward home. He checked his mirrors time and again for police vehicles. If he was stopped he'd have to explain his passenger – don't think that way, do not. Outside his house he unlocked the high metal gates and drove through quickly.

He heard the Dobermans: dogs of war.

He drove the van into the garage and the door closed automatically behind him. He lifted the girl out and carried her into the house, calling ‘Nurse Payne, Nurse Payne, is everything ready?' as he ascended to his surgery at the top of the stairs, passing, the way he always did, through the ghost zone, the mist of ice.

19

Five a.m. in the morgue, and Perlman had no desire to sleep, no chance of getting any even if he wanted: the idea was like voyaging to a country too far to reach. Death had a magnetic energy field, and it kept him hyped, edgy. He drank cup after cardboard cup of bad black coffee from a vending machine.

Now and again he was drawn back to the bed where Kirk McLatchie lay exposed for the purpose of examination, illuminated by a cruel overhead light. A sorry end. No privacy, less dignity.

Adamski was standing a few feet from the body. Burnt-out, he massaged his beefy eyelids continually and sighed time and again – regret, sadness, maybe disgust with the ways of the city he'd served for years. This corpse had been found by two lovers walking in woodland near the Clyde where it flowed close to Cambuslang Road. What a memorable date that turned out to be.

Perlman's mind kept going back to Betty, and the glass of wine she was destined never to taste. How had he broken the news to her?
About Kirk, I'm
sorry to tell you they've found your son …
He had no specific details to give her at that point, just news of Kirk's discovery. She sat motionless, as if paralyzed by a stroke. She shrunk in front of his eyes, diminished by pain. She didn't go through the predictable phases of denial – no, it can't be my son, it can't be Kirk – as if she'd known that the life of her missing kid would end badly all along. She'd tried to light a cigarette and it slipped from her hands and she made no move to pick it up. He saw terror build inside her. She began to shake so badly he knew he couldn't ask her to go to the morgue to identify the boy.

He gave her two sleeping-pills he found in his bathroom cabinet and hoped they'd knock her out. He covered her with a blanket and sat for a long time beside her as she curled up, mute and tiny, on his sofa. Once or twice he'd stroked the side of her face or her arm, and murmured words of condolence, but she seemed neither to feel his touch nor hear his voice.

Sooner or later, she'd have to make an identification, unless Kirk's wife Deborah could be found first – but the phone rang unanswered in Deborah's flat when he'd tried the number, and she didn't respond to the two patrol cops who'd been sent from E Division to knock at her door. Gone AWOL, a late-nighter, a petty little jab of vengeance at her errant husband maybe. Bad timing.

He watched the medical examiner scratch the tip of his nose. He was a tall stately man with grey hair that overhung the collar of his white coat. He was fastidious, solemn. Perlman had run into coroners who were jokers, comics lightening the gloom of their profession.
Dead end job this, chuckle. Nothing but grave prospects here, ho ho
. Harry Whelan was no stand-up act. He worked in silence, and when he had to record his observations into a microphone he spoke softly.

Perlman wanted cold fresh air, away from the confines of this place. But he had a responsibility as a substitute for the boy's mother.

Harry Whelan switched off his recorder. ‘Long night,' he said.

‘You're telling me,' Adamski said.

‘You'll get my written report in time, gentlemen, but I imagine you already know roughly what I'm going to say in it … you've been listening to me talk long enough, after all.' He gazed at the silver instruments of his trade lying in a bloodstained tray beside the bed.

Perlman felt light-headed. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. Christ, all his professional life he'd dealt with violent death: stab and gunshot victims, the strangulated, the ledge-jumpers. Had he reached that point where he'd become too thin-skinned to cope with the faces and bodies of corpses? It happens, cops lose their objectivity, they grow sick and jaded, and every morning shades seamlessly into the one before. The grim sameness of things. Other polis developed a shell of indifference: dead meat on a slab, too bad, another stat. Or was it because he knew Kirk's mother that he was more sensitive than before? Knew her,
liked
her. When he thought about it he realized he'd liked her from that first meeting, her candour, the honest way she looked you straight in the eye.

He wanted to hurry back to his house: if the pills had worked, they'd wear off soon enough, and he didn't want her waking alone. And then he had the dilemma of how to break
this
news to her – the manner in which Kirk's life had been ended.

Harry Whelan, who'd undone the stitches on Kirk's body to perform the internal examination, and then carefully closed the corpse up again, said, ‘Both kidneys removed. Also the liver. And the heart. The surgery was good, economical. Somebody with experience. No question.'

Perlman's thoughts immediately rushed to Jackie Ace. He'd found him convincing. Maybe a second interview would reveal something else, but he didn't expect wild revelations.
I got tired of bodies, Sergeant
. It was a simple, credible reason for giving up surgery. No matter, Perlman would make a point of talking to him again.

Whelan said, ‘Organs. Lucrative business, sadly.'

Perlman asked, ‘Why go to the trouble of plundering the organs and then stitching up the body again? Why not just dump the corpse as is?'

‘A compulsion. Likes to do a tidy job, feels an obligation to finish. Who knows?'

‘I don't mean to sound callous,' Adamski said, ‘but if it was me I'd just toss the remains. I wouldn't waste time sewing, especially if time's a factor. You've got what you want, why bother with needlework?'

Whelan shrugged. He drew a sheet across Kirk McLatchie, glancing at Lou. ‘We still need somebody connected to the family to come down and identify him. Meantime, gents, thanks for the company. It can get lonely here at four in the morning.'

The silent company of the dead, Perlman thought. You bet it's fucking lonely.
Betty's going to be lonely
. He walked out of the room into the corridor.

Adamski followed him. ‘Sorry it turned out this way, Lou.'

‘I asked for help. You gave it. I'm grateful.'

Adamski looked balefully at the lights along the corridor. ‘The older I get the more I want happy endings. What does that make me? A sentimental fool?'

‘A human being.' Perlman clapped a hand on Adamski's shoulder. ‘You have a smoke I can borrow?'

‘I quit last year.'

‘Smart move.' Perlman stepped into the street. The clear night air was starry and cold.