The Last Darkness

1

Lou Perlman stood on the dark riverbank and gazed up at the body dangling from a girder under Central Station Bridge.

This was the second hanging he’d seen in his life.

The first – long ago, almost fifty years – had been a milk delivery-man called Kerr who’d hung himself from an oak in a scrubby little park at the edge of the old Gorbals. Perlman hadn’t thought about Kerr in ages, but now he remembered the dead man had worn a white work uniform with the logo Southern Cooperative Dairy.

Dresses for work, hangs himself instead. Little Lou, about six and chubby, had watched cops cut Kerr down and place him on the grass. Obviously a suicide, one of the cops had said.

Lou had never heard that word. He’d looked it up in his father’s big dictionary. ‘The act of killing oneself intentionally.’ It had seemed strange to him that anyone would take his own life. Years later, as the recipient of several hard-won diplomas from the academy of rough streets, it no longer astonished him. Depression, melancholy, debt, terminal weariness – there were a thousand reasons or more for slashing your wrists in a bathtub or swallowing fifty Temazepam or tying a noose round your neck.

The air beneath the bridge smelled dank. A goods train rumbled overhead. Perlman watched the wagons as they passed out of view. He stamped his feet for warmth. The tip of his nose was an ice-cube. He could sense snow in the air, an early December downfall. He searched the pockets of his coat for his gloves, but could find only one. Christ knows where the other was. He was always losing gloves. Socks too. Anything that comes in pairs I lose one, he thought. Why couldn’t they sell gloves and socks in threes?

He glanced at his watch: 1:15 a.m. He lit a cigarette and watched two cops climb an extension ladder. Another uniform was already up in the girders fiddling with the knotted rope. An ambulance appeared. A couple of medics came out carrying a stretcher, which they set at the foot of the ladder. Perlman scanned the casual observers who stood here and there, the night people, the homeless, the curious who just happened to stumble upon this unexpected cameo of the city.

Suicide. That’s from the Latin, of course, Colin had said. Perlman remembered how his brother had remarked, in a smart-arse offhand manner, that the word was derived from sui, oneself, and cidium, a killing. Clever Colin, four years older than Lou and even in those days the proud owner of a Very Big Brain, top of his class in everything.

Poor Colin, all things considered. Two days ago he’d been a Polaroid of good health. Strong, fit, lean. A weight-lifter, cyclist, non-smoker, a man who abstained from all toxic ingestion except the occasional glass of good wine. Very good wine.

Things change, zoom, zap, God never gives warnings.

The cops were lowering the body now. Carefully, in slow stages, they brought the dead man down. Perlman looked at the corpse’s herringbone overcoat; expensive wool, no shmatte. The fellow’s scarf was grey silk and his slip-on shoes gleamed in the headlights of the ambulance. One trouser leg had ridden up, showing a short black sock and a stretch of white skin. He wore a plain gold wedding ring. He’d come here, rope presumably in coat pocket and, stalked by God knows what horrors, he’d either climbed up into the girders from the stone support plinth on the riverbank, or he’d descended from the railway line above.

Then he’d made the necessary killing attachments and jumped.

Perlman stepped towards the stretcher, looked down at the dead man. What had driven him to finish his life hanging from the underside of a railway bridge that straddled the River Clyde in the middle of Glasgow? Eyes open, lips parted, head tilted limply to one side, the guy had black and silver Brylcreemed hair parted in a razor-sharp line to one side. He might have been dressed for a night out, a serious date. He was sixty, Perlman guessed. Maybe more.

Perlman bent over, and his bones creaked, and he thought how, especially on these biting wintry nights, you could hear the Reaper’s advance signals in the realignment of joints. He studied the rope, one end of which lay across the dead man’s chest; the other was bound hard round the throat and gathered at the back of the neck in a big thick slipknot that looked like a cancerous growth, a lethal melanoma. The end that had been fixed to the girder was stained dark and oily from the city’s emissions, from railway residues and lubricants and leakages.

‘I had to cut that top knot, Sergeant. With my knife.’

Perlman looked up at the young policeman who’d spoken. How like kids they seemed to him these days, callow boys, some of them barely at the age of shaving. This one was called Murdoch. He had an open pink face that shone from the cold and earnest eyes.

‘I couldn’t work it loose with my hands,’ Murdoch said. ‘I tried.’

Perlman shrugged. ‘No big deal, son. We couldn’t leave the poor sod hanging up there until we’d located somebody with nimble wee fingers, could we? Might’ve taken all night.’ He wondered why the young cop sounded so apologetic: eager to please, he assumed. Young and keen, didn’t want to wreck what might have been a vital item of evidence, in this case a knot in a length of rope recently tethered to a girder.

Perlman sometimes had an unsettling effect on young cops. God knows, he always tried to be friendly and understanding, even compassionate, but maybe they were intimidated by the longevity of his career, or his legend as a cop who knew just about every ned in the city. Or they were perturbed, as ambitious young men and women might be, by his refusal to accept promotion beyond the rank of Detective-Sergeant. This was so tough for these kids to understand? It was simple: he didn’t want to get caught up in the internal politics of the Force, which grew more complex the higher you rose. He’d seen too many useful cops taken off the streets and shackled to their desks, clamped in the chains of administration. He thought: if I don’t want to get my arse kicked upstairs, it’s because this is my job and this is my city, and I don’t want to change a bloody thing, not even a situation like this, kneeling on the bank of a black river in the freezing night air in the cold cold heart of Glasgow.

He rummaged in the pockets of the coat. Empty. He fingered the wedding ring, checked it for an inscription, found none. He felt the softness of the dead man’s palm. He undid the buttons of the coat, slid his fingers inside. He had an uneasy sensation, a stark sense of trespass. Going through a dead man’s clothing in front of twenty or so night-crawlers – he knew he ought to have waited until the poor bastard was inside the ambulance before starting this rudimentary exploration, but he’d always been impetuous. A weakness in his psychological structure, too late to fix.

He called to Murdoch. ‘Son, get these bloody gawkers out of here. Scatter the whole crew of them. And don’t be polite either. Use the authority of the uniform, and lean if you need to.’ He gestured to the small crowd. Murdoch and his fellow uniforms began to make the appropriate loud noises, Come on, move along, nothing for you to see here, shove off the lotta you. The pedestrians began to shuffle away. They’d regroup further down the street, of course: death was magnetic.

Perlman took off his glasses, wiped them on the cuff of his coat, then returned to his examination of the suicide’s jacket. The label read: Tailored in Italy for Mandelson’s of Glasgow. Mandelson’s was an expensive menswear shop in Buchanan Street: it wasn’t where Lou Perlman bought his clothes. He slipped a hand into the inside pocket. Two spare buttons wrapped in clear plastic, nothing else. No wallet, no keys, nothing. It was the same with the side and breast pockets. All empty. Perlman frisked the trouser pockets: nothing – no loose change, hankie, crumpled slip of paper, match-book. A dead man, a well-dressed, well-nourished Caucasian, with no identification and only one personal possession, an anonymous gold ring.

Chilled, Perlman cupped his hands and blew into them. He stood upright. His joints felt like fused metal. He gazed at the man’s face and for a moment had a fleeting sense of familiarity. From where? He turned and squinted across the narrow river where the old Renfrew ferryboat lay at anchor: a relic of a dead Glasgow, it had once carried passengers downriver. Now it had been adapted as a floating venue for theatrical and musical events. Perlman had attended a concert there some time ago, a swing revival band from Rotterdam.

He looked down at the suicide again. No ID. No farewell letter.

Maybe that was the way he’d planned it. Just a nobody at the end of a rope with nothing to say. Sad. Perlman nodded at the two orderlies from the ambulance.

‘You can take him,’ he said.

They lifted the dead man into the ambulance. Perlman caught himself staring at the corpse’s shoes, and he thought of the man’s soft hand again, and he had one of those moments when you realize, with a quickened skip of pulse, that appearances are only surface. Stir the pond and the silt shifts and sometimes something unexpected emerges from the murk.

2

The young man walked through the park with his hands in the pockets of his big heavy coat. He listened to a breeze rattle the skeletal branches of trees. He saw a half moon in the sky. Glass from broken lamps and hypodermic syringes littered the ground. He passed a bench, glanced at a man who lay there in a tattered sleeping bag that oozed pieces of insulation. The man’s head was covered in a hood, and he snored. A drunk, a beggar.

Beyond the sleeper, the young man saw the statue and a pale light hanging above it. You’ll find a figure carved in stone. That’s the place where you wait. He tried to read the inscription on the base, but couldn’t make out the letters because too many vandals had come this way with spraypaint. Who was this fellow who’d been honoured by a statue? A political hero? a great poet? He couldn’t have been so very important if he’d been placed in this tiny swathe of park so far from the city centre.

The young man wondered how long he’d have to wait. He walked round the statue and tried to keep warm – a problem in this refrigerated city so far from home. Now and then he touched his short black beard, which was cold. The breeze came up again, arctic, and he lifted the collar of his coat against his neck.

In the darkness to his right the headlights of a car flicked on then off, and again. The sign. He walked forty or fifty yards until he reached the street. He was aware of tenement windows on the edge of his vision, so many families living one on top of the other, creatures in hives. He smelled food frying, and realized he’d eaten nothing save some tangerines and a banana and handfuls of garinim in the last twenty-four hours. He remembered the long shuddering train journey from one end of Europe to the other, and before that the voyage on the rusted fishing boat that ferried him from Port Said to Athens, and the stench of rotten sardine in the airless hold where he’d been obliged to travel, a foul odour he could still feel at the back of his throat.

He reached the car. The passenger door swung open.

‘Get in.’ The face of the man behind the wheel was in shadow.

The young man climbed in, closed the door.

The man behind the wheel said, ‘Call me Ramsay.’ Cawmeramzay.

‘Please … You will have to speak more slowly.’

‘Going too fast for you, Abdullah?’

‘Abdullah? That is not my name –’

‘Look, if I choose to call you Abdullah, that’s your name, okay? Stick your backpack on the floor and show me your passport.’

‘Why?’

‘You could be anybody. That’s why.’ This Ramsay, concealed in shadow, spoke English with an impenetrable accent. Words ran together, letters fell from the end of words, it wasn’t the well-schooled English of the teachers in the schools the young man had attended. Cautiously, he handed his passport to Ramsay, who opened it and checked it with a glance.

‘You look like your photograph, Abdullah,’ Ramsay said, passing the document back.

‘Of course. But my name –’

‘Fuck the name. Who gives a shite? Me Ramsay you Abdullah. Let’s keep it nice and simple.’

The manner in which he said ‘Abdullah’ was offensive. It was a joke name; as if all Middle Easterners were called Abdullah. The young man thought of the passport he’d been given in Athens, which identified him as Shimon Marak, a naturalized Greek of Israeli birth, and he realized that assumed names were simply tools of deception, and unimportant so long as you never lost sight of your real identity.

Ramsay said, ‘Here’s how it is. One, I’ll drive you to a place where you’ll live. It’s not fancy, but I don’t expect you’re accustomed to the Ritz. The address is 45 Braeside Street. Commit it to memory. Two, don’t ask me any questions because the chances are I don’t know the answers anyway. You follow me?’

‘Yes, yes. I follow.’ The young man had expected a warmer reception. He’d anticipated an ally in this alien city, somebody at least kind. But Ramsay’s attitude was the opposite.

I constructed an ideal in my head, Marak thought. Now I must absorb the reality. I am not here as a tourist with a camera. Ramsay’s hostility was unexpected, but what did it matter in the long run?

Ramsay turned his face, and Marak saw his profile for the first time. The nose that terminated in a sharp point, the backward slope of forehead, the strange way the chin ran almost without impediment into the neck. Ramsay’s hair was thick and brushed high from his scalp. One wedge, perhaps gelled, jutted from the front of his head, a promontory.

‘I’ll drive you to your new home, Abdullah.’

‘I’m tired. It’s been a long journey.’

‘I don’t want to know anything about it,’ Ramsay said.

The young man fell silent and stared from the window. He was aware of crossing a narrow river, the same one he’d travelled over earlier on his way to meet Ramsay. He’d ridden in a black taxicab driven by a pockmarked man who spoke as incomprehensibly as Ramsay. Laughing, the cabbie had said, You another fucking illegal then? He’d agreed with the driver: Yes yes. Illegal yes. Another foreigner. Och, there’s always a shortage of dishwashers at the kebab joints. He’d smiled at that too and nodded eagerly. I understand nothing, Mr Driver. I am moron. You do not know if I am Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, whatever. I am just idiot from a distant country.

He saw the glare of the city, the night sky ablaze with electricity. Ramsay switched on the radio and listened to some kind of popular American music.

‘You like the golden oldies, Abdullah?’ Ramsay asked.

‘Pardon me?’

‘Ah, the tunes of yesteryear,’ Ramsay said. ‘The memory lanes of our lives and times. The way we were.’

Splish splash I was taking a bath, the singer sang.

‘Bobby Darin,’ Ramsay said.

The young man glanced at Ramsay as the car passed under a streetlamp and saw that the protruding bolt of hair was a peculiar yellow emerging from the blackness of scalp. He wondered about this decoration, this dye, and whether it signified anything.

‘Bobby Darin,’ Ramsay said again. ‘You’re listening to a dead man’s voice. Amazing when you think about it, Abdullah, intit?’

Abdullah. Enough. The young man looked at a red traffic light. The colour of his feelings. He pressed his palms together hard. ‘Call me Shimon. I prefer that.’

‘Whatever bangs your bongo, pal,’ Ramsay said, and beat a hand on the dash in time to the song. ‘I was splishing and a-splashing. Splashing and a-splishing. Got it? Altogether now, Abdullah.’

3

Sidney Linklater, forensics expert, was a Force Support Officer, a civilian attached to the Strathclyde Police. He was in his early thirties and spent all his spare time in wellies and raincoat trudging through the mud of ancient graveyards in pursuit of his hobby, charcoal rubbings of headstones.

Perlman thought this ghoulish, given the nature of Linklater’s work, which took place in a world of decaying corpses and maggots channelling through rancid flesh. Why didn’t Sid have a hobby that took him well away from death? There was nothing sickly or weirdo in young Linklater’s appearance; he had the healthy open face of an eager boy-scout making his first successful sheepshank. Maybe he just felt at ease with the dead: they couldn’t hurt your feelings, couldn’t let you down. Had some flighty young number broken Linklater’s tender heart?

He needs another life, Perlman thought.

Presently, Linklater hovered over the body that had been removed from the Central Station Bridge. Undressed, stretched on an examination table, the corpse had the look of a man just a little annoyed by his departure from the world. Things left undone, that cruise of the Nile never sailed, Crime and Punishment only half-read.

His flesh was pallid under the glow of two arc-lights. Linklater carefully examined the blue-purple marks left by the rope. Lou Perlman, who couldn’t quite shake off the tiny feeling of familiarity the dead man had aroused, turned and gazed into the shadows beyond the lamps. He didn’t like forensics labs, organic matter floating in bottles, amputated hands or feet suspended in formaldehyde. He didn’t like the smell of chemicals and medicinal soap.

He said, ‘Don’t know about you, Sid, but I’m seriously convinced he’s dead.’

‘He’s crossed the great divide all right,’ Linklater remarked, and looked at Perlman over his glasses.

‘So is there a chance we can wrap the poor bastard up and get the hell out of here?’

‘Indeed we can,’ Linklater said. He drew a sheet over the dead man’s body, then scrubbed his hands at the sink.

Perlman stepped into an adjoining room, a storage area for chemicals and equipment; there was a shaky table and an electric kettle, mugs and tea-bags. He plugged the kettle into the wall and set two mugs beside it. One of them contained a dead fly, which he dumped on the floor. He dropped a tea-bag in each cup.

‘Bloody cold in here,’ Linklater said. He found a stool and sat on it, stretching his long legs.

‘Is there milk?’ Perlman asked.

‘Milk? Lucky there’s tea, Lou.’

‘I like mine milky.’ Perlman couldn’t wait for the kettle to boil. When the water was hot, he poured it into the cups, and shoved one towards Linklater.

‘We don’t have a spoon either,’ Linklater said. ‘Cheers.’

Perlman poked a fingertip at the tea-bag, then sipped his tea. Utter pish. He made a face. ‘Right. One dead man. Apparent suicide.’

‘Apparent,’ Linklater said.

‘Except. No evidence he climbed the concrete column to the girders. No wee crumbs of concrete under the fingernails or on the soles of the shoes. No rough or broken skin, no chipped fingernails. Just oil stains.’

‘Agreed.’

Perlman swirled the awful tea around in his mouth before swallowing it, and thought how quickly you could get used to rubbish if you had no alternative. We are obliged to choke down a load of shite and we don’t even taste it after a while, especially the utterances of politicians. Bad mood, Lou. Fatigue, three in the morning and a corpse you don’t need, ballocks.

‘All right, Sid, so no evidence the poor sod did any climbing. And if he came down from the rail tracks above, how come he’s not totally covered in crap? We’re probably talking about a half century of oil leaks and who knows what substances on the track.’

‘I don’t think there’s any deep mystery here, Lou. There’s grease on his coat.’

‘My main concern is whether it’s enough. You come clambering down from that bridge to the underside, Sid, and it’s not going to be here a smudge, there a smudge, is it? You’d be bathed in black lubricants. I also bet there’s layers of soot trapped up there from away before the Clean Air Act. You might not remember our fair city in its foggy heyday. Darkness at noon. The air was pure schmutz. You know what the people looked like? The Living Dead, Sid. You could leave the house nice and clean at eight a.m. and your pores would be clogged with coal smoke in a matter of twenty minutes … The good old days, Sid, when you sucked down a ton of pollutants on a daily basis.’

‘Excuse me for pointing this out: the city’s still polluted, Lou.’

‘Polluted?’ He lit a cigarette, a Silk Cut. ‘You should’ve been here when they didn’t have pollution in the dictionary.’

‘I see you’re smoking,’ Linklater said.

‘My choice,’ Perlman said. He could smell that old Glasgow suddenly, the stench of soot and smoke and how, when you blew your nose, your mucus was black and had a metallic whiff; even the wax in your ears turned black. ‘So do I get the speech about killing myself, Sid? I smoke because I like it. Also because my nerves cry out for it.’

‘Studies show that nicotine isn’t a tran –’

‘Fuck the studies. They’re all anti-tobacco propaganda. Back to our man at the end of the rope, Sid.’

‘My theory.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Give me a minute.’

Linklater left the room. Perlman took another sip of tea, then poured the rest down the sink. He didn’t want to hear Linklater’s theory: he guessed it would match his own thoughts, basically. He wanted this to be a suicide. He didn’t want it to be something else, even if he already suspected it was heading into perplexity and turbulence, questions without obvious answers, sleepless nights. I need my bloody sleep, he thought. He envisaged the dead man’s face: who was he? This Brylcreemed man with a hair-parting that might have been made by a precision instrument, and the expensive coat from Mandelson of Buchanan Street, and the unengraved wedding ring?

Linklater came back. He carried the dead man’s clothes in a neat pile, shoes on top. He set everything down on the small table, then picked up the shoes. He turned them over, pointed to the soles. ‘A couple of grease-marks, but not a lot. And nothing to indicate he’d climbed a concrete pillar, certainly. No scrapes. Nice shoes, by the way. Soft and Italian, new. Expensive.’

‘So’s the coat,’ Perlman said.

‘Anyway,’ and here Linklater held the shoes, one in each hand, beneath Perlman’s face. ‘Regard the heels, Lou. See. They’re seriously scuffed.’

‘I saw that when they were lifting him into the ambulance.’

‘Deep scuffs. Which suggests?’

Lou Perlman adjusted his glasses. They kept slipping. He needed those little nonslip pads you could buy at an optician’s. Check that for another day. Check so many things for another day. A loose filling at the back of his mouth, the occasional shot of pain when cold liquid was going down. Library books months overdue. A Thelonious Monk CD – Solo – he still hadn’t disinterred from its cellophane, and an old vinyl album of Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel he’d found in a second-hand shop and longed to hear. ‘In My Hour of Darkness’: yes indeed. Life marched all over you in tackety boots and somehow you couldn’t find the time to arrest its progress. His mood was blackening. He might have had rooks nesting inside his head.

‘It suggests he was dragged, Sid,’ Perlman said.

‘Exactly. Consistent with these stains on the back of his trousers. See?’ Linklater touched the garment, then studied the oil stain between his thumb and the tip of his index finger. ‘A man crawling along the girders would have stained the front of his trousers. Unless he slithered along on his back –’

‘He wouldn’t have to slide flat on his back. There’s room under that bridge.’

‘Now the coat.’ Linklater set the trousers to one side. ‘Oily marks on the back of the coat, again consistent with dragging. You’ll notice the smudges you referred to earlier are confined more or less to one central area of the back of the garment, corresponding to the spine. The front of the coat is relatively unsullied.’

Perlman tossed his cigarette into the sink. ‘Don’t tell me what I don’t want to hear. Feed me pleasant fictions, Sid. Lie to me.’

‘I’m saying there’s a possibility somebody killed him.’

‘And hung him from the bridge and wants it to be written off as a suicide.’

‘Just so. The killer – or killers – hauled him along the track, lowered him to the underside, knotted one end of a rope round his neck, the other round a girder, then pushed. Away he goes. A pedestrian sees the body and phones the Force. And here we are, you and me, alone in this godforsaken place at this bloody awful hour sifting a dead man’s clothes.’

‘Because it’s what we do,’ Perlman said. ‘We keep awful hours.’

He looked at the back of the coat. There was more oil on the herringbone garment than he’d first noticed. He could smell the lubricants. He was reminded of foundries and forges and pits where mechanics examined the underbodies of cars. He was reminded of trains racketing into bad-smelling tunnels that plunged beneath rivers. Dragged, he thought. Had the poor fucker been killed elsewhere and taken to the bridge and hung? It wasn’t likely that he’d gone willingly along the bridge and down into the girders. Walk this way, chum. Let’s have a palaver beneath the Central Station Rail Bridge. So where had he been slain, and how?

Perlman coughed. There. That little twinge in the chest. You don’t want to know what it might really mean. Twenty cigarettes a day for thirty years, give or take: that was a massive intake of smoke and wear on the tread of the lungs. Calculate. No, don’t. More than 200,000 cigarettes. A quarter of a million? Oy, fuck. That many? He felt giddy. How many times had he inhaled? Say a dozen times for every cigarette. Multiply a dozen by a quarter of a million and –

Change subject.

‘The suicide ploy isn’t very clever,’ he said. ‘Whoever did it wasn’t blessed with smarts. The assumption we’d overlook the evidence is …’ He groped for a word. ‘Amateur.’

‘Or arrogant,’ Linklater said.

‘Somehow I prefer to think I’m dealing with an amateur.’

‘You could be dealing with an arrogant amateur, Lou.’

Perlman stared into the sink where his discarded tea-bag lay like something washed up on the bank of an industrial river. ‘I’ll need to run his fingerprints. See if I can give him a name at least.’

‘I’ll arrange a post-mortem,’ Linklater said, and glanced at Perlman as if he wanted to expand on the subject of autopsy, but he knew Perlman didn’t have a scientific turn of mind, and grew bored with technicalities. ‘If he wasn’t a suicide, Lou, then maybe he was killed by some means other than strangulation. Leave no stone unturned.’

‘Is that your motto too?’ Perlman asked.

‘Look at my dirty fingernails, if you will.’

Perlman said, ‘Aye, manicures are pointless in this line of work, Sid. You’re not alone.’ He held up a hand for Linklater to look at.

‘You bite your nails, I see.’

‘I’m devouring myself quietly, old son. Piece by piece.’

‘Better no nails than no lungs.’

Perlman walked to the door. ‘Nag nag. I’m away. I’ve a report to write.’

4

Artie Wexler peered from the bedroom window into the street at the parked cars shining under lamps. He knew all the cars in this prosperous cul-de-sac, Sinclair’s red Land Rover, Tutterman’s antique Jaguar, fifty years old and still as showroom-glossy as a wax apple, Mackinlay’s silver Lexus, all of them. I’m looking for something else, he thought. But what? A car I’ve never seen before? Too much imagination. Something goes wrong in your schedule, an old friend fails to keep an appointment, and you feel little breakdowns inside. He closed the slit in the curtain. The palms of his hands were damp.

Ruthie was out cold in bed. Artie glanced at her. Artie and Ruthie, man and wife, thirty years of matrimony. She was ten years younger than him, and a handsome woman. He loved her as much as the day he’d married her. A different kind of love, admittedly, a matter of comfort and mutual support, it had long ago ceased to be the hot seething passion of youth. You couldn’t keep that up, the sexual energy, always grabbing each other any chance you got. Love changed. A settlement took place in the foundations of marriage. You didn’t have the old appetites.

Ruthie’s sleep was Dalmane-induced. She raised her face suddenly and peered at him, eyes slits.

‘How was dinner?’

‘He didn’t show up,’ Wexler said.

‘Strange. Did he call?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe …’ Ruthie didn’t finish her sentence. She turned on her side, slipped immediately back into sleep. Artie Wexler walked out of the room and went downstairs. He turned on the lights in the kitchen. He heard the dog, Reuben, a quiveringly fat Dalmatian, growl in the back yard. The kitchen was over-bright. Artie blinked, lit a cigar.

He thought about the broken engagement again. There had to be some good reason. Something came up, last-minute business, whatever. He’d waited in the restaurant for a while, sipped a G&T slowly, fidgeted with cutlery, then he’d left. He’d stopped for a drink in the Horseshoe, thinking perhaps somebody had seen Joe there. Nobody had. It was odd, and hard to dismiss. A monthly dinner, same night every month, same place and time, La Lanterna at nine, Artie and Joe. What am I, obsessive? Let it go.

He turned his thoughts to another matter troubling him.

Miriam.

Too late to telephone. Maybe. He blew smoke and it hung in the eyes of the spotlights overhead. Ruthie loved the spotlight effect. She’d installed twenty spots on a series of tracks in the ceiling. She also liked stainless-steel appliances, the fridge, the oven, the big extractor hood over the stove.

He picked up the telephone and punched in Miriam’s number. It rang for a long time. He thought, hang up, leave it until morning. He tightened the cord of his robe and listened to the central-heating system come to life, the whisper of hot air flowing through vents. Ruthie liked the house hot.

He heard Miriam. ‘Yes …’

‘It’s Artie,’ he said.

‘Artie, do you know the time?’

‘Just tell me how he is.’

Miriam was quiet. Artie pictured her exquisite face, the dark Mediterranean eyes. She’d been a beautiful young woman and you could still see the ghost of that loveliness about her; time had refined the overt sexuality of her youth. She was graceful now, and elegant. Women admired and envied Miriam. She’s so thin, how does she keep her figure, and that smooth skin, what’s her secret?

And if that isn’t enough she’s talented as well.