White Rage (16 page)

‘I've been there.'

‘And young Dev gets sent to Fettes College, no less. Expelled a year later for selling porno tapes to classmates. The daughter, well, we know her sad destiny. Meanwhile, Barry is financing schemes all over the place. Apartment blocks. Private housing estates in all four corners of our dear green city. He owns or co-owns a couple of Indian restaurants on the upscale side of the tandoori trade. He's rolling.'

‘And all you've got on him is the illegal money-lending stuff? Nothing else?'

McKinnon pushed himself back from the desk. His chair had tiny wheels that squeaked. ‘One other thing. Gupta Senior has a majority stake in a trucking company.'

‘And?'

‘The word is contraband cargo.' McKinnon's shades had slipped, and he pushed them back up his nose.

‘What kind?'

‘My source didn't know.'

‘Can your source find out?'

‘These characters come and go. You know how it is. If I don't buy their information, their next port of call is the blood bank to flog a litre of their own claret.'

‘You know the name of the freight company?'

‘Bargeddie Haulage.'

Perlman said nothing for a time. Crossword puzzles. What could link Indra Gupta, mild-mannered kindergarten teacher, to the dubious activities of her father, brother, or even her cousin? And how had Tilak Gupta really died? And who was the chickadee inside whom he'd blasted off his last fireworks?

‘Thanks for your help, Perse.'

‘If anything new turns up, I'll be in touch.'

Perlman walked into the restaurant. McKinnon followed him. Outside, the wind was awesome, whacking the plate-glass window as if it meant to break through. Something flapped under the restaurant door.

Perseus McKinnon bent to pick it up; a leaflet. He barely glanced at it. ‘Second one this week.'

‘What is it?' Perlman asked.

‘You haven't seen one of these already?'

Perlman shook his head, studied the leaflet. He rubbed its surface between index finger and thumb. Good quality yellow paper, big bold black font:

WHITE RAGE

Do you realize how many immigrant families and so-called ‘asylum seekers' are sponging off social security?

Do you know why there is such a long wait for hospital beds in this country and our people are dying?

Do you know why schools are overcrowded and our kids exposed to diseases?

Do you know where our kids are getting their drugs?

BLACKS, INDIANS, PAKISTANIS, ARABS, ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, ASYLUM SEEKERS ARE RUINING OUR COUNTRY!!! IT'S TIME FOR BLOOD & ACTION …

WHITE RAGE IS COMMITTED

‘White Rage. New to me,' Perlman said. ‘Sounds like a heavy metal band.'

McKinnon dismissed White Rage with a gesture of his hand. ‘Every now and then you get these total arseholes who crank themselves up about blacks or Pakis, so they print a few leaflets. If they're really tanked up, they'll burn some old warehouse down. Then they get bored and vanish again. You know the score.'

Perlman folded the leaflet, tucked it inside his pocket. He couldn't dismiss racist tracts and movements as lightly as Perseus McKinnon. They invariably disturbed him.

‘They don't mention Jews,' McKinnon said.

‘Give them time.'

Perlman opened the door. The wind gusted. It was magnificent and fierce. Facing into it, he couldn't catch his breath. It was a day for chimneypots to be blown off roofs, slates skirled across the sky, satellite dishes frisbeeing through the air.

‘Take care,' McKinnon said.

‘You too.' Lou walked into the blast, which hauled at his coat and threatened to rip his hair from his skull. Jesus Christ. He staggered to where he'd parked his car.

He yanked the door open and got in. White Rage, he thought. He wanted to imagine a group of the demented and the bitter cranking out messages of hatred on mimeograph machines in abandoned rodent-infested slum shops. But he knew that this perception of greasy-haired loners with a deranged mission, marginal Glasgow figures churning out smudged sheets on a dilapidated machine, was outmoded. The yellow paper wasn't cheap tissue, but a high-quality bond. The printing had been done by a laser device because no ink rubbed off when you touched the letters. Spacing and alignment were immaculate, the fonts varied and well denned, even artful.

White Rage obviously had access to some funds, enough at least to buy computer equipment, and decent paper, and a good printer. Funds meant contributions, membership dues, supporters of racist dementia. Friends of White Rage. He wondered how many, and where and when they met? Were they strong and crazy enough to carry out threats?
It's time for blood and action
…

Blood. He'd had enough blood.

He took his mobile from his pocket and dialled Force HQ and asked for Constable Dennis Murdoch. Young Murdoch came on the line, his voice filled with a breezy enthusiasm.

‘Do me a favour,' Perlman said.

‘Will do, Sergeant.'

‘Check on a company called Bargeddie Haulage.'

‘Anything specific in mind?'

‘Nothing in particular. Run the company through the computer. Also, take a trip out to their depot, which I assume is in the wilds of Bargeddie. Have a quiet wee look round. Can you be inconspicuous, Dennis?'

‘I can try.'

‘It helps if you leave your uniform behind.'

Perlman hung up. He drove towards the city centre through a storm of windblown matter, much of it paper; it was as if layers of skin were peeling off the city in flakes.

19

She waited in the doorway of the Ramshorn Church in Ingram Street. The old church, now a theatre, belonged to Strathclyde University. Students carrying big musical instruments jostled her as they entered the building. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jeans and wondered what her life would have been like if she hadn't dropped out of university. Speculation, pointless. All those dreary lectures she'd attended with naive enthusiasm in the beginning; what did she remember of them? Practically nothing. You learned on the streets all you needed to know.

Pegg came along the pavement in her direction. The wind flapped his coat so that it trailed behind him like a cape. He walked with purposeful little steps. She moved forward to meet him, and they turned the corner into Albion Street to get out of the blast. They passed the glossy black building that had once been the offices of the
Evening Times
.

Pegg said he was hungry. She knew a cheap quiet café in Wilson Street. They picked up cheese and tomato rolls and coffee at the counter, and carried them to a table in the corner. She observed Pegg's clenched little face for a time. His black eyebrows made him fierce. The fawn eyepatch that covered the left socket seemed to conceal an even deeper intensity about him. How he'd lost the eye was unclear. She'd heard stories – an explosive had gone off unexpectedly, a firearm mishap. She didn't know the truth, and Pegg, who reinvented his history on a constant basis, wasn't about to tell her. He hinted he'd been a member of the old British National Party, and then later the National Front, that he'd lived in America for some years and joined the American Nazi Party. Too dull, he'd said once, of Lincoln Rockwell's organization; drenched in mediocrity. Americans trivialized every political instinct. American politics were as interesting as sugar-free muesli.

He finished his roll and picked at crumbs on his plate. ‘So tell me about your flawed recruit.'

‘He did what I asked.'

‘But you said on the phone he's a liability.'

‘I didn't take his boozing into account.'

‘Serious oversight.'

She sipped her coffee. ‘We all make them.'

‘And we all regret them. You know how fucking careful we have to be. We're walking on eggshells.'

‘I don't need you to tell me that.' She realized that although she called him Pegg, she had no idea what his real name was. Same with Swank. Same with the man called Oyster she sometimes met in Kennyhill Square who gave her money. They were all strangers, shadows. They lived furtive lives, like her own – except maybe for Oyster. He was different. He didn't have the haggard look of the fugitive, that projection of dread and the signs of an unhealthy life, dry lips, dandruff, discoloured teeth: he suggested quiet prosperity and a certain toughness. She didn't have him sussed out yet, and maybe she never would. She thought about him sexually quite often, attracted by his projection of mystery.

Pegg said, ‘Infantry is always expendable. Christ, we're
all
expendable. You. Me. Swank. Anybody on the inside.'

‘I can get one last gig out of him,' she said.

‘Like what?'

‘Trust me.'

‘In other words, don't ask.'

She watched a recently arrived diner munch into his mutton pie, and she remembered how quickly Beezer had become drunk in the pub in Maryhill Road late last night, how he'd declined into talking brain-fried nonsense about his French parents, buried treasure, bullshite, his red-hot disgust at the way Great Britain had become diminished, how it was Not-so-fucking-Great Britain, a country destroyed by fucking immigrant scum – his voice rising all the time until it reached the level of a roar, his face growing as purple as a bruise, people in the bar turning to stare. Then he'd climbed onto a table like a soapbox orator. In full-rant mode he'd started in on a scheme to create camps, bloody
concentration camps
, hundreds of them.

Somebody called him a Nazi cunt and smacked him on the skull with a beer bottle, and then he'd been dragged out into the street and a couple of hard characters had laughingly kicked him as he lay on the pavement, still speechifying. She'd slipped away then. She didn't want to be seen in his company.

‘You need help to deal with him?' Pegg asked.

‘I can do this on my own.'

He rose. ‘If you say so.'

She watched him step out into the street. He didn't look back. He didn't wave. There were no little social courtesies in Pegg's life. He drifted out of sight, an inconspicuous figure in a raincoat, the beige eyepatch his only distinction. You'd never imagine him capable of stabbing a man in a public street. If he'd done it. Maybe Swank had been the killer. It was also possible they'd acted together. She had no idea why they'd chosen Ochoba as a target. Colour was enough. No reasons beyond pigmentation were ever necessary. And Helen Mboto. Maybe Pegg had seen Helen and Ochoba together in a café and the sight of two black people being openly affectionate had revolted him and he'd decided something had to be done about it. Maybe he and Swank wanted the effect of a double slaying. Big press. They'd plotted it together. They'd learned that Helen would be waiting in the Tinderbox, and so they'd asked her to deal with the woman. They'd followed Ochoba into Ashton Lane and murdered him even as Helen Mboto, anxiously clock-watching in the coffee shop, was about to be led to her own execution.

Something like that.

She watched the street. A woman the colour of milky coffee went past; a child of mixed race clutched her hand. The child wore a hood against the strong wind. The woman bent down to pick the child up; she tucked the kid inside her coat. It was touching in its way, a mother protecting her daughter from the elements.

Motherhood. A universal. Black, white, yellow, it didn't matter.

Except I never felt that need to reproduce, she thought.

What was the point of bringing a kid into this overpopulated shithole of a world? This place of sorrow and strife and famine? She felt a slight edge of loneliness, which she pushed aside: unworthy.

Helen Mboto's face flashed across her brain. She saw the woman's pink palm rise to fend off the first fierce hammer blow.

Detach yourself.

She got up from the table and went outside. The city huffed and creaked all around her. Wind-ruffled pigeons huddled in front of the Cenotaph outside the City Chambers. She walked across George Square to Queen Street Station, where she'd call Beezer from a public phone.

20

Perlman entered Force HQ and passed the reception desk where Jackie Wren was fidgeting with his walrus moustache; a furry upper lip, Perlman thought, was a silly vanity, like having a miniature stole attached to your face.

‘Windy enough out there for you?' Wren asked.

‘Blows the cobwebs away,' Perlman said. He'd been short with Wren the day before, he remembered. He smiled in a conciliatory manner. ‘I'm sorry I snapped at you the other day, Jackie.'

‘With all the tensions in this place, Lou, it's no surprise. Apology accepted. By the way, DI Scullion's been trying to contact you. You're to report to him right away. I get the impression he's not a happy chappy.'

Perlman climbed the stairs. If Scullion wanted him so badly, why hadn't he called? He stuck a hand in his coat pocket and took out the phone and looked at its small dead screen. Shite. He'd switched it off after he'd called Murdoch. He was technologically challenged, that was the crux of it. He belonged in an age where PCs and bytes and phone text and the whole intergalactic freeway of electronic data hadn't been invented. He was a neanderthal. Granted, he'd tried to get the hang of all this technology when he'd signed up for a computer course two years ago, but after three sessions he'd fallen out of the loop and returned to his cave, defeated.

Scullion appeared at the top of the stairs.

‘Before you jump all over me, Sandy –'

‘Your phone's been off.' Scullion wore a dark suit, a white shirt that had clearly been ironed – by Madeleine's hand, of course – and a rust-coloured tie that almost matched his hair. ‘We should find some bloody way to hard-wire you, so that you're always available when you're needed.'

‘What's the big commotion anyway?'

Scullion said, ‘You'll see. Satisfy my curiosity, first. Where have you been?'