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.‘I’m thinking along these lines.Say I give him this information.Just imagine … In exchange, what’s the chance I won’t be drawn into any charges brought against that half-wit Furfee? If he killed a man, I swear, I had nothing to do with it.’Mary Gibson stood up.Her skirt was pleated, Quick noticed.Warm tweedy material.Her stomach was flat.‘That’s all you have to say?’ she asked.‘He wants an address,’ Quick said.‘I can give it to him.Understand what I’m telling you? I can give him this fucking address.Sorry.Beg pardon for the language.’‘I’ve heard worse,’ Mary Gibson said.Why wasn’t she interested? why wasn’t she agog? She just walked past him to the door.He got up from his chair and said, ‘Braeside Street.’‘Number forty-five,’ she said.‘Right –’‘Top floor, no name on the door.’ In a bored monotone.‘Tell me something I don’t know.’‘Aye but –’‘This is exactly what Mr Furfee told me less than ten minutes ago,’ she said.‘He’s as desperate to help as you are.Funny to get as much cooperation.I sniff guilt.But you were just that little bit slower, Mr Quick.He who snoozes, loses.’‘Fuck fuck fuck.What the hell did you promise Furfee?’‘The moon,’ she said.‘What else?’‘And what will he get?’‘He’ll get justice, Mr Quick.He’ll get a fair trial.’‘And me, what about me?’‘The same.’She went out and closed the door and Quick, cursing the way the world worked, cursing his taste for underage girls and fast drugs and rock clubs, cursing everything that had conspired to bring him to this place at this particular time, including the moon and the stars and the drift of tides, tried in his anger to lift the table and topple it over.‘Fuck fuck fuck,’ he roared.He quit when the pain in his neck became unbearable.The table, he observed, was bolted to the floor.51Scullion took Mary Gibson’s call on his cellphone in room 408 of the Waterloo Hotel and immediately pulled Perlman to one side.‘We’re needed elsewhere.Now.’‘What about Charlotte Leckie?’‘Bailey can take her statement down.He writes, you know.I’ve seen examples.’‘What’s the hurry?’‘I’ll tell you on the way.’Perlman turned to the woman and said, ‘I’m leaving you in the very capable hands of Detective-Sergeant Bailey.’‘But –’‘It’s okay.Really it is.Besides, he’s nicer than me.He really is.’Bailey came out of the bathroom, shutting the door quickly as if to hide the sight of something Charlotte Leckie had already seen.Perlman said, ‘Look after her.Take her statement.’‘Where are you off to?’‘It’s a mystery,’ Perlman said.Charlotte Leckie said, ‘I’d like to get dressed.’‘Bailey will be a gentleman and look the other way,’ Perlman said.‘Won’t you, Bailey?’Perlman and Scullion went out into the corridor, where the uniforms had cleared most of the spectators away.They hurried towards the stairs, descended quickly.Perlman bumped along behind the Inspector.He’d yanked a muscle in his upper leg, probably when he’d given chase to the taxi.Now it had begun to ache.They reached the street and walked to where Scullion’s Rover was parked.Slippery underfoot.Glasgow was a city of whoopsadaisy surfaces, slick sheets of ice where any passing pedestrian might perform a pratfall.Scullion unlocked his car.Perlman clambered into the passenger seat.‘Where are we headed?’‘You want to find Abdullah, don’t you?’Perlman buckled his seatbelt.‘Damn right I want to find him.Tell me you’ve got the address.’‘Furfee broke, gave it to Mary Gibson.’‘Furfee did? Well well well.Face to face with the mystery man.How far?’‘Braeside Street.’‘Off Maryhill Road.I know it.’‘I hate driving in these conditions.’ Scullion switched on his de-icer, and wiped condensation from the windscreen with a rag he kept on the dash.He drove down Elmbank Street to St Vincent Street, where he crossed the motorway that slashed the gut of the city; below, the lights of slow-moving cars cut through the mist of exhaust fumes.He turned into North Street and headed for St George’s Cross, and then Maryhill Road.Perlman watched the city go past in a tableau of dark buildings rising beyond streetlamps, the occasional illumination of a restaurant or bar.He was thinking of Abdullah, of the enigmatic envelopes BJ had supposedly delivered.‘Did Furfee say anything about the envelopes?’ he asked.‘Not so far as I know.Christ, it’s an ordeal driving.’ The car failed to grip, slid, tobogganed a few yards to the right before Scullion had it under control again.‘I don’t want to die in a car accident,’ Perlman said.‘It’s so bloody banal.’‘What kind of death are you looking for anyway?’‘Oh.Something heroic.’‘Tell me how you’d ever find yourself in heroic circumstances.’‘Saving a beautiful girl from drowning.’‘You don’t swim, Lou.’‘That’s why it would be heroic.’Perlman pushed his seat back and stared out as Scullion drove up Maryhill Road.He thought of Nina with her garinim and the sheets of pretentious yellow bond on which she wrote her prose; funny how marriage could distil itself in so few sorry memories.He wondered if intensely cold weather induced an occasional melancholy in him [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]