But you do have a Makefile.old. One doesn't start out with a Makefile, it gets generated from Makefile.PL. But if for some reason, there's already a Makefile, that one gets moved to Makefile.old. I guess something went wrong when (re)running Makefile.PL.

You could try to build again from a fresh unpack of the tarball, and if it fails again, search for a previous error. There should be an error when Makefile doesn't get generated - the reported error is just a result of Makefile missing.