The Bad Fire (16 page)

‘It isn't due to be delivered yet,' Billy said.

‘Says you. The man was here. He said he was bringing it in from his van.'

‘Are you sure?' Billy asked.

‘Course I'm bloody sure.'

‘He came into the flat?'

‘No, he was shouting through a fucking loudspeaker from the pavement below,' Larry said.

Billy ignored the sarcasm. You had to. ‘So, you let him in and he said he was bringing the TV –'

‘Right. Then he went away and never came back. And here's the nice thing. Here's the lovely part. The bastard punched me in the nose.'

‘He
what
?'

‘Do you no' understand English? Hit me, Billy. He hit me. He stuck one on me.'

A delivery man who doesn't deliver. A delivery man who punches a sick old guy in the face. Billy McQueen experienced an unexpected poke of dread. It was a brilliant sunny morning in dear old Glasgow, people were strolling in the city parks, it was picnic weather, ice creams were melting over cones and running sticky and white down people's fingers and crowds would be idling in their thousands through the Botanic Gardens: why was it so drab all of a fucking sudden?

Larry said, ‘I mean, what the hell kind of delivery service is it when the man hits you right in the fizzog, eh? What kind of people are you
dealing
with, bawheid?'

I wish I knew, Billy thought. He slumped into depression. He wondered if it ran in families, this melancholy that increased as you got older. Would he eventually take to his bed like Larry and live in his own bleak little world?

‘Here, I bet the telly was nicked,' Larry said. ‘I bet it fell off the back of a lorry. Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies. Sometimes I think you and Lew are working together.'

Lew. Ah, good old Lew, the imaginary playmate who'd sprung fully grown from Larry's mind only last year. Larry and Lew had a relationship filled with contradictions, friends one moment, adversaries the next. A form of regression was going on in Larry's deteriorating brain: back to childhood and stamp-your-feet tantrums and people that didn't exist.

Billy glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Gurk vanish inside a tenement.

‘By the way,' Larry said. ‘This delivery man, he left a name and a phone number. Want me to read it to you?' Sounds of plastic bottles clicking, papers shuffling, the old man humming ‘Charlie is my Darlin'.

Billy McQueen waited, tense as a rubber band in a cocked catapult.

‘Haggs,' Larry McQueen said.

Billy switched his cellphone off at once and sat with his eyes shut. Haggs. Strike me down. Flatten me with a red-hot iron. Roddy Haggs. Jackie Mallon had once said that Haggs had been trying to find a way to muscle in. Gone to all kinds of trouble. Questions. People in parked cars watching Jackie come and go.

If there was a single soul you didn't want within a hundred miles of you or your property, one human being you wouldn't want to travel with on the last interstellar ship carrying to safety the few remaining survivors of the Final Nuclear Holocaust on Earth, it was Roderick Haggs.

22

Caskie gestured at the crime-scene tape hung round the small area of wasteland. ‘The night Jackie was shot, his car was parked here. He'd been having a drink in Blackfriars just along the street. He returned to the car, got inside and he was shot point-blank by somebody in the driver's seat.'

Eddie Mallon stared at the empty plot of land. There was space for a dozen cars, maybe more, but none was parked here today. Eddie thought: Jackie settles in the back seat of the car and the driver turns and shoots him. Like that. If the shooter was Bones, Jackie wouldn't have sensed danger. If the man with the gun was somebody else – wouldn't Jackie have recognized from the back of the guy's head that he wasn't Bones? Or maybe he wasn't paying attention, and he was feeling mellow from drink, and the light wasn't good anyway …

Eddie stepped closer to the tape. He looked at the ground, which was stained by drips of oil and car lubricants. He wondered what forensics had discovered, if there had been anything useful in the car, prints, fibres, anything, no matter how minuscule, that might indicate the identity of the killer. He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and swayed a second on his heels, rocking slightly. This close to the place where Jackie had been killed, he was unnerved, even though there was nothing to see, but what you created in your mind could be more savage than the reality. He imagined the gunshot. The end of his father's life. The dying. The roar of the gun rolled and rolled through him. He felt a hollow in his heart.

A man appeared, a familiar figure who flicked the tip of his index finger against the crime-scene tape several times as he studied the ground. Then he nodded at Caskie.

‘Chris,' he said.

Caskie didn't smile. ‘Can't stay away, Lou?'

‘Drawn back like an iron-filing to a magnet. You look at a place once, it strikes you one way. Look again, you get another impression. A third time, it's different. And so on to an infinity of mirrors and insanity. I lost my brains years ago.'

Caskie said, ‘Eddie, this odd-looking reprobate is Detective-Sergeant Lou Perlman. He's one of the many dedicated souls working your dad's case, although I couldn't tell you what he actually does. He's a mystery.'

‘We already met,' Eddie said. ‘At the airport.'

Perlman reached under his glasses and fingered his eyepatch. ‘How are you bearing up?'

‘So-so,' Eddie said. He could still feel that hole inside. He wondered what it would take to plug it.

Perlman said, ‘It's a bloody rotten end to a life, anyone's life.'

‘What's the reason for the pirate impersonation, Lou?' Caskie asked.

‘Minor infection of the eyelid,' Perlman said. ‘Some say the patch suits me. I may keep it. Makes me feel like a pirate. A life of derring-do and keelhauling people you don't bloody like. I could go for that.'

‘I expect you have a list of candidates,' Caskie said.

‘I do, Chris, I do.'

Eddie asked, ‘Did you know my father?'

‘No, we never met,' Perlman said. A sly smile appeared on his lips. The sun shone on the silver scruff of his unshaved jaw and glinted against his glasses. For a second his face was an oval of pure light. ‘You got a minute, Eddie?'

‘Sure,' Eddie said.

‘What is this? A private convention for two?' Chris Caskie asked.

‘A word in Eddie's ear,' Perlman said. ‘Nothing sinister.'

Caskie shrugged, hesitated, then wandered slowly about ten yards away and tapped one foot in an impatient huff. He whistled quietly to himself, a man excluded from a confidence.

‘This must be bloody frustrating for you,' Perlman said quietly. ‘Looking on from the outside.'

‘Yeah,' Eddie said.

‘You're a cop. You want involvement. A sense of participation.'

‘Yeah. You got it.'

Perlman drew Eddie a few more yards from where Caskie stood and lowered his voice. ‘Yon Caskie has a lean and hungry look.'

‘Meaning?'

‘I don't trust him.'

‘Is this internal politics? Or personal?'

Perlman said, ‘I'm not a political animal, son.'

Eddie hadn't been called ‘son' in years. ‘You've got something you don't want him to hear.'

Perlman said, ‘I never want Caskie to hear
anything
I say. He's a great eavesdropper, our Christopher. He's got an ear like a fucking satellite receiver.'

‘What's on your mind?' Eddie asked.

‘I've been thinking about you since we met. You shouldn't be left out in the cold.'

‘Tay would disagree.'

‘Tay's territorial. He's sprayed his musk across this turf. I'm thinking about something else.'

‘I'm listening,' Eddie said.

‘I'm a great believer in using every resource available in any situation. Why waste a good man just because he's got a funny accent and he's out of his own patch and doesn't know the score, eh?' Perlman laid a hand on Eddie's shoulder. ‘I suggest we cooperate. You and me. A private arrangement. Nobody else knows.'

‘Explain.'

‘I'm your man inside the Force. Your ally. You learn what I learn. You get the unexpurgated truth from me, and not some sanitized version of the investigation that Tay chooses to tell you.'

‘And in return you get?'

‘You become my connection to the Mallons. Your gleanings become my gleanings.'

‘I don't think there's a hell of a lot to glean inside my family,' Eddie said. He thought about Joyce, and then Senga: what could they know that might help Perlman?

‘Ballocks, son. In my long and often colourful experience of this fair city, I've found there's always some black secret in any family. Some faded old whisper. It might be repressed, or half-forgotten, but it's there. You just keep your eyes and ears open, and sometimes you notice the very thing you're looking for is staring you right in the face.'

Eddie smiled. ‘You're saying some awful thing might be hidden in my family?'

‘Don't go putting words into my mouth,' Perlman said. ‘I'm not accusing anyone of wrongdoing. Maybe a friend of the family will be indiscreet. Or Senga will let some revelation slip without realizing what she's done. Maybe she knows somebody who had a murderous dislike of Jackie, only she's too upset to think about it. Or perhaps your sister knows something she doesn't even know she knows. The permutations are beautifully infinite. You'd be surprised how often families are sitting on a truth they don't even know about themselves. The trick for you is how well you pay attention.'

Eddie said, ‘I think you're asking me to spy.'

‘Boo hoo. Don't talk such shite. Spying, Christ. I'm asking you, Eddie, to lend a wee helping hand in the matter of catching your dad's killer. I mean, you don't expect me to believe you came all the way here to bury your dad without some part of you positively
gagging
to help find the killer, do you? I'm not buying that, son. Unless I've seriously misjudged you … in which case I walk away and this chat never happened.'

Eddie cleared his throat. His mouth was dry. The heat pounded him. His hands were damp. Okay. Why deny it? Why go on keeping it tamped down? Perlman saw through him. Perlman, tack-sharp and shrewd, penetrated areas of Eddie he didn't want to explore himself. Right to the heart of it, Eddie: you wanted more than just a sense of Jackie Mallon's life and times, more than the history of your estranged dad. This was no quick overseas trip to say goodbye to your father and console your sister in the process. He hadn't come three thousand miles to be a goddam mourner. It wasn't his style to stand by in passive mode, the grief-driven son surrounded by his bereaved sister and his father's black-veiled common-law wife. He knew it now: it was about justice, sure, but it was also about playing a role in getting it.

‘What you're asking me to do could amount to nothing.'

‘Aye, it might. I'll take that chance.'

‘Why are you doing this anyway?'

‘Because I'm just a kind-hearted old Jew. Because I don't care for Tay, who's like some fucking cardinal with a ring you're expected to kiss. Because I don't have intimate access to your family environment, and I want you to be my eyes and ears. Take your pick. I always have a diversity of explanations just in case.'

‘Plus you don't like the rule-book,' Eddie said.

‘I do this job my way.' Perlman looked up at the sun. ‘You can trust me one hundred per cent. Game?'

Eddie said, ‘Game.'

Perlman sniffed the air in an exaggerated way in the manner of a man seeking signs of a change in the weather. ‘I wish to fuck it would rain. This isn't right, this kind of heat in Glasgow, it's a travesty of nature, it's driving me up the bloody wall … I'm in the phone book, Eddie. Perlman, L. The one and only. Don't call me at work.'

‘One thing,' Eddie said. ‘I understand you went to the warehouse and interviewed Wilkie –'

Perlman dismissed this with a gesture of his hands. ‘Who told me Jackie and Haggs had words. Big deal. I'm not breaking sweat. Don't get me wrong, I'll talk to Haggs. He's on my list. But an argument Haggs had with your father doesn't excite me, because I understand they had more than a few over the years, and none of them ever led to Jackie's demise.'

‘Who else is on your list?'

Sighing, Perlman said, ‘An alkie who says he saw the killer's face in dramatic close-up. A deaf old guy who claims he heard a gunshot. A retired priest who saw a man running away from the area. One or two others. It's not a promising gallery, Eddie … We'll talk.'

Perlman turned and walked away. Eddie watched him go around a corner, the flap of his jacket bouncing, the cuffs of the slightly flared trousers revealing yellow socks. Eddie thought: an ally in yellow socks and flared brown pants. It was something, a chink, a peephole. He might not be directly at the official heart of things, but an association with Perlman was better than a dose of leprosy. He felt an unexpected quickening of his nerves. Perlman had opened a door for him. A corridor stretched ahead. All he had to do was keep an ear open for a hint, a nuance of speech; an eye ready for some off-centre piece of behaviour, something out of alignment.
Families are often sitting on a truth they don't even know about themselves
. Maybe so. Or maybe it would turn out to be nothing. Neither secrets nor gossip nor webby skeletons. It was just Perlman covering his bases.

Caskie approached, still whistling. ‘What was that old sod after?'

‘This, that. He's gung-ho to catch the killer. Wanted to reassure me.'

‘He always looks so damn conspiratorial to me. He's been a cop since the year one. I've known him for about fifteen years and I couldn't tell you a thing about his personal life. If he has one.'