The Bad Fire (2 page)

‘Haggs doesn't pay me to think,' the young man said.

Mallon looked at the gun again. I'm an endangered species, he thought. Cold skin, hot night. He shivered. Mibbe I'm coming down with something. He heard moths buzz with the intensity of locusts under the streetlight and he had a sense of his life dwindling until he was no more than a fly-sized speck that might fit inside the barrel of the Smith & Wesson.

‘Tell Haggs to go fuck himself,' he said.

2

The telephone rang and Eddie Mallon opened one eye: the bedside digital clock read 3:22 a.m. He was tempted to let the answering machine pick up and go back to sleep and see if he could reboard the train of his dream, which had been taking him on a pleasant ride through smooth green countryside that looked exactly like the land where the Jolly Green Giant lived, a place where peas were quick-frozen for freshness at the moment of picking. But he knew the locomotive would have gone from the station by now, and so he reached reluctantly for the handset and hauled himself into the real world.

The room was humid even with the window open; the dark was dead and heavy, the rasp of crickets somnolent and slow. He said his name into the mouthpiece, his voice thick.

‘Eddie?' The woman sounded distant and nervous.

Mallon recognized his sister's voice at once. ‘Weird time of day to be calling, Joyce. It's almost half past three here.'

‘In the morning?'

‘You got it,' he said. What was
wrong
with her? ‘That makes it – what? About eight thirty a.m. where you are.'

‘I'm not wearing a watch,' Joyce said.

Eddie's wife Claire woke and reached for the bedside lamp. The sudden pale light made Eddie blink.

‘Who's calling?' Claire asked.

Eddie covered the mouthpiece. ‘Joyce,' he said.

She looked surprised. ‘Is she calling from Scotland?'

‘I guess,' Eddie said. He spoke into the handset. ‘Are you in Glasgow, Joyce?'

‘Yes,' Joyce said.

‘Something's wrong. I hear it in your voice. Talk to me.'

‘I need you to come home, Eddie.'

‘I
am
home. Queens is where I live, Joyce. Remember? Give me one good reason I should drop everything and come over there.'

‘Because I bloody need you,' she said. ‘Sometimes a sister needs her big brother.'

Joyce had never said such a thing before. She didn't even sound like herself, her voice was small and hurt, and she wasn't in the habit of calling him at this or any other time of day to ask him to go back to Glasgow.

A moment's silence on the line. He wondered if this call travelled through a cable on the dark Atlantic seabed, where no light had ever penetrated. He felt a touch of sorrow, thinking of the ocean's black width and the tourniquet of family and how tightly it was knotted even if you thought it had worked loose over the years.

He heard Joyce take a deep breath. ‘It's Jackie, Eddie. Oh Christ, why is it so damn hard to say? He's dead. Jackie's dead.'

Something he couldn't identify turned over inside Eddie Mallon and dropped like a stone falling from a great height. A heartbeat skipped, an irregularity, a valve malfunctioning. He had a feeling of a screw being drilled through his chest. ‘
Dead?
How? How did it happen?'

‘He didn't die in bed, Eddie. There was no gentle into that good night shite.'

‘I don't understand what you're saying, Joyce.'

Joyce told him in a single spare ugly sentence.

He was surprised by the heft of loss. There was a weight inside him, an iron pendulum creaking back and forth. His eyes smarted. He had difficulty swallowing. He felt himself splinter. He walked with the phone to the window and pressed his forehead to the warm pane and looked down into the darkened back yard. He listened to the heavy silence of the house. A beam of light extended from the bedroom window into the yard, illuminating a narrow patch of grass. He looked beyond the light to a place where blackness concealed beech trees and he had the other-worldly sensation that the ghost of his father was out there beneath the thick limbs and silent leaves.
I'm leaving, Eddie. I wanted to say my last goodbye
.

‘What is it?' Claire asked. ‘What's going on?'

Joyce asked, ‘Eddie? You still there? Hello hello?'

Eddie Mallon felt as if he'd floated from this room, transported back to a Glasgow street in the early 1960s, a little boy on a kerb with his small hand in his father's big palm, and tramcars clattering past on their iron tracks and sometimes in the rain an overhead wire sparking and the air smelling scorched.

Never cross until the way is clear, Eddie. Look left, look right, look left, make sure nothing's coming. Don't you forget that, Eddie
.

Okay, Dad. Left, right, left again.

Good boy
.

You're dead and I don't understand why, Dad. I loved you, yes, I did, no matter what.

He felt tiny and scared a moment, no longer an adult in an adult world.

Claire asked, ‘Who's dead, Eddie? Who is it?'

Mallon didn't hear his wife. His head was racing. Questions crowded his mind. Professional habit. What kind of weapon had been used? Had he been alone at the time of his murder? Had a motive been established? He imagined the old man's pain, or maybe there was no pain, maybe it was all over in a fraction of time too tiny to calculate. ‘Have you phoned mother?'

‘That's your side of the world,' Joyce said.

Eddie pushed the thought of his mother from his mind; he'd return to it soon enough.

Joyce said, ‘The funeral's Friday. The pathologist says he's finished with the body … I can't deal with this alone, Eddie.'

Claire was out of bed now, standing at Eddie's shoulder. ‘It's Jackie, isn't it? It's Jackie who's dead …'

Eddie Mallon touched the side of his wife's face gently and nodded his head.

She said, ‘Oh God, I'm sorry, Eddie,' and he held her against his shoulder, grateful for her comfort even as he was miles away in that place where he could still sense his hand wrapped in his father's spectral grasp. The past could ambush you. Like the way he smelled his dad at that moment, so
real
, so
close
– tobacco clinging to a woollen overcoat, damp socks drying in front of a coal fire, a whiff of Cutty Sark, these things bushwhacked you.

‘I'm sorry, really I am,' Claire said. She had a genuine heart. In her world all setbacks were opportunities in disguise; deaths weren't doors that slammed shut. They were openings into other spaces, worlds we knew nothing about.

He spoke quietly into the handset. ‘I'll call you back in a couple of hours, Joyce.'

‘I'm feeling fragile, Eddie.'

‘I'll arrange something. I promise you.'

‘I'll be waiting right here by the phone,' Joyce said.

Eddie Mallon put the handset down.

‘Sit beside me,' Claire said.

Eddie sat on the edge of the bed. Claire held his hand. He stroked her skin, which was damp. Eddie gazed at his wife's face. Once thin and delicate, a delightful skeletal construct, it had been made puffy by the mischief of time, the lines around the mouth deepening. But he still saw the beauty of a young woman in her. She was still the girl he'd fallen in love with more than twenty years ago. He wondered how much
he'd
changed from her perspective. His black hair, dense and curled, was streaked with grey, and he carried about fifteen pounds more than when they'd married, and some mornings he woke feeling the mass of forty-five years pressing down on him, and it was an effort to face another day.

The really
good
mornings, when you leapt out of bed, when you felt like a god who could overcome any crud the day threw in your face – a flat tyre, a cup of bad coffee, even a sniper in a tower with a scoped rifle and a bad attitude – were diminishing yearly.
I love you, Claire
, he thought. We're just not the people we used to be, those bright smiling kids in the old wedding photographs on the dressing table.

She said, ‘You have to go.'

He heard her, but her words might have been filtered through muslin. He said, ‘He was always talking about coming over here. Always wanted to see his grandson. When we spoke on the phone last New Year's Day he told me this was the year he'd finally make the trip. I don't know if he meant it. You might as well take a goldfish out of a bowl as the old man out of Glasgow.'

He thought of his son, Mark, fifteen years old, asleep in the bedroom down the hall. Mark had never seen Jackie Mallon. And now he never would.

Claire said, ‘You could get a flight today. Joyce is going to need support.'

He hadn't seen his sister in five years, the time of her last American trip, when her marriage to the irredeemable Harry Haskell – a permanently unemployed freeloader – had just ended. She'd dressed in black clothes during her stay, jeans, T-shirts, sneakers, impenetrable sunglasses. She projected an attitude of mystery and cool. She looked as if she were wandering, in a distracted fashion, some Left Bank of her imagination.

But he couldn't bring to mind her features clearly, and this bothered him. He knew what it was: the world was out of focus all of a sudden, and his memory with it. ‘There's a bit I haven't told you.'

‘I'm listening,' Claire said.

He heard a pulse in his skull. It was like the sound of a cork in water slapping time after time against the struts of a pier. ‘I haven't told you how he died.'

3

At ten a.m. Charles McWhinnie drove his Rover south across Kingston Bridge. The heat haze had already burned out of the sky above Glasgow. It was going to be one of those days when light rose shimmeringly from pavements and tar surfaces melted. The headlines in the
Evening Times
would invariably read,
TEMPERATURES SOAR
,
CITY SWELTERS
.

McWhinnie, born and brought up north of the river, didn't like the Southside. The city seemed alien over there. Even the neighbourhood names struck him as strange. Crossmyloof. Strathbungo. Ibrox – which he thought sounded like a veterinary ointment for chafed cow udders.
A jar of Eyebrox lotion, please
.

He glanced at the narrow motionless river as he crossed the bridge. He saw the tall cranes that serviced the Govan Yard, and the George V Docks, but where these huge constructions had once crowded the skyline, they were few now – skeletal souvenirs of the shipbuilding that years before had been the city's most vibrant industry.

It had been a time, McWhinnie thought, when people took a pride in their work. What did you have nowadays? Social Security and welfare fraud and chancrous housing estates where kids bought and sold drugs with brazen abandon and fried their brains on lethal concoctions; any stray traveller in such places might have thought himself in a suburb of Beirut.

Collar undone, tie loose, he parked his car in a narrow street of black tenements a quarter of a mile from the drabness of Govan Cross Shopping Centre. Govan had always been a shipyard burgh, a company town, vibrant and cocky. Now shops were barricaded behind steel shutters, and graffiti had been spray-painted everywhere, most of it cryptic save for the occasional sectarian slogan.
IRA Rules
. Bigotry had never truly died here, no matter what claims to the contrary certain civic leaders and flash media guys might make. It was still simmering in segregated schools and uneasy mixed marriages. Prods and Tims. McWhinnie despised this divide, this moronic anachronism in a city alleged to be surging into a glossy European future.

He took a big paper bag from his Rover, then locked the car. He entered one of the tenements, passing a group of very young kids who were smoking cigarettes. The kids glared at him with tribal hostility as he made his way into the building and walked the length of the close, which was dark and clammy, to the stairs.

He climbed. On the first landing he unlocked a door whose nameplate read:
A Factor
. He slipped inside quickly, nudging the door shut behind him.

‘I want in and out of here as fast as humanly possible,' he said.

The little man who sat in the room and gazed at the TV said, ‘Aye, I don't blame you. This place … I wasn't expecting the fucking Ritz, granted, but this is a bloody slum.'

‘We'll deal with your accommodation at the appropriate time,' McWhinnie said. He tried very hard to be non-specific in his utterances. When you were precise, you often found yourself compromised.

He looked round the one-room flat; claustrophobic, faded daffodil paint, a window so grubby it was opaque, a rag of a curtain, a cracked porcelain sink. A single bed faced the window. On paper, the premises belonged to a certain Arthur Factor, who was non-existent.

McWhinnie put the bag on the table and watched the little man open it hurriedly. It contained a loaf of white bread, a packet of bacon, six small eggs, three apples, three oranges, a carton of milk, a box of tea bags, a paperback sci-fi saga entitled
Planet of Ice
, Tagamet capsules and a bottle of cheap blended whisky.

The little man looked at the label on the bottle with slight disgust, then surveyed the items on the table. ‘How long am I staying here?'

‘I can't say.'

‘A rough idea.'

‘A week,' McWhinnie said vaguely. He didn't have a clue.

‘A week? Christ's sake. The telly's shite. You can't expect me to sit here and go blind looking at a picture as bad as that,' and the little man pointed at the TV, where a fat woman with big hair, blurred by snowy interference, wept in front of Jerry Springer. The caption on the screen read:
MaryLou Says Her Husband Made Love To Her Mother
.

Bones picked up the paperback. ‘A science-fiction book. Beam me the fuck up, Scotty.' He looked at McWhinnie. ‘This isn't my kind of thing, squire. I like anything by Dick Francis.'