The Bad Fire (20 page)

‘People drifted in and out of Jackie's life,' Senga said. ‘I couldn't keep track. Some he introduced me to. Some he didn't. Tommy G, no, I'd remember that name, I think. And I don't remember any black man.' She ignored the No-Smoking sign, lit a cigarette.

A dead end. A door clanging shut.

Eddie saw the massive structure of Barlinnie Prison loom up beyond the houses in the district of Riddrie, so dense and grey it swallowed the light of the afternoon sun. Row after row of narrow barred windows; men shut away in small cells. Jackie's
alma mater
, he thought. What was it Flora had said?
He was never quite the same after jail. He was harder under the surface
. The prison seemed impregnable, impossible to escape. Maybe when a man left this place he took some of it with him. Perhaps Flora had been right and Jackie had walked out of Barlinnie a different person, one inducted in the ways of crime and cruelty. But Flora's view was coloured by loss and bitterness: how could it be accurate?

The taxi stopped. Senga got out, pressed money into the cabby's hand. McGlashan's Funeral Home was a redbrick building; the name of the firm had been painted, in sombre gilt script, on the curtained window.

Senga said, ‘I hate this.'

Eddie led her with gentle pressure towards the door. ‘We'll be in and out in a couple of minutes, Senga. If you don't feel like talking, leave it to me.'

She dropped her half-smoked cigarette on the ground, crushed it with her foot. The cab pulled away, leaving a scent of diesel on the air. Eddie opened the door of McGlashan's and a bell rang, and Senga hesitated a second before she stepped inside. The place, air-conditioned and cool, was shadowy. People who deal in the disposal of the dead don't need bright lights. They want shady corners, an easy sense of peace and eternity.

A man appeared in a doorway. He wore a three-piece black suit and a black tie with a large knot that had slipped slightly to one side. He had a drinker's red-tinted nose and he sniffed a lot.

‘Robert Crichton?' Senga asked. ‘We have an appointment.'

The man nodded. ‘Mrs Craig?'

‘Ms Craig actually.'

Crichton took her hand. He turned his face to Eddie. His breath smelled of gin.

‘I'm the deceased's son,' Eddie said.

Crichton went directly into his spiel. ‘This is always a sorry time. No matter what the circumstances are. You have my condolences. My most serious regrets. McGlashan's is totally at your service …' He led Eddie and Senga inside a room filled with coffins, dark glossy boxes in which muted overhead lights were reflected.

Crichton touched surfaces with a loving gesture, trailing his nail-bitten fingers across lacquered wood and brass handles and satin interiors. Senga stood very still, surveying the room with the look of a woman wishing herself elsewhere, because this, this damn
showroom
, was her idea of hell. All these bloody boxes and bolting Jackie down beneath a lid and turning the screws and into the fires with him. Bone-pale, she found a chair and sat down and gazed into, her hands.

Crichton whispered to Eddie. ‘She's not taking it well. It's hard. We'll do everything we possibly can. You're in good hands here … Shall we price some models?'

Eddie scanned the boxes. ‘What difference does the price make?' he asked.

‘It depends. The kind of send-off you want to give the departed. The matter of your budget, naturally.'

‘You don't exactly budget for your father's murder,' Eddie said. ‘It doesn't come into your general financial plans.' This room annoyed him. The boxes irritated him. Crichton's breath was offensive. They were supposed to be selling more than coffins here; factors like composure and calm came into the transaction. Eddie wasn't feeling calm. He hated the whole thing. Death was absurd, violent death more so. A gunshot in the night, a flash at twilight, snuffed out.

Crichton said, ‘Well, murder, of course, you don't anticipate, you can't, I mean –'

‘Damn right you don't anticipate,' Eddie said.

Crichton pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger as if he were about to plunge his face under water. Then he laid his hands on the edge of a shiny black casket whose interior was lined with off-white satin.

‘This one is a bargain,' he said. ‘And very handsome too.'

‘And what do you call inexpensive?' Eddie asked.

Crichton mentioned a figure that Eddie tried to convert into dollars. He found himself gazing at Crichton's chewed nails and thinking it apt that a sordid little man with boozy breath and an off-centre necktie was the one to sell corpse containers, worm boxes.

Eddie touched the coffin. The wood was slick. Flames would peel the lacquer off in microseconds. ‘It'll do,' he said. ‘You take plastic?'

‘Visa. Mastercard. We require, ah, a twenty per cent deposit.' Eddie gave him his Visa card and Crichton went off to swipe it through a machine.

Eddie walked to where Senga sat. ‘Let's get out of here.'

‘Did you choose that one, Eddie?' she asked. She pointed to the black casket.

‘Yeah, that's the one.'

‘It's nice. I'll repay you.'

‘No.'

‘I insist, Eddie.'

Crichton came back with the credit card and receipt. Eddie scrawled his name quickly on the slip, then escorted Senga in the direction of the front door. Outside, they stood together in Smithycroft Road, small shops behind them and square grey suburban houses facing them; the leaves of dense trees floated sunlight back into their eyes. Eddie put a comforting arm round Senga's shoulders and she inclined her head towards him. Neither of them spoke for a long time: death laid a veneer of silence over them.

Then Eddie drew his arm away and said, ‘Tell me a little more about Haggs. Is he well known in this city?'

‘How do you mean, well known?'

‘Would he be well known in … oh, let's say, law-enforcement circles?'

‘You mean would the
police
know him? Of course they would. He was tried four or five years ago for – what's the expression – tampering with a jury? It made a big splash in the papers at the time. He walked away without a blemish.'

Senga slipped an arm through Eddie's and they walked together in the direction of Cumbernauld Road, where they finally stopped outside the public library, an octagonal building with a view of Barlinnie, and waited for a passing taxi.

‘Where does he live?' Eddie asked.

‘Rouken Glen. I've got the address somewhere.'

‘I'd like it,' he said.

She spotted a taxi and raised a hand and the cab braked. She climbed inside ahead of Eddie and asked, ‘Why?'

26

‘He calls me, orders me to find Billy McQueen. I don't care what it takes, he says, find him. Break a few skulls if you have to.' John Twiddie slurped up a good measure of McEwan's heavy into the funnel of his mouth. ‘Haggs gets on my tits something serious. Go here. Do this. Do that. I'm like a dog on a leash, doll.'

Rita was busy rearranging her rings. She liked to move them around. It's true what people said, she thought; variety is the spice of life. She liked the reflections the little gems made. She finished her Bailey's and stuck the glass on the counter and tilted her head to catch the afternoon sun that came in at an angle through the window of the upstairs bar at the Ubiquitous Chip in the West End of the city.

‘And where do I find Billy McQueen? Eh? Where do I start looking? I don't know the guy.' Twiddie drained his pint. His nose throbbed where the stud was situated. ‘He's not at his house, Haggs says. So give that a body swerve. He might be in England, Haggs says.'

‘England? Big place, England.'

‘Needle in a fucking haystack, hen.'

Rita was finally satisfied with the arrangement of her rings. ‘You have to respect Haggs. He's a self-made man. He's seen you all right with a few quid. You don't have to love him.'

Twiddie made a hawing sound, meaning mibbe, mibbe not. He was thinking of the way the van had caught fire last night. He was remembering flames filling the front, and black smoke drifting towards the wasteland, and the alkies waking up and pushing aside their sheets of newspaper and watching the van smoke and fizz for a time, then they crawled back under their papers or into their threadbare sleeping bags and wondered if they were having DTs.

Through the dull ache of hangover, Twiddie remembered the sound of the fire brigade in the distance, then him and Rita running away from the scene. Holding hands, laughing, collapsing near an old railway arch. And still laughing. They had fun together, and Twiddie liked that. He thought Rita was a knock-out in the looks division. She was sexy, firm tits, easy to arouse, keen to please.

Twiddie ordered two more drinks. Heavy for him, Bailey's for her. McQueen, one-legged man. How bloody hard could it be to track down Wan-Fittit?

He'd make some phone calls. He'd leave a few questions out there in the right places and mibbe get a few answers. He picked up his pint and winked at Rita. She leaned forward on her stool and adjusted the knot of his tie, which was an Armani knock-off, red with small pink dots. Twiddie thought it went well with his counterfeit Versace suit, a three-piece black number with very short lapels.

He set down his glass and spoke quietly. ‘If that old fucker Mallon had talked, then we wouldn't have this shite to wade through –'

‘
If
is a wee word with a big meaning,' Rita said. She adjusted the gold-plated paperclip that pierced her left earlobe then she poked Twiddie in the chest. ‘Why don't you just make your phone calls, lover?'

‘Will do.'

Twiddie looked round the bar. The clientele was mixed, some shabbies hanging about in the hope of a free pint from passing acquaintances, a few low-class criminal types, a well-known author and a gaggle of his girlie acolytes, an undercover detective Twiddie made immediately, a drunken Australian woman who kept wanting to sing ‘Waltzing Matilda' only to be shushed every time she uttered a few notes. It was a drab sort of place, but fashionably situated in a narrow lane close to Byres Road, where an assortment of students and trendies shopped and ate. Twiddie, who'd been born in the clapped-out Cranhill housing estate in the east of the city, the Drug Casbah, thought he'd come up in the world when he drank in The Ubi.

He found a quiet corner where he could use his cellphone. Reception wasn't terrific but at least he had a good view of Rita sitting up on her stool, long legs and red leather miniskirt and some spangled stuff in her hair that sparkled when the sun caught it. She looked a picture. A wanker's dream. He loved when they went to clubs and she danced her arse off for hours.

Twiddie punched in numbers. He talked to people in different parts of the city. Mad Cross-Eyed Logan, who ran betting shops in Shawlands and Govan, said he hadn't seen McQueen in months. Bobby McPherson, operator of a profitable ticket-forging enterprise and nicknamed Bobby Christ because of his intense religious beliefs, said he hadn't heard a dicky bird about Wan-Fittit in weeks. Patrick ‘The Cowboy' O'Hare, who'd once borrowed heavily from McQueen to establish a chain of dry-cleaning establishments throughout the city, said he no longer did business with Billy, and his loans were all paid off. Teejay Guptah, owner of the Patna Palace Curry House in Bath Street, said he thought he'd seen McQueen the day before yesterday near George Square, but he wouldn't swear to it.

He made one last call, this time to Gio the Gasman, so-called on account of his occasional habit of wearing a World War II gas mask because he was allergic to petrol fumes and pollen. Most of the time the Gasman hung out on the corner of Sauchiehall Street and Dalhousie Street, chain-smoking cigarettes hand-rolled in dark brown paper. He spent hours watching the street, grooving to the sounds of his Walkman.

He answered Twiddie's call with his usual greeting. ‘Hazzo.'

Twiddie asked, ‘You know Wan-Fittit McQueen? You know his house?'

‘Nope,' said Gio.

Twiddie mentioned the address in Novar Drive, Hyndland. ‘I want you to go there. Keep an eye open for him.'

‘How much is it worth?'

‘I'll give you twenty.'

‘Twenty-five and I'm scooting, Twiddie. Vrooom. Vrooom.'

‘Right. But leave the mask at home, eh? Keep a low profile.'

Twiddie stuffed his phone into a pocket. He walked back to the bar, where Rita was finishing her Bailey's and was just about to set the glass down on the counter when a man approached her, and Twiddie thought,
Aw Christ, no
. The man, who wore a flesh-coloured eyepatch over his left eye, was Lou Perlman.

‘Well I declare,' Perlman said. ‘The Bobsy Twins, Rita and John. This is my lucky day.'

‘Lemme guess,' said Twiddie. ‘You played a horse and it won.'

‘Only mugs gamble,' Perlman said. He moved close to Rita and Twiddie and extended his arms in such a way that he managed to draw them both into his embrace. ‘My babies. My wee babies. And what have youse two been up to lately?'

Lou Perlman, in brown suit and a gold kipper tie that might just have been fashionable when Carnaby Street was new, had been born and brought up in old Gorbals, before city planners had demolished the place. Twiddie feared him: he was as hard as a bag of shaved steel.

‘Up to nothing, Lou,' Rita said. ‘Do you never shave?'

‘Every third day.' Lou Perlman tightened his embrace. ‘Your beauty takes my breath away, Rita. I gasp. I feel like Willie Wordsworth strolling through a field of daffodils when I look at you.'

‘Pull the other one,' Rita said, and shook a leg at him. ‘It plays “The Bluebells of Scotland”.'

‘So. Bring Lou up to date. Lou likes to be au courant with affairs.'

‘Oh coo-rawn?' Twiddie asked.

‘French, Tweedledum. Comprenez? I see your wee moustache is flourishing. Frankly I've seen more hair on a parrot's arse. You still running errands for Long Roddy, eh?'