The Bad Fire (28 page)

He stepped away from the fireplace.

‘Hello.'

He turned, saw Joyce. ‘Caught me. I was snooping.'

‘Feel free.'

‘I'm sorry, Joyce.'

‘No, seriously, I mean it, look around, take your time, I have nothing to hide from my own brother.'

‘There are a couple of pictures here I hadn't seen before. Your graduation –'

‘Lost youth,' she said. ‘I look like I'm off to discover a new continent in those pictures. The intrepid explorer. Instead I teach secondary school in Shawlands.' She stepped closer to him. ‘Have you been in a war? You're all wet and funny-looking and you've got a bruise like a map of Italy on the side of your neck. How did you get that?'

‘I had an accident,' he said. ‘I slipped.'

‘Right, I noticed it's icy outside.'

He wondered if his ribs were purple too. The Solpadeine made these concerns remote.

‘Tell the truth,' she said. She put a hand on her hip. He imagined her doing this in a class while she waited for one of her students to explain why he hadn't completed his homework.

‘I was in a fight,' he said.

‘A fight? You mean with fists? Who were you fighting?'

‘I had a brief encounter with your acquaintance McWhinnie.'

‘McWhinnie? You've taken to fighting with Glasgow policemen? Jesus Christ, Eddie.'

‘We ended with a kinda truce,' he said.

‘Dare I ask the reason behind the conflict?'

‘He's been following me.'

‘You're paranoid.'

‘Bullshit.'

‘Truth, paranoia, whatever. Are there any good reasons to get into a punch-up with a cop?'

‘You sound like Flora when she was angry with me,' he said, and he looked at her small hand and how tightly it was clenched against her hip, which was thrust aggressively forward. Blue jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, even her clothes seemed combative. She wore no make-up, so no lipstick or face powder detracted from her eyes, which were burning on all cylinders.

‘Well, fuck it, you deserve to be scolded,' she said. ‘It's perfectly understandable that the Strathclyde Police don't like a cop from outside wandering round on their territory. You'd take kindly to some Glasgow policeman in Manhattan, I suppose –'

‘Depends on what he was doing.'

‘Tell me what it is
you're
doing exactly?'

‘I have some questions about Jackie's death.'

‘You and me both,' she said. ‘We want the same thing, like what the hell he was up to at the end of his life, and what got him slaughtered in the back of his car, but fighting with the cops isn't going to help get answers.'

‘You know what they're saying about Bones?'

‘Chris told me.'

‘Oh, right, Chris, good old Chris, he's practically family, after all,' Eddie said. The codeine forcefield short-circuited for a moment and he was a nest of pains, and suddenly furious. Restrain yourself. Chris was sacrosanct. He was a temple you couldn't enter unless you kicked off your shoes, then genuflected.

‘I'm not a fan of easy sarcasm, Eddie. What have you got against Chris anyway?'

Eddie chewed the words in his mouth as if they were made from a substance he couldn't swallow. Pig's liver raw.
He's a goddam liar and crooked as a carnie game. You want the skinny on dear Chris, sister? He's bad to the bone. Let's ask Chris about Jackie's murder …
But he didn't get these words out. Instead, he took the merciful option. ‘Look, the way I feel has probably got nothing to do with Chris. My perceptions are skewed, it's the shock of Jackie –'

‘Shock, I'm beyond shock,' she said. ‘Right now all I want is to get through this funeral.'

‘Right now, what I'd like best is to drive a goddam nine-inch spike into the skull of whoever triggered the old man.' The vehemence in his voice surprised him; it was his first direct encounter with a raw need for retribution, an ugly jagged emotion.

‘Hard words,' she said. ‘Maybe later I'll feel the same way as you. Maybe I'll develop a deep longing for revenge.' She stepped closer to him. Her smile was sad. ‘We shouldn't argue, we need each other.'

He held her. She felt limp.

He saw them reflected in the oval mirror, brother and sister clinging together. He looked big and ponderous compared to the wispy appearance of Joyce. ‘I guess I've missed too much of your life. I'm out of the loop.'

‘Then get back in,' she said. ‘The door's open.'

‘I'm working on it.' He looked over her shoulder, drawn back to the photograph of Jackie and Flora, honeymooners in 1954 in the Seaview Hotel, Largs. But it was Christopher Caskie he was thinking about, and his eye drifted to Caskie and Joyce, graduation day at the University of Glasgow, a man and a young woman who might, to an untrained eye, have been father and daughter.

Eddie squeezed his sister, then let her go.

‘I just want away from death,' she said, ‘and back into the light, if you know what I mean.'

‘I know what you mean.'

He looked at Joyce and saw her once again as that little girl staring at him as he vanished in the back of a black taxi, bright ribbon in her hair and skipping rope dangling from one hand, but now another form took shape to complete the mural of that day, a memory he'd misplaced or buried, a recollection of Jackie standing just behind Joyce, his hands resting possessively on her shoulders, his face shadowed a little by shrubbery, his expression that of a proudly stubborn man who thought it a sign of courage to conceal his feelings, a man above showing the pain of departures, one who wouldn't beg for another chance because begging was a weakness. He'd sooner let his family disintegrate than ask for a fresh start. He understood only the terrible logic of endings. And yet – there was something else, a look within a look, masked, and Eddie realized it was the first inkling of a sorrow that would take Jackie Mallon many years to discover and explore.

A sadness filled Eddie, and he turned his face away from his sister and gazed through the window at the moon climbing the warm night sky, and he wondered what the weather had been like on the day of his enforced leave-taking, but that was one memory lost in the dross of things.

35

‘I think you've had enough, sir.'

Charlie McWhinnie, clutching a napkin filled with ice-cubes to the side of his face, looked at the fat-necked man behind the bar of the Hilton and asked, ‘Have I been aggressive? Have I been insulting to your other customers? Can you honestly say –'

‘No, sir,' said the barman, who had a bright red face and long sideburns. ‘You've been generally well behaved. It's just that you keep falling off your stool –'

‘Gravity is the drunk man's enemy,' McWhinnie said. He scooped a palmful of peanuts from a little silver dish and tossed them towards his mouth. Mostly they went shooting past his face. ‘A question. Are you happy in your work?'

‘Aye. It has its moments.'

McWhinnie belched. His perceptions were unreliable. The room was turning in a slow circle. He felt he was a passenger on a precarious carousel. He narrowed his eyes and looked at his little notebook, which lay open on the bar. The pages were wet with booze and his fountain pen lay in a puddle of spilled drink.
Dear Diary, life is shit. When I was six years of age I fancied playing rugby for Scotland, heroics in the Murrayfield mud
.

‘I'm working on a story,' he said.

‘You a writer then?'

‘More a keeper of records,' said McWhinnie. ‘This barkeeping lark, you think I'd be good at it?'

‘Requires social skills,' the barman said.

‘Those I have in abundance.'

A hand fell heavily over McWhinnie's shoulder. ‘What are you doing to yourself, my young pal?'

McWhinnie turned, saw Lou Perlman. ‘Lou? What brings you here?'

‘You did. You phoned.'

‘Fuck me. Did I?'

‘And the Good Samaritan came running. You're pissed as a newt, son. What happened to your face?'

‘My face is irrelevant, Lou. Listen. Listen to me. A question. Am I or am I not cut out to be a cop? Honest opinion, Lou. No fluff. Straight answer now.'

‘You don't want any kind of answer in your present state of mind, Charlie. Why don't you let me just drive you home, eh? What do you say? Come on.'

McWhinnie felt his stool listing to one side. ‘I don't wanna go home, Lou.'

Perlman said, ‘You look like hell. You need to lie down. What are you drinking for anyway? You feeling sorry for yourself?'

‘I'm questioning my purpose, Lou.'

‘Usually better to ask the really deep questions when you're clear-headed, Charlie. Just lean against me and we'll get you out of here. Okay?'

McWhinnie stuffed notebook and pen into his pocket and stepped down from his stool. He lurched towards Lou Perlman, missed and fell over. Perlman and the barman hauled him to his feet, then Perlman moved him a few steps in the direction of the exit, but it was a struggle.

‘I do not want to be a fucking solicitor, Lou. Uh-huh. Not on your life.'

‘What's biting your arse, Charlie?'

‘My hands are dirty.'

‘Is that a metaphor?'

McWhinnie planted a slobber of a kiss on Perlman's cheek. ‘You're my best pal, Lou. The very best. You're a great man.'

‘Right, I'm a fucking hero,' Perlman said, and guided McWhinnie down a short flight of steps. ‘So your hands are dirty, and you're feeling worthless and your life has no direction?'

‘Spot on,' McWhinnie said.

‘And you want to quit the Force, eh?'

‘You see into my soul.'

‘No, I'm only remembering what you told me on the phone. Let me tell you what I see, Charlie. One weary cop plastered to the gills. You need sleep.'

‘And dreams.'

‘Aye, good ones.'

‘Fucking
Caskie,
' McWhinnie said.
Cashkey
. ‘That fucking Caskie gives me shite jobs to do. He thinks he's God.' He stumbled into a wall. Cubes of ice spilled from the napkin and cascaded over his blazer.

‘He
is
God, Charlie. He invented
your
world, didn't he?'

‘Bastard,' McWhinnie said.

‘Steady there, son.' Perlman steered McWhinnie towards the exit doors. ‘Caskie's got no supernatural powers. He's just an ambitious turd with a black heart.'

‘I want to be inside a murder investigation, Lou. I want to be right at the heart of a hurricane.'

‘Don't let Caskie get you down. The time'll come when you won't be spinning in orbit around him. You'll have moved on. Patience, laddie. There's no fast-track to happiness, in love or work.' Lou Perlman nudged McWhinnie out of the hotel. The sky over Glasgow was clear, a great star-show. ‘Me, I'm a lucky sod, I love my work. It's the only thing in my life, Charlie. Do you think it'll ever be that way for you?'

‘Suffering Jesus,' McWhinnie said, and tripped. He sat on the ground and smiled and looked up at Perlman. ‘Not if I can bloody help it.'

Lou Perlman helped McWhinnie to his feet. ‘By tomorrow you'll think you dreamed all this, Charlie.'

36

A building site where, except for a couple of pale bulbs strung around the perimeter wire, there wasn't much illumination, and Billy McQueen stumbled, pushed from behind by the girl. Sometimes the guy with the little moustache and the nose ring elbowed him sharply in the ribs.

‘There's some confusion here,' Billy said. ‘I don't know either of you. You've got me mixed up –'

‘Shut your face,' the man said.

‘I have money, I mean, I think we can come to some kind of understanding,' Billy said.

‘One more word out of you,' the girl said. ‘Warning you.'

Billy glanced back at her. She was fearful, a frightener with the spikes on her knuckles and the black leather gear that creaked as she walked, and a face like Desperate Dan's sister – if Desperate Dan had a sister, Billy was in no frame of mind to remember the comics of childhood. Desperate Dan ate enormous cow-pies, he remembered that. The horns of the beast protruded from the fucking pastry.

Why were they forcing him across this building site? What part of Glasgow was this anyway? And what did they want with him? He had a flickering suspicion they were connected to Gurk, but he dismissed this because they were locals and he couldn't imagine Gurk using Glasgow heavies. He'd bring up muscle from London if he needed it.

The skeleton of a building loomed up in the dark, a structure in process, metal girders and framework and floors half-laid. It rose, solitary and sinister, to a height of about twelve storeys. Billy was aware of cement mixers and wheelbarrows and piles of brick around him, but these were marginal impressions because it was the incomplete building that seized his attention. What was it? A future block of flats? Offices? Another hotel? He thought: I was a moron to walk into this, to be lured from my beloved penthouse, to care enough for that bitter old sod Larry that I'd venture out into a night filled with danger – and for what?

This. A trap. I'll run. I'll run like the wind.

The Wan-Fittit Wind. You'll get nowhere, Billyboy.

He stared at the dim outline of the tower, saw here and there sheets of protective plastic.

‘Here,' the man said.

‘Here where?' Billy asked.

‘You blind or something? Get on that.'

‘On what?'

The girl shoved him forward. ‘Move your arse.'

Billy McQueen shook his head. ‘I'm not stepping on that,' he said.

The girl whacked his mouth with the spiked fist. Billy's head spun. Glasgow was going round and round.

‘Just move,' she said.

She shoved him aboard the contraption, which was a wooden platform of the kind used by window cleaners. It was attached to the outside of the building by a couple of ropes – a pulley, a bloody pulley, and that meant only one thing: I'm going up, Billy thought. I'm going way way up. I don't have a head for heights.