The Bad Fire (44 page)

Both men crossed Duke Street.

‘The city feels different,' Perlman said. ‘I like to think I'm tuned into the wavelength of Glasgow, and when there's interference, I can hear it. Murder interferes with my reception. There's static.'

Eddie said nothing. He was seeing Charlie McWhinnie dropping to the ground and the crowd parting to create a space, and he was imagining Tommy Gurk, comedian, shooting Roddy Haggs; Gurk, wanted man, out there somewhere in the night.

They reached the corner of Bluevale Street, where Eddie said, I'd like to stroll down to the warehouse. I might never get another chance to look at it.'

‘Planning to stay away for good? Don't like the city, eh?'

‘Maybe I've been gone too long, and the drift's too wide.'

‘Glasgow's an acquired taste,' Perlman said. He dumped the leftovers of his fish and chips in a dustbin.

They walked down Bluevale Street. When they reached the high wire fence that surrounded the yard, a huge dog reared barking inside, a snarling flurry of fur and claws and bared teeth. Beyond, a subdued light was lit in the warehouse window, and it cast a rectangle of illumination across the yard. Inside the building somebody was playing ‘Red River Valley' very softly on a harmonica. Eddie was reminded of old black-and-white prison movies, the condemned man shuffling along Death Row to the chair and some sad-eyed inmate playing a harmonica in the background.

The dog's eyes gleamed, and piles of old brick and sinks and cisterns became dim forms piled willy-nilly. The dog kept growling, throwing itself at the wire. The harmonica stopped.

‘Shut up, Chet,' Eddie said. ‘Cool it.'

The dog appeared puzzled hearing the sound of his own name and withdrew a moment and then, triggered by his training, he dashed himself again at the fence.

A door opened somewhere in the darkness and a voice called out, ‘Who's there?'

‘Eddie Mallon.'

Joe Wilkie appeared at the fence. ‘This is a surprise, Eddie. I wasn't expecting company at this time of night.'

‘Joe, you remember Detective-Sergeant Perlman?'

‘Sure I do,' Joe Wilkie said. ‘We talked already.'

‘Indeed we did,' Perlman said.

Silence a moment. Chet backed off, walking in anxious circles. Joe Wilkie fingered the rims of his glasses and coughed.

Eddie said, ‘I just wanted a last look at the old place. Can we come inside?'

‘Now?'

‘Is it inconvenient for you?'

‘No, no problem,' Joe Wilkie said. He rubbed his jaw, a small gesture of uncertainty, then unlocked the door in the fence and allowed Eddie and Perlman to come through. He shut the door with one hand while he restrained the dog with the other. ‘We were just doing some stocktaking.'

‘At this hour?' Eddie asked.

‘Jackie was never tidy. It always got on my wick the way he did things. I like to keep an accurate record of stock. You want to know what you've got, what's of any value and what's junk you can just toss. Jackie hoarded like an effing jackdaw.'

They went inside the warehouse. The door to Jackie's office was open a few inches. A light burned in there. Eddie surveyed the warehouse; here and there dim overhead lamps were lit. Stone columns and statues, piles of rusted scaffolding that looked like the bones of prototype robots that had failed, quarry slates in great haphazard stacks, chimneypots. It's weird, Eddie thought. Here was his childhood and suddenly he couldn't relate to it, not the way he'd done before in this place. The past was receding.

Joe Wilkie, cleaning his glasses against his sleeve, was emitting tension: was it because he didn't like being interrupted at work?

Perlman sniffed the air in the manner of a wine buff. ‘You know, the smell in here reminds me a wee bit of the old subway system. That lovely underground damp and the scent of old oil.'

‘Aye, I noticed that a few times.'

Ray Wilkie materialized from behind the stack of slates. He held a harmonica in one hand. He wore a warehouseman's grey coat, exactly like Joe's. He nodded and tapped the harmonica in his palm.

‘So this is the musician,' Perlman said. ‘Sweet stuff, son.'

‘I just blow a few notes now and then,' Ray Wilkie said.

‘He's modest as hell.' Joe Wilkie laughed. ‘You should hear him when he really gets going. He's a wizard. Play some jazz, Ray. Play that Cole Porter thing. “Love for Sale.'”

‘Da, I don't feel like it.'

‘Never hide your light under a bushel,' Joe Wilkie said. ‘Make with the music, Ray.'

Ray Wilkie frowned at his father and then raised the harmonica reluctantly to his mouth and blew. Eddie recognized the tune at once, but Ray hurried through the melody and into an area of improvisation that rendered the piece unrecognizable.

‘Boy's good,' Perlman said.

‘He's as good as yon fella, Larry Adler,' Joe Wilkie said with pride.

Eddie listened as he walked around the warehouse. A rat scuttled out from below a heap of old tarps. Above, pigeons stirred on metal beams. He stopped beside a headless statue whose shoulders were thick with years of bird droppings, and he looked across the room. The big aluminium door leading to the yard lay open; directly outside, both rear doors of the Mercedes van were wide.

Eddie was conscious of Joe Wilkie watching him. ‘Isn't he something, eh, Eddie? Isn't the boy a bloody marvel?'

Without turning, Eddie said yeah, Joe, Ray was really something all right.

‘Come back and listen,' Joe Wilkie said.

‘In a minute.'

What looked to Eddie like a stack of unwanted items had been piled inside the big Merc. Stocktaking. Discard the worthless. Busted lamps, formica-top tables and broken-legged chairs all in a tangle, stacked rolls of old linoleum. ‘Love for Sale.' Ray Wilkie segued into another familiar old song, ‘Dream A Little Dream', and Perlman laughed in a delighted way.

Eddie drifted to the open door and looked at the Mercedes. He stepped out into the yard and peered at the junk heaped inside the vehicle. The dog appeared and growled, standing between Eddie and the van. Eddie shushed it, calmed it, carefully ran a hand over the animal's great powerful head.

Joe Wilkie called out, ‘You can't hear the music properly from there, Eddie. Come back inside.'

Eddie didn't answer.
Joe doesn't want me near the vehicle
. I wonder why. ‘Dream A Little Dream' took off down musical highways Eddie had never travelled before. Ray's playing became frantic. The tune changed mood, darkening suddenly, its inherent tenderness altered.

Perlman clapped his hands and said, ‘Oh, he's the goods, he's the goods all right.'

‘He's got the juice,' Joe Wilkie said.

‘God-given,' Perlman said.

Eddie was drawn to the jumble-sale items in the van. He stared at the rubbish, and realized that between the arrangement of unwanted goods and the front of the van was a space which seemingly contained nothing, nothing he could see, as if the broken-down furniture had been deliberately arranged to create an impediment to viewing the deep interior of the Mercedes, but that was a stray thought, a gatecrasher, and Eddie was about to let it drift out of his mind when something caught his eye and he peered through a tunnel in the clutter of crap and caught a certain smell, a whiff of lubricant familiar to him – and then he turned away, tense, a pulse in his throat, hoping he hadn't been noticed, sticking his hands in his pockets, ‘Dream A Little Dream'.

He heard Perlman clap his hands and say, ‘Brilliant, bloody brilliant,' and the kid stopped playing and Joe Wilkie came to the doorway and asked, ‘Jazz not your thing, Eddie?'

‘Sometimes. It depends.'

Joe moved past Eddie and shut the doors of the Mercedes.

It's too late, Joe. I've seen. I didn't want to. I wish to Christ I hadn't.

He stepped back inside the warehouse and Wilkie followed him. Perlman was lighting a cigarette and talking in a quiet voice to young Ray, who was showing the cop his harmonica. Two jazz freaks, they could probably talk for hours.

Eddie saw the door of Jackie's old office open and Senga appeared there in a pair of dark blue jeans and a pale blue sweater. Her hair, unpinned, hung to her shoulders.

‘Well,
Eddie,
' she said. She came towards him, embraced him. ‘Why did you not tell me Eddie was here, Joe?'

‘You were busy with the books,' Wilkie said.

‘I was bored to hell, so I was.' Senga linked her arm through Eddie's. That overwhelming warmth, that sense of inner strength: Eddie thought some magnetic force flowed from the woman.

‘I heard the music and I assumed Ray was just tooting for his own fun the way he sometimes does, I had no idea you were here … Who's your friend, Eddie?'

‘Detective-Sergeant Lou Perlman. He's been involved in the murder investigation.'

‘Oh.' She smiled and held her hand out and shook Lou Perlman's. ‘Nice hands, Lou. You shouldn't bite your nails.'

‘Bad habit,' Perlman said. ‘I'm full of bad habits. You wouldn't believe.'

‘I'd believe,' Senga said.

Eddie gestured round the warehouse. He felt he had to explain his presence. He cleared his throat. He was hoarse, dry. ‘An exercise in nostalgia coming here.'

‘It has a few good memories for Eddie,' Joe Wilkie said to Perlman. ‘He was always in and out of here when he was a wee nipper. Right, Eddie?'

‘Long before I knew him,' Senga said.

Eddie nodded. An awkward, fragile moment: something hung in the balance.
I saw what I wasn't supposed to see
. He was aware of Joe Wilkie running the back of his hand across his lips and Senga taking a cigarette out of a packet and Perlman, a gentleman, lighting it for her, and he was thinking of the van and the jumble of objects in back, and an old Scottish word came back to him that Granny Mallon had used to describe a mess, a
heelie-goleerie
, an expression he hadn't thought of in years.
This is a right heelie-goleerie
, she'd say when dirty dishes had been stacked in the sink or clothes lay about the bedroom floor.

‘Let's call it a night,' Senga said. ‘We can finish up the day after the funeral. I'm bone-tired.'

Eddie looked at her face. Without her usual make-up she appeared a little pale. Stocktaking on the night before the funeral service.

No, it's not that, not that at all.

Perlman said, ‘I'm going back to the office. I've got some stuff to deal with.'

‘The law never sleeps, eh?' Senga said.

‘Only when criminals do.'

Eddie realized Perlman was flirting mildly with Senga. His body language was different, the stoop was gone, he was alert and smiling and his voice was less of a growl. They went out into the yard. Joe Wilkie locked the warehouse door. Ray made sure the van was secure, trying the back handles. The dog whined and whooped, knowing it was about to be abandoned for the night.

They walked into the street, all five of them, and Perlman said, ‘I'll find a taxi.'

Joe Wilkie padlocked the gate. ‘Taxi my arse. I've got my car right here,' and he indicated an old Honda. ‘Not the most comfy ride in the world, but it'll take you anywhere you want to go and it won't cost you a penny.'

‘I don't want to inconvenience you,' Perlman said.

‘Come on, get in, I insist.' Wilkie unlocked the car. Ray climbed into the back seat, Perlman sat in front and looked cramped.

Joe Wilkie slid behind the wheel. ‘What about you, Senga?'

‘I'll walk home,' she said. ‘I need the air and it's a nice night, and I've got Eddie for company. He and I can have a chat just between ourselves.'

Perlman said, ‘I'll call you, Eddie.'

The Honda drew away in a stuttering burst of smoke, and Eddie stood without moving. Senga's arm was hooked through his. He was reluctant to move, as if by taking a step away from the warehouse he was abandoning his childhood for all time. When he moved, he didn't look back.

He walked up Bluevale Street to Duke Street, Senga attached to him. Neither spoke for a couple of blocks. When they'd crossed Duke Street and were heading up Whitehill, Eddie said, ‘Tell me, Senga.'

‘Don't ask.'

‘Just tell me the truth.'

‘The truth?'

‘It would be a real nice change to hear it.'

Senga said, ‘It's a rare commodity.'

‘Practically extinct.'

‘And you found it in the back of a big Mercedes van, didn't you?'

‘It's a funny thing how hard you can look and how many people you can question,' Eddie said, ‘but sometimes you find the truth by pure goddam chance.'

59

Gurk waited until the group had dispersed and the street was empty, then he crossed to the wire fence and looked at the sign: J
MALLON
,
TRADER
. This place was worth a look, he thought. Christ knows, he didn't have a whole lot of options. Earlier, while he'd been lurking in shadow, he'd heard the dog. A deep bark, trained guard dog probably, maybe a Doberman, maybe an Alsatian. It didn't matter. He had a way with animals. They sensed a oneness with him.

He took a run at the fence, which was twelve feet high. He caught the wire at around eight feet and hung there, gaining a toehold and raising his hands to the top. He'd haul himself up and over, one last effort, deep breath, easy-peasy.

The dog was going mental beneath him, snarling, barking, jumping at the fence.

Gurk said, ‘Calm, boy, calm calm.'

The dog raged, curled, sprang. The stench of fur was strong. The teeth shone in what little light fell from a nearby streetlamp. Gurk caught the upper part of the fence: but in the poor light he hadn't seen the fucking barbed
wire
, compacted into wicked rolls and bolted along the top of the fence, that lacerated the palms of his hands. Jesus.
Ohhhh
. This world of pain. This world of mace and crucifixion on barbed wire.