The Bad Fire

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing's best-kept secret.” —
The Sunday Times

“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —
GQ

“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —
Daily Mail

“Armstrong's skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —
The Scotsman

“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.”
—The Daily Telegraph
on
Agents of Darkness

“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —
Books
on
Heat

“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on
Jig

“A full throttle adventure thriller.”
—The Guardian
on
Mambo

“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —
Publishers Weekly
on
Mazurka

The Bad Fire

A Glasgow Novel

Campbell Armstrong

The people who bring Glasgow to life for me:

Annie Spiers, Erl and Ann Wilkie, Kevin and Susan

McCarra, Nigel Clark, Brenda Harris. Thanks.

1

On a hot Monday night in early summer Jackie Mallon went on a leisurely pub crawl. Dressed in a black suit and black shirt and a slim silver tie with a wide ostentatious knot, he allowed himself only one drink, Cutty Sark and water, in each bar he visited. A dandy at sixty-eight, thin hair held back with gel and dyed the colour of crow, his dentures vanilla-ice-cream white, he wore ruby cuff-links and his cuffs hung exactly half an inch from each sleeve. His movement was economical, his manner careful; he might have been walking barefoot on a surface of shaved glass.

He surveyed the customers in each pub, winking at the gilded girls who pierced their lips and eyebrows with safety pins and hooks, girls who knew nothing of his reputation as a ladies' man in the old days, a knight of nooky. He nodded at friends and acquaintances who waved and called out his name cordially and wanted to ply him with drinks or just be seen sharing a joke with him because of his rep, because it did no harm to say you knew Jackie Mallon, you even
drank
with him.

He was also conscious of the young turks who drifted in from the outlying housing schemes and were looking to make their mark. These neds sometimes caught his gaze directly, and he felt a hostile challenge in the way they stared at him.
Who the fuck does this old tosser think he is? High time he was put out to grass
.

Jackie thought: Snottery wee boys. Couldn't lick my black suede shoes. I'll be retired soon enough, lads. One last deal and I'm off into the big red yonder.

He rode from pub to pub in the back seat of his pale blue Mazda, chauffeured by Matty Bones, a former jockey with a pallbearer's face and a Smith & Wesson 4006 in the glove compartment. Bones drove him to the New Monaco Bar, where he bought everyone a drink. Next, they went to the Three Cheers and then the Clutha Vaults in Stockwell Street.

This was Jackie Mallon's terrain. This was where he'd been born and brought up, and where he felt secure. He had this part of Glasgow in his back pocket. He knew the tenements, the people, their feuds and marriages and divorces, their kids. His cocoon was an area bounded by the Duke Street abattoir, the Necropolis and the Gallowgate – a parish of tenements and tombstones and elaborate crosses that made eerie patterns on the Necropolis skyline. His territory encompassed Glasgow Cathedral and the spine of the Tolbooth tower where centuries before the heads of executed criminals were impaled on spikes for public enlightenment.

Jackie Mallon, who'd left school at the age of eleven, remembered Luftwaffe bombs falling on the shipyards, demobilized sailors and soldiers flooding the streets at the war's end, horny and high-spirited, government-issue orange juice that looked like neon chemical goo, old Granny Mallon's rabbit stews on Tuesday nights at the flat in Bathgate Street – but the city's true antiquity was a shuttered house to him.

He sat in the back seat of his car and surveyed the streets with proprietary affection. My town.

‘Where to now, chief?' Bones asked.

Jackie Mallon wondered if he wanted another drink. He considered going back to his terraced house a few blocks north of Duke Street. He pictured Senga painting her nails flamingo or scarlet, and drinking Crossbow in front of the TV. He heard her big merry laugh and saw her fleshy underarms tremble. If she'd drunk enough cider she might be listening to a CD of Eagles songs and looking melancholic, and she'd say: O do you still fancy me, Jackie? Say you do. I'm in the mood to feel wanted.

Eagles, he thought. ‘Crying Eyes.' Electric cowboy shite. He was very fond of Senga, but her taste in music gave him the willies. He liked Sinatra. Elvis. ‘All Shook Up' was an anthem to him.

He peered from the window. Bones was driving down Bell Street, close to the old Fruitmarket, now a venue for musical events. A lot of the old city had been stripped down and tarted up. Jackie Mallon preferred things the way they'd been before the developers came hurrying in with their big blueprints and their wrecking balls and their frantic greed.

It's changing, he thought, and I'm changing too. I don't look at crumpet the way I used to. And they don't look at me. The ashes in the grate grow cold.

For the first time in a long time, Jackie Mallon felt a touch of nervousness. He wasn't sure why. The last bit of business was going fine. The pieces fitted nicely, thank you. He'd go into the sunset with a small fortune. So. Was it the idea of retirement that upset him? What to do with his time? How to fill the days? Or was it because this job was a Big Score and he wasn't sure if he still had the goolies for that kind of action any more?

‘Blackfriars next?' Bones asked.

‘I don't know if I feel like another drink, Matty.'

‘You usually finish off your night at Blackfriars …'

Jackie Mallon was quiet a moment before he said, ‘Right, right, I'll have one last wee drink. You've twisted my arm.'

‘Easy arm to twist, eh,' Matty Bones said, and smiled, showing a mouth filled with the stumps of old teeth. He parked, opened the back door for Jackie Mallon.

Mallon clapped the little man on the shoulder with affection.

‘Righty-o. I'll drive down there and wait for you,' and Bones gestured towards an area of wasteland about a hundred yards away.

‘You'll not join me for one?' Mallon asked.

Matty Bones rubbed his stomach. ‘Ulcer's playing up.'

‘Milk of magnesia,' Jackie Mallon said.

‘That stuff doesn't work for me,' Matty Bones said.

Jackie Mallon paused outside Blackfriars pub. He looked up. Starlings and swallows flew in the darkening blue sky over the city. Soon streetlamps would come on.

Blackfriars was dark and comfortable. He ordered a Cutty, added water from a jug, looked the place over – students arguing about an Italian film, and a couple of familiar faces from a local TV news show trying to look conspicuously incognito. He tossed back his drink, stood at the bar for a few minutes, eyed a flame-haired barmaid, then he went outside and walked towards the patch of wasteland where he could see the Mazda parked among other cars. The driver's door was open. A figure sat behind the wheel. Bones.

Cigarette smoke drifted out of the car towards a nearby streetlamp where thousands of moths created a frantic blizzard. Jackie opened the rear door. He got in and looked at the back of Bones's head.

‘I thought you'd quit smoking, Matty. Had a relapse, eh?'

The man turned his thin face. He wasn't Matty Bones.

‘What the fuck's this?' Jackie Mallon said. ‘Where's Bones?'

The man had a smile that was a sneer, upper lip drawn way over the top teeth. The look was camel-like. He tossed his cigarette away. ‘He had to leave.'

Jackie Mallon said, ‘Bones wouldn't leave.'

The man had a thin moustache. His breath smelled of alcohol. He was twenty-five, maybe, and had a small silver stud in his right nostril, which was inflamed by a yellow cushion of pus. He wore a transparent plastic raincoat buttoned to the neck. Jackie Mallon knew him, and considered him scum.

‘Are you ready to talk, Mallon?'

Mallon sighed. ‘Take this back to your boss. I've got nothing to tell. I've said it before, I'll say it again. And I'll keep saying it.'

‘Oh my. That's going to depress him.'

‘My heart aches.'

‘Is that your last word, Mallon?'

‘Aye.'

‘The boss hates bad news.'

‘Tough shite.'

The man's gloved hand rose to where Jackie Mallon had an unimpeded view of a gun, the barrel of which was pointed at his face. The gun was Bones's Smith & Wesson. This troubled Jackie, because Bones wouldn't let anybody – especially this scruff – touch his weapon.

Which meant.

Jackie Mallon didn't like to think what it meant. He didn't like to think what a plastic raincoat on a hot dry night meant either, although he knew.

I took my eye off the fucking ball. Complacency, the curse of old age. He stared directly into the gun, then the man's face. The man had a look in his eye Jackie Mallon had seen before, fear pretending to be bravado, terror masquerading as cool.

‘That's a very dangerous weapon, sonny,' he said.

‘I know.'

‘Think. Think carefully.'