The Bad Fire (7 page)

Eddie said, ‘We didn't fall out of the sky or anything drastic.'

Scullion smiled. ‘Ha. Indeed indeed.'

Eddie tracked Scullion along a narrow corridor to a room that was little more than a partitioned space with a desk and three chairs and a single metal filing cabinet and a neon strip in the ceiling.

‘Sit down if you like,' Scullion said.

Eddie did so.

Two men entered the room. One, big and square-headed and business-like, had a build and complexion that reminded Eddie of cinderblock. He sat behind the desk. His suit was charcoal, his jacket buttoned tight across his midriff. The other man, who stood slouched, wore an unfashionable brown suit with a two-slash back flap, and thick-framed black glasses. He had a pale pink patch over his left eye and short silver hair cut in the fashion of a marine butchered by a half-blind barber. Hard to tell his age. Middle fifties, but he looked older.

‘I'm Detective-Superintendent Tay,' the big man said. He shook Eddie's hand firmly and then gestured to the man with the eyepatch. ‘This is Detective-Sergeant Perlman.'

Eddie nodded at Perlman who smiled and adjusted his glasses. Eddie wondered about the purpose of the patch under the lens. Perlman had the look of a man whose tailor had expired in the mid-1970s.

‘You're here for your father's funeral, I suppose,' Tay said.

Eddie said, ‘Your grapevine's working.'

‘We like to keep our feelers out,' Tay said. He smiled now, but without enthusiasm. He had a small mouth and tiny teeth. His hands were granite things, enormous, like industrial sculptures. He had the watchful eyes of a prizefighter. ‘I'm in charge of your father's murder investigation.'

Interested suddenly, Eddie leaned forward, elbows on knees. ‘How far along are you? Have you identified the shooter –'

‘So far,' Tay said, ‘no, no shooter. All I can tell you is your father was killed by a person unknown using a fortycalibre handgun. He was sitting in the back seat of his car – a 1998 Mazda – when he was shot. We've ruled out robbery. Your father's wallet was in his pocket. He had a wad of money. Eight hundred and twenty pounds, give or take. The man who was his driver, a longtime acquaintance by the name of Matthew Bones, AKA Matty, has vanished. Nobody knows where. He hasn't been seen.'

‘Is he a suspect?' Eddie asked.

‘He'd been in your father's company for several hours before the murder, and now he's disappeared, so let's just say we'd like to talk to him.' Tay spoke slowly. He appeared to weigh his sentences for possible ambiguities. His pauses were finely calibrated.

Perlman spoke now. His voice was gruff but sympathetic, although his accent was thick and hard for Eddie to follow. ‘We're looking for him, Mr Mallon. You may be sure. We're checking all his usual haunts.'
Aw his yewshall hawntz
.

Matty Bones: Eddie Mallon searched his memory. He thought he saw a shadow more than thirty years old, that of a very small man with callused hands – had he encountered Bones in the company of his father a couple of times? But so many men had drifted into his father's orbit, men who drank bottled beer in the sitting room of the house in Onslow Drive and filled the room with laughter and cigarette smoke. Bones could have been one of those men.

Tay said, ‘You're a policeman in Manhattan.'

Eddie said yes, he was.

Tay looked at Scullion. ‘The Big Apple, Scullion. Kojak and such. I was there once. Didn't like the place. New Yorkers think they live at the centre of the universe. Everything else in the world is crude and unsophisticated. Including police activity. Let me say this. We don't get as much gun-play in this country as you do. So we do our policing a wee bit different here, Mallon.'

‘I'm sure you do,' Eddie said. Three cops, he thought. Quite a welcoming committee.

Tay said, ‘Some people in your situation – especially in your occupation – might fly into Glasgow gung-ho about finding their father's killer. That kind of stuff makes it hard for me to stay focused. And so I get cranky. Right, Sandy?'

Scullion, Tay's foil, said, ‘Very. Worse than cranky.'

Tay said, ‘So let's understand each other, shall we?'

‘I don't intend to make a nuisance of myself,' Eddie said. ‘All I ask is you keep me posted if anything develops.'

Tay said, ‘No problem. We'll keep you up to date. A simple courtesy.'

Eddie said thanks, but he wasn't sure how deep the sincerity ran here. This could be the soft-shoe brush-off, the old we'll-call-you routine.

Tay asked, ‘When are you leaving?'

‘After the funeral.'

‘And the funeral's …?'

‘Friday,' Eddie said. The subtext here was unspoken, but it wasn't subtle, he thought. Finding Jackie Mallon's killer isn't your concern, Eddie, old chap. It's the business of the Strathclyde Police. No outsiders need apply.

Tay consulted a typewritten paper on the desk. ‘You're staying with your sister Joyce in Ingleby Drive, Dennistoun. So if I need you for anything, I know where to find you. Sandy will walk you out.'

Eddie moved to the door. ‘I hope you find the killer.'

‘I'm confident,' Tay said. ‘I'm always confident …'

Perlman rubbed his hands briskly. ‘Nice to meet you, Eddie. Sorry about your father. Really I am.'

‘Thanks.' Eddie nodded at Perlman, then picked up his bag and walked with Scullion back the way they'd come.

Scullion said, ‘Tay's an excellent policeman, Mr Mallon.'

‘I'm sure.'

‘Dealing with the public isn't his forte. He's brusque at times.' Scullion paused, smiled at Eddie in a forlorn way. ‘I just wish you had a better reason for visiting our fair city, Mr Mallon.'

‘So do I,' Eddie said.

‘Anyhow,' Scullion said, spreading his hands in a gesture intended to suggest that the city might be surprisingly bounteous just the same, ‘welcome to Glasgow.'

10

Joyce was waiting for him in the Arrivals lounge.

She'd changed her appearance since he'd seen her last. She'd shed the black clothes and the aura of existentialist gloom in favour of faded old blue jeans, an oversized T-shirt with a camouflage pattern, tan sneakers with yellow-and-brown striped laces. She still wore shades, but the lenses were royal blue and tiny, not big and black. Her hair had been cropped short and dyed blonde. The style gave her oval face an undernourished quality. She threw herself at him energetically, clutching him hard.

‘Eddie Eddie, oh Eddie.'

He held her tightly. He had a sense of love, like oxygen flowing to his head; it surprised him how easy it was to love her, because he often imagined absence and distance would eventually erode his feelings, and hers too, but that hadn't come about. And now all at once he was goddam tearful. It was what happened as you got older, he'd noticed. You sniffled more readily at things, choked up at reunions and soft-hearted movie sequences and farewells. One day you'd be a sentimental old fart in an armchair crying into a Kleenex during
It's A Wonderful Life
.

‘I'm just so damned
glad
you came. Hold me and don't let go, Eddie.'

She felt thin, fragile. He wondered how her life had been lived in the five years since he'd seen her. They were neither of them letter writers. They spoke a couple of times a year by phone, and that was it. In New York he thought about her, missed her – but then, like everyone else, he got immersed in the currents of his own life and the promises he made to himself about calling Joyce more often were pushed to a backburner where they simmered. And that was sad, because the years were rolling inexorably away.

Then he was thinking of how far he'd drifted from Jackie Mallon too, and he wanted to say something to Joyce about him, but he was groping for words. Jackie floated before him, the thick eyebrows and the upright walk that was almost military at times, the cheeky dazzle of the smile and the habit the old man had of cupping a cigarette as he smoked, as if he were afraid of a wind blowing it away. It might have been a mannerism born in the drab post-war years, when cigarettes were precious.

I didn't have enough time with him, Eddie thought, I invented him from memories. And he was suddenly consumed by anger. Somebody had killed the old man, and that fucker, whoever he was, would goddam have to pay in the end –

He caught himself in mid-rage, breathed a couple of times deeply, sought calm. Don't go off the deep end. The police are looking for the killer. They'll find him.

Joyce said, ‘I'm all cried out. Talk to me about the living, Eddie. Talk to me about Claire. Tell me about my gorgeous wee nephew.'

He spoke about Claire. He brought her up to date on Mark and the girls who chased him. She linked her arm in his and they walked across the terminal, which was new and shiny, a gilded palace that corresponded to nothing in his memory of how it had been years ago, a drab matchbox where you half-expected the only craft permitted to land would be 1940s Spitfires in need of fuel to continue the war against Jerry.

They went outside. It was dark and the night air warm, almost tropical. ‘It feels like Miami,' Eddie said. Any subject but their father.

‘We're having an extremely rare heatwave, Eddie. Enjoy it while it lasts. It'll probably be pishing rain again in a day or so. My car's over there,' and she pointed to her left.

The conversational transition from murder to the weather; it was wonderful comfort. How would people live their lives without a vocabulary of weather?

He said, ‘You look … different. You were all dark last time. Your clothes, hair …'

‘Oh, that was my black self. My tragic period. The troubled divorcee, et cetera. You think this haircut's too flashy for a woman almost forty? Too
gallus
?'

‘Gallus?'

‘Have you forgotten your Glasgow patois, Eddie?'

‘Gallus,' he said, remembering. ‘Wait. Brazen, swaggering.'

‘See, it's like riding a bike. You never forget.' She led him across the car park. ‘I love you, Eddie. We're too careless, the way we let ourselves drift.'

‘I know, I know.'

She gripped his hand. He had a strange disorienting moment, as if he'd come to a city where he'd never been, and was talking with a woman he'd never met in his life – and then this web of illusion blew away and he was himself again, except for the fact that he had no idea of time, neither day nor date. Was it still Wednesday? Was it only this morning at 3.30 US Eastern time when Joyce had phoned him in New York? Time zones, loss of hours. He tried to calculate, but gave up.

Joyce unlocked a car, an old dark blue Mini. ‘Just stick your bag in the back.'

He got inside. The space was small and his knees were jammed against the glove compartment. Joyce drove out of the lot to the freeway.
Motorway:
he corrected himself. He looked at the blue signs pointing to Glasgow. He couldn't recollect a motorway linking the airport to the city. It was new. So were the bright tidy suburbs he saw from the window. And light. So much light.

‘When did they do all this?' he asked, nodding at the housing estates.

‘Who knows? Glasgow's a constant work in progress, Eddie.'

What had he expected? Everything the same, preserved in aspic? He thought: I don't recognize the city of my birth.

‘We're right up there these days with the high-flyers,' Joyce said. ‘Milan. Paris. We're dead cosmopolitan now, Eddie. No more soggy tomato sandwiches washed down with cups of nasty instant Nescafé. We've crossed into the promised land of croissants and cappuccino. We're Europe, Eddie.'

‘And you – you're still educating the young?' he asked.

‘What else would I do?'

Joyce, like Flora had done, taught school; she drummed Romantic poetry into the heads of fourteen-year-olds in a school in the Southside of the city. Once, Eddie remembered, she'd announced that the work was too exhausting for a mere human. These kids to whom she force-fed Wordsworth had enough problems understanding the lyrics of fucking
Boyzone
, for Christ's sake.

She drove in silence for a couple of miles.

‘Did you know I identified him, Eddie? At least what was left of him. Did I tell you that?'

‘I didn't know. I'm sorry.'

‘Who needs more raw material for bad dreams? I've got some already.' She flicked her cigarette into the night and it was whipped away in a quick riot of sparks.

Eddie Mallon had seen the violent dead too many times, the faces of clerks shotgunned in robberies, the heads of people blown off for chump-change in filling stations. He touched his sister's hand and wondered why anyone had asked
her
, the stricken daughter, to ID the corpse. They might have been tactful and asked one of Jackie's friends, somebody hardened by the streets. But no. In their insensitivity or haste they'd turned to the daughter.

Is this your dad? Is this mess you see before you Jackie Mallon?

‘Did the cops tell you anything?' he asked. ‘Do you know if they have any ideas about who killed him, or why?'

‘I just remember they asked me to look at the body. There were so many people drifting in and out, suits, uniforms, I was hysterical in a kind of slow-motion way. I remember a guy drove me home after I'd been to the morgue. He was nice. He asked me if I wanted to go for a drink with him any time I felt the need to talk.'

‘He's a master of timing, this character,' Eddie said. ‘What did you tell him?'

‘I said call me in a month or two. But secretly I was flattered because he was drop-dead in a kind of little-boy-lost way. Any other time I would have said yes without thinking.'

‘The last time you said yes without thinking you ended up marrying the guy,' Eddie said.

‘Just as I'd forgotten all about Harry Haskell, you go and remind me. I wish you could do something about that American accent.'