The Bad Fire (17 page)

‘Let's have a drink in this Blackfriars place,' Eddie said.

They walked along Bell Street. The sky was cloudless still, although the cross streets were in shadow. Building work was going on nearby, the transformation of a Victorian bank. Discarded chunks of concrete rumbled loudly as they clattered through a red plastic safety-tube into a skip.

‘A new nightclub,' Caskie said. ‘A restaurant maybe. The city grows and grows. You'll notice changes, Eddie.'

Eddie said, ‘I keep expecting to see tramcars.'

‘You'll only find them nowadays in the Transport Museum.'

The Transport Museum. Relics of old Glasgow displayed for public viewing. You could enter the lost city for the price of a ticket. His childhood was interred in demolished schools and motionless tramcars. That young Eddie had travelled a long way.
I grew up to spy on my own family. I'm staking out Senga and Joyce and whoever else comes into their orbit
. No matter how Perlman described it, it was still espionage, even of a small kind. But he couldn't hide from himself the fact he was uplifted by Perlman's proposal. A cop is a cop; and his dead father is his dead father. The one has to do something about the other, or else the world makes no sense, and everything's anarchy.

Blackfriars was just opening. A smell of food floated out of the big darkened room. Eddie stepped inside.
Jackie had come this way, crossed this threshold and he had maybe twenty minutes to live. Only he didn't know it
. What was in Jackie's head before he died? What thoughts and plans? Could Senga or Joyce know
anything
, even at the subliminal level Perlman had mentioned?

The dead left conundrums behind always. The living had the task of solving them. Or maybe it all vanished inside a mystery you can never penetrate.

Caskie asked, ‘What can I get you?'

‘Something ice cold. Lager.'

‘Pint, half-pint?'

‘A half's fine.'

Caskie attracted the barman's attention and ordered draught lager for Eddie, a shot of Macallan's for himself. He added a tiny measure of water from a jug to his glass.

‘Your health, Eddie.'

‘Cheers,' Eddie said. He tasted the lager, scanned the room. Maybe Jackie had stood exactly where he was standing now. Maybe this was the very place where the old man had had his last drink on the planet. The dead man's spot: Jackie drinks in complete calm, looks round, perhaps he nods to somebody he knows. And the executioner is outside in the heat of the night.
I can't see the killer's face
, Eddie thought.
I can't imagine the features. They're clouded
.

He swallowed half his lager and studied Caskie in profile. He had fine symmetrical features and he drank with a slow controlled movement of his hand. Friend of the family, good old Chris, a gentleman.

Caskie finished his drink. ‘Another?'

‘I'd prefer some air.'

‘Fine,' Caskie said.

Eddie set his glass down on the counter and strolled towards the door. Caskie followed and they walked for a while and then George Square opened out quite unexpectedly, a large sudden sunny space in the aorta of the city; it was if the shaded side streets were no more than tunnels that had been leading you all along to this great expanse of red tarmac which was dominated by the elaborate architecture of the City Chambers, a building of Italianate grandeur. Eddie approached the stone cenotaph located directly outside the Chambers and gazed up at the central tower, which rose with all the pomp and self-assurance of the mercantile class of the 19th century:
Glasgow was an important hub of the Empire, and that would never change
. Or so they believed.

The city's motto was ‘Let Glasgow Flourish'.

He turned away from the building. Nearby, a bald guy with no eyebrows was selling copies of the
Big Issue
, and a deranged man, hollow-eyed and hair wild, sat on a bench and swatted the air with pale fluttering hands, as if to drive off imaginary flying insects. Lunchtime crowds sauntered in their hundreds, or sat eating sandwiches in the sunshine, ignoring the deprived and the demented.

The city flourished all right, Eddie thought, in the same way as cities did everywhere, vivid contrasts and screaming paradoxes, the gulch between rich and poor, sane and crazy. But today the sun shone and the sky was a sheet of pure cobalt and life was just fine and few people were thinking dark thoughts, except maybe himself.

He said, ‘The place has changed a whole lot.'

‘For the better,' Caskie said. ‘It's cleaner. The air is breathable. It used to be a den of smoke and fog. There's more money around. You can see it in the amount of construction going on, and the way those wonderful old Victorian buildings have been cleaned up. Look about you, Eddie.'

Eddie stared back across the square. The busy buzzing pump of the city, Jackie's city. Where he'd lived and died.

And last week, for one night, Jackie had left Glasgow.

‘Do you think there's a connection between Jackie's murder and his trip last week?'

Caskie frowned. ‘Eddie, all I know is he caught a train at Glasgow Central.'

Eddie said, ‘He got off somewhere.'

‘He could have travelled to London and back. He might have gone anywhere in England or Scotland … I couldn't begin to guess.'

‘And who did he meet?'

‘You don't really expect me to know the answer to that.'

‘It was rhetorical.' Eddie gazed at Caskie a moment, wondering why Perlman didn't trust him. Was it something Caskie had done? Something in his manner that Perlman didn't care for? They were opposites, sure, Caskie smooth and Perlman rough around the edges, but that wasn't grounds for mistrust. What then?

Eddie said, ‘I heard some guy might be interested in buying Jackie's business. Haggs.'

Caskie said, ‘Haggs?'

‘You know him?'

Caskie blinked, scratched at his beard and looked across the square. ‘No … I'd remember a name like that.'

Eddie said, ‘So you don't –'

Before Eddie could finish, the cellphone in Caskie's pocket rang and he took it out, answered it, listened, then flipped the cellphone shut. ‘That was Tay,' he said. ‘He wants to see you.'

23

Joyce heard her doorbell ring. Since she hadn't buzzed anyone up, it meant that somebody in the building had forgotten to shut the outside security door properly – probably old Mimms in the flat above. Sweet old guy, but he was forever forgetting to close the security door. She knotted the belt of her dressing gown and walked into the hallway. Through the stained-glass window of her front door she saw the outline of a man.

She hesitated halfway towards the door and called out, ‘Who is it?'

The man said, ‘We've never met, Miss Mallon … I was a friend of your dad. I heard about this terrible tragedy. And. Well. I thought I'd pay my respects, sweetheart.'

She stared at his outline and how it was bevelled by irregularities in the coloured glass. His voice was unfamiliar to her. An English accent, somewhere in the south, maybe London.

‘What's your name?'

‘Your Daddy knew me as Tommy G.'

‘And you were close to him, you say?'

‘Peas in a pod, love. We did a load of business over the years.'

‘I never heard him mention you.'

‘Come on, he must've talked about me once or twice.'

‘No … I don't think he did. How are you spelling your name? GEE?'

‘Just the letter G. Plain and simple, pet.'

‘Just G? That a nickname?'

‘Yeh, a nickname, love. Listen, I feel like a prat standing out here. I'm not the bogeyman, you know. I understand your concern about a stranger turning up outside your door because God only knows we live in times of dread – but you don't need to be suspicious of me, pet. I'll pay my respects and go.'

She took two steps towards the door, then stopped. She felt apprehension. She looked at the panes, which were orange and red and green and blue. She'd thought many times of replacing them with a more secure door, thick wood with a spyhole, but she'd been reluctant to remove the glass, an original feature of the flat. She was attached to the past. She liked a continuity with the endeavours of the dead.

She gazed at the shadow beyond the panes. You live alone in a tenement flat and there's only stained glass between you and someone on the other side of the door. A rapist. Anyone.

She said, ‘I don't mean to be rude, but this is a bad time for me. Can you phone me, and we can meet some other day?'

‘I'm leaving Scotland tonight,' he said.

‘Okay. Next time you're in Glasgow.'

He didn't move. Why didn't he just go away?

She said, ‘My number's in the book. Under my married name. Haskell. Okay?'

He moved a few steps back from the door and his shadow dimmed. She heard him say, ‘Righty-o, sweetie. I'll give you a bell next time I'm here. Count on it. Ciao.'

She watched the shadow retreat from the stained glass. She went inside the living room. She'd sneak a peek from the window when he left the building, get an idea of what he looked like. Maybe she'd seen him before in Jackie's company and hadn't been introduced – people floated into Jackie's life and only a select few lingered for any length of time.

She stood to the side of the curtain and waited, clutching a wedge of dark brown velvet in her fist. He didn't appear. It took maybe thirty seconds, certainly less than a minute, to reach the street from the stairs, so if he hadn't emerged from the building, where was he?

She went back to the hallway. She opened the drawer of a small table and took out a can of mace and stuck it in the pocket of her robe. It was a Peppergard Pocket Model she'd bought on her last trip to America. She remembered it was advertised as having ‘a finger-grip dispenser that fitted comfortably into a woman's hand'. It sprayed six to twelve feet. She had no idea if it worked, or if the chemical had lost its potency with the passage of years; she just knew she felt better with the cylinder in her robe.

She stared at the coloured glass for so long that the panes began to vibrate in her vision. This tension. He's gone. He was slow to leave the building, that was why you didn't see him from the window, perhaps he stopped on the stairs to tie a shoelace or roll himself a smoke, something, anything, you're getting worked up about nothing.

Perhaps he'd changed his mind and was coming back up the stairs to start all over again, wheedling, trying to get her to open the door. Why can't he just pay his respects through a closed door?

Tommy G. I've never heard of him.

She thought of picking up the phone and calling Chris Caskie and telling him about Tommy G and asking him if he could send a uniform round quick, but the Englishman hadn't done anything illegal, he'd just rung the doorbell and talked to her and that wasn't a crime. This is paranoia, she thought. This is what you used to feel on speed. The edge. People are watching you.

She saw a shadow fall outside the door and then coloured panes shattered and shards flew and the lead framework bent back as if dynamite had exploded, and Tommy G's hand came through the broken glass and grabbed the door handle and twisted it, and suddenly he was
inside her home, sweet Jesus
, and she was aware of his milk-chocolate skin and dreadlocks, and she found herself fumbling for the tiny canister of mace and she yanked it out and pointed it at him and pressed the button and the pressurized chemical mist struck him in the face but without any great force or density, and he covered his eyes with his hands and moaned, then he went down on his knees and made a choking sound. She wondered how long the effect of the chemical lasted. She stared at his colourful shirt and all the flecks of broken glass on the floor.

‘I'm on fire,' he said. ‘For the love of Christ, I can't see. Fucking hell.'

She thought, I'll spray the bastard again just to be sure.

He turned his face up towards her. His eyelids were shut. Tears ran over his cheeks. He was coughing harshly. She half-expected to see him spit out slivers of lung. She wanted to hit him, flatten him with something hard, an iron skillet. He crawled on all fours towards her then raised one hand blindly until his fingers touched the hem of her robe. He tugged at the garment.

‘For fuck's sake, do something, get me some water,' he said, and he yanked harder on her robe and she felt herself being drawn down to the floor. He was strong and his hands were big. Even blind and gasping for air, he was capable of hurting her, and she knew it.

Use the spray again, she thought. Burn his eyes out.

She directed the canister at his face, pressed the button. Nothing happened. Panicked, she pressed it again, wondering if it was stuck through lack of use. The same result. Nothing. He reached up and his palm circled a naked leg. He tightened his grip at a place just behind her knee. He squeezed so hard she was forced to bend her leg. She lost her balance and the cylinder slid from her fingers and she fell against him and they rolled together on the floor. He smelled faintly of a long-ago scent. What was it? Some musk from hippie days. He kept coughing, like a man dying badly. Where the hell did his strength come from? Why wasn't he
screaming
with the pain of the mace? Why wasn't he on fire? Instead, he was on top of her, his eyes still shut. It seemed to her he had some weird way of seeing in the dark. He caught her hands and forcibly stretched her arms out on either side of her body and crushed her into the floorboards. Her robe fell open. The cylinder had rolled away, she wasn't sure where.

She could barely breathe under Tommy G's weight. She looked into his face. The red eyelids, the tears squeezed out between them, the white foam of spit at the corners of his open mouth. He coughed straight into her face. If I could get the canister, she thought. If I could reach for it. If it worked. Where is it?