The Bad Fire (49 page)

‘Excuse me for pointing this out: the city's still polluted, Lou.'

‘Polluted?' He lit a cigarette, a Silk Cut. ‘You should've been here when they didn't have pollution in the dictionary.'

‘I see you're smoking,' Linklater said.

‘My choice,' Perlman said. He could smell that old Glasgow suddenly, the stench of soot and smoke and how, when you blew your nose, your mucus was black and had a metallic whiff; even the wax in your ears turned black. ‘So do I get the speech about killing myself, Sid? I smoke because I like it. Also because my nerves cry out for it.'

‘Studies show that nicotine isn't a tran –'

‘Fuck the studies. They're all anti-tobacco propaganda. Back to our man at the end of the rope, Sid.'

‘My theory.'

‘Let's hear it.'

‘Give me a minute.'

Linklater left the room. Perlman took another sip of tea, then poured the rest down the sink. He didn't want to hear Linklater's theory: he guessed it would match his own thoughts, basically. He wanted this to be a suicide. He didn't want it to be something else, even if he already suspected it was heading into perplexity and turbulence, questions without obvious answers, sleepless nights.
I need my bloody sleep
, he thought. He envisaged the dead man's face: who was he? This Brylcreemed man with a hair-parting that might have been made by a precision instrument, and the expensive coat from Mandelson of Buchanan Street, and the unengraved wedding ring?

Linklater came back. He carried the dead man's clothes in a neat pile, shoes on top. He set everything down on the small table, then picked up the shoes. He turned them over, pointed to the soles. ‘A couple of grease-marks, but not a lot. And nothing to indicate he'd climbed a concrete pillar, certainly. No scrapes. Nice shoes, by the way. Soft and Italian, new. Expensive.'

‘So's the coat,' Perlman said.

‘Anyway,' and here Linklater held the shoes, one in each hand, beneath Perlman's face. ‘Regard the heels, Lou. See. They're seriously scuffed.'

‘I saw that when they were lifting him into the ambulance.'

‘Deep scuffs. Which suggests?'

Lou Perlman adjusted his glasses. They kept slipping. He needed those little nonslip pads you could buy at an optician's. Check that for another day. Check so many things for another day. A loose filling at the back of his mouth, the occasional shot of pain when cold liquid was going down. Library books months overdue. A Thelonious Monk CD –
Solo
– he still hadn't disinterred from its cellophane, and an old vinyl album of Gram Parsons's
Grievous Angel
he'd found in a second-hand shop and longed to hear. ‘In My Hour of Darkness': yes indeed. Life marched all over you in tackety boots and somehow you couldn't find the time to arrest its progress. His mood was blackening. He might have had rooks nesting inside his head.

‘It suggests he was
dragged
, Sid,' Perlman said.

‘Exactly. Consistent with these stains on the back of his trousers. See?' Linklater touched the garment, then studied the oil stain between his thumb and the tip of his index finger. ‘A man crawling along the girders would have stained the front of his trousers. Unless he slithered along on his back –'

‘He wouldn't have to slide flat on his back. There's room under that bridge.'

‘Now the coat.' Linklater set the trousers to one side. ‘Oily marks on the back of the coat, again consistent with dragging. You'll notice the “smudges” you referred to earlier are confined more or less to one central area of the back of the garment, corresponding to the spine. The front of the coat is
relatively
unsullied.'

Perlman tossed his cigarette into the sink. ‘Don't tell me what I don't want to hear. Feed me pleasant fictions, Sid. Lie to me.'

‘I'm saying there's a possibility somebody killed him.'

‘And hung him from the bridge and wants it to be written off as a suicide.'

‘Just so. The killer – or killers – hauled him along the track, lowered him to the underside, knotted one end of a rope round his neck, the other round a girder, then pushed. Away he goes. A pedestrian sees the body and phones the Force. And here we are, you and me, alone in this godforsaken place at this bloody awful hour sifting a dead man's clothes.'

‘Because it's what we do,' Perlman said. ‘We keep awful hours.'

He looked at the back of the coat. There was more oil on the herringbone garment than he'd first noticed. He could smell the lubricants. He was reminded of foundries and forges and pits where mechanics examined the underbodies of cars. He was reminded of trains racketing into bad-smelling tunnels that plunged beneath rivers. Dragged, he thought. Had the poor fucker been killed elsewhere and taken to the bridge and hung? It wasn't likely that he'd gone willingly along the bridge and down into the girders.
Walk this way, chum. Let's have a palaver beneath the Central Station Rail Bridge
. So where had he been slain, and how?

Perlman coughed. There. That little twinge in the chest. You don't want to know what it might
really
mean. Twenty cigarettes a day for thirty years, give or take: that was a massive intake of smoke and wear on the tread of the lungs. Calculate. No, don't. More than 200,000 cigarettes.
A quarter of a million
? Oy, fuck. That
many
? He felt giddy. How many times had he inhaled? Say a dozen times for every cigarette. Multiply a dozen by a quarter of a million and –

Change subject.

‘The suicide ploy isn't very clever,' he said. ‘Whoever did it wasn't blessed with smarts. The assumption we'd overlook the evidence is …' He groped for a word. ‘Amateur.'

‘Or arrogant,' Linklater said.

‘Somehow I prefer to think I'm dealing with an amateur.'

‘You could be dealing with an arrogant amateur, Lou.'

Perlman stared into the sink where his discarded tea-bag lay like something washed up on the bank of an industrial river. ‘I'll need to run his fingerprints. See if I can give him a name at least.'

‘I'll arrange a post-mortem,' Linklater said, and glanced at Perlman as if he wanted to expand on the subject of autopsy, but he knew Perlman didn't have a scientific turn of mind, and grew bored with technicalities. ‘If he wasn't a suicide, Lou, then maybe he was killed by some means other than strangulation. Leave no stone unturned.'

‘Is that your motto too?' Perlman asked.

‘Look at my dirty fingernails, if you will.'

Perlman said, ‘Aye, manicures are pointless in this line of work, Sid. You're not alone.' He held up a hand for Linklater to look at.

‘You bite your nails, I see.'

‘I'm devouring myself quietly, old son. Piece by piece.'

‘Better no nails than no lungs.'

Perlman walked to the door. ‘Nag nag. I'm away. I've a report to write.'

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About the Author

Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these,
White Rage
and
Butcher
, were nominated for France's Prix du Polar. Armstrong's novels
Assassins & Victims
and
The Punctual Rape
won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.

Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Campbell Armstrong

Cover design by Angela Goddard

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0711-5

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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