The Bad Fire

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘You and him. You’re a curious pair. Questions, questions.’

  ‘Curious is a cross cops carry.’

  She gazed at the kitchen window for a while. Eddie saw a certain earthy quality in her that must have appealed to Jackie. The large mouth, the powerful body, the long delicate fingers; she had a mature sexuality her air of grief didn’t conceal. ‘He asked why Jackie had left Glasgow last week, and where did he go.’

  ‘And?’

  Senga shook her head. ‘And nothing. Jackie said he had some business to attend to. I didn’t keep tabs on him. I trusted him, and he knew better than to disappoint me, believe me. I had the feeling he was going down the coast because he mentioned he was looking forward to getting some good sea air into his lungs … I drove him to Central Station, dropped him off, then picked him up the next day.’

  Eddie saw a slight bafflement on her face now, the puzzlement that comes with the cold realization that everything’s changed and your world will never be the same again. The structures have been blown away and you don’t know what you’re left with except the empty road that might be the rest of your life.

  He finished his coffee. He found himself gazing at her tattoo, a tiny purple-blue figure etched into flesh; a man astride a horse. She caught the line of his eye and asked, ‘Do you know who this is, Eddie? You remember your history?’

  Old schoolbooks. Stories of violence and hatred. He said, ‘It’s William of Orange seated on a horse, and the date below it is July 1690. The Battle of the Boyne, if I remember correctly.’

  ‘Right, when King Billy defeated James, and James ran away. A big day in the history of Protestantism.’ She covered the tattoo with her hand.

  Eddie asked, ‘What did Jackie think of that?’

  ‘He called it a disfigurement. He didn’t have a sectarian bone in his body. I had this tattoo done when I was seventeen years old and I didn’t know any better. I was brought up in a house of Loyalist maniacs who’d emigrated to Glasgow from Belfast and Derry, true blue do-or-die kill-the-Pope nutters. Catholics were beneath contempt. The Pope was the Antichrist. That was hammered into me. My dad, Willie Craig, was a high-up in the Orange Lodge and he believed the RCs were planning world domination. What chance did I have of an unbiased upbringing, eh? It’s sick, all that stuff, and it takes a long time to break free of it.’

  ‘But you’re free now,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been free a long time, Eddie.’

  He got up from the table. ‘I’ll go see how Joyce is,’ he said.

  ‘Wake her up. She can be a terrible sleepy-head at times.’

  Senga offered her cheek to be kissed and Eddie pressed his mouth against her skin and then let himself out of the house. He walked towards Ingleby Drive. His thoughts were like flashing detour signs directing him places he didn’t want to go.

  18

  Charles McWhinnie spooned a touch of sugar into the foam of his cappuccino and surveyed the sunlit street from his table outside the café. Kelvinbridge, West End of town, McWhinnie’s habitat of patisseries, food-of-the-moment bistros, upscale greengrocers where you could buy yams and Cape gooseberries; normally he would have been comfortable here, but this morning no, quite the opposite.

  He sloshed some milky coffee down the side of his cup as he raised it to his mouth. A shadow fell across him and he raised his face and Chris Caskie was looking down at him through a pair of sunglasses.

  Caskie sat, laid his folded copy of the Scotsman on the table and crossed his legs. He said, ‘Glasgow’s beautiful at times. The way stone changes colour in the sunlight. The varieties of sandstone. Pink. Red. Ginger. Blonde. Lovely place.’

  ‘How is it all those marvellous colours look the same when it rains?’ McWhinnie asked. ‘How come they all look so damn drab?’

  ‘Whoo. Tetchy, are we? Talk to me, Charles.’

  ‘This whole thing isn’t to my liking,’ Charles McWhinnie said. ‘I want that on record.’

  ‘On record? Where? In a file? On a floppy disk? Hold your breath, Charles. You think this situation is a walk in the park for me?’

  McWhinnie tried the coffee again. His hand trembled.

  ‘The shakes, I see,’ Caskie said.

  ‘Sleepless nights.’

  ‘I have a doctor who’ll write you a prescription for Ro-Hypnol or something stronger, no questions asked.’

  ‘Yesterday I had my Rover broken into in bloody Govan.’

  ‘Dear old Govan,’ Caskie said. ‘Sometimes we go places we’d prefer to avoid.’

  McWhinnie gazed at a double-decker bus roaring through a red light. His instinct was to note the number plate. ‘I had honourable ambitions, Chris. Really. I saw my career in terms of nice little stages. I’d go from one case to another more important, then another more important still, a promotion every five or six years or so. Instead I’m sent to Govan with some sharp-faced little git with foul breath, and I get my damn car broken into and the sound system stolen. Now you’ve got me up at dawn and running around … I don’t like these jobs. Even worse, I don’t know why I’m doing them, and I don’t know the reason behind them. What’s this one all about?’

  ‘You want advice, Charlie? You should have joined your dad’s law firm. That way you might have kept your hands nice and clean. A little conveyancing. Drawing up a will every now and then. Being kind to nice old ladies in Bearsden.’

  ‘I hated that prospect,’ McWhinnie said. ‘I would have been a partner within ten years. My father was apoplectic when I joined the force. Why are you so angry, I asked him. I’ll still be on the side of the law … I remember exactly what he said to me in that stiff Victorian way of his. I think you’ll find the law has many branches, young man, and you’re climbing out on the wrong one.’

  Caskie asked a passing waitress for mineral water then tilted his head back to receive the full blast of sun. He wasn’t sympathetic to McWhinnie’s situation. Nobody had forced Charlie into becoming a policeman. Nobody had twisted his arm.

  ‘Don’t go weak on me, Charles.’

  ‘I’m not going weak,’ McWhinnie said.

  ‘I like fortitude and loyalty. Now tell me about your day.’

  McWhinnie was quiet for a second. ‘I think our man saw me. I can’t be sure. He had a funny look on his face.’

  ‘Funny?’

  ‘You know the expression a piano tuner gets when he listens to a tuning fork vibrate? Similar to that. He appeared to be listening for something, but I got the impression he wasn’t sure what.’

  ‘Tell me his itinerary.’

  ‘He left his sister’s flat at five thirty,’ McWhinnie said.

  ‘An early bird,’ Caskie said.

  McWhinnie smiled. ‘I must say Joyce Mallon is the one bright light in all this, Chris. I had the pleasure of her company after she identified her father. Easy on the eye. I drove her home.’

  ‘She isn’t your type, Charles. I can’t imagine her sitting through a bloody rugby match. I’m prepared to bet she prefers a good book to camping in some sodden tent at the side of a freezing loch.’

  ‘I could open new frontiers for her. She could recommend books for me to read –’

  ‘The point, Charles. Where did our man go after he left his sister’s?’

  ‘To his father’s warehouse. He talked to a fellow called …’ McWhinnie referred to a little notebook. ‘Joe Wilkie. He went inside, stayed perhaps twenty minutes, came out again. He walked back up Whitehill Street to Onslow Drive and encountered Senga Craig.’

  ‘Encountered? Meaning what?’

  ‘She was standing outside her house. Barefoot.’

  ‘Poor dear,’ Caskie said. He thought of Senga dancing last night. Sorrow and madness. He remembered how, after the death of his wife, he’d sat in the living room of his house in Broomhill and pictured the last holiday he’d ever taken with Meg, Bermuda, sun and sand, colourful rum cocktails, and how he’d been possessed by the need to mix some of these alcoholic concoctions for himself in the kitchen, as if he m
ight recapture an element of what had been lost years before … And then a few days after the funeral he’d listened to the rain fall miserably on the glass roof of the conservatory and drip from the waxen leaves of the laburnums, and he’d snapped out of the mood and stepped out of the gloomy room of his mind – wherever he’d been.

  He’d felt a deep relief then. He was free of Meg, free of her dreadful sickness, liberated from his oaths and his responsibilities to a love that had died long before Meg’s physical departure.

  ‘Our man went inside the house with Senga,’ McWhinnie said. ‘Fifteen minutes later he emerged, walked back to his sister’s place. I waited for a time. Then at eight o’clock I left.’

  The waitress brought mineral water. Caskie sipped it.

  McWhinnie said, ‘It looked perfectly natural to me, Chris. A little nostalgic walk around the old neighbourhood. I’d probably do the same thing.’

  Caskie looked at his watch. ‘He phoned me half an hour ago. He wants to see the scene of the crime.’

  ‘Morbid,’ McWhinnie said.

  ‘Probably,’ Caskie remarked. I hope that’s all it is, he thought. He drank half his water and stood up. He was wearing a blue and white striped shirt, sleeves rolled to just below the elbows. He carried his jacket slung over a shoulder. ‘Take a break. I think you need one. I’ll call you when it’s time to move again.’

  ‘Joyce was married once, wasn’t she?’ McWhinnie asked.

  Caskie said, ‘Briefly.’

  ‘What happened to the union?’

  ‘It fell apart.’

  ‘His fault or hers?’

  ‘It takes two to screw up, they say.’

  McWhinnie watched traffic in the street. Cars and buses glowed in the sun, mirrors flashed.

  He said, ‘About my car.’

  ‘Send me a bill for the cassette deck. I’ll see what I can do.’

  Feeling despondent, like a low-rent private detective in the pay of dodgy lawyers working squalid divorce cases, McWhinnie watched Caskie turn a corner and disappear. He suddenly remembered what the little man in Govan had said: You don’t have the stuff for this work. Maybe I don’t. He wondered if he should call Lou Perlman. Perlman, an odd bird in the aviary that was Force HQ had taken him under his wing when he’d first joined the Strathclyde Police. Dear old Perlman, smart and big-hearted, that hair cut in tough-guy spikes, always had time for him.

  Perlman, he thought. My rabbi.

  He took out his cellphone and punched in Perlman’s number, then killed the power before a connection was made. Work it out for yourself, Charles, he thought, don’t go running to somebody else when you need rancid water pumped out of your system. Lou Perlman doesn’t need your problems.

  McWhinnie ordered another coffee, took a small diary from his pocket and made a note. He thought, I should be writing something like Dear Diary, I am melancholy. He closed the little book and wondered if he should tell Chris Caskie his white beard looked damned stupid.

  19

  ‘What a dump,’ the detective-sergeant said. His name was Anthony Bothwell. He was a tall man with red hair and a wide nose that might have been broken at one time. He had the soft accent of a Highlander. In his spare time, he was a bagpiper.

  ‘Be a sweetheart and open a window, Vicky. Place pongs.’

  The uniformed officer, Constable Vicky Kyle, thought, I’ll be your sweetheart any time – and did as she was instructed. Brittle flakes of old paint fell from the window frame. The window probably hadn’t been opened in years. She watched Bothwell, a happily married man for whom she had a doomed infatuation, stroll round the room. PC Kyle wasn’t altogether downhearted; she liked the idea of a secret longing. You needed some passion in your life, even if it was only dreamy make-believe stuff.

  ‘Look in there,’ Bothwell said. He pointed to a small bedroom that adjoined the kitchen. ‘I’ll have a shufty here,’ and he began rummaging through drawers and opening cupboards.

  Vicky Kyle stepped into the bedroom. A blind had been drawn down on the window. She tugged it and it rose quickly on its roller, swoosh, releasing a cloud of dust. The window was dirty. Below, cars and buses slogged through the clogged thoroughfare that was Shettleston Road.

  Discarded clothes covered the floor. Pyjamas, underwear, shirts, socks. The bed was unmade. A bedside table was littered with assorted cold medications and empty Nicorette boxes. Squeezed-out tubes and half-empty bottles and God knows what lay under a ceramic lamp which was crusted with dried gobs of gum.

  Vicky Kyle opened the drawer of the table.

  Old football pools coupons, three or four centrefolds, some of them obviously antique, a postcard from Skye signed by somebody called Tam. The message read: Fishing’s crap here and too many midges. She looked inside a wardrobe; sports jackets hung crookedly, neckties dangled from hooks. There was a stink of camphor. A stack of old race programmes had been piled at the bottom of the wardrobe. She bent to examine them. A spider rambled across her knuckles.

  She looked under the bed, saw dust compacted into balls and old newspapers and cast-off slippers and four empty scotch bottles, Haig’s. She stood upright, straightened her skirt. The bedroom was airless and stale. She walked into the kitchen. Bothwell was checking under the sink.

  ‘Nothing in the bedroom, Tony,’ she said. ‘This place is disgusting. I wonder when it was last cleaned. If ever.’

  ‘The year dot,’ said Bothwell, groping behind drainage pipes.

  ‘BC or AD?’

  Bothwell hummed ‘Amazing Grace’ and then ‘The Black Bear’. Pipers’ tunes. He loved getting kitted out in the full regalia, enjoyed the swinging weight of the kilt, the well-polished sporran, the skean-dhu tucked in the sock. He thrilled to parades and bagpipe competitions and Highland games.

  He said, ‘Ah hah. Now what have we here, I wonder.’

  ‘You found something interesting?’ Vicky Kyle asked.

  Bothwell backed out from under the sink. The sleeves of his white shirt were covered in dark streaks. He held a plastic shopping bag in one hand.

  He said, ‘Let’s see what secret the hidden bag holds, shall we?’ He peered inside the bag. Then he looked at Vicky Kyle and winked. ‘Well well,’ he said. ‘Well oh well.’

  She thought his wink playful. She felt blood flush her cheeks. She wondered if it showed. If she was blushing. You’re a big girl, Vicky, for the love of God, act your age.

  ‘What have you got, Tony?’

  ‘See for yourself.’

  She looked inside the bag. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

  20

  The telephone rang at twenty minutes past ten. Alone in the flat, Joyce was still in bed; she answered on the third ring.

  The caller was Flora.

  ‘Ma?’ Joyce said. Her voice was dry. Too much wine before bed.

  ‘Surprised you, did I? Eddie have a good flight?’

  ‘It was fine, Ma.’

  ‘He has that daft phobia about flying.’

  Joyce lit a cigarette – damned habit, why did she need it, especially when her throat was so dry? – and turned over on her back and looked up at the bedroom ceiling. She had a small unexpected flashback to her amphetamine days when the first thing she’d do on waking was drop a hit of speed and wait for it to fire her furnace just enough to get her out of bed and drive to school and babble at her pupils. Wordsworth this and Keats that and here’s what Coleridge wrote … And the pupils, most of them dull-faced and sullen and listening for the bell that would free them, sometimes asked questions that turned out to be jokes so old they had beards … Miss Mallon, what’s a Grecian Urn? Five quid a week, ha ha ha. By mid-afternoon she was always wilting; she’d go inside the staff bathroom and snap a tab in half and swallow it, saving the remainder for later. And so she got through her life, and her separation from Harry, riding the speed train through the hours of daylight and sometimes deep into the night too. She’d never loved Haskell, although she’d tried. She wept a lot back then, not because she missed Harry, but
because she hadn’t been able to get the marriage to work, she’d tried, oh Christ she’d tried, but she was never capable of sustaining the illusion of a healthy marriage. For his part, Harry couldn’t come to terms with the fact that marriage wasn’t always the beautiful dream he wanted it to be. You weren’t always attractive and anxious to fuck. Your period was depressing, or you developed a cold sore at the corner of your lip, or you just drifted away into the private world of a book and you didn’t want Harry to follow, dragging his hard-on.

  All that. The mathematics of matrimony. The downs were troughs of low pressure. And suddenly there were just too many of them, and Harry had become a burden she couldn’t carry and couldn’t learn to love.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ Flora asked.

  ‘Of course I’m listening.’

  ‘So how are you bearing up?’ Flora asked.

  ‘That’s a tough one, Ma.’

  ‘I know, dear. I know. I’d come to the funeral but …’

  ‘It’s okay. I understand.’ Joyce thought, I dread the final goodbye. The ritual.

  ‘I should have phoned before this …’ Flora paused. ‘Sometimes I just don’t know what to say. Sometimes I feel so damn sorry for the way …’

  ‘It’s water under an old bridge, Ma.’

  She tried to picture Flora in her tiny house on Long Island but all she could see were plants, a great forest of them. She remembered the afternoon five years ago when Flora had prepared a barbecue in her back yard and how the smell of burning meat had floated through the neighbourhood and dogs had begun barking everywhere. That was the day Joyce first realized her mother was shrinking with the passage of time. Becoming tiny, a little white-haired thing.

  ‘I try to let it go,’ Flora said. ‘It’s hard.’

  Was she crying? Joyce wondered. Her voice sounded thin and quivery.

  There was a long silence. ‘It must be good to have Eddie with you,’ Flora said eventually.

  ‘It’s great.’

  ‘Is there any news?’

  ‘No, Ma. Nothing.’

  ‘Is Eddie there … can I talk to him?’