One: by prior arrangement Bones had abandoned the car, leaving the way clear for Jackie’s killer. So Bones was an accessory to the murder. At some point after leaving Jackie at Blackfriars, Bones was conveyed to a police safe house.
Two: the killing of Jackie Mallon had been sanctioned by at least one cop, who’d ordered McWhinnie to pay off Bones’s gambling debts and then smuggled him to safety. But Bones, for reasons unknown, had vanished from the safe house. Why leave a secure place? Why take that chance?
Was he forced? Coerced?
Eddie felt the Solpadeine begin to kick in, the glaze of codeine, the way pain receded behind a barrier, and he lost track of his thoughts for a time. You could grow to love codeine, he thought. He suddenly wished he had Tom Collins with him and they could toss ideas back and forward, bounce notions off one another the way they usually did. Tom bites into his maple-glazed donut and takes a drag on his cigarette, smoke and sugared dough all mixed up in his mouth, and he mumbles, This whole scenario involves a bad cop at the heart of it, Eddie. I don’t like these things, when the good guys go off the track.
They don’t thrill me either.
And Caskie’s your candidate. What’s in it for him? Money? Power?
Eddie shut his eyes. What does friendly Chris stand to gain from any of his machinations?
Tom Collins said, The next step is the real toughie, Eddie –
I know, I know where you’re going –
Unavoidable, man. If Uncle Chris smuggled Bones to safety, then he colluded in the murder of Jackie Mallon –
Yeah –
Even if he didn’t pull the trigger himself, Eddie, even if he’s a shoo-in for fucking sainthood in Senga and Joyce’s eyes, he told Bones to take a hike because he was setting Jackie up. He promises Bones a safe haven where he can wait for things to die down.
Eddie felt a certain druggy slippage, a mind-slope he was slithering down. Scree.
Tom Collins says, Hey, if Caskie’s really and truly tight with Haggs, then you gotta consider Haggs is also involved. Maybe he’s the shooter. Maybe he just provided the shooter.
Caskie and Haggs. Laurel and Hardy. A team. Did they have secrets from each other, or were they joined at the hip? In a codeine haze, it was tough to concentrate. He shook his head, massaged his eyelids. He reached for the handset on the coffee table, remembered the number of the international operator and asked to make a collect call to Claire.
‘Hey, how are you?’
‘I’m okay,’ Eddie said. ‘You and Mark?’
‘We’re great. You sound kind of … flat?’
‘I’m just tired.’
‘No, it’s more than that,’ she said.
How could she tell from a distance of three thousand miles? It was a gift she had. She knew from the first syllable of ‘hello’ if he was in a good mood or bad, if he’d had one beer too many, all kinds of things.
‘I miss you,’ he said. ‘You’re hearing a blue note.’
‘By the way, Flora phoned,’ she said. ‘Wanted to know if I was doing okay. Like I’d founder in your absence. I love you with all my heart, Eddie, but I can still manage things here.’
‘You told her so,’ Eddie said.
‘Gently.’
‘Is Mark home?’
‘He’s at Chuckie Roth’s house.’
‘Tell him I called, would you? Give him my love. Tell him to look out for you.’
‘I think you got that last sentence the wrong way round,’ she said. ‘Is Joyce hanging in?’
What was the point of mentioning the assault? He said, ‘I think so. You know Joyce. She has different levels.’
‘And you don’t go there.’
‘Nobody goes there, sweetie. Not even Joyce, I suspect …’
‘Any news? Any developments?’
‘Nothing special to report.’
‘Are you being straight with me, Eddie?’
Fuck. She missed nothing. He pictured her in the kitchen, phone tucked between jaw and shoulder. He heard water running in the background. She might be cleaning salad leaves at the sink, or filling a kettle for tea.
‘It’s complex,’ he said.
She said, ‘Murder usually is.’
He covered a yawn. ‘I’m beat, love. I’ll say goodnight.’
‘Stay out of trouble,’ she said.
‘I always do. I love you.’
‘Likewise, Eddie.’
When he put the handset down he sat for a minute and let the codeine flow easy through his system. The pains diminished. He had a flash of the encounter with McWhinnie; he smelled the rust on the railings he’d stumbled against. He got up, walked the room, tried in vain to summons Tom Collins again.
Blanked, he walked to the kitchen, drew a glass of water, felt a slight swoon. He bent down under the tap and soaked his head, and tried to ignore the tweak in his spine, that ripple of nerve. Dripping, he went back inside the sitting room and then he stopped on the threshold of Joyce’s bedroom.
He went in, flicked on the overhead light.
Double bed unmade, a big quilt of American Indian design, a pile of books on the floor by the bed, an ashtray filled to the max on the antique dressing table, books of matches from various bars and restaurants, Groucho St Jude’s, Trattoria Trevi, The Polo Club, little mounds of clothing scattered here and there. It was a comfortable messy lived-in room. Eddie moved towards the fireplace which was made from carved walnut, little clusters of dark brown grapes and cherubs. The wood imparted warmth, like dark flesh under a hot sun.
There were photographs on the mantelpiece, some framed, others thumbtacked to the wall in a haphazard way. He saw Joyce on her graduation day, mortarboard and black gown and a smile on her face that suggested relief: I’m through with school. World, here I come. Jackie was alongside her, his hair not yet completely silver, sideburns a little unruly. He wore what looked like his best suit, the kind men always wear with an air of deferential discomfort, holding themselves as if the waistband’s too tight and the pants starched. There was a wolfish quality to his smile. The light in the eye was sharp, but it was a middle-aged rake’s light on the cusp of dimming. In this photograph Jackie had been – forty-nine? Fifty? He looked proud of what his daughter had achieved.
Next, photographed on the same day, Joyce and Caskie standing side by side. Joyce has the mortarboard held in front of her and her hair, long then, falls across her shoulders. Her smile in this shot dazzles. Caskie, beardless and strong-chinned, middle to late thirties, is as proud of Joyce as her own father. He’s gazing into the camera with the straightforward honest look of a dad who’s given wholehearted support to a daughter worth every drop of his sweat.
Fuck you, Chris, I want to scissor your goddam face out of the photo.
At the end of the mantelpiece there was a black-and-white picture Eddie had never seen before, and the sight of it disturbed him, although he couldn’t say why precisely, except that the subject of this particular shot had been going through his mind like a hallucination only an hour or so earlier. Jackie holding Flora off the ground, cradling her as if she were as light as a baby, and Flora’s black hair falls away from her face and she’s smiling, she’s happy, he’s never seen that hot smile before, and Jackie – good-looking in a blazer and flannels, a genuine dude – has his head thrown back just a little, face frozen in mid-laugh. And just behind the stone steps where they’re standing, just beyond wooden tubs of flowers, is the edge of a sign – ‘IEW HOTE’. Eddie picked up the photograph and turned it over. Somebody had written, Largs, June 1954, Seaview Hotel. The honeymoon, Eddie thought. Young lovers. That blood fever, the crazed magnetism that binds husbands and wives together in a way that will never be quite the same again. It may stay strong, it may grow even stronger, but it will never be the same kind of bond as the first flourish, when even those simple words ‘husband and wife’ have an erotic charge.
Eddie fingered the picture as if he were trying to divine something that wasn’t immediately apparent. He was su
ddenly depressed: the happy faces in the photograph couldn’t know what thunderclouds were gathering ahead. You always saw old pictures with the privilege of hindsight. You knew the partings and the losses, the sorrows and the pains, that lay before the subjects. People were innocents when the shutter clicked. Frozen in a particular second, they had no futures.
He stepped away from the fireplace.
‘Hello.’
He turned, saw Joyce. ‘Caught me. I was snooping.’
‘Feel free.’
‘I’m sorry, Joyce.’
‘No, seriously, I mean it, look around, take your time, I have nothing to hide from my own brother.’
‘There are a couple of pictures here I hadn’t seen before. Your graduation –’
‘Lost youth,’ she said. ‘I look like I’m off to discover a new continent in those pictures. The intrepid explorer. Instead I teach secondary school in Shawlands.’ She stepped closer to him. ‘Have you been in a war? You’re all wet and funny-looking and you’ve got a bruise like a map of Italy on the side of your neck. How did you get that?’
‘I had an accident,’ he said. ‘I slipped.’
‘Right, I noticed it’s icy outside.’
He wondered if his ribs were purple too. The Solpadeine made these concerns remote.
‘Tell the truth,’ she said. She put a hand on her hip. He imagined her doing this in a class while she waited for one of her students to explain why he hadn’t completed his homework.
‘I was in a fight,’ he said.
‘A fight? You mean with fists? Who were you fighting?’
‘I had a brief encounter with your acquaintance McWhinnie.’
‘McWhinnie? You’ve taken to fighting with Glasgow policemen? Jesus Christ, Eddie.’
‘We ended with a kinda truce,’ he said.
‘Dare I ask the reason behind the conflict?’
‘He’s been following me.’
‘You’re paranoid.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Truth, paranoia, whatever. Are there any good reasons to get into a punch-up with a cop?’
‘You sound like Flora when she was angry with me,’ he said, and he looked at her small hand and how tightly it was clenched against her hip, which was thrust aggressively forward. Blue jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, even her clothes seemed combative. She wore no make-up, so no lipstick or face powder detracted from her eyes, which were burning on all cylinders.
‘Well, fuck it, you deserve to be scolded,’ she said. ‘It’s perfectly understandable that the Strathclyde Police don’t like a cop from outside wandering round on their territory. You’d take kindly to some Glasgow policeman in Manhattan, I suppose –’
‘Depends on what he was doing.’
‘Tell me what it is you’re doing exactly?’
‘I have some questions about Jackie’s death.’
‘You and me both,’ she said. ‘We want the same thing, like what the hell he was up to at the end of his life, and what got him slaughtered in the back of his car, but fighting with the cops isn’t going to help get answers.’
‘You know what they’re saying about Bones?’
‘Chris told me.’
‘Oh, right, Chris, good old Chris, he’s practically family, after all,’ Eddie said. The codeine forcefield short-circuited for a moment and he was a nest of pains, and suddenly furious. Restrain yourself. Chris was sacrosanct. He was a temple you couldn’t enter unless you kicked off your shoes, then genuflected.
‘I’m not a fan of easy sarcasm, Eddie. What have you got against Chris anyway?’
Eddie chewed the words in his mouth as if they were made from a substance he couldn’t swallow. Pig’s liver raw. He’s a goddam liar and crooked as a carnie game. You want the skinny on dear Chris, sister? He’s bad to the bone. Let’s ask Chris about Jackie’s murder … But he didn’t get these words out. Instead, he took the merciful option. ‘Look, the way I feel has probably got nothing to do with Chris. My perceptions are skewed, it’s the shock of Jackie –’
‘Shock, I’m beyond shock,’ she said. ‘Right now all I want is to get through this funeral.’
‘Right now, what I’d like best is to drive a goddam nine-inch spike into the skull of whoever triggered the old man.’ The vehemence in his voice surprised him; it was his first direct encounter with a raw need for retribution, an ugly jagged emotion.
‘Hard words,’ she said. ‘Maybe later I’ll feel the same way as you. Maybe I’ll develop a deep longing for revenge.’ She stepped closer to him. Her smile was sad. ‘We shouldn’t argue, we need each other.’
He held her. She felt limp.
He saw them reflected in the oval mirror, brother and sister clinging together. He looked big and ponderous compared to the wispy appearance of Joyce. ‘I guess I’ve missed too much of your life. I’m out of the loop.’
‘Then get back in,’ she said. ‘The door’s open.’
‘I’m working on it.’ He looked over her shoulder, drawn back to the photograph of Jackie and Flora, honeymooners in 1954 in the Seaview Hotel, Largs. But it was Christopher Caskie he was thinking about, and his eye drifted to Caskie and Joyce, graduation day at the University of Glasgow, a man and a young woman who might, to an untrained eye, have been father and daughter.
Eddie squeezed his sister, then let her go.
‘I just want away from death,’ she said, ‘and back into the light, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean.’
He looked at Joyce and saw her once again as that little girl staring at him as he vanished in the back of a black taxi, bright ribbon in her hair and skipping rope dangling from one hand, but now another form took shape to complete the mural of that day, a memory he’d misplaced or buried, a recollection of Jackie standing just behind Joyce, his hands resting possessively on her shoulders, his face shadowed a little by shrubbery, his expression that of a proudly stubborn man who thought it a sign of courage to conceal his feelings, a man above showing the pain of departures, one who wouldn’t beg for another chance because begging was a weakness. He’d sooner let his family disintegrate than ask for a fresh start. He understood only the terrible logic of endings. And yet – there was something else, a look within a look, masked, and Eddie realized it was the first inkling of a sorrow that would take Jackie Mallon many years to discover and explore.
A sadness filled Eddie, and he turned his face away from his sister and gazed through the window at the moon climbing the warm night sky, and he wondered what the weather had been like on the day of his enforced leave-taking, but that was one memory lost in the dross of things.
35
‘I think you’ve had enough, sir.’
Charlie McWhinnie, clutching a napkin filled with ice-cubes to the side of his face, looked at the fat-necked man behind the bar of the Hilton and asked, ‘Have I been aggressive? Have I been insulting to your other customers? Can you honestly say –’
‘No, sir,’ said the barman, who had a bright red face and long sideburns. ‘You’ve been generally well behaved. It’s just that you keep falling off your stool –’
‘Gravity is the drunk man’s enemy,’ McWhinnie said. He scooped a palmful of peanuts from a little silver dish and tossed them towards his mouth. Mostly they went shooting past his face. ‘A question. Are you happy in your work?’
‘Aye. It has its moments.’
McWhinnie belched. His perceptions were unreliable. The room was turning in a slow circle. He felt he was a passenger on a precarious carousel. He narrowed his eyes and looked at his little notebook, which lay open on the bar. The pages were wet with booze and his fountain pen lay in a puddle of spilled drink. Dear Diary, life is shit. When I was six years of age I fancied playing rugby for Scotland, heroics in the Murrayfield mud.
‘I’m working on a story,’ he said.
‘You a writer then?’
‘More a keeper of records,’ said McWhinnie. ‘This barkeeping lark, you think I’d be good at it?’
‘Requires social skills,’ the barman said.
‘Those I have in abundance.’
A hand fell heavily over McWhinnie’s shoulder. ‘What are you doing to yourself, my young pal?’
McWhinnie turned, saw Lou Perlman. ‘Lou? What brings you here?’
‘You did. You phoned.’
‘Fuck me. Did I?’
‘And the Good Samaritan came running. You’re pissed as a newt, son. What happened to your face?’
‘My face is irrelevant, Lou. Listen. Listen to me. A question. Am I or am I not cut out to be a cop? Honest opinion, Lou. No fluff. Straight answer now.’
‘You don’t want any kind of answer in your present state of mind, Charlie. Why don’t you let me just drive you home, eh? What do you say? Come on.’
McWhinnie felt his stool listing to one side. ‘I don’t wanna go home, Lou.’
Perlman said, ‘You look like hell. You need to lie down. What are you drinking for anyway? You feeling sorry for yourself?’
‘I’m questioning my purpose, Lou.’
‘Usually better to ask the really deep questions when you’re clear-headed, Charlie. Just lean against me and we’ll get you out of here. Okay?’
McWhinnie stuffed notebook and pen into his pocket and stepped down from his stool. He lurched towards Lou Perlman, missed and fell over. Perlman and the barman hauled him to his feet, then Perlman moved him a few steps in the direction of the exit, but it was a struggle.
‘I do not want to be a fucking solicitor, Lou. Uh-huh. Not on your life.’
‘What’s biting your arse, Charlie?’
‘My hands are dirty.’
‘Is that a metaphor?’
McWhinnie planted a slobber of a kiss on Perlman’s cheek. ‘You’re my best pal, Lou. The very best. You’re a great man.’
‘Right, I’m a fucking hero,’ Perlman said, and guided McWhinnie down a short flight of steps. ‘So your hands are dirty, and you’re feeling worthless and your life has no direction?’
‘Spot on,’ McWhinnie said.
‘And you want to quit the Force, eh?’
The Bad Fire Page 21