The Bad Fire (10 page)

And then Senga was suddenly out of breath and had to quit, and she slumped into an armchair, head back, mouth open. Eddie looked at the long red hair and the gold blouse and the lipstick that had faded and the tears that continued to roll down towards the corners of her mouth. ‘What I want to know is why some fucking bastard had to shoot him, for Christ's sake? Why, Eddie? Why? Why did they have to take his life?'

Caskie was quick to comfort her.

Joyce stood at Eddie's side. ‘You're tired,' she whispered.

He shrugged and nodded towards Senga. ‘I'm more worried about her.'

‘I'll make sure she doesn't take any sleepers on top of what she's been drinking. I'll help her up to bed, then we'll leave.'

Joyce killed the music, and whispered in Senga's ear. Senga rose from the chair, leaning on Joyce's arm, and the two women walked together across the room.

At the door Senga looked at Caskie, then at Eddie.

‘Joyce says I have to sleep, gentlemen. I have to drift away … Land of Nod for me.'

‘Joyce is right,' Caskie said.

Senga said, ‘Give me a kiss, Eddie.'

Eddie Mallon took a step forward and pressed his lips against Senga's cheek. She gazed into his eyes, not quite meeting them because drink had skewed her line of vision. ‘We'll talk soon, you and I. We've got some catching up to do. Goodnight.' She blew a sad little kiss. ‘The pair of you.'

The door closed.

‘I think it's time for me to push off,' Caskie said.

Eddie said, ‘He was shot in his car.'

‘Yes.'

‘And no witnesses.'

‘Nobody's come forward,' Caskie said. ‘But this isn't my case, Eddie. I'm not up to speed on it. If you want to know more about the investigation, Superintendent Tay's the man to ask.'

‘I met him at the airport. He gives the impression he might not like questions.' Eddie gazed at Caskie's small white beard. It was tidy, well clipped. His eyebrows were perfect, no stray hairs. He had an easy smile. He was maybe fifty-four, – five, and in good shape.

‘I'm sure he'll keep you posted if anything happens,' Caskie said. ‘He's sympathetic. Don't let the veneer put you off.'

Eddie went on, his voice rising a little. He heard words echo in his head like gunshots in a tunnel. ‘Tay told me Jackie hadn't been robbed. His wallet hadn't been taken and he had money in his possession. But who knows what else he might have had in the car? Something in the glove compartment, say. Or in the trunk. Something Tay didn't know about. So how can he rule out robbery? And then there's the secondary mystery of the missing driver, Bones.'

‘He'll show up, I'm sure. Probably he's scared and imagines he's going to be implicated, so he's lying low, who knows?' Caskie rolled his glass of sherry between the palms of his hands, then set it down unfinished. He checked his wristwatch. ‘I'm tired. It's been a long one.'

Eddie wanted to quit talking, but he couldn't. It was like jogging and not wanting to stop even if you were breathless, because the adrenalin rush was addictive. ‘Either Jackie was shot during an act of robbery, or he was killed for other reasons we don't know about. If I was running this investigation and it turned out nothing
obvious
was stolen from him, then I'd dig deeper and ask myself what the hell he'd done that made somebody want to kill –'

‘But you're not running the investigation, Eddie,' Caskie said.

Eddie stopped, subsided, leaned against the wall. The hard truth of Caskie's statement silenced him. He'd been flying, buzzing in on questions that weren't his to ask. What the hell am I doing exactly? I've come all this way to bury my dad; his murder isn't my business. Whoever had fired a bullet into Jackie Mallon's face isn't my concern. Tay and his team were on the job. Justice would get done, but not by you. Take it easy, for Christ's sake. Slow down. But it was goddam hard to take the heat out of himself.
This ain't Manhattan, Eddie
. Remember that.

He said, ‘I was getting carried away.'

Caskie said, ‘It's understandable.'

Joyce came back into the room. ‘She's out cold. I think we'll go, Eddie. If she needs me later, she can phone me. I don't think she'll wake for hours.'

All three left the sitting room and stood for a moment in the hallway at the foot of the stairs; the awkward etiquette of leave-taking. Who goes first? Who says what?

Caskie reached inside the breast pocket of his jacket and took out a business card. He handed it to Eddie. ‘Here. If you need to get in touch while you're in Glasgow … It's been nice to see you again.'

‘The same for me,' Eddie said. He tucked the card in a hip pocket of his jeans.

Caskie embraced Joyce. ‘Call me if you need me.'

‘I will, Chris.'

‘Help with the funeral arrangements, anything at all …' Caskie raised a hand almost imperceptibly, and then he was gone, closing the front door with hardly a sound. Caskie had an undertaker's diplomacy, Eddie thought, listening to the quiet click of the latch. His body vibrated curiously to the aftermath of the spinning dance Senga had forced him through.

The dance of death.

He remembered he hadn't phoned Claire yet. He gazed up the stairway to the lamp lit on the landing. He touched the polished wood of the banister. He must have slid down that a thousand times when he thought Flora wasn't looking. He had a faded memory of Jackie coming down the stairs towards him, bright red braces and a white shirt with the collar open.

Jackie winked at him and said,
One day we'll hire a boat at Balloch and go fishing
.

That day had never come.

Joyce said, ‘I don't suppose you want a quick tour of the old homestead, do you, Eddie?'

The prospect depressed him. ‘But thanks for the offer,' he said.

‘Another time.'

13

They drove the quarter of a mile from Onslow Drive to Joyce's place, a one-bedroom second-floor flat in a dark red sandstone tenement. Eddie took his bag from the car and followed his sister up the stone stairs.

‘You can phone Claire from the living room,' Joyce said. ‘I need a nightcap. You?'

‘Maybe a soft drink,' Eddie said.

‘Irn-Bru?'

‘Irn-Bru, Jesus, I haven't had that in a lifetime,' Eddie said.

‘You'll be happy to know it tastes the same as it always did. Dyed sugary water with loadsa bubbles.' She went into the kitchen.

Eddie looked at the bookshelves in the living room. They were stacked with paperbacks, many of them old orange-covered Penguins. Absently, he scanned the titles as he reached for the phone. Hugh MacDiarmid. Tom Leonard. A Scottish selection among European classics.
Kidnapped
beside
The Brothers Karamazov. Ivanhoe
leaning against
The Castle
. Joyce had always been buried in a book as kid. Granny Mallon, a sharp-eyed little woman with short silver hair and bulbous arthritic hands, used to say,
Get her out in the fresh air with a skipping rope before she goes blind
.

Eddie picked up the phone, then realized he didn't know the dialling code for the USA. He decided he'd call collect – but what was the number for the international operator? He looked for a phone book among the general clutter of the room, magazines, ashtrays, empty glasses. Joyce's private chaos. The prints on the walls were arranged in no specific pattern. Lithographs and sketches of famous writers, musicians, prints that publicized gallery openings or museum events, a few San Francisco Filmore examples, Bob Dylan, Hendrix. There was also an assortment of half a dozen busts in classical style, faces carved out of old stone, one missing a nose, another an ear: they looked like Greek philosophers pondering facial surgery.

Joyce came into the room carrying two glasses. ‘I hope you appreciate I tidied this place up for you,' she said.

‘I'm grateful,' Eddie said. He indicated the busts. ‘Quite a gallery.'

‘I found them in Dad's warehouse over the years.'

She handed him a long glass filled with a fizzy red liquid. He sipped it; exactly as he remembered. So sweet he imagined sugar armies scaling the enamel battlements of his teeth.

‘How do I get the operator?' he asked. ‘I want to make a collect call to Claire.'

She told him, he dialled, got through to Queens in a matter of moments. Claire sounded close at hand, a voice in the next room. They talked inconsequentially of the flight, then Claire wanted to know how Joyce was. Eddie glanced at his sister and thought she looked exhausted.

‘Hard to say,' he remarked.

‘You can't talk right now,' Claire said.

‘You got it.'

‘You met Senga yet?'

‘I did.'

‘And?'

‘She's … I guess she's what I expected.'

‘You sound tired. Call me tomorrow.'

‘I will. Love you.'

Claire said the same thing, then Eddie hung up. Cutting the connection caused him a little jolt of sadness:
I still love my wife after all this time
. He guessed that seventy-five per cent of his colleagues, maybe more, were divorced, separated or serially unfaithful. He couldn't imagine another woman in his bed.

Joyce closed her book, picked up her wine. ‘Claire's okay?' she asked.

‘Fine.' Eddie nodded. ‘I like this room.'

‘I'm glad, because you'll be sleeping in it. The sofa you're sitting on opens into a bed. It's comfortable.'

Eddie took a swallow of Irn-Bru. ‘Tell me about Chris Caskie. I didn't know about his existence until tonight.'

‘I suppose his name just didn't crop up,' Joyce said. ‘How many times have we met since you left anyway? I've been to the States, let's see – three times in thirty years, Eddie.'

‘It's not enough, I know,' Eddie said, and sighed. ‘It's my fault. I should have made the effort to come over –'

‘I'm not blaming you, Eddie. You have a whole life over there. Responsibilities.' Joyce placed a cigarette between her lips, but didn't light it.

Eddie watched her and thought, I could have made the trip on any one of my vacations, but I didn't, I was afraid, not of seeing the city again – but of coming face to face with Jackie and entering the maze of my own emotions.

What would he really feel about his father? That first contact, whether handshake or hug, how would that have been? Stiff and tentative, warm and welcoming? Uncertainty had kept him from Glasgow. He'd become accustomed to the phantom he'd constructed in his mind – an unreliable man, touched by a wild streak, but honest: a man who meant well most of the time, although circumstance and his own flaws sometimes conspired against him.

Joyce blew cigarette smoke. ‘Chris Caskie was the kindly uncle nobody else in our family knew how to be. He had contacts in universities, he could get the low-down on what universities had the best teachers – the kind of stuff that was light-years away from Jackie's world. It's a funny situation when you think about it, the avuncular cop wondering how he can arrest the father of his adopted niece.'

‘Did he want to nail Jackie?'

‘I think it became a kind of standing joke,' Joyce said. ‘But a serious one. They enjoyed each other, only they just couldn't relinquish their roles. In the blue corner, Detective-Inspector Caskie, career cop. In the red, Jackie Mallon …'

‘Mallon the what?' Eddie asked.

‘How can I put it? The alleged criminal?'

‘No more than alleged?'

‘I really don't think he did much more than chisel the Inland Revenue any chance he got. Sometimes I had the feeling Dad said stuff deliberately to get up Chris's nose. He'd make a reference to a crime he'd heard about, and how he might know the names of a few guys responsible. Chris always pretended he wasn't taking the bait, but you could tell he was storing it away to check later.'

I missed all this, Eddie thought. I missed Caskie's role in Joyce's life, the give-and-take between Jackie and the cop. He'd been robbed of something essential. Suddenly he wasn't the brother, he was a stranger staring through a window into a room he didn't know. His sister had made the transition from child to woman and whole areas of her life were blacked out to him. Her first lover, who was he? Her amphetamine infatuation, which she'd first mentioned five years ago, how had that come about? You could love her with all your heart, but you could never fill in the gaps.

He said, ‘I want to know more about Jackie.'

‘What exactly?'

‘Anything.'

‘Narrow it down, Eddie.'

‘Start with his business. Tell me about that.'

‘He mentioned retirement only a few weeks ago. He was saying how much he was looking forward to becoming one of the wrinkly leisure class. He was going to have a big sale of the inventory in the warehouse, then he planned to sell the building and the yard. I got the impression, right or wrong, that he may have had money worries.'

‘If he sold his stock and his building, his cash concerns would have been over,' Eddie said. ‘At least alleviated.'

Joyce said, ‘Unless he had really big debts … but it doesn't matter any more, does it?'

‘No, I guess not.'

‘It's past, the business is history.' She stared into her wine. She ran a finger round the rim of her glass. ‘You know, about a month ago he came here and his face was this boozy bright red colour, and he grabbed my hand and he said it had been a terrible mistake to hurt Flora, and it was something he'd regretted all his life. It was maudlin, but I believe he meant what he was saying. He hadn't been able to persuade Flora to stay with him, so he'd reacted with what he called “shameful cruelty”. And then he just wept. I'd never seen him do that before. He buried his face in his hands and cried for a long time. It was the saddest thing.'