The Bad Fire (14 page)

Senga folded her arms under her breasts. ‘The neighbours probably think I'm completely daft standing out here like this. They think I'm eccentric as it is.' She looked down, wiggled her toes. ‘Want some coffee?'

‘Sure.' He found himself liking her, the way she shot from the hip, the apparent good sense she made when she talked about the Jackie-Flora saga. He glimpsed what Jackie must have seen in her, somebody straight, no hidden angles.
What you see is what you get
.

He followed her inside the house and walked behind her into the kitchen. This room had been redecorated since he'd last seen it – new stainless-steel appliances, recessed spotlights in the ceiling where a solitary bulb used to hang from a long flex.

‘Pull up a chair, Eddie,' she said.

Senga was the kind of woman you found yourself obeying. She emitted, even in her grief, a sense of power and determination, as if heartbreak was something you could overcome if you worked hard at it. You got out of bed in the morning and kept on going, no matter what. She set cups and saucers on the table. He declined milk and sugar; he wanted his caffeine in an unadulterated rush.

He said, ‘I walked down to the warehouse.'

‘Was anyone there?'

‘Joe Wilkie.'

‘He's loyal,' she said. ‘I like Joe. I like his boy Ray.'

‘Joe hates the idea of the place being sold.'

‘Jackie was always talking about selling,' she said. ‘He blew hot and cold on the idea. But he couldn't have sold without my consent, because I own fifty per cent of the place.'

‘I didn't know.'

‘We'd been partners for more than ten years, Eddie. I invested a little cash of my own at one point when he was going through hard times, and in return I got half the company.' She stared at Eddie with a certain air of mock defiance. ‘It's only a bloody scrapyard, Eddie, when you get right down to it. Okay, sometimes we get some decent stuff passing through, but not often. If I was a gold-digger, believe me, I wouldn't have taken up with your dad. In any case, I've got better business sense than Jackie ever had. I'm not just a pretty face.'

Eddie smiled. Partner in life, partner in business. What else didn't he know about the relationship between Jackie and Senga? For the first time since Jackie's murder, he considered the bureaucracy of death, a last will and testament, ledgers, files, bank accounts, unpaid taxes – all the stuff of life that the dead leave behind.

‘Did Jackie make a will?' he asked.

‘Damn right. I insisted on it. He left this house to me and his half of the business to your sister. I can't see Joyce wanting a half-share in the yard, so I'll cash her out if we can come to an agreement. We'll discuss it some time.'

Eddie was quiet a moment. ‘Wilkie thought Jackie had found a potential buyer, a man called Haggs.'

‘Skinnymalinky?'

‘Who?'

‘That's my name for Roddy Haggs. A long drip of a guy. His hands are always dead cold. He's like something dug up from the frost. It doesn't help that he looks a wee bit like Count Dracula on a bad day.'

‘Tell me more about him.'

‘He's one of those flash characters with his grubby fingers into everything going. A thug, but a rich one. Jackie pretended to like him, but he didn't trust him. I think maybe they did some business together a long time ago but they never got along. I met Haggs five or six times, usually if I was out having a drink with Jackie. He'd always shake my hand and hold it a wee bit longer than necessary. It was like he wanted to flirt with me right under Jackie's nose.'

‘He wanted to think he could upset Jackie,' Eddie suggested.

‘Worth a try.' Senga was overwhelmed a moment by an apparently sad thought, and she frowned, plucked a tissue from a box on the table and blew her nose. ‘I'll tell you something that's bothering me. Where the hell is Bones? He was never far away from Jackie. Why hasn't he come round to offer his condolences? It's not his style. He was Jackie's shadow.' She smoked a cigarette and stared into the lit end. Her eyes watered.

‘Have you any idea why he might have vanished?'

‘Chris Caskie asked me that same question last night. I don't know, maybe something bad has happened to him.'

‘Don't jump to gloomy conclusions,' Eddie said. He thought of Caskie asking questions in his soft fashion. ‘What else did Chris want to know?'

‘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 might 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.'