The Bad Fire (19 page)

Caskie was asking, ‘Can you describe this character, Joyce?'

Joyce took the towel from her lip, which was only slightly swollen. Eddie handed her the brandy.

‘Thanks.' She sipped, shuddered. ‘He called himself Tommy G. G the letter, not GEE the name. He was black, wore his hair in dreadlocks. English accent. Sounded like London. Said he wanted to pay his respects to Jackie, but I wouldn't open the door. You see how expertly he overcame that trifling obstacle. I shot him with mace but it didn't work the way it was supposed to … He grabbed me, hit me. Right here.' She applied the damp towel to her lip again. She spoke through it, her words muffled. ‘He was about five-eight. Muscular. Head sort of weird, square, I don't know what else … a line in oddball sayings.'

‘Like what?' Eddie asked. He imagined somebody striking his sister. He saw a hand in the air, felt the contact of knuckle on lip. The picture angered him.

Joyce shrugged. ‘Oh, some crap about how you can overcome pain. How there was a doorway into a pain-free life, I don't know exactly. Ouch. I wish he'd left me the key to this magic doorway.' She lowered the towel. The collar of her robe was wet. She pointed to her lip. ‘How does it look?'

‘It's nothing, Joyce,' Caskie said.

‘It feels about three feet wide,' she said.

‘Did he hit you more than once?' Caskie asked. He sat down beside Joyce, still stroking her hand.

Joyce said no. One blow.

‘And he told you he wanted to pay his respects,' Caskie said.

Joyce said. ‘Yeah, but what he really wanted was to know if I had any information about a business deal he said he had going with Jackie … I told him no, which is the truth. Then he belted me.'

Caskie asked, ‘What kind of deal? Did he say?'

‘He just said Jackie had something that belonged to him.'

‘But he didn't spell out what?' Caskie said.

Joyce shook her head.

‘Tommy G,' Eddie said. ‘Does that name mean anything to you, Chris?'

Caskie said, ‘No, nothing.'

Eddie looked at Caskie. ‘Can you run the guy's name through your crime computer?'

‘I was just about to do that.' Caskie took his hand away from Joyce and rose. She drank her brandy, glanced at Eddie, then lit a cigarette, which she smoked from the side of her mouth. Caskie stepped out of the room. Joyce patted the arm of the chair and Eddie sat, one arm hung loosely round his sister's shoulder. Caskie could be heard talking on the telephone in the kitchen.

‘Did Tommy G say he was coming back?' Eddie asked.

‘He said he wouldn't like it if he had to come back and hurt me.' She lowered her voice, as if she wanted to be sure Caskie couldn't hear. ‘What in God's name was Jackie up to?'

‘I don't know –'

‘I mean, he mixed with some dodgy characters now and again, Eddie, but they were basically harmless. This is the first time I ever ran into anyone like Tommy G, and I didn't like it. This is one downright desperate bastard, and he scares me.'

Eddie looked into his sister's face. Jackie's deal, okay. But what kind of deal made a man smash through glass panes and attack Joyce? It was no ordinary transaction, no hundred-quid debt Jackie had left unpaid at his death. Jackie had something that belonged to the intruder and the guy wanted it back so badly it was worth physical violence to get it. One thing was sure: you didn't break and enter and cause havoc if you were walking the legal side of the street.

‘I think Jackie was involved in something a tad more spooky than chiselling the Inland Revenue, Joyce,' he said. ‘Unless they're sending out a whole new breed of tax collectors.'

‘Definitely. So what was he doing, Eddie?'

Caskie came back into the room. ‘We'll see what the computer spits out in due course.' He smiled at Joyce. ‘I better make an official report.' He took a little notebook from his jacket. ‘Let's run through it. He rang the doorbell and you went out into the hallway. Take it from there.'

Eddie only half-listened a second, drifted to the window, looked down into the street. He didn't need to hear this reconstruction. He thought about Jackie. He felt an ache that wasn't connected to Jackie's murder; it was the clouded insight into his father's world that disturbed him, that wherever Jackie lived was no place for the innocent.
Fuck it
. It was one thing to pull a few quiet strokes now and again, fiddle a ledger, massage the figures, buy merchandise that had quote unquote fallen off the back of a truck. That was part of the cash-and-carry business, and you winked at it and nobody got hurt. But when you were involved with a guy who behaved like Tommy G, it tethered you to something beyond crimes of funny accounting –

I was never a criminal, son. Remember that. That's the truth
.

Yeah, Eddie thought: and I'm just loyal enough or dumb enough, or some weird filial combination of the two, to hold on to a sliver of hope that there's some reason behind Tommy G's actions that will absolve Jackie Mallon. But what?

Think.

Could Senga know anything about the intruder's identity? Could she throw a little light on Tommy G? He walked across the hall to the kitchen, drank a glass of water at the sink. He felt depressed, confused, he missed Claire, he wondered what she was doing in New York right at that moment. Three thirty p.m. Glasgow, ten thirty a.m. Queens. What day was it? Was it one of her working days when she dressed in her Century 21 blazer and showed prospective home-buyers property available in Queens? He wasn't sure. I'm lonely, I miss my life. I miss standing with Claire in the shower stall, holding her hard under the water jet, and the way water runs into her eyes and flattens her hair against her skull and how she looks beautiful against the tiles. Go home, Eddie. Ignore Jackie's business dealings, whatever they were. Ignore his life and death, attend the funeral, fly away. Do what Tay would dearly love you to do, and leave it alone.

But Perlman, goddam, was correct: I'm not made that way. I'm the son. The only son.

He skimmed the pages of the phone book, found Perlman's number, dialled it. He'd report the attack to Perlman because it fell within the parameters of their arrangement, if that's what it was.

All he got was an answering machine. He didn't leave a message.

He stepped lightly around the stars and chips of stained glass, opened the door and went down the stone stairs. Outside, he turned right along Ingleby Drive. The surface of the street shimmered in heat. Tenements blurred like buildings immersed in rippling water. A dead cat lay in the middle of Whitehill Street. Black fur and blood on the tarmac, paws crushed, head back and mouth wide. Flies. Three kids stood in a circle round the cat. A small red-haired boy poked the animal with a stick.
Telt ye it was deid
.

Beyond all doubt, Eddie thought, and kept moving. He was sweating by the time he reached the house in Onslow Drive. He went up the steps, rang the doorbell, Senga appeared. She was wearing a black silk blouse and smart black slacks.

‘Eddie,' she said. She was pleased to see him.

He thought: Don't alarm her with the story of the assault on Joyce. She doesn't need to know.

‘Come in, come away in,' she said.

He went inside the house, which was dark and cool, and he followed Senga into the living room. ‘I was just about to go out,' she said.

He said, ‘I can come back when it's more convenient, Senga.'

She looked at her watch. ‘I ordered a taxi, which should be here in a couple of minutes …' The horn of a car sounded outside. Senga got up. ‘There it is. I have an appointment at the funeral home.'

‘I'll go with you,' Eddie said.

‘You don't have –'

‘I do,' Eddie said.

‘I'm supposed to choose a coffin. A casket.' She tried a smile, but her face wouldn't make it. ‘I don't want to do it, Eddie. It's so damn final. I put Jackie in a box and the bloody box goes into the flames and that's it. That's the end.'

‘Cremation?'

‘That's what Jackie wanted.'

Flames. Eddie had assumed a burial. He hadn't anticipated fire. What difference did it make anyway? Fire, earth. He wanted to say something credible about an afterlife, immortality, paradise. He didn't hold these beliefs. He wished he did, if only to comfort Senga. He walked with her into the street. The cab was waiting, engine running. Eddie opened the back door, helped Senga in. Her perfume was strong.

She leaned towards the driver and said, ‘McGlashan's Funeral Home. Do you know it?'

‘Riddrie?' the driver asked. He was a young man with a shaven head that looked as if it had been dipped in wax. ‘That's the one on Smithycroft Road, is it?'

‘That's the one,' Senga said. She sat back and was quiet a moment as the cab pulled away, then she turned to Eddie. ‘I don't know what kind of box to pick.'

‘We'll look,' Eddie said. ‘We'll choose something.'

‘He wouldn't have wanted anything fancy. He'd have said it was a waste of money paying out huge sums for something you're just going to burn.' Senga checked her face in a small compact mirror then snapped the lid shut. ‘He never talked much about dying. He was full of life. So full of it, Eddie.'

Eddie gazed from the window. The taxi was travelling along Alexandra Parade. The cigarette factories, in which hundreds of young women had once run the machines that rolled the cigarettes, were empty now. The air used to smell of cured tobacco, as if a cloud of the pulverized weed hung over Dennistoun. Eddie remembered the girls at the end of their day's work, how they wore headscarves and linked arms as they walked along brazenly, gum-chewing and wolf-whistling any young man who passed. They had attitude, he thought, before attitude was invented. Street cred.
Gallus
.

Senga opened the window of the cab and the sleeve of her blouse rolled up and Eddie looked at the tattoo and he had a memory of how Jackie had once answered a question Eddie had asked about the difference between Catholics and Protestants.

Here's the difference, son. You cut a Catholic's throat and he bleeds to death. You slash a Protestant's throat and guess what?

What, Da?

He bleeds to death as well
.

And, Da?

That's it, Eddie. There's nothing else, no difference between them
.

Eddie could even place this conversation in the context of a pale blue summer twilight when he and Jackie had been walking along this very street from a cinema where they'd seen a Randolph Scott Western,
Ride the High Country
. Jackie loved cowboy stuff. Eddie didn't care what the movie was, he just liked going to the flicks with his dad. He liked how he felt secure in Jackie's presence. Besides, there was always vanilla ice cream afterwards at a café called the Bungalow a few blocks from the tobacco factories and a waitress named Serafina who gave him extra raspberry sauce.

Wait …

Something in the memory struck a wrong chord. He shut his eyes and imagined Jackie burning and the hideous intensity of heat, the coffin rolling towards incineration and Jackie reduced to ash. What was wrong with how Jackie had answered his childish question about religions?

He felt the warm breeze against his face and Senga's perfume wafted towards him and he remembered his dad saying,
No difference between them
, and Senga saying only this morning,
Jackie didn't have a sectarian bone in his body
. And then Eddie was spinning back, and the years fell away from him like so many discarded betting slips, and he was standing on the stairs of the Onslow Drive house and the living room was filled with Jackie and his friends, and Eddie could hear the clink of dark-brown beer bottles and rough grown-up masculine laughter, and he could smell the heady reek of strong cigarettes. He paused the memory. Listened. The sound reverberated inside him. Jackie and his mates were singing ‘The Sash My Father Wore', an Orange anthem, but that didn't make sense if what Jackie had said was true, and if Senga's claim was correct: why would Jackie be singing a Protestant song, an anti-Catholic song, why say one thing to your son and then act differently with your pals?

Eddie opened his eyes. Somebody had shouted:
Death to the Fenian cunts
. Then there was more laughter. A beer party, drunks, anything was possible. So Jackie and his mates sometimes sang Orange songs when they were inebriated, so fucking what? That didn't make Jackie a bigot. Eddie didn't doubt that when Jackie said there was no difference between Catholics and Protestants he was telling the truth. It was just that he felt obliged to act differently with his drinking pals and sing whatever they were singing, that was all. One of the gang.
O My Father Was An Orangeman, In the Good Old Days of Yore …
The words faded in Eddie's head. He'd never had any reason to memorize them. He hadn't been brought up in a sectarian environment. Flora never spoke of religion. But it jarred him now to be struck by this particular memory, which felt ugly and menacing –

‘Something wrong, Eddie?'

He turned to Senga. ‘I was miles away.'

‘Let me guess. New York. You were thinking about your family.'

‘You're clairvoyant,' Eddie said.

‘You miss them.'

‘Yeah.' Eddie experienced a flush of tenderness towards her and touched the back of her hand, feeling the big emerald ring on her wedding finger. The common-law wife's ring of respectability. He let his fingertips rest a moment against the stone. Senga's flesh was warm.

It wasn't a good time to ask her questions, but it was never going to be a good time. ‘Tell me. Does the name Tommy G mean anything to you?'

‘Who? Tommy G? No.'

‘He's a black guy. English accent.'
He's vicious, Senga, he attacked Joyce:
but he didn't append this information. ‘He was acquainted with Jackie.'