The Bad Fire (27 page)

He entered the foyer, nodded at the night security man, Cutcheon, who'd once been a professional wrestler. He looked hard and bulky in his black suit. Alec McGroaty was standing at Cutcheon's desk. A small man in a fawn cardigan and baggy tartan trousers such as a golfer might wear, McGroaty had a deferential manner.

‘Hot outside, Mr McQueen,' Cutcheon said.

‘Aye, it's like the Costa del Sol,' McGroaty remarked.

McQueen didn't feel like small talk. He followed McGroaty outside to the taxi. He climbed into the back.

‘Novar Drive,' he said.

McGroaty said, ‘On our way.'

McQueen observed the streets. He had the feeling he was travelling through the veins of the city. At Charing Cross he saw the lights of the Mansions Café & Bar. Fun. Life as average people live it. He had the urge to instruct McGroaty to drop him off at the café where he could lose himself in the throng, have a couple of drinks, loosen up. Then he thought of Larry in his pyjamas.

Out west now, over the River Kelvin and buzzing along Dumbarton Road and then up into the dark red sandstone maze of Hyndland where Billy eyed the well-maintained tenements, the ornate cornices and rosettes and high ceilings you could see in rooms where curtains hadn't been drawn. Comfortable lives. He longed to scratch his stump which had begun to itch seriously. He felt fevered.

Somebody will be watching the house. It's a dead certainty.

He leaned forward to the driver. ‘Alec, go round the block.'

‘Awright,' McGroaty said.

The cab completed a circle of the building. Billy McQueen glanced up at the windows of his flat. The light was on in his father's room. The other windows were dark.

‘Go round again,' Billy McQueen said.

McGroaty drove round the block a second time. Then he parked outside the entrance to the tenement McQueen would have to enter sooner or later. Billy peered from the cab at the security door. No sign of anyone loitering. But how could you tell if it was safe beyond the security door? How could you know there wasn't an intruder waiting for you? And even if the close was empty, there were about a million cars parked along the street and a dark figure could be sitting in any of them, just biding his time until you got out of the cab.

Billy, Billy, this is no kind of life. He said, ‘Alec. Do me a favour.'

‘If I can, Mr McQueen.'

‘See if it's all clear.'

McGroaty turned and looked back at his passenger. ‘Eh, how do you mean all clear?'

‘Go inside the building, see if there's anybody loitering.'

McGroaty said. ‘Is there the possibility of danger here, Mr McQueen?'

‘There's somebody I don't want to see.'

‘Aye, but is there
danger?
Do I have a guarantee of my
personal
safety?'

‘I'll make your tip excessive,' McQueen said.

‘You're scared, right? And you want me to test the waters for you?'

‘Scared? Not at all. Just a precaution, Alec.'

McGroaty appeared to consider this. ‘How much of a tip are you talking?'

‘Fifty.'

‘Could you make it an even hundred? I've got a kid –'

‘– at Eton, and the fees are high?'

McGroaty laughed. ‘Aye, they're extortionate.'

McQueen said, ‘A hundred then.'

‘I'm to make sure nobody's loitering in the building, zat all?'

‘Exactly. Here's the key to the outside door.' McQueen handed McGroaty a key-ring. ‘The big brass one opens the security door. Just go inside, see if anybody's hanging around, then come back and tell me. Got it?'

McGroaty said, ‘Got it.'

McGroaty left the engine running. McQueen watched him walk up the path to the security door. McGroaty unlocked it, entered the building. The door swung shut behind him. Billy thought, I'm having a bad moment. I'm cut off from my lines of communication.

A man materialized in the driver's seat. A black shape.

Billy banged a fist on the glass partition that separated him from the driver. ‘Hey, you, what the fuck? This is McGroaty's taxi.'

The man said, ‘Just a wee detour, Billyboy.'

The cab moved slowly forward.

His heart scampering like a hot greyhound sprung from a trap, Billy reached for the door handle. I'll step out, I'll get away, I can do it, gammy leg or not. The door to his right opened and a girl jumped in beside him. She was big and wore black gloves with spiked attachments on the knuckles, and under the muted glow of a streetlamp Billy saw that her face was battle-hard and unforgiving and that her mouth was set in an expression of vicious determination.

‘
What the hell's this?
' Billy shouted.

‘Shut your fucking gob.' The girl slammed him in the mouth with one of her spiked gloves.

Billy felt brutalized, his face lanced with buckshot.

‘Not another word out of you,' the girl said. ‘Unless I say so.'

‘Right,' Billy mumbled.

‘That was a word, diddy,' and she backhanded him hard, and he felt the taxi turn upside down like a carnival ride that was making him ill.

34

Eddie let himself into Joyce's darkened flat. He switched on lights, calling his sister's name. No answer. He remembered she said she was going to see Senga. She was probably still there. Inside the bathroom he rummaged through the medicine cabinet and found Solpadeine capsules. He read the ingredients on the side of the box. Codeine,
far out
. He swallowed a couple of caps then walked into the living room, sat down on the sofa and massaged his face. He was motionless for a long time, weary. He had to stay alert to call Claire.

He thought about time differences, then his mind wandered to sequences of time lost – such as the period between Bones's disappearance from Jackie's parked car and his sanctuary in the safe house. Okay, Lieutenant, what have we got?

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 suddenly 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.