The Bad Fire (30 page)

‘
Roddy oh no, for God's sake, have a heart.
'

‘It's not such a distance to fall, Billy,' Haggs remarked. ‘Be brave. Be a soldier. Meet your maker with a brisk salute.'

‘
Noooo, Roddy, dear Jesus, no –
'

Billy McQueen was released as casually as the wrapping of a toffee-bar and he plummeted, screaming for barely a few seconds, down the cylinder of the building. On the descent he had an illusory sense of flight, of angels feathering the air about him with their wings.
We'll save you, William McQueen
. He was dead before he hit the ground, his skull shattered against a girder.

Rita said, ‘I bloody hate it when they scream.'

Haggs stared out across the city. He thought of his taxicab fleet going back and forth, ferrying passengers through the night. He thought of people driving hired cars from his company. Cash registers rang in his head. But he wasn't satisfied.

What he sought was out there somewhere, secreted in one of the many thousands of black pockets where no light fell. He thought: I'm missing something. And whatever it is I'm obsessed with it.

37

Was it Thursday, or had he mislaid a day somewhere?

Eddie woke at nine a.m., got up from the sofa. He pulled open the curtains: the sun was ruthless. He glanced into the street, saw a patrol-car parked diagonally across the street: Caskie's watchdog keeping Joyce safe. He showered quickly and dressed in a white SUNY T-shirt and black jeans. In the kitchen he found a carton of fresh orange juice. He poured some, drank quickly. He was dehydrated and his neck ached and his ribcage creaked like the hull of an old boat. There was a niggling friction in the small of his back and he pictured tiny vertebrae knocked a fraction out of alignment. He cut a chunk of cheddar from the block in the fridge, then filled his glass again.

Joyce stepped into the kitchen. She was smartly dressed in a green linen jacket and brown slacks. ‘I overslept. I don't even have time for coffee.'

‘What's the rush?'

‘I have a meeting at school, some bloody boring committee business about the curriculum for next year.'

‘You can't get out of it?'

‘I could, but I feel I should keep busy, even if it's only half-hearted.' She drank orange juice from the carton, then stuck it back in the refrigerator and looked thoughtfully at Eddie. ‘Did you ever hear of a man called Billy McQueen?'

Eddie shook his head. ‘Who's he?'

‘I just caught an item on the news,' Joyce said. ‘I wasn't concentrating on the details. A guy by the name of Billy McQueen was found dead last night … there are probably a dozen Billy McQueens in Glasgow, but one of Dad's old cronies was called by that name. I was just wondering if it was the same guy. Senga might know.'

‘Dead in what circumstances?' he asked.

‘Sorry. I wasn't paying close attention … the name just popped out at me.'

‘I'll ask her,' he said. ‘I was going to drop in on her anyway.'

She kissed Eddie's cheek, then she was gone in a flutter, before he could ask any more questions. He heard the front door close. Billy McQueen: the name meant nothing to him. How could it? He swallowed a Solpadeine. He rose from the table slowly; a mass of aches, bundled pains. He wondered how McWhinnie felt this morning. He walked back into the sitting room where the old busts regarded him balefully. He felt a kinship with their battered broken faces.

He left the flat. The morning was hot. The shadows between the tenements were warm and lifeless: He longed for a breeze, even one so weak it barely stirred shrubbery. He crossed Whitehill Street. He was sweating by the time he reached Onslow Drive.

Senga let him into the house, hugging him exuberantly in the doorway. How could she know the sensitive condition of his ribs? In pain, he bit his lower lip. He smelled gin on her breath; she kissed his cheek with her lipsticked mouth. She led him into the living room.

Two men sat side by side on the sofa.

‘Joe Wilkie, Eddie,' she said. ‘You already met at the yard.'

Wilkie wasn't wearing his glasses, and his pallid round face had the look of a full moon. ‘Eddie,' he said. ‘Nice to see you again.'

‘Same here,' Eddie said.

Senga said, ‘The good-looking one is Ray, Joe's son.'

Ray got up. Eddie shook hands with the young man. Ray Wilkie's grasp was slack and quick, as if he disliked the connection of flesh. Shy, Eddie thought. Or evasive. It depended on your point of view, on what you wanted to see. Ray Wilkie held himself in a slightly stooped manner – which he may have copied from the stance of Joe – and he had a tendency to avoid eye contact, looking down at the carpet much of the time. He wore a sharp black suit, lightweight, short lapels.

‘Pleasure,' Ray said. His voice had the same pitch as his father's.

‘You been in the wars, Eddie?' Senga asked.

Eddie smiled. ‘I slipped, dumb of me,' and he wondered how many times he'd have to explain his bruises.

‘We were just having a drink. Can I get you anything?' Senga asked.

‘Water's fine,' he said. She went out of the room, patting Eddie's shoulder as she passed. He watched her go in big strides, her arms pale in her long-sleeved black blouse. A silvery thread ran through the material and glimmered.

Not ten a.m. yet. She'd started early, Eddie thought. He noticed a half-empty glass of beer in Joe Wilkie's hand, and Ray nursed a small shot of scotch. They'd all started early.

Joe Wilkie said, ‘You must be thinking we're hard-core boozers, Eddie. Eh? When Senga forces a drink on you, you don't refuse it.'

‘I can believe that,' Eddie said. He looked at Ray, who gazed into his drink. He had fair eyelashes.

Senga came back carrying a glass of water stuffed with ice cubes. Eddie took it. ‘Cheers,' he said.

The Wilkies raised their glasses. Eddie held his iced water in the air. The atmosphere in the room struck him as a little awkward, as if he'd intruded on something of a private nature.

Senga said, ‘We were talking about a man called McQueen.'

‘McQueen? Is this the same man who was mentioned on the radio?' Eddie asked. He felt a weird little flutter in his chest, a shudder of pulse: it was as if he'd had a premonition and it was coming true.

‘Aye,' Senga said. ‘You never knew him, did you? He was a friend of Jackie. They did some business together.'

‘What happened to him exactly?'

‘They found him on a building site in Maryhill,' Wilkie said. ‘He fell off a high-rise tower some time last night. Workmen found him this morning early. Nobody knows what the hell he was doing up there to begin with. The place isn't even completed. A man with one leg … what's he climbing up there for? It's all scaffolds and ladders, for Christ's sake.'

Wilkie said, ‘He lost the lower half of a leg in a subway accident years ago.'

‘I heard it was a train,' Ray Wilkie said.

‘Train, subway, what damn difference does it make?' Joe said to his son.

Ray shrugged and looked into his scotch, his expression one of deflation. It was obvious he never won arguments with his father.

Eddie said, ‘You're telling me this guy McQueen climbed a building in the dark – an unfinished building – and
fell
to his death.'

‘Aye, right,' Wilkie said. ‘Fell … they say. On the other hand, mibbe he was shoved.'

‘Shoved?'

‘Well, I'm betting he didn't climb that fucking building just for the hell of it,' Wilkie remarked. ‘I'm betting he had company
egging
him on.'

Senga shook her head, sighed in the manner of somebody retreating from the horror of the real world. Eddie glanced at her and wondered where she'd gone in her mind, what sanctuary behind those closed eyes, and then he thought of a man plunging from a high building through darkness. He remembered the jumper in downtown Manhattan the morning of the day he caught a flight to Glasgow. Now a one-legged man, an occasional business associate of Jackie's, climbs a high-rise block in a place called Maryhill, then falls to his death. He was either a suicide or somebody had forced him to climb in the first place. You could menace the hell out of somebody if you were twenty storeys up and the building had no floors. You could get them to promise you anything, tell you anything.

An associate of Jackie's.

Coincidence? Was it a fluke that Jackie and McQueen had died within days of each other? Sometimes if you chipped away at coincidence you unearthed a message, if you knew how to decode it. At other times all you got was gobbledygook.

‘What kind of business did he do with Jackie?' Eddie asked.

‘He was sort of a financial adviser,' Senga remarked.

‘Something like that,' and Joe Wilkie made a wobbly gesture with his hand, to suggest that ‘financial adviser' was a term to be interpreted loosely in McQueen's case.

Senga said, ‘Jackie liked him. Now he's dead. A couple of days after Jackie …' She reached for his empty glass. ‘Refill?'

‘Please.' He got up and followed her into the kitchen. He watched her fill his glass at the sink. He felt a heavy sadness: it was as if Jackie had fallen from that building and not McQueen, a complete stranger. They're connected, he thought.
They have to be
.

She handed him his glass. Eddie sipped. ‘Tell me more about McQueen.'

‘I didn't know him all that well. I saw him maybe half a dozen times in all. We exchanged a hello, how are you, but that was it. I seem to remember he lived with his father, who's an invalid.'

‘Had he done business with Jackie recently? Did Jackie mention his name lately?'

‘I'm racking my brain, Eddie. McQueen …' She drifted into silence, gazing at the kitchen window, the garden beyond, the entanglement of shrub and stalk that was dry in the sunlight. She looked at Eddie and snapped her thumb and middle finger. ‘It seems to me Jackie said he saw Billy McQueen about two weeks ago. Maybe less than that. Jackie came in, sat at the kitchen table, opened his newspaper and then he said, quite casually, he'd seen Billy. It was an aside. Small talk.'

‘Did he say why they met?'

Senga shrugged. ‘He didn't say whether it was by arrangement, or if they'd run into one another on the street or in a pub. No details. I got the impression he
might
have talked to McQueen, but I didn't get the feeling it was for business reasons. Maybe they had a drink together, and passed the time of day and talked football. I don't know, Eddie.'

Senga reached out and held both his hands in a gesture he found strangely comforting. She emanated warmth. ‘There's an expression on your face that puts me in mind of the look I used to see on my own mother when she was trying to stitch together a patchwork quilt. It's concentration with a dash of frustration. Is that what you're doing, Eddie? Trying to make your own patchwork quilt?'

‘I didn't think of it that way,' he said.

‘She pricked her finger with the needle sometimes,' Senga said. ‘I remember that. When she bled, she always stuck her fingertip inside her mouth. Funny what we remember and what we forget.'

Eddie imagined the tip of a needle puncturing his skin: the moral of Senga's fable didn't elude him. He sipped water, played with a cube of ice on his tongue. McQueen meets Jackie. They talk. Both of them are dead within days of each other. What did it mean?

He looked into the back garden. Years ago, a wooden swing had hung from an old elm. The elm was no longer there. The swing was a phantom.

‘You took Jackie to Central Station last week,' Eddie said. ‘What time?'

‘You're just like the tide, Eddie. You keep rolling in. Ten thirty-five a.m.'

‘You sure about that?'

Senga said, ‘That's a precise answer. Jackie was adamant about it. We had to get to the station no later than ten thirty-five. We got stuck in a traffic jam for about ten minutes and I thought he was going to blow a fuse.'

‘But you made it,' Eddie said.

‘We made it.'

Eddie touched the side of her face. He liked this woman. He imagined her looking after Jackie. Cooking his food, ironing his shirts, all the domestic support. Jackie was of a generation that didn't know how to do these things. He imagined Senga and Jackie Mallon fretting in gridlocked traffic, Jackie hunched forward and tense in his seat, Senga reassuring him. We'll get there. Don't worry. You'll make your appointment, whatever it is.

‘He said he wanted sea air,' Eddie said.

Senga nodded. ‘Aye.'

‘Where could he go from Glasgow Central for sea air?'

Senga was quiet a moment. ‘Ardrossan,' she said. ‘Troon.'

‘Largs?' Eddie asked.

‘Largs, certainly.'

38

Tommy Gurk focused on his dish of passion-fruit ice cream so hard that the small pink confection appeared to glow. Staring at things to the exclusion of objects or happenings on the periphery of his vision – the other customers in the café, the clack of cutlery, the flutter of waitresses – produced an intensity of such purity he felt he melded in some way with the object of his attention. This ice cream was more than a concoction of fruit pulp and cream and sugar: it became an inherent part of Gurk's being.
The Oneness of Things
. Beyond appearance there was essence. Essence was eternal. Life was without end. You came back time and again. A human, a goat, a toad, whatever.

I want to be an eagle next time out, Tommy Gurk thought. His karma worried him, though. He had too much going in the debit column. He'd be a worm or woodlouse or tick, his bleeding luck.

His cellphone rang.

It was Joe Kaminsky, whose heavy accent Gurk sometimes couldn't penetrate. Polish, Russian, who could tell? Kaminsky, who'd feed you vodka until you were hallucinating, and force piles of wild boar and truffles and Beluga into you, who'd take the shoes off his feet and gift them to you if you happened to mention how handsome they looked, was an absolute skinflint when it came to his past. Like he was drawing a blackout curtain across his history. End of. Past is dead, man.